Mrs. Ames (19 page)

‘ 'Pon my word, Altham,' he said, ‘I don't know what to say to you. You've taken my Cleopatra, but then I've taken yours. Exchange no robbery, hey?'

His wife tapped him on the arm with her palmette fan.

‘Lyndhurst, go along with you!' she said, employing an expression, the mental equivalent of which she did not know ever existed in her mind.

‘I'll go along,' he said. ‘But which is my Cleopatra?'

At the moment, Mrs Evans approached.

‘My two Cleopatras must excuse me,' said this amazing man. ‘I am engaged for this next dance to the Cleopatra of us all. Ha! Ha!'

He offered his arm to Mrs Evans, and they went out of the cave of the mulberry tree again.

The band had not yet struck up for the next dance, the majority of the guests were flocking under the mulberry tree at the conclusion of the last, and for the moment they had the cool starlit dusk to themselves. And then, all at once, the Major's sense of boisterous enjoyment deserted him; he felt embarrassed with a secret knowledge that he was expected to say something in tune with this privacy. How that expectation was conveyed he hardly knew; the slight pressure on his arm seemed to announce it unmistakably. It reminded him that he was a man, and yet with all that gaiety and gallantry that were so conspicuous a feature in his behaviour to women in public, he felt awkward and ill at ease. He embarked on a course of desperate and fulsome eulogy, longing in his private soul for the band to begin.

‘ 'Pon my soul, you are an enchantress, Millie!' he said. ‘You come to our staid, respectable old Riseborough, and before you have been here six months you take us all into fairyland. Positively fairyland. And - and I've never seen you looking so lovely as tonight.'

‘Let us stroll all round the garden,' she said. ‘I want you to see it all now it is lit up. And the shrubbery is pretty, too, with - with the filter of starlight coming through the trees. Do tell me truthfully, like a friend, is it going all right? Are they enjoying themselves?'

‘Kicking up their heels like two-year-olds,' said Major Ames.

‘How wicked of you to say that! But really I had one bad moment, when - when the last Cleopatra came in.'

She paused a moment. Then in her clear, silky voice -

‘Dear old things!' she said.

Now Mrs Evans was not in any way a clever woman, but had she had the brains and the wit of Cleopatra herself, she could not have spoken three more consummately chosen words. All the cool, instinctive confidence of a younger woman, and a pretty woman speaking of the more elderly and plain was there; there, too, was the deliberate challenge of the coquette. And Major Ames was quite helpless against the simplicity of such art. Mere manners, the ordinary code of politeness, demanded that he should agree with his hostess. Besides, though he was not in any way in love with her, he could not resist the assumption that her words implied, and, after all, she was a pretty woman, whom he had kissed, and he was alone in the star-hung dusk with her.

‘Poor dear Amy!' he said.

Millie Evans gave a soft little sigh, as of a contented child. He had expressed with the most ruthless accuracy exactly what she wished him to feel. Then, in the manner of a woman whose nature is warped throughout by a slight but ingrained falsity, she spoke as if it was not she who had prompted the three words which she had almost made him say.

‘She is enjoying herself so,' she said. ‘I have never seen Cousin Amy look so thoroughly pleased and contented. I thought she looked so charming, too, and what dear, plump little feet she has. But, my dear, it was rather a surprise when you and she were announced. It looked as if this poor Cleopatra was going to be Antony-less! Dear me, what a word.'

Here was a more direct appeal, and again Major Ames was powerless in her soft clutch. Hers was not exactly an
iron hand in a velvet glove, but a hand made of fly-catching paper. She had taken her glove off now. And he was beginning to stick to her.

‘Pshaw!' he said.

That, again, had a perfectly satisfactory sound to her ears. The very abruptness and bluffness of it pleased her more than any protestation could have done. He was so direct, so shy, so manly.

She laughed softly.

‘Hush, you mustn't say those things,' she said. ‘Ah, there is the band beginning, and it is our dance. But let us just walk through the shrubbery before we go back. The dusk and quiet are such a relief after the glare. Lyndhurst - ah, dear me. Cousin Lyndhurst I ought to say - you really must not go home till my little dance is quite finished. You make things go so well. Dear Wilfred is quite useless to me. Does he not look an old darling as Timon of Athens? A sort of mixture between George the Fourth in tights and a lion tamer.'

