Peter’s dinner at the Ritz was no dinner-party, and there were but three
young men, of whom he was one, and their hostess who assembled in the
Yawning-place. People always yawned there; they were either waiting for
somebody to come, or they were waiting for somebody to go away....
His hostess to-night was the perennial Mrs. Trentham, with whom a party
of herself and three young men was a favourite form of entertainment.
She always professed a coquettish contrition at not having been able to
get some girls to meet her young men--which, indeed, she had been quite
wonderfully unable to do, since it never occurred to her to take the
preliminary step of asking them, and no nice girl would come to dine
with Mrs. Trentham without being asked. So the girls, not being asked,
stayed away, and Mrs. Trentham apologized.
She was considerably older than the rest of her youthful assemblage; but
she looked almost as young as any of them, and might charitably have
been supposed to be a sister, or a wife, or something. She had only one
real passion in her excited life, and that was to dine as publicly as
possible with several young men, sending her husband, to his great
contentment, to amuse himself comfortably at his club. There he talked
politics and played Bridge, and the very number of these public
entertainments on the part of his wife, and the diversity of the youths
who partook of them, were guarantee against any breath of scandal
sullying herself or anybody else. With perfect justice, nobody believed
anything against her; yet this delightful immunity from gossip rather
annoyed her. But, in order to give colour to compromise, she would have
been obliged to descend to duets in quiet corners, which would have been
no fun at all. The loss of publicity, the loss, too, of the pleasing
phenomenon that batch after batch of young men, in groups of two or
three, so constantly accompanied her to one of the most strategic tables
at the Ritz, would not have been compensated for by the added chance of
scandalous talkings. After all, London was not so violently likely to
care what she did, especially since she did not care either, and it was
far more agreeable to continue doing what she liked rather than gain an
entirely spurious loss of reputation by less enjoyable methods. She had
a pleasant, prurient mind, and her morals were beyond reproach. She
called attention to her age, when she was with the young, in a somewhat
excessive manner, and often alluded to her beautiful hair, which had
been grey before she was thirty. “Such an old woman as me,” was an
ungrammatical phrase which she often affected, and this was a preventive
measure against anybody else thinking of such a thing. Her favourite
subject of conversation was love.
Mrs. Trentham was not really quite so silly as she sounded, though her
immense sprightliness often seemed to plunge her into the nethermost
depths of fatuousness. During the war she had taken to dressing in the
uniform of a nurse, which she discovered suited her, though, for fear of
witnessing distressing sights, she kept well away from hospitals; since
then, having realized the decorative value of black and white, she had
adopted a garb which seemed to indicate that she was a widow, though not
quite recently bereaved. An occasional bright note of colour in her hair
or round her charming waist seemed to have forgotten about her widowhood
and was extremely becoming.... So garbed, so minded, she awaited Peter,
who was the last of her conspicuous party of young men. He was certainly
late for her appointed hour, but she did not dislike that as the
Yawning-place was full, and, instead of scolding him, she had her usual
apologetic greetings volubly ready.
“My dear, you will be furious with me, I know,” she said, “but I simply
couldn’t get hold of any girls, so you and Charlie and Tommy will just
have to put up with an old woman until we go to the opera, and then you
will breathe loud sighs of relief, and I shall see you no more. Why are
you so late, Peter? Whom have you been flirting with?”
“My father and my mother,” said Peter. “He has just finished the largest
picture in the world.”
“How sweet of him! Ah, they have brought some cocktails at last.”
She waited till the servant was well out of hearing.
“But how stupid the waiter is,” she said. “I am sure I told him to bring
three not four. Shall I taste it? Shall I like it, do you think?”
It seemed not too optimistic to hope that she would, for, otherwise, she
would long ago have ceased not only tasting the fourth cocktail which
she was sure she had not ordered, but consuming it so completely that
the strip of lemon-peel overbalanced against the tip of her pretty nose.
“My dear, how strong!” she exclaimed. “I feel perfectly tipsy, and one
of you must give me your arm, as if you were a nephew or something if I
stagger or reel. Let us go in to dinner at once. I promised Ella we
would get to Mrs. Wardour’s box by the beginning of the opera.”
