<h2>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">The</span> farewell dinner which Francesca
had hurriedly organised in honour of her son’s departure
threatened from the outset to be a doubtfully successful
function. In the first place, as he observed privately,
there was very little of Comus and a good deal of farewell in
it. His own particular friends were unrepresented.
Courtenay Youghal was out of the question; and though Francesca
would have stretched a point and welcomed some of his other male
associates of whom she scarcely approved, he himself had been
opposed to including any of them in the invitations. On the
other hand, as Henry Greech had provided Comus with this job that
he was going out to, and was, moreover, finding part of the money
for the necessary outfit, Francesca had felt it her duty to ask
him and his wife to the dinner; the obtuseness that seems to
cling to some people like a garment throughout their life had
caused Mr. Greech to accept the invitation. When Comus
heard of the circumstance he laughed long and boisterously; his
spirits, Francesca noted, seemed to be rising fast as the hour
for departure drew near.</p>
<p>The other guests included Serena Golackly and Lady Veula, the
latter having been asked on the inspiration of the moment at the
theatrical first-night. In the height of the Season it was
not easy to get together a goodly selection of guests at short
notice, and Francesca had gladly fallen in with Serena’s
suggestion of bringing with her Stephen Thorle, who was alleged,
in loose feminine phrasing, to “know all about”
tropical Africa. His travels and experiences in those
regions probably did not cover much ground or stretch over any
great length of time, but he was one of those individuals who can
describe a continent on the strength of a few days’ stay in
a coast town as intimately and dogmatically as a paleontologist
will reconstruct an extinct mammal from the evidence of a stray
shin bone. He had the loud penetrating voice and the
prominent penetrating eyes of a man who can do no listening in
the ordinary way and whose eyes have to perform the function of
listening for him. His vanity did not necessarily make him
unbearable, unless one had to spend much time in his society, and
his need for a wide field of audience and admiration was
mercifully calculated to spread his operations over a
considerable human area. Moreover, his craving for
attentive listeners forced him to interest himself in a wonderful
variety of subjects on which he was able to discourse fluently
and with a certain semblance of special knowledge. Politics
he avoided; the ground was too well known, and there was a
definite no to every definite yes that could be put
forward. Moreover, argument was not congenial to his
disposition, which preferred an unchallenged flow of dissertation
modified by occasional helpful questions which formed the
starting point for new offshoots of word-spinning. The
promotion of cottage industries, the prevention of juvenile
street trading, the extension of the Borstal prison system, the
furtherance of vague talkative religious movements the fostering
of inter-racial <i>ententes</i>, all found in him a tireless
exponent, a fluent and entertaining, though perhaps not very
convincing, advocate. With the real motive power behind
these various causes he was not very closely identified; to the
spade-workers who carried on the actual labours of each
particular movement he bore the relation of a trowel-worker,
delving superficially at the surface, but able to devote a
proportionately far greater amount of time to the advertisement
of his progress and achievements. Such was Stephen Thorle,
a governess in the nursery of Chelsea-bred religions, a skilled
window-dresser in the emporium of his own personality, and
needless to say, evanescently popular amid a wide but shifting
circle of acquaintances. He improved on the record of a
socially much-travelled individual whose experience has become
classical, and went to most of the best houses—twice.</p>
<p>His inclusion as a guest at this particular dinner-party was
not a very happy inspiration. He was inclined to patronise
Comus, as well as the African continent, and on even slighter
acquaintance. With the exception of Henry Greech, whose
feelings towards his nephew had been soured by many years of
overt antagonism, there was an uncomfortable feeling among those
present that the topic of the black-sheep export trade, as Comus
would have himself expressed it, was being given undue prominence
in what should have been a festive farewell banquet. And
Comus, in whose honour the feast was given, did not contribute
much towards its success; though his spirits seemed strung up to
a high pitch his merriment was more the merriment of a cynical
and amused onlooker than of one who responds to the gaiety of his
companions. Sometimes he laughed quietly to himself at some
chance remark of a scarcely mirth-provoking nature, and Lady
Veula, watching him narrowly, came to the conclusion that an
element of fear was blended with his seemingly buoyant
spirits. Once or twice he caught her eye across the table,
and a certain sympathy seemed to grow up between them, as though
they were both consciously watching some lugubrious comedy that
was being played out before them.</p>
<p>An untoward little incident had marked the commencement of the
meal. A small still-life picture that hung over the
sideboard had snapped its cord and slid down with an alarming
clatter on to the crowded board beneath it. The picture
itself was scarcely damaged, but its fall had been accompanied by
a tinkle of broken glass, and it was found that a liqueur glass,
one out of a set of seven that would be impossible to match, had
been shivered into fragments. Francesca’s almost
motherly love for her possessions made her peculiarly sensible to
a feeling of annoyance and depression at the accident, but she
turned politely to listen to Mrs. Greech’s account of a
misfortune in which four soup-plates were involved. Mrs.
Henry was not a brilliant conversationalist, and her flank was
speedily turned by Stephen Thorle, who recounted a slum
experience in which two entire families did all their feeding out
of one damaged soup-plate.</p>
<p>“The gratitude of those poor creatures when I presented
them with a set of table crockery apiece, the tears in their eyes
and in their voices when they thanked me, would be impossible to
describe.”</p>
<p>“Thank you all the same for describing it,” said
Comus.</p>
<p>The listening eyes went swiftly round the table to gather
evidence as to how this rather disconcerting remark had been
received, but Thorle’s voice continued uninterruptedly to
retail stories of East-end gratitude, never failing to mention
the particular deeds of disinterested charity on his part which
had evoked and justified the gratitude. Mrs. Greech had to
suppress the interesting sequel to her broken-crockery narrative,
to wit, how she subsequently matched the shattered soup-plates at
Harrod’s. Like an imported plant species that
sometimes flourishes exceedingly, and makes itself at home to the
dwarfing and overshadowing of all native species, Thorle
dominated the dinner-party and thrust its original purport
somewhat into the background. Serena began to look
helplessly apologetic. It was altogether rather a relief
when the filling of champagne glasses gave Francesca an excuse
for bringing matters back to their intended footing.</p>
<p>“We must all drink a health,” she said;
“Comus, my own dear boy, a safe and happy voyage to you,
much prosperity in the life you are going out to, and in due time
a safe and happy return—”</p>
<p>Her hand gave an involuntary jerk in the act of raising the
glass, and the wine went streaming across the tablecloth in a
froth of yellow bubbles. It certainly was not turning out a
comfortable or auspicious dinner party.</p>
<p>“My dear mother,” cried Comus, “you must
have been drinking healths all the afternoon to make your hand so
unsteady.”</p>
<p>He laughed gaily and with apparent carelessness, but again
Lady Veula caught the frightened note in his laughter. Mrs.
Henry, with practical sympathy, was telling Francesca two good
ways for getting wine stains out of tablecloths. The
smaller economies of life were an unnecessary branch of learning
for Mrs. Greech, but she studied them as carefully and
conscientiously as a stay-at-home plain-dwelling English child
commits to memory the measurements and altitudes of the
world’s principal mountain peaks. Some women of her
temperament and mentality know by heart the favourite colours,
flowers and hymn-tunes of all the members of the Royal Family;
Mrs. Greech would possibly have failed in an examination of that
nature, but she knew what to do with carrots that have been
over-long in storage.</p>
<p>Francesca did not renew her speech-making; a chill seemed to
have fallen over all efforts at festivity, and she contented
herself with refilling her glass and simply drinking to her
boy’s good health. The others followed her example,
and Comus drained his glass with a brief “thank you all
very much.” The sense of constraint which hung over
the company was not, however, marked by any uncomfortable pause
in the conversation. Henry Greech was a fluent thinker, of
the kind that prefer to do their thinking aloud; the silence that
descended on him as a mantle in the House of Commons was an
official livery of which he divested himself as thoroughly as
possible in private life. He did not propose to sit through
dinner as a mere listener to Mr. Thorle’s personal
narrative of philanthropic movements and experiences, and took
the first opportunity of launching himself into a flow of
satirical observations on current political affairs. Lady
Veula was inured to this sort of thing in her own home circle,
and sat listening with the stoical indifference with which an
Esquimau might accept the occurrence of one snowstorm the more,
in the course of an Arctic winter. Serena Golackly felt a
certain relief at the fact that her imported guest was not, after
all, monopolising the conversation. But the latter was too
determined a personality to allow himself to be thrust aside for
many minutes by the talkative M.P. Henry Greech paused for
an instant to chuckle at one of his own shafts of satire, and
immediately Thorle’s penetrating voice swept across the
table.</p>
<p>“Oh, you politicians!” he exclaimed, with pleasant
superiority; “you are always fighting about how things
should be done, and the consequence is you are never able to do
anything. Would you like me to tell you what a Unitarian
horsedealer said to me at Brindisi about politicians?”</p>
<p>A Unitarian horsedealer at Brindisi had all the allurement of
the unexpected. Henry Greech’s witticisms at the
expense of the Front Opposition bench were destined to remain as
unfinished as his wife’s history of the broken
soup-plates. Thorle was primed with an ample succession of
stories and themes, chiefly concerning poverty, thriftlessness,
reclamation, reformed characters, and so forth, which carried him
in an almost uninterrupted sequence through the remainder of the
dinner.</p>
<p>“What I want to do is to make people think,” he
said, turning his prominent eyes on to his hostess;
“it’s so hard to make people think.”</p>
<p>“At any rate you give them the opportunity,” said
Comus, cryptically.</p>
<p>As the ladies rose to leave the table Comus crossed over to
pick up one of Lady Veula’s gloves that had fallen to the
floor.</p>
<p>“I did not know you kept a dog,” said Lady
Veula.</p>
<p>“We don’t,” said Comus, “there
isn’t one in the house.”</p>
<p>“I could have sworn I saw one follow you across the hall
this evening,” she said.</p>
<p>“A small black dog, something like a schipperke?”
