At eight o'clock, fortified by the tablet of aspirin she had swallowed on her hurried return to her lodging in Earl's Court earlier in the evening to fling herself into her one dinner-dress, Beulah joined the small party assembled in the drawing-room. Originally, the only invited guest had been Dan Seaton-Carew, but Cynthia, encountering Lord Guisborough and Mr. Harte at her luncheon-party, had, with reckless hospitality, begged both to dine in Charles Street before the rest of the Bridge-guests arrived. Since Beatrice Guisborough, who shared a studio with her brother, had not been present, she was easily able to forget the propriety of including her in her invitation; and as Lord Guisborough was contemptuous of all social conventions, and, in any event, never considered the convenience of anyone but himself, he had no hesitation in accepting the invitation, and leaving Beatrice to join the Bridge-party under her own escort.
Mrs. Haddington, informed midway through the afternoon of this alteration of her plans, had almost lost her temper with her idolised daughter, even going so far as to say that it was really rather thoughtless of her. Her chef entirely lost his, and was only deterred from walking out of Mrs. Haddington's life then and there by the reflection that the incident, judiciously handled, would provide him with an unanswerable pretext for demanding an increase in his already handsome salary.
"My pet, if you had invited one of them, it would have been quite all right," said Mrs. Haddington, in the fond voice none but her daughter was privileged to hear. "But now our numbers are wrong!"
"Oh, Mummy, what on earth does it matter? Besides, they always were!"
"Nonsense, I don't count Dan as a regular guest! I suppose I shall have to tell that Birtley girl she can dine with us."
She then remembered that the library, where Beulah usually partook of meals served to her on a tray, was swept, garnished, and furnished with card-tables; reflected that the servants would infallibly be affronted by any suggestion that they should serve two separate meals that evening, and became more cheerful. Beulah received a curt intimation that she was expected to dine with her employer with outward apathy. Her spirits were not raised by the contemplation of her image in the mirror set within the panel of her wardrobe door. The discreet dinner-dress, bought for just such an occasion as the present one, had, for its provenance, the Inexpensive Department of a London store distinguished more for its reasonable prices than for its exclusiveness of design, and had been worn rather too often. Not even the addition of a pendant of antique and charming design, bequeathed to her by her Italian mother, could redeem it, she considered. A dab of Indian ink had concealed a cut on one of her satin sandals; but her thick brown locks, springing attractively from a broad, low brow, would have been the better for re-setting. "Oh, blast, who cares, anyway?" demanded Beulah of her scowling reflection, and dragged a comb through her hair once more.
She was guilty of the extravagance of hiring a taxi to convey her from Nevern Place to Charles Street, and alighted from it just as Mr. Seaton-Carew was about to press the bell beside the front door of the house. He waited for her to join him, saying, in the half-caressing, half-bantering tone he was apt to adopt when addressing pretty young women: "Well, and how is my little protegee?"
"Thank you, I am perfectly well, and you would oblige me if you would stop calling me your little protegee!" Beulah replied.
He laughed gently, and gave her arm a squeeze above the elbow. "What a farouche child it is!" he remarked. "Ungrateful, aren't you? Eh? Who got you this job, I should like to know? And what thanks has he ever had for doing it? Now, you tell me that, you impossible young termagant!"
"If you had got it for me without telling Mrs. Haddington every detail of my past career, I might have been grateful - even to the extent of letting you paw me about!" retorted Beulah fiercely, detaching his hand from her arm.
Again he laughed, and this time playfully pinched her chin. "Does Lilias put it across you? What a shame! But I really couldn't foist you on to her without letting her know the worst, could I?"
Beulah sought angrily in her purse for her latch-key, realised that she had left it in her shopping-bag, set her finger on the bell, and pressed it viciously. "I told you the truth, and you pretended to believe me!"
"Of course I did! That's one of the rules of the game, my silly sweet."
"And, what is more, you did believe me!" Beulah flashed. "I know enough now to be sure that you'd have found quite another use for me if you hadn't! You saw I wasn't in the least the sort you were looking for, but it occurred to you that you could supply your dear old friend with a slave who wouldn't leave her the first time she was poisonously rude if you sent me to her - complete with my dossier!"
He still seemed to be genuinely amused. "Poor little savage! Do you hate me for it?"
"No more than I hate cockroaches!"
At this moment, Thrimby opened the door. Mr. Seaton-Carew stood back with an exaggerated gesture of civility to allow Beulah to precede him into the house. His eyes mocked her; he said, as he handed Thrimby his hat: "What do you do to cockroaches, my dear? Put your foot on them?"
"When I get the chance!"
"What a cruel little girl! I'm afraid you won't, you know!"
