Still he watches, noting day by day the destruction by wanton shells of one of man’s most glorious tributes to God, ever with the patient look of suffering on his face, as though the prayer from ceaseless repetition had crystallized on his brain:
“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!”
The Trawnbeighs were the sort of people who “dressed for dinner” even when, as sometimes happened, they had no dinner in the house to dress for. It is perhaps unnecessary to add that the Trawnbeighs were English. Indeed, on looking back, I often feel that to my first apparently flippant statement it is unnecessary to add anything. For to one who knew Mr. and Mrs. Trawnbeigh, Edwina, Violet, Maud and Cyril, it was the first and last word on them; their alpha and omega, together with all that went between. Not that the statement is flippant, far from it. There is in it a seriousness, a profundity, an immense philosophic import. At times it has almost moved me to lift my hat, very much as one does for reason of state, or religion, or death.
This, let me hasten to explain, is not at all the way I feel when I put on evening clothes myself, which I do at least twice out of my every three hundred and sixty-five opportunities. No born American could feel that way about his own dress coat. He sometimes thinks he does; he often—and isn’t it boresome?—pretends he does. But he really doesn’t. As a matter of unimportant fact, the born American may have “dressed” every evening of his grown up life. But if he found himself on an isolated, played out Mexican coffee and vanilla _finca_, with a wife, four children, a tiled roof that leaked whenever there was a norther, an unveiled _sala_, through the bamboo partitions of which a cold, wet wind howled sometimes for a week at a time, with no money, no capacity for making any, no prospects and no cook—under these depressing circumstances it is impossible to conceive of an American dressing for dinner every night at a quarter before seven in any spirit but one of ghastly humor.
With the Trawnbeighs’ performance of this sacred rite, however, irony and humor had nothing to do. The Trawnbeighs had a robust sense of fun (so, I feel sure, have pumpkins and turnips and the larger varieties of the nutritious potato family), but humor, when they didn’t recognize it, bewildered them, and it always struck them as just a trifle underbred, when they did.