Tante Part 23

They were to dine at Edith Morton's and go on to Karen's first dance.

Under Betty's supervision she had already made progress through half-a-dozen lessons, though she had not, she confessed to Gregory, greatly distinguished herself at them. "_I'll_ get you round all right,"

he had promised her. They looked forward to the dance.

"So it is," said Gregory. "It's not time to dress yet, is it?"

"It's only half-past six. Shall I wear my white silk, Gregory, with the little white rose wreath?"

"Yes, and the nice little square-toed white silk shoes--like a Reynolds lady's--and like n.o.body else's. I do so like your square toes."

"I cannot bear pinched toes," said Karen. "My father gave me a horror of that; and Tante. Her feet are as perfect as her hands. She has all her shoes made for her by a wonderful old man in Vienna who is an artist in shoes. She was looking well, wasn't she, Tante?" Karen added, in even tones. Gregory and she were sitting now on the sofa together, their arms linked and hand-in-hand.

"Beautiful," said Gregory with sincerity. "How well that odd head-dress became her."

"Didn't it? It was nice that she liked those pretty teacups, wasn't it.

And appreciated our view; even though," Karen smiled, taking now another bull by the horns, "she was so hard on our flat. I'm afraid she feels her Bouddha _en travestie_ here."

"Well, he is, of course. I do hope," said Gregory, also seizing his bull, "that she didn't think me rude in my joke about being willing to burn him. And you will change everything--burn anything--barring the Bouddha and the teacups--that you want to, won't you, dear?"

"No; I wouldn't, even if I wanted to; and I don't want to. Perhaps Tante did not quite understand. I think it may take a little time for her to understand your jokes or you her outspokenness. She is like a child in her candour about the things she likes or dislikes." A fuller ease had come to her voice. By her brave pretence that all was well she was persuading herself that all could be made well.

Perhaps it might be, thought Gregory, if only he could go on keeping his temper with Madame von Marwitz and if Karen, wise and courageous darling, could accept the unspoken between them, and spare him definitions and declarations. A situation undefined is so often a situation saved. Life grows over and around it. It becomes a mere mummied fly, preserved in amber; unsightly perhaps; but unpernicious.

After all, he told himself--and he went on thinking over the incidents of the afternoon while he dressed--after all, Madame von Marwitz might not be much in London; she was a comet and her course would lead her streaming all over the world for the greater part of her time. And above all and mercifully, Madame von Marwitz was not a person upon whose affections one would have to count. He seemed to have found out all sorts of things about her this afternoon: he could have given Sargent points. The main strength of her feeling for anyone, deep instinct told him, was an insatiable demand that they should feel sufficiently for her. And the chief difficulty--he refused to dignify it by the name of danger--was that Madame von Marwitz had her deep instincts, too, and had, no doubt, found out all sorts of things about him. He did not like her; he had not liked her from the first; and she could hardly fail to feel that he liked her less and less. He was able to do Madame von Marwitz justice. Even a selflessly devoted mother could hardly rejoice wholeheartedly in the marriage of a daughter to a man who disliked herself; and how much less could Madame von Marwitz, who was not a mother and not selflessly devoted to anybody, rejoice in Karen's marriage. She was right in feeling that it menaced her own position. He did her justice; he made every allowance for her; he intended to be straight with her; but the fact that stood out for Gregory was that, already, she was not straight with him. Already she was picking surrept.i.tiously, craftily, at his life; and this was to pick at Karen's.

He would give her a long string and make every allowance for the vexations of her situation; but if she began seriously to tarnish Karen's happiness he would have to pull the string smartly. The difficulty--he refused to see this as danger either--was that he could not pull the string upon Madame von Marwitz without, by the same gesture, upsetting himself as well.

CHAPTER XVIII

The unspoken, for the first month or so of Madame von Marwitz's return, remained accepted. There were no declarations and no definitions, and Gregory's immunity was founded on something more rea.s.suring than the mere fact that Madame von Marwitz frequently went away. When she was in London, it became apparent, he was to see very little of her, and as long as they did not meet too often he felt that he was, in so far, safe. Madame von Marwitz was tremendously busy. She paid many week-end visits; she sat to Belot--who had come to London to paint it--for a great portrait; she was to give three concerts in London during the winter and two in Paris, and it was natural enough that she had not found time to come to the flat again.

