“By George, I wish I had seen you,” interjected the infatuated Nutty.
The Good Sport said she was crazy about London.
“I seem to remember,” went on Miss Leonard, “meeting you out at supper. Do you know a man named Delaney in the Coldstream Guards?”
Bill would have liked to deny all knowledge of Delaney, though the latter was one of his best friends, but his natural honesty prevented him.
“I’m sure I met you at a supper he gave at Oddy’s one Friday night. We all went on to Covent Garden. Don’t you remember?”
“Talking of supper,” broke in Nutty, earning Bill’s hearty gratitude thereby, “where’s the headwaiter? I want to find my table.”
He surveyed the restaurant with a melancholy eye.
“Everything changed!” He spoke sadly, as Ulysses might have done when his boat put in at Ithaca. “Every darned thing different since I was here last. New waiters, headwaiter I never saw before in my life, different-colored carpet.”
“Cheer up, Nutty, old thing,” said Miss Leonard. “Cut the Rip van Winkle stuff and find our table. You’ll feel better when you’ve had something to eat. I hope you had the sense to slip the headwaiter something solid, or there won’t be any table. Funny how these joints go up and down in New York. A year ago the whole management would turn out and kiss you if you looked like spending a couple of dollars here. Now it costs the earth to get in at all.”
“Why’s that?” asked Nutty.
“Lady Pauline Wetherby, of course. Didn’t you know this was where she danced?”
“Never heard of her,” said Nutty, in a sort of ecstasy of wistful gloom. “That will show you how long I’ve been away. Who is she?”
Miss Leonard invoked the name of Mike.
“Don’t you ever get the papers in your village, Nutty?”
“I never read the papers. I don’t suppose I’ve read a paper for years. I can’t stand ’em. Who is Lady Pauline Wetherby?”
“She does Greek dances—at least I suppose it’s Greek. All these undress stunts are nowadays, unless they’re Russian. She’s an English peeress.”
Miss Leonard’s friend said she was crazy about these picturesque old English families, and they went in to supper.
Looking back on the evening later and reviewing its leading features, Lord Dawlish came to the conclusion that he never completely recovered from the first shock of the Good Sport. He was conscious all the time of a dreamlike feeling, as if he were watching himself from somewhere outside himself. From some conning tower in this fourth dimension he perceived himself eating broiled lobster and drinking champagne and heard himself bearing an adequate part in the conversation; but his movements were largely automatic. Everything in the place conspired to stupefy his faculties. Accustomed to the quieter atmosphere of London restaurants, he was stunned by the din. It was before nightclubs spread over London like an epidemic, and he had not learned the lesson which the Londoner today knows so well, that there is practically no limit to the noise which half a dozen earnest Senegambians can produce if left alone with a few banjos and a drum or two. He was aware dimly of conversation.
“… It’s the absolute truth. I hunted up and down Broadway for two days and didn’t find a soul I knew. And then I thought of a pal of mine named Gates. And he was gone too. But luckily Chalmers …”
“… I got him in a corner and I said to him: ‘If you’re a gentleman, Mr. Ritchall, you’ll see that justice is done. You know I was promised I could be in this number, and—’ He’s as deaf as a post, you know, but fortunately I’ve a good, strong voice …”
“… Who’s that girl over there? I’ve met her somewhere.”
“… I feel a hundred. I feel as if I had been away a million years …”
“… So the end of it was that next night, when the number came on, I walked straight up and …”
“… Only her hair was a different color then.”
“Waiter!”
“… He had the nerve to stand there and pull that old-time stuff on me!”
“By Jove! Really?”
“Waiter!”
“… She used to be married to a man named Fothergill or Groves or something, and she got a divorce because …”
“Yes, sir?”
“Bring another …”
“… I simply said to him quite quietly: ‘Mr. Zizzbaum, as heaven is my witness, they were at least three sizes too small, so how could I be expected …’ ”
Pop!
Time passed. It seemed to Lord Dawlish, watching from without, that things were livening up. He seemed to perceive a quickening of the tempo of the revels, an added abandon. Nutty was getting quite bright. He had the air of one who recalls the good old days, of one who in familiar scenes reenacts the joys of his vanished youth. The chastened melancholy induced by many months of carrying pails of water, of scrubbing floors with a mop and of jumping like a firecracker to avoid excited bees, had been purged from him by the lights and the music and the wine. He was telling a long anecdote, laughing at it, throwing a crust of bread at an adjacent waiter, and refilling his glass at the same time. It is not easy to do all these things simultaneously, and the fact that Nutty did them with notable success was proof that he was picking up.
Miss Daisy Leonard was still demure, but as she had just slipped a piece of ice down the back of Nutty’s neck, one may assume that she was feeling at her ease, and had overcome any diffidence or shyness which might have interfered with her complete enjoyment of the festivities. As for the Good Sport, she was larger, blonder and more exuberant than ever, and she was addressing someone as “Bill.”
Perhaps the most remarkable phenomenon of the evening, as it advanced, was the change it wrought in Lord Dawlish’s attitude toward this same Good Sport. He was not conscious of the beginning of the change; he awoke to the realization of it suddenly. At the beginning of
