THE CALL
Christine found the night at the guinea-fowl rather dull. The
supper-room, garish and tawdry in its decorations, was functioning as
usual. The round tables and the square tables, the tables large and
the tables small, were well occupied with mixed parties and couples.
Each table had its own yellow illumination, and the upper portion
of the room, with a certain empty space in the centre of it, was
bafflingly shadowed. Between two high, straight falling curtains could
be seen a section of the ball-room, very bright against the curtains,
with the figures of dancers whose bodies seemed to be glued to each
other, pale to black or pale to khaki, passing slowly and rhythmically
across. The rag-time music, over a sort of ground-bass of syncopated
tom-tom, surged through the curtains like a tide of the sea of
Aphrodite, and bathed everyone at the supper-tables in a mysterious
aphrodisiacal fluid. The waiters alone were insensible to its
influence. They moved to and fro with the impassivity and disdain of
eunuchs separated for ever from the world's temptations. Loud laughs
or shrill little shrieks exploded at intervals from the sinister
melancholy of the interior.
On Christine's left, at a round table in a corner, sat G.J.; on her
right, the handsome boy Molder. On Molder's right, Miss Aida Altown
spread her amplitude, and on G.J.'s left was a young girl known to
the company as Alice. Major Craive, the host, the splendid quality of
whose hospitality was proved by the flowers, the fruit, the bottles,
the cigar-boxes and the cigarette-boxes on the table, sat between
Alice and Aida Altown.
The three women on principle despised and scorned each other with
false warm smiles and sudden outbursts of compliment. Christine knew
that the other two detested her as being "one of those French girls"
who, under the protection of Free Trade, came to London and, by their
lack of scruple and decency, took the bread out of the mouths of the
nice, modest, respectable, English girls. She on her side disdained
both of them, not merely because they were courtesans (which
somehow Christine considered she really was not), but also for their
characteristic insipidity, lackadaisicalness and ignorance of the
technique of the profession. They expected to be paid for doing
nothing.
Aida Altown she knew by sight as belonging to a great rival Promenade.
Aida had reached the purgatory of obesity which Christine always
feared. Despite the largeness of her mass, she was a very beautiful
woman in the English manner, blonde, soft, idle, without a trace of
temperament, and incomparably dull and stupid. But she was ageing;
she had been favourably known in the West End continuously (save for
a brief escapade in New York) for perhaps a quarter of a century. She
was at the period when such as she realise with flaccid alarm that
they have no future, and when they are ready to risk grave imprudences
for youths who feel flattered by their extreme maturity. Christine
gazed calmly at her, supercilious and secure in the immense advantage
of at least fifteen years to the good.
And if she shrugged her shoulders at Aida for being too old,
Christine did the same at Alice for being too young. Alice was truly
a girl--probably not more than seventeen. Her pert, pretty, infantile
face was an outrage against the code. She was a mere amateur, with
everything to learn, absurdly presuming upon the very quality which
would vanish first. And she was a fool. She obviously had no sense,
not even the beginnings of sense. She was wearing an impudently
expensive frock which must have cost quite five times as much as
Christine's own, though the latter in the opinion of the wearer was
by far the more authentically _chic_. And she talked proudly at large
about her losses on the turf and of the swindles practised upon her.
Christine admitted that the girl could make plenty of money, and would
continue to make money for a long, long time, bar accidents, but her
final conclusion about Alice was: "She will end on straw."
The supper was over. The conversation had never been vivacious, and
now it was half-drowned in champagne. The girls had wanted to hear
about the war, but the Major, who had arrived in a rather dogmatic
mood, put an absolute ban on shop. Alice had then kept the talk, such
as it was, upon her favourite topic--revues. She was an encyclopaedia
of knowledge concerning revues past, present, and to come. She had
once indeed figured for a few grand weeks in a revue chorus, thereby
acquiring unique status in her world. The topic palled upon both Aida
and Christine. And Christine had said to herself: "They are aware of
nothing, those two," for Aida and Alice had proved to be equally and
utterly ignorant of the superlative social event of the afternoon, the
private view at the Reynolds Galleries--at which indeed Christine had
not assisted, but of which she had learnt all the intimate details
from G.J. What, Christine demanded, _could_ be done with such a pair
of ninnies?
