They didn't go outside the magic confines of the Lees' villa for three
days, and when they did they were still surrounded by their host's
service and possessions; they made an excursion to Chillon in his
motor-cars, and went in his motor-boat to lunch with the Maynards in
their lake-side villa close to Geneva. During all that time they seemed
lifted off the common earth into a world of fine fabrics, agreeable
sounds, noiseless unlimited service, and ample untroubled living. It had
an effect of enchantment, and the long healthy arduous journey thither
seemed a tale of incredible effort amidst these sunny excesses. The
weather had the whim to be serenely fine, sunshine like summer and the
bluest of skies shone above the white wall and the ilex thickets and
cypresses that bounded them in from the great world of crowded homes and
sous and small necessities. And through the texture of it all for
Trafford ran a thread of curious new suggestion. An intermittent
discussion of economics and socialism was going on between himself and
Solomonson and an agreeable little stammering man in brown named Minter,
who walked up in the afternoon from Vevey,--he professed to be writing a
novel--during the earlier half of the day. Minter displayed the keenest
appreciation of everything in his entertainment, and blinked cheerfully
and expressed opinions of the extremest socialistic and anarchistic
flavour to an accompaniment of grateful self-indulgence. "Your port-wine
is wonderful, Lee," he would say, sipping it. "A terrible retribution
will fall upon you some day for all this."
The villa had been designed by Lee to please his wife, and if it was
neither very beautiful nor very dignified, it was at any rate very
pretty and amusing. It might have been built by a Parisian
dressmaker--in the chateauesque style. It was of greyish-white stone,
with a roof of tiles. It had little balconies and acutely roofed
turrets, and almost burlesque buttresses, pierced by doors and gates;
and sun-trap loggias, as pleasantly casual as the bows and embroideries
of a woman's dress; and its central hall, with an impluvium that had
nothing to do with rain-water, and its dining-room, to which one
ascended from this hall between pillars up five broad steps, were
entirely irrelevant to all its exterior features. Unobtrusive
men-servants in grey with scarlet facings hovered serviceably.
From the little terrace, all set with orange-trees in tubs, one could
see, through the branches and stems of evergreens and over a foreground
of budding, starting vineyard, the clustering roofs of Vevey below, an
agglomeration veiled ever so thinly in the morning by a cobweb of wood
smoke, against the blue background of lake with its winged
sailing-boats, and sombre Alpine distances. Minter made it all
significant by a wave of the hand. "All this," he said, and of the
crowded work-a-day life below, "all that."
"All this," with its rich litter of stuffs and ornaments, its fine
profusion, its delicacies of flower and food and furniture, its frequent
inconsecutive pleasures, its noiseless, ready service, was remarkably
novel and yet remarkably familiar to Trafford. For a time he could not
understand this undertone of familiarity, and then a sunlit group of
hangings in one of the small rooms that looked out upon the lake took
his mind back to his own dining-room, and the little inadequate, but
decidedly good, Bokhara embroidery that dominated it like a flag, that
lit it, and now lit his understanding, like a confessed desire. Of
course, Mrs. Lee--happy woman!--was doing just everything that Marjorie
would have loved to do. Marjorie had never confessed as much, perhaps
she had never understood as much, but now in the presence of Mrs. Lee's
aesthetic exuberances, Trafford at least understood. He surveyed the
little room, whose harmonies he had at first simply taken for granted,
noted the lustre-ware that answered to the gleaming Persian tiles, the
inspiration of a metallic thread in the hangings, and the exquisite
choice of the deadened paint upon the woodwork, and realized for the
first time how little aimless extravagance can be, and all the timid,
obstinately insurgent artistry that troubled his wife. He stepped
through the open window into a little loggia, and stared unseeingly over
glittering, dark-green leaves to the mysteries of distance in the great
masses above St. Gingolph, and it seemed for the first time that perhaps
in his thoughts he had done his wife a wrong. He had judged her fickle,
impulsive, erratic, perhaps merely because her mind followed a different
process from his, because while he went upon the lines of constructive
truth, her guide was a more immediate and instinctive sense of beauty.
