‘That you, Jim?’ Sarah’s voice came from the back room, the room they used for dining-room and sitting-room combined.
‘Coming!’ replied Mr. Darby, rising on his toes to hang up his coat. The front room (the parlour) was never used unless there was company. Its chairs and sofa were upholstered in green plush: there were a great many knitted antimacassars, a great many knitted mats on which stood elaborate coloured glass vases, a great many framed photographs. The photographs included even the harmonium: on the rare occasions on which the harmonium was to be opened, half a dozen or so of them had to be removed and piled on a chair. There was a fan of red paper in the grate which looked as if it had never contained a fire. The flat lifeless air smelt of new carpet. It was cold, even at midsummer, in the parlour, and the cold air, the cold steely reflection of ceiling and walls in the mirror over the mantelpiece, sent a chill to the heart. The door was generally kept shut, but to-night it was open. Mr. Darby, when taking off his coat beside the coat rack, had stood with his back to it and when he turned he saw the warm flicker of firelight on the walls. The door of the back room also was open and Mr. Darby, stretching out his arms to shoot his shirtcuffs below the cuffs of his jacket, approached it and stood in the doorway. A glare of white tablecloth, cutlery and glass greeted him. A tall vase of brown chrysanthemums stood in the middle of the table. Beyond it, Sarah, greyhaired and massive, was bending over the table: there was a clink of spoons and forks. It was not until she had finished what she was doing that she straightened herself and looked at Mr. Darby. She was a large woman, much taller than her husband. Her grey hair was arranged with a severe neatness that could not hide its plentifulness over a square, severe face. It was a firm, capable, uncompromising, domineering face, but a fine face too. It was not the face of a bad-tempered woman, but of a woman who would stand no nonsense. She did not often smile, but when she did, the smile was at the same time grim and indulgent, and the person she smiled at was unexpectedly and inexplicably enchanted. It was only then that any but the boldest discovered with astonishment her magnificent grey eyes. Those eyes it was and her smile that had captured Mr. Darby twenty years ago. Sarah Bouch had spent fifteen years of her life in the service of the Duke of Newchester at Blanchford Castle. Her father was the Duke’s head keeper at Blanchford, and she herself had begun in the kitchen, worked her way up to housemaid (one of ten) and at the age of twenty-nine became head housemaid. She was not only a good worker but also a clever, observant woman and an excellent manager. In the course of her career she had managed to pick up a very comprehensive knowledge of the organization and administration of a vast household. When Mrs. Race, the housekeeper, was ill or absent, Sarah had frequently taken her place, and the only perceptible difference in the Castle at such times was that things ran even better than when Mrs. Race was there. Sarah would certainly have succeeded, sooner or later, to this responsible post, had she not been snapped up, at the age of thirty-two, by the enterprising and adventurous Mr. Darby. What in Mr. Darby had made her allow him to do so was not apparent: perhaps it was that she was fond of children and in marrying Mr. Darby she was providing herself with a child that would remain permanently a child. Thus it was that, though the Darbys had had no children, Mrs. Darby could hardly be called a childless woman.
She glanced now at the absurd little man in the doorway, secretly amused but none the less ready to be strict. She knew exactly what he was going to do. He was going to poke and pry round the table, like a cock-robin round a handful of crumbs, to see that everything was all right. On ordinary occasions she didn’t allow this kind of thing. This was her business, not his: ‘and if you haven’t had enough work for the day,’ she would exclaim tartly, ‘you’d better go back to the office.’ But to-day she was willing to be indulgent. Of course, as she knew well enough, the table was all right: he would find nothing wrong, and even if anything had been wrong, he wouldn’t have noticed it. Still, let him amuse himself. There! He was going to begin.
‘Very nice, very elegant I’m sure! ’ he said washing his hands in the doorway like a fly. Then with his hands clasped he advanced on tiptoe into the room and began poking and prying round the table, nodding his head with knowing approval. Then his eye glanced a little timidly at the chrysanthemums. A horrible doubt had crossed his mind. Were they too tall? Would the people at the top of the table, namely Sarah and the guests on her right and left, be able to see him when he stood up? ‘I was wondering. … Do you think?’ he began.
‘Do I think?’ prompted Sarah.
