The Great Pandolfo E-Book

William J. Locke

• Herausgeber: Ktoczyta.pl
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Paula Field was a woman who happily suffered from most people. Such a gift as a gift of a song or painting or a solution to acrostic. Consequently, she had many more friends around the world who loved her than it was humanly possible to love her in return. From time to time, the jealous turned around a scorpion and stung her. They called her insincere.

Leseprobe

Contents

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXIII

CHAPTER XXIV

CHAPTER I

Paula Field was a woman who suffered most people gladly. Such is a gift, like that of song or painting or the solving of acrostics. Consequently she had many more friends, all over the world, who loved her than it was in human power for her to love in return. Now and then the jealous turned scorpion-wise and stung her. They called her insincere, which is the penalty of large-heartedness. Not that she ever promised more than she could perform; but the small-minded read into her sympathy more than she could think of promising. She was also a woman of peculiar personal attraction. Sir Spencer Babington, one of the coming men in post-war diplomacy, and a noted weigher of dry words, once remarked that, a century or so ago, she would have been a reigning toast. The fact of his being in love with her for years past did not detract from the accuracy of his diagnostic.

All kinds of men had fallen in love with her during her nearly thirty years of life. Only one had she selected, and that was a soldier man, Geoffrey Field, whose bones now lay in a prim little cemetery by the Somme. He was a gallant fellow; she had given him her heart; and to all suitors she would say in effect: “What is the good of a woman without the least bit of a heart left to give?” Some sighed and went away. Others gave her to understand that heart was not everything that they were looking for; and, as she had no fortune, in fact was hard put to it to make ends meet, she found herself in the position of the Lady in “Comus,” and like her, dismissed the rabble-rout, but in terms less direct and more graciously ironical. To neither camp did Spencer Babington belong. As maid, she had suffered his adust wooing; as wife, she had proved him a loyal friend; to her, as widow, he remained a faithful swain; and smiling endurance of boredom in his company was her only means of expressing a sincere gratitude.

Still there were limits. A woman’s nerves are not always under control. When the body is enmeshed in a network of sensitive microscopic strands, a certain petulance of expression may be forgiven.

They were in her little flat in Hansel Mansions, under the lee of Harrod’s stores. It was a sunless, airless day in July, the kind of day in which she, big creature bred in open spaces, felt herself at her worst. Spencer Babington had come in casually for tea, and, uninfluenced by meteorological conditions, had asked her to marry him, just as though they had been wandering in scented hay fields, or sitting before the open mystery of the moonlit sea. Paula was conscious of dampness; of a wisp of hair sticking to her forehead. It takes a wise man to appreciate the folly of making love to a damp woman–especially when the love-making is uphill work. In the ways of women Sir Spencer Babington was not wise. Gently repulsed, he pressed his suit.

At last she said wearily:

“My dear Spencer, you would be a much pleasanter creature if you would take no for an answer.”

“This, then, is final?”

“The finalest thing you can possibly imagine.”

His fingers moved in the correct Englishman’s miniature gesture.

“It’s a pity,” said he.

“What’s a pity?”

Here the inevitable petulance. She sat up away from her cushions; somewhat combative.

“In the circumstances,” said he, “it’s rather an odd question.”

“Not a bit. You’ve asked me for the fourth time this year–”

“The fifth,” he corrected.

“Call it the nth. What does it matter? Once more I tell you I can’t marry you–for the simple reason that I don’t want to. You say it’s a pity. I ask why? For a diplomatist the phrase is loose. It sounds as if you were sorry for me; as if in my pigheadedness I had missed something to my advantage.”

He rose and stood before her, tall, lean, distinguished; clean-shaven, grave, just a bit bald; fingering a tortoise-shell-rimmed eyeglass that dangled from his neck by a broad silk ribbon. Although he was precisely dressed–for everything about Spencer Babington was precise–this eyeglass was the only sign of foppery about him. No man had ever seen him fix it in his eye. A vivacious lady had once said that he must use it exclusively in his bath to examine his conscience.

“Isn’t that rather cruel, Paula?” he asked.

She replied that she was open to an explanation.

“It’s a pity,” said he, “that two old and tried friends like us can’t unite our lives. It is I that miss all the happiness and comfort you could give me. To me the loss is a million pities. I have a position with no one to share it; a great house with no one to adorn it; thoughts, tastes, ambitions with no one on whom they can react. A very solitary life, I assure you.”

She replied, a trifle irritably–he was so dry and she so damp: “In your forty years, you could surely have picked up a hundred female reagents in any quarter of the globe.”

Again the tiny gesture–this time of despair.

“It pleases you to–wilfully–misunderstand me.”

He split the infinitive with an air of deliberate sacrifice.

Paula laughed–and when she laughed, she was adorable in most eyes. “No, my dear, I don’t misunderstand you. I’ve known you ever since I was a child. I’m awfully fond of you. You’re the only real man friend I have in the world.”

“Then,” said he, “why on earth–?”

“That’s it,” she interrupted. “Why on earth do you want to convert a valued friend into an inconsiderable husband?”

“I object to the term,” said he, drawing himself up stiffly. “After all, I’m a man of some consideration.”

“Of course you are, you dear foolish Spencer.” She laughed again. “Where’s your logic? Who said you weren’t? I was speaking of you not as a man, but as a husband. An unloved husband, must, qua husband, be inconsiderable. Mustn’t he?”

Obstinate, he declined to agree with her proposition.

She saw that he was hurt. But he always had been hurt when she refused to marry him. And her heart was always pricked with remorse for hurt inflicted. There was monotony, however, in the recurrence of the pangs.

She rose and, as tall as he, a slim and stately woman, laid her hands on his shoulders.

“I have a hundred good reasons for not wanting to marry you, but a thousand for not wanting to spoil precious life-long relations.”

