Our hosts, the Verity-Stewarts, were pleasant people, old friends of mine,
inhabiting a Somerset manor-house which had belonged to their family since
the days of Charles the Second. They were proud of their descent; the
Stewart being hyphenated to the first name by a genealogically enthusiastic
Verity of a hundred years ago; but the alternative to their motto suggested
by the son of the house, Captain Charles Verity-Stewart, "The King can do
no wrong," found no favour in the eyes of his parents, who had lived remote
from the democratic humour of the officers of the New Army.
It was to this irreverent Cavalier, convalescent at home from a machine-gun
bullet through his shoulder, and hero-worshipper of his Colonel, that
Andrew Lackaday owed his shy appearance at Mansfield Court. He was proud of
the boy, a gallant and efficient soldier; Lady Verity-Stewart had couched
her invitation in such cordial terms that a refusal would have been
curmudgeonly; and the Colonel was heartily tired of spending his hard-won
leave horribly alone in London.
Perhaps I may seem to be explaining that which needs no explanation. It is
not so. In England Colonel Lackaday found himself in the position of many
an officer from the Dominions overseas. He had barely an acquaintance.
Hitherto his leave had been spent in France. But one does not take a
holiday in France when the War Officer commands attention at Whitehall. He
was very glad to go to the War Office, suspecting the agreeable issue of
his visit. Yet all the same he was a stranger in a strange land, living
on the sawdust and warmed-up soda-water of unutterable boredom. He had
spent--so he said--his happiest hours in London, at the Holborn Empire.
Three evenings had he devoted to its excellent but not soul-enthralling
entertainment.
"In the name of goodness, why?" I asked puzzled.
"There was a troupe of Japanese acrobats," said he. "In the course of a
roving life one picks up picturesque acquaintances. Hosimura, the head of
them, is a capital fellow."
This he told me later, for our friendship, begun when he was eight years
old, had leaped into sudden renewal; but without any idea of exciting my
commiseration. Yet it made me think.
That a prospective Brigadier-General should find his sole relief from
solitude in the fugitive companionship of a Japanese acrobat seemed to me
pathetic.
Meanwhile there he was at Mansfield Court, lean and unlovely, but, as I
divined, lovable in his unaffected simplicity, the very model of a British
field-officer. At dinner on Saturday evening, he had sat between his
hostess and Lady Auriol Dayne. To the former he had talked of the things
she most loved to hear, the manifold virtues of her son. There were
fallings away from the strict standards of military excellence, of course;
but he touched upon them with his wide, charming smile, condoned them with
the indulgence of the man prematurely mellowed who has kept his hold on
youth, so that Lady Verity-Stewart felt herself in full sympathy with
Charles's chief, and bored the good man considerably with accounts of the
boy's earlier escapades. To Lady Auriol he talked mainly about the war, of
which she appeared to have more complete information than he himself.
"I suppose you think," she said at last with a swift side glance, "that I'm
laying down the law about things I'm quite ignorant of."
He said: "Not at all. You're in a position to judge much better than I.
You people outside the wood can see it, in its entirety. We who are in the
middle of the horrid thing can't see it for the trees."
It was this little speech so simple, so courteous and yet not lacking a
touch of irony, that first made Lady Auriol, in the words which she used
when telling me of it afterwards, sit up and take notice.
Bridge, the monomania which tainted Sir Julius Verity-Stewart's courtly
soul, pinned Lady Auriol down to the green-covered table for the rest of
the evening. But the next day she set herself to satisfy her entirely
unreprehensible curiosity concerning Colonel Lackaday.
Lady Auriol, born with even more curiosities than are the ordinary
birthright of a daughter of Eve, had spent most of her life in trying to
satisfy them. In most cases she had been successful. Here be it said that
Lady Auriol was twenty-eight, unmarried, and almost beautiful when she took
the trouble to do her hair and array herself in becoming costume. As to
maiden's greatest and shyest curiosity, well--as a child of her epoch--she
knew so much about the theory of it that it ceased to be a curiosity at
all. Besides, love--she had preserved a girl's faith in beauty--was a
psychological mystery not to be solved by the cold empirical methods which
could be employed in the solution of other problems. I must ask you to bear
this in mind when judging Lady Auriol. She had once fancied herself in love
with an Italian poet, an Antinous-like young man of impeccable manners,
boasting an authentic pedigree which lost itself in the wolf that suckled
Romulus and Remus. None of your vagabond ballad-mongers. A guest when she
first met him of the Italian Ambassador. To him, Prince Charming, knight
and troubadour, she surrendered. He told her many wonders of fairy things.
