He took nobody by surprise; there was nobody to take. All was quiet;
Denis wandered from room to empty room, looking with pleasure at the
familiar pictures and furniture, at all the little untidy signs of life
that lay scattered here and there. He was rather glad that they were
all out; it was amusing to wander through the house as though one
were exploring a dead, deserted Pompeii. What sort of life would the
excavator reconstruct from these remains; how would he people these
empty chambers? There was the long gallery, with its rows of respectable
and (though, of course, one couldn’t publicly admit it) rather boring
Italian primitives, its Chinese sculptures, its unobtrusive, dateless
furniture. There was the panelled drawing-room, where the huge
chintz-covered arm-chairs stood, oases of comfort among the austere
flesh-mortifying antiques. There was the morning-room, with its pale
lemon walls, its painted Venetian chairs and rococo tables, its mirrors,
its modern pictures. There was the library, cool, spacious, and dark,
book-lined from floor to ceiling, rich in portentous folios. There was
the dining-room, solidly, portwinily English, with its great
mahogany table, its eighteenth-century chairs and sideboard, its
eighteenth-century pictures--family portraits, meticulous animal
paintings. What could one reconstruct from such data? There was much of
Henry Wimbush in the long gallery and the library, something of Anne,
perhaps, in the morning-room. That was all. Among the accumulations of
ten generations the living had left but few traces.
Lying on the table in the morning-room he saw his own book of poems.
What tact! He picked it up and opened it. It was what the reviewers call
“a slim volume.” He read at hazard:
”...But silence and the topless dark
Vault in the lights of Luna Park;
And Blackpool from the nightly gloom
Hollows a bright tumultuous tomb.”
He put it down again, shook his head, and sighed. “What genius I had
then!” he reflected, echoing the aged Swift. It was nearly six months
since the book had been published; he was glad to think he would never
write anything of the same sort again. Who could have been reading it,
he wondered? Anne, perhaps; he liked to think so. Perhaps, too, she had
at last recognised herself in the Hamadryad of the poplar sapling; the
slim Hamadryad whose movements were like the swaying of a young tree in
the wind. “The Woman who was a Tree” was what he had called the poem. He
had given her the book when it came out, hoping that the poem would tell
her what he hadn’t dared to say. She had never referred to it.
He shut his eyes and saw a vision of her in a red velvet cloak, swaying
into the little restaurant where they sometimes dined together in
London--three quarters of an hour late, and he at his table, haggard
with anxiety, irritation, hunger. Oh, she was damnable!
It occurred to him that perhaps his hostess might be in her boudoir. It
was a possibility; he would go and see. Mrs. Wimbush’s boudoir was in
the central tower on the garden front. A little staircase cork-screwed
up to it from the hall. Denis mounted, tapped at the door. “Come in.”
Ah, she was there; he had rather hoped she wouldn’t be. He opened the
door.
Priscilla Wimbush was lying on the sofa. A blotting-pad rested on her
knees and she was thoughtfully sucking the end of a silver pencil.
“Hullo,” she said, looking up. “I’d forgotten you were coming.”
“Well, here I am, I’m afraid,” said Denis deprecatingly. “I’m awfully
sorry.”
Mrs. Wimbush laughed. Her voice, her laughter, were deep and masculine.
Everything about her was manly. She had a large, square, middle-aged
face, with a massive projecting nose and little greenish eyes, the whole
surmounted by a lofty and elaborate coiffure of a curiously improbable
shade of orange. Looking at her, Denis always thought of Wilkie Bard as
the cantatrice.
“That’s why I’m going to
Sing in op’ra, sing in op’ra,
Sing in op-pop-pop-pop-pop-popera.”
Today she was wearing a purple silk dress with a high collar and a row
of pearls. The costume, so richly dowagerish, so suggestive of the Royal
Family, made her look more than ever like something on the Halls.
“What have you been doing all this time?” she asked.
“Well,” said Denis, and he hesitated, almost voluptuously. He had a
tremendously amusing account of London and its doings all ripe and ready
in his mind. It would be a pleasure to give it utterance. “To begin
with,” he said...
But he was too late. Mrs. Wimbush’s question had been what the
grammarians call rhetorical; it asked for no answer. It was a little
conversational flourish, a gambit in the polite game.
“You find me busy at my horoscopes,” she said, without even being aware
that she had interrupted him.
A little pained, Denis decided to reserve his story for more receptive
ears. He contented himself, by way of revenge, with saying “Oh?” rather
icily.
“Did I tell you how I won four hundred on the Grand National this year?”
“Yes,” he replied, still frigid and mono-syllabic. She must have told
him at least six times.
“Wonderful, isn’t it? Everything is in the Stars. In the Old Days,
before I had the Stars to help me, I used to lose thousands. Now”--she
paused an instant--“well, look at that four hundred on the Grand
National. That’s the Stars.”
Denis would have liked to hear more about the Old Days. But he was too
discreet and, still more, too shy to ask. There had been something of
a bust up; that was all he knew. Old Priscilla--not so old then, of
course, and sprightlier--had lost a great deal of money, dropped it
in handfuls and hatfuls on every race-course in the country. She had
gambled too. The number of thousands varied in the different legends,
but all put it high. Henry Wimbush was forced to sell some of his
Primitives--a Taddeo da Poggibonsi, an Amico di Taddeo, and four or five
nameless Sienese--to the Americans. There was a crisis. For the first
time in his life Henry asserted himself, and with good effect, it
seemed.
