ON the following day, which was warm and damp; Lady Holme drove to Bond
Street, bought two new hats, had her hand read by a palmist who called
himself “Cupido,” looked in at a ladies’ club and then went to Mrs.
Wolfstein, with whom she was engaged to lunch. She did not wish to lunch
with her. She disliked Mrs. Wolfstein as she disliked most women, but
she had not been able to get out of it. Mrs. Wolfstein had overheard
her saying to Lady Cardington that she had nothing particular to do till
four that day, and had immediately “pinned her.” Besides disliking
Mrs. Wolfstein, Lady Holme was a little afraid of her. Like many clever
Jewesses, Mrs. Wolfstein was a ruthless conversationalist, and enjoyed
showing off at the expense of others, even when they were her guests.
She had sometimes made Lady Holme feel stupid, even feel as if a good
talker might occasionally gain, and keep, an advantage over a lovely
woman who did not talk so well. The sensation passed, but the fact that
it had ever been did not draw Lady Holme any closer to the woman with
the “pawnbroking expression” in her eyes.
Mrs. Wolfstein was not in the most exclusive set in London, but she was
in the smart set, which is no longer exclusive although it sometimes
hopes it is. She knew the racing people, nearly all the most fashionable
Jews, and those very numerous English patricians who like to go where
money is. She also knew the whole of Upper Bohemia, and was a _persona
gratissima_ in that happy land of talent and jealousy. She entertained
a great deal, generally at modish restaurants. Many French and Germans
were to be met with at her parties; and it was impossible to be with
either them or her for many minutes without hearing the most hearty and
whole-souled abuse of English aspirations, art, letters and cooking.
The respectability, the pictures, the books and the boiled cabbage of
Britain all came impartially under the lash.
Mrs. Wolfstein’s origin was obscure. That she was a Jewess was known to
everybody, but few could say with certainty whether she was a German,
a Spanish, a Polish or an Eastern Jewess. She had much of the covert
coarseness and open impudence of a Levantine, and occasionally said
things which made people wonder whether, before she became Amalia
Wolfstein, she had not perhaps been--well really--something very strange
somewhere a long way off.
Her husband was shocking to look at: small, mean, bald, Semitic and
nervous, with large ears which curved outwards from his head like
leaves, and cheeks blue from much shaving. He was said to hide behind
his anxious manner an acuteness that was diabolic, and to have earned
his ill-health by sly dissipations for which he had paid enormous
sums. There were two Wolfstein children, a boy and a girl of eleven and
twelve; small, swarthy, frog-like, self-possessed. They already spoke
three languages, and their protruding eyes looked almost diseased with
intelligence.
The Wolfstein house, which was in Curzon Street, was not pretty,
Apparently neither Mrs. Wolfstein nor her husband, who was a financier
and company promoter on a very large scale, had good taste in furniture
and decoration. The mansion was spacious but dingy. There was a great
deal of chocolate and fiery yellow paint. There were many stuffy brown
carpets, and tables which were unnecessarily solid. In the hall were
pillars which looked as if they were made of brawn, and arches
with lozenges of azure paint in which golden stars appeared rather
meretriciously. A plaster statue of Hebe, with crinkly hair and staring
eyeballs, stood in a corner without improving matters. That part of the
staircase which was not concealed by the brown carpet was dirty white.
An immense oil painting of a heap of dead pheasants, rabbits and wild
duck, lying beside a gun and a pair of leather gaiters, immediately
faced the hall door, which was opened by two enormous men with yellow
complexions and dissipated eyes. Mrs. Wolfstein was at home, and one
of the enormous men lethargically showed Lady Holme upstairs into a
drawing-room which suggested a Gordon Hotel. She waited for about five
minutes on a brown and yellow sofa near a table on which lay some books
and several paper-knives, and then Mrs. Wolfstein appeared. She was
dressed very smartly in blue and red, and looked either Oriental or
Portuguese, as she came in. Lady Holme was not quite certain which.
“Dear person!” she said, taking Lady Holme’s hands in hers, which were
covered with unusually large rings. “Now, I’ve got a confession to make.
What a delicious hat!”
Lady Holme felt certain the confession was of something unpleasant,
but she only said, in the rather languid manner she generally affected
towards women:
“Well? My ear is at the grating.”
“My lunch is at the Carlton.”
