She dined on Saturday night at a restaurant with three friends, Mrs. Lockwater, Geoffrey Bellingham, and the ubiquitous Mr. Boyton, who was their host. Next them was a larger gathering, all known to her, all visitors, when she cared to ask them, to Grote, all part of the usual pageant of life. There were topics abroad that should have been interesting, the threat, scarcely veiled, of Austria to Serbia, a race-meeting at which the wealthiest and most miserly commoner in England had won a hundred thousand pounds, trouble in Ireland, the marvellous party at Lady Gurtner’s two nights ago, all the froth and bubble which the world makes as it spins through space on its hazardous and unconjecturable journey. There was nothing of an arresting quality in any of these; it was all the kind of thing that London has perennially “on tap.” Geoffrey Bellingham was inclined to be involved and allusive about Serbia, but he might equally well have chosen as his topic the race-meeting and arrived at no less a pitch of picturesque obscurity.
“It is,” he said, “as I figure it to myself, as if a big boy, some athletic creature like our dear Robin, though without the chivalrous sense that size should give, had a small boy gripped by the ear in an inexorable forefinger and relentless thumb, while the menacing boot is poised before its painful application. But our interesting international group is not complete yet: for to my probably pessimistic eye, another big boy, cousin and chivalrous cousin to the scarcely adolescent menaced, says, in fact, ‘Hands off!’ And is there, or is there not, some even more completely equipped youth standing behind the boot that menaces and the hand that grips? Are, in fact, those who watch by the Rhine—in short, is Germany drinking beer or brewing trouble? What, to borrow our metaphor from the financial transactions which to-day have made a perfect Danae, in point not, I may say, of motherhood, but of gold, of our friend who has now another hundred thousand pounds to devote to schemes of stinginess—what is the betting on Germany being behind all this?”
Mr. Boyton had been smoothing his honey-coloured hair with a slight air of impatience. He had not yet been able to get a word in, though it was his own party, so substantial were the periods with which Bellingham had been regaling them. It was true that his resonant, booming voice made everybody in the room look in his direction, where they could behold Boyton entertaining the two most beautiful women in London, but as host he wanted to talk too, and plunged into the very rapids of Bellingham’s eloquence.
“The best grounds for betting against Germany being, as you say, behind all this,” he said, “was a delightful party given two days ago, at which I had the felicity to meet my dear neighbour on my right. Our timorous friend, Lady Grote, should have been there, should he not, and have seen the cordiality between certain of our fellow-guests? His absence marred the perfection of the evening.”
Lady Grote had to think a moment before she could remember what party her host alluded to. There had been such lots of parties, all just the same sort of thing. Two nights ago? What a long time ago that must have been! She could remember that Robin had been out till four in the morning, but ... what else had happened? Then she remembered.
“Yes, yes,” she said. “We were an Anglo-Germanic society, weren’t we? I loved that symphonic poem by Saalfeld, and then Nijinski as Endymion; really, I looked round to be sure that Robin was not there. I should not have been able to face him afterwards.”
She paused a moment.
“And I thought Mr. Kuhlmann sang so well,” she added, feeling suddenly real again. “He is singing in Tristan to-night. If I was not here, Mr. Boyton, I should like to be there.”
“Dear lady,” thundered Mr. Bellingham, “one, at least, and I see I speak for two others, are enraptured at the fact that you prefer this for me delicious rendez-vous to that of the ship that continued, I may say, interminably not coming. It continues, does it not, not to come far longer than any belated liner yet known to the wife of the expectant mariner, or, as it so curiously happened in this case, to the husband, in the sight of God, of the marineering wife. In fact, I thought that that ship would never cease not coming, and that my departure from Covent Garden would be delayed till the Day of Judgment, unless I made my inconspicuous exit before it came. And to the best of my recollection, an equally interminable herdsman continued to pipe on an interminable flute of the reediest order, during the whole period of its non-arrival. Tristan, so I faintly remember, accompanied the meanderings of the flute with writhings in a species of brown dressing-gown, indigenous, I suppose, to some sparsely-inhabited district of Cornwall, and so correct, but unlikely to enhance his chances in the eyes of his long-tarrying mistress. Had some hint, so I put it to myself, subaqueously or telepathically reached that abandoned Princess of the unbecoming dishabille of her, what I must call, husband, or did she eventually arrive in order to put an end, once for all, we must hope, to the pipings of the flute-player? But she came, did she not? I seem to see a corpse of amazingly muscular build but already moribund, disappearing under a landslide, an avalanche of buxom charms, a soprano mountain, may we call it?—a mountain of the most vocal kind. The mountain came to Mohammed, in fact, and I understood that the opera was over. Someone, probably an evangelist, for his name was Mark, said a sort of grace over the perfidious couple!”
Lady Grote gave a great explosion of laughter. All her conscious self delighted in this ludicrous travesty of Tristan as it appeared to the unbaptized. But from the imprisoned self within there came no answering merriment; it sat quite still in its darkness, tolerating, but no more, this chattering of an ape, who spoke in a language scarcely human, but made an obscene kind of gabble that yet somehow amused her enormously. But the amused part of her was the actor on this stage of an unreal restaurant, and it had its part to play. The rest of the actors, or the audience (it did not matter which), were amused, too; they gabbled and chuckled, and it all meant nothing. There they continued sitting round their table, while other parties broke up and went away: Bellingham was being amusing, and Boyton was getting his share of the talk, and Mrs. Lockwater was listening, and she herself was merely waiting till it was time to go down to Covent Garden. The opera would be over by half-past eleven, and she had told her friends that she was going to drive down to Grote that night, and had ordered her car for eleven or thereabouts.