“Who is Mrs. Wardour?” asked Charlie Harman.
“Oh, quite new,” said Mrs. Trentham. “Hardly anyone has seen her yet.
Rich, fabulously rich. Her husband was one of the hugest profiteers--not
eggs at fourpence, but steamers at a quarter of a million. He bought up
everything that floats and sold it to the Government, and most of it got
sunk. He died a couple of years ago. Too sad.”
“More about her, please,” said Peter.
“I haven’t seen her yet, my dear, but Ella Thirlmere is being her
godmother--sponsor, you know--and she asked me to take people to her box
and her dinners and her dances. Her name’s Lucy: it would be. I shall
begin by calling her Lucy almost immediately. There’s no time nowadays
to get to know people. You have to pretend to know them intimately
almost the moment you set eyes on them.”
“And pretend not to know them afterwards, if necessary,” said Peter.
May Trentham gave a hasty glance round the room and, becoming aware that
quite a sufficient number of people were looking at her and her party,
slapped the back of Peter’s hand with the tips of her fingers, and gave
a scream of laughter to show what a tremendously amusing time she was
having.
“You naughty boy!” she said. “Is he not cynical about Lucy? I shan’t
talk to you any more. Tommy, my dear, tell me what you’ve been doing.
You look flushed. I believe you’re in love.”
“No. I’ve been playing squash,” said Tommy.
“What is squash? I believe it’s one of your horrid new words and means
flirting. Who is she?”
“She is Charlie. At least, I was playing squash with Charlie,” said
Tommy, with laborious precision. “He didn’t like it.”
Charlie fingered two little tails of blond hair that grew directly below
his nostrils and formed his moustache. Otherwise his face was completely
feminine--plain and pink and plump. He gesticulated a good deal with his
hands, flapping and dabbing with them.
“Odious game,” he said, showing a great many teeth between his red lips.
“You go on hitting a ball against a putrid wall until you’re too tired
to hit it any more, and then Tommy says ‘One love.’ When you’ve done
that fifteen times, he says ‘Game,’ and then you begin another one. I
hoped I should never hear of it again.”
“You shan’t, my dear; but don’t be such a cross-patch. I know you’re
annoyed with me for not getting you some pretty girl to talk to. You
must talk to Peter. He’s in disgrace with me. Oh, Peter, is it true
about Nellie Heaton’s engagement?”
“Perfectly,” said Peter.
“Then why aren’t you broken-hearted? I don’t believe any of you young
men have got hearts nowadays.”
“That accounts for their not being broken,” said Peter.
It was time to laugh loudly again in order to remind the rest of the
diners what a brilliant time she was having, and May Trentham did this.
“There he goes again!” she said. “Is he not shocking? My dear, have you
had a dreadful scene with her?”
“No. I only had tea with her.”
“Oh, don’t pretend you weren’t desperately in love with her. But never
mind. I will find some other girl for you, who will adore you so
violently that you will lose your heart to her, though you say you
haven’t got one. She shall be rich and lovely, and we shall all be
frantically jealous of her. And you shall both call me Aunt May, because
I have brought you together.”
“Thank you, Aunt May,” said Peter. “Go on about her, please.”
“No, I’ve talked to you long enough. Tommy is feeling left out. When the
opera is over, by the way, I want you all to come on to Ella Thirlmere’s
dance. I promised to bring you all. Mrs. Wardour is sure to be coming,
and she will certainly have plenty of motor-cars to take us. Oh, there
is that marvellous Spanish boxer, is it not, dining alone with Ella. How
gentle and kind he looks! Darling Ella! I wonder if she will have six
rounds with him in the middle of her dance. I would certainly back her:
look at her chest. But how daring of her to dine with him here! They say
he marries again after each of his fights and settles all the money he
has won on his new wife. But, after all, I suppose it’s just as daring
of me to dine with three such attractive young men as for her to dine
with just one Solomon like that!”
Tommy puzzled over this for a moment. He was very good-looking, but
there was no other reason for him.
“Solomon?” he asked.
