Men and Wives Page 9

“Godfrey, cannot you fetch me Griselda’s cup?” said Harriet.

  “Yes, yes. Why, Griselda, you are wanting some more tea?” said Godfrey, attaining the cup without rising. “Well, a man can reach farther than a woman, can’t he?’”

  Chapter X

  Well, Fine Feathers make fine birds, we all know. I don’t need to be told that, so you needn’t be in a hurry to snap it out at me. But I don’t look so little of a fellow, when I have as much done for me as some men take for granted. I only do it for myself for an occasion, not being much concerned with the effect I produce. It doesn’t happen to be one of my interests. Do you see I have my newest suit on, my very last? Would any of you have noticed it? Some men don’t give the feathers the foundation. Well, my Grisel, what do you think of your father?”

  “You don’t need to feel any more pride,” said his daughter.

  “Oh, well, it was the suit I was thinking of. I was meaning to send it back to be altered, but I don’t think there is much wrong with it. I suspected a little something on the shoulder, and I was working myself up into a mood. But I don’t fancy there is great room for improvement. What do you say, Jermyn?”

  “You must not expect more than the most even from your privy expert,” said Jermyn.

  “No, no, I must not. You say the word, Jermyn. And I think it is due to a middle-aged man to have a little more afforded to him than to youngsters. They have youth on their side. Not that the extra years always take from a man’s general impression; far from it; that is quite a fallacy. Now do you think I had better wear these studs or not?”

  “I like the plain ones better,” said Griselda.

  “Yes, so do I; I do too. Your taste is mine, Griselda. We don’t care to see tricking out on a man, either of us. You think people will take it in that the plain ones are put on on purpose. And the effect is not too studied either, the effect of being nothing in a sense. I will change them here, and put the others on the chimney-piece, behind the clock. No one will see them, and they will be quite safe. Now do you think there is anything wrong with your father?”

  “It is Grisel’s appearance we should be concerned with,” said Jermyn.

  “And not that of four hulking males in a uniform,” said Matthew.

  “You are unjust to Father. That is not the number of males in his mind,” said Griselda.

  “No, no, but Grisel’s appearance. That goes without saying,” said Godfrey, settling his cuff with his eyes upon it. “That doesn’t need any confirmation, the impression my girl will make. It is an old fogey like myself who has to bestir himself lest people should shudder to look at him. I don’t see why they should be struck amiss by me to-night. Do any of you?”

  “You are deciding the question for yourself,” said Griselda, as her father adjusted his neck in his collar, but in the direction of a glass.

  “Oh, indeed, am I? You monkey of a girl! Gregory, what is your opinion of my new evening suit?”

  “A better one than of its predecessor,” said Gregory, hunching his shoulders. “I would rather anyone’s mantle descended upon me than yours.”

  “Oh, my poor boy!” said his father, surveying him. “Well, it is a nice suit; it really is a passable thing. I rather fancied myself in it at one time. My one before last, isn’t it? I don’t really know why I gave it up, unless it was getting a little small for me. Though I don’t know that it was. I don’t think I have got any fatter these last few years. Does it strike any of you that I have?”

  “You clearly discarded it on insufficient grounds,” said Gregory.

  “I don’t like to see a middle-aged man too much of a scarecrow,” Godfrey continued along his own line. “Harriet, my dear, a very quiet and impressive effect! I never saw you look more yourself.”

  “That is a chance I have not had,” said Gregory. “No one ever saw me look more like Father.”

  “Well, you should not have left your own suit at Cambridge, my dear,” said his mother. “You could not be seen in the old one you wear or should wear every night.”

  “Oh, that is what it is, Harriet?” cried Godfrey. “Here he has been bemoaning himself and playing the martyr because he was made to wear other people’s old clothes! I hadn’t a thought but what it was that. I declare I have been feeling quite a sense of guilt, for dressing myself up to the hilt, while he was left to appear in cast-offs. And really he has a whole collection of suits, more than I have, I daresay. Well, what a boy!”

  “I will give this one back to you to-morrow,” said Gregory.

  “Oh, you will, will you? Well, you won’t then. I have done with it; I have got too fat for it,” said Godfrey, laughing.

