"It is not a theatrical lodging-house!" said Roydon, goaded to madness. "It is, as you will shortly perceive, a bawdy lodging-house!"
Maud's placid voice broke the stunned silence. "I expect they're just as dirty," she said.
"Look here!" began Nathaniel thunderously.
Joseph intervened in a hurry. "Too many interruptions! We shall be putting Roydon off if we go on like this! I'm sure we're none of us so old-fashioned that we mind a little outspokenness!"
"Speak for yourself!" said Nathaniel.
"He is speaking for himself," said Stephen. "To do him justice, he is also speaking for most of the assembled company."
"Perhaps you would rather I didn't read you any more?" suggested Roydon stiffly. "I warn you, it is not meat for weak stomachs!"
"Oh, you must go on!" Valerie exclaimed. "I know I'm going to adore it. Do, everybody, stop interrupting!"
"She sits motionless, staring at her reflection in the mirror," suddenly declaimed Paula, in thrilling accents. "Then she picks up a lipstick, and begins wearily to rub it on her mouth. A knock falls on the door. With a movement of instinctive coquetry, she pats her curls into position, straightens her tired body, and calls, "Come in!" '
The spectacle of Paula enacting these movements in the improbable setting of a respectable drawing-room proved to be too much for Mathilda. She explained between chokes that she was very sorry, but that recitations always had this deplorable effect on her.
"What you can possibly find to laugh at I fail to see!" said Paula, a dangerous light in her eyes. "Laughter was not the reaction I expected!"
"It wasn't your fault," Mathilda assured her penitently. "In fact, the more tragic recitations are the more I feel impelled to laugh."
"I know so well what you mean!" said Joseph. "Ah, Paula, my dear, Tilda is paying you a greater tribute than you know! You conveyed such a feeling of tension in those few gestures that our Tilda's nerves frayed under it. I remember once, when I was playing in Montreal, to a packed house, working up to a moment of unbearable tension. I felt my audience with me, hanging, as it were, on my lips. I paused for my climax; I knew myself to be holding the house in the hollow of my hand. Suddenly a man broke into laughter! Disconcerting? Yes, but I knew why he laughed, why he could not help laughing!"
"I wouldn't mind hazarding a guess myself," agreed Stephen.
This pleased Nathaniel so much that he changed his mind about banning the reading of Wormwood, and bade Roydon, for the third time, to get on with it.
Roydon said: "Enter Mrs. Perkins, the landlady," and doggedly read a paragraph describing this character in terms revolting enough to have arrested the attention of his hearers had not this been diverted by Maud, who was moving stealthily about the room in search of something.
"The suspense is killing me!" Stephen announced at last. "What are you looking for, Aunt?"
"It's all right, my dear: I'm not going to disturb anyone," replied Maud untruthfully. "I just wondered where I had laid my knitting down. Please go on reading, Mr. Roydon! So interesting! It quite takes one back."
Stephen, who had joined Mathilda in the search for the knitting, remarked, sotto voce, that he had always wondered where Joe had picked Maud up, and now he knew. Mathilda, unearthing an embryo sock on four steel needles from behind a cushion, told him he was a cad.
"Thank you, my dear," said Maud, settling herself by the fire again. "Now I can be getting on with it while I listen."
The rest of Roydon's play was read to the accompaniment of the measured click of Maud's needles. It was by no means a bad play; sometimes, Mathilda thought, it hovered on the edge of brilliance; but it was no play to read to a drawing-room audience. As she had expected, it was often violent, always morbid; and it contained much that could with advantage have been omitted. Paula enjoyed herself immensely in the big scene; and neither she nor Roydon seemed capable of realising that the spectacle of his niece impersonating a fallen woman under tragic circumstances was unlikely to afford Nathaniel the least gratification. Indeed, it was only by a tremendous effort of will-power that Nathaniel was able to control himself; and while Paula's deep voice vibrated through the room, he grew more and more fidgety, and muttered under his breath in a way that boded ill for both dramatist and actress.
It was past seven o'clock before the play ended, and during the last act Nathaniel three times consulted his watch. Once, Stephen said something in his ear which made him smile grimly, but when Roydon at last laid down his typescript there was no trace of a smile on his face. He said in awful tones: "Very edifying!"
