“Yes, Roland Somerville is marvellous in the part,” she said, “and I told him he had never done a finer piece of work. But I thought Margaret had not quite grasped his conception of it. I went round, of course, to see her afterwards, and as she asked me what I thought I told her just that.”
At this moment the telephone bell rang in the room adjoining, and Mrs. Withers, though continuing to analyse the play with her accustomed acumen (it had produced precisely the same effect on her as on the author of the critique in the Daily Herald) was a little distraite in manner till her parlour-maid communicated the message.
“Ah, that accounts for Hugh Chapel’s absence, who was to have sat between us,” she said to Agnes. “He was sent for to the Palace at a quarter-past one and is lunching there. And I ordered golden plovers especially for him. Hugh was at Priscilla’s last night, looking very tired, I thought. You know him, of course, Miss Lockett?”
Agnes was looking a little dazed.
“Not yet,” she said. “You asked me here to meet him.”
Mrs. Withers made a gesture of impatience at herself. As a matter of fact she had, in asking Agnes Lockett, told her that Mr. Chapel was coming, and in asking him, had told him that Miss Lockett was coming, thus hoping to kill two lions with one lunch.
“Of course! How stupid of me,” she said. “Let us instantly arrange another day when you can both be here. Ah! do come to a little party I have on Thursday night. You will find Lord Marrible here too; he only got back from America ten days ago. Poor Jack! he had a terrible voyage, and he is such a bad sailor.”
A look of slight astonishment came over Agnes’s face, and remembering that she and Lord Marrible were old and intimate friends, I wondered whether she was surprised at this odd allusion to “poor Jack,” for he was known to his intimate circle as John. Personally, I had had the felicity of making him and my hostess known to each other only a few days ago, and I too wondered a little at the speedy ripening of the acquaintanceship. I did not wonder much, for I knew Mrs. Withers’s friendly disposition, and her tendency to allude to everybody by his Christian name. But at the moment a too rash act of swallowing on the part of Dickie Sebastian, who sat next me, made it my duty towards my neighbour to thump him on his fat back for fear that we should never hear his violin again, and my attention was distracted. When the fish-bone in question had been safely deposited on the edge of his plate, the telephone had again been ringing, and Mrs. Withers was retailing the reason for the absence of somebody called Humphrey, whose place I conjectured that I was now occupying.
During the discussion of the golden plovers provided for the absent Mr. Chapel, I became aware that Agnes Lockett was being drenched and bewildered with the flood of celebrated names that was playing on her as if from some fire-hose. Actors, authors, politicians, social stars, soldiers and sailors were deluging her, and, without exception, they had all been here, by their Christian names, last week, or at any rate were coming next week. Without exception, too, each of them had told Mrs. Withers in confidence what she repeated now to Agnes, knowing that it would go no farther. George had assured her of this, Arthur had hinted that, Jenny had thought this probable, Maudie had scouted the idea altogether, but however much they had disagreed, it was certain that they would all be here on Thursday evening, and Agnes could talk to them herself.
As I listened and looked, I saw that a species of desperation was seizing Agnes; she was finding the recital absolutely intolerable. Then an idea seemed to strike her, and looking round to catch a friendly eye, she caught mine, and spoke to me across the table.
“Have you seen Robert Oriole lately?” she asked in her delicious husky voice, that was so unlike the canary-tone of Mrs. Withers. But as she asked me this, she gave me a peremptory affirmative nod of which I could not miss the significance. I had never heard of Robert Oriole before, but I was certain that Agnes for some reason of her own insisted that I did know him, and accordingly I answered in that sense.
“We went to a play together last night,” I said. At that precise moment, without a pang or a cry, Robert Oriole was born.
The new name, of course, instantly challenged Mrs. Withers’s whole attention, as Agnes had designed that it should. Devoted as she was to old and celebrated names, new names that she had never heard of demanded the keenest of inquiries.
“Robert Oriole?” she said. “Who can it have been who was speaking of Robert Oriole the other day?”
Agnes’s brilliant smile shot out and sheathed itself again.
“Ah! who isn’t talking about Robert Oriole?” she said.
Much as Mrs. Withers liked appearing to know, she liked really knowing better, and surrendered.
“Was it Maudie?” she said. “I can’t remember.”
Once against a fresh current of conversation claimed my hearing, but rather uneasily, I could catch little enthusiastic phrases in what Agnes was saying to our hostess, and wondered if I should be called upon to invent anything more about this unknown personage. I could not, a moment ago, have done otherwise than I had done, for Agnes unmistakably commanded me to say that I either had or had not seen Robert Oriole lately. I was bound, at any rate, to convey in my answer that I knew him, and so it made no particular difference as to whether I had seen him lately or not, and I had said that we had been to the play together because I had to say something, and it was clearly much more suitable at Mrs. Withers’s table to have done that sort of thing.
For all that I knew for certain there might be such a person; but I strongly suspected that there was something “back of” Robert Oriole, as our American friends say. What that was I could not conjecture, but I felt that I was acting under Agnes’s direction in some Secret Service. My apprehensions increased as I heard his name figuring largely in her conversation, and were confirmed when, as she passed me on her way out, she said in a Secret Service undertone, not looking my way as she spoke:
“I shall come back with you almost immediately to your house, where we must have a serious conversation. For the present just keep your head, and remember that you know Robert intimately.”
