“What’s happened to Edgar?” she asked clamorously.
She was more untidy than ever, and appeared to be in a great state of excitement: even near to tears.
“Who is Edgar?”
“Thought you said you’d known him since you were a kid!”
“Do you mean Mr. Deacon?”
She began to laugh uproariously at this question.
“And your other friend,” she said. “Where did you pick that up?”
Laughter was at that moment modified by a slight, and quickly mastered, attack of hiccups. Her demeanour was becoming more noticeably hysterical. The state she was in might easily lead to an awkward incident. I was so accustomed to the general principle of people finding Widmerpool odd that I could hardly regard her question as even hypercritical. It was, in any case, no more arbitrary an inquiry, so far as it went, than Stringham’s on the subject of Mr. Deacon; although long-standing friendship made Stringham’s form of words more permissible. However, Gypsy Jones’s comment, when thought of later, brought home the impossibility of explaining Widmerpool’s personality at all briefly, even to a sympathetic audience. His case was not, of course, unique. He was merely one single instance among many, of the fact that certain acquaintances remain firmly fixed within this or that person’s particular orbit; a law which seems to lead inexorably to the conclusion that the often repeated saying that people can “choose their friends” is true only in a most strictly limited degree.
However, Gypsy Jones was the last person to be expected to relish discussion upon so hypothetical a subject, even if the proposition had then occurred to me, or she been in a fit state to argue its points. Although she seemed to be enjoying the party, even to the extent of being in sight of hysteria, she had evidently also reached the stage when moving to another spot had become an absolute necessity to her; not because she was in any way dissatisfied with the surroundings in which she found herself, but on account of the coercive dictation of her own nerves, not to be denied in their insistence that a change of scene must take place. I was familiar with a similar spirit of unrest that sometimes haunted Barbara.
“I want to find Edgar and go to The Merry Thought.”
She clung on to me desperately, whether as an affectionate gesture, a means of encouraging sympathy, or merely to maintain her balance, I was uncertain. The condition of excitement which she had reached to some extent communicated itself to me, for her flushed face rather improved her appearance, and she had lost all her earlier ill-humour.
“Why don’t you come to The Merry Thought?” she said. “I got a bit worked up a moment ago, I’m feeling better now.”
Just for a second I wondered whether I would not fall in with this suggestion, but the implications seemed so many, and so varied, that I decided against accompanying her. I felt also that there might be yet more to experience in Mrs. Andriadis’s house; and I was not uninfluenced by the fact that I had, so far as I could remember, only a pound on me.
“Well, if Edgar can’t be found, I shall go without him,” said Gypsy Jones, speaking as if such a deplorable lack of gallantry was unexpected in Mr. Deacon.
She seemed to have recovered her composure. While she proceeded down the stairs, somewhat unsteadily, I called after her, over the banisters, a reminder that her copies of War Never Pays! should preferably not be allowed to lie forgotten under the chair in the hall, as I had no wish to share, even to a small degree, any responsibility for having imported that publication into Mrs. Andriadis’s establishment. Gypsy Jones disappeared from sight. It was doubtful whether she had heard this admonition. I felt, perhaps rather ignobly, that she were better out of the house.
Returning through one of the doorways a minute or two later, I collided with Widmerpool, also red in the face, and with hair, from which customary grease had perhaps been dried out by sugar, ruffled into a kind of cone at the top of his head. He, too, seemed to have drunk more than he was accustomed.
“Have you seen Miss Jones?” he asked, in his most breathless manner.
Even though I had been speaking with her so recently, I could not immediately grasp, under this style, the identity of the person sought.
“The girl we came in with,” he muttered impatiently.
“She has just gone off to a night-club.”
“Is someone taking her there?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Do you mean she has gone by herself?”
“That was what she said.”
Widmerpool seemed more fussed than ever. I could not understand his concern.
“I don’t feel she should have set off like that alone,” he said. “She had had rather a lot to drink — more than she is used to, I should imagine — and she is in some sort of difficulty, too. She was telling me about it.”
There could be no doubt at all that Widmerpool himself had been equally indiscreet in taking more champagne than usual.
“We were having rather an intimate talk together,” he went on. “And then I saw a man I had been wanting to speak to for weeks. Of course, I could have rung him up, but I preferred to wait for a chance meeting. One can often achieve so much more at such moments than at an interview. I crossed the room to have a word with him — explaining to her, as I supposed quite clearly, that I was going to return after a short business discussion — and when I came back she had vanished.”
“Too bad.”
“That was very foolish of me,” said Widmerpool, in a tone almost as if he were apologising abjectly for some grave error of taste. “Rather bad-mannered, too…
He paused, seemingly thoroughly upset: much as he had looked — I called to mind — on the day when he had witnessed Le Bas’s arrest when we had been at school together. At the moment when he spoke those words, if I could have laid claim to a more discerning state of mind, I might have taken greater notice of the overwhelming change that had momentarily come over him. As it was, I attributed his excitement simply to drink: an entirely superficial view that even brief reflection could have corrected. For example — to illustrate how little excuse there was for my own lack of grasp — I had never before, so far as I can now recollect, heard Widmerpool suggest that anything he had ever done could be classed as foolish, or bad-mannered; and even then, on that evening, I suppose I ought to have been dimly aware that Gyspy Jones must have aroused his interest fairly keenly, as it were “on the rebound” from having sugar poured over his head by Barbara.
“There really are moments when one should forget about business,” said Widmerpool. “After all, getting on isn’t everything.”
This precept, so far as I was myself concerned in those days, was one that required no specially vigorous inculcation.
“Pleasure before Business has always been my motto,” I remembered Bill Truscott stating at one of Sillery’s tea-parties when I was an undergraduate; and, although it would have been misleading to suppose that, for Truscott himself, any such label was in the least — in the smallest degree — applicable, the maxim seemed to me such a truism at the moment when I heard it quoted that I could not imagine why Truscott should seem to consider the phrase, on his part, something of an epigram or paradox. Pleasure still seemed to me a natural enough aim in life; and I certainly did not, on that night in Hill Street, appreciate at all how unusually disturbed Widmerpool must have been to have uttered aloud so profane a repudiation of his own deep-rooted system of opinion. However, he was prevented from further particularising of the factors that had impelled him to this revolutionary conclusion, by the arrival beside us of the man whose practical importance had seemed sufficient to cause abandonment of emotional preoccupations. That person had, so it appeared additional dealings to negotiate. I was interested to discover the identity of this figure who had proved, in the circumstances, so powerful a counter-attraction to the matter in hand. The disclosure was, in a quiet way, sufficiently dramatic. The “man” turned out to be Bill Truscott himself, who seemed, through another’s pursuance of his own loudly proclaimed precept, to have been, at least to some degree, temporarily victimised.