Now it happened that one night, not long ago, Shelmerdene, having
nothing better to do, rang me up and, complaining thus and thus,
suggested that I should do the manly thing and dine with her. It was
such a rare happening that I remember it all vividly. I remember I
adopted an offended attitude, asking her if she thought I was the kind
of man who was so lacking in dinner engagements that I could be rung up
to take a lady out to dinner at the last moment. I asked her who she
thought I was. I asked her to dine at the Ritz. But then, after a
certain amount of talk this way and that way, we decided that we would
be frightfully gay, and so we went to dine at the Ambassadors.
Of course, you know the Ambassadors. Every one knows the Ambassadors.
Every one has passed through its mean but patrician-looking entrance in
Bond Street, just between a jeweller’s and a fishmonger’s. It is, of
course, a Night-Club, though there is nothing to prevent you going there
in the afternoon if you feel that way. It is an exclusive Night-Club.
Outside it are posted tall men in brilliant uniforms adorned with
medals, and these men have the eyes of hawks, for it is their business
to sift out the low and vulgar from the fashionable crowds that
perpetually strive for admittance; they are the best sifters of their
kind; and on any night of the week you will see at the Ambassadors all
the quality and only the quality, toying with their food and calling
each other by their Christian names.
The tables are elegantly arranged around the walls, deep sofas and
divans are luxuriously set about them, while the centre is left
unchallenged to the shimmering parquet floor. Of course all parquet
floors shimmer, but none shimmers like this at the Ambassadors. One
dines. One sups. Tommy Tittlebat’s Saxophone Six plays. The quality
dance. The more Tommy Tittlebat’s Saxophone Six plays the more the
quality dance, which is only reasonable. They jump up to dance at the
exact moment when their food is put upon the table, and they cease
dancing only when their food has become so cold that they have to hold
lighted matches under the plates to warm them up. This causes much
laughter.
As evening melts exquisitely into night, the quality enter the
Ambassadors in their hundreds, all calling each other and the waiters
by their Christian names. Some bring well-dressed nobodies with them,
some bring Jews, some bring titled what-nots from the provinces or from
Labrador: so that by midnight the parquet floor is so crowded that you
cannot see the parquet. Then it is great fun to dance.
The game is played like this. As soon as a man and woman, sitting at
their table, see a clear square foot of parquet floor they instantly
leap on same, and, passionately embracing each other thereon, make
movements of their eyebrows, hips, and feet in time to Tommy Tittlebat’s
Saxophone Six. That is called dancing. They stay on their square foot of
shimmering parquet floor until they get shoved off it by a beefier
couple, whereupon the two gentlemen compliment each other in an elegant
way--as is the way with persons of _ton_--or they call each other names
(not Christian names)--as is also the way with persons of _ton_--until
one or other of them is thrown out. That is called enjoying yourself,
and you have to pay to do it. I paid, on the night I am telling you
about. But not even Tommy Tittlebat’s Saxophone Six could drown the
charm of Shelmerdene. Dear Shelmerdene....
At the table next to us sat a solitary gentleman. Obviously, we
thought, he is waiting for some one, and obviously that some one has let
him down. I am not much of a connoisseur as to men’s looks, but
Shelmerdene knows about these things, and she said he was handsome. He
was, even as he sat, noticeably tall; of strong and manly appearance;
and, though swarthy in countenance, so essentially English-looking that
it was with a disagreeable shock that, towards midnight, we noticed that
his dark eyes were wet with tears. There is, as a rule, a scarcity of
six-foot men weeping over supper at the Ambassadors.
“Drunk,” I suggested harshly, but Shelmerdene is a kind woman and she
said that he looked like a man haunted by a great calamity.
“That’s all very well,” I said, “but one doesn’t cry about things.”
Whereupon Shelmerdene looked at me, those wide and wise and witty eyes
looked full at me--men have drowned themselves in Shelmerdene’s
eyes--and I saw laughter at all men playing in their dusky-blue depths;
and I had to confess to those kind, mocking eyes, that I, Ralph Wyndham
Trevor, had also wept, that I had sobbed like a child, and that a woman
had seen me at it--the woman who had caused it.
“Exactly,” said Shelmerdene. “For the more virile a man is, the braver
and the more adventurous a man is, the more likely he is to weep before
a woman and generally make a fool of himself. Fetch me that handsome
man, Ralph. Men in love are not generally very reticent, especially
Englishmen in love. The reticence of Englishmen is as much an illusion
as the good manners of Frenchmen. I am curious. Fetch me that handsome
man, Ralph.”
I leant over to the table beside us. The tall, dark young man turned
moist, absent-minded eyes upon me.
“Sir,” I said, “forgive this unpardonable intrusion. But my companion
and I have observed your solitude, no doubt temporary, and would be
delighted if you would join us in a glass of wine.”
“You are very kind,” said the tall, dark young man.
He refused, with a courtly gesture, to take my seat on the sofa beside
Shelmerdene, but sat on a chair opposite us. I filled him a glass of
champagne.
“Sir,” said he, “your health. And yours, madam.”
But still the tears did not leave those dark, tragic eyes, they
smouldered darkly in them. He looked infinitely wretched, though he
bravely tried to smile as he addressed Shelmerdene:
“You must not think me unamiable if I do not ask you to dance, but I am
not, to-night, in my happiest vein. You must forgive me....”
He looked so very miserable that I was about to say something
sympathetic when Shelmerdene kicked me under the table. She murmured
something gentle across the table....
“You are so kind and sympathetic,” whispered the handsome stranger,
“that I will tell you a story. You are sure it won’t bore you?”
We said we were quite sure, and I filled him a glass of champagne.
“Sir,” said he, “your health. And yours, madam.”
“My story,” he addressed us, “concerns a man and a woman. The man loved
the woman. I call her a woman because all words are vain, and to call
her a goddess were but to lay myself under the charge of affectation.
But if I were to tell you her name, which of course I cannot do, except
to say that it rhymes with custard, you would instantly agree with the
most abandoned epithets for her beauty; for she is one of the best loved
ladies in the land, by reason of her high birth, her peerless carriage,
and her amazing loveliness. I tell you, she has no rival in the present,
nor can history tell us of her like. If the Lady Circe had had golden
hair, which I much doubt, perhaps she may have been a tithe as lovely.
It is, as you know, said of the Lady Circe that she turned men into
swine, but this lady turns swine into men, and what could be more
agreeable than that? It was ever her innocent delight to improve the men
she met; and, with such beauty, was there anything she could not do with
men? Her beauty appals the epithet. She is divinely tall, gold is but
brass beside the sheen of her hair, and white samite is grey beside her
complexion. She is without doubt the loveliest woman in England--which,
of course, also includes America, for all lovely American women live in
England even though they may die in Paris.
“The man met this lady and instantly loved her. Now his was no casual
passion. She was young, but the war had already widowed her; and she
seemed not unaware of, nor entirely repelled by, her new suitor’s
passion, for from her many suitors she chose him as her constant
companion. Thus, rumour very soon came to link their names; and rumour,
generally so malignant, was then kind enough to find something
harmonious in the alliance of that pair. For he was a man of unusual
height, of a good name, a distinguished military record, and looks which
some have thought handsome while none have denied to be very properly
suited to the requirements of an English gentleman.
“She did not, at first, wholly accept him. But no day passed that they
did not meet; and, as day exquisitely strung itself to day so that each
was another pearl on the necklace of an Olympian goddess, she seemed, by
sudden gestures, by sudden impulses, to be growing to love him--she the
loveliest lady in the world! And he was happy--Oh, God, he was happy!”
The handsome stranger fell silent, and I thought he was about to break
down. I filled him a glass of champagne.
“Sir,” said he, “your health. And yours, madam.”
“I have told you,” he went on, “of her amazing beauty, the golden-white
beauty of the world’s last aristocracy. But, as though that were not
enough, she was ambitious; she was a lady of parts, and she increasingly
sought the company of those with whom she could discuss, deeply and
seriously, the current problems of this vexed time. She was, you
understand, tremendously interested in improving people; and politically
she was, of course, a Die-Hard; for, as the daughter of a great house,
her earliest experience in literature was _The Morning Toast_, to which
she had remained faithful even when she grew up, with that tenacity
peculiar to all readers of that remarkable journal. And so, when the
franchise was extended to women, she, even before Lady Astor, raised the
standard of rampant womanhood; and the world was given the rare
sensation of seeing, and the House of Commons the rare privilege of
welcoming, among its foremost legislators, the loveliest lady in the
land, or any land. Words cannot describe the effect she made as she
stood, indisputably the first of the twelve other ladies who had won
their right of entrance into the Lower House, in all her glorious height
and golden beauty among the dolorous decorations of that crypt which the
glamour of centuries had raised to the majesty of Britain’s greatest
institution.
