Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  But the smart set was a terribly baffling Will-o’-the-Wisp kind of affair, or so it had hitherto been to her. A married daughter, an unmarried daughter even, so she observed, might be steeped in the smart set, while the mother was, figuratively speaking, in Bloomsbury. You might robe yourself from head to foot in Balas rubies, you might be a double Duchess, you might dance a cancan down Piccadilly, you might be the most amiable of God’s creatures, the wittiest, the most corrupt, or the most correct of the daughters of Eve, and yet never get near it; but here was Mrs. Lancelot Gordon, who never did anything, was not even an Honourable, dressed rather worse than Mrs. Murchison’s own maid, and yet was a pivot and centre of that charmed circle. Mrs. Murchison racked her brain over the problem, and came to the conclusion that no accomplishment could get you into it, no vice or virtue keep you out. That was a comfort, for she had no vices. But to-day Kit had asked her to dinner; the mystic doors perhaps were beginning to turn on their hinges, and her discarded Countess might continue to revolve on her unillumined orbit in decent and dull obscurity with her belted Earl.

  CHAPTER VI. TOBY’S PARTNER

  Toby finished his cigarette when Kit left him, and threw the end over the balcony into the street. It went flirting through the air like a small firework, and he saw it pitch on the shoulder of an immense policeman below, who looked angrily round. And so it was that the discreet Toby withdrew softly into the ballroom.

  It was only a little after one, and the dancing was at its height. Everyone who intended to come had done so, and no one yet had thought of going away. From the band in the gallery came the enchanting lilt of the dance music, with its graceful stress and abatement, making it impossible not to dance. The light-hearted intoxication of rhythmic movement entering into the souls of many women whom one would naturally have supposed to have left their dancing days behind them, for reasons over which they had no control, had produced the same sort of effect in them as a warm November day does in the bluebottles who have outlived the summer, and they were deluding themselves into thinking that “June was not over, though past her full.” The ballroom was ideally occupied; it was peopled enough, but not overcrowded, and like a whisper underneath the shouting band you could hear the sibilant rustle of skirts, and the “sip-sip” of shoes over the well-polished floor.

  Kit and her partner were as well matched and graceful a pair as could be found in London — too well matched, the world said; but the world is never happy unless it is saying something of the sort, and the wiser there, among whom even her bitterest friends put Kit, are accustomed to discount all that is said. To repeat fresh gossip without actually believing or disbelieving it, and to hear it in the same light-hearted spirit makes the world as fresh as a daily paper to someone just arrived from long sea, and Kit’s interest in what was said about her was of the most breezily superficial sort. She never intended that it should be ever so distantly possible that she should compromise herself, for she recognised with humble thankfulness how hard she was to compromise. She had done many risky things in her life, and there was safety in their very numbers. People would only say that her conduct with So-and-so had been much riskier, and yet it had come to nothing. Probably, then, this intimacy with Lord Comber was equally innocent. Other people had merely looked over hedges and been accused of stealing horses, while Kit, so to speak, had been found before now with the stolen halter in her hand; and yet her excellent grace in giving it up at the proper moment to the proper owner had got her out of what might have been a scrape to a less accomplished adventurer.

  And to-night nobody talked more disagreeably than they had talked scores of times before. Up to a certain point repetition is the soul of wit; at least, the point of a joke grows by dwelling on it, but the repetition in excess is wearisome, and to-night people scarcely said more than what a beautiful couple they were.

  About this there could scarcely be two opinions. Kit was very tall and slenderly made, and there was a boyish spring and grace about her dancing which gave a peculiar spontaneousness to this pretty performance. Ted Comber, a fresh-faced, handsome youth, had no extra weight on his hands; the two moved with an exquisite unanimity of motion. Amiable indiscretions and a course of life not indicated in the educational curriculum had led the authorities both at Eton and Christ Church to make their parting with him take place sooner than he had himself intended, but, as Kit said in her best manner, “He was only a boy then.” He was in years not much more than a boy now; in appearance, especially by artificial light, he was a boy still, and the two numbered scarcely more than fifty years between them.

