The Romantic Adventures of Mr. Darby and of Sarah His Wife (3 page)

‘Well Mrs. D.,' said Stedman, reaching out a huge paw, ‘I hope you're standing the responsibility pretty well.'

Sarah raised her eyebrows and gave him her enchanting grim smile. She had a weakness for George Stedman, perhaps because in figure and character he was a match for her and treated her with a breezy, familiar cordiality. ‘And which responsibility is that, Mr. Stedman? ‘ she said, grasping the huge paw.

‘Why, Jim, your fifty-year-older.'

‘Oh, him! ‘said Sarah. ‘ Being fifty doesn't make him any more of a responsibility,—or any less, for that matter.' They smiled at each other, two mature and responsible people smiling over an incorrigible child.

For George Stedman, even Sarah admitted, was a man. It was not merely that he was six foot two and broad in proportion, that he had a heavy grey moustache and a fine head of curly grey hair, that his manner and speech were downright and confident. It was because his head was screwed on the right way and he ran a flourishing ironmongery business. Stedman's was the chief ironmonger's shop in Savershill. If ever Sarah wanted advice on a matter of serious business, it never occurred to her to consult her husband: she went round to Stedman's and had a word over the counter with the boss. He was one of the people she believed in, a responsible person: you had only to look at him standing there now in his smart black suit—the suit he reserved for funerals and other important occasions—and his spotless turn-down collar and cuffs. Sarah had only just had time to shake hands with Mrs. Stedman when there was another knock at the door and Mr. Darby went out to let in the Cribbs.

As soon as Mr. Darby opened the door a gust of talk blew in and filled the hall. ‘No mistake who's coming,' said George Stedman to Sarah with a wink. Mrs. Cribb had a reputation for wit and humour. That, no doubt, was why Mr. Cribb was a comparatively sad and silent man. Mrs. Cribb's acquaintances defined her, with mixed implication, as ‘a caution.' Sarah's view was that Emma Cribb was all very well once in a way and that it was an advantage not to be her husband. But Mrs. Cribb was at her best at a party, for, on the one hand, she kept things lively, while, on the other, she did not get all the talk to herself. Samuel Cribb, though superficially sad, enjoyed company in his own quiet way, and was found, by those who succeeded in getting at him through his wife's ceaseless chatter, to be a sensible and friendly little man. By profession he was a clerk in a railway office, but his hobby was books. He was a great one for spotting
winners in the literary world and picking up first editions.

Mr. Darby found himself caught up in a whirlpool of congratulations from Mrs. Cribb, so fluent and voluble that his thanks were swallowed up, unheard. He opened the parlour door and it seemed to him that the flood of words at once burst in, relieving the pressure in the hall and carrying Mrs. Cribb herself on the tide. As he passed Mr. Darby, Samuel Cribb, perceptible for the first time, held out a cold, gentle hand, wishing him ‘Good luck, old man!' in his quiet, friendly voice. The parlour was now full of talk, a swirling confusion of voices in which George Stedman's jovial booming provided a solid ground-bass for the high watery babble of the women. The sound went to Mr. Darby's head. He felt that the house was twenty times its usual size, that a vast and fashionable company filled the reception-rooms, that in a moment they would pour into the dining-room where, after a prolonged banquet, the host would rise from his chair and the event of the evening—the event for which all these brilliant people were assembled—would take place. At the mere thought of it, Mr. Darby, following Samuel Cribb into the parlour, cleared his throat.

Then he heard Sarah's voice: ‘Well, if you'll excuse me just a minute …!' and next moment she bore down upon him and gently but firmly pushed him out of her way in her progress towards the door. She was going to see that Mrs. Bricketts, who came daily to scrub and wash-up and had been retained for the evening, was putting the supper on the table without any of those little lapses from good taste which at once catch the eye of a respectable housewife. A few minutes later she threw open the parlour door. ‘Will you all come this way, please,' she said, and the two women went out, Mrs. Cribb finishing a sentence over her shoulder which she had been delivering at Mr. Darby. Samuel Cribb stood modestly aside, but George Stedman pushed him to the door with a large friendly paw and then, following himself, gathered up Sarah, who stood outside, and drove her forward too. Mr. Darby, bland and important, shepherded the flock
from behind. ‘There was a reception last night,' he thought to himself, ‘at the house of Sir James Darby on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday. Among those present were …' He closed the door behind him and went to his place at the foot of the table.

