The Penguin Book of English Short Stories

by Christopher Dolley

  Gabriel took his seat boldly at the head of the table and, having looked to the edge of the carver, plunged his fork firmly into the goose. He felt quite at ease now, for he was an expert carver and liked nothing better than to find himself at the head of a well-laden table.

  ‘Miss Furlong, what shall I send you?’ he asked. ‘A wing or a slice of the breast?’

  ‘Just a small slice of the breast.’

  ‘Miss Higgins, what for you?’

  ‘O, anything at all, Mr Conroy.’

  While Gabriel and Miss Daly exchanged plates of goose and plates of ham and spiced beef, Lily went from guest to guest with a dish of hot floury potatoes wrapped in a white napkin. This was Mary Jane’s idea and she had also suggested apple sauce for the goose, but Aunt Kate had said that plain roast goose without any apple sauce had always been good enough for her and she hoped she might never eat worse. Mary Jane waited on her pupils and saw that they got the best slices, and Aunt Kate and Aunt Julia opened and carried across from the piano bottles of stout and ale for the gentlemen and bottles of minerals for the ladies. There was a great deal of confusion and laughter and noise, the noise of orders and counter-orders, of knives and forks, of corks and glass-stoppers. Gabriel began to carve second helpings as soon as he had finished the first round without serving himself. Everyone protested loudly, so that he compromised by taking a long draught of stout, for he had found the carving hot work. Mary Jane settled down quietly to her supper, but Aunt Kate and Aunt Julia were still toddling round the table, walking on each other’s heels, getting in each other’s way and giving each other unheeded orders. Mr Browne begged of them to sit down and eat their suppers and so did Gabriel, but they said there was time enough, so that, at last, Freddy Malins stood up and, capturing Aunt Kate, plumped her down on her chair amid general laughter.

  When everyone had been well served Gabriel said, smiling:

  ‘Now, if anyone wants a little more of what vulgar people call stuffing let him or her speak.’

  A chorus of voices invited him to begin his own supper, and Lily came forward with three potatoes which she had reserved for him.

  ‘Very well,’ said Gabriel amiably, as he took another preparatory draught, ‘kindly forget my existence, ladies and gentlemen, for a few minutes.’

  He set to his supper and took no part in the conversation with which the table covered Lily’s removal of the plates. The subject of talk was the opera company which was then at the Theatre Royal. Mr Bartell D’Arcy, the tenor, a dark-complexioned young man with a smart moustache, praised very highly the leading contralto of the company, but Miss Furlong thought she had a rather vulgar style of production. Freddy Malins said there was a Negro chieftain singing in the second part of the Gaiety pantomime who had one of the finest tenor voices he had ever heard.

  ‘Have you heard him?’ he asked Mr Bartell D’Arcy across the table.

  ‘No,’ answered Mr Bartell D’Arcy carelessly.

  ‘Because,’ Freddy Malins explained, ‘now I’d be curious to hear your opinion of him. I think he has a grand voice.’

  ‘It takes Teddy to find out the really good things,’ said Mr Browne familiarly to the table.

  ‘And why couldn’t he have a voice too?’ asked Freddy Malins sharply. ‘Is it because he’s only a black?’

  Nobody answered this question and Mary Jane led the table back to the legitimate opera. One of her pupils had given her a pass for Mignon. Of course it was very fine, she said, but it made her think of poor Georgina Burns. Mr Browne could go back farther still, to the old Italian companies that used to come to Dublin – Tietjens, lima de Murzka, Campanini, the great Trebelli, Giuglini, Ravelli, Aramburo. Those were the days, he said, when there was something like singing to be heard in Dublin. He told too of how the top gallery of the old Royal used to be packed night after night, of how one night an Italian tenor had sung five encores to ‘Let me like a Soldier fall’, introducing a high C every time, and of how the gallery boys would sometimes in their enthusiasm unyoke the horses from the carriage of some great prima donna and pull her themselves through the streets to her hotel. Why did they never play the grand old operas now, he asked, Dinorah, Lucrezia Borgia? Because they could not get the voices to sing them: that was why.