‘That the flowers … the … ah … chrysanthemums … will be too tall? ’ Mr. Darby had early in life acquired from old Mr. Lamb, the senior partner of Messrs. Lamb & Marston, a careful and weighty method of speech, a happy blend of the doctor and the clergyman. Its effect was to invest with apparent importance even the most trivial phrase. Sarah was one of the few people who had never succumbed to its influence.
‘Too tall?’ she said sharply. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, I suppose there’ll be some … ah … speeches … just a few words, you know … and will they be too tall for … for people to see the … ah … the speakers? ’
‘Too tall?’ said Sarah, scornfully. ‘What are you thinking of? Isn’t George Stedman six foot two?’
Mr. Darby did not like to be more particular. He let the question drop. But it would be awkward, very awkward, if he really was hidden completely, speechifying away in a grove of chrysanthemums to people he couldn’t see and couldn’t be seen by. It would spoil everything.
‘Have you got the wine?’ asked Sarah.
‘The … ah … champagne? Yes, the parcel’s out in the hall.’
‘Parcel? If it’s still a parcel, you’d better get to work and undo it. They’ll be here in just over half an hour; and look at you, not changed yet.’
Mr. Darby went into the hall, to the table near the hat-rack, and began to undo the parcel. Sarah followed him and turned into the parlour where he heard her putting coal on. He stood the two bottles on the table and, like a conjuror performing a trick, neatly lifted off their straw jackets. Then with a bottle held by the neck in either hand he stepped into the sitting-room. Sarah reappeared.
‘There!’ he said to her. ‘A couple of Clicquots,’
‘And what’s that?’ said Sarah. ‘I thought you were getting champagne.’
‘It is champagne,’ said Mr. Darby. ‘One of the well known brands, you know. A very nice … ah … sound wine!’ he added tolerantly.
He lifted an eye from one of the bottles to Sarah and noticed for the first time that she was dressed in a brand-new coffee-coloured silk dress. ‘My!’ he said, ‘you’ve got a new dress.’ He moved, still holding his champagne-bottles, to another point of view. ‘Well, I call that handsome, very handsome, I must say.’
Sarah smiled. ‘O well, I’ve got to have a new dress sometimes? she said.
Mr. Darby moved to yet another position. ‘Yes, very handsome!’ he said again. ‘Turn round and let’s see the back.
‘Oh get along with you,’ said Sarah, indulgent but strict. ‘What do you know about dresses? Here, give me those bottles and off you go and get changed. The whole four of them’ll be here before you’re ready, and that’ud be a nice thing.’ She took the bottles from him and packed him off. ‘You’ll find all your things laid out on the bed,’ she shouted after him as he went out obediently. ‘And mind put on your black tie and not that fancy grey and blue thing.’
‘She’s a strange one,’ said Mr. Darby to himself as he climbed the stairs. ‘Now if I’d asked her to get a new dress, would she have got one? Not she.’ And in his mind’s ear he heard her voice: ‘New dress? What do I want with a new dress? I’m good enough as I am, thank you.’ And yet, you could always rely on Sarah to rise to the occasion. She had got that dress, without a doubt, on purpose for the party, though she would have died rather than admit it. And very handsome it was; all, absolutely all, he could have wished. Yes, she laughed at him and his ideas, but leave her to herself and she always rose to the occasion.
He closed the bedroom door and began to take off his coat and waistcoat.
• • • • • • • •
The Stedmans were, of course, the first to arrive. Mr. Darby answered their knock. George Stedman with his great height and width filled the passage as he entered, preceded by his thin, gaunt wife who might almost have got in through the slit of the letterbox.
‘Well, Jim,’ shouted George Stedman, ‘I wish you a very happy return. Not many happy returns, mind you, but one happy return. That’ll bring you to a hundred, and that’ll be about as much as is good for you.’
‘And I wish you many happy returns, Mr. Darby,’ said Mrs. Stedman in her precise, mild, shadowy voice, offering him a thin hand, ‘for I don’t see why you shouldn’t live to as many fifties as you like.’
Both removed their coats and Stedman his hat and Mr. Darby ushered them into the parlour, where Sarah awaited them.
