THE farewell dinner which Francesca had hurriedly organised in honour of
her son’s departure threatened from the outset to be a doubtfully
successful function. In the first place, as he observed privately, there
was very little of Comus and a good deal of farewell in it. His own
particular friends were unrepresented. Courtenay Youghal was out of the
question; and though Francesca would have stretched a point and welcomed
some of his other male associates of whom she scarcely approved, he
himself had been opposed to including any of them in the invitations. On
the other hand, as Henry Greech had provided Comus with this job that he
was going out to, and was, moreover, finding part of the money for the
necessary outfit, Francesca had felt it her duty to ask him and his wife
to the dinner; the obtuseness that seems to cling to some people like a
garment throughout their life had caused Mr. Greech to accept the
invitation. When Comus heard of the circumstance he laughed long and
boisterously; his spirits, Francesca noted, seemed to be rising fast as
the hour for departure drew near.
The other guests included Serena Golackly and Lady Veula, the latter
having been asked on the inspiration of the moment at the theatrical
first-night. In the height of the Season it was not easy to get together
a goodly selection of guests at short notice, and Francesca had gladly
fallen in with Serena’s suggestion of bringing with her Stephen Thorle,
who was alleged, in loose feminine phrasing, to “know all about” tropical
Africa. His travels and experiences in those regions probably did not
cover much ground or stretch over any great length of time, but he was
one of those individuals who can describe a continent on the strength of
a few days’ stay in a coast town as intimately and dogmatically as a
paleontologist will reconstruct an extinct mammal from the evidence of a
stray shin bone. He had the loud penetrating voice and the prominent
penetrating eyes of a man who can do no listening in the ordinary way and
whose eyes have to perform the function of listening for him. His vanity
did not necessarily make him unbearable, unless one had to spend much
time in his society, and his need for a wide field of audience and
admiration was mercifully calculated to spread his operations over a
considerable human area. Moreover, his craving for attentive listeners
forced him to interest himself in a wonderful variety of subjects on
which he was able to discourse fluently and with a certain semblance of
special knowledge. Politics he avoided; the ground was too well known,
and there was a definite no to every definite yes that could be put
forward. Moreover, argument was not congenial to his disposition, which
preferred an unchallenged flow of dissertation modified by occasional
helpful questions which formed the starting point for new offshoots of
word-spinning. The promotion of cottage industries, the prevention of
juvenile street trading, the extension of the Borstal prison system, the
furtherance of vague talkative religious movements, the fostering of
inter-racial _ententes_, all found in him a tireless exponent, a fluent
and entertaining, though perhaps not very convincing, advocate. With the
real motive power behind these various causes he was not very closely
identified; to the spade-workers who carried on the actual labours of
each particular movement he bore the relation of a trowel-worker, delving
superficially at the surface, but able to devote a proportionately far
greater amount of time to the advertisement of his progress and
achievements. Such was Stephen Thorle, a governess in the nursery of
Chelsea-bred religions, a skilled window-dresser in the emporium of his
own personality, and needless to say, evanescently popular amid a wide
but shifting circle of acquaintances. He improved on the record of a
socially much-travelled individual whose experience has become classical,
and went to most of the best houses—twice.
His inclusion as a guest at this particular dinner-party was not a very
happy inspiration. He was inclined to patronise Comus, as well as the
African continent, and on even slighter acquaintance. With the exception
of Henry Greech, whose feelings towards his nephew had been soured by
many years of overt antagonism, there was an uncomfortable feeling among
those present that the topic of the black-sheep export trade, as Comus
would have himself expressed it, was being given undue prominence in what
should have been a festive farewell banquet. And Comus, in whose honour
the feast was given, did not contribute much towards its success; though
his spirits seemed strung up to a high pitch his merriment was more the
merriment of a cynical and amused onlooker than of one who responds to
the gaiety of his companions. Sometimes he laughed quietly to himself at
some chance remark of a scarcely mirth-provoking nature, and Lady Veula,
watching him narrowly, came to the conclusion that an element of fear was
blended with his seemingly buoyant spirits. Once or twice he caught her
eye across the table, and a certain sympathy seemed to grow up between
them, as though they were both consciously watching some lugubrious
comedy that was being played out before them.
