CHAPTER IV

 

Pongileoni surpassed himself in the final Badinerie.  Euclidean axioms made holiday with the formulae of elementary statics.  Arithmetic held a wild saturnalian kermess; algebra cut capers.  The music came to an end in an orgy of mathematical merry-making.  There was applause.  Tolley bowed, with all his usual grace; Pongileoni bowed, even the anonymous fiddlers bowed.  The audience pushed back its chairs and got up.  Torrents of pent-up chatter broke loose.

      'Wasn't the Old Man too mar-vellously funny?'  Polly Logan had found a friend.

      'And the little carroty man with him.'

      'Like Mutt and Jeff.'

      'I thought I should die of laughing,' said Norah.

      'Such an old magician!'  Polly spoke in a thrilling whisper, leaning forward and opening her eyes very wide, as though to express in dramatic pantomime as well as words the mysteriousness of the magical old man.  'A wizard.'

      'But what does he do up there?'

      'Cuts up toads and salamanders and all that,' Polly answered.

     

                                             'Eye of newt and toe of frog,

                                             Wool of bat and tongue of dog ...'

 

      She recited with gusto, intoxicated by the words.  'And he takes guinea-pigs and makes them breed with serpents.  Can you image it - a cross between a cobra and a guinea-pig?'

      'Ugh!' the other shuddered.  'But why did he ever marry her, if that's the only sort of thing he's interested in?  That's what I always wonder.'

      'Why did she marry him?'  Polly's voice dropped again to a stage whisper.  She liked to make everything sound exciting - as exciting as she still felt everything to be.  She was only twenty.  'There were very good reasons for that.'

      'Yes, I suppose so.'

      'And she was a Canadian, remember, which made the reasons even more cogent.'

      'One wonders how Lucy ever ...'

      'Sh-sh.'

      The other looked round.  'Wasn't Pongileoni splendid,' she exclaimed very loudly, and with altogether too much presence of mind.

      'Too wonderful!' Polly bawled back, as though she were on the stage at Drury Lane.  'Ah, there's Lady Edward.'  They were both enormously surprised and delighted.  'We were just saying how mar-vellous Pongileoni's playing was.'

      'Were you?' said Lady Edward, smiling and looking from one to the other.  She had a deep rich voice and spoke slowly, as though everything she said were very serious and important.  'That was very nice of you.'  The 'r' was most emphatically rolled.  'He's an Italian,' she added, and her face was now quite grave and unsmiling.  'Which makes it even more wonderful.'  And she passed on, leaving the two young girls haggardly looking into one another's blushing face.

      Lady Edward was a small, thin woman, with an elegance of figure that, in a low-cut dress, was visibly beginning to run to bones and angles, as were also the aquiline good looks of a rather long and narrow face.  A French mother and perhaps, in these later days, the hairdresser's art accounted for the jetty blackness of her hair.  Her skin was whitely opaque.  Under arched black eyebrows her eyes had that boldness and insistence of regard which is the characteristic of all very dark eyes set in a pale face.  To this generic boldness Lady Edward added a certain candid impertinence of fixed gaze and bright ingenuous expression that was entirely her own.  They were the eyes of a child, mais d'un enfant terrible,' as John Bidlake had warned a French colleague whom he had taken to see her.  The French colleague had occasion to make the discovery on his own account.  At the luncheon table he found himself sitting next to the critic who had written of his pictures that they were the work either of an imbecile or of a practical joker.  Wide-eyed and innocent, Lady Edward had started a discussion on art ... John Bidlake was furious.  He drew her aside when the meal was over and gave her a piece of his mind.

      '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 know 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.  'Se 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 of 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 of 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 away 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, Edward 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!  Whoa!'  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'd 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 plutôt péjorative.'  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!  But so touchy.  These politicians - worse than actresses.  Such vanity!  And dear Webley hasn't got much sense of humour.  He wants to be treated as though he were his own colossal statue, erected by an admiring and grateful nation.'  (The r's roared like lions.)  'Posthumously, if you see what I mean.  As a great historical character.  I can never remember, when I see him, that he's really Alexander the Great.  I always make the mistake of thinking it's just Webley.'

      Illidge laughed.  He found himself positively liking Lady Edward.  She had the right feelings about things.  She seemed even to be on the right side, politically.

      'Not but what his Freemen aren't a very good thing,' Lady Edward went on.  Illidge's sympathy began to wane as suddenly as it had shot up.  'Don't you think so, Mr Babbage?'

