Читать книгу Wintersmoon онлайн

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He was taken after the theatre to a place where they danced, and it seemed to him extremely English and decorous. He could find in it none of the dazzling wickedness and abnormality that the English novels of his reading had led him to expect. The Unemployed, bursting into music in the streets, struck him with their exceeding rosiness and physical vigour. He remembered faces seen by him recently in Berlin, Vienna, and Prague that had besieged successfully even his cynical indifference. He saw no such faces here.

And then coming out one day of Colnaghi's in Bond Street he encountered old Lady Mossop, with her large spectacles and larger nose, her broad unwieldly figure, her hat a little askew, just exactly as she had been ten years earlier. She recognised him, told him in her deep, rather wheezy voice (she always talked like an old cab-driver whose life had been spent in rain and fog) that he was looking older, and asked him to her party.

So here he was to-night. He had realised at once on entering the room that for the first time since his return to London he was in the world that he had known before the war. Once in the old days of the South African War he had divided the English ruling classes into three parties—the Autocrats, the Aristocrats, and the Democrats. The Autocrats—the Beaminsters, the Gutterils, the Minsters—had been the people with whom, at that time, he had mostly lived. The old Duchess of Wrexe had been their queen, and for a time she had ruled England. She was long dead, and the Autocrats, as a party of power in England, were gone and gone for ever. The Democrats—Ruddards, Denisons, Funells, Muffats—there were plenty of them about, he supposed. The war and its consequences must have helped them to power. It was they, and the members of the old Autocratic party whom disaster and poverty had driven into their ranks, who danced and kicked their way through the illustrated papers. He didn't know and he didn't care. He felt in his bones that, at the present time at least, they were unimportant whatever they might become. He dismissed them with a shrug. They were food for the novelist who wanted dazzling pictures with post-impressionist colours and Freudian titles.