‘He is a very argumentative young man!’ was all the old lady would say: but she said it audibly, this time, feeling that Society had a right to know it.
Arthur smiled mischievously. ‘I shouldn’t mind betting you a shilling,’ he said, ‘that the Eminent Barrister next you’ (It certainly is possible to say words so as to make them begin with capitals!) ‘ca’n’t answer me!’
‘I never bet,’ she sternly replied.
‘Not even sixpenny points at whist?’
‘Never!’ she repeated. ‘Whist is innocent enough: but whist played for money!’ She shuddered.
Arthur became serious again. ‘I’m afraid I ca’n’t take that view,’ he said. ‘I consider that the introduction of small stakes for card-playing was one of the most moral acts Society ever did, as Society.’
‘How was it so?’ said Lady Muriel.
‘Because it took Cards, once for all, out of the category of games at which cheating is possible. Look at the way Croquet is demoralizing Society. Ladies are beginning to cheat at it, terribly: and, if they’re found out, they only laugh, and call it fun. But when there’s money at stake, that is out of the question. The swindler is not accepted as a wit. When a man sits down to cards, and cheats his friends out of their money, he doesn’t get much fun out of it—unless he thinks it fun to be kicked down stairs!’
‘If all gentlemen thought as badly of ladies as you do,’ my neighbour remarked with some bitterness, ‘there would be very few—very few—’. She seemed doubtful how to end her sentence, but at last took ‘honeymoons’ as a safe word.
‘On the contrary,’ said Arthur, the mischievous smile returning to his face, ‘if only people would adopt my theory, the number of honeymoons—quite of a new kind—would be greatly increased!’
‘May we hear about this new kind of honeymoon?’ said Lady Muriel.
‘Let X be the gentleman,’ Arthur began, in a slightly raised voice, as he now found himself with an audience of six, including ’Mein Herr’, who was seated at the other side of my polynomial partner. ‘Let X be the gentleman, and Y the lady to whom he thinks of proposing. He applies for an Experimental Honeymoon. It is granted. Forthwith the young couple—accompanied by the great-aunt of Y, to act as chaperone—start for a month’s tour, during which they have many a moonlight-walk, and many a tête-à-tête conversation, and each can form a more correct estimate of the other’s character, in four weeks, than would have been possible in as many year, when meeting under the ordinary restrictions of Society. And it is only after their return that X
finally decides whether he will, or will not, put the momentous question to Y!’
‘In nine cases out of ten,’ the pompous man proclaimed, ‘he would decide to break it off!’
‘Then, in nine cases out of ten,’ Arthur rejoined, ‘an unsuitable match would be prevented, and both parties saved from misery!’
‘The only really unsuitable matches,’ the old lady remarked, ‘are those made without sufficient Money. Love may come afterwards. Money is needed to begin with!’
This remark was cast loose upon Society, as a sort of general challenge; and, as such, it was at once accepted by several of those within hearing: Money became the keynote of the conversation for some time: and a fitful echo of it was again heard, when the dessert had been placed upon the table, the servants had left the room, and the Earl had started the wine in its welcome progress round the table.
‘I’m very glad to see you keep up the old customs,’ I said to Lady Muriel as I filled her glass. ‘It’s really delightful to experience, once more, the peaceful feeling that comes over one when the waiters have left the room— when one can converse without the feeling of being overheard, and without having dishes constantly thrust over one’s shoulder. How much more sociable it is to be able to pour out the wine for the ladies, and to hand the dishes to those who wish for them!’
‘In that case, kindly send those peaches down here,’ said a fat red-faced man, who was seated beyond our pompous friend.
‘I’ve been wishing for them—diagonally—for some time!’
‘Yes, it is a ghastly innovation’, Lady Muriel replied, ‘letting the waiters carry round the wine at dessert. For one thing, they always take it the wrong way round—which of course brings bad luck to everybody present!’
‘Better go the wrong way than not go at all!’ said our host. ‘Would you kindly help yourself?’ (This was to the fat red-faced man.) ‘You are not a teetotaler, I think?’
