VOYAGE EN CYTHÈRE
Outside the Café door, hard on midnight, Gaveston stood for a moment
in delicious hesitation. There had, of course, been hours of dizzily
brilliant talk as, one by one, the celebrities of pen and brush and
chisel came forward to be presented. And Gaveston had triumphed,
superbly. Somehow the evening and its experiences had made life more
intricately beautiful, more complex in its manifold possibilities.
Would he go back to the Albany by the Vigo Street entrance? Or would
he rather walk abroad until dawn came, and then spend an hour in the
cold, dim beauty of Covent Garden, watching the great wheeled wains
of cauliflowers passing spectral through the morning mists? It was
a prospect suddenly seductive in this new mood engendered by the
marvellously _fin-de-siècle_ atmosphere of the gilded smoking-room.
“’ullo, dearie!” he heard a timid quavering voice at his elbow.
“Waitin’ for anybody in partic’lar?”
He turned quickly.
And the poor draggled little street-walker turned her starved, painted
cheeks up to him under the hectic lamplight. A thin rain was drizzling
down mercilessly.… A taxicab was cruising slowly along the edge of the
pavement.… The street-lamps went on shining impassively.… The darkened
houses towered above, secretly, ominously.… How long the night.… How
cold the pavement of stone.…
She laid her hand on his arm, wistfully a little, he thought.… Even
in those world-weary features there was beauty left.… Something of
graciousness and evanescent youth lingered still under the hard Cockney
tang of her voice.… What history cowered beneath that monstrous masque
of maquillage…?
He would give much to know.…
But afar off, as from some half-forgotten world, he seemed to hear the
mellow, golden patterning of bells, bells weaving their intricate spell
of beauty about another city than this dark Babel, a City of grave
spires and a curving street and quiet immemorial lanes.…
“No, _carissima_,” he smiled at her with the true ffoulis charm. “No.
Your body is beautiful. But my soul is beautiful. We can never, never
understand each other.”
He expected to see this flotsam-flower of London shuffle off into the
Suburran[12] darkness. But she answered:
[12] Suburban? (LIT. EXEC.).
“Oh, I say!” and there was petulance in her tone. “Don’t try to come
that over _me_! Soma and psyche indeed! D’you think _I_ don’t know my
Plotinus Arbiter? You can’t quote that stuff at this child. D’you read
him too?”
“Oh, off and on,” Gav replied.
“Fancy that now! This _is_ a bit of luck. Oh, _we_ shall get on all
right. You know Joseph de Maistre’s essay, of course?”
“Which?” he asked guardedly. There might be some trap in this.
“Oh, the Arbiter’s influence on the Transcendentalist poets--you know.”
“Afraid I haven’t read it,” confessed Gav.
“You haven’t missed much, _rum-ti-tum_, as Marie Lloyd used to sing,
but I’ll lend it you if you’re keen. I say, you know,” she went
on hurriedly, “I’d a bit o’ luck yesterday. You know that 1642
edition--Amsterdam? Picked up a copy of that, tooled leather and all
the woodcuts, but the back flyleaf just a bit soiled. Eight quid.
Cheap, wasn’t it?”
“He’s your favourite author, I suppose?” he ventured.
“Was once, Mr. Inquisitive. No, I must say I’ve been rather off old Plo
since the Bloomsbury push took him up so strong. I’m on the Hellenic
tack now--Pelester of Chios, you know, and Xanthus the Younger, and the
fragments of the Thracian papyrus that Bötzdorff edited--though I don’t
think much of _his_ gloss, str--th I don’t.”
“I must show you my Plotinus,” Gav broke in on her gathering
enthusiasm. “It’s a fine copy. 1722, I think.”
“My G--dn--ss! 1722! Printed at Venice, I s’pose: Palestrine fount
and borders by Manucci.… I know the sort. Bless your innocent heart!
_that’s_ no b----y good! Common as dirt, these are. If _that’s_ all
you know about the Arbiter, you’re no good to me. So ta-ta, _caro
incognito_!”
She turned angrily on her heel.
“But here!” he caught her by the sleeve. “Take this, I beg as a
favour--a token to remember our little meeting.”
Gaveston slipped from his finger the exquisite cameo of Cypriote
turquoise that the old Duchesa da Chianti had bequeathed him, and
quickly but tactfully wrapping it in a ten-pound note, he pressed it
into her little quivering palm.[13]
[13] See note, page 74. (LIT. EXEC.)
She disappeared.
Smiling gently at the amazing variegation of his metropolitan
adventures, Gaveston crossed towards Vigo Street. Already a heartless
shaft of madder light was sullenly annunciating the approach of yet
another aenigmatick day. They had lingered talking a long time out
there. And as he tore off his crumpled white waistcoat with impatient,
smoke-stained fingers, he wondered suddenly about his father. There was
a queer Quixotic strain in him, he felt, that surely did not come from
the ffoulises.
But he grew tired, and, drawing the too transparent dimity curtains
tighter against the dawn, he leapt into bed. And through the fitful
dreams that so often attend sunlight sleep, there flitted furtively the
ill-matched figures of his mother and the mysterious wanton, confused
in a sinister identity beyond all possibility of disentanglement.