‘Well Mrs. D.,’ said Stedman, reaching out a huge paw, ‘I hope you’re standing the responsibility pretty well.’
Sarah raised her eyebrows and gave him her enchanting grim smile. She had a weakness for George Stedman, perhaps because in figure and character he was a match for her and treated her with a breezy, familiar cordiality. ‘And which responsibility is that, Mr. Stedman? ‘ she said, grasping the huge paw.
‘Why, Jim, your fifty-year-older.’
‘Oh, him! ‘said Sarah. ‘ Being fifty doesn’t make him any more of a responsibility,—or any less, for that matter.’ They smiled at each other, two mature and responsible people smiling over an incorrigible child.
For George Stedman, even Sarah admitted, was a man. It was not merely that he was six foot two and broad in proportion, that he had a heavy grey moustache and a fine head of curly grey hair, that his manner and speech were downright and confident. It was because his head was screwed on the right way and he ran a flourishing ironmongery business. Stedman’s was the chief ironmonger’s shop in Savershill. If ever Sarah wanted advice on a matter of serious business, it never occurred to her to consult her husband: she went round to Stedman’s and had a word over the counter with the boss. He was one of the people she believed in, a responsible person: you had only to look at him standing there now in his smart black suit—the suit he reserved for funerals and other important occasions—and his spotless turn-down collar and cuffs. Sarah had only just had time to shake hands with Mrs. Stedman when there was another knock at the door and Mr. Darby went out to let in the Cribbs.
As soon as Mr. Darby opened the door a gust of talk blew in and filled the hall. ‘No mistake who’s coming,’ said George Stedman to Sarah with a wink. Mrs. Cribb had a reputation for wit and humour. That, no doubt, was why Mr. Cribb was a comparatively sad and silent man. Mrs. Cribb’s acquaintances defined her, with mixed implication, as ‘a caution.’ Sarah’s view was that Emma Cribb was all very well once in a way and that it was an advantage not to be her husband. But Mrs. Cribb was at her best at a party, for, on the one hand, she kept things lively, while, on the other, she did not get all the talk to herself. Samuel Cribb, though superficially sad, enjoyed company in his own quiet way, and was found, by those who succeeded in getting at him through his wife’s ceaseless chatter, to be a sensible and friendly little man. By profession he was a clerk in a railway office, but his hobby was books. He was a great one for spotting winners in the literary world and picking up first editions.
Mr. Darby found himself caught up in a whirlpool of congratulations from Mrs. Cribb, so fluent and voluble that his thanks were swallowed up, unheard. He opened the parlour door and it seemed to him that the flood of words at once burst in, relieving the pressure in the hall and carrying Mrs. Cribb herself on the tide. As he passed Mr. Darby, Samuel Cribb, perceptible for the first time, held out a cold, gentle hand, wishing him ‘Good luck, old man!’ in his quiet, friendly voice. The parlour was now full of talk, a swirling confusion of voices in which George Stedman’s jovial booming provided a solid ground-bass for the high watery babble of the women. The sound went to Mr. Darby’s head. He felt that the house was twenty times its usual size, that a vast and fashionable company filled the reception-rooms, that in a moment they would pour into the dining-room where, after a prolonged banquet, the host would rise from his chair and the event of the evening—the event for which all these brilliant people were assembled—would take place. At the mere thought of it, Mr. Darby, following Samuel Cribb into the parlour, cleared his throat.
Then he heard Sarah’s voice: ‘Well, if you’ll excuse me just a minute …!’ and next moment she bore down upon him and gently but firmly pushed him out of her way in her progress towards the door. She was going to see that Mrs. Bricketts, who came daily to scrub and wash-up and had been retained for the evening, was putting the supper on the table without any of those little lapses from good taste which at once catch the eye of a respectable housewife. A few minutes later she threw open the parlour door. ‘Will you all come this way, please,’ she said, and the two women went out, Mrs. Cribb finishing a sentence over her shoulder which she had been delivering at Mr. Darby. Samuel Cribb stood modestly aside, but George Stedman pushed him to the door with a large friendly paw and then, following himself, gathered up Sarah, who stood outside, and drove her forward too. Mr. Darby, bland and important, shepherded the flock from behind. ‘There was a reception last night,’ he thought to himself, ‘at the house of Sir James Darby on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday. Among those present were …’ He closed the door behind him and went to his place at the foot of the table.
