Complete Novels of E Nesbit, page 383
Who, with the heart of nineteen-year-old Daphne open for him to read like a book, would care to read in the faded pages of an old maid’s heart? Let it therefore be said, in words as few and brief as may be, that Cousin Jane had loved these girls, and that in losing them she suffered love’s great tragedy. Who knows what dream she had cherished of a love returned? That dream is youth’s first, and is, for good or ill, the last vain dream of age.
CHAPTER XIII. GUEST
BEHOLD now Daphne taking, in her new white gown with the green and gold embroidery, the centre of her little stage. Subsidiary characters, Claud, Green Eyes, a grateful Russian, and “That Man” of whom gratitude could not be affirmed. Also her host, unknown, and the unknown other guests. Behold her, secure in the assurance of her mirror that she looks “somebody in particular and not just anybody,” crushing her undisplayed flounces into one hand and holding lightly in the other the not-to-be-crushed outer dress which will, to the world, be her sole covering — all flounces severely unified by its long straight lines. She walks along Percy Street, Tottenham Court Road, Great Russell Street. The pavements are dry and dusty, and her thin bronze shoes will take no harm. Claud walks with her, tall and effective, with a general air of there being nothing to fear while he is with her. Doris, shiny with scented soap — a horribly strong-smelling pink kind shaped like a baby, to buy which in the attractive bazaars of Googe Street she has wheedled her sister out of twopence — lies in her white nightgown determined to keep awake till Daphne comes home from the “real live dinnerparty.”
Mrs. Delarue, established by the lamp with a basketful of lumpy, ugly, misshapen balls which are “her gentlemen’s socks,” is equally, though opposedly, determined.
“I’ll sing to you to keep you awake,” she says with simple craft.
And the “Honeysuckle and the Bee” succeeds to the “Old Bull and Bush.” It is “Bill Bailey,” however, with its monotonous demands on one who has cut himself triumphantly free from the life so well indicated by the voice and vocabulary of the implorer, that works the charm. Doris sleeps. Mrs. Delarue watches her, with tears of affectionate admiration.
“Lor, how pretty she do sleep, bless ‘er ‘eart for a lamb; and I lay her sister sleeps twice as pretty. Her ‘air ud be worth a fortune to anyone in that line. Pity there ain’t no one to see her.”
So she muses, and presently, assured that Doris is now indeed sunk deeper than the tide of dreams, goes out softly, with the key of the trap-door’s padock in her pocket, and seeks a neighbouring house, brightly light, a house of entertainment, in truth, for man and beast. So Doris is left alone.
Daphne foots it lightly up the long lighted length of Theobald’s Row.
“Won’t you take my arm?” says Winston, “as if it were a secret.”
“I can’t — I haven’t a hand.”
“Then I’ll take yours, may I?” He does, unreproved, intrude a hand among the many soft folds bunched up round her.
“I shall be awfully frightened,” Daphne says.
“Not you. You’ll be the star of the evening. Beautiful star,” he adds pensively.
She laughs. He would rather that she sighed.
“Seddon’s got a surprise for us,” he says. “He’s a rum chap. Everything by turns, and nothing long.”
“Who’s to be there,” asks Daphne for a reason that she has, though she knows the list by heart.
Claud rehearses it, leaving out the name which she wishes to hear spoken. She is not pleased with him.
“Is that all?”
“Oh, there’s Henry, of course. But you never know whether he’ll come or not.”
“Does he know who’s going?”
“Oh, yes. Seddon always consults him — shows him the list Henry goes through it with a blue pencil.”
“How silly!” Daphne says.
“How silly?” Claud asks.
Her shoe heel twists sideways, and the question slinks away unanswered.
“Did you hurt yourself?”
“No — not a bit. We shall be late.”
“I say, Daphne.”
“Yes?”
“Don’t you hate London in summer?”
“No.”
“Wouldn’t you like to see green woods and fields.”
“Ye — yes.”
“Look here — let’s run away for the day. I know a lovely place. We’ll have a picnic. Just us. Do say you will?”