asked Comus in a low voice.</p>
<p>“Yes, that was it.”</p>
<p>“I saw it myself to-night; it ran from behind my chair
just as I was sitting down. Don’t say anything to the
others about it; it would frighten my mother.”</p>
<p>“Have you ever seen it before?” Lady Veula asked
quickly.</p>
<p>“Once, when I was six years old. It followed my
father downstairs.”</p>
<p>Lady Veula said nothing. She knew that Comus had lost
his father at the age of six.</p>
<p>In the drawing-room Serena made nervous excuses for her
talkative friend.</p>
<p>“Really, rather an interesting man, you know, and up to
the eyes in all sorts of movements. Just the sort of person
to turn loose at a drawing-room meeting, or to send down to a
mission-hall in some unheard-of neighbourhood. Given a
sounding-board and a harmonium, and a titled woman of some sort
in the chair, and he’ll be perfectly happy; I must say I
hadn’t realised how overpowering he might be at a small
dinner-party.”</p>
<p>“I should say he was a very good man,” said Mrs.
Greech; she had forgiven the mutilation of her soup-plate
story.</p>
<p>The party broke up early as most of the guests had other
engagements to keep. With a belated recognition of the
farewell nature of the occasion they made pleasant little
good-bye remarks to Comus, with the usual predictions of
prosperity and anticipations of an ultimate auspicious
return. Even Henry Greech sank his personal dislike of the
boy for the moment, and made hearty jocular allusions to a
home-coming, which, in the elder man’s eyes, seemed
possibly pleasantly remote. Lady Veula alone made no
reference to the future; she simply said, “Good-bye,
Comus,” but her voice was the kindest of all and he
responded with a look of gratitude. The weariness in her
eyes was more marked than ever as she lay back against the
cushions of her carriage.</p>
<p>“What a tragedy life is,” she said, aloud to
herself.</p>
<p>Serena and Stephen Thorle were the last to leave, and
Francesca stood alone for a moment at the head of the stairway
watching Comus laughing and chatting as he escorted the departing
guests to the door. The ice-wall was melting under the
influence of coming separation, and never had he looked more
adorably handsome in her eyes, never had his merry laugh and
mischief-loving gaiety seemed more infectious than on this night
of his farewell banquet. She was glad enough that he was
going away from a life of idleness and extravagance and
temptation, but she began to suspect that she would miss, for a
little while at any rate, the high-spirited boy who could be so
attractive in his better moods. Her impulse, after the
guests had gone, was to call him to her and hold him once more in
her arms, and repeat her wishes for his happiness and good-luck
in the land he was going to, and her promise of his welcome back,
some not too distant day, to the land he was leaving. She
wanted to forget, and to make him forget, the months of irritable
jangling and sharp discussions, the months of cold aloofness and
indifference and to remember only that he was her own dear Comus
as in the days of yore, before he had grown from an unmanageable
pickle into a weariful problem. But she feared lest she
should break down, and she did not wish to cloud his
light-hearted gaiety on the very eve of his departure. She
watched him for a moment as he stood in the hall, settling his
tie before a mirror, and then went quietly back to her
drawing-room. It had not been a very successful dinner
party, and the general effect it had left on her was one of
depression.</p>
<p>Comus, with a lively musical-comedy air on his lips, and a
look of wretchedness in his eyes, went out to visit the haunts
that he was leaving so soon.</p>
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