“Is that woman still extorting her toll from life?” asked Mr. Deacon.
“Giving a party in Hill Street this very night. I assumed you were all going there.”
“This coffee tastes of glue,” said Gypsy Jones, in her small, rasping, though not entirely unattractive voice.
She was dissatisfied, no doubt, with the lack of attention paid to her; though possibly also stimulated by the way events were shaping.
“One heard a lot of Mrs. Andriadis in Paris,” said Mr. Deacon, taking no notice of this interruption. “In fact, I went to a party of hers once — at least I think she was joint hostess with one of the Murats. A deplorable influence she is, if one may say so.”
“One certainly may,” said Stringham. “She couldn’t be worse. As a matter of fact, my name is rather intimately linked with hers at the moment — though naturally we are unfaithful to each other in our fashion, when opportunity arises, which in my case, I have to confess, is not any too often.”
I really had no very clear idea what all this talk was about, and I had never heard of Mrs. Andriadis. I was also uncertain whether Stringham truly supposed that we might all be on our way to this party, or if he were talking completely at random. Mr. Deacon, however, seemed to grasp the situation perfectly, continuing to laugh out a series of deep chuckles.
“Where do you come from now?” I asked.
“I’ve a flat just round the corner,” said Stringham. “At first I couldn’t make up my mind whether I was in the vein for a party, and thought a short walk would help me decide. To tell the truth, I have only just risen from my couch. There had, for one reason and another, been a number of rather late nights last week, and, as I didn’t want to miss poor Milly’s party in case she felt hurt — she is too touchy for words — I went straight home to bed this afternoon so that I might be in tolerable form for the festivities — instead of the limp rag one feels most of the time. It seemed about the hour to stroll across. Why not come, all of you? Milly would be delighted.”
“Is it near?”
“Just past those Sassoon houses. Do come. That is, if none of you mind low parties.”
2
UNCE GILES’S standard of values was, in most matters, ill-adapted to employment by anyone except himself. At the same time, I can now perceive that by unhesitating contempt for all human conduct but his own — judged among his immediate relatives as far from irreproachable — he held up a mirror to emphasise latent imperfections of almost any situation that momentary enthusiasm might, in the first instance, have overlooked. His views, in fact, provided a kind of yardstick to the proportions of which no earthly yard could possibly measure up. This unquestioning condemnation of everyone, and everything, had no doubt supplied armour against some of the disappointments of life; although any philosophical satisfaction derived from reliance on these sentiments had certainly not at all diminished my uncle’s capacity for grumbling, in and out of season, at anomalies of social behaviour to be found, especially since the war, on all sides. To look at things through Uncle Giles’s eyes would never have occurred to me; but — simply as an exceptional expedient for attempting to preserve a sense of proportion, a state of mind, for that matter, neither always acceptable nor immediately advantageous — there may have been something to be said for borrowing, once in a way, something from Uncle Giles’s method of approach. This concept of regarding one’s own affairs through the medium of a friend or relative is not, of course, a specially profound one; but, in the case of my uncle, the field of vision surveyed was always likely to be so individual to himself that almost any scene contemplated from this point of vantage required, on the part of another observer, more than ordinarily drastic refocusing.
He would, for example, have dismissed the Huntercombes’ dance as one of those formal occasions that he himself, as it were by definition, found wholly unsympathetic. Uncle Giles disapproved on principle of anyone who could afford to live in Belgrave Square (for he echoed almost the identical words of Mr. Deacon regarding people “with more money than was good for them”), especially when they were, in addition, bearers of what he called “handles to their names”; though he would sometimes, in this same connection, refer with conversational familiarity, more in sorrow than anger, to a few members of his own generation, known to him in a greater or lesser degree in years gone by, who had been brought by inheritance to this unhappy condition. He had, for some reason, nothing like so strong an aversion for recently acquired wealth — from holders of which, it is true, he had from time to time even profited to a small degree — provided the money had been amassed by owners safely to be despised, at least in private, by himself or anyone else; and by methods commonly acknowledged to be indefensible. It was to any form of long-established affluence that he took the gravest exception, particularly if the ownership of land was combined with any suggestion of public service, even when such exertions were performed in some quite unspectacular, and apparently harmless, manner, like sitting on a borough council, of helping at a school-treat. “Interfering beggars,” he used to remark of those concerned.
My uncle’s dislike for the incidence of Mrs. Andriadis’s party — equally, as a matter of course, overwhelming — would have required, in order to avoid involving himself as an auxiliary of more than negative kind in some warring faction, the selection of a more careful approach on his part than that adopted to display potential disapproval of the Huntercombes; for, by taking sides too actively, he might easily find himself in the position of defending one or another of the systems of conducting human existence which he was normally to be found attacking in another sector of the battlefield. At the same time, it would hardly be true to say that Uncle Giles was deeply concerned with the question of consistency in argument. On the contrary, inconsistency in his own line of thought worried him scarcely at all. As a matter of fact, if absolutely compelled to make a pronouncement on the subject, he — or, so far as that went, anyone else investigating the matter — might have taken a fairly firm stand on the fact that immediate impressions at Mrs. Andriadis’s were not, after all, greatly different from those conveyed on first arrival at Belgrave Square.
The house, which had the air of being rented furnished only for a month or two, was bare; somewhat unattractively decorated in an anonymous style which, at least in the upholstery, combined touches of the Italian Renaissance with stripped panelling and furniture of “modernistic” design, these square, metallic pieces on the whole suggesting Berlin rather than Paris. Although smaller than the Huntercombes’, my uncle would have detected there a decided suggestion of wealth, and also — something to which his objection was, if possible, even more deeply ingrained — an atmosphere of frivolity. Like many people whose days are passed largely in a state of inanition, when not of crisis, Uncle Giles prided himself on his serious approach to life, deprecating nothing so much as what he called “trying to laugh things off”; and it was true that a lifetime of laughter would scarcely have sufficed to exorcise some of his own fiascos.
On the whole, Mrs. Andriadis’s guests belonged to a generation older than that attending the dance, and their voices swelled more loudly throughout the rooms. The men were in white ties and the ladies’ dresses were carried in general with a greater flourish than at the Huntercombes’: some of the wearers distinctly to be classed as “beauties.” A minute sprinkling of persons from both sexes still in day clothes absolved Mr. Deacon and Gypsy Jones from looking quite so out of place as might otherwise have been apprehended; and, during the course of that night, I was surprised to notice how easily these two (who had deposited their unsold copies of War Never Pays! in the hall, under a high-backed crimson-and-gold chair, designed in an uneasy compromise between avant garde motifs and seventeenth-century Spanish tradition) faded unobtrusively into the general background of the party. There were, indeed, many girls present not at all dissimilar in face and figure to Gypsy Jones; while Mr. Deacon, too, could have found several prototypes of himself among a contingent of sardonic, moderately distinguished, grey-haired men, some of whom smelt of bath-salts, dispersed here and there throughout the gathering. The comparative formality of the scene to be observed on our arrival had cast a certain blight on my own — it now seemed too ready — acceptance of Stringham’s assurance that invitation was wholly unnecessary; for the note of “frivolity,” to which Uncle Giles might so undeniably have taken exception, was, I could not help feeling, infused with an undercurrent of extreme coolness, a chilly consciousness of conflicting egoisms, far more intimidating than anything normally to be met with at Walpole-Wilsons’, Huntercombes’, or, indeed, anywhere else of “that sort.”