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 cooks 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 some one 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 sympathizes with Herod.