The youth brightened at the reminiscence. ‘In a foreign city I wouldn’t mind so much,’ he said; ‘one could go to one’s Consul and get the requisite help from him. Here in one’s own land one is far more derelict if one gets into a fix. Unless I can find some decent chap to swallow my story and lend me some money I seem likely to spend the night on the Embankment. I’m glad, anyhow, that you don’t think the story outrageously improbable.’
He threw a good deal of warmth into the last remark, as though perhaps to indicate his hope that Gortsby did not fall far short of the requisite decency.
‘Of course,’ said Gortsby slowly, ‘the weak point of your story is that you can’t produce the soap.’
The young man sat forward hurriedly, felt rapidly in the pockets of his overcoat, and then jumped to his feet.
‘I must have lost it,’ he muttered angrily.
‘To lose an hotel and a cake of soap on one afternoon suggests wilful carelessness,’ said Gortsby, but the young man scarcely waited to hear the end of the remark. He flitted away down the path, his head held high, with an air of somewhat jaded jauntiness.
‘It was a pity,’ mused Gortsby; ‘the going out to get one’s own soap was the one convincing touch in the whole story, and yet it was just that little detail that brought him to grief. If he had had the brilliant forethought to provide himself with a cake of soap, wrapped and sealed with all the solicitude of the chemist’s counter, he would have been a genius in his particular line. In his particular line genius certainly consists of an infinite capacity for taking precautions.’
With that reflection Gortsby rose to go; as he did so an exclamation of concern escaped him. Lying on the ground by the side of the bench was a small oval packet, wrapped and sealed with the solicitude of a chemist’s counter. It could be nothing else but a cake of soap, and it had evidently fallen out of the youth’s overcoat pocket when he flung himself down on the seat. In another moment Gortsby was scudding along the dusk-shrouded path in anxious quest for a youthful figure in a light overcoat. He had nearly given up the search when he caught sight of the object of his pursuit standing irresolutely on the border of the carriage drive, evidently uncertain whether to strike across the Park or make for the bustling pavements of Knightsbridge. He turned round sharply with an air of defensive hostility when he found Gortsby hailing him.
‘The important witness to the genuineness of your story has turned up,’ said Gortsby, holding out the cake of soap; ‘it must have slid out of your overcoat pocket when you sat down on the seat. I saw it on the ground after you left. You must excuse my disbelief, but appearances were really rather against you, and now, as I appealed to the testimony of the soap I think I ought to abide by its verdict. If the loan of a sovereign is any good to you–’
The young man hastily removed all doubt on the subject by pocketing the coin.
‘Here is my card with my address,’ continued Gortsby; ‘any day this week will do for returning the money, and here is the soap◦– don’t lose it again; it’s been a good friend to you.’
‘Lucky thing your finding it,’ said the youth, and then, with a catch in his voice, he blurted out a word or two of thanks and fled headlong in the direction of Knightsbridge.
‘Poor boy, he as nearly as possible broke down,’ said Gortsby to himself. ‘I don’t wonder either; the relief from his quandary must have been acute. It’s a lesson to me not to be too clever in judging by circumstances.’
As Gortsby retraced his steps past the seat where the little drama had taken place he saw an elderly gentleman poking and peering beneath it and on all sides of it, and recognised his earlier fellow occupant.
‘Have you lost anything, sir?’ he asked.
‘Yes, sir, a cake of soap.’
A Touch of Realism
‘I hope you’ve come full of suggestions for Christmas,’ said Lady Blonze to her latest arrived guest; ‘the old-fashioned Christmas and the up-to-date Christmas are both so played out. I want to have something really original this year.’
‘I was staying with the Mathesons last month,’ said Blanche Boveal eagerly, ‘and we had such a good idea. Every one in the house-party had to be a character and behave consistently all the time, and at the end of the visit one had to guess what every one’s character was. The one who was voted to have acted his or her character best got a prize.’
‘It sounds amusing,’ said Lady Blonze.
‘I was St Francis of Assisi,’ continued Blanche; ‘we hadn’t got to keep to our right sexes. I kept getting up in the middle of a meal and throwing out food to the birds; you see, the chief thing that one remembers of St Francis is that he was fond of the birds. Every one was so stupid about it, and thought that I was the old man who feeds the sparrows in the Tuileries Gardens. Then Colonel Pentley was the Jolly Miller on the banks of Dee.’
‘How on earth did he do that?’ asked Bertie van Tahn.
‘“He laughed and sang from morn till night,”’ explained Blanche.
‘How dreadful for the rest of you,’ said Bertie; ‘and anyway he wasn’t on the banks of Dee.’
‘One had to imagine that,’ said Blanche.
‘If you could imagine all that you might as well imagine cattle on the further bank and keep on calling them home, Mary-fashion, across the sands of Dee. Or you might change the river to the Yarrow and imagine it was on the top of you, and say you were Willie, or whoever it was, drowned in Yarrow.’
‘Of course it’s easy to make fun of it,’ said Blanche sharply, ‘but it was extremely interesting and amusing. The prize was rather a fiasco, though. You see, Millie Matheson said her character was Lady Bountiful, and as she was our hostess, of course we all had to vote that she carried out her character better than any one. Otherwise I ought to have got the prize.’
‘It’s quite an idea for a Christmas party,’ said Lady Blonze; ‘we must certainly do it here.’
Sir Nicholas was not so enthusiastic. ‘Are you quite sure, my dear, that you’re wise in doing this thing?’ he said to his wife when they were alone together. ‘It might do very well at the Mathesons’, where they had rather a staid, elderly house-party, but here it will be a different matter. There is the Durmot flapper, for instance, who simply stops at nothing, and you know what Van Tahn is like. Then there is Cyril Skatterly; he has madness on one side of his family and a Hungarian grandmother on the other.’
‘I don’t see what they could do that would matter,’ said Lady Blonze.
‘It’s the unknown that is to be dreaded,’ said Sir Nicholas. ‘If Skatterly took it into his head to represent a Bull of Bashan, well, I’d rather not be here.’
‘Of course we shan’t allow any Bible characters. Besides, I don’t know what the Bulls of Bashan really did that was so very dreadful; they just came round and gaped, as far as I remember.’
‘My dear, you don’t know what Skatterly’s Hungarian imagination mightn’t read into the part; it would be small satisfaction to say to him afterwards: “You’ve behaved as no Bull of Bashan would have behaved.”’
‘Oh, you’re an alarmist,’ said Lady Blonze; ‘I particularly want to have this idea carried out. It will be sure to be talked about a lot.’
‘That is quite possible,’ said Sir Nicholas.
Dinner that evening was not a particularly lively affair; the strain of trying to impersonate a self-imposed character or to glean hints of identity from other people’s conduct acted as a check on the natural festivity of such a gathering. There was a general feeling of gratitude and acquiescence when good-natured Rachel Klammerstein suggested that there should be an hour or two’s respite from ‘the game’ while they all listened to a little piano-playing after dinner. Rachel’s love of piano music was not indiscriminate, and concentrated itself chiefly on selections rendered by her idolised offspring, Moritz and Augusta, who, to do them justice, played remarkably well.