“See the beaver with the medal,” said Humility to Faith.
“Who is that very important young man?” asked Mrs. Blackwater of Lady Throbbing.
“I don’t know, dear. He bowed to you.”
“He bowed to you, dear.”
“How very nice… I wasn’t quite sure… He reminds me a little of dear Prince Anrep.”
“It’s so nice in these days, isn’t it, dearest, to see someone who really looks… don’t you think?”
“You mean the beard?”
“The beard among other things, darling.”
Father Rothschild was conspiring with Mr. Outrage and Lord Metroland. He stopped short in the middle of his sentence.
“Forgive me,” he said, “but there are spies everywhere. That man with the beard, do you know him?”
Lord Metroland thought vaguely he had something to do with the Foreign Office; Mr. Outrage seemed to remember having seen him before.
“Exactly,” said Father Rothschild. “I think it would be better if we continued our conversation in private. I have been watching him. He is bowing across the room to empty places and to people whose backs are turned to him.” The Great Men withdrew to Lord Metroland’s study. Father Rothschild closed the door silently and looked behind the curtains.
“Shall I lock the door?” asked Lord Metroland.
“No,” said the Jesuit. “A lock does not prevent a spy from hearing; but it does hinder us, inside, from catching the spy.”
“Well, I should never have thought of that,” said Mr. Outrage in frank admiration.
“How pretty Nina Blount is,” said Lady Throbbing, busy from the front row with her lorgnette, “but don’t you think, a little changed; almost as though…”
“You notice everything, darling.”
“When you get to our age, dear, there is so little left, but I do believe Miss Blount must have had an experience… she’s sitting next to Miles. You know I heard from Edward tonight. He’s on his way back. It will be a great blow for Miles because he’s been living in Edward’s house all this time. To tell you the truth I’m a little glad because from what I hear from Anne Opalthorpe, who lives opposite, the things that go on… he’s got a friend staying there now. Such an odd man… a dirt-track racer. But then it’s no use attempting to disguise the fact, is there… There’s Mrs. Panrast… yes, dear, of course you know her, she used to be Eleanor Balcairn… now why does dear Margot ask anyone like that, do you think?… it is not as though Margot was so innocent… and there’s Lord Monomark… yes, the man who owns those amusing papers… they say that he and Margot, but before her marriage, of course (her second marriage, I mean), but you never know, do you, how things crop up again?… I wonder where Peter Pastmaster is?… he never stays to Margot’s parties… he was at dinner, of course, and, my dear, how he drank… He can’t be more than twenty-one… Oh, so that is Mrs. Ape. What a coarse face… no dear, of course she can’t hear… she looks like a procureuse… but perhaps I shouldn’t say that here, should I?”
Adam came and sat next to Nina.
“Hullo,” they said to each other.
“My dear, do look at Mary Mouse’s new young man,” said Nina.
Adam looked and saw that Mary was sitting next to the Maharajah of Pukkapore.
“I call that a pretty pair,” he said.
“Oh, how bored I feel,” said Nina.
Mr. Benfleet was there talking to two poets. They said “… and I wrote to tell William that I didn’t write the review, but it was true that Tony did read me the review over the telephone when I was very sleepy before he sent it in. I thought it was best to tell him the truth because he would hear it from Tony anyway. Only I said I advised him not to publish it just as I had advised William not to publish the book in the first place. Well Tony rang up Michael and told him that I’d said that William thought Michael had written the review because of the reviews I had written of Michael’s book last November, though, as a matter of fact, it was Tony himself who wrote it…”
“Too bad,” said Mr. Benfleet. “Too bad.”
“… but is that any reason, even if I had written it, why Michael should tell Tony that I had stolen five pounds from William?”
“Certainly not,” said Mr. Benfleet. “Too bad.”
“Of course, they’re simply not gentlemen, either of them. That’s all it is, only one’s shy of saying it nowadays.”
Mr. Benfleet shook his head sadly and sympathetically.
Then Mrs. Melrose Ape stood up to speak. A hush fell in the gilt ballroom beginning at the back and spreading among the chairs until only Mrs. Blackwater’s voice was heard exquisitely articulating some details of Lady Metroland’s past. Then she, too, was silent and Mrs. Ape began her oration about Hope.
“Brothers and Sisters,” she said in a hoarse, stirring voice. Then she paused and allowed her eyes, renowned throughout three continents for their magnetism, to travel among the gilded chairs. (It was one of her favorite openings.) “Just you look at yourselves,” she said.
Magically, self-doubt began to spread in the audience. Mrs. Panrast stirred uncomfortably; had that silly little girl been talking, she wondered.
“Darling,” whispered Miss Runcible, “is my nose awful?”
Nina thought how once, only twenty-four hours ago, she had been in love. Mr. Benfleet thought should he have made it three percent on the tenth thousand. The gate-crashers wondered whether it would not have been better to have stayed at home. (Once in Kansas City Mrs. Ape had got no further than these opening words; there had been a tornado of emotion and all the seats in the hall had been broken to splinters. It was there that Humility had joined the Angels.) There were a thousand things in Lady Throbbing’s past… Every heart found something to bemoan.
