CHAPTER XIII

CHAMPAIGN

As the Lent term moved unimpeded to its prepaschal end, Gaveston was faced with an inevitable query. Where was he to pass the Vacation? Aided by a shelf of Black’s Beautiful Books and the rarer writings of Mr. Edward Hutton, he weighed the relative charms of Cefalu and Auch, Nikchitch and Gijon, Châlons and Charenton, Parknasilla and Portobello. All very well in their foreign way, but he had his future to consider. Should he not rather accept a few of those innumerable invitations to British Country Houses that were stuck in the mirror above the fireplace in his Malmaison Lodge study?

David had often protested against his friend’s wasteful habit of treating invitations as useless but ornamental, not even answering Commands from exiled Royalties. (The fame of _The Mongoose_ had reached Cannes and Twickenham.) But Gaveston would have none of it.

“No, David,” he would always answer, “they aren’t wasted. The only invitations worth having are the second ones.”

Besides, in the dear, far-off days of Karlsbad and Knocke and Karsino his mother had often nonchalantly warned him against the trickeries of foreign titles. (There had been a Polish Prince once whom Gaveston was already learning to call “Daddy” when he turned out to be a Turkish Bath attendant absconding from Arkansas.…)

At first Gaveston intended to put all the invitations into the waste-paper basket, and draw one (or perhaps two) out, leaving the choice of the lucky hostess to chance, but the sight of a letter written in Black Letter on vellum paper made him hesitate. Was it not too dangerous a lottery? He took the letter up and read--

_Telegrams: Novena, Wilts._ _Stations: Highchurch and Deane._ _Minsterby Priory, Abbot’s Acre, Wilts, Eng._

_Vigil of St. Quinquagesima._

_Dear Mr. ffoulis_,--

_The Baron and I would be happy beyond words if we could count you among our quite tiny party for Holy Week and Eastertide. The Baron, of course, is a cousin of dear Prenderby Rooke (the financier, you know), who had a lot of business with your step-father in the old days. So we aren’t exactly strangers, are we? Do come._

_Afftely. yrs._

_(Baroness) Leah Finqulestone._

Which step-father, Gaveston wondered; but a glance at Gotha’s Almanack decided him in a trice against acceptance. “Phew!” he said to David, “what an escape!” and the Baroness’s invitation fell heavily back into the “refusals tray.”

But there were others.

* * * * *

It was a gay spring morning. Term was over, but, sitting though he was in a first-class Great Western smoker, Gaveston could hardly realize the fact. For where was the familiar landscape of Berks and Bucks stretching like a sea between his terms and his vacations, his vacations and his terms? Where was deserted Didcot? Where the reasty biscuitries of Reading? And where were Wormwood Scrubbs with their Cyclopean hangar, and their promise of speedy arrival at familiar Paddington? Oh, of course; he remembered now: he had left Oxford from the Down Platform.

And on purpose. The train was the only place (except his bed) where Gaveston was often alone, and cradled by its rhythmical monotone of sound, he always surrendered himself to reflection and revery. With unseeing eyes he gazed upon the expanse of gloomy Drinkwater country which so emphatically was not the usual well-brooked but over-factoried valley of the Thames. How many hours, he thought, one wastes in unmotivated journeyings, in merely purposeless vagulity! How futile the pursuit of action for its own poor sake! For what lay before him at his journey’s end? An English country-house, an English week-end party, with its drinks and its drains, its horses and its carriages, its ghosts and its flirtations, its back-stairs and its back-chat--with no break in its well-bred monotony.

He saw it all stretching prospectively and preposterously before him, all of it: the dormant station on an almost impossibly bifurcated branch-line, its wooden platform bright with Easter Lilies and lanky-Lot’s-wife, and marked [Illustration] Stops by Request in Bradshaw; the rustic _gaucherie_ of the solitary and half-wit porter, and then the glimpse of the perky cockade of the expectant groom; and that predestinedly convergent encounter in the wagonette with the other, but not over-numerous, guests, who, though only too well known to each other, had travelled down in separate, but first-class, compartments; and then that excruciatingly culminative moment of arrival beneath the pompous Georgian portico, with the formalized words of welcome slipping upwards into its stucco recesses, that gossipy tea on the terrace, or, if season or weather proved inclement, in the mauve drawing-room, and that chaste and tapestried bedroom in the bachelors’ wing with (yes) the assertively blue hot-water can ready in the, certainly adequate, but somehow not urbanely inviting, basin.

