Part 7

‘When you get to our age, dear, there is so little left, but I do believe Miss Blount must have had an _experience_ . . . she’s sitting next to Miles. You know I heard from Edward to-night. He’s on his way back. It will be a great blow for Miles because he’s been living in Edward’s house all this time. To tell you the truth I’m a little glad because from what I hear from Anne Opalthorpe, who lives opposite, the things that go on . . . he’s got a friend staying there now. Such an odd man—a dirt-track racer. But then it’s no use attempting to disguise the fact, is there. . . . There’s Mrs Panrast . . . yes, dear, of course you know her, she used to be Eleanor Balcairn . . . now _why_ does dear Margot ask any one like that, do you think? . . . it is not as though Margot was so innocent . . . and there’s Lord Monomark . . . yes, the man who owns those _amusing_ papers . . . they say that he and Margot, but _before_ her marriage, of course (her second marriage, I mean), but you never know, do you, how things _crop_ up again? . . . I wonder where Peter Pastmaster is? . . . he never stays to Margot’s parties . . . he was at dinner, of course, and, my dear, _how_ he drank. . . . He can’t be more than twenty-one. . . . Oh, so that is Mrs Ape. What a coarse face . . . no dear, of course she can’t hear . . . she looks like a _procureuse_ . . . but perhaps I shouldn’t say that _here_, should I?’

Adam came and sat next to Nina.

‘Hullo,’ they said to each other.

‘My dear, do look at Mary Mouse’s new young man,’ said Nina.

Adam looked and saw that Mary was sitting next to the Maharajah of Pukkapore.

‘I call that a pretty pair,’ he said.

‘Oh, how bored I feel,’ said Nina.

Mr Benfleet was there talking to two poets. They said ‘. . . and I wrote to tell William that I didn’t write the review, but it was true that Tony did read me the review over the telephone when I was very sleepy before he sent it in. I thought it was best to tell him the truth because he would hear it from Tony anyway. Only I said I advised him not to publish it just as I had advised William not to publish the book in the first place. Well Tony rang up Michael and told him that I’d said that William thought Michael had written the review because of the reviews I had written of Michael’s book last November, though, as a matter of fact, it was Tony himself who wrote it. . . .’

‘Too bad,’ said Mr Benfleet. ‘Too bad.’

‘. . . but is that any reason, even if I had written it, why Michael should tell Tony that I had stolen five pounds from William?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Mr Benfleet. ‘Too bad.’

‘Of course, they’re _simply_ not _gentlemen_, either of them. That’s all it is, only one’s shy of saying it nowadays.’

Mr Benfleet shook his head sadly and sympathetically.

Then Mrs Melrose Ape stood up to speak. A hush fell in the gilt ballroom beginning at the back and spreading among the chairs until only Mrs Blackwater’s voice was heard exquisitely articulating some details of Lady Metroland’s past. Then she, too, was silent and Mrs Ape began her oration about Hope.

‘Brothers and Sisters,’ she said in a hoarse, stirring voice. Then she paused and allowed her eyes, renowned throughout three continents for their magnetism, to travel among the gilded chairs. (It was one of her favourite openings.) ‘_Just you look at yourselves_,’ she said.

Magically, self-doubt began to spread in the audience. Mrs Panrast stirred uncomfortably; had that silly little girl been talking, she wondered.

‘Darling,’ whispered Miss Runcible, ‘is my nose awful?’

Nina thought how once, only twenty-four hours ago, she had been in love. Mr Benfleet thought should he have made it three per cent. on the tenth thousand. The gate-crashers wondered whether it would not have been better to have stayed at home. (Once in Kansas City Mrs Ape had got no further than these opening words; there had been a tornado of emotion and all the seats in the hall had been broken to splinters. It was there that Humility had joined the Angels.) There were a thousand things in Lady Throbbing’s past. . . . Every heart found something to bemoan.

‘She’s got ’em again,’ whispered Creative Endeavour. ‘Got ’em stiff.’

Lord Vanburgh slipped from the room to telephone through some racy paragraphs about fashionable piety.

Mary Mouse shed two little tears and felt for the brown, bejewelled hand of the Maharajah.

But suddenly on that silence vibrant with self-accusation broke the organ voice of England, the hunting-cry of the _ancien régime_. Lady Circumference gave a resounding snort of disapproval:

‘What a damned impudent woman,’ she said.