“She’s got ’em again,” whispered Creative Endeavor. “Got ’em stiff.”
Lord Vanburgh slipped from the room to telephone through some racy paragraphs about fashionable piety.
Mary Mouse shed two little tears and felt for the brown, bejeweled hand of the Maharajah.
But suddenly on that silence vibrant with self-accusation broke the organ voice of England, the hunting cry of the ancien régime. Lady Circumference gave a resounding snort of disapproval:
“What a damned impudent woman,” she said.
Adam and Nina and Miss Runcible began to giggle, and Margot Metroland for the first time in her many parties was glad to realize that the guest of the evening was going to be a failure. It had been an awkward moment.
In the study Father Rothschild and Mr. Outrage were plotting with enthusiasm. Lord Metroland was smoking a cigar and wondering how soon he could get away. He wanted to hear Mrs. Ape and to have another look at those Angels. There was one with red hair… Besides, all this statesmanship and foreign policy had always bored him. In his years in the Commons he had always liked a good scrap, and often thought a little wistfully of those orgies of competitive dissimulation in which he had risen to eminence. Even now, when some straightforward, easily intelligible subject was under discussion, such as poor people’s wages or public art, he enjoyed from time to time making a sonorous speech to the Upper House. But this sort of thing was not at all in his line.
Suddenly Father Rothschild turned out the light.
“There’s someone coming down the passage,” he said. “Quick, get behind the curtains.”
“Really, Rothschild…” said Mr. Outrage.
“I say…” said Lord Metroland.
“Quick,” said Father Rothschild.
The three statesmen hid themselves. Lord Metroland, still smoking, his head thrown back and his cigar erect. They heard the door open. The light was turned on. A match was struck. Then came the slight tinkle of the telephone as someone lifted the receiver.
“Central ten thousand,” said a slightly muffled voice.
“Now,” said Father Rothschild, and stepped through the curtain.
The bearded stranger who had excited his suspicions was standing at
the table smoking one of Lord Metroland’s cigars and holding the telephone.
“Oh, hullo,” he said, “I didn’t know you were here. Just thought I’d use the telephone. So sorry. Won’t disturb you. Jolly party, isn’t it? Good-bye.”
“Stay exactly where you are,” said Father Rothschild, “and take off that beard.”
“Damned if I do,” said the stranger crossly. “It’s no use talking to me as though I were one of your choir boys… you old bully.”
“Take off that beard,” said Father Rothschild.
“Take off that beard,” said Lord Metroland and the Prime Minister, emerging suddenly from behind the curtain.
This concurrence of Church and State, coming so unexpectedly after an evening of prolonged embarrassment, was too much for Simon.
“Oh, all right,” he said, “if you will make such a thing about it… it hurts too frightfully, if you knew… it ought to be soaked in hot water… ooh… ow.”
He gave some tugs at the black curls, and bit by bit they came away.
“There,” he said. “Now I should go and make Lady Throbbing take off her wig… I should have a really jolly evening while you’re about it, if I were you.”
“I seem to have overestimated the gravity of the situation,” said Father Rothschild.
“Who is it, after all this?” said Mr. Outrage. “Where are those detectives? What does it all mean?”
“That,” said Father Rothschild bitterly, “is Mr. Chatterbox.”
“Never heard of him. I don’t believe there is such a person… Chatterbox, indeed… you make us hide behind a curtain and then you tell us that some young man in a false beard is called Chatterbox. Really, Rothschild…”
“Lord Balcairn,” said Lord Metroland, “will you kindly leave my house immediately?”
“Is this young man called Chatterbox or is he not?… Upon my soul, I believe you’re all crazy.”
“Oh yes, I’m going,” said Simon. “You didn’t think I was going to go back to the party like this, did you?—or did you?” Indeed, he looked very odd with little patches of black hair still adhering to parts of his chin and cheeks.
“Lord Monomark is here this evening. I shall certainly inform him of your behavior…”
“He writes for the papers,” Father Rothschild tried to explain to the Prime Minister.
“Well, damn it, so do I, but I don’t wear a false beard and call myself Chatterbox… I simply do not understand what has happened… Where are those detectives?… Will no one explain?… You treat me like a child,” he said. It was all like one of those Cabinet meetings, when they all talked about something he didn’t understand and paid no attention to him.
Father Rothschild led him away, and attempted with almost humiliating patience and tact to make clear to him some of the complexities of modern journalism.
“I don’t believe a word of it,” the Prime Minister kept saying. “It’s all humbug. You’re keeping something back… Chatterbox, indeed.”
Simon Balcairn was given his hat and coat and shown to the door. The crowd round the awning had dispersed. It was still raining. He walked back to his little flat in Bourdon Street. The rain washed a few of the remaining locks from his face; it dripped down his collar.
They were washing a car outside his front door; he crept between it and his dustbin, fitted his latchkey in the lock and went upstairs. His flat was like Chez Espinosa—all oilcloth and Lalique glass; there were some enterprising photographs by David Lennox, a gramophone (on the installment system) and numberless cards of invitation on the mantelpiece. His bath towel was where he had left it on his bed.
