“I daren’t, my dear man!” she said, puffing relentlessly on up the stairs. “I daren’t; there’s a feeling of damp in the air, and I think it’s going to rain! Does one, I ask you, carry one’s only child out into a storm? Do not then suggest that I should expose my one offspring—my poor little changeling of a voice! Ah, my little angel Gabrielle! so, there, you are all in blue and white, fresh from the Madonna, as it were! What a pleasure again! And what a drawing-room, Monsieur Flaubert! You don’t think it large enough to sing in? My good man, don’t sing! One cannot play every part at once. You make a perfect host! And those pink cakes over there; are they brought up on purpose for me? What an imagination! Aladdin himself never managed better with his lantern! Where do you keep your lantern, Monsieur Aladdin? Or do the Toriallis keep it for you? It’s just the kind of thing, now, that I see our dear Gabrielle collecting! Ah, here is the great Torialli himself!”
Madame Salvi sat down by the pink cakes and motioned Torialli to the seat next to her.
“Now I think,” he said with a good-natured smile, “that this is really capital of Flaubert, dear old man! he has such a head on his shoulders! I should never get on without him. Don’t you think he has done all this very well? I assure you I can’t think how he manages it—those flowers now—Gabrielle and I couldn’t run to orchids like this! I don’t believe Paris held them all; they tell me he wired to London; did you ever hear of such a man? You’ll sing for him to-night, won’t you, Salvi?”
La Salvi ate another pink cake before she answered. Flaubert was receiving Hester Lévi; for her, too, he went half way downstairs; she was the richest woman in Paris.
“No,” said Salvi at length. “I have a cold in my head, I think, or the bubonic plague, or perhaps the cholera; one never knows the beginning of those things. Why should I sing? I am not a gramophone to be turned on and off at everybody’s garden party! Why don’t you sing yourself, then, if you want so to please him?”
“I? Oh well, you know, I’m an old man now,” said Torialli, rather sadly. “When one has sung, as I have sung, one does not come up after the resurrection. It is better to stay dead, my dear Salvi—it’s better to stay dead!”
“Well, for my part,” said Salvi, taking up a green cake instead of a pink one, “I think it better not to die, so I take things very easily and in half an hour I go to bed. Is that the Duchesse de Richemont talking to your wife; because, if it is, bring her over to me; she’s a young woman, and she hasn’t eaten so many cakes, so she may as well do the moving! Thank you, Torialli, you’re a good fellow!”
Torialli was a very good fellow, and he proved it in more ways than one; when he had given his dear Salvi the young duchesse for her companion he did his best to brighten up the waiting soirée.
Still there it was! It would wait. It was waiting to hear La Salvi, and when the element of suspense has been introduced into pleasure the pleasure recedes before it like the ebb of a relentless tide. In vain Torialli moved everywhere with his friendly compliments to Flaubert and his good-tempered laughter; in vain Madame Torialli, always tactful, always serene, glided about among the guests, leaving behind her a wake of gratified smiles and purring amour propre. The evening dragged and people waited. The princes sent a message in from the theatre to ask when La Salvi was coming out, or were they to come in to hear her? because if they were, they would have to take off their tights, which would be really too many kinds of a picturesque nuisance; but at any rate something must be done promptly or they would be bored.
Flaubert took his courage in both hands and approached La Salvi. La Salvi went on talking to the Duchesse de Richemont and did not appear to see him coming. When he had reached her a hush came over the two drawing-rooms. Madame Salvi looked up and smiled.