The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [214]
“Yes, Minister.”
“Then off you both go. And State be with you.”
In perfect peace of heart Miles followed Miss Flower to the Registrar’s office.
Then the mood veered.
Miles felt ill at ease during the ceremony and fidgeted with something small and hard which he found in his pocket. It proved to be his cigarette lighter, a most uncertain apparatus. He pressed the catch and instantly, surprisingly, there burst out a tiny flame—gemlike, hymeneal, auspicious.
BASIL SEAL RIDES AGAIN
or THE RAKE’S REGRESS
I
“ Yes.”
“What d’you mean: ‘Yes’?”
“I didn’t hear what you said.”
“I said he made off with all my shirts.”
“It’s not that I’m the least deaf. It’s simply that I can’t concentrate when a lot of fellows are making a row.”
“There’s a row now.”
“Some sort of speech.”
“And a lot of fellows saying: ‘Shush.’ ”
“Exactly. I can’t concentrate. What did you say?”
“This fellow made off with all my shirts.”
“Fellow making the speech?”
“No, no. Quite another fellow—called Albright.”
“I don’t think so. I heard he was dead.”
“This one isn’t. You can’t say he stole them exactly. My daughter gave them to him.”
“All?”
“Practically all. I had a few in London and there were a few at the wash. Couldn’t believe it when my man told me. Went through all the drawers myself. Nothing there.”
“Bloody thing to happen. My daughter wouldn’t do a thing like that.”
Protests from neighbouring diners rose in volume.
“They can’t want to hear this speech. It’s the most awful rot.”
“We seem to be getting unpopular.”
“Don’t know who all these fellows are. Never saw anyone before except old Ambrose. Thought I ought to turn out and support him.”
Peter Pastmaster and Basil Seal seldom attended public banquets. They sat at the end of a long table under chandeliers and pier-glasses, looking, for all the traditional brightness of the hotel, too bright and too private for their surroundings. Peter was a year or two the younger but he, like Basil, had scorned to order his life with a view of longevity or spurious youth. They were two stout, rubicund, richly dressed old buffers who might have passed as exact contemporaries.
The frowning faces that were turned towards them were of all ages from those of a moribund Celtic bard to the cross adolescent critic’s for whose dinner Mr. Bentley, the organizer, was paying. Mr. Bentley had, as he expressed it, cast his net wide. There were politicians and publicists there, dons and cultural attachés, Fulbright scholars, representatives of the Pen Club, editors; Mr. Bentley, homesick for the belle époque of the American slump, when in England the worlds of art and fashion and action harmoniously mingled, had solicited the attendance of a few of the early friends of the guest of honour and Peter and Basil, meeting casually a few weeks before, had decided to go together. They were celebrating the almost coincident events of Ambrose Silk’s sixtieth birthday and his investiture with the Order of Merit.
Ambrose, white-haired, pallid, emaciated, sat between Dr. Parsnip, Professor of Dramatic Poetry at Minneapolis, and Dr. Pimpernell, Professor of Poetic Drama at St. Paul. These distinguished expatriates had flown to London for the occasion. It was not the sort of party at which decorations are worn but as Ambrose delicately inclined in deprecation of the honeyed words that dripped around him, no one could doubt his effortless distinction. It was Parsnip who was now on his feet attempting to make himself heard.
“I hear the cry of ‘silence,’” he said with sharp spontaneity. His voice had assumed something of the accent of his place of exile but his diction was orthodox—august even; he had quite discarded the patiently acquired proletarian colloquialisms of thirty years earlier. “It is apt, for, surely?, the object of our homage tonight is epitomized in that golden word. The voice which once clearly spoke the message of what I for one, and many of us here, will always regard as the most glorious decade of English letters, the nineteen-thirties,” (growls