Death and the Dancing Footman (3 page)

“I’m glad you realize it,” said Mandrake. “The list of opposites is positively ghastly. I don’t know if I have altogether followed you, but it appears that you hope to reconcile a rejected lover both to his successor and to his late love; a business woman to her detested rival; a ruined beauty to an exponent of the profession that made an effigy of her face, and a mother to a prospective daughter-in-law who has rejected her favourite son for his brother.”

“There is another permutation that you have not yet heard. Local gossip rings with rumours of some secret understanding between Dr. Hart and Madame Lisse. It appears that Madame recommends Dr. Hart’s surgery to those of her clients who have passed the stage when Lisse creams and all the rest of it can improve their aging faces.”

“A business arrangement.”

“Something more than that if Hersey — a prejudiced witness, certainly — is to be believed. Hersey’s spies tell her that Dr. Hart has been observed leaving Madame Lisse’s flat at a most compromising hour; that he presented to an exciting degree the mien of a clandestine lover, his hat drawn over his brows, his cloak (he wears a cloak) pulled about his face. They say that he has been observed to scowl most formidably at the mention of Nicholas Compline.”

“Oh, no,” said Mandrake, “it’s really a little too much. I boggle at the cloak.”

“It’s a Tyrolean cloak with a hood, a most useful garment. Rain-proof. He has presented me with one. I wear it frequently. You shall see it to-morrow.”

“What’s he like, this face-lifter?”

“A smoothish fellow. I find him amusing. He plays very good bridge.”

“We are
not
going to play bridge?”

“No. No; that, I feel, would be asking for trouble. We
are
going to play a round game, however.”

“Oh God!”

“You will enjoy it. A stimulating game. I hope that it will go far towards burying our little armoury of hatchets. Imagine what fun, Aubrey, if on Monday morning they all go gaily away, full of the milk of human kindness.”

“You’re seeing yourself in the detestable role of uplifter. I’ve got it! This is not Pirandello, nor is it vaudeville. Far from it. But it
is
,” cried Mandrake with an air of intense disgust, “it
is
‘The Passing of the Third Floor Back.’ ”

Jonathan rose and stood warming his hands at the fire. He was a small man, very upright, with a long trunk and short legs. Mandrake, staring at him, wondered if it was some trick of firelight that lent a faintly malicious tinge to Jonathan’s smile; if it was merely his thick-lensed glasses that gave him that air of uncanny blankness.

“Ah, well,” said Jonathan, “a peacemaker. Why not? You would like to see your room, Aubrey. The blue room, as usual, of course. It is no longer raining. I propose to take a look at the night before going up to change. Will you accompany me?”

“Very well.”

They went out, crossing a wide hall, to the entrance. The wind had fallen and, as Jonathan opened his great outer doors, the quiet of an upland county at dusk entered the house and the smell of earth, still only lightly covered with snow. They walked out on the wide platform in front of Highfold. Far beneath them Cloudyfold village showed dimly through tree-tops and beyond it the few scattered houses down in the Vale, four miles away. In the southern skies the stars were out, but northward above Cloudyfold Top there was a well of blackness. And as Jonathan and his guest turned towards the north they received the sensation of an icy hand laid on their faces.

“That’s a deathly cold air,” said Mandrake.

“It’s from the north,” said Jonathan, “and still smells of snow. Splendid! Let us go in.”

On the following day Mandrake observed his host to be in a high state of excitement. In spite of his finicky mannerisms and his somewhat old-maidish pedantry, it would never have occurred to his worst enemy to call Jonathan effeminate. Nevertheless he had many small talents that are unusual in a man. He took a passionate interest in the appointments of his house. He arranged flowers to perfection and on the arrival of three boxes from a florist in Great Chipping, darted at them like a delighted ant. Mandrake was sent to the Highfold glass-houses for tuberoses and gardenias. Jonathan, looking odd in one of his housekeeper’s aprons, buried himself in the flower-room. He intended he said, to reproduce bouquets from the French prints in the boudoir. Mandrake, whose floral tastes ran austerely to dead flowers, limped off to the library and thought about his new play, which was to represent twelve aspects of one character, all speaking together.

