A Buyers Market

2

UNCE GILES’S standard of values was, in most matters, ill-adapted to employment by anyone except himself. At the same time, I can now perceive that by unhesitating contempt for all human conduct but his own — judged among his immediate relatives as far from irreproachable — he held up a mirror to emphasise latent imperfections of almost any situation that momentary enthusiasm might, in the first instance, have overlooked. His views, in fact, provided a kind of yardstick to the proportions of which no earthly yard could possibly measure up. This unquestioning condemnation of everyone, and everything, had no doubt supplied armour against some of the disappointments of life; although any philosophical satisfaction derived from reliance on these sentiments had certainly not at all diminished my uncle’s capacity for grumbling, in and out of season, at anomalies of social behaviour to be found, especially since the war, on all sides. To look at things through Uncle Giles’s eyes would never have occurred to me; but — simply as an exceptional expedient for attempting to preserve a sense of proportion, a state of mind, for that matter, neither always acceptable nor immediately advantageous — there may have been something to be said for borrowing, once in a way, something from Uncle Giles’s method of approach. This concept of regarding one’s own affairs through the medium of a friend or relative is not, of course, a specially profound one; but, in the case of my uncle, the field of vision surveyed was always likely to be so individual to himself that almost any scene contemplated from this point of vantage required, on the part of another observer, more than ordinarily drastic refocusing.

He would, for example, have dismissed the Huntercombes’ dance as one of those formal occasions that he himself, as it were by definition, found wholly unsympathetic. Uncle Giles disapproved on principle of anyone who could afford to live in Belgrave Square (for he echoed almost the identical words of Mr. Deacon regarding people “with more money than was good for them”), especially when they were, in addition, bearers of what he called “handles to their names”; though he would sometimes, in this same connection, refer with conversational familiarity, more in sorrow than anger, to a few members of his own generation, known to him in a greater or lesser degree in years gone by, who had been brought by inheritance to this unhappy condition. He had, for some reason, nothing like so strong an aversion for recently acquired wealth — from holders of which, it is true, he had from time to time even profited to a small degree — provided the money had been amassed by owners safely to be despised, at least in private, by himself or anyone else; and by methods commonly acknowledged to be indefensible. It was to any form of long-established affluence that he took the gravest exception, particularly if the ownership of land was combined with any suggestion of public service, even when such exertions were performed in some quite unspectacular, and apparently harmless, manner, like sitting on a borough council, of helping at a school-treat. “Interfering beggars,” he used to remark of those concerned.

My uncle’s dislike for the incidence of Mrs. Andriadis’s party — equally, as a matter of course, overwhelming — would have required, in order to avoid involving himself as an auxiliary of more than negative kind in some warring faction, the selection of a more careful approach on his part than that adopted to display potential disapproval of the Huntercombes; for, by taking sides too actively, he might easily find himself in the position of defending one or another of the systems of conducting human existence which he was normally to be found attacking in another sector of the battlefield. At the same time, it would hardly be true to say that Uncle Giles was deeply concerned with the question of consistency in argument. On the contrary, inconsistency in his own line of thought worried him scarcely at all. As a matter of fact, if absolutely compelled to make a pronouncement on the subject, he — or, so far as that went, anyone else investigating the matter — might have taken a fairly firm stand on the fact that immediate impressions at Mrs. Andriadis’s were not, after all, greatly different from those conveyed on first arrival at Belgrave Square.

The house, which had the air of being rented furnished only for a month or two, was bare; somewhat unattractively decorated in an anonymous style which, at least in the upholstery, combined touches of the Italian Renaissance with stripped panelling and furniture of “modernistic” design, these square, metallic pieces on the whole suggesting Berlin rather than Paris. Although smaller than the Huntercombes’, my uncle would have detected there a decided suggestion of wealth, and also — something to which his objection was, if possible, even more deeply ingrained — an atmosphere of frivolity. Like many people whose days are passed largely in a state of inanition, when not of crisis, Uncle Giles prided himself on his serious approach to life, deprecating nothing so much as what he called “trying to laugh things off”; and it was true that a lifetime of laughter would scarcely have sufficed to exorcise some of his own fiascos.

On the whole, Mrs. Andriadis’s guests belonged to a generation older than that attending the dance, and their voices swelled more loudly throughout the rooms. The men were in white ties and the ladies’ dresses were carried in general with a greater flourish than at the Huntercombes’: some of the wearers distinctly to be classed as “beauties.” A minute sprinkling of persons from both sexes still in day clothes absolved Mr. Deacon and Gypsy Jones from looking quite so out of place as might otherwise have been apprehended; and, during the course of that night, I was surprised to notice how easily these two (who had deposited their unsold copies of War Never Pays! in the hall, under a high-backed crimson-and-gold chair, designed in an uneasy compromise between avant garde motifs and seventeenth-century Spanish tradition) faded unobtrusively into the general background of the party. There were, indeed, many girls present not at all dissimilar in face and figure to Gypsy Jones; while Mr. Deacon, too, could have found several prototypes of himself among a contingent of sardonic, moderately distinguished, grey-haired men, some of whom smelt of bath-salts, dispersed here and there throughout the gathering. The comparative formality of the scene to be observed on our arrival had cast a certain blight on my own — it now seemed too ready — acceptance of Stringham’s assurance that invitation was wholly unnecessary; for the note of “frivolity,” to which Uncle Giles might so undeniably have taken exception, was, I could not help feeling, infused with an undercurrent of extreme coolness, a chilly consciousness of conflicting egoisms, far more intimidating than anything normally to be met with at Walpole-Wilsons’, Huntercombes’, or, indeed, anywhere else of “that sort.”

However, as the eye separated individuals from the mass, marks of a certain exoticism were here revealed, notably absent from the scene at Belgrave Square: such deviations from a more conventional standard alleviating, so far as they went, earlier implications of stiffness; although these intermittent patches of singularity — if they were to be regarded as singular — were, on the whole, not necessarily predisposed to put an uninvited newcomer any more at his ease; except perhaps in the sense that one act of informality in such surroundings might, roughly speaking, be held tacitly to excuse another.

For example, an elderly gentleman with a neat white moustache and eye-glass, evidently come from some official assemblage — perhaps the reception at the Spanish Embassy — because he wore miniatures, and the cross of some order in white enamel and gold under the points of his collar, was conversing with a Negro, almost tawny in pigmentation, rigged out in an elaborately waisted and square-shouldered tail-coat with exaggeratedly pointed lapels. It was really this couple that had made me think of Uncle Giles, who, in spite of advocacy of the urgent dissolution of the British Empire on grounds of its despotic treatment of backward races, did not greatly care for coloured people, whatever their origin; and, unless some quite exceptional circumstance sanctioned the admixture, he would certainly not have approved of guests of African descent being invited to a party to which he himself had been bidden. In this particular case, however, he would undoubtedly have directed the earlier momentum of his disparagement against the man with the eye-glass, since my uncle could not abide the wearing of medals. “Won ’em in Piccadilly, I shouldn’t wonder,” he was always accustomed to comment, when his eye fell on these outward and visible awards, whoever the recipient, and whatever the occasion.

Not far from the two persons just described existed further material no less vulnerable to my uncle’s censure, for a heavily-built man, with a greying beard and the air of a person of consequence, was unsuccessfully striving, to the accompaniment of much laughter on both sides, to wrest a magnum of champagne from the hands of an ancient dame, black-browed, and wearing a tiara, or jewelled head-dress of some sort, who was struggling manfully to retain possession of the bottle. Here, therefore, were assembled in a single group — as it were of baroque sculpture come all at once to life — three classes of object all equally abhorrent to Uncle Giles; that is to say, champagne, beards, and tiaras: each in its different way representing sides of life for which he could find no good to say; beards implying to him Bohemianism’s avoidance of those practical responsibilities with which he always felt himself burdened: tiaras and champagne unavoidably conjuring up images of guilty opulence of a kind naturally inimical to “radical” principles.

Although these relatively exotic embellishments to the scene occurred within a framework on the whole commonplace enough, the shifting groups of the party created, as a spectacle, illusion of moving within the actual confines of a picture or tapestry, into the depths of which the personality of each new arrival had to be automatically amalgamated; even in the case of apparently unassimilable material such as Mr. Deacon or Gyspy Jones, both of whom, as I have said, were immediately absorbed, at least to the eye, almost as soon as they had crossed the threshold of Mrs. Andriadis.

“Who is this extraordinary old puss you have in tow?” Stringham had asked, while he and I had walked a little ahead of the other three, after we had left the coffee-stall.

“A friend of my parents.”

“Mine know the oddest people too — especially my father. And Miss Jones? Also a friend — or a cousin?”

He only laughed when I attempted to describe the circumstances that had led to my finding myself with Mr. Deacon, who certainly seemed to require some explanation at the stage of life, and of behaviour, that he had now reached. Stringham pretended to think — or was at least unwilling to disbelieve — that Gypsy Jones was my own chosen companion, rather than Mr. Deacon’s. However, he had shown no sign of regarding either of them as noticeably more strange than anyone else, encountered on a summer night, who might seem eligible to be asked to a party given by a friend. It was, indeed, clear to me that strangeness was what Stringham now expected, indeed, demanded from life: a need already become hard to satisfy. The detachment he had always seemed to possess was now more marked than ever before. At the same time he had become in some manner different from the person I had known at school, so that, in spite of the air almost of relief that he had shown at falling in with us, I began to feel uncertain whether, in fact, Anne Stepney had not used the term “pompous” in the usual, and not some specialised, sense. Peter Templer, too, I remembered had employed the same word years before at school when he had inquired about Stringham’s family. “Well, I imagine it was all rather pompous even at lunch, wasn’t it?” he had asked. At that time I associated pomposity with Le Bas, or even with Widmerpool, both of whom habitually indulged in mannerisms unthinkable in Stringham. Yet there could be no doubt that he now possessed a personal remoteness, a kind of preoccupation with his own affairs, that gave at least some prima facie excuse for using the epithet. All the rather elaborate friendliness, and apparent gratitude for the meeting — almost as if it might offer means of escape from some burdensome commitment — was unquestionably part of a barrier set up against the rest of the world. Trying to disregard the gap, of which I felt so well aware, as it yawned between us, I asked about his family.

“My father sits in Kenya, quarrelling with his French wife.”

“And your mother?”

“Similarly occupied with Buster over here.”

“At Glimber?”

“Glimber — as arranged by Buster — is let to an Armenian. They now live in a house of more reasonable proportions at Sunningdale. You must come there one day — if only to see dawn breaking over the rock garden. I once arrived there in the small hours and had that unforgettable experience.”

“Is Buster still in the Navy?”

“Not he.”

“A gentleman of leisure?”

“But much humbled. No longer expects one to remember every individual stroke he made during the polo season.”

“So you both rub along all right?”

“Like a house on fire,” said Stringham. “All the same, you know parents — especially step-parents — are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don’t fulfil the promise of their early years. As a matter of fact, Buster may come to the party if he can get away.”

“And Miss Weedon?”

“Tuffy has left. I see her sometimes. She came into a little money. My mother changes her secretary every week now. She can’t get along with anyone since Tuffy resigned.”

“What about Peggy Stepney?”

“What, indeed?”

“I sat next to her sister, Anne, at dinner to-night.”