Simon went to the ice box in the kitchen and chipped off some ice. Then he made himself a cocktail. Then he went to the telephone.
“Central ten thousand…” he said “… Give me Mrs. Brace. Hullo, this is Balcairn.”
“Well… gotcher story?”
“Oh yes, I’ve got my story, only this isn’t gossip, it’s news—front page. You’ll have to fill up the Chatterbox page on Espinosa’s.”
“Hell!”
“Wait till you see the story… Hullo, give me news, will you… This is Balcairn. Put on one of the boys to take this down, will you?… ready? All right.”
At his glass-topped table, sipping his cocktail, Simon Balcairn dictated his last story.
“Scenes of wild religious enthusiasm, comma, reminiscent of a negro camp-meeting in Southern America, comma, broke out in the heart of Mayfair yesterday evening at the party given for the famous American Revivalist Mrs. Ape by the Viscountess Metroland, formerly the Hon. Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde, at her historic mansion, Pastmaster House, stop. The magnificent ballroom can never have enshrined a more brilliant assembly…”
It was his swansong. Lie after monstrous lie bubbled up in his brain.
“… The Hon. Agatha Runcible joined Mrs. Ape among the orchids and led the singing, tears coursing down her face…”
Excitement spread at the Excess office. The machines were stopped. The night staff of reporters, slightly tipsy, as always at that hour, stood over the stenographer as he typed. The compositors snatched the sheets of copy as they came. The subeditors began ruthlessly cutting and scrapping; they suppressed important political announcements, garbled the evidence at a murder trial, reduced the dramatic criticism to one caustic paragraph, to make room for Simon’s story.
It came through “hot and strong, as nice as mother makes it,” as one of them remarked.
“Little Lord Fauntleroy’s on a good thing at last,” said another.
“What ho,” said a third appreciatively.
“… barely had Lady Everyman finished before the Countess of Throbbing rose to confess her sins, and in a voice broken with emotion disclosed the hitherto unverified details of the parentage of the present Earl…”
“Tell Mr. Edwardes to look up photographs of all three of ’em,” said the assistant news editor.
“… The Marquess of Vanburgh, shaken by sobs of contrition… Mrs. Panrast, singing feverishly… Lady Anchorage with downcast eyes…”
“… The Archbishop of Canterbury, who up to now had remained unmoved by the general emotion, then testified that at Eton in the eighties he and Sir James Brown…”
“… the Duchess of Stayle next threw down her emerald and diamond tiara, crying ‘a Guilt Offering,’ an example which was quickly followed by the Countess of Circumference and Lady Brown, until a veritable rain of precious stones fell on to the parquet flooring, heirlooms of priceless value rolling among Tecla pearls and Chanel diamonds. A blank check fluttered from the hands of the Maharajah of Pukkapore…”
It made over two columns, and when Simon finally rang off, after receiving the congratulations of his colleagues, he was for the first time in his journalistic experience perfectly happy about his work. He finished the watery dregs of the cocktail shaker and went into the kitchen. He shut the door and the window and opened the door of the gas oven. Inside it was very black and dirty and smelled of meat. He spread a sheet of newspaper on the lowest tray and lay down, resting his head on it. Then he noticed that by some mischance he had chosen Vanburgh’s gossip page in the Morning Despatch. He put in another sheet. (There were crumbs on the floor.) Then he turned on the gas. It came surprisingly with a loud roar; the wind of it stirred his hair and the remaining particles of his beard. At first he held his breath. Then he thought that was silly and gave a sniff. The sniff made him cough, and coughing made him breathe, and breathing made him feel very ill; but soon he fell into a coma and presently died.
So the last Earl of Balcairn went, as they say, to his fathers (who had fallen in many lands and for many causes, as the eccentricities of British Foreign Policy and their own wandering natures had directed them; at Acre and Agincourt and Killiecrankie, in Egypt and America. One had been picked white by fishes as the tides rolled him among the treetops of a submarine forest; some had grown black and unfit for consideration under tropical suns; while many of them lay in marble tombs of
extravagant design).
At Pastmaster House, Lady Metroland and Lord Monomark were talking about him. Lord Monomark was roaring with boyish laughter.
“That’s a great lad,” he said. “Came in a false beard, did he? That’s peppy. What’d you say his name was? I’ll raise him tomorrow first thing.”
And he turned to give Simon’s name to an attendant secretary.
And when Lady Metroland began to expostulate, he shut her up rather discourteously.
“Shucks, Margot,” he said. “You know better than to get on a high horse with me.”
Seven
Then Adam became Mr. Chatterbox.
He and Nina were lunching at Espinosa’s and quarreling halfheartedly when a businesslike, Eton-cropped woman came across to their table, whom Adam recognized as the social editress of the Daily Excess.
“See here,” she said, “weren’t you over at the office with Balcairn the day he did himself in?”
“Yes.”
“Well, a pretty mess he’s let us in for. Sixty-two writs for libel up to date and more coming in. And that’s not the worst. Left me to do his job and mine. I was wondering if you could tell me the names of any of these people and anything about them.”