CHAPTER II
He took nobody by surprise; there was nobody to take. All was quiet; Denis wandered from room to
empty room, looking with pleasure at the familiar pictures and furniture, at
all the little untidy signs of life that lay scattered here and there. He was rather glad that they were all out; it
was amusing to wander through the house as though one were exploring a dead,
deserted Pompeii. What sort of life
would the excavator reconstruct from these remains; how would he people these
empty chambers? There was a long
gallery, with its rows of respectable and (though, of course, one couldn't
publicly admit it) rather boring Italian primitives, its Chinese sculptures,
its unobtrusive, dateless furniture.
There was the panelled drawing-room, where the huge chintz-covered
armchairs stood, oases of comfort among the austere flesh-mortifying
antiques. There was the morning-room,
with its pale lemon walls, its painted Venetian chairs and rococo tables, its
mirrors, its modern pictures. There was
the library, cool, spacious, and dark, book-lined from floor to ceiling, rich
in portentous folios. There was the
dining-room, solidly, portwinely English, with its
great mahogany table, its eighteenth-century chairs and sideboard, its
eighteenth-century pictures - family portraits, meticulous animal
paintings. What could one reconstruct
from such data? There was much of Henry Wimbush in the long gallery and the library, something of
Anne, perhaps, in the morning-room. That
was all. Among the accumulations of ten
generations the living had left but few traces.
Lying on
the table in the morning-room he saw his own book of poems. What tact! He
picked it up and opened it. It was what
the reviewers call 'a slim volume.' He
read at hazard:
'... But silence and the topless dark
Vault in the lights of Luna Park
And Blackpool from the nightly gloom
Hollows a bright tumultuous tomb.'
He put it down again, shook his head, and sighed. 'What genius I had then!' he reflected,
echoing the aged Swift. It was nearly
six months since the book had been published; he was glad to think he would
never write anything of the same sort again.
Who could have been reading it, he wondered? Anne, perhaps; he liked to think so. Perhaps, too, she had at last recognized
herself in the Hamadryad of the poplar sapling; the
slim Hamadryad whose movements were like the swaying
of a young tree in the wind. 'The Woman
who was a Tree' was what he had called the poem. He had given her the book when it came out, hoping that the poem would tell her what he hadn't
dared to say. She had never referred to
it.
He shut his
eyes and saw a vision of her in a red velvet cloak, swaying into the little
restaurant where they sometimes dined together in
It occurred
to him that perhaps his hostess might be in her boudoir. It was a possibility; he would go and
see. Mrs Wimbush's
boudoir was in the central tower on the garden front. A little staircase corkscrewed up to it from
the hall. Denis mounted, tapped at the
door. 'Come in.' Ah, she was there; he had rather hoped
she wouldn't be. He opened the door.
Priscilla Wimbush was lying on the sofa. A blotting-pad rested on her knees and she was
thoughtfully sucking the end of a silver pencil.
'Hullo,'
she said, looking up. 'I'd forgotten you
were coming.'
'Well, here
I am, I'm afraid,' said Denis deprecatingly.
'I'm awfully sorry.'
Mrs Wimbush laughed. Her
voice, her laughter, were deep and masculine. Everything about her was manly. She had a large, square, middle-aged face,
with a massive projecting nose and little greenish eyes, the whole surmounted
by a lofty and elaborate coiffure of a curiously improbable shade of
orange. Looking at her, Denis always
thought of Wilkie Bard at the cantatrice.
'That's why I'm going to
Sing in op'ra, sing in op'ra,
Sing in op-pop-pop-pop-popera.'
Today she was wearing a purple silk dress with a high
collar and a row of pearls. The costume, so richly dowagerish, so
suggestive of the Royal Family, made her look more than ever like something on
the Halls.
'What have
you been doing all this time?' she asked.
'Well,'
said Denis, and he hesitated, almost voluptuously. He had a tremendously amusing account of
London and its doings all ripe and ready in his mind. It would be a pleasure to give it
utterance. 'To begin with,' he said ...
But he was
too late. Mrs Wimbush's
question had been what the grammarians call rhetorical; it asked for no answer. It was a little conversational flourish, a
gambit in the polite game.
'You find
me busy at my horoscopes,' she said, without even being aware that she had
interrupted him.
A little
pained, Denis decided to reserve his story for more receptive ears. He contented himself, by way of revenge, with
saying 'Oh?' rather icily.
'Did I tell
you how I won four hundred on the Grand National this year?'
'Yes,' he
replied, still frigid and monosyllabic.
She must have told him at least six times.
'Wonderful,
isn't it? Everything is in the
Stars. In the Old Days, before I had the
Stars to help me, I used to loose thousands.
Now' - she paused an instant - 'well, look at that
four hundred on the Grand National.
That's the Stars.'
Denis would
have liked to hear more about the Old Days.
But he was too discreet and, still more, too shy to ask. There had been something of a bust up; that
was all he knew. Old Priscilla - not so
old then, of course, and sprightlier - had lost a great deal of money, dropped
it in handfuls and hatfuls on every racecourse in the country. She had gambled too. The number of thousands varied in the
different legends, but all put it high.
Henry Wimbush was forced to sell some of his
Primitives - a Taddeo da Poggibonsi, an Amico di Taddeo, and four or five
nameless Sienese - to the Americans. There was a crisis. For the first time in his life Henry asserted
himself, and with good effect, it seemed.
