ENGLAND, THEIR ENGLAND
CHAPTER VI
If there is one social custom which distinguishes the Anglo-Saxon from the Latin, from the Slavonic, from the Basque, the Turanian, and the Greek, it is the Saturday-to-Monday hospitality in the country. In what are now usually called the spacious days before the War—indeed, they appear to be becoming almost as spacious as those presided over by Queen Elizabeth, which are well known to have been the widest on record—the hospitality lasted from Friday until Tuesday. But that is rare nowadays because everyone works on Saturday mornings except stockbrokers, and even they lose on the roundabouts. For their attendance upon mysterious things like kerbs, tickers, spot-markets, and contangos is always required so soon after dawn upon Monday mornings that they usually have to leave the week-end party on the evening of the Sunday. So that in the long run the Stock Exchange gains nothing even on the Foreign Office, even though the latter hums like a lodge of beavers from 11 A.M. to 1 P.M. on Saturdays. For the political world may blow up in a storm of cataclysmic convulsions between 1 P.M. on Saturdays and 11 A.M. on Mondays and the Foreign Office will take no official notice. Eleven o'clock is their hour for open ing—like the pubs in Knightsbridge—because in the pre-railway days, also comparatively spacious in their own way, the couriers from Dover, however hard they spurred their horses and however often they changed their mounts, could never arrive in Whitehall with the Paris mail before 10.30 in the morning. So the letters, which were sorted at twenty to 11 and distributed to the departments at five minutes to, were ready for perusal at 11 o'clock. And the routine which defeated the ungentlemanly General Bonaparte was good enough to defeat anyone else.
There are three main sources from which the student of sociology may learn about the English week-end, and Donald had, of course, examined them thoroughly. In the gospel according to the lesser lady novelists, he learnt that the Saturday-to-Monday period was invariably devoted by the entire house-party to profound and brilliant and soul-searing self-analysis. It seemed, from these works, that the English fin-de-semaine, when spent in sufficiently rural surroundings, was of an inspissated gloom, a tenebriferous melancholy, that made Strindberg's studies of demented lighthouse-keepers seem regular rollicks. Nothing ever happened except a fearful lot of heavy thinking and, from time to time, symbolical down-pours of rain which gave scope for some beautiful English prose.
Donald had also learnt much about country-house life from the second source, the books of astonishingly brilliant young men, mostly about one-and-twenty years of age. These books, for some reason, were always on the same model. They began with life at Eton, or Harrow, in the proportion of about eighty of the former to twenty of the latter, and the first part invariably contained two descriptions. There was always a rather sardonic description of the Harrow match, or, in twenty per cent, the Eton match, and always a description of a small boy being whipped by a larger boy. It is only fair to say that the whippings were usually put in at the urgent request of the publishers; for it is a well-known fact that a really good piece of flogging in the early chapters of a novel sells between four and five hundred extra copies.
After these two routine preliminaries, the scene automatically moves in these books to the week-end party, and there the hero, his contempt for cricket having been duly flaunted and his injured posterior healed, finds himself in surroundings that are worthy of him and his brilliance. Arriving at the Norman manor of Faulconhurst St. Honoré at midday on Saturday, he drinks absinthe cocktails and exchanges dazzling epigrams until luncheon with others of his own age and brilliance, all about the Hollowness of Life, the Folly of the Old, the Comicality of the War, the Ideas of the Young, the Brilliance of the Young, the Novels of D. H. Lawrence, the Intelligence of the Young, the Superiority of Modern Photography over Velazquez, and the Futility of People of Forty. After luncheon, which consists of quails and foie gras and sparkling Burgundy, with sherbet for the teetotallers, and pomegranates and persimmons and a glass of Avocat, there are more epigrams until cocktails again at 4.30, and finally the exhausted epigrammatists retire to their virtuous couches at about 3 A.M., to rise again at noon on Sunday for a breakfast of aspirin and absinthe, and another day of brilliance. And finally, Donald had studied the third school of week-end novelists, one of whose leaders was the Mr. Southcott to whom Mr. Huggins had so disrespectfully referred. Mr. Southcott's idea of a country-house week-end was very different from the school of Analysis, or of Aspirin and Absinthe. According to Mr. Southcott, life from Saturday to Monday in great country mansions was quite another affair. There were no deep thinkers, wondering "what it all meant." Nor were there young men and maidens—or indeed by the Monday morning any maidens—who sat up in billiard-rooms and mah-jong-rooms and smoking-rooms, wasting precious time in verbal felicities. All the young ladies were slim, all were exquisitely gowned, and all had lovely long legs "encased in the thinnest of silken stockings." All were seductive, and all were, in due course, seduced. Never were there such goings-on, in the immortal words of Mr. George Robey, as in these week-ends; never were there such soft words, such blandishments, such delicate, and always successful, wooings; never were there such white shoulders or bright eyes, never such satiny chemises, such crumpled gardenias, such bouncings-about upon tiger-skin divans.
Mr. Southcott's sales were enormous, and his school of admiring imitators did pretty well too.