“Poor Anne, I hope you were kind to her.”

He gave no hint as to whether or not he was still involved with Peggy Stepney. I presumed that there was at least no longer any question of an engagement.

“Are you still secretary to Sir Magnus Donners?”

“Still to be seen passing from time to time through the Donners-Brebner Buildings,” said Stringham, laughing again. “It might be hard to establish my precise status there.”

“Nice work if you can get it!”

“‘A transient and embarrassed spectre’, as Le Bas used to say, when one tried to slip past him in the passage without attracting undue attention. As a matter of fact I saw Le Bas not so long ago. He turned up at Cowes last year. Not my favourite place at the best of times, but Buster seems to like the life.”

“Was Le Bas sailing?”

“Got up rather like a park-keeper. It is extraordinary how schoolmasters never get any older. In early life they settle on a cruising speed and just stick to it. Le Bas confused me with a Kenya friend of my father’s called Dicky Umfraville — you probably know the name as a gentleman-rider — who left the school — sacked as a matter of fact — some fifteen or twenty years earlier than myself.”

It was true that Le Bas, like most of his profession, was accustomed to behave as if never particularly clear as to the actual decade in which he might, at any given moment, be existing; but once assuming that recognition had not been immediate, his supposition that Stringham was something more than twenty-three or twenty-four — whatever his age at their meeting at Cowes — was not altogether surprising, because he looked, so it seemed to me by then, at least ten years older than when we had last seen each other. At the same time, it was no doubt unreasonable to mistake Stringham for Dicky Umfraville, of whose activities in Kenya I remember Sillery speaking a word of warning towards the end of my first year at the university. However, téte-â-téte conversation between Stringham and myself had now to come to an end, because by this time we had been admitted to the house, and the presence of a surrounding crowd of people put a stop to that kind of talk.

In one room the carpet had been rolled back, and a hunchback wearing a velvet smoking-jacket was playing an accordion, writhing backwards and forwards as he attacked his instrument with demiurgic frenzy.

“I took one look at you—

That’s all I meant to do—

And then my heart — stood still …”

To this music, cheek to cheek, two or three couples were dancing. Elsewhere the party, again resembling the Huntercombes’, had spread over the entire building, its density as thick on landings and in passages as among the rooms. There were people everywhere, and voices sounded from the upper levels of bedroom floors. Stringham pushed his way through this swarming herd, the rest of us following. There was a buffet in the drawing-room, where hired butlers were serving drinks. Moving through the closely packed mob, from which a powerful aroma of tobacco, alcohol, and cosmetics arose, like the scent of plants and flowers in some monstrous garden, we came suddenly upon Mrs. Andriadis herself, when a further, and enormous, field of speculation was immediately projected into being. Stringham took her hand.

“Milly …”

“Darling …” she said, throwing an arm round his neck and kissing him energetically. “Why so disgustingly late?”

“Overslept.”

“Milly ought to have been there.”

“Why wasn’t she?”

“Milly thought this was going to be a horrible party and she was going to hate it.”

“Not now?”

“Couldn’t be.”

I did not remember exactly what outward appearance I had planned before arrival for Mrs. Andriadis. A suspicion may not have been altogether suppressed that she might turn out to resemble, in physiognomy and dress, one of those formalised classical figures from bronze or ceramic art, posed as Le Bas would sometimes contort himself; but my invention, though perhaps in one aspect ancient Greek, was certainly modern Greek in another. However, the shape any imaginary portrait may have taken was quite unlike this small woman with powder-grey hair, whose faint touch of a Cockney accent, like her coiffure, was evidently retained deliberately as a considered attraction. She was certainly pretty, though the effect was obtained in some indirect and unobtrusive manner. Her dark eyebrows were strongly marked.

She stood clinging to Stringham’s arm, while, as if dancing, she twitched her body this way and that. Her eyes were brown and very bright, and the jewels she wore, in rather defiant profusion, looked as if they might have cost a good deal of money. She could have been about thirty-five; perhaps a year or two more. At first it seemed to me that she must have been a great beauty ten or fifteen years earlier; but I discovered, in due course, from those who had known Mrs. Andriadis for a long time that, on the contrary, the epoch of this party represented perhaps the peak of her good looks — that is, if her looks (or anyone else’s) could be admitted as open to objective judgment by some purely hypothetical standard; for, as Barnby used to say: “It’s no good being a beauty alone on a desert island.” Barnby himself adhered to the theory that Mrs. Andriadis’s appearance had been greatly improved after her hair had turned grey; being accustomed to add to this opinion the statement that the change of shade had taken place “After her first night with The Royal Personage, as Edgar always calls him.” I was strongly reminded by her appearance — so it seemed to me — of another woman; though of whom I could not decide.

“I brought some friends along, Milly,” said Stringham. “You don’t mind?”

“You darlings,” said Mrs. Andriadis. “It is going to be a lovely party now. All arranged on the spur of the moment. Come with me, Charles. We are making Deauville plans.”

Although obviously in the habit of having her own way in most matters, she showed no surprise at all at the sight of Widmerpool, Mr. Deacon, Gypsy Jones, and myself. Indeed, it seemed probable that, as newly-arrived entities, she took cognisance, so far as our self-contained group was concerned, of no more than Mr. Deacon and me, since Widmerpool and Gypsy Jones, threading their way across the room, had been left some little way behind the rest of us. Even Mr. Deacon, in spite of strenuous efforts on his own part, scarcely managed to shake hands with Mrs. Andriadis, although, as he bent almost double, the tips of their fingers may have touched. It was at that instant of tenuous contact that Mr. Deacon attempted to explain the matter, mentioned already by him at the coffee-stall, to the effect that he thought they had met once before “in Paris with the Murats.” An assertion of which Mrs. Andriadis herself took no notice whatsoever.

As it turned out, neither Widmerpool nor Gyspy Jones ever reached her at that — nor, as far as I know, any other — stage of the party, because, evidently deciding to spend no more time or her welcome of such miscellaneous guests, she took Stringham by the arm, and bore him away. Widmerpool, with a set expression on his face, passed obliquely through the crowd, still filled, as I supposed, with an unquenchable determination, even stronger, if possible, than Mr. Deacon’s, to make himself at all costs known to his hostess. Gypsy Jones also disappeared from sight at the same moment, though not, it might be presumed, with the same aim. Their effacement was effected rather to my relief, because I had feared from Widmerpool a stream of comment of a kind for which I felt not at all in the mood; while at the same time, rather snobbishly, I did not wish to appear too closely responsible for being the cause, however indirect, of having brought Mr. Deacon and Gypsy Jones to the house. This was the moment when the surrounding tableaux formed by the guests began to take coherent shape in my eyes, when viewed from the corner by the grand piano, where I had been left beside Mr. Deacon, who now accepted with a somewhat roguish glance, a beaker of champagne from the tray of one of the men-servants.

“I cannot say I altogether like these parties,” he said. “A great many of them seem to be given these days. Paris was just the same. I really should not have accepted your nice-looking friend’s invitation if we had not had such a very indifferent evening with War Never Pays! As it was, I felt some recreation was deserved — though I fear I shall not find much here. Not, at least, in any form likely to appeal to my present mood. By the way, I don’t know whether you would ever care to lend a hand with War Never Pays!, a penny, one of these days? We are always glad to enlist new helpers.”

I excused myself decisively from any such undertaking on grounds of lacking aptitude for any kind of salesmanship.

“Not everyone feels it a bounden duty,” said Mr. Deacon. “I need not tell you that Gypsy is scarcely a colleague I should choose, if I were a free agent, but she is so keen I cannot very well raise objection. Her political motives are not identical with my own, but Pacifism is ally of all who desire this country’s disarmament. Do you know, I even put her up at my place? After all, you can’t expect her to get all the way back to Hendon Central at this time of night. It wouldn’t be right.”

He spoke almost with unction at the nobility of such self-sacrifice, and, finishing his champagne at a gulp, wiped the corners of his mouth carefully with a silk handkerchief. On the wall opposite us, one of the panels of the room had been replaced — possibly with the object of increasing the rather “daring” effect at which decoration of the house evidently aimed — with squares of looking-glass, in the reflections of which could be observed the changing pattern made by the occupants of the room.

The lady with the tiara had at last reluctantly abandoned the magnum to her bearded opponent (now accommodated with a younger, though less conspicuous, woman), and, apparently much flattered by the attention, she was accepting a cigarette from the Negro’s long case, which he was holding out towards her, the metal seeming delicately matched in tone with the skin of its owner’s hand, also the tint of old gold. Beyond this couple, the gentleman with the eye-glass and medals was now talking to a figure whose back-view — for some reason familiar — showed an immensely time-worn suit of evening clothes, the crumpled tails of which hung down almost to its wearer’s heels, giving him the appearance of a musical-hall comedian, or conjuror of burlesque, whose baggy Charlie Chaplin trousers, threatening descent to the ground at any moment, would probably reveal red flannel, grotesquely spotted, or some otherwise traditionally comic, underclothes, or lack of them, beneath. Matted white hair protruded over the back of this person’s collar, and he was alternately rubbing together his hands and replacing them in the pockets of these elephantine trousers, while he stood nodding his head, and sagging slightly at the knees. I suddenly became aware, with some surprise, that the man with the medals was Colonel Budd — Margaret Budd’s father — who held some minor appointment at Court. He had also perhaps, “come on” from the Huntercombes’.

“She reposes herself at the back of the shop,” said Mr. Deacon, pursuing the topic of his connection with Gypsy Jones. “I make up the bed — a divan — myself, with some rather fine Cashmere shawls a former patron of mine left me in his will. However, I don’t expect she will need them on a warm night like this. Just as well, if they’re not to be worn to shreds. As a matter of fact they are going for a mere song if you happen to know anyone interested in Oriental textiles. I can always find something else to put over Gypsy. Of course Barnby doesn’t much like her being there.”

I did not at that time know who Barnby might be, though I felt sure that I had heard of him; connecting the name — as it turned out, correctly — with painting.

“I see his point,” said Mr. Deacon, “even though I know little of such things. Gypsy’s attitude naturally — perhaps Barnby would prefer me to say ‘unnaturally’—offends his amour propre. In some ways he is not an ideal tenant himself. I don’t want women running up and down stairs all day long — and all night long too, for that matter — just because I have to put up with Gypsy in a good cause.”

He spoke complainingly, and paused for breath, coughing throatily, as if he might be suffering from asthma. Both of us helped ourselves to another drink. Meanwhile, seen in the looking-glass, Colonel Budd and the wearer of the Charlie Chaplin trousers now began to edge their way round the wall to where a plump youth with a hooked nose and black curly hair, perhaps an Oriental, was talking to a couple of strikingly pretty girls. For a minute or two I had already been conscious of something capable of recognition about the old clothes and assured carriage of the baggy-trousered personage, whose face, until that moment, had been hidden from me. When he turned towards the room, I found that die features were Sillery’s, not seen since I had come down from the university.

