by E. F. Benson
Most of what his wife had said in her excited harangue had been perfectly well founded. Mrs Ames was not rich, and a marked parsimony often appeared to have presided over the ordering of her dinners; while, so far as birth was concerned, at least two other residents here were related to baronets just as much as she was; Mrs Evans, for instance, was first cousin of the present Sir James Westbourne, whereas Mrs Ames was more distant than that from the same fortunate gentleman by one remove. Her mother, that is to say, had been the eldest sister of the last baronet but one, and older than he, so that beyond any question whatever, if Mrs Ames’ mother had been a boy, and she had been a boy also, she would now have been a baronet herself in place of the cheerful man who had been seen by Mrs Altham driving his motorcar down the High Street that morning. As for General Fortescue, he was the actual brother of a baronet, and there was the end of the matter. But though Riseborough in general had a very proper appreciation of the deference due to birth, Mr Altham felt that Mrs Ames’ supremacy was not really based on so wholesale a rearrangement of parents and sexes. Nor, again, were her manners and breeding such as compelled homage; she seemed to take her position for granted, and very seldom thanked her hostess for ‘a very pleasant evening’ when she went away. Nor was she remarkable for her good looks; indeed, she was more nearly remarkable for the absence of them. Yet, somehow, Mr Altham could not, perhaps owing to his lack of imagination, see anybody else, not even his own wife, occupying Mrs Ames’ position. There was some force about her that put her where she was. You felt her efficiency; you guessed that should situations arise Mrs Ames could deal with them. She had a larger measure of reality than the majority of Mr Altham’s acquaintances. She did not seem to exert herself in any way, or call attention to what she did, and yet when Mrs Ames called on some slightly doubtful newcomer to Riseborough, it was certain that everybody else would call too. And one defect she had of the most glaring nature. She appeared to take the most tepid interest only in what everyone said about every body else. Once, not so long ago, Mrs Altham had shown herself more than ready to question, on the best authority, the birth and upbringing of Mrs Turner, the election of whose husband to the club had caused so many members to threaten resignation. But all Mrs Ames had said, when it was clear that the shadiest antecedents were filed, so to speak, for her perusal, was, ‘I have always found her a very pleasant woman. She is dining with us on Tuesday.’ Or again, when he himself was full of the praise of Mrs Taverner, to whom Mrs Ames was somewhat coldly disposed - (though that lady had called three times, and was perhaps calling again this afternoon, Mrs Ames had never once asked her to lunch or dine, and was believed to have left cards without even inquiring whether she was in) - Mrs Ames had only answered his panegyrics by saying, ‘I am told she is a very good-natured sort of woman.’
Mr Altham, hearing the stopping of a cab at his front-door, got up. It was still thirteen minutes to three, but he was ready to start. Indeed, he felt that motion and distraction would be very welcome, for there had stolen into his brain a strangely upsetting idea. It was very likely quite baseless and ill-founded, but it did occur to him that this defect on the part of Mrs Ames as regards her incuriousness on the subject of the small affairs of other people was somehow connected with her ascendency. He had so often thought of it as a defect that it was quite a shock to find himself wondering whether it was a quality. In any case, it was a quality which he was glad to be without. The possession of it would have robbed him of quite nine points of the laws that governed his nature. He would have been obliged to cultivate a passion for gardening, like Major Ames. Of course, if you married a woman quite ten years your senior, you had to take to something, and it was lucky Major Ames had not taken to drink.
He felt quite cynical, and lost the first four holes. Later, but too late, he pulled himself together. But it was poor consolation to win the bye only.
MRS AMES put up her black and white sunshade as she stepped into the hot street outside Dr Evans’ house, about half past six on the evening of the twenty-eighth of June, and proceeded afoot past the half-dozen houses that lay between it and the High Street. In appearance she was like a small, good-looking toad in half-mourning; or, to state the comparison with greater precision, she was small for a woman, but good-looking for a toad. Her face had something of the sulky and satiated expression of that harmless reptile, and her mourning was for her brother, who had mercifully died of delirium tremens some six months before. This scarcely respectable mode of decease did not curtail his sister’s observance of the fact, and she was proposing to wear mourning for another three months.
