The brief début of Lucian Mallady

G. M. ATTENBOROUGH

A young man yearning to conquer society by his wit finds inspiration in an ancient damask chair

■ Very modern people who regard the death of the Salon as an old, far-off event which happened in the eighteenth century and in France are forgetting that, in the nineties, Lady Elphino received, in her corner house in Hyde Park Square, for ten successive seasons, whatever brilliance in art, literature and personality London had then to offer. And the brilliance of the 'nineties has already become a tantalising legend. On Friday evenings her capacious drawing-room, with its five long windows, was transformed into the diningroom, since Lady Elphino's salon was a salon a dîner, and she sat at the head of the long table whose chaste decorations were never for a moment allowed to distract attention from the human orchids—in the 'nineties flowers were flowers and men were men—with a large silver bell at her elbow.

This bell was the tocsin, the call to arms whose quick, metallic voice heralded the most precarious, tense and exquisite moment in the brilliant dinner party; for when in the authoritative hand of Lady Elphino, it sounded its command, the guests knew that she was about to fix one of them with a gracious and expectant eye, announce her subject, and call on him to speak upon it. But to speak . . . "to speak" were a thin description of what must ensue; for the happy victim of the lady's choice must take the subject, play with it, toss it brilliantly in mid-air to rest deliciously there for a breath, then draw it fondly to him again to mold and caress it with words until it emerged a perfect thing, a triumph of pure integrity clothed in the glittering texture of the speaker's wit. And if he failed—if, for a moment, he became dull or fell below the expected heights of rhetoric, the bell would ring again... and beneath its icy judgment, he must sit down—an ineffectual god, hurled forever from his brief Olympus. That very seldom happened, however, for there was something in Lady Elphino herself that stimulated to epigrammatic attitudes, and when a man is brilliant to start with, and is further inoculated with brilliance by a sparkling and lovely woman, the effect can hardly fail to be dazzling almost to the need of protective blue spectacles.

■ "Are you going to Lady Elphino's S.A.D. to-night?" was the question asked on Friday mornings of May and June throughout the 'nineties, in all coteries of artistic and intellectual aspiration. "No, she hasn't asked me," was more often than not the sad reply. The omission was in itself an accusation.

It was, then, the surprise of his unruffled existence when Lucian Mallady, turning over in bed for his letters and morning tea, found among the little bundle of his correspondence an invitation to Lady Elphino's salon a diner of June ioth, an invitation in the nature, he very well knew, of a command. Lucian had never done anything, except display a charming taste in the suite of his bachelor rooms— more surprising still, he had never said anything. He had just moved about, pleasantly enough, at his Clubs, with the reputation of an amiable, handsome fellow who, when you had said he was a bachelor and by no means poor, had had his good points enumerated.

■ Whatever had possessed Lady Elphino to ask him ? He wouldn't go for a thousand guineas, yet, as he considered the matter, he meditated the terms of his refusal and found them overwhelmingly difficult. He simply couldn't refuse by letter. He would go and tell Lady Elphino frankly that she had done him a thousand honours but that for once she had miscalculated her man. His presence at her table would be as incongruous as a French ballet on the celestial floor. Of course, even if he went, she would never ask him to speak. If that happened, he would simply collapse with as much grace as he could muster, for though Lucian felt that with great preparation and much private practice he might make a speech with some little credit, the feature of Lady Elphino's salon â diner was that a subject was flung like a ball out of the blue at your head and you were expected instantly to catch it and make it bounce. The mere invitation made things very pleasant. "Oh, by the way, I've been invited to Lady Elphino's S.A.D. for June ioth." "Are you going?" "Good Heavens no—but I've been asked." Lucian could not help noticing that it made a difference.

When he called he was concerned to find .hat Lady Elphino was out driving.

"Then may I come in and leave a note?" The butler took him up to the drawing-room, where Lucian felt he could almost scent epigrams and aphorisms, and found him paper and pen at the writing desk. The bell pealed again and the butler excused himself, but on his way out he stopped and pointed—

"That is the spot, Sir, where His Royal Highness sat last Friday."