Could woman let down man more graciously? But he went on arguing.

“Our points of view are different. It’s only a matter of reconciling them; of bringing our spiritual vision, as it were, into a common focus. I can’t conceive the possibility of those relations being spoiled. Quite the contrary. You twitted me just now about remaining a bachelor. I should have thought that, perhaps, in a woman’s eyes, fastidiousness might be a merit. I couldn’t pick up other women by the hundred, for the simple reason that you happened to exist. That you knew in the years gone by. I had hopes. But the gods–and yourself–thought otherwise.”

He turned away, not without feeling and dignity, and stared across the street at the display of perambulators and invalid chairs in the opposite floor-window of Harrod’s stores. She followed him and said softly:

“How can I help it if the gods–and I–are still of the same opinion?”

He swung back. “Then you’ve made up your mind never to marry again?”

She nodded. “I’ll never marry again.”

“That’s one grain of comfort, at any rate,” said he.

When he had gone, she moved restlessly about the small close drawing-room. It was too early to dress for the dinner-party to which she was bidden. The sense of loneliness oppressed her. Did she really mean that, all through the years that stretched before her, in bleaker and bleaker perspective, she would be content to remain faithful to Geoffrey’s memory? Supposing she lived till seventy. That would be forty-one years. Forty-one years all alone. Alone always, with no one to greet her when she entered her home at night. Alone, save for a maid or two, for her household must ever be modest, all night long for forty years, in flat or villa. Alone, when, in the morning, she faced the day. Alone, as she was now, even for an hour, with naught for company but sorrowful memories.

Yet now, in the pride of her beauty and birth and position, all was fairly well. Social distractions beguiled that dreadful consciousness of solitude. But in the years to come, when her beauty should fade, as fade it must–even though she bejezabeled herself like hundreds of faded women of her acquaintance–a generation must arise that knew her not, and pass her by, having no use for her. The aforesaid elderly women, clinging passionately to past beauty, carried on because they were rich. It was a ghastly and degrading thought. But one must face actualities. Their means maintained them in the statu quo terribly ante. But who in twenty years’ time would want or seek from charity or even think of the painted harridan–there can be no crystal globe more fuliginous with inspissated gloom than the soul of a woman confronted with the possible decay of her beauty–who had to think twice before she could ask two or three people to dinner and give them a drinkable bottle of champagne.

She brushed her hair impatiently from her damp forehead. She had not the remotest desire in the world to be a painted harridan. She adored the dears who grew old gracefully. She saw herself–twenty years hence, at forty-nine–a pleasant grey-haired old lady, living out a peaceful old age in a Gloucestershire village, with a resident cat and a visiting curate.

Of course she could go on with her writing. She had the knack of dainty description and for some time had contributed a couple of weekly articles to sound journals. She had written a novel, of which (genteelly reviewed) she had sold nearly four hundred copies. Perhaps, if she persevered, she might acquire an absorbing interest in life together with a tidy income. But all that didn’t do away with the loneliness.

There had been a girl child born of her brief and war-accidented married life; as healthy a baby as could owe its existence to superb parentage. It had contracted some infantile malady and died. Had it lived, there would have been supreme reasons for existence. She could have faced the years to come unfalteringly. All that, however, was over and done with long ago; almost forgotten; hidden only in the sacred depths of memory. She stood, where Spencer Babington had stood, by the window gazing absently across the way, and, becoming conscious of the perambulators, turned with an absurd little pain in her heart.

A social letter or two lay on her writing table awaiting answers. She sat down and took up pen and paper. At present her life was full; she would be ungrateful to complain; but it was full of vain and unsubstantial things. A silver framed photograph of her late husband stood on the railed top of the table; a frank and gallant fellow in the familiar uniform. There is scarcely a home in Great Britain without some such poignant reminder of stricken flower of manhood. If we forget that for which these died, we deserve the curse of whatever God there be who rules our destinies.

For a time, Paula, elbows on table and chin in hands, communed dumbly with the portrait. Would he think it worthless, selfish, wicked of her, to marry again? Just some kind, plain man who would give her companionship and save her from the nightmare of decrepit solitude. He knew that she had been his, body and heart and soul. She had tried to be brave and face the world with an air and a flourish, just as he had faced the enemy; but she was a coward; a splendid show and nothing more.

Would he mind if ever–? And, as she looked, the stern lips seemed to smile, and in her ears there seemed to come the sound, from infinite distance, of the well-remembered voice murmuring consolation... “Dear old thing, how can you think me such a lunatic dog-in-the-manger? You’re in the flesh with which I have nothing to do, except to wish for your happiness. I’m in the spirit, and in the spirit you’re mine eternally, no matter how many rotten old husbands you have.” She heard his careless laugh.

She rubbed her eyes, stretched out her arms and again took up her pen.

“What a silly fool I am,” she said.

