THE SIMPLY NOBODY
The "quiet dinner, simply nobody," to which Kit had invited the
gratified Mrs. Murchison and her daughter the night before had grown
like a rolling snowball during the hours of the Hungarian ball. If you
are having a quiet dinner, one more does not make any difference or
change the character of the entertainment, and there had been many such.
Among others, Kit had met Alice Haslemere in the Park next morning, and
the latter had made an appeal _ad misericordiam_ to her.
"I am bidden to meet a Serene Transparency or a Transparent Serenity of
some sort to-night," she had said. "Who? Oh, some second-class little
royalty made in Germany, and I don't intend to go, and have said so. I
gave an excuse, Kit; I gave you as my excuse, because you are a sort of
privileged person, and even royalty lets you do as you choose. How do
you manage it, dear? I wish you would tell me. Anyhow, I said that you
asked me to dine to-night six weeks ago. You see, I owe you one over
that disingenuous way you treated me about Jack and the baccarat. So you
did ask me, didn't you?"
Kit slowed down; she was riding a white bicycle picked out with crimson.
"Seven weeks ago, Alice," she said; "and if you had forgotten I should
never have forgiven you. Quite quietly, you know; and so we are quits.
Lady Conybeare's dinner," she said with some ceremony, "will be served
as usual at eight-thirty."
They were both riding the wrong side of the road, and Lady Haslemere
cast an offended look at her father's coachman, who did not recognise
her, and made way for the carriage.
"I knew it was an old, old engagement," she said, with feeling. "And who
is coming? I forget; it is so long since you told me."
"Murchison _mère et fille_," said Kit; "and the _fille_ is going to
marry Toby. You just see. Also Ted and Toby and the baccarat man. Jack
is very thick with him just now, and my ladyship smells money. Oh,
Alice, we might play baccarat again to-night; I was thinking that it
would be rather tiresome having to play gooseberry to Toby all the
evening, but a hand at cards would help to pass the time, would it not?
Let's see, baccarat is the game where you have to try and get nine,
isn't it? How pleasant! There are some other people coming, too, and
there will probably be more before evening. I notice that when there are
dinners for Transparencies people ask me to ask them. I am a sort of
refuge from royalty."
"Yes, and how transparent!" remarked Lady Haslemere.
"Isn't it? and what a bad joke! But wear a tea-gown, Alice, because I
told Mrs. M. to do so. Yes, we'll play detectives on the Alington this
evening. I hope he'll cheat again. It must be so amusing to be a real
detective. I think I shall become one if all else fails. And most things
have failed."
"To see if shopping takes so long, and whether the club accounts for
late hours," quoted Lady Haslemere, with a touch of regret. "But, Kit,
what a blessing it is that one does not feel bound to watch one's
husband! Haslemere is so safe, you know; one might as well watch St.
Paul's Cathedral to see if it flirted with St. Mary Magdalene's. It
would bore me to death watching him. Only once have I seen him at all
excited."
"Who was the happy lady?" asked Kit, with interest.
"It wasn't a lady at all--not even me. It was a wire puzzle, and he said
it was mathematically impossible, and woke me up about three in the
morning to tell me so. He was really quite feverish about it. But in
demonstrating to me how impossible it was he accidentally did it, upon
which he became perfectly normal, and we lived happily ever afterwards."
They turned into the road north of the Serpentine by the Achilles
statue, and quickened their pace.
"One always does live happily ever afterwards," said Kit thoughtfully.
"Truth is quite as strange as fiction. There's the old Duchess--what a
cat! And just look at her wig all sideways! But I am also thankful that
one's husband is not a detective. Jack would make such a bad one. I
should be ashamed of him."
"I suppose he would. He is clever," said Alice, "and criminals are so
short-sighted. They make the obvious mistakes. But Jack would make a
ripping criminal."
"That is just it. As a detective Jack would overlook the obvious things
because they are so obvious. Consequently, he would never find out
anything, because criminals always make stupid mistakes, not clever
ones. Jack never found out that the mine man cheated at baccarat, for
instance. Oh, I forgot, you guessed that. Look, there's Ted. How badly
he rides!"
"And he never finds out about Ted," remarked Lady Haslemere, with
extreme dryness.
"Never. You see, there's nothing to find out. I always tell him what a
darling Ted is, and so he never thinks he is a darling. I'm very fond of
Ted, but--but---- After all, frankness pays better than anything else,
especially when you have nothing to conceal."
Lady Haslemere considered the proposition for a moment, but found
nothing to say about it.
"How is the mine man?" she asked abruptly.
