The grill-room clock struck eleven with the respectful
unobtrusiveness of one whose mission in life is to be ignored.
When the flight of time should really have rendered abstinence and
migration imperative the lighting apparatus would signal the fact
in the usual way.
Six minutes later Clovis approached the supper-table, in the
blessed expectancy of one who has dined sketchily and long ago.
"I'm starving," he announced, making an effort to sit down
gracefully and read the menu at the same time.
"So I gathered;" said his host, "from the fact that you were
nearly punctual. I ought to have told you that I'm a Food
Reformer. I've ordered two bowls of bread-and-milk and some
health biscuits. I hope you don't mind."
Clovis pretended afterwards that he didn't go white above the
collar-line for the fraction of a second.
"All the same," he said, "you ought not to joke about such things.
There really are such people. I've known people who've met them.
To think of all the adorable things there are to eat in the world,
and then to go through life munching sawdust and being proud of
it."
"They're like the Flagellants of the Middle Ages, who went about
mortifying themselves."
"They had some excuse," said Clovis. "They did it to save their
immortal souls, didn't they? You needn't tell me that a man who
doesn't love oysters and asparagus and good wines has got a soul,
or a stomach either. He's simply got the instinct for being
unhappy highly developed."
Clovis relapsed for a few golden moments into tender intimacies
with a succession of rapidly disappearing oysters.
"I think oysters are more beautiful than any religion," he resumed
presently. "They not only forgive our unkindness to them; they
justify it, they incite us to go on being perfectly horrid to
them. Once they arrive at the supper-table they seem to enter
thoroughly into the spirit of the thing. There's nothing in
Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic
unselfishness of an oyster. Do you like my new waistcoat? I'm
wearing it for the first time to-night."
"It looks like a great many others you've had lately, only worse.
New dinner waistcoats are becoming a habit with you."
"They say one always pays for the excesses of one's youth;
mercifully that isn't true about one's clothes. My mother is
thinking of getting married."
"Again!"
"It's the first time."
"Of course, you ought to know. I was under the impression that
she'd been married once or twice at least."
"Three times, to be mathematically exact. I meant that it was the
first time she'd thought about getting married; the other times
she did it without thinking. As a matter of fact, it's really I
who am doing the thinking for her in this case. You see, it's
quite two years since her last husband died."
"You evidently think that brevity is the soul of widowhood."
"Well, it struck me that she was getting moped, and beginning to
settle down, which wouldn't suit her a bit. The first symptom
that I noticed was when she began to complain that we were living
beyond our income. All decent people live beyond their incomes
nowadays, and those who aren't respectable live beyond other
peoples. A few gifted individuals manage to do both."
"It's hardly so much a gift as an industry."
"The crisis came," returned Clovis, "when she suddenly started the
theory that late hours were bad for one, and wanted me to be in by
one o'clock every night. Imagine that sort of thing for me, who
was eighteen on my last birthday."
"On your last two birthdays, to be mathematically exact."
"Oh, well, that's not my fault. I'm not going to arrive at
nineteen as long as my mother remains at thirty-seven. One must
have some regard for appearances."
"Perhaps your mother would age a little in the process of settling
down."
"That's the last thing she'd think of. Feminine reformations
always start in on the failings of other people. That's why I was
so keen on the husband idea."
"Did you go as far as to select the gentleman, or did you merely
throw out a general idea, and trust to the force of suggestion?"
"If one wants a thing done in a hurry one must see to it oneself.
I found a military Johnny hanging round on a loose end at the
club, and took him home to lunch once or twice. He'd spent most
of his life on the Indian frontier, building roads, and relieving
famines and minimizing earthquakes, and all that sort of thing
that one does do on frontiers. He could talk sense to a peevish
cobra in fifteen native languages, and probably knew what to do if
you found a rogue elephant on your croquet-lawn; but he was shy
and diffident with women. I told my mother privately that he was
an absolute woman-hater; so, of course, she laid herself out to
flirt all she knew, which isn't a little."
"And was the gentleman responsive?"
"I hear he told some one at the club that he was looking out for a
Colonial job, with plenty of hard work, for a young friend of his,
so I gather that he has some idea of marrying into the family."
"You seem destined to be the victim of the reformation, after
all."
Claws wiped the trace of Turkish coffee and the beginnings of a
smile from his lips, and slowly lowered his dexter eyelid. Which,
being interpreted, probably meant, "I DON'T think!"
_________
-THE END-
The Match-Maker, a short story by HH Munro [Saki]
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