Lady Holme was pleased. At the Carlton one can always look about.
“And--it’s a woman’s lunch.”
Lady Holme’s countenance fell quite frankly.
“I knew you’d be horrified. You think us such bores, and so we are. But
I couldn’t resist being malicious to win such a triumph. You at a hen
lunch! It’ll be the talk of London. Can you forgive me?”
“Of course.”
“And can you stand it?”
Lady Holme looked definitely dubious.
“I’ll tell you who’ll be there--Lady Cardington, Lady Manby, Mrs.
Trent--do you know her? Spanish looking, and’s divorced two husbands,
and’s called the scarlet woman because she always dresses in red--Sally
Perceval, Miss Burns and Pimpernel Schley.”
“Pimpernel Schley! Who is she?”
“The American actress who plays all the improper modern parts. Directly
a piece is produced in Paris that we run over to see--you know the sort!
the Grand Duke and foreign Royalty species--she has it adapted for her.
Of course it’s Bowdlerised as to words, but she manages to get back all
that’s been taken out in her acting. Young America’s crazy about her.
She’s going to play over here.”
“Oh!”
Lady Holme’s voice was not encouraging, but Mrs. Wolfstein was not
sensitive. She chattered gaily all the way to the Haymarket. When they
came into the Palm Court they found Lady Cardington already there,
seated tragically in an armchair, and looking like a weary empress.
The band was playing on the balcony just outside the glass wall which
divides the great dining-room from the court, and several people were
dotted about waiting for friends, or simply killing time by indulging
curiosity. Among them was a large, broad-shouldered young man, with
a round face, contemptuous blue eyes and a mouth with chubby, pouting
lips. He was well dressed, but there was a touch of horseyness in the
cut of his trousers, the arrangement of his tie. He sat close to the
band, tipping his green chair backwards and smoking a cigarette.
As Mrs. Wolfstein and Lady Holme went up to greet Lady Cardington, Sally
Perceval and Mrs. Trent came in together, followed almost immediately by
Lady Manby.
Sally Perceval was a very pretty young married woman, who spent most
of her time racing, gambling and going to house parties. She looked
excessively fragile and consumptive, but had lived hard and never had
a day’s illness in her life. She was accomplished, not at all
intellectual, clever at games, a fine horsewoman and an excellent
swimmer. She had been all over the world with her husband, who was very
handsome and almost idiotic, and who could not have told you what
the Taj was, whether Thebes was in Egypt or India, or what was the
difference, if any, between the Golden Gate and the Golden Horn.
Mrs. Trent was large, sultry, well-informed and supercilious; had the
lustrous eyes of a Spaniard, and spoke in a warm contralto voice. Her
figure was magnificent, and she prided herself on having a masculine
intellect. Her enemies said that she had a more than masculine temper.
Lady Manby had been presented by Providence with a face like a teapot,
her nose being the spout and her cheeks the bulging sides. She saw
everything in caricature. If war were spoken of, her imagination
immediately conjured up visions of unwashed majors conspicuously absurd
in toeless boots, of fat colonels forced to make merry on dead rats,
of field-marshals surprised by the enemy in their nightshirts, and of
common soldiers driven to repair their own clothes and preposterously
at work on women’s tasks. She adored the clergy for their pious humours,
the bench for its delicious attempts at dignity, the bar for its
grotesque travesties of passionate conviction--lies with their wigs
on--the world political for its intrigues dressed up in patriotism.
A Lord Chancellor in full state seemed to her the most delightfully
ridiculous phenomenon in a delightfully ridiculous universe. And she had
once been obliged to make a convulsive exit from an English cathedral,
in which one hundred colonial bishops were singing a solemn hymn,
entirely devastated by the laughter waked in her by this most sacred
spectacle.
Miss Burns, who hurried in breathlessly ten minutes late, was very thin,
badly dressed and insignificant-looking, wore her hair short, and could
not see you if you were more than four feet away from her. She had been
on various lonely and distant travelling excursions, about which she had
written books, had consorted merrily with naked savages, sat in the oily
huts of Esquimaux, and penetrated into the interior of China dressed as
a man. Her lack of affectation hit you in the face on a first meeting,
and her sincerity was perpetually embroiling her with the persistent
liars who, massed together, formed what is called decent society.