The morning was still and extremely cold. During the night there had been another light fall of snow. The sky was leaden and the countryside seemed to wait ominously for some portent from the north. Jonathan remarked several times, and with extraordinary glee, that they were in for a severe storm. Fires were lit in all the guest rooms and from the Highfold chimneys rose columns of smoke, lighter in tone than the clouds they seemed to support. Somewhere up on Cloudyfold a farmer was moving his sheep and the drowsy sound of their slow progress seemed uncannily near. So dark was the sky that the passage of the hours was seen only in a stealthy alteration of shadows. Jonathan and Mandrake lunched by lamplight. Mandrake said that he felt the house to be alive with anticipation, but whether of a storm without or within he was unable to decide. “It’s a grisly day,” said Mandrake.

“I shall telephone Sandra Compline and suggest that she bring her party for tea,” said Jonathan. “It will begin to snow again before six o’clock, I believe. What do you think of the house, Aubrey? How does it feel?”

“Expectant and luxurious.”

“Good. Excellent. You have finished? Let us make a little tour of the rooms, shall we? Dear me, it’s a long time since I looked forward so much to a party.”

They made their tour. In the great drawing-room, seldom used by Jonathan, cedar-wood fires blazed at each end. Mrs. Pouting and two maids put glazed French covers on the armchairs and the
bergère
sofas.

“Summer-time uniforms,” said Jonathan, “but they chime with the flowers and are gay. Admire my flowers, Aubrey. Don’t they look pleasant against the linen-fold walls? Quite a tone-poem, I consider.”

“And when seven furious faces are added,” said Mandrake, “the harmony will be complete.”

“You can’t frighten me. The faces will be all smiles in less than no time, you may depend on it. And, after all, even if they are not to be reconciled, I shall not complain. My play will be less pretty but more exciting.”

“Aren’t you afraid that they will simply refuse to stay under the same roof with each other?”

“They will at least stay tonight; and tomorrow, I hope, will be so inclement that the weather alone will turn the balance.”

“Your courage is amazing. Suppose they all sulk in separate rooms?”

“They won’t. I won’t let ’em. Confess now, Aubrey, aren’t you a little amused, a little stimulated?”

Mandrake grinned. “I feel all the more disagreeable sensations of first-night nerves, but — all right, I’ll admit to a violent interest.”

Jonathan laughed delightedly and took his arm. “You must see the bedrooms and the ‘boudoir’ and the little smoking-room. I’ve allowed myself some rather childish touches but they may amuse you. Elementary symbolism. Character as expressed by vegetation. As the florists’ advertisements would have it, I have ‘said it with flowers.’ ”

“Said what?”

“What I think of everyone.”

They crossed the hall to the left of the front door and entered the room that Jonathan liked to call the “boudoir”— an Adam sitting-room painted a light green and hung with French brocades, whose pert garlands were repeated in nosegays which Jonathan had set in the window, and upon a spinet and a writing-desk.

“Here,” said Jonathan, “I hope the ladies will foregather to write, gossip and knit. Miss Chloris, I should explain, is a W.R.E.N., not yet called up, but filling the interim with an endless succession of indomitable socks. My distant cousin Hersey is also a vigorous knitter. I feel sure poor Sandra is hard at work on some repellent comfort.”

“And Madame Lisse?”

“The picture of Madame in close co-operation with strands of khaki wool is one which could be envisaged only by a surrealist. No doubt you will find yourself able to encompass it. Come along.”

The “boudoir” opened into the small smoking-room, where Jonathan permitted a telephone and a radio set, but which, he explained, had in other respects remained unaltered since his father died. Here were leather chairs, a collection of sporting prints flanked by a collection of weapons and by fading groups of Jonathan and his Cambridge friends in the curious photographic postures of the nineties. Above the mantelpiece hung a trout-rod, complete with cast and fly.

“Sweet-scented tobacco plants, you see,” said Jonathan, “in pots. A trifle obvious, but I couldn’t resist them. Now the library.”