"Green bay-trees. So he must be wicked. A few nights ago, when he dined
with us, I asked him to sing after dinner, and he sang a sort of evening
hymn in four sharps. Don't you know the kind? He has a really beautiful
voice, and it nearly made me cry, I felt so regretful for something I
had forgotten. Now, that shows he must be wicked. Good people only make
me yawn, because they try and adapt themselves to me and talk about
worldly things. And it is only wicked people who sing hymns with real
feeling, who make me want to cry. Luckily, they are rare."
"And the mines?" asked Alice.
"Well, Jack is excited about the mines, like Haslemere with the wire
puzzle, and when Jack is excited it means a good deal. He told me that
if things went decently we should be solvent again--it sounds like a
chemical--in fact, the mines are playing up. For to make Jack and me
solvent, Alice, means a lot."
They had reached the Serpentine, and Kit dismounted and rested by the
rails. It was a typically fine June day. The sky was cloudless, the
trees were comparatively green, large wood-pigeons wandered fatly about,
and childlike old gentlemen were sailing miniature yachts across the
water.
"What a pity one is not a person of simple pleasures!" remarked Lady
Haslemere. "There is an old gentleman there who takes more delight in
his silly little boat than you do in the prospect of solvency, or
Haslemere even in a new wire puzzle. How happy he must be and how dull!
I think dulness is really synonymous with happiness. Think of cows! You
never found an absorbing cow, nor an unhappy one. The old gentleman has
eaten a good breakfast; he will eat a good lunch. And he has probably
got a balance at his bank."
"It's all stomach," said Kit regretfully--"all except the balance, I
mean."
"Yes, that's what it comes to. So we shall play detectives to-night,
Kit."
Kit started; she was absorbed in the toy yacht.
"Detectives? Oh, certainly," she replied. "But I almost wish we were
wrong about the whole concern."
"The mine man cheated," said Alice, with decision. "I was thinking of
asking Tom whether he saw."
"Oh, don't do that," said Kit. "We don't want a scandal. Look!"
A squall shattered the reflections in the calm water, and the old
gentleman's toy yacht bowed to it and skimmed off like a swallow.
"Oh, how nice!" cried Kit, who was rapidly taking the colour of her
surroundings. "Alice, shall we save up our money and buy a little toy
yacht? Think how happy we should be!"
"If you are going to play the milkmaid, Kit," said Alice severely, "I
shall go home. I won't play milkmaid for anybody. Playing gooseberry to
Toby is nothing to it."
Kit sighed.
"Dear old gentleman!" she said. "Alice, I would give anything to be an
old gentleman with white whiskers and a silly little yacht. Yes, I know,
it is an impossible dream. About the baccarat, what were you saying?"
"I have things to say, if you will be so kind as to attend. Try to
forget about your white whiskers, Kit."
"Yes, I will. There were no such white whiskers."
"Last night," said Lady Haslemere, "I lost two hundred and forty pounds
and sixpence."
"How sixpence? What small stakes you must have been playing! Was it the
game where you try to get nine?"
"Yes," said Alice, "and I lost the sixpence because I dropped it on the
floor. I don't know how I got it, and I don't know what happened to it."
"Like Melchisedech," put in Kit.
"Exactly. Anyhow, I dropped it, and it just shows what extraordinary
people people are. We all took candles and grovelled on the ground
looking for that sixpence. Losing it annoyed me more than I can say. I
didn't care so much about the rest."
"I should have cared much more," said Kit very fervently. "But you are
quite right. And it explains to a certain extent how a very rich man
like Mr. Alington can cheat over a few shillings."
"I dreamed about the sixpence too," said Alice. "I thought my salvation
depended on it."
Kit did not reply at once.
"That seems inexpensive," she said at length. "I would go as far as
that. Look at the yacht--oh, I forgot, I mustn't look at the yacht.
Alice, I believe these mines are a big affair. Jack got up this morning
at nine in order to be in the City by half-past eight, and it takes a
lot to make him as punctual as that. Are you going to take a hand in
them?"
"I want to, but Tom says no. He says he has more opportunity of judging,
or something tedious, and will make enough for us both. He is willing to
invest for me, but that is no fun."
"That is so like Jack," said Kit. "He wants me to have nothing to do
with the mines. He expects to make enough for two, which is absurd,
considering that nobody can possibly make enough for one. But I shall
call myself Miss de Rougemont, spinster, care of the Daily Chronicle, or
something, and so invest."
"Have you got a little nest-egg, dear?" asked Alice sympathetically.
"How nice! I always have, but the stupid cards ate a big piece of the
yolk last night."
"I know; they do. But, on the other hand, they fill it up again. I
expect most women have nest-eggs of some sort. It may be money, or
virtue, or vice, or secrets. Well, I'm going to drop mine slap into the
Australian goldfields."
"I intend to be cautious," said Lady Haslemere. "But just to spite Tom I
shall risk something. Tom was most tiresome and interfering. He says
women know nothing about business. A lot he knows himself! If I had to
pick out one man eminently unfitted to be director of anything, it would
be Tom."
