3
Before the party broke up there was a little dance at Plasencia. It was to be early and informal so as not to exclude “flappers”; for, as is apt to be the way with physically selfish men, Arnold found grown-up young ladies too exacting to enjoy their society and preferred teasing “flappers.” Fair play to him, he never flirted with them; but he certainly liked them.
So the drawing-room was cleared of furniture, a scratch meal of sandwiches substituted for dinner, and by eight o’clock they were fox-trotting to the music of a hired pianist and fiddler.
The bare drawing-room, robbed of all the accumulated accessories of everyday life, was the symbol of what was happening in the souls of the dancers—Dionysus had come to Thebes, and, at the touch of his thyrsus, the city had gone mad, had wound itself round with vine tendrils, was flowing with milk and honey; where were now the temples, where the market-place?
Teresa, steered backwards and forwards by Bob Norton, felt a sudden distaste for mediæval books—read always with an object; a sudden distaste, too, for that object itself, which was riding her like a hag. Why not yield to life, become part of it, instead of ever standing outside of it, trying to snatch with one’s hands fragments of it, as it went rushing by?
Whirled round in life’s diurnal course
With rocks and stones and trees.
That was good sense; that was peace. But away from Plasencia ... yes, one must get away from Plasencia.
For once, they were all beset by the same desire—to slip off silently one night, leaving no trace.
“Why shouldn’t I really get that yacht and slip off with Hugh ... to Japan, say ... and no one know? It’s a free country and I’ve got the money—there’s nothing to prevent me doing what I want. To sail right away from Anna ... and ... and ... every one,” thought Dick, as, rather laboriously, he gambolled round with the young wife of a rich stockbroker who had a “cottage” near Plasencia.
As to Concha—she had sloughed her own past and present and got into Rory’s—she seemed to be Rory: lying in his study at Harrow after cricket sipping a water-ice, which his fag had just brought him from the tuck-shop ... “hoch!” and a tiny slipper shoots up into the air—“the beautiful Miss Brabazons,” the belles of the Northern Meeting!... “H.M. the King and the Prince of Wales motored over from Balmoral for the—Highland games. There were also present ...” flags flying, bands playing ... hunting before the War—zizz! Up one goes—over gates, over hedges ... no gates, no hedges, no twelve-barred gates of night and day, no seven-barred gates of weeks, just galloping for ever over the boundless prairie of eternity—far far away from Plasencia and them all.
Only the dowagers, watching the dancers from a little conservatory off the drawing-room, had their roots deep in time and space—a row of huge stone Buddhas set up against a background of orchids and bougainvillea and parroquet-streaked jungle, which were their teeming memories of the past; but set up immovably, and they would see to it that no one should escape.
“There!” said Rory, gently pushing Concha into a chair, “where’s your cloak?”
“Don’t want one.”
“Oh, you’d better. Which is your room? Let me go and fetch you one.”
“But I tell you I don’t want one!”
“Oh, by the way, I meant to ask you, why did you walk on ahead with Arnold this afternoon?”
“Did I?”
“Of course you did. I had to walk with your sister—she scared me to death.”
Then there was a pause.
“Concha!”
“Hallo!”
He gave a little laugh, took her in his arms, and kissed her several times on the mouth.
“You didn’t kiss me back.”
“Why should I?”
“I don’t believe you know how to!”
“Don’t I?”
He kissed her again.
“What a funny mouth you’ve got—it’s soft like a baby’s.”
“You’d better be careful—some one might come along, you know, at any moment.”
“Would they be angry?... You are a baby!”
“Rory! The music’s stopping.”
Rory began talking in a loud voice: “Well, as I was saying, Chislehurst golf is no good to me at all. I like a course where you have plenty of room to open your shoulders.”
“You are a fool!” laughed Concha.
The next dance was a waltz.
