CLAIR DE LUNE BY THE SAME AUTHOR JENNY ESSENDEN MARQUERAY'S DUEL NIGHTFALL AN ORDEAL OF HONOUR In collaboration with R, K. WEEKES THE PURPLE PEARL SHE SLIPPED ACROSS THE ROOM LIKE A GHOST, THE CHINESE COAT HALF OPEN OVER THE SAXON FAIRNESS OF HER SHOULDERS. HER INSTINCT WAS TO TAKE HIM IN HER ARMS. CLAIR DE LUNE BY ANTHONY PRYDE AUTHOR or "MARQUERAY'S DUEL," " NIGHTFALL, " ETC. NEW YORK DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 1922 COPYBIGHT, 1922, BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC. PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY gftt ett<"" * W> m C**9* BOOK MANUFACTURERS To HELEN In memory of the memories that we share Wide sunny rooms; the cuckoo's April call; The silver Darenth rippling through its fair Enamelled meads; the scent of flowers that fall. CLAIR DE LUNE CLAIR DE LUNE CHAPTER I WAS Mr. Evelyn at home? No, Mr. Efelyn was not at home. Was he likely to be in before long? It was impossible to say. Was he often late? He was occasionally a little late. Where had he gone? Mr. Efelyn was playing at the Queen's Hall : had not Mr. Dent seen the posters? it had been verra extensifely advertised; carriages were ordered for ten minutes to elefen, but, as Mr. Dent would be aware, Mr Efelyn was often obliged to give a great many Encores. And would probably go on some- where to supper afterwards? Mr. Dent would surely remember that Mr Efelyn nefer took supper after an efening concert. . . . "Oh! well, I'll wait for him," said George Dent, a trifle impatient under Eraser's coldly Highland grey eyes, which seemed to be always thanking heaven that he was not ignorant as Low- landers are or even as this Southron; and dropping into an armchair Dent ended the interview by picking up a newspaper ,which however he hastily threw down again as soon as Eraser's back was turned the Mu- sical Times was not what he preferred to read. Dent was thickset and sandy-coloured, keeping room for temperate judgments behind a broad fore- head, while his shrewd glance examined the world 2 GLAIR DE LUNE and the men and women in it with the cool slow humour of the Cambridgeshire fens. Only the long upperlip and slightly undershot chin bespoke a few obstinate prepossessions and reserves, and perhaps, behind all else, a hard fighting temper, born of the drop or two of Norse blood that in an Eastern county not infrequently crosses the milder Saxon strain. He had had a long day and a longer night before it, the racket of London tired him, and as a rule he went to bed at ten, but he had come to Hever Street to find Charles Evelyn, and he meant to do it before going back to his hotel if he had to wait all night. In the meanwhile he lit a pipe and examined Eve- lyn's room, which he had never seen before, and which struck him, in the given order of impressions, as very pretty, rather spendthrift, not a bit his style, and last of all, and with a faint uprising of discomfort too much like a woman's drawingroom and the wrong sort of woman at that ! There was nothing effeminate about the chair he was sitting in, a man's chair, deep and shabby and with shoulders well squared against its leather cushions he settled himself lower in it and stretched out his long legs in the luxury of an in- dulged yawn; the fire too was a man's fire, stacked high with a mixture of coal and logs, firtree bavins apparently to judge by their blue twinkling flames and resinous odour: roaring away on a wide and flat brick hearth, the glorious heat of them struck right across to the door. Nor had he any fault to find with the polished floor and Persian rugs, or the wide airy walls washed over with chrome-coloured distemper. Even the grand piano might pass, and the violin flung CLAIR DE LUNE 3 on top of it, and the case of clarinets, the harp, the litter of music printed and in manuscript : it was an extraordinary thing that a man who might have been a country gentleman like his fathers before him should take up with the career of a professional musician, but after all Evelyn was had been only a younger son, and at all events, so long as he worked at his job, it kept him out of mischief. But the pictures ! Dent had pictures at home, a collection of signed engravings and proofs before letters which when the harvest was bad he occasionally threatened to sell, though he would as soon have sold his right hand for they belonged to the house, and the house was part of himself. But those were scenes worth looking at "The Lawn," "The Covert Side," "First