But although Gregory saw so little of her, although she was not in his life as a presence, he felt her in it as an influence. She might have been the invisible but portentous comet moving majestically on the far confines of his solar system; and one accounted for oddities of behaviour in the visible planets by inferring that the comet was the cause of them. If he saw very little of Madame von Marwitz, he saw, too, much less of his twin planet, Karen. It was not so much that Karen's course was odd as that it was altered. If Madame von Marwitz sent for her very intermittently, she had, all the same, in all her life, as she told Gregory, never seen so much of her guardian. She frankly displayed to him the radiance of her state, wishing him, as he guessed, to share to the full every detail of her privileges, and to realise to the full her grat.i.tude to him for proving so conclusively to Tante that there was none of the selfishness of love in him. Tante must see that he made it very easy for her to go to her, and Gregory derived his own secret satisfaction from the thought that Karen's radiance was the best of retorts to Madame von Marwitz's veiled intimations. As long as she made Karen happy and let him alone, he seemed to himself to tell her, he would get on very well; and he suspected that her clutch of Karen would soon loosen when she found it unchallenged. In the meantime there was not much satisfaction for him elsewhere. Karen's altered course left him often lonely. Not only had the readings of Political Economy, begun with so much ardour in their spare evenings, almost lapsed for lack of consecutiveness; but he frequently found on coming home tired for his tea, and eager for the sight of his wife, a little note from her telling him that she had been summoned to Mrs. Forrester's as Tante was "with Fafner in his cave" and wanted her.

Fafner was the name that Madame von Marwitz gave to her moods of sometimes tragic and sometimes petulant melancholy. Karen had told him all about Fafner and how, in the cave, Tante would lie sometimes for long hours, silent, her eyes closed, holding her hand; sometimes asking her to read to her, English, French, German or Italian poetry; their range of reading always astonished Gregory.

He gathered, too, from Karen's confidences, how little, until now, he had gauged the variety of the great woman's resources, how little done justice to her capacity for being merely delightful. She could be whimsically gay in the midst of melancholy, and her jests and merriment were the more touching, the more exquisite, from the fact that they flowered upon the dark background of the cave. It was, he saw, with a richer flavour that Karen tasted again the charm of old days, when, after some great musical or social event, in which the girl had played her part of contented observer, they had laughed together over follies and appreciated qualities, in the familiar language of allusion evolved from long community in experience.

Karen repeated to him Tante's sallies at the expense of this or that person and the phrase with which she introduced these transformations of human foolishness to the service of comedy. "Come, let us make _meringues_ of them."

The dull or ludicrous creatures, so to be whipped up and baked crisp, revealed, in the light of the a.n.a.logy, the tempting vacuity of a bowl of white of egg. When Tante introduced her wit into the colourless substance she frothed it to a sparkling work of art.

Gregory was aware sometimes of a pang as he listened. He and Karen had, indeed, their many little jokes, and their stock of common a.s.sociation was growing; but there was nothing like the range of reference, nothing like the variety of experience, that her life with Madame von Marwitz had given her to draw upon. It was to her companionship, intermittent as it had been, with the world-wandering genius that she owed the security of judgment that often amused yet often disconcerted him, the catholicity of taste beside which, though he would not acknowledge its final validity, he felt his own taste to be sometimes narrow and sometimes guileless. He saw that Karen had every ground for feeling her own point of view a larger one than his. It was no personal complacency that her a.s.surance expressed, but the modest recognition of privilege.

Beyond their personal tie, so her whole demeanour showed him, he had nothing to add to her highly dowered life.

Gregory had known that his world would mean nothing to Karen; yet when, under Betty's guidance, she fulfilled her social duties, dined out, gave dinners, received and returned visits, the very compliance of her indifference, while always amusing, vexed him a little, and a little alarmed him, too. He had known that he would have to make all the adjustments, but how adjust oneself to a permanent separation between one's private and one's social life? Old ties, lacking new elements of growth, tended to become formalities. When Karen was not there, he did not care to go without her to see people, and when she was with him the very charm of her personality was a barrier between him and them. His life became narrower as well as lonelier. There was nothing much to be done with people to whom one's wife was indifferent.

It was very obvious to him that she found the sober, conventional people who were his friends very flavourless, especially when she came to them from Fafner's cave. He had always taken his friends for granted, as part of the pleasant routine of life, like one's breakfast or one's bath; but now, seeing them anew, through Karen's eyes, he was inclined more and more to believe that they weren't as dull as she found them. She lacked the fundamental experience of a rooted life. She was yet to learn--he hoped, he determined, she should learn--that a social system of harmonious people, significant perhaps more because of their places in the system than as units, and bound together by a highly evolved code, was, when all was said and done, a more satisfactory place in which to spend one's life than an anarchic world of erratic, undisciplined, independent individuals. Karen, however, did not understand the use of the system and she saw its members with eyes as clear to their defects as were Gregory's to the defects of Madame von Marwitz.

