Mrs. Ames (18 page)

The party had been announced to begin at half past ten, and it was scarcely that hour when Mrs Ames came downstairs from her bedroom where she had so long been busy since the end of the early dinner. Her arms were bare from finger-tip to her little round shoulders, over which were clasped, with handsome cairngorm brooches, the straps of her long tunic. But there was no effect of an excessive display of human flesh, since her arms were very short, and in addition they were plentifully bedecked. On one arm a metallic snake writhed from wrist to elbow, on the other there was clasped above the elbow a plain circlet of some very bright and shining metal. A net of blue beads altogether too magnificent to be turquoises, was pinned over her unfaded hair, and from the front of it there depended on her forehead a large pear-shaped pearl, suggestive of the one which the extravagant queen subsequently dissolved in vinegar. Any pearl, so scientists tell us, which is capable of solution in vinegar must be a curious pearl; that which Mrs Ames wore in the middle of her forehead was curious also. Art had been specially invoked, over and above the normal skin food tonight, in the matter of Mrs Ames' face, and a formal Egyptian eyebrow, as indicated in the
illustration to ‘Rameses' in the encyclopaedia, decorated in charcoal the place where her own eyebrow once was. Below her eye a touch of the same charcoal added brilliancy to the eye itself; several touches of rouge contributed their appropriate splendour to her cheeks.

The long tunic which was held up over her shoulders by the cairngorm brooches, reached to her knee. It was a little tight, perhaps, but when you have only one Arab shawl, shot with copious gold thread, you have to make it go as far as it can, and after all, it went to her knees. A small fold of it was looped up, and fell over her yellow girdle, it was parted at the sides below the hips, and disclosed a skirt made of two Arab shawls shot with silver, which, stitched together, descended to her ankle. She did not mean to dance anything except the opening quadrille. Below this silver-streaked skirt appeared, as was natural, her pretty plump little feet. On them she wore sandals which exhibited their plumpness and prettiness and smallness to the fullest extent. A correct strap lay between the great toe and the next, and the straps were covered with silver paper. For years Riseborough had known how small were her shoes; tonight Riseborough should see that those shoes had been amply large enough for what they contained. Round her neck, finally, were four rows of magnificent pearl beads; no wonder Cleopatra thought nothing of dissolving one pearl, when its dissolution would leave intact so populous a company of similar treasures.

As she came downstairs she heard a sudden noise in the drawing room, as if a heavy man had suddenly stumbled. It required no more ingenuity than was normally hers to conjecture that Lyndhurst was already there, and had tripped himself up in some novel accoutrement. And at that, a sudden flush of excitement and anticipation invaded her, and she wondered what he would be like. As regards herself she
felt the profoundest confidence in the success of her garniture. He could scarcely help being amazed, delighted. And an emotion never keenly felt by her, but as such long outworn, shook her and made her knees tremulous. She felt so young, so daring. She wished that at this moment he would come out, for as she descended the stairs he could not but see how small and soft were her feet …

Almost before her wish was formed, it was granted.

A well-smothered oath succeeded the stumbling noise, and Major Ames, in white Roman toga and tights came out into the hall. There was no vestige of Venetian cloak about him; he was altogether different from what she had expected. A profuse wig covered his head, the toga completely masked what the exercise with the garden roller had not completely removed, and below, his big calves rose majestic over his classical laced shoes. If ever there was a Mark Antony with a military moustache, he was not in Egypt nor in Rome, but here; by a divine chance, without consultation, he had chosen for himself the character complementary to hers. He looked up and saw her, she looked down and saw him.

‘Bless my soul,' he said. ‘Amy! Cleopatra!'

She gave him a happy little smile.

‘Bless my soul,' she said. ‘Lyndhurst! Mark Antony!'

There was a long and an awful pause. It was quite clear to her that something had occurred totally unexpected. She had wanted to be unexpected, but there was something wrong about the quality of his surprise. Then such manliness as there was in him came to his aid.

‘Upon my word,' he said, ‘you have got yourself up splendidly, Amy. Cleopatra now, pearls and all, and sandals! Why, you'll take the shine out of them all! Here we go, eh? Antony and Cleopatra! Who would have thought of it! The
cab's round, dear. We had better be starting, if we're to take part in the procession. Not want a cloak or anything? Antony and Cleopatra; God bless my soul!'