She had not seen him much of late years, and, as a matter of fact, she thought it was much better that his inglorious career, since he was a hopeless drunkard, had been brought to a conclusion, but her mourning, in spite of this, was a faithful symbol of her regret. He had had the good looks and the frailty of her family, while she was possessed of its complementary plainness and strength, but she remembered with remarkable poignancy, even in her fifty-fifth year, bird’s-nesting expeditions with him, and the alluring of fish in unpopulous waters. They had shared their pocket money together, also, as children, and she had not been the gainer by it. Therefore she thought of him with peculiar tenderness.
It would be idle to deny that she was not interested in the Riseborough view of his blackness. It was quite well known that he was a drunkard, but she had stifled inquiry by stating that he had died of ‘failure’. What organ it was that failed could not be inquired into: anyone with the slightest proper feeling - and she was well aware that Riseborough had almost an apoplexy of proper feeling - would assume that it was some organ not generally mentioned. She felt that there was no call on her to gratify any curiosity that might happen to be rampant. She also felt that the chief joy in the possession of a sense of humour lies in the fact that others do not suspect it. Riseborough would certainly have thought it very heartless of her to derive any amusement from things however remotely connected with her brother’s death; Riseborough also would have been incapable of crediting her with any tenderness of memory, if it had known that he had actually died of delirium tremens.
In this stifling weather she almost envied those who, like Dr Evans, lived at the top of the town, where, in Castle Street, was situated the charming Georgian house in the garden of which he for a little while only, and his wife for three hours, had been entertaining their friends and detractors at the garden party. Though the house was in a ‘Street’, and not a ‘Road’, it had a garden which anybody would expect to belong to a ‘Road’, if not a ‘Place’. Streets seemed to imply small backyards looking into the backs of other houses, whereas Dr Evans’ house did not, at its back, look on other houses at all, but extended a full hundred yards, and then looked over the railway cutting of the South-Eastern line, on open fields. Should you feel unkindly disposed, it was easy to ask whether the noise of passing trains was not very disagreeable, and indeed, Mrs Taverner, in a moment of peevishness arising from the fact that what she thought was champagne cup was only hock cup, had asked that very question of Millicent Evans this afternoon in Mrs Ames’ hearing. But Millicent, in her most confiding and childlike manner, had given what Mrs Ames considered to be a wholly admirable and suitable answer. ‘Indeed we do,’ she had said, ‘and we often envy you your beautiful big lawn.’ For everybody, of course, knew that Mrs Taverner’s beautiful big lawn was a small piece of black earth diversified by plantains, and overlooked and made odorous by the new gasworks. Mrs Taverner had, as was not unnatural, coloured up on receipt of this silken speech, until she looked nearly as red as Mrs Altham. For herself, Mrs Ames would not, even under this provocation, have made so ill-natured a reply, though she was rather glad that Millicent had done so, and to account for her involuntary smile, she instantly asked Mrs Altham to lunch with her the next day. Indeed, walking now down the High Street, she smiled again at the thought, and Mr Pritchard, standing outside his grocery store, thought she smiled at him, and raised his hat. And Mrs
Ames rather hoped he saw how different a sort of smile she kept on tap, so to speak, for grocers.
Mrs Ames knew very well the manner of speeches that Mrs Altham had been indulging in during the last three weeks, about the little dinner-party she was giving this evening, for she had been indiscreet enough to give specimens of them to Millicent Evans, who had promptly repeated them to her, and it is impossible adequately to convey how unimportant she thought was anything that Mrs Altham said. But the fact that she had said so much was indirectly connected with her asking Mrs Altham (‘and your husband, of course,’ as she had rather pointedly added) to lunch tomorrow, for she knew that Mrs Altham would be bursting with curiosity about the success of the new experiment, and she intended to let her burst. She disliked Mrs Altham, but that lady’s hostility to herself only amused her. Of course, Mrs Altham could not refuse to accept her invitation, because it was a point of honour in Riseborough that anyone bidden to lunch the day after a dinner party must, even at moderate inconvenience, accept, for otherwise what was to happen to the remains of salmon and of jelly too debilitated to be served in its original shape, even though untouched, but still excellent if eaten out of jelly glasses? So much malice, then, must be attributed to Mrs Ames, that she wished to observe the febrile symptoms of Mrs Altham’s curiosity, and not to calm them, but rather excite them further.
