Jaffery returned her gaze for a few seconds, then turned away puzzled.
There seemed to be an unnecessary vehemence in Liosha"s tone. He turned again and approached her with a smiling face.
"I only meant that I didn"t know you cared for that sort of thing, Liosha. You must forgive me. Come and dine with me at the Carlton this evening and do a theatre afterwards."
"No, I wont!" cried Liosha. "You insult me."
Her cheeks paled and she shook in sudden wrath. She looked magnificent.
Jaffery frowned.
"I think I"ll have to be a bit of a dragon after all."
I recalled a scene of nearly two years before when he had frowned and spoken thus roughly and she had invited him to chastise her with a cleek. She did not repeat the invitation, but a sob rose in her throat and she marched to the door, and at the door, turned splendidly, quivering.
"I"m not going to have you or any one else for a dragon. And"--alas for the superficiality of Mrs. Considine"s training--"I"m going to do as I d.a.m.n well like."
Her voice broke on the last word, as she dashed from the room. I exchanged a glance with Barbara, who followed her. Barbara could convey a complicated set of instructions by her glance. Jaffery pulled out pouch and pipe and shook his head.
"Woman is a remarkable phenomenon," said he.
"A more remarkable phenomenon still," said I, "is the dunderheaded male."
"I did nothing to cause these heroics."
"You asked her to ask you to ask her out to dinner."
"I didn"t," he protested.
I proved to him by all the rules of feminine logic that he had done so.
Holding the match over the bowl of his pipe, he puffed savagely.
"I wish I were a cannibal in Central Africa, where women are in proper subjection. There"s no worry about "em there."
"Isn"t there?" said I. "You just ask the next cannibal you meet. He is confronted with the Great Conundrum, even as we are."
"He can solve it by clubbing his wife on the head."
"Quite so," said I. "But do you think the poor fellow does it for pleasure? No. It worries him dreadfully to have to do it."
"That"s specious rot, and plat.i.tudinous rubbish such as any soft idiot who"s been glued all his life to an armchair can reel off by the mile. I know better. A couple of years ago Liosha would have eaten out of my hand, to say nothing of dining with me at the Canton. It"s all this infernal civilisation. It has spoiled her."
"You began this argument," said I, "with the proposition that woman was a remarkable phenomenon--a generalisation which includes woman in fig-leaves and woman in diamonds."
"Oh, dry up," said Jaffery, "and tell me what I ought to do. I didn"t want to hurt the girl"s feelings. Why should I? In fact I"m rather fond of her. She appeals to me as something big and primitive. Long ago, if it hadn"t been that poor old Prescott--you know what I mean--I gave up thinking of her in that way at once--and now I just want to be friends--we have been friends. She"s a jolly good sort, and, if I had thought of it, I would have taken her about a bit... . But what I can"t stand is these modern neurotics--"
"You called them heroics--"
"All the same thing. It"s purely artificial. It"s cultivated by every modern woman. Instead of thinking in a straight line they"re taught it"s correct to think in a corkscrew. You never know where to have "em."
"That"s their artfulness," said I. "Who can blame them?"
Meanwhile Liosha, pursued by Barbara, had rushed to her bedroom, where she burst into a pa.s.sion of tears. Jaff Chayne, she wailed, had always treated her like dirt. It was true that her father had stuck pigs in the stockyards; but he was of an old Albanian family, quite as good a family as Jaff Chayne"s. It had numbered princes and great chieftains, the majority of whom had been most gloriously slain in warfare. She would like to know which of Jaff Chayne"s ancestors had died out of their feather beds.
"His grandfather," said Barbara, "was killed in the Indian Mutiny, and his father in the Zulu War."
Liosha didn"t care. That only proved an equality. Jaff Chayne had no right to treat her like dirt. He had no right to put a female policeman over her. She was a free woman--she wouldn"t go out to dinner with Jaff Chayne for a thousand pounds. Oh, she hated him; at which renewed declaration she burst into fresh weeping and wished she were dead. As a guardian of young and beautiful widows Jaffery did not seem to be a success.
Barbara, in her wise way, said very little, and searched the paraphernalia on the dressing table for eau-de-cologne and such other lotions as would remove the stain of tears. Holding these in front of Liosha, like a stern nurse administering medicine, she waited till the fit had subsided. Then she spoke.
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Liosha, going on like a silly schoolgirl instead of a grown-up woman of the world. I wonder you didn"t announce your intention of a.s.sa.s.sinating Jaffery."
"I"ve a good mind to," replied Liosha, nursing her grievance.
"Well, why don"t you do it?" Barbara whipped up a murderous-looking knife that lay on a little table--it was the same weapon that she had lent the Swiss waiter. "Here"s a dagger." She threw it on the girl"s lap. "I"ll ring the bell and send a message for Mr. Chayne to come up.
