Iwonder what the secret of it is—why that little fragment of a musical phrase has always had this instant, irresistible power to move me. The tune of which it formed a part I have never heard; whether it was a merry tune or a sad tune, a pretty tune or a stupid one, I have no means of guessing. A sequence of six notes, like six words taken from the middle of a sentence, it stands quite by itself, detached, fortuitous. If I were to pick it out for you on the piano, you would scoff at it; you would tell me that it is altogether pointless and unsuggestive, that any six notes, struck at haphazard, would signify as much. And I certainly could not, with the least show of reason, maintain the contrary. I could only wonder the more why it has always had, for me, this very singular charm. As when I was a child, so now, after all these years, it is a sort of talisman in my hands, a thing to conjure with. I have but to breathe it never so softly to myself, and (if I choose) the actual world melts away, and I am journeying on wings in dreamland. Whether I choose or not, it always thrills my heart with responsive echoes, it always wakes a sad, sweet emotion.
I remember quite clearly the day when I first heard it; quite clearly, though it was more—oh, more than five-and-twenty years ago, and the days that went before and came after it have entirely lost their outlines, and merged into a vague golden blur. That day, too, as I look backwards, glows in the distance with a golden light; and if I were to speak upon my impulse, I should vow it was a smiling day of June, clothed in sunshine and crowned with roses. But then, if I were to speak upon my impulse, I should vow that it was June at Saint-Graal the whole year round. When I stop to think, I remember that it was a rainy day, and that the ground was sprinkled with dead leaves. I remember standing at a window in my grandmother’s room, and gazing out with rueful eyes. It rained doggedly, relentlessly—even, it seemed to me, defiantly, spitefully, as if it took a malicious pleasure in penning me up within doors. The mountains, the Pyrenees, a few miles to the south, were completely hidden by the veil of waters. The sodden leaves, brown patches on the lawn and in the pathways, struggled convulsively, like wounded birds, to fly from the gusts of wind, but fell back fluttering heavily. One could almost have touched the clouds, they hung so low, big ragged tufts of sad-coloured cotton-wool, blown rapidly through the air, just above the writhing tree-tops. Everywhere in the house there was a faint fragrance of burning wood: fires had been lighted to keep the dampness out.
Indeed, if it had been a fair day, my adventure could scarcely have befallen. I should have been abroad, in the garden or the forest, playing with André, our farmer’s son; angling, with a bit of red worsted as bait, for frogs in the pond; trying to catch lizards on the terrace; lying under a tree withDon QuixoteorLe Capitaine Fracasse; visiting Manuela in her cottage; or perhaps, best of all, spending the afternoon with Hélène, at Granjolaye. It was because the rain interdicted these methods of amusement that I betook myself for solace toConstantinople.
I don’t know why—I don’t think any one knew why—that part of our house was called Constantinople; but it had been called so from time immemorial, and we all accepted it as a matter of course. It was the topmost story of the East Wing—three rooms: one little room, by way of ante-chamber, into which you entered from a corkscrew staircase; then another little room at your left; and then a big room, a long dim room, with only two windows, one at either end. And these rooms served as a sort of Hades for departed household gods. They were crowded, crowded to overflowing, with such wonderful old things! Old furniture—old straight-backed chairs, old card-tables, with green cloth tops, and brass claws for feet, old desks and cabinets, the dismembered relics of old four-post bedsteads; old clothes—old hats, boots, cloaks—green silk calashes, like bonnets meant for the ladies of Brobdingnag—and old hoop-petticoats, the skeletons of dead toilets; old books, newspapers, pictures; old lamps and candlesticks, clocks, fire-irons, vases; an old sedan-chair; old spurs, old swords, old guns and pistols; generations upon generations of superannuated utilities and vanities, slumbering in one another’s shadows, under a common sheet of dust, and giving off a thin, penetrating, ancient smell.
When it rained, Constantinople was my ever-present refuge. It was a land of penumbra and mystery, a realm of perpetual wonderment, a mine of inexhaustible surprises. I never visited it without finding something new, without getting a sensation. One day, when André was there with me, we both saw a ghost—yes, as plainly as at this moment I see the paper I’m writing on; but I won’t turn aside now to speak of that. And as for my finds, on two or three occasions, at least, they had more than a subjective metaphysical importance. The first was a chest filled with jewellery and trinkets, an iron chest, studded with nails, in size and shape like a small trunk, with a rounded lid. I dragged it out of a dark corner, from amidst a quantity of rubbish, and (it wasn’t even locked!) fancy the eyes I made when I beheld its contents: half-a-dozen elaborately carved, high-back tortoise-shell combs, ranged in a morocco case; a beautiful old-fashioned watch, in the form of a miniature guitar; an enamelled snuff-box; and then no end of rings, brooches, buckles, seals, and watch-keys, set with precious stones—not very precious stones, perhaps—only garnets, amethysts, carnelians; but mercy, how they glittered! I ran off in great excitement to call my grandmother; and she called my uncle Edmond; and he, alas, applied the laws of seigniory to the transaction, and I saw my trover appropriated. My other important finds were appropriated also, but about them I did not care so much—they were only papers. One was a certificate, dated in the Year III, and attesting that my grandfather’s father had taken the oath of allegiance to the Republic. As I was a fierce Legitimist, this document afforded me but moderate satisfaction. The other was a Map of the World, covering a sheet of cardboard nearly a yard square, executed in pen-and-ink, but with such a complexity of hair-lines, delicate shading, and ornate lettering, that, until you had examined it closely, you would have thought it a carefully finished steel-engraving. It was signed “Herminie de Pontacq, 1818”; that is to say, by my grandmother herself, who in 1818 had been twelve years old; dear me, only twelve years old! It was delightful and marvellous to think that my own grandmother, in 1818, had been so industrious, and painstaking, and accomplished a little girl. I assure you, I felt almost as proud as if I had done it myself.
The small room at the left of the ante-chamber was consecrated to therobaof an uncle of my grandfather’s, who had been a sugar-planter in the province of New Orleans, in the reign of Louis XVI. He had also been a colonel, and so the room was called the Colonel’s room. Here were numberless mementos of the South: great palm-leaf fans, conch-shells, and branches of coral, broad-brimmed hats of straw, monstrous white umbrellas, and, in a corner, a collection of long slender wands, ending in thick plumes of red and yellow feathers. These, I was informed, the sugar-planter’s slaves, standing behind his chair, would flourish about his head, to warn off the importunate winged insects that aboundlà-bas. He had died at Paris in 1793, and of nothing more romantic than a malignant fever, foolish person, when he might so easily have been guillotined! (It was a matter of permanent regret with me thatnoneof our family had been guillotined.) But his widow had survived him for more than forty years, and her my grandmother remembered perfectly. A fat old Spanish Créole lady, fat and very lazy—oh, but very lazy indeed. At any rate, she used to demand the queerest services of the negress who was in constant attendance upon her. “Nanette, Nanette, tourne tête à moi. Veux”—summon your fortitude—“veux cracher!” Ah, well, we are told, they made less case of such details in those robust old times. How would she have fared, poor soul, had she fallen amongst us squeamish decadents?
