The unspoken, for the first month or so of Madame von Marwitz's return,
remained accepted. There were no declarations and no definitions, and
Gregory's immunity was founded on something more reassuring than the
mere fact that Madame von Marwitz frequently went away. When she was in
London, it became apparent, he was to see very little of her, and as
long as they did not meet too often he felt that he was, in so far,
safe. Madame von Marwitz was tremendously busy. She paid many week-end
visits; she sat to Belot--who had come to London to paint it--for a
great portrait; she was to give three concerts in London during the
winter and two in Paris, and it was natural enough that she had not
found time to come to the flat again.
But although Gregory saw so little of her, although she was not in his
life as a presence, he felt her in it as an influence. She might have
been the invisible but portentous comet moving majestically on the far
confines of his solar system; and one accounted for oddities of
behaviour in the visible planets by inferring that the comet was the
cause of them. If he saw very little of Madame von Marwitz, he saw, too,
much less of his twin planet, Karen. It was not so much that Karen's
course was odd as that it was altered. If Madame von Marwitz sent for
her very intermittently, she had, all the same, in all her life, as she
told Gregory, never seen so much of her guardian. She frankly displayed
to him the radiance of her state, wishing him, as he guessed, to share
to the full every detail of her privileges, and to realise to the full
her gratitude to him for proving so conclusively to Tante that there was
none of the selfishness of love in him. Tante must see that he made it
very easy for her to go to her, and Gregory derived his own secret
satisfaction from the thought that Karen's radiance was the best of
retorts to Madame von Marwitz's veiled intimations. As long as she made
Karen happy and let him alone, he seemed to himself to tell her, he
would get on very well; and he suspected that her clutch of Karen would
soon loosen when she found it unchallenged. In the meantime there was
not much satisfaction for him elsewhere. Karen's altered course left him
often lonely. Not only had the readings of Political Economy, begun with
so much ardour in their spare evenings, almost lapsed for lack of
consecutiveness; but he frequently found on coming home tired for his
tea, and eager for the sight of his wife, a little note from her telling
him that she had been summoned to Mrs. Forrester's as Tante was "with
Fafner in his cave" and wanted her.
Fafner was the name that Madame von Marwitz gave to her moods of
sometimes tragic and sometimes petulant melancholy. Karen had told him
all about Fafner and how, in the cave, Tante would lie sometimes for
long hours, silent, her eyes closed, holding her hand; sometimes asking
her to read to her, English, French, German or Italian poetry; their
range of reading always astonished Gregory.
He gathered, too, from Karen's confidences, how little, until now, he
had gauged the variety of the great woman's resources, how little done
justice to her capacity for being merely delightful. She could be
whimsically gay in the midst of melancholy, and her jests and merriment
were the more touching, the more exquisite, from the fact that they
flowered upon the dark background of the cave. It was, he saw, with a
richer flavour that Karen tasted again the charm of old days, when,
after some great musical or social event, in which the girl had played
her part of contented observer, they had laughed together over follies
and appreciated qualities, in the familiar language of allusion evolved
from long community in experience.
Karen repeated to him Tante's sallies at the expense of this or that
person and the phrase with which she introduced these transformations of
human foolishness to the service of comedy. "Come, let us make
_méringues_ of them."
The dull or ludicrous creatures, so to be whipped up and baked crisp,
revealed, in the light of the analogy, the tempting vacuity of a bowl of
white of egg. When Tante introduced her wit into the colourless
substance she frothed it to a sparkling work of art.
Gregory was aware sometimes of a pang as he listened. He and Karen had,
indeed, their many little jokes, and their stock of common association
was growing; but there was nothing like the range of reference, nothing
like the variety of experience, that her life with Madame von Marwitz
had given her to draw upon. It was to her companionship, intermittent as
it had been, with the world-wandering genius that she owed the security
of judgment that often amused yet often disconcerted him, the
catholicity of taste beside which, though he would not acknowledge its
final validity, he felt his own taste to be sometimes narrow and
sometimes guileless. He saw that Karen had every ground for feeling her
own point of view a larger one than his. It was no personal complacency
that her assurance expressed, but the modest recognition of privilege.
