“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 triumphantly 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; about 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,