There was an awesome silence, which no one seemed courageous enough to break.
"Yes," said H. Stackton Dunckley finally, "and in addition England is decadent."
"But, Mr. Selwyn"--again the American heard the voice of Elise Durwent, that quick intensity of speech that always left a moment of startled silence in its wake--"you have discovered something admirable about England. Won"t you tell us what it is?"
"Well," he said, smiling, "for one thing, no one can deny the beauty of your women."
"All decadent nations," said H. Stackton Dunckley, "produce beautiful women--it is one of the surest signs that they are going to pieces.
The Romans did at the last, and Rome and England are parallel cases.
As Mrs. Le Roy Jennings says, they are parasitic nations. What did the Romans add to Greek art? The Greeks had this"--he made an elliptical movement of his hands--"the Romans did that to it"--he described a circle, then shrugged his shoulders, convinced that he had said something crushing.
"So you think English women beautiful, Mr. Selwyn?" said Lady Durwent, trying to retrieve the conversation from the slough of her inamorato"s ponderosity.
"Undoubtedly," answered the American warmly. "It is no doubt the out-of-door life they lead, and I suppose the moist climate has something to do with their wonderful complexions, but they are womanly as well, and their voices are lovely."
"I smell a rat," said Smyth, who had in his mouth an unlit cigarette, which had fastened itself to his lip and bobbed up and down with his speech, like a miniature baton. "When a man says a woman"s voice is sweet, it means that she has bored him; that what she has to say interests him so little that he turns to contemplation of her voice.
This American is a devilish cute fellow."
A babble of voices took up the charge and demanded immediate explanation.
"To a certain extent," said Selwyn stoutly, "there is much in what Mr.
Smyth says."
"List to the pigmy praising the oracle," chanted the artist.
"I do not think," went on the American, "that the English girls I have met are as bright or as clever as the cultured young women of the continent of America. In other words, with all her natural charm, the English girl does not edit herself well."
"In that," said H. Stackton Dunckley, "she reflects the breed. The Anglo-Saxon has an instinctive indifference to thought."
"As soon as an Englishman thinks," minced Madame Carlotti, "he leaves England with its _cattivo_ climate and goes to the Colonies. _C"est pourquoi_ the Empire ees so powerful--its brains are in the legs."
"Come, come," laughed Selwyn, "is there no one here but me who can discover any merit in Old England?"
"Yes," said Pyford gloomily; "London is only seven hours from Paris."
"Ah--_Parigi_!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Madame Carlotti with the fervour born of the feeling in all Latin women that Paris is their spiritual capital.
"And yet," said Selwyn, after a pause to see if Madame Carlotti"s exuberance was going to develop any further, "in literature, which I suppose is the natural art of the Anglo-Saxon temperament, we still look to you for the outstanding figures. With all our ability for writing short stories--and I think we are second only to the French in that--England still produces the foremost novelists. In the sustained effort required in the formation of a novel, England is yet first. Of course, musically, I think England is very near the bottom."
"And yet," said Johnston Smyth, "we are the only people in the world candid enough to have a monument to our lack of taste."
Every one looked at the artist, who stroked his left arm with the back of his right hand, like a barber sharpening a razor.
"In that part of London known as Kingsway," he said, "there is a beautiful building called "The London Opera House"!" He thrust both hands out, palms upwards, as if the building itself rested on them.
"It stands in a commanding position, with statues of the great composers gazing from the roof at the pa.s.sing proletariat emanating from the Strand. Inside it is luxuriously equipped, as bents the home of Opera."
"Yes," said the American, as the speaker paused.
Smyth produced a watch from nowhere in particular. "It is just past ten," he said. "I am not sure whether it is Charlie Chaplin or Mary Pickford showing on the screen at this hour, at the London Opera House."
A murmur of applause acknowledged the artist"s well-planned climax. He looked about with a satisfied smile, then replaced the watch with the air of pocketing both it and the subject.
"But--you have opera?" said Selwyn wonderingly.
"Of course," said Smyth; "and where? In a vegetable-market. In Covent Garden. Yet England has been accused of hypocrisy! What other nation is so candid?"
By one of those unspoken understandings that are the rules of mobs and dinner-parties, it was felt that the topic was ceasing to be exhaustive and becoming exhausting. Lady Durwent glanced, interrogatively about the table; Madame Carlotti took a hitch in her gown; Norton Pyford emptied his gla.s.s and sat pensively staring at it as if it had hardly done what he expected, but on the whole he felt inclined to forgive it; Johnston Smyth made a belated attempt to be sentimental with the Honourable Miss Durwent, whose lips, always at war with each other, merely parted in a smile that utterly failed to bring any sympathy from her eyes; Mrs. Le Roy Jennings took a last sip of coffee, and finding it quite cold, put it down with a gesture of finality.
"Lady Durwent," said Austin Selwyn--and the quality of his voice was lighter and more musical than it had been--"I suppose that a man who deliberately goes to a country to gather impressions lays himself open to the danger of being influenced by external things only. If I were to base my knowledge of England on what her people say of her, I think I should be justified in a.s.suming that the century-old charge of her decadence is terribly true. Yet I claim to have something of an artist"s sensitiveness to undercurrents, and it seems to me that there is a strong instinct of race over here--perhaps I express myself clumsily--but I think there is an England which has far more depth to it than your artists and writers realise. For some reason you all seem to want to deny that; and when, as to-night, it is my privilege to meet some of this country"s expressionists, it appears that none has any intention of trying to reveal what is fine in your life as a people--you seek only to satirise, caricature, or d.a.m.n altogether. If I believe my ears, there is nothing but stupidity and insularity in England. If I listen to my senses, to my subconscious mind, I feel that a great crisis would reveal that she is still the bed-rock of civilisation."
Madame Carlotti raised her gla.s.s.
"To America"s next amba.s.sador to England!" she cried.
III.
The momentous evening was drawing to a close.
Rain, in fitful gusts, had been besieging the windows, driven by an ill-tempered wind that bl.u.s.tered around the streets, darting up dark alleys, startling the sparks emerging from chimney-pots, roaring across the parks, slamming doors, and venting itself, every now and then, in an ill-natured howl.
Inside the refuge of No. 8 Chelmsford Gardens a fire threw its merry warmth over the large music-room, and did its best to offset the tearful misery of the November night.
Conversation had dwindled in energy with the closing hour of the affair, and seizing an auspicious moment, Norton Pyford had reached the piano, and for twenty minutes demonstrated the close relation of the chord of C Minor to the colour brown. Modernist music, acting on unusual souls as cla.s.sical music on ordinary souls, stimulated the flagging conversational powers of the guests, and he was soon surrounded by a gesticulating group of dissenting or condoning critics.
Selwyn noticed that Elise Durwent had not left her seat by the fire, and absenting himself from the harmonic debate, he took a chair by hers.
"You are pensive, Miss Durwent," he said.
She smiled, with a slight suggestion of weariness, though her eyes had a softness he had not seen in them before.
"I am very dull company to-night," she said, "but ever since I was a child, rain beating against the windows has always made me dreamy. I suppose I am old-fashioned, but it is sweeter music to me than Mr.
Pyford"s new harmonies."
He laughed, and leaning towards the fire, rubbed his hands meditatively. "You must have found our talk wearisome at dinner," he said.
"No," she answered, "it was not so bad as usual. You introduced a note of sincerity that had all the effect of a novelty."
Her mannerism of swift and disjointed speech, which broke all her sentences into rapidly uttered phrases, again annoyed him. Though her voice was refined, it seemed to be acting at the behest of a whip-like brain, and she spoke as if desirous rather of provoking a retort than of establishing any sense of compatibility. Yet she was feminine--gloriously, delicately feminine. The finely moulded arms and the gracefulness of body, indicated rather than revealed beneath her blue gown, intrigued the eye and the senses, just as the swiftly spoken words challenged the brain and infused exasperation in the very midst of admiration. The complicated elements of the girl offered a peculiar fascination to the eternal instinct of study possessed by the young American author.
"Miss Durwent," he said, "if I was sincere to-night, it was because you encouraged me to be so."
"But I said nothing."
"Nevertheless, you were the inspiration."
"I never knew a girl could accomplish so much by holding her tongue."
A crash of "Bravos" broke from the group around the piano; Pyford had just scored a point.