      He made a little grimace.  'Well ...' he began.

      'By the way,' said Lady Edward, cutting short what would have been an admirably sarcastic comment on Webley's Freemen, 'you must really be careful coming down those stairs.  They're terribly slippery.'

      Illidge blushed.  'Not at all,' he muttered and blushed still more deeply - a beetroot to the roots of his carrot-coloured hair - as he realized the imbecility of what he had said.  His sympathy declined still further.

      'Well, rather slippery all the same,' Lady Edward politely insisted, with an emphatic rolling in the throat.  'What were you working at with Edward this evening?' she went on.  'It always interests me so much.'

      Illidge smiled.  'Well, if you really want to know,' he said, 'we were working at the regeneration of lost parts in newts.'  Among the newts he felt more at ease; a little of his liking for Lady Edward returned.

      'Newts?  Those things that swim?'  Illidge nodded.  'But how do they lose their parts?'

      'Well, in the laboratory,' he explained, 'they lose them because we cut them off.'

      'And they grow again?'

      'They grow again.'

      'Dear me,' said Lady Edward.  'I never knew that.  How fascinating these things are.  Do tell me some more.'

      She wasn't so bad after all.  He began to explain.  Warming to his subject, he warmed also to Lady Edward.  He had just reached the crucial, the important and significant point in the proceedings - the conversion of the transplanted tail-bud into a leg - when Lady Edward, whose eyes had been wandering, laid her hand on his arm.

      'Come with me,' she said, 'and I'll introduce you to General Knoyle.  Such an amusing old man - if only unintentionally some times.'

      Illidge's exposition froze suddenly in his throat.  He realized that she had not taken the slightest interest in what he had been saying, had not even troubled to pay the least attention.  Detesting her, he followed in resentful silence.

      General Knoyle was talking with another military-looking gentleman.  His voice was martial and asthmatic.  '"My dear fellow," I said to him' (they heard him as they approached), '"my dear fellow, don't enter the horse now.  It would be a crime," I said.  "It would be sheer madness.  Scratch him," I said, "scratch him."  And he scratched him.'

      Lady Edward made her presence known.  The two military gentlemen were overwhelmingly polite; they had enjoyed their evening immensely.

      'I chose the Bach specially for you, General Knoyle,' said Lady Edward with something of the charming confusion of a young girl confessing an amorous foible.

      'Well - er - really, that was very kind of you.'  General Knoyle's confusion was genuine; he did not know what to do with the musical present she had made him.

      'I hesitated,' Lady Edward went on in the same significantly intimate tone, 'between Handel's Water Music and the B minor Suite with Pongileoni.  Then I remembered you and decided on the Bach.'  Her eyes took in the signs of embarrassment on the General's ruddy face.

      'That was very kind of you,' he protested.  'Not that I can pretend to understand much about music.  But I know what I like, I know what I like.'  The phrase seemed to given him confidence.  He cleared his throat and started again.  'What I always say is ...'

      'And now,' Lady Edward concluded triumphantly, 'I want to introduce Mr Babbage, who helps Edward with his work and who is a real expert on newts.  Mr Babbage, this is General Knoyle and this is Colonel Pilchard.'  She gave a last smile and was gone.

      'Well, I'm damned!' exclaimed the General, and the Colonel said she was a holy terror.

      'One of the holiest,' Illidge feelingly agreed.

      The two military gentlemen looked at him for a moment and decided that from one so obviously beyond the pale the comment was an impertinence.  Good Catholics may have their little jokes about the saints and the habits of the clergy; but they are outraged by the same little jokes on the lips of infidels.  The General made no verbal comment and the Colonel contented himself with looking his disapproval.  But they way in which they turned to one another and continued their uninterrupted discussion of racehorses, as though they were alone, was so intentionally offensive, that Illidge wanted to kick them.

 

*     *     *     *

 

      'Lucy, my child!'

      'Uncle John!'  Lucy Tantamount turned round and smiled at her adopted uncle.  She was of middle height and slim, like her mother, with short dark hair, oiled to complete blackness and brushed back from her forehead.  Naturally pale, she wore no rouge.  Only her thin lips were painted and there was a little blue round the eyes.  A black dress emphasized the whiteness of her arms and shoulders.  It was more than two years now since Henry Tantamount had died - for Lucy had married her second cousin.  But she still mourned in her dress, at any rate by artificial light.  Black suited her so well.  'How are you?' she added, thinking as she spoke the words that he was beginning to look very old.

