Mackellar, who she is inside herself, had always puzzled everybody. No one could pull her together into any sort of personage who would pass muster in the wildest work of fiction as being conceivable. Why, for instance, did she who averted her chaste eye from the naked foot of a fisher-boy herself wear a tight silk bathing dress that reached not quite to her knees, and nowhere near her elbows? Was it, as Mrs. Leonards said, to display the atrocity of her own figure and thereby strengthen the rickety morality of the world in general? That could hardly be the case, since on other occasions she laced herself so tight, and wore such a killing hat, and so many Cairngorms and garnets, that she could not be found guiltless of making a public temptation of herself. Why, again, by what possible psychological consistency, did she revel in a game of poker and reserve the hostility of her finest colloquialisms for those who took tickets at a lottery? Why, again—but there is no use in multiplying her contradictions, for she entirely consists of them.
But the salient point on which every psychologist’s eye was pensive today was why she had dismissed Seraphina after a year’s harmonious co-operation for agreeing with Salvatore that a particular beefsteak did not stink. Never had she had such a servant as Seraphina, nor ever would, and well she knew it. Someone suggested that Mrs. Mackellar had determined to be an eater of uncooked foods, and others who remembered her welter of appreciation over an ordinary mutton cutlet, hardly troubled to reply to so inadmissible a conjecture. As we whittled away at her, the point of the discussion grew ever sharper, for why had she so clearly smiled in answer to Seraphina’s greeting just now? The idea that the smile was purely sardonic had most supporters: one or two who kindly upheld the view that she was meaning to make it up with Seraphina were hissed down. The most obdurate alone stuck to it, and had the hardihood to bet five liras that this was the true explanation of the smile, and the readiness with which he found takers for that bet, caused him to experience an access of prudence, and to explain that he only meant to bet five liras all told, and not fifty. Alas!
No one was walking in my direction, and some half an hour later I went slowly home. Already I was beginning to regret that I had not taken more of those bets, for the shrewdest analyst of motive and psychology in Alatri had been bound to confess that Mrs. Mackellar’s motives, like the path of the comets that should, according to all calculations, periodically destroy the earth, were, when all was said and done, completely unconjecturable. No application of logic, or reason, of the movements of heavy bodies seemed to apply to them, and for that very reason I had rejected the sardonic nature of that smile for Seraphina, and in the spirit of “Credo, quia impossible” had taken it for a smile of reconciliation. But I stood to win five liras, and who would quarrel with so enviable a conclusion, especially since it implied the re-installation of Seraphina? That was not a wholly altruistic consideration, for Leonard had said in so many words that Mrs. Mackellar would probably attempt to seduce Francesco away from my service with the lure of higher wages. That was a horrible thought, and I quickened my steps as I came near to my villa.
I heard bounding footsteps coming down the outside stairs from the front door into the garden, which could only be Francesco’s, and I wondered whether he was prancing towards me in order to communicate his wonderful good luck in going as cook to Mrs. Mackellar, at twice the wages he at present received. I believed Mrs. Mackellar, like the prophet Habakkuk, to be “capable de tout,” but I didn’t really believe this infamy of Francesco. The garden door flew open, and he met me with a face of mourning.
“The Signora Mackellar,” he cried, “walked up with Seraphina to her house. Through your telescope, signor, I saw them kissing and kissing on the roof. Dio! Why does a woman want to kiss a woman? There are many strange things in the world, signor. St. Peter, he had a wife, and also his wife had a mother, and one day—”
“Tell me about it after dinner,” I said. “And bring up the bottle of English wine, the port wine, which I brought from Rome. I have won five liras, Francesco.”
“Sissignor,” said Francesco. “But the dinner is not yet quite ready, for I was watching with your telescope. Five liras!… There was once a man who backed five numbers at the Lotto, and behold they all came out even as he had backed them. He won a hundred thousand liras, and an estate in Calabria, and—”
“Dinner,” said I, and Francesco ran to the kitchen.
I walked on air. Alone that evening I had had the courage of my opinion, and for once had divined Mrs. Mackellar’s mind to the extent of backing my divination for five liras. That is a lot of money here—for a stall at the cinema (front row) only costs one.
THE ORIOLISTS
In spite of the unaccountable absence of a Cabinet Minister who should have sat between our hostess, Mrs. Withers and Miss Agnes Lockett, I felt that this luncheon-party must be considered as perhaps the most epoch-making that had, up to the present date, been enticed beneath that insatiably hospitable roof. Never had the comet-like orbit of our entertainer ascended quite so high towards the zenith.
With the negligible exception of myself, for whose presence there I shall soon amply account, there was not one among us, man, woman or child (for that prodigy on the fiddle, Dickie Sebastian, in his tight colossal sailor-suit, was of the company) whose name was not thrillingly familiar to the great percentage of the readers of those columns in the daily Press which inform us who was in the park on Sunday chatting with friends, or at the first night of the new play looking lovely.
Briefly to tell the number and brightness of these stars, there was a much beribboned general from Salonica, a girl just engaged to the heir of one of our most respectable dukedoms, a repatriated prisoner from Ruhleben, a medium possessed of devastating insight, a prominent actress from a revue, a lion hunter (not our amiable hostess, but a swarthy taciturnity from East Africa), and the adorable Agnes Lockett, lately created a Dame in the Order of the British Empire in connexion with Secret Service. She had just been demobilized, and, as she freely admitted, four years of conundrums and traps had undermined the frankness of her disposition. Schemes, plans, intrigues had become—for the moment—a second nature to her, and she was not happy unless she was laying a trap for somebody else, or suspecting (quite erroneously) that somebody was laying a trap for her. She had also become a smooth conversational liar. These things had not, it may be mentioned, affected her charm and her beauty.
Finally, there was myself, who had no claim to distinction of any kind beyond such as is inherent in living next door to Mrs. Withers and being honoured with the friendship of Agnes Lockett.
I had been asked by telephone just at luncheontime, as I was in the act of sitting down to a tough and mournful omelette alone, and I naturally felt quite certain that I had been bidden to take the place of some guest (not the Cabinet Minister whom she still expected) who had disappointed Mrs. Withers at the last moment. This was confirmed by the fact that she told me in her clearest telephone voice that I had promised to come today (which I knew was not the case) and that she was merely reminding me.
Obviously, then, she was in urgent need of somebody, for it was not her custom to “remind” all her expected guests at the very moment when they were due at her house, and my inclusion in this resplendent galaxy was certainly due to the convenient fact that, as I lived next door, I should not keep the rest of her party waiting.… It is, I hope, unnecessary to add that, with the unfortunate exception of myself, everyone present appeared in the informing pages of “Who’s Who,” so that his work and recreations were known to the reading public and would afford a good start to the medium in case we had a séance afterwards.
As the currents of conversation set this way and that, I was occasionally marooned in a backwater, and could hear what Mrs. Withers was saying to Agnes Lockett. The latter had been to the new play last night, and an allusion to it produced from our hostess a flood of typical monologue delivered in the judicial voice for which she was famous. She was a big lean woman who radiated a stinging vitality that paralysed the timid, and as she spoke, her eyes patrolled the distinguished table with the utmost satisfaction