“It was at this time that the man I have referred to came into her life;
and it chanced for her to be a fortunate occasion, for without him her
political career had been a barren thing. She could not make up a
speech. Memorise and speak a speech she could, so amazingly well that
the populace cried out with wonder at one so gifted with brains and
elocution as well as with beauty--but she could not make up a speech.
The brains in her speeches, which were rapidly winning for her a
foremost position among the Die-Hards, were not hers. Her friend wrote
her speeches for her. He did them gladly, happy and honoured to be of
use to her. He ‘helped’ her with her speeches, so that she seemed not to
be aware that his was every idea, every phrase, every epigram,
everything--and that was his greatest pleasure, his subtle ‘helping’ her
to a place of honour and esteem for something besides her beauty.
Himself, though a gentleman, was not a Die-Hard: he was a man of ideas.
He had a brain like Clapham Junction, going this way and that way and
every way at the same time; and he could, no doubt, have made a great
political name for himself, but he was by nature a soldier and by
temperament adventurous, so that it pleased him infinitely more to
‘help’ the lady of his dreams to political fame rather than to bid for
it in his own person.
“But another soldier came into her life--the most fearless soldier of
our time, it has been said. But whether it was that he was the most
fearless or the luckiest, we cannot tell. He himself insists on his
luck. ‘I cannot lose,’ he is reported to have often said, sometimes
unhappily. Whatever he touched became a jewel in his hand: whatever he
ventured, he won. A name never expressed a man more perfectly--Victor
Fortune! Captain Fortune, V.C., D.S.O., M.C., etc....
“He saw her first from the Strangers’ Gallery in the Lower House. He
was, of course, familiar with her beauty--how often had he not seen
portraits of her in the fashionable journals of the day!--but her face
had hitherto failed to attract him, because of a certain coldness, a
certain vapidity, which only his fastidious taste has chosen to discover
in it. But those were photographs--now, from his obscure seat in the
Gallery, Captain Fortune looked down upon the fairest figure the mind of
man could conceive.
“It was the afternoon set apart for the discussion on Fabric Gloves, and
the loveliest woman of our time excelled herself in her speech: or,
rather, her friend had excelled himself. Captain Fortune, gazing down
upon that tall and golden figure, a light in that dark pit of
legislation, was enthralled and--yes, appalled by her beauty and her
wit. It had needed only her wit, her culture, to add that vivacity to
her perfect features which would enslave Captain Fortune’s fastidious
heart--Victor Fortune, who never ventured but he won! He met the lady
that night, at Lady Savoury’s ball in aid of the Bus-Conductors’
Orphanage.
“Three weeks later her old friend, her ‘helper,’ was stunned to read in
_The Morning Toast_ of the engagement of the lady to Captain Fortune,
V.C., D.S.O., M.C., etc. He was stunned; then, frantically, he rushed to
her house. She was not yet fully dressed, she received him with pretty
confusion. She was very sorry about it all, she said. She was
frightfully sorry, she said. But she had fallen in love. Victor Fortune
was so fine, so magnificent--and it needed but her love and care to help
him combat his few weaknesses, which might be counted human in other men
but were unworthy and degrading in such a man as Victor Fortune.
“And so he went away, her friend, never to return. He never has
returned. He never will return, for thus it is written. And Captain
Fortune, who never ventured but he won, married his lady, the lady of
his dreams....”
What could we say? We could only say that we were very sorry,
frightfully sorry, but his lovely lady had already told him that and it
did not seem to have soothed him. Tears smouldered in those dark eyes,
and I thought he was going to break down. I filled him a glass of
champagne.
“Sir,” said he, “your health. And yours, madam.”
“Of course,” he whispered, “she has never been able to make a speech
since. How could she? Without her old friend she is just a lovely woman,
a lovely woman whose life centres round her care for Captain Fortune.
And her old friend has gone out of her life, he who loved her and still
loves her, never to return, never....”
He rose from his chair and looked miserably down on us. Bravely, he
tried to smile.
“I am so, so sorry,” murmured Shelmerdene.
And silently we watched his tall figure carving a passage through the
quality to the doorway. A broken man is a more miserable thing than a
broken toy, and we were sad....
The agreeable and polished M. Risotto, prince of _maîtres d’hôtel_,
chanced by our table.
“Who,” asked Shelmerdene, “was that tall gentleman who has just left
us?”
“That, madam,” said the agreeable and polished M. Risotto, “is Captain
Fortune, the most gallant gentleman in England....”