“Just you and me and Doris?”
“Of course I meant Doris,” with a fervour proportioned to the intensity with which he had not meant Doris. “I know a ripping place — Chevening Park, quiet as the Garden of Eden, with trees and lawns and rabbits frisking about. Doris loves rabbits.”
“I should love it,” says Daphne. “And while Doris runs after rabbits you shall tell me all the things you promised.”
“I promised?”
“Yes. Don’t you remember? That first evening. You promised to tell me all your secrets. And you’ve never told me a single one.”
“Oh — you know I have.”
“You promised,” said Daphne, severely, answering the almost imperceptible pressure of fingers on her arm, “you promised to tell me all about the girl you’re in love with.”
“Did I?”
“Yes.”
“Do you really want me to?” very tenderly.
“Yes, very much indeed. I want to know her.”
“You do know her.”
“This is very interesting. Who is she?”
“She’s the most beautiful — the dearest — the loveliest.”
“Of course, but who is she?”
“This,” says Claud, “is Gray’s Inn. I hope there’ll be champagne. There generally is at Seddon’s parties. His father’s a wine merchant.”
“I wish my dress wasn’t just muslin,” says Daphne.
I bet all the other girls will wish it wasn’t whatever it is,” says Claud.
And Daphne, intoxicated with the sparkling draught of anticipated pleasure, says gaily: “How can you be so silly!”
The sombre magnificence of perfect taste which marked Mr. Seddon’s rooms was to Daphne a new note in life’s orchestra. Mahogany, silver, china. What was not Sheraton was Chippendale. What was not Spode was Derby. If anything was not silver it was Sheffield plate. There were bow-fronted sideboards, gleaming wine-coolers and snuffer-trays, wonderfully inlaid chairs, curious blackframed prints, and over all magic candle-light from the sconces of concave mirrors, the twisted splendours of old silver-branched candlesticks. Everyone was in evening dress, it is true, but an evening dress that rhymed, more or less accurately, with the furniture. The host and one or two of the guests wore, instead of the white tie so difficult of successful achievement, black stocks suggesting the youth of David Copperfield. The ladies’ dresses were mostly of the middle Victorian period. Daphne wondered where was the crinoline shop. Her own almost classical draperies struck a new note that was yet not a discord.
The Russian was not there.
The host came forward, head bent, shoulders raised high in an archaic bow that Nicholas Nickleby might have been proud to achieve.
“This is indeed a pleasure,” he said in soft staccato tones. “I have heard so much of Miss Carmichael that I began to fear that she would prove to be the ideal lady — dreamed of but never seen.”
Daphne did not know what to say. The host’s oval clean-shaven chin protruded, his round eyes enlarged as he drew her towards the mantelpiece.
“I lived by faith before,” he said, “but now, face to face!”
Daphne supposed that he meant something; and smiled politely.
“‘ You smile. Why, there’s my picture ready made!”’ he said. “You ought to sit to Henry. There’s no one else could do it. ‘ If I could have that little head of hers, painted upon a background of pure gold!’ But that is not our Henry’s method.”
“You think Mr. Henry clever?” she found herself saying.
“Clever? But that’s not the word, my dearest Miss Carmichael. (Daphne looked round apprehensively, but all the other guests were talking together. No one was listening.) Henry is The Man. He is an artist. That is to say ne is an inspired craftsman — the noblest work of God. Don’t you think so?”
Daphne managed to say that she had not thought much about it.
“Ah,” said the host, rolling his round eyes impressively, “but it is of these things that we must think — if we would save our souls. Henry has a message, a great message, to the world. He has a great lesson to teach us — the beauty of ugliness and the ugliness of beauty. That seeming paradox elucidates the whole universe — the mystery of evil — secret of salvation. You know Henry?”
“A little.”
