And so the comedy, thinly masking the drama underneath, began. Eric could hardly refuse to follow such a direct lead without giving something of the truth away to Miss Verity. Armorel practically forced him to play up to her. We others ranged ourselves on chairs at one end of the drawing room; the other end was tacitly adopted as the stage.
Dunderheaded in his own conceit though he was, Eric could not but realize that the atmosphere was electric. His nervousness found a disguise in wildly burlesquing the scene between himself and his cousin. I thought I understood, too, that there was the sound method in his foolery of setting up this precedent of burlesque in view of the next scene. But I could not laugh. Apprehension filled me, even to the extent of crowding the consideration of my own recent and upsetting experiences from my mind. What was Mrs de Ravel’s intention, as she sat there watching, a faint, inscrutable smile just lifting the corners of her expressive mouth?
One consolation at least I had, both for myself and for all of us. No engagement had yet been announced between Elsa and Eric.
With wide smiles the two were now protesting undying love in extravagant terms, agreeing with exaggerated grief that they could never belong to one another; in highly incongruous slang Armorel urged the pact of suicide, which Eric refused in the manner of a fourth-rate tragedian. Armorel made her exit from the stage sobbing loudly. There was no trace, either in her manner or her features, of her recent emotion. I was amazed at the feminine power of dissimulation.
Then Mrs de Ravel rose – and I for one drew a sharp breath.
From the very beginning it was clear that my worst fears were to be more than realized. With infinite care Sylvia de Ravel had made her opportunity; now she was going to use it. Everything, every single thing, was to be thrown into the scales before us all. It was, after all, the actress’ superb gesture.
A feeling of positive suffocation grew on me as I watched. This was no acting, magnificent actress though the woman might be. She loved him – really loved the fellow: that was only too plain. It was inconceivable that anyone could imagine it acting, even her witless husband, watching her too with almost painful concentration, the foolish jests dead on his lips. And poor little Elsa Verity, with white cheeks and bitten lip…
There was a breathlessly dead silence as she swept up to him and hurled her lovely form into arms. ‘Eric – my darling!’ she breathed.
In obvious discomfiture he attempted some silly joke, only to have it stifled against his mouth in a long and fierce kiss – a kiss so evidently real that it gave me acute embarrassment to observe.
And then a flood of words broke from her.
I will not attempt to give them. I could not if I wanted to do so. I only know that, amid the most shameless avowals of her passion, she cited chapter and verse, times, places even, of a string of their amorous interludes, detailing incidents of the most intimate description that could obviously never have been imagined, revealing brutally the subterfuges that had been adopted to deceive her husband, laying bare the relations between the two of them with a candour that in a few seconds had us all crimson with embarrassment. To all eyes it was a woman desperately in love, knowing herself in imminent danger of being cast off, striving with every means in her power, only too physical as well as vocal, to retain her lover’s affection – spending herself on the effort in a way that left her with neither dignity, modesty, nor self-respect. A terrible spectacle.
Covertly from time to time I plucked up moral courage to steal a glance at De Ravel. It was incredible that he should not be learning the truth at last. Apart from his wife’s manner, which in itself left no room but for conviction, the way in which she seemed bent on hammering it home to him by actual proof upon proof of his cuckoldom, afforded him no chance of further blindness. And the tensity of his attitude and his staring eyes seemed equally plain proof that he had understood. I don’t think I am a coward (the reader may have formed his own opinion on that point), but I do not mind confessing that I was really alarmed. What had Ethel stirred up?
And what, I found time to wonder, was in Mrs de Ravel’s own mind? That at least I thought I could guess. She was warning Eric: warning him terribly. If he would take her back and give up Elsa, she would tell her husband that she had only been acting all the time (and from the contempt with which she referred to him in her rôle, it was clear that she had no doubt of her power to twist the besotted fool to any belief she chose); if not, she would tell him that it had been the truth. Deliberately, for all her passion, she was trying to win back her lover by sheer terror.
