whatever that must be done, it, like the grasshopper, becomes a burden.
But I had several things that must be done, and I was nearly crushed by
the prospect. In the first place breakfast was ready before I was out of
bed and I therefore had to postpone shaving till afterwards. This alone
would have made a troublesome morning, but this was far from all. On
coming down I found two letters that had to be answered, one (and I was
sorry for my sins) containing an uncorrected proof, and while I was
still prostrate from the blow Francesco came in with household accounts.
These, for the sake of morality, I make it a rule to check (Francesco’s
addition is always right, mine always wrong), and thus it stood to
reason that I should not be able to start down to the sea to bathe till
nearly eleven. However, “no Briton’s to be baulked,” and I marched
manfully across the thirsty desert of affairs.
An hour in the sea and the consciousness of duty done restored
equanimity, and when after lunch Francesco brought me coffee on to the
veranda and seemed disposed to linger, I remembered the half-heard story
of San Giovanni.
“Tell it me again,” I said, and Francesco told it.
“The signor must know,” he said, “that in Italy there are many
unbaptized children, and if San Giovanni came to earth like the other
saints on his name-day, he would be furious at such neglect, and burn up
the earth with fire. God knows this, and, being unwilling that we should
all suffer, he sends San Giovanni to sleep the day before his name-day,
so that he sleeps for eight days. Then when he wakes up he says to God,
‘Is not my name-day yet?’ And God replies, ‘O San Giovanni, you have
been to sleep and your name-day is over while you slept. It will not
come again for another year.’ Thus it is that we do not go to mass on
the day of San Giovanni, for where is the use if he be asleep? But the
priests say--Ah! has not the Signor heard the news?” he broke off
suddenly and excitedly.
“News! I have heard no news.”
“How can I have forgotten? The Signora Mackellar has danced on her
beefsteak, and Seraphina is dismissed. So when will she marry Antonio?”
Now the two things a Southern Italian loves best are telling a story and
causing a sensation. And it was with the most exquisite enjoyment that
Francesco continued, for both were here combined.
“The market boat came in from Naples this morning,” he said, “and on it
was a fine beefsteak for the Signora. Salvatore, the carrier, took it
up, and it so was that both the Signora and Seraphina were on the
house-roof when he came, and the Signora was ordering dinner. And it
seems she was angry, so said Salvatore, at the cost of the ice cream
yesterday. So he was ordered to bring up the beefsteak, and the Signora
smelt it, and said it was not food for dogs. And Salvatore--you know he
is a sharp fellow--he replied ‘Indeed it is not food for dogs,’ meaning
thereby----”
“Yes, I understand,” I interrupted.
Francesco was getting gesticulative, and he went on with the fire of a
prophet.
“Then gave the Signora the beefsteak to Seraphina,” he cried, “and said
‘Smell it thou also.’ And Seraphina, having smelt it, said, ‘Signora, it
seems to me very good.’ At that the Signora turned on her like one
goaded and cried--‘Thou too art in the plot to cheat me! To-day thou art
no more my cook’; and as for the beefsteak--_ecco_! And she threw it
down, and danced upon it with both feet together, so that the roof
trembled. Also she said many strange words in her own tongue.”
And Francesco, like a true artist, did not linger after making his
point, but turned on his heel, resisting even the temptation to talk it
all over, and went into the house.
Here was a bolt from the blue! The summer had begun, there would be no
fresh visitors to Alatri till the winter, and Seraphina would be out of
place all these months. Antonio’s wages would not keep them both, if
Seraphina was out of place, and had to pay for her board and lodging
with some friend, and who knew whether Mrs. Mackellar’s wrath would not
spread like a devouring flood, and overwhelm Antonio also? Nothing was
more likely, for I remembered how on the dismissal of Mrs. Mackellar’s
last cook, her washing had been withdrawn from its customary
manipulator, simply because she was the cook’s cousin by marriage. How
then should Seraphina’s _promesso_ escape? Already the smell of the
marriage bake-meats was in the air: they were like to eat them with a
sauce of sorrow. To attempt to interfere or to reason with Mrs.
Mackellar was out of the question. Her nose would go in the air, and she
would say “Hoots!” Those who had heard Mrs. Mackellar say “Hoots”
seriously, knew what fear was.
