“I cannot tell, Madame. I have never met with it in this company.”
It was a good passage of arms. He wondered if they would notice if he jotted it down in his commonplace book for future use, but it was not worth the risk. If Mrs. B. saw him she would be merciless. So he did not write, but remembered to smile as he stood with his head a little bent in gracious attention to the conversation that buzzed and cracked all round him.
Through a burst of laughter he heard that Lord Clifford had hanged himself, remarking that there was a God, a just God above, and that that pious man Mr. Evelyn had said “this if true, is dismal.”
In the French provinces, a lady of noble birth had been burnt as a witch. France might lead the world but her imagination was still hag-ridden.
A clergyman’s daughter had been brought to the King at the Newmarket races and proved such an original that she jumped out of a window to escape him, and so was killed.
Suicide, sorcery and rape were served up in mockery as piquant dishes, yet they were real, they happened in the world that went on outside this bright fire-lit room.
On a stormy afternoon some weeks ago, just before the candles were lit, he had fancied he saw a face outside, peering in, dark against the light, with bright, watching eyes and elf-locks blown in the wind. He had been talking with the Lesbia of the Sparrows, and found some pretext to go to the window with her and open it, but there was no one outside, it could only have been a gust of blown leaves or a trick of light and shadow. Yet so strongly did this imagined face affect him that his memory could paint it now against the glass, a wild face that invited him outside to a world of freedom and adventure where passions found issue in dark and terrible actions, not in a perpetual flippant commentary.
He could have no practice in expressing such thoughts, they were as out of place as the raging seas and speeches of dying kings that the old-fashioned poets delighted to mouth and thunder. And because he could not express them, he remained only half conscious of them, as of the leaves that tapped now and again at the windows, vaguely discomforting him.
At the back of the room, a page was singing to a guitar the words of a modern poet.
Love like other little boys
Cries for hearts as they for toys,
Which when gained, in childish play,
Wantonly he throws away.
To the accompaniment of his song, of laughter and the clatter of coffee-cups, the gossip took a lively turn.
“The ridiculous creature has married for love.”
“Who is the unlucky man?”
“Unlucky indeed, for King Louis has clapped him into prison for his impudence before the marriage was consummated.”
“Then I call him lucky. She must be well over forty,—a romantic old maid with a big nose.”
“You have not had the cream of it. She loved him because he talked as well as her father, and now his conversation consists only of reproaches.”
It took Ned a moment to realize that La Grande Mademoiselle, the haughty beauty that had despised King Charles as an awkward youth, was this figure of melancholy fun. For an instant he thought he saw her shadow once again on the wall, but it was that of the cockatoo on its perch. The candles had just been lit against the dark winter’s daylight; perplexed by the lights and noise, it had raised its crest and stepped up and down with a martial air, truculent yet nervous.
The Mazarin saw it too, the Mazarin must have seen his thought; she was a devil, that woman, he did not wonder that black magic was reported among her many vices.
“Look at him,” she shrieked, pointing at the cockatoo, “he is imitating the old hag when she reads aloud those tedious heroical plays and romances.”
Old Lady Stoking took up the hue and cry. She had seen letters from her, for she had known a dear friend of hers and many a laugh they had had together over that ideal kingdom she had attempted to share with so many. Out it all came, the hermitages full of amiable company, the sheep they were to guard, the arts they were to foster, the celibate conditions, all in the name of the one true emotion, Friendship.
“Just such an Elysium,” broke in Mrs. B.’s chipped, scornful voice, “as this in which we find ourselves.”
“Is the company so entirely celibate?” asked Ned.
“Fie, sir, let us not be smutty. I would have all young men of the same mind as my husband who forbade the wenches on his estate to milk the cows lest it should put ideas into their heads.”
