The terrace in front of the house was a long narrow strip of turf,
bounded along its outer edge by a graceful stone balustrade. Two little
summer-houses of brick stood at either end. Below the house the ground
sloped very steeply away, and the terrace was a remarkably high one;
from the balusters to the sloping lawn beneath was a drop of thirty
feet. Seen from below, the high unbroken terrace wall, built like
the house itself of brick, had the almost menacing aspect of a
fortification--a castle bastion, from whose parapet one looked out
across airy depths to distances level with the eye. Below, in the
foreground, hedged in by solid masses of sculptured yew trees, lay the
stone-brimmed swimming-pool. Beyond it stretched the park, with its
massive elms, its green expanses of grass, and, at the bottom of the
valley, the gleam of the narrow river. On the farther side of the stream
the land rose again in a long slope, chequered with cultivation. Looking
up the valley, to the right, one saw a line of blue, far-off hills.
The tea-table had been planted in the shade of one of the little
summer-houses, and the rest of the party was already assembled about it
when Denis and Priscilla made their appearance. Henry Wimbush had begun
to pour out the tea. He was one of those ageless, unchanging men on the
farther side of fifty, who might be thirty, who might be anything. Denis
had known him almost as long as he could remember. In all those years
his pale, rather handsome face had never grown any older; it was
like the pale grey bowler hat which he always wore, winter and
summer--unageing, calm, serenely without expression.
Next him, but separated from him and from the rest of the world by the
almost impenetrable barriers of her deafness, sat Jenny Mullion. She was
perhaps thirty, had a tilted nose and a pink-and-white complexion, and
wore her brown hair plaited and coiled in two lateral buns over her
ears. In the secret tower of her deafness she sat apart, looking down at
the world through sharply piercing eyes. What did she think of men and
women and things? That was something that Denis had never been able to
discover. In her enigmatic remoteness Jenny was a little disquieting.
Even now some interior joke seemed to be amusing her, for she was
smiling to herself, and her brown eyes were like very bright round
marbles.
On his other side the serious, moonlike innocence of Mary Bracegirdle’s
face shone pink and childish. She was nearly twenty-three, but one
wouldn’t have guessed it. Her short hair, clipped like a page’s, hung in
a bell of elastic gold about her cheeks. She had large blue china eyes,
whose expression was one of ingenuous and often puzzled earnestness.
Next to Mary a small gaunt man was sitting, rigid and erect in
his chair. In appearance Mr. Scogan was like one of those extinct
bird-lizards of the Tertiary. His nose was beaked, his dark eye had the
shining quickness of a robin’s. But there was nothing soft or gracious
or feathery about him. The skin of his wrinkled brown face had a dry and
scaly look; his hands were the hands of a crocodile. His movements
were marked by the lizard’s disconcertingly abrupt clockwork speed; his
speech was thin, fluty, and dry. Henry Wimbush’s school-fellow and exact
contemporary, Mr. Scogan looked far older and, at the same time, far
more youthfully alive than did that gentle aristocrat with the face like
a grey bowler.
Mr. Scogan might look like an extinct saurian, but Gombauld was
altogether and essentially human. In the old-fashioned natural histories
of the ‘thirties he might have figured in a steel engraving as a type of
Homo Sapiens--an honour which at that time commonly fell to Lord
Byron. Indeed, with more hair and less collar, Gombauld would have
been completely Byronic--more than Byronic, even, for Gombauld was of
Provencal descent, a black-haired young corsair of thirty, with flashing
teeth and luminous large dark eyes. Denis looked at him enviously. He
was jealous of his talent: if only he wrote verse as well as Gombauld
painted pictures! Still more, at the moment, he envied Gombauld his
looks, his vitality, his easy confidence of manner. Was it surprising
that Anne should like him? Like him?--it might even be something worse,
Denis reflected bitterly, as he walked at Priscilla’s side down the long
grass terrace.
Between Gombauld and Mr. Scogan a very much lowered deck-chair presented
its back to the new arrivals as they advanced towards the tea-table.
Gombauld was leaning over it; his face moved vivaciously; he smiled, he
laughed, he made quick gestures with his hands. From the depths of the
chair came up a sound of soft, lazy laughter. Denis started as he heard
it. That laughter--how well he knew it! What emotions it evoked in him!
He quickened his pace.