Mrs Evans was feeling more actively alive tonight than she had felt for years. Her tongue, which was generally a rather halting adjutant to her glances and little sinuous movements, was almost vivified to wit. Certainly her description of her husband had acuteness and a sense of the ludicrous to inspire it. Through the boughs of laburnums in the shrubbery they could see him now, escorting the tallest and oldest Cleopatra, who was Mrs Brooks, to the end of the garden. Dimly, through the curtain of intervening gloom, they saw the populous wooden floor that had been laid down on the grass; Mrs Ames - the dance was a polka - was frankly pirouetting in the arms of a redoubtable Falstaff. Mrs Altham was wrestling with the Apothecary, and Elsie Evans, one of the few young people present, was vainly trying to galvanize
General Fortescue, thinly disguised as Henry VII, into some semblance of activity.

Mrs Evans gave another sigh, a sigh of curious calibre.

‘It all seems so distant,' she said. ‘All the lights and dancing are less real than the shadows and the stillness.'

That was not quite extemporaneous; she had thought over something of the sort. It had the effect of making Major Ames feel suddenly hot with an anxious kind of heat. He was beginning to perceive the truth of that which he had foppishly imagined in his own self-communings, namely, that this ‘poor little lady' was very, very much attached to him. He had often dwelt on the thought before with odious self-centred satisfaction; now the thought was less satisfactory; it was disquieting and mildly alarming. Like the fly on the flypaper, with one leg already englued, he put down a second to get leverage with which to free the first, and found that it was adhering also.

Mrs Evans spoke again.

‘I took such pleasure in all the preparations.' she said. ‘You were so much interested in it all. Tell me, Cousin Lyndhurst, that you are not disappointed.'

It was hardly possible for him to do less than what he did. What he did was little enough. He pressed the arm that lay in his rather close to his white toga, and an unwonted romanticism of speech rose to his lips.

‘You have enchanted me,' he said. ‘Me, us, all of us.'

She gave a little laugh; in the dusk it sounded no louder than a breeze stirring.

‘You needn't have added that,' she said.

Where she stood a diaper of light and shadow played over her. A little spray of laburnum between her face and the lights on the lawn outside, swaying gently in a breeze that had gone astray in this calm night, cast wavering shadows
over her. Now her arms shone white under freckles of shadow, now it was her face that was a moon to him. Or again, both would be in shade and a diamond star on her bright yellow hair concentrated all the light into itself. All the elusive mysterious charm of her womanhood was there, made more real by the fantastic setting. He was kindled to a greater warmth than he had yet known, but, all the time, some dreadful creature in his semi-puritanical semi-immoral brain, told him that this was all ‘devilish naughty'. He was as unused to such scruples as he was unused to such temptations, and in some curious fashion he felt as ashamed of the one as he felt afraid of the other. At length he summed up the whole of these despicable conclusions.

‘Will you give me just one kiss, Millie!' he said; ‘just one cousin kiss, before we go and dance?'

Such early worms next morning in Major Ames' garden as had escaped the early bird, must certainly have all been caught and laid out flat by the garden roller, so swift and incessant were its journeyings. For though the dawn had overspread the sky with the hueless tints of approaching day when Antony and Cleopatra were charioteered home again by a somnolent cabman; though Major Ames' repose had been of the most fragmentary kind, and though breakfast, in anticipation of late hours, had been ordered the night before at an unusual half past nine, he found his bed an intolerable abode by seven o'clock, and had hoped to expatriate somewhat disquieting thoughts from his mind by the application of his limbs to severe bodily exertion.