  “Sir Percy and Lady Hardisty!” said Buttermere. “Miss Hardisty!”

  “Well, my dear Rachel,” said Godfrey, “I have had it in my mind all day that you were to be with us to-night. If there is a thing I like to see, it is you and Harriet together.”

  “It does show up Harriet as in her prime,” said Rachel.

  “Mellicent, you and I will be absorbed in ourselves the whole evening,” said Jermyn. “People cannot think less of us than they do.”

  “It is unfair of them,” said Mellicent. “We could so easily think less of them. Their opinion makes an impression that remains.”

  “Harriet, my dear,” said Sir Percy, stooping very low, “you can tell me that things are all right with you? There is nothing for me to be troubled about?”

  “Mrs. Calkin, Miss Dabis, Miss Kate Dabis!” said Buttermere.

  “Dear me, three whole women!” said Rachel. “The drawback to a party is that it makes you so ashamed of being a woman, and it is paltry to be ashamed of anything that is not really wrong. Look at dear Harriet, greeting them as if they were nothing to be ashamed of!”

  “That is the essence of being a hostess,” said Mellicent.

  “It is too kind of you to have a welcome for our whole party, Lady Haslam,” said Agatha.

  “I really think it is,” said Mellicent. “Mrs. Calkin is known to be honest.”

  “No one is all bad,” said Rachel, “though I never know why that is so certain.”

  “We felt quite embarrassed by coming in, a group of widows and spinsters,” said Geraldine. “It is too much even of a good thing, people might think.”

  “Why is it a good thing?” said Mellicent. “And why do what causes you embarrassment?”

  “Hush, my dear. Geraldine really is embarrassed,” said Rachel. “It must be trying to speak true words in jest. It is such a true saying that many are spoken.”

  “We cannot have too much of a good thing, Miss Dabis,” said Godfrey. “We are grateful to you for giving it to us.”

  “We all came because we were asked,” said Kate. “It is so satisfying to come to a party, that we just thanked and came.”

  “Mrs. Christy!” said Buttermere.

  “We shall be educated the whole evening,” said Jermyn.

  “And amongst old-fashioned men who do not approve of women’s higher education,” said Mellicent. “For it will be higher, I am sure. Here is the reason for Camilla’s not coming!”

  “Mr. Bellamy!” said Buttermere.

  “Oh, yes, the reason. Yes, yes,” said Sir Percy.

  “They say a parson counts as a woman, but we won’t count him one to-night,” said Rachel. “I am sure Harriet doesn’t mean us to, and we should follow the lead of our hostess.”

  “He does make rather an effect, coming in,” said Mellicent.

  “Yes, an effect, yes. He has rather much manner, hasn’t he?” said Sir Percy, peering forward.

  “Well, Lady Haslam, I am late,” said Bellamy. “And I was not delayed or called away, or anything useful. I am just shamefully and miserably late.”

  “You will take my wife in to dinner, will you, Rector?” said Godfrey.

  “The last shall be first,” said Bellamy, bringing his hands together.

  “You are not quite the last,” said Agatha, as though content to annul this quotation.

&
nbsp; “No, but I am to be quite the first,” said Bellamy.

  “Mr. Spong!” said Buttermere.

  “It is almost your turn to be ashamed, Father,” said Mellicent. “We are all human beings together, but we are not all men together like you and Mr. Spong.”

  “Yes, yes, men together, fellow-guests,” said Sir Percy, just rubbing his hands.

  “Lady Haslam,” Dominic said, “I am sensible of your peculiar kindness in bidding me to complete your party to-night. I am neither the man nor in the mood to enhance the spirits of the occasion, and friendship confers the most when it demands the least.”

  “Spong, will you take Mrs. Calkin in to dinner?” said Godfrey.

  Dominic caused a smile of conscious privilege to alter his face.

  “Mellicent, you will let Jermyn take Griselda as well as you?” said Harriet. “We are a man too few.”

  “You are double privileged, Jermyn,” said Dominic. “We shall all be finding it in our hearts to envy you.”

  “That is not at all a pretty speech to make before your partner!” cried Geraldine, leaning to catch Dominic’s eye, as she accepted Matthew’s arm.