Paula, carried away by her own performance, was deaf to the note of anger in his voice. Her dark eyes glowed; there was a lovely colour in her cheeks; and her thin, expressive hands were restless, as always when she was excited. She started towards Nathaniel, holding out those hands. "Isn't it a wonderful play? Isn't it?"
Mathilda, Joseph, Valerie, and even Mottisfont, whom Wormwood had profoundly shocked, hurried into speech, drowning whatever blistering things Nathaniel meant to say. Stephen lounged at his ease, and watched them derisively. Dread of what Nathaniel might yet say to Roydon made them praise the play in exaggerated terms. Roydon was pleased, and triumphant, but his eyes kept travelling to his host's face with an expression on them of so much anxiety that everyone felt sorry for him, and repeated that the play was arresting, original, and quite made one think.
Paula, with an obtuseness which made Mathilda want to shake her, brushed aside the compliments she was receiving on her acting, and again attacked her uncle. "Now that you've heard it, Uncle Nat, you will help Willoughby, won't you?"
"If by that you mean will I give you the money to squander on a piece of what I can only call salacious balderdash, no, I won't!" he responded, not, however, in a loud enough voice to be overheard by the author. .
Paula stared at him, as though she scarcely grasped his meaning. "Can't you see - can't you see that the part is made for me?" she asked, with a little gasp.
"Upon my soul!" exploded Nathaniel. "I should like to know what the world is coming to when a girl of your breeding can stand there and tell me the part of a harlot is made for her!"
"That out-of-date rubbish!" Paula said contemptuously. "We are talking of Art!"
"Oh, we are, are we?" said Nathaniel, in a grim voice. "And I suppose that is your idea of Art, is it, young woman? Well, all I have to say is that it isn't mine!"
It turned out, unfortunately for everybody else, that this was an understatement. Nathaniel had a good deal more to say, on subjects which ranged from the decadence of modern drama and the puppyishness of modem dramatists to the folly of all women in general and of his niece in particular. He added a rider to the effect that Paula's mother would have done better to have stayed at home to look after her daughter than to spend her time gadding about marrying every Tom, Dick, and Harry she met.
It was now felt by all who were privileged to hear these remarks that it would be advisable to get Roydon out of the way until Nathaniel's wrath had had time to cool. Mathilda very nobly put herself forward, and told Roydon that she had been immensely interested in Wormwood, and would like to have a talk with him about it. Roydon, who, besides being rather impressed by Mathilda, was naturally eager to talk about his play, allowed himself to be manoeuvred out of the room just as Joseph joined the stricken group about his brother, and, with ill-timed jocosity, smote him lightly on the back, saying: "Well, well, Nat, we're a couple of old-stagers, eh? A crude, sometimes a violent piece of work. Yet not without merit, I think. What do you say?"
Nathaniel at once became a cripple. He said: "My lumbago! Damn you, don't do that!" and tottered to a chair, one hand to the small of his back and his manly form bent with suffering.
"Why, I thought it was all right again!" said Valerie innocently.
Nathaniel, who had closed his eyes, opened them to cast a baleful glance in her direction, and replied in the voice of one whose days were attended by anguish bravely borne: "The least touch b
rings it on!"
"Rubbish!" said Paula, with quite unnecessary emphasis. "You weren't even thinking about your lumbago a minute ago! You're a miserable humbug, Uncle Nat!"
Nathaniel rather liked being abused, but he resented having his lumbago belittled, and said that the day might come when Paula would be sorry she had said that.
Maud, who was rolling up her knitting-wool, said in her sensible way that he had better have some antiphlogistin, if it was really bad.
"Of course it's bad!" snapped Nathaniel. "And don't think I'm going to have any of that muck on me, because I'm not! If anyone had the least consideration - But I suppose that's too much to expect! As though it isn't enough to have the house filled with a set of rackety people, I'm forced to sit and listen to a play I should have thought any decent woman would have blushed to sit through!"
"When you talk about decent women you make me sick!" flashed Paula. "If you can't appreciate a work of genius, so much the worse for you! You don't want to put your hand in your pocket: that's why you're making all this fuss! You're mean, and hypocritical, and I despise you from the bottom of my soul!"