She rattled off her notes in a bold and generous hand and tried to read a novel. But her thoughts wandered. Why all this pother of emotionalism because dear old Spencer had asked her, once again, to marry him? She had known him all her life; the same dry stick of a man. A faithful friend; yes. And she, should he need her ministrations as counsellor, agent, nurse, would, so as to afford them, willingly cross seas and continents. Loyal as was her regard, distinguished as was his career, she could not marry him were he the last man left on earth. There was no question of his distinction. From his rooms in Balliol he had absorbed all the honours that the University of Oxford had to bestow. He had but to appear in the Foreign Office, as a young man, to glimmer in his impressive lambent way, as the perfect, God-created private secretary. And since those early days he had gone far. Paula had ever watched his path with amused interest. But a short while before, at an official reception, when he had come up to her, his lank person ablaze with decorations, and she saw impending in his glance the (n-1)th proposal, she had shielded her eyes and begged him, a magnanimous Jove, to spare poor Semele. Unless he came upon her, as to-day, in an irritable mood, she could never regard Spencer Babington unhumorously. Of what there was in him to arouse the Comic Spirit she was not aware. The little Imp of Mischance, whose delighted business is the exploitation of human infirmities, had something, but not everything, to do with it. The aforesaid Imp, finding Paula’s maid and Babington’s valet together in the same country house had locked their heads together in mutual confidence. As a result, the former, devoted, invaluable, yet irrepressible remnant of her girlhood’s ease, had informed her mistress of a few of Sir Spencer’s lighter idiosyncracies. Paula had a short way of repressing Simkin’s gossip. But Simkin had a lightning way, born of practice, of conveying it. Before Paula could shut the fountain tap, she learned that Sir Spencer had a highly developed system of underwear. He had a dozen suits of flannel pyjamas numbered from one to twelve, which must be served to him in exact rotation according to the linen book kept in his own handwriting. A mistake and the wheels of his household were declared to be out of gear, the domestic economy of the country to be a thing past praying for, and the whole of Europe to be in a state of Bolshevist disruption.

“Hold your tongue, Simkin. How dare you tell me such disgusting tittle-tattle?”

So would Paula flame indignant and for the moment blast further confidence. But Simkin had got in first with her lightning flash, and had impressed imperishable pictures on her mistress’s mind.

Thousands of women maintain the happiness of married life by dint of viewing their husbands through the God-given prism of a sense of humour. But they have got to be married first–before God gives it them. When He gives it to women beforehand, ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a hundred thousand, recognize it is a Warning and turn the gentleman over to less gifted sisters. The Imp of Mischance may have had something to do with Paula’s refusal of Babington; but, as before stated, he had not everything. Even when circumstances would have warranted, and Paula herself, like any reasonable woman, would have pardoned impassioned eloquence, his utterances were marked by an incongruous frigidity. And one definition of a sense of humour, as good as another, is a perception of the incongruous.

Again, why should this eminent and irreproachable gentleman’s repeated proposal of marriage have sent her off her balance? She could not say. If every woman knew exactly what was going on within herself the earth would be a less secure planet than it is even at present.

By the time she had dressed for her dinner party she had recovered her serenity. After all, there were still cakes and ale in the world, agreeable to the palate. And she had beauty and health and young blood coursing through her veins. It was to be a stuffy and politico-financial party. But her old hosts, she knew, held her in sincere affection, and their broad and welcoming smiles would be compensation for any after dullness.

She was waiting, lightly cloaked in her drawing-room, for a summoned taxi to be announced, when the telephone bell rang. A servant’s voice. Mrs. Field? Lady Demeter wished to speak to her. Would she hold the line? Then:

“Is that you, Paula dear? It’s Clara speaking. Can you come down to-morrow for the week-end?”

Paula laughed. “What’s the matter?”

“This eleventh hour invitation? Do be an angel and come and I’ll tell you all about it.”

“Anybody dead or bolted?”

“No, no. An unexpected odd man. And he’ll be entirely out of the picture. You’ll come, won’t you?”

“Yes. But I must come down late. Do I know the man? What’s his name?”

“Pandolfo. Sir Victor Pandolfo.”

“Never heard of him,” said Paula.

CHAPTER II

It was Lady Demeter’s amiable foible to turn her West Hertfordshire house once a week into a den of lions. They arrived, sprucely maned and elegantly tailed, in time for tea on Saturday, and they were courteously yet firmly chivvied away before lunch on Monday. They could bring with them wives, husbands, trainers and other attendants. The house was large, with plenty of roaring space, so that if a second lion entering any apartment found the first occupant a bore (in the words of the poet) he could go forth and roar somewhere else to his perfect satisfaction. Lady Demeter, a fearless Daniel, moved among them tactfully. She had the gift of reconciling the all but irreconcilable. At Hinsted Park were contracted the most unlikely friendships and the least imaginable of matrimonial alliances. Now and then a timid little white-haired man would be seen creeping about, and the lions would ask one another who he was and what the deuce he did and, by dint of patient inquiry, would eventually discover he was Lord Demeter. Afterwards they recognized him as the man who, late at night, apathetically sought to know whether they would have brandy or whisky with their soda. He was dreadfully afraid of his wife’s lions.

She was a burly, high-complexioned woman of capacious mind and bosom; a worthy lady, very bountiful and efficient; she sat, heavily, as chairwoman on many committees. She would give any new lion ten minutes at Hinsted and he would eat out of her hand.

In the hall or outer-den, a stately place staircased and galleried, did two lions meet that Saturday afternoon. They were the first arrivals, and they motored down on a day of summer drought, happening to pass and repass each other angrily, so that their throats were filled with mutual dust and their hearts with mutual dislike, especially when they arrived almost simultaneously at the same destination. One was Spencer Babington. He greeted his hostess with a prim “How d’ye do, Clara?”

Said the other: “My dear lady, what a delight to see you in this perfect setting.”

Then Lady Demeter: “I wonder whether you two know each other–”

“We’ve seen a great deal of each other on the road. All the way from the Marble Arch,” answered Babington.

“I got the best of you,” cried his road rival with a great laugh. “My chauffeur’s the most marvellous driver in Europe.”

Babington’s lips curled into the withered smile of the professional diplomatist. “Why not in the world?”

“Why not? No doubt he is. If I thought he wasn’t, I’d sack him. I’ll tell you about him one of these days.”

“You can’t until you’re properly introduced,” laughed Lady Demeter. “Sir Spencer Babington–Sir Victor Pandolfo.”

“If I had known it was you,” said Pandolfo, “I’d have–” he paused.

“What–?” Babington inquired.