He led her into lands where woman's soul is free and dances on buttercups.
He made exquisite verses to her auburn hair. But when she learned that
these same verses were composed in a flat in Milan which he shared with a
naughty little opera singer of no account, she dismissed Prince Charming
offhand, and betook herself alone to the middle of Abyssinia to satisfy her
curiosity as to the existence there of dulcimer-playing maidens singing of
Mount Abora to whom Coleridge in his poem assigns such haunting attributes.
Lady Auriol, in fact, was a great traveller. She had not only gone all over
the world--anybody can do that--but she had gone all through the world.
Alone, she had taken her fate in her hands. In comparison with other
geographical exploits, her journey through Abyssinia was but a trip to
Margate. She had wandered about Turkestan. She had crossed China. She had
fooled about Saghalien.... In her schooldays, hearing of the Sanjak of Novi
Bazar, she had imagined the Sanjak to be a funny little man in a red cap.
Riper knowledge, after its dull exasperating way, had brought disillusion;
but like Mount Abora the name haunted her until she explored it for
herself. When she came back, she knew the Sanjak of Novi Bazar like her
pocket.
Needless to say that Lady Auriol had thrown all her curiosities, her
illusions--they were hydra-headed--her enthusiasms and her splendid
vitality into the war. She had organized and directed as Commandant a great
hospital in the region of Boulogne. "I'm a woman of business," she told
Lackaday and myself, "not a ministering angel with open-worked stockings
and a Red Cross of rubies dangling in front of me. Most of the day I sit
in a beastly office and work at potatoes and beef and army-forms. I can't
nurse, though I daresay I could if I tried; but I hate amateurs. No
amateurs in my show, I assure you. For my job I flatter myself I'm trained.
A woman can't knock about the waste spaces of the earth by herself, head
a rabble of pack-carrying savages, without gaining some experience in
organization. In fact, when I'm not at my own hospital, which now runs on
wheels, I'm employed as a sort of organizing expert--any old where they
choose to send me. Do you think I'm talking swollen-headedly, Colonel
Lackaday?"
She turned suddenly round on him, with a defiant flash of her brown eyes,
which was one of her characteristics---the woman, for all her capable
modernity, instinctively on the defensive.
"It's only a fool who apologizes for doing a thing well," said Lackaday.
"He couldn't do it well if he was a fool," Lady Auriol retorted.
"You never know what a fool can do till you try him," said Lackaday.
It was a summer morning. Nearly all the house-party had gone to church.
Lady Auriol, Colonel Lackaday and I, smitten with pagan revolt, lounged on
the shady lawn in front of the red-brick, gabled manor house. The air was
full of the scent of roses from border beds and of the song of thrushes
and the busy chitter-chatter of starlings in the old walnut trees of
the further garden. It was the restful England which the exiled and the
war-weary used so often to conjure up in their dreams.
"You mean a fool can be egged on to do great things and still remain a
fool?" asked Lady Auriol lazily.
Lackaday smiled--or grinned--it is all the same--a weaver of fairy nothings
could write a delicious thesis on the question; is Lackaday's smile a grin
or is his grin a smile? Anyhow, whatever may be the definition of the
special ear-to-ear white-teeth-revealing contortion of his visage, it had
in it something wistful, irresistible. You will find it in the face of a
tickled baby six months old. He touched his row of ribbons.
"_Voilà_," said he.
"It's polite to say I don't believe it," she said, regarding him beneath
her long lashes. "But, supposing it true for the sake of argument, I should
very much like to know what kind of a fool you are."
Lying back in her long cane chair, an incarnation of the summer morning,
fresh as the air in her white blouse and skirt, daintily white hosed and
shod, her auburn hair faultlessly dressed sweeping from the side parting in
two waves, one bold from right to left, the other with coquettish grace,
from left to right, the swiftness of her face calmed into lazy contours,
the magnificent full physique of her body relaxed as she lay with her
silken ankles crossed on the nether chair support, her hands fingering a
long necklace of jade, she appealed to me as the most marvellous example I
had ever come across of the woman's power of self-transmogrification.
