The Countess of Lowndes Square, and Other Stories

by E. F. Benson

The discerning reader will easily have perceived by this time that both John Marrible and I were but wax in the inventive hands of Agnes, and flowed into the shapes that her swift fingers ordained for us. Occasionally we suggested little curves and decorations of our own, which she might or might not permit; but we had no independent will in the matter of Robert Oriole. She was the architect who built this splendid temple to an imaginary deity in whose honour Mrs. Withers, his deluded worshipper, swung unregarded censers of asparagus and salmon; at the most we were the cognisant choir and the organ....

During the next weeks which included the Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday, on which Mrs. Withers’s hospitality hungered for Robbie, the number of Oriolists greatly increased, and this secret society became positively masonic in clandestine fervour and fidelity. I could see at a glance, without grips of any kind, whether some friend or acquaintance who inquired after Robbie was a mason or not, for there was a gleeful solemnity about the initiated Oriolist which the profane crowd lacked.

There were many who now spoke of him, for Mrs. Withers in her frenzied efforts to capture him and show him at her house, asked everyone she met if he knew Robbie, and her large circle of uninitiated guests and acquaintances grew almost as excited about him as she. Those who knew, the initiates to whom these mysteries had been unveiled, answered casually enough when they were applied to by Mrs. Withers, but with that gleeful solemnity which revealed them to each other.

One morning Robbie would have been “stunting” over Richmond, or had lunched at the Ritz, or had been swimming in the Serpentine before breakfast, dropping in unexpectedly to entrance Agnes with the Brahms-Handel variations, or flying back to the Lakes in the afternoon, and the telephone messages that passed between the houses of the initiated were cryptic and yet comprehended utterances. Then on an ever-memorable day two type-written copies of the Cologne sonnets circulated among the elect, and were secretly read in corners to the less fortunate.

On another day, Robbie must have called on me when I was out, for I found his card with his address, “Blaythwaite Fell,” upon it, when I returned. He was not able to go to Mrs. Withers’s house either on Sunday, Tuesday or Wednesday, but on Friday when she returned from a concert at which Royalty was present, she found a similar card with Agnes’s on her table, and all the account her parlour-maid could give was that Miss Lockett had come to the door with “another gentleman” whom she had not seen before, for Lord Marrible had not previously come to the house.

Mrs. Withers, trembling with chagrin (for she had not been presented to Royalty at the concert, and had missed so much more by not stopping at home) telephoned to Agnes at once, only to learn that Robbie had that moment left by air for the Continent.

It is better to describe than to let the reader imagine for himself the state into which Mrs. Withers was brought during these days, because the imagination from excess of excited fancy would go wildly astray. For she did not grow one atom distraught or deranged; she became on the contrary more concentrated and businesslike than ever. She telephoned daily to Agnes and me to know whether Robbie—she always spoke of him now as Robbie—had got back from the Continent, and told us quite firmly that she would put off any other engagement in order to receive him at her house, or meet him at any other house.

But pending that consummation she remained as regular and as resonant as a cuckoo-clock, and struck her social hours with the same fluty regularity. She did not lose her appetite, or take to cocaine or opium-smoking or drown herself in the Thames, as imagination might expect, but kept her head, went up several times in an aeroplane in order to get used to it in case Robbie on his return suggested an expedition, and temporarily stole my copy of the Cologne sonnets.

I am not quite sure about this, but I missed them one afternoon when she had been having tea with me, and found next day that in my absence she had called and gone into my sitting-room to write a note to me. On my return I found the note prominently displayed, and the Cologne sonnets concealed in the blotting-book which I had unsuccessfully searched the evening before. The case is not proved against her, but certainly after that she could quote from the Cologne sonnets....

Then one morning, even while I was wondering what made Agnes keep Robbie so long on the Continent, I was rung up by her maid, and asked to go round to her at once. In answer to a further inquiry, “It’s about Mr. Oriole, sir.”