As for Mr. and Mrs. Spatt they were both in the state of not knowing where to look. Immediately their gaze met another gaze it leapt away as from something dangerous or obscene.
"I will play Debussy"s Toccata for violin solo," Musa announced tersely. He had blushed; his great eyes were sparkling. And he began to play.
And as soon as he had played a few bars, Audrey gave a start, fortunately not a physical start, and she blushed also. Musa sternly winked at her.
Frenchmen do not make a practice of winking, but he had learnt the accomplishment for fun from Miss Thompkins in Paris. The wink caused Audrey surrept.i.tiously to observe Mr. and Mrs. Spatt. It was no relief to her to perceive that these two were listening to Debussy"s Toccata for solo violin with the trained and appreciative attention of people who had heard it often before in the various capitals of Europe, who knew it by heart, and who knew at just what pa.s.sages to raise the head, to give a nod of recognition or a gesture of ecstasy. The bare room was filled with the sound of Musa"s fiddle and with the high musical culture of Mr. and Mrs.
Spatt. When the piece was over they clapped discreetly, and looked with soft intensity at Audrey, as if murmuring: "You, too, are a cultured cosmopolitan. You share our emotion." And across the face of Mrs. Spatt spread a glow triumphant, for Musa now positively had played for the first time in England in her drawing-room, and she foresaw hundreds of occasions on which she could refer to the matter with a fitting air of casualness.
The glow triumphant, however, paled somewhat as she felt upon herself the eye of Mr. Ziegler.
"Where is Siegfried, Alroy?" she demanded, after having thanked Musa. "I wouldn"t have had him miss that Debussy for anything, but I hadn"t noticed that he was gone. He adores Debussy."
"I think it is like bad Bach," Mr. Ziegler put in suddenly. Then he raised his gla.s.s and imbibed a good portion of the beer specially obtained and provided for him by his hostess and admirer, Mrs. Spatt.
"Do you _really_?" murmured Mrs. Spatt, with deprecation.
"There"s something in the comparison," Mr. Spatt admitted thoughtfully.
"Why not like good Bach?" Musa asked, glaring in a very strange manner at Mr. Ziegler.
"Bosh!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Mr. Ziegler with a most notable imperturbability. "Only Bach himself could com-pose good Bach."
Musa"s breathing could be heard across the drawing-room.
"_Eh bien!_" said Musa. "Now I will play for you Debussy"s Toccata. I was not playing it before. I was playing the Chaconne of Bach, the most famous composition for the violin in the world."
He did not embroider the statement. He left it in its nakedness. Nor did he permit anybody else to embroider it. Before a word of any kind could be uttered he had begun to play again. Probably in all the annals of artistic sn.o.bbery, no cultured cosmopolitan had ever been made to suffer a more exquisite moral torture of humiliation than Musa had contrived to inflict upon Mr. and Mrs. Spatt in return for their hospitality. Their sneaped squirmings upon the sofa were terrible to witness. But Mr. Ziegler"s sensibility was apparently quite unaffected. He continued to smile, to drink, and to smoke. He seemed to be saying to himself: "What does it matter to me that this miserable Frenchman has caught me in a mistake? I could eat him, and one day I shall eat him."
After a little while Musa s.n.a.t.c.hed out of his right-hand lower waistcoat pocket the tiny wooden "mute" which all violinists carry without fail upon all occasions in all their waistcoats; and, sticking it with marvellous rapidity upon the bridge of the violin, he entered upon a pianissimo, but still lively, episode of the Toccata. And simultaneously another melody faint and clear could be heard in the room. It was Mr. Ziegler humming "The Watch on the Rhine" against the Toccata of Debussy. Thus did it occur to Mr. Ziegler to take revenge on Musa for having attempted to humiliate him.