“The Blue Danube! I’m so glad the waltz is coming into fashion again,” said Mrs. Moore, tapping her black-satin-slippered foot in time to the tune, and watching her sixteen-year old daughter Lettice whirl round with Arnold.
“Yes,” said the Doña, “I’m fed up with rag-time.”
“Dear Mrs. Lane, these slangy expressions sound so deliciously quaint when you use them—don’t they, Lady Norton? And that reminds me, I’ve had such a killing letter from Eben....”
But no one listened, and soon she too was silent; for, at the strains of the Blue Danube, myriads of gold and blue butterflies had swarmed out of the jungle and settled on the Buddhas. They still stared in front of them impassively, they were still firm as rocks; but they were covered with butterflies.
Mais le vert paradis des amours enfantines
Les courses, les chansons, les baisers, les bouquets
Les violons vibrant derrière les collines,
Avec les brocs de vin le soir dans les bosquets
—Mais le vert paradis des amours enfantines,
L’innocent paradis, plein de plaisirs furtifs,
Est-il déjà plus loin que l’Inde ou que la Chine?
Peut-on le rappeler avec des cris plaintifs,
Et l’animer encore d’une voix argentine,
L’innocent paradis plein de plaisirs furtifs?
“Waltzes are milestones of sentimentality,” said Guy shrilly to Teresa, as they made their way onto the loggia to sit out the remainder of the dance, “milestones of sentimentality, because a lady can be dated by the fact of whether it’s the Blue Danube, or the Sourire d’Avril, or the Merry Widow, that glazes her eye and parts her lips—taking her back to that charming period when the heels of Mallarmé’s débutantes go tap, tap, tap, when in a deliciously artificial atmosphere sex expands and, like some cunning hunted insect, makes itself look like a flower; I haven’t yet read A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleur, but I’m sure it’s an exquisite description of that period—débutantes, and waltzes, and camouflaged sex. Its very title is like the name of a French waltz—or scent.”
Teresa smiled vaguely.... Why had she scorned that period, barricading herself against it with books, and Bach and ... myths? When she was old and heard the strains of ... yes, the Chocolate Soldier ought to be her milestone ... well, when she hears the Chocolate Soldier, if her eyes glaze and her lips part it will be out of mere bravado.
But something was happening ... what was it Guy was saying?
“I never think of anything else but you ... you’re the only person whose mind I admire ... even if you don’t realise it you must see that you ought to.”
“Oh, Guy, what do you want? What is it all about?” she gasped helplessly.
“Well then, could you? You see, it seems to me so obvious and....”
“Marry you?”
“Yes.”
She saw herself established in St. James’s Street polishing his brasses, rub, rub, rub; polishing his verses perhaps too ... oh no, he didn’t like verses to be polished—roughening them, then, with emery-paper ... oh no, that polished too ... what was it, then, that roughened?
She began to giggle ... oh Lord, that had done it! Now he was furious—and with reason.
“... Your arrogance ... simply unbearable.... I don’t know what you think ... oh it’s damnable!” and he began to sob.
She took his hand and stroked it, murmuring: “Hush! old Guy ... I wasn’t laughing at you, it was just one of those sudden silly thoughts that have nothing to do with anything. Nothing seems real to-night. I’m really very very grateful.”
“Will you then?” and his face brightened.
“No, no, Guy—I can’t. It would be so ... so ... meaningless.”
Then fresh sobs, and like a passionate, proud child he tore away his hands, and plunged into the dark garden. What could she do? She could only leave him to get over it.
Life was never still; though, like the earth, one did not feel it move ... one’s human relations were ever shifting, silently, like those of the constellations. Suddenly one night one looks up at the sky and realises that Orion has reappeared and that the Great Bear is now standing on the tip of his tail, and one gasps at the vast spaces that have been silently traversed; and it was with the same sensation of awe that she looked back on the past year and realised the silent changes in the inter-relations of her little group: her parents’ relations, her own and Concha’s, her own and Guy’s.