“Yes, my dear; think of his wives. I was talking to Anthony Braille
to-day, who makes all those wonderful tables about population, and what
encourages and hinders it. He said the only chance for England was to
close all the music-hall bars and introduce polygamy. Every Englishman,
after this dreadful war--you know I was a nurse during the war--must
have fifty children a year for two years--or did he say two children a
year for fifty years?--in order to bring up the population again to its
proper level. It was all most interesting--if he only didn’t stutter so
much!”
“He seems to have stuttered out the main facts,” said Peter.
“Oh, I couldn’t tell a young man half the things he said to me. We ought
all to be Patagonians and polygamists. The birth-rate among Patagonians
is colossal. They behead all women of the age of thirty-five who aren’t
married, and all bachelors at the age of forty. It has something to do
with eugenics.”
The intoxication of a restaurant now crowded with people had gained
complete ascendancy over Peter’s hostess. She never felt quiet and
contented unless she was surrounded by a host of friends, acquaintances,
and people she knew by sight, and had to shout at the top of her voice
in order to be heard above the roar of other conversations and the blare
of a band. It was equally necessary for the establishment of this
tranquil frame of mind that several young men, and, if possible, no
women, should be with her, and that she should constantly be convulsed
by shrieks of laughter, and should have both her elbows on the table. A
finer _nuance_ in success was that she must appear wholly absorbed in
the brilliance of her own table, and quite unconscious of the hubbub
round her, though presently, when she got up, she would seem to awake to
the fact that she was in a crowded restaurant, and would blow kisses all
over the room, and have dozens of little smiles and words for all those
whose position between her and the door she had unerringly noted. Just a
sentence or two for each, reminding her “my dears” of a meeting
to-morrow, or a meeting yesterday with a phrase of flattery and a bit of
whispered scandal and the conclusion: “I must fly; those boys will be so
cross with me if I keep them waiting. Meet you at dearest Ella’s? Yes?
Lovely!”... All this was faithfully performed on her part, and her
face, with its pretty little features all bunched together in the middle
of it, like the markings in a pansy, had expanded and contracted again
sufficient times before she reached the door of the restaurant to enable
a weary conclave to express itself as it waited for her.
“_Parsifal_, too,” said Charlie. “Thank God we’ve missed the first act.
Aged stunt--flower-maidens and grails. Can’t we get away, Peter? Come
home with me. Say we’re busy at the F.O. German complications.
Bolshevists on the Rhine.”
Tommy stood first on one leg scratching a slim calf with the other
instep, and then on the other leg scratching in a corresponding manner.
“You simply can’t,” he said. “How am I to deal with her and Lucy? And
_Parsifal_?”
“Polygamy and Patagonians,” said Peter, with a vague remembrance of the
preposterous conversation that had garlanded their dinner. “Flirt,
Tommy. Can you flirt? Hold hands. Sigh. Beam. Can’t you manage it?”
“No,” said Tommy.
“Then Tommy and I will go away,” said Charlie. “After all, she doesn’t
want us, except as a stage crowd. She wants you most, Peter. I say, I
like your studs. Who?”
“Nobody. I liked them, too, so I got them. But we’ve all got to go on.
After all, we’ve had dinner.”
“All the more reason for not going on,” said Charlie.
“That’s no good. It doesn’t pay. Besides, she’s awfully decent----”
“Don’t be priggish, Peter. I say, is Nellie really going to marry Philip
Beaumont? Do you mind?”
This atrocious conversation was interrupted by the sprightly tripping
advent of their hostess, who put her fingers in her ears, which she knew
were “shell-like,” as she passed through the direct blast of the band,
and consoled them for her want of appreciation of their professional
functions by distributing more of her little smiles.
“Now I know you are all going to scold me,” she said, “because I’ve kept
you waiting. But there were so many dears who insisted on my having a
word with them. They nearly tore my frock off. Let’s all cram into one
taxi, and I will sit bodkin. And after Ella’s dance we’ll all go on to
Margie Clifford’s. She specially told me to bring all of you, and scold
you well first for not having talked to her on your way out. I don’t
know what everybody will think when I appear at the Ritz and the Opera,
and two dances with the same young men. I shall have to tell my darling
Bob that the _Morning Post_ hasn’t come, or he’ll storm at me. What a
lovely white lie.”