  “I am confident,” said Dominic, “that Mrs. Calkin understood me to refer to quantity rather than quality of companionship.”

  “Now, Rachel, you and I will lead the way,” said Godfrey. “I said to Harriet that I would have you for a partner, whether you fell to my share or not. I don’t care a jot about the etiquette of the thing.”

  “Do you mean that I am not the chief woman guest?” said Rachel. “I thought that was why I generally went in with you.”

  “Sir Godfrey and Lady Hardisty are such very old friends,” said Agatha, proceeding with Dominic.

  “Yes,” said Dominic, looking down on her with protection. “There is something very beautiful in the spectacle of a tried intimacy. I think our good friends, the Haslams and the Hardistys, show us as striking an example as we could see.”

  “I have found them all such congenial intimates myself,” said Agatha. “I have always in my mind the kindness of the whole group at the time when life was emptied for me. It is at those times that we find out the true value of friends.”

  “Mrs. Calkin, it is,” said Dominic, with an impulse to pause which he checked for the sake of the procession. “I should not have thought two months ago, when the greatest of all losses fell also upon me, that I should ever again call myself a fortunate man. But in the proven worth of my fellows, I must thus describe myself.”

  “Well, now, let us take our seats,” said Godfrey, walking round the table. “Let us sit where our names are. Myself at the top, Harriet at the bottom, and all of you in between. Now are we all settled?”

  He paused and bent his head, unmindful of Bellamy’s office, and caused Dominic to cast an arrested look at him and stand with his eyes held down well into the hum of talk.

  “And now what kind of wine are we all to drink?” he said in a voice that seemed to counteract the foregoing solemnity. “Mrs. Calkin, we must persuade you to change your custom to-night.”

  “No, I won’t have anything to drink, thank you.”

  “Mrs. Calkin, we are not, I hope, to take that statement literally,” said Dominic, supplying her with water.

  “Lemonade, madam?” said Buttermere at Agatha’s elbow.

  “Thank you,” said Agatha with dubious eyes on her glass.

  “I am afraid I have been rather precipitate,” said Dominic, glancing over his shoulder with spreading colour.

  “Lemonade, sir?” said Buttermere, indicating Agatha’s glass to his subordinate, and seeming to suggest that he was probably right in his gauging of Dominic’s habit.

  “Thank you,” said Dominic in a casual manner, turning at once to his neighbour.

  “Come, Mrs. Christy, change your mind,” said her host.

  “No, indeed, I must stand up for my principles.”

  “Mrs. Christy, that is often a very hard thing to do,” said Dominic.

  “I hope not at this table; I trust not indeed,” said Godfrey. “Our friends’ principles are always respected here.”

  “Yes, Sir Godfrey,” said Dominic with gratitude.

  “I do not refuse wine on principle,” said Agatha in a distinct voice. “I have no conscientious scruples against it. Often I enjoy a glass of wine. In fact I was brought up to take a little. But I find it works better in different ways not to be dependent on it.”

  “I am dependent on it, and cannot have it,” said Geraldine, looking at the colour in her glass. “That is the sad effect on me of the same bringing up.”

  “Well, get as far as you can to-night, Miss Dabis,” said Godfrey.

  “Food and drink are the things worth living for,” said Gregory.

  “Lady Haslam,” said Dominic, leaning towards Harriet, “I assume we are not to take this young gentleman’s statement seriously.”

  “I don’t know, the little good-for-nothing!” said Godfrey. “What he has to eat and drink and wear! That is what seems to matter to him.”

  “It is the whole of civilisation,” said Gregory.

  “Oh . . . oh!” said Dominic, laughing with his eyes still on his hostess.

  “I think my boy considers anything before those things,” said Agatha.

  “Yes, Mrs. Calkin,” said Dominic in a serious tone that seemed to offer compensation for his withdrawn attention, “I can believe those things are a matter of indifference to him.”

  “I would not say that,” said Agatha, causing her partner’s eyebrows slightly to rise. “He likes good things to eat and drink as well as anyone; he makes that clear when he comes home. Wine isn’t a luxury with us then I can tell you. But they are not the first things in life to him. No.”

