No, one didn’t marry. One did stunts. But she wasn’t any longer interested in George. “Don’t rumple and ruffle my dress.” “Since when Dryad, have you begun to worry about dresses?” “Since this minute.”
Hermione emerged from behind the shelter of the very grand baby-grand piano. “Shirley, we never ask you to play for us—” “Gawd, don’t ask her—” Shirley looked up an odd twist to her fine straight eye-brows. A white flame of pain crossed her eyes, dark eyes, wide apart staring like a crystal gazer’s. Why had George said that? Was he being rude simply? But now his rudeness seemed insanity, seemed blatant cruelty. His rudeness, his casual approach to both of them, for she was sure he had kissed, had long been kissing Shirley. Don’t marry him or her — just go on kissing them. Well, what anyhow did it matter. Wide flame of pain in the almond eyes of Shirley flashed, went, and the almond eyes of Shirley were just odd almond eyes with a little glow of passion. “O George is like that. He thinks I play so badly.” Play badly? Was that it? Was that the thing between them? Hermione knew there had been something there. Something that had drawn her near though so straightly separated, from Shirley. “O but you don’t — I’m sure you don’t. I know you do play nicely.” It was Darrington. For a moment pain swept away and Hermione loved Darrington. Darrington who was making her write again, who was bringing almond eyes back to their normal level of just rather odd blank kindness. Shirley was very kind. Little suppers, tea at any time, people coming and going. It must be lovely to have such a charming flat, a place you could see people, not crowding odd hours in at the Louvre, in restaurants, in tea-shops. It was exhausting never being able to talk properly to Darrington. Shirley was very fortunate, clever too, that was what was wrong really with Shirley. She was clever.
“The trouble is you’re too clever to be a real musician.” “O?” “I feel it. You could write. Criticism. The two don’t go together.”
What was lies, what was truth in all this? But this wasn’t true. This table, this chair, this supper, this coffee after supper, this cigarette. But was this true, just this, this smoke wreathing up and up in the rose-shaded light of the lamp casting its again shaded glow through the half drawn curtain of the inner room beyond the wide French window. Was this true? Was this smoke curling up and up and the numb beatific column of its beauty quite true? “I’m glad I’ve at last taught you to smoke properly.” The voice at her elbow as part of the vagueness of the cigarette was true in the same sense that the smoke was true. Darrington’s voice. Darrington’s voice had always been true for it had always (from the first) been vague, been apprehended through a sort of trance state as first apprehended in that vague drawing room somewhere (London?) where George had made pronouncements on sandal wood and thy painted bark. Whose painted bark? “O George I thought you’d written them to me.” “What made you think that Lointaine?” “I thought you’d told me you had.” “O but I tell that to everybody.” So George had apparently. Told that to everybody. But George Lowndes with his stark beauty, with his brush of beard, with his velvet jacket, with his now accepted scholarship and his little recognized position wasn’t true. He had suddenly projected himself out, become a certain person with a certain reputation and something had departed. Was he a cigarette simply that had been smoked out? “I’m glad Astraea that at last you’re dedicated.” “Dedicated?” It was Walter asking the question, Walter resting his great weight heavily in the low garden chair with the light from within and the shadow from without struggling across his alabaster features. O God. Again pity wracked her. Pity rose and spoiled the dream, the drift and drug of the thing, this smoke that curled up, up in Vérène’s garden, that was reality. Pity cut across like white hail across a smoke-blue lilac bush. Pity was white hail that slashed and tore and rent her. Pity. For who simply? Could it be for Vérène all smooth and small and dark opposite Walter, presiding in her own little garden (their own little garden) over the excellent and exquisite al fresco little supper? Could pity blight with its arrogant assumptions this place of peace, this garden, this far and far and far slow rumble and pulse and beat of light that was far Paris. Could pity so arrogantly enter this demesne? “O Vérène darling, Shirley (I saw her yesterday) sent a message to you — something — I’ve half forgotten—” “Was it about coming in on Monday?” “Yes. That was it. I said I was due out here this evening. She was having some people in and asked — me—” (Hermione had almost said—“us”) “to meet them. When I said I was dining at Vérène’s she said, ‘give her this message for me. Say Shirley’s sorry but she can’t possibly come Monday.’ ” “But she promised — long — ago—” “Why worry with her?” It was Walter, alabaster rose and shadow. Walter spoke seated massive and great in the low chair. “Why, Vérène, have you been so concerned about her?” Vérène said, pouring coffee that she didn’t know, had never really liked the girl, but as she was one of Walter’s pupils—“Was she? Did she ever do anything?” It was Darrington who asked this, evidently half out of curiosity, half to fill the gap, and Vérène said before Walter could anticipate her, “nothing.”
Walter said, “I shouldn’t exactly say that Vérène. She had ideas.” “What sort of ideas?” “O, things that you — wouldn’t — follow—” And someone laughed, was it Vérène simply, blind in her arrogance, full and blown open like a summer rose? The wind had ruffled her petal, the lordly king-wind had stooped from the North, had swept down from the cold irradiance of glaciers to embrace her. Vérène might laugh proud in her little moment. Rose that the wind must pass.
“O I thought her rather odd — her eyes — charming—” Hermione said this. She had thought her odd, began to see her as charming now that she was wreathed about with smoke, with lilac-blue that was the odd and prevalent image of the vague sensation of rest and of recognition Darringtons voice brought her. It had been that way from the first. Darrington had been a voice before he was a presence. He was a presence now, permeated as white wine with alcohol. Alcohol was crude, a poison without the white wine. Darrington’s voice was the distillation of pure aether. What was his voice? Again it broke across her musings. “Old Lowndes, it appeared, was one time thick with her.”
The thing that Darrington said was not exactly the right thing to say on the verge of George Lowndes’ engagement. But that was the nice thing about Darrington. He said the wrong thing in the right voice. There was something piquante, engaging in his manner. He said these things deliberately, one felt he knew he said them, not crudely like George, with his “for Gawd’s sake don’t,” when they had asked Shirley to play for them. Walter said, “yes, we thought here, she was going to marry him.”