Mrs Ames would not naturally have gone for social purposes to the house of her doctor, had he not married Millicent, whose father was her own first cousin, and would have been baronet himself had he been the eldest instead of the youngest child. As it was, Dr Evans was on a wholly different footing from that of an ordinary physician, for by marriage he, as she by birth, was connected with ‘County’, which naturally was the crown and cream of Riseborough society. Mrs Ames was well aware that the profession of a doctor was a noble and self-sacrificing one, but lines had to be drawn somewhere, and it was impossible to contemplate visiting Dr Holmes. A dentist’s profession was self- sacrificing, too, but you did not dine at your dentist’s, though his manipulations enabled you to dine with comfort and confident smiles elsewhere. Such lines as these she drew with precision, but automatic firmness, and the apparently strange case of Mr Turner, whom she had induced her husband to propose for election at the club, whom, with his wife, she herself asked to dinner, was really no exception. For it was not Mr Turner who had ever been a stationer in Riseborough, but his father, and he himself had been to a public school and a university, and had since then purged all taint of stationery away by twenty years’ impartiality as a police magistrate in London. True, he had not changed his name when he came back to live in Riseborough, which would have shown a greater delicacy of mind, and the present inscription above the stationer’s shop, ‘Burrows, late Turner’, was obnoxious, but Mrs Ames was all against the misfortunes of the fathers being visited on the children, and Riseborough, with the exception of Mrs Altham, had quite accepted Mr and Mrs Turner, who gave remarkably good dinners, which were quite equal to the finest efforts of the (Scotch) chef at the club. Mrs Altham said that the Turners had eaten their way into the heart of Riseborough society, which sounded almost witty, until Mrs Ames pointed out that it was Riseborough, not the Turners, who had done the eating. On which the wit in Mrs Altham’s mot went out like a candle in the wind. It may, perhaps, be open to question whether Mrs Altham’s rooted hostility to the Turners did not predispose Mrs Ames to accept them before their quiet amiability disposed her to do so, for she was neither disposed nor predisposed to like Mrs Altham.
Mrs Ames’ way led through Queensgate Street, and she had to hold her black skirt rather high as she crossed the road opposite the club, for the dust was thick. She felt it wiser also to screw her small face up into a tight knot in order to avoid inhaling the fetid blue smoke from an over-lubricated motorcar that very rudely dashed by just in front of her. She did not regard motors with any favour, since there were financial reasons, whose validity was unassailable, why she could not keep one; indeed, partly no doubt owing to her expressed disapproval of them, but chiefly owing to similar financial impediments, Riseborough generally considered that hired flies were a more gentlemanly and certainly more leisurely form of vehicular transport. Mrs Altham, as usual, raised a dissentient voice, and said that she and her husband could not make up their minds between a Daimler and a Rolls-Royce. This showed a very reasonable hesitancy, since at present they had no data whatever with regard to either.