“I know I’m late,” she said, pushing her round black hat askew on her
shaggy little head. “I know I’ve kept you all waiting. Pardon!”
“Indeed you haven’t,” replied Mrs. Wolfstein. “Pimpernel Schley isn’t
here yet. She lives in the hotel, so of course she’ll turn up last.”
Mrs. Trent put one hand on her hip and stared insolently at the various
groups of people in the court, Lady Cardington sighed, and Lady Holme
assumed a vacant look, which suited her mental attitude at the moment.
She generally began to feel rather vacant if she were long alone with
women.
Another ten minutes passed.
“I’m famishing,” said Sally Perceval. “I’ve been at the Bath Club
diving, and I do so want my grub. Let’s skip in.”
“It really is too bad--oh, here she comes!” said Mrs. Wolfstein.
Many heads in the Palm Court were turned towards the stairs, down which
a demure figure was walking with extreme slowness. The big young man
with the round face got up from his chair and looked greedy, and
the waiters standing by the desk just inside the door glanced round,
whispered, and smiled quickly before gliding off to their different
little tables.
Pimpernel Schley was alone, but she moved as if she were leading a quiet
procession of vestal virgins. She was dressed in white, with a black
velvet band round her tiny waist and a large black hat. Her shining,
straw-coloured hair was fluffed out with a sort of ostentatious
innocence on either side of a broad parting, and she kept her round chin
tucked well in as she made what was certainly an effective entrance. Her
arms hung down at her sides, and in one hand she carried a black fan.
She wore no gloves, and many diamond rings glittered on her small
fingers, the rosy nails of which were trimmed into points. As she drew
near to Mrs. Wolfstein’s party she walked slower and slower, as if she
felt that she was arriving at a destination much too soon.
Lady Holme watched her as she approached, examined her with that
piercing scrutiny in which the soul of one woman is thrust out, like a
spear, towards the soul of another. She noticed at once that Miss Schley
resembled her, had something of her charm of fairness. It was a fainter,
more virginal charm than hers. The colouring of hair and eyes was
lighter. The complexion was a more dead, less warm, white. But there was
certainly a resemblance. Miss Schley was almost exactly her height, too,
and--
Lady Holme glanced swiftly round the Palm Court. Of all the women
gathered there Pimpernel Schley and herself were nearest akin in
appearance.
As she recognised this fact Lady Holme felt hostile to Miss Schley.
Not until the latter was almost touching her hostess did she lift her
eyes from the ground. Then she stood still, looked up calmly, and said,
in a drawling and infantine voice:
“I had to see my trunks unpacked, but I was bound to be on time. I
wouldn’t have come down to-day for any soul in the world but you. I
would not.”
It was a pretty speaking voice, clear and youthful, with a choir-boyish
sound in it, and remarkably free from nasal twang, but it was not a
lady’s voice. It sounded like the frontispiece of a summer number become
articulate.
Mrs. Wolfstein began to introduce Miss Schley to her guests, none of
whom, it seemed, knew her. She bowed to each of them, still with the
vestal virgin air, and said, “Glad to know you!” to each in turn without
looking at anyone. Then Mrs. Wolfstein led the way into the restaurant.
Everyone looked at the party of women as they came in and ranged
themselves round a table in the middle of the big room. Lady Cardington
sat on one side of Mrs. Wolfstein and Lady Holme on the other, between
her and Mrs. Trent. Miss Schley was exactly opposite. She kept her eyes
eternally cast down like a nun at Benediction. All the quite young men
who could see her were looking at her with keen interest, and two
or three of them--probably up from Sandhurst--had already assumed
expressions calculated to alarm modesty. Others looked mournfully
fatuous, as if suddenly a prey to lasting and romantic grief. The older
men were more impartial in their observation of Mrs. Wolfstein’s guests.
And all the women, without exception, fixed their eyes upon Lady Holme’s
hat.
Lady Cardington, who seemed oppressed by grief, said to Mrs. Wolfstein:
“Did you see that article in the _Daily Mail_ this morning?”
“Which one?”
“On the suggestion to found a school in which the only thing to be
taught would be happiness.”
“Who’s going to be the teacher?”
“Some man. I forget the name.”
“A man!” said Mrs. Trent, in a slow, veiled contralto voice. “Why, men
are always furious if they think we have any pleasure which they can’t
deprive us of at a minute’s notice. A man is the last two-legged thing
to be a happiness teacher.”