‘Indeed but I am!’ he replied, as he pushed on the bottles. ‘Nearly twice as much money is spent in England on Drink, as on any other article of food. Read this card.’ (What faddist ever goes about without a pocketful of the appropriate literature?) ‘The stripes of different colours represent the amounts spent of various articles of food. Look at the highest three. Money spent on butter and on cheese, thirty-five millions: on bread, seventy millions: on intoxicating liquors, one hundred and thirty-six millions! If I had my way, I would close every public-house in the land! Look at that card, and read the motto. That’s where all the money goes to!’
‘Have you seen the Anti-Teetotal Card?’ Arthur innocently enquired.
‘No, Sir, I have not!’ the orator savagely replied. ‘What is it like?’
‘Almost exactly like this one. The coloured stripes are the same. Only, instead of the words "Money spent on", it has "Incomes derived from sale of"; and, instead of "That’s where all the money goes to", its motto is "That’s where all the money comes from!" ‘
The red-faced man scowled, but evidently considered Arthur beneath his notice. So Lady Muriel took up the cudgels. ‘Do you hold the theory,’ she enquired, ‘that people can preach teetotalism more effectually by being teetotalers themselves?’
‘Certainly I do!’ replied the red-faced man. ‘Now, here is a case in point,’ unfolding a newspaper-cutting: ‘let me read you this letter from a teetotaler. To the Editor. Sir, I was once a moderate drinker, and knew a man who drank to excess. I went to him. "Give up this drink," I said. "It will ruin your health!" "You drink," he said: "why shouldn’t I?" "Yes," I said, "but I know when to leave off." He turned away from me. "You drink in your way," he said: "let me drink in mine. Be off!" Then I saw that, to do any good with him, I must forswear drink. From that hour I haven’t touched a drop!’
‘There! What do you say to that?’ He looked round triumphantly, while the cutting was handed round for inspection.
‘How very curious!’ exclaimed Arthur when it had reached him. ‘Did you happen to see a letter, last week, about early rising?
It was strangely like this one.’
The red-faced man’s curiosity was roused. ‘Where did it appear?’ he asked.
‘Let me read it to you,’ said Arthur. He took some papers from his pocket, opened one of them, and read as follows. To the Editor. Sir, I was once a moderate sleeper, and knew a man who slept to excess. I pleaded with him. "Give up this lying in bed," I said. "It will ruin your health!" "You go to bed," he said: "why shouldn’t I?" "Yes," I said, "but I know when to get up in the morning." He turned away from me. "You sleep in your way," he said: "let me sleep in mine. Be off!" Then I saw that to do any good with him, I must forswear sleep. From that hour I haven’t been to bed!’
Arthur folded and pocketed his paper, and passed on the newspaper-cutting. None of us dared to laugh, the red-faced man was evidently so angry. ‘Your parallel doesn’t run on all fours!’ he snarled.
‘Moderate drinkers never do so!’ Arthur quietly replied. Even the stern old lady laughed at this.
‘But it needs many other things to make a perfect dinner!’ said Lady Muriel, evidently anxious to change the subject. ‘Mein Herr! What is your idea of a perfect dinner party?’
The old man looked around smilingly, and his gigantic spectacles seemed more gigantic than ever. ‘A perfect dinner-party?’ he repeated. ‘First, it must be presided over by our present hostess!’
‘That of course!’ she gail
y interposed. ‘But what else, Mein Herr?’
‘I can but tell you what I have seen,’ said Mein Herr, ‘in mine own—in the country I have traveled in.’
He paused for a full minute, and gazed steadily at the ceiling—with so dreamy an expression on his face, that I feared he was going off into a reverie, which seemed to be his normal state. However, after a minute, he suddenly began again.
‘That which chiefly causes the failure of a dinner-party, is the running-short—not of meat, nor yet of drink, but of conversation.’
‘In an English dinner-party,’ I remarked, ‘I have never known small-talk run short!’
‘Pardon me,’ Mein Herr respectfully replied, ‘I did not say "small-talk". I said "conversation". All such topics as the weather, or politics, or local gossip, are unknown among us. They are either vapid or controversial. What we need for conversation is a topic of interest and of novelty. To secure these things we have tried various plans—Moving-Pictures, Wild-Creatures, Moving-Guests, and a Revolving-Humorist. But this last is only adapted to small parties.’
