THE OLYMPIANS THUNDER.
I.
Lady Durwent was blessed in the possession of a cook whose artistry was
beyond question, if the same could not be said of the guests to whom
she so frequently ministered. She was a descendant of the French, that
race which makes everything tend towards development of the soul, and
consequently looks upon a meal as something of a sacrament. She
prepared a dinner with a balance of contrast and climax that a composer
might show in writing a tone poem.
On this eventful evening, therefore, the dinner-party, stimulated by
her art and by potent wines (gazing with long-necked dignity at the
autocratic whisky-decanter), rapidly assumed a crescendo and an
accelerando--the two things for which a hostess listens.
H. Stackton Dunckley had held the resolutionist in a duel of
language--a combat with broadswords--and honours were fairly even. The
short-sleeved Johnston Smyth had waged futurist warfare against the
modernist Pyford, while the Honourable Miss Durwent sat helplessly
between them, with as little chance of asserting her rights as the
Dormouse at the Mad Hatter's tea-party. The American had held his own
in badinage with the daughter of Italy on one side and his hostess on
the other, the latter, however, being too skilled in entertaining to do
more than murmur a few encouragements to the spontaneity that so
palpably existed.
'Let me see,' said Lady Durwent as the meal came to a close and the
butler looked questioningly at her. 'Shall we'--she opened the caverns
of her throat, producing a volume that instantly silenced every
one--'SHALL WE HAVE COFFEE IN HERE OR IN THE DRAWING-ROOM? I suppose
you gentlemen, as usual, want to chat over your port and cigars alone.'
H. Stackton Dunckley protested that absence from the ladies, even for
so short a time, would completely spoil his evening--receiving in
reward a languorous glance from Lady Durwent. Johnston Smyth, who had
done more than ample justice to the wines, offered to 'pink' at fifty
yards any man who would consider the proposition for a moment. Only
Norton Pyford, in a sort of befuddled gallantry, suggested that the
ladies might have sentimental confidences to exchange, and leered
amorously at Elise Durwent.
'Well,' said Lady Durwent, 'I am sure we are all curious to hear what
Mr. Selwyn thinks of England, so I think we shall have coffee here. Is
it agreeable to every one?'
Unanimous approval greeted the proposal, and, at a sign from the
hostess, cigarettes, cigars, and coffee made their appearance, with the
corresponding niceties of 'Just one, please,' 'Well, perhaps a
cigarette might be enjoyable,' 'I know men like a cigar,' 'After you,
old man,' and all those various utterances which tickle the ear,
creating in the speaker's breast the feeling of saying the right thing
and doing it rather well.
Throughout the dinner the daughter of the house had sat practically
without a remark, and even when chorus effects were achieved by the
rest, remained with almost immobile features, merely glancing from one
to another, momentarily interested or openly bored. Several times the
American had looked furtively at the arresting face, marred by too
apparent mental resentment, but the barricade of Johnston Smyth's
angular personality had been too powerful for him to surmount with
anything but the most superficial persiflage.
He had watched her take a cigarette, accepting a light from Smyth, who
surrounded the action with a ludicrous dignity, when she looked up and
met his eyes.
'Mr. Selwyn,' she said, speaking with the same rapidity of phrasing
that had both held and exasperated him before, 'we are all waiting for
the verdict of the Man from America.'
'Over there,' he smiled, 'it is customary to take evidence before
giving a verdict.'
'Good,' boomed the resolutionist; 'very good!'
'Then,' said Lady Durwent, 'we seven shall constitute a jury.'
'Order!' Johnston Smyth rose to his feet and hammered the table with a
bottle. '_Oyez, oyez_, you hereby swear that you shall well and truly
try'----
'Can't,' said Norton Pyford, pulling himself up; 'I'm prejudiced.'
'For or against?'
'Against the culprit.'
'My discordant friend,' said Smyth, producing a second bottle from an
unsuspected source and making it disappear mysteriously, 'means that he
is prejudiced against England. Am I right, sir?'
'Not exactly,' drawled the composer. 'I don't mind England--but I
think the English are awful.'
'That is a nice point,' said Lady Durwent.
