The Woman with the Fan | Page 6

The night was warm, and the damp earth in the Square garden steamed as if it were oppressed and were breathing wearily. The sky was dark and cloudy, and the air was impregnated with a scent to which many things had contributed, each yielding a fragment of the odour peculiar to it. Rain, smoke, various trees and plants, the wet paint on a railing, the damp straw laid before the house of an invalid, the hothouse flowers carried by a woman in a passing carriage--these and other things were represented in the heavy atmosphere which was full of the sensation of life. Sir Donald expanded his nostrils.
"London, London!" he said. "I should know it if I were blind."
"Yes. The London smell is not to be confused with the smell of any other place. You have been back a good while, I believe?"
"Three years. I am laid on the London shelf now."
"You have had a long life of work--interesting work."
"Yes. Diplomacy has interesting moments. I have seen many countries. I have been transferred from Copenhagen to Teheran, visited the Sultan of Morocco at Fez, and--" he stopped. After a pause he added: "And now I sit in London clubs and look out of bay windows."
They walked on slowly.
"Have you known our hostess of to-night long?" Sir Donald asked presently.
"A good while--quite a good while. But I'm very much away at Rome now. Since I have been there she has married."
"I have only met her to speak to once before to-night, though I have seen her about very often and heard her sing."
"Ah!"
"To me she is an enigma," Sir Donald continued with some hesitation. "I cannot make her out at all."
Robin Pierce smiled in the dark and thrust his hands deep down in the pockets of his overcoat.
"I don't know," Sir Donald resumed, after a slight pause, "I don't know what is your--whether you care much for beauty in its innumerable forms. Many young men don't, I believe."
"I do," said Robin. "My mother is an Italian, you know, and not an Italian Philistine."
"Then you can help me, perhaps. Does Lady Holme care for beauty? But she must. It is impossible that she does not."
"Do you think so? Why?"
"I really cannot reconcile myself to the idea that such performances as hers are matters of chance."
"They are not. Lady Holme is not a woman who chances things before the cruel world in which she, you and I live, Sir Donald."
"Exactly. I felt sure of that. Then we come to calculation of effects, to consideration of that very interesting question--self-consciousness in art."
"Do you feel that Lady Holme is self-conscious when she is singing?"
"No. And that is just the point. She must, I suppose, have studied till she has reached that last stage of accomplishment in which the self-consciousness present is so perfectly concealed that it seems to be eliminated."
"Exactly. She has an absolute command over her means."
"One cannot deny it. No musician could contest it. But the question that interests me lies behind all this. There is more than accomplishment in her performance. There is temperament, there is mind, there is emotion and complete understanding. I am scarcely speaking strongly enough in saying complete--perhaps infinitely subtle would be nearer the mark. What do you say?"
"I don't think if you said that there appears to be an infinitely subtle understanding at work in Lady Holme's singing you would be going at all too far."
"Appears to be?"
Sir Donald stopped for a moment on the pavement under a gas-lamp. As the light fell on him he looked like a weary old ghost longing to fade away into the dark shadows of the London night.
"You say 'appears to be,'" he repeated.
"Yes."
"May I ask why?"
"Well, would you undertake to vouch for Lady Holme's understanding--I mean for the infinite subtlety of it?"
Sir Donald began to walk on once more.
"I cannot find it in her conversation," he said.
"Nor can I, nor can anyone."
"She is full of personal fascination, of course."
"You mean because of her personal beauty?"
"No, it's more than that, I think. It's the woman herself. She is suggestive somehow. She makes one's imagination work. Of course she is beautiful."
"And she thinks that is everything. She would part with her voice, her intelligence--she is very intelligent in the quick, frivolous fashion that is necessary for London--that personal fascination you speak of, everything rather than her white-rose complexion and the wave in her hair."
"Really, really?"
"Yes. She thinks the outside everything. She believes the world is governed, love is won and held, happiness is gained and kept by the husk of things. She told me only to-night that it is her face which sings to us all, not her voice; that were she to sing as well and be an ugly woman we should not care to listen to her."
"H'm! H'm!"
"Absurd, isn't it?"
"What will