There flashed through Peter’s consciousness at that moment an insane
wonder as to what would _happen_ if he said calmly and clearly and
genuinely, “My good woman, who cares? As for the compromising young men
who accompany you, they are all dying to get away, and only the debt of
the excellent dinner you gave us, of which I reminded them, prevents us
from doing so.” There was the truth of the matter, and it was all rather
mean and miserable. Her guests were spending the evening with her and
ministering to her hopeless delight in daring situations simply because
she had, on her side, administered the nosebag. They consented, with a
grudging sense of honourable engagement, to plough their way in her wake
merely because she had fed them. If she had asked them severally or
collectively to drop in after dinner, in the way of a friend, for
conversation and soda water, none of them would have dreamed of
gratifying her. And now, when they had fed deliciously at her expense,
they would all have preferred to go back to Charlie’s rooms in Jermyn
Street, or to Tommy’s flat (Peter’s house was handicapped by the
presence of parents), rather than trail along to _Parsifal_, and to a
dance, and yet another dance. The dances, perhaps, might be amusing, for
there would be girls there, and some sitting about on stairs, and some
sliding about on slippery floors, and an irresponsible atmosphere, and
certainly some more champagne. You had to get through the night somehow,
and nowadays you could smoke while you were dancing, and you needn’t
dance much. The nuisance--rather a serious one--was that Mrs. Trentham
would be there all the time, screaming and dabbing at them to show how
amusing and brilliant they all were, keeping them firmly planted round
her while she told them that they must go away and dance and make
themselves agreeable to others rather than hang round an old woman like
her, and continually whistling them back if they attempted to do
anything of the sort. She would take up a position where she could most
advantageously be seen and heard, and get them all plastered about her,
swiftly talking to each in turn, so that he could not possibly go away
as long as she so volubly told him to. She had that artless art to
perfection; no one had such a gift for making young men adhesive as she,
while all the time she was scolding them for wasting their time on an
old woman. There was no semblance of sentiment in these proceedings; the
entire objective of the manœuvres was to demonstrate to the world that
these boys insisted on crowding round her and not leaving her. That was
her notion of a successful evening, and since they had signed their bond
by eating her dinner, she managed to exact the full pound of flesh.
The curtain went down on the first act of _Parsifal_ precisely as Mrs.
Trentham led her shrill way into one of the two boxes that bore the name
of Mrs. Wardour. She tripped in, all feather fan and stockings, like
some elegant exotic hen, proudly conscious of the brood of most
presentable chicks, though not of her rearing, which followed her. The
house at that moment started into light again, and black against the
oblong of brightness were the backs of two female heads, both of which
turned round at the click of the opened door. One of them had a great
tiara on, sitting firmly on a desert of pale sandy hair.
May Trentham advanced with both hands held out.
“My dear, how late we are,” she said. “You must scold these boys, for
they kept me in such shrieks of laughter at dinner that I had no idea of
the time. Dearest Ella has so often talked to me about you; always
asking: ‘Haven’t I met Mrs. Wardour yet? Was it possible I had not met
her great friend Lucy Wardour?’ Charmed!”
In the hard light of the theatre, Mrs. Wardour’s face appeared to her to
be quite flat; the shadows on it looked like dark smudges applied to the
surface with a brush, rather than markings derived from projections and
depressions. This apparition of a diamond-crowned oval of meaningless
flesh was slightly embarrassing, and she turned to the second occupant
of the box. There, in the younger face, she saw what Lucy might,
perhaps, once have been like, before the years had flattened her out.
Obviously this was a daughter, though Ella Thirlmere had altogether
omitted to mention such a thing. Then, with her rather short-sighted
eyes growing accustomed to the staring light, Mrs. Trentham observed
that her first impression of her hostess’s face was an illusion, though
founded on fact; just as when the figure of a man resolves itself into a
hat and coat hanging on the wall. There was nothing, in fact, abnormal
about Mrs. Wardour’s countenance: it was just blankish. She had large
cheeks of uniform surface, a nose of small elevation, no eyebrows, and
eyes set in very shallow sockets. Then another shadow came on to her
face; but this time, without delay, May Trentham saw that it was her
mouth opening. When she had opened it, she spoke, but she did not
conduct both processes simultaneously.
