Anthony felt that he knew Kitty in the church; she was there in his
world, a part of the act that bound them. He was not sure of her
thoughts, but he was sure of her attitude. Outside the church she ceased
to belong to him. When he suggested under his breath that they should
give up the Carlton, her amazed eyes met his in a flash of hostility.
“Give up lunching with papa?” she exclaimed. “But he’s ordered it!”
Anthony had touched by accident on one of Kitty’s laws. She had so few
that it was not surprising he should have failed to recognize their
existence. But the law of pleasure is at least as strong in its
compulsion to its votaries as any other law. Business appointments never
disturbed Kitty. You kept them if you remembered them and if you had
nothing better to do; but social engagements, which were meant to be an
exchange of pleasure, were inviolate. Inconvenience, suffering, fate
even, bowed before a luncheon party. You couldn’t put off what was meant
to amuse. It might even bore you; but if you’d promised, you’d promised.
The intention was, after all, there, and the intention was sacred.
Henry understood this immediately.
“If you had thought it would be too much for her,” he said a little
reproachfully to Anthony, “you should have telephoned overnight to Mr.
Costrelle.”
“It won’t be too much for me,” said Kitty, impatiently; “I shall like
it. It will be great fun after that stuffy, old, black church. The
flowers were charming, Henry. I like to be drenched in lilies. I could
get drunk on the scent of them, couldn’t you? They’re the least-innocent
flower in the world, and yet every one gets taken in by them, especially
in church. The curate had adenoids. I dare say he couldn’t help it, but
I hate men with adenoids. This is what the troth, or whatever it was
called, sounded like.”
Kitty imitated the curate to perfection. Henry laughed, and Anthony
wondered where the Kitty was who at the moment of those uttered words
had looked afraid. She had not been thinking of the curate’s adenoids
then.
He was absorbed in his thoughts of Kitty’s remaining hours. Did she
realize how few there were, or know the awful curtain which would come
down between the Kitty as she was to-day and the Kitty she was to be
to-morrow? He wanted every moment of her held in the privacy of their
small house, dedicated to their love and understanding, and he felt a
bitter rebellion against the artificial public hours that she had
claimed instead.
It was a harsh, unlovely day. London had a look of dirty cold, the
houses were pinched into mere shelters, the raw air pursued and baffled
the passers-by, forcing them into an irritated consciousness of their
errands. There was no color anywhere. The gray of the sky was dead and
unluminous, the streets a greasy brown. Their motor skidded and shuffled
through the traffic like a sleep-walker, blind to everything but its own
passage.
Henry talked cheerfully of possible skating. At present it was too damp,
but the temperature was falling fast; a good hard frost—
He hoped Kitty and Anthony were not going to fall out on their wedding
day; neither of them made any suitable response to the possibility of
frost. These hasty rushes into marriage usually ended in bad temper.
Henry congratulated himself inwardly on his escapes from matrimony. They
had never been narrow escapes. He had foreseen the danger a long way
off, but they had been complete. People were likely to turn out
unsatisfactory at close quarters, especially women. Women were romantic,
and when they were married they were incessant, and it took a very
strong digestion to stand incessant romance. That was the worst of
marriage; you couldn’t turn away from it with a good conscience.
Of course Anthony had made the situation a great deal more difficult
than it need have been. Miss Costrelle was perfectly charming, but none
of her charms were domestic, and all of them were undoubtedly a shade
too obvious. She reminded Henry of a picture in the Wallace Collection.
It was a portrait of Perdita Robinson with a muff. Perdita Robinson
hadn’t been very domestic, either.
Kitty smiled across at him.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said alarmingly. “You’re like the man
in the Bible who thanked God he wasn’t as other men were. You know the
proper kind of wife is a bother, and the kind of wife who wouldn’t be a
bother—that’s me; you know, Tony—isn’t a proper kind of wife at all.
Confess you were thinking something like that, Henry.”
“Few men can be so fortunate as Anthony,” replied Henry with skilled
irrelevancy; but he was glad when they reached the Carlton.