The Mazarin strode across the room as she spoke, displaying a perfect leg beneath her satin breeches, and playfully flicked his cheek. He longed to repay her with a stinging slap. She had no right to dress as a man if she could not be treated as one. He suddenly ceased to think of her as a Roman Empress. He wished that country house parties could last only for days instead of weeks and months. He wished he could have gone on the expedition with Captain Baker to discover the North-West Passage through frozen mists and ice mountains as blue as sapphire and transparent as glass.
The silly doll she brought everywhere with her was lisping affectedly as she wound one of her dangling ribbons round a throat like a flower-stalk, “I had thought the country would be full of sheep wearing pink and blue ribbons round their necks.”
“There are plenty of sheep,” said Ned, “but no ribbons; that is why none of this flock can recognize them.”
“Do you call us sheep, sir?”
“Certainly, Mademoiselle, led by an ancient bell-wether, whose impotence naturally delights in jeering at others also isolated from the flock.”
“You are very ill-natured about an old woman as soon as she leaves the room.”
“Then let her keep her tongue off other old women.”
“What, are you serious? Is it possible? Was La Grande Mademoiselle then your first love?”
The lady novelist cried, “Look, you have drawn blood to his cheeks. Fie! How far did the matter go?”
“Charming,” chimed in the Mazarin’s deep tones. “And did you kiss her on both sides of her nose?”
He had tried to preserve his panache, but to sustain battle for his Princess in a drawing-room against the tongues of ladies, was to require too much of him. Common sense, not chivalry, was the rule of the age, and what good could he do at this distance to a disappointed old maid? The cynicism of this reflection reassured him. He had no wish to feel that he too was eleven years out of date.
“Why did you speak so angrily? Tell us, dear Ned.”
The doll he had despised was charming when she crossed her embroidered gloves caressingly on his shoulder, gloves perfumed moreover with orange and amber.
He said with an air of languor, “Why does one speak at all but that it is the mode to be ill-natured?”
That was better. He was in character again. No angry discord disturbed the tinkling clatter of china, of silver bells round the necks of spaniels, of gently spoken scandal. No strange earnest face looked in upon that company, taking them unawares with thoughts of age and isolation, of the bitterness of frustrated hopes. The fate of La Grande Mademoiselle was once again ridiculous, and therefore impossible for themselves. For no one recognizes his own character in a lampoon till some painstaking friend points it out.
As for that odd young man, Ned Tarleton, who had turned so abruptly on his heel and walked away from them, they were sorry for him, that was all; he had been too much of late with Rochester, and such company was too heady a drink for any young man; and so he gave himself airs, he mistook rudeness for wit, he obviously disliked women, it followed therefore that he indulged in unspeakable vices, he was ridiculously affected, he was shockingly insolent, he had debauched the parson’s wife and that was why he had been absent last night, he had insulted his hostess, he had lampooned his best friend.
After this round of ammunition, they all hastily added that he was a most promising young man and they were anxious on his behalf only because it would be a thousand pities if such excellent parts found their way to the jail or the scaffold.
He had joined Sir Roger L’Estrange who also seemed out of it in this company, his heavy face was more scowling than usual. Ned had been told to ask him what had happened last night, that meant he must do so warily, for he guessed the intention to have been malicious. He was right, for Sir Roger had been badly disappointed.
He had discovered Cambridge to be a hornet’s nest of sedition; he was certain there was an illicit press somewhere in the town that distributed books free from the eye of the Licenser through those pernicious secret agents the travelling pedlars. If he had his way, every pedlar’s pack should be examined at each village before he was allowed to sell any of his wares. That meant a special official in each village. “No matter,” said Sir Roger, “no expense should be spared for the purity of the Press.”
Late last night he returned to Stoking and found no one in the dining-hall but tittering servants. Chairs were pushed back or overturned, glasses were empty, all was deserted and in confusion. He at last discovered that the King himself had arrived unexpectedly on his return to London after a visit to the Earl of Shaftesbury.
“He came alone then?” asked Ned.
