"It's all right," said Tarvrille to the table generally.Go on!
It's not a general conflagration, and the fire brigade won't be five minutes.Don't see that it's our affair.The stuff's insured.
They say old Lady Paskershortly was dreadful.Like a harpy.The Dowager Empress had shown her some little things of hers.Pet things--hidden away.Susan went straight for them--used to take an umbrella for the silks.Born shoplifter."It was evident he didn't want his dinner spoilt, and we played up loyally.
"This is recorded history," said Wilkins,--" practically.It makes one wonder about unrecorded history.In India, for example."But nobody touched that.
"Thompson," said Tarvrille to the imperturbable butler, and indicating the table generally, "champagne.Champagne.Keep it going.""M'lord," and Thompson marshalled his assistants.
Some man I didn't know began to remember things about Mandalay.
"It's queer," he said, "how people break out at times;" and told his story of an army doctor, brave, public-spirited, and, as it happened, deeply religious, who was caught one evening by the excitement of plundering--and stole and hid, twisted the wrist of a boy until it broke, and was afterwards overcome by wild remorse.
I watched Evesham listening intently."Strange," he said, "very strange.We are such stuff as thieves are made of.And in China, too, they murdered people--for the sake of murdering.Apart, so to speak, from mercenary considerations.I'm afraid there's no doubt of it in certain cases.No doubt at all.Young soldiers fresh from German high schools and English homes!""Did OUR people?" asked some patriot.
"Not so much.But I'm afraid there were cases....Some of the Indian troops were pretty bad."Gane picked up the tale with confirmations.
It is all printed in the vividest way as a picture upon my memory, so that were I a painter I think I could give the deep rich browns and warm greys beyond the brightly lit table, the various distinguished faces, strongly illuminated, interested and keen, above the black and white of evening dress, the alert menservants with their heavier, clean-shaved faces indistinctly seen in the dimness behind.Then this was coloured emotionally for me by my aching sense of loss and sacrifice, and by the chance trend of our talk to the breaches and unrealities of the civilised scheme.We seemed a little transitory circle of light in a universe of darkness and violence; an effect to which the diminishing smell of burning rubber, the trampling of feet overhead, the swish of water, added enormously.Everybody--unless, perhaps, it was Evesham--drank rather carelessly because of the suppressed excitement of our situation, and talked the louder and more freely.
"But what a flimsy thing our civilisation is!" said Evesham; "a mere thin net of habits and associations!""I suppose those men came back," said Wilkins.
"Lady Paskershortly did!" chuckled Evesham.
"How do they fit it in with the rest of their lives?" Wilkins speculated."I suppose there's Pekin-stained police officers, Pekin-stained J.P.'s--trying petty pilferers in the severest manner."...
Then for a time things became preposterous.There was a sudden cascade of water by the fireplace, and then absurdly the ceiling began to rain upon us, first at this point and then that."My new suit!" cried some one."Perrrrrr-up pe-rr"--a new vertical line of blackened water would establish itself and form a spreading pool upon the gleaming cloth.The men nearest would arrange catchment areas of plates and flower bowls."Draw up!" said Tarvrille, "draw up.That's the bad end of the table!" He turned to the imperturbable butler."Take round bath towels," he said; and presently the men behind us were offering--with inflexible dignity--"Port wine, Sir.Bath towel, Sir!" Waulsort, with streaks of blackened water on his forehead, was suddenly reminded of a wet year when he had followed the French army manoeuvres.An animated dispute sprang up between him and Neal about the relative efficiency of the new French and German field guns.Wrassleton joined in and a little drunken shrivelled Oxford don of some sort with a black-splashed shirt front who presently silenced them all by the immensity and particularity of his knowledge of field artillery.
Then the talk drifted to Sedan and the effect of dead horses upon drinking-water, which brought Wrassleton and Weston Massinghay into a dispute of great vigour and emphasis."The trouble in South Africa," said Weston Massinghay, "wasn't that we didn't boil our water.It was that we didn't boil our men.The Boers drank the same stuff we did.THEY didn't get dysentery."That argument went on for some time.I was attacked across the table by a man named Burshort about my Endowment of Motherhood schemes, but in the gaps of that debate I could still hear Weston Massinghay at intervals repeat in a rather thickened voice: "THEYdidn't get dysentery."
I think Evesham went early.The rest of us clustered more and more closely towards the drier end of the room, the table was pushed along, and the area beneath the extinguished conflagration abandoned to a tinkling, splashing company of pots and pans and bowls and baths.Everybody was now disposed to be hilarious and noisy, to say startling and aggressive things; we must have sounded a queer clamour to a listener in the next room.The devil inspired them to begin baiting me."Ours isn't the Tory party any more," said Burshort."Remington has made it the Obstetric Party.""That's good!" said Weston Massinghay, with all his teeth gleaming;"I shall use that against you in the House!""I shall denounce you for abusing private confidences if you do,"said Tarvrille.
"Remington wants us to give up launching Dreadnoughts and launch babies instead," Burshort urged."For the price of one Dreadnought--"The little shrivelled don who had been omniscient about guns joined in the baiting, and displayed himself a venomous creature.