Lady Ormerode was a remarkable figure in Society. A Canadian of humble parentage (or rather it was humble until old Milton Carraway, an ex-saloon- keeper, brought off a capital merger in light beers miles away back in the nineties, and retired with a packet), Adelaide Carraway had taken London Society not by storm, but by sapping her way from bastion to bastion, from trench to trench, enfilading, undermining, breaching, and always consolidating each barbican, ravelin, redan, counterscarp and glacis before moving on to the next, conscious of her own magnificent blonde beauty, and pinning her faith to her undauntable tenacity and her seven million pounds. Thus between 1902, the year when she opened her parallels, to continue the Vaubanesque metaphor, and the time of Donald Cameron's timid arrival in London, Addy Carraway had achieved a lot. For one thing she had married in 1903 Sir Ethelred Ormerode, a gay young baronet from whose unflagging pursuit the Gaiety Chorus had only turned away a contemptuous galaxy of noses because of the extreme shortness of his purse. For another, she had redeemed the mortgage on Ormerode Towers, a superb mansion in which not merely Elizabeth, but Bloody Mary herself had once passed the night, and had startled England with the quiet luxury of her entertainments in that majestic pile. Then she had pushed Sir Ethelred into Parliament, into the Athenaeum, into the local Ruri-Decanal Conference as parish delegate, on to the Royal Commission on the Sterilization of the Insane, on to the Commission of the Peace, and, during the War, into the Chairmanship of a Recruiting Tribunal. For all of which activities Sir Ethelred got an M.V.O. 3rd class, a C.H., and, after the War, an M.B.E.; and, of course, a good whack at the seven million pounds. Lady Ormerode had financed Grand Opera; she had "backed" high-brow plays; she had her portrait painted every year by the newest R.A. She hunted, shot, fished; she raced at Cowes and Newmarket; she subscribed to charities; and during the War she equipped a hospital for officers and received a D.B.E., a French medal, a Belgian medal, six Serbian, one Greek, and one Roumanian medal, and a Silver Garland from one of the Central American Republics, the Minister of which took refuge in the hospital, which was situated near the Admiralty Arch, on the occasion of one of the Zeppelin raids upon Sheerness.
After the War, the redoubtable Addy had conquered new fields. She herself entered politics and won a seat in the House of Commons as a Die-hard Conservative. But she soon found that there was more scope for originality in championing, from time to time, the working classes, and she startled many of those who had thought that they knew "dear old Addy" inside out, by declaring publicly that she was against the shooting of all those who had led the Coal Strike of 1926. But dear old Addy lost no friends by this outspoken Bolshevism. Indeed it was not until she went too far and said, at a garden fête to raise funds for a local Conservative Association near Farnham, that she was also against the policy of shooting Mr. Gandhi, that her right-wing friends felt that they could no longer meet her upon the same old terms of friendly intimacy.
But if Addy shed her Winstons in ones and twos, she picked up her Epsteins and her Gauguins in scores by her unceasing and open-handed and catholic patronage of the arts.
No one could deny that she was catholic. Lady Ormerode, M.P., was not the one to entertain narrow prejudices. She gave a thousand guineas to a fund to buy yet another Titian for a National Gallery that has already plenty of Titians, and, in the same week, financed a one-man exhibition of sculpture at the Leicester Galleries by a Kaffir from the Belgian Mandated Territory of Ruanda-Urundi, in which the now-famous group of three interlocked triangles of varnished ferro-concrete, representing Wordsworth's Conception of Ideal Love, was seen for the first time in London. The masterpiece of the exhibition was a vast cylinder of Congolese basalt which was called, and rightly called, "The Spirit of Bernhardt," and which was dedicated to the President of the French Republic, and which, furthermore, was formally unveiled by the French Ambassador in the presence of eleven London correspondents of provincial papers, a man from the Press Association, the editor of the Quarterly Sculptor, and the Liberian Chargé d'Affaires. And no one could say that it was Lady Ormerode's fault that this work of art was described in the catalogue as "The Spirit of Bernhardi," thus causing dismay and despondency upon the Latin bank of the Rhine and jubilation upon the Teuton, where the name of General Bernhardi occupies an honourable place among the experts whose prophecies, theories, and preachings about the art of war have long been completely discredited.
Nor did the French, usually so gallant, come well out of the subsequent controversy, for the only counter which they could find to the Teuton argument that the spirits of Bernhardi, of Hindenburg, of the Vaterland itself, are all like solid cylinders of basalt, was that Madame Bernhardt, in her later years, was just as solid a cylinder as any dirty little Prussian general.
In the same spirit of catholicity, Lady Ormerode in one year paid for the entire regilding of the roof of the Albert Hall, for the mending of all the broken windows in the Crystal and Alexandra Palaces, and offered to stand the whole racket of "doing up," in her own good-hearted words, "the Stones in that Henge of theirs that they're always talking about."
Such, then, was the Lady of Ormerode Towers who was to be Donald's hostess for the week-end.
A Rolls-Royce met the train at Godalming, and Donald felt like bursting into tears as suitcase after suitcase emerged from the station. He was too miserable to notice the subtle increase of deference with which each piece of luggage was greeted by the chauffeur and footman. The station-master himself attended with his own hands to the Secret Despatches, murmuring discreetly in Donald's ear, "I was warned by telephone, my lord, from our Head Office." He was charmed by Donald's unassuming manner and his half-crown.
Just before it reached the front door of Ormerode Towers, the Rolls-Royce loosed several melodious toots upon the summery air, obviously a prearranged signal, and half a dozen flunkeys came tumbling down the broad steps followed, with great majesty, by the butler. As Donald disentangled himself from the huge fur rug with which the chauffeur had insisted upon enveloping him, and scrambled out of the mammoth automobile, the butler sidled up to him respectfully and whispered in his ear, "The Secretary of the French Foreign Ministry rang up, sir, and Budapest has also been on the line. Budapest is to telephone again, sir."
Donald was completely staggered by this information until he reflected that this must be Mr. Huggins' amiable method of "fixing that bloody butler." He wondered, with a sinking heart, what other steps that eccentric individual was likely to take in order to smooth his week-end path, and he heartily cursed the entire family of Huggins, whether from Bolton or from Sark, and the purple-bubbled wine of Corsica. But he could not deny that so far Mr. Huggins had been successful in securing vicarious deference from proud menials.