It was into the Colonel’s room that I turned to-day. There was a cupboard in its wall that I had never thoroughly examined. The lower shelves, indeed, I knew by heart; they held, for the most part, empty medicine bottles. But the upper ones?
I shut my eyes for a moment, and the flavour of that far-away afternoon comes back fresher in my memory than yesterday’s. I am perched on a chair, in the dim light of Constantinople, at Saint-Graal; my nostrils are full of a musty, ancient smell; I can hear the rain pat-pattering on the roof, the wind whistling at the window, and, faintly, in a distant quarter of the house, my cousin Elodie playing her exercises monotonously on the piano. I am balancing myself on tip-toe, craning my neck, with only one care, one preoccupation, in the world—to get a survey of the top shelf of the closet in the Colonel’s room. The next to the top, and the next below that, I already command; they are vacant of everything save dust. But the top one is still above my head, and how to reach it seems a terribly vexed problem, of which, for a little while, motionless, with bent brows, I am rapt in meditation. And then, suddenly, I have an inspiration—I see my way.
It was not for nothing that my great-aunt Radigonde (think of having had a great-aunt named Radigonde, and yet never having seen her! She died before I was born—isn’t Fate unkind?)—it was not for nothing that my great-aunt Radigonde, from 1820 till its extinction in 1838, had subscribed to theRevue Rose—La Revue Rose; Echo du Bon Ton; Miroir de la Mode; paraissant tous les mois; dirigée par une Dame de la Cour; nor was it in vain, either, that my great-aunt Radigonde had had the annual volumes of this fashionable intelligencer bound. Three or four of them now, piled one above the other on my chair, lent me the altitude I needed; and the top shelf yielded up its secret.
It was an abominably dusty secret, and it was quite a business to wipe it off. Then I perceived that it was a box, a square box, about eighteen inches long and half as deep, made of polished mahogany, inlaid with scrolls and flourishes of satin-wood. Opened, it proved to be a dressing-case. It was lined with pink velvet and white brocaded silk. There was a looking-glass, in a pink velvet frame, with an edge of gold lace, that swung up on a hinged support of tarnished ormolu; a sere and yellow looking-glass, that gave back a reluctant, filmy image of my face. There were half-a-dozen pear-shaped bottles, of wine-coloured glass, with tarnished gilt tops. There was a thing that looked like the paw of a small animal, the fur of which, at one end, was reddened, as if it had been rubbed in some red powder. The velvet straps that had once presumably held combs and brushes, had been despoiled by an earlier hand than mine; but of two pockets in the lid the treasures were intact: a tortoise-shell housewife, containing a pair of scissors, a thimble, and a bodkin, and a tortoise-shell purse, each prettily incrusted with silver and lined with thin pink silk.
In front, between two of the gilt-topped bottles, an oval of pink velvet, with a tiny bird in ormolu perched upon it, was evidently movable—a cover to something. When I had lifted it, I saw, first, a little pane of glass, and then, through that, the brass cylinder and long steel comb of a musical box. Wasn’t it an amiable conceit, whereby my lady should be entertained with tinkling harmonies the while her eyes and fingers were busied in the composition of her face? Was it a frequent one in old dressing-cases?
Oh, yes, the key was there—a gilt key, coquettishly decorated with a bow of pink ribbon; and when I had wound the mechanism up, the cylinder, to my great relief, began to turn—to my relief, for I had feared that the spring might be broken, or something; springs are so apt to be broken in this disappointing world. The cylinder began to turn—but, alas, in silence, or almost in silence, emitting only a faintly audible, rusty gr-r-r-r, a sort of guttural grumble; until, all at once, when I was least expecting it—tirala-tirala—it trilled out clearly, crisply, six silvery notes, and then relapsed into its rusty gr-r-r-r.
So it would go on and on till it ran down. A minute or two of creaking and croaking, as it were, whilst it cleared its old asthmatic throat, then a sudden silvery tirala-tirala, then a catch, a cough, and mutter-mutter-mutter. Or was it more like an old woman maundering in her sleep, who should suddenly quaver out a snatch from a ditty of her girlhood, and afterwards mumble incoherently again?
I suppose the pin-points on the cylinder, all save just those six, were worn away; or, possibly, those teeth of the steel comb were the only ones that retained elasticity enough to vibrate.
A sequence of six notes, as inconclusive as six words plucked at random from the middle of a sentence; as void of musical value as six such words would be of literary value. I wonder why it has always had this instant, irresistible power to move me. It has always been a talisman in my hands, a thing to conjure with. As when I was a child, so now, after twenty years, I have but to breathe it to myself, and, if I will, the actual world melts away, and I am journeying in dreamland. Whether I will or not, it always stirs a sad, sweet emotion in my heart. I wonder why. Tirala-tirala—I dare say, for another, any six notes, struck at haphazard, would signify as much. But for me—ah, if I could seize the sentiment it has for me, and translate it into English words, I should have achieved a sort of miracle. For me, it is the voice of a spirit, sighing something unutterable. It is an elixir, distilled of unearthly things, six lucent drops; I drink them, and I am transported into another atmosphere, and I see visions. It is Aladdin’s lamp; I touch it, and cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces are mine in the twinkling of an eye. It is my wishing-cap, my magic-carpet, my key to the Castle of Enchantment.
The Castle of Enchantment....
When I was a child the Castle of Enchantment meant—the Future; the great mysterious Future, away, away there, beneath the uttermost horizon, where the sky is luminious with tints of rose and pearl; the ineffable Future, when I should be grownup, when I should be a Man, and when the world would be my garden, the world and life, and all their riches, mine to explore, to adventure in, to do as I pleased with! The Future and the World, the real World, the World that lay beyond our village, beyond the Forest of Granjolaye, farther than Bayonne, farther even than Pau; the World one read of and heard strange legends of: Paris, and Bagdad, and England, and Peru. Oh, how I longed to see it; how hard it was to wait; how desperately hard to think of the immense number of long years that must be worn through somehow, before it could come true.
