‘Wilfrid,’ murmured Fleur, with a little reminiscent smile, ‘really behaved quite well. He went East like a lamb.’
‘But surely that hasn’t kept him East ever since?’
‘No more than measles keep you permanently to your room. Oh! no, he likes it. He’s probably got a harem.’
‘No,’ said Dinny, ‘he’s fastidious, or I should be surprised.’
‘Quite right, my dear; and one for my cheap cynicism. Wilfrid’s the queerest sort of person, and rather a dear. Michael loved him. But,’ she said, suddenly looking at Dinny, ‘he’s impossible to be in love with – disharmony personified. I studied him pretty closely at one time – had to, you know. He’s elusive. Passionate, and a bundle of nerves. Soft-hearted and bitter. And search me for anything he believes in.’
‘Except,’ queried Dinny, ‘beauty, perhaps; and truth if he could find it?’
Fleur made the unexpected answer, ‘Well, my dear, we all believe in those, when they’re about. The trouble is they aren’t, unless – unless they lie in oneself, perhaps. And if you happen to be disharmonic, what chance have you? Where did you see him?’
‘Staring at Foch.’
‘Ah! I seem to remember he rather idolized Foch. Poor Wilfrid, he hasn’t much chance. Shell-shock, poetry, and his breeding – a father who’s turned his back on life; a mother who was half an Italian, and ran off with another. Not restful. His eyes were his best point, they made you sorry for him; and they’re beautiful – rather a fatal combination. Did the young nerves flutter again?’ She looked rather more broadly into Dinny’s face.
‘No, but I wondered if yours would still if I mentioned him.’
‘Mine? My child, I’m nearly thirty. I have two children, and’ – her face darkened – ‘I have been inoculated. If I ever told anyone about that, Dinny, I might tell you, but there are things one doesn’t tell.’
Up in her room, somewhat incommoded by the amplitude of Aunt Em’s nightgown, Dinny stared into a fire lighted against protest. She felt that what she was feeling was absurd – a queer eagerness, at once shy and bold, the sensations, as it were, of direct action impending. And why? She had seen again a man who ten years before had made her feel silly; from all accounts a most unsatisfactory man. Taking a looking-glass, she scrutinized her face above the embroidery on the too ample gown. She saw what might have satisfied but did not.
‘One gets tired of it,’ she thought – ‘always the same Botticellian artifact,
‘The nose that’s snub,
The eyes of blue!
‘Ware self, you red-haired nymph,
And shun the image that is you!’
He was so accustomed to the East, to dark eyes through veils, languishing; to curves enticingly disguised; to sex, mystery, teeth like pearls – vide houri! Dinny showed her own teeth to the glass. There she was on safe ground – the best teeth in her family. Nor was her hair really red – more what Miss Braddon used to call auburn. Nice word! Pity it had gone out. With all that embroidery it was no good examining herself below the Victorian washing line. Remember that tomorrow before her bath! For what she was about to examine might the Lord make her truly thankful! Putting down the glass with a little sigh, she got into bed.
Chapter Three
WILFRID DESERT still maintained his chambers in Cork Street. They were, in fact, paid for by Lord Mullyon, who used them on the rare occasions when he emerged from rural retreat. It was not saying much that the secluded peer had more in common with his second than with his eldest son, who was in Parliament. It gave him, however, no particular pain to encounter Wilfrid; but as a rule the chambers were occupied only by Stack, who had been Wilfrid’s batman in the war, and had for him one of those sphinx-like habits which wear better than expressed devotions. When Wilfrid returned, at a moment or two’s notice, his rooms were ever exactly as he left them, neither more or less dusty and unaired; the same clothes hung on the same clothes-stretchers; and the same nicely cooked steak and mushrooms appeased his first appetite. The ancestral ‘junk’, fringed and dotted by Eastern whims brought home, gave to the large sitting-room the same castled air of immutable possession. And the divan before the log fire received Wilfrid as if he had never left it. He lay there the morning after his encounter with Dinny, wondering why he could only get really good coffee when Stack made it. The East was the home of coffee, but Turkish coffee was a rite, a toy; and, like all rites and toys, served but to titillate the soul. This was his third day in London after three years; and in the last two years he had been through a good deal more than he would ever care to speak of, or even wish to remember; including one experience which still divided him against himself, however much he effected to discredit its importance. In other words, he had come back with a skeleton in his cupboard. He had brought back, too, enough poems for a fourth slender volume. He lay there, debating whether its slender bulk could not be increased by inclusion of the longest poem he had ever written, the outcome of that experience; in his view, too, the best poem he had ever written – a pity it should not be published, but—! And the ‘but’ was so considerable that he had many times been on the point of tearing the thing up, obliterating all trace of it, as he would have wished to blot remembrance from his mind. Again, but—! The poem expressed his defence for allowing what he hoped no one knew had happened to him. To tear it up would be parting with his defence. For he could never again adequately render his sensations in that past dilemma. He would be parting with his best protection from his own conscience, too; and perhaps with the only means of laying a ghost. For he sometimes thought that, unless he proclaimed to the world what had happened to him, he would never again feel quite in possession of his soul.