Читать книгу The storm of London: a social rhapsody онлайн

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They had reached Hyde Park Corner.

“I have passed a very pleasant hour with you, Danford; perhaps one of the pleasantest for many years. Shall we say 6.30 at the foot of Achilles’s statue?”

“Yes, my lord, and the place you name is most appropriate.”

With a wave of the hand Danford walked away in the direction of Sloane Street, and Lord Somerville slowly went up Piccadilly. He felt what he had not experienced since his Eton days—an interest in life; and he was determined to see this farce through.

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Dick Danford was as good as his word. After an hour’s stroll through London, Lord Somerville came to the conclusion that, for the present, his eyes were no more to him than a tail would have been. The old world of before the storm seemed to have vanished in a bottomless pit, and what he viewed instead was as prodigious as what he had hoped to see on his travels across Acheron. He noticed that tricks and mannerisms were as yet clinging to both sexes: women still grasped their invisible dresses as if they had been bunches of keys, twisted about their fingers absent chains round their necks; men tried to put their hands in vanished pockets, and held imaginary umbrellas in front of them (the latter Danford declared were clergymen), and their necks, stiffened by the long use of high collars, gave them the appearance of turkeys. But as to knowing anyone in this Babel of faces, that was quite out of the question; and Lionel went from one ejaculation to another as Dick enumerated the different notabilities of Society, the theatrical world and financial booths. It was like a transformation scene at Drury Lane. The world was not what he had altogether taken it to be, and if he found himself to have been even more swindled than he had believed, still, there were surprises for which he had not been prepared and which were worth living for: the beautiful women were not all as beautiful as he had thought them, but the plain ones had a great many points that commended them to a connoisseur. As to the men whom he had feared as rivals in the arena of good fortunes, they made him smile as he gave an admiring glance at his spinal curve reflected in a shop mirror. The little artist’s conversation was a succession of fireworks; never on the boards had he been more entertaining than this afternoon, acting the part of a humorous Mephistopheles to this masher Faust. He informed Lord Somerville that after he had left him in the morning he had done some good work for the public welfare, and had come to a final arrangement with the Commissioner of Police.