But—tirala-tirala!—my little broken bar of music was a touchstone. At the sound of it, at the thought of it, the Present was spirited away; Saint-Graal and all our countryside were left a thousand miles behind; and the Future and the World opened their portals to me, and I wandered in them where I would. In a sort of trance, with wide eyes and bated breath, I wandered in them, through enraptured hours. Believe me, it was a Future, it was a World, of quite unstinted magnificence. My many-pinnacled Castle of Enchantment was built of gold and silver, ivory, alabaster, and mother-of-pearl; the fountains in its courts ran with perfumed waters; and its pleasaunce was an orchard of pomegranates—one had no need to spare one’s colours. I dare say, too, that it was rather vague, wrapped in a good deal of roseate haze, and of an architecture that could scarcely have been reduced to ground-plans and elevations; but what of that? And oh, the people, the people by whom the World and the Future were inhabited, the cavalcading knights, the beautiful princesses! And their virtues, and their graces, and their talents Î There were no ugly people, of course, no stupid people, no disagreeable people; everybody was young and handsome, gallant, generous, and splendidly dressed. And everybody was astonishingly nice to me, and it never seemed to occur to anybody that I wasn’t to have my own way in everything. And I had it. Love and wealth, glory, and all manner of romance—I had them for the wishing. The stars left their courses to fight for me. And the winds of heaven vied with each other to prosper my galleons.
To be sure, it was nothing more nor other than the day-dream of every child. But it happened that that little accidental fragment of a phrase of music had a quite peculiar power to send me off dreaming it.
I suppose it must be that we pass the Castle of Enchantment while we are asleep. For surely, at first, it is before us—we are moving towards it; we can see it shining in the distance; we shall reach it to-morrow, next week, next year. And then—and then, one morning, we wake up, and lo! it is behind us. We have passed it—we are sailing away from it—we can’t turn back. We have passed the Castle of Enchantment! And yet, it was only to reach it that we made our weary voyage, toiling through hardships and perils and discouragements, forcing our impatient hearts to wait; it was only the hope, the certain hope, of reaching it at last, that made our toiling and our waiting possible. And now—we have passed it. We are sailing away from it. We can’t turn back. We can onlylookback—with the bitterness that every heart knows. If we look forward, what is there to see, save grey waters, and then a darkness that we fear to enter?
When I was a child, it was the great world and the future into which my talisman carried me, dreaming desirous dreams; the great world, all gold and marble, peopled by beautiful princesses and cavalcading knights; the future, when I should be grown-up, when I should be a Man.
Well, I am grown-up now, and I have seen something of the great world—something of its gold and marble, its cavalcading knights and beautiful princesses. But if I care to dream desirous dreams, I touch my talisman, and wish myself back in the little world of my childhood. Tirala-tirala—I breathe it softly, softly; and the sentiment of my childhood comes and fills my room like a fragrance. I am at Saint-Graal again; and my grandmother is seated at her window, knitting; and André is bringing up the milk from the farm; and my cousin Elodie is playing her exercises on the piano; and Hélène and I are walking in the garden—Hélène in her short white frock, with a red sash, and her black hair loose down her back. All round us grow innumerable flowers, and innumerable birds are singing in the air, and the frogs are croaking, croaking in our pond. And farther off, the sun shines tranquilly on the chestnut-trees of the Forest of Granjolaye; and farther still, the Pyrenees gloom purple.... It is not much, perhaps it is not very wonderful; but oh, how my heart yearns to recover it, how it aches to realise that it never can.
In the Morning (says Paraschkine) the Eastern Rim of the Earth was piled high with Emeralds and Rubies, as if the Gods had massed their Riches there; but he—ingenuous Pilgrim—who set forth to reach this Treasure-hoard, and to make the Gods’ Riches his, seemed presently to have lost his Way; he could no longer discern the faintest Glint of the Gems that had tempted him: until, in the Afternoon, chancing to turn his Head, he saw a bewildering Sight—the Emeralds and Rubies were behind him, immeasurably far behind, piled up in the West.
Whereis the Castle of Enchantment?Whendo we pass it? Ah, well, thank goodness, we all have talismans (like my little broken bit of a forgotten tune) whereby we are enabled sometimes to visit it in spirit, and to lose ourselves during enraptured moments among its glistening, labyrinthine halls.
At a masked ball given by the Countess Wohenhoffen, in Vienna, during carnival week, a year ago, a man draped in the embroidered silks of a Chinese mandarin, his features entirely concealed by an enormous Chinese head in cardboard, was standing in the Wintergarten, the big, dimly lighted conservatory, near the door of one of the gilt-and-white reception-rooms, rather a stolid-seeming witness of the multi-coloured romp within, when a voice behind him said, “How do you do, Mr. Field?”—a woman’s voice, an English voice.
The mandarin turned round.
From a black mask, a pair of blue-grey eyes looked into his broad, bland Chinese face; and a black domino dropped him an extravagant little curtsey.
“How do you do?” he responded. “I’m afraid I’m not Mr. Field; but I’ll gladly pretend I am, if you’ll stop and talk with me. I was dying for a little human conversation.”
“Oh, you’re afraid you’re not Mr. Field, are you?” the mask replied derisively. “Then why did you turn when I called his name?”
“You mustn’t hope to disconcert me with questions like that,” said he. “I turned because I liked your voice.”
He might quite reasonably have liked her voice, a delicate, clear, soft voice, somewhat high in register, with an accent, crisp, chiselled, concise, that suggested wit as well as distinction. She was rather tall, for a woman; one could divine her slender and graceful, under the voluminous folds of her domino.
She moved a little away from the door, deeper into the conservatory. The mandarin kept beside her. There, amongst the palms, afontaine lumineusewas playing, rhythmically changing colour. Now it was a shower of rubies; now of emeralds or amethysts, of sapphires, topazes, or opals.
“How pretty,” she said, “and how frightfully ingenious. I am wondering whether this wouldn’t be a good place to sit down. What do you think?” And she pointed with a fan to a rustic bench.
“I think it would be no more than fair to give it a trial,” he assented.
So they sat down on the rustic bench, by thefontaine lumineuse.
“In view of your fear that you’re not Mr. Field, it’s rather a coincidence that at a masked ball in Vienna you should just happen to be English, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Oh, everybody’s more or less English, in these days, you know,” said he.