A low voice came from the morning-room; it was the Doña’s: “Whatever Pepa’s opinions or wishes may have been during the latter part of her life, they are the same as mine now.”
“Upon my soul! You evidently ... er ... er have sources of ... er ... information closed to the rest of us—I really cannot ... er ... cope with such statements” and Harry came out on to the loggia, evidently irritated beyond endurance. He was followed by the Doña; but when she saw Teresa and realised that the opportunity for a tête-à-tête was over, having told her to get a wrap, she went in again.
Harry walked up and down for a few seconds, in silence, and then ejaculated ironically: “Remarkable woman, your mother!” “Very!” said Teresa coldly; she did not choose to discuss her with Harry.
“Of course, in the light of ... er ... modern psychology it’s as clear as a pike-staff,” he went on, as usual not reacting to the emotional atmosphere, “she ... er ... doesn’t ... er ... know it, of course, but she’s putting up this Catholicism as a barrier to your marriages—every mother is jealous of her daughters.”
Oh, these scientific people! Always right, and, yet, at the same time, always absurdly wrong! For the real sages, the people who live life, these ugly little treasures found by the excavators miles and miles and miles down into the human soul, are of absolutely no value ... horrid little flints that have long since evolved into beautiful bronze axes ... it was only scientists that cared about that sort of thing. For all practical purposes it was an absolute libel on the Doña—but, dramatically, it might be of value; for dramatic values have nothing to do with truth.
“Our dance, I think, Miss Lane. I couldn’t find you anywhere”; it was Rory’s voice.
He led her into the drawing-room, and they began to move up and down, round and round, among the other solemn and concentrated couples, all engaged in too serious an exercise to indulge in any conversation beyond an occasional: “Sorry!” “Oh, sorry!”
When they passed Concha, she and Rory smiled at each other, and he said: “Telegrams: Oysters.”
That meant: “We are both rather hungry, but never mind, it won’t be long now till supper—Hurray!”
How humiliating it was to be so familiar with their jargon!
She looked at him; his eyes were stern, and fixed on some invisible point beyond her shoulder, his lips were slightly parted. She was no more to him than the compass with which Newton in Blake’s picture draws geometrical figures on the sand.
Then the music stopped.
“Shall we sit here?”
He had become human again.
“It has been a lovely dance—I do think it’s so awfully good of you all to have me down for Christmas.”
How many times exactly had she heard that during the last week? Once before to herself, twice to the Doña, once to her father, once to Jollypot.
“Oh, we liked having you. We generally have lots of people for Christmas.”
“Well, one couldn’t have a more Christmassy house. It always seems to me like the house one suddenly comes upon in a wood in a fairy story. One expects the door to be opened by a badger in livery.”
Again that bastard Fancy! The same sort of thing had occurred to her herself—when she was a child; but the imagination of a man ought to be different from the fancy of a child.
“It’s the sort of house one can imagine a Barrie play happening in, don’t you think? Did you see Dear Brutus?”
“Yes; I did.”
“I didn’t like the girl much—what was her name? Margaret, wasn’t it? I’m sure her papa starved her—I longed to take her and give her a good square meal.” Pause.
She wondered what it would feel like to be the sort of young woman who could interest and allure him. And what were the qualities needed? It could not be brains, for she had plenty of brains; nor looks, for she was good-looking. But nothing about her stirred him; she knew it.
“Of course, it’s an extraordinary hard life, an actress’s,” he went on, “it’s a wonder that they keep their looks as they do. It’s a shame! Women seem handicapped all along the line,” and he looked at her expectantly, as if sure of her approval at last, “It can’t be much fun being a woman, unless one were a very beautiful one ... or a very clever one, of course,” he added hastily.
Well, the cat was out of the bag: she was plain as well as undesirable.
Suddenly, Dionysus and his rout vanished from Thebes; temples and market-place sprang up again, and she remembered joyfully that a fresh packet of books ought to arrive to-morrow from the London Library.