  But balls are not given in order to furnish a hunting-ground for the novelist and reformer, and to-night there were few such present. Indeed, anyone must have had a soul of putty not to have laid criticism aside; not to have forgotten all that had been said before, and all that might be said afterwards, in the enchanting moment. This dance had been on the board some ten minutes when Toby entered; people with winds and what is known, by an elegant periphrasis, as a superfluity of adipose tissue had paused; and for a few minutes there were not more than half a dozen couples on the floor. Kit, secure in the knowledge that no one present except herself and Jack had been to that City dinner a fortnight before, had put on again the same orange chiffon creation as she had worn that night, and she blazed out against the man’s dark clothes; she was a flame in his encircling arm. The room was nearly square, and they danced not in straight lines up, across and down, but in one big circle, coming close to the walls only at four points in the middle of the sides of the room; like some beautiful twin star they moved round a centre, revolving also on a private axis of their own. Indeed, the sight of them whirling fast and smoothly in perfect time to the delicious rhythm was so pretty that no one thought of alluding to their private axis at all. Even the Hungarian Ambassador, as sprightly a young man of eighty or thereabouts as you could wish to see, and still accustomed to lead the cotillion, recognised the superiority of the performance. “Decidedly all the rest of us cut a poor figure when those two are dancing,” he said with unwonted modesty to Lady Haslemere.

  But in a few minutes the room grew crowded again. Recovered couples sprang up like mushrooms on the floor, and the pace slowed. Lord Comber steered as no one else could steer, but checks infinitesimal but infinite could not but occur. It would have been good enough had it not just now been better.

  “We’ll wait a moment, Ted,” said Kit; “perhaps at the end it will be emptier again.”

  She stopped opposite one of the doors.

  “Shall we go on to the balcony?” he asked. “There will be no one there.”

  “Yes. Oh, there is Mrs. Murchison! Take me to her. I’ll follow you in a moment.”

  Ted swore gently under his breath.

  “Oh, leave the Crœsum alone,” he said. “Do come now, Kit. This is my last dance with you this evening.”

  But Kit dropped his arm.

  “Fetch Toby,” she said under her voice to Lord Comber; “fetch, you understand, and at once. He is over there.” Then, without a pause, “So we meet again,” she said to Mrs. Murchison. “You were right and I was wrong, for I said, do you remember, that the one way not to meet a person was to go to the same dance. And did you get all those great purchases of yours home safely? You were quite too charitable! What will you do with a hundred and forty fire-screens? — or was it a hundred and forty-one? Miss Murchison, what magnificent pearls you have! They are too beautiful! Now, if I wore pearls like yours, people would say they were not real, and they would be perfectly right.”

  Miss Murchison was what Kit would have called at first sight an uncomfortable sort of a girl, very pretty, beautiful indeed, but uncomfortable. What she should have said to Kit’s praise of her pearls Kit could not have told you, but having made yourself agreeable to anyone, it is that person’s business to reply in the same strain. Else, what happens to social and festive meetings? But Miss Murchison looked neither gratified nor embarrassed. Either would have shown a proper sp
irit.

  “They are good,” she said shortly.

  Kit kept a weather eye open for Toby. She could see him near, and yet far, for the room was full, being reluctantly “fetched” by Lord Comber, who appeared to be expostulating with him. There were still some seconds to elapse before he could get to them, but Kit had determined to introduce him then and there to Miss Murchison. Perhaps her beauty would be more effective than her own arguments.

  “It is only quite a little dinner to-morrow,” she said to Mrs. Murchison, in order to fill up the time naturally. “You will have to take a sort of pot-luck with us. A kind of ‘no fish-knife’ dinner.”

  Better and better. This was a promising beginning to the intimacy Mrs. Murchison craved. It was nothing, she said to herself, to be asked to a big dinner; the pot-luck dinner was far more to her taste.