“Whom would you have then?” said Lady Cardington.
“Nobody, or a child.”
“Of which sex?” said Mrs. Wolfstein.
“The sex of a child,” replied Mrs. Trent.
Mrs. Wolfstein laughed rather loudly.
“I think children are the most greedy, unsatisfied individuals in--” she
began.
“I was not alluding to Curzon Street children,” observed Mrs. Trent,
interrupting. “When I speak in general terms of anything I always except
London.”
“Why?” said Sally Perceval.
“Because it’s no more natural, no more central, no more in line with the
truth of things than you are, Sally.”
“But, my dear, you surely aren’t a belated follower of Tolstoi!” cried
Mrs. Wolfstein. “You don’t want us all to live like day labourers.”
“I don’t want anybody to do anything, but if happiness is to be taught
it must not be by a man or by a Londoner.”
“I had no idea you had been caught by the cult of simplicity,” said Mrs.
Wolfstein. “But you are so clever. You reveal your dislikes but conceal
your preferences. Most women think that if they only conceal their
dislikes they are quite perfectly subtle.”
“Subtle people are delicious,” said Lady Manby, putting her mouth on
one side. “They remind me of a kleptomaniac I once knew who had a little
pocket closed by a flap let into the front of her gown. When she dined
out she filled it with scraps. Once she dined with us and I saw her,
when she thought no one was watching, peppering her pocket with cayenne,
and looking so delightfully sly and thieving. Subtle people are always
peppering their little pockets and thinking nobody sees them.”
“And lots of people don’t,” said Mrs. Wolfstein.
“The vices are divinely comic,” continued Lady Manby, looking every
moment more like a teapot. “I think it’s such a mercy. Fancy what a lot
of fun we should lose if there were no drunkards, for instance!”
Lady Cardington looked shocked.
“The virtues are often more comic than the vices,” said Mrs. Trent,
with calm authority. “Dramatists know that. Think of the dozens of good
farces whose foundation is supreme respectability in contact with the
wicked world.”
“I didn’t know anyone called respectability a virtue,” cried Sally
Perceval.
“Oh, all the English do in their hearts,” said Mrs. Wolfstein.
“Pimpernel, are you Yankees as bad?”
Miss Schley was eating _sole a la Colbert_ with her eyes on her plate.
She ate very slowly and took tiny morsels. Now she looked up.
“We’re pretty respectable over in America, I suppose,” she drawled. “Why
not? What harm does it do anyway?”
“Well, it limits the inventive faculties for one thing. If one is
strictly respectable life is plain sailing.”
“Oh, life is never that,” said Mrs. Trent, “for women.”
Lady Cardington seemed touched by this remark.
“Never, never,” she said in her curious voice--a voice in which tears
seemed for ever to be lingering. “We women are always near the rocks.”
“Or on them,” said Mrs. Trent, thinking doubtless of the two husbands
she had divorced.
“I like a good shipwreck,” exclaimed Miss Burns in a loud tenor voice.
“I was in two before I was thirty, one off Hayti and one off Java, and
I enjoyed them both thoroughly. They wake folks up and make them show
their mettle.”
“It’s always dangerous to speak figuratively if she’s anywhere about,”
murmured Mrs. Wolfstein to Lady Holme. “She’ll talk about lowering boats
and life-preservers now till the end of lunch.”
Lady Holme started. She had not been listening to the conversation but
had been looking at Miss Schley. She had noticed instantly the effect
created in the room by the actress’s presence in it. The magic of a
name flits, like a migratory bird, across the Atlantic. Numbers of the
youthful loungers of London had been waiting impatiently during the last
weeks for the arrival of this pale and demure star. Now that she
had come their interest in her was keen. Her peculiar reputation for
ingeniously tricking Mrs. Bowdler, secretary to Mrs. Grundy, rendered
her very piquant, and this piquancy was increased by her ostentatiously
vestal appearance.
Lady Holme was sometimes clairvoyante. At this moment every nerve in her
body seemed telling her that the silent girl, who sat there nibbling her
lunch composedly, was going to be the rage in London. It did not matter
at all whether she had talent or not. Lady Holme saw that directly,
as she glanced from one little table to another at the observant,
whispering men.
