VI
LADY ANN SPENWORTH HOLDS THE Corps
Diplomatique TO ITS DUTY
Lady Ann (to a friend of proved discretion): I feel—don't you?—that, if the embassies can give no enlightenment, they might just as well not be there. Paris is different, of course; nowadays it is hardly more than a suburb of London; with that vast cosmopolitan army always coming and going, one is hardly expected to be one's brother's keeper. And Washington is unlike any other capital; one goes there en poste—or not at all. But in Vienna or Rome... Goodness me, in the old days when my father was ambassador, it was a matter of course. When a new star swam into your ken, you made enquiries in the English colony; if not known there or at the embassy, a wise woman stayed her hand until she had a little something to go on.
In London the corps diplomatique is more diplomatique than corps. Just a swarm of warring atoms, some of them very charming, all of them invaluable if a man fails you at the last moment—a word by telephone to the Chancery: "Two men; I must have them; golf and bridge; the 4.20 from Waterloo; not to bring a servant." ... And so on and so forth. Indispensable for entertaining on Connie Maitland's lines. They are so nice and tractable; but worse than useless if you go officially, as it were, for a whispered word of guidance. As witness Mrs. Sawyer...
I cannot remember where I first met her; probably at Lady Maitland's... Sooner or later one meets everybody there; and, with all respect to dear Connie, I, personally, should not mind if some of her protégés came a little later and left a little sooner ... before I had time to be involved, I mean. It is all this craze for collecting money and, incidentally, carving a niche for oneself as the great organizer. One pictures Connie standing blindfold over a map of England and spearing it ruthlessly with a knitting-needle. "I, Constance Maitland," you can hear her saying, "ordain that here and here and here I will erect hospitals, libraries and wash-houses." ...
Whether the locality likes it or not, as it were. If the needle pierces Grasmere, so much the worse for Grasmere. It shall have its hospital—in mid-lake, regardless of the needless additional expense. I am serious about that, because I feel that, if Connie spent more judiciously, she would not have to appeal so persistently; some of us did contrive to keep the machine running even before my Lady Maitland descended upon us... It does not affect me much, because I am never able to contribute more than a trifle; one cannot undertake her new charities indiscriminately without doing an injustice to the old. Others are more happily placed, and my only quarrel with Connie is that I must either drop her or else consent to embrace all her new friends. This Mrs. Sawyer, for instance...
I forget whether you were in London at the time... No, of course not. Well, I can testify to you that her arrival created quite a stir. The rastaquouère type is not unknown to me by any means, but I thought Mrs. Sawyer a very favourable specimen. Not more than two or three and twenty, though these South American women reach their prime very early—and pass it; jet-black hair and eyes, dead-white face, scarlet lips, really beautiful teeth; altogether a very striking young woman, with just enough of a foreign accent to give an added charm—for those who like that sort of thing. She had a wistful, mysterious manner which accorded well with the ensemble ... and with the story they told about her. I never heard her maiden name, but I was told at once that she was one of the greatest heiresses in Peru—or it may have been Argentina. This Sawyer was a ne'er-do-well Irishman who had been sent to South America ... as one does have to send these people sometimes; he fascinated her, married her, beat her (I should think) and drank himself to death, leaving her utterly broken-hearted and disillusionized—not with him alone, but with the world... She had come to Europe to find a new life. Such was the story that Connie Maitland shouted at one; and, if poor Mrs. Sawyer overheard it, so much the worse for her...
A romantic setting, do you not agree? If you had seen her come into a room with those great, tragic eyes sweeping face after face as though she were looking for the one man who would gather up the fragments of her broken youth... If I had been a man... Superb diamonds, I need hardly say; and almost an arrogance of mourning, as though she would not be comforted... All the young men followed her with their eyes—spell-bound. And some men no longer young...
Do you see much of that pathetic class of over-ripe bachelor which my boy rather naughtily calls the "Have-Beens"? They are common, I suppose, to every age and country, but England seems to contain more than her fair share. Between thirty-five and fifty, not particularly well-connected, not a parti among them, not even extravagantly popular, but useful—apparently—and ubiquitous. I could give you the names of a dozen... Several of them have been in quite good regiments at some time or other. I understand they belong to the usual clubs; most of them dance quite competently; all of them play extremely good bridge, I am told... Several women I know make out a stop-gap list of them; then, if they're short of a man—it is several grades lower than the embassies, of course, and you are not expected to give even a day's notice—, the butler can telephone to them in turn until he finds one disengaged. Delightfully simple, is it not? Having no personalities of their own, they accord well with every one; having no pride, they never resent an eleventh-hour invitation; they are too discreet to pay unduly marked attention to a married woman, they know their place too well to attempt any intimacy with the girls.
I am not ashamed to confess that I have an old-fashioned prejudice in favour of a man who is a man; but the kind I am describing seem to ask nothing more of life than invitations and more invitations—and this strange modern privilege of being "Bunny" and "Chris" and "Theo" to women who are old enough to have outgrown such nonsense. If you entertain—I do not, as you are aware—, I believe it is essential to have some such list as I have indicated; and I am told that the men repay you by running errands and being useful in a thousand ways. For their sake I hope they never hear what other men say about them, even the fellow-members of their little community—there is no more contemptuous critic of "Bunny" than "Theo"—or what the women say, for that matter. We may, if we are built that way, ask "Bunny" or "Theo" to come and look at frocks with us; but we don't respect the man who does... If any girl dared ask Will to waste a morning, talking to her while she sat for her portrait...