'Ah,' broke in Madame Carlotti, 'but, much as I detest the English, I
hate England more. _Nom de Dieu_! I--a daughter of the Mediterranean,
where the sun ees so rarely a stranger, and the sky and the water it
ees always blue. In Italy one lives because she ees alive--it ees
sufficient. Here it ees always gray, gray--always g-r-ray. When the
sun comes--_sacramento_! he sees his mistake and goes queek away. Ah,
Signor Selwyn, it ees _désolant_ that I am compelled to live here.'
A roar of unfeeling laughter greeting her familiar plaint, Madame
Carlotti took a hitch in her gown and reimprisoned some of her person
which had escaped from custody.
'Then,' said Johnston Smyth, 'if we are all of a mind, there is no need
to have a trial. You have all seen the accusation in Mr. Selwyn's eye,
you have considered the unbiassed evidence of the lovely Carlotti'----
'But jurors can't give evidence,' muttered Mr. Dunckley.
'My dear sir, I know she can't, but she did,' said Smyth triumphantly.
'_Oyez, oyez_--all in favour'----
'But,' interrupted the American, 'are we not to hear any one for the
defence?'
'No,' said Smyth, who was thoroughly happy as a self-constituted master
of ceremonies. 'No one would accept the brief.'
'Then,' said Selwyn, 'I apply for the post of counsel for the defence,
for in the limited time I have been in your country I have seen much
that appeals to me.'
'Of course, it is a well-known fact,' said Dunckley sententiously,
'that American humour relies on exaggeration.'
'No, no,' said Johnston Smyth, hushing the voices with a _pianissimo_
movement of his hands, 'it is not humour on Mr. Selwyn's part, but
gratitude. In return for Christopher Columbus discovering America,
this gentleman is going to repay the debt of the New World to the Old
by discovering England.'
'SHALL WE HAVE SOME PORT?' said Lady Durwent, opening the sluice-gates
of her vocal production.
II.
'Speaking of America,' said Mrs. Le Roy Jennings a few minutes later,
Johnston Smyth having sat down in order to do justice to the wine of
Portugal, 'she is in the very vanguard of progress. Women have
achieved an independence there unknown elsewhere in the world.'
'That is true,' said Lady Durwent, who knew nothing whatever about it.
'You are right,' said Madame Carlotti.
'The other day in Paris I heard an American woman whistling. "Have you
lost your dog?" I asked. "No," she says; "my husband."'
A chorus of approval greeted this malicious sally, followed by the
retailing of various anti-American anecdotes that made up in sting what
they lacked in delicacy. These showed no signs of abatement until,
slightly nettled, Selwyn put in an oar.
'I had hoped,' he said, 'to find some illuminating points in the
conversation to-night. But it seems as if you treat not only your own
country in a spirit of caricature, but mine as well. We are a very
young race, and we have the faults of youth; but, then, youth always
has a future. It was a sort of post-graduate course to come to England
and Europe to absorb some of the lore--or isn't it one of your poets
who speaks of "The Spoils of Time"? Your past is so rich that
naturally we look to you and Europe for the fundamental things of
civilisation.'
'And what have you found?' asked Elise Durwent.
'Well,' said the American, 'much to admire--and much to deplore.'
'In other words,' said Johnston Smyth, 'he has been to Edinburgh and to
London.'
'That is so,' smiled Selwyn; 'but I don't'----
'All people,' said Smyth serenely, 'admire Edinburgh, but abuse London.
Over here a man will jest about his religion or even his grandfather,
but never about Edinburgh. On the other hand, as every one damns
London, and as an Englishman is never so happy as when he has something
on hand to grouse about, London's population has grown to some eight
millions.'
'I think, Mr. Smyth,' said Lady Durwent, 'that you are as much a
philosopher as a painter.'
'Lady Durwent,' said the futurist, 'all art is philosophy--even old
Pyford's here, though his amounts almost to theology.'
For a few minutes the conversation drifted in inconsequential channels
until H. Stackton Dunckley becalmed everything with a laborious
dissertation on the lack of literary taste in both England and America.
Selwyn took the opportunity of studying the elusive beauty of Elise
Durwent, which seemed to provoke the eye to admiration, yet fade into
imperfection under a prolonged searching. Pyford grew sleepy, and even
Smyth appeared a little melancholy, when, on a signal from Lady
Durwent, brandy and liqueurs were served, checking Mr. Dunckley's
oratory and reviving every one's spirits noticeably.
