The drawback is, one never really _knows_ one's hosts and hostesses. One
gets to know their fox-terriers and their chrysanthemums, and whether the
story about the go-cart can be turned loose in the drawing-room, or must
be told privately to each member of the party, for fear of shocking
public opinion; but one's host and hostess are a sort of human hinterland
that one never has the time to explore.
There was a fellow I stayed with once in Warwickshire who farmed his own
land, but was otherwise quite steady. Should never have suspected him of
having a soul, yet not very long afterwards he eloped with a lion-tamer's
widow and set up as a golf-instructor somewhere on the Persian Gulf;
dreadfully immoral, of course, because he was only an indifferent player,
but still, it showed imagination. His wife was really to be pitied,
because he had been the only person in the house who understood how to
manage the cook's temper, and now she has to put "D.V." on her dinner
invitations. Still, that's better than a domestic scandal; a woman who
leaves her cook never wholly recovers her position in Society.
I suppose the same thing holds good with the hosts; they seldom have more
than a superficial acquaintance with their guests, and so often just when
they do get to know you a bit better, they leave off knowing you
altogether. There was _rather_ a breath of winter in the air when I left
those Dorsetshire people. You see, they had asked me down to shoot, and
I'm not particularly immense at that sort of thing. There's such a
deadly sameness about partridges; when you've missed one, you've missed
the lot--at least, that's been my experience. And they tried to rag me
in the smoking-room about not being able to hit a bird at five yards, a
sort of bovine ragging that suggested cows buzzing round a gadfly and
thinking they were teasing it. So I got up the next morning at early
dawn--I know it was dawn, because there were lark-noises in the sky, and
the grass looked as if it had been left out all night--and hunted up the
most conspicuous thing in the bird line that I could find, and measured
the distance, as nearly as it would let me, and shot away all I knew.
They said afterwards that it was a tame bird; that's simply _silly_,
because it was awfully wild at the first few shots. Afterwards it
quieted down a bit, and when its legs had stopped waving farewells to the
landscape I got a gardener-boy to drag it into the hall, where everybody
must see it on their way to the breakfast-room. I breakfasted upstairs
myself. I gathered afterwards that the meal was tinged with a very
unchristian spirit. I suppose it's unlucky to bring peacock's feathers
into a house; anyway, there was a blue-pencilly look in my hostess's eye
when I took my departure.
Some hostesses, of course, will forgive anything, even unto pavonicide
(is there such a word?), as long as one is nice-looking and sufficiently
unusual to counterbalance some of the others; and there _are_ others--the
girl, for instance, who reads Meredith, and appears at meals with
unnatural punctuality in a frock that's made at home and repented at
leisure. She eventually finds her way to India and gets married, and
comes home to admire the Royal Academy, and to imagine that an
indifferent prawn curry is for ever an effective substitute for all that
we have been taught to believe is luncheon. It's then that she is really
dangerous; but at her worst she is never quite so bad as the woman who
fires _Exchange and Mart_ questions at you without the least provocation.
Imagine the other day, just when I was doing my best to understand half
the things I was saying, being asked by one of those seekers after
country home truths how many fowls she could keep in a run ten feet by
six, or whatever it was! I told her whole crowds, as long as she kept
the door shut, and the idea didn't seem to have struck her before; at
least, she brooded over it for the rest of dinner.
Of course, as I say, one never really _knows_ one's ground, and one may
make mistakes occasionally. But then one's mistakes sometimes turn out
assets in the long-run: if we had never bungled away our American
colonies we might never have had the boy from the States to teach us how
to wear our hair and cut our clothes, and we must get our ideas from
somewhere, I suppose. Even the Hooligan was probably invented in China
centuries before we thought of him. England must wake up, as the Duke of
Devonshire said the other day; wasn't it? Oh, well, it was someone else.
Not that I ever indulge in despair about the Future; there always have
been men who have gone about despairing of the Future, and when the
Future arrives it says nice, superior things about their having acted
according to their lights. It is dreadful to think that other people's
grandchildren may one day rise up and call one amiable.
There are moments when one sympathises with Herod.