From all nations, peoples and languages were they gathered together; France, Germany and Russia all sent representatives to this court of Mayfair, which was as exclusive in one sense as it was democratic in another. For into other courts any successful grocer and his wife can penetrate and make their obeisance, provided they have wealth, benevolence and respectability to be their sponsors, but mere benevolence and respectability were as powerless as unweaned babes to secure an entry on to Lady Grote’s lawn. So, too, was mere birth; the door was shut courteously but perfectly firmly in the face of anyone whose sole claim to coming in was something to do with William the Conqueror or Plantagenets generally; Lady Grote, in fact, was very exclusive in her hospitalities towards her own class, which, as a rule, consider it to be its right not so much to be excluded but to exclude.
On the other hand, as opposed to the usual procedure of less notable courts, the complete absence of anything approaching respectability was by no means a bar to entrance, though dullness, just ordinary, uncriminal, respectable dullness, quite unaccustomed in other places to be turned away, was here ejected with remarkable swiftness. But wealth, given that it was of Pounce-like proportions, here as elsewhere could show a ticket of admittance, even when totally unaccompanied by benevolence and respectability, for wealth in sufficient quantities had, in Lady Grote’s mind, a certain distinction: it implied power....
Wealth, indeed, to-day was considerably represented, and notable blends from America, Germany and (originally) Palestine could, by forming a small Semitic syndicate, have bought up the rest of the crowd, had it been for sale. Not to mention Mrs. Pounce, Sir Isaac Levison was there, playing bridge for extremely small points and almost squealing with dismay when his partner, greatly daring, incurred penalties. Lady Gurtner was there, too; she had two valid claims for admittance, the first of which was the really colossal wealth of her husband, Sir Hermann Gurtner, a German Jew, like in appearance to a small London fog, all black and yellow; the second her own almost lascivious enjoyment of the circles into which she had so firmly and industriously climbed. Like all her sisterhood, she had a speciality to attract people to her house beyond mere food and magnificent tapestries, for with a good deal of acumen, on her entry into London life but a few years ago, she had foreseen a “boom” in poetry, and made her house an absolute Parnassus. There all the bards, French, English and German, congregated, and read aloud their latest productions. Nobody, or very few at the most, really cared about poetry, bad, good, or indifferent, but in a certain prominent set in London it was the fashion to simulate a passion for verse, and on the “viewless wings of poesy,” with this set as pilots, she soared with prodigious rapidity. In bright blue stockings, assumed for the purpose of flight, she mounted into the blue, and now being able to pick and choose her friends, instead of having eagerly to welcome anybody who would come, she was beginning to throw both the poetical set and the poets overboard like ballast, for she found there were others whom poetry, especially the recitation of it after dinner, when they preferred poker, positively kept away.
She was a very good linguist, being German on her mother’s side, and having lived much as a girl in France, and before Sir Hermann married her had been a governess in a family, where, as is the custom with governesses, she did not come down to dinner. Now, by the revolution of the wheel of fate, she was able to ask her late employers to dinner, and send them in towards the tail of her more resplendent guests. She was a snob of purest ray serene, and dressed her tall and beautiful figure in the most amazing gowns.
Sir Hermann had lately built an enormous house in Curzon Street, and had furnished it with anything in the way of tapestry, lacquer, Louis XV., and old oak that was expensive enough. There was no taste of any sort exercised over his purchases; the only point was that they should be extremely costly, and in consequence the whole house resembled a museum. He spoke German with an English accent, French with a German accent and English with a Yiddish accent. But he spoke all three sparingly, for he had nothing much to say in any of them.
To-day Lady Gurtner had brought down a young Neapolitan poet on Lady Grote’s invitation, who recited some amorous outpourings of his own to an enraptured audience, who understood not a word he was saying, for he shouted and whispered and bellowed and hissed in the dialect of the Neapolitan Camorra, of which society he was a prominent and active member. But it was wildly exciting to see anybody get so excited, especially since it was a sort of Apollo who raved, and he was further notable for having killed his wife, whom he passionately adored, for the very best of motives. These stanzas were addressed to her, and when he came to the last line in which he told her that her last hour was come, he gave a wild scream (which so startled the tennis-champion that he served a double fault) and burst into a torrent of tears. This was immensely thrilling, and he was a great success until, on his being sufficiently comforted by Lady Gurtner and a friend or two of the poetical fanatics, whose hands he grasped so hard that they were covered with bruises next day, he proceeded to console himself further by getting drunk, and was in consequence unable to appear at dinner. But he had done his “stunt,” he had contributed his quota of excitement, and it did not particularly matter what happened to him afterwards, for nobody really wanted to hear “Giustizia” again.
It was Lady Grote’s amiable custom to devote some portion of the hours to each of her guests after the morning, which she claimed as her own, and since she had not yet had a word with Mr. Boyton she took him for a short stroll in the woods above the river in the half hour before dinner. Sunset flamed between the powdered trunks of the beech-trees, but the river in the valley below, from which the light had been withdrawn, lay like a broad riband of pale green, reflecting the sky above the flaming west.
His admiration for her was perfectly sincere, his expression of it verged on the dithyrambic, because that was his habit of speech when he paid his florid tributes to the aristocracy, and because he also wished, if possible, to get an invitation for next Sunday, when, so he had ascertained, some very august people were expected.
“I want to applaud you, my dear lady,” he said, “every moment of the exquisite day that I pass here. If I followed my inclination, my hands would be mere ribands of raw flesh before evening. Like some celestial and magical amalgam you weld into a complete whole the amazingly different units that come here to pay you homage. Why is it that no one else has the smallest idea of how to do it, or, to put it differently, how is it that you have so complete a recipe for making us all homogeneous?”
Lady Grote, for all her splendour, was the most modest of mankind, but she rather liked other people being immodest, so to speak, about her.