She turned, at the foot of the stairs, to look back at him. "Don't be too sure of that, Mr. Seaton-Carew! Add determined to cruel, and you'll be very nearly right!"
"Your overcoat, sir?" said Thrimby, in a voice that clearly expressed his opinion of this interchange.
Beulah postponed her entrance to the drawing-room until the last moment, and did, not join the party until after the separate arrivals of Lord Guisborough and Mr. Harte. She found her employer very stately in black velvet and diamonds, with a large black lace fan, mounted on ebony sticks, which she carried in one hand. This was in imitation of a certain much admired Duchess, and was a plagiarism which Mr. Harte had instantly recognised and appreciated. He caught Beulah's eye as she entered the room, and directed it to the gloves and the fan. Since Beulah had not been informed of the identities of the two extra guests Mr. Harte's presence came as a glad surprise to her. Her rather forbidding expression was lightened by an involuntary smile, and a faint flush. These indications of her pleasure were not lost on her employer, who observed them with a steely light in her eyes. But Mrs. Haddington never committed the solecism of being rude to her secretary in public, and she said, with her mechanical smile: "Ah, here you are, Miss Birtley! You know my secretary, don't you, Lance?"
The latest flower of the peerage was seated beside Cynthia on a deep sofa, engrossed in expounding the high principles infusing every Russian bosom, but he turned his head at these words, waved a vague hand, and said graciously: "Oh, hallo!"
"And Mr. Harte I feel sure you have met before, Miss Birtley," said Mrs. Haddington.
"How do you do? May I mix you a drink?" Timothy said, shaking hands with his unofficially betrothed, and moving towards the tray laid upon a side-table.
Beulah refused it, and Mrs. Haddington, who saw no reason why she should provide a member of her staff with cocktails as well as an expensive meal, said lightly: "I'm afraid you won't be able to persuade her, Mr. Harte. Miss Birtley doesn't drink."
"What an exemplary character!" remarked Seaton-Carew, amusement in his sleepy eyes.
"Dinner is served, madam," announced Thrimby, from the doorway.
A buffet had already been set up in the back half of the dining-room, and the mahogany table, much reduced in length, had been thrust wholly into the front half. Mrs. Haddington, with a graceful apology for what she described as a picnic-meal, requested Lord Guisborough to take the head of the board, seated herself at the foot, with Timothy on her right, and Seaton-Carew on her left, and directed her daughter to the vacant chair between his lordship and Mr. Harte. This left the place beside Seaton-Carew to Beulah, and since Lord Guisborough continued to address himself exclusively to Cynthia, and Timothy, handicapped by an upbringing, politely set himself to entertain his hostess, she was obliged to maintain an unwilling exchange of small talk with him.
Of this he had an easy and inexhaustible flow. He was a middle-aged man who had wonderfully preserved his figure, and his air of youth. He was handsome, in a slightly florid style, and possessed a marked amount of rather animal magnetism. His manner, which was a nice blend of indulgent amusement and affectionate flattery, strongly attracted a certain type of woman, and various young men whose careers had not hitherto earned them any very distinguishing attention either from their contemporaries or from their seniors. He lived in a service-flat in Jermyn Street, and was apparently a gentleman of leisure. His position in Mrs. Haddington's house was undefined, but it was generally supposed that the past veiled a greater degree of intimacy than now prevailed between them. As Miss Mapperley so shrewdly phrased it: "Anyone knows what to think when someone asks a gentleman to go and fetch her something out of her bedroom." Miss Mapperley added with relish: "But if My Lady thinks he's still got a fancy for her she'll very soon smile on the other side of her face, for it's her precious Cynthia he's after, as anybody could see with half an eye. Disgusting, I call it!"
Lord Guisborough, who, while rapidly disposing of half a dozen oysters, was angrily condemning a state of Capitalism which had neglected to make oysters the staple diet of the Masses, had long since decided that Mr. Seaton-Carew was a parasite who, in a more golden age, would have perished under a guillotine, and paid little heed to him, beyond casting one or two fiery glances in his direction, and contradicting three of his statements. These in no way discomposed Dan Seaton-Carew, but seemed rather to amuse him. He had very little interest in impoverished peers; and as it was common knowledge that the late Lord Guisborough, upon the death of his last surviving son, had divided all his unentailed property between his daughter and his more favoured nephew Kenelm, he had never made any attempt to captivate the heir. Lord Guisborough was a bony young man, with a cavernous eye and hollow cheeks, who had been employed for some years on the staff of a firm of left-wing publishers. He was not without ability, but he lacked ballast. An older and a shrewder colleague had once described him as being over-engined for his beam. He was capable of bearing an intelligent part in discussion for just as long as the subject had no bearing on the Kremlin, but the smallest reference to Soviet Russia acted upon his brain like a powerful drug, slaying in an instant his critical faculty, and inspiring him with a fanaticism that dismissed as Capitalist Propaganda all the more displeasing activities of an Asiatic race which from time to time came to light. He had taken no active part in the War, at first because he had conscientiously objected to it; and later, when the enforced participation of Russia in the hostilities had altered his outlook, because he was engaged on Educational Work of paramount importance. This consisted of a series of lectures, which he was perfectly well qualified to deliver, having completed his education at the London School of Economics.
