The Saki Megapack

by H. H. Munro

  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 stairwa
y 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.

  CHAPTER XV

  Elaine Youghal sat at lunch in the Speise Saal of one of Vienna’s costlier hotels. The double-headed eagle, with its “K.u.K.” legend, everywhere met the eye and announced the imperial favour in which the establishment basked. Some several square yards of yellow bunting, charged with the image of another double-headed eagle, floating from the highest flag-staff above the building, betrayed to the initiated the fact that a Russian Grand Duke was concealed somewhere on the premises. Unannounced by heraldic symbolism but unconcealable by reason of nature’s own blazonry, were several citizens and citizenesses of the great republic of the Western world. One or two Cobdenite members of the British Parliament engaged in the useful task of proving that the cost of living in Vienna was on an exorbitant scale, flitted with restrained importance through a land whose fatness they had come to spy out; every fancied over-charge in their bills was welcome as providing another nail in the coffin of their fiscal opponents. It is the glory of democracies that they may be misled but never driven. Here and there, like brave deeds in a dust-patterned world, flashed and glittered the sumptuous uniforms of representatives of the Austrian military caste. Also in evidence, at discreet intervals, were stray units of the Semetic tribe that nineteen centuries of European neglect had been unable to mislay.

  Elaine sitting with Courtenay at an elaborately appointed luncheon table, gay with high goblets of Bohemian glassware, was mistress of three discoveries. First, to her disappointment, that if you frequent the more expensive hotels of Europe you must be prepared to find, in whatever country you may chance to be staying, a depressing international likeness between them all. Secondly, to her relief, that one is not expected to be sentimentally amorous during a modern honeymoon. Thirdly, rather to her dismay, that Courtenay Youghal did not necessarily expect her to be markedly affectionate in private. Someone had described him, after their marriage, as one of Nature’s bachelors, and she began to see how aptly the description fitted him.

  “Will those Germans on our left never stop talking?” she asked, as an undying flow of Teutonic small talk rattled and jangled across the intervening stretch of carpet. “Not one of those three women has ceased talking for an instant since we’ve been sitting here.”

  “They will presently, if only for a moment,” said Courtenay; “when the dish you have ordered comes in there will be a deathly silence at the next table. No German can see a plat brought in for someone else without being possessed with a great fear that it represents a more toothsome morsel or a better money’s worth than what he has ordered for himself.”

  The exuberant Teutonic chatter was balanced on the other side of the room by an even more penetrating conversation unflaggingly maintained by a party of Americans, who were sitting in judgment on the cuisine of the country they were passing through, and finding few extenuating circumstances.

  “What Mr. Lonkins wants is a real deep cherry pie,” announced a lady in a tone of dramatic and honest conviction.

  “Why, yes, that is so,” corroborated a gentleman who was apparently the Mr. Lonkins in question; “a real deep cherry pie.”

  “We had the same trouble way back in Paris,” proclaimed another lady; “little Jerome and the girls don’t want to eat any more crème renversée. I’d give anything if they could get some real cherry pie.”

  “Real deep cherry pie,” assented Mr. Lonkins.

  “Way down in Ohio we used to have peach pie that was real good,” said Mrs. Lonkins, turning on a tap of reminiscence that presently flowed to a cascade. The subject of pies seemed to lend itself to indefinite expansion.

  “Do those people think of nothing but their food?” asked Elaine, as the virtues of roasted mutton suddenly came to the fore and received emphatic recognition, even the absent and youthful Jerome being quoted in its favour.

  “On the contrary,” said Courtenay, “they are a widely-travelled set, and the man has had a notably interesting career. It is a form of home-sickness with them to discuss and lament the cookery and foods that they’ve never had the leisure to stay at home and digest. The Wandering Jew probably babbled unremittingly about some breakfast dish that took so long to prepare that he had never time to eat it.”

  A waiter deposited a dish of Wiener Nierenbraten in front of Elaine. At the same moment a magic hush fell upon the three German ladies at the adjoining table, and the flicker of a great fear passed across their eyes. Then they burst forth again into tumultuous chatter. Courtenay had proved a reliable prophet.

  Almost at the same moment as the luncheon-dish appeared on the scene, two ladies arrived at a neighbouring table, and bowed with dignified cordiality to Elaine and Courtenay. They were two of the more worldly and travelled of Elaine’s extensive stock of aunts, and they happened to be making a short stay at the same hotel as the young couple. They were far too correct and rationally minded to intrude themselves on their niece, but it was significant of Elaine’s altered view as to the sanctity of honeymoon life that she secretly rather welcomed the presence of her two relatives in the hotel, and had found time and occasion to give them more of her society than she would have considered necessary or desirable a few weeks ago. The younger of the two she rather liked, in a restrained fashion, as one likes an unpretentious watering-place or a restaurant that does not try to give one a musical education in addition to one’s dinner. One felt instinctively about her that she would never wear rather more valuable diamonds than any other woman in the room, and would never be the only person to be saved in a steamboat disaster or hotel fire. As a child she might have been perfectly well able to recite “On Linden when the sun was low,” but one felt certain that nothing ever induced her to do so. The elder aunt, Mrs. Goldbrook, did not share her sister’s character as a human rest-cure; most people found her rather disturbing, chiefly, perhaps, from her habit of asking unimportant questions with enormous solemnity. Her manner of enquiring after a trifling ailment gave one the impression that she was more concerned with the fortunes of the malady than with oneself, and when one got rid of a cold one felt that she almost expected to be given its postal address. Probably her manner was merely the defensive outwork of an innate shyness, but she was not a woman who commanded confidences.

  “A telephone call for Courtenay,” commented the younger of the two women as Youghal hurriedly flashed through the room; “the telephone system seems to enter very largely into that young man’s life.”

  “The telephone has robbed matrimony of most of its sting,”
said the elder; “so much more discreet than pen and ink communications which get read by the wrong people.”

  Elaine’s aunts were conscientiously worldly; they were the natural outcome of a stock that had been conscientiously straight-laced for many generations.

  Elaine had progressed to the pancake stage before Courtenay returned.

  “Sorry to be away so long,” he said, “but I’ve arranged something rather nice for to-night. There’s rather a jolly masquerade ball on. I’ve ’phoned about getting a costume for you and it’s alright. It will suit you beautifully, and I’ve got my harlequin dress with me. Madame Kelnicort, excellent soul, is going to chaperone you, and she’ll take you back any time you like; I’m quite unreliable when I get into fancy dress. I shall probably keep going till some unearthly hour of the morning.”

  A masquerade ball in a strange city hardly represented Elaine’s idea of enjoyment. Carefully to disguise one’s identity in a neighbourhood where one was entirely unknown seemed to her rather meaningless. With Courtenay, of course, it was different; he seemed to have friends and acquaintances everywhere. However, the matter had progressed to a point which would have made a refusal to go seem rather ungracious. Elaine finished her pancake and began to take a polite interest in her costume.

  “What is your character?” asked Madame Kelnicort that evening, as they uncloaked, preparatory to entering the already crowded ball-room.

  “I believe I’m supposed to represent Marjolaine de Montfort, whoever she may have been,” said Elaine. “Courtenay declares he only wanted to marry me because I’m his ideal of her.”