In the comedy of London Mrs. Mansfield and her daughter did not play
leading parts, but they were, in the phrase of the day, "very much in
it." Mrs. Mansfield's father had been a highly intelligent, cultivated,
charming and well-off man, who had had a place in the Isle of Wight, and
been an intimate friend of Tennyson, and of most of the big men of his
day. Her mother had possessed the peculiar and rather fragile kind of
beauty which seems to attract great English painters, and had been much
admired and beloved in Melbury Road, Holland Park, and elsewhere. She,
too, had been intelligent, intellectual and very musical. From Frederick
Leighton's little parties, where Joachim or Norman Neruda played to a
chosen few, the beautiful Mrs. Mortimer and her delightful husband were
seldom missing. They were prominent members of that sort of family party
which made the "Monday Pops" for years a social as well as an artistic
function. And their small, but exquisite house in Berkeley Square, now
inherited by their daughter, was famous for its "winter evenings," at
which might be met the _creme de la creme_ of the intellectual and
artistic worlds, and at which no vulgarian, however rich and prominent,
was ever to be seen.
Mrs. Mansfield, quite instinctively and naturally, had carried on the
family tradition; at first with her husband, Arthur Mansfield, one of
the most cultivated and graceful members of their "set," and after his
death alone. She was well off, had a love of beauty and comfort, but a
horror of display, and knew everyone she cared to know, without having
the vaguest idea who was, or was not, included in "the smart set."
Having been brought up among lions, she had never hunted a lion in her
life, though she had occasionally pulled the ears of one, or stroked its
nose. She had been, and was, the intimate friend of many men and women
who were "doing things" in the world. But she had never felt within
herself the power to create anything original, and was far too
intelligent, far too aristocratic in mind, to struggle impotently to be
what she was not meant to be, or to fight against her own clearly seen
limitations.
Unlike Mrs. Mansfield in this respect Charmian struggled, and her mother
knew it.
On the following evening, when Charmian and her mother were dining
together before going to Max Elliot's, she said rather abruptly:
"Why didn't Mr. Elliot invite us to dinner to-night, do you think?"
"Why should he have invited us?"
"Well, perhaps it wasn't necessary. But surely it would have been quite
natural."
"Probably he wanted to prepare the new note for you."
"Why should I require preparation?"
"The new note!"
"Why should the new note require preparation against me?"
"I said for you. Possibly we may find out this evening. Besides Delia is
in a rest cure as usual. So there is no hostess."
Delia was Max Elliot's wife, a graceful nonentity who, having never done
a stroke of work in her life, was perpetually breaking down, and being
obliged to rest expensively under the supervision of fashionable
doctors. She was now in Hampstead, enclosed in a pale green chamber,
living on milk and a preparation called "Marella," and enjoying
injections of salt water. She was also being massaged perpetually by a
stout young woman from Sweden, and was deprived of her letters. "No
letters!" was a prescription which had made her physician celebrated.
"Oh, the peace of it!" Mrs. Elliot was faintly murmuring to the athletic
masseuse, at the very moment when Charmian said:
"There very seldom is a hostess. Poor Max Elliot!"
"He's accustomed to it. And Delia must be doing something. This time she
may be cured. Life originally issued from the sea, they say."
"Near Margate, I suppose. What a mystery existence is!"
"Are you going to be tiresome to-night?"
"No, I won't, I won't. But if he plays his Te Deum I know I shall sleep
like a tired child."
"I don't suppose he will."
"I feel he's going to."
"Then why were you so anxious to go?"
"I don't like to be left out of things. No one does."
"Except the elect. How thoughtful of you to dress in black!"
"Well, dearest, you are always in white. And I love to throw up my
beautiful mother."
Mrs. Mansfield put an arm gently round her as they left the dining-room.
"You could make any mother be a sister to you."
Just before ten their motor glided up to the Elliots' green door in
Cadogan Place.