The library opened out of the smoking-room. It had an air of being the most used room in the house, and indeed it was here that Jonathan could generally be found amid a company of books that bore witness to generations of rather freakish taste and to the money by which such taste could be gratified. Jonathan had added lavishly to the collection. His books ranged oddly from translations of Turkish and Persian verse to the works of the most inscrutable of the moderns and text-books on criminology and police detection. He had a magpie taste in reading, but it was steadied by a constancy of devotion to the Elizabethans.

“Here,” he said, “I was troubled by an embarrassment of riches. A Shakespearian nosegay seemed a little
vieux jeu
, but on the other hand it had the advantage of being easily recognized. I was tempted by Leigh Hunt’s conceit of ‘saying all one feels and thinks in clever daffodils and pinks; in puns of tulips and in phrases, charming for their truth, of daisies.’ Unfortunately the glass-houses were not equal to Leigh Hunt in midwinter, but here, you see, is the great Doctor’s ensign of supreme command, the myrtle; and here, after all, is most of poor Ophelia’s rather dreary little collection. The sombre note predominates. But upstairs I have let myself go again. A riot of snowdrops for Chloris (you take the allusion to William Stone’s charming conceit?), tuberoses and even some orchids for Madame Lisse, and so on.”

“And for Mrs. Compline?”

“A delightful arrangement of immortelles.”

“Aren’t you rather cruel?”

“Dear me, I don’t think so,” said Jonathan, with a curious glance at his guest. “I hope you admire the really superb cactus on your window-sill, Aubrey. John Nash might pause before it, I believe, and begin to plan some wonderful arrangement of greys and elusive greens. And now I must telephone to Sandra Compline and after that to Dr. Hart. I am making the bold move of suggesting he drive Madame Lisse. Hersey has her own car. Will you excuse me?”

“One moment. What flowers have you put in your own room?”

“Honesty,” said Jonathan.

Mrs. Compline, her son William, and his fiancée Chloris Wynne, arrived by car at four o’clock. Mandrake discovered himself to be in almost as high a state of excitement as his host. He was unable to decide whether Jonathan’s party would prove to be disastrous, amusing, or merely a bore, but the anticipation, at least, was enthralling. He had formed a very precise mental picture of each of the guests. William Compline, he decided, would present the most interesting subject-matter. The exaggerated filial devotion, hinted at by Jonathan, brought him into the sphere of Mandrake’s literary interest. And muttering “mother-fixation” to himself, he wondered if indeed he should find in William the starting point for a new dramatic poem. Poetically, Mrs. Compline’s disfigurement might best be conveyed by a terrible mask, seen in the background of William’s spoken thoughts. “Perhaps in the final scene,” thought Mandrake, “I should let them turn into the semblance of animals. Or would that be a little banal?” For not the least of a modern poetic dramatist’s problems lies in the distressing truth that where all is strange nothing escapes the imputation of banality. But in William Compline with his dullish appearance, his devotion to his mother, his dubious triumph over his brother, Mandrake hoped to find matter for his art. He was actually picturing an opening scene in which William, standing between his mother and his fiancée, appeared against a sky composed of cubes of greenish light, when the drawing-room door opened and Caper announced them.

They were, of course, less striking than the images that had grown so rapidly in Mandrake’s imagination. He had seen Mrs. Compline as a figure in a sombre robe, and here she was in Harris tweeds. He had envisaged a black cowl, and he saw a countrified hat with a trout-fly in the band. But her face, less fantastic than his image, was perhaps more distressing. It looked as if its maker had given it two or three vicious tweaks. Her eyes, large and lack-lustre, retained something of their original beauty, her nose was short and straight, but the left corner of her mouth dropped and her left cheek fell into a sort of pocket, so that she looked as though she had hurriedly stowed a large mouthful into one side of her face. She had the exaggeratedly dolorous expression of a clown. As Jonathan had told him, there was a cruelly comic look. When Jonathan introduced them, Mandrake was illogically surprised at her composure. She had a cold, dry voice.