Half an hour later, accordingly, we were seated together in my house. The wall between mine and Mrs. Withers’s drawing-room was not very thick, and the bountiful roulades of Dickie Sebastian’s violin were plainly audible. Agnes, with a flushed face, like a child who had been triumphiantly mischievous, was sipping barley-water, for she felt feverish with imagination.
“So that’s that,” she said decisively, after a lurid sketch of what had happened, “and it’s no use regretting it. We must save all our nervous force to go through with it.”
“But what made you invent Robert Oriole at all?” I asked. “And then why have brought me in?”
“I couldn’t help inventing him; it may have been demoniacal possession, or more likely it was a defensive measure against my going mad, which I undoubtedly should have done if Mrs. Withers had told me any more at all of what the great ones of the earth said to her in confidence. I should either have gone mad, or taken up a handful of those soft chocolates and rubbed her face with them. So I was obliged to know some glorious creature whom she didn’t know. Obliged! She knew all the real ones, so I had to invent one. And does she really call them by their Christian names?”
“At a distance,” said I.
“Then she ought to do it right. She called John Marrible, Jack, when nobody else had ever called him anything but John; and she spoke of you as Frank, whereas nobody had ever called you anything but Francis. In a week from now she will be calling my darling Robert Oriole, Bob. But he really is Robbie.”
She put down her empty glass.
“That has calmed me,” she said, “and so now we will get to business. I must repeat all that I told Mrs. Withers about Robbie. He is thirty-one, and is the most marvellous airman. He has yellow hair and blue eyes, and is like the Hermes at Olympia (she thought I meant Earl’s Court). It is perfectly clear to Mrs. Withers’s ferreting instincts that I am in love with him; ab
out that you had better say, if she asks you, that we are merely great friends. He flew over to France about a week ago, piloting three Cabinet Ministers. They won’t fly with any other pilot——”
“That won’t do,” said I. “I went to the play with him last night.”
“I am not so stupid as to have forgotten that. He came back yesterday, and left for Paris again this morning, carrying a new cypher to the Embassy. He writes the most wonderful poems, which he composes as he is flying.”
“She will ask for them at Bickers,” said I.
Agnes thought intently for a moment.
“She may ask for them at Bickers,” she said, “but she won’t get them because they are not published. They are type-written on vellum, and he lets his friends see them. Perhaps we had better write one or two. What is vellum?”
My head whirled.
“But what is it all about?” I cried. “I don’t mean his poems, but himself. Why are you making all this up?”
She looked at me as at a rather stupid child.
“Now, try to understand,” she said. “I invented him originally to save myself from going mad, and we are making up delicious details about him to save ourselves from detection. We have both of us said that we know Robbie Oriole, and so we must know something about him; the more picturesque the better. We must be able (I have already done so and am telling you about it) to describe his appearance, his career, his tastes. If you told somebody you knew me, and couldn’t say anything definite about me, people would think that you didn’t know me at all. It’s the same with Robert Oriole: we must be able to tell Mrs. Withers about him, and say the same thing. You would be quite despicable if, having said you knew a glorious creature like Robbie, it appeared as if you didn’t. What a delicious name, too! It came to me in a flash, and I felt as if I had known him all my life. Fancy poor Mrs. Withers not knowing Robert Oriole! How bitter for her!”
“Ah, that’s your real reason,” said I. “Now you are serious.”
“Not at all; that is the humorous side of it. It is to save ourselves that we have got to build up this solid, splendid presentment of our friend, and that is why I am telling you so carefully all I have said about him to Mrs. Withers. When it comes to your turn, as it undoubtedly will, to describe him further, you must always telephone to me at once what you have said.... Where had we got to? Oh, yes, his poems. Haven’t you got some joyous little lyrics in your desk which are his? Or better, some vague morbid little wailings? Yes: that shall be the other side of Robbie, known only to his most intimate friends. To the world, which worships him, he is all sunshine and splendour, but to us, his dear friends, there is another side. His grandmother was a Russian, you must remember. I think I had better write the poems.”
Somehow, incredibly to myself, the fascination of creating and building up and furnishing out a wonderful young man like this, who had no existence whatever, began to gain on me. Also, as Agnes had said, there was the instinct of self-preservation to spur on the imaginative faculty. There was also the pleasure of going one better than Mrs. Withers and of pretending to know intimately somebody whom nobody could possibly know.
“He is an orphan,” I said. “And may he be an American? That would make him easier to get rid of than if he was English.”
She shook her head.
“Orphan—yes,” she said. “American—no. I can’t bear American poetry, and I am sure I couldn’t write it. But his parents lived in India. They are both dead, and he hasn’t got any relations whatever, which makes him so romantic and accounts for that salt soul-loneliness in his poems. We will give him a home—just a little remote house by the sea, in Cornwall, near St. Ives, and the Atlantic rolls in on the beach in front of his grey-walled garden. His poems have the beat and rhythm of the sea——”
I sprang from my chair.