“There’s some truth in that,” she admitted, with a laugh. “What a diverting piece of artifice this Wintergarten is, to be sure. Fancy arranging the electric lights to shine through a dome of purple glass, and look like stars. They do look like stars, don’t they? Slightly over-dressed, showy stars, indeed; stars in the German taste; but stars, all the same. Then, by day, you know, the purple glass is removed, and you get the sun—the real sun. Do you notice the delicious fragrance of lilac? If one hadn’t too exacting an imagination, one might almost persuade oneself that one was in a proper open-air garden, on a night in May.... Yes, everybody is more or less English, in these days. That’s precisely the sort of thing I should have expected Victor Field to say.”
“By-the-bye,” questioned the mandarin, “if you don’t mind increasing my stores of knowledge, whoisthis fellow Field?”
“This fellow Field? Ah, who indeed?” said she. “That’s just what I wish you’d tell me.”
“I’ll tell you with pleasure, after you’ve supplied me with the necessary data,” he promised cheerfully.
“Well, by some accounts, he’s a little literary man in London,” she remarked.
“Oh, come! You never imagined that I was a little literary man in London,” protested he.
“You might be worse,” she retorted. “However, if the phrase offends you, I’ll say a rising young literary man, instead. He writes things, you know.”
“Poor chap, does he? But then, that’s a way they have, rising young literary persons?” His tone was interrogative.
“Doubtless,” she agreed. “Poems and stories and things. And book reviews, I suspect. And even, perhaps, leading articles in the newspapers.”
“Toute la lyre enfin?What they call a penny-a-liner?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what he’s paid. I should think he’d get rather more than a penny. He’s fairly successful. The things he does aren’t bad,” she said.
“I must look ’em up,” said he. “But meantime, will you tell me how you came to mistake me for him? Has he the Chinese type? Besides, what on earth should a little London literary man be doing at the Countess Wohenhoffen’s?”
“He was standing near the door, over there,” she told him, sweetly, “dying for a little human conversation, till I took pity on him. No, he hasn’t exactly the Chinese type, but he’s wearing a Chinese costume, and I should suppose he’d feel uncommonly hot in that exasperatingly placid Chinese head.I’mnearly suffocated, and I’m only wearing aloup. For the rest, whyshouldn’the be here?”
“If yourloupbothers you, pray take it off. Don’t mind me,” he urged gallantly.
“You’re extremely good,” she responded. “But if I should take off myloup, you’d be sorry. Of course, manlike, you’re hoping that I’m young and pretty.”
“Well, and aren’t you?”
“I’m a perfect fright. I’m an old maid.”
“Thank you. Manlike, I confess Iwashoping you’d be young and pretty. Now my hope has received the strongest confirmation. I’m sure you are,” he declared triumphantly.
“Your argument, with a meretricious air of subtlety, is facile and superficial. Don’t pin your faith to it. Whyshouldn’tVictor Field be here?” she persisted.
“The Countess only receives tremendous swells. It’s the most exclusive house in Europe.”
“Are you a tremendous swell?” she wondered.
“Rather!” he asseverated. “Aren’t you?”
She laughed a little, and stroked her fan, a big fan of fluffy black feathers.
“That’s very jolly,” said he.
“What?” said she.
“That thing in your lap.”
“My fan?”
“I expect you’d call it a fan.”
“For goodness’ sake, what wouldyoucall it?” cried she.
“I should call it a fan.”
She gave another little laugh. “You have a nice instinct for themot juste,” she informed him.
“Oh, no,” he disclaimed, modestly. “But I can call a fan a fan, when I think it won’t shock the sensibilities of my hearer.”
“If the Countess only receives tremendous swells,” said she, “you must remember that Victor Field belongs to the Aristocracy of Talent.”
“Oh,quant à ça, so, from the Wohenhoffens’ point of view, do the barber and the horse-leech. In this house, the Aristocracy of Talent dines with the butler.”
“Is the Countess such a snob?” she asked.
“No; she’s an Austrian. They draw the line so absurdly tight in Austria.”
“Well, then, you leave me no alternative,” she argued, “but to conclude that Victor Field is a tremendous swell. Didn’t you notice, I bobbed him a curtsey?”
“I took the curtsey as a tribute to my Oriental magnificence,” he confessed. “Field doesn’t sound like an especially patrician name. I’d give anything to discover who you are. Can’t you be induced to tell me? I’ll bribe, entreat, threaten—I’ll do anything you think might persuade you.”
“I’ll tell you at once, if you’ll own up that you’re Victor Field,” said she.
“Oh, I’ll own up that I’m Queen Elizabeth if you’ll tell me who you are. The end justifies the means.”
“Then youareVictor Field?” she pursued him eagerly.
“If you don’t mind suborning perjury, why should I mind committing it?” he reflected. “Yes. And now, who are you?”
“No; I must have an unequivocal avowal,” she stipulated. “Are you or are you not Victor Field?”
“Let us put it at this,” he proposed, “that I’m a good serviceable imitation; an excellent substitute when the genuine article is not procurable.”
“Of course, your real name isn’t anything like Victor Field,” she declared, pensively.
“I never said it was. But I admire the way in which you give with one hand and take back with the other.”
“Your real name——” she began. “Wait a moment... Yes, now I have it. Your real name... It’s rather long. You don’t think it will bore you?”
“Oh, if it’s really my real name, I daresay I’m hardened to it,” said he.
“Your real name is Louis Charles Ferdinand Stanislas John Joseph Emmanuel Maria Anna.”
“Mercy upon me,” he cried, “what a name! You ought to have broken it to me in instalments. And it’s all Christian name at that. Can’t you spare me just a little rag of a surname, for decency’s sake?” he pleaded.
“The surnames of royalties don’t matter, Monseigneur,” she said, with a flourish.
“Royalties? What? Dear me, here’s rapid promotion! I am royal now! And a moment ago I was a little penny-a-liner in London.”
“L’un n’empêche pas l’autre. Have you never heard the story of the Invisible Prince?” she asked.
“I adore irrelevancy,” said he. “I seem to have read something about an invisible prince, when I was young. A fairy tale, wasn’t it?”
“The irrelevancy is only apparent. The story I mean is a story of real life. Have you ever heard of the Duke of Zeln?”
“Zeln? Zeln?” he repeated, reflectively. “No, I don’t think so.”
She clapped her hands. “Really, you do it admirably. If I weren’t perfectly sure of my facts, I believe I should be taken in. Zeln, as any history would tell you, as any old atlas would show you, was a little independent duchy in the centre of Germany.”
“Poor dear thing! Like Jonah in the centre of the whale,” he murmured, sympathetically.
“Hush. Don’t interrupt. Zeln was a little independent German duchy, and the Duke of Zeln was its sovereign. After the war with France it was absorbed by Prussia. But the ducal family still rank as royal highnesses. Of course, you’ve heard of the Leczinskis?”
