The Parts Men Play Part 11

'I was thinking,' he answered, 'that it is hardly twenty-four hours since we met, and yet I have as many impressions of you as an ordinary woman would give in six months. For instance, last night when you entered the room'----

'But, Mr. Selwyn, any girl knows enough to arrive late when there is no woman within twenty years of her age in the room. The effect is certain.'

There was no humour in her voice, but just a tone of weary, world-wise knowledge. A look of displeasure clouded his face.

'Surely,' he said, 'with your qualities and appearance, you don't need such an elaborate technique.'

'In a world where there is so little that is genuine, why should I debar myself from the pleasure of being a humbug?'

'Come, come,' he said, smiling, 'you are not going to join the ranks of England's detractors?'

She shrugged her shoulders. 'I'm certainly not going to become a professional critic like Stackton Dunckley, who hasn't even the excuse that he's an Irishman; or Lucia Carlotti, who hardly ever leaves London because her dinners cost her nothing. But I reserve the right of personal resentment.'

IV.

They were interrupted by a waiter, who removed the soup-plates with studied dexterity, and subst.i.tuted _Troncon de turbotin Duglere_; _pommes vapeur_, the dish which had delivered the fatal blow against the Cabinet Minister's digestive armour.

'Perhaps I am too personal,' resumed Selwyn after the completion of this task, 'but last night one of the impressions I took away with me was your critical att.i.tude towards your surroundings. Then this morning you were so completely'----

'Charming?'

'----bewitching,' he said, smiling, 'that I thought myself an idiot for the previous night's opinion. But, then, this evening'----

'Mr. Selwyn, you are not going to tell me I'm disappointing, and we just finished with the soup?'

More than her words, the forced rapidity with which she spoke nettled him. With bad taste perhaps, but still with well-meant sincerity, he was trying to elucidate the personality which had gripped him; while she, though seemingly having no objection to serving as a study for a.n.a.lysis, was constantly thrusting her deflecting sentences in his path. To him words were as clay to the sculptor. When he conversed he liked to choose his theme, then, by adroit use of language, bring his artistry to bear on the subject, accentuating a line here, introducing a note of subtlety elsewhere, amplifying, smoothing, finis.h.i.+ng with the veneer of words the construction of his mind. Another quality in her that troubled him was the apparent rigidity of her thoughts. Not once did she give the impression that she was nursing an idea in the lap of her mentality, but always that she had arrived at a conclusion by an instantaneous process, which would not permit of retraction or expansion. As though by suggestion he could reduce her phrasing to a _tempo_ less quick, his own voice slowed to a drawl.

'Miss Durwent,' he said, 'you are unique among the English girls I have met. I should think that contentment, almost reduced to placidity, is one of their outstanding characteristics.'

'That is because you are a man, and with a stranger we have our company manners on. England is full of bitter, resentful women, but they don't cry about it. That's one result of our playing games like boys. We learn not to whine.'

'I suppose the activities of your suffragettes are a sign of this unrest.'

'Yes--though they don't know what is really the trouble. I do not think women should run the country, but I do feel that we should have something to say about our ordinary day-to-day lives. Man-made laws are stupid enough, but a man-made society is intolerable. Just a very little wine, please.'

For a moment there was silence; then she continued: 'Oh, I suppose if it were all sifted down I should find that it is largely egotism on my part.'

He waited, not wanting to alter her course by any injudicious comment.

'Mr. Selwyn,' she said abruptly, 'do you feel that there is a Higher Purpose working through life?'

'Y-yes,' he said, rather startled, 'I think there is.'

'Sometimes I do,' she went on; 'then, again, I think we're here on this earth for no purpose at all. It often strikes me that Some One up above started humanity with a great idea, but lost interest in us.'

'I think,' he said slowly, 'that every man has an instinctive feeling sometime in his life that he is a small part of a great plan that is working somehow towards the light.'

'Yes. It's a comfortable thought. It's what makes good Christians enjoy their dinner without worrying too much about the poor.'

