A Fish Dinner in Memison

‘How should I know?’

‘I’ll show you’: he began to arrange them side by side. ‘They’re highly symbolical. Nine white. Those are your nine first years: tabula rasa, from my point of view. Then, you see, a red one: a red-letter day for you when you first met me.’

‘Was I ten then? I’d forgotten.’

‘La Belle Dame sans Merci, always forgets. Now, look: violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, pink.’

‘The rainbow?’

‘Haven’t I charming thoughts?’

‘Then three goldy ones. Gold dust in them,’ said she, touching them with one finger.

‘Because of the presents,’ Jim said, ‘that I’d like to have given you these last three years, had I been Midas or John D. Rockefeller. Last, you observe: Black. For my own sake, because you’re going to be married.’

‘My dear Jim, what awful nonsense! Who told you so?’

‘That would be telling. Isn’t it true?’ He backed to the fireplace and stood looking at her.

The sudden colour in her cheek, spreading yet lower as she faced him, made her seem (if that could be) yet lovelier. ‘It is not so,’ answered she. ‘Nor it was not so. And, indeed, God forbid it ever should be so.’

‘O dangerous resolution. But I really think it’s uncommon nice of you, Mary. Of course, for myself, I gave up hope long ago; and you’ll have noticed I’ve even given up asking you these last – two years, is it? No, since your last birthday:’ Mary gave a little start. He moved to the window, and stood not to look direct at her: ‘that was really when I decided, better give it up. But it does help my self-esteem to know there’s no one else in the offing,’ he said, lightly as before, playing with the scissors. ‘May I tell people the good news?’

‘Certainly not. Why should you go meddling with my affairs? I think it’s most insolent of you.’

‘Well, I thought you might like me to tell – well, Glanford: just to break the news to the pore fella.’

There was dead silence. He looked round. Mary’s head was turned away: she seemed to be counting the little candles with her finger. Suddenly she stood up: went over to the fire-place. ‘Sheila’s a naughty little thing,’ she said: the form curled up on the chair moved the tip of a feathery tail and, with a pricking and apologetic laying again of bat-like ears, cast up at Mary a most melting glance. ‘Ate a quarter of a pound of butter in the larder this morning; and yet now, what a little jewel she looks: as if butter wouldn’t melt.’ She bent and kissed the little creature between the eyes, a kind of butterfly kiss, then, erect again, confronted Jim.

‘It was infernal cheek on my part,’ he said, ‘to say that. Still: between old friends—’

Mary swept up the candles. ‘I must fly and change.’ Then, over her shoulder from the doorway, where she turned for an instant, tall, light of carriage in her white dress, like a nymph of Artemis: ‘Thanks for a word fitly spoken, mon ami!

IV

LADY MARY SCARNSIDE

THAT something which, asleep or awake, resided near the corner of Mary’s mouth peeked at itself in the looking-glass: a private interchange of intelligence between it and its reflection there, not for her to read. She turned from the dressing-table to the window. It was slack-water, and the tide in. Under the sun the surface of the creek was liquid gold. The point, with its coastguard cottage, showed misty in the distance. Landscape and waterscape departed, horizon beyond horizon, to that meeting of earth and heaven which, perhaps because of the so many more and finer gradations of air made visible, seemed far further remote in this beginning of midsummer evening than in the height of day. Mary stood for a minute looking from the window, where the airs stirred with honeysuckle scents and rose scents and salt and pungent scents of the marsh and sea.

Suddenly she moved and came back to the looking-glass. ‘“Then that’s settled, Señorita Maria. I carry you off tonight.” – And that,’ she said aloud, looking at herself with that sideways incisive mocking look that she inherited from her father, ‘was a piece of damned impertinence.’

There was a knock at the door. ‘Come in. O Angier, I’ll ring when I’m ready for you: ten minutes or so.’

‘Yes, my lady. I thought your ladyship would want me to do your hair tonight.’

‘Yes I’ll ring,’ Mary said, giving her maid a smile in the looking-glass. She retired, saying, ‘It’s nearly half past seven, my lady.’

Half past seven. And half past seven this morning. Twelve hours ago. Thrown from her ring, where the sun took it, a rainbow streak of colour appeared on the carpet: her white kitten made a pounce to seize the mysterious dancing presence, now there, now gone. And then, half past seven tomorrow. Always on the go, by the look of it: everything. Nothing stays. She moved her finger, to draw the iridescent phantom again along the carpet and so up the wall, out of reach from velvet paws that pounced. And yet, you can’t believe that. The whole point about a thing like this morning is that it does stay: somewhere it stays. What you want to find out how to get back to it: or forward? for it is forward, too. Or perhaps back and forward don’t belong to it at all: it just is. Perhaps back and forward just aren’t. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

To ride her down like that: if anyone had seen them. ‘Unpardonable,’ Mary said, as she took her seat at the mirror and began to let down her hair. And Tessa is a pretty good little mare: showed him a clean pair of heels for a mile or so. Something in the shadowy backgrounds of the mirror surprisingly assumed a neat little black thoroughbred horse’s face, and shockingly said to Mary: ‘Haven’t I a perfect mouth? to have understood and slowed down the least little bit in the world just at the—’