“Lecz———-what?” said he.
“Leczinski,” she repeated.
“How do you spell it?”
“L—e—c—z—i—n—s—k—i.”
“Good. Capital. You have a real gift for spelling,” he exclaimed.
“Will you be quiet,” she said, severely, “and answer my question? Are you familiar with the name?”
“I should never venture to be familiar with a name I didn’t know,” he asserted.
“Ah, you don’t know it? You have never heard of Stanislas Leczinski, who was king of Poland? Of Marie Leczinska, who married Louis XV.?”
“Oh, to be sure. I remember. The lady whose portrait one sees at Versailles.”
“Quite so. Very well,” she continued, “the last representative of the Leczinskis, in the elder line, was the Princess Anna Leczinska, who, in 1858, married the Duke of Zeln. She was the daughter of John Leczinski, Duke of Grodnia and Governor of Galicia, and of the Archduchess Henrietta d’.ste, a cousin of the Emperor of Austria. She was also a great heiress, and an extremely handsome woman. But the Duke of Zeln was a bad lot, a viveur, a gambler, a spendthrift. His wife, like a fool, made her entire fortune over to him, and he proceeded to play ducks and drakes with it. By the time their son was born he’d got rid of the last farthing. Their son wasn’t born till ’63, five years after their marriage. Well, and then, what do you suppose the Duke did?”
“Reformed, of course. The wicked husband always reforms when a child is born, and there’s no more money,” he generalised.
“You know perfectly well what he did,” said she. “He petitioned the German Diet to annul the marriage. You see, having exhausted the dowry of the Princess Anna, it occurred to him that if she could only be got out of the way, he might marry another heiress, and have the spending of another fortune.”
“Clever dodge,” he observed. “Did it come off?”
“It came off, all too well. He based his petition on the ground that the marriage had never been.... I forget what the technical term is. Anyhow, he pretended that the princess had never been his wife except in name, and that the child couldn’t possibly be his. The Emperor of Austria stood by his connection, like the loyal gentleman he is; used every scrap of influence he possessed to help her. But the duke, who was a Protestant (the princess was of course a Catholic), the duke persuaded all the Protestant States in the Diet to vote in his favour. The Emperor of Austria was powerless, the Pope was powerless. And the Diet annulled the marriage.”
“Ah,” said the mandarin.
“Yes,” she went on. “The marriage was annulled, and the child declared illegitimate. Ernest Augustus, as the duke was somewhat inconsequently named, married again, and had other children, the eldest of whom is the present bearer of the title—the same Duke of Zeln one hears of, quarrelling with the croupiers at Monte Carlo. The Princess Anna, with her baby, came to Austria. The Emperor gave her a pension, and lent her one of his country houses to live in—Schloss Sanct-Andreas. Our hostess, by-the-bye, the Countess Wohenhoffen, was her intimate friend and herpremière dame d’honneur.”
“Ah,” said the mandarin.
“But the poor princess had suffered more than she could bear. She died when her child was four years old. The Countess Wohenhoffen took the infant, by the Emperor’s desire, and brought him up with her own son Peter. He was called Prince Louis Leczinski. Of course, in all moral right, he was the Hereditary Prince of Zeln. His legitimacy, for the rest, and his mother’s innocence, are perfectly well established, in every sense but a legal sense, by the fact that he has all the physical characteristics of the Zeln stock. He has the Zeln nose and the Zeln chin, which are as distinctive as the Habsburg lip.”
“I hope, for the poor young man’s sake, though, that they’re not so unbecoming?” questioned the mandarin.
“They’re not exactly pretty,” answered the mask. “The nose is a thought too long, the chin is a trifle too short. However, I daresay the poor young man is satisfied. As I was about to tell you, the Countess Wohenhoflen brought him up, and the Emperor destined him for the Church. He even went to Rome and entered the Austrian College. He’d have been on the high road to a cardinalate by this time if he’d stuck to the priesthood, for he had strong interest. But, lo and behold, when he was about twenty, he chucked the whole thing up.”
“Ah?Histoire de femme?”
“Very likely,” she assented, “though I’ve never heard any one say so. At all events, he left Rome, and started upon his travels. He had no money of his own, but the Emperor made him an allowance. He started upon his travels, and he went to India, and he went to America, and he went to South Africa, and then, finally, in ’87 or ’88, he went—no one knows where. He totally disappeared, vanished into space. He’s not been heard of since. Some people think he’s dead. But the greater number suppose that he tired of his false position in the world, and one fine day determined to escape from it, by sinking his identity, changing his name, and going in for a new life under new conditions. They call him the Invisible Prince. His positionwasrather an ambiguous one, wasn’t it? You see, he was neither one thing nor the other. He had noétat-civil. In the eyes of the law he was a bastard, yet he knew himself to be the legitimate son of the Duke of Zeln. He was a citizen of no country, yet he was the rightful heir to a throne. He was the last descendant of Stanislas Leczinski, yet it was without authority that he bore his name. And then, of course, the rights and wrongs of the matter were only known to a few. The majority of people simply remembered that there had been a scandal. And (as a wag once said of him) wherever he went, he left his mother’s reputation behind him. No wonder he found the situation irksome. Well, there is the story of the Invisible Prince.”
“And a very exciting, melodramatic little story, too. For my part, I suspect your Prince met a boojum. I love to listen to stories. Won’t you tell me another? Do, please,” he pressed her.
“No, he didn’t meet a boojum,” she returned. “He went to England, and set up for an author. The Invisible Prince and Victor Field are one and the same person.”
“Oh, I say! Not really!” he exclaimed.
“Yes, really.”
“What makes you think so?” he wondered.
“I’m sure of it,” said she. “To begin with, I must confide to you that Victor Field is a man I’ve never met.”
“Never met...?” he gasped. “But, by the blithe way in which you were laying his sins at my door, a little while ago, I supposed you were sworn confederates.”
“What’s the good of masked balls, if you can’t talk to people you’ve never met?” she submitted. “I’ve never met him, but I’m one of his admirers. I like his little poems. And I’m the happy possessor of a portrait of him. It’s a print after a photograph. I cut it from an illustrated paper.”
“I really almost wish IwasVictor Field,” he sighed. “I should feel such a glow of gratified vanity.”
“And the Countess Wohenhoffen,” she added, “has at least twenty portraits of the Invisible Prince—photographs, miniatures, life-size paintings, taken from the time he was born, almost, to the time of his disappearance. Victor Field and Louis Leczinski have countenances as like each other as two halfpence.”