It was not long after midday when Donald arrived and the house-party was walking in the grounds, except those who were upstairs writing letters. The butler sent the fourteen suitcases upstairs, by the hands of the wondering footmen, and indicated to Donald that he could hardly do better than examine the illustrated papers in the gigantic entrance-hall, and drink a bottle of iced lager. Donald timidly agreed and sat down in a discreet corner and gazed round. Though it was the first time he had actually been in one of these superb lounge-halls with their sofas and divans and pouffes and cigarette-boxes and gramophones and wireless sets and tantaluses and tennis racquets and golf clubs, nevertheless he had had the opportunity of studying their appurtenances from the stalls on nineteen out of the twenty-one occasions on which he had visited the theatre during the war, and therefore was thoroughly familiar with them. The only feature which was lacking at Ormerode Towers, but which had not been lacking in the nineteen scenes, was the long French windows without which no English dramatist dares to face his audience.
The house-party returned just before 1 o'clock, and Lady Ormerode was delighted to see him. She introduced him to the crowd of guests, who all looked exactly like each other to Donald's confused glances, and then took him aside for a moment. "The Duke of Devonshire has been on the telephone," she whispered confidentially, and with a subtle bending from her massive hips that conveyed even more deference than the butler's more unreserved obeisance. "You are on no account to telephone him, but you are to go to Chatsworth in time for luncheon on Monday, and to say nothing to anyone." She laid a beringed finger on her lips and nodded wisely, as if to convey that she too knew what was what, and all that sort of thing.
By tea-time a good deal of Donald's shyness had worn off, and he had been able to disentangle the identities of his fellow-guests from one another. For his particular purpose—the first-hand study of the English people—no set of guests could have been more suitably chosen. Lady Ormerode's catholicity of taste extended to her week-end parties, and her friends had practically nothing in common with each other except their genuine affection for their hostess.
As that Saturday afternoon was extremely wet, Donald had a heaven-sent opportunity for collecting material of the utmost value for his book. And, for a time at least, it would be quite true to say that Mr. Huggins' diabolical activities on the telephone were of definite assistance to him. For instance, after lunch, an elderly man whose face with its heavy brown moustache seemed familiar, and who was wearing a grey morning coat that was more beautifully built than any coat Donald had ever seen or imagined, with a superb orchid in one buttonhole and a foreign decoration in the other, slipped an arm through his with a bluff, jovial "You're the boy I want to see," and led him off to a distant drawing-room down many corridors, talking heartily as he went about greyhound-racing. But as soon as he had got Donald into the distant drawing-room his jolly manner changed into a confidential knowingness.
"Boy," he said, "you know me. Everyone knows me. That's my ticket. Now, can you tell me anything?"
He looked at Donald as a kindly uncle might look who was taking a small nephew round the Zoo—an uncle who obviously knows everything that there is to know. Donald, who had lunched well and who did not know that Lady Ormerode's whisky was of pre-war strength, found that he was able to reply to this mysterious opening, "Surely there's nothing I can tell you about anything."
"Ah!" replied the man thoughtfully, "so that's how it stands, does it? Nothing has moved since Tuesday?"
This rather shook Donald.
"What do you mean by nothing?" he asked. The man tapped his waistcoat with a roguish air, as of one man of the world to another.
"That's it," he said. "That's what I keep on telling 'em, the blasted monkeys. But they won't see it. Can you beat it?"
"Er—no," Donald replied hesitatingly but truthfully. It was an intriguing conversation, but somewhat cryptic; and although he longed to know who the monkeys were and why they were blasted and by whom, he longed even more to escape. But the beautifully dressed man pushed a thick forefinger into his buttonhole, and, lowering his voice, whispered, "Will it go?"
"Go? Go where?"
"I see," replied the other, which was a great deal more than Donald did, and again, "I see"; and then, "Well, I never really thought it would," and then, to Donald's intense relief, he burst into joviality again, clapped Donald heartily on the back with the words, "I won't deny I'm sick about it, but there, are we down-hearted? That's my ticket," and went out of the room quickly.
Donald, completely bewildered, made his way back to the central hall where a lot of bridge was in progress. In one corner the mysterious man with the orchid was talking in eager whispers to a younger man with a beautifully silky moustache and an Old Etonian tie.
It was when Donald discovered, later on in the evening, that his tête-à-tête in the distant drawing-room had been with one of the most famous of England's Labour leaders, that he realized for the first time what a unique chance of studying England Lady Ormerode's invitation was giving him. For the Right Honourable Robert Bloomer, M.P., was not only a former President of the Trades Union Congress and for thirty-five years Secretary of the Amalgamated Union of West-end Journeymen Tailors, Hem-stitchers, and Cutters, but he was also an ex-Secretary of State. Donald hastily got out his note-book and jotted down his impressions of this famous man, but he was bound to admit that he still did not know what on earth the famous man had been talking about.
He had hardly finished his notes when a young lady of remarkable beauty and elegance came swinging into the hall and came straight across to the sofa, on the edge of which he was perched, and coiled herself down beside him. If Bob Bloomer's homely face was known to thousands, the loveliness of Esmeralda d'Avenant was an inspiration to millions. Theatre-goers adored her at Daly's, the Winter Garden, Drury Lane. Film-fans worshipped her from Pole to Pole. She had the most dazzling smile and the best publicity man in the English-speaking world, and her legs, which, though excellently shaped, were not more noticeably alluring than the legs of many a humble shop-girl or typist, were always insured for ten per cent more than Mistinguett's. Again Donald thanked his stars that he had been invited to Orme rode Towers, for Esmeralda d'Avenant was as typical of a branch of English art as Bob Bloomer of a branch of English labour. And here she was, this exquisite lady, snuggling down between a lot of black satin cushions beside him, actually beside him, on a sofa. Donald was thrilled. Shy and modest though he was, he felt a warm glow steal over him at the flattering thought that this miracle of beauty had selected him, Donald Cameron, out of all that brilliant house-party to honour with her fragrant presence and her radiant smile.