“I’d have gone twice as fast, so that you wouldn’t have been inconvenienced. She can do a hundred miles an hour as easily as twenty.”

Babington’s manner was of the coldest.

“Really?” said he.

“Just a cheap American car. I took her to pieces. Fitted her up with all sorts of contrivances of my own of which no one has got the secret yet. An experiment, you see. And as I tell you, she’s a wonder. A bird on wheels.”

“At any rate, after your experiences, you must both be very thirsty,” said Lady Demeter, moving to the tea table. “Tea, Spencer?”

“If you please.”

“Sir Victor?”

“May I take advantage of the promise of more cooling streams which I see over yonder?”

Pandolfo waved a hand to a table against the wall set with gleaming silver and glass and crystal jugs and ice and decanters.

The lady smiled hospitably. He turned half-way:

“Perhaps Sir Spencer will change his mind?”

“Thanks, no. Tea is more refreshing. One lump, dear Clara. A thousand thanks.”

“Your lump doesn’t clink like this, my dear fellow,” said Pandolfo, coming forward with a great tumbler glad with the music of ice. “This is good, Lady Demeter. The concocter is almost a genius; but not quite. I’ll give you a secret that will make him one. A dash–a mere dash of Fernet Branca.”

“What is that? I don’t know it,” laughed Lady Demeter.

“If Sir Victor will excuse my saying so,” Babington interjected, “it’s the most obnoxious liquid–a kind of bitters–that only the perverted taste of modern Italy could have invented. It ties the tongue into knots and destroys the coat of the stomach.”

“On the contrary, my dear fellow. It titillates the healthy tongue and stimulates the healthy stomach. It’s one of Italy’s priceless boons to mankind–mother of immortal boons that she is. Besides, you take it in drops, not in jorums like tea.”

Lady Demeter glanced anxiously at the clock. There were still twenty minutes before the train guests could arrive; and no one else was expected by motor. Never had she entertained two new lions more mutually antipathetic. She had hoped for the mixture of other elements. What, thought she, could be common ground for a famous inventor and a diplomatist not without celebrity? Furthermore: for a spacious creature of wide gesture and proclamation and a dry, thin-lipped apostle of secrecy? She talked rather wildly of the house and its artistic treasures. There was that Sassoferrato, for instance. Demeter, poor dear, had been persuaded to buy it, unframed and rolled up, by a Russian Grand Duke in whose family palace it had hung for a couple of centuries. But it was too pretty-pretty for her taste.

Babington crossed the hall, fingering the ribbon of his tortoise-shell-rimmed monocle, and examined the picture.

“A very fine example, indeed, with all the artist’s exquisite finish. I don’t hold with the people who profess to despise the later Eclectics. They carried on the torch, the sacred torch of Raphael. I have a Sassoferrato in my own little collection–but, I’m afraid, of doubtful authenticity.” He turned, holding out the never-used eye-glass. “If Demeter should like to part with it–well, there’s a congenial home for it in Eaton Square.”

“If it depended on me, my dear man, you could tuck it under your arm and walk away with it now,” said Lady Demeter, with a laugh. “But you’ve got to reckon with my money-thirsty husband.”

Meanwhile Victor Pandolfo, mighty glass beaker still in hand, had inspected the picture. He strolled back to the tea-table.

“Splendid. Sassoferrato didn’t reach achievement–who of us does? But he had the one and only idea. The vast conception alone and all by itself–that’s the sea in which infinite geniuses have perished impotently. The maze of detail leading to some vague Purpose–millions of eager but blind souls have been lost and starved in it. It’s the Great Thing ahead, with the details at command that matters. The Divine Gift of Combination–” his fingers flickered for a moment on his brow–”our friend Sassoferrato just misses it. Raphael had it. Sir Isaac Newton, Harvey, Pasteur, the chap–the simple sort of fool, just like you and me”–he bowed to Babington–”who built the Parthenon, all had it... Anyhow, I’m glad you like the Eclectics. They were poor devils bursting to deliver a message, and no medium at their command but a worn-out formula. So I love ’em. I’d like to see your Sassoferrato. On the other hand I prefer their successors, the Naturalisti–Caravaggio–he’s trying to do things in a new way–but he’s one of the fellows that got overwhelmed in his own waves–”

“Pardon me,” said Babington, “I’ve made a study of the post-Raphaelites–As a matter of fact I’ve published two little books on the subject...”

“Read ’em. Read ’em. Read ‘em,” said Pandolfo, with a smile and an airy wave of his hand.

“Well, my dear sir,” said Babington, “you must see that I’m not quite at one with you–”

“But how good! How splendid!” cried Pandolfo, his arms wide apart–his left hand still clutching his empty glass. “Lady Demeter, you’re like the lady of the Enchanted Castle. You’ve brought two knights together–thrown down your glove–your Sassoferrato picture–and we’re going to hack each other to pieces about it.–”

The hall door was thrown open and the butler entered heralding vague forms of men and women. Lady Demeter rose and sailed forth in welcome. Pandolfo hooked Babington’s arm and swept him away into a far corner of the hall, under the lee of the stately staircase.

“My dear fellow,” said he, “in your books you’re as right as rain. As right as any professional beggar of questions can be. But there’s such a thing as universality. I’ve got an Andrea Vaccaro–one of the Naturalisti–”

“I’m aware of him,” said Babington.

“Well, come and see it. If it explodes all your ideas I’ll give it to you.”

His compelling good nature was irresistible. Babington allowed himself to be beguiled.

“I confess,” said he, “that to me it’s a surprise–a most agreeable surprise–that a man whose name is associated with mechanical and utilitarian things should have, well, practically the same hobby as myself.”

