V. A Hostess at Home
An English telephone is a contradiction in terms. If it is in England, it isn’t a telephone. It is a thing that looks something like a broken ox-yoke, that is manipulated something like a trombone, and is about as effectual as the Keeley Motor.
A course of lessons is necessary to learn to use one, but the lessons are wasted, as the instrument is invariably out of order, and moreover, nobody has one, anyhow.
But one morning, before I had discovered all this, I was summoned to the telephone booth of the Pantheon Club, and blithely grasped the cumbersome affair, with its receiver on one end and its transmitter on the other. I ignorantly held it wrong end to, but that made no difference, as it wouldn’t work either way.
“Grawsp it stiffer, madame,” advised the anxious Buttons who engineered it. At length I discovered that this meant to press firmly on a fret, as if playing a flute, but by this time the party addressing me had been disconnected from the other end, and all attempts to regain communication were futile.
The boy took the instrument, and I have never seen a finer display of human ingenuity and patience than he showed for the next half-hour trying to hear that chord again. Then he gave it up, and, laying the horrid thing gently in its cradle, he nonchalantly informed me that if the party awrsked for me again, he’d send me naotice, and then demanded tuppence.
This I willingly paid, as I was always glad to get rid of those copper heavy-weights; and, too, it seemed a remarkably small price even for a telephone call, – until I suddenly remembered that I hadn’t made the call, – nor had I received it.
The call was repeated later, and after another distracting session of incoherent shouting, and painfully-cramped finger muscles, I learned that I was invited to an informal dinner that evening at Mrs. Marchbanks’s at seven-thirty.
I had not intended to plunge into the social whirl so soon, and had declined all the many invitations which had come to me by mail.
But somehow the telephone invitation took me unawares, and, too, I was so pleased to succeed in getting the message at all that it seemed ungracious and ungrateful to refuse. So, I took a fresh grip on the fretted monster, and, aiming my voice carefully at the far-away transmitter, I shouted an acceptance. I hoped it reached the goal, but as there was nothing but awful silence afterward, I had to take it on faith, and I went away to look over my dinner gowns.
The invitation had been classed as “informal,” but I knew the elasticity of that term, and so, though I did not select my very best raiment, I chose a pretty décolleté frock, that had “New York” legibly written on its every fold and pucker.
So late is the dusk of the London spring that I easily made my toilette by daylight, and was all ready at seven o’clock.
Carefully studying my Baedeker maps and plans to make sure of the distance, I stepped into my hansom just in time to reach my destination at a minute or two before half past seven, assuming that New York customs prevailed in England.
The door was opened to me by an amazed-looking maid, who seemed so uncertain what to do with me that I almost grew embarrassed myself.
Finally, she asked me to follow her up-stairs, and then ushered me into a room where my hostess, in the hands of her maid, was in the earliest stages of her toilette.
“You dear thing,” she said, “how sweet of you to come. Yes, Louise, that aigrette is right. Here is the key of my jewel case.”
“I fear I have mistaken the hour,” I said; “the telephone was a bit difficult, – but I understood half past seven.”
“Yes,” agreed Mrs. Marchbanks, studying the back of her head in a hand-mirror, “but in London seven-thirty means eight, you know.”
This was definite information, and I promptly stored it away for future use. Also, it was reliable information, for it proved true, and at eight the guests began to arrive.
Dinner was served at quarter to nine, and all was well.
Incidentally I had learned my lesson.
The half-hour in the drawing-room before dinner was an interesting “first impression” of that indescribable combination of warmth and frost known as a London Hostess.
Further experience taught me that Mrs. Marchbanks was a typical one.
The London hostess’s invariable mode of procedure is a sudden, inordinate gush of welcome, followed immediately by an icy stare. By the time you have politely responded to the welcome, your hostess has forgotten your existence. Nay, more, she seems almost to have forgotten her own. She is vague, self-absorbed, and quite oblivious of your existence. I have heard of a lady with a gracious presence. The London hostess is best described by a gracious absence.
But having adapted yourself to this condition, your hostess is likely to whirl about and dart a remark or a question at you.
On the evening under discussion, my hostess suddenly broke off her own greeting to another guest, to say to me, “Of course you’ll be wanting to buy some new clothes at once.”
This statement was accompanied by a deliberate survey, from berthe to hem, of my palpably American-made gown, and as the incident pleased my sense of humor, I felt no resentment, and amiably acquiesced in her decision.
Then, funnily enough, the conversation turned upon good-breeding.
“A well-bred Englishwoman,” my hostess dictatorially observed, “never talks of herself. She tactfully makes the person to whom she is talking the subject of conversation.”
“But,” said I, “if the person to whom she is talking is also well-bred, he must reject that subject, and tactfully talk about the first speaker. This must bring about a deadlock.” She looked at me, or rather through me, in a pitying, uncomprehending way, and went on:
“The well-bred Englishwoman never makes an allusion or an implication that could cause even the slightest trace of discomfiture or annoyance to the person addressed.”
