Ermyntrude broke in on this indeterminate speech, her natural kindliness prompting her to say with as much heartiness as she could assume: "Now, you know I'm always pleased to see you and Alan, dear. This is Prince Alexis Varasashvili."
Any fears that Ermyntrude might have nourished that Janet would try to monopolise her exalted guest were soon dispersed. Janet looked flustered, and retreated as soon as she could to Mary's side. Janet was engaged to be married to a tea-planter, living in Ceylon; and although she had so far been unable to reconcile it with her conscience to abandon her father and brother, she was a constant young woman, and found every other man than her tea-planter supremely uninteresting. The Prince alarmed her a little, for she was a simple creature, quite unused to cosmopolitan circles, and instead of listening to his conversation, she began to give Mary an account, in a tiresome undertone, of the tea-planter's adventures, as exemplified in his last letter to her.
Her brother, however, a willowy youth, who cultivated an errant lock of hair, took up a determined position on the sofa beside the Prince, and proclaimed himself to be a fervent admirer of the Russian School.
"And what school might that be?" asked Ermyntrude, bent on putting him in his place.
"My dear Mrs. Carter!" said Alan with a superior smile. "Literature!"
"Oh literature!" said Ermyntrude. "Is that all!"
"All! Yes, I am inclined to think that it is indeed all!"
White, who was waiting by a side-table while Wally mixed a drink for him, overheard this, and said, with a laugh: "That young cub of mine getting astride his hobbyhorse? You snub him, Mrs. Carter, that's my advice to you! If he read less and worked more, he'd do well."
"Oh well!" said Wally tolerantly. "I'm very fond of reading myself. Not in the summer, of course."
Alan apparently considered this remark beneath contempt, for he turned his shoulder to the rest of the room, and fixing the Prince with a stern and penetrating gaze, uttered one word: 'Tchekhov!"
Vicky, who thought she had been out of the limelight for long enough, and had once seen The Cherry Orchard, said thrillingly: "The psychology of humanity! Too, too marvellous!"
"Oh, Vicky, you're doing your hair a new way!" exclaimed Janet, suddenly noticing it.
"Yes," said Vicky, firmly putting the conversation back on to an elevated plane. "It's an expression of mood. Tonight I felt as though some other, stranger soul had entered into me. I had to fit myself to it. Had to!"
"You look beautiful!" Alan said, in a low voice. "I sometimes think there must be Russian blood in you. You're so sensitive, if you know what I mean."
"Storm-tossed," said Vicky unhappily.
"No, no, duchinka!" said the Prince, amused. "I find instead that you are youth-tossed."
"One must believe in youth," said Alan intensely.
With the exception of Vicky, none of his audience showed much sign of agreeing with this dictum. White told him that he talked too much, and Steel said that, speaking for himself, he had no use for Tchekhov.
"Good God!" exclaimed Alan, profoundly disgusted. "That mastery of under-statement! That fluid style! When I saw The Three Sisters, for instance, it absolutely shattered me!"
"Well, if it comes to that, it pretty well shattered me," said Wally. "In fact, had anyone told me what sort of a show it was, I wouldn't have gone."
"I must say, that was a dreary piece," admitted Ermyntrude. "I dare say it was all very clever, but it wasn't my idea of a cheery evening."
"To my mind, The Seagull was yet finer," said Alan. "There one had the crushing weight of cumulative gloom pressing on one until it became almost an agony!"
"When I go to the theatre," said Ermyntrude flatly, "I don't want to be crushed by gloom."
It was plain that Alan thought such an attitude of mind contemptible, but the Prince threw Ermyntrude one of his brilliant smiles, and said: "Always you are right, Trudinka. Indeed, you were made for light and laughter."
"Take Gogol!" commanded Alan. "Think of that subtle union of mysticism and realism, more especially in Dead Souls!"
"Well, what of it?" asked Wally. "It's all very well for you to say "take Gogol", but nobody wants to, and what's more we don't want to talk about dead souls either. You run along with Vicky and have a game of billiards, or something."
"The panacea of the inevitable ball!" said Alan, with a bitter smile. "Does it puzzle you, Prince, our obsession with Sport?"
"But I find that you are not obsessed with Sport, my friend, but on the contrary with the literature of my country. Yet I must tell you that in translation something is lost."
The mention of sport put Ermyntrude in mind of the borrowed shot-gun, and she at once turned to catch Wally's eye. Failing, she was obliged to nudge Mary, and to whisper: "Tell him to ask about the gun!"
Mary, who saw no reason for such stealth, at once said: "Oh, Uncle Wally, don't forget you were going to ask Mr. White for the shot-gun!"
Ermyntrude thought such a direct approach rather rude, and blushed; but White was at once profuse in apologies. "It slipped my memory," he said. "If you'd only given me a ring I could have brought it over tonight! I'll tell you what, Mrs. Carter, I'll pop across with it first thing in the morning."
"Oh, I'm sure I didn't mean That is, Wally's shooting tomorrow, you see!" said Ermyntrude, flustered. "Naturally, you're very welcome, what with Wally using it so seldom, and that."
Wally spoilt the effect of this generous speech by giving vent to his annoying snigger. "Well, that's not what you said this morning. A nice slating I got for lending you the gun, I can tell you, Harold!"
Ready tears of mortification sprang to Ermyntrude's eyes. Mary saw Steel watching her steadily, a little angry pulse throbbing in his temple, and said quickly: "I suggest we get up a game of snooker! You'll play, won't you, Janet?"
Janet, however, said that she was so bad at it that she would prefer to watch. Steel was more obliging, and the Prince announced that nothing could give him greater pleasure. After a good deal of argument, Janet was persuaded to overcome her diffidence, and everyone but Ermyntrude, Vicky and Alan consented to play. Vicky volunteered to mark, and Alan, refusing to play on the score that the sides were even without him, attached himself to her, and tried to hold her attention with a description of the wealth of sordid misery to be found in the works of Maxim Gorky. The billiard-room was a very large room, one end of it being furnished to constitute what Ermyntrude called a smoking-lounge. Here Ermyntrude ensconced herself, in a deep armchair. Between shots, the Prince stood beside her, conversing in low tones, a circumstance which did not find favour in Steel's eyes.
The game was necessarily a light-hearted affair, for the Prince and White were the only really skilled players, and Janet insisted upon being told continually which ball to aim at, which pocket to put it in, and how to handle her cue. White took no part in the coaching of his daughter, but seized the opportunity afforded by the Prince's patiently instructing her, to draw Wally aside, and say to him in a confidential undertone: "If you're looking for a good thing - mind you, when I say good I mean a regular snip! - I think I can put you on to it."
Wally, who was imbibing his third whisky since dinner, was feeling slightly querulous, and replied in a Complaining voice: "What about that money I lent you?"
"That'll be all right, old man," said White soothingly. "No need for you to worry about that."
"Oh, there isn't, isn't there? That's what you think, but I don't, Nice to-do there'd be if Ermy found out about it."
"Well, she won't. I tell you it's all right!"
"No, she won't find out because now I come to think of it you've got to pay it back next week," said Wally triumphantly.
These words, which were spoken in an unguarded tone, reached Mary's ears. At that moment, Janet, taking painstaking aim, miscued, and it became White's turn to play. As he walked over to the table, Mary caught Steel's eye, and realised, with a curious sinking of her spirits, that he also had overheard Wally's last speech. He was standing beside Mary, and asked in an abrupt undertone whether Wally had lent money to White.