Part 10

“Now let me see,” Mrs. Dersingham began, as usual, feeling that these guests were not people now but six enormous bodies of which she, the wretched criminal, had to dispose. “Now let me see. Will you sit there, Mrs. Trape. And Mrs. Pearson, there.” And then, having disposed of the bodies, she had time to notice that the soup looked horribly greasy.

III

The soup was bad, and Miss Verever left most of hers and contrived to be looking down at it very curiously every time Mrs. Dersingham glanced across the table at her. As there were eight of them, Mrs. Dersingham was not sitting at the end of the table, opposite her husband. Mr. Golspie was there, and very much at his ease, putting away a very ungentlemanly quantity of bread under that great moustache of his. On Mr. Golspie’s right were Mrs. Dersingham, Major Trape, and Mrs. Pearson, and on the other side were Miss Verever, Mr. Pearson, and Mrs. Trape.

“And how,” said Miss Verever to Mrs. Dersingham, “did you enjoy your Norfolk holiday this summer? You never told me that, and I’ve been dying to know.” The smile that accompanied this statement announced that Miss Verever could not imagine a more idiotic or boring topic, that you would be insufferably dull if you answered her question and terribly rude if you didn’t.

“Not bad,” Mrs. Dersingham shouted desperately. “In fact, quite good, on the whole. Rather cold, you know.”

“Really, you found it cold?” And you would have sworn that the speaker meant to suggest that the cold had obviously been manufactured for you and that it served you right.

At the other end of the table, Major Trape and his host were talking about football, across Mrs. Pearson, who nodded and smiled and shook her mysterious curls all the time, to show that she was not really being left out.

“Do you ever watch rugger, Golspie?” Mr. Dersingham demanded down the table.

“What, Rugby? Haven’t seen a match for years,” replied Mr. Golspie. “Prefer the other kind when I do watch one.”

Major Trape raised his eyebrows. “What, you a soccah man? Not this professional stuff? Don’t tell me you like that.”

“What’s the matter with it?”

“Oh, come now! I mean, you can’t possibly--I mean, it’s a dirty business, selling fellahs for money and so on, very unsporting.”

“I must say I agree, Trape,” said Mr. Dersingham. “Dashed unsporting business, I call it.”

“Oh, certainly,” Major Trape continued, “must be amatahs--love of the game. Play the game for its own sake, I say, and not as all these fellahs do--for monay. Can’t possibly be a sportsman and play for monay. Oh, dirty business, eh, Dersingham?”

“I’m with you there.”

A sound came from Mrs. Trape’s face and it seemed to declare that she was with him too.

“Well, I’m not with you,” said Mr. Golspie bluntly. He did not care tuppence about it, one way or the other, but there was something in Trape’s manner that demanded contradiction, and Mr. Golspie was not the man to ignore such a challenge. “If a poor man can play a game well, why shouldn’t he allow that game to keep him? What’s the answer to that? A man’s as much right to play cricket and football for a living as he has to clean windows or sell tripe----”

“Tripe indeed! How can you, Mr. Golspie?” cried Mrs. Pearson, girlishly shaking her curls at him.

“My wife hates tripe,” said Mr. Pearson. “Tee-tee-tee-tee-tee.”

“I disagree,” said Major Trape, stiffer than ever now. “Those things are business, quite diff’rent. Games ought to be played for their own sake. That’s the proper English way. Love of the game. Clean sport. Don’t mind if the other fellahs win. Sport and business, two diff’rent things.”

“Not if sport _is_ your business,” Mr. Golspie returned, looking darkly mischievous. “We can’t all be rich amachures. Let the chaps have their six or seven pounds a week. They earn it. If one lot of chaps can earn their living by telling us to be good every Sunday--that is, if you go to listen to ’em: I don’t--why shouldn’t another lot be paid to knock a ball about every Saturday, without all this talk of dirty business? It beats me. Unless it’s snobbery. Lot o’ snobbery still about in this country. It pops up all the time.”

“What _is_ this argument all about?” Miss Verever inquired. And, perhaps feeling that Mr. Golspie needed a rebuke, she put on her most peculiar look and brought out her most disturbing tone of voice, finally throwing in a smile that was a tried veteran, an Old Guard.

