There was a mad brutality of discordant noise, and the risen curtain
disclosed an astrologer. He roared and yelled, and soon a dishevelled
female, in an advanced stage of corruption, shrieked back at him. Silvia
found herself disliking the Wagner noise, and her attention came closer
home; came, in fact, to the quarter-view of Peter’s face, as he sat low
in his chair in order to give her a clear view of Klingsor. She was not
sure that she liked Peter any better than the hurly-burly that was going
on, and though she knew she had been liking him during the interval
between the acts, she now seriously set herself to the task of disliking
him, and the easiest method of achieving that result was to class him as
just one of the crowd which had come that night to occupy, by request,
her mother’s two boxes. She perfectly understood the situation: Lady
Thirlmere, the woman with the pearls and the blue-black hair, had told a
lot of her friends that they could go to see _Parsifal_ for nothing, and
reap a quantity of subsequent benefits at the price of knowing Mrs.
Wardour, of frequenting her house, and of permitting her to eddy round
in the general whirlpool. For some reason, inscrutable to Silvia, her
mother wanted that; she and her mother, in fact, were like a pill, which
Lady Thirlmere had guaranteed that the world should swallow. The pill
was nobly gilded, and there was any amount of jam to assist the
swallowing of it.
Without doubt Peter was one of the open mouths.
Klingsor and Kundry continued to rave at each other, and so far from
listening, Silvia used that external noise to drive her own thought into
seclusion; much as a dull sermon, a tedious lecture, makes for
introspection in the audience. And hardly had she classed Peter among
the open mouths than she wondered if she had been quite fair in doing
so, for the talk they had had was not of the same timbre as the
conventional quackings which for the last week had made her mother’s
house like a farmyard, with her, like Mrs. Bond of the nursery rhyme,
calling “Dilly, dilly ... you shall be stuffed,” and stuffed they were.
Silvia could no more enter with sympathy into her mother’s aims than she
could enter with sympathy into stamp-collecting; but out of love for the
stamp-collector--the dear, weary, steadfast stamp-collector--she was
eager to feel the highest possible interest in the collection and
collect for her with all her might. But she knew that she despised the
spirit of the stamps, which, in return for food and drink and
opera-boxes, were so willing to be collected. Next week there was to be
a dance “for her,” in that immense mansion which had been re-christened
Wardour House, and pages of the stamp-book would on that occasion be
filled with adhesive specimens. “Everybody,” so she understood Ella
Thirlmere to say, would come, and no doubt it would be tremendous
fun....
There were certainly some stamps here now. Lord Charles was one, though
why had he been willing to be collected? He sat with his head propped
between two long hands, and a queer sort of nose, just protruding,
indicated by its downward angle that he was profoundly meditating. Next
him was her mother, whose pearls clinked rhythmically to her breathing,
and nearest to herself she could see the half-averted profile of the
young man whom she was encouraging herself to dislike. He appeared to be
looking at the stage; certainly he was paying no attention to her, and
she got back to what she actually thought of him, instead of forcing
herself into a defensive attitude against him. Somehow they seemed (not
that it mattered) to have been talking to each other from odd
standpoints. When, ridiculously interested for the moment, she had asked
him what men “felt,” he had not given a masculine answer. He had spoken
to her as if he had been a girl; he had said that men were as vain as
peacocks, and thought of women as an inferior sex, designed for their
amusement. Very likely that was quite true; but now in this isolation of
darkness and loud noises, which cut her off from him and everyone else
in the box, it seemed to her to have required a woman to state that.
That was a woman’s view of a man; a man, though he shared it, could
scarcely have said it. Instead, he would have told her that women were
the angelic sex, meant to be adored....
Some violent concussion had occurred on the stage; there was no longer a
gloomy black man with a photographic lens, but some insane sort of
flower-bed; and remembering her programme, she recollected that this was
the enchanted garden. The enchantment seemed to lie in a quantity of
prodigious calico or cardboard flowers. Presently they burst. If they
had not burst they must have burst, for mature females, singing loudly,
were hatched out of the centre of each. The change had awakened Charlie,
and he opened his mouth very wide.