Check," and so on, "Harry Hieover on 'Tilter,' " Wilkie's "Penny Wedding," Richard Herring's "Black Rabbit", an epi- tome of farm and sporting life, every stroke distinct in pale blue and green and scarlet, or dimness of sepia shadow. The works that Evelyn hung on his walls one and no more to each wall were neither dim nor distinct: bizarre combinations of coloured angles, which looked to Dent like the dreams of a house-painter gone mad. He couldn't make out the subjects, and after scrutinising them for some time from a distance with his light eyes, wrinkled at the corners by much gazing across field and fallow under a bronzing sun, he was not sorry for it : for the least confusing of the five threatened to resolve into one of those pink and white caf6 studies which, in Dent's private opinion, decent people neither paint nor pur- chase. 4 CLAIR DE LUNE And it wasn't the pictures only, but the curtains and cushions, the metal work and lacquer and china : the room was like a curio-shop, for every table (and there were too many tables) was strewn with objects of value: to inherit them was well enough (Dent had inherited not a few of his own), but as for taking the trouble to collect them ! And in any case they should be set out with discrimination and reserve. Dent did not mentally use the phrase "economy of effect" when he found an ivory-hilted Persian sword niched into the spout of a bronze Pyrenean regalada, but this was the instinct that prompted him to dis- content. And then the photographs ! men and women of every class and age, standing about framed or un- f ramed here there and everywhere : and signed, many of them, with names well known in more than one London world. . . . Apparently Charles Evelyn was liked by people of all sorts, but especially by women and such pretty women too ! And Evelyn's own portrait amid the debris : how like him to possess his own portrait ! Dent got up out of his chair to examine it. He had not seen the original for a twelvemonth, and was anxious to learn whether the racket of this London life had altered him. A painting, but of a different school from those that graced the walls, it stood propped up unframed on a French cabinet, between a plaster cast of a woman's head which Dent thought the most hideously death- like object he had ever seen, and an ivory fan through whose sticks some one had twisted a couple of half fresh, half fading pink rosebuds. Dent carried the likeness to the lamp and studied it attentively. Come, there was no want of economy here at all events! CLAIE DE LUNE 5 the head and throat only, in oils, and isolated by some craftsman's trick on a background of indigo blue: and smiling Dent owned to himself that Evelyn had not altered after all, it was the same Evelyn as he had known all his life, rather melancholy and delicate and inaccessible, with the haunting grey eyes under the waved cedar-brown hair, and the musician's pointed chin. . . . ". . . and wait till Charles turns up, shall we?" ". . . your cloak, Sophy?" Dent laid down the portrait as the confused mur- mur of voices preluded the entrance of these other friends of Charles Evelyn : a big fair man, exquisitely dressed, Mayfair from head to heel, accompanied by a tall girl in black and white flounces and a gold-em- broidered coat. "Meredith!" Dent exclaimed. He had known Meredith years ago at the university in what seemed like a different life, and his first idea was that "Sophy" was either Mrs. or Miss Meredith, but he altered his mind when her escort, with a vague provisional smile for the unexpected meeting, put her into a chair by the fire without the offer of an in- troduction. Brother and sister they certainly were not: nor husband and wife, for she wore no ring. Dent then, though unwillingly, entered her in a dif- ferent pigeon-hole. In Cambridgeshire, in the society to which he was accustomed, girls did not visit men of Evelyn's years in their own rooms at any time, and least of all after ten o'clock at night. Yet there was a want of sentiment in the atmosphere which seemed to rule Meredith out of the field. "Dent is it Dent? what ages since I've seen you! 