For, strictly speaking, technically speaking, it was, unde niably, the foot. The head of the table is where the carver sits, and Sarah was the carver. Already she was dealing in a masterly fashion with the beef, and the plates travelled down to Mr. Darby who was in charge of the vegetables. The arrival of each plate took him completely by surprise, for whenever he had been called to attention by Sarah’s ‘Now, Jim!’ and had loaded a plate, his mind dismissed vegetables and fell into a seraphic contemplation of the social event in which he was involved.
At last even the Darbys themselves were fed and the company abandoned talk and fell to. Even Mrs. Cribb was silent. The only sounds in the room came from the vigorous action of knives and forks on plates. Everybody was hungry, for it was well known that Sarah Darby provided good and plentiful food and they had all arrived in a proper state to do justice to it. Mr. Darby himself had been careful to have a light lunch. He raised his eyes now from his plate and observed them all at work. Jane Stedman on his right was belying her shadowy thinness by the excellence of her appetite. He noticed how well she managed her knife and fork, how quietly and how well she was dressed. A very superior woman: much more so, really, than Mrs. Cribb with her chatter, her affected way of holding her knife as if it were a pencil, and her red knitted dress and saucy hat. ‘Very showy,’ thought Mr. Darby fixing blue, innocent eyes on her finery, ‘but not really half as good as Jane Stedman’s. Ready made and probably cost, half the price.’
He was recalled to himself by Sarah’s voice. ‘Now Jim, aren’t we going to have anything to drink?’
‘My!’ he exclaimed, jumping up from his chair. ‘I was forgetting all about it.’ He turned to the sideboard behind him and began to unwire one of the champagne bottles. At that everyone began to chatter again.
‘Anyone here for Prohibition?’ asked Mr. Darby jocularly. ‘Because if there is,’—he turned to the table with the bottle in his hand—’ we have a tap in the scullery.’
Before anyone could take up this sally there was a for-midable report, a shriek from Mrs. Cribb, and a cork struck the ceiling with a smart crack, rebounded, and buried itself in the chrysanthemums, while the bottle in Mr. Darby’s hand burst prodigiously into a cauliflower of foam. Mr. Darby looked at it in terror. It seemed for a moment as if he would drop it, but George Stedman’s voice brought him to his senses: ‘Keep ‘er nose down, Jim. Keep ‘er nose down. Not so much of the fireman!’
Mr. Darby, always obedient, obeyed, and Mrs. Stedman dexterously snatched a tumbler and held it to the mouth of the bottle.
‘Steady now, Jim! Steady! Don’t let her run away with you.’ Thus admonished by George Stedman, Mr. Darby regained control of himself and the bottle and began to go round filling the glasses.
When he had completed the circuit, filled his own glass, and resumed his seat amid a sudden and complete silence, Mrs. Stedman raised her glass.
‘Mr. Darby,’ she said, ‘I look towards you. Many happy returns of the day.’ There was a choral murmur of ‘Many happy returns,’ ‘And many of them,’ and everybody raised their glasses and drank.
Mr. Darby bowed. ‘My best thanks, ladies and gentlermen,’ he said.
The first solemn moment was over and the talk broke out again. Through it Sarah’s voice was heard inviting the guests to second helpings. ‘A little more, Jane. Emma, I’m sure your plate’s empty.’ Then plates went up and down the table and were replenished. But now the pace grew steadier: they had all taken the first fine edge off their hunger: they were inclined now not merely to eat but also to talk, and the champagne tuned them up. Everybody started at once and soon the room was as full of fine social hubbub as the parlour had been. ‘Laugh? ‘Mrs. Cribb was saying to Mr. Darby. ‘Well, I thought my poor auntie would have died. And whenever I see her now—and I see her every August. She lives down at Saltburn, you know. Very healthy place, Saltburn. Oh wonderful. The doctors swear by it. Air full of owes-one, or whatever they call it.—And whenever I see my poor old auntie now, she says to me: “Well, Emma,” she says … She was always a great one for laughing, was the aunt … “Well, Emma, and what about those smellingsalts.”’