As soon as he enters you can stick it into him. Then you can stick it into me. Then if you like you can go downstairs and stick it into Hilary. And having destroyed everybody who cares for you and is good to you, you"ll feel a silly a.s.s--such a silly a.s.s that you"ll forget to stick it into yourself."
Liosha threw the knife into a corner. On its way it snicked a neat little chip out of a chair-back.
"What do you want me to do?"
"Clean your face," said Barbara, and presented the materials.
Sitting on the bed and regarding herself in a hand-mirror Liosha obeyed meekly. Barbara brought the powder puff.
"Now your nose. There!" For the first time Barbara smiled. "Now you look better. Oh, my dear girl!" she cried, seating herself beside Liosha and putting an arm round her waist. "That"s not the way to deal with men.
You must learn. They"re only overgrown babies. Listen."
And she poured into unsophisticated but sympathetic ears all the duplicity, all the treachery, all the insidious cunning and all the serpent-like wisdom of her unscrupulous s.e.x. What she said neither I nor any of the sons of men are ever likely to know! but so proud of belonging to that nefarious sisterhood, so overweening in her s.e.x-conceit did she render Liosha, that when they entered the little private sitting-room next door whither, according to the instructions conveyed by Barbara"s parting glance downstairs, I had dragged a softly swearing Jaffery, she marched up to him and said serenely:
"If you really do want me to dine with you, I"ll come with pleasure. But the next time you ask me, please do it in a decent way."
I saw mischief lurking in my wife"s eye and shook my head at her rebukingly. But Jaffery stared at Liosha and gasped. It was all very well for Doria and Barbara to be ever putting him in the wrong: they were daughters of a subtle civilisation; but here was Liosha, who had once asked him to beat her, doing the same--woman was a more curious phenomenon than ever.
"I"m sorry if my manners are not as they should be," said he with a touch of irony. "I"ll try to mend "em. Anyhow, it"s awfully good of you to come."
She smiled and bowed; not the deep bow of Albania, but the delicate little inclination of South Kensington. The quarrel was healed, the incident closed. He arranged to call for her in a taxi at a quarter to seven. Barbara looked at the clock and said that we must be going. We rose to take our leave. Maliciously I said:
"But we"ve settled nothing about a remplacante for Mrs. Considine."
"I guess we"ve settled everything," Liosha replied sweetly. "No one can replace Mrs. Considine."
I quite enjoyed our little silent walk downstairs. Evidently Jaffery"s theory of primitive woman had been knocked endways; and, to judge by the faint knitting of her brow, Barbara was uneasily conscious of a mission unfulfilled. Liosha had gained her independence.
Our friends carried out the evening"s programme. Liosha behaved with extreme propriety, modelling her outward demeanour upon that of Mrs.
Considine, and her att.i.tude towards Jaffery on a literal interpretation of Barbara"s reprehensible precepts. She was so dignified that Jaffery, lest he should offend, was afraid to open his mouth except for the purpose of shovelling in food, which he did, in astounding quant.i.ty.
From what both of us gathered afterwards--and gleefully we compared notes--they were vastly polite to each other. He might have been entertaining the decorous wife of a Dutch Colonial Governor from whom he desired facilities of travel. The simple Eve travestied in guile took him in completely. Aware that it was her duty to treat him like an overgrown baby and mould him to her fancy and twist him round her finger and lead him whithersoever she willed, making him feel all the time that he was pointing out the road, she did not know how to begin. She sat tongue-tied, racking her brains to loss of appet.i.te; which was a pity, for the matre d"hotel, given a free hand by her barbarously ignorant host, had composed a royal menu. As dinner proceeded she grew shyer than a chit of sixteen. Over the quails a great silence reigned. Hers she could not touch, but she watched him fork, as it seemed to her, one after the other, whole, down his throat: and she adored him for it. It was her ideal of manly gusto. She nearly wept into her _Fraises Diane_--vast craggy strawberries (in March) rising from a drift of snow impregnated by all the distillations of all the flowers of all the summers of all the hills--because she would have given her soul to sit beside him on the table with the bowl on her lap and feed him with a tablespoon and, for her share of it, lick the spoon after his every mouthful. But it had been drummed into her that she was a woman of the world, the fashionable and all but incomprehensible world, the English world. She looked around and saw a hundred of her s.e.x practising the well-bred deportment that Mrs. Considine had preached. She reflected that to all of those women gently nurtured in this queer English civilisation, equally remote from Armour"s stockyards and from her Albanian fastness, the wisdom that Barbara had imparted to her a few hours before was but their A.B.C. of life in their dealings with their male companions. She also reflected--and for the reflection not Mrs.
Considine or Barbara, only her woman"s heart was responsible--that to the man whom she yearned to feed with great tablespoonfuls of delight, she counted no more than a pig or a cow--her instinctive similes, you must remember, were pastoral--or that peculiar damfool of a sister of his, Euphemia.