“My dear, what unspeakable wenches!” he said loudly to Mrs. Trentham.
“Silvia, look at the flower-maidens,” said her mother. “They all came
out of the flowers. Was not that wonderful? Look at the one from the
blue convolvulus! Isn’t she sweet?”
Silvia choked a laugh with an audible effort, swallowing it whole.
“Yes, darling,” she said. “Aren’t they pretty?”
Peter turned to her quickly.
“Oh, that’s just how I talk to my father!” he said, and instantly looked
back at the stage again.
She reconsidered her verdict of him as merely belonging to the open
mouths which Lady Thirlmere showered on her mother. They, at any rate,
did not behave in that unwarranted way. Her neighbour was ill-bred,
odious, familiar, and having thrown an impertinence like that over his
shoulder, he did not even wait for her rejoinder. What it would have
been she did not quite know. But ... was it impertinent of him after
all? Was it, perhaps, rather a pleasant indication of intimacy? For
intimacy, in the ordinary sense, there had not been time or opportunity;
but had he, perhaps, just spoken quite naturally, assuming a
corresponding naturalness on her part?
If so, she had failed him....
Silvia was annoyed with herself for such a suggestion. How could she
have “failed” a young man whom she had seen for the first time half an
hour ago, who was only one specimen out of that flock of rooks which had
alighted there in this new field, where worms were to be had for the
mere picking of them up....
* * * * *
There was a long interval at the end of this second act, and a reseating
of the occupants of the two boxes. Lord Poole, whom Mrs. Wardour’s
godmother had chosen as a genial acquaintance, came in with his great
towering frame and his immense red face and his unlimited capacity for
enjoying himself.
“Lucky dog, Parsifal,” he remarked to Silvia, “to have had all those
girls to choose from. He should have taken the one that came out of that
great white lily. My word, she did surprise me when she came out of that
lily. I wish I knew where I could get some of those lilies. Hallo,
Peter! Get out of that chair like a good boy, and let me sit between
Miss Silvia and her mother. Haven’t had a word with either of them yet.
Go and make love to my wife for ten minutes; you’ll find her next door,
and come back and tell me how you’ve been getting on.”
When this great licensed victualler of London appeared on the scene and
made some such suggestion, it was usual to go and do as he told you. But
now Peter glanced at the girl as if to ask whether she wished him to
make way or not. She gave him no sign, however, no hint that he was to
stop where he was, and so the best thing, as his cool, quick brain told
him, was to answer Lord Poole genially according to his folly.
“You condone it, then,” he said.
“Lord, yes, I condone anything,” he said. “We all condone everything
nowadays. Saves a lot of trouble in the courts.”
The frankness of these odious sentiments made it quite impossible not to
treat them as a farce. No one in his senses took Lord Poole seriously;
he was so jolly and so preposterous, and so successfully sought safety
in numbers. He instantly spread himself over Peter’s chair and firmly
put one arm round Silvia’s waist and the other round her mother’s.
“Nice young fellow that,” he observed as Peter went out of the box.
“What a pair he and Miss Silvia make, hey? He’s black and she’s fair,
and he’s a clever fellow and won’t have a penny, and I wish I was his
age. Do you know his father? He’s a rum ’un.”
These remarkable statements were addressed in a loud, hoarse whisper to
Mrs. Wardour, and were, of course, perfectly audible to Silvia. Then he
turned to the girl.
“I’ve been asking your mother to elope with me,” he said, “so I hope you
didn’t overhear. Now I’m going to talk to you and she mustn’t listen.
You’re perfectly delicious, my dear, you and your golden hair, and that
little foot that’s kicking me. Let it go on kicking; I like it. Wonder
how Peter’s getting on with my missus. Peep round the corner, Miss
Silvia, and see if she looks like going off with him. There are several
topping girls in that box, but she’s the pick of them, bless her heart.