"I can't have Jack left out in the cold like that," said Kit.
"They are a pretty pair. Tom's honest; that is all that can be said for
him."
Kit screamed with laughter.
"I bet you that Jack is as honest as Tom," she said. "But that is just
the way with your family, dear. They all think that they have a monopoly
of the cardinal virtues, just as Mr. Leiter thought he could have a
corner in corn. But, seriously, I do hope and trust that Alington's
mines are sound. Think how the Radical papers would shout if
something--well, if something untoward happened. Salaries, you know!
Supposing the British public dropped a lot of money and there was an
inquiry? Personally, I think Jack is rash to be chairman. He is paid for
his name--he knows that perfectly well; but directors are supposed to be
dimly responsible. And his boss cheats at baccarat! Also I think he
shouldn't have a salary as director; that doesn't look well."
"That will surely be periphrased in the accounts, won't it?" asked
Alice.
"I hope so; periphrasis covers a multitude of cheques."
They had got round to Hyde Park Corner again, and rode slowly through
the gate into the roaring street. Kit's eye brightened at the sight of
life; she forgot about her dream of white whiskers.
"I think gold-mines are an excellent form of gambling," remarked Alice.
"You can play directly after breakfast. Now, one can't play cards
directly after breakfast. I tried the other day, but it was a hopeless
failure. Even naturals looked horrid by daylight."
"Gold-mines are a tonic," said Kit "You take them after breakfast like
Easton's syrup, and they pick you up wonderfully. You should see how
brisk Jack is getting in the morning."
"Well, _au revoir_, dear. Half-past eight, isn't it? May Tom come too?"
"Oh yes, and Haslemere if you like," said Kit, turning up Park Lane.
"I don't like," called out Alice shrilly, going straight on.
Kit giggled at intervals all the way home.
Mrs. Murchison's cup of happiness was very full that evening. Though the
quiet little dinner had grown about eighteen, yet everyone was of Kit's
own particular set, and it was what Kit called a "Christian
dinner"--that is to say, everyone called each other by their Christian
names. "So much nicer than a heathen dinner," she said to Mrs.
Murchison. "You may meet cannibals there."
Mrs. Murchison herself was taken in by Tom Abbotsworthy, and it is
doubtful which of them enjoyed their conversation most. She was
enchanted to find herself with him, and her own remarks were really
memorable.
"I just adore English society," she said over the first mouthfuls of
soup. "Our brightest talkers in America cannot be compared with the
ordinary clubmen in London. And the dinners, how charming!"
"You find people amusing?" asked Tom.
"Yes, and the substantiality of it. Not only the viands and the drinks,
but the really improving conversation--the--the _tout à fait_."
Tom had the greatest of all social gifts--gravity.
"You think people have less _tout à fait_ in America?" he asked.
"There's none of it; and now I come to think of it, I mean _tout
ensemble_. How quick of you to see what I meant! But that's just it. My
heart--and I told Mr. Murchison so the first time I saw him--is English.
My head may be American, but my heart is English. Those were my words,
_ipse dixit_."
"Very remarkable," said Tom.
"The air of dignity," continued Mrs. Murchison (soup always thawed her),
"and the simile of tastes which I find in England! The wealth without
ostensity--I should say ostentiousness! The solid comfort and no
gimcrackiness!"
"I am afraid you will find plenty of gimcrackiness if you go to the
suburbs," said Tom.
"I haven't yet projected any trips to the suburbs," said Mrs. Murchison
with some dignity.
"Of course not. The proper definition of suburbs is the place to which
one does not go. They are merely a negative geographical expression."
"Well, I'm an Anglophobe," said Mrs. Murchison with conviction; "and I
believe nothing against England, not even its suburbs. But what would
you say, Lord Abbotsworthy, was the main tendency of the upper classes
in England?"
Tom was slightly puzzled.
"Tendency in what line?" he asked.
"By tendency I mean the direction in which they are advancing?"
"We are advancing towards America," he replied, after a moment's
thought. "That is where our fiction goes, and that is whence our
inventions come."
Mrs. Murchison dropped a large truffle off her fork, and remained a
moment with it poised.
"I guess that's deep," she said. "I shall cable that to Mr. Murchison."
Tom wondered silently whether Mr. Murchison would be as much puzzled by
it as he was himself; but his wife proceeded to elucidate.
"The fictions are the inventions, you mean," she said. "The one goes to
where the other comes from. The oneness of the two countries, in fact.
The brightest thing I've heard this summer," she observed.
Tom was lost in contemplation at the thought of the deep gloom in which
all else that Mrs. Murchison had heard this summer must be involved, and
he was grateful when that lady, after a reflective pause on his dazzling
remark, changed the subject.
"What a lovely man Lord Evelyn is!" she said.