For, strictly speaking, technically speaking, it was, unde niably, the foot. The head of the table is where the carver sits, and Sarah was the carver. Already she was dealing in a masterly fashion with the beef, and the plates travelled down to Mr. Darby who was in charge of the vegetables. The arrival of each plate took him completely by surprise, for whenever he had been called to attention by Sarah's ‘Now, Jim!' and had loaded a plate, his mind dismissed vegetables and fell into a seraphic contemplation of the social event in which he was involved.

At last even the Darbys themselves were fed and the company abandoned talk and fell to. Even Mrs. Cribb was silent. The only sounds in the room came from the vigorous action of knives and forks on plates. Everybody was hungry, for it was well known that Sarah Darby provided good and plentiful food and they had all arrived in a proper state to do justice to it. Mr. Darby himself had been careful to have a light lunch. He raised his eyes now from his plate and observed them all at work. Jane Stedman on his right was belying her shadowy thinness by the excellence of her appetite. He noticed how well she managed her knife and fork, how quietly and how well she was dressed. A very superior woman: much more so, really, than Mrs. Cribb with her chatter, her affected way of holding her knife as if it were a pencil, and her red knitted dress and saucy hat. ‘Very showy,' thought Mr. Darby fixing blue, innocent eyes on her finery, ‘but not really half as good as Jane Stedman's. Ready made and probably cost, half the price.'

He was recalled to himself by Sarah's voice. ‘Now Jim, aren't we going to have anything to drink?'

‘My!' he exclaimed, jumping up from his chair. ‘I was forgetting all about it.' He turned to the sideboard behind
him and began to unwire one of the champagne bottles. At that everyone began to chatter again.

‘Anyone here for Prohibition?' asked Mr. Darby jocularly. ‘Because if there is,'—he turned to the table with the bottle in his hand—' we have a tap in the scullery.'

Before anyone could take up this sally there was a for-midable report, a shriek from Mrs. Cribb, and a cork struck the ceiling with a smart crack, rebounded, and buried itself in the chrysanthemums, while the bottle in Mr. Darby's hand burst prodigiously into a cauliflower of foam. Mr. Darby looked at it in terror. It seemed for a moment as if he would drop it, but George Stedman's voice brought him to his senses: ‘Keep ‘er nose down, Jim. Keep ‘er nose down. Not so much of the fireman!'

Mr. Darby, always obedient, obeyed, and Mrs. Stedman dexterously snatched a tumbler and held it to the mouth of the bottle.

‘Steady now, Jim! Steady! Don't let her run away with you.' Thus admonished by George Stedman, Mr. Darby regained control of himself and the bottle and began to go round filling the glasses.

When he had completed the circuit, filled his own glass, and resumed his seat amid a sudden and complete silence, Mrs. Stedman raised her glass.

‘Mr. Darby,' she said, ‘I look towards you. Many happy returns of the day.' There was a choral murmur of ‘Many happy returns,' ‘And many of them,' and everybody raised their glasses and drank.

Mr. Darby bowed. ‘My best thanks, ladies and gentlermen,' he said.

The first solemn moment was over and the talk broke out again. Through it Sarah's voice was heard inviting the guests to second helpings. ‘A little more, Jane. Emma, I'm sure your plate's empty.' Then plates went up and down the table and were replenished. But now the pace grew steadier: they had all taken the first fine edge off their hunger: they were inclined now not merely to eat but also to talk, and the champagne tuned them up. Everybody started at once and
soon the room was as full of fine social hubbub as the parlour had been. ‘Laugh? ‘Mrs. Cribb was saying to Mr. Darby. ‘Well, I thought my poor auntie would have died. And whenever I see her now—and I see her every August. She lives down at Saltburn, you know. Very healthy place, Saltburn. Oh wonderful. The doctors swear by it. Air full of
owes-one,
or whatever they call it.—And whenever I see my poor old auntie now, she says to me: “Well, Emma,” she says … She was always a great one for laughing, was the aunt … “Well, Emma, and what about those smellingsalts.”'

‘Oh no,' Mr. Cribb was explaining to Sarah Darby, ‘oh dear me no, you don't have to
read
them. I don't suppose I read one in twenty of the books that pass through my hands. You just watch the second-hand catalogues for names and prices. It isn't the best sellers, you know, that go up in price. Not a bit of it. These valuable chaps are dark horses. Now there's Joseph Conrad and D. H. Lawrence: I dare say I've made as much as thirty pounds out of each of them. And I had a bit of luck a couple of months back. I picked up a book I'd been looking out for a long time, a little flimsy-looking book by a chap of the name of Coppard, called
Adam and Eve and Pinch Me.
Silly name, isn't it? Well, believe me or believe me not, Mrs. Darby, I cleared ten pounds on that little job. And a book, mind you, badly bound, that you wouldn't give tuppence for if you didn't happen to be in the know.'