What! Here’s your mother getting up and leaving me. More friends coming
in! I never saw such a lot of friends. Why, it’s Ella! I’m in luck
to-night. And there’s May Trentham only one chair away. Look at her
profile against the light. Did you ever see anything so perfect? Looks
rather like the head on a postage-stamp, but don’t say I said so.”
Lord Poole was now satisfactorily engaged in his usual evening
occupation of getting as many girls and pretty women round him as
possible, while Mrs. Trentham was performing a similar office with
regard to every young man who came into the box. Her pansy face was
growing sillier than ever as she kept telling them all to go and talk to
somebody else. The object of these two middle-aged magnets was
precisely similar: one wanted to attract to itself all the men, the
other all the women; but there was an infinite divergence in their
methods. May Trentham, pretending to be young, kept asserting how old
she was; Lord Poole, pretending to be old, could not conceal the fact of
how young, he was. He, again, was not thinking one atom about himself,
but was entirely absorbed in his collection of sirens; she was thinking
exclusively about herself, and was only anxious that every one in the
house should turn green with envy at her galaxy of adorers.... Then Ella
Thirlmere and a friend or two joined the group, and he returned
blatantly, fatuously, delightfully to the opera.
“Well, now, I do feel like Parsifal,” he said. “Here I am in the middle
of such flower-maidens, any of whom could give a couple of furlongs in a
mile to those on the stage and come romping home in a canter. Look at
Ella now: there’s a picture for you! Why, my gracious, here’s Winifred,
too! Come and tell us all about it, Winifred; how many hearts, not
reckoning mine, have you broken to-ight? Look at that hair of hers! Did
anybody ever see hair like that? I never did, and I’ve seen a lot in my
time. May Trentham, too! Do you wonder that all the young men go
swarming round her? I’m sure I don’t, and I’d join the swarm myself if I
wasn’t so blissfully situated just where I am. Haven’t enjoyed an
evening so much for years. Wish this interval would last till Doomsday,
and then we’d all go up to heaven together! St. Peter would let me in
without a question when he saw whom I’d brought along with me.”
Among the people who had drifted in at the end of the act was Philip
Beaumont, whom Mrs. Trentham had instantly rendered adhesive by her
voluble commands to go back to Nellie Heaton at once. Nellie, however,
had very designedly sent him here, for she had become aware by a
glimpse, a sound (an instinct, perhaps even more) that Peter was in the
box next door, and her dispatch of her lover there would certainly
signify to Peter that she wished him to take the chair now vacant by her
and resume the talk in the window that had taken place that afternoon.
Somehow that talk had made for itself an anchorage uncomfortable to her
consciousness; it had been like a fishbone in her throat. She had taken
gulps of her _fiancé_, so to speak, in order to dislodge it; but she had
not succeeded in swallowing it. She had tried to divert her attention
from it; had pounced with fixed claws on the opera in front of her; had
jotted down in her memory, with the fell example of Lady Poole as an
object-lesson, a quantity of ways of behaviour and of the presentation
of yourself to others which were undesirable when you were fifty or
seventy or whatever Lady Poole happened to be. You must be quiet and
calm when you had tottered up to those hoary altitudes; you must leave
your hair to turn any colour it chose.... You mustn’t wriggle and snort,
for whereas wriggling in the young might exhibit (quite advantageously)
a graceful litheness, it suggested in the old that a galvanic battery
had been unexpectedly applied to the knees and the elbows and the middle
part of the person. But there was something remote about these gleanings
of knowledge; they might prove to be nutritious (and possibly palatable)
if preserved and remembered for thirty or forty years; at the present
moment they were not of sufficiently arresting a quality to divert her
mind from this fishbone of her interview with Peter.... There had been
a harshness, a crudity in it; there had been, to her mind, a certain
hostility in it; there had been also a certain hunger in it, an
emptiness that ached. He had clearly pronounced that their
relationship--the bond, in fact, of which she had spoken--must be
changed by her engagement, and, though she would have combated that with
wit and good sense, some internal fibre of her throbbed, vibrated to the
truth of it. She wanted to convince Peter (and even more to convince
herself) that the old bond, the old relationship, still flowered and had
lost no petal of its fragrance.
