That the gathering was too large for Aunt Angela's not very large room I
instinctively set down to Miss Levey's account, for several of those
present appeared to be her friends. There must have been ten or a dozen
people there. Miss Levey herself had already given me several welcoming
nods across the room from where she sat, cross-legged and resolutely
youthful, on the floor at Evie's feet; and on her black hair was a
tissue-paper cap of Liberty, with a red spot on one side of it. I had
already discovered that the sounds of nasal singing I had heard came
from the metal corolla of a gramophone. This, I surmised, belonged to
the gentleman who was operating it, a little Japanese named Kato, whom I
had seen once or twice at Aunt Angela's old boarding-house in Woburn
Place. He wore a dairymaid's bonnet of pale blue, with torn strings. Two
other of Aunt Angela's old fellow-boarders also were there, one of them
a delicate little man with white spats, a Mr Trimble, the other an
attenuated little lady, with the red marks of a pince-nez across the
bridge of her nose, and very thin hair, silver save for a few strands of
a yellowish hue. Sitting on Aunt Angela's couch-bed was a younger
couple, not very obviously engaged, yet nevertheless carrying on what I
gathered to be a courtship by means of quick glad exchanges of the more
paradoxical sayings of Schmerveloff. "Oh, rather!" the lady gasped from
time to time; "And do you remember that passage?"... "Remember it! _I_
should say so--about the 'man-made law' you mean?" These at any rate
bore all the marks of being friends of Miss Levey's, and members of the
Emancipation Guild. Aunt Angela herself, Evie, and Billy Izzard
completed the party.
As I was pushing back my chair, having supped, the gramophone broke out
again. Not to interrupt it, I sat where I was, watching the little
Japanese who operated it. Mr Kato seemed to have neither eyebrows nor
lashes, and the slits of his eyes with their little bitumen dots held,
as he looked slyly up from time to time, that indulgent, insulting
expression that I distrust in his race over here. He had the appearance
of trying the air of the "Intermezzo" from _Cavalleria Rusticana_ upon
us, as if he contemptuously thought to gauge our taste; and his small
hands touched screws and lifted little metal arms with a negligent
intelligence. He, too, had nodded to me, though our acquaintance was of
the slightest; and with him on the one hand, and Miss Levey on the
other, I hoped Evie would not want me to stay very long.
The tune had finished, and I had made another motion to rise when
suddenly a few words of Miss Levey's caused me to start, and then to
sink slowly back into my chair again. She was speaking to Mr Kato.
"Oh, _do_ let's have 'Ora pro Nobis' again, Mr Kato--Miss Windus loves
it so--don't you, Kitty?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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