VI
It was excellent to have Charteris to talk against. The little man had many tales to tell me of those dissolute gay people we had known and frolicked with; indeed, I think that he was trying to allure me back to the old circles, for he preoccupied his life by scheming to bring about by underhand methods some perfectly unimportant consummation, which very often a plain word would have secured at once. But now he swore he was not “making tea.”
That had always been a byword between us, by the way, since I applied to him the phrase first used of Alexander Pope—“that he could not make tea without a conspiracy.” And it may be that in this case Charteris spoke the truth, and had come to Fairhaven just for the pleasure of seeing me, for certainly he must have had some reason for leaving the Musgraves’ house-party so abruptly.
“You are very well rid of the Hardresses,” he adjudged. “Did I tell you of the male one’s exhibition of jealousy last year! I can assure you that the fellow now entertains for me precisely the same affection I have always borne toward cold lamb. It is the real tragedy of my life that Anne is ethically incapable of letting a week pass without partaking of a leg of mutton. She is not particularly fond of it, and indeed I never encountered anybody who was; she has simply been reared with the notion that ‘people’ always have mutton once a week. What, have you never noticed that with ‘people,’ to eat mutton once a week is a sort of guarantee of respectability? I do not refer to chops of course, which are not wholly inconsistent with depravity. But the ability to eat mutton in its roasted form, by some odd law of nature, connotes the habit of paying your pew-rent regularly and of changing your flannels on the proper date. However, I was telling you about Jasper Hardress—” And Charteris repeated the story of their imbroglio in such a fashion that it sounded farcical.
“But, after all, John, you did make love to her.”
“I have forgotten what was exactly the last observation of the lamented Julius Caesar,” Mr. Charteris leisurely observed—“though I remember that at the time it impressed me as being uncommonly appropriate—But to get back: do you not see that this clause ought to come here, at the end of the sentence? And, child, on all my ancient bended knees, I implore you to remember that ‘genuine’ does not mean the same thing as ‘real.’ …”