And already he could see, foreshortened before him in a (should he venture?) prescient perspective, all that weary business of the _toilette_ regulated by a complicated, and never, before the day of departure, fully comprehended, system of gongs, and that winding circuitous descent down gradually broadening and more and more elaborately balustraded staircases to a long, but to Gaveston’s taste (he was a real _gourmand_) hopelessly agricultural (he could not conscientiously call it a dinner, but rather, a) meal.…

However, he’ld have to go through with it now. He owed that to his mother.

For it was by Lady Penhaligon’s request, cabled from Canterbury, Pa., a fortnight ago, that he had accepted Lord Jordan’s invitation (the fourth) to spend a frankly rather political week-end at Oylecombe Towers. Her wire had decided him.

_Gav dear do go Jordans if they ask such old friends of dear Joey how cold here do wrap up well dear spring days so deceptive have you met boy called David Paunceford love Mums_

And with the compression of a skilled journalist he had answered.

_Been Jonathan years kisses Gav_

And here he was.…

* * * * *

The charming _cloisonné_ clock in Gaveston’s dressing-room was busily preparing to strike eight.

He gave a last glimpse in the cheval-glass at his elaborately pleated dress-shirt, in which gleamed three studs of solid amber, each with an embedded fly. In the further distances of Oylecombe Towers clanged a gong, and the young man went down to the great ancestor-hung hall with his usual good intention of being the life and soul of the party.

Lord and Lady Jordan stepped forward to welcome their remarkable guest.

His Lordship’s face was unfamiliar to Gaveston. A slightly older generation had known its fine, hawk-like features extremely well. He had long been conspicuous in the _entourage_ of the late King, but changed traditions at Court had latterly made the first holder of the Jordan Barony an almost unrecognized figure on the Mall. Nowadays, though his town-house was not a hundred miles from Park Lane, he lived in rural seclusion at the Towers, with occasional visits to the City of London itself. His knowledge of the world, however, remained wide. With the same facility and gestures he could talk of shells and bears, eagles and bulls, of Brazil and both the Bethlehems, while the motto SI VIS PACEM, entwined aposiopesically about his escutcheon, well exemplified his Liberal political instincts.

Gaveston touched her ladyship’s hand with his lips.

Considerably younger than her husband, and only comparatively recently married, she too was one of those tantalizingly complex personalities which only an old landed aristocracy can evolve. Born in Latvia, and educated in a pensionnat hard by Warsaw, she was at once _mondaine_ and mystic. Her keen sense of social values would have shamed Debrett or Burke themselves, but at the same time she appeared to be an eager searcher after the greater and more eternal aspects of Truth, an untiring student of Burnt Njal and other Oriental works upon religion, and indefatigable in her study of the lesser-known works of Freud, of which she read even the appendices; (the German language presented few difficulties to her.)

“Delighted,” murmured Gaveston, as the other guests were presented to him. “The usual set!” he said inwardly.

So _that_ was Sir Nicholas Gomme, was it? Gaveston looked at him with interest, for the famous Irish Secretary had been specially asked, he knew, to meet the rising young man from Wallace. How many chapters of contemporary history had not risen Minerva-like from that quasi-Napoleonic cranium! Free Trade legislation, _concerti_, wars and rumours of wars, sonnets, bridge-debts, and snuff-boxes. Nothing was too modern to appeal to his vivid imagination; he was an admitted adept in New thought and _Art Nouveau_, and had acquired a deserved reputation in three continents for his philately. A man who had lived! And Gaveston looked at Sir Nicholas’ silvering hair not without respect.

And there was Tierra del Fuego, the painter of the moment. Gaveston had last seen him in the Régale, in those ludicrously far-off days of his Bohemian life in London. He painted everything in curves. In Chelsea they spoke of him reverently as _Le père du globisme_, but, like many an original theorist, he was a poor conversationalist.

“_La ligne droite, voilà l’ennemi!_” he would interject repeatedly and ferociously. But fortunately this, his only, constatation usually fitted well into most discussions, artistic, political, or financial.

Close by stood the venerable Bishop of Barset, his shrewd kindly eyes blinking benignly at all around. “_Such_ a favourite of mine,” whispered Lady Jordan to Gaveston. “_So_ broad-minded!”

