by E. F. Benson
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 dra
nk 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.
CHAPTER IX. THE PLOT MISCARRIES
Some ten or twelve people only remained in the drawing-room when Kit returned, for several had taken their departure before the Murchisons, and Toby seemed to be a target at which was being fired some straight, hard chaff. As usual, he was looking serene and pleasant, but it seemed to Kit that his smile at this moment was more the result of habit than of any entertainment that the chaff afforded him.
“Toby has made an impression,” explained Alice, “and he’s too modest to acknowledge it.”
“Dear Toby, you made an excellent impression,” said Kit, taking his arm, as he stood rather hot and stiff under the chandelier. “I’m very much pleased with you, and I’ll remember you in my will.”
“If he’ll promise to remember you in his!” said Jack, who had returned from speeding the parting guest. “That should be worth something.”
“Answer them back, Toby,” said Kit. “Hit out.”
“A lovely man,” said Tom, “but homely. A happy and amiable disposition.”
“More than can be said for you, old chap,” remarked Toby. “Tom, how gray you are getting!”
“Yes, I’ve no chance. But you are in luck, Toby. The girl is charming, and her mother is unique.”
“I haven’t the slightest idea what you are talking about,” said Toby, amid loud laughter and a shrill cat-call from Alice. “Well, I’m going, Kit. Good-night; and try to teach Tom manners.”
And Toby, still smiling genially, went towards the door. But Kit retained his arm.
“Don’t go, Toby,” she said. “Stop and play a bit. You like baccarat. And don’t mind what Tom says. You’re a credit to the family.”
“Toby will bring the family more credit,” said Tom, in a low, audible voice to his sister.
“Tom, be quiet,” said Alice. “When you try to chaff people, it is like an elephant dancing on eggshell china.”
“Toby, Alice is calling you eggshell china. Lovely but homely.”
“Awfully sorry, Kit,” said Toby, “but I must go. I promised to go on to the Keynes’.”
Now, it was to the Keynes’ that the Murchisons had gone, and Kit knew it. She saw also that Toby had had enough of the subject, and, without any more efforts to detain him, especially since he was rather tiresome at baccarat, and always won. “Well, if you must go, you must,” she said. “Let’s see you again soon, old boy.”
Toby smiled and nodded and left the room.
“Dear Toby!” said Kit, “it was hard luck on him. How could you say such things, Tom? It’s serious. The poor boy is head over ears.”
“There is a phenomenon in hypnotism called suggestion, Kit,” he said, as she took a seat beside him. “If a thing is suggested to the subject, the suggestion is followed. Did you suggest it?”
“Oh, in a sort of way. But Toby isn’t hypnotized; he’s fascinated. I am delighted he takes it seriously. She is a sweet girl, and I would sooner have Toby for my husband than anyone. I shall get him to marry me when Jack dies, like the woman in the parable. Oh, they have just put out a little green table. How queer of them! And cards! Well, I suppose, as it is there —— You play baccarat, I think, Mr. Alington?”
Mr. Alington paused, as usual, before replying, and looked benevolently at Kit and Lady Haslemere in turn.
“I shall be delighted to play,” he said. “I find it very soothing after a tiring day; one does not have to think at all. I used to play a good deal in Australia, and, dear me, yes! I had the pleasure of playing the other night at your house, Lady Haslemere. Odd games we used to have in Australia. One had to keep both eyes open to see that nobody cheated. Indeed, that was not very soothing work. I have seen five nines on the table before now, which really is an excessive number. Embarrassing almost.”
He had the manner of taking everybody into his confidence, and as the others were standing together as he spoke, and he a few steps from them, he had an easy opportunity to look several people in the face. Kit and Alice again received a special share of his kind and intelligent glance, and, as he finished speaking, he laughed in his pleasant voice, as if with considerable inward amusement. So, when they sat down at the card-table, out of the dozen of them there were at least two disconcerted people present, for it was not certain whether Jack had heard.
“I think he scored,” said Alice, in a low voice to Kit; and Kit looked impatient, and thought so too.
When they had all taken their seats, Alington was found, as Kit and Alice had wished (and he also, if they had known it), to be opposite them. There were a few moments’ delay, as the table was lined, and, playing idly with the counters he had purchased, he looked up at them.
“It is so simple to cheat at baccarat, without the clumsy device of five nines,” he said. “One need only lay one’s stake just on the white line, neither over it nor behind it. Then, if you win, the slightest touch and the counters will go over, and it appears that you have staked; if not, you leave them as they are. A touch of the cards will do it. So!”
He put a couple of cards face upwards on the table, as if showing his hand, and as he did it, drew his stake over the line so gently and imperceptibly that it was impossible to see that the counters moved. Kit laughed, not very pleasantly. Her laughter sounded a trifle cracked.
“Take care, all of you!” she cried. “There is a brilliant sharper present. Mr. Alington, how stupid of you to tell us! You might have won all our money without any of us being the wiser.”
Alington laughed, and Alice told Kit in a low voice not to lose her temper. Alington’s laugh was a great contrast to Kit’s, pleasant and amused.
“I make the company a present of the only safe way to cheat at baccarat,” he said. “The bank? Ah, I see Lord Conybeare takes the bank.”
Death and baccarat are great levellers, and Kit in her more sententious moments used to call the latter an escape from the trammels of civilization, and a return to the natural savage instincts. Certainly nothing can be simpler; the cave-men, provided they could count as far as nine, might have played at it. And, indeed, unalloyed gambling is not a bad second, considered as a leveller, to death itself. Rich men win, poor men lose; the Countess rubs shoulders (it is not meant that she did at Kit’s house) with the cocotte; Jew spoils Jew, and Gentile Gentile. The simple turn of the cards is an affair as haphazard as life. If anyone, it must be the devil who knows wher
e and when the nines will come up, and he is incorruptible on this point. The brute loses; the honest man wins; the honest man is made a pauper; the brute a millionaire. There is certainly something fascinating about what we call Luck. No virtue or vice invented by the asceticism or perverted corruptness of man has yet made a bait that she will take. Mathematicians tell us that she is purely mathematical; yet how emphatic a denial she gives to this shallow description of her if one tries to woo her on a system! One might as well make love on the prescriptions of the “Complete Letter-writer.”
On this particular night she showed herself the opposite of all the epithets with which her unintelligent worshippers have plastered her. She is called fickle — she was a pattern of devotion; she is called changeable — she exhibited an immutable face. Wherever Alington sat, whether to the right or to the left of the dealer, or whether he took the bank himself, she favoured him with a fixed, unalterable smile, a smile nailed to her features, as if her photograph was being taken. Like the two-faced Jannet, as Mrs. Murchison had once called that heathen deity, she kept the benignant aspect for him.
Now, it is one of the rules without exception in this world, that nobody likes losing at cards. People have been heard to say that they do not like winning. This statement is certainly incorrect. It is possible to play an interesting set at tennis, an enjoyable round of golf, an entrancing football match, a really memorable game of chess, and lose, but it is not humanly possible to enjoy losing at baccarat. The object of the game is to win the money of your friends in an exciting and diverting manner, but the diversion tends to become something worse than tedium if they consistently win yours. Excuses and justifications may be found for most unprofitable pursuits, and perhaps the only thing to be said in favour of gambling is that there is no nonsense about it, and, as a rule, no nonsense about those who indulge in it. No one as yet has said that it improves the breed of cards, or that he has the prosperity of the card-makers at heart. The card-table is still a place where hypocrites do not win credence from anybody.