“Quite so, dear Mephisto; those red lips would rather kiss than tell, those large melting eyes are pure—to an uninformed observer. Honi soit—ha! ha! ha!”
The sarcastic laughter of the two men was drowned by the tuning of a beautiful Stradivarius, and for a moment the rising uproar of a London At Home was hushed.
Johann Staub stood near the piano, his long brown hair framing a strong Teutonic face, his deep, dark eyes roving over the mass of heads turned towards him. He played magnificently, electric vibrations ran through his leonine mane, still, they hardly listened; the silence that had followed his first bars of the Kreuzer Sonata was soon broken, as voices one by one resumed their interrupted chatting, and the Dowager Lady Pendelton, lulled by the heat and the scent of exotic flowers, let her senile chin drop on her wrinkled breast. She was asleep. Staub ended his Sonata, and loud applause broke loose, a kind of thanksgiving applause, not in honour of the superb way in which the artist had played, but to celebrate their relief and satisfaction at his having finished. Old women went up to him, pressed his hands, asked him to luncheon, to dinner—would they were young—to what would they not invite him! The one had heard Paganini—“Psh! he was no match to you.” Another had known Beriot very well—he was the only one to whom he could be compared. Lady Pendelton woke suddenly, gave a few approving grunts, her eyes still shut, while she struck the parquet with her ebony stick. She wanted Mrs Webster to bring Staub to her at once, as she would like her granddaughter, Lady Augusta, to have some violin lessons.
“Danford, are you not, like me, struck by the incongruity of all this?”
“My lord, to-morrow, after breakfast, I shall submit to you some of my observations on the subject of entertainments. Look at these women seated on chairs, these men bending over them. Their movements are without grace and their hair badly dressed; we cannot have any more of the Patrick Campbell style in our modern mythology. Besides, there are too many people here, and in this Edenic attire the less people you group together, the better the effect.”
“I agree with you, Dan; but for God’s sake let us leave this room—I see someone approaching the piano. Let us be off, I am dying with thirst.” They edged their way down the staircase, not without trouble, for the crowd was coming back from partaking of refreshment, and climbing up the stairs with the renewed vigour that champagne and sandwiches give to drawing-room visitors. As they jammed sideways through the dining-room door, Lionel frowned at the discomfort, and Dan, finding himself breast to breast with his pupil, murmured to him,—
“I should abolish this barbarous fashion of going downstairs to feed at the altar of the tea-urn and bread-and-butter. Ah! at last we are through!”
“The buffet system has always revolted me”—a shiver ran down Lionel’s back. “That kind of social bar at which both sexes voraciously satisfy their internal craving has, to my mind, been a proof of the uncivilised state of Society.”
“But the whole thing is based on false pretences, my lord. Can I get you a glass of champagne?” and he ducked his head between two women who were talking loudly and munching incessantly. “Parties like these are Zoo entertainments at which the pranks of some animal are to be viewed; it is either a foreign prince, a cowboy, or a monkey.”
“Very often,” added Lionel, sipping his champagne, “it is not so original, and only consists of personal interests; this one is going to be introduced to a member of Parliament; a woman is going to meet her lover; a man to see his future bride. There is very little sociability in our social bazaars, I assure you.”