She had not to wait long for his entry; Philip had barely left the box
before Peter appeared in the doorway, and she applauded his quickness in
answering the signal she had waved to him in the ejection of the other.
He was silhouetted there for a moment as he spoke to someone in the
corridor outside, cool and crisp and complete. Peter was always like
that; nature had applied to him some extra polish, some exquisite
finish, which detached him from all others in the moist or dusty crowd.
Adorable though that was, the thought came to the girl that, above all
else, she wanted to disturb and disarrange that. Peter excited and
dishevelled. Peter enthusiastic. Peter undetached and clinging was
perhaps the real Peter.... A clamorous, turbulent Peter....
He looked round as he entered; he clearly saw her, and as clearly
disregarded the obvious movement of her hand to the vacant seat which
Philip had just quitted. Though that rejection--that “cut” you might
call it, considering their friendship--was in no way premeditated, it
was, when he saw Nellie beckoning as with proprietorship, or so it
struck him, quite deliberate. He had given no thought to it before, and
apparently gave no further thought now, for he instantly placed himself
next Lady Poole, beside whom there was another empty seat. There was a
great green feather nodding a welcome from her violent hair; it matched
her green shoes and the large slabs of false emerald with which her
dress was hazardously held together. She was quite as absurd as her
husband, and had a witty poison under her tongue, which she sprayed
profusely over most subjects of discussion. But her poison hurt nobody,
since nobody ever believed a word she said. She was, in fact, as
harmless as a serpent, and certainly not as wise as a dove.
The serpent aspect showed its innocuous fangs.
“Monster,” she said to Peter. “Sit down and tell me at once what’s going
on next door. Whom’s my Christopher flirting with?”
“Everybody,” said Peter. “He sent me away to flirt with you. Let’s
begin. Shall I begin? Tell me why you and he should always remain young
when all the rest of us are as old as the hills.”
The wisdom of the mature dove peeped out for a moment, but was driven
back by a hiss of the serpent, as a loud squeal of laughter sounded from
the next box.
“That’s May Trentham,” said Lady Poole unerringly. “My dear, what a
woman! Why do all you young men crowd round her like moths round a
night-light. Whom has she got?”
“The rest of the males,” said Peter. “Male and female, you know----”
“Stuff and nonsense. There are people who are things! Look at our
hostess, whom Christopher is probably embracing at this moment. I assure
you she hasn’t got a face; she’s got a slab. What are we coming to?
Then there’s her daughter. She’s a boy; a nice, handsome, healthy boy,
doing well. I wish my son was like her. Do you know him? He’s like a
pincushion.”
Peter was not actively listening to these extraordinary remarks; he was
taking in and assimilating just what he had done in not occupying the
place indicated to him by Nellie. He came to the conclusion that he had
not done so precisely because she intended him to. She was meaning to
get on perfectly well without him, and had better begin at once.
“Why pincushion?” he asked.
“Because I put pins into him whenever I see him, which isn’t often, and
he just sits there and keeps my pins. He doesn’t mind; he doesn’t bleed.
He’s nothing at all, poor wretch. I beg him to steal or bear false
witness or break any commandment that comes handy so long as he does
something. He eats chocolate and trims hats. I shall have no pins left
soon.
“Never mind Eddy! But what a horrible opera; must have been written by
an organist in collaboration with a choirboy. I wonder if Christopher is
in the next box at all. I expect he’s gone behind to scrape acquaintance
with some flower-maiden--probably that voluptuous crone who came out of
a large white lily, though how she got into it originally is more than I
can say, because she was bigger than anything I ever saw. If only Eddy
would do that sort of thing: so much more suitable. Anæmic; that’s what
you all are. The women aren’t quite so bad as the men. I know personally
five grandmothers who have married again in the last fortnight. But the
grandmothers who continue optimistically marrying will die in time, and
what’s going to happen to England then? What’s the use of saying
‘emigration,’ when there won’t be anybody to emigrate?”
