Volume X Part 6 (2/2)
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 a.s.surance. 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 ident.i.ties 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? Or _vice 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 Circa.s.sian 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, she was willing to bet her halidome 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 gray eyes, or grayish-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 gray or blue-gray 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 patronized 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 pa.s.sed, 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 fas.h.i.+on 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?”
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