1
Mrs. Gray occurred suddenly, as has been said, but in accustomed surroundings: at one of those parties, in fact, that are nightly scattered about a corner of London, and are, through open first-floor windows, apt to hit the solitary passer-by of the small hours across the eyes with the vivid glare and gesticulation of their gaiety. These parties are much despised (a) by the people who go to them; (b) by the people who don’t get the chance; and (c) by essayists who begin their essays with: “I sometimes ask myself what hidden pleasures there are to be found in Crowds....”
This particular party, in June, 1912, in the Halliday house in Deanery Street, was quite small; or rather it looked small, for although there were present about a hundred people they were, as usual at a Halliday party, so scattered about the various rooms upstairs and downstairs that there were never more than ten or twelve couples to encourage the band in the ballroom; so that, if you were a bad dancer, you had no chance to use the excuse so often effective on a crowded floor, that the art of dancing is not to dance but to avoid other dancers.
This was an intimate party: no decorations or dowagers. The frequent Halliday parties of the intimate sort were justly renowned, for Euphemia, Mrs. Halliday, was expert in achieving that pleasant impromptu effect which is the result of a lavish and organised hospitality. (The name must not, by the way, be confused with that of the famous brewers. The Hallidays, Euphemia said, were, and always had been, bankers and gentlemen, not brewers and aristocrats.) No one “received” you at these parties, though they were by no means of that slack order to which “every one” could go; you just happened on your host, John, or your hostess, Euphemia—so dark and florid she always was!—as time went on; and you talked with the one and danced with the other according to the press of your business elsewhere. You had gone there that night in response to a casual telephone message from Euphemia’s butler, the formidable Hebblethwaite, and you left as casually; and you always left very late, and you always left wondering why you had stayed so long. But there was one young man, anyway, who on leaving Deanery Street that night did not wonder why he had stayed so long, and that young man’s name was Ivor Marlay. He was wondering about something else.
On his entrance, just after midnight, he had happened on Gerald Trevor descending the stairs alone, to have a peaceful “glass of wine” in the as yet uncrowded supper-room. From the stairs Trevor’s face lit up with his quick little smile of pleasure. There was a great deal of courtliness in the man, but he summarised it all in that jerky little smile: keeping his speech as free from it as every one else’s, or nearly.
“Join me,” he said, taking Ivor’s arm, “and we will talk a little.”
Gerald Trevor was inevitable at all such parties, but not nearly so boring as you might think from that inevitability. No one ever thought Gerald Trevor boring, not even the women who were tired of him. He was that rare person who can join two others without interrupting their conversation. He was in between the generations, neither the old nor the new, neither too courtly nor too careless; and he looked, with his small slender figure, his thick fair hair and fair moustache cropped very close to his lip, his keen and scholarly blue eyes, and the nose which rather surprisingly stuck out from his face like the peak of a cap and gave his features a surprising look of keen aggression—he looked delightfully like a man who has loved a few women and killed a few men. And he probably had, for he had been through the Boer war and had been divorced by his wife, though that was by arrangement, as she wanted to marry some one else; whereupon Gerald Trevor had thought to himself: “Thou shalt not commit alimony,” and didn’t.
“You and I,” said Trevor, juggling with a macaroon, a cigarette, and a glass, as they stood at the long table of Hebblethwaite’s kingdom—“You and I are always meeting at these places, Ivor. And, it seems to me, we’re meeting in spirit, as well as in fact. Now that’s very strange, don’t you think, considering——”
Ivor grinned. “You are about to refer,” he said softly, “to the amazing fact that you are old enough to be my father—yes, you are, Gerald. I never see you but you say that at least once and would like to say it twice, and I can’t help thinking that it’s a kind of parlour-game peculiar to the house of Trevor. I feel I ought to slap you on the shoulder twice and say “Bo,” and then you’ll tell me where you’ve hidden something....”
“Ass,” said Trevor.