Unmoved by the stares of the audience, Barbara sat absorbed in moody
thoughts.
Into the three weeks since Miltoun's election there had been crowded
such a multitude of functions that she had found, as it were, no time,
no energy to know where she stood with herself. Since that morning in
the stable, when he had watched her with the horse Hal, Harbinger had
seemed to live only to be close to her. And the consciousness of his
passion gave her a tingling sense of pleasure. She had been riding and
dancing with him, and sometimes this had been almost blissful. But there
were times too, when she felt—though always with a certain contempt of
herself, as when she sat on that sunwarmed stone below the tor—a queer
dissatisfaction, a longing for something outside a world where she
had to invent her own starvations and simplicities, to make-believe in
earnestness.
She had seen Courtier three times. Once he had come to dine, in response
to an invitation from Lady Valleys worded in that charming, almost
wistful style, which she had taught herself to use to those below her
in social rank, especially if they were intelligent; once to the Valleys
House garden party; and next day, having told him what time she would be
riding, she had found him in the Row, not mounted, but standing by the
rail just where she must pass, with that look on his face of mingled
deference and ironic self-containment, of which he was a master. It
appeared that he was leaving England; and to her questions why, and
where, he had only shrugged his shoulders. Up on this dusty platform, in
the hot bare hall, facing all those people, listening to speeches whose
sense she was too languid and preoccupied to take in, the whole medley
of thoughts, and faces round her, and the sound of the speakers'
voices, formed a kind of nightmare, out of which she noted with extreme
exactitude the colour of her mother's neck beneath a large black hat,
and the expression on the face of a Committee man to the right, who
was biting his fingers under cover of a blue paper. She realized that
someone was speaking amongst the audience, casting forth, as it were,
small bunches of words. She could see him—a little man in a black coat,
with a white face which kept jerking up and down.
“I feel that this is terrible,” she heard him say; “I feel that this
is blasphemy. That we should try to tamper with the greatest force, the
greatest and the most sacred and secret-force, that—that moves in the
world, is to me horrible. I cannot bear to listen; it seems to make
everything so small!” She saw him sit down, and her mother rising to
answer.
“We must all sympathize with the sincerity and to a certain extent with
the intention of our friend in the body of the hall. But we must ask
ourselves:
“Have we the right to allow ourselves the luxury, of private feelings in
a matter which concerns the national expansion. We must not give way to
sentiment. Our friend in the body of the hall spoke—he will forgive me
for saying so—like a poet, rather than a serious reformer. I am afraid
that if we let ourselves drop into poetry, the birth rate of this
country will very soon drop into poetry too. And that I think it is
impossible for us to contemplate with folded hands. The resolution I was
about to propose when our friend in the body of the hall——”
But Barbara's attention, had wandered off again into that queer medley
of thoughts, and feelings, out of which the little man had so abruptly
roused her. Then she realized that the meeting was breaking up, and her
mother saying:
“Now, my dear, it's hospital day. We've just time.”
When they were once more in the car, she leaned back very silent,
watching the traffic.
Lady Valleys eyed her sidelong.
“What a little bombshell,” she said, “from that small person! He
must have got in by mistake. I hear Mr. Courtier has a card for Helen
Gloucester's ball to-night, Babs.”
“Poor man!”
“You will be there,” said Lady Valleys dryly.
Barbara drew back into her corner.
“Don't tease me, Mother!”
An expression of compunction crossed Lady Valleys' face; she tried to
possess herself of Barbara's hand. But that languid hand did not return
her squeeze.
“I know the mood you're in, dear. It wants all one's pluck to shake
it off; don't let it grow on you. You'd better go down to Uncle Dennis
to-morrow. You've been overdoing it.”
Barbara sighed.
“I wish it were to-morrow.”
The car had stopped, and Lady Valleys said:
“Will you come in, or are you too tired? It always does them good to see
you.”
“You're twice as tired as me,” Barbara answered; “of course I'll come.”
At the entrance of the two ladies, there rose at once a faint buzz
and murmur. Lady Valleys, whose ample presence radiated suddenly a
businesslike and cheery confidence, went to a bedside and sat down. But
Barbara stood in a thin streak of the July sunlight, uncertain where to
begin, amongst the faces turned towards her. The poor dears looked so
humble, and so wistful, and so tired. There was one lying quite
flat, who had not even raised her head to see who had come in. That
slumbering, pale, high cheek-boned face had a frailty as if a touch, a
breath, would shatter it; a wisp of the blackest hair, finer than silk,
lay across the forehead; the closed eyes were deep sunk; one hand,
scarred almost to the bone with work, rested above her breast. She
breathed between lips which had no colour. About her, sleeping, was a
kind of beauty. And there came over the girl a queer rush of emotion.