The north-westerly sun made it hot in the dressing-room. The door was shut between this and her bedroom, to keep that cool for the night: bedroom with windows that opened north and east to let in the mornings. She was in a kind of kimono of pale blue silk after her bath, and now, for this heat, while she sat to brush her hair, she untied the sash, and with a shake of her shoulders, let the soft garment fall open and down about her hips. ‘Carry you off tonight.’ It really was a bit much. The extraordinary coolness of it all, after that dreadful scene they had had at the end of April, when he had turned up five months before his time, and she had said – well, said enough to end it for most men, one would think. And yet now, this morning, after six weeks of obedient absence and silence— She had ridden to hounds often enough; but to be hunted like a hare! True, she had started the thing, in a way, by turning to ride off in the other direction as soon as she saw him. But still. Her bosom rose and fell with the memory of it: as if all the wide universe had suddenly run hunting-mad, and she the quarry: she and poor little Tessa with her flying feet: an excitement like darkness with sudden rollings in it like distant drums; and the trees, the solid ground, the waking buttercups and meadowsweet with the dew on them, the peggy-whitethroat on the thorn, the brier-rose at the edge of the wood, larks trilling invisible in the blue, the very upland newness of the summer air of this birthday morning, all had seemed as if caught up into that frenzy of flight to join in the hunt, multiplying the galloping music of Lessingham’s horse-hooves, now loud, now dim, now loud again, to a hue and cry and a gallop of all these things. And then the coolness of him, after this wild horse-race: the astounding assurance of this proposition, put to her so easily and as if it were the simplest thing in the world: and his having a motorcar, so that they shouldn’t be caught. Most monstrous of all, about the luggage: that he had luggage for her as well, every possible thing she could want, every kind of clothes.

How did he know? Mary laid down her brush and leaned back, staring into her own eyes for a minute in the looking-glass. Then, after a minute, some comical matter stirred in her eyes’ inward corners. ‘How did you know?’ she said, addressing not her own image but the mirrored door over its shoulder, as if somone had come in there and stood in the doorway. Then, with eyes resting on herself again, she said suddenly in herself: ‘This is how I should— If we were to be— If we are to be— But no, my friend. Not to be swept up like – like a bunch of candles.’

She and her looking-glass self surveyed one another for a while, coolly, in detail, not looking any more into each other’s eyes nor over each other’s shoulders to the door beyond. At length the looking-glass image said, not audibly, but to Mary’s inward ear: I suppose a man sees it differently. I think I understand, partly, how he might see it: something very delicate, easily hurt, easily broken, but so gentle that you couldn’t bear to. Like a field-mouse or some such: or like a baby. No, for what matters about a baby is what it is going to be; but this – here it is, full-fledged: what it is and what it ought to be, in one: doesn’t want to change: just to be. That is enough for anybody. And its power, what all power ought to be: not to overpower the weak, but overpower the powerful. Really it hasn’t any power: except that it need only lift a finger, and every power there is or ever could be must rise to protect it.

But that isn’t true (said the looking-glass image, going over with musing untroubled eyes the thing before it: chin, throat: gleam of a shoulder betwixt fallen masses of flame-coloured hair: arms whose curves had the motion of swans in them and the swan’s whiteness: breasts of a Greek mould and firmness, dove-like, silver-pure, pointing their rose-flowers in a Greek pride: and those wild delicate little perfections, of the like flame colour, beneath her arms): that isn’t true. And with that (perhaps for two seconds) something happened in the mirror: a two-seconds’ glimpse as of some menace that rushed upwards, like the smoke of some explosion, to yawning immensities bleak, unmeaning, unmindful of the worm that is man; into which void there seemed, for that moment, to be sucked up all comfort of cosy room, home, dear ones, gaiety of youthful blood, the sweet nostalgia of childhood born of the peace of that June evening, its scents, its inwardness and whispered promise: the familiar countryside that made a lap for all these: the sea, island-girdling of England: the kindly natural earth: the very backgrounds and foundations of historic time: sucked up, swallowed, brought to nought. And, naked to this roofless and universal Nothing, she: immeasurably alone, a little feminine living being, and these ‘little decaying beauties of the body’.

But two seconds only, and blood danced again. Mary jumped to her feet: put on some clothes: rang the bell.

She was nearly ready when her father’s knock came on the door: his voice, ‘Can I come in?’

‘Come in, Father.’ She swam towards him with the style of a du Maurier duchess and shook hands in the most extreme high-handed affectation of the moment. ‘So charmed you could come, Lord Anmering. So charmin’ of you to spare us the time, with so much huntin’ and shootin’ this time of year, and the foxes eatin’ up all the pear-blossom and all.’

He played up; then stood back to admire her, theatrically posed for him, with sweeping of her train and manage of her point-lace fan. Her eyes danced with his. ‘Looking very bonnie,’ he said, and kissed her on the forehead. ‘Table arranged? I suppose you’ve given me Lady Southmere? And Hugh on your right?’

