Changing Winds Part 49

She paused for a moment, and then said, "How long will it take you to write the notice of the play?" she asked, adding before he could answer, "Can't you do it now?"

"Yes, Gilbert," Henry said, "you can do it now. You know the play, and you've seen the acting in two acts...."

Gilbert looked at him very directly, and when he spoke, his voice was very firm. "No," he said, "I must go down to Fleet Street!"

Lady Cecily was cross and hurt, and she turned away pettishly.

"Oh, very well!" she said shortly.

There was a slight air of restraint among them ... even Lord Jasper seemed to feel it. It was he who spoke next.

"You can come and join us at the Savoy after you've done your ...

whatyoumaycallit, can't you?" he said.

Gilbert paused for a moment. He looked as if he were undecided as to what he should say. Then he said, "Yes, I can do that ... if I get away from the office in time!"

Henry was about to say, "Why, of course, you can get away in plenty of time!" but he checked himself and did not say it.

"Oh, that will do excellently," said Lady Cecily, all smiles again.

Then the lights of the theatre were lowered and the third act began.

4

When the play was over, they drove to Fleet Street in Lord Jasper's motor-car. Lady Cecily had suggested that they should take Gilbert to his newspaper office in order to save time, and he had consented readily enough.

"We might wait for you!..." she added, but Gilbert would not agree to this proposal. "It isn't fair to keep Jimphy from his birthday treat any longer," he said, "and I may be some time before I'm ready!"

She was sitting next to Gilbert, and Henry and Jimphy were together with their backs to the chauffeur. She did not appear to be tired nor had the sparkle of her beautiful eyes diminished. She lay against the padded back of the car and chattered in an inconsequent fashion that was oddly amusing. She did not listen to replies that were made to her questions, nor did she appear to notice that sometimes replies were not made. It seemed to Henry that she would have chattered exactly as she was now chattering if she had been alone. Neither Gilbert nor Jimphy answered her, but Henry felt that something ought to be said when she made a direct remark.

"Isn't Fleet Street funny at this time of night?" she said. "So quiet. I do hope the supper will be fit to eat. Oh, Gilbert, I wish you'd say something in your notice of Wilde's play about his insincerity. I felt all the time I was listening to the play that ... that it wasn't true!'"

Gilbert sat up straight in his seat and looked at her.

"Oh!" he exclaimed.

"Yes," she went on. "The wit seemed to be stuck on to the play ... it wasn't part of it!..."

Gilbert leant back in his seat again. "You've been talking to Henry about Wilde, haven't you?"

She laughed lightly and turned towards Henry. "Oh, of course. Mr. Quinn, I always repeat what other people say. I forget that they've said it to me and think that I've thought of it myself!"

Henry professed to be pleased that she had accepted his ideas so completely.

"But, of course," she continued, "what you said was quite true. I've always felt that there was something wrong with Wilde's plays...."

"I can't think what you all want to talk about a play for. I never see anything in 'em to talk about!" Jimphy murmured sleepily.

"Go to sleep, Jimphy, dear. Well wake you when we get to the Savoy...."

"Always ragging a chap!" Jimphy muttered, and then closed his eyes.

The car turned down one of the narrow streets that lead from Fleet Street to the Thames Embankment, and then turned again and stopped.

"Oh, is this your office, Gilbert?" Lady Cecily said. "Such an ugly, dark looking place! But I suppose it's interesting inside? Newspaper offices are supposed to be awfully interesting inside, aren't they?"

"Are they?" Gilbert replied, as he got out of the car. "I've never noticed it. Noisy holes where no one has time to think. Good-bye."

"Not 'good-bye,' Gilbert! We shall see you soon at the Savoy, shan't we?"

"Oh, yes. Yes. I'd almost forgotten that!"

The car drove off, threading the narrow steep street slowly. They could hear the deep rurr-rurr of the printing machines coming from the bas.e.m.e.nts of the buildings, and now and then great patches of pallid blue light shot out of open windows. Motor-vans and horse-waggons were drawn up against the pavements in front of the office-doors, waiting for the newly-printed papers. Bundles of _Daily Reflexions_ were already printed and were being thrown on to the cars and waggons for distribution.

"Are they printed already?" Lady Cecily said.

"Most of them were printed at nine o'clock," Henry replied. "The ha'penny ill.u.s.trated papers go all over the country before the ordinary papers are printed at all!"

"How awfully clever of them!" she said.

The car turned into Fleet Street and quickly drove up to the Savoy.

"Thank G.o.d!" said Jimphy. "I shall get some fun out of my birthday now!"

"Jimphy loves his food," Lady Cecily exclaimed. "Don't you, Jimphy?

Don't you love your little tum-tum?..."

They entered the hotel and found the table which had been reserved for them. There was a queer, hectic gaiety about the place, as if every one present were making a desperate effort to eat, drink _and_ be merry.

People greeted Lady Cecily as she pa.s.sed them and muttered, "'loa, Jimphy!" Henry had never been to a fashionable restaurant before, and the barbaric beauty of the scene fascinated him. The women were riotously dressed, and the colours of their garments mingled and merged like the colours of a sunset. There was a constant flow of people through the room, and the chatter of animated voices and bursts of laughter and the jingling, sentimental music played by the orchestra made Jimphy forget how bored he had been at the theatre. The slightly fuddled air which he had had in the bar of St. James's had left him and he began to talk.

"Ripping woman, that!" he said to Henry, indicating a slight, dark girl who had entered the restaurant in company with a tall, flaxen-haired man. "Pretty little flapper, I call her! I like thin women, myself.

Well, slender's a better word, isn't it? What you say, Cecily?"

Lady Cecily had tapped her husband's arm. "Ernest Lensley's just come in," she said. "He's with Boltt. Go and bring them both here. They can't find seats, poor dears!"

Ernest Lensley and Boltt were fashionable novelists. Lensley was an impudent-looking man with very blue eyes who had written a number of popular stories about society women who "chattered" very much in the way that Lady Cecily chattered. The heroine of his best-known book was modelled, so people said, on the wife of a Cabinet Minister, and thousands of suburban Englishwomen professed to have an intimate knowledge of the statesman's family life solely because they had read Lensley's novel. It was a flippant, vulgar book, the outcome of a flippant, vulgar mind. Boltt had a wider public than Lensley. Boltt, a tall, thin, stooping man, with peering eyes, had discovered "the human note" of which Gilbert's editor prated continually. He was a precise, priggish man, extraordinarily vain though no vainer than Lensley, who, however, had an easy manner that Boltt would never acquire. He spoke in the way in which one might expect a "reduced gentlewoman, poor dear!" to speak, and there was something about him that made a man long to kick him up a room and down a room and across a room and back again. His heroes were all big, burly, red-haired giants, who wore beards and old clothes and said "By G.o.d, yes!" when they admired the scenery, and led a vagabond life in a perfectly gentlemanly manner until they met the heroine.... His heroines constantly fell into situations which were extremely compromising in the eyes of a censorious world, but they were never completely compromised. The whole world knew, before the conclusion of the story, that the heroine had been falsely suspected. If she had spent the night in the hero's bedroom, she had done so with the best intentions, under the strictest chaperonage ... usually that of her dear, devoted old nurse, G.o.d bless her!... whose presence in the bedroom had been hidden, until the middle of the penultimate chapter, from the heroine's friends and relatives. The hero, of course, poor, manly, broken giant, had been ill, suffering from a fever, and in his delirium had called for her, discontent until she had put her cool firm hand upon his hot brow, and the doctor had said that if she would stay with him, she would save his life. So she had flung her reputation to the winds and had hurried to his bedroom.... It was pretentious, flatulent stuff, through which a thin stream of tepid l.u.s.t trickled so gently that it seemed like a stream of pretty sentiment, and it was written with such cleverness that young ladies in Bath and Cheltenham and Atlantic City, U.S.A., were tricked into believing that this was Life ... Real Life....

Lensley and Boltt followed Jimphy eagerly to Lady Cecily's table.

Lensley was glad to sit with her: Boltt was glad to be certain of his supper. Lensley enjoyed listening to Cecily's babble because he could always be certain of getting something out of her speech that would just fit into his next novel: Boltt liked his contiguity to members of the governing cla.s.s. They completely ignored Henry after they had been introduced to him.

"Mr. Quinn is writing a novel, too!" said Lady Cecily.

"Oh, yes!" said Lensley.

"Indeed!" Boltt burbled.

Thereafter they addressed themselves exclusively to Lady Cecily and her husband. Lensley told Lady Cecily that she was to be the heroine of his next book. "I'm studying you now, dear Lady Cecily!" he said. "Jotting you down in my little book ... all your little plaguey ways and speeches!..."