In her low deck-chair Anne was nearer to lying than to sitting. Her
long, slender body reposed in an attitude of listless and indolent
grace. Within its setting of light brown hair her face had a pretty
regularity that was almost doll-like. And indeed there were moments
when she seemed nothing more than a doll; when the oval face, with its
long-lashed, pale blue eyes, expressed nothing; when it was no more than
a lazy mask of wax. She was Henry Wimbush’s own niece; that bowler-like
countenance was one of the Wimbush heirlooms; it ran in the family,
appearing in its female members as a blank doll-face. But across this
dollish mask, like a gay melody dancing over an unchanging fundamental
bass, passed Anne’s other inheritance--quick laughter, light ironic
amusement, and the changing expressions of many moods. She was smiling
now as Denis looked down at her: her cat’s smile, he called it, for no
very good reason. The mouth was compressed, and on either side of it
two tiny wrinkles had formed themselves in her cheeks. An infinity
of slightly malicious amusement lurked in those little folds, in the
puckers about the half-closed eyes, in the eyes themselves, bright and
laughing between the narrowed lids.
The preliminary greetings spoken, Denis found an empty chair between
Gombauld and Jenny and sat down.
“How are you, Jenny?” he shouted to her.
Jenny nodded and smiled in mysterious silence, as though the subject of
her health were a secret that could not be publicly divulged.
“How’s London been since I went away?” Anne inquired from the depth of
her chair.
The moment had come; the tremendously amusing narrative was waiting for
utterance. “Well,” said Denis, smiling happily, “to begin with...”
“Has Priscilla told you of our great antiquarian find?” Henry Wimbush
leaned forward; the most promising of buds was nipped.
“To begin with,” said Denis desperately, “there was the Ballet...”
“Last week,” Mr. Wimbush went on softly and implacably, “we dug up fifty
yards of oaken drain-pipes; just tree trunks with a hole bored through
the middle. Very interesting indeed. Whether they were laid down by the
monks in the fifteenth century, or whether...”
Denis listened gloomily. “Extraordinary!” he said, when Mr. Wimbush had
finished; “quite extraordinary!” He helped himself to another slice
of cake. He didn’t even want to tell his tale about London now; he was
damped.
For some time past Mary’s grave blue eyes had been fixed upon him. “What
have you been writing lately?” she asked. It would be nice to have a
little literary conversation.
“Oh, verse and prose,” said Denis--“just verse and prose.”
“Prose?” Mr. Scogan pounced alarmingly on the word. “You’ve been writing
prose?”
“Yes.”
“Not a novel?”
“Yes.”
“My poor Denis!” exclaimed Mr. Scogan. “What about?”
Denis felt rather uncomfortable. “Oh, about the usual things, you know.”
“Of course,” Mr. Scogan groaned. “I’ll describe the plot for you. Little
Percy, the hero, was never good at games, but he was always clever.
He passes through the usual public school and the usual university and
comes to London, where he lives among the artists. He is bowed down with
melancholy thought; he carries the whole weight of the universe upon
his shoulders. He writes a novel of dazzling brilliance; he dabbles
delicately in Amour and disappears, at the end of the book, into the
luminous Future.”
Denis blushed scarlet. Mr. Scogan had described the plan of his novel
with an accuracy that was appalling. He made an effort to laugh. “You’re
entirely wrong,” he said. “My novel is not in the least like that.” It
was a heroic lie. Luckily, he reflected, only two chapters were written.
He would tear them up that very evening when he unpacked.
Mr. Scogan paid no attention to his denial, but went on: “Why will
you young men continue to write about things that are so entirely
uninteresting as the mentality of adolescents and artists? Professional
anthropologists might find it interesting to turn sometimes from the
beliefs of the Blackfellow to the philosophical preoccupations of the
undergraduate. But you can’t expect an ordinary adult man, like myself,
to be much moved by the story of his spiritual troubles. And after all,
even in England, even in Germany and Russia, there are more adults than
adolescents. As for the artist, he is preoccupied with problems that
are so utterly unlike those of the ordinary adult man--problems of pure
aesthetics which don’t so much as present themselves to people like
myself--that a description of his mental processes is as boring to the
ordinary reader as a piece of pure mathematics. A serious book about
artists regarded as artists is unreadable; and a book about artists
regarded as lovers, husbands, dipsomaniacs, heroes, and the like is
really not worth writing again. Jean-Christophe is the stock artist of
literature, just as Professor Radium of ‘Comic Cuts’ is its stock man of
science.”
“I’m sorry to hear I’m as uninteresting as all that,” said Gombauld.
“Not at all, my dear Gombauld,” Mr. Scogan hastened to explain. “As a
lover or a dipsomaniac, I’ve no doubt of your being a most fascinating
specimen. But as a combiner of forms, you must honestly admit it, you’re
a bore.”
“I entirely disagree with you,” exclaimed Mary. She was somehow always
out of breath when she talked. And her speech was punctuated by little
gasps. “I’ve known a great many artists, and I’ve always found their
mentality very interesting. Especially in Paris. Tschuplitski, for
example--I saw a great deal of Tschuplitski in Paris this spring...”
“Ah, but then you’re an exception, Mary, you’re an exception,” said Mr.
Scogan. “You are a femme superieure.”
A flush of pleasure turned Mary’s face into a harvest moon.