I
The perfect hostess makes a point of never displaying discomposure. In moments of trial she aims at the easy repose of manner of a Red Indian at the stake. Nevertheless, there was a moment when, as she saw Sigsbee H. caracole into the drawing-room with George and heard him announce in a ringing voice that this fine young son of the western prairies had come to take potluck, Mrs. Waddington indisputably reeled.
She recovered herself. All the woman in her was urging her to take Sigsbee H. by his outstanding ears and shake him till he came unstuck, but she fought the emotion down. Gradually her glazed eye lost its dead-fishy look. Like Death in the poem, she “grinned horrible a ghastly smile.” And it was with a well-assumed graciousness that she eventually extended to George the quivering right hand which, had she been a less highly civilised woman, would about now have been landing on the side of her husband’s head, swung from the hip.
“Chahmed!” said Mrs. Waddington. “So very, very glad that you were able to come, Mr.—”
She paused, and George, eyeing her mistily, gathered that she wished to be informed of his name. He would have been glad to supply the information, but unfortunately at the moment he had forgotten it himself. He had a dim sort of idea that it began with an F or a G, but beyond that his mind was a blank.
The fact was that, in the act of shaking hands with his hostess, George Finch had caught sight of Molly, and the spectacle had been a little too much for him.
Molly was wearing the new evening dress of which she had spoken so feelingly to her father at their recent interview, and it seemed to George as if the scales had fallen from his eyes and he was seeing her for the first time. Before, in a vague way he had supposed that she possessed arms and shoulders and hair, but it was only at this moment that he perceived how truly these arms and those shoulders and that hair were arms and shoulders and hair in the deepest and holiest sense of the words. It was as if a goddess had thrown aside the veil. It was as if a statue had come to life. It was as if … well, the point we are trying to make is that George Finch was impressed. His eyes enlarged to the dimensions of saucers; the tip of his nose quivered like a rabbit’s: and unseen hands began to pour iced water down his spine.
Mrs. Waddington, having given him a long, steady look that blistered his forehead, turned away and began to talk to a soda-water magnate. She had no real desire to ascertain George’s name, though she would have read it with pleasure on a tombstone.
“Dinner is served,” announced Ferris, the butler, appearing noiselessly like a Djinn summoned by the rubbing of a lamp.
George found himself swept up in the stampede of millionaires. He was still swallowing feebly.
There are few things more embarrassing to a shy and sensitive young man than to be present at a dinner-party where something seems to tell him he is not really wanted. The something that seemed to tell George Finch he was not really wanted at tonight’s festive gathering was Mrs. Waddington’s eye, which kept shooting down the table at intervals and reducing him to pulp at those very moments when he was beginning to feel that, if treated with gentle care and kindness, he might eventually recover.
It was an eye that, like a thermos flask, could be alternately extremely hot and intensely cold. When George met it during the soup course he had the feeling of having encountered a simoom while journeying across an African desert. When, on the other hand, it sniped him as he toyed with his fish, his sensations were those of a searcher for the Pole who unexpectedly bumps into a blizzard. But, whether it was cold or hot, there was always in Mrs. Waddington’s gaze one constant factor—a sort of sick loathing which nothing that he could ever do, George felt, would have the power to allay. It was the kind of look which Sisera might have surprised in the eye of Jael the wife of Heber, had he chanced to catch it immediately before she began operations with the spike. George had made one new friend that night, but not two.
The consequence was that as regards George Finch’s contribution to the feast of wit and flow of soul at that dinner-party we have nothing to report. He uttered no epigrams. He told no good stories. Indeed, the only time he spoke at all was when he said “Sherry” to the footman when he meant “Hock.”
Even, however, had the conditions been uniformly pleasant, it is to be doubted whether he would have really dominated the gathering. Mrs. Waddington, in her selection of guests, confined herself to the extremely wealthy: and, while the conversation of the extremely wealthy is fascinating in its way, it tends to be a little too technical for the average man.
With the soup, someone who looked like a cartoon of Capital in a Socialistic paper said he was glad to see that Westinghouse Common were buoyant again. A man who might have been his brother agreed that they had firmed up nicely at closing. Whereas Wabash Pref. A, falling to 73⅞, caused shakings of the head. However, one rather liked the look of Royal Dutch Oil Ordinaries at 54¾.
With the fish, United Beef began to tell a neat, though rather long, story about the Bolivian Land Concession, the gist of which was that the Bolivian Oil and Land Syndicate, acquiring from the Bolivian Government the land and prospecting concessions of Bolivia, would be known as Bolivian Concessions, Ltd., and would have a capital of one million dollars in two hundred thousand five-dollar “A” shares and two hundred thousand half-dollar “B” shares, and that while no cash payment was to be made to the vendor syndicate the latter was being allotted the whole of the “B” shares as consideration for the concession. And—this was where the raconteur made his point—the “B” shares were to receive half the divisible profits and to rank equal with the “A” shares in any distribution of assets.
The story went well, and conversation became general. There was a certain amount of good-natured chaff about the elasticity of the form of credit handled by the Commercial Banks, and once somebody raised a laugh with a sly retort about the Reserve against Circulation and Total Deposits. On the question of the collateral liability of shareholders, however, argument ran high, and it was rather a relief when, as tempers began to get a little heated, Mrs. Waddington gave the signal and the women left the table.
Coffee having been served and cigars lighted, the magnates drew together at the end of the table where Mr. Waddington sat. But Mr. Waddington, adroitly sidestepping, left them and came down to George.
“Out West,” said Mr. Waddington in a rumbling undertone, malevolently eyeing Amalgamated Toothbrushes, who had begun to talk about the Mid-Continent Fiduciary Conference at St. Louis, “they would shoot at that fellow’s feet.”
George agreed that such behaviour could reflect nothing but credit on the West.
“These Easterners make me tired,” said Mr. Waddington.
George confessed to a similar fatigue.
“When you think that at this very moment out in Utah and Arizona,” said Mr. Waddington, “strong men are packing their saddlebags and making them secure with their lassoes you kind of don’t know whether to laugh or cry, do you?”
That was the very problem, said George.
“Say, listen,” said Mr. Waddington, “I’ll just push these potbellied guys off upstairs, and then you and I will sneak off to my study and have a real talk.”