Gregory's friends belonged to that orderly and efficient section of the nation that moves contentedly between the simply professional and the ultra fashionable. They had a great many duties, social, political and domestic, which they took with a pleasant seriousness, and a great many pleasures which they took seriously, too. They "came up" from the quiet responsibilities of the country-side for a season and "did" the concerts and exhibitions as they "did" their shopping and their b.a.l.l.s. Art, to most of them, was a thing accepted on authority, like the latest cut for sleeves or the latest fashion for dressing the hair. A few of them, like the Cornish Lavingtons, had never heard Madame Okraska; a great many of them had never heard of Belot. The Madame Okraskas and the Belots of the world were to them a queer, alien people, regarded with only a mild, derivative interest. They recognized the artist as a decorative appurtenance of civilized life, very much as they recognized the dentist or the undertaker as its convenient appurtenances. It still struck them as rather strange that one should meet artists socially and, perhaps, as rather regrettable, their traditional standard of good faith requiring that the people one met socially should, on the whole, be people whom one wouldn't mind one's sons and daughters marrying; and they didn't conceive of artists as entering that category.

Gregory, with all his acuteness, did not gauge the astonishment with which Karen came to realize these standards of his world. Her cheerful evenness of demeanour was a cloak, sometimes for indignation and sometimes for mirth. She could only face the fact that this world must, in a sense, be hers, by relegating it and all that it meant to the merest background in their lives. Her real life consisted in Gregory; in Tante. All that she had to do with these people--oh, so nice and kind they were, she saw that well, but oh so stupid, most of them, so inconceivably blind to everything of value in life--all that she had to do was, from time to time, to open their box, their well-padded, well-provendered box, and look at them pleasantly. She felt sure that for Gregory's sake, if not for theirs, she should always be able to look pleasantly; unless--she had been afraid of this sometimes--they should say or do things that in their blindness struck at Tante and at the realities that Tante stood for. But all had gone so well, so Karen believed, that she felt no misgivings when Tante expressed a wish to look into the box with her and said, "You must give a little dinner-party for me, my Karen, so that I may see your new _milieu_."

Gregory controlled a dry little grimace when Karen reported this speech to him. He couldn't but suspect Tante's motives in wanting them to give a little dinner-party for her. But he feigned the most genial interest in the plan and agreed with Karen that they must ask their very nicest to meet Tante.

Betty had helped Karen with all her dinners; she had seen as yet very little of the great woman, and entered fully into Karen's eagerness that everything should be very nice.

"Gregory will take her in," said Betty; "and we'll put Bertram Fraser on her other side. He's always delightful. And we'll have the Canning-Thompsons and the Overtons and the Byngs; the Byngs are so decorative!" Constance Armytage was now Mrs. Byng.

"And my dear old General," said Karen, sitting at her desk with a paper on her knee and an obedient pencil in her hand; "I forget his name, but we met him at the dinner that you gave after we married; you know, Betty, with the thin russet face and the little blue eyes. May he take me in?"

"General Montgomery. Yes; that is a good idea; glorious old man. Though Lady Montgomery is rather a stodge," said Betty; "but Oliver can have her."

"I remember, a sleek, small head--like a turtle--with salmon-pink feathers on it. Poor Oliver. Will he mind?"

"Not a bit. He never minds anything but the dinner; and with Mrs. Barker we can trust to that."

"Tante often likes soldiers," said Karen, pleased with her good idea.

"Our flags, she says, they are, and that the world would be drab-coloured without them."

So it was arranged. Bertram Fraser was an old family friend of the Jardines'. His father was still the rector of their Northumberland parish, and he and Gregory and Oliver had hunted and fished and shot and gone to Oxford together. Bertram had been a traveller in strange countries since those days, had written one or two clever books and was now in Parliament. The Overtons, also country neighbours, were fond of music as well as of hunting, and Mr. Canning-Thompson was an eminent, if rather ponderous, Q.C., for whose wife, the gentle and emaciated Lady Mary, Gregory had a special affection. She was a great philanthropist and a patient student of early Italian art, and he and she talked gardens and pictures together.

Betty and Oliver were the first to arrive on the festal night, Betty's efficiency, expressed by all her diamonds and a dress of rose-coloured velvet, making up for whatever there might be of inefficiency in Karen's appearance and deportment. Karen was still, touchingly so to her husband's eyes, the little Hans Andersen heroine in appearance. She wore to-night the white silk dress and the wreath of little white roses.

Oliver and Gregory chatted desultorily until the Byngs arrived. Oliver was fair and ruddy and his air of dozing contentment was always vexatious to his younger brother. He had every reason for contentment.