  “They must be in his heart,” said Gregory.

  “Oh, Lady Haslam!” said Dominic, with further merriment.

  “Gregory, this foolish joke has gone on long enough,” said his father, presumably not noticing its effect on his guest.

  “Gregory has made a joke,” said Matthew. “He is doing his best to make the party go.”

  “Now that is a thing I cannot do,” said Godfrey. “If anyone asked me to make a joke now on the spur of the moment, I could not do it for my life.”

  “Well, we will ask you,” said Geraldine.

  “You have made your answer betimes, Sir Godfrey,” said Dominic with a touch of apprehension, “and one which I make no doubt will have to do for many of us here.”

  “I always think there is so much involved in humour,” said Mrs. Christy. “So many things flood the memory at the mere conception of it. I am such a votary of the comic muse. ‘No,’ I have said, when people have challenged me, ‘I will not have comedy pushed into a back place.’ I think tragedy and comedy are a greater, wider thing than tragedy by itself. And comedy is so often seen to have tragedy behind it.”

  “That is true. I think all my jesting about Percy’s first marriage is seen in that way,” said Rachel.

  “I am not speaking of the oft-instanced order of so-called humour,” continued Mrs. Christy. “I hold no brief for Jane Austen and her kind. Woman though I am, I want something more involved with the deeper truths and wider issues of life.”

  “Well, I don’t set myself up to be a critic,” said Godfrey in an aloof and contented tone.

  “You don’t need to set yourself up in any way,” said Gregory. “You are too high.”

  “High enough to be one of Jane Austen’s fathers,” said Jermyn.

  “Oh, am I? Well, what do you mean by that?” said Godfrey, in a suspicious but still incurious spirit.

  “What do you think of Miss Jane Austen’s books, Jermyn?” said Dominic—“if I may approach so great a man upon a comparatively flimsy subject.”

  “Our row of green books with the pattern on the backs, Rachel?” said Sir Percy with a sense of adequacy in conversation. “Very old-fashioned, aren’t they?”

  “What do the ladies think of the author, the author
ess, for she is of their own sex?” said Dominic.

  “I have a higher standard for greatness,” said Agatha, “but I don’t deny she has great qualities. I give her the word great in that sense.”

  “You put that very well, Mrs. Calkin,” said Dominic. “I feel I must become acquainted with the fair writer.”

  “That is a great honour for her!” said Geraldine.

  “Miss Dabis, I assure you I do not feel it so.”

  “What do you think, Mr. Bellamy?” said Harriet.

  “I did think something at the time when I used to think. She has some inner light. To copy her is hopeless. I am on my knees.”

  “Mr. Bellamy hid himself somewhat under his cover of silence,” said Dominic.

  “I did not know you wrote yourself, Mr. Bellamy?” said Harriet.

  “I write and I paint and I play and I act, and I don’t do anything well enough to be worth while, and everything rather too well to give it up. I am a rolling stone, a proof that a little learning is a dangerous thing, that he does much who does a little well. I am an illustration of every warning proverb under the sun.”

  “It may be something to be that, Mr. Bellamy,” said Dominic in a complimentary but indefinite spirit.

  “But I do not like to live simply as a warning to others. I often wonder why I continue to live at all. I honour those people we never meet, who take the matter into their own hands. Of course we cannot come across them after they have taken that step.”

  Dominic’s gaze swelled.

  “Mr. Bellamy,” he said, with a forced smile, “that is hardly a speech we expect from a clergyman.”

  “Any kind of speech does for a clergyman. He can’t be turned out for his discourse, in the pulpit or elsewhere. In his case actions really speak louder than words. ‘Be good, sweet man, and let who will be clever.’”

  “I never see why we should not end our own lives if we wish to,” said Jermyn.

  “Perhaps people would not suffer as much or as long as we think,” said Harriet, as if to herself.

  “Harriet, my dear!” said Godfrey, while Dominic turned his eyes on his hostess in involuntary consternation.

  “It shows a want of courage to end one’s own life. I think that must be said,” said Agatha with gentle tolerance towards any human proceeding.