The Way of Ambition. Robert Hichens
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fair and small women who always look years younger than almost anyone really is, was full of vague charm, was kind, not stupid, and a good little thing, had two children and was only concentrated when at the dressmaker's or trying on hats.
Max was devoted to her and rejoiced in spoiling her. He was one of those men who like to have a butterfly in the room with them.
Mrs. Mansfield never tried to talk to Delia in a crowd, and she and Charmian went on into the big room. It was already full of people, many of whom were sitting on chairs grouped about the dais on which was the piano, while others stood about, and still others looked down upon the throng from recessed balconies, gained from a hidden corridor with which the main staircase of the house communicated.
Charmian saw Mrs. Shiffney not far off, talking and laughing with a great portrait painter, who looked like a burly farmer, and with a renowned operatic baritone, whose voice had left him in the prime of his life and who now gave singing lessons, and tried to fight down the genius which was in him and to which he could no longer give expression. He had a pale, large, and cruel face, and gray eyes that had become sinister since the disaster which had overtaken him. Near this group were three men, a musical critic, Paul Lane, and a famous English composer, prop and stay of provincial festivals. The composer was handsome, with merry eyes and a hearty laugh which seemed to proclaim "Sanity! Sanity! Sanity! Don't be afraid of the composer!" The critic was tall, gay, and energetic, and also looked—indeed, seemed to mean to look—a thorough good fellow who had a hatred of shams. Lane, pale and discontented, had an air of being out of place in their company. Pretty women were everywhere, and there were many young and very smart men. On a sofa close to Charmian a dégagée-looking Duchess was telling a "darkie" story to a lively and debonair writer, who was finding his story to cap it while he listened and smiled. Just beyond them were two impertinent and picturesquely dressed girls, sisters, whom Charmian knew intimately and met at almost every party she went to. One of them, who wore gold laurel leaves in her dark hair, made a little face at Charmian, which seemed to express a satirical welcome and the promise of sarcasm when they should be near enough to talk. The other was being prettily absurd with an excellent match. Close to the piano stood a very beautiful woman dressed in black, without jewels or gloves, who had an exquisite profile, hollow cheeks and haggard but lovely brown eyes. She was talking to several people who were gathered about her, and never smiled. It was impossible to imagine that she could ever smile. Her name was Lady Mildred Burnington, and she was an admirable amateur violinist, married to Admiral Sir Hilary Burnington, one of the Sea Lords. Max Elliot was in the distance, talking eagerly in the midst of a group of musicians. A tall singer, a woman from the Paris Opéra Comique, stood by him with her right hand on his arm, as if she wanted to interrupt him. She was deathly pale, with hair like the night, ebon, and a face almost as exaggeratedly expressive as a tragic pierrot's. People pointed her out as Millie Deans, a Southern American never yet heard in London. She spoke to Max Elliot, then looked round the room, with sultry, defiant and yet anxious eyes.
As if in answer to Millie Deans's words, Max Elliot moved away with her, and took her through the throng to Mrs. Shiffney, who turned round with her movement of the shoulders as they came up. Charmian, watching, saw Mrs. Shiffney's gay and careless smile, the piercing light in her eyes as she looked swiftly at the singer, who faced her with a tragic and determined expression. The portrait painter stood by, with his rather protruding eyes fixed on Miss Deans.
As Charmian glanced round at the crowd and spoke to one person and another she was seized again by her horror of being one of the unknown lives. She saw many celebrities. She yearned to be numbered among them. If she could even be as Mrs. Shiffney, an arbiter of taste, a setter of fashions in admiration; if she could see people look at her, as Millie Deans looked at Mrs. Shiffney, with the hard determination to win her over to their side in the battle of art, she thought she could be happy. But to be nobody, "that pretty little Charmian," "that graceful Charmian Mansfield, but she's not half as clever as her mother"! To-night she felt as if she could not bear it.
