Mr Topp played and played. He would have continued all night, as he had developed the vice of playing for himself, but Miss Hollier had to be pressed, and was eventually persuaded to execute that piece in which she crossed her wrists several times, ever so gracefully, above the keys.
Then Tom Radclyffe must stand up to sing Love’s Witchcraft. He had a high bass. Real fervour filled his scarlet coat, and caused some vibration amongst the objects in glass and china on the shelves of cabinets. Belle Bonner’s skin had turned a cloudy white.
‘Maiden look me in the face,’
the Lieutenant sang;
‘Steadfast, serious, no grimace!
Maiden, mark me, now I task thee
Answer quickly, what I ask thee!
Steadfast look me in the face.
Little vixen, no grimace!’
Now Belle was neither flesh nor marble. She was enveloped in, and had herself become, a cloud of the most assiduous tenderness. To have remained in such a trance, of cloud wrapping cloud, would have been perpetual bliss, but her practical nature led her out and away, and she was walking along the gravel paths surrounding a house in which she was established, with every sign of prosperity and elegance — and Love; Love, of course. Love approached along that same gravel, smelling familiarly of macassar, or, assuming another of his forms, stroked with the skins of seven babies. Until Belle blushed, and those who had been looking for it, saw.
By that hour, before the tea-things were brought in, the lamplight, which in the beginning had been a solid, engrossed yellow, was suffused with the palpitating rose colours. The petals that had fallen on mahogany were reflected upward. The big, no longer perfect roses were bursting with scent and sticky stamens. And it was rather warm.
Partly for that reason Laura Trevelyan had gone out through the moths to the terrace where the stone urns were, and where somebody had been crushing geranium, but the heavy air of darkness was, if anything, more distasteful to her than that of the rapt, cloying room. As she strolled she was still attended by the light from lamps. This, however, could not be stretched much farther, and she did hesitate. It was now possible that the usually solid house, and all that it contained, that the whole civil history of those parts was presumptuous, and that the night, close and sultry as savage flesh, distant and dilating as stars, would prevail by natural law.
Drifting in that nihilistic darkness with agreeable resignation, the young woman bumped against some hard body and immediately recovered her own.
‘I beg your pardon, Miss Trevelyan,’ said Voss. ‘You also have come out in search of refreshment.’
‘I?’ said Laura. ‘Yes, it was stuffy. The first hot nights of the season are difficult. But so deceptive. Dangerous, even. A wind may spring up in half an hour from now, and we shall be shivering.’
She was already, despite the fact that they were swathed in a woollen darkness. Down there, round the bay, there was still a rushy marsh, from which a young man who had recently gone in search of mussels had contracted a fever, it was told, and died.
But Voss was not at that moment interested in climatic peculiarities.
To what extent is this girl dishonest? he wondered.
Unaccustomed to recognize his own dishonesties, he was rather sensitive to them in others.
It is disgraceful, of course, Laura realized; I have come out here for no convincing reason. She was defenceless. Perhaps even guilty.
‘I try to visualize your life in this house,’ said Voss, facing the honeycomb of windows, in some of which dark figures burrowed for a moment before drowning in the honey-coloured light. ‘Do you count the linen?’
He was truly interested, now that it did seem to affect him in some way not yet accounted for.
‘Do you make pastry? Hem sheets? Or are you reading novels in these rooms, and receiving morning calls from acquaintances, ladies with small waists and affectations?’
‘We indulge in a little of each,’ Laura admitted, ‘but in no event are we insects, Mr Voss.’
‘I have not intended to suggest,’ he laughed. ‘It is my habit of approach.’
‘Is it so difficult then, for a man, to imagine the lives of poor domesticated women? How very extraordinary! Or is it that you are an extraordinary man?’
‘I have not entered into the minds of other men, so that I cannot honestly say with any degree of accuracy.’
But he would keep his private conviction.
‘I think that I can enter into the minds of most men,’ said the young woman, softly. ‘At times. An advantage we insect-women enjoy is that we have endless opportunity to indulge the imagination as we go backwards and forwards in the hive.’
‘And in my instance, what does your imagination find?’
He was laughing, of course, at the absurdity of that which he expected to be told. But he would have liked to hear practically anything.
‘Shall we go a little?’ he invited.
‘Walking in this darkness is full of dangers.’
‘It is not really dark. When you are accustomed to it.’
Which was true. The thick night was growing luminous. At least, it was possible almost to see, while remaining almost hidden.
The man and woman were walking over grass that was still kindly beneath their feet. Smooth, almost cold leaves soothed their faces and the backs of their hands.
‘These are the camellia bushes Uncle planted when he first came here as a young man,’ Laura Trevelyan said. ‘There are fifteen varieties, as well as sports. This one here is the largest,’ she said, shaking it as if it had been an inanimate object; it was so familiar to her, and now so necessary. ‘It is a white, but there is one branch that bears those marbled flowers, you know, like the edges of a ledger.’
‘Interesting,’ he said.
But it was an obscure reply, of a piece with the spongy darkness that surrounded them.
‘Then you are not going to answer my question?’ he asked.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘that silly claim I made! Although, to a certain extent, it is true.’
‘Tell me, then.’
‘Everyone is offended by the truth, and you will not be an exception.’
That it would take place, they both knew now.
Consequently, when she did speak, the sense of inevitability that they shared made her sound as if she were reading from a notebook, only this one was her head, in which her memorandum had been written, in invisible ink, that the night had breathed upon; and as she read, or spoke, it became obvious to both that she had begun to compile her record from the first moment of their becoming acquainted.
‘You are so vast and ugly,’ Laura Trevelyan was repeating the words; ‘I can imagine some desert, with rocks, rocks of prejudice, and, yes, even hatred. You are so isolated. That is why you are fascinated by the prospect of desert places, in which you will find your own situation taken for granted, or more than that, exalted. You sometimes scatter kind words or bits of poetry to people, who soon realize the extent of their illusion. Everything is for yourself. Human emotions, when you have them, are quite flattering to you. If those emotions strike sparks from others, that also is flattering. But most flattering, I think, when you experience it, is the hatred, or even the mere irritation of weaker characters.’