“Of course! I could not spare you at dinner.”
“We’ll dance too,” he suggested. “My leg is better to-day. I’m sure I could hobble round.”
She clapped her hands.
“Go and have it massaged again,” she advised. “We’ll dance, Andrew—naturally—just as though nothing in the world mattered. Every one shall see us happy, and alone together.”
She sat quite still for some time after he had left her. She heard him in his room, moving about, heard the scratching of a match as he lit a cigarette, heard his servant brushing imaginary dust from his coat, heard the front door close behind him as he left. Then she rang the bell for her maid.
“Annette, dress me,” she directed. “I shall be lunching here by myself. An omelette—very little. Afterwards I shall want the car. I am going to my dressmakers’ and I have some calls to make.”
She crossed the threshold of the apartment in Milden Square late that afternoon with aversion stamped upon her sensitive face. They all stared at her, these strange people of hers. There was little of greeting on her part, less of welcome on theirs. Old Madame Protinoff rose from behind the samovar to peer ill-naturedly forward. Her shabby, grey-haired husband scowled from his seat in front of the fire. The others all looked curiously at this strange yet brilliant visitor. Charles alone stepped forward to greet her.
“It is time you came,” he said. “Every one has been sitting here waiting for you.”
“Waiting for me or for what I may have brought?” she asked tonelessly.
A handsome sullen-faced girl, wrapped in a shabby kimono, removed a cigarette from her over-painted lips, threw down a pad with which she had been rubbing her nails, and glanced across the room.
“That depends upon what you have brought, little one,” she said. “Living here is dear, and there are many of us.”
“It seems to me,” Félice ventured, “that some of you should be earning money.”
The old man glared at her.
“Ho, ho!” he exclaimed. “And at my age too! What a daughter! Even if there was no rheumatism in my bones! Would your husband engage me for a butler, or should I carry up the coals for your ladyship?”
“As for me,” the stout woman behind the samovar expostulated, “I worked in the restaurant until the dropsy came to my legs. I could do no more. I should have a doctor every day.”
A younger edition of Charles looked up from a stained novel he was reading.
“Charles is teaching me dance steps,” he announced. “When I am a little older I shall do like him. I shall get money from the ladies who dance with me. Oh, it is easy! Charles knows all about it. He picks out the old ones and he makes them pay.”
“And I too,” the girl Anna said scornfully—“I earn money, the same way that you would have to earn it, little Félice, but for the luck of things. I earn money, but it costs much for clothes here, and one never knows—men are such brutes.”
Félice sank into a chair and looked around with something like despair.
“I think,” she decided, “that the time has come when I must confess, when I must tell my husband all about you.”
There was an instant clamour. The old man and the woman shouted one against the other. Charles joined in and they all three talked faster and faster. Anna only laughed.
“Yes, tell him,” she put in, during a momentary silence. “Get us all asked down to your fine house. I wonder what your husband will think of his crew of degenerate relations? Will he like his sister-in-law? He might take a fancy to me, you know, Félice. They say I am still handsome. He can meet me any day at six o’clock in the Burlington Arcade, and Cork Street afterwards.”
“Oh, be quiet, all of you!” Félice cried, shuddering, “Listen to me. My husband is generous, but we have not a single secret from each other except this, and he must wonder sometimes where the money goes to. The housekeeping is no concern of mine. There is a woman who arranges all that. My clothes—the bills are paid by his secretary. In this country, where one has an establishment, no one pays otherwise. Yet it is always the same thing. There is not a single thing for which I pay at the time, and yet I always need money. Soon he must ask me—even out of curiosity—where it goes? What shall I say? What can I say? He is very generous. I think that he is rich. He is fond of me. He will understand that you have all known suffering for so many years, that you have —have changed. It is better to speak the truth.”
Again the clamour. Félice hated the ugliness of it, the discordance, the unwholesome face of that repulsive woman with her unkempt grey hair. Thank God that she, at any rate, was no relative. The hugely framed, gaunt old man held up his hand. He insisted upon silence from the others whilst he spoke.
“Listen,” he pointed out bitterly, “how can you speak of us? I who have been in prison. Your stepmother who—well, she’s had no clothes to wear for so many years that she has become—well, you see. And I—I’ve had no clothes for two years. Besides, your stepmother—”
He hesitated. The woman laughed—a hideous travesty of mirth.
“How delicate you have become all at once,” she jeered. “Why should you mind? Confess that I was your cook. Lucky you were too, to have found such a good cook with a little money saved. You would have starved if it had not been for me. Aristocrats!” she scoffed. “Why, you would have been in the workhouse but for me. I know what I think of the lot of you!”
“Your stepmother has spoken for herself,” the old man went on, with a sneer. “Then there is your brother Charles—the best of the lot of us to look at, perhaps, but a professional dancer—a Prince of Suess, mind—a son of mine—and a professional dancer! Then there is that ignorant young lad, Paul, also your brother, whose one idea in life is to imitate the vices of his elders. Even if we dared disclose ourselves, and even here in London face certain death, what would he think of the brood, this English husband of yours?”
Charles began to speak rapidly in Russian. It was clear that he had a certain amount of authority over the others. They listened in gloomy silence. When he had finished, Félice opened her pocketbook. They all crowded round, gazing covetously into its compartments.
“Ha, ha!” the old man, who had stumbled to his feet, declared. “Bank notes! I see them coming. Just in time too. Only yesterday I discovered where the real vodka can still be bought.”
“I could go out and dance at some of the smaller places if I had a dress suit,” Paul confided. “I couldn’t be a swell like Charles, but they would have me at the Golden Globe round the corner. One might easily earn a little, but one must have money in one’s pocket to start with.”
Félice emptied the notes out upon the table wearily.
“There are seventy pounds here,” she announced. “Make the best of them.”
“It is not much for an English marchioness,” the woman scoffed.
“Félice will come again soon,” the old man mumbled.
“I must have my suit of clothes,” Paul shouted, dancing round the table and trying to snatch at the notes.
“I must have twenty pounds,” the girl insisted. “I must have new clothes, or I will not go out any more. There must be wine for dinner too. I will drink no more beer. It makes one coarse.”
“Divide the money amongst yourselves,” Charles enjoined, with a scornful little wave of the hand.
“This time I need nothing. I am going to give Félice dancing lessons three times a week. That will do for me.”
Félice watched the struggle for the notes, and her face was almost hard.
“It is terrible, this!”