After a pause Manon tried again. “The young man who has just entered the drawing-room has beautiful eyes. Do you not think so?”
“He’s my brother David. And he’s only a boy. He’s the youngest of us.”
Her prospective friend shrugged plump shoulders semi-bare in her quaint early Victorian frock. “Too young for me, bien entendu. Doubtless he will be infatuated with Mama. The men of her age who visit her, take no notice of Mama, comme femme, you understand, but try always to play with me. And they pretend it is as a child that they make a pet of me, and I pretend too, and Mama. But we all know it is not so,” she nodded wisely. Certainly, if Nell were to attempt the task of preserving Manon’s early-morning dreaminess, here was an excellent opportunity to start. Instead, she sped across the room to David; pulled imperiously, desperately at his arm. “David, I’m ready to go home with you. Quite ready.”
But David was not to be beguiled. He had found in La llorraine what had been so poignantly missing from his life since the outbreak of war. He had re-found his Continent. She embodied all the thraldom of a tour abroad; all the lost delights he had described to Richard. Her looks, her voice, her setting, her clothes and perfume even; the outflung movements of her long white ringed hands, her bits of richly suggestive reminiscences, with ejaculations given in all languages. Sudden familiarities; her exhaustive and professional acquaintance with foreign music, foreign artists and their very questionable careers; of foreign cities—their opera-houses and their royalties; gossip, garlic-spiced and succulent, or else melodramatic and sonorous—her whole attitude towards life, towards the ingénue, towards David himself——
He vowed afterwards to Antonia, in ecstatic gratitude for her share in bringing him hither, that never again while he had the freedom of the flat near Elgin Avenue, would he fret at island limitations. “She’s simply incredible. When she talks, I can smell hot coffee and those jolly bright brown lengths of bread that one plunged for at the buffet, arriving at Boulogne or Dieppe....”
“I’m glad you’re happy, at least. My other two introductions to the party look simply sodden with misery. I think we must be unselfish, and get them away.”
She indicated Nell and Samson, the former still being entertained by Manon; the other, an obstinate misfit in the company of Deb and Kennedy.
Antonia Verity was Cliffe’s only fixed territory; his spiritual headquarters. He returned to Antonia after all his zig-zagging spurts of enthusiasm. But Deb was his present caprice. He took Deb with him everywhere; displayed her proudly to such fragments of his circle as were handy; told her all the stories of all his loves; telephoned her before and after meals; wrote her long and blasphemously witty letters, or postcards that were the scandal of Montagu Hall; made her free of his home and his books and his mother, teased her and argued with her and shocked her and bullied her and—did not make love to her.
It was an enervating existence—for Deb. There was a peculiarly flattering quality to Cliffe Kennedy’s absorption in her, even in its impermanence. Other queens had reigned ... other queens would reign.
She was not in the least infatuated by Kennedy, in spite of occasional efforts to believe this the cause of the diffused glamour on all her days and nights. His personality was not quite that of a real man ... it was a vivid tricky personality—wantonly elusive—wantonly exacting. He had to be forgiven half a hundred lapses of manners—even of humanity—per instant. He was a veritable lob of mischief-making, untrustworthy, with not even that one point of reliable consistency of being a law unto himself. No one could ever hope to pin him down to any statement or opinion. Yet, with these traits, there was nothing womanish about Cliffe Kennedy. His tastes were masculine; his language forcible; his brain elastic but brilliant. Other men—ordinary men—liked and sought his company, while deploring his fantastic appearance, the leathery spider-webbed face and the two bits of blue inset with the vividly light effect of a chimney-sweeper’s eyes among the soot; his abandonment of yellow hair; his wild sad thin legs that were like that kind of poem which having no end or beginning, straggles on and on in various shapeless forms of incoherence. It was a pity, with those legs, that he should favour so strongly the tweed knickerbocker style of clothing. He would have been better suited by a jester’s motley of red and yellow, or a picturesque costume of fluttering rags and slouch hat and knotted staff. He resembled that sort of concentrated allegory in pedestrian form which a few years ago meandered variously through novel and drama as the Wanderer, the Pilgrim, the Minstrel, the Fiddler, the Vagabond, the Gypsy, the Tramp, the Pedlar, the Just-Outsider, the Never-Coming-Quite-in-er. He was the vanguard of that type with which Deb was presently to become so familiar—the young male of the transition period, who, perhaps in self-defence, rose to match the half-and-half girl; young male who required neither extreme of mistress nor wife, but accepted, in a spiritual sense only, the semi-privileges accorded him—the licence of speech confidential or witty; and temporary rights of appropriation—by an unspoken avowal that he might be trusted in all situations not to transgress limits; but in return it must be clearly understood that he was on his guard against the responsibilities of wedlock: