Outside the Café door, hard on midnight, Gaveston stood for a moment in delicious hesitation. There had, of course, been hours of dizzily brilliant talk as, one by one, the celebrities of pen and brush and chisel came forward to be presented. And Gaveston had triumphed, superbly. Somehow the evening and its experiences had made life more intricately beautiful, more complex in its manifold possibilities. Would he go back to the Albany by the Vigo Street entrance? Or would he rather walk abroad until dawn came, and then spend an hour in the cold, dim beauty of Covent Garden, watching the great wheeled wains of cauliflowers passing spectral through the morning mists? It was a prospect suddenly seductive in this new mood engendered by the marvellously fin-de-siècle atmosphere of the gilded smoking-room.
“’ullo, dearie!” he heard a timid quavering voice at his elbow. “Waitin’ for anybody in partic’lar?”
He turned quickly.
And the poor draggled little street-walker turned her starved, painted cheeks up to him under the hectic lamplight. A thin rain was drizzling down mercilessly.… A taxicab was cruising slowly along the edge of the pavement.… The street-lamps went on shining impassively.… The darkened houses towered above, secretly, ominously.… How long the night.… How cold the pavement of stone.…
She laid her hand on his arm, wistfully a little, he thought.… Even in those world-weary features there was beauty left.… Something of graciousness and evanescent youth lingered still under the hard Cockney tang of her voice.… What history cowered beneath that monstrous masque of maquillage…?
He would give much to know.…
But afar off, as from some half-forgotten world, he seemed to hear the mellow, golden patterning of bells, bells weaving their intricate spell of beauty about another city than this dark Babel, a City of grave spires and a curving street and quiet immemorial lanes.…
“No, carissima,” he smiled at her with the true ffoulis charm. “No. Your body is beautiful. But my soul is beautiful. We can never, never understand each other.”
He expected to see this flotsam-flower of London shuffle off into the Suburran[12] darkness. But she answered:
[12] Suburban? (Lit. Exec.).
“Oh, I say!” and there was petulance in her tone. “Don’t try to come that over me! Soma and psyche indeed! D’you think I don’t know my Plotinus Arbiter? You can’t quote that stuff at this child. D’you read him too?”
“Oh, off and on,” Gav replied.
“Fancy that now! This is a bit of luck. Oh, we shall get on all right. You know Joseph de Maistre’s essay, of course?”
“Which?” he asked guardedly. There might be some trap in this.
“Oh, the Arbiter’s influence on the Transcendentalist poets—you know.”
“Afraid I haven’t read it,” confessed Gav.
“You haven’t missed much, rum-ti-tum, as Marie Lloyd used to sing, but I’ll lend it you if you’re keen. I say, you know,” she went on hurriedly, “I’d a bit o’ luck yesterday. You know that 1642 edition—Amsterdam? Picked up a copy of that, tooled leather and all the woodcuts, but the back flyleaf just a bit soiled. Eight quid. Cheap, wasn’t it?”
“He’s your favourite author, I suppose?” he ventured.
“Was once, Mr. Inquisitive. No, I must say I’ve been rather off old Plo since the Bloomsbury push took him up so strong. I’m on the Hellenic tack now—Pelester of Chios, you know, and Xanthus the Younger, and the fragments of the Thracian papyrus that Bötzdorff edited—though I don’t think much of his gloss, str—th I don’t.”
“I must show you my Plotinus,” Gav broke in on her gathering enthusiasm. “It’s a fine copy. 1722, I think.”
“My G—dn—ss! 1722! Printed at Venice, I s’pose: Palestrine fount and borders by Manucci.… I know the sort. Bless your innocent heart! that’s no b——y good! Common as dirt, these are. If that’s all you know about the Arbiter, you’re no good to me. So ta-ta, caro incognito!”
She turned angrily on her heel.
“But here!” he caught her by the sleeve. “Take this, I beg as a favour—a token to remember our little meeting.”
Gaveston slipped from his finger the exquisite cameo of Cypriote turquoise that the old Duchesa da Chianti had bequeathed him, and quickly but tactfully wrapping it in a ten-pound note, he pressed it into her little quivering palm.[13]
She disappeared.
Smiling gently at the amazing variegation of his metropolitan adventures, Gaveston crossed towards Vigo Street. Already a heartless shaft of madder light was sullenly annunciating the approach of yet another aenigmatick day. They had lingered talking a long time out there. And as he tore off his crumpled white waistcoat with impatient, smoke-stained fingers, he wondered suddenly about his father. There was a queer Quixotic strain in him, he felt, that surely did not come from the ffoulises.
But he grew tired, and, drawing the too transparent dimity curtains tighter against the dawn, he leapt into bed. And through the fitful dreams that so often attend sunlight sleep, there flitted furtively the ill-matched figures of his mother and the mysterious wanton, confused in a sinister identity beyond all possibility of disentanglement.