“Never, never!” I cried. “Mrs. Withers goes to St. Ives every summer.”
“We will give him his home, then, in the Lake District,” said Agnes thoughtfully. “There is no beat and rhythm of the sea in his poems, but the eternal melancholy of lakes and mountains. He must have somewhere pretty far off to go to when he is demobilized, as he will be almost immediately. His constant presence in London would lead to detection.”
“Then why demobilize him?” I asked. “He can always be in France when it is convenient to us.”
She was quite firm about this.
“It would never do,” she said. “Mrs. Withers might make inquiries about him from some General in the Flying Corps. Indeed, I am almost sorry he was an airman at all, but that can’t be helped now.”
“He can go to India to see his parents’ graves,” said I, “if we want to get him out of the country for a long period.”
“Yes, but he can’t always be doing that. No one would make constant visits to India to see graves, however beloved were their occupants. Besides, it takes so long to go to India and back. He had much better be in his lovely home in the Lakes, and pay flying visits to London—here to-day and gone to-morrow—just giving us a new poem on vellum. That will be much more fun. Oh, a most important point! He must have some other friends besides us who are worthy of knowing him. John Marrible will be a nice friend for him; John will appreciate him. I will tell a few trustworthy people about Robbie, and you must do the same. We will call ourselves the Oriolists.”
Mrs. Withers, of course, telephoned both to Agnes and to me to bring Robert Oriole to her party on Thursday evening; but there were so many new and resplendent friends there that she did not, except for a passing moment, regret the absence of that poetic airman, who was up in Westmorland. We had each of us provided him with two or three nice friends, who were in sympathy with him, but for some days after that he made no particular developments, and I began to think that, having served his purpose in protecting Agnes from insanity at Mrs. Withers’s luncheon party, she was losing interest in her benefactor.
Then suddenly he burst out in renewed glory, for it came to Agnes’s ears that in allusion to that same luncheon party Mrs. Withers had said to a mutual friend that dear Aggie had told her the most wonderful things about the Secret Service which she could not possibly repeat. This was sufficient to put new life and vigour into Robert Oriole. Agnes—who had never been called “Aggie” before—dragged me from the music-room at an evening party, where Dickie Sebastian was playing all that had ever been written for the violin, and recounted this outrage on the stairs.
“I have seen that woman three times,” she said, “once when I was introduced to her, once when I lunched with her on the day Robbie was born, and once when I didn’t bring him to her Thursday evening. And now I am ‘Aggie,’ and told her all about the Secret Service! I was almost inclined to let Robbie fade away again, but now she shall see. Heavens! There she is!”
Dickie Sebastian had ceased for the moment, and a few straggling couples emerged stealthily from the music-room, the first of whom was Mrs. Withers and Lord Marrible. Mrs. Withers would have been content, so it struck me, to kiss her hand to Agnes and pass on, for she had just been alluding to Aggie again, but since he came to a stop, she was obliged to wait also. He had already heard that he was “Jack,” and his broad good-humoured face was a-chink with merriment as he spoke to my companion.
“Hallo, Aggie!” he said. “Been talking Secret Service on the stairs?”
“Mr. Goodenough and I,” said Agnes carefully, “were waiting for Robbie. Do go and find him and bring him here by his golden hair.”
“What, is Robbie here?” he asked, thereby conveying to me that he was an Oriolist. “I didn’t see him. If Robbie is in a room it’s not easy to miss him. I didn’t even know he was in town.”
“Of course he is,” said Agnes. “Fancy not knowing if Robbie is in town. You might as well not know——”
“If the sun is shining,” said I fervently.
“Quite. Lord Marrible, do go back and see if he isn’t there. He and Mr. Goodenough and I are going back to his flat, and he is going to read to
us. And then he is going to play the piano and then I suppose it will be time for breakfast before we have talked enough.”
Mrs. Withers rose like a great salmon fresh from the sea, and rushed at this wonderful lure.
“I never heard anything so improper,” she said. “You and—and Mr. Goodenough and Robbie Oriole! My dear Miss Lockett, who is chaperoning you?”
Agnes’s face dimpled into the most delicious smile.
“Ah, we don’t want any chaperon in the sunlight,” she said, as John shouldered his way back into the music-room.
“Then let me drop you all at his flat,” said Mrs. Withers. “I have my motor here, and I’m going home now. I am sure it is not out of my way.”
Agnes nudged me with her elbow to indicate that I had to answer this.
“Robbie’s car is here, many thanks,” I said. “It’s waiting for us. I saw it when I came in.”
“And he plays the piano too?” asked Mrs. Withers.
Agnes laughed.
“Ah, I believe you know him all the time,” she said, “and mean to repeat to him all the nice things that we say about him. You know him intimately, I believe, but if you tell me that he has already sent you those three sonnets he wrote as he flew to Cologne the other day, which he promised to read us to-night, I don’t think I could bear it. Mr. Goodenough and I were promised the first hearing of them, and I believe he has sent them to you already.”
“Indeed he hasn’t,” said Mrs. Withers in a social agony. “I really don’t know Mr. Oriole, though I am dying to. I hoped you would have brought him to my little party last Thursday.”