‘Let us have it in four separate Chapters, please!’ said Lady Muriel, who was evidently deeply interested—as, indeed, most of the party were, by this time: and, all down the table, talk had ceased, and heads were leaning forwards, eager to catch fragments of Mein Herr’s oration.
‘Chapter One! Moving-Pictures!’ was proclaimed in the silvery voice of our hostess.
‘The dining-table is shaped like a circular ring,’ Mein Herr began, in low dreamy tones, which, however, were perfectly audible in the silence. ‘The guests are seated at the inner side as well as the outer, having ascended to their places by a winding-staircase, from the room below. Along the middle of the table runs a little railway; and there is an endless train of trucks, worked round by machinery; and on each truck there are two pictures, leaning back to back. The train makes two circuits during dinner; and, when it has been once round, the waiters turn the pictures round in each truck, making them face the other way. Thus every guest sees every picture!’
He paused, and the silence seemed deader than ever. Lady Muriel looked aghast. ‘Really, if this goes on,’ she exclaimed, ‘I shall have to drop a pin! Oh, it’s my fault, is it?’ (In answer to an appealing look from Mein Herr.) ‘I was forgetting my duty.
Chapter Two! Wild-Creatures!’
‘We found the Moving-Pictures a little monotonous,’ said Mein Herr. ‘People didn’t care to talk Art through a whole dinner; so we tried Wild-Creatures. Among the flowers, which we laid (just as you do) about the table, were to be seen, here a mouse, there a beetle; here a spider’ (Lady Muriel shuddered), ‘there a wasp; here a toad, there a snake’; (Father!’ said Lady Muriel, plaintively. ‘Did you hear that?’); ‘so we had plenty to talk about!’
‘And when you got stung—’ the old lady began.
‘They were all chained-up, dear Madam!’
And the old lady gave a satisfied nod.
There was no silence to follow, this time. ‘Third Chapter!’ Lady Muriel proclaimed at once. ‘moving-Guests!’
‘Even the Wild-Creatures proved monotonous,’ the orator proceeded. ‘So we left the guests to choose their own subjects; and, to avoid monotony, we changed them. We made the table of two rings; and the inner ring moved slowly round, all the time, along with the floor in the middle and the inner row of guests. Thus every inner guest was brought face-to-face with every outer guest. It was a little confusing, sometimes, to have to begin a story to one friend and finish it to another; but every plan has its faults, you know.’
‘Fourth Chapter!’ Lady Muriel hastened to announce. ‘The Revolving-Humorist!’
‘For a small party we found it an excellent plan to have a round table, with a hole cut in the middle large enough to hold one guest. Here we placed our best talker. He revolved slowly, facing every other guest in turn: and he told lively anecdotes the whole time!’
‘I shouldn’t like it!’ murmured the pompous man. ‘It would make me giddy, revolving like that! I should decline to—’ here it appeared to dawn upon him that perhaps the assumption he was making was not warranted by the circumstances: he took a hasty gulp of wine, and choked himself.
But Mein Herr had relapsed into reverie, and made no further remark. Lady Muriel gave the signal, and the ladies left the room.
CHAPTER TEN
JABBERING AND JAM
WHEN the last lady had disappeared, and the Earl, taking his place at the head of the table, had issued the military order ’Gentlemen! Close up the ranks, if you please!’ and when, in obedience to his command, we had gathered ourselves compactly round him, the pompous man gave a deep sigh of relief, filled his glass to the brim, pushed on the wine, and began one of his favourite orations. ‘They are charming, no doubt! Charming, but very frivolous. They drag us down, so to speak, to a lower level. They—’
‘Do not all pronouns require antecedent nouns?’ the Earl gently enquired.
‘Pardon me,’ said the pompous man, with lofty condescension. ‘I had overlooked the noun. The ladies. We regret their absence. yet we console ourselves. Thought is free. With them, we are limited to trivial topics—Art, Literature, Politics, and so forth. One can bear to discuss such paltry matters with a lady. But no man, in his senses—’ (he looked sternly round the table, as if defying contradiction) ‘—ever yet discussed WINE with a lady!’ He sipped his glass of port, leaned back in his chair, and slowly raised it up to his eye, so as to look through it at the lamp. ‘The vintage, my Lord?’ he enquired, glancing at his host.