“Bless your heart,” cried Pandolfo, “I’ve a million hobbies. Now, I should really like you to see my Andrea Vaccaro. Name any day. Whenever you like. Come and lunch. I’ll show you lots of things.”

Lady Demeter, dispensing tea to her guests, cast an eye into the far corner where the two lions were now conversing with indubitable amiability, and inwardly congratulated herself on her unfailing tact.

Towards the end of the dressing-hour, she entered the room of Paula Field, who had arrived late, and embraced her fondly.

“My dear, with all this menagerie on my hands I haven’t had a moment for a word with you. It’s too sweet of you to come down and help me.”

“With the poor lion who hasn’t got a Christian? I hope I’ll do.”

Paula laughed, teasing and adorable, and glanced for a second into the pier glass before which she stood. It reflected a tall, delicately made woman, with wavy brown hair on a dainty head and a humorous smile behind blue almost violet eyes; a quality of style, in the sense of its application to a poem or a picture. A shimmering silver dress conveyed the impression of great stateliness.

Lady Demeter followed the glance.

“Always perfection,” she sighed admiringly. She knew that she herself was the Dressmaker’s Despair.

Paula chose to be rueful. “You’ve seen it before, Clara, and you’ll see it again. Still, it is rather nice, isn’t it? Well, what about the man? What’s his name? Rudolfo?”

“Pandolfo. Sir Victor Pandolfo. You must have heard of him.” Lady Demeter’s voice grew plaintive.

Paula shook her head. “Sorry, dear.”

“He’s the greatest inventor of modern times and he’s going to take you in to dinner. You see it was this way–”

Hastily she explained her embarrassing situation. Only yesterday had Pandolfo proposed himself, over the telephone, for this week-end. She had invited him for the next one together with a scientific crowd, half the Royal Society, all bulging with brains and other funny things like that, and she thought he would interest them and wake them up a bit. But he wasn’t free. So, flustered, at the end of the telephone, she had to tell him to come down. And there he was, putting out the whole of her carefully selected party. Quite out of the picture, as she had told Paula. Why, that very afternoon, she had thought he was going to eat up poor Spencer Babington.

“Oh, he’s here, is he?” said Paula, with a little grimace.

Lady Demeter nodded. Yes. Spencer, and George Brendon, the poet and Miss Dragma Winthorne who wrote the improper books, and the Bishop of Dedminster (“Who, I presume, reads them,” Paula interjected) and the President of the Board of Trade and the Paraguayan Minister and a charming American singer. All delightful people. And, as far as Paula could gather, into this perfect den of leonine soul-mates, had leaped the disconcerting Pandolfo.

“I had to get another woman, of course. And you were the only one I could think of who could tackle him. And, Paula dear, I knew you wouldn’t mind.”

“Mind?” laughed Paula. “Don’t be silly. When there’s a chance of escaping from my stuffy little flat under the shadow of Harrod’s stores and coming here, I throw every bit of pride out of the window and myself out of the door into the first taxi.”

Lady Demeter drew a deep and buxom breath. “You’re always such a dear, Paula. But I did owe you some apology.”

“Tell me more about the man Pandolfo.”

Lady Demeter became suddenly aware of the poverty of her knowledge. She had been constantly running up against him, in all sort of places, during the season. He had invented something during the war–an application of the tank system to submarines–she was not quite certain. Lady Demeter lived in a golden haze of general misinformation. Anyhow they had given him a K.B.E. And he was an authority on wireless telegraphy. Also, there was something about a new metal that could supersede steel. As far as she knew, it was the Duchess–that dear scatter-brained Lavinia–who had really set him going socially. And then the Daily–she snapped a finger’s invitation to memory–the Daily–anyhow one of the Daily Horrors had begun to boom him–and so–”

“And so, what could I do, my dear? I had to ask the man down.”

Equipped with this vague account of her predestined dinner-partner, Paula Field, a little later, entered the already humming drawing-room. With most of the house-party she was acquainted. Smiles and homage greeted her, as they have ever greeted woman with the gift of beauty and graciousness. Spencer Babington, spying her, gripped the ribbon of his eye-glass and crossing the room came up to her in his dignified way.

“A delightful surprise. Lady Demeter never told me I should meet you.”

“Well, I’m here anyhow. You didn’t tell me yesterday you were coming.”

“My mind, as you know, was occupied with matters far more important.”

“All the same, you seem to be glad to see me, and it’s very nice of you. I wonder you don’t hate the sight of me.”

“You little know me,” said he.

She was about to reply, when, just behind her a voice, not unpleasant in its resonance, rose above the polite din.

“My dear Bishop–the Comacine masters–I don’t believe in ’em. One of the myths of the Middle Ages. Your Cathedral was conceived by an Englishman inspired direct by the Almighty. Never an Italian had anything to do with it.”

She turned and beheld a man smiling, sweeping with free gesture bishops and Comacine masters and every one who disagreed with him off the face of the earth. She beheld him as an arresting personality; olive-skinned; dark and luminously eyed; rugged and pronounced of feature; with a high forehead from which swept back thick bronze hair scrupulously trimmed according to the day’s fashion. His only conscious concession to personal idiosyncrasy was the low shirt collar revealing a thick and powerful throat. He might have been a singer. His strong hands and nervous fingers were eloquent in gesture.

Instinctively she asked–although she guessed the answer as soon as the words died from her lips:–

“Who on earth’s that?”

“Sir Victor Pandolfo. I’ve been with him most of the afternoon. Quite an interesting man.”

And then came Lady Demeter with a swoop tearing Pandolfo from the Bishop and introducing him to Paula. After a word or two she took off Babington. The two were left alone. Paula was about to make one of the commonplace openings of conversation when she became conscious of his eyes fixed upon her. Then of an embarrassed span of silence. At last she broke it and said with lame challenge:

“Well?”