And that she was terrifying him was plain to see. Time and time again he tried to stem the torrent of her awful confessions, his ruddy face almost as pale as Elsa’s own, even to the extent of drowning her voice in his. It was useless. Neither half-hearted bluster nor downright appeal (with difficulty kept in character) could make her more than pause; and when, in something like real panic, he tried to escape from the room, she simply clung to him so that he could not move. If I still bore Eric any vengeful feelings over the incident in the swimming pool, they were surely glutted in those throat-constricting ten minutes. I was really sorry for the man.
No one in Mrs de Ravel’s audience could have felt very differently from myself. Armorel was standing like a statue by the door, her mouth slightly open; Ethel actually hid her face in her hands; on Paul and Elsa I have already touched. Only John, for whom my respect was mounting higher and higher, appeared on the surface to be entirely unmoved. Clapping his hands gently from time to time, he would ejaculate softly: ‘Bravo! Magnificent, Sylvia! Keep it up!’ I wonder nobody screamed at him.
It was over at last, and I for one felt like a piece of wet cloth. But with Sylvia de Ravel’s blessed silence (and never have I welcomed silence more wholeheartedly) the tension, after a momentary drop, rose even higher: what would Paul do? I looked warily at his hands, positively shaking on his knees, ready to intervene if he showed signs of attacking Eric then and there before us all, as indeed I more than half believed he would. The fellow was obviously strung up almost beyond endurance. We were all looking at him with fearful attention, Eric from a position almost of self-defence; even his wife, who had dropped into a chair as if exhausted, was regarding him with a half-frightened, half-defiant air of sulkiness.
He laughed jerkily. ‘Good gracious, Sylvia, why did you leave the stage? Upon my word, I could almost have believed you meant it all, if I hadn’t known you so well. Phew! Well, you certainly got me, old girl.’ He wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, with hands that still trembled.
Could one have believed it? The numskull refused to hear the truth when it was shouted in his very ear! Could uxoriousness go further?
But poor little Elsa Verity! She was making the bravest attempt to smile, but in her face at any rate was horrified disillusionment. I exchanged glances with Ethel. She nodded and beamed. I understood. Her end had been triumphantly gained without Paul de Ravel having been enlightened at all. One look at Elsa, and the way the child’s eyes avoided painfully the neighbourhood of Eric, was enough to show that no further danger existed of any engagement.
My heart (to use a poetical metaphor) sang in my bosom.
There is little more to tell. With De Ravel’s final proof of his incredible fatuousness the proceedings reverted abruptly to farce again. The jealous-husband scene between himself and Eric was, I make no doubt, a miracle of the comic spirit. Myself, I found it a miracle of tragic irony, but that was no longer either here or there.
Our prologue was over.
Yet not quite over. One conclusive scene remained to be played.
As soon as conversation broke out (a little hectically perhaps) on the conclusion of the comic jealous-husband scene, Miss Verity rose. I, standing solicitously by, noticed that she did so a little unsteadily, and was prompt to offer my arm; it was refused with a wan smile. ‘I’ve got rather a headache, Aunt Ethel,’ she said in subdued tones. ‘I think I’ll lie down till lunch.’
‘Head
ache?’ officiously put in Eric, now quite recovered. ‘Rotten luck. Well, best thing for a headache’s a swim. Get your costume on, and come down for a quick bathe before lunch; we’ve just time.’
I waited for the coup de grâce. It came.
‘Thank you,’ said the child, with pathetic dignity. ‘I’d rather lie down.’
She went out of the room
Eric must needs follow her, of course; but I did not mind that. The fellow’s spell was broken now.
I glanced at my watch. The time was half-past twelve. Our guests could be expected at any moment now and Ethel in consequence had only time for a happy smile and a nod in my direction before hurrying away to pursue her duties as hostess. With a smile to myself, but secret and ironical, I watched De Ravel slip an arm through his wife’s and draw her out into the garden, no doubt to congratulate her on her remarkable acting.
Then, with a start, I realized that John had disappeared too. Armorel and I were left alone together.