“I didn’t say ‘emigration,’” said Peter, with his head whirling. This
sort of speech was characteristic of Lady Poole. She dashed pictures on
to a screen like a magic lantern, and took them off again before you had
seen them, leaving darkness and the smell of oil.
“May Trentham, too,” said this amazing lady. “I hear you’ve been dining
with her. She would like every boy in the kingdom to remain celibate for
her antiquated sake. I will say for Christopher that he doesn’t want
that. He would like every woman to do just the opposite.... Good
gracious, here’s another act and I thought it was all over and that we
were only waiting for our motors. Come and see me to-morrow. Any time,
I’m always at home. Where is one to go in these days? Profiteers and
Bolshevists and Jews! That’s England; mark my words!”
Peter groped his way out of the box in the sudden eclipse of the lights,
sidling by others who were tip-toeing back again, without any response
to Nellie’s signal. He knew quite well that there was an unoccupied seat
next her, and that it would have been the most natural thing in the
world for him to have appropriated it; but he chose to consider that it
was more suitable yet that Philip should find his way back to it. She
had given him the right to be there, and Peter, with a tinge of
insincerity, told himself that he was behaving with extreme correctness
in not occupying it; the insincerity lying in the fact that his
root-reason for going back to the other box being that he was determined
that Nellie should not have everything quite her own way.
Then again--another reason for behaving so properly--she had said
herself that afternoon that she meant to fit herself to the conventional
mould, and here was he helping to secure a perfect fit. No doubt she was
right; she was right also in divining that the nature of the bond
between them must now necessarily be changed. It had never been a
passionate one; their individual independence, no less than the material
obstacles in the way of declared and complete surrender to each other,
had always stood between them; but there seemed, now that the bond was
slackened, to have been potential passion woven into it. Perhaps the
slight collision with Philip in the doorway, and the knowledge that he
was groping his way back to the chair by Nellie again, accentuated that
perception. For a moment Peter paused; he had yet just time to slide
past Philip and occupy the chair; but there seemed to glimmer in the
seat of it some label “Reserved,” and he checked his impulse. No doubt
he would resume natural relations with Nellie again to-morrow, or
probably even to-night in the dance--or two dances, was it?--where they
would be sure to meet, and a certain subtle antagonism which had begun
to smoke and smoulder within him would be quenched. He left it, for the
present, at that.
For three or four hours more that night, after the conclusion of the
opera, Sivia found herself in touch with one or other of the guests who
had so agreeably and with so little ceremony decorated the fronts of her
mother’s boxes. They seemed just as much at home in Lady Thirlmere’s
house, taking genial possession of it, dancing to her band, drinking her
champagne in the same clubable manner. Lord Poole was greatly in
evidence, surrounding himself with the gay moths that positively stuck
in the spiced honey of his outrageous compliments and could scarcely
disentangle their feet therefrom. He squeezed their hands, he put his
arm round their waists, he made the most amazing speeches right and left
as to their irresistibility. He was like some mirror into which every
woman looked and saw there a fascinating reflection of herself, that
presented an image of herself more delicious than, even when trying on a
new hat, she had ever supposed herself to be. “What’s to happen to us
poor men,” he asked Silvia, “if you’re all of you going on being so
tip-top? We shan’t do a stroke more work; we shall spend all our time in
looking at you, and then who’s to pay your bills? I’ve lost my heart
twenty times already to-night, and that’s enough for an old chap like
me, so I shall take myself off to bed. Where’s my wife, I wonder? Can
your bright eyes pick out any extra dense crowd of young men? If you
can, I shall plunge straight into them, like taking a dive after a
pearl-oyster, and I’ll find her right in the very middle of them.”
