From these fixed stars radiate flashes of talk, and supplementing this, the laughter of the connecting circle should follow as punctually as thunder upon lightning. The hostess, like a beneficent sun, kindles and warms and sways her little system, while the servants revolve about the table in their courses, like orderly planets.
But we might push the allegory a step farther. Though the round of a score of dinners may exhibit no more unusual a cosmogony than this, yet at every thirty-third event, perhaps, we may encounter a comet! There is no prognosticating his eccentric course; he comes and goes according to a mysterious law, but wherever he appears, blazing with a new light, foreign to all our conventions, he is a compelling attraction, drawing the regular and steady orbs of fashion this way and that out of their orbits, shifting their axes, and upsetting social tides and seasons.
To such an innovator a dinner is given not for food but for pastime, and it is a game of which he may change the rules as soon and as often as they hamper his enjoyment. It matters little to him that he is dressed for a feast of propriety. To him alone it is not a livery; he is not the servant of custom. If it pleases him to settle a dispute out of hand, he will send the butler for the dictionary while the discussion is hot, or more likely go himself forthright. If he wishes to see a red rose in the hair of his host's daughter over against him, he will whip round two corners to her place, and adjust the decoration. And if it is necessary to his thesis that you, his shocked or amused partner, help him illustrate a Spanish jerabe, you too must up and help him in the pantomime if you would not have such fine enthusiasm wasted for a scruple.
I knew one such once who retrieved an almost hopelessly misarranged dinner by his generalship, usurping the power of the hostess herself. The guests were distributed in a way to give the greatest possible discomfort to the greatest number, though from stupidity rather than from malice. Mr. Comet solved the problem at a glance. He rose before the fish was served, with a wine-glass in one hand and his serviette in the other. "The gentlemen," he announced, "will all kindly move to the left four places." It was before the day of "progressive dinner parties," and the scheme was new. The ladies gasped at his audacity, but after this change of partners the function began to succeed.
Your comet, then, must not only be a social anarchist but he must convert the whole company, or he presents merely the sorry spectacle of a man making a fool of himself, never a sight conducive to appetite or to refined amusement, except perhaps to the cynic. He must be able to swing the situation. He must believe, and convince others, that the true object of a dinner is to amuse, and if it should take all of the time devoted to the entrée for him to show the pretty sculptress at his right how to model an angel out of bread, his observing hostess should feel no pang that he has neglected his brochette. After all, the elaborate supervision of the ménu was undertaken, any modern hostess will acknowledge, only that, in the dire case her guests did not succeed in amusing each other, they might at least have good things to eat. Every dish untasted in the excitement of conversation, then, should be a tribute to her higher skill in experiments with human chemistry.
If she can catch no comet, however, she must be contented with lesser meteoric wits who make up for real brilliancy by saying what they do say quickly and spontaneously; with the punsters, in short, and such hair-trigger intellects. Failing these, the last class above the bores-positive are those well-meaning diners-out who load themselves with stories for a dinner as a soldier goes into an engagement with a belt full of cartridges. They may not get a chance for a shot very often, but, given an opening, their fire is accurate and deadly till the last round is gone, when they are at the mercy of a more inventive wit. Yet even these welter-weights have their place at the table, for we must have bread as well as wine.
It was one of Lewis Carroll's pet fancies to have a dinner-table in the shape of a ring, and half the guests seated inside upon a platform which revolved slowly round the circle till each one had circumnavigated the orbit and passed opposite every guest seated on the outside of the table. But this would break up many of the little secret schemes for which the modern dinner is planned, and many a young man would suddenly find himself flirting with the wrong lady across the board.
And this last hint carries me from the exoteric to the esoteric charms of the dinner. Here, however, you must guess your own way; I dare not tell you precisely what it means when Celestine shifts her glass from left to right of her plate, nor what I answer when I raise my serviette by one corner, for Celestine and I may dine with you some day, and you may remember our little code. You would better not invite me anyway, for, though I am no comet, yet I admit I would be mad enough to upset the claret purposely rather than have nothing exciting happen!
The Uncharted Sea
Ay, there's the rub! If we could but forecast our dreams, who would care to keep awake? In that, we are no further advanced than in the times of Pythagoras; still clumsy, ignorant amateurs in this most fascinating and mysterious game, played by every race and condition of men under the moon. There are some, maybe, who do not dream, poor half-made men and women, to whom a waking, literal prosaic life is the whole of existence. They stay idly at home, while you and I take ship upon the Unknown Sea and navigate uncharted waters every night. Then we are poets, dunces, philosophers, clowns or madcaps of sorts in a secret carnival, changing not only our costumes, but often our very selves, doffing conscience, habit and taste, to play a new part at each performance.