But Mr. Golspie returned her gaze quite calmly, and even conveyed a piece of fish, and far too large a piece, to his mouth before replying. “We’re arguing about football and cricket. I don’t suppose you’re interested. I’m not much, myself. I like billiards. That’s one thing about coming back to this country, you can always get a good game of billiards. Proper tables, y’know.”

“I used to be very fond of a game of billiards, snooker too,” said Mr. Pearson, nodding his head so that his fat cheeks shook like beef jellies, “when I was out in Singapore. There were some splendid players at the club there, splendid players, make breaks of forty and fifty. But I wasn’t one of them. Tee-tee-tee----”

“We went to see Susie Dean and Jerry Jerningham the other night,” said Major Trape, turning to Mrs. Dersingham. “Good show. Very clevah, very clevah. You been to any shows lately, Mrs. Dersingham?”

“That’s true,” Mrs. Pearson informed her host and anybody else who cared to listen. “When we were out in Singapore, my husband was always going over to the club for billiards. And now he hardly ever plays. I don’t think he’s had a game this year. Have you, Walter? I’m just saying I don’t think you’ve had a game this year.”

“And so what with one thing and another,” Mrs. Dersingham told Major Trape, “I’ve simply not been able to see half the plays I’ve wanted to see. Something has to go, hasn’t it? We were out at the Trevors’--I think you know them, don’t you?--the shipbuilding people, you know, only of course these Trevors are out of that--they’re terribly in with all that young smart set, Mrs. Dellingham, young Mostyn-Price, Lady Muriel Pagworth, and the famous Ditchways. Well, what with that, and then going to Mrs. Westbury’s musical tea-fight--Dossevitch and Rougeot _ought_ to have been there and were only prevented from coming at the last minute, but Imogen Farley was there and played divinely. Oh, and then on top of all that, I went to see that new thing at His Majesty’s--what’s it called?--oh, yes--_The Other Man_. And so I haven’t had a single moment for any other show.”

“No, by Jove, you haven’t, have you?” said Major Trape, with whom this miracle of the social loaves and fishes worked every time. “You’re worse than Dorothy, and I tell her she overdoes it. Mustn’t overdo it, you know.”

Mrs. Dersingham, wondering how long Agnes was going to be bringing up the cutlets, shrugged her shoulders, and did it exactly as she had seen Irene Prince do it in _Smart Women_ at the Ambassadors. “It _is_ stupid, I know,” she confessed charmingly, “and I’m always saying I’ll cut most of it out--but--well, you know what happens.”

Miss Verever, wearing her most peculiar smile, leaned forward, caught the eye of her hostess, and said, “But what _does_ happen, my dear?”

Mrs. Dersingham was able to escape, however, by plunging at once into the talk at the other end of the table, as if she had not heard Miss Verever’s inquiry. “Oh, have you been reading that?” she cried across the table to Mrs. Trape, who did not look as if she had spoken for weeks, but nevertheless had actually just conjured out several remarks. “No, I _haven’t_ read it, and I don’t mean to.” But did Agnes mean to bring the cutlets?

The talk at Mr. Dersingham’s end, as we have guessed, had suddenly turned literary. Mrs. Trape had just read a certain book. It was, she added, apparently throwing her voice into the claret decanter, a very clever book. Mr. Dersingham had not read this book, and did not hesitate to say that it did not sound his kind of book, for after a jolly good hard day in the office he found such books too heavy going and preferred a detective story. Mrs. Pearson was actually reading a book, had been reading it that very afternoon, had nearly finished it and was enjoying it immensely.

“And I’m sure it’s a story _you’d_ like, Mr. Dersingham,” she cried, “even though there aren’t any detectives in it. I could hardly put it down. It’s all about a girl going to one of those Pacific Islands, one of those lovely coral and lagoon places, you know, and she goes there to stay with an uncle because she’s lost all her money and when she gets there she finds that he’s drinking terribly, and so she goes to another man--but I mustn’t spoil it for you. Do read it, Mrs. Trape.”

The claret decanter murmured that it would love to read it, and asked what the name of the book was, so that it might put it down on its library list.

“I’ll tell you the title in a moment,” and Mrs. Pearson, bringing her curls to rest, bit her lip reflectively. “Now how stupid of me! Do you know, I can’t remember. It’s a very striking title, too, and that’s what made me take it when the girl at the library showed it to me. Now isn’t that silly of me?”