  ‘O, well,’ said Mr Bartell D’Arcy, ‘I presume there are as good singers today as there were then.’

  ‘Where are they?’ asked Mr Browne defiantly.

  ‘In London, Paris, Milan,’ said Mr Bartell D’Arcy warmly. ‘I suppose Caruso, for example, is quite as good, if not better than any of the men you have mentioned.’

  ‘Maybe so,’ said Mr Browne. ‘But I may tell you I doubt it strongly.’

  ‘O, I’d give anything to hear Caruso sing,’ said Mary Jane.

  ‘For me,’ said Aunt Kate, who had been picking a bone, ‘there was only one tenor. To please me, I mean. But I suppose none of you ever heard of him.’

  ‘Who was he, Miss Morkan?’ asked Mr Bartell D’Arcy politely.

  ‘His name,’ said Aunt Kate, ‘was Parkinson. I heard him when he was in his prime and I think he had then the purest tenor voice that was ever put into a man’s throat.’

  ‘Strange,’ said Mr Bartell D’Arcy. ‘I never even beard of him.’

  ‘Yes, yes, Miss Morkan is right,’ said Mr Browne. ‘I remember hearing old Parkinson, but he’s too far back for me.’

  ‘A beautiful, pure, sweet, mellow English tenor,’ said Aunt Kate with enthusiasm.

  Gabriel having finished, the huge pudding was transferred to the table. The clatter of forks and spoons began again. Gabriel’s wife served out spoonfuls of the pudding and passed the plates down the table. Midway down they were held up by Mary Jane, who replenished them with raspberry or orange jelly or with blancmange and jam. The pudding was of Aunt Julia’s making, and she received praises for it from all quarters. She herself said that it was not quite brown enough.

  ‘Well, I hope, Miss Morkan,’ said Mr Browne, ‘that I’m brown enough for you because, you know, I’m all Brown.’

  All the gentlemen, except Gabriel, ate some of the pudding out of compliment to Aunt Julia. As Gabriel never ate sweets the celery had been left for him. Freddy Malins also took a stalk of celery and ate it with his pudding. He had been told that celery was a capital thing for the blood and he was just then under doctor’s care. Mrs Malins, who had been silent all through the supper, said that her son was going down to Mount Melleray in a week or so. The table then spoke of Mount Melleray, how bracing the air was down there, how hospitable the monks were and how they never asked for a penny-piece from their guests.

  ‘And do you mean to say,’ asked Mr Browne incredulously, ‘that a chap can go down there and put up there as if it were a hotel and live on the fat of the land and then come away without paying anything?’

  ‘O, most people give some donation to the monastery when they leave,’ said Mary Jane.

  ‘I wish we had an institution like that in our Church,’ said Mr Browne candidly.

  He was astonished to hear that the monks never spoke, got up at two in the morning and slept in their coffins. He asked what they did it for.

  ‘That’s the rule of the order,’ said Aunt Kate firmly.

  ‘Yes, but why?’ asked Mr Browne.

  Aunt Kate repeated that it was the rule, that was all. Mr Browne still seemed not to understand. Freddy Malins explained to him, as best he could, that the monks were trying to make up for the sins committed by all the sinners in the outside world. The explanation was not very dear, for Mr Browne grinned and said:

  ‘I like that idea very much, but wouldn’t a comfortable spring bed do them as well as a coffin?’

  ‘The coffin,’ said Mary Jane, ‘is to remind them of their last end.’

