Mammon and Co Part 9

Toby looked round.

"I don't see them," he said. "But I expect it's Ted Comber. Kit usually dances with him. They are supposed to be the best dancers in London. Oh yes, I see them. It is Comber."

"Do you know him?"

"Yes, in the sort of way one knows fifty thousand people. We always say 'Hulloa' to each other, and then we've finished, don't you know."

"You don't like him, apparently."

"I particularly dislike him," said Toby, in a voice that was cheerful and had the real ring of sincerity.

"Why?"

"Don't know. He doesn't do any of the things he ought. He doesn't shoot, or ride, or play games. He stays at country houses, you see, and sits with the women in the drawing-room, or walks with them, and bicycles with them in the afternoon. Not my sort."

Lily glanced at his ugly, pleasant face.

"I quite agree with you," she said. "I hate men to sit on chairs and look beautiful. He was introduced to me just now, though I did not catch his name, and I felt he knew what my dress was made of, and how it was made, and what it cost."

"Oh, he knows all that sort of thing," said Toby. "You should hear him and Kit talking chiffon together. And you dislike that sort of inspection?"

"Intensely. But most women apparently don't."

"No: isn't it funny! So many women don't seem to know a man when they see him. Certainly Comber is very popular with them. But a man ought to be liked by men."

Miss Murchison smiled. Toby had got two ices and was sitting opposite her, devouring his in large mouthfuls, as if it had been porridge. She had been brought up in the country and the open air, among horses and dogs, and other nice wholesome things, and this mode of life in London, as she saw it, under her mother's marchings and manoeuvres to storm the smart set, seemed to her at times to be little short of insane. If you were not putting on a dress, you were taking it off, and all this simply to sit on a chair in the Park, to say half a dozen words to half a dozen people, to lunch at one house, to dine at another, and dance at a third. All that was only incidental in life seemed to her to be turned into its business; everything was topsy-turvy. She understood well enough that if you lived in the midst of your best friends, it would be delightful to see them there three times a day, in these pretty well-dressed settings, but to go to a house simply in order to have been there was inexplicable. Mrs. Murchison had given a ball only a few weeks before at her house in Grosvenor Square, about which even after the lapse of days people had scarcely ceased talking. Royalty had been there, and Mrs. Murchison, in the true republican spirit, had entertained them royally. Her cotillion presents had been really marvellous; there had been so many flowers that it was scarcely possible to breathe, and so many people that it was quite impossible to dance.

But as success to Mrs. Murchison's and many other minds was measured by your crowd and your extravagance, she had been ecstatically satisfied, and had sent across to her husband several elegantly written accounts of the festivity clipped from society papers. The evening had been to her, as it were, a sort of signed certificate of her social standing. But to Lily the ball had been more nearly a nightmare than a certificate: neither she nor her mother knew by sight half the people who came, and certainly half the people who came did not know them by sight. The whole thing seemed to her vulgar, wickedly wasteful, and totally unenjoyable.

There are those, and her mother was one, who would cheerfully be asphyxiated in a sufficiently exalted crowd. To be found dead among a heap of d.u.c.h.esses would be to her what to a soldier is death in the forefront of the battle. A mob of fas.h.i.+onable people had eaten and drunk at her expense, listened to her band and marvelled at her orchids. She had also to a high degree that excellent though slightly barbarous virtue which is called hospitality. She liked to feed people. But the human soul, as poets are unanimous in telling us, is ever aspiring upwards, and this point reached, Mrs. Murchison, as has been already stated, desired more. Her tastes became childlike again; she yearned for simple little dinners with the mystic few, those dinners which never even appeared in the papers, and were followed by no ball, perhaps not even by a "few people." Cold roast beef or bits of common bacon on skewers are sometimes served in the middle of banquets. Mrs. Murchison longed for her bits of bacon in suitable company. It was very nice to have the Prince asking after your dachshund's cough, but she had got past that.

These things pa.s.sed vaguely through Miss Murchison's mind, as she and Toby ate their ices. He was like a whiff of fresh air, she thought, to one who had been breathing a close and vitiated atmosphere. He did not ask her where she had been last night, and where she had dined to-day, and who was in the Park in the morning. He seemed to be as little of the world which danced and capered in the next room, chattering volubly about itself, as she was herself. On that point she would like information.

"Do you like London?" she asked, at length, and then thought herself inane for saying that. It sounded like one of the _ba.n.a.lites_ she found so desperately stupid.

But Toby understood. He had just finished his ice, and with his spoon he made a comprehensive circle in the air. "This sort of thing, do you mean?" he asked. "All these fine people?"

"Yes, just that. All these fine people."

"It seems to me perfectly idiotic," he replied.

"Then why do you come?"

"Why? Oh, because there are a lot of people I really do like--real friends of mine, you understand, whom I see in this way. And they come for the same reason, I suppose."

Lily looked at him a moment out of her big dark eyes, and then nodded gravely.

"Yes, that makes all the difference," she said. "If you have a lot of friends here, there is a reason for coming. But----" and she stopped loyally.