Two days have passed after that terrible dance of death on the
house-roof, two days of paralysed inaction. There was of course no other
subject in the mouth of the folk, and grave groups formed and reformed
in the piazza and at Morgano’s, and looked at the question this way and
that like impotent conspirators wanting a plan of action. I happened to
be sitting at that café before dinner on the second evening, and we were
shaking our heads over it all when Mrs. Mackellar herself came snorting
and stamping round the corner. Like children detected in some forbidden
ecstasy, we all sank into silence. She did not even sit down to enjoy
her vermouth, but sipped it standing, with loud, angry sucking noises,
as if it was the life-blood of Seraphina.
We all froze under the contempt of her blue tremendous eye, and then,
most unfairly, she singled me out, and pointing the finger of scorn,
hissed at me:
“I ken fine what the hale clamjanfry of ye has been talkin’ about,” she
said, or words to that effect, and, without deigning to translate, this
tempestuous lady swept on her course. She stepped so high in her
indignation that the Duchess of Alatri, lying for coolness’ sake on the
pavement outside, thought that Mrs. Mackellar was dancing for her, and
rising to her feet, Her Grace trod a circular Saracenic measure. Hardly
pausing to swing a string-bag containing such comestibles as would be
easily rendered palatable without the aid of a cook, Mrs. Mackellar
turned to me again, and spoke in English in order that I might
understand.
“If I were you,” she said, “I should be ashamed to keep a dog that eats
as much as six Christians, I’ll be bound, be they Presbyterians or Roman
Catholics.”... Even as she spoke, who should come by but Seraphina
herself? Though she had been hounded out of the Casa Mackellar only
yesterday, with every circumstance of ignominy and Highland expressions,
Seraphina, sunny and incapable of rudeness, gave her late employer a
little smile, and a little obeisance, and said, “Buona sera, Signora!”
Without the smallest doubt, Mrs. Mackellar returned that smile.
Now in Alatri, I must have you know, we are all great psychologists and
students of character, and often talk about each other’s actions and the
gloomy traits of character exhibited therein, so that if you didn’t know
the seriousness of our aims, you might think we were gossips. But the
true character of Mrs. Mackellar, who she is inside herself, had always
puzzled everybody. No one could pull her together into any sort of
personage who would pass muster in the wildest work of fiction as being
conceivable. Why, for instance, did she who averted her chaste eye from
the naked foot of a fisher-boy herself wear a tight silk bathing dress
that reached not quite to her knees, and nowhere near her elbows? Was
it, as Mrs. Leonards said, to display the atrocity of her own figure
and thereby strengthen the rickety morality of the world in general?
That could hardly be the case, since on other occasions she laced
herself so tight, and wore such a killing hat, and so many Cairngorms
and garnets, that she could not be found guiltless of making a public
temptation of herself. Why, again, by what possible psychological
consistency, did she revel in a game of poker and reserve the hostility
of her finest colloquialisms for those who took tickets at a lottery?
Why, again--but there is no use in multiplying her contradictions, for
she entirely consists of them.
But the salient point on which every psychologist’s eye was pensive
to-day was why she had dismissed Seraphina after a year’s harmonious
co-operation for agreeing with Salvatore that a particular beefsteak did
not stink. Never had she had such a servant as Seraphina, nor ever
would, and well she knew it. Someone suggested that Mrs. Mackellar had
determined to be an eater of uncooked foods, and others who remembered
her welter of appreciation over an ordinary mutton cutlet, hardly
troubled to reply to so inadmissible a conjecture. As we whittled away
at her, the point of the discussion grew ever sharper, for why had she
so clearly smiled in answer to Seraphina’s greeting just now? The idea
that the smile was purely sardonic had most supporters: one or two who
kindly upheld the view that she was meaning to make it up with Seraphina
were hissed down. The most obdurate alone stuck to it, and had the
hardihood to bet five liras that this was the true explanation of the
smile, and the readiness with which he found takers for that bet, caused
him to experience an access of prudence, and to explain that he only
meant to bet five liras all told, and not fifty. Alas!
No one was walking in my direction, and some half an hour later I went
slowly home. Already I was beginning to regret that I had not taken more
of those bets, for the shrewdest analyst of motive and psychology in
Alatri had been bound to confess that Mrs. Mackellar’s motives, like the
path of the comets that should, according to all calculations,
periodically destroy the earth, were, when all was said and done,
completely unconjecturable. No application of logic, or reason, of the
movements of heavy bodies seemed to apply to them, and for that very
reason I had rejected the sardonic nature of that smile for Seraphina,
and in the spirit of “Credo, quia impossible” had taken it for a smile
of reconciliation. But I stood to win five liras, and who would quarrel
with so enviable a conclusion, especially since it implied the
re-installation of Seraphina? That was not a wholly altruistic
consideration, for Leonard had said in so many words that Mrs. Mackellar
would probably attempt to seduce Francesco away from my service with the
lure of higher wages. That was a horrible thought, and I quickened my
steps as I came near to my villa.