Adam and Nina and Miss Runcible began to giggle, and Margot Metroland for the first time in her many parties was glad to realize that the guest of the evening was going to be a failure. It had been an awkward moment.

In the study Father Rothschild and Mr Outrage were plotting with enthusiasm. Lord Metroland was smoking a cigar and wondering how soon he could get away. He wanted to hear Mrs Ape and to have another look at those Angels. There was one with red hair. . . . Besides all this statesmanship and foreign policy had always bored him. In his years in the Commons he had always liked a good scrap, and often thought a little wistfully of those orgies of competitive dissimulation in which he had risen to eminence. Even now, when some straightforward, easily intelligible subject was under discussion, such as poor people’s wages or public art, he enjoyed from time to time making a sonorous speech to the Upper House. But this sort of thing was not at all in his line.

Suddenly Father Rothschild turned out the light.

‘There’s some one coming down the passage,’ he said.

‘Quick, get behind the curtains.’

‘Really, Rothschild . . .’ said Mr Outrage.

‘I say . . .’ said Lord Metroland.

‘_Quick_,’ said Father Rothschild.

The three statesmen hid themselves. Lord Metroland, still smoking, his head thrown back and his cigar erect. They heard the door open. The light was turned on. A match was struck. Then came the slight tinkle of the telephone as someone lifted the receiver.

‘Central ten thousand,’ said a slightly muffled voice.

‘_Now_,’ said Father Rothschild, and stepped through the curtain.

The bearded stranger who had excited his suspicions was standing at the table smoking one of Lord Metroland’s cigars and holding the telephone.

‘Oh, hullo,’ he said, ‘I didn’t know you were here. Just thought I’d use the telephone. So sorry. Won’t disturb you. Jolly party, isn’t it? Good-bye.’

‘Stay exactly where you are,’ said Father Rothschild, ‘and take off that beard.’

‘Damned if I do,’ said the stranger crossly. ‘It’s no use talking to me as though I were one of your choir boys . . . you old _bully_.’

‘Take off that beard,’ said Father Rothschild.

‘Take off that beard,’ said Lord Metroland and the Prime Minister, emerging suddenly from behind the curtain.

This concurrence of Church and State, coming so unexpectedly after an evening of prolonged embarrassment, was too much for Simon.

‘Oh, all right,’ he said, ‘if you _will_ make such a _thing_ about it . . . it hurts too frightfully, if you knew . . . it ought to be soaked in hot water . . . ooh . . . ow.’

He gave some tugs at the black curls, and bit by bit they came away.

‘_There_’, he said. ‘Now I should go and make Lady Throbbing take off her wig. . . . I should have a really jolly evening while you’re about it, if I were you.’

‘I seem to have over-estimated the gravity of the situation,’ said Father Rothschild.

‘Who is it, after all this?’ said Mr Outrage. ‘Where are those detectives? What does it all mean?’

‘That’ said Father Rothschild bitterly, ‘is _Mr Chatterbox_.’

‘Never heard of him. I don’t believe there is such a person. . . . _Chatterbox_, indeed . . . you make us hide behind a curtain and then you tell us that some young man in a false beard is called Chatterbox. Really, Rothschild . . .’

‘Lord Balcairn,’ said Lord Metroland, ‘will you kindly leave my house immediately?’

‘_Is_ this young man called Chatterbox or is he not? . . . Upon my soul, I believe you’re all crazy.’

‘Oh yes, I’m going,’ said Simon. ‘You didn’t think I was going to go back to the party like this, did you?—or did you?’ Indeed, he looked very odd with little patches of black hair still adhering to parts of his chin and cheeks.

‘Lord Monomark is here this evening. I shall certainly inform him of your behaviour . . .’

‘He writes for the papers,’ Father Rothschild tried to explain to the Prime Minister.

‘Well, damn it, so do I, but I don’t wear a false beard and call myself Chatterbox. . . . I simply do not understand what has happened. . . . Where are those detectives? . . . Will no one explain? . . . _You treat me like a child_,’ he said. It was all like one of those Cabinet meetings, when they all talked about something he didn’t understand and paid no attention to him.

Father Rothschild led him away, and attempted with almost humiliating patience and tact to make clear to him some of the complexities of modern journalism.

‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ the Prime Minister kept saying. ‘It’s all humbug. You’re keeping something back. . . . _Chatterbox_, indeed.’