"Yes, you'd be very glad to see me laid underground! I know that!" said Nathaniel, hugely enjoying this refreshing interlude. "Don't think I don't see through you! All the same, you women: money's all you're out for! Well, you won't get any of mine to waste on that young puppy, and that's flat!"
"All right!" said Paula, in the accents of a tragedienne. "Keep your money! But when you're dead I shall spend every penny you leave me on really immoral plays, and I shall hope that you'll know it, and hate it, and be sorry you were such a beast to me when you were alive!"
Nathaniel was so pleased by this vigorous response to his taunt that he forgot to be a cripple, and sat up quite straight in his chair, and said that she had better not count her chickens before they were hatched, since after this he would be damned if he didn't Make a Few Changes.
"Do as you please!" Paula said disdainfully. "I don't want your money."
"Oho, now you sing a different tune!" Nathaniel said, his eyes glinting with triumph. "I thought that that was just what you did want - two thousand pounds of my money, and ready to murder me to get it!"
"What are two thousand pounds to you?" demanded Paula, with poor logic, but fine dramatic delivery. "You'd never miss it, but just because you have a bourgeois taste in art you deny me the one thing I want! More than that! You are denying me my chance in life!"
"I don't care for that line," said Stephen critically.
"You shut up!" said Paula, rounding on him. "You've done all you can to crab Willoughby's play! I suppose your tender regard for me makes you shudder at the thought of my appearing in the role of a prostitute!"
"Bless your heart, I don't care what sort of a role you appear in!" replied Stephen. "All I beg is that you won't stand there ranting like Lady Macbeth. Too much drama in the home turns my stomach, I find."
"If you had a shred of decency, you'd be on my side!"
"In that case, I haven't a shred of decency. I don't like the play, I don't like the dramatist, and I object to being read to."
"Children, children!" said Joseph. "Come now, this won't do, you know! On Christmas Eve, too!"
"Now I am going to be sick," said Stephen, dragging himself up, and lounging over to the door. "Let me know the outcome of this Homeric battle, won't you? I'm betting six to four on Uncle Nat myself."
"Well, really, Stephen!" exclaimed Valerie, with a giggle. "I do think you're the limit!"
This infelicitous intervention seemed to remind Nathaniel of her existence. He glared at her, loathing her empty prettiness, her crimson fingernails, her irritating laugh; and gave vent to his feelings by barking at Stephen. "You're as bad as your sister! There isn't a penny to choose between you! You've got bad taste, do you hear me? This is the last time either of you will come to Lexham! Put that in your pipe, and smoke it!"
"Tut-tut!" said Stephen, and walked out of the room, greatly disconcerting Sturry, who was standing outside with a tray of cocktails, listening with deep appreciation to the quarrel raging within.
"I beg your pardon, sir; I was about to enter," said Sturry, fixing Stephen with a quelling eye.
"What a lot you'll have to regale them with in the servants' hall, won't you?" said Stephen amiably.
"I was never one to gossip, sir, such being beneath me," replied Sturry, in a very grand and despising way.
He stalked into the room, bearing his burden. Paula, who was addressing an impassioned monologue to her elder uncle, broke off short, and rushed out; Joseph urged Valerie, and Maud, and Mottisfont to go up and change for dinner; and Nathaniel told Sturry to bring him a glass of the pale sherry.
While this family strife had been in full swing, Mathilda, in the library, had been explaining to Willoughby, as tactfully as she could, that Nathaniel was not at all likely to finance his play. He was strung up after his reading, and at first he seemed hardly to understand her. Plainly, Paula had led him to suppose that her uncle's help was a foregone conclusion. He went perfectly white when the sense of what Mathilda was saying penetrated his brain, and said in a trembling voice: "Then it's all no use!"
"I'm afraid it's no use as far as Nat is concerned," Mathilda said. "It isn't his kind of play. But he isn't the only potential backer in the world, you know."
He shook his head. "I don't know any rich people. Why won't he back it? Why shouldn't p-people like me be g-given a chance? It isn't fair! People with money - people who don't care for anything but -"
"I think you'd be far better advised to send your play to some producer in the usual way," said Mathilda, in a bracing voice calculated to check hysteria.