“Well, I’m pleased to see you,” she said; “but there are so many friends
of Lady Thirlmere--Ella, I should say; she told me always to say
Ella--there are so many of Ella’s friends visiting me to-night that I
don’t quite seem to know your name.”
May Trentham felt that her brain was giving way. Here was a perfectly
empty box, except for Mrs. Wardour and her daughter, and yet here was
Mrs. Wardour assuring her that so many friends of Ella were here....
Where were the friends? Were they invisible? Was the box in reality
crowded with unseen presences?...
“I’m Mrs. Trentham,” she said, clinging firmly to that sure and certain
fact. “May Trentham. Ella told me you would expect me.”
Mrs. Wardour appeared to be making an effort of recollection. This, in a
few moments, seemed successful.
“That’s correct,” she said. “I remember; and this is my daughter
Silvia.”
For a moment her face slipped off its sheath of meaninglessness, and
something homely and kindly and simple gleamed in it.
“I’ve got two boxes to-night, Mrs. Trentham,” she said. “This and the
next, as Lady Thirlmere--Ella--so kindly sent along such a quantity of
her friends. That’s what it is; and so Silvia and I (didn’t we, Silvia?)
we left the other box, seeing that it was so full, and came in here,
for, naturally, I wanted to put my guests where they could see the play,
and Silvia and I, we wanted to see, too. Mrs. Trentham was it? And I’m
sure I’m very glad to see you and your young friends. I should like them
all to be introduced to me and Silvia.”
Charlie had hung up his hat and coat during this amazing conversation,
and now came forward.
“How-de-do?” he said.
“I haven’t caught the name yet,” said Mrs. Wardour. The sheath had gone
back over her face again.
“This is Lord Charles Harmer,” said Mrs. Trentham.
“Indeed. The son of the Marquis of Nairn?” asked Mrs. Wardour.
Charlie opened his mouth very wide.
“Brother!” he exclaimed, as if he were saying “Murder!” on the Lyceum
stage.
Tommy and Peter were less important; the latter, when the introductions
were over, found himself sitting between Silvia and her mother. On the
further side of Mrs. Wardour was May Trentham between the other two
young men and already absorbed in identifying the occupants of boxes
opposite and blowing kisses.
“There! There’s just room for all of us,” said Mrs. Wardour, “without
squeezing each other. We were too squeezed in the other box, weren’t we
Silvia? There’s six in the other box, and now we’re six here. Let me
think; there’s Lord Poole and there’s Lady Poole. There’s Mrs. Heaton,
and there’s Miss Heaton, and there’s Mr. Philip Beaumont. That’s five.
Miss Heaton is engaged to Mr. Beaumont; isn’t that it, Silvia? I want to
get it clear.”
“Yes, that’s right,” said Peter.
“Indeed! Do you know Miss Heaton?” asked Mrs. Wardour.
“Yes, very well,” said he.
“That’s what’s so pleasant,” said she. “Just to sit here and know
everybody. That’s what we want, Silvia, isn’t it? Just to sit and know
everybody. But that only makes five. Who’s the other one? His name began
with F, and he was very fat.”
“Perhaps that was his name,” said Peter. He was beginning to enjoy
himself; the whole thing was such complete nonsense. What kept up the
high level of it was that Mrs. Wardour replied with seriousness:
“No; if his name had been Fat, I should have remembered it,” she said.
“It wasn’t Mr. Fat, nor Lord Fat. He seemed to know everybody, too. He
just sat there and knew everybody.”
From Peter’s other side, where Silvia sat, there came some little tremor
of a laugh, hardly audible, and turning, he saw that her face dimpled
with amusement. It was singularly sexless; the curve of her jaw, the
lines of her mouth were more like a boy’s than a girl’s; boyish, too,
was her sideways cross-legged attitude. If she was laughing at her
mother’s remark, her amusement was clearly of the most genial
kindliness.