Max Elliot was the very successful senior partner of an old-established
stockbroking firm in the City. This was a fact, so people had to accept
it. But acceptance was made difficult by his almost strangely
unfinancial appearance and manner. Out of the City he never spoke of the
City. He was devoted to the arts, and especially to music, of which he
had a really considerable knowledge. All prominent musicians knew him.
He was the friend of _prime donne_, a pillar of the opera, an ardent
frequenter of all the important concerts. Where Threadneedle Street came
into his life nobody seemed to know. Nevertheless, his numerous clients
trusted him completely as a business man. And more than one singer,
whose artistic temperament had brought her--or him, as the case might
be--to the door of the poorhouse, had reason to bless Max Elliot's
shrewd business head and generous industry in friendship. He had a good
heart as well as a fine taste, and his power of criticism had not
succeeded in killing his capacity for enthusiasm.
"_He's_ not begun yet!" murmured Charmian to her mother, as the butler
led them sedately down a rather long hall, past two or three doors, to
the music-room which Elliot had built out at the back of his house.
"I never heard that he was going to begin at all. We haven't come here
for a performance, but to make an acquaintance."
Charmian twisted her lips, and the butler opened the door and announced
them.
At the end of the room, which was panelled with wood and was high, by a
large open fireplace, Max Elliot was sitting with Paul Lane and two
other people, a woman and a young man. The woman was large and broad,
with brown hair, reckless hazel eyes, and a nose and mouth which
suggested a Roman emperor. She looked about thirty-five. In her large
ears, which were set very flat against her head, there were long,
diamond earrings, and diamonds glittered round her neck. She was
laughing when the Mansfields came in, and went on laughing while Max
Elliot went to receive them.
"Mrs. Shiffney has just come," he said. "Paul has been dining."
"And--the other?" murmured Charmian, with a hushed air of awed
expectation which was not free from a hint of mockery.
Mrs. Mansfield sent her a glance of half-humorous rebuke.
"Claude Heath," answered Elliot.
"How wonderful he is."
"Charmian, don't be tiresome!" observed her mother, as they went toward
the fire.
The two men got up, and Charmian had an impression of height, of a bony
slimness that was almost cadaverous, of irregular features, rather high
cheek-bones, brown, very short hair, and large, enthusiastic and
observant eyes that glanced almost piercingly at her, and quickly looked
away.
Mrs. Shiffney remained in her armchair, moved her shoulders, and said in
a rather deep, but not disagreeable voice:
"Mr. Heath and I are hearing all about 'Marella.' It builds you up if
you are a skeleton and pulls you down if you are enormous, as I am. It
makes you sleep if you suffer from insomnia, and if you have the
sleeping sickness it wakes you up. Dr. Curling has patented it, and
feeds his patients on nothing else. Delia is living entirely on it, and
is to emerge looking seventeen and a female Sandow. Mr. Heath is longing
to try it."
She had held out a powerful hand to the new arrivals, and now turned
toward the composer, who stood waiting to be introduced.
"Oh, but no, please!" said Heath, speaking quickly and almost anxiously,
with a certain naivete that was attractive, but that did not suggest
simplicity, but rather great sensitiveness of mind. "I never take quack
medicines or foods. I have no need to. And I think they're all invented
to humbug us."
Max Elliot took him by the arm.
"I want to introduce you to a dear friend of mine, Mrs. Mansfield."
He paused and added:
"Mr. Claude Heath--Miss Mansfield."
Paul Lane began talking to Charmian when the two handshakes--Heath had
shaken hands quickly--were over. She looked across the room, and saw her
mother in conversation with the composer. And she knew immediately that
he had conceived a strong liking for her mother. It seemed to her in
that moment as if his liking for her mother might prevent him from
liking her, and, she did not know why, she was aware of a faint
sensation of hostility toward him. Yet usually the fact that a man
admired, or was fond of, Mrs. Mansfield predisposed Charmian in his
favor.
Perhaps to-night she was in a tiresome mood, as her mother had hinted.