He was very much alive to her now, and deeply in love with her. He had
reached Les Avants with all his sense of their discordance clean washed
and walked out of his mind, by rain and sun and a flow of high
resolutions, and the brotherly swing of their strides together. They had
come to the Lee's villa, mud-splashed, air-sweet comrades, all unaware
of the subtle differences of atmosphere they had to encounter. They had
no suspicion that it was only about half of each other that had
fraternized. Now here they were in a company that was not only
altogether alien to their former mood, but extremely interesting and
exciting and closely akin to the latent factors in Marjorie's
composition. Their hostess and her sister had the keen, quick aesthetic
sensibilities of their race, with all that freedom of reading and
enfranchisement of mind which is the lot of the Western women. Lee had
an immense indulgent affection for his wife, he regarded her
arrangements and exploits with an admiration that was almost American.
And Mrs. Lee's imagination had run loose in pursuit of beautiful and
remarkable people and splendours rather than harmonies of line and
colour. Lee, like Solomonson, had that inexplicable alchemy of mind
which distils gold from the commerce of the world ("All this," said
Minter to Trafford, "is an exhalation from all that"); he accumulated
wealth as one grows a beard, and found his interest in his uxorious
satisfactions, and so Mrs. Lee, with her bright watchful eyes, quick
impulsive movements and instinctive command had the utmost freedom to
realize her ideals.
In the world at large Lee and Solomonson seemed both a little short and
a little stout, and a little too black and bright for their entirely
conventional clothing, but for the dinner and evening of the villa they
were now, out of consideration for Trafford, at their ease, and far more
dignified in Oriental robes. Trafford was accommodated with a long,
black, delicately embroidered garment that reached to his feet, and
suited something upstanding and fine in his bearing; Minter, who had
stayed on from an afternoon call, was gorgeous in Chinese embroidery.
The rest of the men clung boldly or bashfully to evening dress....
On the evening of his arrival Trafford, bathed and robed, found the rest
of the men assembling about an open wood fire in the smaller hall at the
foot of the main staircase. Lee was still upstairs, and Solomonson, with
a new grace of gesture begotten by his costume, made the necessary
introductions; a little man with fine-cut features and a Galway accent
was Rex the playwright; a tall, grey-haired, clean-shaven man was Bright
from the New York Central Museum; and a bearded giant with a roof of red
hair and a remote eye was Radlett Barns, the great portrait-painter, who
consents to paint your portrait for posterity as the King confers a
knighthood. These were presently joined by Lee and Pacey, the
blond-haired musician, and Mottersham, whose patents and inventions
control electric lighting and heating all over the world, and then, with
the men duly gathered and expectant, the women came down the wide
staircase.
The staircase had been planned and lit for these effects, and Mrs. Lee
meant to make the most of her new discovery. Her voice could be heard in
the unseen corridor above arranging the descent: "You go first, dear.
Will you go with Christabel?" The conversation about the fire checked
and ceased with the sound of voices above and the faint rustle of
skirts. Then came Christabel Morrison, her slender grace beautifully
contrasted with the fuller beauties of that great lady of the stage,
Marion Rufus. Lady Solomonson descended confidently in a group of three,
with Lady Mottersham and sharp-tongued little Mrs. Rex, all very rich
and splendid. After a brief interval their hostess preceded Marjorie,
and was so much of an artist that she had dressed herself merely as a
foil to this new creation. She wore black and scarlet, that made the
white face and bright eyes under her sombre hair seem the face of an
inspiring spirit. A step behind her and to the right of her came
Marjorie, tall and wonderful, as if she were the queen of earth and
sunshine, swathed barbarically in gold and ruddy brown, and with her
abundant hair bound back by a fillet of bloodstones and gold. Radlett
Barns exclaimed at the sight of her. She was full of the manifest
consciousness of dignity as she descended, quite conscious and quite
unembarrassed; two borrowed golden circlets glittered on her shining
arm, and a thin chain of gold and garnets broke the contrast of the
warm, sun-touched neck above, with the unsullied skin below.