Why did a strange sensation invade the pit of my stomach, and my mouth go suddenly dry? It was exceedingly odd.
To my relief, however, Armorel made not the slightest reference to our recent encounter. She helped herself to a cigarette from John’s silver box and threw herself, with all her usual lack of grace, into a chair. ‘Phew!’ she said.
It would have been foolish to pretend to misunderstand her. ‘Exactly,’ I agreed.
‘As for Paul!’ Armorel made a gesture of somewhat distressing vulgarity. ‘Well, it’s almost as if he knew ignorance was bliss, and dam’ well refuses to be wise.’
‘That is really very succinctly put, Armorel,’ I remarked, not without surprise.
‘Oh, I’m not always quite such a fool as you think me. Pinkie,’ Armorel said carelessly.
‘Well, at any rate Eric’s embarrassments are presumably over,’ I said, steering the conversation into safer waters. ‘At least for today.’
‘Shouldn’t be too sure of that,’ she laughed. ‘He’s still got Helen Fitzwilliam to face.’
‘Helen Fitzwilliam? Oh, Helen Asche, yes. Well, why shouldn’t he face her?’
But Armorel shook her head, smiling. I questioned her discreetly (purely with a view to using my tact later should it be required), but she would say no more on the subject.
There followed rather an awkward pause.
I became aware of a remarkable phenomenon: I wanted to kiss Armorel again! I wanted, indeed, quite intensely. I could not understand myself in the least. The girl meant nothing to me; I was not even acutely sorry for her as I was for Miss Verity; it would not, I imagined, occasion me very much distress if I were never to see her again; and yet – I wanted desperately to kiss Armorel Scott-Davies! It was inexplicable. And so was that strange sensation which had returned in full force to my lower abdomen, and that curious sandiness of the mouth.
I leant over her, no doubt a little clumsily, for I am a novice in these matters.
To my astonishment she spoke quite sharply. ‘Now then, Pinkie, paws down!’
‘I beg your pardon, Armorel?’ I said, drawing back stiffly.
‘Just because I let you kiss me to give us both something else to think about in a bad half-hour, you needn’t think you’ve got the grazing rights for good.’
I passed over the extreme vulgarity of this expression in my surprise at her meaning. ‘Both of us?’
‘Yes, you’ve got a pash on Elsa, haven’t you? Well, I thought if you couldn’t get it there, the least I could do was to give you a little gentle browsing myself.’
‘Really, Armorel,’ I said, disgusted by this phrasing, ‘am I to understand, then, that you permitted me – no, asked me to kiss you purely because you imagined that I should derive a vicarious pleasure from doing so?’
‘You can understand what you dam’ well like, Pinkie,’ she retorted, with quite unnecessary rudeness.
I fear I lost my temper for the moment. ‘Then it is fortunate that you won’t be called upon to do so again. In future I shall certainly avoid recourse to – to substitutes.’ It was absurd to take the girl so seriously as to endeavour to wound her by turning her own mistaken suggestion against her, but really she had been exceedingly provoking.
Armorel was staring at me. ‘My poor mutt,’ she said, ‘can’t you see that… Oh, well, never mind.’
I should have liked to question her further on this odd, if offensively worded beginning, but at that moment our guests appeared, with John.
Not having been thrown ever very much into the society of writers, I was interested to meet them; but my interest soon gave way to disappointment. They seemed very ordinary persons. Morton Harrogate Bradley, the famous detective-story writer, was a tall, thin young man with a manner, which I very soon found extremely irritating, of languid superiority. I did my best to engage him in what I imagined would be a congenial subject (a discussion upon certain of the more obscure eighteenth-century dramatists, a subject which I had been reading up recently), but to my annoyance he left me abruptly in mid-sentence to join Armorel, of all people.