I heard bounding footsteps coming down the outside stairs from the front
door into the garden, which could only be Francesco’s, and I wondered
whether he was prancing towards me in order to communicate his wonderful
good luck in going as cook to Mrs. Mackellar, at twice the wages he at
present received. I believed Mrs. Mackellar, like the prophet Habakkuk,
to be “_capable de tout_,” but I didn’t really believe this infamy of
Francesco. The garden door flew open, and he met me with a face of
mourning.
“The Signora Mackellar,” he cried, “walked up with Seraphina to her
house. Through your telescope, signor, I saw them kissing and kissing on
the roof. _Dio!_ Why does a woman want to kiss a woman? There are many
strange things in the world, signor. St. Peter, he had a wife, and also
his wife had a mother, and one day----”
“Tell me about it after dinner,” I said. “And bring up the bottle of
English wine, the port wine, which I brought from Rome, I have won five
liras, Francesco.”
“_Sissignor_,” said Francesco. “But the dinner is not yet quite ready,
for I was watching with your telescope. Five liras!... There was once a
man who backed five numbers at the _Lotto_, and behold they all came out
even as he had backed them. He won a hundred thousand liras, and an
estate in Calabria, and----”
“Dinner,” said I, and Francesco ran to the kitchen.
I walked on air. Alone that evening I had had the courage of my opinion,
and for once had divined Mrs. Mackellar’s mind to the extent of backing
my divination for five liras. That is a lot of money here--for a stall
at the cinema (front row) only costs one.
THE ORIOLISTS
In spite of the unaccountable absence of a Cabinet Minister who should
have sat between our hostess, Mrs. Withers and Miss Agnes Lockett, I
felt that this luncheon-party must be considered as perhaps the most
epoch-making that had, up to the present date, been enticed beneath that
insatiably hospitable roof. Never had the comet-like orbit of our
entertainer ascended quite so high towards the zenith.
With the negligible exception of myself, for whose presence there I
shall soon amply account, there was not one among us, man, woman or
child (for that prodigy on the fiddle, Dickie Sebastian, in his tight
colossal sailor-suit, was of the company) whose name was not thrillingly
familiar to the great percentage of the readers of those columns in the
daily Press which inform us who was in the park on Sunday chatting with
friends, or at the first night of the new play looking lovely.
Briefly to tell the number and brightness of these stars, there was a
much be-ribanded general from Salonica, a girl just engaged to the heir
of one of our most respectable dukedoms, a repatriated prisoner from
Ruhleben, a medium possessed of devastating insight, a prominent actress
from a révue, a lion hunter (not our amiable hostess, but a swarthy
taciturnity from East Africa), and the adorable Agnes Lockett, lately
created a Dame in the Order of the British Empire in connexion with
Secret Service. She had just been demobilized, and, as she freely
admitted, four years of conundrums and traps had undermined the
frankness of her disposition. Schemes, plans, intrigues had become--for
the moment--a second nature to her, and she was not happy unless she was
laying a trap for somebody else, or suspecting (quite erroneously) that
somebody was laying a trap for her. She had also become a smooth
conversational liar. These things had not, it may be mentioned, affected
her charm and her beauty.
Finally, there was myself, who had no claim to distinction of any kind
beyond such as is inherent in living next door to Mrs. Withers and being
honoured with the friendship of Agnes Lockett.
I had been asked by telephone just at luncheon-time, as I was in the act
of sitting down to a tough and mournful omelette alone, and I naturally
felt quite certain that I had been bidden to take the place of some
guest (not the Cabinet Minister whom she still expected) who had
disappointed Mrs. Withers at the last moment. This was confirmed by the
fact that she told me in her clearest telephone voice that I had
promised to come to-day (which I knew was not the case) and that she was
merely reminding me.