Mrs. Wardour continued in a perfectly even voice that almost intoned the
words, so void was it of inflection.
“It’s a pity your party has missed so much of the opera,” she said.
“There’s been a lot of pretty music; some of it reminded me of being in
church and hymns. It’ll seem quite strange going to a dance afterwards.
A lot of knights singing hymns. _Parsifal_, you know. Some say it’s the
best opera Wagner ever wrote.”
This time Silvia certainly laughed, and again her laugh had not the
smallest hint of satirical enjoyment; she was just amused. Peter found
himself, though he had scarcely yet glanced at her, somehow
understanding her. He recognized in her amusement all that he himself
failed to feel with regard to his father’s cartoons and his mother’s
readings in Bradshaw. He knew intuitively that Silvia had got hold of
the right way to regard absurdities; to see comedy without contempt.
Whether she knew it or not (it was quite certain that she did not), she
had given him a glimpse, a hint, an enlightenment, not only of what she
was, but of what he was not. Looking at her now directly for the first
time, his handsome face caught some reflection of her boyish
brightness.
“And what do you think of _Parsifal_?” he asked.
She raised her eyebrows.
“How can I tell?” she asked. “I never saw an opera before.”
“I envy you,” said Peter.
“Why? For not having seen one, or because I am at last seeing one?” she
asked.
Peter, as usual, found himself wanting to make a good impression. If he
had been in a lift with a crossing-sweeper he would certainly have tried
to make the crossing-sweeper like him, and have exerted his wits to hit
upon something which the crossing-sweeper would think to be admirable,
even though on arriving at the next floor he would never see him again.
He quickly decided now that the girl would not admire mere drivel....
She happened to want to know what he envied her for.
“For both,” he said. “For getting a new impression. That includes both.
You mustn’t have seen an opera before, and you must be seeing one now.”
She looked at him with perfectly unshadowed frankness.
“I believe you meant the first,” she said. “I believe when you said you
envied me, that you meant I was lucky in not having spent a quantity of
boring evenings.”
“In any case, I don’t mean that now,” said Peter.
“Ah, then you did. Why do you mean it no longer?”
Peter found himself criticizing her. A conversation between the acts of
an opera was not meant to degenerate into a catechism. You talked in
order to mask the ticking of the minutes. But as he was in for a
catechism, it was better to be an agreeable candidate.
“Why?” he asked. “Because I expect that you never spend boring evenings.
Probably you are not a person who is bored.”
Clearly, as he suspected, she was not going to commit herself to any
statement without consideration, even when so violently trivial a
subject was under discussion. Her eyebrows, much darker than the shade
of her hair, like Nellie’s, pulled themselves a little downwards and
inwards, so that they nearly met.
“Oh, I could easily be bored,” she said. “A lot of bored people would
infect me and make me bored.”
She leaned a little forward towards him, again with that boyish appeal.
“Please don’t be bored,” she said. “Be interested and amused. Make
yourself into a sort of disinfectant to protect me.”
“Is there an epidemic?” he asked.
“Yes; the place is reeking with it. My mother, for instance, detests
music. Isn’t it darling of her?”
“How very odd of her, then----” he began.
He stopped because, in some emphatic, intangible way, the girl retreated
from the platform of intimacy on to which she had stepped. She moved her
chair an inch or two away from him, hitching it back with her foot, but
that was only a symbol of her change of attitude. What to Peter made the
significance of that small steering was a certain quenching of light in
her face, as if, over it, she had put up some mask of herself that might
easily have been mistaken for her, if the beholder had not, for a
glimpse or two, seen her unmasked. She shifted from the personal ground
on which, for a minute, they had met, and became Miss Silvia Wardour,
generalizing in small talk, in the usual imbecile and social manner. She
also became much more feminine....
“I wonder how many people in the house, who have come to hear Wagner,
really dislike it,” she said. “Probably we all of us like some species
of noise, and dislike another species of noise. If you like the
Beethoven noise, you probably dislike the Wagner noise. Only nobody will
say so. They come to look at each other.”