'Are you waiting for Evelyn? He'll be in directly; 6 CLAIB DE LUNE I got sick of hanging about Queen's Hall in the rain and came on in a taxi. How long are you in town for?" "The night. I'm only here on business. You're living in London, ain't you?" "Well, I have a flat in Mount Street, which I inhabit for three months out of the twelve. But I'm an out- rageous globe-trotter. I cut the Diplomatic because it was such a bore to be tied. What are you doing? the last I heard, you were farming your ancestral acres somewhere in the Midlands." "So I am still," said Dent drily. "Near Temple Evelyn. Eve and I are country neighbours, as you may remember, which is why I've kept up with him. We don't as a rule see anything of each other except when he's at home. Working farmers like me don't get many holidays." He was aware of a tinge of the unduly defiant in his manner, but Meredith always had irritated him and always would do so, with his faultless clothes and faultless voice and the little studied air of self-depreciation which seemed to say "Do let me set you at your ease." Still Dent was thoroughly goodhumoured, and, since he really was quite at his ease, his spurt of irritation ended in a slow apologetic laugh. "Very jolly to see you again, Edmund," it had been Edmund and George at Cam- bridge, and Dent, suddenly feeling warm towards the companion of his lost youth, went back to the old terms without much caring whether Meredith were pleased or no. "You look as though the world had been treating you pretty well. But then you al- ways did, so that's nothing new." "And Miss Dent, how is she?" CLAIR DE LUNE 7 "My sister? Oh ah ! I remember, you met her in town. Very fit, thanks. Very busy just at present with an ailing Alderney calf. She runs the dairy and the poultry yard." "And she's not engaged yet?" Dent's eyes widened in surprise. "A thousand pardons, my dear fellow, but there were moths enough round the candle !" "I dare say I don't pretend to keep count of Kitty's dancing partners," Dent answered placidly. How little change fifteen years make in a man's manner! The shade of impertinence was as characteristic of the Meredith he remembered as the shade of affec- tation put on to cover it. "By the by, how soon do you expect Evelyn? The fact is " Dent's explanation, which would have explained nothing, was lost as the door opened again and the room was flooded with fresh visitors all talking at once. A middle-aged plump man badly dressed in light brown tweeds and a flannel shirt ; an extremely handsome youth in evening clothes, as dark-haired and olive-skinned as an Italian; and a third who might have been any age, brown as a gipsy, thin as a lath, and frankly disreputable in a wet macintosh worn over a Leander blazer : Dent backed away from all of them, rather liking their looks, but apprehensive of a life so unlike his own. So these were Evelyn's London friends, were they? They might have been worse yes, in view of the Futurist paintings they might have been very much worse! Yet they made Dent feel shy because they all knew one another so well and were so far more at home in Hever Street than he would ever be. But the wave poured in, it closed over 8 CLAIE DE LUNE Meredith and his companion and over Dent as well: Meredith was not expansive, but the others were in- capable of leaving a stranger in the cold. "That you, Meredith? ... I say, Sophy, what an auriferous coat! . . . Good show wasn't it?" Then discovering Dent in his corner, "Are you waiting for Eve? Do come over to the fire," the elder man made him hospitably welcome while the Leander blazer pulled up a chair and patted the seat of it as if Dent had been a timid dog. "He won't be long now. We often drop in to cheer him up after a Queen's Hall night, he gets the blues if he's left to recover from it by himself." Dent said "Thanks very much, sir," feeling stiff and shy and yet attracted, and the Leander blazer, who had taken off his macintosh and was sit- ting cross-legged on the rug, looked up with a lazy twinkle in his brown eyes. "What'll you have to drink? We're all having cof- fee. You will too? That's so harmonious. Selwyn, my son, you're young and active in the legs, cut down- stairs and tell Eraser coffee for six." "You can't go ordering Eraser about like that," said Meredith angrily, "on my word, Wright, you seem to forget that this is Evelyn's flat!" "Selwyn !" "Y-yes?" from the stairs. "Five coffees, one gin and bitters." "Nothing of the sort! Do you hear, Selwyn? I won't have anything at all. I must say, if anyone did that in my house " "Cheer up. No one would do it in your house. Amateurs are safe. But Eve is a freeman of the Republic of Art, to which in my humble way I also CLAIR DE LUNE 9 belong the beautiful communion of one faith, one hope, one toothbrush anathema in all ages to you of the unthinking bourgeoisie " Dent perceived that Meredith was making himself ridiculous : perceived too that the Leander blazer had salted his chaff with truth. Meredith was distin- guished from the other men, even young Selwyn in his slim black and white, by the want of some quality they had in common : what was it? perhaps a common outlook, the direct simplicity of men who keep in their pockets a private standard of values. And observant and reflective, though enveloped in good will, Dent sat and listened to their conversation, from which an impression of Evelyn gradually disengaged itself, familiar though elusive. "Shut up, you two, you're always sparring," came the goodhumoured voice of the elder man. "You might shift over a bit, Wright, and let the rest of us see the fire. Rotten weather I call it for the begin- ning of September! But wasn't the Hall packed? Bless 'em, they'd come to hear old Eve play if it rained cats and dogs. Paris, Rome, Munich, Zurich there's not one of 'em all so reliable as good old London. We don't know much about music, but our heart's in the right place." "Were you looking at Eve's portrait?" this was young Selwyn returning, a little out of breath. He came up with his engaging smile and stammer and took it out of Dent's hand. "L-like him isn't it? How long is it since you've seen him? Oh, a t-twelvemonth ! But Eve never alters. Oh!" in a voice suddenly raised and shrill with indignation, "good God don't put your nose in it! It isn't meant to be s-smelt!" 10 CLAIR DE LUNE "Am I looking at it too close? I don't know any- thing about Art," Dent said humbly. He looked round at the black and gold cloak with some vague idea of drawing her into the conversation, but in- stantly felt his mistake, just as he had felt the ab- surdity of addressing the older man as "sir" ; if she remained silent it was from preference ; she could have come in whenever she liked. He fell back on the safer subject of the portrait, which young Selwyn was hold- ing out at arm's length with an expression half pleased and half dissatisfied. "I'm sure it's uncommonly clever." "Y-yes it is," agreed the boy gravely. "It's Eve all over, he so often looks as though if you t-touched him he wouldn't be there. I've never done anything bet- ter." Dent looked up in surprise. "Oh, you didn't know? That was r-rather a shame, to ask you how you liked it without telling you it was mine. But fellows often do seem to know me." He paused a moment and then added "S-somehow," in a deprecating voice. "Ah, but I don't know anyone," said Dent, smiling at him. "I'm a country cousin. I only turn up in town once a twelvemonth to go to an Agricultural Show. It must be a good ten years since I've been to the Academy." "Better introduce ourselves, shall we?" said the elder man. "The young ? un is Selwyn Yarborough." Dent opened his eyes ; even he, though his views were bounded by Burlington House, had heard of Selwyn Yarborough, Tennant's favourite pupil, and so a spirit- ual grandson of Carolus Duran, whose work at twenty- two had been hung on the line at the Autumn Salon. "And Wright and I are Messenger men." Now the CLAIR DE LUNE 11 Messenger was the illustrated paper that Dent read over his breakfast table every Friday morning. "I'm Hurst Cecil Hurst and Wright does rotten sketches to illustrate my rotten stories." Another shock to Dent's preconceptions ; but for the sparkle of sagacity and courage in the light-blue dangerous eye, this hard-bitten fighting journalist might have passed for a prosperous grocer. "And I'm only George Dent, and a hopeless duffer," Dent said smiling, "though I've seen or heard of all your things. I wish I weren't such an outsider. Oh ! wait a bit, though, I'm indispensable after all I'm the admiring public !" "Well, and what about me?" the girl in the black and gold coat raised her voice for the first time. "Haven't any of you got enough manners to introduce me to Mr Dent?" Hurst turned round and smiled at her, a good kind smile that touched his face with beauty. But no one was ready with a reply, and there was time for Dent to feel distressed again and uncomfortable, be- fore he became aware that Evelyn himself was in the room, appearing from nowhere with his usual belated grace, and smiling down at Sophy with whimsical yet melancholy eyes. "You're the star to all our wandering barks," he said in his pleasant voice, naturally soft, but the softer for a tone of affection which struck strangely on Dent's bewildered ear. "The rest of us play tricks on platforms, George is the fat public in the stalls, and you fling the laurel when we earn it : and that's all the introduction you deserve." 