The Woman with the Fan | Page 9

only the married man knows anything of women. The Frenchmen are wrong. It is not the mistress who informs, it is the loving wife. For me the sex remains mysterious, like the heroine of my realm of dreams."
"You are talking great nonsense, Rupert."
"I always do when I am depressed, and I am very specially depressed to-night."
"But why? There must be some very special reason."
"There is. I, too, dined out and met at dinner a young man whose one desire in life appears to be to deprive living creatures of life."
Sir Donald moved slightly.
"You're not a sportsman, then, Mr. Carey?" he said.
"Indeed, I am. I've shot big game, the Lord forgive me, and found big pleasure in doing it. Yet this young man depressed me. He was so robust, so perfectly happy, so supremely self-satisfied, and, according to his own account, so enormously destructive, that he made me feel very sick. He is married. He married a widow who has an ear-trumpet and a big shooting in Scotland. If she could be induced to crawl in underwood, or stand on a cairn against a skyline, I'm sure he'd pot at her for the fun of the thing."
"What is his name?" asked Sir Donald.
"I didn't catch it. My host called him Leo. He has--"
"Ah! He is my only son."
Pierce looked very uncomfortable, but Carey replied calmly:
"Really. I wonder he hasn't shot you long ago."
Sir Donald smiled.
"Doesn't he depress you?" added Carey.
"He does, I'm sorry to say, but scarcely so much as I depress him."
"I think Lady Holme would like him."
For once Sir Donald looked really expressive, of surprise and disgust.
"Oh, I can't think so!" he said.
"Yes, yes, she would. She doesn't care honestly for art-loving men. Her idea of a real man, the sort of man a woman marries, or bolts with, or goes off her head for, is a huge mass of bones and muscles and thews and sinews that knows not beauty. And your son would adore her, Sir Donald. Better not let him, though. Holme's a jealous devil."
"Totally without reason," said Pierce, with a touch of bitterness.
"No doubt. It's part of his Grand Turk nature. He ought to possess a Yildiz. He's out of place in London where marital jealousy is more unfashionable than pegtop trousers."
He buried himself in his glass. Sir Donald rose to go.
"I hope I may see you again," he said rather tentatively at parting. "I am to be found in the Albany."
They both said they would call, and he slipped away gently.
"There's a sensitive man," said Carey when he had gone. "A sort of male Lady Cardington. Both of them are morbidly conscious of their age and carry it about with them as if it were a crime. Yet they're both worth knowing. People with that temperament who don't use hair-dye must have grit. His son's awful."
"And his poems?"
"Very crude, very faulty, very shy, but the real thing. But he'll never publish anything again. It must have been torture to him to reveal as much as he did in that book. He must find others to express him, and such as him, to the world."
"Lady Holmes?"
"/Par exemple/. Deuced odd that while the dumb understand the whole show the person who's describing it quite accurately to them often knows nothing about it. Paradox, irony, blasted eternal cussedness of life! Did you ever know Lady Ulford?"
"No."
"She was a horse-dealer's daughter."
Rupert!"
"On my honour! One of those women who are all shirt and collar and nattiness, with a gold fox for a tie-pin and a hunting-crop under the arm. She was killed schooling a horse in Mexico after making Ulford shy and uncomfortable for fifteen years. Lady Cardington and a Texas cowboy would have been as well suited to one another. Ulford's been like a wistful ghost, they tell me, ever since her death. I should like to see him and his son together."
A hard and almost vicious gleam shone for as instant in his eyes.
"You're as cruel as a Spaniard at a bull-fight."
"My boy, I've been gored by the bull."
Pierce was silent for a minute. He thought of Lady Holme's white-rose complexion and of the cessation of Carey's acquaintance with the Holmes. No one seemed to know exactly why Carey went to the house in Cadogan Square no more.
"For God's sake give me another drink, Robin, and make it a stiff one."
Pierce poured out the whisky and thought:
"Could it have been that?"
Carey emptied the tumbler and heaved a long sigh.
"When d'you go back to Rome?"
"Beginning of July."
"You'll be there in the dead season."
"I like Rome then. The heat doesn't hurt me and I love the peace. Antiquity seems to descend upon the city in August, returning to its own when America is far away."
Carey stared at him hard.
"A rising diplomatist oughtn't to live in the past," he said