Speaking for myself, I had been prepared for anything at Mr. Deacon’s party. I was conscious, as it happened, of a certain sense of disappointment, even of annoyance, in my own life, and weariness of its routine. This was because, not many days before, I had rung up the Duports’ house in Hill Street, and a caretaker, or whoever had answered the telephone, had informed me that the Duports had gone abroad again, and were coming back in the spring. This statement was accompanied by various hypotheses and suggestions on the part of the speaker, embedded in a suitable density of hesitation and subterfuge, that made the fact that Jean was, as my informant put it, “expecting,” no longer a secret even before this definitive word itself dropped into our conversation. This eventuality, I realised at once, was something to be inevitably associated with the married state; certainly not to be looked upon as unreasonable, or — as Mr. Deacon would say—”indiscreet.”
All the same, I felt, as I have said, disappointed, although aware that I could hardly claim that anything had taken place to justify even the faintest suspicion of a broken “romance.” In fact, I could not even explain to myself why it was, for some reason, necessary to make this denial — that a relatively serious hope had been blighted — sufficiently clear in my own mind. In short, the situation encouraged the kind of mood that made the prospect of an entertainment such as Mr. Deacon’s party promised to be, acceptable rather than the reverse. The same pervading spirit of being left, emotionally speaking, high and dry on a not specially Elysian coast, had also caused a faint pang, while having my hair cut, at seeing a picture of Prince Theodoric, sitting on the sands of the Lido between Lady Ardglass and a beautiful Brazilian, a reminder of the visit to Stourwater that now seemed so long past, and also of the perennial charm of female companionship in attractive surroundings. On thinking over this photograph, however, I recalled that, even apart from circumstances inherent in our different walks of life, the Prince’s own preferred associate had been Mrs. Wentworth, so that he, too, had probably suffered a lack of fulfilment. Barnby had been delighted when his attention had been drawn to this snapshot.
“I knew Baby would ditch Theodoric,” he said. “I wonder who the Brazilian girl was.”
He had even expressed a hope that he might succeed in bringing Mrs. Wentworth to Mr. Deacon’s party.
“Somewhere where she would at least be sure of not meeting Donners,” he had added.
Certainly, Sir Magnus had not turned up at Mr. Deacon’s, nor, for that matter, anyone at all like him. The sitting-room had been largely cleared of the many objects over-flowed from the shop that were usually contained there. Chairs and sofa had been pushed back to the walls, which were hung on all sides, frame to frame, with his own paintings, making a kind of memorial hall of Mr. Deacon’s art. Even this drastic treatment of the furniture did not entirely exempt the place from its habitually old-maidish air, which seemed, as a rule, to be vested in the extraordinary number of knick-knacks, tear-bottles and tiny ornamental cases for needles or toothpicks, that normally littered every available space.
At either end of the mantelpiece stood a small oval frame — the pair of them uniformly ornamented with sea shells — one of which contained a tinted daguerreotype of Mr. Deacon’s mother, the other enclosing a bearded figure, the likeness, so it appeared, of Walt Whitman, for whom Mr. Deacon possessed a profound admiration. The late Mrs. Deacon’s features so much resembled her son’s as for the picture, at first sight, almost to cause the illusion that he had himself posed, as a jeu d’esprit, in crinoline and pork-pie hat. Juxtaposition of the two portraits was intended, I suppose, to suggest that the American poet, morally and intellectually speaking, represented the true source of Mr. Deacon’s otherwise ignored paternal origins.
The atmosphere of the room had already become rather thick when I arrived upstairs that night, and a good many bottles and glasses were set about on occasional tables. After the meticulous process of selection to which they had been subjected, the first sight of the people assembled there came as something of an anti-climax; and Mr. Deacon’s method of choosing was certainly not made at once apparent by a casual glance round the room. A few customers had been invited, picked from the ranks of those specially distinguished in buying expensive “antiques.” These were mostly married couples, middle-aged to elderly, their position in life hard to define with any certainty. They laughed rather uneasily throughout the evening, in due course leaving early. The rest of the gathering was predominantly made up of young men, some of whom might reasonably have been considered to fall within Mr. Deacon’s preferential category of “respectable,” together with others whose claim to good repute was, at least outwardly, less pronounced: in some cases, even widely open to question.
There were, however, two persons present who, as it now seems to me, first revealed themselves at Mr. Deacon’s party as linked together in that mysterious manner that circumscribes certain couples, and larger groups of human beings: a subject of which I have already spoken in connection with Widmerpool and myself. These two were Mark Members and Quiggin; although at that period I was, of course, unable to appreciate that this pair had already begun the course of their long pilgrimage together, regarding them as no more connected with each other than with myself. I had not set eyes upon Quiggin since coming down from the university, although, as it happened, I had already learnt that he was to be invited as the result of a chance remark let fall by Gypsy during discussion of arrangements to be made for the party.
“Don’t let Quiggin get left over in the house at the end of the evening,” she had said. “I don’t want him snuffling round downstairs after I have just dropped off to sleep.”
“Really, the ineffable vanity of woman,” Mr. Deacon had answered sharply. “Quiggin will not molest you. He thinks too much about himself, for one thing, to bother about anyone else. You can set your mind at rest on that point.”
“I’d rather be safe than sorry,” said Gypsy. “He showed signs of making himself quite a nuisance the other night, you may like to know. I’m just warning you, Edgar.”
Thinking the person named might well be the same Quiggin I had known as an undergraduate, I inquired about his personal appearance.
“Very plain, I’m afraid, poor boy,” said Mr. Deacon. “With a shocking North-Country accent — though I suppose one should not say such a thing. He is a nephew of a client of mine in the Midlands. Rather hard up at the moment, he tells me, so he lends a hand in the shop from time to time. I’m surprised you have never run across him here. It gives him a pittance — and leisure to write. That’s where his heart is.”
“He is J. G. Quiggin, you know,” said Gypsy. “You must have read things by him.”
She may have thought that the importance she had ascribed to Quiggin as a potential source of nocturnal persecution of herself had been under-estimated by me, through ignorance of his relative eminence as a literary figure; and it was certainly true that I was unfamiliar with the name of the magazine mentioned by her as the organ to which he was said most regularly to contribute.