‘Damn it all,’ he said, ‘the man’s my friend. I bring him to see you. And this is how you treat him. It’s a bit thick.’
Lady Edward’s bright black eyes had never been more candid, nor her voice more disarmingly French-Canadian (for she could modify her accent at will, making it more or less colonial according as it suited her to be the simple-hearted child of the North American steppe or the English aristocrat). ‘But what’s too thick?’ she asked. ‘What have I done this time?’
‘None of your comedy with me,’ said Bidlake.
‘But it isn’t a comedy. I’ve no idea what’s thick. No idea.’
Bidlake explained about the critic. ‘You knew as well as I do,’ he said.’ And now I come to think of it, we were talking about his article only last week.’
Lady Edward frowned, as though trying to recapture a vanished memory. ‘so we were!’ she cried at last, and looked at him with an expression of horror and repentance. ‘Too awful! But you know what a hopeless memory I have.’
‘You have the best memory of any person I know,’ said Bidlake.
‘But I always forget,’ she protested.
‘Only what you know you ought to remember. It’s a damned sight too regular to be accidental. You deliberately remember to forget.’
‘What nonsense!’ cried Lady Edward.
‘If you had a bad memory,’ Bidlake went on, ‘you might occasionally forget that husbands oughtn’t to be asked to meet the notorious lovers of their wives; you might sometimes forget that anarchists and leader writers in the Morning Post aren’t likely to be the best friends, and that pious Catholics don’t much enjoy listening to blasphemy from professional atheists. You might occasionally forget, if your memory were bad. But, I assure you, it needs a first-class memory to forget every time. A first-class memory and a first-class love of mischief.’
For the first time since the conversation had begun Lady Edward relaxed her ingenuous seriousness. She laughed. ‘You’re too absurd, my dear John.’
Talking, Bidlake had recovered his good humour; he echoed her laughter. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘I don’t in the least object to your playing practical jokes on other people. I enjoy it. But I do draw the line at having them played on me.’
‘I’ll do my best to remember next time,’ she said meekly and looked at him with an ingenuousness that was so impertinent, that he had to laugh.
That had been many years before; she had kept her word and played no more tricks on him. But with other people, she was just as embarrassingly innocent and forgetful as ever. Throughout the world in which she moved her exploits were proverbial. People laughed. But there were too many victims; she was feared, she was not liked. But her parties were always thronged; her cook, her wine merchant and caterer were of the first class. Much was forgiven her for her husband’s wealth.
Besides, the company at Tantamount House was always variously and often eccentrically distinguished. People accepted her invitations and took their revenge by speaking ill of her behind her back. They called her, among other things, a snob and a lion hunter. But a snob, they had to admit to her defenders, who laughed at the pomps and grandeurs for which she lived. A hunter who collected lions in order that she might bait them. Where a middle-class Englishwoman would have been serious and abject, Lady Edward was mockingly irreverent. She hailed from the New World; for her the traditional hierarchies were a joke—but a picturesque joke and one worth living for.
‘She might have been the heroine of that anecdote,’ old Bidlake had once remarked of her, ‘that anecdote about the American and the two English peers. You remember? He got into conversation with two Englishmen in the train, liked them very much, wanted to renew the acquaintance later and asked their names. “My name,” says one of them, “is the Duke of Hampshire and this is my friend the Master of Ballantrae.” “Glad to meet you,” says the American. “Allow me to present my son Jesus Christ.” That’s Hilda all over. And yet her whole life consists precisely in asking and being asked out by the people whose titles seem to her so comic. Queer.’ He shook his head.’very queer indeed.’
Turning way from the two discomfited young girls, Lady Edward was almost run down by a very tall and burly man, who was hurrying with dangerous speed across the crowded room.
‘Sorry,’ he said without looking down to see who it was he had almost knocked over. His eyes were following the movements of somebody at the other end of the room; he was only aware of a smallish obstacle, presumably human, since all the obstacles in the neighbourhood were human. He checked himself in mid career and took a step to the side, so as to get round the obstacle. But the obstacle was not of the kind one circumvents as easily as that.