He even began to wonder, so subtle, so irresistible is the flattery of a beautiful woman to every man who ever lived except that superlative boob, St. Anthony, which was the particular quality that he possessed that had first attracted the attention of this dragonfly. He wondered what he had said or done. He soon found out. Nothing. It was that infernal Mr. Huggins who had been saying and doing. For as soon as Esmeralda had snuggled herself into a graceful attitude, had shaken her long Spanish earrings clear of her short English hair, had drawn up her quite-well-shaped and million-pound legs into a position that complied with the rules of decorum and yet at the same time wrecked the peace of mind and concentration of an Anglo-Indian Major-General across the hall who was desperately trying to create three no-trumps where God had only created two, she looked up at him and said murmurously, "You are Donald, aren't you? I've got a message for you. Ivor Novello has just telephoned from Hollywood to say that he quite agrees with you, but you're to say nothing now."
"Is that all he said?" exclaimed Donald, mixing up realities and Mr. Huggins for a moment.
"You were expecting more?" purred the siren admiringly. She adored film magnates.
"Oh well, perhaps not," he conceded, and he relapsed into a state of complete vacuity.
Esmeralda thought she had never seen a film magnate assume so cleverly an expression of innocence. Most of the ones she had had anything to do with were far from innocent. They had, indeed, prided themselves upon their cunning. "You can't get past me" had been the slogan of Mr. Sonnenschein. "You get up early, but I'm up all night" was emblazoned in letters of gold on the ancestral scutcheon of the Brothers Zinzembaumer, while the senior partner in the firm of Snigglefritz, Snigglefritz, Maclehose & Snigglefritz, specialists in high-art films about Joachim du Bellay, Ronsard, Villon, and Pico della Mirandola, used as his favourite expression, "Hot Ziggety Dam! I'm sure the hot dog." This assumption of nervous naïveté by one who received telephone calls from Ivor Novello in Hollywood as if they were calls from ordinary people, baffled and piqued and allured Esmeralda. She shot a dark glance from under her lashes at Donald. He paid no attention. She raised her head a little upon its alabaster column and opened her great eyes upon him for a moment. He neither wilted nor blushed. Esmeralda was not accustomed to this sort of thing. She called up her reserves, regardless of the bitter glances of the Major-General's wife—for the Major-General had twice led out of the wrong hand, had revoked once, and had gone down 650 points above the line whereas he ought to have made two no-trumps without the slightest difficulty, and the Major-General's wife, who had not lived in Indian hill stations for nothing, knew exactly why all this had happened—Esmeralda called up her reserves, gave an unconscious hitch to her skirt, and exhibited another seventy-five thousand pounds' worth of leg, and leant forward seductively, turning her full battery of dark eyes upon the doomed youth. No one had ever made the faintest show of resistance against her on the rare occasions on which she had brought that particular attitude into action. She had tried it on old Sonnenschein and he had raised her salary twenty thousand dollars a month on the spot and asked her to be his mistress. As soon as he had signed the contract for the former she had naturally, being a decent English girl—the daughter of a parson, too, called Jukes, who had a cure of souls near Daventry—refused the latter. She had also tried it upon the old Duke of Dorchester, at his house in Grosvenor Square, and the old Duchess of Dorchester, who had been watching through a moth-hole in a thirteenth-century tapestry, had been carried, screaming, to a private nursing-home behind Cavendish Street. Esmeralda once told an intimate friend of hers—Cristal Arlington of Daly's, the Winter Garden, and Drury Lane—that if she had only had a chance to try it on the Crown Prince of Germany there would not have been a war. It was, in effect, her chef-d'œuvre, and it brought into action simultaneously her dark liquid eyes, her legs, her slender hands, her graceful arms, her Spanish earrings, and a suggestion of a white and soft bosom. "Poor young man," she thought, as she blew the metaphorical whistle and the metaphorical troops went over the top, for Esmeralda was a kind-hearted soul and hated using unnecessary violence, "Poor young man."
But to her astonishment the object of her attack and her commiseration paid no attention to her dark liquid eyes, her slender hands, and graceful arms; he did not look at her legs (the Major-General, gallant as ever, had upset the card-table and was making no pretence at picking up the cards); he did not throw so much as a glance at the suggestion of white and soft bosom. Instead, he looked straight in front of him, rose to his feet and exclaimed, "Blast that bloody Huggins!" and walked out of the lounge into the rain.
Esmeralda was thrilled. Never had she met such an unusual film magnate. Never had she met such an iron man, such devastating sex appeal. "If he had been the Crown Prince of Germany," she said to herself as she watched Donald marching out, "there would have been a war," and she could have paid him no higher compliment.
Donald hid in his room for the rest of the afternoon, and his self-confidence was only restored by the extraordinary respect shown him by the footman who had been detailed to look after him. At 6.30 that functionary knocked at his door and came in with a very large cocktail-shaker and a glass upon a tray, and coughed once or twice unobtrusively.
"I beg your pardon, sir," he said timidly, when Donald looked up, equally timidly, from his book, "but I've brought you a cocktail, sir, if it won't interfere with your training, sir."
"My what?" said Donald, his brain beginning to reel.
"Your training, sir," repeated the flunkey, looking like a priest who has suddenly been ushered into the presence of his Deity. "They rang up, sir," he added, and then broke off under the stress of Donald's fearful scowl.
"Who rang up?" Donald asked in a voice that was as near a bark as he had ever got in the course of his mild and gentle life.
"The Chelsea Football Club, sir," replied the lackey, and then, the Man triumphing over the Livery, he went on with a rush, "Oh! Mr. Wilson, sir, I'm proud to be looking after you, sir," and then he lowered his voice to a reverent whisper and concluded, "The finest centre-forward in the world!" and backed out of the room.