"Is it indeed?" Lucian replied, surveying the patch of carpet as though it were an exquisite mosaic let into the floor. "How very interesting!"

He sat down and began to write.

"Dear Lady Elphino,

You have done me a thousand honours by your invitation. Were I to accept it I should do you a thousand discredits. Qui s'excuse, s'accuse.

Yours very regretfully,

Lucian Mallady."

Would that do? He hesitated and looked up. What a beautiful French chair was facing him, a poem in its faded damask and dusky gold. He got up and examined it with his connoisseur's eye, turned it over, rubbed his fingers lovingly along its edges and into the smooth shadow between cushion and back. His fingers touched something, hesitated, and then—and then . . .

Lucian returned to the bureau and tore up his note into fifty tiny fragments. The butler was back again asking if there were sufficient ink. Lucian wrote rapidly.

"Dear Lady Elphino,

You have done me a thousand honours. I will do my best not to repay you with a thousand discredits. With the deepest sensibility of your kindness,

Yours very gratefully,

Lucian Mallady."

While awaiting the date, Lucian ordered new dress clothes, and for a week his Club saw very little of him. They rather wondered, since he was still in town, what he could be doing.

Merely in the matter of numbers, this dinner of June ioth was going to be conspicuously unique. Everybody who was anybody seemed to be assembled downstairs, and as usual the conversation buzzed round the speculation as to whom Lady Elphino would pitch upon, and what would be her themes. At last they went up to dinner—going up seemed in itself a symbol—and found their places at the long table. Lucian was next to the young author of whom all Paris was talking, M. Edmond Rostand, but that caused him little concern. His French, if faulty, was fluent. The talk was general, thrown into the centre of the table and drawn out again. People who had only the gift of talking en aparte were, in Lady Elphino's opinion, not talkers at all.

■ Lady Elphino had the art of the dinner at her finger-ends, but a dinner and a diner d salon had no sort of relationship. Three delicious courses followed one another, and then, when everything possible had been done to the mind by the menu, Lady Elphino seized the supreme moment of stimulation to ring her silver bell and call upon her first speaker. On this lovely summer evening of June ioth both loquacity and laughter were at their height when the bell pealed. Instantly the buzz was quelled and Lady Elphino rose from her seat with an immense rustle of her vieux rose draperies.

"I will ask Mr. Oscar Wilde to speak to us. The subject I have chosen for Mr. Wilde is— very naturally—lilies."

Very languidly Mr. Oscar Wilde rose and unpulled his tie. "Dear Lady," he drawled, "let me have some lilies." Within five minutes there were six superb lilies standing before him in an ebony jar. Mr. Wilde threw five of them under the table and retained one. He was being good of course, but not very good—tremendous for anywhere else than Lady Elphino's salon a diner, but for that the esprit w'as not sufficiently distingue, les idees not sufficiently nouvelles. Within five minutes he had sailed into the polluted waters of the obvious. Lady Elphino rang her bell vigorously and Mr. Wilde, with the lily in his hand, sank with infinite grace into his seat.

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The buzz rose again as a noisette was served, its complexities scheduled with a silver skewer. In ten minutes the bell rang once more, and Mr. George Du Maurier was selected.

"The subject I have chosen for Mr. Du Maurier," said Lady Elphino, "is again, very naturally, Feet."

Mr. Du Maurier rose, "Dear Lady, let me have a foot," he pleaded.

"Mais oui, certainement," cried Lady Elphino. In the 'nineties, a lady's foot was not reached very easily, but •the speed and insouciance with which Lady Elphino picked up her petticoats, and unrolled a stocking, and displayed a foot equal in every point to Trilby's own, were superb.

"Linford," she cried to a butler, "put a chair upon the table, a revolving chair."