Priscilla’s gay and gadding existence had come to an abrupt end.
Nowadays she spent almost all her time at Crome, cultivating a rather
ill-defined malady. For consolation she dallied with New Thought and the
Occult. Her passion for racing still possessed her, and Henry, who was a
kind-hearted fellow at bottom, allowed her forty pounds a month betting
money. Most of Priscilla’s days were spent in casting the horoscopes
of horses, and she invested her money scientifically, as the stars
dictated. She betted on football too, and had a large notebook in which
she registered the horoscopes of all the players in all the teams of
the League. The process of balancing the horoscopes of two elevens one
against the other was a very delicate and difficult one. A match between
the Spurs and the Villa entailed a conflict in the heavens so vast and
so complicated that it was not to be wondered at if she sometimes made a
mistake about the outcome.
“Such a pity you don’t believe in these things, Denis, such a pity,”
said Mrs. Wimbush in her deep, distinct voice.
“I can’t say I feel it so.”
“Ah, that’s because you don’t know what it’s like to have faith. You’ve
no idea how amusing and exciting life becomes when you do believe. All
that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant. It
makes life so jolly, you know. Here am I at Crome. Dull as ditchwater,
you’d think; but no, I don’t find it so. I don’t regret the Old Days
a bit. I have the Stars...” She picked up the sheet of paper that was
lying on the blotting-pad. “Inman’s horoscope,” she explained. “(I
thought I’d like to have a little fling on the billiards championship
this autumn.) I have the Infinite to keep in tune with,” she waved her
hand. “And then there’s the next world and all the spirits, and one’s
Aura, and Mrs. Eddy and saying you’re not ill, and the Christian
Mysteries and Mrs. Besant. It’s all splendid. One’s never dull for a
moment. I can’t think how I used to get on before--in the Old Days.
Pleasure--running about, that’s all it was; just running about. Lunch,
tea, dinner, theatre, supper every day. It was fun, of course, while it
lasted. But there wasn’t much left of it afterwards. There’s rather a
good thing about that in Barbecue-Smith’s new book. Where is it?”
She sat up and reached for a book that was lying on the little table by
the head of the sofa.
“Do you know him, by the way?” she asked.
“Who?”
“Mr. Barbecue-Smith.”
Denis knew of him vaguely. Barbecue-Smith was a name in the Sunday
papers. He wrote about the Conduct of Life. He might even be the author
of “What a Young Girl Ought to Know”.
“No, not personally,” he said.
“I’ve invited him for next week-end.” She turned over the pages of the
book. “Here’s the passage I was thinking of. I marked it. I always mark
the things I like.”
Holding the book almost at arm’s length, for she was somewhat
long-sighted, and making suitable gestures with her free hand, she began
to read, slowly, dramatically.
“‘What are thousand pound fur coats, what are quarter million incomes?’”
She looked up from the page with a histrionic movement of the head; her
orange coiffure nodded portentously. Denis looked at it, fascinated.
Was it the Real Thing and henna, he wondered, or was it one of those
Complete Transformations one sees in the advertisements?
“‘What are Thrones and Sceptres?’”
The orange Transformation--yes, it must be a Transformation--bobbed up
again.
“‘What are the gaieties of the Rich, the splendours of the Powerful,
what is the pride of the Great, what are the gaudy pleasures of High
Society?’”
The voice, which had risen in tone, questioningly, from sentence to
sentence, dropped suddenly and boomed reply.
“‘They are nothing. Vanity, fluff, dandelion seed in the wind, thin
vapours of fever. The things that matter happen in the heart.
Seen things are sweet, but those unseen are a thousand times more
significant. It is the unseen that counts in Life.’”
Mrs. Wimbush lowered the book. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” she said.
Denis preferred not to hazard an opinion, but uttered a non-committal
“H’m.”
“Ah, it’s a fine book this, a beautiful book,” said Priscilla, as she
let the pages flick back, one by one, from under her thumb. “And here’s
the passage about the Lotus Pool. He compares the Soul to a Lotus Pool,
you know.” She held up the book again and read. “‘A Friend of mine has
a Lotus Pool in his garden. It lies in a little dell embowered with wild
roses and eglantine, among which the nightingale pours forth its amorous
descant all the summer long. Within the pool the Lotuses blossom, and
the birds of the air come to drink and bathe themselves in its crystal
waters...’ Ah, and that reminds me,” Priscilla exclaimed, shutting the
book with a clap and uttering her big profound laugh--“that reminds me
of the things that have been going on in our bathing-pool since you were
here last. We gave the village people leave to come and bathe here in
the evenings. You’ve no idea of the things that happened.”
She leaned forward, speaking in a confidential whisper; every now and
then she uttered a deep gurgle of laughter. “...mixed bathing...saw them
out of my window...sent for a pair of field-glasses to make sure...no
doubt of it...” The laughter broke out again. Denis laughed too.
Barbecue-Smith was tossed on the floor.
“It’s time we went to see if tea’s ready,” said Priscilla. She hoisted
herself up from the sofa and went swishing off across the room, striding
beneath the trailing silk. Denis followed her, faintly humming to
himself:
“That’s why I’m going to
Sing in op’ra, sing in op’ra,
Sing in op-pop-pop-pop-pop-popera.”
And then the little twiddly bit of accompaniment at the end: “ra-ra.”