An untoward little incident had marked the commencement of the meal. A
small still-life picture that hung over the sideboard had snapped its
cord and slid down with an alarming clatter on to the crowded board
beneath it. The picture itself was scarcely damaged, but its fall had
been accompanied by a tinkle of broken glass, and it was found that a
liqueur glass, one out of a set of seven that would be impossible to
match, had been shivered into fragments. Francesca’s almost motherly
love for her possessions made her peculiarly sensible to a feeling of
annoyance and depression at the accident, but she turned politely to
listen to Mrs. Greech’s account of a misfortune in which four soup-plates
were involved. Mrs. Henry was not a brilliant conversationalist, and her
flank was speedily turned by Stephen Thorle, who recounted a slum
experience in which two entire families did all their feeding out of one
damaged soup-plate.
“The gratitude of those poor creatures when I presented them with a set
of table crockery apiece, the tears in their eyes and in their voices
when they thanked me, would be impossible to describe.”
“Thank you all the same for describing it,” said Comus.
The listening eyes went swiftly round the table to gather evidence as to
how this rather disconcerting remark had been received, but Thorle’s
voice continued uninterruptedly to retail stories of East-end gratitude,
never failing to mention the particular deeds of disinterested charity on
his part which had evoked and justified the gratitude. Mrs. Greech had
to suppress the interesting sequel to her broken-crockery narrative, to
wit, how she subsequently matched the shattered soup-plates at Harrod’s.
Like an imported plant species that sometimes flourishes exceedingly, and
makes itself at home to the dwarfing and overshadowing of all native
species, Thorle dominated the dinner-party and thrust its original
purport somewhat into the background. Serena began to look helplessly
apologetic. It was altogether rather a relief when the filling of
champagne glasses gave Francesca an excuse for bringing matters back to
their intended footing.
“We must all drink a health,” she said; “Comus, my own dear boy, a safe
and happy voyage to you, much prosperity in the life you are going out
to, and in due time a safe and happy return—”
Her hand gave an involuntary jerk in the act of raising the glass, and
the wine went streaming across the tablecloth in a froth of yellow
bubbles. It certainly was not turning out a comfortable or auspicious
dinner party.
“My dear mother,” cried Comus, “you must have been drinking healths all
the afternoon to make your hand so unsteady.”
He laughed gaily and with apparent carelessness, but again Lady Veula
caught the frightened note in his laughter. Mrs. Henry, with practical
sympathy, was telling Francesca two good ways for getting wine stains out
of tablecloths. The smaller economies of life were an unnecessary branch
of learning for Mrs. Greech, but she studied them as carefully and
conscientiously as a stay-at-home plain-dwelling English child commits to
memory the measurements and altitudes of the world’s principal mountain
peaks. Some women of her temperament and mentality know by heart the
favourite colours, flowers and hymn-tunes of all the members of the Royal
Family; Mrs. Greech would possibly have failed in an examination of that
nature, but she knew what to do with carrots that have been over-long in
storage.
Francesca did not renew her speech-making; a chill seemed to have fallen
over all efforts at festivity, and she contented herself with refilling
her glass and simply drinking to her boy’s good health. The others
followed her example, and Comus drained his glass with a brief “thank you
all very much.” The sense of constraint which hung over the company was
not, however, marked by any uncomfortable pause in the conversation.
Henry Greech was a fluent thinker, of the kind that prefer to do their
thinking aloud; the silence that descended on him as a mantle in the
House of Commons was an official livery of which he divested himself as
thoroughly as possible in private life. He did not propose to sit
through dinner as a mere listener to Mr. Thorle’s personal narrative of
philanthropic movements and experiences, and took the first opportunity
of launching himself into a flow of satirical observations on current
political affairs. Lady Veula was inured to this sort of thing in her
own home circle, and sat listening with the stoical indifference with
which an Esquimau might accept the occurrence of one snowstorm the more,
in the course of an Arctic winter. Serena Golackly felt a certain relief
at the fact that her imported guest was not, after all, monopolising the
conversation. But the latter was too determined a personality to allow
himself to be thrust aside for many minutes by the talkative M.P. Henry
Greech paused for an instant to chuckle at one of his own shafts of
satire, and immediately Thorle’s penetrating voice swept across the
table.
