For answer he purred the first notes of the great love-duet.
CHAPTER V
LADY GROTE did not consider it part of her duties as a hostess to appear at breakfast on Sunday morning; indeed, she would have considered it rather a breach of them to do so. The women of the party had their breakfasts in their own rooms, and she knew quite enough of men to be sure that, however sprightly in disposition, they vastly prefer a smoking-room kind of meal, sitting sideways to the table, not speaking unless they feel disposed, and with the power of erecting a palisade round themselves by a propped-up morning paper, to making themselves agreeable, even to the woman who most engaged their attention the evening before.
The Frenchman is differently constituted, and at however immature an hour likes to take up again, as near as possible to the point at which he left it, his mood of the evening before; but upon the English mind sleep seems to leave a sort of tarnish which must be scoured off in silence with fish and sausages before it becomes an agreeable and polished surface again. Then, after a round of golf or a game of tennis for those who require “exposure,” like a photograph, before their proper image reappears, or an hour or so in an armchair in a well-shaded light for those to whom, like a mushroom, darkness and warmth are necessary for their morning development, the Saturday-till-Monday Englishman finds that the burden of life is light again.
But mere avoidance of her guests from notions of politeness did not form the entire reason of Lady Grote’s self-effacement on Sunday morning. A whole catechism of telephonic inquiries delivered here and at her house in London yesterday evening required her attention, and she was busy with her secretary for an hour over these and over a similar catechism which she sent forth on her own account.
One evening during the ensuing week she was giving a party at her London house, at which two Russian dancers would appear, and she must issue some more invitations for that; on another evening she had a dinner-party, at which the principal guest was one who was entitled to inspect the proposed list of those he would meet, and intimate if there was anyone else he would like to be present. (He had just instructed that he would like to see an extraordinarily dull couple, who must accordingly be invited.) That disposed of Tuesday and Thursday evening, on Wednesday and Friday she was dining out, and on Saturday again she came down here to entertain. That only left Monday evening, and on that she was going to the opera to hear Kuhlmann sing Tristan. It was necessary, she was afraid, to ask two or three people to her box, for she could scarcely occupy it alone. But that was what she longed to do: she wanted to be quite by herself, without the distraction of any other presence, and give herself up to the mood which that wonderful voice, and that soft-pawed savage personality produced in her....
The evenings then were simple enough, but the rest of the five days was more complicated, and the things she wanted to do, and the people she wished to see, had to be fitted into the hours like the closely-joining fragments of a jig-saw puzzle. She had all the time there was: every moment of the next week belonged to her, but it was maddening to think that there were so many under vitalized and uninterested people in the world, on whose hands time hung heavy, who invented dreary employments to fill the undesired hours, who were glad (so far as they were capable of any positive emotion) when the day was over, who went to sleep in chairs, or read books that did not in the least amuse them merely in order that the hands of the clock should trace their circles unyawned-at.
It was a hideously stupid arrangement, that whereas you could buy or somehow or other obtain, if you were rich and clever, everything else that made life pleasant, all your cleverness and all the wealth of Midas could not purchase for you one single second of time, without which everything else was non-existent! And to think of all those people who had much more time than they wanted, and had no idea how to use it! Think also of the armies and battalions of the young who had no conception of the value of the golden treasure that ran through their fingers! Poor people, too, how many a poor man would gladly accept, say a thousand pounds in return for a year! That would come to twenty pounds a week: she would gladly have taken any amount of weeks at that rate. Fancy having the chance of living the last twenty-four hours over again for three pounds and a few shillings! Why the joy just of waking this morning was worth a hundred times that, but by no expenditure of millions could she ever get it back again. It had gone down plump into the dark well, where all dead days and moments lay faintly glimmering, or black and forgotten.
Certainly it was a waste of that most precious and unpurchasable commodity to devote a single moment to a regret so unavailing, but she did not at once pull herself up (while waiting for Miss Armitage to unravel the complication of engagements that caused the hours of Tuesday to overlap in so inconvenient a manner), or use the minutes in skating a little further on the very thin ice of the French short stories that had been recommended her, or even call in her manicure. Every now and then, and, so it seemed to her, with increasing frequency during this last year or two, some shadow fell across the brilliance of the sunshine that lay on her path. It did not come from any intervening object, any troublesome circumstance that interposed itself between her and the sun, it seemed rather as if the sun itself blazed less brightly, making a dusk even at noonday.
Nor was this failure to be laid to the door of that thief, Time, the inveterate flower-stealer, for she had still too many flowers in her garden, and even buds yet undeveloped, to miss the spoils of his maraudings. Nor again did she fear the approach of old age, for it was mere waste of energy to spend a thought over the inevitable, or the final arrival of the grim doorkeeper, who equally certainly would open the portals that led into whatever lay beyond.