CHAPTER VI
At the door of the Cafe Royal they stopped, and Miss Van Tuyn laid ahand on Lady Sellingworth's arm.
"Do come in, dearest. It will really amuse you," she said urgently."And--I'll be truthful--I want to show you off to the Georgians as myfriend. I want them to know how wonderful an Edwardian can be."
"Please--please!" pleaded Jennings from under his sombrero. "Dick wouldrevel in you. You would whip him into brilliance. I know it. You admirehis work, surely?"
"I admire it very much."
"And he is more wonderful still when he's drunk. And to-night--I feelit--he will be drunk. I pledge myself that Dick Garstin will be drunk."
"I'm sure it would be a very great privilege to see Mr. Garstin drunk.But I must go home. Good night, dear Beryl."
"But the little Bolshevik! You must meet the little Bolshevik!" criedJennings.
Lady Sellingworth shook her deer-like head, smiling.
"Good night, Mr. Craven."
"But he is going to get you a taxi," said Miss Van Tuyn.
"Yes, and if you will allow me I am going to leave you at your door,"said Craven, with decision.
A line appeared in Miss Van Tuyn's low forehead, but she only said:
"And then you will come back and join us."
"Thank you," said Craven.
He took off his hat. Miss Van Tuyn gave him a long and eloquent look,which was really not unlike a Leap Year proposal. Then she entered thecafe with Jennings. Craven thought at that moment that her back lookedunusually rigid.
A taxi was passing. He held up his hand. It stopped. Lady Sellingworthand he got in, after he had given the address to the chauffeur.
"What a lovely girl Beryl Van Tuyn is!" said Lady Sellingworth, as theydrove off.
"She is--very lovely."
"And she has a lot of courage, moral courage."
"Is it?" he could not help saying.
"Yes. She lives as she chooses to live. And yet she isn't married."
"Would marriage make it all easier for her?"
"Much, if she married the man who suited her."
"I wonder what sort of a man that would be."
"So does she, I think. But she's a strange girl. I should not besurprised if she were never to marry at all."
"Don't you think she would fall in love?"
"Yes. For I think every living woman is capable of that. But she has thesort of intellect which would not be tricked for very long by the heart.Any weakness of hers would soon be over, I fancy."
"I dare say you are right. In fact I believe you are generally right.She told me you were a book of wisdom. And I feel that it is true."
"Here is Berkeley Square."
"How wrong it is of these chauffeurs to drive so fast! It is almost asbad as in Paris. They defy the law. I should like to have this man up."
He got out. She followed him, looking immensely tall in the dimness.
"I am not going back to the Cafe Royal," he said.
"But it will be amusing. And I think they are certainly expecting you."
"I am not going there."
She rang. Instantly the door was opened by the handsome middle-agedbutler.
"Then come in for a little while," she said casually. "Murgatroyd, youmight bring us up some tea and lemon, or will you have whisky and soda,Mr. Craven?"
"I would much rather have tea and lemon, please," he said.
A great fire was burning in the hall. Again Craven felt that he was ina more elegant London than the London of modern days. As he went upthe wide, calm staircase, and tasted the big silence of the house, hethought of the packed crowd in the Cafe Royal, of the uproar there, ofthe smoke wreaths, of the staring heterogeneous faces, of the shoutingor sullenly folded lips, of the--perhaps--tipsy man of genius, ofJennings with his green eyes, his black beard, his tall ebony staff, ofthe "little bloodthirsty thing" with the round Russian face, of Miss VanTuyn in the midst of it all, sitting by the side of Enid Blunt, smokingcigarettes, and searching the men's faces for the looks which were foodfor her craving. And he loved the contrast which was given to him.
"Do go in and sit by the fire, and I'll come in a moment," said thehusky voice he was learning to love. "I'm just going to take off myhat."
Craven opened the great mahogany door and went in.
The big room was very dimly lighted by two standard electric lamps, onenear the fireplace, the other in a distant corner where a grand pianostood behind a huge china bowl in which a pink azalea was blooming.There was a low armchair near the fire by a sofa. He sat down in it,and picked up a book which lay on a table close beside it. What did sheread--this book of wisdom?
"_Musiciens d'aujourd'hui_," by Romain Rolland.
Craven thought he was disappointed. There was no revelation for him inthat. He held the book on his knee, and wondered what he had expectedto find, what type of book. What special line of reading was LadySellingworth's likely to be? He could imagine her dreaming over "Wisdomand Destiny," or perhaps over "The Book of Pity and of Death." On theother hand, it seemed quite natural to think of her smiling her mockingsmile over a work of delicate, or even of bitter, irony, such asAnatole France's story of Pilate at the Baths of Baies, or study ofthe Penguins. He could not think that she cared for sentimental books,though she might perhaps have a taste for works dealing with genuinepassion.
He heard the door open gently, and got up. Lady Sellingworth came in.She had not changed her dress, which was a simple day dress of black.She had only taken off her fur and hat, and now came towards him, stillwearing white gloves and holding a large black fan in her hand.
"What's that you've got?" she asked. "Oh--my book!"
"Yes. I took it up because I wondered what you were reading. I thinkwhat people read by preference tells one something of what they are. Iwas interested to know what you read. Forgive my curiosity."
She sat down by the fire, opened the fan, and held it between her faceand the flames.
"I read all sorts of things."
"Novels?"
"I very seldom read a novel now. Here is our tea. But I know you wouldrather have a whisky-and-soda."
"As a rule I should, but not to-night. I want to drink what you aredrinking."
"And to smoke what I am smoking?" she said, with a faintly ironic smile.
"Yes--please."
She held out a box of cigarettes. The butler went out of the room.