“Oh, you politicians!” he exclaimed, with pleasant superiority; “you are
always fighting about how things should be done, and the consequence is
you are never able to do anything. Would you like me to tell you what a
Unitarian horsedealer said to me at Brindisi about politicians?”
A Unitarian horsedealer at Brindisi had all the allurement of the
unexpected. Henry Greech’s witticisms at the expense of the Front
Opposition bench were destined to remain as unfinished as his wife’s
history of the broken soup-plates. Thorle was primed with an ample
succession of stories and themes, chiefly concerning poverty,
thriftlessness, reclamation, reformed characters, and so forth, which
carried him in an almost uninterrupted sequence through the remainder of
the dinner.
“What I want to do is to make people think,” he said, turning his
prominent eyes on to his hostess; “it’s so hard to make people think.”
“At any rate you give them the opportunity,” said Comus, cryptically.
As the ladies rose to leave the table Comus crossed over to pick up one
of Lady Veula’s gloves that had fallen to the floor.
“I did not know you kept a dog,” said Lady Veula.
“We don’t,” said Comus, “there isn’t one in the house.”
“I could have sworn I saw one follow you across the hall this evening,”
she said.
“A small black dog, something like a schipperke?” asked Comus in a low
voice.
“Yes, that was it.”
“I saw it myself to-night; it ran from behind my chair just as I was
sitting down. Don’t say anything to the others about it; it would
frighten my mother.”
“Have you ever seen it before?” Lady Veula asked quickly.
“Once, when I was six years old. It followed my father downstairs.”
Lady Veula said nothing. She knew that Comus had lost his father at the
age of six.
In the drawing-room Serena made nervous excuses for her talkative friend.
“Really, rather an interesting man, you know, and up to the eyes in all
sorts of movements. Just the sort of person to turn loose at a
drawing-room meeting, or to send down to a mission-hall in some
unheard-of neighbourhood. Given a sounding-board and a harmonium, and a
titled woman of some sort in the chair, and he’ll be perfectly happy; I
must say I hadn’t realised how overpowering he might be at a small
dinner-party.”
“I should say he was a very good man,” said Mrs. Greech; she had forgiven
the mutilation of her soup-plate story.
The party broke up early as most of the guests had other engagements to
keep. With a belated recognition of the farewell nature of the occasion
they made pleasant little good-bye remarks to Comus, with the usual
predictions of prosperity and anticipations of an ultimate auspicious
return. Even Henry Greech sank his personal dislike of the boy for the
moment, and made hearty jocular allusions to a home-coming, which, in the
elder man’s eyes, seemed possibly pleasantly remote. Lady Veula alone
made no reference to the future; she simply said, “Good-bye, Comus,” but
her voice was the kindest of all and he responded with a look of
gratitude. The weariness in her eyes was more marked than ever as she
lay back against the cushions of her carriage.
“What a tragedy life is,” she said, aloud to herself.
Serena and Stephen Thorle were the last to leave, and Francesca stood
alone for a moment at the head of the stairway watching Comus laughing
and chatting as he escorted the departing guests to the door. The
ice-wall was melting under the influence of coming separation, and never
had he looked more adorably handsome in her eyes, never had his merry
laugh and mischief-loving gaiety seemed more infectious than on this
night of his farewell banquet. She was glad enough that he was going
away from a life of idleness and extravagance and temptation, but she
began to suspect that she would miss, for a little while at any rate, the
high-spirited boy who could be so attractive in his better moods. Her
impulse, after the guests had gone, was to call him to her and hold him
once more in her arms, and repeat her wishes for his happiness and
good-luck in the land he was going to, and her promise of his welcome
back, some not too distant day, to the land he was leaving. She wanted
to forget, and to make him forget, the months of irritable jangling and
sharp discussions, the months of cold aloofness and indifference and to
remember only that he was her own dear Comus as in the days of yore,
before he had grown from an unmanageable pickle into a weariful problem.
But she feared lest she should break down, and she did not wish to cloud
his light-hearted gaiety on the very eve of his departure. She watched
him for a moment as he stood in the hall, settling his tie before a
mirror, and then went quietly back to her drawing-room. It had not been
a very successful dinner party, and the general effect it had left on her
was one of depression.
Comus, with a lively musical-comedy air on his lips, and a look of
wretchedness in his eyes, went out to visit the haunts that he was
leaving so soon.