“An accidental resemblance, doubtless.”
“No, it isn’t an accidental resemblance,” she affirmed.
“Oh, then you think it’s intentional?” he quizzed.
“Don’t be absurd. I might have thought it accidental, except for one or two odd little circumstances.Primo, Victor Field is a guest at the Wohenhoffens’ ball.”
“Oh, heisa guest here?”
“Yes, he is,” she said. “You are wondering how I know. Nothing simpler. The same costumier who made my domino, supplied his Chinese dress. I noticed it at his shop. It struck me as rather nice, and I asked whom it was for. The costumier said, for an Englishman at the Hôtel de Bade. Then he looked in his book, and told me the Englishman’s name. It was Victor Field. So, when I saw the same Chinese dress here to-night, I knew it covered the person of one of my favourite authors. But I own, like you, I was a good deal surprised. What on earth should a little London literary man be doing at the Countess Wohenhoffen’s? And then I remembered the astonishing resemblance between Victor Field and Louis Leczinski; and I remembered that to Louis Leczinski the Countess Wohenhoffen had been a second mother; and I reflected that though he chose to be as one dead and buried for the rest of the world, Louis Leczinski might very probably keep up private relations with the Countess. He might very probably come to her ball, incognito, and safely masked. I observed also that the Countess’s rooms were decorated throughout withwhite lilac. But the white lilac is the emblematic flower of the Leczinskis; green and white are their family colours. Wasn’t the choice of white lilac on this occasion perhaps designed as a secret compliment to the Prince? I was taught in the schoolroom that two and two make four.”
“Oh, one can see that you’ve enjoyed a liberal education,” he apprised her. “But where were you taught to jump to conclusions? You do it with a grace, an assurance. I too have heard that two and two make four; but first you must catch your two and two. Really, as if there couldn’t be more than one Chinese costume knocking about Vienna, during carnival week! Dear, good, sweet lady, it’s of all disguises the disguise they’re driving hardest, this particular season. And then to build up an elaborate theory of identities upon the mere chance resemblance of a pair of photographs! Photographs indeed! Photographs don’t give the complexion. Say that your Invisible Prince is dark, what’s to prevent your literary man from being fair or sandy? Orvice versa?And then, how is a little German Polish princeling to write poems and things in English? No, no, no; your reasoning hasn’t a leg to stand on.”
“Oh, I don’t mind its not having legs,” she laughed, “so long as it convinces me. As for writing poems and things in English, you yourself said that everybody is more or less English, in these days. German princes are especially so. They all learn English, as a second mother-tongue. You see, like Circassian beauties, they are mostly bred up for the marriage market; and nothing is a greater help towards a good sound remunerative English marriage, than a knowledge of the language. However, don’t be frightened. I must take it for granted that Victor Field would prefer not to let the world know who he is. I happen to have discovered his secret. He may trust to my discretion.”
“You still persist in imagining that I’m Victor Field?” he murmured sadly.
“I should have to be extremely simple-minded,” she announced, “to imagine anything else. You wouldn’t be a male human being if you had sat here for half an hour patiently talking about another man.”
“Your argument,” said he, “with a meretricious air of subtlety, is facile and superficial. I thank you for teaching me that word. I’d sit here till doomsday talking about my worst enemy, for the pleasure of talking with you.”
“Perhaps we have been talking of your worst enemy. Whom do the moralists pretend a man’s worst enemy is wont to be?” she asked.
“I wish you would tell me the name of the person the moralists would consider your worst enemy,” he replied.
“I’ll tell you directly, as I said before, if you’ll own up,” she offered.
“Your price is prohibitive. I’ve nothing to own up to.”
“Well then—good night,” she said.
Lightly, swiftly, she fled from the conservatory, and was soon irrecoverable in the crowd.
The next morning Victor Field left Vienna for London; but before he left he wrote a letter to Peter Wohenhoffen. In the course of it he said: “There was an Englishwoman at your ball last night with the reasoning powers of a detective in a novel. By divers processes of elimination and induction, she had formed all sorts of theories about no end of things. Among others, for instance, he was willing to bet her hali-dome that a certain Prince Louis Leczinski, who seems to have gone on the spree some years ago, and never to have come home again—she was willing to bet anything you like that Leczinski and I—moi qui vous parle—were to all intents and purposes the same. Who was she, please? Rather a tall woman, in a black domino, with grey eyes, or greyish-blue, and a nice voice.”
In the answer which he received from Peter Wohenhoffen towards the end of the week, Peter said: “There were nineteen Englishwomen at my mother’s party, all of them rather tall, with nice voices, and grey or blue-grey eyes. I don’t know what colours their dominoes were. Here is a list of them.”
The names that followed were names of people whom Victor Field almost certainly would never meet. The people Victor knew in London were the sort of people a little literary man might be expected to know. Most of them were respectable; some of them even deemed themselves rather smart, and patronised him right Britishly. But the nineteen names in Peter Wohenhoffen’s list (”Oh, me! Oh, my!” cried Victor) were names to make you gasp.
All the same, he went a good deal to Hyde Park during the season, and watched the driving.
“Which of all those haughty high-born beauties is she?” he wondered futilely.
And then the season passed, and then the year; and little by little, of course, he ceased to think about her.
One afternoon last May, a man, habited in accordance with the fashion of the period, stopped before a hairdresser’s shop in Knightsbridge somewhere, and, raising his hat, bowed to the three waxen ladies who simpered from the window.
“Oh! It’s Mr. Field!” a voice behind him cried. “What are those cryptic rites that you’re performing? What on earth are you bowing into a hairdresser’s window for?”—a smooth, melodious voice, tinged by an inflection that was half ironical, half bewildered.
“I was saluting the type of English beauty,” he answered, turning. “Fortunately, there are divergencies from it,” he added, as he met the puzzled smile of his interlocutrice; a puzzled smile indeed, but, like the voice, by no means without its touch of irony.
She gave a little laugh; and then, examining the models critically, “Oh?” she questioned. “Would you call that the type? You place the type high. Their features are quite faultless, and who ever saw such complexions?”
“It’s the type, all the same,” said he. “Just as the imitation marionette is the type of English breeding.”
“The imitation marionette? I’m afraid I don’t follow,” she confessed.
“The imitation marionettes. You’ve seen them at little theatres in Italy. They’re actors who imitate puppets. Men and women who try to behave as if they weren’t human, as if they were made of starch and whalebone, instead of flesh and blood.”
