TO bring together certain of the dramatic critics (such high arbiters of
the stage as Sylvester Fry of the _Dispatch_, Lupin Petrol of _Now_,
Amethyst Valer of _Fashion_, Berinthia of _Woodfalls_ (the terrible, the
embittered Berinthia who was also Angela)), cards had been sent out from
Foreign-Colony Street, in the comprehensive name of Sir Oliver Dawtry,
the famous banker and financier, to meet the new lessee of the Source.
It was one of those sultry summer nights of electricity and tension,
when nerves at almost nothing are apt to explode. Beyond the iron
Calvary on the Ursulines’ great wall, London flared with lights.
Perched upon a parapet in brilliant solitude, her identity unsuspected
by the throng, Miss Sinquier, swathed in black mousseline and nursing a
sheaf of calla lilies, surveyed the scene with inexpressive eyes.
“And there was the wind bellowing and we witches wailing: and no
Macbeth!” a young man with a voice like cheap scent was saying to a
sympathetic journalist for whatever it might be worth....
Miss Sinquier craned her head.
Where were the two “Washingtons”? or the little Iris girl?
By the Buddha shrine, festively decked with lamps, couples were
pirouetting to a nigger band, while in the vicinity of the buffet, a
masked adept was holding a clairaudience of a nature only to be guessed
at from afar. An agile negro melody, wild rag-time with passages of
almost Wesleyan hymnishness—reminiscent of Georgia gospel-missions; the
eighteenth century in the Dutch East Indies—charmed and soothed the ear.
Miss Sinquier jigged her foot.
At their cell windows, as if riveted by the lights and commotion, leaned
a few pale nuns.
Poor things.
The call of the world could seldom wholly be quenched!
She started as a fan of seabirds’ feathers skimmed her arm.
“Sylvester’s come,” Mrs. Sixsmith in passing said.
“Oh!”
“Aren’t you scared?”
“Scared?”
“You know, he always belittles people. Sylvester traduces everyone; he
even crabs his daughter; he damns all he sees.”
“Boom!”
“How he got up those narrow stairs is a mystery to me,” Mrs. Sixsmith
smiled.
Miss Sinquier raised her face towards the bustling stars. An elfish
horse-shoe moon, felicitously bright, struck her as auspicious.
“One should bow to it,” she said.
“Idolatry!”
“There! look what nodding does.”
A blanche bacchante with a top-knot of leaves venturesomely approached.
“I’m Amethyst,” she murmured.
“Indeed?”
“Of _Fashion._ You are Miss Sinquier, I take it, whose costumes for
Romeo—Renaissance, and ergo _à la mode_!—I so long to hear about.”
Miss Sinquier dimpled.
“The frocks,” she said, “some of them, will be simply killing.”
“I want your first.”
“Loose white.”
“I suppose, _coiffé de sphinx avec un tortis de perles_?”
Miss Sinquier shook her head.
“No ‘Juliet-cap’ of spurious pearls for me,” she said.
“You dare to abolish it?”
“I do.”
“You excite me.”
“Unless the bloom is off the peach, Juliet needs no nets.”
Miss Valer lowered discreetly her voice.
“And your Romeo?” she queried. “He must make love angelically?”
“He does.”
“I admire enormously his friend.”
“Mr. Nice?”
“He has such perfect sloth. I love his lazaroni-ness, his
Riva-Schiavoni-ness.... He’s very, very handsome. But, of course, it
cannot last!”
“No?”
“Like an open rose: Have you no sympathy yourself?”
“None.”
“That’s a pity. An actress ... she needs a lover: a sort of husbandina,
as it were ...; I always say Passion tells: _L’amour!_”
Miss Sinquier threw a glance towards Mrs. Sixsmith, who stood listlessly
flirting her fan.
“I’m going to the buffet, child,” she said.
“Then I think I’ll join you.”
And drawing her friend’s arm within her own, Miss Sinquier moved away.
“She must belong to more than one weekly!” she reflected.
“You didn’t mention your Old Mechlin scarf, or your fox-trimmed
nightie,” Mrs. Sixsmith murmured, dexterously evading the psychic
freedoms of the masked adept.
“Have you no shame, _Paul_?” she asked.
“Paul!”
Miss Sinquier wondered.
“Mephisto! I know his parlour tricks ... though it would only be just,
perhaps, to say he did foresee our separation some time before it
occurred.”
“Oh, how extraordinary.”
“Once as I was making ready to pay some calls, in order to frighten me,
he caused the hare’s foot on my toilet-table to leave its carton sheath
and go skipping about the room.”
“Whatever did you do?”
“My dear, I was disgusted. It really seemed as if the whole of Womanhood
was outraged. So, to _punish_ him—for revenge—instead of going to a
number of houses that day, I went to only one.”
“There wouldn’t be time?”
“I shall always blame myself....”
“Why?”
But a lanthorn falling in flames just then above them put an end to the
conversation.
“That’s the second I’ve seen drop,” Miss May Mant exclaimed, darting up.
“What have you been up to?”
“Having my bumps examined.”
“What!”
“By the masked professor.... Oh, the things he said; only fancy, he told
me I’d cause the death of one both near and dear; Ita’s near ...; but
she certainly isn’t dear—odious cat.”
“He must have thought you curiously credulous,” Miss Sinquier murmured,
turning her head aside.
To her annoyance she perceived the scholarly representative of the
_Dispatch_—a man of prodigious size—leaning solidly on a gold-headed
cane while appraising her to Sir Oliver Dawtry, from her bebandeaued
head to her jewelly shoes.
“She reminds me just a little of someone _de l’Évangile_,” she could
hear the great critic say.
“Sylvester!”
“Oh?”
“Should he speak,” Mrs. Sixsmith murmured, wincing at the summer
lightning that flickered every now and then, “don’t forget the mediæval
nightie or the Mechlin lace! Five long yards—a cloud....”
Miss Sinquier buried her lips in her flowers.
Through the barred windows of the convent opposite, certain novices
appeared to be enjoying a small saltation among themselves.
Up and down the corridor to the yearning melody of the minstrel players
they twirled, clinging to one another in an ecstasy of delight.
Her fine eyes looked beautiful as, raising them fraught with soul, they
met the veteran critic’s own.
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