“Only a few of his gentlemen attended him, and a body of thirty or forty horse, to which,” Sir Roger added in exasperation, “he alluded as ‘part of his nightbag.’”
“But where is His Majesty?”
“He departed early this morning. You know his brisk habits.”
Conscious of the female foes he had so lately made behind him, Ned did not dare show his feelings. The blood had mounted to his head in an angry wave, but they were watching him, they would pounce with delight on any sign of chagrin, and so he smiled in a jaunty manner that Sir Roger not unnaturally found irritating.
For Sir Roger, though present last night, had had no chance to display his enemies’ treachery and his own vigilance. He had been led into the cellars, where by the light of a couple of lanterns he saw a group of gentlemen sitting or reclining on the great casks, and among them the King himself in the act of knighting some miserable rascal for a joke he had just made, so that he stood there with drawn sword, swaying somewhat on his heels, as he solemnly pronounced, “Rise, Sir Edward—hic—Hooper, Knight.”
He was at once aware that his news would get no attention. Instead, it became the turn of the centre cask to receive the royal compliments; bowing to it, the King promised to have a crown placed in the middle of the cellar arch, just over its head. The workmen were already busy on this piece of folly, and their host as pleased as if he had received a duchy.
“That is how he keeps these fools content,” said Sir Roger. All his reward for his guidance of the nation’s mind was £400 a year for his paper The Intelligencer; whereas he spent at least £500 a year on entertaining spies for information. But all failed to recognize his disinterested service, he could not flatter and fawn, that was why; even his love of music was turned against him. They still called him Old Noll’s Fiddler because he had once been playing with one or two others at the house of an acquaintance, when the Lord Protector had entered, but not allowed any interruption of the music; he had merely sat listening for some while and at last departed without any word on either side. Yet this old tale they tried to twist against him, “and after all I’ve done,” he muttered, but not so that Ned heard him.
This new tolerance everywhere he found as soft and as depressing as a feather bed on top of him; it smothered all opinions, it put everybody on a level. He decided, as he always did when disappointed, to retire to the country, plant the potato and that other American root they called the Girasol artichoke, and translate the classics. He, who could share his principles and fears and furies with so few, might yet find his best friend in Æsop. And so he did, for after two and a half centuries a public that had never heard of his ferocious attack on Milton in No Blind Guides, fell eagerly upon the new illustrated edition of L’Estrange’s Æsop among the Christmas books of 1928.
But no prescient glow of this future harmony could now warm his spirit. He repeated the stale, bitter jest that the King’s Act of Indemnity and Oblivion had been one of Indemnity for his foes and Oblivion for his friends.
“Then put a b into your daughter’s name,” said Ned, “and call her Oblivia lest you forget your grievances.”
Sir Roger looked sourly on him, and silently noted him as a dangerous modern spirit and one whose plays should be watched.
Ned saw he had been a fool, but he too was furious with disappointment. In the merry intimacy of that company in the cellar he would have had such a chance as he could never get at Court to attract the royal favour. Had he been there when Sir Roger showed his discontented face, his joke on his daughter’s name would have won him friends as well as an enemy. Now he had gone and spat it out only on the subject concerned, an insane act, but he could never pickle his wit, it came fresh or not at all, and would have stood as good a chance to get him knighted in a cellar as the insignificant Hooper.
But swaggering to himself could not console him. The chance he might have had, he had thrown away. He had chosen to drink with bumpkins when he might have drunk with the King of England and of Boon Companions, and so sodden had it made his head that he had planned to write a stupid dull tragedy all about nothing as long as it was in the country and sufficiently dismal, a play that not one of the Court could glance at except to yawn. He was cured of that. He would instead write the most startling and impudent play that had yet been put on the stage. Even the King would have to take notice of it.