“You’re the most beautiful woman I have ever seen,” said he.

She flushed to her hair at the suddenness of the crude tribute. Felt ever so little afraid; also urged by swift instinct of woman on the defensive to ask Clara to find her another dinner-partner. At once, however, civilized habit gripped her. She laughed.

“Your experience must be very limited.”

“By no means,” said he. “It’s as vast as the sun which shines on the just and the unjust, on the plain and the beautiful. I have made observations in all the four quarters of the earth.”

“Doubtless, the same observation,” said Paula.

He bowed. “You have wit. But let it pass. I’m afraid I’ve none. I’m a slave of accuracy. If I weren’t accurate, the Seven Seas would be paved with the bones of British sailors. You think I paid you an idle and unmannerly compliment.”

“The formula’s yours,” she answered, regaining the weapon of her dignity.

“I beseech you not to believe it. Why should I pay women idle compliments?”

“It’s the foolish way of ordinary men,” said Paula.

“But good God alive, dear lady, I’m not an ordinary man. What do you take me for?”

“For the man,” said Paula, noticing the general surge towards the door, “who is ticked off to take me into dinner. Let us go.” She laid a couple of fingers in the crook of his arm. “I hope we shan’t quarrel too violently.”

“People like you and me can’t quarrel. It’s a psychological impossibility.”

They took their places in the paired procession.

“Why?”

“That’s for the little folk,” said he. “We’re too big.”

And so it went on during the conventional intervals of the stately meal. Up to now Paula, a childhood friend of Clara Demeter and a widow of recently reduced fortune, had found a peculiar æsthetic enjoyment, during her visits to Hinsted, in the setting of the old seignorial dining-room. She relived her life passed among such surroundings. She loved the old oak panellings; the majestic Sir Joshuas and Raeburns in their proud gilt frames; the gleam of statuary in the recess of the bay window; the perfect table into which heavy silver and exquisite glass cast their deep reflections as into a pool; the diamonds and pearls of choicely arrayed women set off, each one, between the dead black and white of men; the panorama of keen human faces; even the mystery of the grey-liveried serving men who floated like ministering and impeccable ghosts around the table. And she loved the luxury of the Sèvres dinner-service and the frothing and curling and bubbling of champagne in her glass. It was her dainty delight to have this same glass replenished a little finger’s breadth full, every time the golden necked bottle appeared over her shoulder in the white gloved hand of the ghostly serving-man.

But, to-night, for the most part, her usual enjoyment of things loved and lost, was, as it were, wiped out by a fascinating hatred of her overwhelming partner. Over and over again she turned to the poet on her right, only to listen blankly to his divagations on golf and Monte Carlo systems and the only polish for brown boots and such other topics as form the staple conversation of modern self-respecting poets, while she caught with the back of a maddeningly jealous ear, the sonorous voice of Pandolfo engaged in juicy talk with his left-hand neighbour, the Bishop’s wife. She was angry with herself for returning to him with freshly stimulated interest.

He pointed to an unfastened diamond barette in her corsage.

“You’ll lose that,” said he, “let me see it.” She put it in his hand. “Yes. The sort of fastening you see on Japanese jewellery in a Christmas cracker. The world is divided into fools, damn fools and Insurance Companies. They actually insure a thing like that. Do you want to lose it?”

“It’s my most precious possession.”

“Then I’ll contrive a hinge, pin and catch for you. It’ll put me on the track of a modification of my new metal for delicate purposes. They’ve been carrying on with this sort of foolery since the days of ancient Knossos. I’ll send you a model next week. If you like it, I’ll fit it on to your brooch.” With deft strong fingers he straightened the platinum pin and twisted the catch. “This will last for the time being.”

She thanked him, compelled to admiration of his exquisite touch. A jeweller would have done the same work with patent pliers. Civility bade her remark:–

“You mentioned your new metal, Sir Victor?”

“It’s going to revolutionize the world,” said he. “It will be brighter than burnished silver, untarnishable like platinum, which anyway looks like tin, harder than diamond, unbreakable; a sixteen-inch gun made of it will go on for ever without re-rifling, and the seamstress’s finest needle will never blunt or snap.”

“What it is called?”

“Ah there, I’m waiting for an inspiration. Already you see I’m your humble servant for life; but give me a name and I’ll be your devoted slave for eternity. Have you ever met an inventor before?” he asked suddenly.

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Well, now you’ve met one, what do you think of them?”

“I should say they were quite well-meaning folk,” 7replied Paula.

He laughed. “Also a bit mad, eh? Well, you can’t live in a perpetual romance and retain the stately equilibrium of Babington over there. An inventor is a vagabond not only on the high roads of mankind’s aspiration, but through the bye-ways of human needs and infirmities over meadows of pleasantness.”

“Interesting, yes,” she smiled, “but romantic...?”

“When–in the sanctity of your retirement, you wash your hair–tell me–I ask out of curiosity–how do you dry it?”

“If you want to know,” she said amused, “my maid connects a little machine with an ordinary electric plug in the wall, and something whirrs hot air round my head. Oh, don’t ask me to explain–”

“What’s the name of your little machine?”

“The–the–oh something ‘Perfecto.’”

“There!” said he. “I suspected it. What could I conceive more romantic than to have the privilege of drying your beautiful hair?”

She fell down, with a laugh, from her high estate.

“No? Really? How funny that you should have invented it. What put such a concession to woman’s vanity into your head?”