  “Well, I think that’s perfectly charming of you, Lady Conybeare,” she said. “If there’s one thing I am folle about, it’s those quiet little dinners, and one gets so little of them. Be it ever so humble, there’s nothing like dining quietly with your friends.”

  Kit’s face dimpled with merriment.

  “That’s so sweet of you,” she said. “Oh, here’s Toby. Toby, let me introduce you to Mrs. Murchison. Oh, what’s your name? — I always forget. It begins with Evelyn. Anyhow, he is Conybeare’s brother, you know, Mrs. Murchison.”

  Mrs. Murchison did not know, but she was very happy to do so. Also the informality was charming. But her happiness had a momentary eclipse. She knew that a man was introduced to a woman, and not the other way about, but might not some other rule hold when the case was between a plain miss and the brother of a Marquis? English precedence seemed to her a fearful and wonderful thing. But Kit relieved her of her difficulty.

  “And Miss Murchison, Toby,” she said. “Charmed to have seen you again. Till 8.30 to-morrow;” and she smiled and retreated with Ted.

  Blushing honours were raining thick on the enchanted lady. “One thing leads to another,” she said to herself, and here was the brother of Lord Conybeare endorsing the happy meeting of this afternoon.

  Then aloud:

  “Very pleased to make your acquaintance,” she said, for the phrase was ineradicable. She had searched in vain for a cisatlantic equivalent, but could not get hold of one. Like the snake in spring, she had cast off the slough of many of her transatlanticisms, but “very pleased” was deeply engrained, and appeared involuntarily and inevitably.

  But Toby’s inflammable eye had caught the filia pulchrior.

  “My sister-in-law tells me you are dining with her to-morrow,” he said genially. “That is delightful.”

  He paused a moment, and racked his brain for another suitable remark; but, finding none, he turned abruptly to Miss Murchison.

  “May I have the pleasure?” he asked. “We shall just have time for a turn before this is over.”

  “Of course you may, Lord Evelyn,” said her mother precipitately.

  Miss Murchison paused for a moment without replying, and Toby, though naturally modest, told himself that her mother’s ready acceptance for her justified the pause.

  “Delighted,” she said.

  Toby might be described as a good, useful dancer, but no more. People who persist in describing one thing in terms suitable to another speak of the poetry and the melody of motion, and the dancing Toby had no more poetry or melody in his motion than a motor car or a street piano. The tide of couples, as inexplicable in its ebb and flow as deep sea-currents, had gone down again, and they had a fairly free floor. But before they had made the circuit of the room twice Kit and Lord Comber reappeared, and Kit heaved a thankful sister-in-law’s sigh.

  “Toby is dancing with the Murchison girl,” she said; “and she hardly ever dances. Now — —”

  And they glided off on to the floor.

  “A design of yours?” asked Ted.

  “Yes, all my own. Ego fecit, as Mrs. Murchison says. She has millions. If Jack were dead and I was a man, I should try to marry her myself. Simply millions, Ted. Don’t you wish you had?”

  “Certainly; but I am very content dancing with you. I prefer it.”

  “That is silly,” said Kit. “No sane man really prefers dancing with — with anyone, to having millions.”

  “Why try the cynical rôle? Do you really believe that, Kit?”

  “Yes, and I hate compliments. Compliments should always be insincere, and I’m sure you mean what you say. If they are sincere they are unnecessary. Oh, it’s stopping. What a bore! Six bars more. Quicker — quicker!”

  The coda gathered up the dreamy threads of the valse into a vivid ever-quickening pattern of sound, and came to an end with a great blare. The industrious and heated Toby wiped his forehead.

  “That was delicious,” he said. “Won’t you have an ice or something, Miss Murchison? I say, it is sw — stewing hot, isn’t it?”

  Lily took his arm.

  “Yes, do give me an ice,” she said. “Who is that dancing with Lady Conybeare?”