"Lord Evelyn? Oh, Toby! Yes, he's an excellent fellow."
"By lovely, I do not refer to his personal appearance," said Mrs.
Murchison, "for that is homely. But by lovely I refer to his happy and
amiable disposition."
"You have hit him off completely," said Tom. "Happy and amiable is just
what Toby is."
Mrs. Murchison's mind went off for a moment on a maternal excursion at
the sight of Lily and Toby, who were talking eagerly together, but came
quickly back again.
"And the vivacity at present depicted in his face is considerable," went
on Mrs. Murchison in a burst of analytic intuition. "I just adore
vivacity. Vivacity without screaming, Lord Abbotsworthy, is what I just
adore. Mr. Murchison is very vivacious; but to hear him when he is being
vivacious, why,--you'd think he had the chicken-pox--I should say
whooping-cough."
"That must be very alarming until you are used to it," said Tom.
"It is that. And the choking fit which sometimes ensues on his
hilarity--why, I have seen times and again his life hung by a hair, like
the sword of Demosthenes at Belshazzar's feast."
Mrs. Murchison delivered herself of this surprising allusion with the
most touching confidence. She liked a well-turned sentence, and repeated
it softly to herself.
"Such anxieties are inseparable from the union of the married life,"
said Tom in a voice that trembled slightly.
Kit from the other side of the table had just burst out into a loud
meaningless laugh, and he suspected that she had overheard.
"That's what I say," answered Mrs. Murchison; "and that's what the
Prayer-Book says. The joys and the sorrows; the opportunities and the
importunities."
This was slightly cryptic, but it was probable that importunity was to
be taken as the opposite of opportunity. Tom chanced it, though he did
not seem to remember anything in the Prayer-book which suggested the
widest parallel to Mrs. Murchison's quotation. She went ahead in such a
surprising manner in conversation that it was really difficult to keep
up. She positively scoured the plains of thought.
"You find the opportunities, I am sure, much more numerous than the
importunities," he said, faint, yet pursuing. "Yes, champagne."
"And that's just beautifully put, Lord Abbotsworthy," said Mrs.
Murchison.
The tide of conversation changed, and set to opposite sides. Toby and
Lily alone refused to obey the action of the tide, as if they were a
rebel moon, which demanded a system of its own, refusing allegiance
elsewhere, and continued to talk, regardless of the isolated unit they
left on each side of them. Mrs. Murchison, who liked the agreeable
hovering of the mind over first one subject and then another, which
reminded her, she said, of the way in which the puma birds in the
Southern States sucked honey from various flowers without alighting, was
instantly involved in a sort of double-barrelled conversation with Lord
Comber about the check system of baggage, and the relative position of
women in England and the United States of America.
As dinner went on conversation became louder and more desultory. No one
listened particularly to what anyone else was saying; the tendency for
everyone to talk at once (this may have been the tendency of the upper
classes which Mrs. Murchison had inquired about) became more marked, and
the inimitable atmosphere of laughter was abroad. At Kit's house
everyone always left the dining-room together as soon as cigarettes were
handed round, for her excellent social sense told her that when people
were getting on well (and at her house they always did), it was absurd
for a party to go through the refrigerating process of isolation of the
sexes, and waste time in thawing again. Besides, she considered it
obsolete for men to sit over wine; nobody ever drank now, it was only in
England that so absurd a form was kept up.
Some of the party were going on to a vague elsewhere, and Mrs.
Murchison's eye caught Lily's soon after ten. She was most anxious on
this first occasion not to outstay her welcome.
"It's been just too charming, Lady Conybeare," she said; "but Lily and I
must go. We've got to go here and there, on and on till morning."
Kit rose. Her plan was prospering, for Lily and Toby were still talking
together, and she felt particularly pleased with herself and everybody
else.
"Too unkind of you to go," she said; "and if you don't come to see us
again very soon, now that you know the way, I shan't forgive you. Send
me a line any day and come to lunch. I am almost always in for lunch.
And has Toby been making himself pleasant, Miss Murchison? He can when
he likes. I saw him shaking with laughter at something you were telling
him at dinner, and I longed to shout across the table and ask what it
was. Good-night! Too tiresome that you have to go! Conybeare and I are
going to be very domestic this evening, and not set one foot out, but
sit and play cat's-cradle together when the others have gone. Mind, I
only let you go under the distinct understanding that you will come back
very soon, unless we've bored you both beyond forgiveness."
Jack went down with them to the front-door, and Kit as far as the head
of the stairs, where she kissed her hand and looked regretfully after
them, with her head a little on one side. As she expected, Mrs.
Murchison gave one backward glance as she went out, and Kit kissed her
hand again, smiling. Then, as soon as the front-door closed, she hurried
back in a brisk business-like manner to join the others.