The Fortunate Youth Part 22

"And you call that pleasure?" asked Count Lavretsky.

"It isn't hedonism, at any rate," said Paul.

"I call it life," said the Princess. "Don't you?"--she turned to Doon.

"I think what Mr. Savelli calls the emotive force of mankind helps to balance our own personal emotions," said he.

"Or isn't it rather a wear and tear on the nervous system?" laughed his wife.

"It seems so to me," said Count Lavretsky. "Perhaps, being a Russian, I am more primitive and envy a n.o.bleman of the time of Pharaoh who never heard of devastations in Mexico, did not feel his heart called upon to pulsate at anything beyond his own concerns. But he in his wisdom at his little world was vanity and was depressed. We moderns, with our infinitely bigger world and our infinitely greater knowledge, have no more wisdom than the Egyptian, and we see that the world is all the more vanity and are all the more overwhelmed with despair."

"But--" said Paul.

"But--" cried the Princess.

Both laughed, and paused. Paul bowed with a slight gesture.

"I am not overwhelmed with despair," the Princess continued.

"Neither am I," said Paul.

"I am keeping my end up wonderfully," said Lady Angela.

"I am in a nest of optimists," Count Lavretsky groaned. "But was it not you, Lady Angela, who talked of wear and tear.

"That was only to contradict my husband."

"What is all this about?" asked the Countess Lavretsky, who had been discussing opera with Lord Bantry and Mademoiselle de Cressy.

Doon scientifically crystallized the argument. It held the octette, while men-servants in powder and gold-laced livery offered poires Zobraska, a subtle creation of the chef. Lord Bantry envied the contemplative calm which unexciting circ.u.mstances allowed the literary ancient. Mademoiselle de Cressy advanced the feminist view in favour of the modern world. The talk became the light and dancing interplay of opinion and paradox common to thousands of twentieth-century dinner-tables.

"All the same," said Count Lavretsky, "they wear you out, these emotive forces. n.o.body is young nowadays. Youth is a lost art."

"On the contrary," cried Mademoiselle de Cressy in French. "Everybody is young to-day. This pulsation of the heart keeps you young. It is the day of the young woman of forty-five."

Count Lavretsky, who was fifty-nine, twirled a grey moustache. "I am one of the few people in the world who do not regret their youth. I do not regret mine, with its immaturity, its follies and subsequent headaches. I would sooner be the scornful philosopher of sixty than the credulous lover of twenty."

"He always talks like that," said the Countess to Paul; "but when he met me first he was thirty-five--and"--she laughed--"and now voila--for him there is no difference between twenty and sixty. Expliquez-moi ca."

"It's very simple," declared Paul. "In this century the thirties, forties, and fifties don't exist. You're either twenty or sixty."

"I hope I shall always be twenty," said the Princess lightly.

"Do you find your youth so precious, then?" asked Count Lavretsky.

"More than I ever did!" She laughed and again met Paul's eyes.

This time she flushed faintly as she held them for a fraction of a second. He had time to catch a veiled soft gleam intimate and disquieting. For some time he did not look again in her direction; when he did, he met in her eyes only the lazy smile with which she regarded all and sundry.

Later in the evening she said to him: "I'm glad you opposed Lavretsky.

He makes me shiver. He was born old and wrinkled. He has never had a thrill in his life."

"And if you don't have thrills when you're young, you can't expect to have them when you're old," said Paul.

"He would ask what was the good of thrills."

"You don't expect me to answer, Princess."

"We know because we're young."

They stood laughing in the joy of their full youth, a splendid couple, some distance away from the others, ostensibly inspecting a luminous little Cima on the wall. The Princess loved it as the bright jewel of her collection, and Paul, with his sense of beauty and knowledge of art, loved it too. Yet, instead of talking of the picture, they talked of Lavretsky, who was looking at them sardonically from beneath his heavy eyelids.

