Sally Bishop Part 31

"What does being the lion of the evening mean?" he asked, with the ironical turn of the lip. "That your bedroom door is liable to open, I suppose, and admit whatever lady is most hampered in the way of debts."

"Jack!" She sat upright in the chair she had taken, eyes well lit with a forced blaze, breath cunningly driven through the nostrils.

"What?"

"How dare you talk to me like that?"

"Don't know," he replied, imperturbably. "It is daring, I suppose, seeing that I'm not one of you. You'd listen to that on the hunting field from a man whom you'd met once before. But it was daring of me; I'm only your brother, and not in the crew at that."

Her eyes glittered more vividly, the breath came quicker still. Then it all blew away like sea-froth, and she shook with charming laughter.

"You talk like a Jesuit," she said. "Do you really feel those things as keenly as that?"

"Me?" He laughed with her and went for his pipe. "I don't feel them at all. What's there to feel about in them? I only want to show you that I'm not totally ignorant of what your set is like, the set you want me to become a lion-of-the-evening in. Lion-of-the-evening, beautiful lion, eh? Have a cigarette?"

"Thanks. Then why are you so hard on us?"

"Hard! I'm not hard." He lit a match for her, watched by the light of it her lineless face, deftly made up with its powder and its dust of rouge, the eyebrows cunningly pencilled, the lashes touched with black. None of it was obvious. It was only by the match's glare, held close to her face, that he could see the art that, in any less vivid an illumination, concealed the art. He smiled at it all, and her eyes, lifting, as the cigarette glowed, found the smile and sensitively questioned it.

"Why the smile?" she said, quickly.

"Why? Oh, I don't know. A comparison. I suppose you people really are artists. Mind you, I don't mean you. I'm not talking about you.

If it were you--well, I shouldn't talk about it."

For the first moment in all their conversation of that evening, she looked ill-at-ease. A cloud pa.s.sed over the sun of her self-a.s.surance.

It seemed, on the instant, to turn her eyes from blue to grey.

"What do you mean by--a comparison?" she inquired, "and saying we're artists? Artists at what? I believe you like to talk in riddles.

That's another thing too that 'ud be in your favour. People 'ud think you so awfully clever. But what do you mean by comparison?"

He blew through his pipe, set it burning comfortably--took his favourite seat on the table with his legs swinging like a schoolboy's.

"A comparison--I mean a comparison between the women of your set, and the women who toil at the same job in the streets of London."

"Yes, but you said that when you looked at me, when you smiled while I was lighting the cigarette." The words hurried out of her lips, dropping metallically with a hard sound on his ears.

"I know, but I told you I didn't refer to you. Good G.o.d!" He gripped the table. "Do you think I could think about you like that? Look here, it's no good having this nonsense; I won't say another word if you think I am."

"Very well; all right. But tell me, at any rate, why you said it when you looked at me."

"Because you're made-up--made-up to perfection. I should never have seen it if I hadn't held the match up to your face. And there's the difference--there's the comparison. The women in your set are artists. There's all the difference in a Sargent and a man with half a dozen coloured chalks on the pavement, between them and the women you'll find in Piccadilly at night. But they're both workers in the same dignified profession. When you think of the way those poor wretches shove on their rouge--a little silk bag turned inside out with eider-down on it and rouge powder on that, then the whole thing jammed on to the face before a mirror in one of Swan & Edgar's shop windows; any night you can see 'em doing it--and then look at a society woman done up, with a maid in attendance and a mirror lighted up, as if it were an actor's dressing-table--my heavens, you're liable to make a comparison then."

Dolly shuddered at the picture. "I think you've got a loathsome mind, Jack," she said with conviction.

"Of course you do, and you're quite right. It is a loathsome idea to think that a man of the type of Sargent is of the same n.o.ble profession as the pavement artist. You can only disinfect its loathsomeness in a degree by a.s.suring people that they don't work in the same street. But it always is loathsome in this country to see facts as they really are, and when you know of society women who send nude portraits of themselves--"

"Jack!"

"--Up to wealthy men whom they have not had the pleasure of meeting, it's naturally a beastly conception of life to compare them with those unfortunate women whose existence of course we all know about, but would much rather not discuss. I really quite agree with you, I have a loathsome mind."

Dolly rose with perfect dignity to her feet. "Do you think you ought to talk about things like that to me, Jack?"

"I don't know. I suppose it is questionable whether one ought to treat one's sister as a simple innocent, or talk to her, as undoubtedly you do talk in society to other men's wives and other men's daughters.

I think myself that it doesn't really matter. You're not thinking of the impropriety of it. That doesn't worry you in the least. Many a man has talked to you sympathetically on similar subjects before.

You've listened to them. The fault in me is the gentle vein of irony.