The last time I had seen her was in France, wet through in old
short-skirted kit, with badly rolled muddy puttees, muddier heavy boots, a
beast of a dripping hat pinned through rain-sodden strands of hair, streaks
of mud over her face, ploughing through mud to a British Field Ambulance,
yet erect, hawk-eyed, with the air of a General of Division. There sex was
wiped out. During our chance meeting, one of the many queer chance meetings
of the war, a meeting which lasted five minutes while I accompanied her to
her destination, we spoke as man to man. She took a swig out of my brandy
flask. She asked me for a cigarette--smoked out, she said. I was in nearly
the same predicament, having only, at the moment, for all tobacco, the pipe
I was then smoking. "For God's sake, like a good chap, give me a puff or
two," she pleaded. And so we walked on through the rain and mud, she pipe
in mouth, her shoulders hunched, her hands, under the scornfully hitched up
skirt, deep in her breeches pockets. And now, this summer morning, there
she lay, all woman, insidiously, devilishly alluring woman, almost
voluptuous in her self-confident abandonment to the fundamental conception
of feminine existence.
Lackaday's eyes rested on her admiringly. He did not reply to her remark,
until she added in a bantering tone:
"Tell me."
Then he said, with an air of significance: "The most genuine brand you can
imagine, I assure you."
"A motley fool," she suggested idly.
At that moment, Evadne, the thirteen-year-old daughter of the house, who,
as she told me soon afterwards, in the idiom of her generation, had given
the divine-services a miss, carried me off to see a litter of Sealyham
puppies. That inspection over, we reviewed rabbits and fetched a compass
round about the pigsties and crossed the orchard to the chicken's parade,
and passed on to her own allotment in the kitchen garden, where a few
moth-eaten cabbages and a wilting tomato in a planted pot seemed to hang
degraded heads at our approach, and, lingering through the rose garden, we
eventually emerged on the further side of the lawn.
"I suppose you want to go and join them," she said with a jerk of her
bobbed head in the direction of Lady Auriol and Colonel Lackaday.
"Perhaps we ought," said I.
"They don't want us--you can bet your boots," said she.
"How do you know that, young woman of wisdom?"
She sniffed. "Look at 'em."
I looked at 'em; mole-visioned masculine fifty seeing through the eyes of
feminine thirteen; and, seeing very distinctly indeed, I said:
"What would you like to do?"
"If you wouldn't mind very much," she replied eagerly, her interest in, or
her scorn of, elderly romance instantly vanishing, "let us go back to the
peaches. That's the beauty of Sundays. That silly old ass Jenkins"--Jenkins
was the head gardener--"is giving his family a treat, instead of coming
down on me. See?"
Evadne linked her arm in mine. Again I saw. She had already eaten two
peaches. Who was I to stand in the way of her eating a third or a fourth or
a fifth? With the after consequences of her crime against Jenkins, physical
and otherwise, I had nothing to do. It was the affair of her parents, her
doctor, her Creator. But the sight of the rapturous enjoyment on her face
when her white teeth bit into the velvet bloom of the fruit sped one back
to one's own youth and procured a delight not the less intense because it
was vicarious.
"Come along," said I.
"You're a perfect lamb," said she.
Before the perfect lamb was led to the peach slaughter, he looked again
across the lawn. Colonel Lackaday had moved his chair very close to Lady
Auriol's wicker lounge, so that facing her, his head was but a couple
of feet from hers. They talked not so much animatedly as intimately.
Lackaday's face I could not see, his back being turned to me; I saw Lady
Auriol's eyes wide, full of earnest interest, and compassionate admiration.
I had no idea that her eyes could melt to such softness. It was a
revelation. No woman ever looked at a man like that, unless she was
an accomplished syren, without some soul-betrayal. I am a _vieux
routier_, an old campaigner in this world of men and women. Time was
when--but that has nothing to do with this story. At any rate I think I
ought to know something about women's eyes.
"Did you ever see anything so idiotic?" asked Evadne, dragging me round.
"I think I did once," said I.
"When was that?"
"Ah!" said I.
"Do tell me, Uncle Tony."
I, who have seen things far more idiotic a thousand times, racked my brain
for an answer that would satisfy the child.
"Well, my dear," I began, "your father and mother, when they were
engaged----"
She burst out: "But they were young. It isn't the same thing. Aunt Auriol's
as old as anything. And Colonel Lackaday's about sixty."
"My dear Evadne," said I. "I happen to know that Colonel Lackaday is
thirty-eight."
Thirteen shrugged its slim shoulders. "It's all the same," it said.
We went to the net-covered wall of ripe and beauteous temptation, trampling
over Jenkins's beds of I know not what, and ate forbidden fruit. At least
Evadne did, until, son of Adam, I fell.
"Do have a bite. It's lovely. And I've left you the blushy side."