And there was Major-General Tremullion, ablaze with the decorations of the Irish War. Gav had once pilloried him in an article as “apparently wishing to die as hard as he had lived.” And deep in conversation beside the roaring hearth stood the representatives of contemporary literature: Ermyntrude Tropes, who lived on the novels she published about her friends, and the immaculate figure of Augustus Tollendale, who lived on the novels he was dissuaded from publishing about his.

But the party was apparently still one short.

“I can’t think where Bladge can be, Mr. ffoulis,” said Lady Jordan, who looked a trifle distracted; “I wanted you to take her in. But really we can’t wait.”

Gaveston bowed his surprised regret, and the brilliant house-party swept into the banqueting hall.

Over the substantial viands the guests soon warmed to their favourite topics, and Gav was enabled to see how subtle and intricate was the blending of politicians and artists which made the Jordans’ parties familiar to every reader of the _Tatler_ and the _Sketch_. He listened appreciatively to the shreds of conversation that floated up the table towards him.

“Ireland!” gasped General Tremullion. “I only asked for fifty tanks, and they----” But the adroit hostess had perceived the warrior’s choleric frustration and changed the subject.

“For Lent reading,” affirmed the Bishop confidently, “I always recommend the ‘Mahabharata.’”

Mr. Tollendale made a hurried note.

And, yes, those were the measured tones of the Irish Secretary himself.

“I admit that I should have liked to change that over-rated North Borneo for their almost untouched Mauritius; and they’d have done it too, if only.…”

“What a _coup_ it would have been!” interrupted Gaveston, his quick imagination kindling at the opening vistas of a new Colonial policy.

“You see, I think they knew I’d been concentrating on Africa for some time now.” The great Statesman continued, “For, as a matter of fact, I can tell you, in confidence of course, that, I’m, er … well, I’m buying Seychelles and Liberia, against a rise.”

Gaveston gasped. What a scoop for _The Mongoose_!

“And I don’t mind telling you,” the booming voice went on, “that the King himself is jealous of my three-cornered Cape of Good Hopes.”

“Three cornered…?” Gaveston’s head swam. But only for a moment. How it all came back to him! His wits rallied, and he recovered himself. “I hope, Sir Nicholas,” he winged the words down the long table, “you won’t swap a defaced Ireland for a second-hand St. Helena.”

It was a characteristic lightning-flash, and a thunder-clap of delighted laughter broke from all, not least from Sir Nicholas himself; he appreciated the subtle compliment. The Jordans gazed proudly at their promising _débutant_. Miss Tropes made a hurried note. Seldom had even Gaveston himself felt so sure of himself or so proud of the great ffoulis heritage of wit.

But while the laughter still echoed in the high-flung rafters, Sir Nicholas was seen to be gazing intently towards the door, a charmed delight in his eyes. The late-comer!

“_Quelle fille!_” he ejaculated with a graceful, old-world bow.

Everyone turned.

“Bladge!” came the unanimous cry. “Bladge!”

And even Gaveston felt that the spot-lime of interest had for a moment shifted from himself. He too turned, and saw, framed there in the noble Tudor doorway, an entrancing vision of loveliness, English and womanly at once, shimmering snake-like in sequins and a picture-hat. Was it--or was it not? Why, yes! It was none other than Lady Blandula Merris! And in their frenzied welcome the guests let their very aspic grow cold.

“Bladge!”--so _that_ was her name among the glittering few whom she counted as her intimates.… He must remember that.

Although the daughter of one of our lesser-known marquesses, Lady Blandula was certainly the foremost figure of British womanhood, more wryly _chic_ than any but the most anglicized _Parisiennes_, more sought after than any Royalty, more daring than any Bohemian, more photographed than any race-horse. No dance could boast itself a ball unless she graced it, no _matinée_ charitable if she did not assist, nor were any theatricals amateur in which she did not perform. Slum missions and night-clubs were as one to her, for NIL ALIENUM PUTO was the proud old Merris motto. Her beauty was rivalled only by her superb audacities. To those who knew her she seemed Virtue incarnate, but dark stories were whispered round the envious suburbs of her more than Paphian orgies.… As she sat down in the vacant place beside him, Gaveston ffoulis felt that at last he had met a woman whom he could respect.

Yet he felt oddly aware that, somewhere or somewhen, he had met her before.… All through the princely meal he watched her discreetly but closely--in what incarnation could it have been … or what æon?… When he was a King in Babylon…?