Lady Edward reached out and caught him by the sleeve. ‘Webley!’ Pretending not to have felt the hand on his sleeve, not to have heard the calling of his name, Everard Webley still moved on; he had no wish and no leisure to talk to Lady Edward. But Lady Edward would not be shaken off; she suffered herself to be dragged along, still tugging, at his side.
‘Webley!’ she repeated.’Stop! Woa!’ And her imitation of a country carter was so loud and so realistically rustic that Webley was compelled to listen, for fear of attracting the laughing attention of his fellow guests.
He looked down at her. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said gruffly. ‘Sorry I hadn’t noticed.’ The annoyance, expressed in his frown and his ill-mannered words, was partly genuine, partly assumed. Many people, he had found, are frightened of anger; he cultivated his natural ferocity. It kept people at a distance, saved him from being bothered.
‘Goodness!’ exclaimed Lady Edward with an expression of terror that was frankly a caricature.
‘Did you want anything?’ he demanded in the tone in which he might have addressed an importunate beggar in the street.
‘You do look cross.’
‘If that was all you wanted to say to me, I think I might as well…’
‘Lady Edward, meanwhile, had been examining him critically out of her candidly impertinent eyes.
‘You know,’ she said, interrupting him in the middle of his sentence, as though unable to delay for a moment longer the announcement of her great and sudden discovery,’ you ought to play the part of Captain Hook in Peter Pan. Yes, really. You have the ideal face for a pirate king. Hasn’t he, Mr. Babbage?’ She caught at Illidge as he was passing, disconsolately alien, through the crowd of strangers.
‘Good evening,’ he said. The cordiality of Lady Edward’s smile did not entirely make up for the insult of his unremembered name.
‘Webley, this is Mr. Babbage, who helps my husband with his work.’ Webley nodded a distant acknowledgment of Illidge’s existence. ‘But don’t you think he’s like a pirate king, Mr. Babbage? ‘ Lady Edward went on. ‘Look at him now.’
Illidge uncomfortably laughed. ‘Not that I’ve seen many pirate kings,’ he said.
‘But of course,’ Lady Edward cried out, ‘I’d forgotten; he is a pirate king. In real life. Aren’t you, Webley?’
Everard Webley laughed.’Oh, certainly, certainly.’
‘Because, you see,’ Lady Edward explained, turning confidentially to Illidge, ‘this is Mr. Everard Webley. The head of the British Freemen. You know those men in the green uniform? Like the male chorus at a musical comedy.’
Illidge smiled maliciously and nodded. So this, he was thinking, was Everard Webley. The founder and the head of the Brotherhood of British Freemen—the B.B.F.’s, the ‘B—y, b—ing, f—s,’ as their enemies called them. Inevitably; for, as the extremely well-informed correspondent of the Figaro once remarked in an article devoted to the Freemen, ‘les initiales B.B.F. ont, pour le public anglais, une signification plutot pejorative.’ Webley had not thought of that, when he gave his Freemen their name. It pleased Illidge to reflect that he must be made to think of it very often now.
‘If you’ve finished being funny,’ said Everard, ‘I’ll take my leave.’
Tinpot Mussolini, Illidge was thinking. Looks his part, too. (He had a special personal hatred of anyone who was tall and handsome, or who looked in any way distinguished. He himself was small and had the appearance of a very intelligent street Arab, grown up.) Great lout!’
‘But you’re not offended by anything I said, are you?’ Lady Edward asked with a great show of anxiety and contrition.
Illidge remembered a cartoon in the Daily Herald. ‘The British Freemen,’ Webley had had the insolence to say, ‘exist to keep the world safe for intelligence.’ The cartoon showed Webley and half a dozen of his uniformed bandits kicking and bludgeoning a workman to death. Behind them a top-hatted company-director looked on approvingly. Across his monstrous belly sprawled the word: INTELLIGENCE.
‘Not offended, Webley?’ Lady Edward repeated.
‘Not in the least. I’m only rather busy. You see,’ he explained in his silkiest voice, ‘ I have things to do. I work, if you know what that means.’
Illidge wished that the hit had been scored by someone else. The dirty ruffian! He himself was a communist. Webley left them. Lady Edward watched him ploughing his way through the crowd. ‘Like a steam engine, she said. ‘What energy!
