Reginald on House-Parties

by H.H. Munro (SAKI)

　　

---

The drawback is, one never really knows one's hosts andhostesses. One gets to know their fox-terriers and theirchrysanthemums, and whether the story about the go-cart canbe turned loose in the drawing-room, or must be toldprivately to each member of the party, for fear of shockingpublic opinion; but one's host and hostess are a sort ofhuman hinterland that one never has the time to explore.There was a fellow I stayed with once in Warwickshire whofarmed his own land, but was otherwise quite steady. Shouldnever have suspected him of having a soul, yet not very longafterwards he eloped with a lion-tamer's widow and set up asa golf-instructor somewhere on the Persian Gulf; dreadfullyimmoral, of course, because he was only an indifferentplayer, but still, it showed imagination. His wife wasreally to be pitied, because he had been the only person inthe house who understood how to manage the cook's temper, andnow she has to put "D.V." on her dinner invitations. Still,that's better than a domestic scandal; a woman who leaves hercook never wholly recovers her position in Society.I suppose the same thing holds good with the hosts; theyseldom have more than a superficial acquaintance with theirguests, and so often just when they do get to know you a bitbetter, they leave off knowing you altogether. There wasrather a breath of winter in the air when I left thoseDorset-shire people. You see, they had asked me down toshoot, and I'm not particularly immense at that sort ofthing. There's such a deadly sameness about partridges; whenyou've missed one, you've missed the lot--at least, that'sbeen my experience. And they tried to rag me in the smoking-room about not being able to hit a bird at five yards, a sortof bovine ragging that suggested cows buzzing round a gadflyand thinking they were teasing it. So I got up the nextmorning at early dawn--I know it was dawn, because there werelark-noises in the sky, and the grass looked as if it hadbeen left out all night--and hunted up the most conspicuousthing in the bird line that I could find, and measured thedistance, as nearly as it would let me, and shot away all Iknew. They said afterwards that it was a tame bird; that'ssimply silly, because it was awfully wild at the first fewshots. Afterwards it quieted down a bit, and when its legshad stopped waving farewells to the landscape I got agardener-boy to drag it into the hall, where everybody mustsee it on their way to the breakfast-room. I breakfastedupstairs myself. I gathered afterwards that the meal wastinged with a very unchristian spirit. I suppose it'sunlucky to bring peacock's feathers into a house; anyway,there was a blue-pencilly look in my hostess's eye when Itook my departure.Some hostesses, of course, will forgive anything, even untopavonicide (is there such a word?), as long as one is nice-looking and sufficiently unusual to counterbalance some ofthe others; and there are others--the girl, for instance, whoreads Meredith, and appears at meals with unnaturalpunctuality in a frock that's made at home and repented atleisure. She eventually finds her way to India and getsmarried, and comes home to admire the Royal Academy, and toimagine that an indifferent prawn curry is for ever aneffective substitute for all that we have been taught tobelieve is luncheon. It's then that she is really dangerous;but at her worst she is never quite so bad as the woman whofires Exchange and Mart questions at you without the leastprovocation. Imagine the other day, just when I was doing mybest to understand half the things I was saying, being askedby one of those seekers after country home truths how manyfowls she could keep in a run ten feet by six, or whatever itwas! I told her whole crowds, as long as she kept the doorshut, and the idea didn't seem to have struck her before; atleast, she brooded over it for the rest of dinner.Of course, as I say, one never really knows one's ground, andone may make mistakes occasionally. But then one's mistakessometimes turn out assets in the long-run: if we had neverbungled away our American colonies we might never have hadthe boy from the States to teach us how to wear our hair andcut our clothes, and we must get our ideas from somewhere, Isuppose. Even the Hooligan was probably invented in Chinacenturies before we thought of him. England must wake up, asthe Duke of Devonshire said the other day; wasn't it? Oh,well, it was someone else. Not that I ever indulge indespair about the Future; there always have been men who havegone about despairing of the Future, and when the Futurearrives it says nice, superior things about their havingacted according to their lights. It is dreadful to thinkthat other people's grandchildren may one day rise up andcall one amiable.There are moments when one sympathises with Herod.

---

---