'Mr. Selwyn,' said Mrs. Le Roy Jennings in her best manner, 'after you
have subjected England to a microscopic examination for a sufficient
length of time, you will discover that we are a nation of parasites.'
'I would rather you said that than I, Mrs. Jennings.'
'Parasites,' reiterated the speaker, fixing an eye on some point on the
wall directly between Selwyn and the hostess. 'We sprawl over the
world--why? To develop resources? No! It is to reap the natural
growth of others' endeavours? Yes! The Englishman never creates. He
is the world's greatest brigand'----
'Too thoroughly masculine to be really cruel,' chimed in the
irrepressible Smyth.
'Brigand,' repeated Mrs. Jennings, not deigning the artist so much as a
glance, 'skimming the earth of its surface riches, and rendering every
place the poorer for his being there.'
There was an awesome silence, which no one seemed courageous enough to
break.
'Yes,' said H. Stackton Dunckley finally, 'and in addition England is
decadent.'
'But, Mr. Selwyn'--again the American heard the voice of Elise Durwent,
that quick intensity of speech that always left a moment of startled
silence in its wake--'you have discovered something admirable about
England. Won't you tell us what it is?'
'Well,' he said, smiling, 'for one thing, no one can deny the beauty of
your women.'
'All decadent nations,' said H. Stackton Dunckley, 'produce beautiful
women--it is one of the surest signs that they are going to pieces.
The Romans did at the last, and Rome and England are parallel cases.
As Mrs. Le Roy Jennings says, they are parasitic nations. What did the
Romans add to Greek art? The Greeks had this'--he made an elliptical
movement of his hands--'the Romans did that to it'--he described a
circle, then shrugged his shoulders, convinced that he had said
something crushing.
'So you think English women beautiful, Mr. Selwyn?' said Lady Durwent,
trying to retrieve the conversation from the slough of her inamorato's
ponderosity.
'Undoubtedly,' answered the American warmly. 'It is no doubt the
out-of-door life they lead, and I suppose the moist climate has
something to do with their wonderful complexions, but they are womanly
as well, and their voices are lovely.'
'I smell a rat,' said Smyth, who had in his mouth an unlit cigarette,
which had fastened itself to his lip and bobbed up and down with his
speech, like a miniature baton. 'When a man says a woman's voice is
sweet, it means that she has bored him; that what she has to say
interests him so little that he turns to contemplation of her voice.
This American is a devilish cute fellow.'
A babble of voices took up the charge and demanded immediate
explanation.
'To a certain extent,' said Selwyn stoutly, 'there is much in what Mr.
Smyth says.'
'List to the pigmy praising the oracle,' chanted the artist.
'I do not think,' went on the American, 'that the English girls I have
met are as bright or as clever as the cultured young women of the
continent of America. In other words, with all her natural charm, the
English girl does not edit herself well.'
'In that,' said H. Stackton Dunckley, 'she reflects the breed. The
Anglo-Saxon has an instinctive indifference to thought.'
'As soon as an Englishman thinks,' minced Madame Carlotti, 'he leaves
England with its _cattivo_ climate and goes to the Colonies. _C'est
pourquoi_ the Empire ees so powerful--its brains are in the legs.'
'Come, come,' laughed Selwyn, 'is there no one here but me who can
discover any merit in Old England?'
'Yes,' said Pyford gloomily; 'London is only seven hours from Paris.'
'Ah--_Parigi_!' ejaculated Madame Carlotti with the fervour born of the
feeling in all Latin women that Paris is their spiritual capital.
'And yet,' said Selwyn, after a pause to see if Madame Carlotti's
exuberance was going to develop any further, 'in literature, which I
suppose is the natural art of the Anglo-Saxon temperament, we still
look to you for the outstanding figures. With all our ability for
writing short stories--and I think we are second only to the French in
that--England still produces the foremost novelists. In the sustained
effort required in the formation of a novel, England is yet first. Of
course, musically, I think England is very near the bottom.'
'And yet,' said Johnston Smyth, 'we are the only people in the world
candid enough to have a monument to our lack of taste.'
Every one looked at the artist, who stroked his left arm with the back
of his right hand, like a barber sharpening a razor.
'In that part of London known as Kingsway,' he said, 'there is a
beautiful building called "The London Opera House"!' He thrust both
hands out, palms upwards, as if the building itself rested on them.