      'Perishing,' said John Bidlake.  Her took her arm familiarly, grasping it just above the elbow with a big, blue-veined hand.  'Give me an excuse for going to have supper.  I'm ravenously hungry.'

      'But I'm not.'

      'No matter,' said John Bidlake.  'My need is great than thine, as Sir Philip Sidney so justly remarked.'

      'But I don't want to eat.'  She objected to being domineered, to following instead of leading.  But Uncle John was too much for her.

      'I'll do all the eating,' he declared.  'Enough for two.'  And jovially laughing, he continued to lead her along towards the dining-room.

      Lucy abandoned the struggle.  They edged their way through the crowd.  Greenish-yellow and freckled, the orchid in John Bidlake's buttonhole resembled the face of a yawning serpent.  His monocle glittered in his eye.

      'Who's that old man with Lucy?' Polly Logan enquired as they passed.

      'That's old Bidlake.'

      'Bidlake?  The man who ... who painted the pictures?'  Polly spoke hesitatingly, in the tone of one who is conscious of a hole in her education and is afraid of making a ridiculous mistake.  'Do you mean that Bidlake?'  Her companion nodded.  She felt enormously relieved.  'Well I never,' she went on, raising her eyebrows and opening her eyes very wide.  'I always thought he was an Old Master.  But he must be about a hundred by this time, isn't he?'

      'I should think he must be.'  Norah was also under twenty.

      'I must say,' Polly handsomely admitted, 'he doesn't look it.  He's still quite a beau, or a buck, or a Champagne Charlie, or whatever people were in his young days.'

      'He's had about fifteen wives,' said Norah.

      It was at this moment that Hugo Brockle found the courage to present himself.  'You don't remember me.  We were introduced in our perambulators.'  How idiotic it sounded!  He felt himself blushing all over.

      The third and finest of John Bidlake's 'Bathers' hung over the mantelpiece in the dining-room of Tantamount House.  It was a gay and joyous picture, very light in tone, the colouring very pure and brilliant.  Eight plump and pearly bathers grouped themselves in the water and on the banks of a stream so as to form with their moving bodies and limbs and kind of garland (completed above by the foliage of a tree) round the central point of the canvas.  Through the wreath of nacreous flesh (and even their faces were just smiling flesh, not a trace of spirit to distract you from the contemplation of the lovely forms and their relations) the eye travelled on towards a pale bright landscape of softly swelling downland and clouds.

      Plate in hand and munching caviar sandwiches, old Bidlake stood with his companion, contemplating his own work.  An emotion of mingled elation and sadness possessed him.

      'It's good,' he said, 'it's enormously good.  Look at the way it's composed.  Perfect balance, and yet there's no suggestion of repetition or artificial arrangement.'  The other thoughts and feelings which the picture evoked in his mind he left unexpressed.  They were too many and too confused to be easily put into words.  Too melancholy above all; he did not care to dwell on them.  He stretched out a finger and touched the sideboard; it was mahogany, genuine wood.  'Look at the figure on the right with the arms up.'  He went on with his technical exposition in order that he might keep down, might drive away the uninvited thoughts.  'See how it compensates for the big stooping one there on the left.  Like a long lever lifting a heavy weight.'  But the figure with the arms up was Jenny Smith, the loveliest model he had ever had.  Incarnation of beauty, incarnation of stupidity and vulgarity.  A goddess as long as she was naked, kept her mouth shut, or had it kept shut for her with kisses; but oh, when she opened it, when she put on her clothes, her frightful hats!  He remembered the time he had taken her to Paris with him.  He had to send her back after a week.  'You ought to be muzzled, Jenny,' he told her, and Jenny cried.  'It was a mistake going to Paris,' he went on.  'Too much sun in Paris, too many artificial lights.  Next time, we'll go to Spitzbergen.  In winter.  The nights are six months long up there.'  That had made her cry still more loudly.  The girl had treasures of sensuality as well as of beauty.  Afterwards she took to drink and decayed, came round begging and drank up the charity.  And finally what was left of her died.  But the real Jenny remained here in the picture with her arms up and the pectoral muscles lifting her little breasts.  What remained of John Bidlake, the John Bidlake of five and twenty years ago, was there in the picture too.  Another John Bidlake still existed to contemplate his own ghost.  Soon even he would have disappeared.  And in any case, was he the real Bidlake, any more than the sodden and bloated woman who died had been the real Jenny?  Real Jenny lived among the pearly bathers.  And real Bidlake, their creator, existed by implication in his creatures.