To happen upon Sillery in London at that season of the year was surprising. Usually, by the time the first few weeks of the Long Vacation had passed, he was already abroad, in Austria or Italy, with a reading party of picked undergraduates: or even a fellow don or two, chosen with equal care, always twenty or thirty years younger than himself. Sillery, probably with wisdom, always considered himself at a disadvantage outside his own academical strongholds. He was accordingly accustomed, on the whole, to emphasise the corruption of metropolitan life as such, in spite of almost febrile interest in the affairs of those who found themselves habitually engaged in London’s social activities; but, on the other hand, if passing through on his way to the Continent, he would naturally welcome opportunity to be present, as if by accident, at a party of this kind, when luck put such a chance in his way. The accumulated gossip there obtainable could be secreted, and eked out for weeks and months — even years — at his own tea-parties; or injected in judiciously homeopathic doses to rebut and subdue refractory colleagues at High Table. Possibly, with a view to enjoying such potential benefits, he might even have delayed departure to the lakes and mountains where his summers were chiefly spent; but if he had come to London specially to be present, there could be no doubt that it was to pursue here some negotiation judged by himself to be of first-rate importance.

As they skirted the wall, Sillery and his companion, by contrast remarkably spruce, had almost the appearance of a pair of desperadoes on their way to commit an act of violence, and, on reaching the place where the dark young man was standing, the Colonel certainly seemed to get rid of the women without much ceremony, treating them almost as a policeman might peremptorily “move on” from the corner of the street female loiterers of dubious complexion. The taller of the two girls was largely built, with china-blue eyes and yellow hair, holding herself in a somewhat conventionally languorous style: the other, dark, with small, pointed breasts and a neat, supple figure. The combined effect of their beauty was irresistible, causing a kind of involuntary pang, as if for a split-second I loved both of them passionately; though a further survey convinced me that nothing so disturbing had taken place. The girls composedly allowed themselves to be dislodged by Colonel Budd and Sillery: at the same time remaining on guard in a strategic position at a short distance, talking and laughing with each other, and with people in the immediate neighbourhood: evidently unwilling to abandon entirely their original stations vis-à-vis the young man.

The Colonel, imperceptibly inclining his neck in an abrupt gesture suggesting almost the sudden suppression of an unexpected eructation, presented Sillery, not without deference to this rather mysterious figure, regarding whom I had begun to feel a decided curiosity. The young man, smiling graciously, though rather shyly, held out a hand. Sillery, grinning broadly in return, made a deep bow that seemed, by its mixture of farce and formality, to accord perfectly with the cut of his evening clothes, in their implication of pantomime or charade. However, fearing that absorption in this scene, as reflected in the looking-glass, might have made me seem inattentive to Mr. Deacon’s exposition of difficulties experienced in contending with his household, I made further inquiries regarding Barnby’s status as a painter. Mr. Deacon did not warm to this subject. I found when I knew him better that this luke-warm attitude was not to be attributed entirely to jealousy he might feel towards Barnby’s success, but rather because, finding his own views on the subject so opposed to contemporary opinion as to be in practice untenable, he preferred to close his eyes to the existence of modern painting, just as formerly he had closed his eyes to politics and war. Accordingly, I asked about the nature of Barnby’s objections to Gypsy Jones.

“When Gypsy and I were first acquainted,” said Mr. Deacon, lowering his voice, “I was given to understand — well, hasn’t Swinburne got some lines about ‘wandering watery sighs where the sea sobs round Lesbian promontories’? In fact restriction to such a coastline was almost a condition of our association.”

“Did Barnby object?”

“I think he undoubtedly felt resentment,” said Mr. Deacon. “But, as a very dear friend of mine once remarked when I was a young man — for I was a young man once, whatever you may think to the contrary—‘Gothic manners don’t mix with Greek morals.’ Gypsy would never learn that.”

Mr. Deacon stopped speaking. He seemed to be deliberating within himself whether or not to ask some question, in the wording of which he found perhaps a certain embarrassment. After a few seconds he said: “As a matter of fact I am rather worried about Gypsy. I suppose you don’t happen to know the address of any medicos — I don’t mean the usual general practitioner with the restricted views of his profession — no, I didn’t for a moment suppose that you did. And of course one does not wish to get mixed up. I feel just the same as yourself. But you were inquiring about Barnby. I really must arrange for you to meet. I think you would like each other.”

When such scraps of gossip are committed to paper, the words bear a heavier weight than when the same information is imparted huskily between draughts of champagne, in the noise of a crowded room; besides which, my thoughts hovering still on the two girls who had been displaced by Sillery and Colonel Budd, I had not been giving very full attention to what Mr. Deacon had been saying. However, if I had at that moment considered Gypsy Jones’s difficulties with any seriousness, I should probably have decided, rightly or wrongly, that she was well able to look after herself. Even in the quietest forms of life the untoward is rarely far from the surface, and in the intemperate circles to which she seemed to belong nothing was surprising. I felt at the time absolutely no inclination to pursue the matter further. Mr. Deacon himself became temporarily lost in thought.

Our attention was at that moment violently reorientated by the return to the room of Mrs. Andriadis, who now shouted — a less forcible word would have been inadequate to describe her manner of announcing the news — that “darling Max” was going to sing: a statement creating a small upheaval in our immediate surroundings, owing to the proximity of the piano, upon which a bottle of champagne was now placed. A mild-looking young man in spectacles was thrust through the crowd, who seating himself on the music-stool, protested: “Must I really tickle the dominoes?” A number of voices at once encouraged him to embark upon his musical activity, and, after winding round the seat once or twice, apparently more as a ritual than for practical reasons, he struck a few chords.

“Really,” said Mr. Deacon, as if entitled to feel honest disgust at this development, “Mrs. Andriadis does not seem to care in the least whom she makes friends with.”

“Who is he?”

“Max Pilgrim — a public performer of some sort.”

The young man now began to sing in a tremulous, quavering voice, like that of an immensely ancient lady, though at the same time the words filled the room with a considerable volume of sound:

“I’m Tess of Le Touquet,

My morals are flukey,

Tossed on the foam,

I couldn’t be busier;

Permanent waves

Splash me into the caves;

Everyone loves me as much as Delysia.

When it’s wet on the Links, I know where to have a beau

Down in the club-house — next door to the lavabo.”

There was muffled laughter and some fragmentary applause, though a hum of conversation continued to be heard round about us.

“I don’t care for this at all,” said Mr. Deacon. “To begin with, I do not entirely understand the meaning of the words — if they have any meaning — and, in the second place, the singer once behaved to me in what I consider an objectionable manner. I can’t think how Mrs. Andriadis can have him in the house. It can’t do her reputation any good.”

The appearance of Max Pilgrim at the piano had thoroughly put out Mr. Deacon. In an attempt to relieve the gloom that had fallen on him I inquired about Mrs. Andriadis’s past.

“Barnby knows more about her than I do,” he said, rather resentfully. “She is said to have been mistress of a Royal Personage for a time. Personally I am not greatly stimulated by such revelations.”

“Is she still kept?”

“My dear boy, you have the crudest way of putting things,” said Mr. Deacon, smiling at this, and showing signs of cheering up a little. “No — so far as I am aware — our hostess is no longer ‘kept,’ as you are pleased to term the former state of life to which she was called by Providence. A client of mine told me that her present husband — there have been several — possessed comprehensive business interests in Manchester, or that region. My friend’s description suggested at least a sufficient competence on the latest husband’s part for the condition of dependence you mention to be, financially speaking, no longer necessary for his lady — even, perhaps, undesirable. Apart from this, I know little of Mr. Andriadis, though I imagine him to be a man of almost infinite tolerance. You are, I expect, familiar, with Barnby’s story of the necklace?”

“What necklace?”

“Milly,” said Mr. Deacon, pronouncing Mrs. Andriadis’s name with affected delicacy, “Milly saw a diamond-and-emerald necklace in Cartier’s. It cost, shall we say, two million francs. She approached the Royal Personage, who happened to be staying at the Crillon at that moment, and asked for the money to buy herself the necklace as a birthday present. The Royal Personage handed her the banknotes — which he was no doubt accustomed to keep in his pocket — and Milly curtsied her way out. She went round the corner to the apartment of a well-known French industrialist — I cannot remember which, but you would know the name — who was also interested in her welfare, and requested him to drive there and then to Cartier’s and buy the necklace on the spot. This the industrialist was obliging enough to do. Milly, was, therefore, two million francs to the good, and could, at the same time, give pleasure to both her protectors by wearing the necklace in the company of either. Simple — like all great ideas.”

Mr Deacon paused. He seemed all at once to regret this sudden, and uncharacteristic, outburst of sophistication on so mundane a subject. The anecdote had certainly been told in a manner entirely foreign to his accustomed tone in dealing with worldly matters; discussed by him in general, at least publicly — as I found at a later date, as if all practical transactions were wrapped in mystery impenetrable for one of his simple outlook. Such an approach had been, indeed, habitual with him at all times, and, even so far back as the days when my parents used to speak of him, I could recall banter about Mr. Deacon’s repeatedly expressed ignorance of the world. This attitude did not, of course, repudiate on his part a certain insistence on his own knowingness in minor, and more “human,” affairs, such as the running of his shop, described so precisely by him a short time earlier at the coffee-stall. The story of the necklace was, I thought, in some way vaguely familiar to me. It had possibly figured in the repertoire of Peter Templer at school, the heroine of Templer’s anecdote, so I believed, represented as a well-known actress rather than Mrs. Andriadis herself.

“Not that I know anything of such gallivanting,” said Mr. Deacon, as if by now ashamed of his momentary abandonment of the unassailable position vouchsafed to him by reliance, in all circumstances, on an artist’s traditional innocence of heart. “Personally I should be delighted for kings, priests, armament manufacturers, poules de luxe, and hoc genus omne to be swept into the dust-bin — and I might add all the nonsense we find about us tonight.”

As he stopped speaking, the words of the song, which had been proceeding through a number of verses, now became once more audible:

“Even the fairies

Say how sweet my hair is;

They mess my mascara and pinch the peroxide.

I know a coward

Would be overpowered,

When they all offer to be orthodox. I’d

Like to be kind but say: ‘Some other day, dears;

Pansies for thoughts remains still the best way, dears.’”

This verse gave great offence to Mr. Deacon. Indeed, its effect was almost electric in the suddenness of the ferment it caused within him. He brushed away a lock of grey hair fallen over his forehead, and clenched his fist until the knuckles were white. He was evidently very angry. “Insufferable!” he said. “And from such a person.”

He had gone quite pale with irritation. The Negro, too, perhaps himself a vocalist, or performer upon some instrument, had also been watching Max Pilgrim with a look of mounting, though silent, hatred that had contracted the whole of his face into a scowl of self-righteous rage. This look seemed by then to have dramatised his bearing into the character of Othello. But the pianist, taking occasional nips at his champagne, showed no sign of observing any of the odium aroused by him in these or other quarters. Mr. Deacon sighed. There was a moment when I thought he might, there and then, have decided to leave the house. His chest heaved. However, he evidently made up his mind to dismiss unpleasant reflections.

“Your young friend appears to hold the place of honour here,” he said, in a more restrained voice. “Is he rich? Who are his parents — if I am not being inquisitive?”

“They are divorced. His father married a Frenchwoman and lives in Kenya. His mother was a South African, also remarried — to a sailor called Foxe.”

“Buster Foxe?”

“Yes.”

“Rather a chic sailor,” said Mr. Deacon. “If I mistake not, I used to hear about him in Paris. And she started life as wife of some belted earl or other.”