"They're all afraid of it!" he said. "They say it hasn't got box-office appeal. But I know - I know it's a good play! I've - I've sweated blood over it! I can't give it up like this! It means so much to me! You don't know what it means to me, Miss Clare!"
She began gently to suggest that he had it in him to write other plays, plays with the desired box-office appeal, but he interrupted her, saying violently that he would rather starve than write the sort of play she meant. Mathilda began to feel a little impatient, and was quite glad to see Paula stride into the room.
"Paula!" said Roydon despairingly, "is it true, what Miss Clare says? Is he going to refuse to put up the money?"
Paula was flushed and bright-eyed, stimulated by her quarrel with Nathaniel. She said: "I've just told him what I think of him! I told him -"
"Well, we don't want you to tell us," said Mathilda, losing patience. "You ought to have known that there wasn't a hope!"
Paula's gaze flickered to her face. "I shall get the money. I always get what I want, always! And I want this more than I've ever wanted anything in my life!"
Judging by those of Nat's remarks which I was privileged to hear -"
"Oh, that's nothing!" Paula said, tossing back her hair. "He doesn't mind having rows. We none of us do. We like rows! I shall talk to him again soon. You'll see!"
"I hope to God I shan't!" said Mathilda.
"Ah, you're so un-understanding!" Paula said. "I know him much better than you do. Of course I shall get the money! I know I shall!"
"Don't buoy yourself up with false hopes: you won't!" said Mathilda.
"I've got to get it!" Paula said, looking rapt, and tense. "I've got to!"
Roydon glanced uncertainly from her glowing face to Mathilda's discouraging one. He said in a dejected voice: "I suppose I'd better go and change. It doesn't seem much use -"
Paula said: "I'm coming too. It is of use, Willoughby! I always get my own way! Really!"
A merry Christmas! Mathilda thought, watching them go. She took a cigarette from the box on the table, and lit it, and sat down by the fire, feeling quite limp. All this emotional strain! she thought, with a wry smile. It was not her affair, of course, but the threadbare playwright, tiresome though he was, had roused her pity, and Paula had a disastrous way of dragging even mere on
lookers into her quarrels. Besides, one couldn't sit back and watch this ill-starred party going to perdition. One had at least to try to save it from utter ruin.
She was forced to admit that she could not immediately perceive any way of saving it from ruin. If Paula's folly did not precipitate a crisis, Joseph's balm spreading would. There could be no stopping either of them. Paula cared only for what concerned herself; Joseph could never be convinced that his oil was not oil but vitriol. He saw himself as a peacemaker; he was probably peacemaking now, Mathilda reflected: infuriating Nat with platitudes, making bad worse, all with the best intentions.
A door opened across the wide hall; Nathaniel's voice came to Mathilda's ears. "Damn you, stop pawing me about! For two pins, I'd turn the whole lot of them out of doors, bag and baggage!"
Mathilda smiled to herself. Joseph at it again!
"Now, Nat, old fellow, you know you don't mean that! Let's talk the whole thing over quietly together!"
"I don't want to talk it over!" shouted Nathaniel. "And don't call me old fellow! You've done enough, inviting all these people to my house, and turning it into a damned bazaar! Paper-streamers! Mistletoe! I won't have it! Next you'll want to dress up as Santa Claus! I hate Christmas, do you hear me? Loathe it! abominate it!"
"Not you, Nat!" Joseph said. "You're just an old curmudgeon, and you're upset because you didn't like young Roydon's play. Well, I didn't care for it either, if you want to know, but, my dear old chap, youth must be served!"
"Not in my house!" snarled Nathaniel. "Don't come upstairs with me! I don't want you!"
Mathilda heard him stump up the four stairs which led to the first half-landing. A crash which she had no difficulty in recognising followed. Nathaniel, she deduced, had knocked over the steps.
She strolled to the door. The steps lay on the ground, -and Joseph was tenderly assisting his brother to rise from his knees.
"My dear Nat, I'm so sorry! I'm afraid it was my fault," he said remorsefully. "I'm a careless fellow! I had meant to have finished my poor little decorations before this!"
"Take them down!" ordered Nathaniel in a strangled voice. "All of them! This instant! Clumsy jackass! My lumbago!"
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