“But, sweetie,” Mrs. Andriadis was saying, “you can’t possibly want to go to the Embassy now.”
“But the odd thing is,” said Stringham, speaking slowly and deliberately, “the odd thing is that is just what I do want to do. I want to go to the Embassy at once. Without further delay.”
“But it will be closed.”
“I am rather glad to hear that. I never really liked the Embassy. I shall go somewhere else.”
“But you said it was just the Embassy you wanted to go to.”
“I can’t think why. I really want to go somewhere quite different”
“You really are being too boring for words, Charles.”
“I quite agree,” said Stringham, suddenly changing his tone. “The fact is I am much too boring to stay at a party. That is exactly how I feel myself. Especially one of your parties, Milly — one of your charming, gay, exquisite, unrivalled parties. I cast a gloom over the merry scene. ‘Who is that corpse at the feast?’ people ask, and the reply is ‘Poor old Stringham’.”
“But you wouldn’t feel any better at the Embassy, darling, even if it were open.”
“You are probably right. In fact, I should certainly feel no better at the Embassy. I should feel worse. That is why I am going somewhere much lower than that. Somewhere really frightful.”
“You are being very silly.”
“The Forty-Three would be too stuffy — In all senses — for my present mood.”
“You can’t want to go to the Forty-Three.”
“I repeat that I do not want to go to the Forty-Three. I am at the moment looking into my soul to examine the interesting question of where exactly I do want to go.”
“Wherever it is, I shall come too.”
“As you wish, Milly. As you wish. As a matter of fact I was turning over the possibilities of a visit to Mrs. Fitz.”
“Charles, you are impossible.”
I suppose he had had a good deal to drink, though this was, in a way, beside the point, for I knew from past experience that he could be just as perverse in his behaviour when there had been no question of drinking. If he were a little drunk, apart from making a slight bow, he showed no physical sign of such a condition. Mrs. Andriadis, who was evidently determined to master the situation — and who still, in her own particular style, managed to remain rather dazzling, in spite of being obviously put out by this altercation — turned to one of the men-servants who happened to be passing at that moment, carrying a tray laden with glasses, and said: “Go and get my coat — and be quick about it.”
The man, an old fellow with a blotched face, who had perhaps taken the opportunity to sample the champagne himself more freely than had been wise, stared at her, and, setting down the tray, ambled slowly off. Stringham caught sight of us sitting near-by. He took a step towards me.
“At least I can rely on you, Nick, as an old friend,” he said, “to accompany me to a haunt of vice. Somewhere where the stains on the table-cloth make the flesh creep — some cellar far below the level of the street, where ageing harlots caper cheerlessly to the discordant strains of jazz.”
Mrs. Andriadis grasped at once that we had known each other for a long time, because she smiled with one of those looks of captivating and whole-hearted sincerity that must have contributed in no small degree to her adventurous career. I was conscious that heavy artillery was now ranged upon my position. At the same time she managed to present herself — as it were, stood before me — in her weakness, threatened by Stringham’s behaviour certainly aggravating enough, remarking softly: “Do tell him not to be such an ass.
Stringham, too, perfectly took in the situation, evidently deciding immediately, and probably correctly, that if any kind of discussion were allowed to develop between the three of us, Mrs. Andriadis would, in some manner, bring him to heel. There had been, presumably, some collision of wills between them in the course of the evening; probably the consequence of mutual irritation extending over weeks, or even months. Perhaps he had deliberately intended to provoke a quarrel when he had arrived at the house that evening. The situation had rather the appearance of something of the sort. It was equally possible that he was suffering merely from the same kind of restlessness that had earlier afflicted Gypsy Jones. I did not know. In any case, though no business of mine, a break between them might be for the best. However, no time remained to weigh such question in the balance, because Stringham did not wait. He laughed loudly, and went off through the door. Mrs. Andriadis took my arm.
“Will you persuade him to stay!” she said, with that trace of Cockney which — as Barnby would have remarked — had once “come near to breaking a royal heart.”
At that moment the young man with the orchid, who had risen with dignity from the sofa where he had been silently contemplating the world, came towards us, breaking into the conversation with the words: “My dear Milly, I simply must tell you the story about Theodoric and the Prince of Wales …”
“Another time, darling.”
Mrs. Andriadis gave him a slight push with her left hand, so that he collapsed quietly, and apparently quite happily, into an easy-chair. Almost simultaneously an enormous, purple-faced man with a decided air of authority about him, whose features were for some reason familiar to me, accompanied by a small woman, much younger than himself, came up, mumbling and faintly swaying, as he attempted to thank Mrs. Andriadis for entertaining them. She brushed him aside, clearly to his immense, rather intoxicated surprise, with the same ruthlessness she had shown to the young man with the orchid: at the same time saying to another servant, whom I took, this time, to be her own butler: “I told one of those bloody hired men to fetch my coat. Go and see where he’s got to.”
All these minor incidents inevitably caused delay, giving Stringham a start on the journey down the stairs, towards which we now set off, Mrs. Andriadis still grasping my arm, along which, from second to second, she convulsively altered the grip of her hand. As we reached the foot of the last flight together, the front door slammed. Three or four people were chatting, or putting on wraps, in the hall, in preparation to leave. The elderly lady with the black eyebrows and tiara was sitting on one of the crimson and gold high-backed chairs, beneath which I could see a pile of War Never Pays!: Mr. Deacon’s, or those forgotten by Gypsy Jones. She had removed her right shoe and was examining the heel intently, to observe if it were still intact. Mrs. Andriadis let go my arm, and ran swiftly towards the door, which she wrenched open violently, just in time to see a taxi drive away from the front of the house. She made use of an expletive that I had never before — in those distant days — heard a woman employ. The phrase left no doubt in the mind that she was extremely provoked. The door swung on its hinge. In silence Mrs. Andriadis watched it shut with a bang. It was hard to know what comment, if any, was required. At that moment the butler arrived with her coat.
“Will you wear it, madam?”
“Take the damned thing away,” she said. “Are you and the rest of them a lot of bloody cripples? Do I have to wait half an hour every time I want to go out just because I haven’t a rag to put round me?”
The butler, accustomed no doubt to such reproaches as all in the day’s work — and possibly remunerated on a scale to allow a generous margin for hard words — seemed entirely undisturbed by these strictures on his own agility, and that of his fellows. He agreed at once that his temporary colleague “did not appear to have his wits about him at all.” In the second’s pause during which Mrs. Andriadis seemed to consider this statement, I prepared to say goodbye, partly from conviction that the occasion for doing so, once missed, might not easily recur; even more, because immediate farewell would be a convenient method of bringing to an end the distressing period of tension that had come into existence ever since Stringham’s departure, while Mrs. Andriadis contemplated her next move. However, before there was time, on my own part, to take any step in the direction of leave-taking, a loud noise from the stairs behind distracted my attention. Mrs. Andriadis, too, was brought by this sudden disturbance out of the state of suspended animation into which she appeared momentarily to have fallen.