He was again showing recklessness in giving voice to these spasmodic outbursts of worldly knowledge. The champagne perhaps caused this intermittent pulling aside of the curtain that concealed some, apparently considerable, volume of practical information about unlikely people: a little storehouse, the existence of which he was normally unwilling to admit, yet preserved safely at the back of his mind in case of need.

“What was the name?” he went on. “She is a very handsome woman — or was.”

“Warrington.”

“The Beautiful Lady Warrington!” said Mr. Deacon. “I remember seeing a photograph of her in The Queen. There was some nonsense there, too, about a fancy-dress ball she had given. When will people learn better? And Warrington himself was much older than she, and died soon after their marriage. He probably drank.”

“So far as I know, he was a respectable brigadier-general. It is Charles Stringham’s father who likes the bottle.”

“They are all the same,” said Mr. Deacon, decisively.

Whether this condemnation was aimed at all husbands of Stringham’s mother, or, more probably, intended, in principle, to embrace members of the entire social stratum from which these husbands had, up to date, been drawn, was not made clear. Once more he fell into silence, as if thinking things over. Max Pilgrim continued to hammer and strum and take gulps of champagne, while against an ever-increasing buzz of conversation, he chanted his song continuously, as if it were a narrative poem or saga recording the heroic, legendary deeds of some primitive race:

“I do hope Tallulah

Now feels a shade cooler,

But why does she pout, as she wanders so far off

From Monsieur Citroën,

Who says something knowin’

To Lady Cunard and Sir Basil Zaharoff?

Has someone guessed who was having a beano

At Milly’s last party behind the Casino?”

This verse turned out to be the climax. Max Pilgrim, removing his spectacles, rose and bowed. Since the beginning of the song, many people, among them Mrs. Andriadis herself, had drifted away, and the room was now half empty, though a small group of enthusiasts still hovered round the piano. This residuum now clapped and applauded heartily. Pilgrim was almost immediately led away by two ladies, neither of them young. What remained of the crowd began to shift and rearrange its component parts, so that in the movement following the song’s termination Mr. Deacon was swept away from his corner. I watched him betake himself by easy stages to the door, no doubt with the object of further exploration. While I was looking, someone grasped my arm, and I found that Sillery was standing beside me.

By employment of a successful disengaging movement, the dark young man had by then managed to extract himself from the encirclement that had cut him off from the two girls, to whom he had now successfully returned; an operation made easier by the fact that the girls themselves had remained conveniently near, chattering and tittering together. At this development Sillery, who seemed to be enjoying himself hugely, must have pottered away from Colonel Budd, with whom his association was no doubt on a purely business footing. He had paused by me, as if to take breath, apparently unable to decide where best to make his next important descent, puffing out his still dark walrus moustache, and leaning forward, as he swayed slightly. This faint oscillation was not, of course, due to drink, which he touched in no circumstances, but sustained himself through hour after hour of social adventure on a cup or two of café au lait, with perhaps an occasional sandwich or biscuit. His white tie was knotted so loosely that it formed a kind of four-in-hand under the huge wings of his collar, itself limp from want of starch.

“Why so thoughtful?” he asked, grinning widely. “Did Charles Stringham bring you here? Such a friend of our hostess is Charles, isn’t he? I heard that you and Charles had not been seeing so much of each other as you used in the old days when you were both undergraduates.”

He was obviously well aware that Stringham’s life had changed greatly from the period of which he spoke, and he probably knew, too, as his words implied, that Stringham and I had not met for years. On such stray pieces of information, the cumulative effect not to be despised, Sillery’s intelligence system was built up. As to the effectiveness of this system, opinion, as I have said before, differed greatly. At any rate, Sillery himself believed implicitly in his own powers, ceaselessly collecting, sorting, and collating small items in connection with the personal relationships of the people he knew; or, at least, knew about. No doubt a few of these units of information turned out to be of value in prosecuting schemes in which, for one reason or another, he might himself become suddenly interested.

I admitted that I had not seen Stringham for some little time before that evening, but I did not feel it necessary to reveal in detail to Sillery the circumstances that had brought me to the house of Mrs. Andriadis.

“You stayed too long in the company of that gentleman with the equivocal reputation,” said Sillery, giving my arm a pinch. “People have to be careful about such things. They do, indeed. Can’t think how he got to this very respectable party — but don’t let’s talk about such matters. I have just been having a most enlightening chat with Prince Theodoric.”

“The Levantine young man?”

“A dark young prince with curly hair,” said Sillery, chuckling. “That’s quite a Tennysonian line, isn’t it? Handsome, if it were not for that rather too obtrusive nose. One would never guess him descended from Queen Victoria. Perhaps he isn’t. But we mustn’t be scandalous. A very clever family, his Royal House — and well connected, too.”

I remembered that there had been some talk of Prince Theodoric at the Walpole-Wilsons’. Although aware that his visit was in progress, I could not recall much about the Prince himself, nor the problems that he was called upon to discuss. Remarks made by Widmerpool and Tompsitt on the subject earlier that evening had become somewhat confused in my mind with the substance of an article in one of the “weeklies,” skimmed through recently in a club, in which the writer associated “the question of industrial development of base metals”—the phrase that had caught Archie Gilbert’s ear at dinner — with “a final settlement in Macedonia.” The same periodical, in its editorial notes, had spoken, rather slightingly, of “the part Prince Theodoric might be hoped to play on the Balkan chess-board,” adding that “informed circles in Belgrade, Bucharest, and Athens are watching this young man’s movements closely; while scarcely less interest has been evoked in Sofia and Tirana, in spite of a certain parade of aloofness in the latter capital. Only in Ankara is scepticism freely expressed as to the likelihood of the links of an acceptable solution being welded upon the, by now happily obsolescent, anvil of throne-room diplomacy,” Sillery’s description of the Prince as “well connected” made me think again, involuntarily, of Uncle Giles, who would no doubt, within the same reference, also have commented on Prince Theodoric’s employment of “influence” in the advancement of his own or his country’s interests.

“Mrs. Andriadis must be at least a tiny bit flattered to find H.R.H. here to-night,” said Sillery. “Although, of course, our hostess, as you are probably aware, is no stranger to Royalty in its lighter moments. I expect it is the first time, too, that the good Theodoric has been at the same party as one of our coloured cousins. However, he is broad-minded. It is that touch of Coburgh blood.”

“Is he over here for long?”

“Perhaps a month or two. Is it aluminium? Something like that. Hope we are paying a fair price. Some of us try and organise public opinion, but there are always people who think we should have our own way, no matter what, aren’t there? However, I expect all that is safe in the hands of such a great and good man as Sir Magnus Donners — with two such great and good assistants as Charles Stringham and Bill Truscott.”

He chuckled again heartily at his last comment.

“Was Prince Theodoric educated over here?”

Sillery shook his head and sighed.

“Tried to get him,” he said. “But it couldn’t be did. All the same, I think we may be going to have something almost as good.”

“Another brother?”

“Better than that. Theodoric is interested in the proposed Donners-Brebner Fellowships. Picked students to come to the university at the Donners-Brebner Company’s expense. After all, we have to do something for them, if we take away their metal, don’t we?”

“Will you organise the Fellowships, Sillers?”

“The Prince was good enough to ask my advice on certain academical points.”

“And you told him how it should be done?”

“Said I would help him as much as he liked, if he promised not to give me one of those great gawdy decorations that I hate so much, because I never know how to put them on right when I have to go out all dressed up to grand parties.”

“Did he agree to that?”

“Also said a few words ‘bout de political sitchivashun,’ remarked Sillery, ignoring the question and grinning more broadly than ever. “Dull things for de poor Prince, I’m ’fraid. ’Spect he’s ’joying hisself more now.”

He gave no explanation of this sudden metamorphosis into confused memories of Uncle Remus and the diction of the old plantations, aroused perhaps at that moment by sight of the Negro, who passed by, now in friendly conversation with Pilgrim. Possibly the impersonation was merely some Dickensian old fogey. It was impossible to say with certainty. Probably the act had, in truth, no meaning at all. These sudden character parts were a recognised element in Sillery’s technique of attacking life. There could be no doubt that he was delighted with the result of his recent conversation, whatever the ground covered; though he was probably correct in his suggestion that the Prince was more happily occupied at that moment with the girls than in earlier discussion of economic or diplomatic problems.

However, apart from the fact that he had presumably initiated the counter-move that had finally displaced Sillery, Prince Theodoric, as it happened, was showing little, if any, outward sign of this presumed partiality. He was gravely watching the two young women between whom he stood, as if attempting to make up his mind which of this couple had more to offer. I could not help feeling some envy at his monopoly of the companionship of such an attractive pair, each in her contrasted looks seeming to personify a style of beauty both exquisite and notably fashionable at that moment: the latter perhaps a minor, even irrelevant, consideration, but one hard to resist. I inquired the names of these friends of Prince Theodoric.

“Well-known nymphs,” said Sillery, sniggering. “The smaller one is Mrs. Wentworth — quite a famous person in her way — sister of Jack Vowchurch. Mixed up in the divorce of Charles’s sister. I seem to remember her name was also mentioned in the Derwentwater case, though not culpably. The tall and statuesque is Lady Ardglass. She was, I believe, a mannequin before her marriage.”

He began to move off, nodding, and rubbing his hands together, deriving too much pleasure from the party to waste any more valuable time from the necessarily limited period of its prolongation. I should have liked to make the acquaintance of one or both ladies, or at least to hear more of them, but I could tell from Sillery’s manner that he knew neither personally, or was, at best, far from being at ease with them, so that to apply for an introduction — should they ever leave Prince Theodoric’s side — would, therefore, be quite useless. Mrs. Wentworth was, outwardly, the more remarkable of the pair, on account of the conspicuous force of her personality: a characteristic accentuated by the simplicity of her dress, short curly hair, and look of infinite slyness. Lady Ardglass was more like a caryatid, or ship’s figurehead, though for that reason no less superb. Seeing no immediate prospect of achieving a meeting with either, I found my way to another room, where I suddenly came upon Gypsy Jones, who appeared to have taken a good deal to drink since her arrival.

“What’s happened to Edgar?” she asked clamorously.

She was more untidy than ever, and appeared to be in a great state of excitement: even near to tears.

“Who is Edgar?”

“Thought you said you’d known him since you were a kid!”

“Do you mean Mr. Deacon?”

She began to laugh uproariously at this question.

“And your other friend,” she said. “Where did you pick that up?”

Laughter was at that moment modified by a slight, and quickly mastered, attack of hiccups. Her demeanour was becoming more noticeably hysterical. The state she was in might easily lead to an awkward incident. I was so accustomed to the general principle of people finding Widmerpool odd that I could hardly regard her question as even hypercritical. It was, in any case, no more arbitrary an inquiry, so far as it went, than Stringham’s on the subject of Mr. Deacon; although long-standing friendship made Stringham’s form of words more permissible. However, Gypsy Jones’s comment, when thought of later, brought home the impossibility of explaining Widmerpool’s personality at all briefly, even to a sympathetic audience. His case was not, of course, unique. He was merely one single instance among many, of the fact that certain acquaintances remain firmly fixed within this or that person’s particular orbit; a law which seems to lead inexorably to the conclusion that the often repeated saying that people can “choose their friends” is true only in a most strictly limited degree.

