I was just saying that I liked London, and had pretty well mastered Oxford Street and Edgware Road, when a deep and musical chime of bells rang out and the door was thrown open.
“Will you take my sister in to dinner?” said Mr. Benyon Pepys; but I was prepared for this, because Aunt Augusta had warned me that it might happen. So I gave her my right arm, and she put the tips of her left hand fingers upon it, and I remember feeling curiously that, what with diamonds and rubies and one thing and another, her hand, small though it was, might easily have been worth many thousands of pounds.
“If the mere sister of a Director can do this sort of thing, how majestic must be the wealth of the Director himself!” I thought. In fact I very nearly said it, because it seemed to me that the idea was a great compliment and ought to have pleased them both. It would have been well meant anyway. But I found it difficult to make conversation, owing to the immense number of things all round me that had to be noticed.
As a matter of fact, I couldn’t be said to take Miss Benyon Pepys in to dinner, not knowing the way. But she took me in, and it was no mere dinner, but a dazzling banquet on a table groaning with massive silver and other forms of plate. There was no tablecloth in the usual acceptation of the word; but a strip of rich fabric—probably antique tapestry from France or Turkey—spread on a polished table which glittered and reflected in its ebony depths the wax candles and silver and various pieces of rare workmanship arranged upon the hospitable board.
One would have thought, to see them, that a dinner of this kind—seven courses not counting dessert—was an everyday thing with the Benyon Pepys! It may have been, for all I know. Wine flowed like water—at least, it would have done so if there had been anybody there to drink it; but, of course, I didn’t, knowing well that wine goes to the head if you’re not used to it—and Miss Benyon Pepys merely drank hot water with a little tablet of some chemical that fizzed away in it—medicine, I suppose. It was sad in a way to see her pass the luxurious dishes without touching them. She little knew what she was missing. Even Mr. Benyon Pepys himself only sipped each wine in turn, with birdlike sips, but he never drank his glass quite empty. I expect the footmen dashed off what he left, doubtless tossing up among themselves which should have it.
I tried to talk at dinner, though there was little time, and once a good thing, full of rich and rare flavours, was swept away before I had finished it, because I stopped to speak.
I asked after the Pepys diaries and hoped they were successful. I said:
“I shall, of course, keep a diary in London, and I was going to get a Raphael Tuck diary; but I shall buy a Pepys now.”
Looking back, I don’t think either of them heard this. At any rate, that night when my Aunt Augusta explained about it, I prayed to God in my prayers that they might not have heard. The footmen, however, must have.
But I made Mr. Benyon Pepys laugh with a remark which, curiously enough, was not in the least amusing nor intended to be. I said: