“O you cynical man!” cried the lady from Pittsburgh. She had wattles, and a jewelled lorgnette through which she made me aware of the disadvantage under which we suffered in that day and generation who went about the world without shoulder-straps. She leaned forward a little in order to obtain a better view of those worn by Mrs. Maturin’s General.
“Heavens!” I protested. “Do you think me as young as that? A cynic is a doggish person, who snarls. Now I may be a dog, but at bottom I am as sentimental as a school-girl. At the same time I can’t help noticing that people are very seldom of one piece. And I understand them better if I put together, or take apart, the different pieces. Besides, what people do is not often important. What may be important are their reasons for doing it. Don’t you think?”
She didn’t. A waiter, bearing away her oyster shells, widened the breach between us. Across it the lady from Pittsburgh confided to me that her husband, also without shoulder-straps, who sat at the left of our hostess, was in his quiet way working for Uncle Sam. I asked myself if her phrase did not perhaps contain an unnecessary preposition. For although half an hour before I had never heard of her, I had heard of him. He was one of those gentlemen so plentiful in Washington just then, full of good advice for the Government, and a little uneasy lest their particular good thing be looked into by some inquisitive commission. What his particular thing was I am too discreet to mention; but it was good enough to keep his wife’s wattles in the pink, not to say the purple, of condition, and to set them off by a quite rococo display of diamonds. They confirmed me anew in an old persuasion of mine that a diamond is a stone for a chambermaid—and not for those rare members of that oppressed profession who are as good as gold.
I should say for the lady from Pittsburgh that this reflection probably came to me because fate, generally readier with a surprise than with a piece of good fortune, had put at my other side the famous Miss Sanderson—or the famous Mrs. Maturin, as she is now. She had in her hair some of those perfect emeralds which are the only jewels she ever wears. She explains that she has to, because she was born in May and because a romantic parent took it into his head to name her Esmeralda. Her explanation would be less convincing if the same individual had not bequeathed her a dot as melodramatic as her name. Who bequeathed her that aureole of smouldering bronze hair—of the kind you read about in the short-story magazines, but never see—it is not for me to say. In such cases one usually suspects the beauty doctor. But no beauty doctor could achieve that ivory skin, or those grey-green eyes which—Well, they were so much more lyric than I remembered that I myself could almost break out in the most approved magazine manner about moonlit pools in mountain forests, etc. So if the lady from Pittsburgh considered me an ill-natured dog, I counted myself a lucky one, after all. Not that Mrs. Maturin is witty, or rich in recondite stores of gossip. But then, she needs no such adventitious attractions. She has only to enter a room to have all eyes rest upon her with the tranquil pleasure that is given, say, by an orchid in an old silver-gilt vase.
In furtively giving myself that pleasure, amid the chatter about food conservation which went on above a delicious terrapin soup, it amused me to recall the last time I had seen Mrs. Maturin, there on the other side of the world—Miss Sanderson as she was then. Whereupon she suddenly paid me the compliment of turning away from her General long enough to say in a low voice:
“I got it, you know. I’ll tell you about it when I get a chance. I haven’t forgotten that I really owe it to you. And it gave me Peter.”
At the moment I was dull enough to wonder what she meant. For I had imagined that her fortune had given her Peter. But as she turned back to the General she bent forward a little toward Peter, across the table, and I saw his eyes light up as they looked for hers. It was pretty to see, at that table where diamonds lit up double chins and pouched eyes from which all fire had long since faded. And no fortune could have bought that. It simply is not in the market.
Even as I told myself so, however, Peter’s expression changed so abruptly, as he caught me looking at him, with so little of pride and triumph in his eye, that I could not help asking myself if I had misread his radio message. Was it conceivable that any dramatic complication of the human comedy could lie in wait among the lights and flowers of so polite a dinner-party? At any rate, nothing but an S. O. S. could have the passion of Peter’s look, if it were not such a look as I first fancied. Yet why on earth should Peter be going down with all on board—now, at our comfortable Shoreham, in our safe Washington, before the lovely eyes of his well-dowered Esmeralda? And if by any chance he was, what could she do to save him?
I paid for these untimely and fantastic ruminations by finding that the lorgnette of the lady from Pittsburgh was no longer turned in my direction. It now glittered upon young Rodman of the Intelligence Service, at her right, who had been the means of her making that ever delightful discovery with regard to the smallness of the world. At my left Beauty and Valour were already deep in the war. As for myself, whom fate has seen fit to withhold from the paths of glory, and upon whom two great ladies now turned a sufficiently unflattering pair of backs, I was not too piqued to be grateful for a moment in which to turn over the case of Peter and Mrs. Peter.
Yes, Mrs. Maturin was right. I suppose I had, after all, given her Peter. At any rate, I had accidentally set in motion the series of events that ended in so eugenic a marriage. I have lived long enough, however, to learn that it is never safe to say where a series of events has ended. And knowing Peter far far better than I knew his wife, I could not help wondering whether the condition of equilibrium which had been arrived at were a stable one. Still, there had been that look across the table. And larger fortunes than Mrs. Maturin’s have been spent on objects less worthy than Peter. He was young: I fancy a little younger than his Esmeralda. He was tall and well made. He was very nearly as good-looking in his way as she was in hers. He was no fool, either. He could ride, he could shoot, he could play every imaginable game—though somehow he could never carry off the stakes. And he was enough of an engineer, or a mineralogist, or whatever an oil-man needs to be, for an English company to send him out to Persia, of all places, to tap rocks and drill holes for their dark operations. The only thing was—Well, I wondered whether he would prove completely satisfactory as a husband. But then, perhaps it is not the truly good young man who is most adored.