She felt angry with Miss Schley for resembling her in colouring, for
resembling her in another respect--capacity for remaining calmly silent
in the midst of fashionable chatterboxes.
“Will she?” she said to Mrs. Wolfstein.
“Yes. If she’d never been shipwrecked she’d have been almost
entertaining, but--there’s Sir Donald Ulford trying to attract your
attention.”
“Where?”
She looked and saw Sir Donald sitting opposite to the large young man
with the contemptuous blue eyes and the chubby mouth. They both seemed
very bored. Sir Donald bowed.
“Who is that with him?” asked Lady Holme.
“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Wolfstein. “He looks like a Cupid who’s been
through Sandow’s school. He oughtn’t to wear anything but wings.”
“It’s Sir Donald’s son, Leo,” said Lady Cardington.
Pimpernel Schley lifted her eyes for an instant from her plate, glanced
at Leo Ulford, and cast them down again.
“Leo Ulford’s a blackguard,” observed Mrs. Trent. “And when a fair man’s
a blackguard he’s much more dangerous than a dark man.”
All the women stared at Leo Ulford with a certain eagerness.
“He’s good-looking,” said Sally Perceval. “But I always distrust
cherubic people. They’re bound to do you if they get the chance. Isn’t
he married?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Trent. “He married a deaf heiress.”
“Intelligent of him!” remarked Mrs. Wolfstein. “I always wish I’d
married a blind millionaire instead of Henry. Being a Jew, Henry sees
not only all there is to see, but all there isn’t. Sir Donald and his
Cupid son don’t seem to have much to say to one another.”
“Oh, don’t you know that family affection’s the dumbest thing on earth?”
said Mrs. Trent.
“Too deep for speech,” said Lady Manby. “I love to see fathers and sons
together, the fathers trying to look younger than they are and the sons
older. It’s the most comic relationship, and breeds shyness as the West
African climate breeds fever.”
“I know the whole of the West African coast by heart,” declared Miss
Burns, wagging her head, and moving her brown hands nervously among her
knives and forks. “And I never caught anything there.”
“Not even a husband,” murmured Mrs. Wolfstein to Lady Manby.
“In fact, I never felt better in my life than I did at Old Calabar,”
continued Miss Burns. “But there my mind was occupied. I was studying
the habits of alligators.”
“They’re very bad, aren’t they?” asked Lady Manby, in a tone of earnest
inquiry.
“I prefer to study the habits of men,” said Sally Perceval, who was
always surrounded by a troup of young racing men and athletes, who
admired her swimming feats.
“Men are very disappointing, I think,” observed Mrs. Trent. “They are
like a lot of beads all threaded on one string.”
“And what’s the string?” asked Sally Perceval.
“Vanity. Men are far vainer than we are. Their indifference to the
little arts we practise shows it. A woman whose head is bald covers it
with a wig. Without a wig she would feel that she was an outcast totally
powerless to attract. But a bald-headed man has no idea of diffidence.
He does not bother about a wig because he expects to be adored without
one.”
“And the worst of it is that he is adored,” said Mrs. Wolfstein. “Look
at my passion for Henry.”
They began to talk about their husbands. Lady Holme did not join in. She
and Pimpernel Schley were very silent members of the party. Even Miss
Burns, who was--so she said--a spinster by conviction not by
necessity, plunged into the husband question, and gave some very daring
illustrations of the marriage customs of certain heathen tribes.
Pimpernel Schley hardly spoke at all. When someone, turning to her,
asked her what she thought about the subject under discussion, she
lifted her pale eyes and said, with the choir-boy drawl:
“I’ve got no husband and never had one, so I guess I’m no kind of a
judge.”
“I guess she’s a judge of other women’s husbands, though,” said Mrs.
Wolfstein to Lady Cardington. “That child is going to devastate London.”
Now and then Lady Holme glanced towards Sir Donald and his son. They
seemed as untalkative as she was. Sir Donald kept on looking towards
Mrs. Wolfstein’s table. So did Leo. But whereas Leo Ulford’s eyes were
fixed on Pimpernel Schley, Sir Donald’s met the eyes of Lady Holme. She
felt annoyed; not because Sir Donald was looking at her, but because his
son was not.
How these women talked about their husbands! Lady Cardington, who was
a widow, spoke of husbands as if they were a race which was gradually
dying out. She thought the modern woman was beginning to get a little
tired of the institution of matrimony, and to care much less for men
than was formerly the case. Being contradicted by Mrs. Trent, she gave
her reasons for this belief. One was that whereas American matinee girls
used to go mad over the “leading men” of the stage they now went mad
over the leading women. She also instanced the many beautiful London
women, universally admired, who were over thirty and still remained
spinsters. Mrs. Trent declared that they were abnormal, and that, till
the end of time, women would always wish to be wives. Mrs. Wolfstein
agreed with her on various grounds. One was that it was the instinct
of woman to buy and to rule, and that if she were rich she could
now acquire a husband as, in former days, people acquired slaves--by
purchase. This remark led to the old question of American heiresses and
the English nobility, and to a prolonged discussion as to whether or not
most women ruled their husbands.
Women nearly always argue from personal experience, and consequently
Lady Cardington--whose husband had treated her badly--differed on this
point from Mrs. Wolfstein, who always did precisely what she pleased,
regardless of Mr. Wolfstein’s wishes. Mrs. Trent affirmed that for her
part she thought women should treat their husbands as they treated their
servants, and dismiss them if they didn’t behave themselves, without
giving them a character. She had done so twice, and would do it a
third time if the occasion arose. Sally Perceval attacked her for this,
pleading slangily that men would be men, and that their failings
ought to be winked at; and Miss Burns, as usual, brought the marital
proceedings of African savages upon the carpet. Lady Manby turned the
whole thing into a joke by a farcical description of the Private Enquiry
proceedings of a jealous woman of her acquaintance, who had donned a
canary-coloured wig as a disguise, and dogged her husband’s footsteps
in the streets of London, only to find that he went out at odd times to
visit a grandmother from whom he had expectations, and who happened to
live in St. John’s Wood.
The foreign waiters, who moved round the table handing the dishes,
occasionally exchanged furtive glances which seemed indicative of
suppressed amusement, and the men who were lunching near, many of whom
were now smoking cigarettes, became more and more intent upon Mrs.
Wolfstein and her guests. As they were getting up to go into the Palm
Court for coffee and liqueurs, Lady Cardington again referred to the
article on the proposed school for happiness, which had apparently made
a deep impression upon her.
“I wonder if happiness can be taught,” she said. “If it can--”
“It can’t,” said Mrs. Trent, with more than her usual sledge-hammer
bluntness. “We aren’t meant to be happy here.”
“Who doesn’t mean us to be happy?” asked poor Lady Cardington in a
deplorable voice.
“First--our husbands.”
“It’s cowardly not to be happy,” cried Miss Burns, pushing her hat over
her left eye as a tribute to the close of lunch. “In a savage state
you’ll always find--”
The remainder of her remark was lost in the _frou-frou_ of skirts as the
eight women began slowly to thread their way between the tables to the
door.
Lady Holme found herself immediately behind Miss Schley, who moved with
impressive deliberation and the extreme composure of a well-brought-up
child thoroughly accustomed to being shown off to visitors. Her
straw-coloured hair was done low in the nape of her snowy neck, and,
as she took her little steps, her white skirt trailed over the carpet
behind her with a sort of virginal slyness. As she passed Leo Ulford it
brushed gently against him, and he drummed the large fingers of his left
hand with sudden violence on the tablecloth, at the same time pursing
his chubby lips and then opening his mouth as if he were going to say
something.
Sir Donald rose and bowed. Mrs. Wolfstein murmured a word to him in
passing, and they had not been sipping their coffee for more than two or
three minutes before he joined them with his son.
Sir Donald came up at once to Lady Holme.
“May I present my son to you, Lady Holme?” he said.
“Certainly.”
“Leo, I wish to introduce you to Lady Holme.”
Leo Ulford bowed rather ungracefully. Standing up he looked more than
ever like a huge boy, and he had much of the expression that is often
characteristic of huge boys--an expression in which impudence seems to
float forward from a background of surliness.
Lady Holme said nothing. Leo Ulford sat down beside her in an armchair.
“Better weather,” he remarked.
Then he called a waiter, and said to him, in a hectoring voice:
“Bring me a Kummel and make haste about it.”
He lit a cigarette that was almost as big as a cigar, and turned again
to Lady Holme.