Beyond their personal tie, so her whole demeanour showed him, he had
nothing to add to her highly dowered life.
Gregory had known that his world would mean nothing to Karen; yet when,
under Betty's guidance, she fulfilled her social duties, dined out, gave
dinners, received and returned visits, the very compliance of her
indifference, while always amusing, vexed him a little, and a little
alarmed him, too. He had known that he would have to make all the
adjustments, but how adjust oneself to a permanent separation between
one's private and one's social life? Old ties, lacking new elements of
growth, tended to become formalities. When Karen was not there, he did
not care to go without her to see people, and when she was with him the
very charm of her personality was a barrier between him and them. His
life became narrower as well as lonelier. There was nothing much to be
done with people to whom one's wife was indifferent.
It was very obvious to him that she found the sober, conventional people
who were his friends very flavourless, especially when she came to them
from Fafner's cave. He had always taken his friends for granted, as part
of the pleasant routine of life, like one's breakfast or one's bath; but
now, seeing them anew, through Karen's eyes, he was inclined more and
more to believe that they weren't as dull as she found them. She lacked
the fundamental experience of a rooted life. She was yet to learn--he
hoped, he determined, she should learn--that a social system of
harmonious people, significant perhaps more because of their places in
the system than as units, and bound together by a highly evolved code,
was, when all was said and done, a more satisfactory place in which to
spend one's life than an anarchic world of erratic, undisciplined,
independent individuals. Karen, however, did not understand the use of
the system and she saw its members with eyes as clear to their defects
as were Gregory's to the defects of Madame von Marwitz.
Gregory's friends belonged to that orderly and efficient section of the
nation that moves contentedly between the simply professional and the
ultra fashionable. They had a great many duties, social, political and
domestic, which they took with a pleasant seriousness, and a great many
pleasures which they took seriously, too. They "came up" from the quiet
responsibilities of the country-side for a season and "did" the concerts
and exhibitions as they "did" their shopping and their balls. Art, to
most of them, was a thing accepted on authority, like the latest cut for
sleeves or the latest fashion for dressing the hair. A few of them, like
the Cornish Lavingtons, had never heard Madame Okraska; a great many of
them had never heard of Belot. The Madame Okraskas and the Belots of the
world were to them a queer, alien people, regarded with only a mild,
derivative interest. They recognized the artist as a decorative
appurtenance of civilized life, very much as they recognized the dentist
or the undertaker as its convenient appurtenances. It still struck them
as rather strange that one should meet artists socially and, perhaps, as
rather regrettable, their traditional standard of good faith requiring
that the people one met socially should, on the whole, be people whom
one wouldn't mind one's sons and daughters marrying; and they didn't
conceive of artists as entering that category.
Gregory, with all his acuteness, did not gauge the astonishment with
which Karen came to realize these standards of his world. Her cheerful
evenness of demeanour was a cloak, sometimes for indignation and
sometimes for mirth. She could only face the fact that this world must,
in a sense, be hers, by relegating it and all that it meant to the
merest background in their lives. Her real life consisted in Gregory; in
Tante. All that she had to do with these people--oh, so nice and kind
they were, she saw that well, but oh so stupid, most of them, so
inconceivably blind to everything of value in life--all that she had to
do was, from time to time, to open their box, their well-padded,
well-provendered box, and look at them pleasantly. She felt sure that
for Gregory's sake, if not for theirs, she should always be able to look
pleasantly; unless--she had been afraid of this sometimes--they should
say or do things that in their blindness struck at Tante and at the
realities that Tante stood for. But all had gone so well, so Karen
believed, that she felt no misgivings when Tante expressed a wish to
look into the box with her and said, "You must give a little
dinner-party for me, my Karen, so that I may see your new _milieu_."
Gregory controlled a dry little grimace when Karen reported this speech
to him. He couldn't but suspect Tante's motives in wanting them to give
a little dinner-party for her. But he feigned the most genial interest
in the plan and agreed with Karen that they must ask their very nicest
to meet Tante.
Betty had helped Karen with all her dinners; she had seen as yet very
little of the great woman, and entered fully into Karen's eagerness that
everything should be very nice.
