A SOUTH SEA BUBBLE
"I want you," said my hostess, "to take in Mrs. Blank. She is charming. All through the War she has been with her husband in the South Seas. London is a new place to her."
Mrs. Blank did not look too promising. She was pretty in her way—"elegant" an American would have called her—but she lacked animation. However, the South Seas...! Any one fresh from the Pacific must have enough to tell to see soup, fish, and entrée safely through.
I began by remarking that she must find London a very complete change after the sun and serenity that she had come from.
"It's certainly noisier," she said; "but we had our share of rain."
"I thought it was always fine there," I remarked; but she laughed a denial and relapsed into silence.
She was one of those women who don't take soup, and this made the economy of her utterances the more unfair.
Racking my brain for a new start, I fell back on those useful fellows, the authors. Presuming that any one who had lived in that fascinating region—the promised land of so many of us who are weary of English climatic treacheries—would be familiar with the literature of it, I went boldy to work.
"The first book about the South Seas that I ever read," I said, "was Ballantyne's 'Coral Island'."
"Indeed!" she replied.
I asked her if she too had not been brought up on Ballantyne, and she said no. She did not even know his name.
"He wrote for boys," I explained, rather lamely.
"I read poetry chiefly as a girl," she said.
"But surely you know Stevenson's 'Island Nights' Entertainments'?" I said.
No, she did not. Was it nice?
"It's extraordinary," I said. "It gives you more of the atmosphere of the South Seas than any other work. And Louis Becke—you must have read him?" I continued.
No, she had not. She read very little. The last book she had read was on spiritualism.
"Not even Conrad?" I pursued. "No one has so described the calms and storms of the Pacific."
No, she remembered no story called Conrad.
I was about to explain that Conrad was the writer, not the written; but it seemed a waste of words, and we fell into a stillness broken only by the sound of knife and fork.
"I wonder," I ventured next, "if you came across anyone who had met Ganguin."
"Go—what?" she asked.
"That amazing Peruvian-Frenchman," I went on, with a certain foolish desperation. "Ganguin. He Lived in Tahiti."
"How comically geographical you are!" was all she replied, and again a silence brooded over our plates.
"Hang it! you shall talk," I said to myself; and then aloud, "Tell me all about copra. I have longed to know what copra is; how it grows, what it looks like, what it is for."
"You have come to the wrong person," she replied, with very wide eyes. "I never heard of it. Or did you say 'cobra'? Of course I know what a cobra is—it's a snake. I've seen them at the Zoo."
I put her right. "Copra, the stuff that the traders in the South Seas deal in."
"I never heard of it," she said, "but then why should I? I know nothing about the South Seas."
My stock fell thirty points and I crumbled bread nervously, hoping for something sensible to say; but at this moment "half-time" mercifully set in. My partner on the other side turned to me suavely and asked if I thought the verses in "Abraham Lincoln" were a beauty or a blemish; and with the assistance of the Russian ballet, some new novels, and the universal unrest I sailed serenely into port. She was as easy and agreeable a woman as that other was difficult, and before she left for the drawing-room she had invited me to lunch and I had accepted.
As I said good night to my hostess I asked why she had told me that my first partner had been in the South Seas. She said that she had said nothing of the sort; what she had said was that during the War she had been stationed with her husband, Colonel Blank, at Southsea.