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_ The drawback is, one never really KNOWS one's hosts and
hostesses. One gets to know their fox-terriers and their
chrysanthemums, and whether the story about the go-cart can
be turned loose in the drawing-room, or must be told
privately to each member of the party, for fear of shocking
public opinion; but one's host and hostess are a sort of
human hinterland that one never has the time to explore.
There was a fellow I stayed with once in Warwickshire who
farmed his own land, but was otherwise quite steady. Should
never have suspected him of having a soul, yet not very long
afterwards he eloped with a lion-tamer's widow and set up as
a golf-instructor somewhere on the Persian Gulf; dreadfully
immoral, of course, because he was only an indifferent
player, but still, it showed imagination. His wife was
really to be pitied, because he had been the only person in
the house who understood how to manage the cook's temper, and
now she has to put "D.V." on her dinner invitations. Still,
that's better than a domestic scandal; a woman who leaves her
cook never wholly recovers her position in Society.
I suppose the same thing holds good with the hosts; they
seldom have more than a superficial acquaintance with their
guests, and so often just when they do get to know you a bit
better, they leave off knowing you altogether. There was
RATHER a breath of winter in the air when I left those
Dorset-shire people. You see, they had asked me down to
shoot, and I'm not particularly immense at that sort of
thing. There's such a deadly sameness about partridges; when
you've missed one, you've missed the lot--at least, that's
been my experience. And they tried to rag me in the smoking-
room about not being able to hit a bird at five yards, a sort
of bovine ragging that suggested cows buzzing round a gadfly
and thinking they were teasing it. So I got up the next
morning at early dawn--I know it was dawn, because there were
lark-noises in the sky, and the grass looked as if it had
been left out all night--and hunted up the most conspicuous
thing in the bird line that I could find, and measured the
distance, as nearly as it would let me, and shot away all I
knew. They said afterwards that it was a tame bird; that's
simply SILLY, because it was awfully wild at the first few
shots. Afterwards it quieted down a bit, and when its legs
had stopped waving farewells to the landscape I got a
gardener-boy to drag it into the hall, where everybody must
see it on their way to the breakfast-room. I breakfasted
upstairs myself. I gathered afterwards that the meal was
tinged with a very unchristian spirit. I suppose it's
unlucky to bring peacock's feathers into a house; anyway,
there was a blue-pencilly look in my hostess's eye when I
took my departure.
Some hostesses, of course, will forgive anything, even unto
pavonicide (is there such a word?), as long as one is nice-
looking and sufficiently unusual to counterbalance some of
the others; and there ARE others--the girl, for instance, who
reads Meredith, and appears at meals with unnatural
punctuality in a frock that's made at home and repented at
leisure. She eventually finds her way to India and gets
married, and comes home to admire the Royal Academy, and to
imagine that an indifferent prawn curry is for ever an
effective substitute for all that we have been taught to
believe is luncheon. It's then that she is really dangerous;
but at her worst she is never quite so bad as the woman who
fires Exchange and Mart questions at you without the least
provocation. Imagine the other day, just when I was doing my
best to understand half the things I was saying, being asked
by one of those seekers after country home truths how many
fowls she could keep in a run ten feet by six, or whatever it
was! I told her whole crowds, as long as she kept the door
shut, and the idea didn't seem to have struck her before; at
least, she brooded over it for the rest of dinner.
Of course, as I say, one never really KNOWS one's ground, and
one may make mistakes occasionally. But then one's mistakes
sometimes turn out assets in the long-run: if we had never
bungled away our American colonies we might never have had
the boy from the States to teach us how to wear our hair and
cut our clothes, and we must get our ideas from somewhere, I
suppose. Even the Hooligan was probably invented in China
centuries before we thought of him. England must wake up, as
the Duke of Devonshire said the other day; wasn't it? Oh,
well, it was someone else. Not that I ever indulge in
despair about the Future; there always have been men who have
gone about despairing of the Future, and when the Future
arrives it says nice, superior things about their having
acted according to their lights. It is dreadful to think
that other people's grandchildren may one day rise up and
call one amiable.
There are moments when one sympathises with Herod. _
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