As she talked to Paul Lane, whom she had known pretty well for years,
and liked as much as she could ever like him, she was secretly intent on
the new note. Her quick mind of an intelligent girl, who had seen many
people and been much in contact with the London world, was pacing about
him, measuring, weighing, summing up with the audacity of youth. Whether
he pleased her eyes she was not sure. But through her eyes he interested
her.
Heath was tall, and looked taller than he was because he was almost
emaciated, and he was a plain man whom something made beautiful, not
handsome. This was a strange, and almost mysterious imaginativeness
which was expressed by his face, and even, perhaps, by something in his
whole bearing and manner. It looked out certainly at many moments from
his eyes. But not only his eyes shadowed it forth. The brow, the rather
thin lips, the hands, and occasionally their movements, suggested it.
His face was not what is often called "an open face." Although quite
free from slyness, or anything unpleasantly furtive, it had a shut,
reserved look when his eyes were cast down. There was something austere,
combined with something eager and passionate, in his expression and
manner. Charmian guessed him to be twenty-six or twenty-seven.
He was now turned sideways to Charmian, and was moving rather restlessly
on the sofa beside Mrs. Mansfield, but was listening with obvious
intentness to what she was saying. Charmian found herself wondering how
she knew that he had taken a swift liking to her mother.
"Did you have an interesting time at dinner?" she asked Paul Lane.
"Not specially so. Music was never mentioned."
"Was boxing?"
"Boxing!"
"Well, Mr. Elliot said he and Mr. Heath met first at a place in
Whitechapel where Conky somebody was fighting the Nutcracker."
Lane smiled with his mouth.
"I suspect the new note to be a poseur, not quite of the usual species,
but a poseur. Most musicians are ludicrously of their profession. This
one is too much apparently detached from it to be quite natural. But the
truth is, nobody is really natural. And no doubt it's a great mercy that
it is so."
Charmian looked at him for a few seconds in silence. Then she observed:
"You know there's something in you that I can't abide, as old dames
say."
This time Lane really smiled.
"I hope so," he said. "Or else I should certainly lack variety. Well,
Max, what is it?"
"Mrs. Shiffney wants you."
"I always want him. I swim in his irony and can't sink, like a tourist
in the Dead Sea."
"What a left-handed compliment!"
"A right-handed one would bore you to death, and my aim in life is--"
"To avoid being bored. How often do you succeed in your aim?"
"Whenever I am with you in this delightful house."
"It is delightful," said Charmian to her host. "But why? Of course it is
beautiful. But that's not all. It's personal. Perhaps that's it."
She got up, and walked slowly away from the fire, very naturally, with a
gesture, just touching her soft cheek and fluttering her fingers toward
the glow, as if she were too hot. Max Elliot accompanied her.
"And all the lovely music that has sounded here," she continued,
"perhaps lingers silently in the air, and, without being aware of it, we
feel the vibrations."
She sat down on a sofa near the Steinway grand piano, which stood on a
low dais, looked up at Max Elliot, and added, in quite a different
voice:
"Shall we hear any of his music to-night?"
"I believe now we may."
"Why--now?"
Elliot looked toward Mrs. Mansfield.
"Because of mother, you mean?"
"He likes her."
"Anyone can see that."
After a moment she added, with a touch of irritation:
"He's evidently very difficile for an unknown man."
"No, it isn't that at all. If you ever know him well, you will
understand."
"What?" she asked with petulance.
"That his reserve is a right instinct, nothing more. Between ourselves,"
he bent toward her, "I made a little mistake in asking Mrs. Shiffney,
delightful though she is."
"I wondered why you had asked her, when you didn't want even to ask me."
"Middle-aged as I am, I get carried away by people. I met Mrs. Shiffney
to-day at a concert. She was so absolutely right in her enthusiasm, so
clever and artistic--though she's ignorant of music--over the whole
thing, that--well, here she is."
"And here I am!"
"Yes, here you are!" he said genially.
He had been standing. Now he sat down beside her, crossed one leg over
the other, held his knee with his clasped hands, and continued:
"The worst of it is Mrs. Shiffney has made him bolt several doors. When
she looked at him I could see at once that she made him feel
transparent."