However, Gypsy Jones was the last person to be expected to relish discussion upon so hypothetical a subject, even if the proposition had then occurred to me, or she been in a fit state to argue its points. Although she seemed to be enjoying the party, even to the extent of being in sight of hysteria, she had evidently also reached the stage when moving to another spot had become an absolute necessity to her; not because she was in any way dissatisfied with the surroundings in which she found herself, but on account of the coercive dictation of her own nerves, not to be denied in their insistence that a change of scene must take place. I was familiar with a similar spirit of unrest that sometimes haunted Barbara.

“I want to find Edgar and go to The Merry Thought.”

She clung on to me desperately, whether as an affectionate gesture, a means of encouraging sympathy, or merely to maintain her balance, I was uncertain. The condition of excitement which she had reached to some extent communicated itself to me, for her flushed face rather improved her appearance, and she had lost all her earlier ill-humour.

“Why don’t you come to The Merry Thought?” she said. “I got a bit worked up a moment ago, I’m feeling better now.”

Just for a second I wondered whether I would not fall in with this suggestion, but the implications seemed so many, and so varied, that I decided against accompanying her. I felt also that there might be yet more to experience in Mrs. Andriadis’s house; and I was not uninfluenced by the fact that I had, so far as I could remember, only a pound on me.

“Well, if Edgar can’t be found, I shall go without him,” said Gypsy Jones, speaking as if such a deplorable lack of gallantry was unexpected in Mr. Deacon.

She seemed to have recovered her composure. While she proceeded down the stairs, somewhat unsteadily, I called after her, over the banisters, a reminder that her copies of War Never Pays! should preferably not be allowed to lie forgotten under the chair in the hall, as I had no wish to share, even to a small degree, any responsibility for having imported that publication into Mrs. Andriadis’s establishment. Gypsy Jones disappeared from sight. It was doubtful whether she had heard this admonition. I felt, perhaps rather ignobly, that she were better out of the house.

Returning through one of the doorways a minute or two later, I collided with Widmerpool, also red in the face, and with hair, from which customary grease had perhaps been dried out by sugar, ruffled into a kind of cone at the top of his head. He, too, seemed to have drunk more than he was accustomed.

“Have you seen Miss Jones?” he asked, in his most breathless manner.

Even though I had been speaking with her so recently, I could not immediately grasp, under this style, the identity of the person sought.

“The girl we came in with,” he muttered impatiently.

“She has just gone off to a night-club.”

“Is someone taking her there?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Do you mean she has gone by herself?”

“That was what she said.”

Widmerpool seemed more fussed than ever. I could not understand his concern.

“I don’t feel she should have set off like that alone,” he said. “She had had rather a lot to drink — more than she is used to, I should imagine — and she is in some sort of difficulty, too. She was telling me about it.”

There could be no doubt at all that Widmerpool himself had been equally indiscreet in taking more champagne than usual.

“We were having rather an intimate talk together,” he went on. “And then I saw a man I had been wanting to speak to for weeks. Of course, I could have rung him up, but I preferred to wait for a chance meeting. One can often achieve so much more at such moments than at an interview. I crossed the room to have a word with him — explaining to her, as I supposed quite clearly, that I was going to return after a short business discussion — and when I came back she had vanished.”

“Too bad.”

“That was very foolish of me,” said Widmerpool, in a tone almost as if he were apologising abjectly for some grave error of taste. “Rather bad-mannered, too…

He paused, seemingly thoroughly upset: much as he had looked — I called to mind — on the day when he had witnessed Le Bas’s arrest when we had been at school together. At the moment when he spoke those words, if I could have laid claim to a more discerning state of mind, I might have taken greater notice of the overwhelming change that had momentarily come over him. As it was, I attributed his excitement simply to drink: an entirely superficial view that even brief reflection could have corrected. For example — to illustrate how little excuse there was for my own lack of grasp — I had never before, so far as I can now recollect, heard Widmerpool suggest that anything he had ever done could be classed as foolish, or bad-mannered; and even then, on that evening, I suppose I ought to have been dimly aware that Gyspy Jones must have aroused his interest fairly keenly, as it were “on the rebound” from having sugar poured over his head by Barbara.

“There really are moments when one should forget about business,” said Widmerpool. “After all, getting on isn’t everything.”

This precept, so far as I was myself concerned in those days, was one that required no specially vigorous inculcation.

“Pleasure before Business has always been my motto,” I remembered Bill Truscott stating at one of Sillery’s tea-parties when I was an undergraduate; and, although it would have been misleading to suppose that, for Truscott himself, any such label was in the least — in the smallest degree — applicable, the maxim seemed to me such a truism at the moment when I heard it quoted that I could not imagine why Truscott should seem to consider the phrase, on his part, something of an epigram or paradox. Pleasure still seemed to me a natural enough aim in life; and I certainly did not, on that night in Hill Street, appreciate at all how unusually disturbed Widmerpool must have been to have uttered aloud so profane a repudiation of his own deep-rooted system of opinion. However, he was prevented from further particularising of the factors that had impelled him to this revolutionary conclusion, by the arrival beside us of the man whose practical importance had seemed sufficient to cause abandonment of emotional preoccupations. That person had, so it appeared additional dealings to negotiate. I was interested to discover the identity of this figure who had proved, in the circumstances, so powerful a counter-attraction to the matter in hand. The disclosure was, in a quiet way, sufficiently dramatic. The “man” turned out to be Bill Truscott himself, who seemed, through another’s pursuance of his own loudly proclaimed precept, to have been, at least to some degree, temporarily victimised.

When I had last seen him, earlier in the year, at a Rothschild dance chatting with the chaperones, there could be no doubt that Truscott was still a general favourite: a “spare man” treated by everyone with respect and in quite a different, and distinctly higher, category in the hierarchy of male guests from, say, Archie Gilbert. It was, indeed, impossible to deny Truscott’s good looks, and the dignity of his wavy, youthfully grey hair and broad shoulders. All the same, the final form of his great career remained still, so far as I knew, undecided. It was not that he was showing signs of turning out less capable — certainly not less reliable — than his elders had supposed; nor, as had been evident on the night when I had seen him, was he growing any less popular with dowagers. On the contrary, many persons, if not all, continued to speak of Truscott’s brilliance almost as a matter of course, and it was generally agreed that he was contriving most successfully to retain the delicate balance required to remain a promising young man who still survived in exactly the same place — and a very good place, too — that he had taken on coming down from the university; rather than preferring to make his mark as an innovator in breaking new, and possibly unfruitful, ground in forwarding ambitions that seemed, whatever they were, fated to remain long masked from friends and admirers. At least outwardly, he had neither improved nor worsened his position, so it was said, at least, by Short, who, upon such subjects, could be relied upon to take the entirely unimaginative view of the world in general. In fact, Truscott might still be expected to make name and fortune before he was thirty, though the new decade must be perilously near, and he would have to be quick about it. The promised volume of poems (or possibly belles lettres) had never appeared; though there were still those who firmly declared that Truscott would “write something” one day. Meanwhile he was on excellent terms with most people, especially, for some reason, elderly bankers, both married and unmarried, with whom he was, almost without exception, a great favourite.

On that earlier occasion when I had seen him at the dance, Truscott, although he might excusably have forgotten our two or three meetings with Sillery in days past, had dispensed one of those exhausted, engaging smiles for which he was noted; while his eyes wandered round the ballroom “ear-marking duchesses,” as Stringham — years later — once called that wistful, haunted intensity that Truscott’s eyes took on, from time to time, among any large concourse of people that might include individuals of either sex potentially important to an ambitious young man’s career. As he came through the door at that moment, he gave his weary smile again, to show that he still remembered me, saying at the same time to Widmerpool: “You went away so quickly that I had no time to tell you that the Chief will very likely be here to-night. He is an old friend of Milly’s. Besides, I happen to know that he told Baby Wentworth he would look in — so it’s a virtual certainty.”

Truscott was still, so far as I knew, one of the secretaries of Sir Magnus Donners, to whom it was to be presumed he referred as “the Chief.” Stringham’s vagueness in speaking of his own employment had left me uncertain whether or not he and Truscott remained such close colleagues as formerly, though Sillery’s remarks certainly suggested that they were still working together.

“Well, of course, that would be splendid,” said Widmerpool slowly.

But, although unquestionably interested in the information just given him, he spoke rather forlornly. His mind seemed to be on other things: unable to concentrate fully on the comings and goings even of so portentous a figure as Sir Magnus Donners.

“He could meet you,” Truscott said dryly. “And then we could talk things over next week.”

Widmerpool, trying to collect himself, seemed still uncertain in his own mind. He smoothed down his hair, the disarrangement of which he must have observed in the mural looking-glass in front of us.

“The Chief is the most unconventional man in the world,” said Truscott, more encouragingly. “He loves informality.”

He stood there, smiling down at Widmerpool, for, although not more than an inch or two taller, he managed to give an impression of height. His thick and glossy hair had grown perceptibly more grey round the ears. I wondered how Truscott and Widmerpool had been brought together, since it was clear that arrangements projected for that night must have been the result of earlier, possibly even laborious, negotiation between them. There could be no doubt, whatever my own opinion of Widmerpool’s natural endowments, that he managed to make a decidedly good impression on people primarily interested in “getting on.” For example, neither Tompsitt nor Truscott had much in common except concentration on “the main chance,” and yet both had apparently been struck — in Tompsitt’s case, almost immediately — by some inner belief in Widmerpool’s fundamental ability. This matter of making headway in life was one to which I felt perhaps I, too, ought to devote greater consideration in future, if I were myself not to remain inextricably fixed in a monotonous, even sometimes dreary, groove.

“You don’t think I had better ring you up in the morning?” said Widmerpool, rather anxiously. “My brain is a bit confused to-night. I don’t want to make a poor impression on Sir Magnus. To tell the truth, I was thinking of going home. I don’t usually stay up as late as this.”

“All right,” said Truscott, not attempting to repress a polite smile at the idea of anyone being so weak in spirit as to limit their chances of advancement by reluctance to keep late hours. “Perhaps that might be best. Donners-Brebner, Extension 5, any time after ten o’clock “

“I don’t expect it would be much use looking for my hostess to say good-bye,” said Widmerpool, gazing about him wildly as if by now tired out. “You know, I haven’t managed to meet her properly the whole time I have been here.”

“Not the slightest use,” said Truscott, smiling again at such naïveté.

He regarded Widmerpool as if he thought — now that a decision to retire to bed had been finally taken — that the sooner Widmerpool embarked upon a good night’s rest, the better, if he were to be fit for the plans Truscott had in store for him in the near future.

“Then I’ll bid you good night,” said Widmerpool, turning to me and speaking in a voice of great exhaustion.

“Sweet dreams.”

“Tell Stringham I was sorry not to see him before I left the party.”

“I will.”

“Thank him for bringing us. It was kind. He must lunch with me in the City.”

He made his way from the room. I wondered whether or not it had indeed been kind of Stringham to bring him to the party. Kind or the reverse, I felt pretty sure that Stringham would not lunch with Widmerpool in the City. Truscott showed more surprise at Widmerpool’s mention of Stringham than he usually allowed himself, at least in public.