The company sat down seventeen to dinner, one chair being vacant. There was Lady Ormerode at one end of the table and Sir Ethelred, looking like a rather subdued and worried Regency buck, a Corinthian who has accidentally swallowed a bodkin, at the other. The guests were, beginning on Sir Ethelred's left, and going round with the port:
Miss Perugia Gaukrodger, the lady novelist of Mr. Davies' dinner-party. Miss Gaukrodger's novels were mostly about suppressed desires, and were written in a style that made even the simplest of actions seem perfect monstrosities of abnormality. Her sales were much larger in Paris, where the police are notoriously lax in their moral outlook, than in London, but her fame in both capitals was immense. Sir Ethelred hated her because he knew she had been placed on his left in order to prevent him getting Esmeralda.
Next was Porson W. M. Jebb, a young man whose father had cherished the ambition of seeing his son become one of the great classical scholars of the age. Filled with a love of the classics himself, and inspired by the happy coincidence that had given him the same surname as one of the immortals of scholarship, Mr. Jebb, senior, had christened his son Porson after another of the immortals. It was some consolation, as Mr. Jebb, senior, often used to say with a sigh, that even if Porson did fail at the Winchester entrance examination, even if he was superannuated from Eton after four successive failures in "Trials," even if he was ploughed six times in Smalls, nevertheless no one could deny that he was the finest amateur batsman in the world, and that his hundred and sixty-one before lunch in the Sheffield Test Match against Australia was a masterpiece of classic batsmanship. "Only I had hoped for a different sort of classics," he used to add mournfully. As for Porson, much of his time and energy was spent in concealing from the world that the initials W. M. in his name stood, lamentably, for Wilamowitz Möllendorf, so intense an admiration had the misguided Mr. Jebb, senior, for the mighty Prussian scholar; although, had Mr. Jebb, junior, only known it, it was only by the narrowest squeak that he did not get Hermann and Schliemann as well. His only topic of conversation was cricket.
Next to Mr. Porson Jebb was a niece of the host, Patience Ormerode. She was about twenty years of age, and had ivory-coloured cheeks, orange lips, thin, blackened eyebrows, close-cut hair, pale pink ears, and purple finger-nails. She smoked all through dinner what are sometimes even now called Russian cigarettes because they are rolled in brown paper and stamped with the two-headed eagle of Tsardom. She was wearing a black frock which terminated in a sheaf of wispy, petal-shaped flounces, and was in no way disconcerted when, half-way through dinner, she deduced from a gleam of pale pink above her stocking that she had forgotten to put on any knickers. She had no topic of conversation and only one adjective at a time. At the moment the adjective was "grisly."
Beyond her was the man with the silky moustache. His name was Captain de Wilton-ffallow and he was Conservative member for a South of England constituency. Just before dinner he had taken Donald aside and said, "Bloomer told me your news." "What news?" muttered Donald, looking wildly round for a means of escape. Captain de Wilton-ffallow had nodded approvingly and said, "You can keep your mouth shut. Good man." The gallant captain—his military rank was one of those which had mysteriously survived into the days of peace; some have survived, others have not, and no one knows the reason—obviously regarded discretion as a cardinal virtue, for he hardly said a word all through dinner, greatly to the disappointment of the enchanting Esmeralda, who sat on his other side and vastly admired his silky moustache. In fact she found the dinner rather dull, for her left-hand neighbour was the Major-General, and he, poor veteran, was ill at ease. He was also a Conservative Member of Parliament, and he had soldiered on veld and kopje, on Himalayan hill-sides, on Chinese rivers, on burning plains and deserts, and had even, once or twice, visited front-line trenches, or at any rate got as far as battalion headquarters. He knew how to deal with Boers and Pathans and Waziris and Afridis and Chinks and Bolshies and hecklers, and, in fact, with every sort of nigger and dago. And, for he had not neglected the recreational side of a warrior's life, he knew how to flirt with a pretty girl. But he did not know how to flirt with a pretty girl under the eyes of Mrs. Major-General who was sitting opposite. For Mrs. Major-General knew a thing or two about her warrior's character and she did not trust him an inch. So the Major-General fidgeted, and Esmeralda yawned, and laid plans for vamping Donald into giving her the lead in his new film, and longed to put Patience Ormerode across her knee and give her a quick six with the back of a hair-brush.
On the other side of the hero of Spion Kop, the Khyber, and the Yang-tse-Kiang was a very rich and very plain woman of about thirty-five, whose three specialities were motor-racing, lovers, and giggling. She screamed with shrill laughter at the extremely dubious conversation of the Right Hon. Bob Bloomer, thus causing at least one oasis of sound in the silent desert on that side of the table. Lady Ormerode had the ex-Secretary of State on her right, and on her left, on the strength of the invitation to Chatsworth, Donald.
Next to Donald was the portly wife of the warrior. She drank whisky and soda and, with a vigilant eye upon her spouse, told Donald a good many times that no one could really understand the Indian problem unless they had actually lived there, and that the only solution of the difficulty, now that the initial blunder of not hanging Mr. Montagu and Lord Chelmsford years ago had been irrevocably committed, was to let the natives try another Mutiny and then show them what was what. "A few soldiers like my Horace," she said quite a number of times, "ought to be given a free hand. That is what they want," and she looked across at her Horace in a way that implied that if ever he tried the free-hand business he would get such a fearful clip across the ear. "Blast them from the guns," she said, glaring at the superb Esmeralda, and then she went on to describe station life at Landi-Kotal, Quetta, Peshawur, Secunderabad, Amritsar, and Amballa.