Not unsurprisingly, Musa detected at once the compet.i.tive air. He continued to play, gazing hard at his violin and apparently entranced, but edging little by little towards Mr. Ziegler. Audrey desired either to give a cry or to run out of the room. She did neither, being held to inaction by the spell of Mr. Ziegler"s perfect unconcern as, with the beer gla.s.s lifted towards his mouth, he proceeded steadily to work through "The Watch on the Rhine," while Musa lilted out the delicate, gay phrases of Debussy. The enchantment upon the whole room was sinister and painful. Musa got closer to Mr. Ziegler, who did not blench nor cease from his humming. Then suddenly Musa, lowering his fiddle and interrupting the scene, s.n.a.t.c.hed the mute from the bridge of the violin.
"I have put it on the wrong instrument," he said thickly, with a very French intonation, and simultaneously he shoved the mute with violence into the mouth of Mr. Ziegler. In doing so, he jerked up Mr. Ziegler"s elbow, and the remains of the beer flew up and baptised Mr. Ziegler"s face and vesture. Then he jammed the violin into its case, and ran out of the room.
"_Barbare! Imbecile! Sauvage!_" he muttered ferociously on the threshold.
The enchantment was broken. Everybody rose, and not the least precipitately the streaming Mr. Ziegler, who, ejecting the mute with much spluttering, and pitching away his empty gla.s.s, sprang towards the door, with justifiable homicide in every movement.
"Mr. Ziegler!" Audrey appealed to him, s.n.a.t.c.hing at his dress-coat and sticking to it.
He turned, furious, his face still dripping the finest Pilsener beer.
"If your dress-coat is not wiped instantly, it will be ruined," said Audrey.
"_Ach! Meiner Frack!_" exclaimed Mr. Ziegler, forgetting his deep knowledge of English. His economic instincts had been swiftly aroused, and they dominated all the other instincts. "_Meiner Frack!_ Vill you vipe it?" His glance was imploring.
"Oh! Mrs. Spatt will attend to it," said Audrey with solemnity, and walked out of the room into the hall. There was not a sign of Musa; the disappearance of the violinist was disquieting; and yet it made her glad--so much so that she laughed aloud. A few moments later Mr. Ziegler stalked forth from the house which he was never to enter again, and his silent scorn and the grandeur of his displeasure were terrific. He entirely ignored Audrey, who had nevertheless been the means of saving his _Frack_ for him.
CHAPTER XXVI
NOCTURNE
Soon afterwards Audrey, who had put on a hat, went out with Mr. Spatt to look for Musa. Not until shortly before the musical performance had the Spatts succeeded in persuading Musa to "accept their hospitality for the night." (The phrase was their own. They were incapable of saying "Let us put you up.") Meanwhile his bag had been left in the hall. This bag had now vanished. The parlourmaid, questioned, said frigidly that she had not touched it because she had received no orders to touch it. Musa himself must therefore have removed it. With bag in one hand and fiddle case in the other, he must have fled, relinquishing nothing but the mute in his flight.
He knew naught of England, naught of Frinton, and he was the least practical creature alive. Hence Audrey, who was in essence his mother, and who knew Frinton as some people know London, had said that she would go and look for him. Mr. Spatt, ever chivalrous, had impulsively offered to accompany her. He could indeed do no less. Mrs. Spatt, overwhelmed by the tragic sequel to her innocent triumphant, had retired to the first floor.
The wind blew, and it was very dark, as Audrey and her squire pa.s.sed along Third Avenue to the front. They did not converse--they were both too shy, too impressed by the peculiarity of the predicament. They simply peered.
They peered everywhere for the truant form of Musa balanced on one side by a bag and on the other by a fiddle case. From the trim houses, each without exception new, twinkled discreet lights, with glimpses of surpa.s.singly correct domesticity, and the wind rustled loudly through the foliage of the prim gardens, ruffling them as it might have ruffled the unwilling hair of the daughters of an arch-deacon. n.o.body was abroad. Absurd thoughts ran through Audrey"s head. A letter from Mr. Foulger had followed her to Birmingham, and in the letter Mr. Foulger had acquainted her with the fact that Great Mexican Oil shares had just risen to 2 3s. apiece. She knew that she had 180,000 of them, and now under the thin protection of Mr.