“Does he know Charles, then?” he asked, as Widmerpool disappeared through the door.

“We were all at the same house at school.”

“Indeed?”

“Widmerpool was a shade senior.”

“He really might be quite useful in our new politico-legal branch,” said Truscott. “Not necessarily full time — anyway at first — and the Chief always insists on hand-picking everyone himself. He’ll grow out of that rather unfortunate manner, of course.”

I thought it improbable that Widmerpool would ever change his manner at the mandate of Sir Magnus Donners, Truscott, Stringham, or anyone else, though the projected employment — an aspect of those rather mysterious business activities, so different from those of my own small firm — sounded normal enough. In fact the job, as such, did not at the time make any strong impression on me. I felt more interest in trying to learn something of Stringham’s life. This seemed an opportunity to make some inquiries.

“Oh, yes,” said Truscott, almost with enthusiasm. “Of course Charles is still with us. He can really be quite an asset at times. Such charm, you know. But I see my Chief has arrived. If you will forgive me …”

He was gone instantaneously, stepping quickly across the floor to meet, and intercept, a tallish man, who, with Mrs. Wentworth at his side, had just entered the room. At first I was uncertain whether this outwardly unemphatic figure could indeed be Sir Magnus Donners, the person addressed by Truscott being so unlike my pre-conceived idea of what might be expected from the exterior of a public character of that particular kind. Hesitation on this point was justifiable. The name of Sir Magnus Donners, both in capacity of well-known industrialist and former member of the Government (in which he had never reached Cabinet rank) attached to the imagination, almost automatically, one of those paraphrases — on the whole uncomplimentary — presented by the cartoonist; representations that serve, more or less effectually, to supply the mind on easy terms with the supposedly salient traits, personal, social, or political, of individuals or types: such delineations being naturally concerned for the most part with men, or categories of men, to be thought of as important in exercising power in one form or another.

In the first place, it was unexpected that Sir Magnus Donners should look at least ten years younger than might reasonably have been supposed; so that, although well into his middle fifties — where he stood beneath an unsatisfying picture executed in the manner of Derain — he seemed scarcely middle-aged. Clean-shaven, good-looking, rather than the reverse, possibly there was something odd, even a trifle disturbing, about the set of his mouth. Something that perhaps conveyed interior ferment kept in severe repression. Apart from that his features had been reduced, no doubt by laborious mental discipline, to a state of almost unnatural ordinariness. He possessed, however, a suggestion about him that was decidedly parsonic: a lay-reader, or clerical headmaster: even some distinguished athlete, of almost uncomfortably rigid moral convictions, of whose good work at the boys’ club in some East End settlement his own close friends were quite unaware. The complexion was of a man whose life appeared to have been lived, on the whole, out of doors. He seemed, indeed, too used to the open air to be altogether at ease in evening clothes, which were carelessly worn, as if only assumed under protest, though he shared that appearance of almost chemical cleanliness characteristic, in another form, of Archie Gilbert. At the same time, in spite of these intimations of higher things, the heavy, purposeful walk implied the professional politician. A touch of sadness about his face was not unprepossessing.

That ponderous tread was also the only faint hint of the side expressed by common gossip, for example, at Sillery’s — where Bill Truscott’s connection with Donners-Brebner made Sir Magnus’s name a relatively familiar one in the twilight world of undergraduate conversation — that is to say, of a kind of stage “profiteer” or “tycoon”: a man of Big Business and professionally strong will. Such, indeed, I had previously pictured him. Now the matter, like so many others, had to be reconsidered. Equally, he showed still less of that aspect called up by the remark once let fall by Stringham: “He is always trying to get in with my mother.” Everything about Sir Magnus seemed far too quiet and correct for any of his elements even to insinuate that there could be in his conduct, or nature, anything that might urge him to push his way into a world where welcome admission might be questionable — even deliberately withheld. Indeed, much later, when I came to hear more about him,’ there could be no doubt that whatever efforts Sir Magnus may have made to ingratiate himself with Mrs. Foxe, through her son, or otherwise — and there was reason to suppose such efforts had in truth been made — must have been accountable to one of those whims to which men of his sort are particularly subject; that is to say, desire to cut a figure somewhere outside the circle familiar to themselves; because Sir Magnus was, after all, in a position, so far as that went, to “go” pretty well anywhere he might happen to wish. The social process he elected to follow was rather like that of mountaineers who chose deliberately the sheer ascent of the cliff face; for it was true I found particular difficulty in associating him with Stringham, or, so far as I knew of them, with Stringham’s family. Widmerpool, on the other hand, though this was by the way, was a victim easily imaginable; no doubt, as I guessed, fated to-be captivated irrevocably at his pending interview by that colourless, respectable, dominating exterior of “the Chief.”

What part Mrs. Wentworth played in Sir Magnus’s life was, of course, a question that at once suggested itself. He was not married. Truscott’s words: “He told Baby Wentworth he would look in — so it’s a virtual certainty,” seemed to imply a fairly firm influence, or attachment, of one kind or another, probably temporary. However, as Sir Magnus and Mrs. Wentworth came through the door, side by side, there was nothing in their outward appearance to denote pleasure in each other’s company. On the contrary, they had entered the room together, both of them, with an almost hang-dog air, and Mrs. Wentworth’s features had lost all the gaiety and animation assumed earlier to charm Prince Theodoric. She now appeared sulky, and, if the word could be used at all of someone so self-possessed, and of such pleasing face and figure, almost awkward. It was rather as if they were walking away together from some excessively embarrassing scene in which they had been taking joint part: some incident for which the two of them felt both equally to blame, and heartily ashamed. I could not help thinking of one of those pictures — neither traditional, nor in Mr. Deacon’s vernacular, but in “modern dress” a pictorial method of treating Biblical subjects then somewhat in vogue — of Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden after the Fall: this impression being so vivid that I almost expected them to be followed through the door by a well-tailored angel, pointing in their direction a flaming sword.

Any such view of them was not only entirely fanciful, but perhaps also without any foundation in fact, because Truscott seemed to regard their bearing as perfectly normal. He came up to them buoyantly, and talked for a minute or two in his accustomed easy style. Mrs. Wentworth lit a cigarette, and, without smiling, watched him, her eyebrows slightly raised. Then she spoke to Sir Magnus, at which he nodded his head heavily several rimes. Perhaps arrangements were-being made for sending her home in his car, because he looked at his watch before saying good night, and asked Truscott some questions. Then Mrs. Wentworth, after giving Sir Magnus little more than a nod, went off with Truscott; who returned a minute or two later, and settled down with his employer on the sofa. They began to talk gravely, looking rather like father and son, though, strangely enough, it might have been Truscott who was playing the paternal role.

By now the crowd had thinned considerably, and the music of the hunchback’s accordion had ceased. I was beginning to feel more than a little exhausted, yet, unable to make up my mind to go home, I wandered rather aimlessly round the house, throughout which the remaining guests were now sitting about in pairs, or larger groups. Chronological sequence of events pertaining to this interlude of the party became afterwards somewhat confused in my head. I can recall a brief conversation with a woman — not pretty, though possessing excellent legs — on the subject of cheese, which she alleged to be unprocurable, at the buffet. Prince Theodoric and Sillery had disappeared, and already there was the impression, given by most parties, sooner or later, that the residue still assembled under Mrs. Andriadis’s roof was gradually, inexorably, sinking to a small band of those hard cases who can never tear themselves away from what still remains, for an hour or so longer, if not of gaiety, then at least some sort of mellow companionship, and protection from the austerities of the outer world.

Two young men strolled by, and I heard one of them say: “Poor Milly really got together quite an elegant crowd to-night.”

The other, who wore an orchid in his button-hole, replied: “I felt that Sillery imparted a faintly bourgeois note — and there were one or two extraordinary figures from the lofts of Chelsea.”

He added that, personally, he proposed to have “one more drink” before leaving, while the other murmured something about an invitation to “bacon and eggs at the Kit-Cat.” They parted company at this, and when the young man with the orchid returned from the bar, he set down his glass near me, and without further introduction, began to discuss, at large, the house’s style of decoration, of which he appeared strongly to disapprove.

“Of course it must have cost a fortune to have had all those carpets cut right up to the walls,” he said. “But why go and spoil everything by these appalling Italianate fittings — and the pictures — my God, the pictures.”

I asked if the house belonged to Mrs. Andriadis.

“Good heavens, no,” he said. “Milly has only taken it for a few months from a man named Duport.”

“Bob Duport?”

“Not an intimate friend of yours, I hope?”

“On the contrary.”

“Because his manners don’t attract me.”

“Nor me.”

“Not that I ever see him these days, but we were at the same college — before he was sent down.”

I commented to the effect that, however unsatisfactory its decoration might be, I found the house an unexpectedly sumptuous place for Duport to inhabit. The young man with the orchid immediately assured me that Duport was not short of money.

“He came into quite a bit,” he said. “And then he is one of those men money likes. He is in the Balkans at the moment — doing well there, too, I have no doubt. He is, I regret to say, that sort of man.”

He sighed,

“Is he married?”

“Rather a nice wife.”

Although I scarcely knew Bob Duport, he had always remained in my mind on account of his having been one of the company when Peter Templer, in a recently purchased car, had driven Stringham and myself into the ditch, together with a couple of shop-girls and another unprepossessing friend of Templer’s called Brent. That episode had been during the single term that Stringham had remained in residence at the university. The incident seemed absurd enough when looked back upon, but I had not greatly liked Duport. Now I felt, for some reason, inexplicably annoyed that he should own a house like this one, however ineptly decorated, and also be the possessor of a wife whom my informant — whose manner suggested absolute infallibility on such matters — regarded as attractive; while I myself, at the same time, lived a comparative hand-to-mouth existence in rooms, in my own case, there had never been any serious prospect of getting married. This seemed, on examination, a contrast from which I came out rather poorly.

Since living in London, I had seen Peter Templer several rimes, but, in the course of an interminable chain of anecdotes about his ever-changing circle of cronies, I could not remember the name of Duport figuring, so that I did not know whether or not the two of them continued to see each other. Peter himself had taken to the city like a duck to water. He now talked unendingly of “cleaning up a packet” and “making a killing”; money, with its multifarious imagery and restrictive mystique, holding a place in his mind only seriously rivalled by preoccupation with the pursuit of women: the latter interest having proportionately increased with opportunity to experiment in a wider field than formerly.

When we had lunched or dined together, the occasions had been enjoyable, although there had hardly been any renewal of the friendship that had existed between us at school. Peter did not frequent the world of dances because — like Stringham — he was bored by their unduly respectable environment.

“At least,” he said once, when discussing the matter, “I don’t go as a habit to the sort of dance you see reported in The Morning Post or The Times. I don’t say I have never attended similar entertainments in some huge and gloomy house in Bayswater or Holland Park — probably Jewish — if I happened to take a fancy to a girl who moves in those circles. There is more fun to be found amongst all that mahogany furniture and Moorish brasswork than you might think.”

In business, at least in a small way, he had begun to “make a bit on his own, and there seemed no reason to disbelieve his account of himself as looked upon in his firm as a promising young man. In fact, it appeared that Peter, so far from becoming the outcast from society prophesied by our housemaster, Le Bas, now showed every sign of being about to prove himself a notable success in life: an outcome that seemed to demand another of those revisions of opinion, made every day more necessary, in relation to such an enormous amount of material, accepted as incontrovertible at an earlier period of practical experience.