That was sufficient to allay the immediate embarrassment. True, he had not been knocked over by this apparition of her in the way she had meant, and the astonished pause, she was afraid, was not one of surrendering admiration. And yet, perhaps, he was feeling shy, even as she was; standing here in all this splendour of shining pantomime he might well feel her to be as strange to him, as she felt him to be to her. Moreover, she had not only to look Cleopatra, but to be Cleopatra, to behave herself with the gaiety and youth which her appearance gave him the right to expect. In the meantime he also had earned her compliments, for no man who thinks it worthwhile to assume a fancy dress has a soul so unhuman as to be unappreciative of applause.

She fell back a step or two to regard him comprehensively.

‘My dear,' she said, ‘you are splendid; that toga suits you to admiration. And your arms look so well coming out of the folds of it. What great strong arms, Lyndhurst! You could pick up your little Cleopatra and carry her back - back to Egypt so easily.'

Something of their irresponsibility which, as by a special Providence, broods over the audacity of assuming strange guises, descended on her. She could no more have made such a speech to him in her ordinary morning clothes, nor yet in the famous rose-coloured silk, than she could have flown. But now her costume unloosed her tongue. And despite the dreadful embarrassment that he knew would await him when they got to the party, and a second Cleopatra welcomed them, this intoxication of costume (liable, unfortunately, to manifest itself not only in vin gai) mounted to his head also.

‘Ma reine!' he said, feeling that French brought them somehow closer to the appropriate Oriental atmosphere.

She held up her skirt with one hand, and gave him the other.

‘We must be off, my Antony,' she said.

They got into the cab; a somewhat jaded-looking horse was lashed into a slow and mournful trot, and they rattled away down the hard, dry road.

A queue of carriages was already waiting to disembark its cargoes when they drew near the house, and leaning furtively and feverishly from the window, Mrs Ames saw a Hamlet or two and some Titanias swiftly and shyly cross the pavement between two rows of the astonished proletariat. Beside her in the cab her husband grunted and fidgeted; she guessed that to him this entrance was of the nature of bathing on a cold day; however invigorating might be the subsequent swim, the plunge was chilly. But she little knew the true cause of his embarrassment and apprehension; had his military career ever entailed (which it had not) the facing of fire, it was probable, though his courage was of no conspicuous a kind, that he would have met the guns with greater blitheness than he awaited the moment that now inevitably faced him. Then came their turn; there was a pause, and then their carriage door was flung open, and they descended from the innocent vehicle that to him was as portentous as a tumbril. In a moment Cleopatra would meet Cleopatra, and he could form no idea how either Cleopatra would take it. The Cleopatra-hostess, as he knew, was going to wear sandals also; snakes were to writhe up her long white arms …

Mrs Ames adjusted the pear-shaped pearl on her forehead.

‘I think if we say half past one it will be late enough, Lyndhurst,' she said. ‘If we are not ready he can wait.'

It seemed to Lyndhurst that half past one would probably be quite late enough.

The assemblage of guests took place in the drawing room which opened into the garden; a waiter from the ‘Crown' inn, with a chin beard and dressed in a sort of white surplice and carrying a lantern in his hand, who might with equal reasonableness be supposed to be the Man in the Moon out of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, or a gravedigger out of
Hamlet
, said, ‘Character names, please, ma'am,' and preceded them to the door of this chamber. He bawled out ‘Cleopatra and Mark Antony.'

Another Cleopatra, a ‘different conception of this part', as the Kent Chronicle said in its next issue, a Cleopatra dim and white and willowy, advanced to them. She looked vexed, but as she ran her eyes up and down Mrs Ames' figure, like a practised pianist playing a chromatic scale, her vexation seemed completely to clear.

‘Dear Cousin Amy,' she said, ‘how perfectly lovely! I never saw - Wilfred, make your bow to Cleopatra. And Antony! Oh, Major Ames!'

Again she made the chromatic scale, starting at the top, so to speak (his face), with a long note, and dwelling there again when she returned to it.