What could I do? There she stood, fair, slim, bobbed-haired, green-kirtled,
serious-eyed, carelessly juicy-lipped, holding up the peach. I, to whom all
wall-fruit is death, bit into the side that blushed. She anxiously watched
my expression.
"Topping, isn't it?"
"Yum, yum," said I.
"Isn't it?" she said, taking back the peach.
That's the beauty of childhood. It demands no elaborate expression.
Simplicity is its only coinage. A rhapsody on the exquisiteness of the
fruit's flavour would have bored Evadne stiff. Her soul yearned for the
establishment between us of a link of appreciation. "Yum, yum," said I, and
the link was instantly supplied.
She threw away a peach stone and sighed.
"Let's go."
"Why?" I asked.
"I'm not looking for any more trouble," she replied.
We returned to the lawn and Lady Auriol and Colonel Lackaday. Not a hole
could be picked in the perfect courtesy of their greeting; but it lacked
passionate enthusiasm. Evadne and I sat down, and our exceedingly dull
conversation was soon interrupted by the advent of the church goers.
Towards lunch time Lackaday and I, chance companions, strolled towards the
house.
"What a charming woman," he remarked.
"Lady Verity-Stewart," said I, with a touch of malice--our hostess was the
last woman with whom he had spoken--"is a perfect dear."
"So she is, but I meant Lady Auriol."
"I've known her since she was that high," I said spreading out a measuring
hand. "Her development has been most interesting."
A shade of annoyance passed over the Colonel's ugly good-humoured face.
To treat the radiant creature who had swum into his ken as a subject for
psychological observation savoured of profanity. With a smile I added:
"She's one of the very best."
His brow cleared and his teeth gleamed out my tribute.
"I've met very few English ladies in the course of my life," said he half
apologetically. "The other day, a brother officer finding me fooling about
Pall Mall insisted on my lunching with him at the Carlton. He had a party.
I sat next to a Mrs. Tankerville, who I gather is a celebrity."
"She is," said I. "And she said, 'You must really come and have tea with me
to-morrow. I've a crowd of most interesting people coming.'"
"She did," cried Lackaday, regarding me with awestricken eyes, as Saul must
have looked at the Witch of Endor. "But I didn't go. I couldn't talk to
her. I was as dumb as a fish. Oh, damned dumb! And the dumber I was the
more she talked at me. I had risen from the ranks, hadn't I? She thought
careers like mine such a romance. I just sat and sweated and couldn't eat.
She made me feel as if she was going to exhibit me as the fighting skeleton
in her freak museum. If ever I see that woman coming towards me in the
street, I'll turn tail and run like hell."
I laughed. "You mustn't compare Mrs. Tankerville with Lady Auriol Dayne."
"_Mon Dieu!_ I should think not!" he cried with a fervent gesture.
"Lady Auriol----"
Our passage from the terrace across the threshold of the drawing-room cut
short a possible rhapsody.
Later in the afternoon, in the panelled Elizabethan entrance hall, I came
across Lady Auriol in tweed coat and skirt and business-like walking boots,
a felt hat on her head and a stout stick in her hands.
"Whither away?" I asked.
"Colonel Lackaday and I are off for a tramp, over to Glastonbury." Her lips
moved ironically. "Like to come?"
"God forbid!" I cried.
"Thought you wouldn't," she said, drawing on a wash-leather gauntlet, "but
when I'm in Society, I do try to be polite."
"My teaching and example for the last twenty years," said I, "have not been
without effect."
"You're a master of deportment, my dear Tony." I was old enough to be her
father, but she had always called me Tony, and had no more respect for my
grey hairs than her cousin Evadne. "Tell me," she said, with a swift change
of manner, "do you know anything about Colonel Lackaday?"
"We met here as strangers," said I, "and I can only say that he impresses
me as being a very gallant gentleman."
Her face beamed. She held out her hand. "I'm so glad you think so." She
glanced at the clock.
"Good Lord! I'm a minute late. He's outside. I loathe unpunctuality. So
long, Tony."
She waved a careless farewell and strode out.
In the evening she gave Sir Julius to understand that, for aught she cared,
he could go into a corner and play Bridge by himself, thus holding herself
free, as it appeared to my amused fancy, for any pleasanter eventuality. In
a few moments Colonel Lackaday was sitting by her side. I drew a chair to
a bridge-table, and idly looked over my hostess's hand. Presently, being
dummy, she turned to me, with a little motion of her head towards the pair
and whispered:
"Those two--Auriol and ---- don't you think it's rather rapid?"
"My dear Selina," said I. "What would you have? '_C'est la guerre_.'"