'It stands in a commanding position, with statues of the great
composers gazing from the roof at the passing proletariat emanating
from the Strand. Inside it is luxuriously equipped, as bents the home
of Opera.'
'Yes,' said the American, as the speaker paused.
Smyth produced a watch from nowhere in particular. 'It is just past
ten,' he said. 'I am not sure whether it is Charlie Chaplin or Mary
Pickford showing on the screen at this hour, at the London Opera House.'
A murmur of applause acknowledged the artist's well-planned climax. He
looked about with a satisfied smile, then replaced the watch with the
air of pocketing both it and the subject.
'But--you have opera?' said Selwyn wonderingly.
'Of course,' said Smyth; 'and where? In a vegetable-market. In Covent
Garden. Yet England has been accused of hypocrisy! What other nation
is so candid?'
By one of those unspoken understandings that are the rules of mobs and
dinner-parties, it was felt that the topic was ceasing to be exhaustive
and becoming exhausting. Lady Durwent glanced, interrogatively about
the table; Madame Carlotti took a hitch in her gown; Norton Pyford
emptied his glass and sat pensively staring at it as if it had hardly
done what he expected, but on the whole he felt inclined to forgive it;
Johnston Smyth made a belated attempt to be sentimental with the
Honourable Miss Durwent, whose lips, always at war with each other,
merely parted in a smile that utterly failed to bring any sympathy from
her eyes; Mrs. Le Roy Jennings took a last sip of coffee, and finding
it quite cold, put it down with a gesture of finality.
'Lady Durwent,' said Austin Selwyn--and the quality of his voice was
lighter and more musical than it had been--'I suppose that a man who
deliberately goes to a country to gather impressions lays himself open
to the danger of being influenced by external things only. If I were
to base my knowledge of England on what her people say of her, I think
I should be justified in assuming that the century-old charge of her
decadence is terribly true. Yet I claim to have something of an
artist's sensitiveness to undercurrents, and it seems to me that there
is a strong instinct of race over here--perhaps I express myself
clumsily--but I think there is an England which has far more depth to
it than your artists and writers realise. For some reason you all seem
to want to deny that; and when, as to-night, it is my privilege to meet
some of this country's expressionists, it appears that none has any
intention of trying to reveal what is fine in your life as a
people--you seek only to satirise, caricature, or damn altogether. If
I believe my ears, there is nothing but stupidity and insularity in
England. If I listen to my senses, to my subconscious mind, I feel
that a great crisis would reveal that she is still the bed-rock of
civilisation.'
Madame Carlotti raised her glass.
'To America's next ambassador to England!' she cried.
III.
The momentous evening was drawing to a close.
Rain, in fitful gusts, had been besieging the windows, driven by an
ill-tempered wind that blustered around the streets, darting up dark
alleys, startling the sparks emerging from chimney-pots, roaring across
the parks, slamming doors, and venting itself, every now and then, in
an ill-natured howl.
Inside the refuge of No. 8 Chelmsford Gardens a fire threw its merry
warmth over the large music-room, and did its best to offset the
tearful misery of the November night.
Conversation had dwindled in energy with the closing hour of the
affair, and seizing an auspicious moment, Norton Pyford had reached the
piano, and for twenty minutes demonstrated the close relation of the
chord of C Minor to the colour brown. Modernist music, acting on
unusual souls as classical music on ordinary souls, stimulated the
flagging conversational powers of the guests, and he was soon
surrounded by a gesticulating group of dissenting or condoning critics.
Selwyn noticed that Elise Durwent had not left her seat by the fire,
and absenting himself from the harmonic debate, he took a chair by hers.
'You are pensive, Miss Durwent,' he said.
She smiled, with a slight suggestion of weariness, though her eyes had
a softness he had not seen in them before.
'I am very dull company to-night,' she said, 'but ever since I was a
child, rain beating against the windows has always made me dreamy. I
suppose I am old-fashioned, but it is sweeter music to me than Mr.
Pyford's new harmonies.'
He laughed, and leaning towards the fire, rubbed his hands
meditatively. 'You must have found our talk wearisome at dinner,' he
said.
'No,' she answered, 'it was not so bad as usual. You introduced a note
of sincerity that had all the effect of a novelty.'
