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Updated: May 1, 2025
When they were sitting not far from the fountain, which made a pleasant murmur as it fell into the pool where the three goldfish moved slowly as if in a vague and perpetual search, Charmian turned the conversation to Constantine. "It's perfectly marvellous!" said Mrs. Shiffney. "Barbaric and extraordinary." And she talked of the gorge and of the Chemin des Touristes.
"Of course it is," said Max Elliot, heartily. Mrs. Shiffney shook her shoulders. "I'm sure it's quite perfect," she said, in her rather deep voice, gazing at the young composer with eyes in which a light satire twinkled. "Don't think I'm criticizing it. Only I'm so dreadfully un-English, and I think English musicians get rather into a groove. The Hallelujah bow-wow, you know!"
Shiffney was standing up in it, looking, he thought, very smart and large and audacious, bringing upon him, so he felt as he went in, murmurs and lights from a distant world with which he had nothing to do. "How angry you are with me!" she said, lifting her veil and smiling with a careless assurance. "Your eyes are quite blazing with fury."
He was not like everybody. It would have been interesting to take him in hand. It had certainly been irritating to make no impression upon him. And now he was married and living in a delicious Arab nest with that foolish Charmian Mansfield. So Mrs. Shiffney called Charmian at that moment. Suddenly she felt rather melancholy and rather cross. She wanted to give somebody a slap.
I could never pursue my art through wildness, as so many men have done, women too. I don't believe I could even stick to it in the midst of the ordinary life of pleasures and distractions. It's like a bone that I have to seize and take away into a cave where no one can see me gnaw it. Isn't that a beastly simile?" "Is that why you won't go to Max Elliot's, that you refused Mrs. Shiffney?
As an unmarried girl in Berkeley Square, with a popular mother, possibilities had floated about her. Clever, rising men came to that house. She had charm. She was "in" everything. Now she felt that a sort of fiat had been pronounced, perhaps by Adelaide Shiffney, and her following, "Charmian's dropping out." No doubt she exaggerated. She was half conscious that she was exaggerating.
Shiffney did not intend to make the journey alone with Susan, and to be left "in the air" at Algiers. She must get a man or two. After a few minutes' thought she sent a message to Max Elliot asking him to look in upon her. When he came she invited him to join the party. "You must come," she said. "Only ten days or so. Surely you can get away. And you'll see your protégé, Mr. Heath." "My protégé!"
Shiffney to Claude, when at last the song Au Revoir, tumultuously brilliant with a tremendous crescendo at the close, had been played, and with many salaams and good wishes the musicians had departed. "I love their playing," Claude answered. "But really you shouldn't have paid them. I have arranged with Hitani to come every evening."
"Sennier's playing has stirred me up too much." "Resolve quietly to sleep, and I think you will." Charmian did not tell Susan that she was quite incapable at that moment of resolving quietly on anything. She lay awake nearly all night. Meanwhile Mrs. Shiffney, Madame Sennier, and Max Elliot were in the night-train travelling to Constantine. It had all been arranged with Mrs.
Shiffney was, musically speaking of course, in love with Jacques Sennier. Since Wagner there had been nobody to play upon feminine nerves as the little Frenchman played, to take women "out of themselves." As a well-known society woman said, with almost pathetic frankness, "When one hears Sennier's music one wants to hold hands with somebody." Apparently Mrs.
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