“I escaped from hideous factories where Moloch commanded that dreadful reeking things should be made dry, dry, dry in five seconds, and flew into a sylvan glade, and threw myself down on a mossy bank by the side of a stream. And water-nymphs crept shyly around me. And I said: ‘You are very comely of feature and shapely of form; but your long wet straight hair is decidedly unbecoming.’ And one of them replied: ‘Tell us how to dry it quickly, for it gives us such a headache to sit in the sun.’ I had a bright idea and invited them to Moloch’s factory where they could get as dry as Bombay ducks. The usual feminine answer: ‘My dear, I’ve nothing to wear.’ So, being a good-natured fellow, I said: ‘If you won’t go to Moloch, Moloch shall come to you.’ And there, my dear lady, you have the romance in a nutshell.”

She laughed. “You’re a bit of a poet too.”

“A bit? A complete one. A maker of things out of dreams. Could you have a better definition?”

“Heaps,” replied Paula, who was not to be browbeaten.

“To-morrow, then, I’ll challenge you. Definitions are important. The night brings counsel.”

Again their respective neighbours claimed them. She turned to her professional poet. The impudence of the man to suggest that she should stay awake all night in order to equip herself with argument against him! She put the question to the poet Brendon who talked in vague discomfort. He was fresh faced, young, British and rather shy; was conscious that the beautiful lady whose name he had not caught, because, in abstraction she had turned her name card maddeningly upside down, took little or no interest in him. He professed himself, ingenuously, to be a very humble person. Whereupon Paula, quick to react, realized her unkind preoccupation and spread her graciousness over him to the end of the dinner.

The ladies rose; Pandolfo swung back her chair.

“You’ll get used to me in time,” he said with a smile in his bright eyes.

“I hope not,” she replied ironically.

CHAPTER III

Paula could only exchange a few hurried words with her much-engaged hostess.

“Am I off duty, Clara?”

“What a question!”

“I’ve really been good, and, please, may I play for an hour or two? I assure you he’ll be all right. He’s quite capable of looking after himself.”

Again Lady Demeter proclaimed her a dear. She had set him going. Not that he needed much winding up, after all. Mrs. Winterton (the Bishop’s wife) was enchanted with him. Paula could go and play with a free conscience and the meed of her gratitude.

So, when the men came in, and for the rest of the evening, Paula manoeuvred avoidance of the overpowering and obviously pursuing man, until she took refuge with Spencer Babington outside, in a corner of the summer-scented terrace.

The next morning, however, Pandolfo found her alone with a book, in the Italian garden. He approached her, hat in hand.

“Dear Lady, in what have I offended?”

She looked up coolly from her page. “I don’t know what you mean?”

Said he: “I was dying to talk to you last night. What are the snatches of dinner conversation? A thimbleful of water to a parched man. And you gave me no chance. Was it fair?”

“Why should I give you a chance, as you call it?” making the obvious retort feminine.

He sat down with something of a flourish on the garden seat, by her side.

“Because I’m worth it. I really am. Nobody but I would have dared to tell you–and by you I mean you–Paula Field–forgive my using your Christian name, which I’ve made it my business to learn–but Paula Field signifies a vital being, whereas Mrs. Field is a polite abstraction–oh yes–” he held up a checking hand, and smiled luminously “–you need not fear. In addressing you, I shall always be abstractly polite. In thinking of you, or alluding to you, I defy you to forbid my concrete conception of you. Miss Kauffmann, who is she? Angelica Kauffmann–and the impersonal lady rends the veil and arises like a rose. My analogy–what have you to say against it?”

“That I’m a very humble woman, without any notoriety, thank goodness, who is known to her general acquaintances as Mrs. Field.”

“I’ll bet you a million pounds to a penny that you’re not.” He threw himself back on the seat, which rocked from the impact of his body. “The artistry of your personality makes you Paula Field to everyone who has known you for five minutes, or seen your portrait in the papers. Oh, I know,” he said, bending forward, “that by your remark you intended to set me in my proper place. But my proper place is not where you think it is.”

Paula, conscious of balance calmly kept, asked:

“Where is it? I should like to know.”

He flickered a hand from ground to sky.

“Wherever I will it to be. Circumstances have not placed me. I have placed myself. Year by year, higher and higher. It’s a matter of will, of self-appreciation. That’s why–a moment ago–I began to tell you something and broke off... Any semi-bred puppy can tell a commonplace pretty woman that she’s the most beautiful thing in the world. But what real man–save me–” he smote his broad chest “–has ever had the audacity to make such an instantaneous declaration to Paula Field?”

“I’ll admit,” said she, “that you’re unique.”

“And so you’re up against me. I’m not according to pattern. You can’t fit me into one pigeon hole as you can Spencer Babington, or another like the dreary prelate of Dedminster, or another like the sex-ridden young woman who writes the awful novels. You shrink into your British shell of defensive armour. But you know very well that inside yourself, your mind, your soul, whatever it is, you are saying, ‘Why shouldn’t a human being be unique?’ And, indeed, where’s the crime?”

“It’s not a crime, but it may be a discomfort.”

He threw back his head and laughed good-humouredly. The infection caught her.

He asked: “Am I forgiven?”

She smiled. It was a golden day with a breeze in it and the shade was most restful, the man’s voice pleasant, his attitude flattering. In answer to his question she said:

“I suppose so. At least, you will be if you talk about something else.”

“I will talk with you,” said he, “on any subject under the sun.”

She made a laughing answer and so peace was made between them. She found that his boast was not so thrasonical as it seemed. His mind was stored with a wealth of knowledge coloured by a fervid imagination. With him picturesque and emphatic statement took the place of argument. Paula’s feminine wit quickly discerned that the best of him went forth to the accomplished listener. When they rose, to move towards the house and preparations for luncheon, they were sworn friends. At least, so proclaimed Pandolfo, with a flourish, as they walked along.