She sought and met her husband's astonishment with the faintest,
remotest of smiles. It seemed to him that never before had he
appreciated her beauty. His daily companion had become this splendour in
the sky. She came close by him with hand extended to greet Sir Philip
Mottersham. He was sensible of the glow of her, as it were of a scented
aura about her. He had a first full intimation of the cult and worship
of woman and the magnificence of women, old as the Mediterranean and its
goddesses, and altogether novel to his mind....
Christabel Morrison found him a pleasant but not very entertaining or
exciting neighbor at the dinner-table, and was relieved when the time
came for her to turn an ear to the artistic compliments of Radlett
Barns. But Trafford was too interested and amused by the general effect
of the dinner to devote himself to the rather heavy business of really
exhilarating Christabel. He didn't give his mind to her. He found the
transformation of Sir Rupert into a turbanned Oriental who might have
come out of a picture by Carpaccio, gently stimulating and altogether
delightful. His attention returned again and again to that genial
swarthiness. Mrs. Lee on his left lived in her eyes, and didn't so much
talk to him as rattle her mind at him almost absent-mindedly, as one
might dangle keys at a baby while one talked to its mother. Yet it was
evident she liked the look of him. Her glance went from his face to his
robe, and up and down the table, at the bright dresses, the shining
arms, the glass and light and silver. She asked him to tell her just
where he had tramped and just what he had seen, and he had scarcely
begun answering her question before her thoughts flew off to three
trophies of china and silver, struggling groups of china boys bearing up
great silver shells of fruit and flowers that stood down the centre of
the table. "What do you think of my chubby boys?" she asked. "They're
German work. They came from a show at Duesseldorf last week. Ben saw I
liked them, and sent back for them secretly, and here they, are! I
thought they might be too colourless. But are they?"
"No," said Trafford, "they're just cool. Under that glow of fruit. Is
this salt-cellar English cut glass?"
"Old Dutch," said Mrs. Lee. "Isn't it jolly?" She embarked with a roving
eye upon the story of her Dutch glass, which was abundant and admirable,
and broke off abruptly to say, "Your wife is wonderful."
"Her hair goes back," she said, "like music. You know what I mean--a
sort of easy rhythm. You don't mind my praising your wife?"
Trafford said he didn't.
"And there's a sort of dignity about her. All my life, Mr. Trafford,
I've wanted to be tall. It stopped my growth."
She glanced off at a tangent. "Tell me, Mr. Trafford," she asked, "was
your wife beautiful like this when you married her? I mean--of course
she was a beautiful girl and adorable and all that; but wasn't she just
a slender thing?"
She paused, but if she had a habit of asking disconcerting questions she
did not at any rate insist upon answers, and she went on to confess that
she believed she would be a happier woman poor than rich--"not that Ben
isn't all he should be"--but that then she would have been a fashionable
dressmaker. "People want help," she said, "so much more help than they
get. They go about with themselves--what was it Mr. Radlett Barns said
the other night--oh!--like people leading horses they daren't ride. I
think he says such good things at times, don't you? So wonderful to be
clever in two ways like that. Just look _now_ at your wife--now I mean,
that they've drawn that peacock-coloured curtain behind her. My
brother-in-law has been telling me you keep the most wonderful and
precious secrets locked up in your breast, that you know how to make
gold and diamonds and all sorts of things. If I did,--I should make
them."
She pounced suddenly upon Rex at her left with questions about the
Keltic Renascence, was it still going on--or what? and Trafford was at
liberty for a time to enjoy the bright effects about him, the shadowed
profile and black hair of Christabel to the right of him, and the
coruscating refractions and reflections of Lady Solomonson across the
white and silver and ivory and blossom of the table. Then Mrs. Lee
dragged him into a sudden conflict with Rex, by saying abruptly--
"Of course, Mr. Trafford wouldn't believe that."
He looked perhaps a little lost.
"I was telling Mrs. Lee," said Rex, "that I don't believe there's any
economy of human toil in machinery whatever. I mean that the machine
itself really embodies all the toil it seems to save, toil that went to
the making of it and preparing it and getting coal for it...."