Scoop-Evelyn-Waugh [70]
At last the great moment came. The toastmaster thundered on the floor with his staff and his tremendous message rang through the room. "My Lords and Gentlemen. Pray silence for the Right Honourable the Viscount Copper." Lord Copper rose and breasted the applause. Even the waiters, he noticed with approval, were diligently clapping. He leant forwards on his fists, as it was his habit to stand on these happy occasions, and waited for silence. His secretary made a small, quite unnecessary adjustment to the microphone. His speech lay before him in a sheaf of typewritten papers. Uncle Theodore murmured a few words of encouragement. "Cheer up," he said. "It won't last long." "Gentlemen," he began, "many duties fall to the lot of a man of my position, some onerous, some pleasant. It is a very pleasant duty to welcome tonight a colleague who though �" and Lord Copper saw the words "young in years" looming up at him; he swerved �"young in his service to Megalopolitan Newspapers, has already added lustre to the great enterprise we have at heart � Boot of the Beast." Uncle Theodore, who had joined the staff of the Beast less than six hours ago, smirked dissent and began to revise his opinion of Lord Copper; he was really an uncommonly civil fellow, thought Uncle Theodore. At the name of Boot applause broke out thunderously, and Lord Copper, waiting for it to subside, glanced grimly through the pages ahead of him. For some time now his newspapers had been advocating a new form of driving test, by which the applicant for a licence sat in a stationary car while a cinema film unfolded before his eyes a nightmare drive down a road full of obstacles. Lord Copper had personally inspected a device of the kind and it was thus that his speech now appeared to him. The opportunities and achievements of youth had been the theme. Lord Copper looked from the glowing sentences to the guest of honour beside him (who at the moment had buried his nose in his brandy glass and was inhaling stertorously) and he rose above it. The banquet must go on. The applause ended and Lord Copper resumed his speech. His hearers sank low in their chairs and beguiled the time in a variety of ways; by drawing little pictures on the menu, by playing noughts and crosses on the table cloth, by having modest bets as to who could keep the ash longest on his cigar; and over them the tropic tide of oratory rose and broke in foaming surf, over the bowed, bald head of Uncle Theodore. It lasted thirty-eight minutes by Mr. Salter's watch. "Gentlemen," said Lord Copper at last, "in giving you the toast of Boot, I give you the toast of the Future..." The Future...A calm and vinous optimism possessed the banquet.
A future for Lord Copper that was full to surfeit of things which no sane man seriously coveted � of long years of uninterrupted oratory at other banquets in other causes; of yearly, prodigious payments of super-tax crowned at their final end by death duties of unprecedented size; of a deferential opening and closing of doors, of muffled telephone bells and almost soundless typewriters. A future for Uncle Theodore such as he had always at heart believed to be attainable. Two thousand a year, shady little gentlemen's chambers, the opportunity for endless reminiscence; sunlit morning saunterings down St. James's Street between hatter and bootmaker and club; feline prowlings after dark; a buttonhole, a bowler hat with a curly brim, a clouded malacca cane, a kindly word to commissionaires and cab-drivers. A future for Mr. Salter as Art Editor of Home Knitting; punctual domestic dinners; Sunday at home among the crazy pavements. A future for Sir John Boot with the cropped amazons of the Antarctic. A future for Mrs. Stitch heaped with the spoils of every continent and every century, gadgets from New York and bronzes from the Aegean, new entr