She refused to let herself be laughed out of the habit.
‘Electric, electric,’ she went on, dropping her voice, and speaking in a dramatic whisper. ‘Electrical musketry, metrical biscuitry. Ow! ‘ The comb had caught in a tangle. She leaned forward to see more clearly in the glass what she was doing. The reflected face approached. ‘Ma chere,’ exclaimed Polly in another tone, ‘tu as l’air fatigue. Tu es vieille. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. At your age. Tz, tz!’ She clicked her tongue disapprovingly against her teeth and shook her head. ‘This won’t do, this won’t do. Still, you looked all right to-night. “My dear, how sweet you look in white!”’ She imitated Mrs. Betterton’s emphatic voice. ‘Same to you and many of them. Do you think I shall look like an elephant when I’m sixty? Still, I suppose one ought to be grateful even for an elephant’s compliments.
“Count your blessings, count them one by one,”’ she chanted softly, ‘“And it will surprise you what the Lord has done.” Oh, heavens, heavens!’ She put down her comb, she violently shuddered and covered her face with her hands. ‘Heavens!’ She felt the blood rushing up into her cheeks. ‘The gaffe! The enormous and ghastly floater!’ She had thought suddenly of Lady Edward. Of course she had overheard. ‘How could I have risked saying that about her being a Canadian?’ Polly moaned, overwhelmed with retrospective shame and embarrassment. ‘That’s what comes of wanting to say something clever at any cost. And then think of wasting attempted cleverness on Norah! Norah! Oh Lord, oh Lord!’ She jumped up and pulling her dressing-gown round her as she went, hurried down the corridor to her mother’s room. Mrs. Logan was already in bed and had turned out the light. Polly opened the door and stepped into darkness.
‘Mother,’ she called, ‘mother!’ Her tone was urgent and agonized.
‘What is it?’ Mrs. Logan answered anxiously out of the dark. She sat up and fumbled for the, electric switch by the bed. ‘What is it?’ The light went on with a click. ‘What is it, my darling?’
Polly threw herself down on the bed and hid her face against her mother’s knees. ‘Oh, mother, if you knew what a terrible floater I made with Lady Edward! If you knew! I forgot to tell you.’
Mrs. Logan was almost angry that her anxiety had been for nothing. When one has put forth all one’s strength to raise what seems an enormous weight, it is annoying to find that the dumb-bell is made of cardboard and could have been lifted between two fingers. ‘Was it necessary to come and wake me up out of my first sleep to tell me?’ she asked crossly.
Polly looked up at her mother ‘I’m sorry, mother,’ she said repentantly. ‘But if you knew what an awful floater it was!’
Mrs. Logan could not help laughing.
‘I couldn’t have gone to sleep if I hadn’t told you,’ Polly went on.
‘And I mayn’t go to sleep until you have.’ Mrs. Logan tried to be severe and sarcastic. But her eyes, her smile betrayed her.
Polly took her mother’s hand and kissed it. ‘I knew you wouldn’t mind,’ she said.
‘I do mind. Very much.’
‘It’s no good trying to bluff me,’ said Polly. ‘But now I must tell you about the floater.’
Mrs. Logan heaved the parody of a sigh of resignation and, pretending to be overwhelmed with sleepiness, closed her eyes. Polly talked. It was after halfpast two before she went back to her room. They had discussed, not only the floater and Lady Edward, but the whole party, and everyone who was there. Or rather Polly had discussed and Mrs. Logan had listened, had laughed and laughingly protested when her daughter’s comments became too exuberantly highspirited.
‘But Polly, Polly,’ she had said, ‘you really mustn’t say that people look like elephants.’
‘But Mrs. Betterton does look like an elephant,’ Polly had replied. ‘It’s the truth.’ And in her dramatic stage whisper she had added, rising from fancy to still more preposterous fancy: ‘Even her nose is like a trunk.’
‘But she’s got a short nose.’
Polly’s whisper had become more gruesome. ‘An amputated trunk. They bit it off when she was a baby. Like puppies’ tails.’
CHAPTER XII
For valued clients, Sbisa never closed his restaurant. They could sit there, in spite of the law, and consume intoxicating poisons as far into the small hours as they liked. An extra waiter came on at midnight to attend to the valued clients who wished to break the law. Old Sbisa saw to it that their value, to him, was very high. Alcohol was cheaper at the Ritz than at Sbisa’s.