  As the subject had grown lugubrious it was buried in a silence of the table, during which Mrs Malins could be heard saying to her neighbour in an indistinct undertone:

  ‘They are very good men, the monks, very pious men.�
�

  The raisins and almonds and figs and apples and oranges and chocolates and sweets were now passed about the table, and Aunt Julia invited all the guests to have either port or sherry. At first Mr Bartell D’Arcy refused to take either, but one of his neighbours nudged him and whispered something to him, upon which he allowed his glass to be filled. Gradually as the last glasses were being filled the conversation ceased. A pause followed, broken only by the noise of the wine and by unsettling of chairs. The Misses Morkan, all three, looked down at the tablecloth. Someone coughed once or twice, and then a few gentlemen patted the table gently as a signal for silence. The silence came and Gabriel pushed back his chair and stood up.

  The patting at once grew louder in encouragement and then ceased altogether. Gabriel leaned his ten trembling fingers on the tablecloth and smiled nervously at the company. Meeting a row of upturned faces he raised his eyes to the chandelier. The piano was playing a waltz tune and he could hear the skirts sweeping against the drawing-room door. People, perhaps, were standing in the snow on the quay outside, gazing up at the lighted windows and listening to the waltz music. The air was pure there. In the distance lay the park, where the trees were weighted with snow. The Wellington Monument wore a gleaming cap of snow that flashed westwards over the white field of Fifteen Acres.

  He began:

  ‘Ladies and Gentlemen,

  ‘It has fallen to my lot this evening, as in years past, to perform a very pleasing task, but a task for which I am afraid my poor powers as a speaker are all too inadequate.’

  ‘No, no!’ said Mr Browne.

  ‘But however that may be, I can only ask you tonight to take the will for the deed, and to lend me your attention for a few moments while I endeavour to express to you in words what my feelings are on this occasion.

  ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, it is not the first time that we have gathered together under this hospitable roof, around this hospitable board. It is not the first time that we have been the recipients – or perhaps, I had better say, the victims – of the hospitality of certain good ladies.’

  He made a circle in the air with his arm and paused. Everyone laughed or smiled at Aunt Kate and Aunt Julia and Mary Jane, who all turned crimson with pleasure. Gabriel went on more boldly:

  ‘I feel more strongly with every recurring year that our country has no tradition which does it so much honour and which it should guard so jealously as that of its hospitality. It is a tradition that is unique as far as my experience goes (and I have visited not a few places abroad) among the modern nations. Some would say, perhaps, that with us it is rather a failing than anything to be boasted of. But granted even that, it is, to my mind, a princely failing, and one that I trust will long be cultivated among us. Of one thing, at least, I am sure. As long as this one roof shelters the good ladies aforesaid – and I wish from my heart it may do so for many and many a long year to come – the tradition of genuine warm-hearted courteous Irish hospitality, which our forefathers have handed down to us and which we must hand down to our descendants, is still alive among us.’

  A hearty murmur of assent ran round the table. It shot through Gabriel’s mind that Miss Ivors was not there and that she had gone away discourteously: and he said with confidence in himself:

  ‘Ladies and Gentlemen,

  ‘A new generation is growing up in our midst, a generation actuated by new ideas and new principles. It is serious and enthusiastic for these new ideas and its enthusiasm, even when it is misdirected, is, I believe, in the main sincere. But we are living in a sceptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age: and sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hyper-educated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humour which belonged to an older day. Listening tonight to the names of all those great singers of the past it seemed to me, I must confess, that we were living in a less spacious age. Those days might, without exaggeration, be called spacious days: and if they are gone beyond recall, let us hope, at least, that in gatherings such as this we shall still speak of them with pride and affection, still cherish in our hearts the memory of those dead and gone great ones whose fame the world will not willingly let die.’

  ‘Hear, hear!’ said Mr Browne loudly.

  ‘But yet,’ continued Gabriel, his voice falling into a softer inflection, ‘there are always in gatherings such as this sadder thoughts that will recur to our minds: thoughts of the past, of youth, of changes, of absent faces that we miss here tonight. Our path through life is strewn with many such sad memories: and were we to brood upon them always we could not find the heart to go on bravely with our work among the living. We have all of us living duties and living affections which claim, and rightly claim, our strenuous endeavours.

