The Finer Grain | Page 8

very
expression of his fellow-guests own countenance determined in him a
different and a still more dreadful view; in fact an immediate collapse
of the dream in which he had for the splendid previous space of time
been living. The young Lord himself, in his radiant costly barbarism,
figured far better than John Berridge could do the prepossessing
shepherd, the beautiful mythological mortal "distinguished" by a
goddess; for our hero now saw that his whole manner of dealing with
his ridiculous tribute was marked exactly by the grand simplicity, the
prehistoric good faith, as one might call it, of far-off romantic and
"plastic" creatures, figures of exquisite Arcadian stamp, glorified
rustics like those of the train of peasants in "A Winter's Tale," who
thought nothing of such treasure-trove, on a Claude Lorrain sea-strand,

as a royal infant wrapped in purple: something in that fabulous style of
exhibition appearing exactly what his present demonstration might
have been prompted by. "The Top of the Tree, by Amy Evans"--scarce
credible words floating before Berridge after he had with an anguish of
effort dropped his eyes on the importunate title-page--represented an
object as alien to the careless grace of goddess-haunted Arcady as a
washed-up "kodak" from a wrecked ship might have been to the
appreciation of some islander of wholly unvisited seas. Nothing could
have been more in the tone of an islander deplorably diverted from his
native interests and dignities than the glibness with which John's own
child of nature went on. "It's her pen-name, Amy Evans"--he couldn't
have said it otherwise had he been a blue-chinned penny-a-liner; yet
marking it with a disconnectedness of intelligence that kept up all the
poetry of his own situation and only crashed into that of other persons.
The reference put the author of "The Heart of Gold" quite into his place,
but left the speaker absolutely free of Arcady. "Thanks
awfully"--Berridge somehow clutched at that, to keep everything from
swimming. "Yes, I should like to look at it," he managed, horribly
grimacing now, he believed, to say; and there was in fact a strange
short interlude after this in which he scarce knew what had become of
any one or of anything; in which he only seemed to himself to stand
alone in a desolate place where even its desolation didn't save him from
having to stare at the greyest of printed pages. Nothing here helped
anything else, since the stamped greyness didn't even in itself make it
impossible his eyes should follow such sentences as: "The loveliness of
the face, which was that of the glorious period in which Pheidias
reigned supreme, and which owed its most exquisite note to that
shell-like curl of the upper lip which always somehow recalls for us the
smile with which windblown Astarte must have risen from the salt sea
to which she owed her birth and her terrible moods; or it was too much
for all the passionate woman in her, and she let herself go, over the
flowering land that had been, but was no longer their love, with an
effect of blighting desolation that might have proceeded from one of
the more physical, though not more awful, convulsions of nature."
He seemed to know later on that other and much more natural things
had occurred; as that, for instance, with now at last a definite

intermission of the rare music that for a long time past, save at the
briefest intervals, had kept all participants ostensibly attentive and
motionless, and that in spite of its high quality and the supposed
privilege of listening to it he had allowed himself not to catch a note of,
there was a great rustling and shifting and vociferous drop to a lower
plane, more marked still with the quick clearance of a way to supper
and a lively dispersal of most of the guests. Hadn't he made out,
through the queer glare of appearances, though they yet somehow all
came to him as confused and unreal, that the Princess was no longer
there, wasn't even only crowded out of his range by the immediate
multiplication of her court, the obsequious court that the change of
pitch had at once permitted to close round her; that Gloriani had offered
her his arm, in a gallant official way, as to the greatest lady present, and
that he was left with half a dozen persons more knowing than the others,
who had promptly taken, singly or in couples, to a closer inspection of
the fine small scattered treasures of the studio?
He himself stood there, rueful and stricken, nursing a silly red-bound
book under his arm very much as if he might have been holding on
tight to an upright stake, or to the nearest piece of furniture, during
some impression of a sharp earthquake-shock