It was about halfpast one—’only halfpast one,’ Lucy complained—when she and Walter and Spandrell left the restaurant.
‘Still young,’ was Spandrell’s comment on the night. ‘Young and rather insipid. Nights are like human beings—never interesting till they’re grown up. Round about midnight they reach puberty. At a little after one they come of age. Their prime is from two to halfpast. An hour later they’re growing rather desperate, like those man-eating women and waning middleaged men who hop around twice as violently as they ever did in the hope of persuading themselves that they’re not old. After four they’re in full decay. And their death is horrible. Really horrible at sunrise, when the bottles are empty and people look like corpses and desire’s exhausted itself into disgust. I have rather a weakness for the death-bed scenes, I must confess,’ Spandrell added.
‘I’m sure you have,’ said Lucy.
‘And it’s only in the light of ends that you can judge beginnings and middles. The night has just come of age. It remains to be seen how it will die. Till then, we can’t judge it.’
Walter knew how it would die for him—in the midst of Marjorie’s tears and his own complicated misery and exasperation, in an explosion of self-hatred and hatred for the woman to whom he had been cruel. He knew, but would not admit his knowledge; nor that it was already halfpast one and that Marjorie would be awake and anxiously wondering why he hadn’t returned.
At five to one Walter had looked at his watch and declared that he must go. What was the good of staying? Spandrell was immovable. There was no prospect of his having a moment alone with Lucy. He lacked even that justification for making Marjorie suffer. He was torturing her, not that he might be happy, but that he might feel bored, ill, exasperated, impatiently wretched.
‘I must really go,’ he had said, standing up.
But Lucy had protested, cajoled, commanded. In the end he sat down again. That had been more than half an hour ago and now they were out in Soho Square, and the evening, according to Lucy and Spandrell, had hardly begun.
‘I think it’s time,’ Spandrell had said to Lucy, ‘that you saw what a revolutionary communist looked like.’
Lucy demanded nothing better.
‘I belong to a sort of club,’ Spandrell explained. He offered to take them in with him.
‘There’ll still be a few enemies of society on view, I expect,’ he went on, as they stepped out into the refreshing darkness. ‘Good fellows mostly. But absurdly childish. Some of them seem genuinely to believe that a revolution would make people happier. It’s charming, it’s positively touching.’ He uttered his noiseless laugh. ‘But I’m an aesthete in these matters. Dynamite for dynamite’s sake.’
‘But what’s the point of dynamite, if you don’t believe in Utopia?’ asked Lucy.
‘The point? But haven’t you eyes?’
Lucy looked round her. ‘I see nothing particularly frightful.’
‘They have eyes and see not.’ He halted, took her arm with one hand and with the other pointed round the square. ‘The deserted pickle factory, transformed into a dance hall; the lying-in hospital; Sbisa’s; the publishers of Who’s Who. And once,’ he added, ‘the Duke of Monmouth’s palace. You can imagine the ghosts:
‘Whether inspired by some diviner lust,
His father got him with a keener gust…’
And so forth. You know the portrait of him after the execution, lying on a bed, with the sheet up to his chin, so that you can’t see the place where the neck was cut through? By Kneller. Or was it Lely? Monmouth and pickles, lying-in and Who’s Who, and dancing and Sbisa’s champagne—think of them a little, think of them.’
‘I’m thinking of them,’ said Lucy. ‘Hard.’
‘And do you still ask what the point of dynamite is?’ They walked on. At the door of a little house in St. Giles’s Spandrell called a halt. ‘Wait a moment,’ he said, beckoning the others back into the darkness. He rang. The door opened at once. There was a brief parleying in the shadows; then Spandrell turned and called to his companions. They followed him into a dark hall, up a flight of stairs and into a brightly-lighted room on the first floor. Two men were standing near the fire place, a turbaned Indian and a little man with red hair. At the sound of footsteps they turned round. The red-haired man was Illidge.
‘Spandrell? Bidlake?’ he raised his invisibly sandy eyebrows in astonishment. And what’s that woman doing here? he wondered.
Lucy came forward with outstretched hand. ‘We’re old acquaintances,’ she said with a smile of friendly recognition. Illidge, who was