      'It's good,' he said again, when he had finished his exposition, and his tone was mournful; his face as he looked at his picture was sad.  'But after all,' he added, after a little pause and with a sudden explosion of voluntary laughter, 'after all, everything I do is good; damn good even.'  It was a bidding of defiance to the stupid critics who had seen a falling off in his later paintings; it was a challenge to his own past, to time and old age, to the real John Bidlake who had painted real Jenny and kissed her into silence.

      'Of course it's good,' said Lucy, and wondered why the old man's painting had fallen off so much of late.  This last exhibition - it was deplorable.  He himself, after all, had remained so young, comparatively speaking.  Though of course, she reflected, as she looked at him, he had certainly aged a good deal during the last few months.

      'Of course,' he repeated.  'That's the right spirit.'

      'Though I must confess,' Lucy added, to change the subject, 'I always find your bathers rather an insult.'

      'An insult?'

      'Speaking as a woman, I mean.  Do you really find us so profoundly silly as you paint us?'

      'Yes, do you?' another voice enquired.  'Do you really?'  It was an intense, emphatic voice, and the words came out in gushes, explosively, as though they were being forced through a narrow aperture under emotional pressure.

      Lucy and John Bidlake turned and saw Mrs Betterton, massive in dove grey, with arms, old Bidlake reflected, like thighs, and hair that was, in relation to the fleshy cheeks and chins, ridiculously short, curly, and auburn.  Her nose, which had tilted up so charmingly in the days when he had ridden the black horse and she the bay, was now preposterous, an absurd irrelevance in the middle-aged face.  Real Bidlake had talked about art with a naïve, schoolgirlish earnestness which he had found laughable and charming.  He had cured her, he remembered, of a passion for Burne-Jones, but never, alas, of her prejudice in favour of virtue.  It was with all the old earnestness and a certain significant sentimentality as of one who remembers old times and would like to exchange reminiscences as well as general ideas, that she now addressed him.  Bidlake had to pretend that he was pleased to see her after all these years.  It was extraordinary, he reflected as he took her hand, how completely he had succeeded in avoiding her; he could not remember having spoken to her more than three or four times in all the quarter of a century which had turned Mary Betterton into a momento mori.

      'Dear Mrs Betterton!' he exclaimed.  'This is delightful.'  But he disguised his repugnance very badly.  And when she addressed him by his Christian name - 'Now, John,' she said, 'you must give us an answer to our question,' and she laid her hand on Lucy's arm, so as to associate her in the demand - old Bidlake was positively indignant.  Familiarity from a momento mori - it was intolerable.  He'd give her a lesson.  The question, it happened, was well chosen for his purposes; it fairly invited the retort discourteous.  Mary Betterton had intellectual pretensions, was tremendously keen on the soul.  Remembering this, old Bidlake asserted that he had never known a woman who had anything worth having beyond a pair of legs and a figure.  Some of them, he added, significantly, lacked even those indispensables.  True, many of them had interesting faces; but that meant nothing.  Bloodhounds, he pointed out, have the air of learned judges, oxen when they chew the cud seem to meditate the problems of metaphysics, the mantis looks as though it were praying; but these appearances are entirely deceptive.  It was the same with women.  He had preferred to paint his bathers unmasked as well as naked, to give them faces that were merely extensions of their charming bodies and not deceptive symbols of a non-existent spirituality.  It seemed to him more realistic, truer to the fundamental facts.  He felt his good humour returning as he talked, and, as it came back, his dislike for Mary Betterton seemed to wane.  When one is in high spirits, memento mori's cease to remind.

      'John, you're incorrigible,' said Mrs Betterton, indulgently.  She turned to Lucy, smiling.  'But he doesn't mean a word he says.'

      'I should have thought, on the contrary, that he meant it all,' objected Lucy.  'I've noticed that men who like women very much are the ones who express the greatest contempt for them.'

      Old Bidlake laughed.

      'Because they're the ones who know women most intimately.'

      'Or perhaps because they resent our power over them.'

      'But I assure you,' Mrs Betterton insisted, 'he doesn't mean it.  I knew him before you were born, my dear.'

      The gaiety went out of John Bidlake's face.  The momento mori grinned for him again behind Mary Betterton's flabby mask.