“I’ve been in the Sahara gazelle shooting,” he continued.
He spoke in a rather thick, lumbering voice and very loud, probably
because he was married to a deaf woman.
“Just come back,” he added.
“Oh!” said Lady Holme.
She was sitting perfectly upright on her chair, and noticed that her
companion’s eyes travelled calmly and critically over her figure with
an unveiled deliberation that was exceptionally brazen even in a modern
London man. Lady Holme did not mind it. Indeed, she rather liked it. She
knew at once, by that look, the type of man with whom she had to deal.
In Leo Ulford there was something of Lord Holme, as in Pimpernel Schley
there was perhaps a touch of herself. Having finished his stare, Leo
Ulford continued:
“Jolly out there. No rot. Do as you like and no one to bother you.
Gazelle are awfully shy beasts though.”
“They must have suited you,” said Lady Holme, very gravely.
“Why?” he asked, taking the glass of Kummel which the waiter had brought
and setting it down on a table by him.
“Aren’t you a shy--er--beast?”
He stared at her calmly for a moment, and then said:
“I say, you’re too sharp, Lady Holme.”
He turned his head towards Pimpernel Schley, who was sitting a little
way off with her soft, white chin tucked well in, looking steadily down
into a cup half full of Turkish coffee and speaking to nobody.
“Who’s that girl?” he asked.
“That’s Miss Pimpernel Schley. A pretty name, isn’t it?”
“Is it? An American of course.”
“Of course.”
“What cheek they have? What’s she do?”
“I believe she acts in--well, a certain sort of plays.”
A slow smile overspread Leo Ulford’s face and made him look more like a
huge boy than ever.
“What certain sort?” he asked. “The sort I’d like?”
“Very probably. But I know nothing of your tastes.”
She did--everything almost. There are a good many Leo Ulfords lounging
about London.
“I like anything that’s a bit lively, with no puritanic humbug about
it.”
“Well, you surely can’t suppose that there can be any puritanic humbug
about Miss Schley or anything she has to do with!”
He glanced again at Pimpernel Schley and then at Lady Holme. The smile
on his face became a grin. Then his huge shoulders began to shake
gently.
“I do love talking to women,” he said, on the tide of a prolonged
chuckle. “When they aren’t deaf.”
Lady Holme still remained perfectly grave.
“Do you? Why?” she inquired.
“Can’t you guess why?”
“Our charity to our sister women?”
She was smiling now.
“You teach me such a lot,” he said.
He drank his Kummel.
“I always learn something when I talk to a woman. I’ve learnt something
from you.”
Lady Holme did not ask him what it was. She saw that he was now more
intent on her than he had been on Miss Schley, and she got up to go,
feeling more cheerful than she had since she left the _atelier_ of
“Cupido.”
“Don’t go.”
“I must.”
“Already! May I come and call?”
“Your father knows my address.”
“Oh, I say--but--”
“You’re not going already!” cried Mrs. Wolfstein, who was having a
second glass of Benedictine and beginning to talk rather outrageously
and with a more than usually pronounced foreign accent.
“I must, really.”
“I’m afraid my son has bored you,” murmured Sir Donald, in his worn-out
voice.
“No, I like him,” she replied, loud enough for Leo to hear.
Sir Donald did not look particularly gratified at this praise of his
achievement. Lady Holme took an airy leave of everybody. When she came
to Pimpernel Schley she said:
“I wish you a great success, Miss Schley.”
“Many thanks,” drawled the vestal virgin, who was still looking into her
coffee cup.
“I must come to your first night. Have you ever acted in London?”
“Never.”
“You won’t be nervous?”
“Nervous! Don’t know the word.”
She bent to sip her coffee.
When Lady Holme reached the door of the Carlton, and was just entering
one of the revolving cells to gain the pavement, she heard Lady
Cardington’s low voice behind her.
“Let me drive you home, dear.”
At the moment she felt inclined to be alone. She had even just refused
Sir Donald’s earnest request to accompany her to her carriage. Had any
other woman made her this offer she would certainly have refused it. But
few people refused any request of Lady Cardington’s. Lady Holme, like
the rest of the world, felt the powerful influence that lay in her
gentleness as a nerve lies in a body. And then had she not wept when
Lady Holme sang a tender song to her? In a moment they were driving up
the Haymarket together in Lady Cardington’s barouche.