“Does it not make you proud?” he asked, “even you — crowned with all the gifts of the gods — to think that you have touched the hand of the Coming Man — the genius who is to revolutionize the world of Ideas — to seek out the lost art of to-day, poor, degraded, prostituted to the base uses of Jew stockbrokers and their diamond-laden women — and to raise her once more to the pinnacle where she shall stand before the eyes of all, naked — immortal — not to be denied.”
“Yes,” said Daphne. “Oh, yes, of course.” She wished he wouldn’t.
“I shall let you into a little secret, dearest lady,” the host went on. “So far it is a secret to all but me — and now to you — the object of this little dinner. A dinner should always have its object, just as a chaconne has its theme.”
“And do you repeat the object three hundred and sixty times? 9 asked Daphne.
“Very good,” he answered, laughing conscientiously, “excellent — Minerva as well as Venus (and Diana of course) presided at your birth. No, the motive of my little dinner is One and Only. It is this picture of Henry’s which I have just been fortunate enough to secure. It is no small joy, Miss Carmichael, to reflect that to generations yet unborn, I shall go down — I — with my modest incompetence in all save taste and some poor means of grace — I — even I — shall go down, covered with honour as the patron — the phrase is comic — I mean it so, I assure you — the patron of our Henry.”
Daphne definitely disliked the pronoun.
“The picture?” she asked.
“This,” he said, pointing to a long panel above the mantelpiece.
“This — the pride of my life, the desire of my eyes. This masterpiece, my dearest Miss Carmichael, I have had the happiness to secure — and, between ourselves, at a price that twenty years hence will turn the readers of the Burlington of that day green with envy. You, I know, can sympathize with my feelings. You can understand. Every curve of your hair, every movement of your lips, every line of your wonderfully conceived raiment tells me that you at least can understand.”
“What I don’t understand,” said Daphne, intentionally stolid, “is how you make a dinner party out of a picture.”
“Ah, now you’re laughing at me,” he said. “The delicious laughter of the gods! There will be other foods — concessions to the vile body, Miss Carmichael, but the little feast is really sacrificial. It is a love-feast We meet together to honour genius and incidentally to feed our brother the ass — as dear St Francis so beautifully styles our mortal flesh. I can’t resist my little ideas, ils sont plus forte que moi. You see to-night we have the dinner — such as it is — and overshadowing it, hallowing it, presiding over it, as it were, in a lummous transcendental way, we have the overwhelming presence of this work of genius. You see I have the seven candles ready to light the moment he appears. And incense in this little square bronze vessel with the four crooked legs and the crouched dragon above. That’s symbolical, of course — the earthly breathing homage to the heavenly. And, down below, the Master will be with us, even us — one of us, laying aside his crown and sceptre to taste anchovies and iced asparagus, with his fellows of men (and women,” he added, adrift for an instant in a cross current). “And — what was I saying?”
“Crown and sceptre,” Daphne prompted.
“Yes — oh yes — laying aside his crown and sceptre to feed on life’s common bread and wine with us, his fellow mortals. It’s a beautiful allegory, dearest lady — it is the resplendent contradiction that resolves the discords of all religions. You see with me in this, eye to eye. I am sure that you do.” Assured by a sidelong glance that Claud was out of earshot, Daphne was disingenuous enough to say: “Yes, indeed.”
The host looked deeply gratified.
“Do you know?” he said, musingly, “the moment that I heard your name something stirred in me — the mystic inwardness that stirs in dry wood when flame draws near? I knew what you would be. I knew it These intuitions never deceive.”
“Mr. Henry is late, isn’t he?” was absolutely the best Daphne could do on her side.
“Time,” said her astonishing host, “is only a mode of thought. So is space. Is it not wonderful to feel that Henry is here now, in substance, though the accidents we call Henry are probably even now involved in some street accident — the breakdown of a cab, or the sudden soul-sickness of a motor-bus.” Daphne laughed — aloud. The other guests looked enviously as her. One who could find food for laughter in Seddon’s talk must indeed, they felt, be fresh from the mint of the gods.
“Oh, Mr. Seddon,” she said. “I’m so sorry, but I can’t help it You are so funny, you know.”
