第86章 THE FIRST(2)

It is curious to recall how Britten helped shatter that obvious, lucidly explicable presentation of myself upon which I had embarked with Margaret.He returned to revive a memory of adolescent dreams and a habit of adolescent frankness; he reached through my shallow frontage as no one else seemed capable of doing, and dragged that back-self into relation with it.

I remember very distinctly a dinner and a subsequent walk with him which presents itself now as altogether typical of the quality of his influence.

I had come upon him one day while lunching with Somers and Sutton at the Playwrights' Club, and had asked him to dinner on the spur of the moment.He was oddly the same curly-headed, red-faced ventriloquist, and oddly different, rather seedy as well as untidy, and at first a little inclined to make comparisons with my sleek successfulness.But that disposition presently evaporated, and his talk was good and fresh and provocative.And something that had long been straining at its checks in my mind flapped over, and he and I found ourselves of one accord.

Altiora wasn't at this dinner.When she came matters were apt to become confusedly strenuous.There was always a slight and ineffectual struggle at the end on the part of Margaret to anticipate Altiora's overpowering tendency to a rally and the establishment of some entirely unjustifiable conclusion by a COUP-DE-MAIN.When, however, Altiora was absent, the quieter influence of the Cramptons prevailed; temperance and information for its own sake prevailed excessively over dinner and the play of thought....

Good Lord! what bores the Cramptons were! I wonder I endured them as I did.They had all of them the trick of lying in wait conversationally; they had no sense of the self-exposures, the gallant experiments in statement that are necessary for good conversation.They would watch one talking with an expression exactly like peeping through bushes.Then they would, as it were, dash out, dissent succinctly, contradict some secondary fact, and back to cover.They gave one twilight nerves.Their wives were easier but still difficult at a stretch; they talked a good deal about children and servants, but with an air caught from Altiora of making observations upon sociological types.Lewis gossiped about the House in an entirely finite manner.He never raised a discussion; nobody ever raised a discussion.He would ask what we thought of Evesham's question that afternoon, and Edward would say it was good, and Mrs.Willie, who had been behind the grille, would think it was very good, and then Willie, parting the branches, would say rather conclusively that he didn't think it was very much good, and I would deny hearing the question in order to evade a profitless statement of views in that vacuum, and then we would cast about in our minds for some other topic of equal interest....

On this occasion Altiora was absent, and to qualify our Young Liberal bleakness we had Mrs.Millingham, with her white hair and her fresh mind and complexion, and Esmeer.Willie Crampton was with us, but not his wife, who was having her third baby on principle;his brother Edward was present, and the Lewises, and of course the Bunting Harblows.There was also some other lady.I remember her as pale blue, but for the life of me I cannot remember her name.

Quite early there was a little breeze between Edward Crampton and Esmeer, who had ventured an opinion about the partition of Poland.

Edward was at work then upon the seventh volume of his monumental Life of Kosciusko, and a little impatient with views perhaps not altogether false but betraying a lamentable ignorance of accessible literature.At any rate, his correction of Esmeer was magisterial.

After that there was a distinct and not altogether delightful pause, and then some one, it may have been the pale-blue lady, asked Mrs.

Lewis whether her aunt Lady Carmixter had returned from her rest-and-sun-cure in Italy.That led to a rather anxiously sustained talk about regimen, and Willie told us how he had profited by the no-breakfast system.It had increased his power of work enormously.

He could get through ten hours a day now without inconvenience.

"What do you do?" said Esmeer abruptly.

"Oh! no end of work.There's all the estate and looking after things.""But publicly?"

"I asked three questions yesterday.And for one of them I had to consult nine books!"We were drifting, I could see, towards Doctor Haig's system of dietary, and whether the exclusion or inclusion of fish and chicken were most conducive to high efficiency, when Britten, who had refused lemonade and claret and demanded Burgundy, broke out, and was discovered to be demanding in his throat just what we Young Liberals thought we were up to?

"I want," said Britten, repeating his challenge a little louder, "to hear just exactly what you think you are doing in Parliament?"Lewis laughed nervously, and thought we were "Seeking the Good of the Community.""HOW?"

"Beneficient Legislation," said Lewis.

"Beneficient in what direction?" insisted Britten."I want to know where you think you are going.""Amelioration of Social Conditions," said Lewis.

"That's only a phrase!"

"You wouldn't have me sketch bills at dinner?""I'd like you to indicate directions," said Britten, and waited.

"Upward and On," said Lewis with conscious neatness, and turned to ask Mrs.Bunting Harblow about her little boy's French.

For a time talk frothed over Britten's head, but the natural mischief in Mrs.Millingham had been stirred, and she was presently echoing his demand in lisping, quasi-confidential undertones."What ARE we Liberals doing?" Then Esmeer fell in with the revolutionaries.