She might have been excused for abandoning all attempt to behave as
a woman of the world should at a supper party. Nevertheless, she
continued good-naturedly and conscientiously in the performance of her
duty to charm, to divert, and to enliven. After all, the ladies
were there to captivate the males, and if Aida and Alice dishonestly
flouted obligations, Christine would not. She would, at any rate, show
them how to behave.
She especially attended to G.J., who having drunk little, was taciturn
and preoccupied in his amiabilities. She divined that something was
the matter, but she could not divine that his thoughts were saddened
by the recollection at the Guinea-Fowl of the lovely music which he
had heard earlier in his drawing-room and by the memory of the Major's
letters and of what the Major had said at the Reynolds Galleries
about the past and the possibilities of the future. The Major was very
benevolently intoxicated, and at short intervals he raised his glass
to G.J., who did not once fail to respond with an affectionate smile
which Christine had never before seen on G.J.'s face.
Suddenly Alice, who had been lounging semi-somnolent with an extinct
cigarette in her jewelled fingers, sat up and said in the uncertain
voice of an inexperienced girl who has ceased to count the number of
glasses emptied:
"Shall I recite? I've been trained, you know."
And, not waiting for an answer, she stood and recited, with a
surprisingly correct and sure pronunciation of difficult words to show
that she had, in fact, received some training:
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently o'er a perfumed sea
The weary, wayworn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.
On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece,
To the grandeur that was Rome.
Lo! In your brilliant window niche,
How statue-like I see thee stand,
The agate lamp within thy hand!
Ah, Psyche from the regions which
Are Holy Land!
The uncomprehended marvellous poem, having startled the whole room,
ceased, and the rag-time resumed its sway. A drunken "Bravo!"
came from one table, a cheer from another. Young Alice nodded an
acknowledgment and sank loosely into her chair, exhausted by her last
effort against the spell of champagne and liqueurs. And the naive, big
Major, bewitched by the child, subsided into soft contact with her,
and they almost tearfully embraced. A waiter sedately replaced a glass
which Alice's drooping, negligent hand had over-turned, and wiped the
cloth. G.J. was silent. The whole table was silent.
"_Est-ce de la grande poésie_?" asked Christine of G.J., who did not
reply. Christine, though she condemned Alice as now disgusting, had
been taken aback and, in spite of herself, much impressed by the
surprising display of elocution.
"_Oui_," said Molder, in his clipped, self-conscious Oxford French.
Two couples from other tables were dancing in the middle of the room.
Molder demanded, leaning towards her:
"I say, do you dance?"
"But certainly," said Christine. "I learnt at the convent." And she
spoke of her convent education, a triumphant subject with her, though
she had actually spent less than a year in the convent.
After a few moments they both rose, and Christine, bending over G.J.,
whispered lovingly in his ear:
"Dear, thou wilt not be jealous if I dance one turn with thy young
friend?"
She was addressing the wrong person. Already throughout the supper
Aida, ignoring the fact that the whole structure of civilised society
is based on the rule that at a meal a man must talk first to the lady
on his right and then to the lady on his left and so on infinitely,
had secretly taken exception to the periodic intercourse--and
particularly the intercourse in French--between Christine and Molder,
who was officially "hers". That these two should go off and dance
together was the supreme insult to her. By ill-chance she had not
sufficient physical command of herself.
Christine felt that Molder would have danced better two hours earlier;
but still he danced beautifully. Their bodies fitted like two parts
of a jigsaw puzzle that have discovered each other. She realised that
G.J. was middle-aged, and regret tinctured the ecstasy of the dance.
Then suddenly she heard a loud, imploring cry in her ear:
"Christine!"
She looked round, pale, still dancing, but only by inertia.
Nobody was near her. The four people at the Major's table gave no sign
of agitation or even of interest. The Major still had Alice more or
less in his arms.
"What was that?" she asked wildly.
"What was what?" said Molder, at a loss to understand her
extraordinary demeanour.
And she heard the cry again, and then again:
"Christine! Christine!"
She recognised the voice. It was the voice of the officer whom she had
taken to Victoria Station one Sunday night months and months ago.
"Excuse me!" she said, slipping from Molder's hold, and she hurried
out of the room to the ladies' cloak-room, got her wraps, and ran past
the watchful guardian, through the dark, dubious portico of the club
into the street. The thing was done in a moment, and why she did it
she could not tell. She knew simply that she must do it, and that she
was under the dominion of those unseen powers in whom she had always
believed. She forgot the Guinea-Fowl as completely as though it had
been a pre-natal phenomenon with her.