“Yes,” he said with a certain gentle sadness, “I know I am. I can’t help it, either. But just then I meant to be funny. These impulses capture and control the will, despite the calmer motions of the soul. This is an exquisite moment. Do you ever, I wonder, feel the whole world poised on a thistledown that a breath can displace? Do you ever hang ensorcelled on the wondrous chance of life’s next happening?”
“Yes, always,” said Daphne recklessly—”at least almost always.”
“If one comes to think of it,” he went on, “each moment of life is full of divine possibilities as a thistle head is full of soft delicious seed-bearing aeroplanes.” Daphne refused to let her mind dwell on thistles even in their more usual associations.
“I think I see what you mean,” she said. What she really saw was that everyone seemed to look likingly at that white dress of hers with the greeny gold embroidery, and that the hands of the old Dutch clock on the bracket pointed to a quarter-past eight “Even as we speak,” he went on, smoothing his chin with a hand on which shone an early Italian ring, “even now Destiny, darkly veiled, may be drawing near to us through the wonder and mystery of the hectic London night Who knows what unspeakable miracle may even now be at our gates—”
“Mr. Henry,” said the perfect manservant, and That Man entered.
Daphne had had thoughts of charcoal. Did charcoal, she had wondered, charcoal as ingrained as that, really wash off? It had. That Man looked like any other man, his evening dress perfectly correct, the only personal note the almost savage inaccuracy of his white tie. The atmosphere of the room had, to Daphne, become abruptly changed.
The host whispered to a short, stout friend and rustled forward — so Daphne always declared, though how a man could rustle she never explained — to greet the late comer.
Dear master,” he said, “this is indeed good.”
Daphne heard a low, fierce growl, something that sounded like, “I tell you I won’t have it,” and her heart sank — but Seddon was unperturbed.
“I was just telling Miss Carmichael — you have already the privilege, yes—” a guarded bow from Henry, a frozen exaggerated curtsey from Daphne—”the thema — the true inwardness of our little meeting.”
The fat satellite was going along the mantelpiece with a flame-tipped taper from which light leaped to one after another of the seven candles.
Daphne perceived that that right hand, to whose touch no sensible person would nave given another thought, was clenched as a man’s is clenched when he means to strike. The smoked topaz eyes, in one instantaneous glance took in, she knew, every detail of her dress, every curve of her hair. And all, as it seemed, aroused in him the same furious distaste.
Seddon’s voice went on and on. A spout of hot scented smoke came from the mouth of the bronze dragon. “And the supreme moment,” he was saying, “when we can bow the head before your work, and offer, in silence, the tribute of the wine-god to the divine in man — the transcendent in human genius.”
“You are an excellent old ass,” said Henry, without moving his lips, and so low that only two heard him.
Seddon smiled with his lips only, as one who must smile or burst into tears. Daphne smiled — but only with her eyes.
Henry was speaking, in a voice not for two only, but for all.
“I am most extravagantly sorry, my dear Seddon,” he said, “but I have only looked in to beg you to excuse me. A dear uncle, almost a father to me, lies at death’s door. I have to hurry away to Upper Tooting to soothe his last moments. Your kind heart, I am sure, will make my excuses.”
“Of course, of course, awfully sorry, my dear chap,” Seddon was fussing round the other like a woman, “anything I can do, you know,” he added vaguely. “You’ll come in later, if you can?”
If I can,” said Henry, “yes.” And suddenly, in his habitual way, he was not there any more. Slow dramatic exits were not Mr. Henry’s strong point. He was, and was not. That was all.
“I suppose,” said Seddon flatly, in the echo of the banging of his oak, “we may as well have dinner. Miss Carmichael,” he added, struggling like the brave little man he was against overwhelming disappointment, “you will sit by me, and help me to bear this crushing disappointment with equanimity?”
“Equanimity?” murmured Claud, seating himself by Green Eyes.
“Oh, Claud, again,” Green Eyes murmured in her turn.
“It isn’t again,” he said. “It’s the first and only time.”
