Nothing So Strange Read Free Page A

their distress at least made them
momentarily entertaining; but he could see I was not a bore, so perhaps I
would now talk about something serious. I said I could never talk seriously
to any man with one of those bristly little toothbrush mustaches, and was it
true that in certain crack regiments of the British Army men were compelled
to have them? He answered, Good God, how should he know, better ask
our host, who was a recognized authority on totem and taboo. After that we
got along fairly well, and presently he paid me what many Englishmen think is
the supreme compliment; he said he wouldn’t have guessed I was American.
    Suddenly I was relieved to see that my mother, across the table, was
talking to her nervous neighbor. I knew then that everything would be all
right. She was adept at putting young men, indeed men of any age, at their
ease; she didn’t mind if they talked politics or business or art or
sport—even if they were intellectual she never tried to match them at
it, and if they weren’t she would make them feel a freemasonry existing
between her and them in a world, or at a table, of highbrows. Actually she
was cleverer than she pretended—not that she was especially modest, but
in her bones she felt that men do not like clever women, and what she felt in
her bones counted more than anything she could think out with her
intelligence. She had had an upper-crust education composed of governess,
boarding school, then finishing school abroad, and probably she had forgotten
95 per cent of everything she had ever learned from textbooks; but she had
done nothing but travel and meet some of the world’s most interesting people
for almost twenty years, and the result was a quick-minded knowledgeableness
unspoiled by knowledge. It made her understand politicians rather than
politics and diplomats rather than diplomacy. She talked plenty of nonsense,
and it was easy to trap her, though not always to prove that she was trapped;
and she would go on discussing a book she said she had read but manifestly
hadn’t, or she would break up a dull conversation with some fantastic
irrelevance for which everyone was secretly grateful.
    After dinner I wasn’t anywhere near the nervous man, but when the party
broke up it appeared we were scheduled to drop him where he lived, which was
in our direction, and because we were also taking two other guests on their
way, he sat in front with Henry. We dropped these others first and then he
moved inside, but there was hardly time for talk before he began urging us
not to drive out of our way, his place was only a short walk from the main
road, anywhere near there would do. But my father insisted: “No, no, we’ll
take you right up to your door”; so Brad had to direct Henry through a
succession of side streets, and eventually gave the stop signal in the middle
of a long block of four-story houses with basements. He said good-night and
thanked us, bumping his head against the top of the car as he got out.
    “North Dakota,” my father said, as we drove away.
    “Yes, he told me too,” said my mother. “I’d have known it was somewhere in
the Middle West from his accent.”
    “Thank goodness for that,” I said, and mentioned the Englishman’s
compliment to me.
    My father smiled and seemed in an unusually good humor. He wasn’t always,
after parties at other people’s houses. He said: “I find my own Kentucky
drawl a great help with the English. It makes them think me tough and
guileless, whereas in reality I’m neither.”
    “And in reality you haven’t even got a Kentucky drawl,” said my
mother.
    “Haven’t I? How would you know?… Well, coming back to Dakota. I had some
talk with him after the ladies left the table. Seems he’s a research lecturer
at your college, Jane.”
    “Then that’s where I must have seen him before. I had an idea I had.”
    “A young man of promise, from all accounts,” my father went on.