Miss Chloris Wynne was about twenty-three, and very, very pretty. Her light gold hair was pulled back from her forehead and moulded into cusps, so rigidly placed that they might have been made of any material rather than hair. Her eyes were wide apart and beautifully made-up, her mouth was large and scarlet, and her skin flawless. She was rather tall, and moved in a leisurely fashion, looking gravely about her. She was followed by William Compline.

In William, Mandrake saw what he had hoped to see — the commonplace faintly touched by a hint of something that was disturbing. He was in uniform and looked perfectly tidy but not quite smart. He was fair and should have been good-looking, but the lines of his features were blunted and missed distinction, He was like an unsuccessful drawing of a fine subject. There was an air of uneasiness about him and he had not been long in the room before Mandrake saw that whenever he turned to look at his fiancée, which was very often, he first darted a glance at his mother, who never returned it. Mrs. Compline talked easily and with the air of an old friend to Jonathan, who continually drew the others into their conversation. Jonathan was in grand form. “A nice start,” thought Mandrake, “with plenty in reserve.” And he turned to Miss Wynne with the uneasy feeling that she had said something directly to him.

“… I didn’t in the least understand it, of course,” Miss Wynne was saying, “but it completely unnerved me and that’s always rather fun.”

“Ah,” thought Mandrake, “one of my plays.”

“Of course,” Miss Wynne continued, “I don’t know if you were thinking, when you wrote it, what I was thinking when I saw it; but if you were, I’m surprised you got past the Lord Chamberlain.”

“The Lord Chamberlain,” said Mandrake, “is afraid of me and for a similar reason. He doesn’t know whether it’s my dirty mind or his, so he says nothing.”

“Ah,” cried Jonathan, “is Miss Wynne a devotee, Aubrey?”

“A devotee of what?” asked Mrs. Compline in her exhausted voice.

“Of Aubrey’s plays. The Unicorn is to reopen with Aubrey’s new play in March, Sandra, if all goes well. You must come to the first night. It’s called ‘Bad Black-out’ and is enormously exciting.”

“A war play?” asked Mrs. Compline. It was a question that for some reason infuriated Mandrake, but he answered with alarming politeness that it was not a war play but an experiment in two-dimensional formulism. Mrs. Compline looked at him blankly and turned to Jonathan.

“What does that mean?” asked William. He stared at Mandrake with an expression of offended incredulity. “Two-dimensional? That means flat, doesn’t it?”

Mandrake heard Miss Wynne give an impatient sigh and guessed at a certain persistency in William.

“Does it mean that the characters will be sort of unphotographic?” she asked.

“Exactly.”

“Yes,” said William heavily, “but
two-dimensional
. I don’t quite see—”

Mandrake felt a terrible apprehension of boredom but Jonathan cut in neatly with an amusing account of his own apprenticeship as an audience to modern drama, and William listened with his mouth not quite closed and an anxious expression in his eyes. When the others laughed at Jonathan’s facetiæ, William looked baffled. Mandrake could see him forming with his lips the offending syllables “two-dimensional.”

“I suppose,” he said suddenly, “it’s not what you say but the way you say it that you think matters. Do your plays have plots?”

“They have themes.”

“What’s the difference?”

“My darling old Bill,” said Miss Wynne, “you mustn’t browbeat famous authors.”

William turned to her and his smile made him almost handsome. “Mustn’t you?” he said. “But if you do a thing, you like talking about it. I like talking about the things I do. I mean the things I did before there was a war.”

It suddenly occurred to Mandrake that he did not know what William’s occupation was. “What do you do?” he asked.

“Well,” said William, astonishingly, “I paint pictures.”

Mrs. Compline marched firmly into the conversation. “William,” she said, “has Penfelton to look after in peacetime. At present, of course, we have our old bailiff, who manages very well. My younger son, Nicholas, is a soldier. Have you heard, Jonathan, that he did
not
pass his medical for active service? It was a very bitter blow to him. At the moment he is stationed at Great Chipping but he longs so much to be with his regiment in France. Of
course
,” she added. And Mandrake saw her glance at the built-up shoe on his club-foot.