Scott of the Antarctic by David Crane

Author:David Crane [David Crane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007369065
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

TWENTY

Of Lions and Lionesses

Falkner is the lion of the season. Therefore we may be quite sure that Falkner won’t make love to any pretty woman who comes in his way. It doesn’t seem to work out right.

Henry Arthur Jones, The Liars (1897)

AT THE BEGINNING OF 1907, a young nobody of a woman just back from Greece was invited to a ‘luncheon party of lions’ given by Mabel Beardsley. It was one of those occasions in the social zoo of London life when there were no balancing ‘lionesses’ to match the ‘lions’, she recalled, with only the hostess herself, an actress and writer manqueé and the sister of the dead artist Aubrey Beardsley, even so much as a ‘lioness’ by association.

The lunch was, in fact, largely for his old friends,

but lions they were, and to me very splendid ones indeed, the men whose books I had read, whose pictures I had admired. There was a poet, a politician, and an explorer. I, the humble, sat between Max Beerbohm and J.M. Barrie. I wished they would roar a little louder. I was terribly shy of them both. Englishmen are very difficult, I thought. Far down the other side of the table was a naval officer, Captain Scott. He was not very young, perhaps forty, not very good looking; but he looked very healthy and alert, and I glowed rather foolishly and suddenly when I clearly saw him ask his neighbour who I was. I was nobody, and I knew his neighbour, my hostess, would be saying so. I had heard that he had just returned from a very heroic and rather sensational exploit, and for the last few months had been subject to the torture of intrusive popularity. I was introduced to him after lunch and he wanted to know where I had got my wonderful sunburn. I was of the richest brown which made my eyes a very startling blue. I told him I had been vagabonding in Greece, and he thought how entrancing to vagabond like that. I had to leave immediately to catch a train. He left two minutes after me, hoping to catch me up, but he saw me just ahead carrying a rather large suitcase, and his ‘English gentlemen don’t carry large objects in the street’ upbringing was too much for him. He did not catch me up.

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