Arlington Stringham made a joke in the House of Commons. It was a
thin House, and a very thin joke; something about the Anglo-Saxon
race having a great many angles. It is possible that it was
unintentional, but a fellow-member, who did not wish it to be
supposed that he was asleep because his eyes were shut, laughed.
One or two of the papers noted "a laugh" in brackets, and another,
which was notorious for the carelessness of its political news,
mentioned "laughter." Things often begin in that way.
"Arlington made a joke in the House last night," said Eleanor
Stringham to her mother; "in all the years we've been married
neither of us has made jokes, and I don't like it now. I'm afraid
it's the beginning of the rift in the lute."
"What lute?" said her mother.
"It's a quotation," said Eleanor.
To say that anything was a quotation was an excellent method, in
Eleanor's eyes, for withdrawing it from discussion, just as you
could always defend indifferent lamb late in the season by saying
"It's mutton."
And, of course, Arlington Stringham continued to tread the thorny
path of conscious humour into which Fate had beckoned him.
"The country's looking very green, but, after all, that's what
it's there for," he remarked to his wife two days later.
"That's very modern, and I dare say very clever, but I'm afraid
it's wasted on me," she observed coldly. If she had known how
much effort it had cost him to make the remark she might have
greeted it in a kinder spirit. It is the tragedy of human
endeavour that it works so often unseen and unguessed.
Arlington said nothing, not from injured pride, but because he was
thinking hard for something to say. Eleanor mistook his silence
for an assumption of tolerant superiority, and her anger prompted
her to a further gibe.
"You had better tell it to Lady Isobel. I've no doubt she would
appreciate it."
Lady Isobel was seen everywhere with a fawn coloured collie at a
time when every one else kept nothing but Pekinese, and she had
once eaten four green apples at an afternoon tea in the Botanical
Gardens, so she was widely credited with a rather unpleasant wit.
The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's
poems, but her family denied both stories.
"The rift is widening to an abyss," said Eleanor to her mother
that afternoon.
"I should not tell that to anyone," remarked her mother, after
long reflection.
"Naturally, I should not talk about it very much?" said Eleanor,
"but why shouldn't I mention it to anyone?"
"Because you can't have an abyss in a lute. There isn't room."
Eleanor's outlook on life did not improve as the afternoon wore
on. The page-boy had brought from the library BY MERE AND WOLD
instead of BY MERE CHANCE, the book which every one denied having
read. The unwelcome substitute appeared to be a collection of
nature notes contributed by the author to the pages of some
Northern weekly, and when one had been prepared to plunge with
disapproving mind into a regrettable chronicle of ill-spent lives
it was intensely irritating to read "the dainty yellow-hammers are
now with us and flaunt their jaundiced livery from every bush and
hillock." Besides, the thing was so obviously untrue; either
there must be hardly any bushes or hillocks in those parts or the
country must be fearfully overstocked with yellow-hammers. The
thing scarcely seemed worth telling such a lie about. And the
page-boy stood there, with his sleekly brushed and parted hair,
and his air of chaste and callous indifference to the desires and
passions of the world. Eleanor hated boys, and she would have
liked to have whipped this one long and often. It was perhaps the
yearning of a woman who had no children of her own.
She turned at random to another paragraph. "Lie quietly concealed
in the fern and bramble in the gap by the old rowan tree, and you
may see, almost every evening during early summer, a pair of
lesser whitethroats creeping up and down the nettles and hedge-
growth that mask their nesting-place."
The insufferable monotony of the proposed recreation! Eleanor
would not have watched the most brilliant performance at His
Majesty's Theatre for a single evening under such uncomfortable
circumstances, and to be asked to watch lesser whitethroats
creeping up and down a nettle "almost every evening" during the
height of the season struck her as an imputation on her
intelligence that was positively offensive. Impatiently she
transferred her attention to the dinner menu, which the boy had
thoughtfully brought in as an alternative to the more solid
literary fare. "Rabbit curry," met her eye, and the lines of
disapproval deepened on her already puckered brow. The cook was a
great believer in the influence of environment, and nourished an
obstinate conviction that if you brought rabbit and curry-powder
together in one dish a rabbit curry would be the result. And
Clovis and the odious Bertie van Tahn were coming to dinner.
Surely, thought Eleanor, if Arlington knew how much she had had
that day to try her, he would refrain from joke-making.
At dinner that night it was Eleanor herself who mentioned the name
of a certain statesman, who may be decently covered under the
disguise of X.
"X," said Arlington Stringham, "has the soul of a meringue."
It was a useful remark to have on hand, because it applied equally
well to four prominent statesmen of the day, which quadrupled the
opportunities for using it.
"Meringues haven't got souls," said Eleanor's mother.
"It's a mercy that they haven't," said Clovis; "they would be
always losing them, and people like my aunt would get up missions
to meringues, and say it was wonderful how much one could teach
them and how much more one could learn from them."
"What could you learn from a meringue?" asked Eleanor's mother.
"My aunt has been known to learn humility from an ex-Viceroy,"
said Clovis.
"I wish cook would learn to make curry, or have the sense to leave
it alone," said Arlington, suddenly and savagely.
Eleanor's face softened. It was like one of his old remarks in
the days when there was no abyss between them.
It was during the debate on the Foreign Office vote that Stringham
made his great remark that "the people of Crete unfortunately make
more history than they can consume locally." It was not
brilliant, but it came in the middle of a dull speech, and the
House was quite pleased with it. Old gentlemen with bad memories
said it reminded them of Disraeli.
It was Eleanor's friend, Gertrude Ilpton, who drew her attention
to Arlington's newest outbreak. Eleanor in these days avoided the
morning papers.
"It's very modern, and I suppose very clever," she observed.
"Of course it's clever," said Gertrude; "all Lady Isobel's sayings
are clever, and luckily they bear repeating."
"Are you sure it's one of her sayings?" asked Eleanor.
"My dear, I've heard her say it dozens of times."
"So that is where he gets his humour," said Eleanor slowly, and
the hard lines deepened round her mouth.
The death of Eleanor Stringham from an overdose of chloral,
occurring at the end of a rather uneventful season, excited a
certain amount of unobtrusive speculation. Clovis, who perhaps
exaggerated the importance of curry in the home, hinted at
domestic sorrow.
And of course Arlington never knew. It was the tragedy of his
life that he should miss the fullest effect of his jesting.
_________
-THE END-
[Munro] Saki's short story: The Jesting Of Arlington Stringham
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