“That is nice of you. But nothing quite comes up to what you expect of it. The evening is the sadder light.”
“I have heard—I do not know with what truth—” said he, “that there are people so fortunate as to experience very agreeable sensations after sunset.”
This was thoroughly Boytonian, the sort of thing that made people laugh at their own thoughts. But on this occasion her own thoughts did not amuse her. They were too serious.
CHAPTER VI
LADY GURTNER felt on this July evening that she had “arrived,” and her face at the end of her table, flushed with triumph, was like the harvest moon over the fields where she had sowed and reaped. She had not precisely sowed in tears, nor had she watered her springing fields with them, for tears do not in the crop she was raising, produce any kind of result, but she had sowed early and late, with winter wheat and summer wheat, spring and autumn, in poetry gatherings, in dinners and concerts and operas and week-ends, and to-night she felt definitely that her harvest was reaped and her barns stacked with golden grain.
All her sowings had helped her, even the poetry-sowings which she had altogether abandoned when she perceived that poetry was considered a nuisance by all but a very small and rather weird and curious set of falsetto people, and to-night, poetry, as a climbing ladder, was represented only by an ancient light who looked rather the worse for wear and want of washing. She had even asked one or two people “to be kind to the poor Duchess,” for she was sure that Constance Hampshire was not accustomed to shine among so bright a galaxy of stars as those who to-night sat at the very much extended table in her new house in Curzon Street. So extended was it, and so bright were the hungry constellations on each side of it, quite dimming the lustre of the Queen Anne silver which she had lately been buying by the hundredweight to furnish her table, that both from actual distance and, figuratively, from the distance of social values, she could barely see her husband, that little London fog, who sat at the far end, and paid for everything, and perspired easily.
There were two great achievements which to Aline Gurtner’s mind marked off this particular party as being in a somewhat different class to all her previous gatherings, increasingly splendid though these had been. The first was that there was a real Royal princess present, no mere Transparency or Serenity or Liability, or any of those pinchbeck German imitations, but the thing itself, a woman who was a near relation of a real imperial house, and talked of her brothers and sisters in a perfectly natural manner by their Christian names. There she sat next the little London fog, big and handsome and jolly, eating with an immense hereditary appetite and laughing at Sir Hermann’s sparse conversation with such cheerful spontaneity that he began to think he was a very amusing fellow, which in reality he was not.
The other achievement was hardly less notable, for she had got Lady Grote also to dine with her, and in her growing knowledge of the rungs of the London ladder she had become aware that this was almost as brilliant a feat as securing a real princess. True, she had been down to one of Lady Grote’s Sunday menageries, where all the world went, but that was a totally different thing from getting Lady Grote here, even as it was a totally different thing to go to a Windsor garden party from entertaining the giver of that yourself. But Aline Gurtner had begun to know her London well enough to tell Lady Grote that Kuhlmann was among her guests, and to know Lady Grote well enough to place him next her.
Presently, after dinner, there was to be quite a short concert in the big music-room. She had asked very few extra guests to that, for it was to be no affair of sitting elbow to elbow on small gilt chairs, but everybody was to be comfortably seated and at ease to listen to the entertainment, really colossal in quality. The London Symphony Orchestra was to accompany Kuhlmann, who had never before sung at a private concert, but had been induced to accept the tremendous price that the little London fog had offered him. (He had also been made aware that Lady Grote was to be among the guests.) The orchestra furthermore was to perform the new symphonic poem by Saalfeld, the modern German composer, who was to conduct in person this piece, which had not yet been performed in England. A Russian soprano was to sing, and she with Kuhlmann and an alto and bass, equally prohibitive in price to all but the princes of finance, were to perform a new vocal quartette, composed and conducted by the same Saalfeld. Then the band was to move into the gallery at the end of the music-room, and on the stage which they had vacated Nijinski and Rimorska would give the ballet of Endymion.
All this was to be produced for the benefit of not more than eighty people. The little London fog knew what it would work out at per head (dividing the total cost by eighty), and with a touch of playful cynicism had suggested to Aline that if she presented the guests she wished to ask with a cheque that, though considerable in itself, would yet fall far short of their share in the entertainment, she would win the friendships she desired, and he would save money, which he always found an attractive occupation. But as a matter of fact, it rather amused him to know that she, an ex-governess, and he, an ex-office boy, could thus whistle all London that mattered to their table. Aline quite realized that by keeping this sumptuous party so small she would assuredly make a host of enemies, but it seemed to her that a handful of the right sort of friends quite outweighed this. Besides, if her enemies were good, she would give them another treat one of these days. But they would have to wait for that, since it was now more than half-way through July, and she herself was going off to Baireuth next week. She would do something for her enemies in the autumn.