‘That’s enough, George,’ said my aunt.
‘What?’
‘Admiring yourself in the looking-glass all the time.’
‘Not a bit—’
‘You will dine with us.’
‘Yes. Now I must go back to the hotel to change.’
‘Don’t be late,’ she called after me.
When I descended, Beastly had already gone. At the hotel I found an invitation for me to attend next week a dinner given by the Imperial General Staff. As I drove back to dinner, full of half-apprehended anticipations, the shadows were already black under the wheels, and next to the little dwarf slave there ran another with a longer neck and legs like stilts.
7
AND AS I RANG THE BELL AND THE BOY OPENED THE door to me, Sylvia was there, standing in the hall, bright-eyed, long-limbed, graceful as a sylph. We waited for my aunt: some moments afterwards she came down, and in her wake we all went in to dinner. Sylvia sat facing me. She bent her head, closed her eyes (while I noticed the length of the lashes), and bringing her outstretched fingers together, hurriedly mumbled grace to herself. Then took up the spoon — and once again revealed her luminous eyes. And I noticed the exquisite curve of her finely drawn black brows.
She was so strikingly beautiful that one could not get used to her face: could not rest one’s eyes on her, could not make out what was the matter with it, after all. She was so beautiful that one’s eye could not fix on her — and one asked oneself why the deuce she wasn’t more beautiful still!
‘Sylvia! Again!’ said Aunt Teresa.
And, involuntarily, Sylvia blinked.
‘And your friend?’ Mme Vanderphant asked.
‘Who? Beastly? He is dining out.’
‘Mais voilà un nom!’ laughed my aunt, and revealed her beautiful profile against the light: it was plastered up pretty considerably with powder and paste, but the outlines were intact and lovely enough, I can tell you.
‘There are some funny names in the world,’ I agreed, ‘like that of my batman, for instance, who is called Pickup. I didn’t invent them, so I can’t help it.’
‘Ah, je te crois bien!’ Uncle Emmanuel agreed.
‘He has perfectly vertical nostrils, that man Major Beastly,’ exclaimed Aunt Teresa. ‘I never saw anything like it!’
‘He seems a very nice man none the less,’ said Berthe.
‘But — a horrible nuisance! When he wasn’t seasick he suffered from acute attacks of dysentery all the way out.’
‘Poor man!’ she exclaimed. ‘And nobody to look after him.’
‘And instead of shaving in the clean manly way as he should, he used a fiendish contrivance (devised, I think, for the benefit of your sex) for burning off his facial growth, making an unholy stink in the doing — regularly on the fourth day.’
Sylvia laughed.
‘The voyage across the Pacific’—I turned to her—‘took us fourteen days, during which time Major Beastly made a stink in our cabin three times.’
‘George!’ said my aunt, calling me to order.
I raised my eyes and looked straight into hers. ‘I use the word advisedly: a smell wasn’t in it!’
‘But, mon Dieu! I should have protested against this,’ said Mme Vanderphant.
‘To a senior officer?’ My uncle turned to her sardonically, as one who knew that such things were not done in the Service.
‘Impossible?’
‘Mais je le crois bien, madame!’ he said excitedly.
‘As a matter of fact,’ I explained, ‘Beastly was my junior three days before we sailed. But he was promoted in a single day from a sub to a major because he deals in rail and steam, and is just the man they wanted to advise them on the Manchurian railway, I believe.’
‘Sylvia! Again!’ Aunt Teresa interrupted. Sylvia blinked again.
‘His answer when I approached him diplomatically was that he had a very delicate skin which couldn’t stand the scraping of the razor blade.’
‘And nothing happened?’
‘I cannot say what happened. As I was about to press him more definitely, he had an acute attack of dysentery, and the question was indefinitely postponed.’
‘Pauvre homme,’ said Berthe.
The two Vanderphant girls were conspicuously well-behaved, and confined themselves to saying, ‘Oui, maman,’ and ‘Non, maman,’ or possibly, when passing things to Aunt Teresa, who was like a Queen amongst us, they might anticipate her wishes with a coy: ‘Madame désire?’ But scarcely anything more. There they sat, side by side, the one dressed exactly like the other and wearing the same fringe across the forehead, neither plain nor yet particularly good-looking, but very well-behaved; while their mother talked to me of Guy de Maupassant and the novels of Zola.
‘It is so good that your parents sent you to Oxford,’ my aunt said.
I lowered my lashes at that. ‘Yes, of course, it is rather an event to go up to Oxford. It’s not as if you went up to Cambridge, or anything like that.’
‘It had always been my ambition,’ said Uncle Emmanuel, ‘to go to the University. Alas! I was sent to the Military Academy instead.’
‘And Anatole, too,’ exclaimed my aunt, ‘would rather have gone to the University, as his father also would have liked him to go. But I wouldn’t let him — I don’t remember why — and he, good boy that he is, would not have done anything to sadden me. His only thought, his only interest in life is his mother.’
She sighed — while I remembered how Anatole said to me one evening while on leave in England:
‘Oh, you know, I get round mother easily enough.’
‘Still, a university,’ she mused, ‘may have been better for him, now that the war’s over. Like his father he is a poet, though he is his mother’s boy. But I sent him to the Military College instead.’
‘There are as many fools at a university as elsewhere,’ I said to calm her belated qualms of conscience. ‘But their folly, I admit, has a certain stamp — the stamp of university training, if you like. It is trained folly.’
‘Ah!’ said Mme Vanderphant, with a very conscious attempt at being intellectual, ‘is it not always so: one belittles one’s past opportunities if one hasn’t made full use of them?’
‘It’s not a question of belittling anything,’ I said. ‘It’s the attitude which Oxford breeds in you: that nothing will henceforth astonish you — Oxford included.’
And suddenly I remembered summer term: the Oxford Colleges exuding culture and inertia. And I became rhapsodical. ‘Ah!’ I cried, ‘there’s nothing like it! It’s wonderful. You go down the High, let us say, to your tutor’s, enter his rooms like your own, and there he stands, a grey-haired scholar with a beak that hawks would envy, in his bedroom slippers, terribly learned, jingling the money in his trouser pockets and warming his seat at the fire, smoking at you while he talks to you, like an elder brother, of literature. Or take a bump supper. There’s a don nicknamed Horse, and at a bump supper, after the Master has spoken, we all cry: “Horse! Horse! Horse!” and he gets up, smiling, and makes a speech. But there is such a din of voices that not a word can be heard.’
To tell you the truth, when I was at Oxford — I was bored. My impression of Oxford is that I sat in my rooms, bored, and that it ceaselessly rained. But now, warmed by their interest, I told them how I played soccer, rowed in the Eights, sat in the president’s chair at the Union. Rank lies, of course. I cannot help it. I am like that — imaginative. I have a sensitive heart. I cannot get myself to disappoint expectations. Ah! Oxford is best in retrospect. I think life is best in retrospect. When I lie in my grave and remember my life back to the time I was born, as a whole, perhaps I shall forgive my creator the sin of creating me.