This, of itself, seemed true enough, but again she turned swiftly toward me, and abruptly inquired, “Doesn’t the servility of the English servants embarrass you?”
This time, too, my sense of humor saved me from embarrassment, but I began to think serious-minded persons should not brave the slings and arrows of a well-bred Englishwoman.
Geniality and ingenuousness are alike unknown to the English hostess. It is a very rare thing to meet a charming Englishwoman. Good traits they have in plenty and many sterling qualities which Americans often lack, but magnetism and responsiveness are as a rule not among these qualities.
And I do not yet know whether it is through ignorance or with malice prepense that an English hostess greets you effusively, and then drops you with an air of finality that gives a “lost your last friend” feeling more than anything else in all the world.
This state of things is of course more pronouncedly noticeable at teas than at dinners. At an afternoon reception, the hostility of the hostess is beyond all words. Moreover, at English afternoon teas there are two rules. One is you may not speak to a fellow-guest without an introduction. The other is that no introduction is necessary between guests of the house. One of these rules is always inflexibly enforced at every tea; but the casual guest never knows which one, and so complications ensue.
English hostesses always seem to me very much like that peculiar kind of flowered chintz with which they cover their furniture – the kind that looks like oilcloth, and is very cold and shiny, very beautiful, very slippery, and decidedly uncomfortable.
But in inverse proportion to the conversational unsatisfactoriness of the English women are the entertaining powers of the English men. They are voluntarily delightful. They make an effort (if necessary) to be pleasantly talkative and amusing.
And, notwithstanding the traditional slurs on British humor, the English society man is deliciously humorous, and often as brilliantly witty as our own Americans.
At the dinner I have mentioned above, I was seated next to a somewhat insignificant-looking young man of true English spick-and-spanness, and with a delightful drawl, almost like the one written as dialect in international novels.
Perhaps in consideration of my probable American attitude toward British humor, he good-naturedly amused me with jokes directed against his national peculiarities.
He described graphically an Englishman who was blindly groping about in his brain for a good story which he had heard and stored away there. “Ah, yes,” said the supposed would-be jester; “the man was ill; and he said his physician advised that he should every morning take a cup of coffee and take a walk around the place.”
“He had missed the point, do you see,” explained my amusing neighbor, “and the joke should have been ‘take a cup of coffee, and take a walk on the grounds,’ do you see?”
So pleased was the young man with the whole story, that I laughed in sympathy, and he went on to say:
“But you Americans make just the same mistakes about our jokes. Now only last week Punch had a ripping line asking why the Americans were making such a fuss about Bishop Potter, and said any one would think he was a meat-potter. Now one of your New York daily papers borrowed the thing, and made it read, ‘What’s the matter with Bishop Potter? Any one would think he was a meat packer.’ ’Pon my honor, Miss Emmins, I know that for a fact!”
“Then I think,” I replied, “that we ought never again to throw stones at the British sense of humor.”
In the pause that followed, a bulky English lord across the table was heard denouncing the course taken by a certain political party. So energetic were his gestures, and so forceful his speech, that he had grown very red and belligerent-looking, and fairly hammered the table in his indignation.
The young man next to me looked at him, as an indulgent father might look at a naughty child. “Isn’t he the saucy puss?” said my neighbor, turning to me with such a roguish smile that his remark seemed the funniest thing I had ever heard.
I frankly told my attractive dinner partner that the men of London society were far more entertaining than the women. He did not seem surprised at this, but seemed to look upon it as an accepted condition.
I glanced across the table at a young Englishwoman. She was an “Honorable,” and possessed of a jointed surname. She was attired with great wealth and unbecomingness, and, to sum her up in a general way, she looked as if she did not write poetry.
“Yes,” she was saying, “cabs are cheap with us, but if you ride a lot in a day, they count up.” This is a stock remark with London women and I was not surprised to hear it again.
I glanced at my young man. He too had heard, and he quickly caught my mental attitude.
“Yes,” he said, “Englishwomen and girls are very fit; they’re good form, accomplished, and all that. But, though they know a lot, somehow, er, – their minds don’t jell.”
As this exactly expressed my own opinion, I was delighted at his clever phrasing of it.
But if the Englishman is charming as a dinner guest, he is even more so when he is host, as he often is at afternoon tea. And though I attended many teas presided over by London men, all others fade into insignificance beside the one given me at the Punch office.
I was the only guest, the host was the genial and miraculously clever Editor of Punch.
The tea was of the ordinary London deliciousness, the cakes and thin bread-and-butter were, as always, over there, the best in the world; but it was served to us on the historic Punch table, the great table where every Friday night, since the beginning of that publication, its editorial staff has dined.
And as each diner at some time cut his monogram into the table, the semi-polished surface shows priceless memorials of the great British authors, artists, and illustrators.
I was informed by my kind host that I might sit at any place I chose. I hesitated between Thackeray’s and Mark Lemon’s, but finally by a sudden impulse I dropped into a chair in front of the monogram of George du Maurier.
The Editor of Punch smiled a little, but he only said, “You Americans are a humorous people.”