He made no answer, though he was not one who often let an epigram go by without a counter-thrust; but he could see that the girl was struggling towards a sincerity of expression much as a frightened horse crosses a bridge which spans a roaring waterfall, ready to bolt at the first thing that affrights it.

'Mr. Selwyn,' she said--and for the first time her words had something of a lilt and less incision--'do you think women are living the life intended for them?'

'Why not?' he fenced.

'Well, it seems to me that when any living creature is placed in the world it is given certain powers to use. You saw this morning how our horses wanted to race, and couldn't understand our holding them back.

A mosquito bites because that's apparently its job in the world, and it doesn't know anything else. I was once told that if animals do not use some faculty they possess, in time Nature takes it away from them.'

'You are quite a student of natural history, Miss Durwent.'

'No--but every now and then mother unearths a man who teaches us something, like last night.'

He acknowledged the compliment with a slight inclination of his head.

The waiter leant expectantly beside him.

'To descend from the metaphysical to the purely physical,' he said, glancing in some perplexity at the terrific nomenclature of Monsieur Beauchamp's dishes, 'do you think we might take a chance on this _Poulet reine aux primeurs; salade lorette_? I gather that it has something to do with chicken.'

'It's rather artful of Monsieur Beauchamp to word it so we poor English can get that much, isn't it?'

'Yes. He apparently acts on the principle that a little learning is a common thing.'

V.

As Selwyn gave the necessary order to the waiter, a noisy hubbub of laughter from an adjoining _cabinet particulier_ almost drowned his words. There was one woman's voice that was rasping and sustained with an abandon of vulgarity released by the potency of champagne.

Elise Durwent looked across the table at her companion. 'Are you bored with all my talk?' she said. 'You Americans aren't nearly so candid about such things as Englishmen.'

'On the contrary, Miss Durwent, I am deeply interested. Only, I am a little puzzled as to how you connect the usual functions of animals with woman's place in the world.'

With an air of abstraction she drew some pattern on the table-cloth with the p.r.o.ngs of a fork. 'I don't know,' she said dreamily, 'that I can apply the argument correctly, 'but--Mr. Selwyn, when I was a child playing about with my little brother "Boy-blue"--that was a pet name I had for him--I was just as happy to be a girl as he was to be a boy. I think that is true of all children. But ask any woman which she would rather be, a man or a woman, and unless she is trying to make you fall in love with her she will say the former. That is not as it should be, but it's true. Yet, if we are part of your great plan working towards the light, we're ent.i.tled to the same share in life as you--more, if anything, because we perpetuate life and have more in common with all that it holds than men have. There, that is a long speech for me.'

'Please don't stop.'

There was a howl in a man's voice from the noisy _cabinet particulier_, followed by a laugh from the same woman as before, which set the teeth on edge.

'That woman in there,' she went on, 'will partly show what I mean. In the beginning we were both given certain qualities. She has lost her modesty through disuse; I'm losing my womanliness and power of sympathy for the same reason. She's more candid about it, that's all. When d.i.c.k and I were youngsters I dreamed of life as Casim Baba's cave full of undiscovered treasures that would be endless. Now I look back upon those days as the only really happy ones I shall ever have.'

'You are--how old?'

'Twenty-three.'

'You will grow less cynical as you grow older,' he said, from the alt.i.tude of twenty-six.

'I agree,' she said. 'As, unlike the j.a.panese, we haven't the moral courage of suicide, I shall get used to the idea of being an Englishman's wife; of living in a calm routine of sport, bridge, week-ends, and small-talk--entertaining people who bore you, and in turn helping to bore those who entertain you. In time I'll forget that I was born, as most women are, with a fine perception of life's subtleties, and settle down to living year in and year out with no change except that each season you're less attractive and more petty.

After a while I shall even get to like the calm level of being an Englishman's wife, and if I see any girl thinking as I do now, I'll know what a little fool she is. That's what happens to us--we get used to things. Those of us who don't, either get a divorce, or go to the devil, or just live out our little farce. It is a real tragedy of English life that women are losing through disuse the qualities that were given them. That is why an American like you comes here and says we do not edit ourselves cleverly.'