He and his wife had been the last guests to leave; indeed, after the others had gone they lingered a little, smoking a final cigarette. Even Mrs Ames had been persuaded to light one, but a convulsive paroxysm of coughing, which made the pear-shaped pearl to quiver and shake like an
aspen leaf, led her to throw it away, saying she enjoyed it very much. He had danced with Mrs Evans three or four times; three or four times they had sat in the cool darkness of the shrubbery, and he had said to her several things which at the moment it seemed imperative to say, but which he did not really mean. But as the evening went on he had meant them more; she had a helpless, childlike charm about her that began to stir his senses. And yet below that childlike confiding manner he was dimly aware that there was an eager woman's soul that sought him. Her charm was a weapon; a very efficient will wielded it. All the same, he reflected as the honest dews of toil poured from his forehead this morning in the hot early sunlight, he had not said very much … he had said that Riseborough was a different place since she - or had he said ‘they'? had come there; that her eyes looked black in the starlight, that - honestly, he could not remember anything more intimate than this. But that which had made his bed intolerable was the sense that the situation had not terminated last night, that his boat, so to speak, had not been drawn up safely ashore, but was still in the midst of accelerating waters. And yet it was in his own power to draw the boat ashore at any moment; he had but to take a decisive stroke to land, to step out and beach it, to return - surely it was not difficult - to his normal thoughts and activities. For years his garden, his club, his domestic concerns, his daily paper, had provided him with a sufficiency of pursuits; he had but to step back into their safe if monotonous circle, and look upon these disturbances as episodic. But already he had ceased to think of Mrs Evans as ‘dear little woman' or ‘poor little woman'; somehow it seemed as if she had got her finger - to use a prosaic metaphor - into his works. She was prodding about among the internal wheels and springs of
his mechanism. Yet that was stating his case too strongly; it was that of contingency that he was afraid. But with the curious irresponsibility of a rather selfish and unimaginative man, the fact that he had allowed himself to prod about in her internal mechanism represented itself to him as an unimportant and negligible detail. It was only when she began prodding about in him, producing, as it were, extraordinary little whirrings and racings of wheels that had long gone slow and steady, that he began to think that anything significant was occurring. But, after all, there was nothing like a pull at the garden roller for giving a fellow an appetite for breakfast and for squashing worms and unprofitable reflections.

Though half past nine had seemed ‘late enough for anybody', as Mrs Ames had said the evening before, it was not till nearly ten that she put an extra spoonful of tea into her silver teapot, for she felt that she needed a more than usually fortifying beverage, to nullify her disinclination for the day's routine. The sight of her Cleopatra costume also, laid upon the sofa in her bedroom, and shone upon by a cheerful and uncompromising summer sun, had awakened in her mind a certain discontent, a certain sense of disappointment, of age, of grievance. The gilt paper had moulted off one of the sandal straps, a spilt dropping of strawberry ice made a disfiguring spot on the tunic of Arab shawl, and she herself felt vaguely ungilded and disfigured.

The cigarette, too - she had so often said in the most liberal manner that she did not think it wicked of women to smoke, but only horrid. Certainly she did not feel wicked this morning, but as certainly she felt disposed to consider anybody else horrid, and - and possibly wicked. Decidedly a cup of strong tea was indicated.

Major Ames had gone upstairs again to have his bath, and to dress after his exercise in the garden, and came down a few minutes later, smelling of soap, with a jovial boisterousness of demeanour that smelt of unreality.

‘Good morning, my dear Amy,' he said. ‘And how do you feel after the party? I've been up a couple of hours; nothing like a spell of exercise to buck one up after late hours.'

‘Will you have your tea now, Lyndhurst?' she asked.

‘Have it now, or wait till I get it, eh? I'll have it now. Delicious! I always say that nobody makes tea like you.'

Now boisterous spirits at breakfast were not usual with Major Ames, and, as has been said, his wife easily detected a false air about them. Her vague sense of disappointment and grievance began to take more solid outlines.

‘It is delightful to see you in such good spirits, Lyndhurst,' she observed, with a faint undertone of acidity. ‘Sitting up late does not usually agree with you.'

There was enough here to provoke repartee. Also his superficial boisterousness was rapidly disappearing before his wife's acidity, like stains at the touch of ammonia.

‘It does not, in this instance, seem to have agreed with you, my dear,' he said. ‘I hope you have not got a headache. It was unwise of you to stop so late. However, no doubt we shall feel better after breakfast. Shall I give you some bacon? Or will you try something that appears to be fish?'