The weather had grown brighter. Wavering gleams of light broke through
the clouds and lay across the city, giving a peculiarly unctuous look to
the slimy streets, in which there were a good many pedestrians more
or less splashed with mud. There was a certain hopefulness in the
atmosphere, and yet a pathos such as there always is in Spring, when it
walks through London ways, bearing itself half nervously, like a country
cousin.
“I don’t like this time of year,” said Lady Cardington.
She was leaning back and glancing anxiously about her.
“But why not?” asked Lady Holme. “What’s the matter with it?”
“Youth.”
“But surely--”
“The year’s too young. And at my age one feels very often as if the
advantage of youth were an unfair advantage.”
“Dare I ask--?”
She checked herself, looking at her companion’s snow-white hair, which
was arranged in such a way that it looked immensely thick under the big
black hat she wore--a hat half grandmotherly and half coquettish, that
certainly suited her to perfection.
“Spring--” she was beginning rather quickly; but Lady Cardington
interrupted her.
“Fifty-eight,” she said.
She laughed anxiously and looked at Lady Holme.
“Didn’t you think I was older?”
“I don’t know that I ever thought about it,” replied Lady Holme, with
the rather careless frankness she often used towards women.
“Of course not. Why should you, or anyone? When a woman’s once
over fifty it really doesn’t matter much whether she’s fifty-one or
seventy-one. Does it?”
Lady Holme thought for a moment. Then she said:
“I really don’t know. You see, I’m not a man.”
Lady Cardington’s forehead puckered and her mouth drooped piteously.
“A woman’s real life is very short,” she said. “But her desire for real
life can last very long--her silly, useless desire.”
“But if her looks remain?”
“They don’t.”
“You think it is a question of looks?”
“Do you think it is?” asked Lady Cardington. “But how can you know
anything about it, at your age, and with your appearance?”
“I suppose we all have our different opinions as to what men are and
what men want,” Lady Holme said, more thoughtfully than usual.
“Men! Men!” Lady Cardington exclaimed, with a touch of irritation
unusual in her. “Why should we women do, and be, everything for men?”
“I don’t know, but we do and we are. There are some men, though, who
think it isn’t a question of looks, or think they think so.”
“Who?” said Lady Cardington, quickly.
“Oh, there are some,” answered Lady Holme, evasively, “who believe in
mental charm more than in physical charm, or say they do. And mental
charm doesn’t age so obviously as physical--as the body does, I suppose.
Perhaps we ought to pin our faith to it. What do you think of Miss
Schley?”
Lady Cardington glanced at her with a kind of depressed curiosity.
“She pins her faith to the other thing,” she said.
“Yes.”
“She’s pretty. Do you know she reminds me faintly of you.”
Lady Holme felt acute irritation at this remark, but she only said:
“Does she?”
“Something in her colouring. I’m sure she’s a man’s woman, but I can’t
say I found her interesting.”
“Men’s women seldom are interesting to us. They don’t care to be,” said
Lady Holme.
Suddenly she thought that possibly between Pimpernel Schley and herself
there were resemblances unconnected with colouring.
“I suppose not. But still--ah, here’s Cadogan Square!”
She kissed Lady Holme lightly on the cheek.
“Fifty-eight!” Lady Holme said to herself as she went into the house.
“Just think of being fifty-eight if one has been a man’s woman! Perhaps
it’s better after all to be an everybody’s woman. Well, but how’s it
done?”
She looked quite puzzled as she came into the drawing-room, where Robin
Pierce had been waiting impatiently for twenty minutes.
“Robin,” she said seriously, “I’m very unhappy.”
“Not so unhappy as I have been for the last half hour,” he said, taking
her hand and holding it. “What is it?”
“I’m dreadfully afraid I’m a man’s woman. Do you think I am?”
He could not help smiling as he looked into her solemn eyes.
“I do indeed. Why should you be upset about it?”
“I don’t know. Lady Cardington’s been saying things--and I met a rather
abominable little person at lunch, a little person like a baby that’s
been about a great deal in a former state, and altogether--Let’s have
tea.”
“By all means.”
“And now soothe me, Robin. I’m dreadfully strung up. Soothe me. Tell
me, I’m an everybody’s woman and that I shall never be _de trop_ in the
world--not even when I’m fifty-eight.”