‘Oh no,’ Mr. Cribb was explaining to Sarah Darby, ‘oh dear me no, you don’t have to read them. I don’t suppose I read one in twenty of the books that pass through my hands. You just watch the second-hand catalogues for names and prices. It isn’t the best sellers, you know, that go up in price. Not a bit of it. These valuable chaps are dark horses. Now there’s Joseph Conrad and D. H. Lawrence: I dare say I’ve made as much as thirty pounds out of each of them. And I had a bit of luck a couple of months back. I picked up a book I’d been looking out for a long time, a little flimsy-looking book by a chap of the name of Coppard, called Adam and Eve and Pinch Me. Silly name, isn’t it? Well, believe me or believe me not, Mrs. Darby, I cleared ten pounds on that little job. And a book, mind you, badly bound, that you wouldn’t give tuppence for if you didn’t happen to be in the know.’
‘No, Mr. Darby,’ Mrs. Stedman was saying, ‘what I always say is, give me my own fireside. I don’t mind a fortnight at the seaside in the summer-time, but foreign places and foreigners and foreign food, oh dear me no!’
‘Well, I suppose it’s in my blood,’ replied Mr. Darby. ‘I’ve always been one for adventure and foreign parts. Of course, the wife’s like you. She’s what you might call a home-bird, whereas I’m a bird of passage.’
‘But however do you manage to get along,’ said Mrs. Stedman, ‘when no one understands you, nor you them? ’
‘Well … er …’ said Mr. Darby, ‘well, people do, you know. Signs, and that, I suppose.’
‘And you really enjoy it?’
‘Enjoy it? Why travel’s my hobby. The world’s so full of wonderful things. The pyramids and the Sphinx, for example; and then, of course, there’s the Jungle and all that, and the Red Sea.’
‘But then you’re a good sailor.’
‘Yes,’ said Mr. Darby, ‘I think I can say I’m a good sailor. I was in quite a rough sea at Scarborough last year, in no more than a little fishing-boat too.’
‘Indeed! ’ said Mrs. Stedman. ‘ But it’s these long voyages that I couldn’t stand. What was your longest on the sea, Mr. Darby? ’
‘Oh a matter of two hours, I suppose,’ said Mr. Darby. ‘That time at Scarborough was the longest, I think; and I know that was two hours, because it was one and six an hour and I remember I paid three shillings.’
Mrs. Stedman glanced at Mr. Darby. She had supposed he was joking. But his candid blue eyes, magnified by the gold-rimmed spectacles into giant forget-me-nots, had the transparency of a child’s: there was not a trace of humour or guile in his innocent pink face.
‘Then you’re not really what you might call a travelled man, Mr. Darby,’ she said.
‘No, not exactly,’ he replied. ‘No.’ He considered the point. ‘No, Mrs. Stedman, only … ah … portentously, as it were. No, I should be more inclined to call myself a would-be traveller.’
‘you open the second bottle,’ whispered Sarah with a nod to George Stedman. ‘You’ll make a better job of it.’
Stedman rose and went to the sideboard. ‘I’ll manage this one, Jim,’ he murmured confidentially. ‘You’ve got the ladies on your hands.’ And there was so little of the romantic and spectacular in George Stedman’s treatment of the champagne-bottle that they none of them knew that anything was happening till they found him at their elbows filling their glasses.
Mr. Darby stared in blue-eyed wonder when Mrs. Bricketts appeared, to remove the plates, in a neat black dress and snowy apron. He was accustomed to see her in the slatternly guise of a char with an old tweed cap skewered on to her head with a black hatpin. ‘Now isn’t that Sarah all over!’ he thought to himself.
The next course was a plum-pudding.
‘Plum-pudding before Christmas, Mrs. D?’ said Stedman.
‘Plum-pudding after Christmas, Mr. Stedman,’ replied Sarah. ‘This one is two years old. It’s the proper sort. I learnt to make them from my grandmother, and, for all I know, she learnt it from hers.’