      'Perhaps he was different then,' said Lucy.  'He's been infected by the cynicism of the younger generation, I suppose.  We're dangerous company, Uncle John.  You ought to be careful.'

      She had started one of Mrs Betterton's favourite hares.  That lady dashed off in serious pursuit.  'It's the upbringing,' she explained.  'Children are brought up so stupidly nowadays.  No wonder they're cynical.'  She proceeded eloquently.  Children were given too much, too early.  They were satiated with amusements, inured to all the pleasures from the cradle.  'I never saw the inside of a theatre till I was eighteen,' she declared, with pride.

      'My poor dear lady!'

      'I began going when I was six,' said Lucy.

      'And dances,' Mrs Betterton continued.  'The hunt ball - what an excitement!  Because it only happened once a year.'  She quoted Shakespeare.

 

                                             'Therefore are feasts so solemn and so rare,

                                             Since seldom coming, in the long year set,

                                             Like stones of worth they thinly placed are ...

 

      'They're a row of pearls nowadays.'

      'And false ones at that,' said Lucy.

      Mrs Betterton was triumphant.  'False ones - you see?  But for us they were genuine, because they were rare.  We didn't "blunt the fine point of seldom pleasure" by daily wear.  Nowadays young people are bored and world-weary before they come of age.  A pleasure too often repeated produces numbness; it's no more felt as a pleasure.'

      'And what's your remedy?' enquired John Bidlake.  'If a member of the congregation may be permitted to ask questions,' he added ironically.

      'Naughty!' cried Mrs Betterton with an appalling playfulness.  Then, becoming serious, 'The remedy,' she went on, 'is fewer diversions.'

      'But I don't want them fewer,' objected John Bidlake.

      'In that case,' said Lucy, 'they must be stronger - progressively.'

      'Progressively?' Mrs Betterton repeated.  'But where would that sort of progress end?'

      'In bull fighting?' suggested John Bidlake.  'Or gladiatorial shows?  Or public executions, perhaps?  Or the amusements of the Marquis de Sade?  Where?'

      Lucy shrugged her shoulders.  'Who knows?'

 

*    *     *    *

 

      Hugo Brockle and Polly were already quarrelling.

      'I think it's detestable,' Polly was saying - and her face was flushed with anger, 'to make war on the poor.'

      'But the Freemen don't make war on the poor.'

      'They do.'

      'They don't,' said Hugo.  'Read Webley's speeches.'

      'I only read about his actions.'

      'But they're in accordance with his words.'

      'They are not.'

      'They are.  All he's opposed to is dictatorship of a class.'

      'Of the poor class.'

      'Of any class,' Hugo earnestly insisted.  'That's his whole point.  The classes must be equally strong.  A strong working class clamouring for high wages keeps the professional middle class active.'

      'Like flies on a dog,' suggested Polly and laughed with a return towards good humour.  When a ludicrous thought occurred to her she could never prevent herself from giving utterance to it, even when she was supposed to be serious, or, as in this case, in a rage.

      'They've jolly well got to be inventive and progressive,' Hugo continued, struggling with the difficulties of lucid exposition.  'Otherwise they wouldn't be able to pay the workers what they demand and make a profit for themselves.  And at the same time a strong and intelligent middle class is good for the workers, because they get good leadership and good organization.  Which means better wages and peace and happiness.'

      'Amen,' said Polly.

      'So the dictatorship of one class is nonsense,' continued Hugo.  'Webley wants to keep all the classes and strengthen them.  He wanted them to live in a condition of tension, so that the state is balanced by each pulling as hard as it can its own way.  Scientists say that the different organs of the body are like that.  They live in a state -' he hesitated, he blushed - 'of hostile symbiosis.'

      'Golly!'

      'I'm sorry,' Hugo apologized.

      'All the same,' said Polly, 'he doesn't want to allow men to strike.'

      'Because strikes are stupid.'

      'He's against democracy.'

      'Because it allows such awful people to get power.  He wants the best to rule.'

      'Himself, for example,' said Polly sarcastically.

      'Well, why not?  If you knew what a wonderful chap he was.'  Hugo became enthusiastic.  He had been acting as one of Webley's aides-de-camp for the last three months.  'I never met anyone like him,' he said.

      Polly listened to his outpourings with a smile.  She felt old and superior.  At school she herself had felt and talked like that about the domestic economy mistress.  All the same, she liked him for being so loyal.