There were occasions, as he had said, when Traill met his sister.
They were infrequent, as infrequent as he could make them. And they
were seldom, if ever, at her house in Sloane Street.
One evening, some three weeks or less after his parting with Sally,
he took her out to dinner. He donned evening dress, loudly cursing
the formality, and brought her to a fashionable restaurant, where
he gently cursed the abject civility of the waiters beneath his
breath.
"They're not men," he said to his sister; "they're worms of the
underworld, waiting for the corpse to be lowered its regulation six
feet."
Mrs. Durlacher shuddered. "You make use of horrible similes
sometimes, Jack," she said.
"I see some horrible things," said Traill. "Look at that waiter,
hovering like a vulture, while the fat old gentleman from Aberdeen
goes through the items of the bill. He might just as well shut one
eye and stand on one leg to make the picture complete. That's rather
a pretty girl, too, at the same table."
His sister looked in the direction. "Why, he's not from Aberdeen,"
she said, daintily. "That's Sir Standish-Roe; he sits on boards in
the city."
"A vigorous exercise like that ought to reduce his bulk," said Traill.
"Do you know them, then?"
"Yes."
"Who's the girl?"
"That's his daughter. I'll introduce you after dinner if they're not
hurrying off to a theatre."
"No you don't," said Traill; "baited traps don't catch me, however
alluring they are."
So they talked, all through dinner, criticizing in idle good-humour
the various people about them. Whenever he was in his sister's
company Traill sharpened his wits. Putting on the social gloss, he
called it, whenever she laughed at his remarks and told him he would
be a God-send at some of her dinners.
"Is it quite hopeless?" she asked him that evening.
"Quite! As far removed from possibility as I am from a seat in the
Cabinet."
"But you might if you took up politics."
"Exactly, the point of absolute certainty being that I never shall."
She waited awhile, letting the conversation drift as it liked; then
she dipped her oar again.
"Do you ever hunt or shoot now?"
"Hunt, yes, for jobs. I've made that feeble joke before to somebody
else. No--neither."
"We had some rather good days with the pheasants this year down at
Apsley."
"Did you?"
"Yes, Harold got sixty-seven birds one day."
"Lucky dog! Have you finished? Well, look here, we'll come along to
my rooms--I'm on the first floor now; I hate talking in these places.
You won't have to climb up all those stairs this time, and I'll give
you some more of that coffee."
She needed no second persuasion. In the drift of her mind, she fancied
she saw impressions floating by, first one and then another,
impressions that he was more tractable this evening, more likely to
be won a little to her side; for social though she was--the blood
in her veins to the finger tips--she still cared for this Bohemian
brother of hers; considered it trouble well spent to bring him to
her way of thinking. We are all of us apt to think thus generously
of those whom we hold dear.
"There aren't many women who come up these stairs in evening dress,
I can assure you," he said, as they mounted the flight together.
She laughed. "And I suppose the ones who do are on their way to see
you?"
"Dolly, I'm ashamed of you," he replied.
"Well, you've made yourself the reputation; don't grumble at it or
shirk it."
"Shirk it? Why should I?" He stood aside to let her pass in. "I've
nothing to be ashamed of. I don't wear the garment of respectability,
but then I'm not stark naked. Every man clothes himself in some
article of faith, virtue if you like." The name of Sally and Sally's
face swept across his mind. There was one virtue at least which he
could put on. "You people, the set you want me to join, the hunting
set, the country house set--all you wear--I don't mean you
particularly. God! If you were like that!" He was too intent upon
what he was saying to notice the smile of ice that twisted her pretty
lips. "All you wear is the big, comprehensive cloak of respectability,
and sometimes you're not particular whether that's tied up
properly."
Dolly broke into low laughter. "If you'd come down to Apsley," she
said, "one week end, I'd get a certain number of people down there,
and when they are all congregated in the drawing-room after dinner,
you could stand with your back to the fire, command the whole room
and, at a signal from me, make that speech. You'd be the lion of the
evening."
"What does being the lion of the evening mean?" he asked, with the
ironical turn of the lip. "That your bedroom door is liable to open,
I suppose, and admit whatever lady is most hampered in the way of
debts."
"Jack!" She sat upright in the chair she had taken, eyes well lit
with a forced blaze, breath cunningly driven through the nostrils.
"What?"
"How dare you talk to me like that?"
"Don't know," he replied, imperturbably. "It is daring, I suppose,
seeing that I'm not one of you. You'd listen to that on the hunting
field from a man whom you'd met once before. But it was daring of
me; I'm only your brother, and not in the crew at that."
Her eyes glittered more vividly, the breath came quicker still. Then
it all blew away like sea-froth, and she shook with charming
laughter.
"You talk like a Jesuit," she said. "Do you really feel those things
as keenly as that?"
"Me?" He laughed with her and went for his pipe. "I don't feel them
at all. What's there to feel about in them? I only want to show you
that I'm not totally ignorant of what your set is like, the set you
want me to become a lion-of-the-evening in. Lion-of-the-evening,
beautiful lion, eh? Have a cigarette?"
"Thanks. Then why are you so hard on us?"
"Hard! I'm not hard." He lit a match for her, watched by the light
of it her lineless face, deftly made up with its powder and its dust
of rouge, the eyebrows cunningly pencilled, the lashes touched with
black. None of it was obvious. It was only by the match's glare, held
close to her face, that he could see the art that, in any less vivid
an illumination, concealed the art. He smiled at it all, and her eyes,
lifting, as the cigarette glowed, found the smile and sensitively
questioned it.