Mrs. Bricketts put a decanter in front of Mr. Darby. He eyed it: it was the port. Suddenly his heart began to beat very fast: the great moment, the event of the evening, was almost upon him. The champagne had gone to his head and he felt vigorous, elated, but a little insecure. He was not in perfect control, but perhaps that was all to the good. ‘Don’t let my mind dwell on it,’ he admonished himself. ‘It’s all there. Don’t worry. When I start talking, it’ll all come back.’ He took up his spoon and fork and fell upon his plum-pudding.
Sarah’s helpings were large ones, and everyone, though pressed, refused a second. The port had been round. Everybody’s glass was full: Mr. Darby sat with his eyes fixed on his, as though it were a mousetrap likely to go off at any minute. Then George Stedman pushed back his chair and at the sound of it Mr. Darby’s heart leapt with delicious terror. ‘The Baronet’s health,’ his poetic imagination whispered to him, ‘was proposed by his old friend Mr. George Stedman. In the course of a moving speech …’ But George Stedman was on his feet, surveying the company with bland composure. The silence was absolute.
‘Ladies and Gentlemen,’ he began with slow and solemn deliberation. ‘We are met together this evening on an Unusual, a unique, occasion. We are met together to celebrate the fiftieth birthday of an old and very valued friend.’ He paused and once more surveyed the company. The faces of all had dropped to an expression of strained and gloomy solemnity. Mr. Darby gazed at his port glass with eyes of melancholy reproach. Then, ending this weighty pause, Stedman’s tone suddenly grew livelier, more confidential. He broke from his funeral pace into an easier movement and simultaneously the faces of his listeners relaxed. ‘I have known Jim Darby now,’ he said, rolling his head back on his deep shoulders, ‘for a matter of twenty years. Now twenty years is a long time, Ladies and Gentlemen; a very long time; a fifth of a century.’ Mrs. Cribb gave a little scandalized shriek and, with an arch glance at Mr. Darby, muzzled herself with the palm of her hand. But Mr. Darby, it appeared, had not heard her. His eyes were still fixed with an infinite sadness on his port-glass. His mood was not to be interrupted by humorous trivialities. ‘I have changed a good deal myself in the last twenty years,’ said Mr. Stedman, running both hands down his ample waistcoat, ‘and so—I would deny it, Ladies and Gentlemen, if I could—has Jim Darby. In those far off days, Jim was a gay young spark.’ Stedman paused for the expected ripple of laughter. Mr. Darby, still deep in meditation, slightly raised his eyebrows and smiled wistfully. ‘Only a few months before we met,’ continued the speaker, ‘he had led his blushing bride,’ he paused to drop a humorous eye on Sarah and all other eyes but Mr. Darby’s followed suit.
‘Not me, Mr. Stedman!’ said Sarah. ‘I was never one for blushing.’
George Stedman withdrew his eye. ‘Led his blushing bride,’ he insisted, ‘to settle in these parts. They were strangers, Ladies and Gentlemen,—foreigners you might say, for they came from the other side of Newchester,—from Jockswood, which, I may tell you, is a matter of five miles from here.’ Stedman paused once more, till the mirth had subsided. Then he dropped back into the more solemn tone of his prelude, swaying the mood of his audience with all the ease of the practised orator. Only Mr. Darby failed to follow, lingering behind in contemplation of that reference to Jocks-wood and his emigration to Savershill. Yes, he had done it then, twenty years ago: he had taken the plunge. But the plunge had carried him only five miles. The mistake had been—yes, he confessed sadly to his port-glass that it was a mistake—to weight himself with Sarah. Uncle Tom Darby had been more practical: he had plunged alone, unhampered, and his plunge had carried him clean across the world. If it had been wet on that Saturday afternoon when he took Sarah Bouch out to Hobblesfield, everything might have been different. That was the worst of being so impressionable. Strong feelings, that was his trouble. He had always been a man of strong feelings. He could feel them boiling and surging in him now like a stormy sea. Yes, the meek, quiet little man, sitting motionless before his port-glass, felt himself tossed, even now, upon high seas of emotion, rising on crests of strange, ecstatic joy, plunging into troughs of indefinable misery, as he sailed before the wind of George Stedman’s interminable eloquence, which came to him in his dream as a slow rise and fall of wordless, windlike sound. He was recalled to himself by the cessation of it, a prolonged silence, followed at last by George Stedman’s concluding phrase. ‘Well, Ladies and Gentlemen, I must stand no longer between you and our host. I conclude by asking you to join me ‘—he raised his glass—’ in wishing Jim Darby and Mrs. Darby long life and every happiness.’
