Mrs. Ames (10 page)

‘And the dinner?' asked Mrs Altham. ‘At least, I need not ask that, since I am going to lunch there, and so I shall soon know as well as you what there was.'

Mrs Brooks smiled in a rather superior manner.

‘I never know what I am eating,' she said. And she looked as if it disagreed with her, too, whatever it was.

This was not particularly thrilling, for though it was generally known that Harry had an emotional temperament and wrote amorous poems, he appeared to Mrs Altham an improbable Lothario. In any case, the slight interest that this aroused in her was nothing compared to that which awaited her and her husband when they arrived for lunch at Mrs Ames'.

There had been a long-standing feud between Mrs Altham and her hostess on the subject of punctuality. About
two years ago Mrs Ames had arrived at Mrs Altham's at least ten minutes late for dinner, and Mrs Altham had very properly retorted by arriving a quarter of an hour late when next she was bidden to dinner with Mrs Ames, though that involved sitting in a dark cab for ten minutes at the corner of the next turning. So, next time that Mrs Altham ‘hoped to have the pleasure of seeing you and Major Ames at dinner on Thursday at a quarter to eight,' she asked the rest of her guests at eight. With the effect that Mrs Ames and her husband arrived a few minutes before anybody else, and Riseborough generally considered that Mrs Altham had scored. Since then there had been but a sort of desultory pea-shooting kept up, such as would harm nobody, and today Mrs Altham and her husband arrived certainly within ten minutes of the hour named. Mr Pettit, who generally lunched with Mrs Ames or Mrs Brooks on Sunday, was already there with his sister. Harry was morosely fidgeting in a corner, and Mrs Ames was the only other person present in the small sitting room where she received her guests, instead of troubling them to go up to the drawing room and instantly to go down again. She gave Mrs Altham her fat little hand, and then made this remarkable statement.

‘We are not waiting for anybody else, I think.'

Upon which they went into lunch, and Harry sat at the head of the table, instead of his father.

Mrs Ames was in her most conversational mood, and it was not until the chaud-froid, consisting mainly of the legs of chickens pasted over with a yellow sauce that concealed the long blue hair roots with which Nature has adorned their lower extremities, was being handed round, that Mrs Altham had opportunity to ask the question that had been effervescing like an antiseptic lozenge on the tip of her tongue ever since she remarked the Major's absence.

‘And where is Major Ames?' she asked. ‘I hope he is not ill? I thought he looked far from well at Mrs Evans' garden-party yesterday.'

Mrs Ames set her mind at rest with regard to the second point, and inflamed it on the first.

‘Oh, no!' she said. ‘Did you think he looked ill? How good of you to ask after him. But Lyndhurst is quite well. Mr Pettit, a little more chicken? After your sermon.'

Mr Pettit had a shrewd, ugly, delightful face, very lean, very capable. Humanly speaking, he probably abhorred Mrs Ames. Humanely speaking, he knew there was a great deal of good in her, and a quantity of debatable stuff. He smiled, showing thick white teeth.

‘Before and after my sermon,' he said. ‘Also before a children's service and a Bible class. I cannot help thinking that God forgot his poor clergymen when he defined the seventh day as one of rest.'

Mrs Ames hid a small portion of her little face with her little hand. She always said that Mr Pettit was not like a clergyman at all.

‘How naughty of you,' she said. ‘But I must correct you. The seventh day has become the first day now.'

Harry gave vent to a designedly audible sigh. The Omar Club were chiefly atheists, and he felt bound to uphold their principles.

‘That is the sort of thing that confuses me,' he said. ‘Mr Pettit says Sunday was called a day of rest, and my mother says that God meant what we call Monday, or Saturday. I have been behaving as if it was Tuesday or Wednesday.'

Mr Pettit gave him a kindly glance.

‘Quite right, my dear boy,' he said. ‘Spend your Tuesday or Wednesday properly and God won't mind whether it is Thursday or Friday.'

Harry pushed back his lank hair, and became Omar-ish.

‘Do you fast on Friday, may I ask?' he said.

Mrs Ames looked pained, and tried to think of something to say. She failed. But Mrs Altham thought without difficulty.

