himself. Why are you making all this up?”
She looked at me as at a rather stupid child.
“Now, try to understand,” she said. “I invented him originally to save
myself from going mad, and we are making up delicious details about him
to save ourselves from detection. We have both of us said that we know
Robbie Oriole, and so we must know something about him; the more
picturesque the better. We must be able (I have already done so and am
telling you about it) to describe his appearance, his career, his
tastes. If you told somebody you knew me, and couldn’t say anything
definite about me, people would think that you didn’t know me at all.
It’s the same with Robert Oriole: we must be able to tell Mrs. Withers
about him, and say the same thing. You would be quite despicable if,
having said you knew a glorious creature like Robbie, it appeared as if
you didn’t. What a delicious name, too! It came to me in a flash, and I
felt as if I had known him all my life. Fancy poor Mrs. Withers not
knowing Robert Oriole! How bitter for her!”
“Ah, that’s your real reason,” said I. “Now you are serious.”
“Not at all; that is the humorous side of it. It is to save ourselves
that we have got to build up this solid, splendid presentment of our
friend, and that is why I am telling you so carefully all I have said
about him to Mrs. Withers. When it comes to your turn, as it undoubtedly
will, to describe him further, you must always telephone to me at once
what you have said.... Where had we got to? Oh, yes, his poems. Haven’t
you got some joyous little lyrics in your desk which are his? Or better,
some vague morbid little wailings? Yes: that shall be the other side of
Robbie, known only to his most intimate friends. To the world, which
worships him, he is all sunshine and splendour, but to us, his dear
friends, there is another side. His grandmother was a Russian, you must
remember. I think I had better write the poems.”
Somehow, incredibly to myself, the fascination of creating and building
up and furnishing out a wonderful young man like this, who had no
existence whatever, began to gain on me. Also, as Agnes had said, there
was the instinct of self-preservation to spur on the imaginative
faculty. There was also the pleasure of going one better than Mrs.
Withers and of pretending to know intimately somebody whom nobody could
possibly know.
“He is an orphan,” I said. “And may he be an American? That would make
him easier to get rid of than if he was English.”
She shook her head.
“Orphan--yes,” she said. “American--no. I can’t bear American poetry,
and I am sure I couldn’t write it. But his parents lived in India. They
are both dead, and he hasn’t got any relations whatever, which makes him
so romantic and accounts for that salt soul-loneliness in his poems. We
will give him a home--just a little remote house by the sea, in
Cornwall, near St. Ives, and the Atlantic rolls in on the beach in front
of his grey-walled garden. His poems have the beat and rhythm of the
sea----”
I sprang from my chair.
“Never, never!” I cried. “Mrs. Withers goes to St. Ives every summer.”
“We will give him his home, then, in the Lake District,” said Agnes
thoughtfully. “There is no beat and rhythm of the sea in his poems, but
the eternal melancholy of lakes and mountains. He must have somewhere
pretty far off to go to when he is demobilized, as he will be almost
immediately. His constant presence in London would lead to detection.”
“Then why demobilize him?” I asked. “He can always be in France when it
is convenient to us.”
She was quite firm about this.
“It would never do,” she said. “Mrs. Withers might make inquiries about
him from some General in the Flying Corps. Indeed, I am almost sorry he
was an airman at all, but that can’t be helped now.”
“He can go to India to see his parents’ graves,” said I, “if we want to
get him out of the country for a long period.”
“Yes, but he can’t always be doing that. No one would make constant
visits to India to see graves, however beloved were their occupants.
Besides, it takes so long to go to India and back. He had much better be
in his lovely home in the Lakes, and pay flying visits to London--here
to-day and gone to-morrow--just giving us a new poem on vellum. That
will be much more fun. Oh, a most important point! He must have some
other friends besides us who are worthy of knowing him. John Marrible
will be a nice friend for him; John will appreciate him. I will tell a
few trustworthy people about Robbie, and you must do the same. We will
call ourselves the Oriolists.”
* * * * *
Mrs. Withers, of course, telephoned both to Agnes and to me to bring
Robert Oriole to her party on Thursday evening; but there were so many
new and resplendent friends there that she did not, except for a passing
moment, regret the absence of that poetic airman, who was up in
Westmorland. We had each of us provided him with two or three nice
friends, who were in sympathy with him, but for some days after that he
made no particular developments, and I began to think that, having
served his purpose in protecting Agnes from insanity at Mrs. Withers’s
luncheon party, she was losing interest in her benefactor.