But everything he wrote would be an imitation, for everything had been said, everything discovered, there was nothing new under the sun. He had run after novelty, and missed the King; instead of careering with royalty into the cellars, he had followed a chase with a lot of roaring louts,—what was it they had chased through the house? Some wild animal, he fancied, a wild cat perhaps; no, he thought it was something smaller, that he had heard a man shout something about a wren, or it may have been a sparrow.
And suddenly, with a clearness that convinced him he was remembering an actual scene of the night before, there came into his mind a picture of that company feasting round the table, when a bird flew in at a window that had been left open, hovered an instant in the light of the candles, and flew out again through the door at the other end.
The company left for the town early on the following day. Those in the coaches carried their muffs. The Mazarin’s little blackamoor looked a livid lead colour from cold. “Brrr! Your detestable country!” she complained. She had lost all her gaiety. She could think of nothing but her nose; it was a fine shape but large, and the raw cold did not become it. The country was flat, the sky one uniform cloud, the whole aspect sad and hostile to mankind. But their spirits were cheered as gradually they approached that cluster of buildings on the banks of the Thames, most of them new since the Fire, where there awaited them every opportunity their lives could afford.
The cavalcade passed on its way, leaving behind it a trail of gossip that spread over the countryside and furnished light refreshment for many months. It spread slowly, for winter now imprisoned the land. Snow and frost made the roads impassable; the ground was too hard to dig; the sheep grew like skeletons since it was not for another century that a useful dilettante was to introduce mangel-wurzels into England for their winter feeding. People could not meet for sport; the houses were too dark for much indoor work or reading, even supposing their inhabitants could read. A great deal more time was spent in bed since that was the warmest place, and long stories were told round the kitchen fire. As on every other year, the old men declared the winters were getting steadily worse since they could remember, and put it down to the growing laxity with regard to witches. The witch-hunts, duckings and executions had been a perpetual enlivenment to country life in their young days; now for several years there had not been more than two old women burnt, with a result that everyone could see for themselves in the bad weather and the report, which occurred yearly, that a wolf had been seen not ten miles off.
The fact that it had not been seen nor heard of again only proved it to have been a werewolf.
Mr. Hambridge saw more of Bess but he yawned more often both in her presence and her absence, and he drank more steadily, seeking from boredom an oblivion as near as possible to death. When he patted the dogs lying on the hearth and called them “Good True—good Luby,” there was a wistful note in his voice that bespoke envy, for a dog’s life was a good one when all was said and done; dogs had each other for companions and did not blow hot or cold with their humours and tantrums, changing all the time; dogs had no need and no chance to drink till they were fuddled so as to feel more cheerful than they really were, and then when the effect began to wear off, to feel yet more depressed. In this desire for an exaltation not natural to him, Mr. Hambridge experienced one of his few intimations of immortality, but the fate of beasts who are not so troubled seemed to him the more enviable.
His two companions no longer afforded him sport at table by twitting each other. Often they sat quite glum, and when they did speak it was with a respect that steadily increased. Nan now was scarcely ever rude or excited, though once or twice she unaccountably burst into tears and rushed from the table. Mr. Hambridge would then push the bottle over to his chaplain with some jocular remark expressive of relief at their finding themselves alone earlier than usual, and encounter a face so blank and wooden that he felt it was only he who was left alone, with nothing but a dummy in the room. His wife’s coming had enlivened the chaplain at one time but now he was duller than ever. That was the worst of women, they changed things, sometimes possibly for the better, more often for the worse, but whichever it was, they could not let well alone.
“Women are the devil,” he said, and was surprised to meet this time with acquiescence, surly but sincere. “My Bess,” he continued, “she lets things alone. A man might as soon ride a mare as her. Dang me if you’d know she’s a woman at all but for the money she gets out of you.”
“No,” said Mr. Cork and was silent a long time, staring at a blancmange in the middle of the table. It looked to him like passive white flesh, and he began to imagine it shaking horribly in motion. “You could not kill her,” he at last proceeded. “You could stamp on her as if she were a fungus but she would come up again like leather.”
None So Pretty Page 14