"Why the smile?" she said, quickly.
"Why? Oh, I don't know. A comparison. I suppose you people really
are artists. Mind you, I don't mean you. I'm not talking about you.
If it were you--well, I shouldn't talk about it."
For the first moment in all their conversation of that evening, she
looked ill-at-ease. A cloud passed over the sun of her self-assurance.
It seemed, on the instant, to turn her eyes from blue to grey.
"What do you mean by--a comparison?" she inquired, "and saying we're
artists? Artists at what? I believe you like to talk in riddles.
That's another thing too that 'ud be in your favour. People 'ud think
you so awfully clever. But what do you mean by comparison?"
He blew through his pipe, set it burning comfortably--took his
favourite seat on the table with his legs swinging like a
schoolboy's.
"A comparison--I mean a comparison between the women of your set,
and the women who toil at the same job in the streets of London."
"Yes, but you said that when you looked at me, when you smiled while
I was lighting the cigarette." The words hurried out of her lips,
dropping metallically with a hard sound on his ears.
"I know, but I told you I didn't refer to you. Good God!" He gripped
the table. "Do you think I could think about you like that? Look here,
it's no good having this nonsense; I won't say another word if you
think I am."
"Very well; all right. But tell me, at any rate, why you said it when
you looked at me."
"Because you're made-up--made-up to perfection. I should never have
seen it if I hadn't held the match up to your face. And there's the
difference--there's the comparison. The women in your set are
artists. There's all the difference in a Sargent and a man with half
a dozen coloured chalks on the pavement, between them and the women
you'll find in Piccadilly at night. But they're both workers in the
same dignified profession. When you think of the way those poor
wretches shove on their rouge--a little silk bag turned inside out
with eider-down on it and rouge powder on that, then the whole thing
jammed on to the face before a mirror in one of Swan & Edgar's shop
windows; any night you can see 'em doing it--and then look at a
society woman done up, with a maid in attendance and a mirror lighted
up, as if it were an actor's dressing-table--my heavens, you're
liable to make a comparison then."
Dolly shuddered at the picture. "I think you've got a loathsome mind,
Jack," she said with conviction.
"Of course you do, and you're quite right. It is a loathsome idea
to think that a man of the type of Sargent is of the same noble
profession as the pavement artist. You can only disinfect its
loathsomeness in a degree by assuring people that they don't work
in the same street. But it always is loathsome in this country to
see facts as they really are, and when you know of society women who
send nude portraits of themselves--"
"Jack!"
"--Up to wealthy men whom they have not had the pleasure of meeting,
it's naturally a beastly conception of life to compare them with
those unfortunate women whose existence of course we all know about,
but would much rather not discuss. I really quite agree with you,
I have a loathsome mind."
Dolly rose with perfect dignity to her feet. "Do you think you ought
to talk about things like that to me, Jack?"
"I don't know. I suppose it is questionable whether one ought to treat
one's sister as a simple innocent, or talk to her, as undoubtedly
you do talk in society to other men's wives and other men's daughters.
I think myself that it doesn't really matter. You're not thinking
of the impropriety of it. That doesn't worry you in the least. Many
a man has talked to you sympathetically on similar subjects before.
You've listened to them. The fault in me is the gentle vein of irony.
Irony's an insidious thing when you grind it out of the truth. Sit
down, Dolly; I won't talk about it any more. I'll pour the sweetest
nothings you ever heard into your ears. Come on--sit down. It's not
much after nine. I only wanted to show you why I don't appreciate
society. I wouldn't mind it, if it admitted its vices and called them
by their names; I think I'd permit myself to be dragged into it by
a woman who was clean right through; but as it is, and as it describes
itself, I prefer the pavement artist with his little sack of coloured
chalks. There's not much reality, I admit, in his portrait of Lord
Roberts or his beautiful pink and blue mackerel with its high light,
that never shone on land or sea, except on the scales of that fish;
there's not much reality in them, when they're finished, but there's
a hell of a lot of it in the doing of them."
He sat and puffed at his pipe, while she remained standing, looking
down into the fire.
The silence was long, then it was broken abruptly. A knock rattled
gently on the door. It was soft, timid, but it rushed violently
through their silence. Traill slid to his feet. His sister stood
erect. Her eyes fastened to his face, and she watched him calculating
the possibilities, as if he were counting them on his fingers, of
whom it might be.
Then it came again.
"Who do you think it is?" she whispered. She was beginning already
to shrink at the thought that some woman had come to see him. He heard
that in her voice and casually smiled.
"It's all right," he said quietly. "I shan't let any one in who'd
offend your sense of propriety. However I talk, we're related. Stay
there."
She watched him cross to the door; turned, so that she could still
observe him and yet with one twist of the head, if any one entered,
seem to have been untouched by any curiosity.
He opened the door. It cut off his face from view; but she heard his
sudden exclamation of surprise, and allowed a thousand speculations
to travel through her brain.
"You!" he said.
"Yes," a woman's voice replied in a nervous undertone. "I came to
see you, to see if you were in. I--I wanted to see you." The words
were stilted with nervous repetitions.
"Of course, of course; come in; let me introduce you to my sister.
Oh--you must--come in--please; we've been dining together and came
on here--for coffee--"
He threw the door wide open, and Sally walked apprehensively into
the room.