"Gregory will take her in," said Betty; "and we'll put Bertram Fraser on
her other side. He's always delightful. And we'll have the
Canning-Thompsons and the Overtons and the Byngs; the Byngs are so
decorative!" Constance Armytage was now Mrs. Byng.
"And my dear old General," said Karen, sitting at her desk with a paper
on her knee and an obedient pencil in her hand; "I forget his name, but
we met him at the dinner that you gave after we married; you know,
Betty, with the thin russet face and the little blue eyes. May he take
me in?"
"General Montgomery. Yes; that is a good idea; glorious old man. Though
Lady Montgomery is rather a stodge," said Betty; "but Oliver can have
her."
"I remember, a sleek, small head--like a turtle--with salmon-pink
feathers on it. Poor Oliver. Will he mind?"
"Not a bit. He never minds anything but the dinner; and with Mrs. Barker
we can trust to that."
"Tante often likes soldiers," said Karen, pleased with her good idea.
"Our flags, she says, they are, and that the world would be
drab-coloured without them."
So it was arranged. Bertram Fraser was an old family friend of the
Jardines'. His father was still the rector of their Northumberland
parish, and he and Gregory and Oliver had hunted and fished and shot and
gone to Oxford together. Bertram had been a traveller in strange
countries since those days, had written one or two clever books and was
now in Parliament. The Overtons, also country neighbours, were fond of
music as well as of hunting, and Mr. Canning-Thompson was an eminent, if
rather ponderous, Q.C., for whose wife, the gentle and emaciated Lady
Mary, Gregory had a special affection. She was a great philanthropist
and a patient student of early Italian art, and he and she talked
gardens and pictures together.
Betty and Oliver were the first to arrive on the festal night, Betty's
efficiency, expressed by all her diamonds and a dress of rose-coloured
velvet, making up for whatever there might be of inefficiency in Karen's
appearance and deportment. Karen was still, touchingly so to her
husband's eyes, the little Hans Andersen heroine in appearance. She wore
to-night the white silk dress and the wreath of little white roses.
Oliver and Gregory chatted desultorily until the Byngs arrived. Oliver
was fair and ruddy and his air of dozing contentment was always
vexatious to his younger brother. He had every reason for contentment.
Betty's money had securely buttressed the family fortunes and he had
three delightful little boys to buttress Betty's money. Gregory grew a
little out of temper after talking for five minutes to Oliver and this
was not a fortunate mood in which to realise, as the Montgomerys, the
Overtons and the Canning-Thompsons followed the Byngs, at eight-fifteen,
that Madame von Marwitz was probably going to be late. At eight-thirty,
Karen, looking at him with some anxiety expressed in her raised brows,
silently conveyed to him her fear that the soup, at the very least,
would be spoiled. At eight-forty Betty murmured to Karen that they had
perhaps better begin without Madame von Marwitz--hadn't they? She must,
for some reason, be unable to come. Dinner was for eight. "Oh, but we
must wait longer," said Karen. "She would have telephoned--or Mrs.
Forrester would--if she had not been coming. Tante is always late; but
always, always," she added, without condemnation if with anxiety. "And
there is the bell now. Yes, I heard it."
It was a quarter to nine when Madame von Marwitz, with Karen, who had
hastened out to meet her, following behind, appeared at last, benign and
unperturbed as a moon sliding from clouds. In the doorway she made her
accustomed pause, the pause of one not surveying her audience but
indulgently allowing her audience to survey her. It was the attitude in
which Belot was painting his great portrait of her. But it was not met
to-night by the eyes to which she was accustomed. The hungry guests
looked at Madame von Marwitz with austere relief and looked only long
enough to satisfy themselves that her appearance really meant dinner.
Gregory led the way with her into the dining-room and suspected in her
air of absent musing a certain discomfiture.