She had carried back the conversation on to the personal platform again,
as if she was sorry to have slipped off it so suddenly. But she carried
it on to another part of the platform. Quite clearly she did not intend
to discuss her mother’s presence at the opera.
“Tell me,” she said. “What sort of noise do you really like? This or
somebody else’s?”
Peter wondered for the moment whether she was to prove to be the earnest
sort of girl, who, whatever you said, insisted on discussing your random
statements, until you contradicted yourself (which usually happened
quite soon), and then, vouchsafing a gleam of daylight, found an
explanation for them in order that you might be encouraged to entangle
yourself further. The earnest girl, the inquisitorial girl; he did not
like that type.... They gave you pencils and pieces of paper after
dinner and made you write acrostics; they took letters out of a box and
gave you eight of them, from which you had to make a word; they divided
the guests up into equal numbers, told them that this was “Clumps,” and
that two people were going to leave the room and guess whatever had been
thought of. These were their lighter, intellectual motions, and you
feverishly played “Clumps” in order to avoid intolerable abstract
discussions. Yet Silvia had not the sleuth-hound expression that usually
accompanied these hunters after intellect.
“What a searching question,” he said. “But, really, I’m omnivorous about
noises. I like the noise I’m listening to. I like it particularly.”
There was not in her face the smallest consciousness that he might
conceivably be alluding to the fact that she was talking to him. She let
her eyes sweep across the crowded theatre.
“That noise?” she asked. “All those people talking? I love it, too. Oh,
wouldn’t it be interesting to be somebody else for a minute, and know
what he meant, what he felt like when he said anything?”
Clearly she had used the masculine gender quite unconsciously. Peter’s
answer, on the other hand, was deliberate.
“Yes, I should love to know what she feels like, even over the most
trivial speech,” he said.
Silvia dropped on to this with a precision that only showed how complete
her own unconsciousness had been.
“She?” she asked.
“Certainly ‘she,’” he said. “I know well enough the kind of thing which
men feel like.”
She leaned forward again.
“Oh, tell me about that,” she said.
Certainly they were together on the personal platform again. Peter was
quite at home there; his passion for making a good impression on new
acquaintances, his rather uncanny skill in extracting intimacy from
them, gave him a confident gait on these boards. He felt that this
queer, attractive girl did not in the least wish to be talked to in the
ordinary, nonsensical manner. In the gabble of the ballroom, and in the
more intimate duologue on the stairs outside it, girls, the generality
of them, liked to be told that men thought exclusively about them, and
spent their waking and sleeping moments in the contemplation of their
divinity and pricelessness. Nellie, of course, was an exception, for
between them there certainly was some peculiar bond of understanding;
but the majority of girls, so ran his indolent and incurious creed, just
wanted to be told that they were too priceless for anything, and some
wanted to be kissed. It was all nonsense; they knew that as well as he
did; but such was the inherited instinct, or, if you wished to be
precise, the inherited instinct acting on the new conditions. But he
knew that Silvia was not like that; there was some eager, friendly
quality about her. She was not quite the normal girl of the ballroom;
nor again, was she the earnest girl, who wanted to explore your brains
and prove that you hadn’t got any. She seemed merely interested in the
topic, not because it would lead to a demonstration of her cleverness.
“Men?” he said. “What do men feel? They are as vain as peacocks, and
they think entirely about themselves. They think of you as an inferior
sex designed to amuse them.”
“Ah, the darlings!” said Silvia, quite unexpectedly.
The great pervading brilliance of the lights went out. A row of veiled
illuminations only remained in front of the red confectionery of the
curtain, against which the conductor’s head was silhouetted. Silvia,
after her surprising exclamation, drew her chair more into the corner
in order to enable Peter to pull his up to the front of the box.
“Klingsor’s Castle,” said Mrs. Wardour, with a final desperate glance at
her programme. “Who is Klingsor, Silvia?”
Peter wondered whether he could whisper, “Who is Silvia?”; but decided
against it.
“A magician, darling,” said Silvia, with the same underlying bubble of
amusement.