Priscilla's
gay and gadding existence had come to an abrupt end. Nowadays she spent almost all her time at Crome, cultivating a rather ill-defined malady. For consolation she dallied with New Thought
and the Occult. Her passion for racing
still possessed her, and Henry, was who a kind-hearted fellow at bottom,
allowed her forty pounds a month betting money. Most of Priscilla's days were spent in
casting the horoscopes of horses, and she invested her money scientifically, as
the Stars dictated. She betted on football too, and had a large notebook in
which she registered the horoscopes of all the players in all the teams of the
League. The process of balancing the
horoscopes of two elevens one against the other was a very delicate and
difficult one. A match between the Spurs
and the Villa entailed a conflict in the heavens so vast and so complicated
that it was not to be wondered at if she sometimes made a mistake about the
outcome.
'Such a
pity you don't believe in these things, Denis, such a pity,' said Mrs Wimbush in her deep, distant voice.
'I can't
say I feel it so.'
'Ah, that's
because you don't know what it's like to have faith. You've no idea how amusing and exciting life
becomes when you do believe. All that
happens means something; nothing you do is every insignificant. It makes life so jolly, you know. Here am I at Crome. Dull as ditchwater, you'd think; but no, I
don't find it so. I don't regret the Old
Days a bit. I have the Stars ...' She picked up the sheet of paper that was lying on the
blotting-pad. 'Inman's horoscope,' she
explained. '(I thought I'd like to have
a little fling on the billiards championship this autumn.) I have the Infinite to keep in tune with,'
she waved her hand. 'And then there's
the next world and all the spirits, and one's Aura, and Mrs Eddy and saying
you're not ill, and the Christian Mysteries and Mrs Besant. It's all splendid. One's never dull for a moment. I can't think how I used to get on before -
in the Old Days. Pleasure?
- running about, that's all it was; just running about. Lunch, tea, dinner,
theatre, supper, every day. It
was fun, of course, while it lasted. But
there wasn't much left of it afterwards.
There's rather a good thing about that in Barbecue-Smith's new book. Where is it?'
She sat up
and reached for a book that was lying on the little table by the head of the
sofa.
'Do you
know him, by the way?' she asked.
'Who?'
'Mr
Barbecue-Smith.'
Denis knew
of him vaguely. Barbecue-Smith was a
name in the Sunday papers. He wrote
about the Conduct of Life. He might even
be the author of What a Young Girl Ought to Know.
'No, not
personally,' he said.
'I've
invited him for next weekend.' She
turned over the pages of the book.
'Here's the passage I was thinking of.
I marked it. I always mark the
things I like.'
Holding the
book almost at arm's length, for she was somewhat long-sighted, and making
suitable gestures with her free hand, she began to read, slowly, dramatically.
'"What
are thousand pound fur coats, what are quarter million incomes?"' She looked up from the page with a histrionic
movement of the head; her orange coiffure nodded portentously. Denis looked at it, fascinated. What it the Real Thing and henna, he
wondered, or was it one of those Complete Transformations one sees in the
advertisements?
'"What
are Thrones and Sceptres?"'
The orange
Transformation - yes it must be a Transformation - bobbed up again.
'"What
are the gaieties of the Rich, the splendours of the Powerful, what is the pride
of the Great, what are the gaudy pleasures of High Society?"'
The voice,
which had risen in tone, questioningly, from sentence to sentence, dropped
suddenly and boomed reply.
'"They
are nothing. Vanity,
fluff, dandelion seed in the wind, thin vapours of fever. The things that matter happen in the
heart. Seen things are sweet, but those
unseen are a thousand times more significant.
It is the Unseen that counts in Life."'
Mrs Wimbush lowered the book.
'Beautiful, isn't it?' she said.
Denis
preferred not to hazard an opinion, but uttered a non-committal 'H'm.'
'Ah, it's a
fine book this, a beautiful book,' said Priscilla, as she let the pages flick
back, one by one, from under her thumb.
'And here's the passage about the Lotus Pool. He compares the Soul to a Lotus Pool, you
know.' She held up the book again and read. '"A friend of mine has a Lotus Pool in
his garden. It lies in a little dell
embowered with wild roses and eglantine, among which the nightingale pours
forth its amorous descant all the summer long.
Within the pool the Lotuses blossom, and the
birds of the air come to drink and bathe themselves in its crystal
waters..." Ah, and that reminds me,' Priscilla exclaimed, shutting the
book with a clap and uttering her big profound laugh - 'that reminds me of the
things that have been going on in our bathing-pool since you were here
last. We gave the village people leave
to come and bathe here in the evenings.
You've no idea of the things that happened.'
She leaned
forward, speaking in a confidential whisper; every now and then she uttered a
deep gurgle of laughter. '... mixed
bathing ... saw them out of my window ... sent for a pair of field-glasses to
make sure ... no doubt of it....' The
laughter broke out again. Denis laughed
too. Barbecue-Smith was tossed on the
floor.
'It's time
we went to see if tea's ready,' said Priscilla.
She hoisted herself up from the sofa and went swishing off across the
room, striding beneath the trailing silk.
Denis followed her, faintly humming to himself:
'That's why I'm going to
Sing in op'ra, sing in op'ra,
Sing in op-pop-pop-pop-popera.'
And then the little twiddly bit of accompaniment at the end: 'ra-ra.'