If Kitty had been guilty of a gust of bad temper, it left her as she
entered the hotel. The big, smart lounge was like home to her. She drew
in a long breath of the slightly stale, slightly scented air as if it
refreshed her. She knew exactly how to hold herself in public. She was
more conscious than any Englishwoman is by nature, and more trained than
any Englishwoman allows herself to be to hide her consciousness. Her
studied spontaneity gave an impression of perfect ease, which is the
seal of the true artist.
The Carlton was Kitty’s sphere; in a moment she had seen and mastered
the human material in the lounge. No other woman there held men’s eyes
as Kitty held them. She moved slowly, with little pauses, in exactly the
right space and light. With each brief phrase she threw at Henry or
Anthony she was aware first of its effect upon them, and then in the
widening circles of a disturbed pool she noted the further effect
spreading throughout the room.
Mr. Costrelle rose slowly from behind a palm and greeted his guests
phlegmatically. His eyes ran over Kitty with a steady critical
appreciation. Anthony saw with a pang of pure surprise that at the
moment it mattered more to Mr. Costrelle that Kitty should be dressed
properly than that she shouldn’t look ill.
She did not look ill to the ordinary spectator, who failed to take
account of the carefully hidden signs. She was made up with finished and
unerring skill. Her picture-hat, with its thick, shaded plumes of dull
pale pink, softened the outlines of her face. She carried her head as if
she had never known physical fatigue.
Kitty had what other women missed, the art of personality. Nothing that
she did miscarried, and no movement of her fine, supple body was without
significance. To-day she was more alive than Anthony had ever seen her;
differently alive, for it was not the life of her inner self: it was the
directed energy of a trained workman performing his task.
Mr. Costrelle led them to the table he had prepared for them. He had
chosen the most public and visible spot in the room.
Kitty sat down with her back to the light, and smiled at him across a
bowl of mauve and pale-pink carnations. Her smile was like a signal
between two trained performers.
Mr. Costrelle had done his part. The meal was perfect. He had ordered a
few dishes, each one the best and most delicate of its kind. He had
chosen two sound wines, and crowned them with the Château Yquêm, which
lay in a basket beside him.
It was now Kitty’s turn to play hers. She must be entertaining enough to
keep everything going, and not so absorbing as to interfere with a due
appreciation of the food. She must make each man feel at his best for
not too long at a time, and without interfering with the attractions of
the other men. She must also make all the other women in the room
jealous and their men envious.
Anthony, with his heart on the rack, watched her with grim concern.
Everything in the big, spacious room was utterly unreal to him: its
little tables, its flowers, its groups of well-dressed people. Their
idleness, their privileges, their evocation of temporary tastes,
revolted and amazed him.
For years he had lived hard and thought continuously, he had seen pain
and struggled with it as the man in the Laocoon struggles with the
presence of the coiled serpent; and these people lived dead against the
image of pain, even when, as in Kitty’s case, it hung poised above them
ready to strike; they blinded themselves against the issues of life.
They spent money and time and strength on expensive clothes and foods
and endless reiterations and repetitions of unnecessary, unenlightening
words.
Sometimes Anthony caught a clever phrase. Mr. Costrelle and Kitty
herself were often inadvertently witty, but they had not set out to be,
and they never let it go very far. They wanted to entertain, but they
hadn’t any notion of sticking to an idea; it did not seem to them very
entertaining to stick to anything for long.
Kitty sat there discussing a notorious career with clipped expert
phrases—the career of a woman she didn’t know, a mere bagatelle out of
a newspaper—and she was within a few hours of the sharpest of personal
struggles, she was even now menaced by acute and driving pain.
Anthony saw the shadow of it in her eyes, and heard in the faint
hardness of her laughter, the effort of her self-control.
They were wasting their few hours, that tiny margin left to them, on a
dish called “_les jeunes demoiselles_,” a careful preparation of
shell-less craw-fish in a cream sauce. Kitty’s eyes rested on Anthony
for a moment, but only with the genial audacity with which they passed
on to Henry. They had no message for him. She acquiesced in the _jeunes
demoiselles_.
A smart, good-looking man, whose attention had been riveted on their
table for some time, rose, and crossed the room to speak to Kitty. His
eyes had a look in them which was like the sudden assertion of a claim.
“What luck!” he exclaimed as he reached them. “Who in the world would
have expected you here?”