The sleeper seemed so apart from everything there, from all the
formality and stiffness of the ward. To look at her swept away the
languid, hollow feeling with which she had come in; it made her think
of the tors at home, when the wind was blowing, and all was bare, and
grand, and sometimes terrible. There was something elemental in that
still sleep. And the old lady in the next led, with a brown wrinkled
face and bright black eyes brimful of life, seemed almost vulgar beside
such remote tranquillity, while she was telling Barbara that a little
bunch of heather in the better half of a soap-dish on the window-sill
had come from Wales, because, as she explained: “My mother was born in
Stirling, dearie; so I likes a bit of heather, though I never been out
o' Bethnal Green meself.”
But when Barbara again passed, the sleeping woman was sitting up,
and looked but a poor ordinary thing—her strange fragile beauty all
withdrawn.
It was a relief when Lady Valleys said:
“My dear, my Naval Bazaar at five-thirty; and while I'm there you must
go home and have a rest, and freshen yourself up for the evening. We
dine at Plassey House.”
The Duchess of Gloucester's Ball, a function which no one could very
well miss, had been fixed for this late date owing to the Duchess's
announced desire to prolong the season and so help the hackney cabmen;
and though everybody sympathized, it had been felt by most that it would
be simpler to go away, motor up on the day of the Ball, and motor down
again on the following morning. And throughout the week by which the
season was thus prolonged, in long rows at the railway stations, and on
their stands, the hackney cabmen, unconscious of what was being done for
them, waited, patient as their horses. But since everybody was making
this special effort, an exceptionally large, exclusive, and brilliant
company reassembled at Gloucester House.
In the vast ballroom over the medley of entwined revolving couples,
punkahs had been fixed, to clear and freshen the languid air, and these
huge fans, moving with incredible slowness, drove a faint refreshing
draught down over the sea of white shirt-fronts and bare necks, and
freed the scent from innumerable flowers.
Late in the evening, close by one of the great clumps of bloom, a very
pretty woman stood talking to Bertie Caradoc. She was his cousin, Lily
Malvezin, sister of Geoffrey Winlow, and wife of a Liberal peer, a
charming creature, whose pink cheeks, bright eyes, quick lips, and
rounded figure, endowed her with the prettiest air of animation. And
while she spoke she kept stealing sly glances at her partner, trying as
it were to pierce the armour of that self-contained young man.
“No, my dear,” she said in her mocking voice, “you'll never persuade
me that Miltoun is going to catch on. 'Il est trop intransigeant'. Ah!
there's Babs!”
For the girl had come gliding by, her eyes wandering lazily, her lips
just parted; her neck, hardly less pale than her white frock; her face
pale, and marked with languor, under the heavy coil of her tawny hair;
and her swaying body seeming with each turn of the waltz to be caught by
the arms of her partner from out of a swoon.
With that immobility of lips, learned by all imprisoned in Society, Lily
Malvezin murmured:
“Who's that she's dancing with? Is it the dark horse, Bertie?”
Through lips no less immobile Bertie answered:
“Forty to one, no takers.”
But those inquisitive bright eyes still followed Barbara, drifting in
the dance, like a great waterlily caught in the swirl of a mill pool;
and the thought passed through that pretty head:
“She's hooked him. It's naughty of Babs, really!” And then she saw
leaning against a pillar another whose eyes also were following those
two; and she thought: “H'm! Poor Claud—no wonder he's looking like that.
Oh! Babs!”
By one of the statues on the terrace Barbara and her partner stood,
where trees, disfigured by no gaudy lanterns, offered the refreshment of
their darkness and serenity.
Wrapped in her new pale languor, still breathing deeply from the waltz,
she seemed to Courtier too utterly moulded out of loveliness. To what
end should a man frame speeches to a vision! She was but an incarnation
of beauty imprinted on the air, and would fade out at a touch-like the
sudden ghosts of enchantment that came to one under the blue, and the
starlit snow of a mountain night, or in a birch wood all wistful golden!
Speech seemed but desecration! Besides, what of interest was there
for him to say in this world of hers, so bewildering and of such glib
assurance—this world that was like a building, whose every window was
shut and had a blind drawn down. A building that admitted none who had
not sworn, as it were, to believe it the world, the whole world, and
nothing but the world, outside which were only the nibbled remains of
what had built it. This, world of Society, in which he felt like one
travelling through a desert, longing to meet a fellow-creature.
The voice of Harbinger behind them said:
“Lady-Babs!”
Long did the punkahs waft their breeze over that brave-hued wheel of
pleasure, and the sound of the violins quaver and wail out into the
morning. Then quickly, as the spangles of dew vanish off grass when
the sun rises, all melted away; and in the great rooms were none but
flunkeys presiding over the polished surfaces like flamingoes by some
lakeside at dawn.