Other arrivals followed, and this particular Antony and Cleopatra mingled with such guests as were already assembled. The greater part had gathered, and Mrs Ames' habitual manner and bearing suited excellently with her regal role. The Turner family, at any rate, who were standing a little apart from the others, not being quite completely ‘in' Riseborough society, and, feeling rather hot and feverish in the thick brocaded stuffs suitable to Falstaff, Mistress Page and King Theseus, felt neither more nor less uncomfortable when she made a few complimentary remarks to them than
they did when, with her fat prayer book in her hand, she spoke to them after church on Sunday. Elsewhere young Morton, with a white face and a red nose, was the traditional Apothecary, and Mrs Taverner was so copiously apparalled as Queen Catherine that she was looking forward very much indeed to the moment when the procession should go forth into the greater coolness of the night air. Then a stentorian announcement from the waiter at the Crown made everyone turn again to the door.

‘Antony and Cleopatra ten years later,' he shouted.

There was a slight pause. Then entered Mr and Mrs Altham with high-held hands clasped at fingertips. They both stepped rather high, she holding her skirt away from her feet, and both pointing their toes as if performing a pavanne. This entry had been much rehearsed, and it was arresting to the point of producing a sort of stupefaction.

Mrs Evans ran her eye up and down the pair, and was apparently satisfied.

‘Dear Mrs Altham,' she said, ‘how perfectly lovely! AND Mr Altham. But ten years later! You must not ask us to believe that.'

She turned to her husband and spoke quickly, with a look on her face less amiable than she usually wore in public.

‘Wilfred,' she said, ‘tell the band to begin the opening march at once for the procession, in case there are any more - '

But he interrupted -

‘Here's another, Millie,' he said cheerfully. ‘Yes, we'd better begin.'

His speech was drowned by the voice of the brazen-lunged waiter.

‘Cleopatra!' he shouted.

Mrs Brooks entered with all the rows of seed pearls.

Riseborough, if the census papers were consulted, might perhaps not prove to have an abnormally large percentage of inhabitants who had reached middle age, but certainly in the festivities of its upper circles, maturity held an overwhelming majority over youth. It was so tonight, and of the half-hundred folk who thus masqueraded, there were few who were not, numerically speaking, of thoroughly discreet years. The diffused knowledge of this undoubtedly gave confidence to their gaiety, for there was no unconscious standard of sterling youth by which their slightly mature exhilaration could be judged and found deficient in genuine and natural effervescence. Thus, despite the somewhat untoward conjunction of four matronly Cleopatras, a spirit of extraordinary gaiety soon possessed the entire party. Odious comparisons might conceivably spring up mushroom-like tomorrow, and (unmushroom-like) continue to wax and flourish through many days and dinners, but tonight so large an environment of elderly people gave to every one of those elderly people a pleasant sense of not suffering but rather shining in comparison with the others. Even the Cleopatras themselves were content; Mrs Ames, for instance, saw how sensible it was that Mrs Altham should announce herself as a Cleopatra of ten years later, while Mrs Altham, observing Mrs Ames, saw how supererogatory her titular modesty had been, and wondered that Mrs Ames cared to show her feet like that, while Mrs Brooks knew that everybody was mentally contrasting her queenliness of height with Mrs Ames' paucity of inches, and her abundance of beautiful hair with Mrs Altham's obvious wig. While, all the time, Mrs Evans, whom the appearance of a fourth Cleopatra had considerably upset for the moment, felt that at this rate she could easily continue being Cleopatra for more years than ‘the ten after', so properly assumed by
Mrs Altham. In the same way Major Ames, with his six feet of solid English bone and muscle, and his fifth decade of years still but half-consumed, felt that Mr Altham had but provided a scale of comparison uncommonly flattering to himself. Simultaneously, Mr Altham, with a laurel wreath round his head, reflected how uncomfortable he would have felt if his laurel wreath was anchored on no sounder a foundation than a wig, and wondered if gardening (on the principle that all flesh is grass) invariably resulted in so great a growth of tissue. But all these pleasant self-communings were, indeed, but a minor tributary to the real river of enjoyment that danced and chattered through the starlit hours of this July night. Somehow the whole assembly seemed to have shifted off themselves the natural and inevitable burden of their years; they danced and mildly flirted, they sat out in the dim shrubbery, and played on the seashore of life again, finding the sandcastles had become real once more. Mrs Ames, for instance, had intended to dance nothing but the opening quadrille, but before the second dance, which was a waltz, had come to a close, she had accepted Mr Altham's offer, and was slowly capering round with him. A little care was necessary in order not to put too unjust a strain on the sandal straps, but she exercised this precaution, and was sorry, though hot, when the dance came to an end. Then Major Ames, who had been piloting Mrs Altham, joined them at the moselle-cup table.