A Fish Dinner in Memison - Zimiamvian Trilogy 02 (7 page)

There was frost in Lord Anmering's greeting.
‘
I had forgotten that,' he said. 'When was it I met you last?'

'About a year ago
, sir', said Lessingham. ‘I’
ve been out of England.'

‘I
think I remember. You've lived abroad a good deal?'

'Yes, sir: on and off, these last seven years.'

'What did you come home for?'

Lessingham's eyes were grey: straight of gaze, but not easily read, and with a smoulder in the depths of them. He answered, 'To settle up some affairs.'

'And so abroad again?'

‘I’
ve not decided yet.'

'A rolling stone?'

Lessingham smiled. 'Afraid I am, sir.'

Jim joined them: 'Did I tell you, uncle, about Lessingham's running across some of your Gurkha porters when he was in India two or three years ago? that had climbed with you and Mr. Freshfield in Sikkim?'

'You're a climber, then?' Lord Anmering said to Lessingham, looking him up and down: very tall, perhaps six foot three, black-haired, sunburnt but, as his forehead showed, naturally white and clear of skin, and with the look of one able to command both himself and others, as is not often seen a
t that age of five and twenty. ‘I’
ve done a little.'

'A lot,' said Jim. Lessingham shook his head.
‘
In the Himalaya?' said Lord Anmering.
‘
A little, sir.'

‘
A little!' said Jim: 'just listen how these mountaineers talk to each other! Twenty-two thousand feet he did once, on—what's the name of it?—one of the cubs of Nanga Parbat. A terrific thing; and pages about it at the time in the
Alpine Journal
Come,' he said, taking Lessingham's arm, ‘I
want to introduce you to my sister. She married a Russian: we can never pronounce the name, none of us; so please don't mind, and please don't try. You're taking her in to dinner: that's right, Mary?'

Mary smiled assent. Fo
r a flash, as she turned to wel
come the Denmore-Benthams who had just come in, her glance met Lessingham's. And, unless seen by him and by her, then to every living eye invisible, something (for that flash) danced in the air between them: "But, after dinner—'

Dinner was in the picture gallery (where later they were also to dance), the only room big enough and long enough to take forty people comfortably at one table. A fine room it was, eighty feet perhaps by twenty-five, with a row of tall low-silled windows going the whole length of its western wall. These, left uncurtained when dinner began, and with their lower sashes thrown up to admit the evening air, were filled with the sunset. Dozens of candles, each from under its rose-coloured little prim hat of pleated silk, beamed down clear upon the white of the table-cloth, the glass, the silver and the china and the flowers of Mary's choosing and delicate trailers of greenery; imbuing besides with a softer, a widelier diffused and a warmer glow the evening dresses, the jewels, the masculine black and white, the faces, hosts' or guests': faces which, young old or of doubtful date, were yet all by this unity of candlelight brought into one picture, and by the yet airier but deeper unity that is in pleasant English blood, secure, easy, gay, fancy-free. And, (as for proof that England were to wrong her own nature did she fail to absorb the exotic), even the Spanish woman, midway down the table between Jim Scarnside and Hesper Dagworth, was assimilated by that solvent, as the sovereign alkahest will subdue and swallow up all refractory elements and gold itself.

Conversation, like a ballet of little animals (guests at Queen Alice's looking-glass party when things began to happen), tripped, paused, footed it in and out, pirouetted, crossed and returned, back and forth among the faces and the glasses and the dresses and the lights. For a while, about the head of the table, the more classic figures revolved under the direction of Lord Anmering, Mr. Romer, General Macnaghten and Mr. Everard Scarnside. Lady Rosamund Kirstead, on the skirts of this Parnassus, her back to the windows, tempered its airs with visions of skiing-slopes above Villars that February (her first taste of winter sports), and so succeeded at last in enveagling Anne and Margesson and Mr. Scarnside from those more intellectual scintillations (which Anne excelled in but Rosamund found boring) down to congenial common ground of Ascot, Hentley, Lord's, the Franco-British Exhibition, in prospect and retrospect: what to wear, what not to wear: August, September, grouse-moo
rs and stalkers' paths of Invern
esshire and Sutherland.