Simon Balcairn was given his hat and coat and shown to the door. The crowd round the awning had dispersed. It was still raining. He walked back to his little flat in Bourdon Street. The rain washed a few of the remaining locks from his face; it dripped down his collar.

They were washing a car outside his front door; he crept between it and his dustbin, fitted his latchkey in the lock and went upstairs. His flat was like _Chez Espinosa_—all oilcloth and Lalique glass; there were some enterprising photographs by David Lennox, a gramophone (on the instalment system) and numberless cards of invitation on the mantelpiece. His bath towel was where he had left it on his bed.

Simon went to the ice box in the kitchen and chipped off some ice. Then he made himself a cocktail. Then he went to the telephone.

‘Central ten thousand . . .’ he said. ‘. . . give me Mrs Brace. Hullo, this is Balcairn.’

‘Well . . . gotcher story?’

‘Oh yes, I’ve got my story, only this isn’t gossip, it’s news—front page. You’ll have to fill up the Chatterbox page on Espinosa’s.’

‘Hell!’

‘Wait till you see the story. . . . Hullo, give me news, will you. . . . This is Balcairn. Put on one of the boys to take this down, will you? . . . ready? All right.’

At his glass-topped table, sipping his cocktail, Simon Balcairn dictated his last story.

‘_Scenes of wild religious enthusiasm, comma, reminiscent of a negro camp-meeting in Southern America, comma, broke out in the heart of Mayfair yesterday evening at the party given for the famous American Revivalist Mrs Ape by the Viscountess Metroland, formerly the Hon. Mrs Beste-Chetwynd, at her historic mansion, Pastmaster House, stop. The magnificent ballroom can never have enshrined a more brilliant assembly . . ._’

It was his swan-song. Lie after monstrous lie bubbled up in his brain.

‘_. . . The Hon. Agatha Runcible joined Mrs Ape among the orchids and led the singing, tears coursing down her face . . ._’

Excitement spread at the _Excess_ office. The machines were stopped. The night staff of reporters, slightly tipsy, as always at that hour, stood over the stenographer as he typed. The compositors snatched the sheets of copy as they came. The sub-editors began ruthlessly cutting and scrapping; they suppressed important political announcements, garbled the evidence at a murder trial, reduced the dramatic criticism to one caustic paragraph, to make room for Simon’s story.

It came through ‘hot and strong, as nice as mother makes it,’ as one of them remarked.

‘Little Lord Fauntleroy’s on a good thing at last,’ said another.

‘What-ho,’ said a third appreciatively.

‘_. . . barely had Lady Everyman finished before the Countess of Throbbing rose to confess her sins, and in a voice broken with emotion disclosed the hitherto unverified details of the parentage of the present Earl. . . ._’

‘Tell Mr Edwardes to look up photographs of all three of ’em,’ said the assistant news editor.

‘_. . . The Marquess of Vanburgh shaken by sobs of contrition . . . . Mrs Panrast, singing feverishly. . . . Lady Anchorage with downcast eyes._’

‘_. . . The Archbishop of Canterbury, who up to now had remained unmoved by the general emotion, then testified that at Eton in the ’eighties he and Sir James Brown . . ._’

‘_. . . the Duchess of Stayle next threw down her emerald and diamond tiara, crying “a Guilt Offering”, an example which was quickly followed by the Countess of Circumference and Lady Brown, until a veritable rain of precious stones fell on to the parquet flooring, heirlooms of priceless value rolling among Tecla pearls and Chanel diamonds. A blank cheque fluttered from the hands of the Maharajah of Pukkapore . . ._’

It made over two columns, and when Simon finally rang off, after receiving the congratulations of his colleagues, he was for the first time in his journalistic experience perfectly happy about his work. He finished the watery dregs of the cocktail shaker and went into the kitchen. He shut the door and the window and opened the door of the gas oven. Inside it was very black and dirty and smelled of meat. He spread a sheet of newspaper on the lowest tray and lay down, resting his head on it. Then he noticed that by some mischance he had chosen Vanburgh’s gossip-page in the _Morning Despatch_. He put in another sheet. (There were crumbs on the floor.) Then he turned on the gas. It came surprisingly with a loud roar; the wind of it stirred his hair and the remaining particles of his beard. At first he held his breath. Then he thought that was silly and gave a sniff. The sniff made him cough, and coughing made him breathe, and breathing made him feel very ill; but soon he fell into a coma and presently died.