So Lady Elphino sat above her guests, slowly revolving herself with her outstretched foot, while Mr. Du Maurier too, was not being quite at his best, and a little frown presently showed itself just above Lady Elphino's beautifully modelled nose. That to-morrow's talk of the Town should present Lady Elphino's latest Friday as perhaps not quite so brilliant as usual wras an intolerable thought. To Lady Elphino, comparative success was starvation.

But Mr. Du Maurier recovered himself. He had thought of a quotation—

"The many-tivinkling feet, so small and sylph-like,

Suggesting the more perfect symmetry

Of the fair forms ivhich terminate so well"

"Bravo!" cried Lady Elphino as she replaced her stocking and once more spread her ample draperies on each side of her chair at the head of the table. "Bravo! We have listened avec seduction." But as she sipped her ice her smiles died. There was defiance even in her ringing of the bell.

"For. the third speech of the evening I am going to call upon Mr. Lucian Mallady who makes his first appearance at my Salon. He is very welcome. The subject I have chosen for Mr. Mallady is—Stays."

A murmur ran along the serried ranks of the diners. Oh, but Lady Elphino was cruel! Mr. Mallady was untried, ingenu, living blamelessly, so far as the world knew, en garqon. A speech on any subject would be an ordeal— but on Stays!

Lucian had risen. The table was perceptibly nervous, but there was not the shade of a shadow of nervousness in Lucian's voice as he called for a glass of water. He drank it very deliberately. Then he looked at Lady Elphino.

"Since you command me to speak on stays, permit me a view of them."

For a second Lady Elphino hesitated. No, London was London and Paris was Paris. In London she could display her foot, but she must cross the Channel to unlace, publicly, her stays. She rang for her maid.

"Melusine, bring me my last pair of stays."

In a moment the stays were standing like a triple screen before Lucian. He lifted them very carefully —as though he were examining the joints.

And then, he spoke. Delicately, wittily, hilariously he spoke on Stays. He took Stays, and made of them a structure of subtle strength on which to hang his tapestry of words. Around him, as he talked, the reflected brilliance of innumerable candelabra faltered and fell in a swift, dancing pattern of light and shadow—but it was no swifter than his wit. Before Lucian Mallady's speech on Stays, the epigrammatic antics of Mr. Oscar Wilde seemed a vulgar contortion, the gentle humour of Mr. Du Maurier the maunderings of a blunted mind.

Let us not mar by quotation the perfect symmetry of this speech on Stays. Enough that it was a triumph, a masterpiece; and that, beneath its spell, his fellow guests, and even the unimpressionable Lady Elphino herself sat in a silence broken only by admiring laughter, sat motionless in an exquisite enchantment of listening.

Presently, he sat down and when, this time, Lady Elphino rang her bell, it was to make her voice heard above a buzz of congratulations.

He never spoke again. Only the stays stood, a brocade triptych, in a glass case on one of his bookshelves to remind the world of his single and supreme achievement. Lady Elphino commanded—besought—implored.

And now he wras dead. Lady Elphino, saw his obituary in The Times. He must have a wreath of immortelles.

She looked round her drawing-room. It was full of ghosts. As she was moving to a smaller house she ran her eyes round the walls, revolving what she should keep, what Christie's should have. That lovely old French chair. She must retain that, even though the damask were all frayed, and even torn. It could perhaps be mended a little. She put on her large spectacles and ran her old fingers round the edges to see if there were any damask to spare. Her fingers, deep down, touched something stiff. She foraged, and at last brought up one of her own cards—and a smile transformed her face for a moment almost into youlhfulness. It was the card on which she had arranged the salon d diner of June 10th, 1895—her most famous dinner of all. On one side was the menu, and on the other her list of speakers and their subjects.

1. Mr. Oscar Wilde—Lilies.

2. Mr. Du Maurier—Feet.

3. Mr. Lucian Mallady—Stays.

No doubt she had stuffed the card down the chair when a sudden visitor had been announced thirty years ago.

She sighed reminiscently, those dinners of her past. . . . the brilliance of the speeches, their wit, the aptness of their quotations. And all impromptu —every one.