Beyond her was a very handsome Polish count who did not speak English, and he had been placed beside a beautiful Russian princess who also did not speak English (greatly to Esmeralda's relief, for the Russian really was lovely) so that they could talk to each other. Unfortunately, the Russian lady's grandfather had, shortly after the regrettable incidents of 1863, caused the Polish count's grandfather to walk all the way to Siberia, an exercise in pedestrianism which the latter had bitterly resented; and furthermore, the Polish count knew, and the Russian princess knew that he knew, that she was not a princess at all but only a baroness, and had attained the higher rank by the quaint old custom of self-promotion that has always been common among aristocrats in exile. The result was that, although they could have conversed with equal fluency in Polish, Russian, German, or French, they preferred not to recognize each other's existence, and the Major-General told Bob Bloomer that Slavs were always very reserved people.
Next to the princess was an empty chair and beyond that again an American lady called Mrs. Poop, whose husband was the senior partner in the well-known stockbroking firm of O. K. Poop and Artaxerxes Tintinfass, Inc. Patience Ormerode's brother, Charles, sat next to her. He was at Trinity College, Cambridge, and he had no topic of conversation and only one adjective at a time. At present it was "grisly."
And finally, on Sir Ethelred's right was a Miss Prudence Pott, a Labour M.P.; a woman of painstaking industry, of sterling worth, and of extreme dullness. Sir Ethelred hated her, for he knew that she had only been placed on his right in order to prevent him getting Esmeralda.
These were the people who sat down to dinner at Ormerode Towers that Saturday evening, and Donald reflected that all over England similar parties were sitting down to similar meals in the Week-End Cottages, the Houses, the Mansions, the Manors, Granges, Towers, Courts, Halls, and Abbeys of England.
Lady Ormerode was very worried about the empty chair. She kept on saying plaintively, "It's just like Rupert. Now I ask you, isn't it just like Rupert?" but as no one knew which Rupert it was out of all the Ruperts that it might have been, no one was able to answer the question for her.
It was not until the woodcock and the Nuits St. Georges were being simultaneously served that the missing Rupert arrived. He was not in the least disconcerted at being late; not in the least disconcerted by the glittering scene of cut crystal, diamonds, white waistcoats, and feminine loveliness; not in the least disconcerted by the fact that he was wearing old army field-boots, riding-breeches, and a corduroy jacket. But then, as Donald reflected, that was not at all surprising, for the missing Rupert was none other than his friend of the Fleet Street pubs—Mr. Harcourt, the poet. Furthermore, Mr. Harcourt the poet had been, even to the most charitable eye, drinking. His eye was glittering and roving; his face wore a healthy flush; his manner was assured; and there was a devilish look of mischief about his whole jaunty demeanour. Donald, who was only just beginning to recover from the impact of Mr. Huggins, felt a little dizzy. The Major-General glared at the new-comer's costume and muttered something about the Willingdon Club in Bombay.
Lady Ormerode was delighted, Sir Ethelred cold; Miss Perugia Gaukrodger smiled effusively, for Mr. Harcourt did a good deal of influential reviewing; Captain de Wilton-ffallow gazed disapprovingly and shut his lips tightly, and was extremely put out when Mr. Harcourt saw him and called out genially, "Hallo, ffallow, how's the coffee swindle?" and Bob Bloomer, tactless as ever, shouted, "Why, de Wilt, are you in the coffee ramp?" and Captain de Wilton-ffallow, who actually was concerned in the prospective coffee merger but did not know that anyone knew it, blushed furiously.
The Polish count and the Russian princess looked at the corduroy coat and simultaneously said "Mon Dieu!" and then scowled at each other. Miss Patience Ormerode lit a brown-paper cigarette and murmured "Grisly!" As it turned out, it was rather an unfortunate remark, for Mr. Harcourt with an ineffably sweet smile replied, "If I'm grisly, you're bare, so we're well matched," and then turned to talk to his hostess. The Right Honourable Bob Bloomer laughed till he choked, and Esmeralda thought that Mr. Harcourt was rather sweet.
Mr. Harcourt drank a glass of burgundy and looked round the table. There was a lull in a conversation that had never been very brisk. "What a damned dull party," he observed blandly. "How are the lovers, Esmeralda? Going strong?"
The Major-General coughed ferociously and muttered something about the Byculla Club in Bombay. Again it was an unfortunate remark, for Mr. Harcourt's quicksilver wits grasped the implication. He leant back and addressed the Right Honourable Mr. Bloomer:
"Well, Bloomer, I hear we're going to clear out of India at last."
Mr. Bloomer was surprised. He hadn't heard about it.
"Oh yes, it's quite true," went on Mr. Harcourt, "though of course it hasn't been officially announced yet. The Indian Civil is going to be abolished and no Englishman is to hold higher rank in the Army than colour-sergeant. And the word Sahib is to be forbidden," he added, seeing that the Major-General's eyes were already bulging out of their sockets.
"Dear me!" said Esmeralda, with a yawn. Patience Ormerode started to give it as her considered opinion that it was all very grisly, but remembered in time and stopped.
Sir Ethelred said that the trouble about the English was that they were too modest. After all, they were admittedly the finest governors in the world, so why didn't they just go on governing? The Major-General exclaimed "Hear, hear!" very loudly at this and Mr. Bloomer added that the English were too reserved. Captain de Wilton-ffallow stated that in his view if a white man was going to be a white man, he meant, he had to be reserved, and Esmeralda said she thought reserve was all right for women, and Mrs. Major-General said that it was the sporting spirit that made the Englishman beloved wherever he went, and cited as an instance the worship accorded by the Waziris to Bongleton Sahib after he had killed a hundred and eleven of the most beautiful ibexes you ever saw in a single week's shikari near Landi-Kotal.
