His companions were already paying their bills, so he abandoned his cheese and walked upstairs with them to the bright biscuit-coloured card-room overlooking the gardens of Buckingham Palace. While the others drank their coffee, he tried to write a very short, very simple note which somehow rejected his best efforts of phrasing. He had torn up four unsatisfactory drafts when Lord Ettrick threw away his cigar and asked whether any one was walking towards the Privy Council.
"I'm only scribbling one note," Eric answered.
What he was always in danger of forgetting was that Barbara was really only a child; she had begun to speak with a delightful ripple of laughter, and he had driven it from her voice. When she apologized, there was something hurt, something very much surprised—as though he had seen her smiling and slapped the smile away.
"Please forgive me," he wrote. "I didn't mean to be rude."
5
Before deciding whether to send his letter by hand, Eric ascertained that, by posting it, he could be sure of its reaching its destination by the last delivery. Then he walked through the Park with Lord Ettrick, left him at the door of the Privy Council Office and returned home for an hour's work before rehearsal. On leaving the Regency, he came back to Ryder Street and dressed for dinner. His own letters clattered into their wire cage at a quarter past eight, and, before sitting down to dinner, he transferred the telephone to his dining-room. The child was unlikely to refuse so open an invitation to ring up and say that all was well.…
There was no call during dinner, no call as he worked in the smoking-room with the telephone and lamp on a table at his elbow, no call when he went to bed, though he lay reading for half-an-hour after his usual time, to be ready for her. The morning brought a pencilled note ("Surprisingly tidy hand," Eric commented, "seeing what she's like"), instinct with a new aloofness and restraint. "After your refreshingly plain hint that I was a nuisance to you, I determined that you should not have occasion to suffer from my importunity. You may lunch with us on Saturday, if you like. And I shall be very glad indeed to see you, but you must not feel that you are doing this to please me. I SAY as you THINK: that I have no claim on you. Barbara."
Eric smiled indulgently and tossed the note into a despatch-box before ringing for his secretary. He must be more careful in future.…
When he looked at his engagement-book on Saturday morning, he found that Barbara had named no hour; which was characteristic of her. When he telephoned to the house, there was no answer; which—by no great stretch of calumny—was characteristic of the house in which she lived. Ninety per cent. of the people that he knew lunched at half-past one, excluding a Cabinet Minister, who lunched punctually at a quarter past two, and three Treasury clerks and one novelist who lunched at one; accordingly, at half-past one, he presented himself in Berkeley Square, to be informed by a sedately combative butler that luncheon was at two o'clock but that Barbara was believed to be in her room.
Eric followed his guide up four short flights of marble stairs and was shewn into the untidiest room that he had ever seen, filled in equal measure with the priceless and the worthless. The bindings of Riviere rubbed shoulders with tattered paper-backs; a cabinet of Japanese porcelain was outraged by foolish, intrusive china cats; there was a shelf of Waterford glass with a dynasty of blown-glass pigs, descending from the ten-inch-high parent to the thumb-nail baby of the litter—gravely and ridiculously arranged in a serpentine procession. Fifty kinds of trophy adorned the mantel-piece, ranging from a West African idol at one end to a pathetic, brown-eyed Teddy Bear at the other, with stiff, conventional photographs and occasional miniatures for punctuation. He recognized his own silver flask—and passed on, with a smile. Three small tables were almost buried beneath their load of pink carnations; a box of cigarettes, half-open and half-empty, lay tucked between the cushions in each of three arm-chairs, and the white bearskin rug was littered with The Times, a round milliner's box, two cheque-books and a volume of Ronsard.