After dinner a galaxy of intelligentsian entertainment was provided by the experienced hosts; planchette, charades, chamber-music, recitations and auto-suggestion were freely indulged in; and in the Edward VII smoke-room the kindly host grew deliberately reminiscent. But Gav and Lady Blandula, in their unconventional way, were sitting out on one of the greater staircases, sipping liqueurs and bandying witticisms highly characteristic of each other. Suddenly Bladge slipped from her finger a curiously wrought ring of turquoise, and handed it to her surprised, and almost flattered, companion.

“Yours, Gav,” she said with a champagne-like laugh. “I got it on false pretences, you know--and I’ll draw you a cheque for its wrapping.”

Gav looked at her in puzzled silence.

“Oh, stupid!” she rattled on. “And is your soul _still_ so beautiful? My body certainly is!”

“But really----”

“No, I could see all the time you didn’t really know your Plotinus Arbiter, _mon petit rat_!”

And Gaveston remembered. So _that_ had been another of the famous syren’s tricks! This one at all costs must be kept from the newspapers.… His look spoke for him, and Lady Blandula laughed heartily as she went on.

“Oh, it’s all right, you poor lamb! Innocent relaxation and social research--why _shouldn’t_ I combine them? I did, you know, for quite a week after that night, too.”

Synthesis always appealed to Gaveston.

“Bladge!” he cried, and his voice rang true. “You are wonderful! I see all this century in you!”

But just then a voice was heard behind them. General Tremullion was coming down from the Bezique Gallery with Lady Jordan. He was still talking professionally.

“A whiff of powder soon puts things right,” he was saying.

Bladge looked surprised.

“You too, General!” she cooed, almost hectically, Gav thought. “You very nearly shock me, you know.” And with neat furtiveness she offered him a tiny crystal _tabatière_ encrusted with fire-opals.

“What--what’s this, m’gal?” gasped General Tremullion. Lady Jordan, a skilled hostess of the _haute monde_, affected to notice nothing.

“But have a whiff, old thing, if it does you good,” answered Bladge cordially. “It’s the right stuff all right. Straight from Chinatown!”

But the old soldier declined.

“You young people!” he smiled, and passed on.

A piqued frown shadowed Lady Blandula’s brow for an instant.

“These b----y Victorians!” she muttered, rising from the step. “G----d, it’s too d----d quiet for me here. H----g it, I’m for bed. Night, Gav.”

A _soupçon_ of Peau d’Espagne, and the modern Circe was gone.

* * * * *

Throughout that week-end the amazing pair tested each the other’s strength, vying from dawn to eve in the audacity of their wit and the originality of their whimsies. If Lady Blandula resolved to sleep on the roof, Gaveston asked for his bed to be made on the lawn. Did Gaveston swim in the river? Lady Blandula was quick to organize a motor-trip to bathe in the sea! If Lady Blandula danced on the dinner-table when the wine was brought, Gaveston slid down the great staircase on a silver tea-tray, whooping and tally-hoing to his heart’s content.

The very footmen, of whom there were ten, entered into the spirit of this breathless competition. All through Sunday the stables rang with “Three to two on Mr. Fooliss!” or “Even bobs on the filly!”

Gav and Bladge--the duet of the day! The thought gave Lady Jordan a comforting sense of security as she lay awake in bed in the early hours of Monday morning, listening to the tea-trays racing in the moonlight down the West terrace steps. Was she not their _entremettrice_ and _impresaria_? It had cost her years of effort, but it could only be counted a triumph for her diligence. To improve her status, had she not diligently taken a house in Chelsea (a part of London she particularly disliked, having been brought up to believe that it lay low)? Had she not organized endless concerts there (she was unhappily tone-deaf)? Had she not brought numberless cubist pictures (her real taste was for Marcus Stone)? She had.

But now she had achieved! And she fell asleep deliciously, to dream of living once more on the salubrious heights to the North of the Park, of buying another Farquharson, of playing _vingt-et-un_ in the evening. She was secure at last: no post-card of invitation but would evoke enthusiastic acceptance, no satire but would add to her reputation. After many years, Lady Jordan was entering the Promised Land.

And by the time of his departure on Monday afternoon (he travelled to London with Sir Nicholas and the inevitable Miss Tropes) Gaveston knew that Fate had thrown his lines with Lady Blandula’s. _Coûte que coûte_, he must get her to Oxford next term! What a challenge of emancipation to fling at the callowness of the hidebound university! Lady Blandula Merris! A name to conjure with! Everyone knew it. Everyone knew her fame and her infame. But only he knew her _au fond_--how mad-a-cap she was!

Bladge!