The Little Theatre loved it. Acting is a great provoker of hunger and conviviality, and the bread and the cheese, the fruit and the coffee were consumed in great quantities. Professor Vambrace complimented Griselda upon the classical simplicity of this refreshment; it put him in mind of the meals in Homer, he said. Pearl and he ate heartily upon these occasions, not knowing what Spartan nastiness the preoccupied Mrs Vambrace might have left in the refrigerator for them at home. But Griselda’s hospitality begot hospitality in others, and soon the actors were vying with one another to entertain the cast after a rehearsal; simplicity was forgotten, and hospitality raged unchecked. Some of these affairs were very pleasant; others were markedly less agreeable. Mrs Leakey’s after-rehearsal soirée came well down in the latter category.
What Mrs Leakey felt when she discovered that Leakey was going to other people’s houses to eat and drink, without her, four times a week, was simple jealousy. But it was not Mrs Leakey’s way to admit to base emotions; she sublimated them. So she addressed Leakey thus:
“You can’t very well go on eating everywhere and anywhere, week in and week out, without Repaying Hospitality. We don’t want people to think we’re cheapskates. I don’t know that we’re exactly in a position to entertain. Goodness knows we have little enough in the way of cups and saucers. But if other people are having the cast in after rehearsal, we’ll do it too. So you’d better invite the whole tribe for next Friday night, and get it over with.”
When Mrs Leakey heard that the fare at St Agnes’ was of the simplest, she smiled a superior smile. Beginning at ten o”clock in the morning on the Friday in question, she worked the greater part of the day on the food which she would serve that night. She baked a chocolate cake and a white cake; she iced the former in the difficult and lumpy Log Cabin style, and the latter she covered with a deep layer of sticky stuff resembling marshmallow. She imprisoned little sausages in pastry and baked them. She made an elaborate ice cream, and coloured it green. She made sandwiches of the utmost difficulty, possible only to a thirty-third degree sandwichmaker, in which bananas were tongued and grooved with celery; sandwiches loaded with cream cheese, or encrusted with nuts and olives; sandwiches in which lengths of chilly asparagus were entombed in two kinds of bread; sandwiches in which fish, mayonnaise and onion were forced into uneasy union. She produced pickles of her own making from the cellar cupboard, and created a jelly from which the imbedded bits of fruit stared forth, like fish from a ruby bowl. By evening she was, to use her own phrase; “all in”, and let Mr Leakey know it before he went to rehearsal.
“Don’t be later than nine getting back here with them,” she said; “we don’t want them hanging around till all hours. Some of us have to get up in the morning if others don’t.”
This was enough to make Mr Leakey nervous all through the rehearsal, which began at half-past six, and to put him into a state of real apprehension from half-past eight onward. But when the cast arrived in a body at the Leakey home at half-past nine, who could have been a more gracious chatelaine than Mrs Leakey?
“I’m glad you came just in whatever you stood up in,” said she, taking in Griselda, who was in slacks, the Torso, who was in shorts, and Valentine, who wore a suit but the tail of whose blouse kept popping out. Mrs Leakey wore a creation of scratchy lace which showed off her large, strong collar bones to great advantage.
She had invited a few ladies of her acquaintance to help her in serving the refreshments. Some hostesses might have felt that this was a mistake, for these ladies knew nothing about the play, were not members of the Little Theatre, and wanted to talk about other things. Now a theatrical company, however ill-assorted or however amateur, is bound together by ties which are incomprehensible to outsiders. They want to talk about their play, or if they talk of other things, they are likely to talk about them in a manner which does not readily take in strangers. Even a determined hostess like Mrs Leakey may find herself bested by this exclusiveness. She decided to make small-talk with Solly on the one topic which seemed to interest him.
“I’ve been hearing Eric his lines,” said she, offering him a pickle; “I must say they don’t mean much to me.”
“Oh,” said Solly, who was tired and not in a mood to encourage this line of conversation.
“I think some of Shakespeare’s characters are awfully overdrawn,” said Mrs Leakey, firmly.
“Really?” said Solly, looking curiously into a sandwich.
“As a matter of fact, I’ve said to Eric that it seems to me that more people would like Shakespeare if he had written in prose.”
“Very likely.”
“Still, that’s just one person’s opinion.”
“Quite.”
The party took on a strongly Ontario character. That is to say, all the ladies gathered in the drawing room, and all the gentlemen gathered in a small room behind it, which Mr Leakey used as his “den”. In the dining-room, enthroned behind the silver service, one of Mrs Leakey’s female friends poured out coffee, and the other female friends came to the table from time to time to load up with fresh consignments of food. Roger wanted to talk to Griselda; Valentine wanted to talk to Solly; the Torso yearned in a generous and all-embracing fashion to be at the men. But the power of the hostess at such affairs is very great, and Mrs Leakey liked to run her parties on tried-and-true pioneer lines. So the sexes ate in decent segregation, and were so cowed that they obediently gobbled some of everything which was offered to them, regardless of how little they wanted it. And promptly at half-past ten the ladies rose, almost as one, and the guests departed.
“Well,” said Mrs Leakey; “thank Heaven they didn’t stay till all hours. Now we’d better get these dishes washed; I don’t want them staring at me when I come down in the morning. It’s been a hard day, but I don’t want it to stretch over into another.”
By midnight the Leakeys had washed everything and put it away, and were in bed, having shown themselves hospitable.
It was not long before Mrs Bridgetower, who had a knack of knowing what was going on even when she was most secluded and ailing, heard about this round of hospitality.
“You know how it grieves me not to be able to do my part,” she said to Solly. “When your Father was alive this house was a rendezvous—a regular rendezvous. But I simply couldn’t see so many people at once in my present condition. I might manage a few, but I couldn’t manage all.”
“Please don’t worry about it, Mother,” said he. “Nobody minds.”
“Oh, don’t they?” said his mother. “I didn’t know that I’d been forgotten quite so quickly. There was a time, I can tell you, when people looked to this house for hospitality. And you know, lovey, that there is nothing I like so much as to see your friends here.”
Solly had often been assured of this by his mother, but the evidence pointed in a different direction. What his mother liked was to see his friends come to the house, fail in some direction or other to measure up to the standard which she set for companions of her only son, and depart in disgrace. It was still remembered against one miserable youth that five years before he had crumbled a piece of cake on the drawing-room carpet, and had then nervously trodden in it and tracked it into the dining-room; Mrs Bridgetower could still point out exactly where his crumby spoor had lain. Solly hoped to let the matter drop, but his mother detected this and continued: