"I did."
"Why?"
"Why?" she said maliciously. "Don"t you keep an account of every penny you spend?" (It was true.)
Here was a fair example of her sardonic and unscrupulous humour--a humour not of words but of acts. G.J. simply tossed his head, aware of the futility of expostulation.
She went on in a different tone:
"You were the first to see Connie?"
"Yes," he said sadly.
"She has lain in my arms all afternoon," Lady Queenie burst out, her voice liquid. "And now I"m going straight back to her." She looked at him with the strangest triumphant expression. Then her large, equivocal blue eyes fell from his face to the flowers, and their expression simultaneously altered to disdainful amus.e.m.e.nt full of mischievous implications. She ran off without another word. The glazed entrance doors revolved, and he saw her nip into an electric brougham, which, before he had time to b.u.t.ton his overcoat, vanished like an apparition in the rainy mist.
Chapter 15
EVENING OUT
He found Christine exactly as he had left her, in the same tea-gown and the same posture, and on the same sofa. But a small table had been put by the sofa; and on this table was a penny bottle of ink in a saucer, and a pen. She was studying some kind of official form. The pucker between the eyes was very marked.
"Already!" she exclaimed, as if amazed. "But there is not a clock that goes, and I had not the least idea of the hour. Besides, I was splitting my head to fill up this form."
Such was her notion of being exact! He had abandoned an important meeting of a committee which was doing untold mercies to her compatriots in order to keep his appointment with her; and she, whose professional business it was that evening to charm him and harmonise with him, had merely flouted the appointment. Nevertheless, her gestures and smile as she rose and came towards him were so utterly exquisite that immediately he also flouted the appointment. What, after all, could it matter whether they dined at eight, nine, or even ten o"clock?
"Thou wilt pardon me, monster?" she murmured, kissing him.
No woman had ever put her chin up to his as she did, nor with a glance expressed so unreserved a surrender to his masculinity.
She went on, twining languishingly round him:
"I do not know whether I ought to go out. I am yet far from--It is perhaps imprudent."
"Absurd!" he protested--he could not bear the thought of her not dining with him. He knew too well the desolation of a solitary dinner.
"Absurd! We go in a taxi. The restaurant is warm. We return in a taxi."
"To please thee, then."
"What is that form?"
"It is for the telephone. Thou understandest how it is necessary that I have the telephone--me! But I comprehend nothing of this form."
She pa.s.sed him the form. She had written her name in the s.p.a.ce allotted. "Christine Dubois." A fair calligraphy! But what a name!
The French equivalent of "Smith". Nothing could be less distinguished.
Suddenly it occurred to him that Concepcion"s name also was Smith.
"I will fill it up for you. It is quite simple."
"It is possible that it is simple when one is English. But English--that is as if to say Chinese. Everything contrary. Here is a pen."
"No. I have my fountain-pen." He hated a cheap pen, and still more a penny bottle of ink, but somehow this particular penny bottle of ink seemed touching in its simple ugliness. She was eminently teachable.
He would teach her his own att.i.tude towards penny bottles of ink....
Of course she would need the telephone--that could not be denied.
As Christine was signing the form Marthe entered with the chrysanthemums, which he had handed over to her; she had arranged them in a horrible blue gla.s.s vase cheaply gilded; and while Marthe was putting the vase on the small table there was a ring at the outer door. Marthe hurried off.
Christine said, kissing him again tenderly:
"Thou art a squanderer! Fine for me to tell thee not to buy costly flowers! Thou has spent at least ten shillings for these. With ten shillings--"
"No, no!" he interrupted her. "Five." It was a fib. He had paid half a guinea for the few flowers, but he could not confess it.
They could hear a powerful voice indistinctly booming at the top of the stairs. "Two callers on one afternoon!" G.J. reflected. And yet she had told him she went out for the first time only the day before yesterday! He scarcely liked it, but his reason rescued him from the puerility of a grievance against her on this account. "And why not?
She is bound to be a marked success."
Marthe returned to the drawing-room and shut the door.
"Madame--" she began, slightly agitated.
"Speak, then!" Christine urged, catching her agitation.
"It is the police!"
G.J. had a shock. He knew many of the policemen who lurked in the dark doorways of Piccadilly at night, had little friendly talks with them, held them for excellent fellows. But a policeman invading the flat of a courtesan, and himself in the flat, seemed a different being from the honest stalwarts who threw the beams of lanterns on the key-holes of jewellers" shops.
Christine steeled herself to meet the crisis with self-reliance. She pointedly did not appeal to the male.
"Well, what is it that he wants?"
"He talks of the chimney. It appears this morning there was a chimney on fire. But since we burn only anthracite and gas--He knows madame"s name."
There was a pause. Christine asked sharply and mysteriously:
"How much do you think?"
"If madame gave five pounds--having regard to the _chic_ of the quarter."
Christine rushed into the bedroom and came back with a five-pound note.
"Here! Chuck that at him--politely. Tell him we are very sorry."
"Yes, madame."
"But he"ll never take it. You can"t treat the London police like that!" G.J. could not help expostulating as soon as Marthe had gone.