Lessingham, further down on the same side of the table, held a three-cornered conversation with Amabel Mitzmesczinsky on his right and Fanny on his left: here the talk danced to merrier and stranger tunes, decking itself out as if the five continents and all past and present were its wardrobe. Into its vortex were drawn Tom Chedisford and Mrs. Bentham from across the table, till Jack Bailey sat marooned; for, while Mrs. Bentham, his rightful partner, who had hitherto displayed a most comforting interest in things within the grasp of his understanding, unfeelingly began to ignore him for the quattrocento, Lucy Dilstead on his other side conducted an esoteric conversation, n
ot very vocal, with her. Fiancé.
Jack, hearing at last in this loneliness a name he knew (of Botticelli's
Primavera),
took advantage of a lull in the talk to say, with honest philistine conviction, 'And
that’
s
a
nasty
picture.' Jim and Hesper Dagworth experimented by turns, Hesper with his own Spanish, Jim with the lady's English, on Madame de Rosas, who thus became a distraction in the more serious discussions carried on by Bremmerdale, Colonel Playter, and Jim, on the subject of point-to-points. Appleyard with his funny stories kept the Playter girls in fits of boisterous laughter, till finally they took to bombarding him with bread-pills: an enterprise as suddenly ended as suddenly begun, under the horrified reproof of the parson's wife and the more quelling glare of the paternal eye upon them.

At the foot of the table Mary, as hostess, seemed at first to have her hands full: with Hugh on her right, rather sulky, scenting (may be) an unfavorable climate for his intended proposal, and becoming more and more nervous as time went by; and, on her left, the breezy Admiral, flirting outrageously with Mrs. Dagworth who seemed, however, a little distrait, with her eye on Hesper and the de Rosas woman. But Mary's witty talk and the mere presence of her worked as lovely weather in spring, that can set sap and blood and the whole world in tune.

Lessingham and Mary, breaking off from the dance as it brought them alongside the door, went out quickly and through the tea-room and so out from the music and the stir and the glitter to the free air of the terrace, and there stood a minute to taste it, her arm still in his, looking both into the same enbowered remoteness of the dark and the star-shine: the fragrant body of night, wakeful but still.

Mary withdrew her arm.

Lessingham said, 'Do you mean to make a practice of
this? For the future, I mean?' ‘
Of what?'

‘
What you've been doing to me to-night?'

'I don't know. Probably.'

'Good.'

Mary was fanning herself. Presently he took the fan and plied it for her. The music sounded, rhythmic and sweet, from the picture gallery. 'That was rather charming of you,' she said: 'to say "good".'

'Extremely charming of me, if I was a free agent But you may have noticed, that I'm not'

Mary said, 'Do you think I am?'

'Completely, I should say. Completely free, and remarkably elusive.'

'Elusive? Sometimes people speak truer than they guess.'

'You've eluded me pretty successfully all the evening,' Lessingham said, as she took back the fan. The music stopped. Mary said,
‘
We must go in.'

"Need we? You're not cold?'

‘I
want to.' She turned to go.

‘
But, please,' he said at her elbow.
‘
What have I done? The only dance we've had, and the evening half over—' 'I'm feeling—ratty.'

Lessingham said no more, but followed her between the sleeping flower-borders to the house. In the doorway they encountered, among others, Glanford coming out. He reddened and looked awkward. Mary reddened too, but passed in, aloof, unperturbed. She and Lessingham came now, through the tea-room and the great galleried hall, to the drawing-room, where, since dinner, at the far end a kind of platform or stage had been put up, with footlights along the front of it, and in all the main floor of the room chairs and sofas arranged as for an audience. Shaded lamps on standards or on tables at the sides and corners of the room made a restful, uncertain, golden light

'You've heard the castanets before, I suppose?' said Mary.

