"How long will that be?" she asked.
"I don"t know. Are you anxious for his immediate perfecting?"
Her shoulders gave what in ordinary women would have been a shrug: with her it was a slow ripple. I vow if her neck had been bare one could have seen it undulate beneath the skin.
"What is perfection?"
"Can you ask?" laughed Dale. "Behold!" And he pointed to me.
"That"s cheap," said the lady. "I"ve heard Auguste say cleverer things."
"Who"s Auguste?" asked Dale.
"Auguste," said I, "is the generic name of the clown in the French Hippodrome."
"Oh, the Circus!" cried Dale.
"I"ll be glad if you"ll teach him to call it the Hippodrome, Mr. de Gex," she remarked, with another of her slumberous glances.
"That will be one step nearer perfection," said I.
The short November twilight had deepened into darkness; the fire, which was blazing when we entered, had settled into a glow, and the room was lit by one shaded lamp. To me the dimness was restful, but Dale, who, with the crude instincts of youth, loves glare, began to fidget, and presently asked whether he might turn on the electric light. Permission was given. My hostess invited me to smoke and, to hand her a box of cigarettes which lay on the mantelpiece, I rose, bent over her while she lit her cigarette from my match, and resuming an upright position, became rooted to the hearthrug.
With the flood of illumination, disclosing everything that hitherto had been wrapped in shadow and mystery, came a shock.
It was a most extraordinary, perplexing room. The cheap and the costly, the rare and the common, the exquisite and the tawdry jostled one another on walls and floor. At one end of the Louis XVI sofa on which Dale had been sitting lay a boating cushion covered with a Union Jack, at the other a cushion covered with old Moorish embroidery. The chair I had vacated I discovered to be of old Spanish oak and stamped Cordova leather bearing traces of a coat-of-arms in gold. My hostess lounged in a low characterless seat amid a ma.s.s of heterogeneous cushions. There were many flowers in the room--some in Cloisonne vases, others in gimcrack vessels such as are bought at country fairs. On the mantelpiece and on tables were mingled precious ivories from j.a.pan, trumpery chalets from the Tyrol, choice bits of Sevres and Venetian gla.s.s, bottles with ladders and little men inside them, vulgar china fowls sitting on eggs, and a thousand restless little objects screeching in dumb agony at one another.
The more one looked the more confounded became confusion. Lengths of beautifully embroidered Chinese silk formed curtains for the doors and windows; but they were tied back with cords ending in horrible little plush monkeys in lieu of ta.s.sels. A Second Empire gilt mirror hung over the Louis XVI sofa, and was flanked on the one side by a villainous German print of "The Huntsman"s Return" and on the other by a dainty water-colour. Myriads of photographs, some in frames, met the eye everywhere--on the grand piano, on the occasional tables, on the mantelpiece, stuck obliquely all round the Queen Anne mirror above it, on the walls. Many of them represented animals--bears and lions and pawing horses. Dale"s photograph I noticed in a silver frame on the piano. There was not a book in the place. But in the corner of the room by a further window gleamed a large marble Venus of Milo, charmingly executed, who stood regarding the welter with eyes calm and unconcerned.
I was aroused from the momentary shock caused by the revelation of this eccentric apartment by an unknown nauseous flavour in my mouth.
I realised it was the cigarette to which I had helped myself from the beautifully chased silver casket I had taken from the mantelpiece. I eyed the thing and concluded it was made of the very cheapest tobacco, and was what the street urchin calls a "f.a.g." I learned afterwards that I was right. She purchased them at the rate of six for a penny, and smoked them in enormous quant.i.ties. For politeness" sake I continued to puff at the unclean thing until I nearly made myself sick. Then, simulating absentmindedness, I threw it into the fire.
Why, in the sacred name of Nicotine, does a luxurious lady like Lola Brandt smoke such unutterable garbage?
On the other hand, the tea which she offered us a few minutes later, and begged us to drink without milk, was the most exquisite I have tasted outside Russia. She informed us that she got it direct from Moscow.
"I can"t stand your black Ceylon tea," she remarked, with a grimace.
And yet she could smoke "f.a.gs." I wondered what other contradictious tastes she possessed. No doubt she could eat blood puddings with relish and had a discriminating palate for claret. Truly, a perplexing lady.
"You must find leisure in London a great change after your adventurous career," said I, by way of polite conversation.
"I just love it. I"m as lazy as a cat," she said, settling with her pantherine grace among the cushions. "Do you know what has been my ambition ever since I was a kid?"
"Whatever of woman"s ambitions you had you must have attained," said I, with a bow.
"Pooh!" she said. "You mean that I can have crowds of men falling in love with me. That"s rubbish." She was certainly frank. "I meant something quite different. I wonder whether you can understand. The world used to seem to me divided into two cla.s.ses that never met--we performing people and the public, the thousand white faces that looked at us and went away and talked to other white faces and forgot all about performing animals till they came next time. Now I"ve got what I wanted.
See? I"m one of the public."
"And you love Philistia better than Bohemia?" I asked.
She knitted her brows and looked at me puzzled.
"If you want to talk to me," she said, "you must talk straight. I"ve had no more education than a tinker"s dog."
She made this peculiar announcement, not defiantly, not rudely, but appealingly, graciously. It was not a rebuke for priggishness; it was the unpresentable statement of a fact. I apologized for a lunatic habit of speech and paraphrased my question.
"In a word," cried Dale, coming in on my heels with an elucidation of my periphrasis, "what de Gex is driving at is--Do you prefer respectability to ramping round?"
She turned slowly to him. "My dear boy, when do you think I was not respectable?"
He jumped from the sofa as if the Chow dog had bitten him.
"Good Heavens, I never meant you to take it that way!"
She laughed, stretched up a lazy arm to him, and looked at him somewhat quizzically in the face as he kissed her finger-tips. Although I could have boxed the silly fellow"s ears, I vow he did it in a very pretty fashion. The young man of the day, as a general rule, has no more notion how to kiss a woman"s hand than how to take snuff or dance a pavane.
Indeed, lots of them don"t know how to kiss a girl at all.
"My dear," she said. "I was much more respectable sitting on the stage at tea with my horse, Sultan, than supping with you at the Savoy. You don"t know the deadly respectability of most people in the profession, and the worst of it is that while we"re being utterly dull and dowdy, the public think we"re having a devil of a time. So we don"t even get the credit of our virtues. I prefer the Savoy--and this." She turned to me. "It is nice having decent people to tea. Do you know what I should love? I should love to have an At Home day--and receive ladies, real ladies. And I have such a sweet place, haven"t I?"
"You have many beautiful things around you," said I truthfully.
She sighed. "I should like more people to see them."
"In fact," said I, "you have social ambitions, Madame Brandt?"
She looked at me for a moment out of the corner of her eye.
"Are you skinning me?" she asked.
Where she had picked up this eccentric metaphor I know not. She had many odd turns of language as yet not current among the fashionable cla.s.ses.
I gravely a.s.sured her that I was not sarcastic. I commended her praiseworthy aspirations.
"But," said I innocently, "don"t you miss the hard training, the physical exercise, the delight of motion, the excitement, the----?"--my vocabulary failing me, I sketched with a gesture the equestrienne"s cla.s.sical encouragement to her steed.
She looked at me uncomprehendingly.
"The what?" she asked.
"What are you playing at?" inquired Dale.
"I was referring to the ring," said I.
They both burst out laughing, to my discomfiture.
"What do you take me for? A circus rider? Performing in a tent and living in a caravan? You think I jump through a hoop in tights?"
"All I can say," I murmured, by way of apology, "is that it"s a mendacious world. I"m deeply sorry."