NOËL ANSON and I had been great friends in our first youthful days, but our lives and ambitions had led us so contrarily that we had not seen each other for more than six years when, on the night two weeks ago, we happened to meet at the Club. We had both, of course, so much to say that, as often happens, we babbled on quite inartistically, spoiling many a good story in the gay, breathless exchange of reminiscence and experience; from all of which, however, clearly loomed out these great cardinal facts of our lives, that we had both married; my wife, who was a perfect woman, I explained, I had had to leave behind in New Zealand to take care of her old father; while his wife, who was also a perfect woman, he chivalrously insisted, had thought fit to divorce poor Noël some six months before.
But there was one story, anyway, which Noël Anson did not hurriedly spoil. He kept it long inside him—until that hour after ten when our corner of the smoking-room was entirely our own, and until he safely knew that I had talked enough to be able now to remain comfortably silent and attentive. Dear Noël, he dearly loved to tell a story!
"You are the very first person to hear this," he began untruthfully; and the calm grey eyes of my friend Noël Anson merged into the luxurious stare with which the raconteur hypnotically fixes his prey all the world over. Even thus must the gentle Marlow have transfixed his hearers as he led them inexorably through the labyrinth of Lord Jim's career, and through many another such intricacy of Conradian imagination.
"It's old, older than the stuff that hills and Armenians are made of," he said. "The ageless tale of the inevitable lady sitting alone in the inevitable box of the inevitable theatre to which our inevitable young man has gone to wile away a tiresome evening. History supplies the formula, it is only the details for which I'm personally responsible.
"There I sat, one night years ago, alone in a stall at the old Imperial; grimly smoking, and watching the footlight favourites 'getting-off' with a stage-boxful of rowdy young men who hadn't the grace even to try to imitate the few gentlemen who might at one time have been good enough to know 'em—until, on a moment, my eyes circled round the upper boxes and fixed on a marvellous lady in white, amazing and alone and unashamed....
"One has grown into the habit of using phrases trivially, but when I say that I caught my breath at the sight of that figure through the smoke, I mean that I actually did. There she suddenly was, a wonderful fact in a dreary place! A candle lighting even the dimmest recesses of that mausoleum! She, in contrast to all around, was real, exquisite life....
"And, of course, there was to her beauty the added attraction of the curious, as you can well understand. For there simply was not the slightest trace of the demi-monde about her, nothing at all to suggest that she might at any moment be the mistress of a great shopkeeper—as, the deuce take it, there well might be about any woman who had the effrontery to sit so shamelessly alone and—and soignée in front of a box at the Imperial! I mean, it was not the sort of thing one's sister could do and look dignified about—in fact, it is some very special and subtle quality which will prevent a well-dressed woman looking like a courtesan under certain circumstances. French women say English women haven't got it, and English women say French women have got nothing else. But this dark-haired, immobile, alien woman had just that quality—well, of utter 'rightness'; she was impeccable, you understand. It was more than an impertinence not to take for granted that she herself had walked into Cartier's and bought that rope of pearls around her throat.... For although she was in one of the upper boxes, I could see her quite clearly.
"But 'desirable'—that's the word for the particular creak in the hinge of one's mind as it enfolds the beauty of such a person—desirable! You wanted to stretch out a long graceful arm above the heads of all the stuffy people around you and catch her up, not by force, for she must yield; and then, as you brought her close to you, what happened would depend entirely on the sort of woman she was and the sort of man you were....
"Of course one couldn't let this sort of thing go on without, anyway, trying to see about it. In the first entr'acte I made a dash for that ginger-haired old boy by the box-office and got him to send a page-boy with a note. It naturally wasn't all done in a breath, for the note had obviously to be a note of the finer sort, it had to convey a very particular impertinence which wasn't an impertinence simply because it was so particular. You must know what I mean.... Oh, it had to be just right! You must be neither too casual nor too ingratiating. You must not write it either in clogs or in carpet slippers, but in a happy mean, in the most exquisite pumps that were ever contrived by Lobb. You may think I'm exaggerating, but really I sweated blood over those few lines—how, how did one know that one might not miss the best thing of a lifetime by a gauche word!
"I sent it off at last—the central idea of it being that I greatly desired the honour of her presence at supper, while apologising for my monstrous cheek in asking for her presence at same, and that I was sitting in the third seat from the end of the third row of the stalls.... Which, by the way, reminds me! It always pays to take a stall, for imagine writing to a marvellous woman who may have spent her maid's quarterly wages on a box and saying that you are sitting in the dress-circle—the dress-circle, mind you! It sounds so odd—anyway, I breathe again when I think that I might have missed a perfect thing by sitting in the dress-circle. One isn't being a snob, but an opportunist.