Helen Asche (or Mrs Fitzwilliam, to give her her real name) I found little more interesting, for a lady with such a reputation for clever work as she had; indeed, I began to cast my mind back over such books of hers as I had read, questioning whether her fame might not be exaggerated. She was a dark, small woman with an extremely lively manner, not by any means ill-looking; her age I estimated at thirty-five. She seemed to prefer discussing feminine trivialities with Ethel to giving me her opinion on the current literature of the moment, which I thought it my social duty to ask her. Incidentally, I noticed not the faintest sign of embarrassment in her quite casual greeting of Eric, as he entered the room shortly after their arrival. So much for Armorel’s hinted gossip.
Professor Johnson, I regret to say, I found positively dull for a man certainly learned and apparently gifted. He insisted on describing to me some abstruse mathematical problem in which I had no interest at all, mumbling into his beard and fumbling with his spectacles in a positively senile way, though the man cannot have been much over fifty. I made my excuses as soon as I saw Miss Verity come into the room, and hurried over towards her.
Eric, however, with his usual insensitive lack of manners, forestalled me. Before I could reach her he was at the door, elbowing his way offensively through the throng of people in the little sitting room – elbowing unceremoniously even, I noticed, past Mrs de Ravel herself.
‘Now then, come and have a cocktail, Elsa,’ he cried in his boisterous voice, oblivious, it seemed, of all decency.
To my disappointment Miss Verity, instead of ignoring the fellow, actually smiled at him, though she certainly had the grace to blush.
‘Cocktail forward, John, please,’ Eric was shouting. ‘Elsa wants a little sustaining before we break the news.’
A stab of apprehension shot through me, though I knew the fear which caused it to be ludicrous. I glanced at Ethel, and saw that the same thought had occurred to her. I sent her a reassuring smile, but she did not seem to see it.
‘What news, Eric?’ she asked.
He turned from handing a cocktail to Elsa, to grin at her. ‘Glasses full, everybody, please,’ he boomed. ‘You’ve got to drink a toast!’ And his tone added plainly: whether we liked it or not. ‘Elsa and I are engaged to be married.’
The effrontery of the man! The downright criminal effrontery!
chapter five
I hardly knew what happened at the lunch that followed.
I was upset. Exceedingly upset. To the garrulous chatter of my neighbour, Mrs Fitzwilliams, I could make only mechanical responses. The iniquity, the utter iniquity absorbed me of the tragedy that was to fall on that unfortunate child, and which it now seemed we were powerless to prevent. To think of her at the mercy of that blackguard almost made me choke as I ate, and yet I could think of nothing else. All thought of Armorel had been completely wiped from my mind. One impossible plan after another passed through my mind for saving Mi
ss Verity even now, only to be rejected at once. As for Ethel, what despair there must be behind her bright, hostess-like smiles, I could only guess.
At Mrs de Ravel I hardly dared look at all. Positively flaunting his fiancée in her face, Eric was taking full vengeance on that misguided but unhappy lady for the fright she had given him an hour ago. The fool, her husband, had of course been loudest in his congratulations upon Eric Scott-Davies’ wickedest crime.
Mrs Fitzwilliam must have noticed my absorption, and with an intuition which surprised me (though after all one should have expected it of her) went straight to the heart of the trouble. Looking at me curiously, she said in a low voice during a particularly loud period in the surrounding conversation: ‘And what do you think of our friend’s engagement?’
I was far too upset to be discreet. I told her that I considered it iniquitous.
‘She seems a nice girl?’
‘She is a charming, unaffected girl,’ I said with heat. ‘It’s nothing short of a crime that her inexperience should be taken advantage of in this way.’
‘I take it that Eric is after her money?’
‘Nothing else. Miss Verity herself,’ I replied bitterly, ‘is merely incidental.’
My neighbour’s curious look deepened. ‘I shouldn’t worry too much, Mr Pinkerton. There’s many a slip, you know. Personally, I should be more than surprised if the wedding ever takes place.’
I could only hope she was right.
After luncheon I excused myself to my hostess and walked down to the woods. I felt it almost a physical impossibility to remain in a company which included Scott-Davies. For half an hour at any rate I had to be alone.
The Second Shot Page 7