In general, he was by no means popular with the more ruthless sex, most of whom, in defiance of all attempts to enlighten their minds, continued to let instinct govern their impulses, and maintained an obstinate preference for stalwart males who showed every sign of being able and willing to defend their own. Some of these ladies who had spent the war-years doing rescue work in blitzed areas, could scarcely look at him without wishing to hand him a white feather. Mr. Harte, who possessed an elegant leather case containing a row of miniature medals which made his mother's heart swell with pride, was more tolerant. He said that Lord Guisborough's war-time activities were not due to common funk, but to a form of beany intellectualism, and bore him not the slightest illwill for his failure to share in the heat and burden of the day. But he did think that his remarks on the subject of oysters lacked civility to his hostess, and were deserving of punishment, so he remarked, in what he knew his victim would consider an Oxford drawl, that it was extremely doubtful that the masses would appreciate the addition of these bivalves to their diet.
"When oysters were more plentiful," he said affably, "it was one of the articles of indenture for apprentices that they should not be fed on them more than a strictly limited number of times in the week. Which doesn't lead one to suppose that they were very popular, does it?"
Since. his lordship was unable to refute this piece of recondite knowledge, he could think of no adequate retort, and therefore said nothing. So, having successfully put him in his place, Timothy continued in an easy, conversational tone: "Rather odd, the way different foods go in and out of fashion. My mother tells me that when she was a girl, for instance, scallops, which we think very well of, were considered to be too cheap and common to figure on any menu."
"I had the pleasure of meeting your mother at dear Mary Petersfield's party," said Mrs. Haddington. "I should so much like to know her better: what an interesting woman she is! How much I enjoyed her book describing her adventures on the Congo border!"
Timothy, who shared with his half-brother, Mr. James Kane, an ineradicable conviction that the Second World War had been inaugurated by providence to put an end to their beloved but very trying parent's passion for exploring remote quarters of the globe, bowed, and murmured one of the conventional acknowledgements with which the more astute relatives of an author take care to equip themselves.
"Is Norma Harte your mother?" demanded Guisborough abruptly. "I can't say I've read any of her books, but I've heard of her. She knows Equatorial Africa pretty well, doesn't she? What are her views on the native question? Or hasn't she any?"
Timothy had not read his mother's books either, but he was not going to put up with this sort of thing. He replied with deceptive readiness: "Oh, rather! I believe she's very sound. In fact, if you're thinking of a safari you couldn't do better than to consult her. She'll tell you which tribes make the best carriers, and what you want to look out for in your headman, and what are the main pitfalls: Christianised boys, boys who try to talk English to you, and sit down in your chairs - that sort of thing!"
"That," said Guisborough, reddening angrily, "is not what I meant! I was referring - though possibly this might not interest Lady Harte! - to -"
"Oh, do shut up about Africa and natives!" interrupted Cynthia. "I do think all that sort of thing is too boring!"
Mrs. Haddington, although she could not but be glad of the intervention, uttered a reproving exclamation, looking rather anxiously at her daughter as she did so. Cynthia was in one of her petulant moods, rejecting most of the dishes offered to her, fidgeting with the cutlery, and taking no pains at all to be polite to her mother's guests.
"Tired, baby?" asked Seaton-Carew, smiling at her across the table. "I suppose you've been on the go since breakfast-time, as usual?"
"I'm afraid she has," said Mrs. Haddington. "I think I shall have to have the telephone dismantled! It never stops ringing from morning till night, and always it's scinuxme wanting my frivolous daughter, isn't it, Miss Birtly?"
"Always," responded Beulah obediently.
"Oh, Mummy, what lies you do tell!" said Cynthia, hunching a pettish shoulder.
"That reminds me," said Seaton-Carew, with what even Mr. Harte acknowledged to be praiseworthy swiftness, "I've been cursing the telephone all day myself. Been expecting an important call, which hasn't come through. I've told the Exchange to put any calls for me through to this number, Lilias. I knew you wouldn't mind."