The Earl named the date.
‘So I had supposed. But one likes to be certain. The tint is, perhaps, slightly pale. But the body is unquestionable. And as for the bouquet—’
Ah, that magic Bouquet! How vividly that magic word recalled the scene! The little beggar boy turning his somersault in the road—the sweet little crippled maiden in my arms—the mysterious evanescent nursemaid—all rushed tumultuously into my mind, like the creatures of a dream: and through this mental haze there still boomed on, like the tolling of a bell, the solemn voice of the great connoisseur of WINE!
Even his utterances had taken on themselves a strange and dream-like form. ‘No,’ he resumed—and why is it, I pause to ask, that, in taking up the broken thread of a dialogue, one always begins with this cheerless monosyllable? After much anxious thought, I have come to the conclusion that the object in view is the same as that of the schoolboy, when the sum he is working has got into a hopeless muddle, and when in despair he takes the sponge, washes it all out, and begins again. Just in the same way the bewildered orator, by the simple process of denying everything that has been hitherto asserted, makes a clean sweep of the whole discussion, and can ‘start fair’ with a fresh theory. ‘No,’ he resumed: ‘there’s nothing like cherry-jam, after all.
That’s what I say!’
‘Not for all qualities!’ an eager little man shrilly interposed. ‘For richness of general tone I don’t say that it has a rival. But for delicacy of modulation— for what one may call the "harmonics" of flavour—give me good old raspberry-jam!’
‘Allow me one word!’ The fat red-faced man, quite hoarse with excitement, broke into the dialogue. ‘It’s too important a question to be settled by Amateurs! I can give you the views of a Professional—perhaps the most experienced jam-taster now living. Why, I’ve known him fix the age of strawberry-jam, to a day—and we all know what a difficult jam it is to give a date to—on a single tasting! Well, I put to him the very question you are discussing. His words were "cherry-jam is best, for mere chiaroscuro of flavour: raspberry-jam lends itself best to those resolved discords that linger so lovingly on the tongue: but, for rapturous utterness of saccharine perfection, it’s apricot-jam first and the rest nowhere!" That was well put, wasn’t it?’
‘Consummately put!’ shrieked the eager little man.
‘I know your friend well,’ said the pompous man. ‘As a jam-taster, he has no rival! Yet I scarcely think�
��’
But here the discussion became general: and his words were lost in a confused medley of names, every guest sounding the praises of his own favourite jam. At length, through the din, our host’s voice made itself heard. ‘Let us join the ladies!’ These words seemed to recall me to waking life, and I felt sure that, for the last few minutes, I had relapsed into the ‘eerie’ state.
‘A strange dream!’ I said to myself as we trooped upstairs. ‘Grown men discussing, as seriously as if they were matters of life and death, the hopelessly trivial details of mere delicacies, that appeal to no higher human function than the nerves of the tongue and palate! What a humiliating spectacle such a discussion would be in waking life!’
When, on our way to the drawing-room, I received from the housekeeper my little friends, clad in the daintiest of evening costumes, and looking, in the flush of expectant delight, more radiantly beautiful than I had ever seen them before, I felt no shock of surprise, but accepted the fact with the same unreasoning apathy with which one meets the events of a dream, and was merely conscious of a vague anxiety as to how they would acquit themselves in so novel a scene—forgetting that Court-life in Outland was as good training as they could need for Society in the more substantial world.
It would be best, I thought, to introduce them as soon as possible to some good-natured lady-guest, and I selected the young lady whose piano-forte-playing had been so much talked of. ‘I am sure you like children,’ I said. ‘May I introduce two little friends of mine? This is Sylvie; and this is Bruno.’
The young lady kissed Sylvie very graciously. She would have done the same for Bruno, but he hastily drew back out of reach.
‘Their faces are new to me,’ she said. ‘Where do you come from, my dear?’
I had not anticipated so inconvenient a question; and fearing that it might embarrass Sylvie, I answered for her. ‘They come from some distance. They are only here just for this one evening.’
‘How far have you come, dear?’ the young lady persisted.
Complete Works of Lewis Carroll Page 51