There seemed to be an unusual congregation at the end of the
drawing-room, which opened on to the dancing floor, and Lord Poole
accordingly took his dive. Silvia could see, as the waves of black coats
and white shirts split up round him, that it was Mrs. Trentham who was
the pearl-oyster just there; but the dive must have been satisfactory,
for Lord Poole disappeared fathoms deep.
Silvia began to revise her judgment on the nonchalant greed of the
mouths that flocked to be fed. Everyone was so gay and pleasant, so
intent on laughter and amusement; everyone knew everyone else. She had
done no more than set eyes on a young man who had come in with Mrs.
Trentham to her mother’s box, but Tommy confidently claimed her as an
old friend, and she stalked and slid about the floor with him. At the
conclusion of that a girl whom she remembered with even mistier
vagueness disentangled herself from another young man (the one who had
slept so quietly and cried out so audibly at the appearance of the
flower-maiden) and ejected Tommy from the seat next Silvia. She was
entrancingly pretty in some wild, dewy manner, and had all the assurance
that the knowledge of a delightful appearance gives its possessor.
“I haven’t had a word with you all the evening,” she said, “and I want
to tell you how delicious it was of your mother to let me come to her
box. I saw you round the edge of the curtain talking to Peter. He raves
about you; so, as I wanted to rave too, I--well, here I am. Don’t send
me away.”
Silvia was utterly unaccustomed to exercise any critical faculty where
friendliness seemed to be offered. There were no outlying forts to her
heart, no challenging sentries; if a girl seemed to like her, that was
passport enough. Who this was she could not for the moment remember,
though doubtless her name was among those which her mother had repeated
as being occupant next door. Then the name, Nellie Heaton, found a
lodging in her mind and seemed secure. She was not sure that she liked
the information that Peter was “raving” about her; but it was surely
friendliness, the desire to be pleasant, that had prompted the retailing
of it to her.
“You must be Miss Heaton,” she said. “Am I right? There were so many new
faces to-night, you know....”
She looked at Nellie with that direct gaze that sought only to
appreciate. There was certainly a great deal to appreciate: the girl was
dazzlingly pretty.
Nellie laughed.
“Yes; I suppose I am Miss Heaton for the present,” she said.
A little more of her mother’s commentaries came into Silvia’s mind. Had
there not been a man in the next box--name missing for the moment--to
whom Miss Heaton was engaged? Perhaps her phrase, “for the present,”
alluded to that.
“Ah, I’m beginning to remember,” she said. “I remember that you are soon
to be married. I hope you’ll be tremendously happy.”
“That’s dear of you,” said Nellie. “But when I said I was Miss Heaton
for the present, I didn’t quite mean that.”
Silvia, with all her friendliness, shrank ever so slightly from this.
There was a certain reserve about her which did not quite allow the
indicated response. But the welcome of her manner was not abated.
“Do be kind and sort out all these nice people for me,” she said. “I
have grasped Lord Poole, and isn’t it Mr. Mainwaring who is Peter? He
sat next me for an act. All the Christian names are a little puzzling at
first. Then there’s Tommy; I haven’t the slightest idea what his surname
is, though I shall know him again, because I danced with him just now.
And there’s Lord Charles, who went to sleep--I shall know him again----”
“And won’t you know Peter again?” asked Nellie. “That’s one for Peter.”
“Oh, but I shall,” said Silvia. “He’s----”
The two were sitting close to the door into the ballroom, and at that
moment Peter passed in front of them talking to a girl. He just glanced
at them, took them both in, and melted into the crowd.
“Yes; that’s Mr. Mainwaring,” said Silvia confidently. “I--I liked him.
Don’t you like him?”
Nellie made a little sideways, bird-like movement of her head. Out of
her changed relations with Peter she felt that something like antagonism
had minutely sprouted. She wanted ... yes, she would give an answer that
would seem wholly appreciative of Peter, and that would yet contain
something that Silvia possibly (just possibly) would not like.
“Dear Peter!” she said. “Of course, we’re all devoted to Peter. It’s the
fashion to be devoted to Peter.”