12 CLAIR DE LUNE Dent would have liked to send the unseasonable guests packing. But they were in no hurry, and after all his errand could wait. The room was soon blue with smoke and Sophy accepted a cigar from Evelyn. By degrees Dent gathered that the pianist, fresh home from a brilliant visit to Paris, had given that evening a more than usually brilliant performance and had been encored again and again by a Queen's Hall audience full in spite of the wet weather : there was talk of other men and comparison of other triumphs. But there was no sign of elation in him, he was still the same quiet easy-going Charles Evelyn as in old days, and Dent, who had been feeling irritated, soon found himself falling afresh under the old charm ; he never had been able to be angry with Evelyn and was not now. And by and by he began to wonder whether this disability were not common to the rest of the room, even Meredith in his detachment, even the still anonymous Sophy : they were all very proud of him, it was evident, and though they were not all fond of one another, young Yarborough being much inclined to fall out with Meredith, and Meredith with the imperturbable Wright, for Evelyn their feeling seemed to range between willing and unwilling love. Hurst said "Play us the Alkan again," and without affectation Evelyn sat down at once to the piano and began to play, keeping his wrists low with little move- ment of the shoulders : "Alkan's Le Vent, The Wind," as he explained to Dent, whose French was of the fur- thest end of Norfolk. And very queer music Dent thought it, and (privately) much like that mythopoeic tune that the old cow died of. A run of infinitesimal CLAIE DE LUNE 13 unstressed notes flying up and down the treble octaves, separate notes no longer but indistinguishably mingled like the wail of a violin : a lull and break of sun and blue sky : the roar of a gale rising to thunder in a spinney of fir trees : and then again the run and ripple and cold ceaseless crying of wind on a thymy moor. . . . "Not so bad," said Hurst frowning, as Evelyn let his hands lie on the keys, prolonging the last faint vibrations which were just not silence, and then were silence. "But I don't hold with programme-music all the same. And what business have you to make the piano do the job of a violin eh, Sophy? Tell me that, young Evelyn." "But that's what the B. P. like," said Wright. "No- body wants to hear a penny whistle. But all London would go miles to hear a chap who could make a trom- bone sound like a penny whistle." "Oh you be quiet!" said Evelyn, getting up from the piano. "I've got to master my tools, haven't I?" "And earn a living like the rest of us," put in Mere- dith from before the mirror in which he was calmly examining the sit of his coat. " 'Like the rest of us !' " Wright pointed a derisive finger. "Now then, lily of the field !" "We are not all so innocent as you are, my dear Wright," said Meredith with the neatly genial smile which so often gave to his acidities a delusive aspect of compliment. "This flat is extremely comfortable, and I don't suppose Evelyn could pay the rent of it out of his unearned income. For my part, if I were he, I had rather play Pomp and Circumstance into a gramo- phone than retire to a garret in Bloomsbury." 14 GLAIR DE LUNE "Ah ! but there speaks the gross soul of the unthink- ing bourgeoisie " Dent perceived that Meredith did not, no, he really did not like that joke about the 'bourgeoisie. "I don't care a button for any one of the lot of you," said Evelyn pettishly. "I only want to be let alone. I do hate being worried!" He brought both hands down on the keys again in a crash of chords which made Selwyn jump, but he was not allowed to proceed, for before a dozen bars were over Fraser hurried in Fraser, once defined by Leslie Wright as "one of those faithful servants whose service is per- fect freedom." "Mr Efelyn will remember that he promised not to make a noise after elef en o'clock !" "Oh bother!" said Evelyn piteously. "I forgot the people downstairs. Oh Fraser, I haven't done it for ever so long ! They ought to be able to stand a little noise now and then?" "That iss fery well, but it iss not six months since we were turned out of our last flat, and it iss not easy to find rooms that will suit us." He shut the piano: Dent was only surprised that he did not lock it. "An