She was, as usual, strangely and beautifully attired, as though for the
operatic stage rather than for a dinner-party. Strings of pearls fell
from either side of her head to her shoulders and a wide tiara of pearls
banded her forehead in a manner recalling a Russian head-dress. She
looked, though so lovely, also so conspicuous that there was a certain
ludicrousness in her appearance. It apparently displeased or surprised
Lady Montgomery, who, on Gregory's other hand, her head adorned with the
salmon-pink, ostrich feathers, raised a long tortoiseshell lorgnette and
fixed Madame von Marwitz through it for a mute, resentful moment. Madame
von Marwitz, erect and sublime as a goddess in a shrine, looked back. It
was a look lifted far above the region of Lady Montgomery's formal, and
after all only tentative, disapprobations; divine impertinence,
sovereign disdain informed it. Lady Montgomery dropped her lorgnette
with a little clatter and, adjusting her heavy diamond bracelets, turned
her sleek mid-Victorian head to her neighbour. Gregory did not know
whether to be amused or vexed.
It was now his part to carry on a conversation with the great woman: and
he found the task difficult. She was not silent, nor unresponsive. She
listened to his remarks with the almost disconcerting closeness of
attention that he had observed in her on their meeting of the other day,
seeming to seek in them some savour that still escaped her good-will.
She answered him alertly, swiftly, and often at random, as though by her
intelligence and competence to cover his ineptitude. Her smile was
brightly mechanical; her voice at once insistent and monotonous. She had
an air, which Gregory felt more and more to be almost insolent, of doing
her duty.
Bertram Fraser's turn came and he rose to it with his usual buoyancy. He
was interested in meeting Madame von Marwitz; but he was a young man who
had made his way in the world and perhaps exaggerated his achievement.
He expected people to be interested also in meeting him. He expected
from the great genius a reciprocal buoyancy. Madame von Marwitz bent her
brows upon him. Irony grew in her smile, a staccato crispness in her
utterance. Cool and competent as he was, Bertram presently looked
disconcerted; he did not easily forgive those who disconcerted him, and,
making no further effort to carry on the conversation, he sat silent,
smiling a little, and waited for his partner to turn to him again. Had
Gregory not taken up his talk, lamely and coldly, with Madame von
Marwitz, she would have been left in an awkward isolation.
She answered him now in a voice of lassitude and melancholy. Leaning
back in her chair, strange and almost stupefying object that she was,
her eyes moved slowly round the table with a wintry desolation of
glance, until, meeting Karen's eyes, they beamed forth a brave warmth of
cherishing, encouraging sweetness. "Yes, _ma chérie_," they seemed to
say; "Bear up, I am bearing up. I will make _méringues_ of them for
you."
She could make _méringues_ of them; Gregory didn't doubt it. Yet, and
here was the glow of malicious satisfaction that atoned to him for the
discomforts he endured, they were, every one of them, making _méringues_
of her.
In their narrowness, in their defects, ran an instinct, as shrewd as it
was unconscious, that was a match for Madame von Marwitz's intelligence.
They were so unperceiving that no one of them, except perhaps Betty and
Karen--who of course didn't count among them at all--was aware of the
wintry wind of Madame von Marwitz's boredom; yet if it had been
recognised it would have been felt as insignificant. They knew that she
was a genius, and that she was very odd looking and that, as Mrs.
Jardine's guardian, she had not come in a professional capacity and
might therefore not play to them after dinner. So defined, she was seen,
with all her splendour of association, as incidental.
Only perhaps in this particular section of the British people could this
particular effect of cheerful imperviousness have been achieved. They
were not of the voracious, cultured hordes who make their way by their
well-trained appreciations, nor of the fashionable lion-collecting tribe
who do not need to make their way but who need to have their way made
amusing. Well-bred, securely stationed, untouched by boredom or anxiety,
they were at once too dull and too intelligent to be fluttered by the
presence of a celebrity. They wanted nothing of her, except, perhaps,
that after their coffee she should give them some music, and they did
not want this at all eagerly.
If Madame von Marwitz had come to crush, to subjugate or to enchant, she
had failed in every respect and Gregory saw that her failure was not
lost upon her. Her manner, as the consciousness grew, became more
frankly that of the vain, ill-tempered child, ignored. She ceased to
speak; her eyes, fixed on the wall over Sir Oliver's head, enlarged in a
sullen despondency.
Lady Montgomery was making her way through a bunch of grapes and Lady
Mary had only peeled her peach, when, suddenly, taking upon herself the
prerogative of a hostess, Madame von Marwitz caught up her fan and
gloves with a gesture of open impatience, and swept to the door almost
before Gregory had time to reach it or the startled guests to rise from
their places.