Spatt she tried to reckon 180,000 times 2 3s. She could not do the sum. At any rate she could not be sure that she did it correctly. However, she was fairly well convinced beneath the dark, impenetrable sky that the answer totalled nearly 400,000, that was, ten million francs. And the ridiculousness of an heiress who owned over ten million francs wandering about a place like Frinton with a man like Mr. Spatt, searching for another man like Musa, struck her as exceeding the bounds of the permissible. She considered that she ought to have been in a magnificent drawing-room of her own in Park Lane or the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, welcoming counts, princes, d.u.c.h.esses, diplomats and self-possessed geniuses of finished manners, with witty phrase that displayed familiarity with all that was profoundest and most brilliant in European civilisation. Life seemed to be disappointing her, and a.s.suredly money was not the thing that she had imagined it to be.
She thought:
"If this walking lamp-post does not say something soon I shall scream."
Mr. Spatt said:
"It seems to be blowing up for rain."
She screamed in the silent solitude of Frinton.
"I"m so sorry," she apologised quickly. "I thought I saw something move."
"One does," faltered Mr. Spatt.
They were now in the shopping street, where in the mornings the elect encounter each other on expeditions to purchase bridge-markers, chocolate, bathing costumes and tennis b.a.l.l.s. It was a black and empty canyon through which the wind raced.
"He may be down--down on the sh.o.r.e," Mr. Spatt timidly suggested. He seemed to be suggesting suicide.
They turned and descended across the Greensward to the sh.o.r.e, which was lined with hundreds of bathing huts, each christened with a name, and each deserted, for the by-laws of the Frinton Urban District Council judiciously forbade that the huts should be used as sleeping-chambers. The tide was very low. They walked over the wide flat sands, and came at length to the sea"s roar, the white tumbling of foamy breakers, and the full force of the south-east wind. Across the invisible expanse of water could be discerned the beam of a lightship. And Audrey was aware of mysterious sensations such as she had not had since she inhabited Flank Hall and used to steal out at nights to watch the estuary. And she thought solemnly: "Musa is somewhere near, existing." And then she thought: "What a silly thought! Of course he is!"
"I see somebody coming!" Mr. Spatt burst out in a dramatic whisper. But the precaution of whispering was useless, because the next instant, in spite of himself, he loudly sneezed.
And about two hundred yards off on the sands Audrey made out a moving figure, which at that distance did in fact seem to have vague appendages that might have resembled a bag and a fiddle case. But the atmosphere of the night was deceptive, and the figure as it approached resolved itself into three figures--a black one in the middle of two white ones. A girl"s coa.r.s.e laugh came down the wind. It could not conceivably have been the laugh of any girl who went into the shopping street to buy bridge-markers, chocolate, bathing costumes or tennis b.a.l.l.s. But it might have been--it not improbably was--the laugh of some girl whose mission was to sell such things. The trio meandered past, heedless. Mr. Spatt said no word, but he appreciably winced. The black figure in the midst of the two white ones was that of his son Siegfried, reputedly so fond of Debussy. As the group receded and faded, a fragment of a music-hall song floated away from it into the firmament.
"I"m afraid it"s not much use looking any longer," said Mr. Spatt weakly.
"He--he may have gone back to the house. Let us hope so."
At the chief garden gate of the Spatt residence they came upon Miss Nickall, trying to open it. The sling round her arm made her unmistakable.
And Miss Nickall having allowed them to recover from a pardonable astonishment at the sight of her who was supposed to be exhausted and in bed, said cheerfully:
"I"ve found him, and I"ve put him up at the Excelsior Hotel."
Mrs. Spatt had related the terrible episode to her guest, who had wilfully risen at once. Miss Nickall had had luck, but Audrey had to admit that these American girls were stupendously equal to an emergency. And she hated the angelic Nick for having found Musa.
"We tried first to find a cafe," said Nick. "But there aren"t any in this city. What do you call them in England--public-houses, isn"t it?"
"No," agreed Mr. Spatt in a shaking voice. "Public-houses are not permitted in Frinton, I am glad to say." And he began to form an intention, subject to Aurora"s approval, to withdraw altogether from the suffrage movement, which appeared to him to be getting out of hand.
As they were all separating for the night Audrey and Nick hesitated for a moment in front of each other, and then they kissed with a quite unusual effusiveness.