"Poor thing! Tell me, do you enjoy very much protecting all the
sensitive artistic temperaments that come into this room? Do you enjoy
arranging the cotton-wool wadding so that there may be no chance of a
nasty jar, to say nothing of a breakage?"
He pursed his rather thick lips, that smiled so easily.
"When the treasure is a treasure, genuinely valuable, I don't mind it. I
feel then that I am doing worthy service."
"You really are a dear, you know!" she said, with a sudden change, a
melting. "It was good of you to ask me, when you didn't want to."
She leaned a little toward him, with one light hand palm downward on the
cushion of the sofa, and her small, rather square chin thrust forward in
a way that made her look suddenly intense.
"I'll try not to be like Mrs. Shiffney. I'll try not to make him feel
transparent."
"I'm not sure that you could," he said, smiling at her.
"How horrid of you to doubt my powers! Why, why will nobody believe I
have anything in me?"
She brought the words out with a force that was almost vicious. As she
said them it happened that Claude Heath turned a little. His eyes
travelled down the room and met hers. Perhaps her mother had just been
speaking to him of her, had been making some assertion about her. For he
seemed to look at her with inquiry.
When Charmian turned away her eyes from his she added to Max Elliot:
"But what does it matter? Because people, some people, can't see a
thing, that doesn't prove that it has no existence. And I don't really
care what people think of me."
"This--to your old friend!"
"Yes. And besides, I expect one must possess to discover."
Her voice was almost complacent.
"You deal in enigmas to-night."
"One ought to carry a light when one goes into a cave to seek for gold."
But Elliot would not let her see that he had from the first fully
understood her impertinence.
"Let us go back to the fire," he said. "Unless you are really afraid of
the heat. Let us hear what your mother and Heath are talking about."
"I'm not afraid of anything except a Te Deum."
"There's Mrs. Shiffney speaking to him. I don't think we shall have it
to-night."
"Then I'll venture to draw near," said Charmian, again assuming a
semblance of awe.
The minx was evidently uppermost in her as they approached the others.
She walked with a dainty slowness, a composed consciousness, that were
almost the least bit affected, and as she stood still for a minute close
to her mother, with her long eyes half shut, she looked typically of the
world worldly, languid, almost prettily disdainful.
Mrs. Shiffney was speaking of the concert of that afternoon with
discrimination and with enthusiasm.
"Of course he's a little monkey," she concluded, evidently alluding to
some artist. "But _what_ a little monkey! I was in the front row, and he
called my attention to everything he was going to do, sometimes in
Russian, sometimes in dreadful French, or in English that was really a
criminal offense, and very often with his right elbow. He has a way of
nudging the air in one's direction so that one feels it in one's side.
Animal magnetism, I suppose. And he begs for sympathy as if it were a
biscuit. Do you know him, Mr. Heath?"
"No, not at all. I know very few big artists."
"But all the young coming ones, I suppose? Did you study abroad?"
"I went to the Royal College at Kensington Gore."
Mrs. Shiffney, who was very cosmopolitan, had a flat in Paris, and was
more often out of England than in it, slightly raised her eyebrows.
"You haven't studied in France or Germany?"
Heath began to look rather uncomfortable, and slightly self-conscious.
"No," he said quickly.
He paused, then as if with a decided effort he added:
"I think the training a student gets at the Royal College is splendid."
"Of course it is," said Max Elliot, heartily.
Mrs. Shiffney shook her shoulders.
"I'm sure it's quite perfect," she said, in her rather deep voice,
gazing at the young composer with eyes in which a light satire twinkled.
"Don't think I'm criticizing it. Only I'm so dreadfully un-English, and
I think English musicians get rather into a groove. The Hallelujah
bow-wow, you know!"
At this point in the conversation Charmian tranquilly interposed.
"Mr. Heath," she said, slightly protruding her chin, "when you've done
with my only mother"--Mrs. Shiffney's lips tightened ever so little--"I
want you to be very nice to me."