“And why not here?” asked Kitty, with a veiled challenge in her laughing
eyes. “It’s very jolly and comfortable and not unknown, I believe, as a
European resort. You know my father, don’t you? This is my
husband—Captain Arden. Sir Frederick Stair.”
The claim in Sir Frederick’s eyes sharpened into incredulity. He turned
from Kitty to Anthony. Anthony met and returned his hard critical gaze.
The two men measured each other, and Kitty, leaning back in her chair,
watched them with unconcealed amusement.
Mr. Costrelle poured out a glass of wine imperturbably. The situation
appealed to him; he liked to watch Kitty handle a difficult moment.
Henry cleared his throat. He was not sure that everything was quite
comfortable, and he was annoyed that Sir Frederick had apparently
forgotten playing bridge with him some time ago at the club.
“Oh,” said Sir Frederick at last, with his eyes still on Anthony. “We
haven’t run across each other before, I think?”
“We have not been particularly likely to,” said Anthony, a little dryly.
“I spent most of the war in a German prison.”
“I was in Egypt,” said Sir Frederick. “A good deal going on there one
way or another. Where does one find you now, Mrs. Arden? I can’t afford
to have you disappear again. But perhaps you will be more permanent now
that you’re married?”
“I don’t think I shall ever be awfully permanent,” said Kitty, closing
her long eyelashes together and then opening them suddenly. “We’re just
passing through town.”
Sir Frederick’s eyebrows shot up. He was being dismissed, and he had not
expected dismissal. Kitty smiled at him. Her smile was reassuring to his
pride.
Stupid things, her kind eyes said, had intervened. She didn’t like
dismissing him, either; but still she dismissed him.
“I was fortunate,” he said politely, “to have caught even this glimpse.”
Kitty gave him her hand. Mr. Costrelle mentioned his club.
Sir Frederick threw back a very fine pair of shoulders, bowed stiffly to
Anthony, and walked away.
He had been perfectly polite and he had shown Kitty no sign of
disrespect, perhaps he had been a shade more respectful than a man need
be to a woman for whom no other idea had ever occurred.
“An odd coincidence,” said Mr. Costrelle, “Stair turning up to-day. I
shall now open the Château Yquêm.”
He took up a small napkin and the best type of corkscrew in silence, and
with great precaution he first held and then detached the cork, handing
it round to each in turn to catch the perfume which clung to it; then
with unfaltering gravity he poured out the four glasses. The wine was
golden and as soft as honey; the dry fire in it had blended with the
ripening touch of time.
They drank in silence and without a toast. Anthony raised his eyes to
Kitty, but she was not looking at him. She was smiling, but her lips
were grave. Some memory or perhaps some premonition held her.
“I don’t think,” said Mr. Costrelle, slowly and gravely, “that you can
beat this wine now in England.”
“The war has done a dreadful lot of harm,” agreed Henry,
sympathetically. “Priceless wine has been parted with—I believe
rashly—to Americans.”
“People who can take wine like this across the Atlantic,” said Mr.
Costrelle, “deserve to drink nothing but their own raw grapes.”
“It’s been simply awfully jolly, Papa dear,” said Kitty, drawing on her
gloves; “but I suppose we must be off. I’ve enjoyed myself immensely.”
Kitty lingered in the lounge. She liked watching the throngs of people
passing in and out. The veiled admiration of the men, the covert glances
of the women, eased her heart. After all, it was her world. She had
succeeded in it.
She said good-by laughingly to Henry and her father. Henry’s
appreciation of the lunch had brought Mr. Costrelle to offering him one
of his best cigars.
“I’ll see you next week, I dare say,” Mr. Costrelle observed to Kitty.
“That dead pink is a good shade, especially with sable.” And to Anthony
he added, “You might perhaps ring me up sometime.”
Henry shook hands warmly with them both. Anthony had, after all, done
nothing out of the way, and Kitty had been perfect—perfect, that is, as
another man’s wife. For Henry himself she would have had to be a little
toned down.
When they were alone in the motor, Kitty turned to Anthony with
appealing eyes.
“You didn’t mind awfully, did you?” she asked quickly. “You see, after
all, Tony, it _is_ the only kind of thing I know how to do.”