Her mannerism of swift and disjointed speech, which broke all her
sentences into rapidly uttered phrases, again annoyed him. Though her
voice was refined, it seemed to be acting at the behest of a whip-like
brain, and she spoke as if desirous rather of provoking a retort than
of establishing any sense of compatibility. Yet she was
feminine--gloriously, delicately feminine. The finely moulded arms and
the gracefulness of body, indicated rather than revealed beneath her
blue gown, intrigued the eye and the senses, just as the swiftly spoken
words challenged the brain and infused exasperation in the very midst
of admiration. The complicated elements of the girl offered a peculiar
fascination to the eternal instinct of study possessed by the young
American author.
'Miss Durwent,' he said, 'if I was sincere to-night, it was because you
encouraged me to be so.'
'But I said nothing.'
'Nevertheless, you were the inspiration.'
'I never knew a girl could accomplish so much by holding her tongue.'
A crash of 'Bravos' broke from the group around the piano; Pyford had
just scored a point.
'You know,' resumed Selwyn thoughtfully, 'a man doesn't go to a
dinner-party conscious of what he is going to say. It is the people he
meets that produce ideas in him, many of which he had never thought of
before.'
She tapped the ground with her foot, and looked smilingly at his
serious face. 'It is the reverse with me,' she said. 'I go out to
dinner full of ideas, and the people I meet inspire a silence in me of
unsuspected depth.'
'May I smoke?' asked Selwyn, calling a halt in the verbal duel.
'Certainly; I'll join you. Don't smoke your own cigarettes--there are
some right in front of you.'
He reached for a silver box, offered her a cigarette, and struck a
match. As he leaned over her she raised her face to the light, and the
blood mounted angrily to his head.
Though a man accustomed to dissect rather than obey his passions, he
possessed that universal quality of man which demands the weakness of
the feminine nature in the woman who interests him. He will satirise
that failing; if he be a writer, it will serve as an endless theme for
light cynicism. He will deplore that a woman's brains are so submerged
by her emotions; but let him meet one reversely constituted, and he
steers his course in another direction with all possible speed.
Selwyn had come to her with a comfortable, after-dinner desire for a
_tête-à-tête_. He expected flattering questions about his writings,
and would have enjoyed talking about them; instead of which this
English girl with the crimson colouring and the maddening eyes had
coolly kept him at a distance with her rapier brain. He felt a sudden
indignation at her sexlessness, and struck a match for his own
cigarette with such energy that it broke in two.
'Miss Durwent,' he said suddenly, lighting another match, 'I want to
see you again--soon.' He paused, astonished at his own abruptness, and
an awkward smile expanded until it crinkled the very pinnacle of his
nose.
'I like you when you look like that,' she said. 'It was just like my
brother Dick when he fell off a horse. By the way, do you ride?'
'Yes,' he said, watching the cigarette-smoke curl towards the
fireplace, 'though I prefer an amiable beast to a spirited one.'
'Good!' she said, so quickly that it seemed like the thrust of a sword
in tierce. 'You have the same taste in horses as in women. Most men
have.'
'Miss Durwent'--his face flushed angrily and his jaw stiffened--'I'll
ride any horse you choose in England, and'----
'And break the heart of the most vixenish maiden in London! You are a
real American, after all. What is it you say over there? "Shake!"'
She slapped her hand into his, and he held it in a strong grip.
'But you _will_ let me see you again soon?'
'Certainly.' She withdrew her hand from his with a firmness that had
neither censure nor coquetry in it, and the heightened colour of her
cheeks subsided with the sparkle of her eyes.
'When?' he said.
'To-morrow morning, if you like. I shall have horses here at eleven,
and we can ride in the Row, providing you will put up with anything so
quiet as our cattle.'
'That is bully of you. I shall be here at eleven.'
'I thought all Americans used slang,' she said.
'You are the first English girl I have met,' he answered with
extraordinary venom in his voice, 'who has not said "ripping."'
* * * * * *
Twenty minutes later Austin Selwyn, unable to secure a taxi, tramped
along Oxford Street towards his hotel. He had just reached the Circus
when the malignant wind, hiding in ambush down Regent Street, rushed at
him unawares and sent his hat roistering into the doorway of a store.
With a frown, Selwyn stopped and stared at the truant.
'Confound the wretched thing!' he said.