So the last Earl of Balcairn went, as they say, to his fathers (who had fallen in many lands and for many causes, as the eccentricities of British Foreign Policy and their own wandering natures had directed them; at Acre and Agincourt and Killiecrankie, in Egypt and America. One had been picked white by fishes as the tides rolled him among the tree-tops of a submarine forest; some had grown black and unfit for consideration under tropical suns; while many of them lay in marble tombs of extravagant design).

At Pastmaster House, Lady Metroland and Lord Monomark were talking about him. Lord Monomark was roaring with boyish laughter.

‘That’s a great lad,’ he said. ‘Came in a false beard, did he? That’s peppy. What’d you say his name was? I’ll raise him to-morrow first thing.’

And he turned to give Simon’s name to an attendant secretary.

And when Lady Metroland began to expostulate, he shut her up rather discourteously.

‘Shucks, Margot,’ he said. ‘You know better than to get on a high horse with me.’

_Chapter Seven_

Then Adam became Mr Chatterbox. He and Nina were lunching at Espinosa’s and quarrelling half-heartedly when a business-like, Eton-cropped woman came across to their table, whom Adam recognized as the social editress of the _Daily Excess_.

‘See here,’ she said, ‘weren’t you over at the office with Balcairn the day he did himself in?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, a pretty mess he’s let us in for. Sixty-two writs for libel up to date and more coming in. And that’s not the worst. Left me to do his job and mine. I was wondering if you could tell me the names of any of these people and anything about them.’

Adam pointed out a few well-worn faces.

‘Yes, they ain’t no good. They’re on the black list. You see, Monomark was in an awful way about Balcairn’s story of Lady Metroland’s party, and he’s sent down a chit that none of the people who are bringing actions against the paper can be mentioned again. Well, I ask you, what’s one to do? It’s just bricks without straw. Why, we can’t even mention the Prime Minister or the Archbishop of Canterbury. I suppose you don’t know of any one who’d care to take on the job? They’d have to be a pretty good mutt, if they would.’

‘What do they pay?’

‘Ten pounds a week and expenses. Know any one?’

‘I’d do it myself for that.’

‘_You?_’ The social editress looked at him sceptically. ‘Would you be any good?’

‘I’ll try for a week or two.’

‘That’s about as long as any one sticks it. All right, come back to the office with me when you’ve finished lunch. You can’t cause more trouble than Balcairn, anyhow, and he looked the goods at first.’

‘Now we can get married,’ said Nina.

Meanwhile the libel actions against the authors, printers and publishers of Simon Balcairn’s last story practically paralysed the judicial system of the country. The old brigade, led by Mrs Blackwater, threw themselves with relish into an orgy of litigation such as they had not seen since the war (one of the younger counsel causing Lady Throbbing particular delight. . . . ‘I do think, when you get to my age, dear, there is something _sympathetique_ about a wig, don’t you? . . .’). The younger generation for the most part allowed their cases to be settled out of court and later gave a very delightful party on the proceeds in a captive dirigible. Miss Runcible, less well advised, filled two albums with Press cuttings portraying her various appearances at the Law Courts, sometimes as plaintiff, sometimes as witness, sometimes (in a hat borrowed from Miss Mouse) as part of the queue of ‘fashionably dressed women waiting for admission’, once as an intruder being removed by an usher from the Press gallery, and finally as prisoner being sentenced to a fine of ten pounds or seven days’ imprisonment for contempt of court.

The proceedings were considerably complicated by the behaviour of Mrs Ape, who gave an interview in which she fully confirmed Simon Balcairn’s story. She also caused her Press agent to wire a further account to all parts of the world. She then left the country with her angels, having received a sudden call to ginger up the religious life of Oberammergau.

At intervals letters arrived from Buenos Aires in which Chastity and Divine Discontent spoke rather critically of Latin American entertainment.

‘They didn’t know when they was well off,’ said Mrs Ape.

‘It don’t sound much different from us,’ said Creative Endeavour wistfully.

‘They won’t be dead five minutes before _they_ see the difference,’ said Mrs Ape.

