"And Mr. Harte I feel sure you have met before, Miss Birtley," said Mrs. Haddington.
"How do you do? May I mix you a drink?" Timothy said, shaking hands with his unofficially betrothed, and moving towards the tray laid upon a side-table.
Beulah refused it, and Mrs. Haddington, who saw no reason why she should provide a member of her staff with cocktails as well as an expensive meal, said lightly: "I'm afraid you won't be able to persuade her, Mr. Harte. Miss Birtley doesn't drink."
"What an exemplary character!" remarked Seaton-Carew, amusement in his sleepy eyes.
"Dinner is served, madam," announced Thrimby, from the doorway.
A buffet had already been set up in the back half of the dining-room, and the mahogany table, much reduced in length, had been thrust wholly into the front half. Mrs. Haddington, with a graceful apology for what she described as a picnic-meal, requested Lord Guisborough to take the head of the board, seated herself at the foot, with Timothy on her right, and Seaton-Carew on her left, and directed her daughter to the vacant chair between his lordship and Mr. Harte. This left the place beside Seaton-Carew to Beulah, and since Lord Guisborough continued to address himself exclusively to Cynthia, and Timothy, handicapped by an upbringing, politely set himself to entertain his hostess, she was obliged to maintain an unwilling exchange of small talk with him.
Of this he had an easy and inexhaustible flow. He was a middle-aged man who had wonderfully preserved his figure, and his air of youth. He was handsome, in a slightly florid style, and possessed a marked amount of rather animal magnetism. His manner, which was a nice blend of indulgent amusement and affectionate flattery, strongly attracted a certain type of woman, and various young men whose careers had not hitherto earned them any very distinguishing attention either from their contemporaries or from their seniors. He lived in a service-flat in Jermyn Street, and was apparently a gentleman of leisure. His position in Mrs. Haddington's house was undefined, but it was generally supposed that the past veiled a greater degree of intimacy than now prevailed between them. As Miss Mapperley so shrewdly phrased it: "Anyone knows what to think when someone asks a gentleman to go and fetch her something out of her bedroom." Miss Mapperley added with relish: "But if My Lady thinks he's still got a fancy for her she'll very soon smile on the other side of her face, for it's her precious Cynthia he's after, as anybody could see with half an eye. Disgusting, I call it!"
Lord Guisborough, who, while rapidly disposing of half a dozen oysters, was angrily condemning a state of Capitalism which had neglected to make oysters the staple diet of the Masses, had long since decided that Mr. Seaton-Carew was a parasite who, in a more golden age, would have perished under a guillotine, and paid little heed to him, beyond casting one or two fiery glances in his direction, and contradicting three of his statements. These in no way discomposed Dan Seaton-Carew, but seemed rather to amuse him. He had very little interest in impoverished peers; and as it was common knowledge that the late Lord Guisborough, upon the death of his last surviving son, had divided all his unentailed property between his daughter and his more favoured nephew Kenelm, he had never made any attempt to captivate the heir. Lord Guisborough was a bony young man, with a cavernous eye and hollow cheeks, who had been employed for some years on the staff of a firm of left-wing publishers. He was not without ability, but he lacked ballast. An older and a shrewder colleague had once described him as being over-engined for his beam. He was capable of bearing an intelligent part in discussion for just as long as the subject had no bearing on the Kremlin, but the smallest reference to Soviet Russia acted upon his brain like a powerful drug, slaying in an instant his critical faculty, and inspiring him with a fanaticism that dismissed as Capitalist Propaganda all the more displeasing activities of an Asiatic race which from time to time came to light. He had taken no active part in the War, at first because he had conscientiously objected to it; and later, when the enforced participation of Russia in the hostilities had altered his outlook, because he was engaged on Educational Work of paramount importance. This consisted of a series of lectures, which he was perfectly well qualified to deliver, having completed his education at the London School of Economics.
In general, he was by no means popular with the more ruthless sex, most of whom, in defiance of all attempts to enlighten their minds, continued to let instinct govern their impulses, and maintained an obstinate preference for stalwart males who showed every sign of being able and willing to defend their own. Some of these ladies who had spent the war-years doing rescue work in blitzed areas, could scarcely look at him without wishing to hand him a white feather. Mr. Harte, who possessed an elegant leather case containing a row of miniature medals which made his mother's heart swell with pride, was more tolerant. He said that Lord Guisborough's war-time activities were not due to common funk, but to a form of beany intellectualism, and bore him not the slightest illwill for his failure to share in the heat and burden of the day. But he did think that his remarks on the subject of oysters lacked civility to his hostess, and were deserving of punishment, so he remarked, in what he knew his victim would consider an Oxford drawl, that it was extremely doubtful that the masses would appreciate the addition of these bivalves to their diet.
"When oysters were more plentiful," he said affably, "it was one of the articles of indenture for apprentices that they should not be fed on them more than a strictly limited number of times in the week. Which doesn't lead one to suppose that they were very popular, does it?"
Since. his lordship was unable to refute this piece of recondite knowledge, he could think of no adequate retort, and therefore said nothing. So, having successfully put him in his place, Timothy continued in an easy, conversational tone: "Rather odd, the way different foods go in and out of fashion. My mother tells me that when she was a girl, for instance, scallops, which we think very well of, were considered to be too cheap and common to figure on any menu."
"I had the pleasure of meeting your mother at dear Mary Petersfield's party," said Mrs. Haddington. "I should so much like to know her better: what an interesting woman she is! How much I enjoyed her book describing her adventures on the Congo border!"
Timothy, who shared with his half-brother, Mr. James Kane, an ineradicable conviction that the Second World War had been inaugurated by providence to put an end to their beloved but very trying parent's passion for exploring remote quarters of the globe, bowed, and murmured one of the conventional acknowledgements with which the more astute relatives of an author take care to equip themselves.
"Is Norma Harte your mother?" demanded Guisborough abruptly. "I can't say I've read any of her books, but I've heard of her. She knows Equatorial Africa pretty well, doesn't she? What are her views on the native question? Or hasn't she any?"
Timothy had not read his mother's books either, but he was not going to put up with this sort of thing. He replied with deceptive readiness: "Oh, rather! I believe she's very sound. In fact, if you're thinking of a safari you couldn't do better than to consult her. She'll tell you which tribes make the best carriers, and what you want to look out for in your headman, and what are the main pitfalls: Christianised boys, boys who try to talk English to you, and sit down in your chairs - that sort of thing!"
"That," said Guisborough, reddening angrily, "is not what I meant! I was referring - though possibly this might not interest Lady Harte! - to -"
"Oh, do shut up about Africa and natives!" interrupted Cynthia. "I do think all that sort of thing is too boring!"
Mrs. Haddington, although she could not but be glad of the intervention, uttered a reproving exclamation, looking rather anxiously at her daughter as she did so. Cynthia was in one of her petulant moods, rejecting most of the dishes offered to her, fidgeting with the cutlery, and taking no pains at all to be polite to her mother's guests.