"I don't know about shooting," said Porson Jebb, "but our Test Match sides are Britain's best ambassadors." It was his favourite, indeed almost his only, remark.
"The Portuguese are good governors, and so are the Egyptians too," said Mr. Harcourt, peering pointedly into his empty glass as he spoke, and sighing deeply.
This was more than the Major-General could stand. He banged the table with his fist and exclaimed, "The Portuguese are damned bad governors! And as for the Egyptians——"
"Just as you like," interrupted Mr. Harcourt pleasantly.
After the ladies had left the table, Esmeralda with ill-concealed reluctance, the talk turned to politics. Donald listened attentively and wished that he could openly produce his note-book. For he knew that it was at just such week-end parties as this, and at just this precise moment when cigars and port and old brandy are going round, that the affairs of England are very largely settled. And here were four Members of Parliament, three Conservative, and a Coalition Socialist, pushing their chairs back, lighting their cigars, and sipping their brandies.
But the absence of the note-book did not matter very much, for, after all, nothing of importance was settled. The conversation ran on simple and unimpressive lines.
"Well, Bob," began Sir Ethelred, "and when are we going to get a really decent tariff instead of this footling ten per cent?"
"As soon as we've drowned all those poisonous Liberals," replied Mr. Bloomer. "It won't be so long now."
"Poisonous crew of traitors," said the Major-General, "I wish I'd had them in my company in the old days at Abbotabad!"
"Do you think that this Free Trade stuff is lunacy or criminal?" enquired Captain de Wilton-ffallow.
"Definitely criminal," replied his senior officer. "They're all in the pay of Moscow."
"I wouldn't go so far as that," said Sir Ethelred, who was a kindly man. "I don't think they actually accept money."
"Then what on earth is the explanation of it?" asked the Captain.
"Oh, I think it's just a form of insanity," explained Sir Ethelred amiably. "You've got to be unhinged to argue that we gain anything by getting cheap wheat from Russia. A man who sees any sort of good in imports must be mad."
"I hope you're right," said the Major-General gloomily. "I'd sooner have to deal with loonies than with traitors. But all the same, a man whose judgment I rely on, a sound man, mind you, told me that he knows for a fact that every Liberal candidate at the last election was sent a thousand roubles in gold to help with his expenses."
"Whew!" the Captain whistled.
"The trouble with Russia is that there's no cricket there," said Mr. Jebb.
"Grisly," said young Mr. Ormerode, yawning.
"Furthermore," said the Major-General, "I myself heard a Liberal say the other day that he would sooner see the people of this country pay a shilling a pound for Russian cocoa than three shillings a pound for Sierra Leone cocoa."
"Whew!" the Captain whistled again.
"Why Sierra Leone?" enquired young Mr. Ormerode, yawning.
"Because Sierra Leone is in the Empire, sir," cried the Major-General indignantly, "and if that isn't either downright, stark, staring insanity or slow, cold-blooded treachery, I don't know what is!"
"I agree," said Sir Ethelred; "I agree profoundly that Liberals are insane, but it will need more than that to persuade me that they are treacherous as well."
"I'm a Liberal," said Mr. Harcourt, suddenly waking up out of a trance, and there was an awkward pause, filled up by Mr. Jebb, who observed:
"They play quite a good game on the Gold Coast. Matting wickets, of course."
"I am in favour," said Mr. Harcourt, with painful clarity of diction and a pleasing smile, "of selling the Gold Coast to the United States as part payment of the War Debt, and the Slave Coast and the Pepper Coast and the Salt Coast and the Mustard Coast," his voice went off into a sort of croon, "and the Nutmeg Coast and the Cinnamon Coast and the Vinegar Coast and the Oil Coast, and Northern Nigeria and Southern Nigeria and old Uncle Sierra Leone and all." His voice had fallen to a murmur; his chin drooped upon his corduroy chest and his head nodded. Then with a last effort he raised his head and, in a silvery-clear voice, wound up his statement of Imperial policy with the words, "And I would use the British Fleet to coerce Japan into accepting Australia—" and, adding as a final afterthought, "with all the Australians," he lay back and fell instantly asleep.
"Let us join the ladies," exclaimed Sir Ethelred hastily. The cigars were only a quarter smoked, the brandy had only been round once, but at all costs bloodshed had to be averted.
The ladies, who had, as usual upon these occasions, resigned themselves with the traditional submissiveness of their sex to a period of dullness, were startled by the unexpected termination of their dreary vigil, and at the same time alarmed by the appalling look of savagery upon the bloodshot face of the Major-General. It was easy to understand at that moment why the North-West Frontier had enjoyed a period of tranquillity during the years of his command at Peshawur.
It was not a very serene evening. Patience Ormerode, having learnt from the butler of Donald's gigantic film interests, backed him into a corner and described in staccato sentences, often containing words of as many as three syllables, her extraordinary acting in the part of Monna Vanna at her school festival near Cheltenham, puffing bogus Russian smoke into his face all the time and shooting devastating glances at him from her kohl-fringed eyes. Esmeralda, furiously angry, and longing more than ever for a hair-brush and the chance to catch the little swine in a suitable posture, had to fall back upon Porson Jebb, who immediately began to describe, stroke by stroke, his famous innings at the Adelaide Oval against South Australia during the last M.C.C. tour. Esmeralda, bored to the verge of insanity, gazed across at the handsome Polish count and sighed and wished that she had paid more attention to her French governess, or even to her German governess, in the dear old days in the Vicarage near Daventry when she had been simple little Jane Jukes.