Mrs Ames permitted herself one momentary glance at the bow window of the club, as she regained the pavement after this dusty passage, and then swiftly looked straight in front of her again, since it was not quite QUITE to look in at the window of a man’s club. But she had seen several things: her husband was standing there with face contorted by the imminent approach of a sneeze, which showed that his hay fever was not yet over, as he hoped it might be. There was General Fortescue with a large cigar in his mouth, and a glass, probably of sherry, in his hand; there was also the top of a bald head peering over the geraniums in the window like a pink full moon. That no doubt was Mr Turner (for no one was quite so bald as he), enjoying the privilege which she had been instrumental in securing for him. Then Mrs Altham passed her driving, and Mrs Ames waved and kissed her black-gloved hand to her, thinking how very angular curiosity made people, while Mrs Altham waved back thinking that it was no use trying to look important if you were only five foot two, so that honours were about divided. Finally, just before she turned into her own gate, she saw coming along the road, walking very fast, as his custom was, the man she respected and even revered more than anyone in Riseborough. She would have liked to wave her hand to him too, only the Reverend Thomas Pettit would certainly have thought such a proceeding to be very odd conduct. He was county too - very much county, although a clergyman - being the son of that wealthy and distressing peer, Lord Evesham, who occasionally came into Riseborough on county business. On these occasions he lunched at the club, instead of going to his son’s house, but did not eat the club lunch, preferring to devour in the smoking room, like an ogre with false teeth, sandwiches which seemed to be made of fish in their decline. Mrs Ames, who could not be called a religious woman, but was certainly very high church, was the most notable of Mr Pettit’s admirers, and, indeed, had set quite a fashion in going to the services at St Barnabas’, which were copiously embellished by banners, vestments and incense. Indeed, she went there in adoration of him as much as for any other reason, for he seemed to her to be a perfect apostle. He was rich, and gave far more than half his goods to feed the poor; he was eloquent, and (she would not have used so common a phrase) let them all ‘have it’ from his pulpit, and she was sure he was rapidly wearing himself out with work. And how thrilling it would be to address her rather frequent notes to him with the title ‘The Reverend The Lord Evesham’! … She gave a heavy sigh, and decided to flutter her podgy hand in his direction for a greeting as she turned into her gate.
The little dinner which had so agitated Riseborough for the last three weeks gave Mrs Ames no qualms at all. Whatever happened at her house was right, and she never had any reason to wonder, like minor dinner givers, if things would go off well, since she and no other was responsible for the feast; it was Mrs Ames’ dinner party. It was summoned for a quarter to eight, and at half past ten somebody’s carriage would be announced, and she would say, ‘I hope nobody is thinking of going away yet,’ in consequence of which everybody would go away at twenty minutes to eleven instead. If anybody expected to play cards or smoke in the drawing room, he would be disappointed, because these diversions did not form part of the curriculum. The gentlemen had one cigarette in the dining room after their wine and with their coffee: then they followed the ladies and indulged in the pleasures of conversation. Mrs Ames always sat in a chair by the window, and always as the clock struck ten she re-sorted her conversationalists. That was (without disrespect) a parlour trick of the most supreme and unfathomable kind. There was always some natural reason why she should get up, a
nd quite as naturally two or three people got up too. Then a sort of involuntary general post took place. Mrs Ames annexed the seat of the risen woman whose partner she intended to talk to, and instantly said, ‘Do tell me, because I am so much interested … ’ upon which her new partner sat down again. The ejected female then wandered disconsolately forward till she found herself talking to some man who had also got up. Therefore they sat down again together. But no one in Riseborough could do the trick as Mrs Ames could do it. Mrs Altham had often tried, and her efforts always ended in everybody sitting down again exactly where they had been before, after standing for a moment, as if an inaudible grace was being said. But Mrs Ames, though not socially jealous (for, being the queen of Riseborough society, she had nobody to be jealous of), was a little prone to spoil this parlour trick when she was dining at other houses, by suddenly developing an earnest conversation with her already existing partner, when she saw that her hostess contemplated a copy of her famous manoeuvre. Yet, after all, she was within her rights, for the parlour trick was her own patent, and it was quite proper to thwart the attempted infringement of it.
Having waggled her hand in the direction of Mr Pettit, she went straight to the dining room, where the dinner table was being laid. There was to be a company of eight tonight, and accordingly she took three little cardboard slips from the top left-hand drawer of her writing table, on each of which was printed:
PLEASE TAKE IN TO DINNER.
These were presented in the hall to the men before dinner (it was unnecessary to write one for her husband), each folded, with the name of the guest in question being written on the back, while the name of the woman he was to take in filled the second line. Thus there were no separate and hurried communications to be made in the drawing room, as everything was arranged already. This was not so original as the other parlour trick, but at present nobody else in Riseborough had attempted it. Then out of the same drawer she took - what she took requires a fresh paragraph.