Mrs. Shiffney had turned away from the singer, and now her eyes rested on Charmian. She nodded and smiled and made a beckoning motion with her left hand. But at this moment a singer and composer, half Spanish, half nobody knew what, who called himself Ferdinand Rades, sat down before the piano with a lighted cigarette in his mouth and struck a few soft chords, looking about him with a sort of sad and languid insolence and frowning till his thick eyebrows came down to make a penthouse roof above his jet black eyes.
"Hush—hush, please!" said Max Elliot, loudly. "'Sh—'sh—'sh! Monsieur Rades is going to sing."
He bent to Rades.
"What is it? Monsieur Rades will sing Le Moulin, and Le Retour de Madame Blague."
There was a ripple of applause, and Mrs. Shiffney hastily made her way to a chair just in front of the piano, sat down on it, and gazed at Rades, who turned and stared at her. Then, taking the cigarette from his mouth, he sang Le Moulin at her, leaning back, swaying and moving his thick eyebrows. It was a sad song, full of autumnal atmosphere, a delicate and sensual caress of sorrow. The handsome composer and the lusty musical critic listened to it, watched the singer with a sort of bland contempt. But when he threw away his cigarette and sang Le Retour de Madame Blague, an outrageous trifle, full of biting esprit and insolent wit, with a refrain like the hum of Paris by night, and a long bouche fermée effect at the end, even they joined in the laughter and the applause, though with a certain reluctance, as if, in doing so, they half feared to descend into a gutter where slippery and slimy things made their abode.
Mrs. Shiffney got up and begged Ferdinand to sing again, mentioning several songs by name. He shook his head, letting his apparently boneless and square-nailed hands stray about over the piano all the time she was speaking to him.
"Non, non! Ce soir non! Impossible!"
"Then sing Petite Fille de Tombouctou!" she exclaimed at last.
And before he could answer she turned round, smiling, and said: "Petite Fille de Tombouctou."
There was a murmur of delight, and the impertinent girl with laurel leaves in her dark hair suddenly looked exotic and full of languors. And Charmian thought of the yacht. Had Mrs. Shiffney received Claude Heath's answer yet? He was to make up his mind on Sunday. Rades was singing. His accompaniment was almost terribly rhythmical, with a suggestion of the little drums that the black men love. She saw fierce red flowers while he sang, strange alleys with houses like huts, trees standing stiffly in a blaze of heat, sand, limbs the color of slate. The sound of the curious voice had become Eastern, the look in the insolent black eyes Eastern. There seemed to be an odd intoxication in the face, pale, impassive, and unrighteous, as if the effects of a drug were beginning to steal upon the senses. And the white, square-nailed hands beat gently upon the piano till many people, unconsciously, began to sway ever so little to and fro. An angry look came into Millie Deans's eyes, and when the last drum throb died away and the little girl of Tombouctou slept for ever in the sand, slain by her Prince of Darkness, for a reason that seemed absurdly inadequate to the British composer who was a prop of the provincial festivals, but quite adequate to almost every woman in the room, her mouth set in a hardness that was almost menacing.
After ten minutes' conversation an English soprano sang Bach's Heart Ever Faithful. Variety was always welcomed at the parties in Cadogan Square.
"Glorious, old chap!" said the British composer. "We've come up into God's air now."
The critic swung his right arm like a man who enjoyed bowling practice at the nets.
"Lung exercise! Lung exercise!" he breathed. "And that drop at the end! What a stroke of genius!"
Mrs. Shiffney had disappeared with Rades. She loved Bach—in the supper room. In the general movement which took place when the soprano had left the dais, escorted by Max Elliot, to have a glass of something, Charmian found herself beside Margot Drake, the girl with the laurel leaves.
Margot and her sister Kit were extremely well known in London. Their father was a very rich iron-master, a self-made man, who had been created a Baronet and had married an ultra-aristocratic woman, the beautiful Miss Enid Blensover, related to half