The toast was drunk. Mr. Darby inadvertently drank it himself, draining his glass at a single gulp. Then, with great caution, he rose to his feet. He felt disquietingly insecure, with an insecurity localized especially in the tongue, the mind, and the legs. This was not at all the state in which he had imagined himself rising to address the assembly. For three or four seconds the room dissolved and swam before his eyes. The moment was critical: only a supreme effort could save him.
Mr. Darby made that effort. With an almost superhuman determination he stemmed the rising mutiny, imposed his will on vacillating mind and body. ‘Be calm!’ he adjured himself. ‘Be calm! Pull yourself together! Don’t begin yet. Plenty of time.’ He reminded himself that a long pause, however strange and desperate it might appear to himself in his present state, was bound to produce an impression of extreme self-control on his audience. It was this reassuring thought that saved him. He took his time. He stood steady. He could feel, triumphantly, that he was standing steady, that he was quite definitely not swaying. And now he made another comforting discovery. The chrysanthemums were not too tall: nowhere near it. He towered above them. Far beneath him he saw the white expanse of tablecloth, and around it and above it the faces of his guests blossoming like huge flowers against the outer dimness. At the end of the table, straight opposite him, Sarah’s was regarding him sternly. But he did not care. With every moment new strength was being added to him. He smiled defiantly at Sarah’s scowl and then, clasping his hands upon his waistcoat, began as slowly as George Stedman:
‘Ladies and Gentlemen. On behalf of myself and my wife I thank you all. I am sensible, deeply sensible?—he paused, assailed by a sudden horrible doubt about the word sensible. When he had heard himself repeat it for the second time it had seemed to him, in this connection, to be perfect nonsense. But a rapid glance round the table reassured him. If he was talking nonsense, no one had noticed it. ‘… sensible,’ he continued, ‘of the sincerity, and the … ah … cordiality of the congratulations which our friend Mr. Stedman here … ‘Mr. Darby unclasped his hands, neatly indicated George Stedman with an open palm, and reclasped them … ‘has … ah …voiced for you with his customary eloquence. It is a solemn moment, Ladies and Gentlemen—our friend Mr. Stedman has experienced it and will corrod … corrog … corrobulate me … when a man joins the ranks of the kinka … quinco … twinka … ‘Mr. Darby hesitated and, dropping his eyes, accidentally smiled a little weakly at Mrs. Cribb.
Mrs. Cribb thought the smile intentional, and giggled in response. ‘The kinkajous, Mr. Darby?’ she suggested brightly.
This unpardonable frivolity gave Mr. Darby the necessary stimulus. He pulled himself sternly together and raised his chin: ‘… of the quinquagenians,’ he said with great seriousness.
He had equipped himself with several other imposing words to adorn the occasion, but now wisely determined to discard them in favour of more managable vocables. For Mr. Darby had now realized his present limitations: he had discovered what orders he could expect his rallied mutineers to obey, what would be bungled or ignored, and like a wise general he tempered his commands to the condition of his troops. Thenceforward things went without a hitch. He swung his listeners to heights undreamt of by George Stedman, held them there on pinnacles of an almost unearthly eloquence; then plunged them suddenly into dramatic silences, from which, when all hope seemed lost, he calmly rescued them and set them down on the comfortable levels of the commonplace. He was now perfectly at his ease, fully master of himself. He felt that he could easily go on speaking for half the night. But when he had been at it for a quarter of an hour he happened to notice that Sarah’s eye was upon him. He tried to avoid it, but it held him and for a moment his eloquence flagged. He floundered, but instantly recovered himself. But perhaps she was right: the best of things must end. He threw out his chest and raised his chin. ‘In a word, my friends,’ he concluded, enveloping the company in a gaze which was moist and glittering with emotion, while with a fine forensic skill he began gradually to diminish his speed and the volume of his tone, ‘In a word, I thank you, we thank you, both for your good wishes, and for the great privilege you have given us in allowing us … to entertain you here … to-night.’
With the ponderous slowness of one who sways empires, Mr. Darby resumed his seat.