‘No, Mr. Darby,' Mrs. Stedman was saying, ‘what I always say is, give me my own fireside. I don't mind a fortnight at the seaside in the summer-time, but foreign places and foreigners and foreign food, oh dear me no!'

‘Well, I suppose it's in my blood,' replied Mr. Darby. ‘I've always been one for adventure and foreign parts. Of course, the wife's like you. She's what you might call a home-bird, whereas I'm a bird of passage.'

‘But however do you manage to get along,' said Mrs. Stedman, ‘when no one understands you, nor you them? '

‘Well … er …' said Mr. Darby, ‘well, people
do,
you know. Signs, and that, I suppose.'

‘And you really enjoy it?'

‘Enjoy it? Why travel's my hobby. The world's so full of wonderful things. The pyramids and the Sphinx, for example; and then, of course, there's the Jungle and all that, and the Red Sea.'

‘But then you're a good sailor.'

‘Yes,' said Mr. Darby, ‘I think I can say I'm a good sailor. I was in quite a rough sea at Scarborough last year, in no more than a little fishing-boat too.'

‘Indeed! ' said Mrs. Stedman. ‘ But it's these long voyages that I couldn't stand. What was your longest on the sea, Mr. Darby? '

‘Oh a matter of two hours, I suppose,' said Mr. Darby. ‘That time at Scarborough was the longest, I think; and I know that was two hours, because it was one and six an hour and I remember I paid three shillings.'

Mrs. Stedman glanced at Mr. Darby. She had supposed he was joking. But his candid blue eyes, magnified by the gold-rimmed spectacles into giant forget-me-nots, had the transparency of a child's: there was not a trace of humour or guile in his innocent pink face.

‘Then you're not really what you might call a travelled man, Mr. Darby,' she said.

‘No, not exactly,' he replied. ‘No.' He considered the point. ‘No, Mrs. Stedman, only … ah … portentously, as it were. No, I should be more inclined to call myself a
would-be
traveller.'

‘you
open the second bottle,' whispered Sarah with a nod to George Stedman. ‘You'll make a better job of it.'

Stedman rose and went to the sideboard. ‘I'll manage this one, Jim,' he murmured confidentially. ‘You've got the ladies on your hands.' And there was so little of the romantic and spectacular in George Stedman's treatment of the champagne-bottle that they none of them knew that anything was happening till they found him at their elbows filling their glasses.

Mr. Darby stared in blue-eyed wonder when Mrs. Bricketts appeared, to remove the plates, in a neat black dress and snowy apron. He was accustomed to see her in the slatternly guise of a char with an old tweed cap skewered on to her head with a black hatpin. ‘Now isn't that Sarah all over!' he thought to himself.

The next course was a plum-pudding.

‘Plum-pudding
before
Christmas, Mrs. D?' said Stedman.

‘Plum-pudding
after
Christmas, Mr. Stedman,' replied Sarah. ‘This one is two years old. It's the proper sort. I learnt to make them from my grandmother, and, for all I know, she learnt it from hers.'

Mrs. Bricketts put a decanter in front of Mr. Darby. He eyed it: it was the port. Suddenly his heart began to beat very fast: the great moment, the event of the evening, was almost upon him. The champagne had gone to his head and he felt vigorous, elated, but a little insecure. He was not in perfect control, but perhaps that was all to the good. ‘Don't let my mind dwell on it,' he admonished himself. ‘It's all
there.
Don't worry. When I start talking, it'll all come back.' He took up his spoon and fork and fell upon his plum-pudding.

Sarah's helpings were large ones, and everyone, though pressed, refused a second. The port had been round. Everybody's glass was full: Mr. Darby sat with his eyes fixed on his, as though it were a mousetrap likely to go off at any minute. Then George Stedman pushed back his chair and at the sound of it Mr. Darby's heart leapt with delicious terror. ‘The Baronet's health,' his poetic imagination whispered to him, ‘was proposed by his old friend Mr. George Stedman. In the course of a moving speech …' But George Stedman was on his feet, surveying the company with bland composure. The silence was absolute.