CHAPTER III.
The terrace in front of the house was a long narrow strip of turf,bounded along its outer edge by a graceful stone balustrade. Two littlesummer-houses of brick stood at either end. Below the house the groundsloped very steeply away, and the terrace was a remarkably high one;from the balusters to the sloping lawn beneath was a drop of thirtyfeet. Seen from below, the high unbroken terrace wall, built likethe house itself of brick, had the almost menacing aspect of afortification--a castle bastion, from whose parapet one looked outacross airy depths to distances level with the eye. Below, in theforeground, hedged in by solid masses of sculptured yew trees, lay thestone-brimmed swimming-pool. Beyond it stretched the park, with itsmassive elms, its green expanses of grass, and, at the bottom of thevalley, the gleam of the narrow river. On the farther side of the streamthe land rose again in a long slope, chequered with cultivation. Lookingup the valley, to the right, one saw a line of blue, far-off hills.
The tea-table had been planted in the shade of one of the littlesummer-houses, and the rest of the party was already assembled about itwhen Denis and Priscilla made their appearance. Henry Wimbush had begunto pour out the tea. He was one of those ageless, unchanging men on thefarther side of fifty, who might be thirty, who might be anything. Denishad known him almost as long as he could remember. In all those yearshis pale, rather handsome face had never grown any older; it waslike the pale grey bowler hat which he always wore, winter andsummer--unageing, calm, serenely without expression.
Next him, but separated from him and from the rest of the world by thealmost impenetrable barriers of her deafness, sat Jenny Mullion. She wasperhaps thirty, had a tilted nose and a pink-and-white complexion, andwore her brown hair plaited and coiled in two lateral buns over herears. In the secret tower of her deafness she sat apart, looking down atthe world through sharply piercing eyes. What did she think of men andwomen and things? That was something that Denis had never been able todiscover. In her enigmatic remoteness Jenny was a little disquieting.Even now some interior joke seemed to be amusing her, for she wassmiling to herself, and her brown eyes were like very bright roundmarbles.
On his other side the serious, moonlike innocence of Mary Bracegirdle'sface shone pink and childish. She was nearly twenty-three, but onewouldn't have guessed it. Her short hair, clipped like a page's, hung ina bell of elastic gold about her cheeks. She had large blue china eyes,whose expression was one of ingenuous and often puzzled earnestness.
Next to Mary a small gaunt man was sitting, rigid and erect inhis chair. In appearance Mr. Scogan was like one of those extinctbird-lizards of the Tertiary. His nose was beaked, his dark eye had theshining quickness of a robin's. But there was nothing soft or graciousor feathery about him. The skin of his wrinkled brown face had a dry andscaly look; his hands were the hands of a crocodile. His movementswere marked by the lizard's disconcertingly abrupt clockwork speed; hisspeech was thin, fluty, and dry. Henry Wimbush's school-fellow and exactcontemporary, Mr. Scogan looked far older and, at the same time, farmore youthfully alive than did that gentle aristocrat with the face likea grey bowler.
Mr. Scogan might look like an extinct saurian, but Gombauld wasaltogether and essentially human. In the old-fashioned natural historiesof the 'thirties he might have figured in a steel engraving as a type ofHomo Sapiens--an honour which at that time commonly fell to LordByron. Indeed, with more hair and less collar, Gombauld would havebeen completely Byronic--more than Byronic, even, for Gombauld was ofProvencal descent, a black-haired young corsair of thirty, with flashingteeth and luminous large dark eyes. Denis looked at him enviously. Hewas jealous of his talent: if only he wrote verse as well as Gombauldpainted pictures! Still more, at the moment, he envied Gombauld hislooks, his vitality, his easy confidence of manner. Was it surprisingthat Anne should like him? Like him?--it might even be something worse,Denis reflected bitterly, as he walked at Priscilla's side down the longgrass terrace.
Between Gombauld and Mr. Scogan a very much lowered deck-chair presentedits back to the new arrivals as they advanced towards the tea-table.Gombauld was leaning over it; his face moved vivaciously; he smiled, helaughed, he made quick gestures with his hands. From the depths of thechair came up a sound of soft, lazy laughter. Denis started as he heardit. That laughter--how well he knew it! What emotions it evoked in him!He quickened his pace.