‘I suppose Major Ames is away, Mr Harry?' she said.

Even then, though her intentions might easily be supposed to be amiable, she was not allowed the privilege of being replied to, for Mr Pettit cheerfully answered Harry's question, without a shadow of embarrassment, just as if he did not mind what the Omar Khayyam Club thought.

‘Of course I do, my dear fellow,' he said, ‘because our Lord and dearest friend died that day. He allows us to watch and pray with Him an hour or two.'

Harry appeared indulgent.

‘Curious,' he said.

Mr Pettit looked at him for just the space of time anyone looks at the speaker, with cheerful cordiality of face, and then turned to his mother again.

‘I want you at church next Sunday,' he said, ‘with a fat purse, to be made thin. I am going to have an offertory to finance a children's treat. I want to send every child in the parish to the seaside for a day.'

Harry interrupted in the critical manner.

‘Why the seaside?' he asked.

Mr Pettit turned to him with unabated cordiality.

‘How right to ask!' he said. ‘Because the sea is His, and He made it! Also, they will build sandcastles, and pick up shells. You must come too, my dear Harry, and help us to give them a nice day.'

Harry felt that this was a Philistine here, who needed to be put in his place. He was not really a very rude youth, but one who felt it incumbent on him to oppose Christianity,
which he regarded as superstition. A bright idea came into his head.

‘But His hands prepared the dry land,' he said, ‘on the same supposition.'

‘Certainly; and as the dear mites have always seen the dry land,' said Mr Pettit, with the utmost good humour, ‘we want to show them that God thought of something they never thought of. And then there are the sandcastles.'

Harry was tired, and did not proceed to crush Mr Pettit with the atheistical arguments that were but commonplace to the Omar Khayyam Club. He was not worth argument: you could only really argue with the enlightened people who fundamentally agreed with you, and he was sure that Mr Pettit did not fulfil that requirement. So, indulgently, he turned to Mrs Altham.

‘I saw you at Mrs Evans' garden party yesterday,' he said. ‘I think she is the most wonderful person I ever met. She was dining here last night, and I took her into the garden - '

‘And showed her the roses,' said Mrs Altham, unable to restrain herself.

Harry became a parody of himself, though that might seem to be a feat of insuperable difficulty.

‘I supposed it would get about,' he said. ‘That is the worst of a little place like this. Whatever you do is instantly known.'

The slightly viscous remains of the strawberry ice were being handed, and Mr Pettit was talking to Mrs Ames and his sister from a pitiably Christian standpoint.

‘What did you hear?' asked Harry, in a low voice.

‘Merely that she and you went out into the garden after dinner, and that you picked roses for her - '

Harry pushed back his lank hair with his bony hand.

‘You have heard all,' he said. ‘There was nothing more than that. I did not see her home. Her carriage did not come: there was some mistake about it, I suppose. But it was my father who saw her home, not I.'

He laid down the spoon with which he had been consuming the viscous fluid.

‘If you hear that I saw her home, Mrs Altham,' he said, ‘tell them it is not true. From what you have already told me, I gather there is talk going on. There is no reason for such talk.'

He paused a moment, and then a line or two of the intensely Swinburnian effusion which he had written last night fermented in his head, making him infinitely more preposterous.

‘I assure you that at present there is no reason for such talk,' he said earnestly.

Now Mrs Altham, with her wide interest in all that concerned anybody else, might be expected to feel the intensest curiosity on such a topic, but somehow she felt very little, since she knew that behind the talk there was really very little topic, and the gallant misgivings of poor, ugly Harry seemed to her destitute of any real thrill. On the other hand, she wanted very much to know where Major Ames was, and being endowed with the persistence of the household cat, which you may turn out of a particular armchair a hundred times, without producing the slightest discouragement in its mind, she reverted to her own subject again.

‘I am sure there is no reason for such talk, Mr Harry,' she said, with strangely unwelcome conviction, ‘and I will be sure to contradict it if ever I hear it. I am so glad to hear Major Ames is not ill. I was afraid that his absence from lunch today might mean that he was.'

Now Harry, as a matter of fact, had no idea where his father was, since the telephone message had been received by Mrs Ames.