Obviously, then, she was in urgent need of somebody, for it was not her
custom to “remind” all her expected guests at the very moment when they
were due at her house, and my inclusion in this resplendent galaxy was
certainly due to the convenient fact that, as I lived next door, I
should not keep the rest of her party waiting.... It is, I hope,
unnecessary to add that, with the unfortunate exception of myself,
everyone present appeared in the informing pages of “Who’s Who,” so that
his work and recreations were known to the reading public and would
afford a good start to the medium in case we had a _séance_ afterwards.
As the currents of conversation set this way and that, I was
occasionally marooned in a backwater, and could hear what Mrs. Withers
was saying to Agnes Lockett. The latter had been to the new play last
night, and an allusion to it produced from our hostess a flood of
typical monologue delivered in the judicial voice for which she was
famous. She was a big lean woman who radiated a stinging vitality that
paralysed the timid, and as she spoke, her eyes patrolled the
distinguished table with the utmost satisfaction and controlled the
service.
“Yes, Roland Somerville is marvellous in the part,” she said, “and I
told him he had never done a finer piece of work. But I thought Margaret
had not quite grasped his conception of it. I went round, of course, to
see her afterwards, and as she asked me what I thought I told her just
that.”
At this moment the telephone bell rang in the room adjoining, and Mrs.
Withers, though continuing to analyse the play with her accustomed
acumen (it had produced precisely the same effect on her as on the
author of the critique in the _Daily Herald_) was a little _distraite_
in manner till her parlour-maid communicated the message.
“Ah, that accounts for Hugh Chapel’s absence, who was to have sat
between us,” she said to Agnes. “He was sent for to the Palace at a
quarter-past one and is lunching there. And I ordered golden plovers
especially for him. Hugh was at Priscilla’s last night, looking very
tired, I thought. You know him, of course, Miss Lockett?”
Agnes was looking a little dazed.
“Not yet,” she said. “You asked me here to meet him.”
Mrs. Withers made a gesture of impatience at herself. As a matter of
fact she had, in asking Agnes Lockett, told her that Mr. Chapel was
coming, and in asking him, had told him that Miss Lockett was coming,
thus hoping to kill two lions with one lunch.
“Of course! How stupid of me,” she said. “Let us instantly arrange
another day when you can both be here. Ah! do come to a little party I
have on Thursday night. You will find Lord Marrible here too; he only
got back from America ten days ago. Poor Jack! he had a terrible voyage,
and he is such a bad sailor.”
A look of slight astonishment came over Agnes’s face, and remembering
that she and Lord Marrible were old and intimate friends, I wondered
whether she was surprised at this odd allusion to “poor Jack,” for he
was known to his intimate circle as John. Personally, I had had the
felicity of making him and my hostess known to each other only a few
days ago, and I too wondered a little at the speedy ripening of the
acquaintanceship. I did not wonder much, for I knew Mrs. Withers’s
friendly disposition, and her tendency to allude to everybody by his
Christian name. But at the moment a too rash act of swallowing on the
part of Dickie Sebastian, who sat next me, made it my duty towards my
neighbour to thump him on his fat back for fear that we should never
hear his violin again, and my attention was distracted. When the
fish-bone in question had been safely deposited on the edge of his
plate, the telephone had again been ringing, and Mrs. Withers was
retailing the reason for the absence of somebody called Humphrey, whose
place I conjectured that I was now occupying.
During the discussion of the golden plovers provided for the absent Mr.
Chapel, I became aware that Agnes Lockett was being drenched and
bewildered with the flood of celebrated names that was playing on her as
if from some fire-hose. Actors, authors, politicians, social stars,
soldiers and sailors were deluging her, and, without exception, they had
all been here, by their Christian names, last week, or at any rate were
coming next week. Without exception, too, each of them had told Mrs.
Withers in confidence what she repeated now to Agnes, knowing that it
would go no farther. George had assured her of this, Arthur had hinted
that, Jenny had thought this probable, Maudie had scouted the idea
altogether, but however much they had disagreed, it was certain that
they would all be here on Thursday evening, and Agnes could talk to them
herself.
As I listened and looked, I saw that a species of desperation was
seizing Agnes; she was finding the recital absolutely intolerable. Then
an idea seemed to strike her, and looking round to catch a friendly eye,
she caught mine, and spoke to me across the table.
“Have you seen Robert Oriole lately?” she asked in her delicious husky
voice, that was so unlike the canary-tone of Mrs. Withers. But as she
asked me this, she gave me a peremptory affirmative nod of which I could
not miss the significance. I had never heard of Robert Oriole before,
but I was certain that Agnes for some reason of her own insisted that I
did know him, and accordingly I answered in that sense.