“Ah, yes,” she assented, with another little laugh. “That would be rather typical of our insular methods. But do you know what an engaging, what a reviving spectacle you presented, as you stood there flourishing your hat? What do you imagine people thought? And what would have happened to you if I had just chanced to be a policeman instead of a friend?”
“Would you have clapped your handcuffs on me?” he enquired. “I suppose my conduct did seem rather suspicious. I was in the deepest depth of dejection. One must give some expression to one’s sorrow.”
“Are you going towards Kensington?” she asked, preparing to move on.
“Before I commit myself, I should like to be sure whether you are,” he replied.
“You can easily discover with a little perseverance.”
He placed himself beside her, and together they walked towards Kensington.
She was rather taller than the usual woman, and slender. She was exceedingly well-dressed; smartly, becomingly; a jaunty little hat of strangely twisted straw, with an aigrette springing defiantly from it; a jacket covered with mazes and labyrinths of embroidery; at her throat a big knot of white lace, the ends of which fell winding in a creamy cascade to her waist (do they call the thing ajabot?); and then....
But what can a man trust himself to write of these esoteric matters? She carried herself extremely well, too: with grace, with distinction, her head held high, even thrown back a little, superciliously. She had an immense quantity of very lovely hair. Red hair? Yellow hair? Red hair with yellow lights burning in it? Yellow hair with red fires shimmering through it? In a single loose, full billow it swept away from her forehead, and then flowed into half-a-thousand rippling, crinkling, capricious undulations. And her skin had the sensitive colouring, the fineness of texture, that are apt to accompany red hair when it’s yellow, yellow hair when it’s red. Her face, with its pensive, quizzical eyes, it’s tip-tilted nose, it’s rather large mouth, and the little mocking quirks and curves the lips took, was an alert, arch, witty face; a delicate high-bred face; and withal a somewhat sensuous, emotional face; the face of a woman with a vast deal of humour in her soul, a vast deal of mischief; of a woman who would love to tease you, and mystify you, and lead you on, and put you off; and yet who, in her own way, at her own time, would know supremely well how to be kind.
But it was mischief rather than kindness that glimmered in her eyes at present, as she asked, “You were in the deepest depths of dejection. Poor man! Why?”
“I can’t precisely determine,” said he, “whether the sympathy that seems to vibrate in your voice is genuine or counterfeit.”
“Perhaps it’s half and half,” she suggested. “But my curiosity is unmixed. Tell me your troubles.”
“The catalogue is long. I’ve sixteen hundred million. The weather, for example. The shameless beauty of this radiant spring day. It’s enough to stir all manner of wild pangs and longings in the heart of an octogenarian. But, anyhow, when one’s life is passed in a dungeon, one can’t perpetually be singing and dancing from mere exuberance of joy, can one?”
“Is your life passed in a dungeon?” she exclaimed.
“Indeed, indeed, it is. Isn’t yours?”
“It had never occurred to me that it was.”
“You’re lucky. Mine is passed in the dungeons of Castle Ennui,” he said.
“Oh, Castle Ennui. Ah, yes. You mean you’re bored?”
“At this particular moment I’m savouring the most exquisite excitement,” he professed. “But in general, when I am not working or sleeping, I’m bored to extermination—incomparably bored. If only one could work and sleep alternately, twenty-four hours a day, the year round! There’s no use trying to play in London. It’s so hard to find a playmate. The English people take their pleasures without salt.”
“The dungeons of Castle Ennui,” she repeated meditatively. “Yes, we are fellow-prisoners. I’m bored to extermination too. Still,” she added, “one is allowed out on parole, now and again. And sometimes one has really quite delightful little experiences.”
“It would ill become me, in the present circumstances, to dispute that,” he answered, bowing.
“But the castle waits to reclaim us afterwards, doesn’t it?” she mused. “That’s rather a happy image, Castle Ennui.”
“I’m extremely glad you approve of it. Castle Ennui is the Bastille of modern life. It is built of prunes and prisms; it has its outer court of Convention, and its inner court of Propriety; it is moated round by Respectability, and the shackles its inmates wear are forged of dull little duties and arbitrary little rules. You can only escape from it at the risk of breaking your social neck, or remaining a fugitive from social justice to the end of your days. Yes, it is a fairly decent little image.”
“A bit out of something you’re preparing for the press?” she hinted.
“Oh, how unkind of you!” he cried. “It was absolutely extemporaneous.”
“One can never tell, withvous autres gens-de-lettres“ she laughed.
“It would be friendlier to saynous autres gens desprit,’ he submitted.
“Aren’t we proving to what degreenous autres gens d’esprit sont bêtes,” she remarked, “by continuing to walk along this narrow pavement, when we can get into Kensington Gardens by merely crossing the street? Would it take you out of your way?”
“I have no way. I was sauntering for pleasure, if you can believe me. I wish I could hope that you have no way either. Then we could stop here, and crack little jokes together the livelong afternoon,” he said, as they entered the Gardens.
“Alas, my way leads straight back to the Castle. I’ve promised to call on an old woman in Campden Hill,” said she.
“Disappoint her. It’s good for old women to be disappointed. It whips up their circulation.”
“I shouldn’t much regret disappointing the old woman,” she admitted, “and I should rather like an hour or two of stolen freedom. I don’t mind owning that I’ve generally found you, as men go, a moderately interesting man to talk with. But the deuce of it is... You permit the expression?”
“I’m devoted to the expression.”
“The deuce of it is, I’m supposed to be driving,” she explained.
“Oh, that doesn’t matter. So many suppositions in this world are baseless,” he reminded her.
“But there’s the prison van,” she said. “It’s one of the tiresome rules in the female wing of Castle Ennui that you’re always supposed, more or less, to be driving. And though you may cheat the authorities by slipping out of the prison van directly it’s turned the corner, and sending it on ahead, there it remains, a factor that can’t be eliminated. The prison van will relentlessly await my arrival in the old woman’s street.”
“That only adds to the sport. Let it wait. When a factor can’t be eliminated, it should be haughtily ignored. Besides, there are higher considerations. If you leave me, what shall I do with the rest of this weary day?”
“You can go to your club.”
He threw up his hand. “Merciful lady! What sin have I committed? I never go to my club, except when I’ve been wicked, as a penance. If you will permit me to employ a metaphor—oh, but a tried and trusty metaphor—when one ship on the sea meets another in distress, it stops and comforts it, and forgets all about its previous engagements and the prison van and everything. Shall we cross to the north, and see whether the Serpentine is in its place? Or would you prefer to inspect the eastern front of the Palace? Or may I offer you a penny chair?”
“I think a penny chair would be the maddest of the three dissipations,” she decided.