Then suddenly he burst out in renewed glory, for it came to Agnes’s ears
that in allusion to that same luncheon party Mrs. Withers had said to a
mutual friend that dear Aggie had told her the most wonderful things
about the Secret Service which she could not possibly repeat. This was
sufficient to put new life and vigour into Robert Oriole. Agnes--who had
never been called “Aggie” before--dragged me from the music-room at an
evening party, where Dickie Sebastian was playing all that had ever been
written for the violin, and recounted this outrage on the stairs.
“I have seen that woman three times,” she said, “once when I was
introduced to her, once when I lunched with her on the day Robbie was
born, and once when I didn’t bring him to her Thursday evening. And now
I am ‘Aggie,’ and told her all about the Secret Service! I was almost
inclined to let Robbie fade away again, but now she shall see. Heavens!
There she is!”
Dickie Sebastian had ceased for the moment, and a few straggling couples
emerged stealthily from the music-room, the first of whom was Mrs.
Withers and Lord Marrible. Mrs. Withers would have been content, so it
struck me, to kiss her hand to Agnes and pass on, for she had just been
alluding to Aggie again, but since he came to a stop, she was obliged to
wait also. He had already heard that he was “Jack,” and his broad
good-humoured face was a-chink with merriment as he spoke to my
companion.
“Hallo, Aggie!” he said. “Been talking Secret Service on the stairs?”
“Mr. Goodenough and I,” said Agnes carefully, “were waiting for Robbie.
Do go and find him and bring him here by his golden hair.”
“What, is Robbie here?” he asked, thereby conveying to me that he was an
Oriolist. “I didn’t see him. If Robbie is in a room it’s not easy to
miss him. I didn’t even know he was in town.”
“Of course he is,” said Agnes. “Fancy not knowing if Robbie is in town.
You might as well not know----”
“If the sun is shining,” said I fervently.
“Quite. Lord Marrible, do go back and see if he isn’t there. He and Mr.
Goodenough and I are going back to his flat, and he is going to read to
us. And then he is going to play the piano and then I suppose it will be
time for breakfast before we have talked enough.”
Mrs. Withers rose like a great salmon fresh from the sea, and rushed at
this wonderful lure.
“I never heard anything so improper,” she said. “You and--and Mr.
Goodenough and Robbie Oriole! My dear Miss Lockett, who is chaperoning
you?”
Agnes’s face dimpled into the most delicious smile.
“Ah, we don’t want any chaperon in the sunlight,” she said, as John
shouldered his way back into the music-room.
“Then let me drop you all at his flat,” said Mrs. Withers. “I have my
motor here, and I’m going home now. I am sure it is not out of my way.”
Agnes nudged me with her elbow to indicate that I had to answer this.
“Robbie’s car is here, many thanks,” I said. “It’s waiting for us. I saw
it when I came in.”
“And he plays the piano too?” asked Mrs. Withers.
Agnes laughed.
“Ah, I believe you know him all the time,” she said, “and mean to repeat
to him all the nice things that we say about him. You know him
intimately, I believe, but if you tell me that he has already sent you
those three sonnets he wrote as he flew to Cologne the other day, which
he promised to read us to-night, I don’t think I could bear it. Mr.
Goodenough and I were promised the first hearing of them, and I believe
he has sent them to you already.”
“Indeed he hasn’t,” said Mrs. Withers in a social agony. “I really don’t
know Mr. Oriole, though I am dying to. I hoped you would have brought
him to my little party last Thursday.”
“Thursday, Thursday,” said Agnes. “Yes, I remember: Robbie was up in the
Lakes. Such a pity! He would have loved it, just the sort of party he
adores.”
Mrs. Withers’s brow, that Greek brow with a fillet of crimson velvet
across it, from which depended a splendid pearl, grew slightly
corrugated, and made the pearl tremble. She prided herself on knowing
all her engagements for a week ahead, but the recollection of them was
difficult even to her.
“Sunday at lunch then,” she said. “Will you both come and bring Mr.
Oriole? Tell him how divine it would be if he would read us the Cologne
sonnets.”