CHAPTER XII

A FEW days afterwards you might have seen Paul dashing through the quiet main street of Morebury in a high dog-cart, on his way to call on the Princess. A less Fortunate Youth might have had to walk, risking boots impolitely muddy, or to hire a funereal cab from the local job-master; but Paul had only to give an order, and the cart and showy chestnut were brought round to the front door of Drane's Court. He loved to drive the showy chestnut, whose manifold depravities were the terror of Miss Winwood's life. Why didn't he take the cob? It was so much safer. Whereupon he would reply gaily that in the first place he found no amus.e.m.e.nt in driving woolly lambs, and in the second that if he did not take some of the devil out of the chestnut it would become the flaming terror of the countryside. So Paul, spruce in hard felt hat and box-cloth overcoat, clattered joyously through the Morebury streets, returning the salutations of the little notabilities of the town with the air of the owner not only of horse and cart, but of half the hearts in the place. He was proud of his popularity, and it scarcely entered his head that he was not the proprietor of his equipage. Besides, he was going to call on the Princess. He hoped that she would be alone: not that he had anything particular to say to her, or had any defined idea of love-making; but he was eight-and-twenty, an age at which desire has not yet failed and there is not the sign of a burdensome gra.s.shopper anywhere about.

But the Princess was not alone. He found Mademoiselle de Cressy in charge of the tea-table and the conversation. Like many Frenchwomen, she had a high-pitched voice; she also had definite opinions on matter-of-fact subjects. Now when you have come to talk gossamer with an attractive and sympathetic woman, it is irritating to have to discuss Tariff Reform and the position of the working cla.s.ses in Germany with somebody else, especially when the attractive and pretty woman does not give you in any way to understand that she would prefer gossamer to such arid topics. The Princess was as gracious as you please. She made him feel that he was welcome in her cosy boudoir; but there was no further exchange of mutually understanding glances. If a great lady entertaining a penniless young man can be demure, then demure was the Princess Sophie Zobraska. Paul, who prided himself on his knowledge of feminine subtlety, was at fault; but who was he to appreciate the repressive influence of a practical-minded convent friend, quickly formative and loudly a.s.sertive of opinions, on an impressionable lady awakening to curiosities? He was just a dunderhead, like any one of us--just as much as the most eminent feminine psychologist alive--which is saying a good deal. So he drove away disappointed, the sobriety of the chestnut's return trot through Morebury contrasting oddly with the dashing clatter of the former journey.

It was some time before he met the Princess again, for an autumn session of Parliament required migration to Portland Place. The Princess, indeed, came to London, shortly afterwards, to her great house in Berkeley Square; but it was not till late November that he was fortunate enough to see her. Then it was only a kiss of the hand and a hurried remark or two, at a large dinner-party at the Winwoods'. You see, there are such forces as rank and precedence at London dinner-parties, to which even princesses and fortunate youths have to yield.

On this occasion, as he bent over her hand, he murmured: "May I say how beautiful you are to-night, Princess?"

She wore a costume of silver and deep blue, and the blue intensified the blue depths of her eyes. "I am delighted to please monsieur," she said in French.

And that was their meeting. On parting she said again in French: "When are you coming to see me, fickle one?"

"Whenever you ask me. I have called in vain."

"You have a card for my reception next Tuesday?"

"I have replied that I do myself the honour of accepting the Princess's gracious invitation."

"I don't like London, do you?" she asked, allowing a touch of wistfulness to inflect her voice.

"It has its charms. A row on the Serpentine, for instance, or a bicycle ride in Battersea Park."

"How lovely it would be," she said, between laugh and sigh, "if only it could be kept out of the newspapers! I see it from here under the Fashionable Intelligence. 'The beautiful Princess Zobraska was observed in a boat on the ornamental water in Regent's Park with the well-known--tiens--what are you?--politician, say--with the well-known young politician, Mr. Paul Savelli.' Quel scandale, hein?"

"I must content myself with kissing your finger tips at your reception," said Paul.

She smiled. "We will find a means," she said.

At her reception, an a.s.semblage glittering with the diamonds and orders of the great ones of the earth, she found only time to say: "Come to-morrow at five. I shall be alone."

Darkness descended on Paul as he replied: "Impossible, Princess.

Colonel Winwood wants me at the House."