The illuminated room, the many faces, whirled about Vance. Ahead of him Floss Delaney’s brown shoulders flashed like the dryad’s in the Fontainebleau woods; he heard familiar voices, saw Mrs. Glaisher armoured in diamonds, Lady Pevensey’s dry sparkle (“She looks like a cocktail,” the novelist in him noted), and the dull enigma of Sir Felix Oster’s full-moon countenance.
“We thought you two were lost,” Mrs. Glaisher simpered; and Alders, fluttering up, whispered: “He’s here, you know . . . such luck! I do hope you’ll persuade him to do that Blemer article before they leave. . .”
And there was Chris.
Clearly he had not expected to meet Vance. He turned pale under his sallowness, then flushed to the roots of his orange-tawny hair. But his disturbance was only skin-deep; his eye remained cool, his smile undaunted. This was a new Chris, the man-of-the-world twin of the unhappy changeling of Oubli: evening clothes, sleeked hair, the lustre of his linen, transformed him into the ornamental frequenter of fashionable entertainments. “We always try to secure an author or two: Mr. Churley’s one of the new literary critics, isn’t he — on the ‘Owl’, or the ‘Windmill’, or something?” Lady Pevensey threw off, catching Vance’s signal to Chris.
“Well — so you’re here?” said Vance, laughing; and the other responded glibly: “Such luck! When I heard you were coming tonight I chucked another engagement. . .” (“Liar!” thought Vance, more amused than indignant). “Fact is, you’re the very man I want to get hold of,” Chris continued on a tidal rush of assurance. “You know Blemer, I suppose? Just as I was starting for London the ‘Windmill’ wired me that he was at Cannes, and told me to try to pick up an interview before I left the Riviera. Lucky job, getting the wire just as I was shaking the dust of Oubli from my feet,” he grinned complacently. “But now that I’ve seen Blemer I— well, frankly, you might just as well ask a fellow to write an article about a fountain-pen. That’s all Blemer appears to be: his own fountain-pen. Where’s the man behind it? Haven’t an idea! Have you? Alders says you know him, and it’s a God-send my running across you, for I was just going to chuck the whole thing and start for London. If you’ll let me go home with you tonight we might talk Blemer over, and I could get an inkling of what to say about him.”
Vance was tempted to retort: “Have you got an inkling from Blemer of what to say about me?” — but the party was moving toward the lamp~hung loggia where the tables were set. “All right — come in tonight.” He turned to follow his host, and Churley was absorbed in the group about another table.
Vance was with Lady Pevensey, and a pretty young woman on his right was soon deluging him with literary raptures. He had to listen again to all the old questions: were his novels inspired by things that had really happened, or did they just “come to him”? And his characters — would he mind telling her who the people really were? Of course she knew novelists always pretended they invented their characters — but wouldn’t he be a darling, and just whisper to her some of the real names of the people in his books? And the love~scenes — she did so long to know how far the novelist had to LIVE his love-scenes; in “The Puritan in Spain”, for instance, there was that marvellous chapter in Valencia — oh, yes, she knew some people called it morbid, but she just adored it — where, after being with the dancer all night, the hero comes out into the street at daylight, just as the funeral of the woman who’d really loved him is passing . . . Had anything as tremendous as that actually happened in his own life? Because she’d heard people say that a novelist couldn’t describe such things unless . . .
Across the lights and flowers Vance caught sight of Floss. She was at Sir Felix’s table with Mrs. Glaisher. Next to her sat the Duke of Spartivento; her lids were lowered as he spoke to her. She wore a dress of some thin silver tissue, against which her arms and shoulders looked like sun-warmed marble. There was a bowl of silver-white gardenias in the middle of the table, and her neighbour reached over to it and drew out a cluster which she fastened on her breast. At another table Chris, flushed and handsome, was discoursing to Alders about the art of interviewing. As Sir Felix’s Pommery circulated the spirits of the guests bubbled up with it, and talk and laughter drowned the pulsations of the harp and violin in the balcony. Outside, modelled by the rising moon, the couchant landscape stretched its Sphinx-like paws upon the sea.
Vance was seized by the longing to be alone with Floss — chatter silenced, lights extinguished, only he and she lifted above the world on a moon-washed height. But the dinner went on: more truffles, more champagne, more noise; and when it was over, and the party trailed out onto the terrace, as they had the night before at Mrs. Glaisher’s, some one exclaimed: “Oh, but there are no fireworks tonight, are there? Don’t let’s stay out here in the cold for nothing. . .”
Floss was one of the first to re-enter the illuminated room. Bridge-tables were being set out where the party had feasted, and part of the floor had been cleared for dancing. Two cabaret professionals were alread............