For the rest of the visit Paula endured his dominance with half-rueful acknowledgment. He interested her always; at times fascinated her; now and then, also, sent her back curiously shivering. The last sensation she resented, being accustomed to the cool and confident handling of men. Their homage had been hers since girlhood. She had the regal beauty that ensures it. She possessed, too, the common sense and the humour which presented her safe and pleasant conduct. In her own way, she was a man’s woman. She had a frank love of the company of men, and, knowing them, walked among them fearlessly. Thus fear of a man, instinctive, feminine, was new and peculiarly disagreeable. It was not that Pandolfo overstepped limits of propriety in speech or action. His first tribute had been his most monstrous declaration. Behind his eyes, when he looked at her, there had been nothing of that with which her woman’s equipment had always enabled her to deal. There was nothing, in fact, that could suggest him as a lover, ardent, devout or humble. He was too vehement and masculine to talk the disgusting twaddle of esoteric spiritual relationship. He had proclaimed her, once and for all, as a woman on his own plane of personality. It was splendid arrogance, colossal impudence, anything you like in the way of braggadocio. But there it rested. He had caught her up into the spheres wherein he professed to have his being and implicitly declared his intention of maintaining her there for ever; at any rate, in some such figurative style did she realize her position. She was afraid. And she could not conceive an ordinary, straightforward reason for her fear.

She was an ordinary, straightforward woman, impatient of subtleties. She had lived her life in the major key of love and death and courage. It was the very directness of the man that attracted her and compelled her. There must be some direct reason for her fear.

There was nothing remotely suggestive of the hypnotic about him. She said to herself that he was too vast. Still less was there anything of the vampiric; the quality of the creature who gets hold of you, gradually, remorselessly and sucks your vitality to feed its own thin-blooded necessities. Poor old Spencer–she repudiated instantly the ungenerous thought–was more of that type. This disturbing man made not the shadow of a claim. He was gradually self-sufficing. He gave lavishly of himself; took for granted her acceptance. She said to Clara Demeter:

“He swamps one. I feel like a bit of wood carried down by a river in spate. Of course I like him, my dear. But I like a quiet life better... I’m not going to do any more lion taming for you,” she said, after the give and take of talk had necessitated a change of metaphor. “It’s too strenuous. Besides there are consequences.”

There were, as she, wise prophetess, foretold. He insisted on motoring her to London on the Monday morning. In the first place a crowded train on a sweltering July day was not for a woman of her quality. Secondly, unless she drove with him she would be reckoned among the benighted billions of human beings–all mankind, in fact, save himself and his chauffeur sworn to secrecy–who had no idea of the potentialities of the inner combustion engine. There was also a new adaptation of springs, of cunning shock-absorbers, which made headlong progress over broken flints smoother than a crawl round Brooklands.

“It will please you,” said he. “Why deny me the simple satisfaction of giving you pleasure?”

Indeed, what valid reason had she for refusal? A lift for a lone woman in a hospitable car was the most conventional thing in the world. She went. She had to agree that his boastings had not been vain. No gondola on the laziest Venice canals could have advanced with more languorous smoothness.

“Lots of people talk of the great things they’re going to do,” said he, “I don’t until they’re done.”

Thus began a fascinating yet embarrassing intimacy. A few days afterwards he called on her, having telephoned for an appointment, with the model for the fastening of her barette. He declared it as fast as death, as eager as a child for her admiration. What could she do but entrust her brooch to him? He would yield, this time, to convention, and have the fastener executed in platinum.

“But why?” she asked diffidently. “This new metal of yours is most attractive.”

“It isn’t perfect,” said he. “I aim at perfection. Nothing but that can come out of my hands to be laid at your feet.”

Later, he called again, all in a hurry. Lady Demeter and one or two others had promised to lunch with him at his house in Chelsea. Would she come? What day, she asked. It was for her to name it, said he, thereby signifying that Lady Demeter and the others were attendant on her good pleasure. At random, for it was the fag end of the season, she suggested Tuesday. Tuesday should it be.

Meanwhile she collected odds and scraps of information concerning him. Before her meeting him at Hinsted, she had never heard his name; now it seemed to be familiar to most of her acquaintances. His reputation, she found, ran every gamut, from captivating gentleman to unmannerly boor; from irreproachable idealist to the grossest of evil livers; from genius to charlatan. Details were blurred, save those manifestly extravagant. No one seemed to know whence he had come. Knowledge of his achievement was vague. Some said that all the Admiralty’s anti-torpedo appliances were due to his brain; others that he had come forward and grabbed his K.B.E. with the brazen assurance of the thief who, entering a jeweller’s shop in broad daylight walks off with a diamond necklace. Worshippers of Mammon, as is their way, said that he rolled in the immense fortune brought to him by his inventions; the evil-tongued and envious, that he staggered on the brink of the adventurer’s bankruptcy. One old-fashioned gentleman said darkly: “The man’s an enigma.”

Paula found at any rate, that his house was one, for all the reflection it afforded of its owner’s character. It was as impersonal as a museum; as uninhabited and uninhabitable as the show apartments of a historic mansion. It was richly furnished, in the French style of Louis Seize and Empire. In the rooms hung a small but choice collection of pictures. To his guests he was the perfect cicerone, vaunting the qualities of his pieces, and not without justification.

Said Sir Spencer Babington, especially invited to inspect the Andrea Vaccaro:

“These fellows who talk so much–you always expect to find them tripping. He doesn’t trip, confound him.”

“Why should you want him to?” she asked.

“I don’t like people so overpoweringly Jovian,” said he.

This was after lunch. Pandolfo had recommended an 1892 Ayala, deprecating prejudice against midday champagne. But they would see. They would taste the perfection of light luncheon wines! Babington politely questioned the possibility of champagne surviving thirty years. Pandolfo smiled at him, with uplifted head. “My dear fellow!” said he. His glass was the first to be filled. He smelled and tasted it. He smiled again and waved across the table.