Thinking that if the young man with the orchid knew Duport, he might also know Peter, whom I had not by then seen for about a year, I asked if the two of them had ever met.

“I’ve never run across Templer,” he said. “But I’ve heard tell of him. As a matter of fact, I believe Duport married Templer’s sister, didn’t he? What was her name?”

“Jean.”

“That was it. A thin girl with blue eyes. I think they got married abroad — South America or somewhere, was it?”

The sudden awareness of displeasure felt a second earlier at the apparent prosperity of Duport’s general state was nothing to the pang I suffered on hearing this piece of news: the former sense of grievance caused, perhaps, by premonition that worse was to come. I had not, it was true, thought much of Jean Templer for years, having relegated any question of being, as I had once supposed, “in love” with her to a comparatively humble position in memory; indeed, regarding the incident as dating from a time when any such feelings were, in my own eyes, hopelessly immature, in comparison, for example, with sentiments felt for Barbara. However, I now found, rather to my own surprise, deep vexation in the discovery that Jean was the wife of someone so unsympathetic as Bob Duport.

Such emotions, sudden bursts of sexual jealousy that pursue us through life, sometimes without the smallest justification that memory or affection might provide, are like wounds, unknown and quiescent, that suddenly break out to give pain, or at least irritation, at a later season of the year, or in an unfamiliar climate. The party, and the young man with the orchid, supplied perfect setting for an attack of that kind. I was about to return to the subject of Duport, with a view to relieving this sense of annoyance by further unfavourable comment regarding his personality (as it had appeared to me in the past) in the hope that my views would find ready agreement, when I became suddenly aware that Stringham and Mrs. Andriadis were together engaged in vehement argument just beside the place we sat.

“But, sweetie,” Mrs. Andriadis was saying, “you can’t possibly want to go to the Embassy now.”

“But the odd thing is,” said Stringham, speaking slowly and deliberately, “the odd thing is that is just what I do want to do. I want to go to the Embassy at once. Without further delay.”

“But it will be closed.”

“I am rather glad to hear that. I never really liked the Embassy. I shall go somewhere else.”

“But you said it was just the Embassy you wanted to go to.”

“I can’t think why. I really want to go somewhere quite different”

“You really are being too boring for words, Charles.”

“I quite agree,” said Stringham, suddenly changing his tone. “The fact is I am much too boring to stay at a party. That is exactly how I feel myself. Especially one of your parties, Milly — one of your charming, gay, exquisite, unrivalled parties. I cast a gloom over the merry scene. ‘Who is that corpse at the feast?’ people ask, and the reply is ‘Poor old Stringham’.”

“But you wouldn’t feel any better at the Embassy, darling, even if it were open.”

“You are probably right. In fact, I should certainly feel no better at the Embassy. I should feel worse. That is why I am going somewhere much lower than that. Somewhere really frightful.”

“You are being very silly.”

“The Forty-Three would be too stuffy — In all senses — for my present mood.”

“You can’t want to go to the Forty-Three.”

“I repeat that I do not want to go to the Forty-Three. I am at the moment looking into my soul to examine the interesting question of where exactly I do want to go.”

“Wherever it is, I shall come too.”

“As you wish, Milly. As you wish. As a matter of fact I was turning over the possibilities of a visit to Mrs. Fitz.”

“Charles, you are impossible.”

I suppose he had had a good deal to drink, though this was, in a way, beside the point, for I knew from past experience that he could be just as perverse in his behaviour when there had been no question of drinking. If he were a little drunk, apart from making a slight bow, he showed no physical sign of such a condition. Mrs. Andriadis, who was evidently determined to master the situation — and who still, in her own particular style, managed to remain rather dazzling, in spite of being obviously put out by this altercation — turned to one of the men-servants who happened to be passing at that moment, carrying a tray laden with glasses, and said: “Go and get my coat — and be quick about it.”

The man, an old fellow with a blotched face, who had perhaps taken the opportunity to sample the champagne himself more freely than had been wise, stared at her, and, setting down the tray, ambled slowly off. Stringham caught sight of us sitting near-by. He took a step towards me.

“At least I can rely on you, Nick, as an old friend,” he said, “to accompany me to a haunt of vice. Somewhere where the stains on the table-cloth make the flesh creep — some cellar far below the level of the street, where ageing harlots caper cheerlessly to the discordant strains of jazz.”

Mrs. Andriadis grasped at once that we had known each other for a long time, because she smiled with one of those looks of captivating and whole-hearted sincerity that must have contributed in no small degree to her adventurous career. I was conscious that heavy artillery was now ranged upon my position. At the same time she managed to present herself — as it were, stood before me — in her weakness, threatened by Stringham’s behaviour certainly aggravating enough, remarking softly: “Do tell him not to be such an ass.

Stringham, too, perfectly took in the situation, evidently deciding immediately, and probably correctly, that if any kind of discussion were allowed to develop between the three of us, Mrs. Andriadis would, in some manner, bring him to heel. There had been, presumably, some collision of wills between them in the course of the evening; probably the consequence of mutual irritation extending over weeks, or even months. Perhaps he had deliberately intended to provoke a quarrel when he had arrived at the house that evening. The situation had rather the appearance of something of the sort. It was equally possible that he was suffering merely from the same kind of restlessness that had earlier afflicted Gypsy Jones. I did not know. In any case, though no business of mine, a break between them might be for the best. However, no time remained to weigh such question in the balance, because Stringham did not wait. He laughed loudly, and went off through the door. Mrs. Andriadis took my arm.

“Will you persuade him to stay!” she said, with that trace of Cockney which — as Barnby would have remarked — had once “come near to breaking a royal heart.”

At that moment the young man with the orchid, who had risen with dignity from the sofa where he had been silently contemplating the world, came towards us, breaking into the conversation with the words: “My dear Milly, I simply must tell you the story about Theodoric and the Prince of Wales …”

“Another time, darling.”

Mrs. Andriadis gave him a slight push with her left hand, so that he collapsed quietly, and apparently quite happily, into an easy-chair. Almost simultaneously an enormous, purple-faced man with a decided air of authority about him, whose features were for some reason familiar to me, accompanied by a small woman, much younger than himself, came up, mumbling and faintly swaying, as he attempted to thank Mrs. Andriadis for entertaining them. She brushed him aside, clearly to his immense, rather intoxicated surprise, with the same ruthlessness she had shown to the young man with the orchid: at the same time saying to another servant, whom I took, this time, to be her own butler: “I told one of those bloody hired men to fetch my coat. Go and see where he’s got to.”

All these minor incidents inevitably caused delay, giving Stringham a start on the journey down the stairs, towards which we now set off, Mrs. Andriadis still grasping my arm, along which, from second to second, she convulsively altered the grip of her hand. As we reached the foot of the last flight together, the front door slammed. Three or four people were chatting, or putting on wraps, in the hall, in preparation to leave. The elderly lady with the black eyebrows and tiara was sitting on one of the crimson and gold high-backed chairs, beneath which I could see a pile of War Never Pays!: Mr. Deacon’s, or those forgotten by Gypsy Jones. She had removed her right shoe and was examining the heel intently, to observe if it were still intact. Mrs. Andriadis let go my arm, and ran swiftly towards the door, which she wrenched open violently, just in time to see a taxi drive away from the front of the house. She made use of an expletive that I had never before — in those distant days — heard a woman employ. The phrase left no doubt in the mind that she was extremely provoked. The door swung on its hinge. In silence Mrs. Andriadis watched it shut with a bang. It was hard to know what comment, if any, was required. At that moment the butler arrived with her coat.

“Will you wear it, madam?”

“Take the damned thing away,” she said. “Are you and the rest of them a lot of bloody cripples? Do I have to wait half an hour every time I want to go out just because I haven’t a rag to put round me?”

The butler, accustomed no doubt to such reproaches as all in the day’s work — and possibly remunerated on a scale to allow a generous margin for hard words — seemed entirely undisturbed by these strictures on his own agility, and that of his fellows. He agreed at once that his temporary colleague “did not appear to have his wits about him at all.” In the second’s pause during which Mrs. Andriadis seemed to consider this statement, I prepared to say goodbye, partly from conviction that the occasion for doing so, once missed, might not easily recur; even more, because immediate farewell would be a convenient method of bringing to an end the distressing period of tension that had come into existence ever since Stringham’s departure, while Mrs. Andriadis contemplated her next move. However, before there was time, on my own part, to take any step in the direction of leave-taking, a loud noise from the stairs behind distracted my attention. Mrs. Andriadis, too, was brought by this sudden disturbance out of the state of suspended animation into which she appeared momentarily to have fallen.

The cause of the commotion now became manifest. Mr. Deacon and the singer, Max Pilgrim, followed by the Negro, were descending the stairs rapidly, side by side, jerking down from step to step in the tumult of a frantic quarrel. At first I supposed, improbable as such a thing would be, that some kind of practical joke or “rag” was taking place in which all three were engaged; but looking closer, it became plain that Mr. Deacon was angry with Pilgrim, while the Negro was more or less a spectator, not greatly involved except by his obvious enjoyment of the row. The loose lock of Mr. Deacon’s hair had once more fallen across his forehead: his voice had taken on a deep and mordant note. Pilgrim was red in the face and sweating, though keeping his temper with difficulty, and attempting to steer the dispute, whatever its subject, into channels more facetious than polemical.

“There are always leering eyes on the look-out,” Mr. Deacon was saying. “Besides, your song puts a weapon in the hands of the puritans.”

“I don’t expect there were many puritans present—” began Pilgrim.

Mr. Deacon cut him short.

“It is a matter of principle,” he said. “If you have any.”

“What do you know about my principles?” said Pilgrim. “I don’t expect your own principles bear much examination when the lights are out.”

“I can give you an assurance that you have no cause to worry about my principles,” Mr. Deacon almost screamed. “Such a situation could never arise — I can assure you of that. This is not the first time, to my knowledge, that you have presumed on such a thing.”

This comment seemed to annoy Pilgrim a great deal, so that he now became scarcely less enraged than Mr. Deacon himself. His quavering voice rose in protest, while Mr. Deacon’s sank to a scathing growl: the most offensive tone I have ever heard him employ.

“You person,” he said.

Turning fiercely away from Pilgrim, he strode across the hall in the direction of the chair under which he had stored away War Never Pays! Together with his own copies, he gathered up those brought by Gypsy Jones — forgotten by her, as I had foreseen — and, tucking a sheaf under each arm, he made towards the front door. He ignored the figure of Mrs. Andriadis, of whose presence he was no doubt, in his rage, entirely unaware. The catch of the door must have jammed, for that, or some other cause, prevented the hinge from opening freely. Mr. Deacon’s first intention was evidently to hold all the papers, his own and those belonging to Gypsy Jones, under his left arm for the brief second during which he opened the door with his right hand to sweep for ever from the obnoxious presence of Max Pilgrim. However, the two combined packets of War Never Pays! made quite a considerable bundle, and he must have found himself compelled to bring his left hand also into play, while he hugged most of the copies of the publication — by then rather crumpled — by pressure from his left elbow against his side. The door swung open suddenly. Mr. Deacon was taken by surprise. All at once there was a sound as of the rending of silk, and the papers, like a waterfall — or sugar on Widmerpool’s head — began to tumble, one after another, to the ground from under Mr. Deacon’s-arm. He made a violent effort to check their descent, contriving only to increase the area over which they were freely shed; an unexpected current of air blowing through the open door at that moment into the house helped to scatter sheets of War Never Pays! far and wide throughout the hall, even up to the threshold of the room beyond. There was a loud, stagey laugh from the stairs in the background. “Ha! Ha! Ha!”

