"But, of course," continued Lord Lathkill, "you _needn't_ have this
room. We have another one ready as well. Would you like to see it?"
"How does your ghost manifest herself?" I said, parrying.
"Well, I hardly know. She seems to be a very grateful _presence_, and
that's about all I do know. She was apparently quite _persona grata_ to
everyone she visited. Gratissima, apparently!"
"_Benissimo_!" said I.
A servant appeared in the doorway, murmuring something I could not hear.
Everybody in the house, except Carlotta and Lord Lathkill, seemed to
murmur under their breath.
"What's she say?" I asked.
"If you will stay in this room? I told her you might like a room on the
front. And if you'll take a bath?" said Carlotta.
"Yes!" said I. And Carlotta repeated to the maid-servant.
"And for heaven's sake speak to me loudly," said I to that elderly
correct female in her starched collar, in the doorway.
"Very good, sir!" she piped up. "And shall I make the bath hot, or
medium?"
"Hot!" said I, like a cannon-shot.
"Very good, sir!" she piped up again, and her elderly eyes twinkled as
she turned and disappeared.
Carlotta laughed, and I sighed.
We were six at table. The pink Colonel with the yellow creases under his
blue eyes sat opposite me, like an old boy with a liver. Next him sat
Lady Lathkill, watching from her distance. Her pink, soft old face,
naked-seeming, with its pin-point blue eyes, was a real modern
witch-face.
Next me, on my left, was the dark young woman, whose slim, swarthy arms
had an indiscernible down on them. She had a blackish neck, and her
expressionless yellow-brown eyes said nothing, under level black brows.
She was inaccessible. I made some remarks, without result. Then I said:
"I didn't hear your name when Lady Lathkill introduced me to you."
Her yellow-brown eyes stared into mine for some moments before she said:
"Mrs. Hale!" Then she glanced across the table. "Colonel Hale is my
husband."
My face must have signalled my surprise. She stared into my eyes very
curiously, with a significance I could not grasp, a long, hard stare. I
looked at the bald, pink head of the Colonel bent over his soup, and I
returned to my own soup.
"Did you have a good time in London?" said Carlotta.
"No," said I. "It was dismal."
"Not a good word to say for it?"
"Not one."
"No nice people?"
"Not my sort of nice."
"What's your sort of nice?" she asked, with a little laugh.
The other people were stone. It was like talking into a chasm.
"Ah! If I knew myself, I'd look for them! But not sentimental, with a
lot of soppy emotions on top, and nasty ones underneath."
"Who are you thinking of?" Carlotta looked up at me as the man brought
the fish. She had a crushed sort of roguishness. The other diners were
images.
"I? Nobody. Just everybody. No, I think I was thinking of the Obelisk
Memorial Service."
"Did you go to it?"
"No, but I fell into it."
"Wasn't it moving?"
"Rhubarb, senna, that kind of moving!"
She gave a little laugh, looking up into my face, from the fish.
"What was wrong with it?"
I noticed that the Colonel and Lady Lathkill each had a little dish of
rice, no fish, and that they were served second--oh, humility!--and that
neither took the white wine. No, they had no wine-glasses. The
remoteness gathered about them, like the snows on Everest. The dowager
peered across at me occasionally, like a white ermine out of the snow,
and she had that cold air about her, of being good, and containing a
secret of goodness: remotely, ponderously, fixedly knowing better. And
I, with my chatter, was one of those fabulous fleas that are said to hop
upon glaciers.
"Wrong with it? _It_ was wrong, all wrong. In the rain, a soppy crowd,
with soppy bare heads, soppy emotions, soppy chrysanthemums and prickly
laurestinus! A steam of wet mob-emotions! Ah, no, it shouldn't be
allowed."
Carlotta's face had fallen. She again could feel death in her bowels,
the kind of death the war signifies.
"Wouldn't you have us honour the dead?" came Lady Lathkill's secretive
voice across at me, as if a white ermine had barked.
"Honour the dead!" My mind opened in amazement. "Do you think they'd be
honoured?"