"I want you," said my hostess, "to take in Mrs. Blank. She is
charming. All through the War she has been with her husband in the
South Seas. London is a new place to her."
Mrs. Blank did not look too promising. She was pretty in her
way--"elegant" an American would have called her--but she lacked
animation. However, the South Seas...! Anyone fresh from the Pacific
must have enough to tell to see soup, fish and _entrée_ safely
through.
I began by remarking that she must find London a very complete change
after the sun and placidity that she had come from.
"It's certainly noisier," she said; "but we had our share of rain."
"I thought it was always fine there," I remarked; but she laughed a
denial and relapsed into silence.
She was one of those women who don't take soup, and this made the
economy of her utterances the more unfair.
Racking my brain for a new start I fell back on those useful fellows,
the authors. Presuming that anyone who had lived in that fascinating
region--the promised land (if land is the word) of so many of us who
are weary of English climatic treacheries--would be familiar with the
literature of it. I went boldly to work.
"The first book about the South Seas that I ever read," I said, "was
BALLANTYNE'S _Coral Island_."
"Indeed!" she replied.
I asked her if she too had not been brought up on BALLANTYNE, and she
said no. She did not even know his name.
"He wrote for boys," I explained rather lamely.
"I read poetry chiefly as a girl," she said.
"But surely you know STEVENSON'S _Island Nights' Entertainment_?"
I said.
No, she did not. Was it nice?
"It's extraordinary," I said. "It gives you more of the atmosphere
of the South Seas than any other work. And Louis BECKE--you must have
read him?" I continued.
No, she had not. She read very little. The last book she had read was
on spiritualism.
"Not even CONRAD?" I pursued. "No one has so described the calms and
storms of the Pacific."
No, she remembered no story called _Conrad_.
I was about to explain that CONRAD was the writer, not the written;
but it seemed a waste of words, and we fell into a stillness broken
only by the sound of knife and fork.
"Hang it! you shall talk," I said to myself; and then aloud, "Tell me
all about copra. I have longed to know what copra is; how it grows,
what it looks like, what it is for."
"You have come to the wrong person," she replied, with wide eyes. "I
never heard of it. Or did you say 'cobra'? Of course I know what a
cobra is--it's a snake. I've seen them at the Zoo."
I put her right. "Copra, the stuff that the traders in the South Seas
deal in."
"I never heard of it," she said. "But then why should I? I know
nothing about the South Seas."
My stock fell thirty points and I crumbled bread nervously, hoping for
something sensible to say; but at this moment "half-time" mercifully
set in. My partner on the other side turned to me suavely and asked if
I thought the verses in _Abraham Lincoln_ were a beauty or a blemish;
and with the assistance of the London stage, the flight to America,
Mrs. FULTON'S _Blight_, Mr. WALPOLE'S _Secret City_ and the prospects
of the new Academy, I sailed serenely into port. She was as easy and
agreeable a woman as that other was difficult, and before she left for
the drawing-room she had invited me to lunch and I had accepted.
As I said Good-night to my hostess I asked why she had told me that my
first partner had been in the South Seas. She said that she had said
nothing of the sort; what she had said was that during the War she had
been stationed with her husband, Colonel Blank, at Southsea.
* * * * *