It was the Negro. He was grinning from ear to ear, now more like a nigger minstrel — a coon with bones and tambourine from some old-fashioned show on the pier at a seaside resort of the Victorian era — than his former dignified, well-groomed self. The sound of his wild, African laughter must have caused Mrs. Andriadis to emerge unequivocally from her coma. She turned on Mr< Deacon.

“You awful old creature,” die said, “get out of my house.”

He stared at her, and then burst into a fearful fit of coughing, clutching at his chest. My hat stood on a table not far away. While Mrs. Andriadis was still turned from me, I took it up without further delay, and passed through the open door. Mr. Deacon had proved himself a graver responsibility than I, for one, by then felt myself prepared to sustain. They could, all of them, arrange matters between themselves without my help. It would, indeed, be better so. Whatever solution was, in fact, found to terminate the complexities of that moment, Mr. Deacon’s immediate expulsion from the house at the command of Mrs. Andriadis was not one of them; because, when I looked back — after proceeding nearly a hundred yards up the road — there was still no sign of his egress, violent or otherwise, from the house.

It was already quite light in the street, and although the air was fresh, almost breezy, after the atmosphere of the party, there was a hint, even at this early hour, of another sultry day on the way. Narrow streaks of blue were already beginning to appear across the flat surface of a livid sky. The dawn had a kind of heaviness, perhaps of thundery weather in the offing. No one was about, though the hum of an occasional car driving up Park Lane from time to time broke the silence for a few seconds, the sound, mournful as the huntsman’s horn echoing in the forest, dying away quickly in the distance. Early morning bears with it a sense of pressure, a kind of threat of what the day will bring forth. I felt unsettled and dissatisfied though not in the least drunk. On the contrary, my brain seemed to be working all at once with quite unusual clarity. Indeed, I found myself almost deciding to sit down, as soon as I reached my room, and attempt to compose a series of essays on human life and character in the manner of, say, Montaigne, so icily etched in my mind at that moment appeared the actions and nature of those with whom that night I had been spending my time. However, second thoughts convinced me that any such efforts at composition would be inadvisable at such an hour. The first thing to do on reaching home would be to try and achieve some sleep. In the morning, literary matters might be reconsidered. I was conscious of having travelled a long way since the Walpole-Wilsons’ dinner-party. I was, in fact, very tired.

Attempting to sort out and classify the events of the night, as I walked home between the grey Mayfair houses, I found myself unable to enjoy in retrospect the pleasure reasonably to be expected from the sense of having broken fresh ground. Mrs. Andriadis’s party had certainly been something new. Its strangeness and fascination had not escaped me. But there appeared now, so far as I could foresee, no prospect of setting foot again within those unaccustomed regions; even temporary connection with them, tenuously supplied by Stringham in his latest avatar, seeming uncompromisingly removed by the drift of circumstance.

Apart from these reflections, I was also painfully aware that I had, so it appeared to me, prodigally wasted my time at the party. Instead, for example, of finding a girl to take the place of Barbara — she, at least had been finally swept away by Mrs. Andriadis — I had squandered the hours of opportunity with Mr. Deacon, or with Sillery. I thought suddenly of Sunny Farebrother, and the pleasure he had described himself as deriving from meeting “interesting people” in the course of his work at the Peace Conference. No such “interesting” contacts, so far as I myself had been concerned that evening, could possibly have been said to have taken place. For a moment I regretted having refused Gypsy Jones’s invitation to accompany her to The Merry Thought. From the point of view of either sentiment or snobbery, giving both terms their widest connotation, the night had been an empty one. I had, so it appeared, merely stayed up until the small hours — no doubt relatively incapacitating myself for serious work on the day following — with nothing better to show for it than the certainty, now absolute, that I was no longer in love with Barbara Goring; though this emancipation would include, of course, relief also from such minor irritations as Tompsitt and his fellows. I remembered now, all at once, Widmerpool’s apprehensions at what had seemed to him the “unserious” nature of my employment.

As I reached the outskirts of Shepherd Market, at that period scarcely touched by rebuilding, I regained once more some small sense of exultation, enjoyed whenever crossing the perimeter of that sinister little village, that I lived within an enchanted precinct. Inconvenient, at moments, as a locality: noisy and uncomfortable: stuffy, depressing, unsavoury: yet the ancient houses still retained some vestige of the dignity of another age; while the inhabitants, many of them existing precariously on their bridge earnings, or hire of their bodies, were — as more than one novelist had, even in those days, already remarked — not without their own seedy glory.

Now, touched almost mystically, like another Stonehenge, by the first rays of the morning sun, the spot seemed one of those clusters of tumble-down dwellings depicted By Canaletto or Piranesi, habitations from amongst which arches, obelisks and viaducts, ruined and overgrown with ivy, arise from the mean houses huddled together below them. Here, too, such massive structures might, one felt, at any moment come into existence by some latent sorcery, for the place was scarcely of this world, and anything was to be surmised. As I penetrated farther into the heart of that rookery, in the direction of my own door, there even stood, as if waiting to greet a friend, one of those indeterminate figures that occur so frequently in the pictures of the kind suggested — Hubert Robert or Pannini — in which the architectural subject predominates. This materialisation took clearer shape as a man, middle-aged to elderly, wearing a bowler hat and discreetly horsy overcoat, the collar turned-up round a claret-coloured scarf with white spots. He leant a little to one side on a rolled umbrella, just as those single figures in romantic landscape are apt to pose; as if the painter, in dealing with so much static matter, were determined to emphasise “movement” in the almost infinitesimal human side of his composition.

“Where are you off to?” this person suddenly called across the street.

The voice, grating on the morning air, was somewhat accusing in tone. I saw, as a kind of instantaneous revelation, that it was Uncle Giles who stood on the corner in front of the public-house. He seemed undecided which road to take. It was plain that, a minute or two earlier, he had emerged from one of the three main centres of nocturnal activity in the immediate neighbourhood, represented by the garage, the sandwich bar, and the block of flats of dubious repute. There was not a shred of evidence pointing to one of these starting points in preference to another, though other alternatives seemed excluded by his position. I crossed the road.

“Just up from the country,” he said, gruffly.

“By car?”

“By car? Yes, of course.”

“Is it a new one?”

“Yes,” said Uncle Giles. “It’s a new one.”

He spoke as if he had only just thought of that aspect of the vehicle, supposedly his property, that was stated to have brought him to London. One of those pauses followed for which my uncle’s conversation was noted within the family circle. I explained that I was returning from a dance, a half-truth that seemed to cover whatever information was required, then and there, to define my circumstances in as compact and easily intelligible a form as possible. Uncle Giles was not practised in following any narrative at all involved in its nature. His mind was inclined to stray back to his own affairs if a story’s duration was of anything but the briefest. My words proved redundant, however. He was not in the least interested.

“I am here on business,” he said. “I don’t want to waste a lot of time. Never was keen on remaining too long in London. Your hand is never out of your pocket.”

“Where are you staying?”

My uncle thought for a moment.

“Bayswater,” he said, slowly and rather thoughtfully.

I must have looked surprised at finding him so comparatively far afield from his pied-à-terre, because Uncle Giles added:

“I mean, of course, that Bayswater is where I am going to stay — at the Ufford, as usual. There is a lot to be said for a place where they know you. Get some civility. At the moment I am on my way to my club, only round the corner.”

“My rooms are just by here.”

“Where?” he asked, suspiciously.

“Opposite.”

“Can’t you find anywhere better to live — I mean it’s rather a disreputable part of the world, isn’t it?”

As if in confirmation of my uncle’s misgivings, a prostitute, small, almost a dwarf, with a stumpy umbrella tucked under her arm, came hurrying home, late off her beat — tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap — along the pavement, her extravagant heels making a noise like a woodpecker attacking a tree. She wore a kind of felt helmet pulled low over her face, which looked exceedingly bad-tempered. Some instinct must have told her that neither my uncle nor I were to be regarded in the circumstances as potential clients; for altering her expression no more than to bare a fang at the side of her mouth like an angry animal, she sped along the street at a furious pace — tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap — and up the steps of the entrance to the flats, when she disappeared from sight. Uncle Giles averted his eyes. He still showed no sign of wishing to move from the spot, almost as if he feared even the smallest change of posture might in some unforeseen manner prejudice the veil of secrecy that so utterly cloaked his immediate point of departure.

“I have been with friends in Surrey,” he said grudgingly, as if the admission were unwillingly drawn from him. “It’s a favourite county of mine. Lovely in the autumn. I’m connected with the paper business now.”

I hoped sincerely that this connection took, as was probable, remote and esoteric form, and that he was not associated with some normal branch of the industry with which my own firm might be expected to open an account. However, he showed no desire to pursue this matter of his new employment. Instead, he produced from his overcoat pocket a handful of documents, looking like company reports, and glanced swiftly through them. I thought he was going to begin discussing the Trust — by now the Trust remained practically the only unsevered link between himself and his relations — in spite of the earliness of the hour. If his original idea had been to make the Trust subject of comment, he must have changed his mind, finding these memoranda, if such they were, in some way wanting, because he replaced the papers carefully in order and stuffed them back into his coat.

“Tell your father to try and get some San Pedro Warehouses Deferred,” he said, shortly. “I have had reliable advice about them.”

“I’ll say you said so.”

“Do you always stay up as late as this?”

“No — it was a specially good party.”

I could see from my uncle’s face that not only did he not accept this as an excuse, but that he had also chosen to consider the words as intended deliberately to disconcert him.

“Take a bit of advice from one who has knocked about the world for a good many years,” he said. “Don’t get in the habit of sitting up till all hours. It never did anyone any good.”

“I’ll bear it in mind.”

“Parents well?”

“Very well.”

“I’ve been having trouble with my teeth.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Well, I must be off. Good-bye to you.”

He made a stiff gesture, rather as if motioning someone away from him, and moved off suddenly in the direction of Hertford Street, striding along very serious, with his umbrella shouldered, as if once more at the head of his troops, drums beating and colours flying, as the column, conceded all honours of war, marched out of the capitulated town. Just as I opened the door of my house, he turned to wave. I raised my hand in return. Within, the bedroom remained unaltered, just as it had appeared when I had set out for the Walpole-Wilsons’, the suit I had worn the day before hanging dejectedly over the back of a chair. While I undressed I reflected on the difficulty of believing in the existence of certain human beings, my uncle among them, even in the face of unquestionable evidence — indications sometimes even wanting in the case of persons for some reason more substantial to the mind — that each had dreams and desires like other men. Was it possible to take Uncle Giles seriously? And yet he was, no doubt, serious enough to himself. If a clue to that problem could be found, other mysteries of life might be revealed. I was still pondering Uncle Giles and his ways when I dropped into an uneasy sleep.