In her low deck-chair Anne was nearer to lying than to sitting. Herlong, slender body reposed in an attitude of listless and indolentgrace. Within its setting of light brown hair her face had a prettyregularity that was almost doll-like. And indeed there were momentswhen she seemed nothing more than a doll; when the oval face, with itslong-lashed, pale blue eyes, expressed nothing; when it was no more thana lazy mask of wax. She was Henry Wimbush's own niece; that bowler-likecountenance was one of the Wimbush heirlooms; it ran in the family,appearing in its female members as a blank doll-face. But across thisdollish mask, like a gay melody dancing over an unchanging fundamentalbass, passed Anne's other inheritance--quick laughter, light ironicamusement, and the changing expressions of many moods. She was smilingnow as Denis looked down at her: her cat's smile, he called it, for novery good reason. The mouth was compressed, and on either side of ittwo tiny wrinkles had formed themselves in her cheeks. An infinityof slightly malicious amusement lurked in those little folds, in thepuckers about the half-closed eyes, in the eyes themselves, bright andlaughing between the narrowed lids.
The preliminary greetings spoken, Denis found an empty chair betweenGombauld and Jenny and sat down.
"How are you, Jenny?" he shouted to her.
Jenny nodded and smiled in mysterious silence, as though the subject ofher health were a secret that could not be publicly divulged.
"How's London been since I went away?" Anne inquired from the depth ofher chair.
The moment had come; the tremendously amusing narrative was waiting forutterance. "Well," said Denis, smiling happily, "to begin with..."
"Has Priscilla told you of our great antiquarian find?" Henry Wimbushleaned forward; the most promising of buds was nipped.
"To begin with," said Denis desperately, "there was the Ballet..."
"Last week," Mr. Wimbush went on softly and implacably, "we dug up fiftyyards of oaken drain-pipes; just tree trunks with a hole bored throughthe middle. Very interesting indeed. Whether they were laid down by themonks in the fifteenth century, or whether..."
Denis listened gloomily. "Extraordinary!" he said, when Mr. Wimbush hadfinished; "quite extraordinary!" He helped himself to another sliceof cake. He didn't even want to tell his tale about London now; he wasdamped.
For some time past Mary's grave blue eyes had been fixed upon him. "Whathave you been writing lately?" she asked. It would be nice to have alittle literary conversation.
"Oh, verse and prose," said Denis--"just verse and prose."
"Prose?" Mr. Scogan pounced alarmingly on the word. "You've been writingprose?"
"Yes."
"Not a novel?"
"Yes."
"My poor Denis!" exclaimed Mr. Scogan. "What about?"
Denis felt rather uncomfortable. "Oh, about the usual things, you know."
"Of course," Mr. Scogan groaned. "I'll describe the plot for you. LittlePercy, the hero, was never good at games, but he was always clever.He passes through the usual public school and the usual university andcomes to London, where he lives among the artists. He is bowed down withmelancholy thought; he carries the whole weight of the universe uponhis shoulders. He writes a novel of dazzling brilliance; he dabblesdelicately in Amour and disappears, at the end of the book, into theluminous Future."
Denis blushed scarlet. Mr. Scogan had described the plan of his novelwith an accuracy that was appalling. He made an effort to laugh. "You'reentirely wrong," he said. "My novel is not in the least like that." Itwas a heroic lie. Luckily, he reflected, only two chapters were written.He would tear them up that very evening when he unpacked.
Mr. Scogan paid no attention to his denial,
but went on: "Why willyou young men continue to write about things that are so entirelyuninteresting as the mentality of adolescents and artists? Professionalanthropologists might find it interesting to turn sometimes from thebeliefs of the Blackfellow to the philosophical preoccupations of theundergraduate. But you can't expect an ordinary adult man, like myself,to be much moved by the story of his spiritual troubles. And after all,even in England, even in Germany and Russia, there are more adults thanadolescents. As for the artist, he is preoccupied with problems thatare so utterly unlike those of the ordinary adult man--problems of pureaesthetics which don't so much as present themselves to people likemyself--that a description of his mental processes is as boring to theordinary reader as a piece of pure mathematics. A serious book aboutartists regarded as artists is unreadable; and a book about artistsregarded as lovers, husbands, dipsomaniacs, heroes, and the like isreally not worth writing again. Jean-Christophe is the stock artist ofliterature, just as Professor Radium of 'Comic Cuts' is its stock man ofscience."
"I'm sorry to hear I'm as uninteresting as all that," said Gombauld.
"Not at all, my dear Gombauld," Mr. Scogan hastened to explain. "As alover or a dipsomaniac, I've no doubt of your being a most fascinatingspecimen. But as a combiner of forms, you must honestly admit it, you'rea bore."
"I entirely disagree with you," exclaimed Mary. She was somehow alwaysout of breath when she talked. And her speech was punctuated by littlegasps. "I've known a great many artists, and I've always found theirmentality very interesting. Especially in Paris. Tschuplitski, forexample--I saw a great deal of Tschuplitski in Paris this spring..."
"Ah, but then you're an exception, Mary, you're an exception," said Mr.Scogan. "You are a femme superieure."
A flush of pleasure turned Mary's face into a harvest moon.