Toby guessed what was on the end of her tongue, and with a certain instinct of delicacy changed the subject, or rather led it away from what he imagined was in her mind.

"I know what you mean," he said, "and everyone finds it a bore at times.

One goes to a party hoping to see a particular person, and the particular person is not there. Really, I often wish I was never in London at all. But, you see, I am private secretary to my cousin Pangbourne, and while they are in office and the House is sitting I have to be in town. What would happen to the British Const.i.tution if I wasn't, I don't dare to think."

Miss Murchison laughed.

"That must be interesting, though," she said. "I should love to be in the middle of the wheels. I notice in England that a sudden hush always comes over a room whenever a politician enters. Somebody describes the English as a race of shopkeepers. It is a very bad definition; they are much more a race of politicians. The shopkeepers come from America."

Toby shook his head.

"I wish I could notice a hush whenever I came into a room," he said. "I should feel as if I was making a mark. But I don't."

"But it is interesting, is it not?" asked Miss Murchison--"being secretary to a Minister, I mean."

Toby considered.

"Last week," he said, "I looked over the bills for the flowers in Hyde Park. They were immense, so I hope you approve of the flowers. I also checked the food of the ducks in St. James's Park, so I hope you do not think they are looking thin. Those ducks are the bane of my existence.

Since then I have done nothing. My cousin comes into the secretaries'

room every morning to see that we are working. He invariably finds us playing cricket with the fire-shovel. I am usually in."

"That also is interesting," said Miss Murchison. "I love games. Oh, there's my mother! I think she is looking for me."

"But I may have this dance?" asked Toby.

"I am sure she would allow me," said the girl; and as they both thought of her mother's feverish acceptance for her of the last, their eyes met.

"Let us go," said Toby gravely; and he gave her his arm back into the ballroom.

Miss Murchison, when she left half an hour later with her mother, was conscious of having enjoyed herself much more than she usually did at such parties. For the most part they seemed to her sad and strange forms of amus.e.m.e.nt. She danced with a certain number of young men, who admired her pearls or her profile. It is true that both were admirable, especially her profile. But to talk to them was like talking to order through a telephone; it seemed impossible to get beyond the _ba.n.a.lites_ of the day. She was labelled, as she knew, as the heiress of the year; and it was as difficult to forget that as to forget that other people remembered it. No doubt when she got to know people more intimately it would be different; but these first weeks of debutancy could not, she thought, be considered amusing.

But Toby had been a most delightful change. Here was an ordinary human young man, who did not seem to be merely a weary automaton for going from one party to another. He was fairly stupid--an unutterable relief; for if there was one mode of conversation she detested, it was cheap epigram; and he was quite sensible and natural, a relief more unutterable.

Her mother drove home with her in a state of elation. The mystic innermost shrine was going to be unlocked at last.

"Lady Conybeare said that simply no one was coming to-morrow night," she said. "We shall be six or eight only. Lord Comber, I think, is coming, and Lord Evelyn. It will be quite an arcanum. She said she would wear only a tea-gown--I should say a tea-gown only. So _chic_. We will have a little tea-gown party before the end of the season, dear. You and Lord Evelyn quite hobnailed together. Did you enjoy yourself, Lily?"

"Yes, very much."

"So glad, darling. I saw no pearls so good as yours. Wear them to-morrow, dear. Lady Conybeare said she adored pearls. 'Ah, Margerita!'" And Mrs. Murchison hummed a bar or two of Siebel's song in a variety of keys. "And the evening after we go to see 'Tristram and Isolde,'" she continued. "It is a gala night, and Jean de Risky plays Tristram. How lucky we were to get the box next the royal box! I hope it won't be very hot, for I hear that everybody stops to the end in 'Tristram.' There is a Leitmotif--or is it Liebstod?--at the end, which is quite marvellous, I am told. However, we can go late. I hope it will be in Italian. Italian is the only language for singing. I remember when I was a girl I used to sing 'La donna e n.o.bile.' I forget who wrote it; those Italian names are so alike. And what did you talk to Lord Evelyn about, dear? Was he amusing? We might ask him to our box on Thursday to see 'Tristram.'"

"I don't think he cares about Wagner," said Lily; "indeed, he told me so."

"How very unfas.h.i.+onable! We all like Wagner now. Personally I think it is quite enchanting; but it always sends me fast asleep, though I enjoy it very much until. But there is a great sameness in the operas; they are like those novels I used to read by Mrs. Austen--'Sense and Sensibleness,' and all the rest of them about Bath and other watering-places. I thought them very tedious; but I was told one must read them. Or was it Sir George Eliot who wrote them? Dear me, how stupid of me! Sir George was there to-night, and I never once thought of telling him how much I enjoyed his charming novels!"

"George Eliot was a woman," remarked Lily, leaning back in her corner, tremulous with heroically-repressed amus.e.m.e.nt.

"You may be right, dear; but it isn't a common name for a woman. Of course, there's George Sand. But if you are right, how lucky I did not speak about his novels to Sir George! He would not have liked being mistaken for someone else. Some of those literary men are so sensitive."

"But, you see, he did not write any of those novels," said Lily, with a sudden little spasm of laughter.