“Woman is unchanging,” Eric answered, “she resigns herself to civilization, but she has never been civilized. Man is, to her, a physiological incident and a domestic accessory, so that a war only affects woman by withdrawing so many potential fathers of her children and supporters of her house.”
He glanced covertly at the plan of the table and found opposite his own name that of Lady Woodstock. Sir Matthew Woodstock, three chairs away, was a partner in Woodstock, McArthur and Company and had been sent to America by the Ministry of Munitions as British representative on the Purchasing and Priority Council.
To right and left rose an eager debate on sex and conduct. Eric had thrown them a bait which, he knew well, few men and no woman could resist. An “academic” discussion of sex enabled them to talk about themselves, to indulge their own sex-curiosity, to fancy themselves wholesomely fearless and unprejudiced; it enabled him to dine peacefully in the soothing haze of sham-intellectuality and to study anew the names on the table-plan. Next to Carstairs he saw Mrs. O’Rane deep in conversation with John Gaymer; next to him was Lady John, with O’Rane on her other side. It was indeed no great exaggeration to say that there were more British officials than Americans in New York; and the sight of this compact alien colony set Eric thinking about his speech. He was unlikely to enter the Plaza again, but he could not spend a week in London without meeting O’Rane or Gaymer; his valediction should be something for them to remember and quote when he had slipped through their hands into a retirement from which, this time, there would be no return... He was roused by the touch of a woman’s hand on his sleeve. Finding him unoccupied, his neighbour was asking him to sign her menu. Instantly her example was followed by every one who saw him writing; menus were passed from hand to hand, waiters appeared from other tables with piled-up trays; he was still signing when Nelson Millbank whispered a question and stood up to propose the toast of the evening.
Eric lighted his cigar and leaned back, looking over the heads of the diners to a vast fan-group of the Allied flags, draped over the main door. At a semicircular table twenty feet away the press-men were industriously scribbling: two were looking up at him from their sketch-books and down to the sketch-books again; he posed himself and sat patiently still. Millbank’s rising had been greeted with a storm of cheers and clapping; his opening sentences called forth fresh cheers, and punctually thereafter, at the polished end of each resonant period, as he half turned to the guest of the evening or indicated him with a slight movement of his hand, there was a new outburst of applause.
Though he listened with only half his attention, Eric knew that it was a great speech from a man who had been known for more than forty years as one of the greatest after-dinner speakers in America. That much, at least, he had expected, but he was hardly prepared for the white-hot enthusiasm of the audience. This, if anything, should stimulate a man to better work than he had ever yet accomplished; but for two years all work had mysteriously lost its savour and purpose. If he ever wrote again, he would still be artist enough to give forth only the best that was in him, but he no longer cared for the applause of a blurred, indistinguishable mob; his plays, indeed, were running in three continents, but in a thousand audiences there was no one whose judgement mattered to him as in the old days when above “the mad houseful’s plaudits” he looked “through all the roaring and the wreaths” for one half smile of praise from Barbara. Had all these bright-eyed men and women masked their faces, were Millbank speaking an unknown tongue, Eric could not have had less in common with them. Mrs. O’Rane threw him a dazzling glance of congratulation; and, before he could bow, he had to overcome his surprise that she had recognized him. In all this funeral throng he alone knew that for two years he had been dead....
Voice, gesture and mounting sentiment shewed that the peroration was at hand:
“And, lastly, I thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for the honour and the opportunity of having my name associated for a moment of one night with the loved name of our guest. He and I stand at the remote opposite ends of life, so that I cannot hope to meet him often again. You, who will meet him and see him and read him, I congratulate and envy. I ask you to rise and join me in wishing him long life, health and prosperity.”
There was an instant’s silence, and the room rose in a wave of black and white. “Lane! Lane! Lane!” The thundering repetition of his name drowned the clink of the glasses, the individual toasts and even the college yell which rocketed from the end of the room. Eric bowed to Millbank, then turned slowly and inclined his head to right, to left and in front. The speech had intoxicated them; they looked at him with shining eyes, an inch removed from hysteria.
“And what do they expect I can say after that, sir?” Eric whispered to Millbank, as the applause died slowly away and he sat down.
“Take your time, Mr. Lane.”