Betty's money had securely b.u.t.tressed the family fortunes and he had three delightful little boys to b.u.t.tress Betty's money. Gregory grew a little out of temper after talking for five minutes to Oliver and this was not a fortunate mood in which to realise, as the Montgomerys, the Overtons and the Canning-Thompsons followed the Byngs, at eight-fifteen, that Madame von Marwitz was probably going to be late. At eight-thirty, Karen, looking at him with some anxiety expressed in her raised brows, silently conveyed to him her fear that the soup, at the very least, would be spoiled. At eight-forty Betty murmured to Karen that they had perhaps better begin without Madame von Marwitz--hadn't they? She must, for some reason, be unable to come. Dinner was for eight. "Oh, but we must wait longer," said Karen. "She would have telephoned--or Mrs.

Forrester would--if she had not been coming. Tante is always late; but always, always," she added, without condemnation if with anxiety. "And there is the bell now. Yes, I heard it."

It was a quarter to nine when Madame von Marwitz, with Karen, who had hastened out to meet her, following behind, appeared at last, benign and unperturbed as a moon sliding from clouds. In the doorway she made her accustomed pause, the pause of one not surveying her audience but indulgently allowing her audience to survey her. It was the att.i.tude in which Belot was painting his great portrait of her. But it was not met to-night by the eyes to which she was accustomed. The hungry guests looked at Madame von Marwitz with austere relief and looked only long enough to satisfy themselves that her appearance really meant dinner.

Gregory led the way with her into the dining-room and suspected in her air of absent musing a certain discomfiture.

She was, as usual, strangely and beautifully attired, as though for the operatic stage rather than for a dinner-party. Strings of pearls fell from either side of her head to her shoulders and a wide tiara of pearls banded her forehead in a manner recalling a Russian head-dress. She looked, though so lovely, also so conspicuous that there was a certain ludicrousness in her appearance. It apparently displeased or surprised Lady Montgomery, who, on Gregory's other hand, her head adorned with the salmon-pink, ostrich feathers, raised a long tortoisesh.e.l.l lorgnette and fixed Madame von Marwitz through it for a mute, resentful moment. Madame von Marwitz, erect and sublime as a G.o.ddess in a shrine, looked back. It was a look lifted far above the region of Lady Montgomery's formal, and after all only tentative, disapprobations; divine impertinence, sovereign disdain informed it. Lady Montgomery dropped her lorgnette with a little clatter and, adjusting her heavy diamond bracelets, turned her sleek mid-Victorian head to her neighbour. Gregory did not know whether to be amused or vexed.

It was now his part to carry on a conversation with the great woman: and he found the task difficult. She was not silent, nor unresponsive. She listened to his remarks with the almost disconcerting closeness of attention that he had observed in her on their meeting of the other day, seeming to seek in them some savour that still escaped her good-will.

She answered him alertly, swiftly, and often at random, as though by her intelligence and competence to cover his inept.i.tude. Her smile was brightly mechanical; her voice at once insistent and monotonous. She had an air, which Gregory felt more and more to be almost insolent, of doing her duty.

Bertram Fraser's turn came and he rose to it with his usual buoyancy. He was interested in meeting Madame von Marwitz; but he was a young man who had made his way in the world and perhaps exaggerated his achievement.

He expected people to be interested also in meeting him. He expected from the great genius a reciprocal buoyancy. Madame von Marwitz bent her brows upon him. Irony grew in her smile, a staccato crispness in her utterance. Cool and competent as he was, Bertram presently looked disconcerted; he did not easily forgive those who disconcerted him, and, making no further effort to carry on the conversation, he sat silent, smiling a little, and waited for his partner to turn to him again. Had Gregory not taken up his talk, lamely and coldly, with Madame von Marwitz, she would have been left in an awkward isolation.

She answered him now in a voice of la.s.situde and melancholy. Leaning back in her chair, strange and almost stupefying object that she was, her eyes moved slowly round the table with a wintry desolation of glance, until, meeting Karen's eyes, they beamed forth a brave warmth of cherishing, encouraging sweetness. "Yes, _ma cherie_," they seemed to say; "Bear up, I am bearing up. I will make _meringues_ of them for you."

She could make _meringues_ of them; Gregory didn't doubt it. Yet, and here was the glow of malicious satisfaction that atoned to him for the discomforts he endured, they were, every one of them, making _meringues_ of her.

In their narrowness, in their defects, ran an instinct, as shrewd as it was unconscious, that was a match for Madame von Marwitz's intelligence.

They were so unperceiving that no one of them, except perhaps Betty and Karen--who of course didn't count among them at all--was aware of the wintry wind of Madame von Marwitz's boredom; yet if it had been recognised it would have been felt as insignificant. They knew that she was a genius, and that she was very odd looking and that, as Mrs.

Jardine's guardian, she had not come in a professional capacity and might therefore not play to them after dinner. So defined, she was seen, with all her splendour of a.s.sociation, as incidental.