‘O yes. Duty at dinner: pleasure afterwards.’

He caught the look on her face as she turned to the dressing-table for her gloves: this and a strained something in her voice. ‘Not a very nice way,’ he said, ‘to talk about our friends.’

Mary said nothing, busy at her looking-glass.

Lord Anmering stood at the window, trimming his nails, his back towards her. Presently he said quietly, ‘I’m getting a bit tired of this attitude towards Glanford.’

Mary was unclasping her pearl necklace to change it for the sapphire pendant: it slipped and fell on the dressing-table. ‘Damn!’ she said, and was silent.

‘Do you understand what I said?’

‘Attitude? I’ve none, that I’m aware of. Certainly not “towards”.’ She fastened the clasp at the back of her neck, turned and came to where he stood, still turned away from her in the window: slipped her arm in his. ‘And I’m not going to be bullied on my birthday.’ His arm tightened on hers, a large reassuring pressure, as to say: Of course she shan’t.

He looked at his watch. ‘Five past eight. We ought to be going down.’

‘O and, Father,’ she said, turning back to him half way to the door, ‘I don’t think I told you (such a rush all day): whom do you think I met out riding this morning? and asked him to come to dinner tonight? Edward Lessingham. Only back from Italy, and I don’t know where, last month.’

Lord Anmering had stopped short ‘You asked him to dinner?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did you do that for?’

‘Ordinary civility. Very lucky, too: we’d have been three thirteens otherwise, with Lady Dilstead turning up.’

‘Pah! We’d have been three thirteens with him, then, when you asked him. And it isn’t so: we were thirty-eight.’

‘Thirty-nine with Madame de Rosas.’

‘My dear girl, you can’t have that dancer woman sit down with us.’

‘Why not? She’s very nice. Perfectly respectable. I think it would be unkind not to. Anybody else would do it.’

‘It’s monstrous, and you’re old enough to know better.’

‘Well, I’ve asked her, and I’ve asked him. You can order them both out if you want to make a scene.’

‘Don’t talk to me like that,’ said her father. She shrugged her shoulders and stood looking away, very rebellious and angry. ‘And I thought you knew perfectly well,’ he said, ‘that I don’t care for that young Lessingham about the place.’

‘I don’t understand what you mean, “about the place”.’

‘I don’t care about him.’

‘I can’t think why. You’ve always liked Anne Bremmerdale. Isn’t his family good enough for you? As old as ours. Older, I should think. You’ve hardly seen him.’

‘I don’t propose to discuss him,’ said Lord Anmering, looking at her piercingly through his eye-glass: then fell silent, as if in debate whether or not to speak his mind. ‘Look here, my darling,’ he said, at last, with an upward flick of the eyebrow letting the eye-glass fall: ‘It’s just as well to have cards on the table. It has been my serious hope that you would one day marry Hugh Glanford. I’m not going to force it or say any more. But, things being as they are, it is as well to be plain about it.’

‘I should have thought it had been plain enough for some time. Hanging about us all the season: most of last winter, too. People beginning to talk, I should think.’

‘What rubbish.’

‘All the same, it was nice of you to tell me, Father. Have you been plain about it to him too?’

‘He approached me some time ago.’

‘And you gave him your—?’

‘I wished him luck. But naturally he understands that my girl must decide for herself in a thing like that.’

‘How very kind of him.’ Mary began laughing. ‘This is delightful: like the ballad:

He’s teld her father and mither baith,

As I hear sindry say,

But he has nae teld the lass her sell,

Till on her wedding day.’

Her voice hardened: ‘I wish I was twenty-one. Do as I liked, then. Marry the next man that asked me—’

‘Mary, Mary—’

‘—So long as it wasn’t Hugh.’ Mary gave a little gulp and disappeared into her bedroom, slamming the door behind her. Her father, feet planted wide apart in the middle of her dressing room floor, waited, moodily polishing his eye-glass with a white silk pocket-handkerchief scented with eau de Cologne. In three minutes she was back again, radiantly mistress of herself, with a presence of mischief dimpling so elusively about mouth and eyes in her swimming towards him, that it were easier tell black from green in the rifle-bird’s glinting neck, than tell whether in this peace-making she charmingly dispensed pardon or as charmingly sought it. ‘Happy birthday?’ she said, inclining her brow demurely for him to kiss. ‘Must go down now, or people will be arriving.’

Among the guests now assembling in the drawing-room Lessingham’s arrival was with some such unnoted yet precise effect as follows the passing of a light cloud across the sun, or the coming of the sun full out again as the cloud shifts. Mary said, as they shook hands, ‘You know Mr Lessingham, Father? You remember he and Jim were at Eton together.’

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 at 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. For a flash, as she turned to welcome 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 enveigling 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, Henley, Lord’s, the Franco-British Exhibition, in prospect and retrospect: what to wear, what not to wear: August, September, grouse-moors and stalkers’ paths of Invernesshire 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, not 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 tonight?’

‘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.’