Edward Throbbing and two secretaries returned to Hertford Street somewhat inopportunely for Miles and his dirt-track racer, who were obliged to move into Shepheard’s. Miles said that the thing he resented about his brother’s return was not so much the inconvenience as the expense. For some weeks Throbbing suffered from the successive discoveries by his secretaries of curious and compromising things in all parts of the house; his butler, too, seemed changed. He hiccoughed heavily while serving dinner to two Secretaries of State, complained of spiders in his bath and the sound of musical instruments, and finally had ‘the horrors’, ran mildly amok in the pantry with the kitchen poker, and had to be taken away in a van. Long after these immediate causes of distress had been removed, the life of Throbbing’s secretaries was periodically disturbed by ambiguous telephone calls and the visits of menacing young men who wanted new suits or tickets to America, or a fiver to go on with.

But all these events, though of wide general interest, are of necessity a closed book to the readers of Mr Chatterbox’s page.

Lord Monomark’s black list had made a devastating change in the personnel of the _Daily Excess_ gossip. In a single day Mr Chatterbox’s readers found themselves plunged into a murky underworld of nonentities. They were shown photographs of the misshapen daughters of backwoods peers carrying buckets of meal to their fathers’ chickens; they learned of the engagement of the younger sister of the Bishop of Chertsey and of a dinner party given in Elm Park Gardens by the widow of a High Commissioner to some of the friends she had made in their colony. There were details of the blameless home life of women novelists, photographed with their spaniels before rose-covered cottages; stories of undergraduate ‘rags’ and regimental reunion dinners; anecdotes from Harley Street and the Inns of Court; snaps and snippets about cocktail parties given in basement flats by spotty announcers at the B.B.C., of tea dances in Gloucester Terrace and jokes made at High Table by dons.

Urged on by the taunts of the social editress, Adam brought new enterprise and humanity into this sorry column. He started a series of ‘Notable Invalids’, which was from the first, wildly successful. He began chattily. ‘_At a dinner party the other evening my neighbour and I began to compile a list of the most popular deaf peeresses. First, of course, came old Lady ——. . ._’

Next day he followed it up with a page about deaf peers and statesmen; then about the one-legged, blind and bald. Postcards of appreciation poured in from all over the country.

‘_I have read your column for many years now_,’ wrote a correspondent from Bude, ‘_but this is the first time I have really enjoyed it. I have myself been deaf for a long time, and it is a great comfort to me to know that my affliction is shared by so many famous men and women. Thank you, Mr Chatterbox, and good luck to you._’

Another wrote: ‘_Ever since childhood I have been cursed with abnormally large ears which have been a source of ridicule to me and a serious handicap in my career (I am a chub fuddler). I should be so glad to know whether any great people have suffered in the same way._’

Finally, he ransacked the lunatic asylums and mental houses of the country, and for nearly a week ran an extremely popular series under the heading ‘Titled Eccentrics’.

‘_It is not generally known that the Earl of ——, who lives in strict retirement, has the unusual foible of wearing costume of the Napoleonic Period. So great, indeed, is his detestation of modern dress that on one occasion . . ._’

‘_Lord ——, whose public appearances are regrettably rare nowadays, is a close student of comparative religions. There is an amusing story of how, when lunching with the then Dean of Westminster, Lord —— startled his host by proclaiming that so far from being of divine ordinance, the Ten Commandments were, in point of fact, composed by himself and delivered by him to Moses on Sinai. . . ._’

‘_Lady ——, whose imitations of animal sounds are so lifelike that she can seldom be persuaded to converse in any other way, . . ._’

And so on.

Besides this, arguing that people did not really mind _whom_ they read about provided that a kind of vicarious inquisitiveness into the lives of others was satisfied, Adam began to invent people.

He invented a sculptor called Provna, the son of a Polish nobleman, who lived in a top-floor studio in Grosvenor House. Most of his work (which was all in private hands) was constructed in cork, vulcanite and steel. The Metropolitan Museum at New York, Mr Chatterbox learned, had been negotiating for some time to purchase a specimen, but so far had been unable to outbid the collectors.

Such is the power of the Press, that soon after this a steady output of early Provnas began to travel from Warsaw to Bond Street and from Bond Street to California, while Mrs Hoop announced to her friends that Provna was at the moment at work on a bust of Johnny, which she intended to present to the nation (a statement which Adam was unable to record owing to the presence of Mrs Hoop’s name on the black list, but which duly appeared, under a photograph of Johnny, in the Marquess of Vanburgh’s rival column).