In this he was mistaken. Mrs. Haddington might be grateful to him for trying to cover up her daughter's lapse, but she could scarcely be expected to contemplate with pleasure the prospect of seeing the smooth running of her Bridge-party disturbed by the interruption of a telephone-call. Her response, though civil, was so lacking in cordiality that even Lord Guisborough became conscious of an atmosphere of constraint. However, Timothy was inspired to ask Cynthia if she had seen the latest gangster-film, showing at the Orpheum, a gambit which dispelled her ill-humour, and induced her to launch forth into an animated and enthusiastic discussion on this and several other films of the same order. The rest of dinner passed without untoward incident. Mrs. Haddington rose from the table, playfully apologising for not being able to allow her male guests more than ten minutes with the port, and inviting them to join her in her boudoir for coffee. She then led the way out of the room, and while Cynthia went up to her bedroom to put more powder on her face and to exaggerate the already beautiful curve of her upper lip, she reminded Beulah what her various duties would be during the rest of the evening. Obedient to her command, Seaton-Carew brought his fellow-guests up to the boudoir in good time; and Thrimby, leaving a couple of flurried subordinates to clear away the remains of dinner and transform the dining-room into a refreshment buffet, followed him with the coffee-tray, which he majestically offered to everyone in turn. Cynthia reappeared just as he was leaving the room, and nearly caused Seaton-Carew to spill his coffee by seizing his free hand and saying: "Oh, Dan darling, I've something frightfully important I want to tell you! Do come up to the drawing-room!"
"Not now, my pet," said Mrs. Haddington firmly. "You can talk to Dan some other time."
"But, Mummy, you don't understand! I particularly want to say something to him now.!"
"Darling, you're forgetting! You must stay and entertain Lance, and Mr. Harte. Besides, I want to have a word with Dan myself."
"We'll go into a huddle together later on, Cynny," said Seaton-Carew soothingly.
Cynthia pouted, and protested, but before her voice had developed more than a hint of a whining note her harassed parent had inexorably swept Mr. Seaton-Carew off to the library, to discuss with him, she said, certain minor details of the approaching contest.
"I do think people are sickening," Cynthia remarked. "Where's my coffee? Oh, thanks, Timothy, you are an angel! Did you pour it out for me?"
She then gravitated, as though drawn by a magnet, to the radio-cabinet in one corner of the room, switched it on, and began to twiddle the dials. Lord Guisborough followed her, and Timothy seized the opportunity to say to Beulah, in an undervoice; "Aren't we having fun? Have you had a bloody day? You look worn-out."
"That's not very polite. I expected better things of that charming Mr. Harte who has such lovely manners."
"Less of it, my girl!" said Timothy.
At this moment a reverent voice announced that they were listening to the Third Preeogramme, and were about to be regaled with a composition by Meeozart. "This little-kneeown work," continued the voice, in the kindly tone of one addressing a class of backward students, "was compeeosed by Meeozart at the age of eighteen. It was originally -"
"O God!" ejaculated Cynthia, swinging the dial round.
This seemed, on the whole, to be fair comment. "Well said!" approved Timothy. "I bar having my enjoyment of a concert marred by a patronising voice that tells me a lot of arid facts I am capable of looking up for myself, should I by any chance wish to acquaint myself with them."
"Wireless programmes are not primarily intended for the privileged few who have had the opportunity and the leisure to acquire your culture!" said Guisborough offensively.
"Wireless programmes are neither primarily nor secondarily intended for cultured persons," replied Timothy, quite unruffled. "Too often they appear to be intended either for the entirely witless, or for those desirous of acquiring without effort a little easy knowledge. I remember that someone once gave a fifteen minute talk on the Battle of Waterloo. A sobering thought."
"Well, at least that's better than incessant and uninspiring glorification of the Little Man," said Beulah.
"I suppose," said Guisborough contemptuously, "that you are one of those who fondly imagine that history is made by the so-called Great Man?"
"Yes," replied Beulah. "I am."
"Good heavens, woman, you mustn't say things like that!" exclaimed Timothy, shocked. "Next you will say that the race is to the swift!"
Guisborough flushed angrily, but the retort he was seen to make was providentially drowned by the cacophony of sound produced by Cynthia's efforts to discover a programme that appealed to her. While she rapidly travelled from one station to the next, conversation was impossible, and by the time she had switched the current off in disgust, Mrs. Haddington had come back into the room with the curt announcement that the first of the guests was arriving. She too was somewhat flushed, and it was apparent to the most casual observer that her interview with Dan Seaton-Carew had not been attended by complete harmony. Her lips were compressed, and her nostrils slightly distended; and it was some moments before she was again able to assume her social smile. She drove her guests upstairs to the drawing-room, told Beulah rather harshly to see to it that the coffee-cups were, removed from the boudoir, and swept out to receive Mr. Sydney Butterwick.