She burst into high, loud laughter. He said:
“Damn it all, it isn’t any laughing matter!… Look here! You don’t know what I risk…. There are A.P.M.s and P.M.s and deputy sub-acting A.P.M.s walking about the corridors of all the hotels in this town, all night long…. It’s as much as my job is worth….”
She put her handkerchief to her lips to hide a smile that she knew would be too cruel for him not to notice. And even when she took it away, he said:
“Hang it all, what a cruel-looking fiend you are!… Why the devil do I hang around you?… There’s a picture that my mother’s got, by Burne-Jones… A cruel-looking woman with a distant smile… some vampire… La belle Dame sans Merci. That’s what you’re like.”
She looked at him suddenly with considerable seriousness….
“See here, Potty…” she began. He groaned:
“I believe you’d like me to be sent to the beastly trenches…. Yet a big, distinguished-looking chap like me wouldn’t have a chance…. At the first volley the Germans fired, they’d pick me off….”
“Oh, Potty,” she exclaimed, “try to be serious for a minute…. I tell you I’m a woman who’s trying… who’s desperately wanting… to be reconciled to her husband! I would riot tell that to another soul…. I would not tell it to myself…. But one owes something… a parting scene, if nothing else…. Well, something… to a man one’s been in bed with…. I didn’t give you a parting scene at ah, Yssingueux-les-Pervenches… so I give you this tip instead….”
He said:
“Will you leave your bedroom door unlocked, or won’t you?”
She said:
“If that man would throw his handkerchief to me, I would follow him round the world in my shift! Look here… see me shake when I think of it….” She held out her hand at the end of her long arm: hand and arm trembled together, minutely, then very much…. “Well,” she finished, “if you see that and still want to come to my room… your blood be on your own head….” She paused for a breath or two and then said:
“You can come…. I won’t lock my door. But I don’t say that you’ll get anything… or that you’ll like what you get…. That’s a fair tip….” She added suddenly: “You sale fat… take what you get and be damned to you!…”
Major Perowne had suddenly taken to twirling his moustaches; he said:
“Oh, I’ll chance the A.P.M.s…”
She suddenly coiled her legs into her chair.
“I know now what I came here for,” she said.
Major Wilfrid Fosbrooke Eddicker Perowne of Perowne, the son of his mother, was one of those individuals who have no history, no strong proclivities, nothing; his knowledge seemed to be bounded by the contents of his newspaper for the immediate day. At any rate, his conversation never went any farther. He was not bold, he was not shy; he was neither markedly courageous nor markedly cowardly. His mother was immoderately wealthy, owned an immense castle that hung over crags, above a western sea, much as a bird-cage hangs from a window of a high tenement building, but she received few or no visitors, her cuisine being indifferent and her wine atrocious. She had strong temperance opinions and, immediately after the death of her husband, she had emptied the contents of his cellar, which were almost as historic as his castle, into the sea, a shudder going through county-family and no, or almost no, characteristics. He had done England. But even this was not enough to make Perowne himself notorious.
His mother allowed him — after an eyeopener in early youth — the income of a junior royalty, but he did nothing with it. He lived in a great house in Palace Gardens, Kensington, and he lived all alone with rather a large staff of servants who had been selected by his mother, but they did nothing at all, for he, ate all his meals, and even took his bath and dressed for dinner at the Bath Club. He was otherwise parsimonious.
He had, after the fashion of his day, passed a year or two in the army when young. He had been first gazetted to His Majesty’s Forty-second Regiment, but on the Black Watch proceeding to India he had exchanged into the Glamorganshires, at that time commanded by General Campion and recruiting in and around Lincolnshire. The general had been an old friend of Perowne’s mother, and, on being promoted to brigadier, had taken Perowne on to his staff as his galloper, for, although Perowne rode rather indifferently, he had a certain social knowledge and could be counted on to know how correctly to address a regimental invitation to a dowager countess who had married a viscount’s third son…. As a military figure otherwise he had a very indifferent word of command, a very poor drill and next to no control of his men, but he was popular with his batmen, and in a rather stiff way was presentable in the old scarlet uniform or the blue mess jacket. He was exactly six foot, to a hairbreadth, in his stockings, had very dark eyes, and a rather grating voice; the fact that his limbs were a shade too bulky for his trunk, which was not at all corpulent, made him appear a little clumsy. If in a club you asked what sort of a fellow he was your interlocutor would tell you, most probably, that he had or was supposed to have warts on his head, this to account for his hair which all his life he had combed back, unparted from his forehead. But as a matter of fact he had no warts on his head.
He had once started out on an expedition to shoot big game in Portuguese East Africa. But on its arrival his expedition was met with the news that the natives of the interior were in revolt, so Perowne had returned to Kensington Palace Gardens. He had had several mild successes with women, but, owing to his habits of economy and fear of imbroglios, until the age of thirty-four, he had limited the field of his amours to young women of the lower social orders….
His affair with Sylvia Tietjens might have been something to boast about, but he was not boastful, and indeed he had been too hard hit when she had left him even to bear to account lyingly for the employment of the time he had spent with her in Brittany. Fortunately no one took sufficient interest in his movements to wait for his answer to their indifferent questions as to where he had spent the summer. When his mind reverted to her desertion of him moisture would come out of his eyes, undemonstratively, as water leaves the surface of a sponge….
Sylvia had left him by the simple expedient of stepping without so much as a reticule on to the little French tramway that took you to the main railway line. From there she had written to him in pencil on a closed correspondence card that she had left him because she simply could not bear either his dullness or his craking voice. She said they would probably run up against each other in the course of the autumn season in town and, after purchase of some night things, had made straight for the German spa to which her mother had retreated.
At the later date Sylvia had no difficulty in accounting to herself for her having gone off with such an oaf: she had simply reacted in a violent fit of sexual hatred, from her husband’s mind. And she could not have found a mind more utterly dissimilar than Perowne’s in any decently groomed man to be found in London. She could recall, even in the French hotel lounge, years after, the almost painful emotion of joyful hatred that had visited her when she had first thought of going off with him. It was the self-applause of one who has just hit upon an excruciatingly inspiring intellectual discovery. In her previous transitory infidelities to Christopher she had discovered that, however presentable the man with whom she might have been having an affair, and however short the affair, even if it were only a matter of a week-end, Christopher had spoilt her for the other man. It was the most damnable of his qualities that to hear any other man talk of any subject — any, any subject — from stable form to the balance of power, or from the voice of a given opera singer to the recurrence of a comet — to have to pass a week-end with any other man and hear his talk after having spent the inside of the week with Christopher, hate his ideas how you might, was the difference between listening to a grown man and, with an intense boredom, trying to entertain an inarticulate schoolboy. As beside him, other men simply did not seem ever to have grown up….