  Toby looked round.

  “I don’t see them,” he said. “But I expect it’s Ted Comber. Kit usually dances with him. They are supposed to be the best dancers in London. Oh yes, I see them. It is Comber.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “Yes, in the sort of way one knows fifty thousand people. We always say ‘Hulloa’ to each other, and then we’ve finished, don’t you know.”

  “You don’t like him, apparently.”

  “I particularly dislike him,” said Toby, in a voice that was cheerful and had the real ring of sincerity.

  “Why?”

  “Don’t know. He doesn’t do any of the things he ought. He doesn’t shoot, or ride, or play games. He stays at country houses, you see, and sits with the women in the drawing-room, or walks with them, and bicycles with them in the afternoon. Not my sort.”

  Lily glanced at his ugly, pleasant face.

  “I quite agree with you,” she said. “I hate men to sit on chairs and look beautiful. He was introduced to me just now, though I did not catch his name, and I felt he knew what my dress was made of, and how it was made, and what it cost.”

  “Oh, he knows all that sort of thing,” said Toby. “You should hear him and Kit talking chiffon together. And you dislike that sort of inspection?”

  “Intensely. But most women apparently don’t.”

  “No: isn’t it funny! So many women don’t seem to know a man when they see him. Certainly Comber is very popular with them. But a man ought to be liked by men.”

  Miss Murchison smiled. Toby had got two ices and was sitting opposite her, devouring his in large mouthfuls, as if it had been porridge. She had been brought up in the country and the open air, among horses and dogs, and other nice wholesome things, and this mode of life in London, as she saw it, under her mother’s marchings and manœuvres to storm the smart set, seemed to her at times to be little short of insane. If you were not putting on a dress, you were taking it off, and all this simply to sit on a chair in the Park, to say half a dozen words to half a dozen people, to lunch at one house, to dine at another, and dance at a third. All that was only incidental in life seemed to her to be turned into its business; everything was topsy-turvy. She understood well enough that if you lived in the midst of your best friends, it would be delightful to see them there three times a day, in these pretty well-dressed settings, but to go to a house simply in order to have been there was inexplicable. Mrs. Murchison had given a ball only a few weeks before at her house in Grosvenor Square, about which even after the lapse of days people had scarcely ceased talking. Royalty had been there, and Mrs. Murchison, in the true republican spirit, had entertained them royally. Her cotillion presents had been really marvellous; there had been so many flowers that it was scarcely possible to breathe, and so many people that it was quite impossible to dance. But as success to Mrs. Murchison’s and many other minds was measured by your crowd and your extravagance, she had been ecstatically satisfied, and ha
d sent across to her husband several elegantly written accounts of the festivity clipped from society papers. The evening had been to her, as it were, a sort of signed certificate of her social standing. But to Lily the ball had been more nearly a nightmare than a certificate: neither she nor her mother knew by sight half the people who came, and certainly half the people who came did not know them by sight. The whole thing seemed to her vulgar, wickedly wasteful, and totally unenjoyable.

  There are those, and her mother was one, who would cheerfully be asphyxiated in a sufficiently exalted crowd. To be found dead among a heap of Duchesses would be to her what to a soldier is death in the forefront of the battle. A mob of fashionable people had eaten and drunk at her expense, listened to her band and marvelled at her orchids. She had also to a high degree that excellent though slightly barbarous virtue which is called hospitality. She liked to feed people. But the human soul, as poets are unanimous in telling us, is ever aspiring upwards, and this point reached, Mrs. Murchison, as has been already stated, desired more. Her tastes became childlike again; she yearned for simple little dinners with the mystic few, those dinners which never even appeared in the papers, and were followed by no ball, perhaps not even by a “few people.” Cold roast beef or bits of common bacon on skewers are sometimes served in the middle of banquets. Mrs. Murchison longed for her bits of bacon in suitable company. It was very nice to have the Prince asking after your dachshund’s cough, but she had got past that.