Sir Ethelred, the Major-General, de Wilton-ffallow, and Mrs. O. K. Poop played bridge under the eye of Mrs. Major-General. The Russian princess offered, in very broken English, to give a lesson in French or German to Mr. Bloomer—an invitation which was accepted with vast alacrity—and the pair retired to the billiard-room. Young Ormerode looked at the Play Pictorial and yawned. Miss Pott, M.P., put on a pair of horn-rimmed glasses and settled down with Lady Ormerode to discuss the proposed amendments to the first two clauses of the Government's Housing Bill, while Miss Perugia Gaukrodger described, with a wealth of painful detail, the plot of her forthcoming novel to Mr. Harcourt. It was a moving tale, 877 pages, all about the remorse of a young man for having admitted to himself, while standing beside a soda-fountain in a tea-shop in Chancery Lane, that if his maternal grandmother, who had died twenty-eight years before, had been as beautiful as Helen of Troy and as seductive as Cleopatra, he would probably have fallen in love with her and married her. But—moving, painful, harrowingly true to life though it undoubtedly was—it left Mr. Harcourt cold, for he slept peacefully through it all, from page one to page eight hundred and seventy-seven, including even the four chapters, afterwards so famous as the symbolical key to the whole book, in which the hero watches a cockroach climb up an egg-stained wall in a Bloomsbury bed-sitting-room.
Mr. Harcourt woke up with mysterious suddenness at twenty-seven minutes past 10, and, by a curious coincidence, it was at that very instant that the butler came in with two footmen laden with trays of whisky, brandy, syphons, glasses, and biscuits. Mr. Harcourt stifled a yawn, mixed a little soda into a glass of whisky, blinked heavily, and stared with an air of extreme puzzlement round the room.
"Good God!" he observed with dismay, "I've forgotten where I am."
"You're in Ormerode Towers," snapped Miss Perugia Gaukrodger, who was beginning to suspect that the famous reviewer had missed one or two of her best bits of description.
"Yes, I know that, my good woman," replied Mr. Harcourt. "What I mean is, I've forgotten what sort of a party it is. Are we up-to-date moderns, mixing gin and beer and wallowing in T. S. Eliot? Or are we straight-living chaps who sing the Eton Boating Song a good deal? Or are we all just simple boys and girls together, darting in and out of each other's bedrooms from time to time? Strike me pink if I know what to make of it!"
"You're at an ordinary English week-end party, sir," thundered the Major-General.
"Come, come, General," said Mr. Harcourt severely, "we want none of your barrack-room licentiousness here. I shall have to sleep on the mat outside Esmeralda's door if this sort of thing is to be allowed."
"What the devil do you mean?" shouted the exasperated soldier.
"I don't know what sort of chivalry they teach at Sandhurst or Coalville Secondary School or Borstal or Woolwich," replied Mr. Harcourt, with immense dignity, "but to an old Giggleswickian a woman is sacred."
"Whatever for?" enquired Esmeralda.
"I've forgotten now," said Mr. Harcourt, "but they used to tell us."
"I never see the point," said Captain de Wilton-ffallow, the rubber now over, "of sneering at the public-school system. It has its drawbacks, like everything else, but its advantages are so overwhelming that people who attack it are merely stamping themselves as fools."
"The public school," agreed Sir Ethelred, "is the breeding-ground of great men."
"Not necessarily the public school," amended the Major-General, who had, like many another successful soldier before him, gone straight from the preparatory school to the crammer and from the crammer, after one or two shots, into Sandhurst. "Not necessarily the public school, but the public school type."
"Hear, hear!" said Mr. Porson Jebb approvingly.
"Damned good show, the public school," said young Mr. Ormerode. "Those privately educated oicks are a pretty grisly set of oicks. Grocers' sons and oicks and what not."
"My father was a grocer," said Mr. Harcourt.
Young Mr. Ormerode tried to stammer an apology, while the Major-General muttered, perfectly audibly, "I'm not surprised to hear it." Lady Ormerode hastened to cover up this gaucherie by saying, "But, Rupert, I thought all your family were soldiers?"
"Only the ones who weren't clever enough to be taken into the grocery business," replied Mr. Harcourt sweetly.
"In America," said Mrs. O. K. Poop languidly, "everyone is clever enough to get into the grocery business."
"That's why you've got no army," said the poet.
"The United States Army won the War," replied Mrs. Poop, showing faint traces of animation for the first time that evening.
"Madam!" exclaimed the Major-General, bristling up, but Mr. Harcourt interrupted deftly:
"Mrs. Boob means the Civil War of 1861."
"I do not, and my name is Poop," replied the American lady with sudden vivacity.
"The United States Army——" began the Major-General with impressive slowness.
"Is the best in the world," said Mrs. Poop, leaning back on the sofa, "and the United States Navy is the best in the world."
"And the trees in California," said Mr. Harcourt, "are the tallest in the world."
"That is so," said Mrs. Poop.
"And the climate is the best in the world."
"That is so," said Mrs. Poop.
"And the public lavatories are the biggest in the world."
At this point Esmeralda sighed one of the biggest sighs on record and yawned one of the biggest yawns, and said she was going to bed.
"I wish," said Mr. Harcourt plaintively, "that someone would tell me if this is the sort of week-end party where I offer to come with you."
"Really, Rupert!" exclaimed Lady Ormerode, scandalized, "I won't allow you to say such things."
"No, but will Esmeralda? That's the point."
The lady in question smiled and kicked up an elegant heel and waved an elegant hand and said, "Good night, everyone," and went out.
One by one the house-party went to bed. The lights were extinguished by a tired-looking footman. The fires were raked out, the shutters bolted, the windows locked. Another Saturday was finished. Another typical week-end had been successfully launched at Ormerode Towers.
Sunday was just the same as the Saturday had been, and Donald went back to Royal Avenue on Monday morning with a note-book full of notes. Mr. Harcourt travelled up with him in the same carriage, and, before the train had reached London, he had made great havoc with a pint flask of neat whisky.