"Please tell me," said Heath, with the almost anxious eagerness that
seemed to be characteristic of him.
Mrs. Mansfield fixed her blazing eyes on her daughter, slightly drawing
down her gray eyebrows.
"Well, it's rather a secret."
Charmian glanced round at the others, then she added:
"It's about the Nutcracker."
"The Nutcracker!"
Heath puckered up his forehead.
"Yes." She moved a little, and looked at the chair not far from the fire
on which she had sat when first she came into the room. "I care rather
for boxing. Now"--she went slowly toward the chair, followed by Heath,
"what I want to know, and what you can tell me, is this"--she sat down,
and leaned her chin on her upturned palm--"on _present_ form do you
believe the Nutcracker is up to Conky Ja-ky Joe?"
As Claude Heath sat down to reply to this question, Mrs. Shiffney said:
"Conky Jarky Joe! I thought I was _dans le mouvement_ up to my
dog-collar, but I know nothing about the phenomenon. Where does it
belong to?"
"Wonderland," said Elliot, in a gravely romantic voice.
"That's the land I've never seen, although I've had the yacht for so
many years."
"Nor I!" said Paul Lane. "I don't believe it exists, or we must have
been there. We have both been everywhere."
"Tell the poor things about it," said Mrs. Mansfield. "Then Adelaide can
get up steam on _The Wanderer_ and realize her dreams."
"But Mr. Elliot told me he met you there, and I remember distinctly his
saying the fight was on between those two pets of the ring," said
Charmian plaintively, after a certain amount of negation from Claude
Heath.
"Yes, but I'm sure he didn't tell you I was an authority on boxing
form."
"You aren't?"
"No, indeed!"
"But you want to be?"
"I shouldn't mind. But it isn't my chief aim in life."
Charmian was silent. She leaned back, taking her chin from her hand, and
at last said gravely:
"It isn't _that_, then?"
"That--what?" exclaimed Heath, looking at her and away from her.
"That you want. It's something else. Because you know you want a very,
very great deal of something."
"Oh, a good many of us do, I suppose."
"I don't think I do. I'm quite satisfied with my life. I have a good
mother, a comfortable home. What should a properly-brought-up English
girl, who has been educated at Brighton, want more?"
"I'm very glad indeed to know that a Brighton education stands its
receiver in such good stead in the after years, very glad indeed!"
"You are laughing at me. And that's unchristian."
"Oh, but--but you were laughing at me!"
Despite Heath's eagerness, and marked social readiness of manner,
Charmian was disagreeably conscious of a mental remoteness in him. Only
the tip of his mind, perhaps scarcely that, was in touch with hers. Now
she almost regretted that she had chosen to begin their acquaintance
with absurdity, that she had approached Heath with a pose. She scarcely
knew why she had done so. But she half thought, only half because of her
self-respect, that she had been a little afraid of him, and so had
instinctively caught up some armor, put a shield in front of her. Was
she really impressed by a well-spoken-of Te Deum? She glanced at Heath
inscrutably, as only woman can, and knew that she was not. It was the
man himself who had caused her to fall into what she already thought of
as a mistake. There was in Heath something that almost confused her. And
she was not accustomed to be confused.
"I've made a bad beginning," she almost blurted out, not able to escape
from artifice, yet speaking truth. "And I'm generally rather good at
beginnings. It's so easy to take the first step, I think, despite that
silly saying which, of course, I'm not going to quote. It's when one is
getting to know a person really well that difficulties generally begin."
"Do they?"
"Yes, because it's then that very reserved people begin hurriedly
building barricades, isn't it? I ask you, because I'm not at all
reserved."
"But how should I know any better than you?"
"You mean, when you're so unreserved, too? No, that's true."
Heath's eyes troubled Charmian. She was feeling with every moment less
at ease in his companionship and more determined to seem at ease. Being
generally self-possessed, she had a horror of slipping into shyness and
so retrograding from her usual vantage ground. She expected him to
speak. It was his turn. But he said nothing. She felt sure that he had
seen through her last lie, and that he was secretly resenting it as a
heavy-footed approach to sacred ground. What a blunderer she was
to-night! Desperation seized her.
