Scolding, she had long ago realised, was a useless
waste of time and energy where Comus was concerned,
but this evening she unloosed her tongue for the mere
relief that it gave to her surcharged feelings.
He sat listening without comment, though she purposely
let fall remarks that she hoped might sting him into
self-defence or protest. It was an unsparing
indictment, the more damaging in that it was so irrefutably
true, the more tragic in that it came from perhaps
the one person in the world whose opinion he had ever
cared for. And he sat through it as silent and
seemingly unmoved as though she had been rehearsing
a speech for some drawing-room comedy. When
she had had her say his method of retort was not the
soft answer that turneth away wrath but the inconsequent
one that shelves it.
“Let’s go and dress for dinner.”
The meal, like so many that Francesca and Comus had
eaten in each other’s company of late, was a
silent one. Now that the full bearings of the
disaster had been discussed in all its aspects there
was nothing more to be said. Any attempt at ignoring
the situation, and passing on to less controversial
topics would have been a mockery and pretence which
neither of them would have troubled to sustain.
So the meal went forward with its dragged-out dreary
intimacy of two people who were separated by a gulf
of bitterness, and whose hearts were hard with resentment
against one another.
Francesca felt a sense of relief when she was able
to give the maid the order to serve her coffee upstairs.
Comus had a sullen scowl on his face, but he looked
up as she rose to leave the room, and gave his half-mocking
little laugh.
“You needn’t look so tragic,” he
said, “You’re going to have your own way.
I’ll go out to that West African hole.”
Comus found his way to his seat in the stalls of the
Straw Exchange Theatre and turned to watch the stream
of distinguished and distinguishable people who made
their appearance as a matter of course at a First
Night in the height of the Season. Pit and gallery
were already packed with a throng, tense, expectant
and alert, that waited for the rise of the curtain
with the eager patience of a terrier watching a dilatory
human prepare for outdoor exercises. Stalls
and boxes filled slowly and hesitatingly with a crowd
whose component units seemed for the most part to recognise
the probability that they were quite as interesting
as any play they were likely to see. Those who
bore no particular face-value themselves derived a
certain amount of social dignity from the near neighbourhood
of obvious notabilities; if one could not obtain recognition
oneself there was some vague pleasure in being able
to recognise notoriety at intimately close quarters.
“Who is that woman with the auburn hair and
a rather effective belligerent gleam in her eyes?”
asked a man sitting just behind Comus; “she
looks as if she might have created the world in six
days and destroyed it on the seventh.”
