That had come about because just as she had got into the dog-cart to be driven to the rectory—for she herself could not drive a horse—Miss Wannop had told her mother that there would be two men at breakfast, one whose name she didn’t know; the other, a Mr Macmaster, a celebrated critic. Mrs Wannop had called up to her:
‘A critic? Of what?’ her whole sleepy being electrified.
‘I don’t know,’ her daughter had answered. ‘Books, I daresay . . . ’
A second or so after, when the horse, a large black animal that wouldn’t stand, had made twenty yards or so at several bounds, the handy man who drove had said:
Yer mother’s ‘owlin’ after yer.’ But Miss Wannop had answered that it didn’t matter. She was confident that she had arranged for everything. She was to be back to get lunch; her mother was to give an occasional look at Genie Wilson in the garret; Hannah, the daily help, was to be told she could go for the day. It was of the highest importance that Hannah should not know that a completely strange young woman was asleep in the garret at eleven in the morning. If she did the news would be all over the neighbourhood at once, and the police instantly down on them.
But Mrs Wannop was a woman of business. If she heard of a reviewer within driving distance she called on him with eggs as a present. The moment the daily help had arrived, she had set out and walked to the rectory. No consideration of danger from the police would have stopped her; besides, she had forgotten all about the police.
Her arrival worried Mrs Duchemin a good deal, because she wished all her guests, to be seated and the breakfast well begun before the entrance of her husband. And this was not easy. Mrs Wannop, who was uninvited, refused to be separated from Mr Macmaster. Mr Macmaster had told her that he never wrote reviews in the daily papers, only articles for the heavy quarterlies, and it had occurred to Mrs Wannop that an article on her new book in one of the quarterlies was just what was needed. She was, therefore, engaged in telling Mr Macmaster how to write about herself, and twice after Mrs Duchemin had succeeded in shepherding Mr Macmaster nearly to his seat, Mrs Wannop had conducted him back to the embrasure of the window. It was only by sitting herself firmly in her chair next to Macmaster that Mrs Duchemin was able to retain for herself this all-essential, strategic position. And it was only by calling out:
‘Mr Horsley, do take Mrs Wannop to the seat beside you and feed her,’ that Mrs Duchemin got Mrs Wannop out of Mr Duchemin’s own seat at the head of the table, for Mrs Wannop, having perceived this seat to be vacant next to Mr Macmaster, had pulled out the Chippendale armchair and had prepared to sit down in it. This could only have spelt disaster, for it would have meant turning Mrs Duchemin’s husband loose amongst the other guests.
Mr Horsley, however, accomplished his duty of leading away this lady with such firmness that Mrs Wannop conceived of him as a very disagreeable and awkward person. Mr. Horsley’s seat was next to Miss Fox, a grey spinster, who sat, as it were, within the fortification of silver urns and deftly occupied herself with the ivory taps of these machines. This seat, too, Mrs Wannop tried to occupy, imagining that, by moving the silver vases that upheld the tall delphiniums, she would be able to get a diagonal view of Macmaster and so to shout to him. She found, however, that she couldn’t, and so resigned herself to taking the chair that had been reserved for Miss Genie Wilson, who was to have been the eighth guest. Once there she sat in distracted gloom, occasionally saying to her daughter:
‘I think it’s very bad management. I think this party’s very badly arranged.’ Mr Horsley she hardly thanked for the sole that he placed before her; Tietjens she did not even look at.
Sitting beside Macmaster, her eyes fixed on a small door in the corner of the panelled wall, Mrs Duchemin became a prey to a sudden and overwhelming fit of apprehension. It forced her to say to her guest, though she had resolved to chance it and say nothing:
‘It wasn’t perhaps fair to ask you to come all this way. You may get nothing out of my husband. He’s apt . . . especially on Saturdays . . . ’
She trailed off into indecision. It was possible that nothing might occur. On two Saturdays out of seven nothing did occur. Then an admission would be wasted; this sympathetic being would go out of her life with a knowledge that he needn’t have had—to be a slur on her memory in his mind . . . But then, overwhelmingly, there came over her the feeling that, if he knew of her sufferings, he might feel impelled to remain and comfort her. She cast about for words with which to finish her sentence. But Macmaster said:
‘Oh, dear lady!’ (And it seemed to her to be charming to be addressed thus!) ‘One understands . . . One is surely trained and adapted to understand . . . that these great scholars, these abstracted cognoscenti . . . ’
Mrs Duchemin breathed a great ‘Ah!’ of relief. Macmaster had used the exactly right words.
‘And,’ Macmaster was going on, ‘merely to spend a short hour; a swallow flight . . . “As when the swallow gliding from lofty portal to lofty portal!” . . . You know the lines . . . in these, your perfect surroundings . . . ’
Blissful waves seemed to pass from him to her. It was in this way that men should speak; in that way—steel-blue tie, true-looking gold ring, steel-blue eyes beneath black brows!—that men should look. She was half-conscious of warmth; this suggested the bliss of falling asleep, truly, in perfect surroundings. The roses on the table were lovely; their scent came to her.
A voice came to her:
‘You do do the thing in style, I must say.’
The large, clumsy but otherwise unnoticeable being that this fascinating man had brought in his train was setting up pretensions to her notice. He had just placed before her a small blue china plate that contained a little black caviare and a round of lemon; a small Sevres, pinkish, delicate plate that held the pinkest peach in the room. She had said to him: ‘Oh . . . a little caviare! A peach!’ a long time before, with the vague underfeeling that the names of such comestibles must convey to her person a charm in the eyes of Caliban.
She buckled about her her armour of charm; Tietjens was gazing with large, fishy eyes at the caviare before her. ‘How do you get that, for instance?’ he asked.
‘Oh!’ she answered: ‘If it wasn’t my husband’s doing it would look like ostentation. I’d find it ostentatious for myself.’ She found a smile, radiant, yet muted. ‘He’s trained Simpkins of New Bond Street. For a telephone message overnight special messengers go to Billingsgate at dawn for salmon, and red mullet, this, in ice, and great blocks of ice too. It’s such pretty stuff . . . and then by seven the car goes to Ashford Junction . . . All the same, it’s difficult to give a breakfast before ten.’
She didn’t want to waste her careful sentences on this grey fellow; she couldn’t, however, turn back, as she yearned to do, to the kindredly running phrases—as if out of books she had read!—of the smaller man.
‘Ah, but it isn’t,’ Tietjens said, ‘ostentation. It’s the great Tradition. You mustn’t ever forget that your husband’s Breakfast Duchemin of Magdalen.’
He seemed to be gazing, inscrutably, deep into her eyes. But no doubt he meant to be agreeable.
‘Sometimes I wish I could,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t get anything out of it himself. He’s ascetic to unreasonableness. On Fridays he eats nothing at all. It makes me quite anxious . . . for Saturdays.’
Tietjens said:
‘I know.’
She exclaimed—and almost with sharpness:
‘You know!’
He continued to gaze straight into her eyes:
‘Oh, of course one knows all about Breakfast Duchemin!’ he said. ‘He was one of Ruskin’s road-builders. He was said to be the most Ruskin-like of them all!’
Mrs