Kimono | Page 5

were given, with an extra cheer
for Mrs. Geoffrey. The husband, who was no hand at speechmaking,
replied--and his good-natured voice was quite thick with emotion--that
it was awfully good of them all to give his wife and himself such a
ripping send-off, and awfully good of Sir George and Lady Everington
especially, and awfully good of Count Saito; and that he was the
happiest man in the world and the luckiest, and that his wife had told
him to tell them all that she was the happiest woman, though he really
did not see why she should be. Anyhow, he would do his best to give
her a jolly good time. He thanked his friends for their good wishes and
for their beautiful presents. They had had jolly good times together, and,
in return for all their kindness, he and his wife wanted to wish them all
a jolly good time.
So spoke Geoffrey Barrington; and at that moment many people
present must have felt a pang of regret that this fine specimen of
England's young manhood should marry an oriental. He was over six
feet high. His broad shoulders seemed to stoop a little with the lazy
strength of a good-tempered carnivore, of Una's lion, and his face,
which was almost round, was set off by a mane of the real lion colour.
He wore his moustache rather longer than was the fashion. It was a face
which seemed ready to laugh at any moment--or else to yawn. For there
was about the man's character and appearance something indolent and
half-awakened and much of the schoolboy. Yet he was over thirty. But
there is always a tendency for Army life to be merely a continuation of
public-school existence. Eton merges into Sandhurst, and Sandhurst
merges into the regiment. One's companions are all the time men of the

same class and of the same ideas. The discipline is the same, the
conventionality and the presiding fetish of Good and Bad Form. So
many, generals are perennial school boys. They lose their freshness,
that is all.
But Geoffrey Barrington had not lost his freshness. This was his great
charm, for he certainly was not quick or witty. Lady Everington said
that she kept him as a disinfectant to purify the atmosphere.
"This house," she declared, "sometimes gets over-scented with
tuberoses. Then I open the window and let Geoffrey Barrington in!"
He was the only son of Lord Brandan and heir to that ancient but
impoverished title. He had been brought up to the idea that he must
marry a rich wife. He neither jibbed foolishly at the proposal, nor did
he surrender lightly to any of the willing heiresses who threw
themselves at his head. He accepted his destiny with the fatalism which
every soldier must carry in his knapsack, and took up his post as Mars
in attendance in Lady Everington's drawing-room, recognising that
there lay the strategic point for achieving his purpose. He was not
without hope, too, that besides obtaining the moneybags he might be so
fortunate as to fall in love with the possessor of them.
Asako Fujinami, whom he had first met at dinner, at Lady Everington's,
had crossed his mind just like an exquisite bar of melody. He made no
comments at the time, but he could not forget her. The haunting tune
came back to him again and again. By the time that she had floated in
his arms through three or four dances, the spell had worked. La belle
dame sans merci, the enchantress who lurks in every woman, had him
in thrall. Her simplest observations seemed to him to be pearls of
wisdom, her every movement a triumph of grace.
"Reggie," he said to his friend Forsyth, "what do you think of that little
Japanese girl?"
Reggie, who was a diplomat by profession and a musician by the grace
of God, and whose intuition was almost feminine especially where
Geoffrey was concerned, answered,--

"Why, Geoffrey, are you thinking of marrying her?"
"By Jove!" exclaimed his friend, starting at the thought as at a
discovery; "but I, don't think she'd have me. I'm not her sort."
"You never can tell," suggested Reggie mischievously; "She is quite
unspoilt, and she has twenty thousand a year. She is unique. You could
not possibly get her confused with somebody else's wife, as so many
people seem to do when they get married. Why not try?"
Reggie thought that such a mating was impossible, but it amused him
to play with the idea. As for Lady Everington, who knew every one so
well, and who thought that she knew them perfectly, she never guessed.
"I think, Geoffrey, that you like to be seen with Asako," she said, "just
to point the contrast."
Her confession to her sister, Mrs.