"We must leave the question to the reserved," she said. "Poor things! I
always pity them. They can never taste life as you and I and our kind
are able to. We are put here to try to know and to be known. I feel sure
of that. So the reserved are for ever endeavoring to escape their
destiny. No wonder they are punished!"
"I am not sure that I entirely agree with your view as to the reason why
we are put here," observed Heath, without a trace of obvious sarcasm.
Nevertheless, the mere words stung Charmian's almost childish
self-conceit.
"But I wasn't claiming to have pierced the Creator's most secret
designs!" she exclaimed. "I was simply endeavoring to state that it can
scarcely be natural for men and women to try to hide all they are from
each other. I think there's something ugly in hiding things; and
ugliness can't be meant."
"Ugliness is certainly not meant," said Heath, and for the first time
she felt as if she were somewhere not very far from him. "Except very
often by man. Isn't it astonishing that men created Venice and that men
have now put steam launches in the canals of Venice!"
Venice! Charmian seized upon the word, mentally leaped upon and clung to
the city in the sea. From that moment their conversation became easier,
and gradually Charmian began to recover from her strange social
prostration. So she thought of it. She forced the note, no doubt.
Afterward she was unpleasantly conscious of that. But at any rate the
talk flowed. There was some give and take. The joints of their
intercourse did not creak as if despairingly appealing to be oiled. Of
course it was very banal to talk about Italy. But, still, these moments
must come sometimes to all those who go much into the world. And what is
Italy, beautiful, siren-like Italy, for if not to be talked about?
Charmian said that to herself afterward, and was amazed at her own
vulgarity of mind. Ah, yes! That was what she had disliked in Claude
Heath--his faculty of making her feel almost vulgar-minded,
vulgar-intellected! She coined horrible bastard words in her efforts to
condemn him. But all that was later on, when she had even said
good-night to her only mother.
Their tete-a-tete was broken by Mrs. Shiffney's departure to a reception
at the Ritz. She must surely have been disappointed in the musician;
but, if so, she was too clever to show it. And she was by way of being a
good-natured woman and seldom seemed to think ill of anybody. "I have so
many sins on my own conscience," she sometimes said, "that I decline to
see other people's. I want them to be blind to mine. Sin and let sin is
an excellent rule in social life." She seldom condemned anyone except a
bore.
"If you ever pay a call, which I doubt," she said to Claude Heath as she
was going, "I'm in Grosvenor Square. The Red Book will tell you."
She looked at him with her almost insolently self-possessed and careless
eyes, and added:
"Perhaps some day you'll come on the yacht and show me the course to set
for Wonderland. Mr. Elliot says you know it. And of course we all want
to. I've been everywhere except there."
"I doubt if a yacht could take us there," said Heath, smiling as if to
cover something grave or sad.
A piercing look again came into Mrs. Shiffney's eyes.
"I really hope I shall see you in Grosvenor Square," she said.
Without giving him time to say anything more she went away, accompanied
from the room by Max Elliot, walking carelessly and looking very
powerful and almost outrageously self-possessed.
Within the music-room there was a moment's silence. Then Paul Lane said:
"Delightful creature!"
"Yes," said Mrs. Mansfield. "Adelaide is delightful. And why? She always
thinks of herself, lives for herself. She wouldn't put herself out for
anyone. I've known her for years and would never go to her in a
difficulty or trust her with a confidence. And yet I delight in her. I
think it's because she's so entirely herself."
"She's a darling!" said Lane. "She's so preposterously human, in her
way, and yet she's always distinguished. And she's so clever as well as
so ignorant. I love that combination. Even on a yacht she never seems
to have a bad day."
Charmian looked at Claude Heath, who was silent. She was wondering
whether he meant to call in Grosvenor Square, whether he would ever set
sail with Mrs. Shiffney on _The Wanderer_.