“We went to a play together last night,” I said. At that precise moment,
without a pang or a cry, Robert Oriole was born.
* * * * *
The new name, of course, instantly challenged Mrs. Withers’s whole
attention, as Agnes had designed that it should. Devoted as she was to
old and celebrated names, new names that she had never heard of demanded
the keenest of inquiries.
“Robert Oriole?” she said. “Who can it have been who was speaking of
Robert Oriole the other day?”
Agnes’s brilliant smile shot out and sheathed itself again.
“Ah! who isn’t talking about Robert Oriole?” she said.
Much as Mrs. Withers liked appearing to know, she liked really knowing
better, and surrendered.
“Was it Maudie?” she said. “I can’t remember.”
Once against a fresh current of conversation claimed my hearing, but
rather uneasily, I could catch little enthusiastic phrases in what Agnes
was saying to our hostess, and wondered if I should be called upon to
invent anything more about this unknown personage. I could not, a moment
ago, have done otherwise than I had done, for Agnes unmistakably
commanded me to say that I either had or had not seen Robert Oriole
lately. I was bound, at any rate, to convey in my answer that I knew
him, and so it made no particular difference as to whether I had seen
him lately or not, and I had said that we had been to the play together
because I had to say something, and it was clearly much more suitable at
Mrs. Withers’s table to have done that sort of thing.
For all that I knew for certain there might be such a person; but I
strongly suspected that there was something “back of” Robert Oriole, as
our American friends say. What that was I could not conjecture, but I
felt that I was acting under Agnes’s direction in some Secret Service.
My apprehensions increased as I heard his name figuring largely in her
conversation, and were confirmed when, as she passed me on her way out,
she said in a Secret Service undertone, not looking my way as she spoke:
“I shall come back with you almost immediately to your house, where we
must have a serious conversation. For the present just keep your head,
and remember that you know Robert intimately.”
Half an hour later, accordingly, we were seated together in my house.
The wall between mine and Mrs. Withers’s drawing-room was not very
thick, and the bountiful roulades of Dickie Sebastian’s violin were
plainly audible. Agnes, with a flushed face, like a child who had been
triumphiantly mischievous, was sipping barley-water, for she felt
feverish with imagination.
“So that’s that,” she said decisively, after a lurid sketch of what had
happened, “and it’s no use regretting it. We must save all our nervous
force to go through with it.”
“But what made you invent Robert Oriole at all?” I asked. “And then why
have brought me in?”
“I couldn’t help inventing him; it may have been demoniacal possession,
or more likely it was a defensive measure against my going mad, which I
undoubtedly should have done if Mrs. Withers had told me any more at all
of what the great ones of the earth said to her in confidence. I should
either have gone mad, or taken up a handful of those soft chocolates and
rubbed her face with them. So I was obliged to know some glorious
creature whom she didn’t know. Obliged! She knew all the real ones, so I
had to invent one. And does she really call them by their Christian
names?”
“At a distance,” said I.
“Then she ought to do it right. She called John Marrible, Jack, when
nobody else had ever called him anything but John; and she spoke of you
as Frank, whereas nobody had ever called you anything but Francis. In a
week from now she will be calling my darling Robert Oriole, Bob. But he
really is Robbie.”
She put down her empty glass.
“That has calmed me,” she said, “and so now we will get to business. I
must repeat all that I told Mrs. Withers about Robbie. He is thirty-one,
and is the most marvellous airman. He has yellow hair and blue eyes, and
is like the Hermes at Olympia (she thought I meant Earl’s Court). It is
perfectly clear to Mrs. Withers’s ferreting instincts that I am in love
with him; about that you had better say, if she asks you, that we are
merely great friends. He flew over to France about a week ago, piloting
three Cabinet Ministers. They won’t fly with any other pilot----”
“That won’t do,” said I. “I went to the play with him last night.”
“I am not so stupid as to have forgotten that. He came back yesterday,
and left for Paris again this morning, carrying a new cypher to the
Embassy. He writes the most wonderful poems, which he composes as he is
flying.”
“She will ask for them at Bickers,” said I.
Agnes thought intently for a moment.
“She may ask for them at Bickers,” she said, “but she won’t get them
because they are not published. They are type-written on vellum, and he
lets his friends see them. Perhaps we had better write one or two. What
is vellum?”
My head whirled.