At the Gate of Samaria

by William John Locke

“Ah! but you are young and can make fun out of them. I can't.”

The occasion was a meeting of Mr. Farquharson's archaeological set. The inner circle dined at each other's houses in turn once a month, and the outer circle came in later, for the “conversazione,” as Mrs. Farquharson called it, with a little shudder. A paper was usually read, followed by a discussion, from which the more flippant seceded and gossipped casually in odd corners. Clytie had never been to one of these strangely homogeneous reunions. The people she generally met at her friends' house were miscellaneous, and the talk danced about upon all subjects under heaven, wreathed in blue curls of cigarette smoke. Mrs. Farquharson had begged her to come and support her—“to strike a note of colour among the gray ruins.” Clytie looked forward to the incongruous formalism of the evening with an anticipation of amusement.

She hinted as much to Mr. Farquharson when he came into the drawing-room. He laughed, bowed his long, ungainly figure, hoped that Miss Davenant had come to be instructed. Professor Petherick was to read a paper on an aureus of Geta of the type Cohen No. 11,—Clytie and her hostess communed with each other dumbly,—and many rare coins were to be exhibited. He trusted that Miss Davenant would be appreciative and on her best behaviour. Numismatics was not a subject that lent itself to flippancy.

“My wife can turn the house into a bear-garden every Sunday evening, more shame to her, though she does sit and smile in her superior way. But twice a year I assert my individuality and this house becomes sober and respectable. So no cigarettes to-night, Miss Davenant. When I put on these dress-clothes I am rigid.”

“You look very nice,” said Clytie.

He looked down at himself complacently, accepting the flattery; such is man. He always insisted upon wearing very square-toed kid boots, a high buttoned waistcoat with a chain made of old coins banded across it, a deep velvet collar to his dress-coat, and a shirt-collar, with two long ends that served as a tie, beneath his beard.

“I like him better in his velvet jacket,” said Mrs. Farquharson. “Go and put it on, George.”

But George shook his head sadly. He must be properly attired to discuss an aureus of Geta.

The guests arrived, seven in number, and they went down to the dining-room. Clytie sat between Professor Petherick, a little rosy man with a bald head and gastronomic appreciation, and a young clergyman who had taken her in to dinner. She had been for so long a time outside Church influences that a strange little Durdleham qualm come over her. He looked stern, overworked, dreadfully in earnest, she thought, not likely to sympathise with the Thelemite joyousness of life of the house whose motto was, “Fays ce que vouldras.” He was the only bachelor among the guests. The six others, including the professor, consisted of three married couples, middle-aged, respectable. Mr. Vansittart was a great Egyptologist. It was of his wife, a faded, weary-looking woman, that Mrs. Farquharson had so pathetically spoken with reference to the correction of proof-sheets. Mrs. Petherick was literary, fond of lions. Her talk was a catalogue raisonné of her menagerie. Mr. Farquharson listened politely and went on with his dinner. The remaining couple were the Chowders, retired Anglo-Indians, who found only late in life an opportunity of gratifying their ruling passions—on her part an undisturbed warm bath of domesticity; on his, archaeological dilettanteism. She was florid and buxom; he bronzed and shrivelled. Both talked on their pet subjects. The Rev. Victor Treherne was a keen numismatist. “A recognised authority,” Farquharson had whispered to Clytie. “Will give Petherick beans if he goes wrong.” Clytie knew nothing of numismatics. She did not know the difference between a moidur and a bezant, nor did she seek enlightenment from her neighbour. She questioned him as to his environment—North London, a large parish, chiefly poor. The conversation languished, then it brightened up through common effort. Each had a King Charles the First's head to keep in the background, feeling it to be distasteful to the other. Treherne had left his parish behind, and had brought no other interests with him save those circling round the famous aureus, a matter of supreme indifference to Clytie, who, for her part, had been cautioned to act as the superior Ki-Pi-Yu, friend of Confucius, did on certain occasions—roll her principles up and keep them in her breast. Each, too, divined dimly the other's personality, and they talked eagerly, seeking to like and interest one another through a current of mutual antipathy.

The professor and Mrs. Farquharson were talking less unreservedly on the question of female disabilities. He had theories on the sacredness of woman's mission. Mrs. Farquharson's views were more materialistic. Her early training had disabused her of the oak and ivy illusion, which the professor still entertained.