“I’ll tell Robbie,” said Agnes, “but as for your chance of finding him
disengaged, I couldn’t promise anything. How his friends grab him when
he appears! Ah, there’s John--I mean Lord Marrible. Well?”
“He simply isn’t here.”
Agnes turned to me.
“Ah, now I remember,” she said. “He told me that if he couldn’t get here
by half-past ten, he wouldn’t come at all, but would just send the car
for us. What time is it now?”
“Eleven,” said I.
“Oh, come quick, then,” said she. “We’ve missed half an hour already.”
Lord Marrible turned to Mrs. Withers.
“Well, you and I must console ourselves with supper,” he said, “as
Robbie hasn’t asked us.”
It was all very well for Agnes to say that we would go quickly, but Mrs.
Withers just clung.
“But wouldn’t he let me come too?” she said. “Mayn’t I drop you at his
door, Miss Lockett, and I would wait while you asked him if I might come
in?”
Agnes’s face dimpled again.
“My dear, if it were possible!” she said. “But with Robbie, however
intimately you know him, you can’t quite do that. You agree with me,
Lord Marrible, I know. But if--if he gives me a copy of the Cologne
sonnets, or lets me make one, you may guess to whom I will show it,
unless he absolutely forbids me to show it to anybody. How tiresome it
is that you don’t know him!”
Mrs. Withers’s pearl trembled again.
“Or if lunch on Sunday won’t suit Mr. Oriole,” she said, “I have got a
few people to dinner on Tuesday and Wednesday, and if you would bring
him then I should be more than charmed.”
She remembered that her hospitable table was crammed on Wednesday, but
there were two or three people who did not matter, and she could easily
tell them that she expected them not that Wednesday but the next....
“Or if he would ring me up and suggest any time,” she added.
Agnes laughed again.
“Too kind of you,” she said, “and how rude of me to laugh! I laughed at
the idea of Robbie telephoning. He can’t bear any modern invention.”
“But he is an airman, isn’t he?” asked Mrs. Withers.
Never have I admired the quickness and felicity of the female mind more
than at that critical moment which would have caused any mere man to
stumble and bungle, and leave an unconvincing impression. There was not
even the “perceptible pause” before Agnes answered.
“Ah, but Robbie says that flying is the effort to recapture bird-life of
a million years ago,” she said. “Birds and angels fly; it is not a
modern discovery, but a celestial and ancient secret now being learned
by us in our clumsy way. Robbie is lyrical about flying. But what bird
or angel ever telephoned? Come, Mr. Goodenough, let us find that car.”
“I forget how he reconciles himself to motoring,” I said. I did not want
to put Agnes in a fix, but only to delight my soul with another instance
of feminine alacrity.
“He doesn’t,” said she brightly. “But then you have got to get to places
quickly, and you can’t fly through the streets of London yet.”
“He sounds too marvellous,” said Mrs. Withers ecstatically. “Sunday,
Tuesday or Wednesday then. Any of them.”
The discerning reader will easily have perceived by this time that both
John Marrible and I were but wax in the inventive hands of Agnes, and
flowed into the shapes that her swift fingers ordained for us.
Occasionally we suggested little curves and decorations of our own,
which she might or might not permit; but we had no independent will in
the matter of Robert Oriole. She was the architect who built this
splendid temple to an imaginary deity in whose honour Mrs. Withers, his
deluded worshipper, swung unregarded censers of asparagus and salmon; at
the most we were the cognisant choir and the organ....
During the next weeks which included the Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday,
on which Mrs. Withers’s hospitality hungered for Robbie, the number of
Oriolists greatly increased, and this secret society became positively
masonic in clandestine fervour and fidelity. I could see at a glance,
without grips of any kind, whether some friend or acquaintance who
inquired after Robbie was a mason or not, for there was a gleeful
solemnity about the initiated Oriolist which the profane crowd lacked.
There were many who now spoke of him, for Mrs. Withers in her frenzied
efforts to capture him and show him at her house, asked everyone she met
if he knew Robbie, and her large circle of uninitiated guests and
acquaintances grew almost as excited about him as she. Those who knew,
the initiates to whom these mysteries had been unveiled, answered
casually enough when they were applied to by Mrs. Withers, but with that
gleeful solemnity which revealed them to each other.
One morning Robbie would have been “stunting” over Richmond, or had
lunched at the Ritz, or had been swimming in the Serpentine before
breakfast, dropping in unexpectedly to entrance Agnes with the
Brahms-Handel variations, or flying back to the Lakes in the afternoon,
and the telephone messages that passed between the houses of the
initiated were cryptic and yet comprehended utterances. Then on an
ever-memorable day two type-written copies of the Cologne sonnets
circulated among the elect, and were secretly read in corners to the
less fortunate.
On another day, Robbie must have called on me when I was out, for I
found his card with his address, “Blaythwaite Fell,” upon it, when I
returned. He was not able to go to Mrs. Withers’s house either on
Sunday, Tuesday or Wednesday, but on Friday when she returned from a
concert at which Royalty was present, she found a similar card with
Agnes’s on her table, and all the account her parlour-maid could give
was that Miss Lockett had come to the door with “another gentleman” whom
she had not seen before, for Lord Marrible had not previously come to
the house.
Mrs. Withers, trembling with chagrin (for she had not been presented to
Royalty at the concert, and had missed so much more by not stopping at
home) telephoned to Agnes at once, only to learn that Robbie had that
moment left by air for the Continent.
It is better to describe than to let the reader imagine for himself the
state into which Mrs. Withers was brought during these days, because the
imagination from excess of excited fancy would go wildly astray. For she
did not grow one atom distraught or deranged; she became on the contrary
more concentrated and businesslike than ever. She telephoned daily to
Agnes and me to know whether Robbie--she always spoke of him now as
Robbie--had got back from the Continent, and told us quite firmly that
she would put off any other engagement in order to receive him at her
house, or meet him at any other house.
But pending that consummation she remained as regular and as resonant as
a cuckoo-clock, and struck her social hours with the same fluty
regularity. She did not lose her appetite, or take to cocaine or
opium-smoking or drown herself in the Thames, as imagination might
expect, but kept her head, went up several times in an aeroplane in
order to get used to it in case Robbie on his return suggested an
expedition, and temporarily stole my copy of the Cologne sonnets.
I am not quite sure about this, but I missed them one afternoon when she
had been having tea with me, and found next day that in my absence she
had called and gone into my sitting-room to write a note to me. On my
return I found the note prominently displayed, and the Cologne sonnets
concealed in the blotting-book which I had unsuccessfully searched the
evening before. The case is not proved against her, but certainly after
that she could quote from the Cologne sonnets....
Then one morning, even while I was wondering what made Agnes keep Robbie
so long on the Continent, I was rung up by her maid, and asked to go
round to her at once. In answer to a further inquiry, “It’s about Mr.
Oriole, sir.”
Full of some nameless apprehension, I started instantly on that bright
June morning, feeling sure that at the least Robbie was the victim of
some catastrophe. I was even prepared to learn that Robbie was dead,
though I could not form the slightest conjecture as to what had led to
this sudden demise. Or was Robbie engaged to be married, and had we to
arrange about an elusive female of mysterious charm and antecedents?...
Well, it was not that, but it was even worse, for Agnes was engaged to
John Marrible, who, with the selfishness of his sex, insisted that
Robbie should die. He was with her and put his case. Agnes really seemed
more taken up with Robbie than she was with him, and he demanded her
undivided affection. For her part, she wanted to leave Robbie on the
Continent for future emergencies, and promised not to think about him,
but John objected to that. His head, he told us with a glance at her,
was too full of other things, and he could not trust himself not to give
the whole affair away by some inadvertence of happiness and pride. That
glance settled it; Agnes took a half sheet of paper and wrote on it for
a few minutes in silence.
“I will send it to the principal morning papers,” she said, “and John
shall pay for it. Listen! Will this do?
“_ORIOLE.--On the 17th instant, very suddenly, at Mannheim, Robert,
only son of the late William and Margaret Oriole, of Karachi,
India. Age 31. Deeply lamented. No flowers._
‘_We will grieve not, only find_
_Strength in what remains behind._’”
That appeared next day, and I do not suppose that anybody lamented him
more deeply than Mrs. Withers. She sent Agnes and me charming little
notes of condolence and quoted from one of the Cologne sonnets, and
asked if those touching lines in the notice of his death were by him.
A week or two later, I sat next Mrs. Withers at dinner, and Mr. Chapel
was on her other side.