“I can never remember the titles either,” Mr. Dersingham assured her heartily. “What was the name of the chap who wrote it? Was it a man or a woman?”

“I _think_ it was a man’s name, in fact I’m nearly sure it was. It was quite a common name, too. Something like Wilson. No, it wasn’t, it was Wilkinson. Walter, do you remember the name of the author of that book I’m reading? Wasn’t it Wilkinson?”

“You’re thinking of the man that came to mend the wireless set,” Mr. Pearson replied, shooting his long neck at her. “That was Wilkinson. You know the people, Dersingham--the electricians in Earl’s Court Road?”

“Oh, so it was. How silly of me!”

“Tee-tee-tee-tee-tee.”

Mrs. Pearson smiled vaguely but amiably, then said: “So you see I can’t tell you _now_, but I’ll tell Mrs. Dersingham in the morning and then she can tell you.”

A sudden silence fell on the table at that moment, perhaps because there was a sort of scratching sound at the door, which opened, but only about an inch or two. That silence was shattered by the most appalling crash of breaking crockery, followed by a short sharp wail. Then silence again for one sinking moment. The cutlets and the vegetables had arrived at last, and a brown stain, creeping beneath the door, told where they were.

“My God!” cried Mr. Golspie to Miss Verever, as Mrs. Dersingham dashed to the door, “there goes our dinner.”

“Indeed!”

“You bet your life!” Mr. Golspie, earnest and unabashed, assured her.

Miss Verever and Major Trape exchanged glances, which removed Mr. Golspie once and for all from decent society and handed him over to the social worker and the anthropologist.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Dersingham had disappeared through the doorway, and Mr. Dersingham was trying to follow her example but could not do so because, what with cutlets, vegetables, gravy, broken dishes and plates, a weeping Agnes, and a panic-stricken Mrs. Dersingham, there was no space for him. So he stood there, holding the door open, with his body inside the dining-room and his head outside.

“Oh, do shut the door, Howard,” the guests heard Mrs. Dersingham cry.

“All right,” the invisible head replied hesitatingly. “But I say--can’t I--er--do anything? I mean, do you want me to come out or--er--well, what do you want me to do?”

“Oh, go-in-and-shut-the-door.” And there was no doubt that in another moment Mrs. Dersingham would have screamed, for this was the voice of a woman in an extremity.

Mr. Dersingham closed the door and returned to his chair. He looked at Major Trape, and Major Trape looked at him, and no doubt they were both remembering the good old school, Worrelians together.

“Sorry, but--er--” and here Mr. Dersingham looked round apologetically at his guests--“I’m afraid there’s been some sort of accident outside.”

Immediately, Mrs. Trape, Mrs. Pearson, Major Trape, and Mr. Pearson began talking all at once, not talking about this accident but about accidents in general, with special reference to very queer accidents that had happened to them. Miss Verever merely looked peculiarly at everybody, while Mr. Golspie finished his claret with a certain remote gloom, as if he were a man taking quinine on the summit of a mountain.

Then the door, which had not been properly fastened, swung open again, to admit a mixed knocking and gobbling and guggling noise that suggested that Agnes was now lying on the floor, in hysterics, and drumming her feet. Then came a new voice, very hoarse and resentful, and this voice declared that it was all a crying shame, even if the girl was clumsy with her hands, and that one pair of hands was one pair of hands and could not be expected to be any more, and that while notices were being given right and left, _her_ notice could be taken, there and then. In short, the cook had arrived on the scene.

Mr. Dersingham arose miserably, but whether to shut the door again or to make an entrance into the drama outside we shall never know, for Mrs. Pearson, fired with neighbourly solicitude, sprang up, crying, “Poor Mrs. Dersingham! I’m sure I ought to do something,” and was outside, with the door closed behind her, before Mr. Dersingham knew what was happening.

And Mrs. Pearson, once outside, did not simply intrude, did not gape and hang about and get in the way, but took charge of the situation, for though Mrs. Pearson may have been a foolish table-talker, may have worn mysterious curls and been old-fashioned and monstrously girlish and affectionate, she was a housewife of experience, who had weathered the most fantastic tropical domestic storms in Singapore.

“I _knew_ you wouldn’t mind my coming out,” she cried, “and I felt I must help, because after all we are neighbours, aren’t we? and that makes a difference.”

“It’s too absurd,” Mrs. Dersingham wailed. “This wretched girl’s smashed everything and ruined the dinner, and now she’s going off into a fit or something out of sheer temper. And it’s all her own fault. I engaged her sister to come and help her to-night, and then when her sister couldn’t come, at the last minute of course, she wouldn’t let me get anybody else, she said she could do it herself.”

Mrs. Pearson was looking at Agnes, who was still guggling and drumming on the floor. “Only stupid hysterics. Get up at once, you silly, silly girl. Do you hear? You’re in the way. We’ll pour cold water over her. That will soon bring her round, you’ll see.”

The cook, who was standing in the hall, a few yards away, and had been looking on with the air of a complacent prophetess, now began to lose some of her rigidity. The mournful triumph died out of her face. She had no respect for Mrs. Dersingham, but for some strange reason she had almost a veneration for Mrs. Pearson, who was possibly a far more ladylike and commanding figure in her eyes.

“That’s so,” the cook hoarsely declared now. “A jug of water’s what she wants. Accidents will happen and one pair of hands can’t be two or three pairs of hands, eight for dinner being out of all reason with them steps and no service lift, but there’s no call to be lying there all night, Agnes, having your hysterics and carrying on silly when there’s all this mess to be cleared, let alone anything else.”

This treacherous withdrawal of a stout ally, combined with the talk of cold water, soon brought the hysterics to mere choking and sniffing, and in a minute or two Agnes was bending over the ruins. “I’ll clear these away,” she announced between sniffs and chokes, “but I won’t bring anything else and serve it, I won’t. I couldn’t if I tried, I couldn’t. I haven’t a nerve in me body, not after what’s happened, I haven’t.”

“But I shall have to give them _something_,” Mrs. Dersingham was saying. Clearly she no longer included Mrs. Pearson among the guests. Mrs. Pearson had ceased to be one of “them.”

“Of course you will, my dear,” cried Mrs. Pearson, her eyes gleaming with a happy excitement. “Not that _we’d_ mind, of course. It’s the men, isn’t it? You know what the men are? Now then, what about eggs?”

“Eggs,” the cook repeated hoarsely and gloomily. “There’s two eggs, an’ two eggs only, in that kitchen. Just the two eggs, and them’s for the morning.”

“Listen, my dear.” And Mrs. Pearson clutched at her neighbour affectionately and imploringly. “_Do_ leave it to me and I promise you I won’t be ten minutes. I won’t, really. Now not a word! Don’t bother about _anything_. Just you leave it to me.” She hurried towards the outer door, pulled herself up before she reached it, and cried over her shoulder, “But warm some plates, that’s all.”

During the subsequent interval, Mrs. Dersingham had not the heart to return to the dining-room, though she did just look in, put her face round the door and smile apologetically at everybody and say that it was _too_ absurd and annoying and that the two of them, she and Mrs. Pearson, would be back in a few minutes. She spent the rest of the time superintending the salvage work outside the dining-room door and helping cook to find enough fresh plates to warm. She felt hot, dishevelled and miserable. She could have cried. Indeed, that was why she did not slip upstairs to her bedroom to look at herself and powder her nose, for once there, really alone with herself, she was sure she would have cried. Oh, it was all too hateful for words!

“There!” And Mrs. Pearson stood before her, breathless, flushed, and happy, and whipped off the lid of a silver dish.

“Oh!” cried Mrs. Dersingham in the very reek of the omelette, a fine large specimen. “You angel! It’s absolutely perfect.”

“I remembered we had some eggs, and then I remembered we had a bottle of mushrooms tucked away somewhere, and so I rushed upstairs and made this mushroom omelette. It ought to be nice. I used to be good with omelettes.”

“It’s marvellous. And I don’t know how to begin to thank you, my dear.” And Mrs. Dersingham meant it. From that moment, Mrs. Pearson ceased to be a merely foolish if kindly neighbour and became a friend, worthy of the most secret confidences. In the steam of the omelette, rich as the smoke of burnt offerings, this friendship began, and Mrs. Dersingham never tasted a mushroom afterwards without being reminded of it.

“Don’t think of it, my dear,” said Mrs. Pearson happily, for her own life, after months of the dull routine of time-killing, had suddenly become crimson, rich and glorious. “Now have you got the plates ready? You must have this served at once, mustn’t you? Where’s that silly girl? Gone to bed? All right, then, make the cook serve the rest of the dinner. She must have everything ready by this time. Call her, my dear. Tell her to bring up the plates.” And they returned at last to the dining-room, two sisters out of burning Troy.

Alas, all was not well in there. Something had happened during the interval of waiting. It was not the women, who were all sympathetic smiles and solicitude: Mrs. Trape even dropped the ventriloquial effect, actually disturbed the lower part of her face, in order to explain that she knew, no one better, what it was these days, when anything might be expected of that class; and Miss Verever, though retaining automatically some peculiarities of tone and grimace, contrived to say something reassuring. No, it was not the women; it was the men. Mr. Golspie looked like a man who had already said some brutal things and was fully prepared to say some more; Major Trape looked very stiff and uncompromising, as if he had just sentenced a couple of surveyors to be shot; Mr. Pearson gave the impression that he had been faintly tee-teeing on both sides of a quarrel and was rather tired of it; and Mr. Dersingham looked uneasy, anxious, exasperated. There was no mistaking the atmosphere, in which distant thunder still rolled. The stupid men had had to wait for the more substantial part of dinner; they had felt empty, then they had felt cross; and so they had argued, shouted, quarrelled, not all of them perhaps, but certainly Mr. Golspie and Major Trape. Probably at any moment, they would begin arguing, shouting, quarrelling again. Mrs. Dersingham, very tired now and with a hundred little nerves screaming to be taken out of all this and put to bed, would have liked to bang their silly heads together.

Cook came in, breathing heavily and disapprovingly, and gave them their omelette. There was not a single movement she made during the whole time she was in the room that did not announce, quite plainly, that she was the cook, that the kitchen was her place, that she did not pretend to be able to wait at table and that if they did not like it they could lump it. Her heavy breathing went further, pointing out that when she did condescend to wait at table, she expected to find a better company than this seated round it. Even Mrs. Pearson had apparently lost favour, for she had her plate shoved contemptuously in front of her, like the rest. Real ladies, that plate said, don’t rush away and cook omelettes for other people’s dinner tables. “P’raps you’ll ring when you want the next,” the cook wheezed, and then slowly, scornfully, took her departure.

“If you don’t mind my saying so, Mrs. Dersingham,” said Major Trape, “this omelette’s awf’ly good, awf’ly good. And there’s nothing I like better than a jolly good omelette.”

A voice from Mrs. Trape’s direction said that it agreed with him.

“They’re right there,” said Mr. Golspie to Mrs. Dersingham, as if the Trapes were not often right. “It’s as good an omelette as I’ve had for months and months, and that’s saying something, because I’ve been in places where they can make omelettes. They can’t make ’em here in England.” And he said this in such a way as to suggest that it was really a challenge to Trape, who was nothing if not patriotic. Obviously, he and Trape had been quarrelling.

Major Trape stiffened, then smiled laboriously at his hostess. “Mr. Golspie seems to think we can’t make anything in England. That’s where he and I diffah. Isn’t it, Dersingham?”

“Well, yes, in a way, I suppose,” Mr. Dersingham mumbled unhappily. He felt divided between Worrell and Angel Pavement, between his old and respected school friend, Trape, with whom he instinctively agreed, and the forceful man who was now saving Twigg & Dersingham and making it prosperous, his guest for the first time, too; and it was a wretched situation. He muttered now that there was a lot to be said on both sides.

“There may be,” said Major Trape. “But I don’t like to hear a man continually runnin’ down his own country. Tastes diffah, I suppose. But I feel--well, it isn’t done, that’s all.”

“Time it was done then,” said Mr. Golspie aggressively. “Most of the people I meet here these days seem to be living in a fool’s paradise----”

“Now, Mr. Golspie,” cried his hostess with desperate vivacity, “you’re not to call us all fools. Is he, Mrs. Trape? We won’t have it.” Then, saving the situation at all cost, she turned to Miss Verever. “My dear, I forgot to tell you, I’ve had the absurdest letter from Alice. When I read it, I simply howled.”

“No, did you?” said Miss Verever.

“A-ha!” cried Mr. Dersingham, doing his best. “What’s the latest from Alice? We must all hear about this.”

They were all listening now, all at peace for the moment.