“Or if he would ring me up and suggest any time,” she added.
Agnes laughed again.
“Too kind of you,” she said, “and how rude of me to laugh! I laughed at the idea of Robbie telephoning. He can’t bear any modern invention.”
“But he is an airman, isn’t he?” asked Mrs. Withers.
Never have I admired the quickness and felicity of the female mind more than at that critical moment which would have caused any mere man to stumble and bungle, and leave an unconvincing impression. There was not even the “perceptible pause” before Agnes answered.
“Ah, but Robbie says that flying is the effort to recapture bird-life of a million years ago,” she said. “Birds and angels fly; it is not a modern discovery, but a celestial and ancient secret now being learned by us in our clumsy way. Robbie is lyrical about flying. But what bird or angel ever telephoned? Come, Mr. Goodenough, let us find that car.”
“I forget how he reconciles himself to motoring,” I said. I did not want to put Agnes in a fix, but only to delight my soul with another instance of feminine alacrity.
“He doesn’t,” said she brightly. “But then you have got to get to places quickly, and you can’t fly through the streets of London yet.”
“He sounds too marvellous,” said Mrs. Withers ecstatically. “Sunday, Tuesday or Wednesday then. Any of them.”
The discerning reader will easily have perceived by this time that both John Marrible and I were but wax in the inventive hands of Agnes, and flowed into the shapes that her swift fingers ordained for us. Occasionally we suggested little curves and decorations of our own, which she might or might not permit; but we had no independent will in the matter of Robert Oriole. She was the architect who built this splendid temple to an imaginary deity in whose honour Mrs. Withers, his deluded worshipper, swung unregarded censers of asparagus and salmon; at the most we were the cognisant choir and the organ.…
During the next weeks which included the Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday, on which Mrs. Withers’s hospitality hungered for Robbie, the number of Oriolists greatly increased, and this secret society became positively masonic in clandestine fervour and fidelity. I could see at a glance, without grips of any kind, whether some friend or acquaintance who inquired after Robbie was a mason or not, for there was a gleeful solemnity about the initiated Oriolist which the profane crowd lacked.
There were many who now spoke of him, for Mrs. Withers in her frenzied efforts to capture him and show him at her house, asked everyone she met if he knew Robbie, and her large circle of uninitiated guests and acquaintances grew almost as excited about him as she. Those who knew, the initiates to whom these mysteries had been unveiled, answered casually enough when they were applied to by Mrs. Withers, but with that gleeful solemnity which revealed them to each other.
One morning Robbie would have been “stunting” over Richmond, or had lunched at the Ritz, or had been swimming in the Serpentine before breakfast, dropping in unexpectedly to entrance Agnes with the Brahms-Handel variations, or flying back to the Lakes in the afternoon, and the telephone messages that passed between the houses of the initiated were cryptic and yet comprehended utterances. Then on an ever-memorable day two type-written copies of the Cologne sonnets circulated among the elect, and were secretlv read in corners to the less fortunate.
On another day, Robbie must have called on me when I was out, for I found his card with his address, “Blaythwaite Fell,” upon it, when I returned. He was not able to go to Mrs. Withers’s house either on Sunday, Tuesday or Wednesday, but on Friday when she returned from a concert at which Royalty was present, she found a similar card with Agnes’s on her table, and all the account her parlour-maid could give was that Miss Lockett had come to the door with “another gentleman” whom she had not seen before, for Lord Marrible had not previously come to the house.
Mrs. Withers, trembling with chagrin (for she had not been presented to Royalty at the concert, and had missed so much more by not stopping at home) telephoned to Agnes at once, only to learn that Robbie had that moment left by air for the Continent.
It is better to describe than to let the reader imagine for himself the state into which Mrs. Withers was brought during these days, because the imagination from excess of excited fancy would go wildly astray. For she did not grow one atom distraught or deranged; she became on the contrary more concentrated and businesslike than ever. She telephoned daily to Agnes and me to know whether Robbie—she always spoke of him now as Robbiehad got back from the Continent, and told us quite firmly that she would put off any other engagement in order to receive him at her house, or meet him at any other house.
But pending that consummation she remained as regular and as resonant as a cuckoo-clock, and struck her social hours with the same fluty regularity. She did not lose her appetite, or take to cocaine or opiumsmoking or drown herself in the Thames, as imagination might expect, but kept her head, went up several times in an aeroplane in order to get used to it in case Robbie on his return suggested an expedition, and temporarily stole my copy of the Cologne sonnets.
I am not quite sure about this, but I missed them one afternoon when she had been having tea with me, and found next day that in my absence she had called and gone into my sitting-room to write a note to me. On my return I found the note prominently displayed, and the Cologne sonnets concealed in the blotting-book which I had unsuccessfully searched the evening before. The case is not proved against her, but certainly after that she could quote from the Cologne sonnets.…
Then one morning, even while I was wondering what made Agnes keep Robbie so long on the Continent, I was rung up by her maid, and asked to go round to her at once. In answer to a further inquiry, “It’s about Mr. Oriole, sir.”
Full of some nameless apprehension, I started instantly on that bright June morning, feeling sure that at the least Robbie was the victim of some catastrophe. I was even prepared to learn that Robbie was dead, though I could not form the slightest conjecture as to what had led to this sudden demise. Or was Robbie engaged to be married, and had we to arrange about an elusive female of mysterious charm and antecedents?…
Well, it was not that, but it was even worse, for Agnes was engaged to John Marrible, who, with the selfishness of his sex, insisted that Robbie should die. He was with her and put his case. Agnes really seemed more taken up with Robbie than she was with him, and he demanded her undivided affection. For her part, she wanted to leave Robbie on the Continent for future emergencies, and promised not to think about him, but John objected to that. His head, he told us with a glance at her, was too full of other things, and he could not trust himself not to give the whole affair away by some inadvertence of happiness and pride. That glance settled it; Agnes took a half sheet of paper and wrote on it for a few minutes in silence.
“I will send it to the principal morning papers,” she said, “and John shall pay for it. Listen! Will this do?
“ORIOLE—On the 19th instant, very suddenly, at Mannheim, Robert, only son of the late William and Margaret Oriole, of Karachi, India. Age 31. Deeply lamented. No flowers.
‘We will grieve not, only find
Strength in what remains behind.’”
* * * *
That appeared next day, and I do not suppose that anybody lamented him more deeply than Mrs. Withers. She sent Agnes and me charming little notes of condolence and quoted from one of the Cologne sonnets, and asked if those touching lines in the notice of his death were by him.
A week or two later, I sat next Mrs. Withers at dinner, and Mr. Chapel was on her other side.
“Of course, you knew dear Robbie Oriole, Mr. Chapel,” she said. “What a loss to poetry. Are not those Cologne sonnets the finest in your opinion since Keats? I was privileged to have a copy of them. You agree with me, do you not, Mr. Goodenough? Do you remember that marvellous one