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The Match-Maker
The grill-room clock struck eleven with
the respectful unobtrusiveness of one whose mission in life is to be
ignored. When the flight of time should really have rendered
abstinence and migration imperative the lighting apparatus would
signal the fact in the usual way.
Six minutes later Clovis approached the
supper-table, in the blessed expectancy of one who has dined
sketchily and long ago.
"I'm starving," he announced,
making an effort to sit down gracefully and read the menu at the
same time.
"So I gathered," said his host,
"from the fact that you were nearly punctual. I ought to have
told you that I'm a Food Reformer. I've ordered two bowls of
bread-and-milk and some health biscuits. I hope you don't
mind."
Clovis pretended afterwards that he didn't
go white above the collar-line for the fraction of a second.
"All the same," he said,
"you ought not to joke about such things. There really are such
people. I've known people who've met them. To think of all the
adorable things there are to eat in the world, and then to go
through life munching sawdust and being proud of it."
"They're like the Flagellants of the
Middle Ages, who went about mortifying themselves."
"They had some excuse," said
Clovis. "They did it to save their immortal souls, didn't they?
You needn't tell me that a man who doesn't love oysters and
asparagus and good wines has got a soul, or a stomach either. He's
simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed."
Clovis relapsed for a few golden moments
into tender intimacies with a succession of rapidly disappearing
oysters.
"I think oysters are more beautiful
than any religion," he resumed presently. "They not only
forgive our unkindness to them; they justify it, they incite us to
go on being perfectly horrid to them. Once they arrive at the
supper-table they seem to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the
thing. There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite
matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster. Do you like my
new waistcoat? I'm wearing it for the first time tonight."
"It looks like a great many others
you've had lately, only worse. New dinner waistcoats are becoming a
habit with you."
"They say one always pays for the
excesses of one's youth; mercifully that isn't true about one's
clothes. My mother is thinking of getting married."
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2 >
"Again!"
"It's the first time."
"Of course, you ought to know. I was
under the impression that she'd been married once or twice at
least."
"Three times, to be mathematically
exact. I meant that it was the first time she'd thought about
getting married; the other times she did it without thinking. As a
matter of fact, it's really I who am doing the thinking for her in
this case. You see, it's quite two years since her last husband
died."
"You evidently think that brevity is
the soul of widowhood."
"Well, it struck me that she was
getting moped, and beginning to settle down, which wouldn't suit her
a bit. The first symptom that I noticed was when she began to
complain that we were living beyond our income. All decent people
live beyond their incomes nowadays, and those who aren't respectable
live beyond other people's. A few gifted individuals manage to do
both."
"It's hardly so much a gift as an
industry."
"The crisis came," returned
Clovis, "when she suddenly started the theory that late hours
were bad for one, and wanted me to be in by one o'clock every night.
Imagine that sort of thing for me, who was eighteen on my last
birthday."
"On your last two birthdays, to be
mathematically exact."
"Oh, well, that's not my fault. I'm
not going to arrive at nineteen as long as my mother remains at
thirty-seven. One must have some regard for appearances."
"Perhaps your mother would age a
little in the process of settling down."
"That's the last thing she'd think of.
Feminine reformations always start in on the failings of other
people. That's why I was so keen on the husband idea."
"Did you go as far as to select the
gentleman, or did you merely throw out a general idea, and trust to
the force of suggestion?"
"If one wants a thing done in a hurry
one must see to it oneself. I found a military Johnny hanging round
on a loose end at the club, and took him home to lunch once or
twice. He'd spent most of his life on the Indian frontier, building
roads, and relieving famines and minimizing earthquakes, and all
that sort of thing that one does do on frontiers. He could talk
sense to a peevish cobra in fifteen native languages, and probably
knew what to do if you found a rogue elephant on your croquet-lawn;
but he was shy and diffident with women. I told my mother privately
that he was an absolute woman-hater; so, of course, she laid herself
out to flirt all she knew, which isn't a little."
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3 >
"And was
the gentleman responsive?"
"I hear he told some one at the club
that he was looking out for a Colonial job, with plenty of hard
work, for a young friend of his, so I gather that he has some idea
of marrying into the family."
"You seem destined to be the victim of
the reformation, after all."
Clovis wiped the trace of Turkish coffee
and the beginnings of a smile from his lips, and slowly lowered his
dexter eyelid. Which, being interpreted, probably meant, "I
don't think!"
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