'Yes. Only once properly: in Burgos.' 'Castanets and cathedrals go rather well together, I should think.'

'Yes,' he said. 'I never thought of that before; but they do. A curious mix up of opposites: the feeling of Time, clicking and clicking endlessly away; and the other—well, as if there were something that did persist.'

'Like mountains,' Mary said; 'and the funny little noise of streams, day after day, month after month,
running
down their sides.'

Lessingham said, under his breath, 'And sometimes, an avalanche.'

They were standing now before the fire-place, which was filled with masses of white madonna lilies. Over the mantel-piece, lighted from above by a hidden electric lamp, hung an oil painting, the head-and-shoulders portrait of a lady with smooth black hair, very pale of complexion, taken nearly full-face, with sloping shoulders under her gauzy dress and a delicate slender neck
.
Her forehead was high: face long and oval: eyebrows arched and slender: nose rather long, very straight, and with the faintest disposition to turn up at the end, which gave it a certain air of insolent but not unkindly disdainfulness. Her eyes were large, and the space wide between them and between lid and eyebrow: the lid of each, curving swiftly up from the inner corner, ended at the outer corner with another sudden upward twist: a slightly eastern cast of countenance, with a touch perhaps of the Japanese and a touch of the harsh Tartar.

'Reynolds,' said Lessingham, after a minute's looking at it in silence.

'Yes.'

'An ancestress?'

'No. No relation. Look at the name.'

He leaned near to look, in the corner of the canvas:
Anne Horton 1766.

'Done when she was about nineteen,' said Mary. There seemed to come, as she looked at that portrait, a subtle alteration in her whole demeanour, as when, some gay inward stirrings of the sympathies, friend looks on friend. 'Do you like it?'

On Lessingham's face, still studying the picture, a like alteration came. 'I love it'

'She went in for fatty degeneration later on, and became Duchess of Cumberland. Gainsborough painted her as that, several times, later.'

‘I
don't believe it,' he said. He looked round at Mary. 'Neither the fat,' he said, 'nor the degeneration. I think I know those later paintings, and now I don't believe them.'

They're not interesting,' Mary said. 'But in this one, she's certainly not very eighteenth-century. Curiously outside all dates, I should say.'

'Or inside.'

'Yes: or inside all dates.'

Lessingham looked again at Mrs. Anne Horton—the sideways inclination of the eyes: the completely serene, completely aware, impenetrable, weighing, look: lips as if new-closed, as in Verona, upon that private
C
a m'amuse.
He looked quickly back again at Mary. And, plain for him to see, the something that inhabited near Mary's mouth seemed to start awake or deliciously to recognize, in the picture, its own likeness.

It recognized also (one may guess) a present justification for the
C
a m'amuse.
Perhaps the lady in the picture had divined Mary's annoyance at Glanford's insistent, unduly possessive, proposal, at her own rather summary rejection of it, and at Lessingham's methods that seemed to tar him incongruously with the same brush (and her father, too, not without a touch of that tar): divined, moreover, the exasperation in Mary's consciousness that she overwhelmingly belonged to Lessingham, that she was being swept on to a choice she did not want to make, and that Lessingham unpardonably (but scarcely unnaturally, not being in these secrets) did not seem to understand the situation.

Mary laughed. It was as if all the face of the night was cleared again.

The room was filling now. Madame de Rosas, in shawl and black mantilla, took her place on the platform, while below, on her right, the musicia
ns began to tune up. Les
singham and Mary had easy chairs at the back, near the door. The lamps were switched out, all except those that lighted the pictures, and the footlights were switched on. 'And my Cyprus picture over there?' Lessingham said in Mary's ear. 'Do you know why I sent it you?'

Mary shook her head.

'You know what it is?'