“Why isn’t your best boy in khaki?” laughed Deb.
“He has been medically rejected. That bit of information happened to be correct. It’s those dotted fragments of truth which make the whole so perilous. It can’t be altogether discarded.”
“And has he really only a year to live? Oh, Antonia——”
“Bless your tears of sympathy, little girl. Cliffe will probably be a hale old man of eighty. Come along....”
Mrs Verity detained Deb after supper on some pretext, while Cliffe and Antonia returned to the studio. In any normal mother, this piece of manœuvring could easily be interpreted as a wish to further a favourable “match” for Antonia; and Mrs Verity’s intentions were similar and yet startlingly dissimilar; she was benignly hopeful that a free union with that charming Mr Kennedy would be that step in the wrong direction, which she so earnestly desired for Antonia’s good.
“Antonia is the sweetest of companions, and also deserves my supreme respect as an artist,” she told Deb. “But sometimes, Miss Marcus, and oh, I trust indeed that I may be mistaken, sometimes she strikes me as being just a trifle narrow-minded. She seems too content to accept those illogical conventions which have been fetishes since countless years. It would grieve me inexpressibly if Antonia should miss some of the Fullness of life. Do you not agree with me, Miss Marcus, and pray, if you do not agree, do not hesitate to contradict me—do not hesitate to call me unreasonable, but do you not think”—mittened hands fervently clasped in her lap—“that it is Antonia’s duty to the Age to be a little more abandoned in her conduct?”
If one could judge by Kennedy’s conversation during the rest of the evening, Antonia’s friends at least were certainly not to be complained of in that respect. Cliffe slaughtered their presumable confidences with as little ruth as a butcher slaughters lambs, and then disported himself merrily among the mangled heaps. A certain Theo Pandos, after completely maiming the glorious genius of Gillian Sherwood, was flirting shamefully with “Winifred,” who, it seemed, was found in dire need by Gillian on her doorstep, and taken in and clothed and fed. “And I tell you, Antonia, and this is Gospel truth, that sticky, white-slug girl has done the doorstep trick before.... Blair Stevenson knows a man who swears for a fact he met her at Tom Maryon’s, the dramatist, three years ago, under the very same conditions. He made Blair take his oath never to breathe one word about it, for fear of making mischief. One doorstep?—she’s lain on twenty-seven doorsteps.”
From “Winifred,” Cliffe went on to “Zoe” and “Blair,” and was equally startling in his revelations. There was nothing of vindictive or paltry gossip in Cliffe’s stupendous onslaughts upon the truth. He committed mortality on lines that waxed from merely generous to colossal, breath-taking. He flung about reputations and caught them, as deftly as a juggler his plates; or dropped them with magnificent disregard of the smash. Treachery was here conducted on as opulent a scale of grandeur as falsehood. Coincidence was blown out to a lusty, full-bellied creature triumphant over those meagre, lean-throated sisters of accuracy and consistency. No human being could have survived one day of life under such a stress of superlative achievement, such haphazard of occurrence, such complicated interplay of motives, actions, and reactions.
Antonia did not interrupt Mr Cliffe Kennedy’s entertainment. It was a very fine one-man performance, and lasted until eleven o’clock. Then he relapsed into moody depression, and said he would go mad unless he could be solitary ... but would kindly see Deb home first, if she promised not to talk.