‘Father is quite well,' he said. ‘He was picking sweet peas half the morning. He picked a great bunch.'

Mrs Altham looked round: the table was decorated with the roses of the dinner party of the evening before.

‘Then where are the sweet peas?' she asked.

But Harry was not in the least interested in the question.

‘I don't know,' he said. ‘Perhaps they are in the next room. I showed Mrs Evans last night how the La France roses looked blue when dusk fell. She had never noticed it, though they turn as blue as her eyes.'

‘How curious!' said Mrs Altham. ‘But I didn't see the sweet peas in the next room. Surely if there had been a quantity of them I should have noticed them. Or perhaps they are in the drawing room.'

At this moment, Mrs Ames' voice was heard from the other end of the table.

‘Then shall we have our coffee outside?' she said. ‘Harry, if you will ring the bell - '

There was the pushing back of chairs, and Mrs Altham passed along the table to the French windows that opened on to the verandah.

‘I hear Major Ames has been picking the loveliest sweet peas all the morning,' she said to her hostess. ‘It would be such a pleasure to see them. I always admire Major Ames' sweet peas.'

Now this was unfortunate, for Mrs Altham desired information herself, but by her speech she had only succeeded in giving information to Mrs Ames, who guessed without the slightest difficulty where the sweet peas had gone, which she had not yet known had been picked. She was already
considerably annoyed with her husband for his unceremonious desertion of her luncheon party, and was aware that Mrs Altham would cause the fact to be as well known in Riseborough as if it had been inserted in the column of local intelligence in the county paper. But she felt she would sooner put it there herself than let Mrs Altham know where he and his sweet peas were. She had no greater objection (or if she had, she studiously concealed it from herself even) to his going to lunch in this improvising manner with Mrs Evans than if he had gone to lunch with anybody else; what she minded was his non-appearance at an institution so firmly established and so faithfully observed as the lunch that followed the dinner party. But at the moment her entire mind was set on thwarting Mrs Altham. She looked interested.

‘Indeed, has he been picking sweet peas?' she said. ‘I must scold him if it was only that which kept him away from church. I don't know what he has done with them. Very likely they are in his dressing room: he often likes to have flowers there. But as you admire his sweet peas so much, pray walk down the garden, and look at them. You will find them in their full beauty.'

This, of course, was not in the least what Mrs Altham wanted, since she did not care two straws for the rest of the sweet peas. But life was scarcely worth living unless she knew where those particular sweet peas were. As for their being in his dressing room, she felt that Mrs Ames must have a very poor opinion of her intellectual capacities, if she thought that an old wives' tale like that would satisfy it. In this she was partly right: Mrs Ames had indeed no opinion at all of her mind; on the other hand, she did not for a moment suppose that this suggestion about the dressing room would content that feeble organ. It was not designed to: the object
was to stir it to a wilder and still unsatisfied curiosity. It perfectly succeeded, and from by-ways Mrs Altham emerged full speed, like a motorcar, into the high road of direct question.

‘I am sure they are lovely,' she said. ‘And where is Major Ames lunching?'

Mrs Ames raised the pieces of her face where there might have been eyebrows in other days. She told one of the truths that Bismarck loved.

‘He did not tell me before he went out,' she said. ‘Perhaps Harry knows. Harry, where is your father lunching?'

Now this was ludicrous. As if it was possible that any wife in Riseborough did not know where her husband was lunching! Harry apparently did not know either, and Mrs Ames, tasting the joys of the bull-baiter, goaded Mrs Altham further by pointedly asking Parker, when she brought the coffee, if she knew where the Major was lunching. Of course Parker did not, and so Parker was told to cut Mrs Altham a nice bunch of sweet peas to carry away with her.

This pleasant duty of thwarting undue curiosity being performed, Mrs Ames turned to Mr Pettit, though she had not quite done with Mrs Altham yet. For she had heard on the best authority that Mrs Altham occasionally indulged in the disgusting and unfeminine habit of cigarette smoking. Mrs Brooks had several times seen her walking about her garden with a cigarette, and she had told Mrs Taverner, who had told Mrs Ames. The evidence was overwhelming.