And they sat down in penny chairs.
“It’s rather jolly here, isn’t it?” said he. “The trees, with their black trunks, and their leaves, and things. Have you ever seen such sumptuous foliage? And the greensward, and the shadows, and the sunlight, and the atmosphere, and the mistiness—isn’t it like pearl-dust and gold-dust floating in the air? It’s all got up to imitate the background of a Watteau. We must do our best to be frivolous and ribald, and supply a proper foreground. How big and fleecy and white the clouds are. Do you think they’re made of cotton-wool? And what do you suppose they paint the sky with? There never was such a brilliant, breath-taking blue. It’s much too nice to be natural. And they’ve sprinkled the whole place with scent, haven’t they? You notice how fresh and sweet it smells. If only one could get rid of the sparrows—the cynical little beasts! hear how they’re chortling—and the people, and the nursemaids and children. I have never been able to understand why they admit the public to the parks.”
“Go on,” she encouraged him. “You’re succeeding admirably in your effort to be ribald.”
“But that last remark wasn’t ribald in the least—it was desperately sincere. I do think it’s inconsiderate of them to admit the public to the parks. They ought to exclude all the lower classes, the People, at one fell swoop, and then to discriminate tremendously amongst the others.”
“Mercy, what undemocratic sentiments!” she cried. “The People, the poor dear People—what have they done?”
“Everything. What haven’t they done? One could forgive their being dirty and stupid and noisy and rude; one could forgive their ugliness, the ineffable banality of their faces, their goggle-eyes, their protruding teeth, their ungainly motions; but the trait one can’t forgive is their venality. They’re so mercenary. They’re always thinking how much they can get out of you—everlastingly touching their hats and expecting you to put your hand in your pocket. Oh, no, believe me, there’s no health in the People. Ground down under the iron heel of despotism, reduced to a condition of hopeless serfdom, I don’t say that they might not develop redeeming virtues. But free, but sovereign, as they are in these days, they’re everything that is squalid and sordid and offensive. Besides, they read such abominably bad literature.”
“In that particular they’re curiously like the aristocracy, aren’t they?” said she. “By-the-bye, when are you going to publish another book of poems?”
“Apropos of bad literature?”
“Not altogether bad. I rather like your poems.”
“So do I,” said he. “It’s useless to pretend that we haven’t tastes in common.”
They were both silent for a bit. She looked at him oddly, an inscrutable little light flickering in her eyes. All at once she broke out with a merry trill of laughter.
“What are you laughing at?” he demanded.
“I’m hugely amused,” she answered.
“I wasn’t aware that I’d said anything especially good.”
“You’re building better than you know. But if I am amused,youlook ripe for tears. What is the matter?”
“Every heart knows its own bitterness,” he answered. “Don’t pay the least attention to me. You mustn’t let moodiness of mine cast a blight upon your high spirits.”
“No fear,” she assured him. “There are pleasures that nothing can rob of their sweetness. Life is not all dust and ashes. There are bright spots.”
“Yes, I’ve no doubt there are,” he said.
“And thrilling little adventures—no?” she questioned.
“For the bold, I dare say.”
“None but the bold deserve them. Sometimes it’s one thing, and sometimes it’s another.”
“That’s very certain,” he agreed.
“Sometimes, for instance,” she went on, “one meets a man one knows, and speaks to him. And he answers with a glibness! And then, almost directly, what do you suppose one discovers?”
“What?” he asked.
“One discovers that the wretch hasn’t the ghost of a notion who one is—that he’s totally and absolutely forgotten one!”
“Oh, I say! Really?” he exclaimed.
“Yes, really. You can’t deny thatthat’san exhilarating little adventure.”
“I should think it might be. One could enjoy the man’s embarrassment,” he reflected.
“Or his lack of embarrassment. Some men are of an assurance, of asang froid!They’ll place themselves beside you, and walk with you, and talk with you, and even propose that you should pass the livelong afternoon cracking jokes with them in a garden, and never breathe a hint of their perplexity. They’ll brazen it out.”
“That’s distinctly heroic, Spartan, of them, don’t you think?” he said. “Internally, poor dears, they’re very likely suffering agonies of discomfiture.”
“We’ll hope they are. Could they decently do less?” said she.
“And fancy the mental struggles that must be going on in their brains,” he urged. “If I were a man in such a situation I’d throw myself upon the woman’s mercy. I’d say, ’Beautiful, sweet lady! I know I know you. Your name, your entirely charming and appropriate name, is trembling on the tip of my tongue. But, for some unaccountable reason, my brute of a memory chooses to play the fool. If you’ve a spark of Christian kindness in your soul, you’ll come to my rescue with a little clue.’.rdquo;
“If the woman had a Christian sense of the ridiculous in her soul, I fear you’d throw yourself on her mercy in vain,” she warned him.
“Whatisthe good of tantalising people?”
“Besides,” she continued, “the woman might reasonably feel slightly humiliated to find herself forgotten in that bare-faced manner.”
“The humiliation surely would be all the man’s. Have you heard from the Wohenhoffens lately?”
“The—what? The—who?” She raised her eyebrows.
“The Wohenhoffens,” he repeated.
“What are the Wohenhoffens? Are they persons? Are they things?”
“Oh, nothing. My enquiry was merely dictated by a thirst for knowledge. It occurred to me vaguely that you might have worn a black domino at a masked ball they gave, the Wohenhoffens. Are you sure you didn’t?”
“I’ve a great mind to punish your forgetfulness by pretending that I did,” she teased.
“She was rather tall, like you, and she had grey eyes, and a nice voice, and a laugh that was sweeter than the singing of nightingales. She was monstrously clever, too, with a flow of language that would have made her a leader in any sphere. She was also a perfect fiend. I have always been anxious to meet her again, in order that I might ask her to marry me. I’m strongly disposed to believe that she was you. Was she?” he pleaded.
“If I say yes, will you at once proceed to ask me to marry you?” she asked.
“Try it and see.”
“Ce n’est pas la peine. It occasionally happens that a woman’s already got a husband.”
“She said she was an old maid.”
“Do you dare to insinuate that I look like an old maid?” she cried.
“Yes.”
“Upon my word!”
“Would you wish me to insinuate that you look like anything so insipid as a young girl?Wereyou the woman of the black domino?” he persisted.
“I should need further information, before being able to make up my mind. Are the—what’s their name?—Wohenheimer?—are the Wohenheimers people one can safely confess to knowing? Oh, you’re a man, and don’t count. But a woman? It sounds a trifle Jewish, Wohenheimer. But of course there are Jews and Jews.”