  ‘Therefore, I will not linger on the past. I will not let any gloomy moralizing intrude upon us here tonight. Here we are gathered together for a brief moment from the bustle and rush of our everyday routine. We are met here as friends, in the spirit of good-fellowship, as colleagues, also, to a certain extent, in the true spirit of camaraderie, and as the guests of – what shall I call them? – the Three Graces of the Dublin musical world.’

  The table burst into applause and laughter at this allusion. Aunt Julia vainly asked each of her neighbours in turn to tell her what Gabriel had said.

  ‘He says we are the Three Graces, Aunt Julia,’ said Mary Jane.

  Aunt Julia did not understand, but she looked up, smiling, at Gabriel, who continued in the same vein:

  ‘Ladies and Gentlemen,

  ‘I will not attempt to play tonight the part that Paris played on another occasion. I will not attempt to choose between them. The task would be an invidious one and one beyond my poor powers. For when I view them in turn, whether it be our chief hostess herself, whose good heart, whose too good heart, has become a byword with all who know her; or her sister, who seems to be gifted with perennial youth and whose singing must have been a surprise and a revelation to us all tonight; or, last but not least, when I consider our youngest hostess, talented, cheerful, hard-working and the best of nieces, I confess, Ladies and Gentlemen, that I do not know to which of them I should award the prize.’

  Gabriel glanced down at his aunts and, seeing the large smile on Aunt Julia’s face and the tears which had risen to Aunt Kate’s eyes, hastened to his close. He raised his glass of port gallantly, while every member of the company fingered a glass expectantly, and said loudly:

  ‘Let us toast them all three together. Let us drink to their health, wealth, long life, happiness, and prosperity and may they long continue to hold the proud and self-won position which they hold in their profession and the position of honour and affection which they hold in our hearts.’

  All the guests stood up, glass in hand, and turning towards the three seated ladies, sang in unison, with Mr Browne as leader:

  ‘For they are jolly gay fellows,

  For they are jolly gay fellows,

  For they are jolly gay fellows,

  Which nobody can deny.’

  Aunt Kate was making frank use of her handkerchief and even Aunt Julia seemed moved. Freddy Malins beat time with his pudding-fork and the singers turned towards one another, as if in melodious conference, while they sang with emphasis:

  ‘Unless he tells a lie,

  Unless he tells a lie.’

  Then, turning once more towards their hostesses, they sang:

  ‘For they are jolly gay fellows,

  For they are jolly gay fellows,

  For they are jolly gay fellows,

  Which nobody can deny.’

  The acclamation which followed was taken up beyond the door of the supper room by many of the other guests and renewed time after time, Freddy Malins acting as officer with his fork on high.

  The piercing morning air came into the hall where they were standing so that Aunt Kate said:

  ‘Close the door, somebody. Mrs Malins will get her death of cold.’

  ‘Browne is
out there, Aunt Kate,’ said Mary Jane.

  ‘Browne is everywhere,’ said Aunt Kate, lowering her voice.

  Mary Jane laughed at her tone.

  ‘Really,’ she said archly, ‘he is very attentive.’

  ‘He has been laid on here like the gas,’ said Aunt Kate in the same tone, ‘all during the Christmas.’

  She laughed herself this time good-humouredly and then added quickly:

  ‘But tell him to come in, Mary Jane, and close the door. I hope to goodness he didn’t hear me.’

  At that moment the hall-door was opened and Mr Browne came in from the doorstep, laughing as if his heart would break. He was dressed in a long green overcoat with mock astrakhan cuffs and collar and wore on his head an oval fur cap. He pointed down the snow-covered quay from where the sound of shrill prolonged whistling was borne in.

  ‘Teddy will have all the cabs in Dublin out,’ he said.