“Of course, you knew dear Robbie Oriole, Mr. Chapel,” she said. “What a
loss to poetry. Are not those Cologne sonnets the finest in your opinion
since Keats? I was privileged to have a copy of them. You agree with me,
do you not, Mr. Goodenough? Do you remember that marvellous one
beginning, ‘The clouds weep westwards under the scurrilous sky’?”
I hugged myself over not asking who had given her that privilege and
sadly assented. She proceeded to talk to both of us, as her manner was
at the dinner-table, with an intuition wrong in itself, but so
excruciatingly right in general direction that it made me catch my
breath.
“Yes, those sonnets,” she said. “How amazingly feminine they are, both
in their tenderness and bitterness. Or, perhaps, all I mean is that
women will always appreciate them more than men. When I say them over to
myself, as I so often do, I seem to see Robbie reading them to Aggie
Lockett. Certainly, I thought, when she first spoke to me about Robbie,
that she was absolutely devoted to him. Indeed, it gave me a little
shock when I saw to-day that she was to marry Jack Marrible.”
This was almost incredibly wonderful, for Mr. Chapel was one of our most
fervent Oriolists. It was as full of points as a hedgehog; I could not
count them all----
Then he turned on me the usual look of gleeful solemnity, and I knew we
both wondered who would be the first to tell Aggie.
“Poor Robbie,” he said. “I never knew anybody the least like him. He
will be a sacred memory to us, will he not?”
Mrs. Withers shook her head, regretfully, smiling.
“And the last time he called,” she said, “I was not at home. Of course,
if he had only told me he was coming, I would have thrown over any
engagement to be there, but, as you may not know, he would never use a
telephone. It will always give me a little heartache to think that I was
not there the last time.”
Mr. Chapel let his eyes wander admirably before he caught mine again.
“It is only human to feel that,” he observed in the best style.
IN THE DARK
Reginald Case, newly promoted to the rank of Captain in the 43rd Native
Cavalry of the Indian Army, was picking his way back to his bungalow by
the light of a somewhat ill-burning lantern from the regimental
mess-room where he had dined. It was early in July, the long-delayed
rains had broken at Haziri, in the Central Provinces, ten days before,
and it was an imprudent man who would venture on a mere field-path like
this at night without some illumination for his steps, lest
inadvertently he might tread on a meditative and deadly kerait, with
murder behind its stale small eyes, or step on the black coils of some
hooded cobra. Only a few days before, Case had found one such in the
bathroom of his bungalow, curled up on the mat within a few inches of
his bare foot, when he went there to bathe before dinner, and he had no
desire to give his nerves any further test of steadiness under such
circumstances.
To-day there had been a break in the prodigious deluge, and all the
afternoon the midsummer sun had blazed from a clear sky, causing all
vegetable things to sprout with magical rapidity. This path, which
yesterday had been a bare track over the fields, was now covered with
springing herbs; the parade-ground, which for the last week had been
but a sea of viscous mud, was clad in a mantle of delicate green blades,
and the tamarisks and neem trees were studded with swelling buds among
the dead and dripping foliage of the spring. A similar animation had
tingled through the insect world, and as Case passed across the couple
of fields that lay between the mess-room and his bungalow, a swarm of
evil flies dashed themselves against the glass of his lantern. Overhead,
since sunset, the clouds had gathered densely again across the vault of
the sky, but to the east an arch of clear and star-lit heavens was
dove-coloured with the approaching moonrise. Against it the shapes of
silhouetted trees stood sharp and black in the windless and stifling
calm.
It was a night of intolerable heat, and his two bulldogs, chained up in
the veranda of his bungalow, with their dinner lying untouched beside
them, could do no more by way of welcome to him than tap languidly with
their tails on the matting in acknowledgment of his return. His bearer,
not expecting him to be back so soon from the mess-room, was out, and he
had to wait on himself, pulling out a long chair and table from his
sitting-room, and groping for whisky and soda in his cupboard. The ice
had run out, and after mixing and drinking a tepid peg, he went back to
his bedroom and changed his hot dinner clothes for pyjamas and slippers.
Cursing inwardly at the absence of his servant, he lit his lamp with a
solitary match that he found on the table, and came out again into the
veranda to think over, with such coolness as was capturable, the whole
intolerable situation.