Irony's an insidious thing when you grind it out of the truth. Sit down, Dolly; I won't talk about it any more. I'll pour the sweetest nothings you ever heard into your ears. Come on--sit down. It's not much after nine. I only wanted to show you why I don't appreciate society. I wouldn't mind it, if it admitted its vices and called them by their names; I think I'd permit myself to be dragged into it by a woman who was clean right through; but as it is, and as it describes itself, I prefer the pavement artist with his little sack of coloured chalks. There's not much reality, I admit, in his portrait of Lord Roberts or his beautiful pink and blue mackerel with its high light, that never shone on land or sea, except on the scales of that fish; there's not much reality in them, when they're finished, but there's a h.e.l.l of a lot of it in the doing of them."

He sat and puffed at his pipe, while she remained standing, looking down into the fire.

The silence was long, then it was broken abruptly. A knock rattled gently on the door. It was soft, timid, but it rushed violently through their silence. Traill slid to his feet. His sister stood erect. Her eyes fastened to his face, and she watched him calculating the possibilities, as if he were counting them on his fingers, of whom it might be.

Then it came again.

"Who do you think it is?" she whispered. She was beginning already to shrink at the thought that some woman had come to see him. He heard that in her voice and casually smiled.

"It's all right," he said quietly. "I shan't let any one in who'd offend your sense of propriety. However I talk, we're related. Stay there."

She watched him cross to the door; turned, so that she could still observe him and yet with one twist of the head, if any one entered, seem to have been untouched by any curiosity.

He opened the door. It cut off his face from view; but she heard his sudden exclamation of surprise, and allowed a thousand speculations to travel through her brain.

"You!" he said.

"Yes," a woman's voice replied in a nervous undertone. "I came to see you, to see if you were in. I--I wanted to see you." The words were stilted with nervous repet.i.tions.

"Of course, of course; come in; let me introduce you to my sister.

Oh--you must--come in--please; we've been dining together and came on here--for coffee--"

He threw the door wide open, and Sally walked apprehensively into the room.

CHAPTER XXI

Superficially, training is everything. The heaven-born genius comes once in a century of decades to remind us, as it were, that there is such a thing as creation; but beyond the heaven-born genius, training, on a day of superficialities, must win.

This moment, when Sally stood but a few paces within Traill's room, and looked--half-appealing, half-guardedly--at Mrs. Durlacher, the perfect woman of society--perfectly robed, perfectly mannered, perfectly painted, was a moment as superficial as one, so charged with possibilities, could be. And through that moment, over it, almost as if it were an occurrence of her daily life, Mrs. Durlacher rode as a swallow rides on an upland wind--pinions stretched straightly out--the consummate absence of effort; all the training of numberless years and numberless birds of the air in its wings.

"Dolly--this is Miss Bishop--my sister, Mrs. Durlacher." Traill stamped through the ceremony, like a man through a ploughed field.

In the minute fraction of time that followed--so short that no one in reason could call it a pause--Mrs. Durlacher had moulded a swift impression of Sally. Two facts--guide-ropes across a swinging bridge--she held to for support in her sudden calculation. Firstly, Sally's appearance--the quiet, inexpensive display of a gentle taste.

The blouse, showing through the little short-waisted coat--home-made--that, seen at a glance. The hat, with its quite artistic and un.o.btrusive colours--self-trimmed--the frame-work a year behind the fas.h.i.+on. The gloves, no holes in them, but well-worn.

The skirt--not badly cut, but obviously a cheap material. The person, herself--more than probably a milliner's a.s.sistant. Secondly, the fact that she was in her brother's rooms. She knew Jack's dealings with women--did not even close her eyes to them--admitted them to be human and natural so long as he refrained from tying himself up with any one of them and thereby irretrievably separating himself from her and her set. With these two facts, then, she made her ultimate deduction of Sally's ident.i.ty--a milliner's a.s.sistant, with a pardonable freedom of thought in the matter of propriety--and on that deduction, she acted accordingly. Ah, but it was acting that was finished and superb!

Her manner was gracious--she was compelled to accept her brother at his word, that he would let no one in who could offend her sense of propriety--yet it was graciousness which you saw through a polished gla.s.s, but could not touch. When Sally half-ventured forward with hand tentatively lifting, she bowed first--made it plain to Sally that in such a manner introductions were taken--then generously offered her hand, palpably to ease Sally's confusion.

Dressed as she was, looking as she did, in comparison with Sally, she held all the weapons. She could play them, wield them, just as she wished. Well-frocked, looking her best, a woman is a dangerous animal; but throw her in contact with another of her s.e.x who is but poorly clad, socially beneath her, and in training her inferior, and you may behold all the grace, all the symmetry of the cobra as it unwinds its beautiful, sinuous body before the eyes of its panic-stricken prey.