"I love this house," said Craven abruptly. "I love its atmosphere."
"It isn't a modern atmosphere, is it?"
"Neither distinctively modern, nor in the least old-fashioned. I thinkthe right adjective for it would be perhaps--"
He paused and sat silent for a moment.
"I hardly know. There's something remote, distinguished and yet verywarm and intimate about it."
He looked at her and added, almost with hardihood.
"It's not a cold, or even a reserved house."
"Coldness and unnecessary reserve are tiresome--indeed, I might almostsay abhorrent--to me."
She had given him his tea and lemon and taken hers.
"But not aloofness?"
"You have travelled?"
"Yes."
"Well, you know how, when travelling, it is easy to get into intimacieswith people whom one doesn't want to be intimate with at home."
"Yes. I know all about that."
"At my age one has learnt to avoid not only such intimacies but manyothers less disagreeable, but which at moments might give one what I canonly call mental gooseflesh. Is that aloofness?"
"I think it would probably be called so by some."
"By whom?"
"Oh, by mental gooseflesh-givers!"
She laughed, laughed quite out with a completeness which had somethingalmost of youth in it.
"I wonder," he added rather ruefully, after the pause which the laughhad filled up, "I wonder whether I am one of them?"
"I don't think you are."
"And Ambrose Jennings?"
/> "That's a clever man!" was her reply.
And then she changed the conversation to criticism in general, and tothe type of clever mind which, unable to create, analyses the creationsof others sensitively.
"But I much prefer the creators," she presently said.
"So do I. They are like the fresh air compared with the air in acarefully closed room," said Craven. "Talking of closed rooms, don't youthink it is strange the liking many brilliant men and women have, bothcreators and analysers of creators, for the atmosphere of garish orsordid cafes?"
"You are thinking of the Cafe Royal?"
"Yes. Do you know it?"
"Don't tell Beryl--but I have never been in it. Nevertheless, I knowexactly what it is like."
"By hearsay?"
"Oh, no. In years gone by I have been into many of the cafes in Paris."
"And did you like them and the life in them?"
"In those days they often fascinated me, as no doubt the Cafe Royal andits life fascinates Beryl to-day. The hectic appeals to something inyouth, when there is often fever in the blood. Strong lights, noise, thehuman pressure of crowds, the sight of myriads of faces, the sound ofmany voices--all that represents life to us when we are young. Calm,empty spaces, single notes, room all round us for breathing amply andfully, a face here or there--that doesn't seem like life to us then.Beryl dines with me alone sometimes. But she must finish up in theevening with a crowd if she is near the door of the place where thecrowd is. And you must not tell me you never like the Cafe Royal, for ifyou do I shall not believe you."
"I do like it at times," he acknowledged. "But to-night, sitting here,the mere thought of it is almost hateful to me. It is all vermilion andorange colour, while this . . ."
"Is drab!"
"No, indeed! Dim purple, perhaps, or deepest green."
"You couldn't bear it for long. You would soon begin longing forvermilion again."
"You seem to think me very young. I am twenty-nine."
"Have you ceased to love wildness already?"
"No," he answered truthfully. "But there is something there which makesme feel as if it were almost vulgar."
"No, no. It need not be vulgar. It can be wonderful--beautiful, even.It can be like the wild light which sometimes breaks out in the midstof the blackness of a storm and which is wilder far than the darkestclouds. Do you ever read William Watson?"
"I have read some of his poems."
"There is one I think very beautiful. I wonder if you know it. 'Pass,thou wild heart, wild heart of youth that still hast half a will tostay--'"
She stopped and held her fan a little higher.
"I don't know it," he said.
"It always makes me feel that the man or woman who has never had thewild heart has never been truly and intensely human. But one must knowwhen to stop, when to let the wild heart pass away."
"But if the heart wants to remain?"
"Then you must dominate it. Nothing is more pitiable, nothing is moredisgusting, even, than wildness in old age. I have a horror of that.And I am certain that nothing else can affect youth so painfully. Oldwildness--that must give youth nausea of the soul."
She spoke with a thrill of energy which penetrated Craven in a peculiarand fascinating way. He felt almost as if she sent a vital fluid throughhis veins.
Suddenly he thought of the "old guard," and he knew that not one of thetruly marvellous women who belonged to it could hold him or charm him asthis white-haired woman, with the frankly old face, could and did.
"After all," he thought, "it isn't the envelope that matters; it is theletter inside."
Deeply he believed that just then. He was, indeed, under a sort ofspell for the moment. Could the spell be lasting? He looked at LadySellingworth's eyes in the lamplight and firelight, and, despite acertain not forgotten moment connected with the Hyde Park Hotel, hebelieved that it could. And Lady Sellingworth looked at him and knewthat it could not. About such a matter she had no illusions.
And yet for years she had lived a life cloudy with illusions. What hadled her out from those clouds? Braybrooke had hinted to Craven thatpossibly Seymour Portman knew the secret of Lady Sellingworth's abruptdesertion of the "old guard" and plunge into old age. But even he didnot know it. For he loved her in a still, determined, undeviating way.And no woman would care to tell such a secret to a man who loved her andwho was almost certain, barring the explosion of a moral bombshell, andperhaps even then, to go on loving her.
No one knew why Lady Sellingworth had abruptly and finally emerged fromthe world of illusions in which she had lived. But possibly a member ofthe underworld, a light-fingered gentleman of brazen assurance, had longago guessed the reason for her sudden departure from the regiment ofwhich she had been a conspicuous member; possibly he had guessed, orsurmised, why she had sent in her papers. But even he could scarcely becertain.
The truth of the matter was this.
PART TWO