Part 8

Encouraged by his success, Adam began gradually to introduce to his readers a brilliant and lovely company. He mentioned them casually at first in lists of genuine people. There was a popular young attaché at the Italian Embassy called Count Cincinnati. He was descended from the famous Roman Consul, Cincinnatus, and bore a plough as his crest. Count Cincinnati was held to be the best amateur ’cellist in London. Adam saw him one evening dancing at the Café de la Paix. A few evenings later Lord Vanburgh noticed him at Covent Garden, remarking that his collection of the original designs for the Russian ballet was unequalled in Europe. Two days later Adam sent him to Monte Carlo for a few days’ rest, and Vanburgh hinted that there was more in this visit than met the eye, and mentioned the daughter of a well-known American hostess who was staying there at her aunt’s villa.

There was a Captain Angus Stuart-Kerr, too, whose rare appearances in England were a delight to his friends; unlike most big-game hunters, he was an expert and indefatigable dancer. Much to Adam’s disgust he found Captain Stuart-Kerr taken up by an unknown gossip writer in a twopenny, illustrated weekly, who saw him at a point-to-point meeting, and remarked that he was well known as the hardest rider in the Hebrides. Adam put a stop to that next day.

‘_Some people_,’ he wrote, ‘_are under the impression that Captain Angus Stuart-Kerr, whom I mentioned on this page a short time ago, is a keen rider. Perhaps they are confusing him with Alastair Kerr-Stuart, of Inverauchty, a very distant cousin. Captain Stuart-Kerr never rides, and for a very interesting reason. There is an old Gaelic rhyme repeated among his clansmen which says in rough translation “the Laird rides well on two legs”. Tradition has it that when the head of the house mounts a horse the clan will be dispersed._’[C]

[C] This story, slightly expanded, found its way later into a volume of Highland Legends called _Tales from the Mist_, which has been approved to be read in elementary schools. This shows the difference between what is called a ‘living’ as opposed to a ‘dead’ folk tradition.

But Adam’s most important creation was Mrs Andrew Quest. There was always some difficulty about introducing English people into his column as his readers had a way of verifying his references in Debrett (as he knew to his cost, for one day, having referred to the engagement of the third and youngest daughter of a Welsh baronet, he received six postcards, eighteen telephone calls, a telegram and a personal visit of protest to inform him that there are two equally beautiful sisters still in the schoolroom. The social editress had been scathing about this). However, he put Imogen Quest down one day, quietly and decisively, as the most lovely and popular of the younger married set. And from the first she exhibited signs of a marked personality. Adam wisely eschewed any attempts at derivation, but his readers nodded to each other and speedily supplied her with an exalted if irregular origin. Everything else Adam showered upon her. She had slightly more than average height, and was very dark and slim, with large Laurencin eyes and the negligent grace of the trained athlete (she fenced with the sabre for half an hour every morning before breakfast). Even Provna, who was notoriously indifferent to conventional beauty, described her as ‘justifying the century’.

Her clothes were incomparable, with just that suggestion of the haphazard which raised them high above the mere _chic_ of the mannequin.

Her character was a lovely harmony of contending virtues—she was witty and tender hearted; passionate and serene, sensual and temperate, impulsive and discreet.

Her set, the most intimate and brilliant in Europe, achieved a superb mean between those two poles of savagery Lady Circumference and Lady Metroland.

Soon Imogen Quest became a byword for social inaccessibility—the final goal for all climbers.

Adam went one day to a shop in Hanover Square to watch Nina buy some hats and was seriously incommoded by the heaps of bandboxes disposed on the chairs and dressing-tables ostentatiously addressed to Mrs Andrew Quest. He could hear her name spoken reverently in cocktail clubs, and casually let slip in such phrases as ‘My dear, I never see Peter now. He spends all his time with Imogen Quest,’ or ‘As Imogen would say . . .’ or ‘I think the Quests have got one like that. I must ask them where it came from.’ And this knowledge on the intangible Quest set, moving among them in uncontrolled dignity of life, seemed to leaven and sweeten the lives of Mr Chatterbox’s readers.

One day Imogen gave a party, the preparations for which occupied several paragraphs. On the following day Adam found his table deep in letters of complaint from gate-crashers who had found the house in Seamore Place untenanted.

Finally a message came down that Lord Monomark was interested in Mrs Quest; could Mr Chatterbox arrange a meeting. That day the Quests sailed for Jamaica.

Adam also attempted in an unobtrusive way to exercise some influence over the clothes of his readers. ‘_I noticed at the Café de la Paix yesterday evening_,’ he wrote, ‘_that two of the smartest men in the room were wearing black suède shoes with their evening clothes—one of them, who shall be nameless, was a Very Important Person indeed. I hear that this fashion, which comes, like so many others, from New York, is likely to become popular over here this season._’ A few days later he mentioned Captain Stuart-Kerr’s appearance at the Embassy ‘_wearing, of course, the ultra-fashionable black suède shoes_’. In a week he was gratified to notice that Johnny Hoop and Archie Schwert had both followed Captain Stuart-Kerr’s lead, while in a fortnight the big emporiums of ready-made clothes in Regent Street had transposed their tickets in the windows and arranged rows of black suède shoes on a silver step labelled ‘For evening wear’.

His attempt to introduce a bottle-green bowler hat, however, was not successful; in fact, a ‘well-known St James’s Street hatter’, when interviewed by an evening paper on the subject, said that he had never seen or heard of such a thing, and though he would not refuse to construct one if requested to by an old customer, he was of the opinion that no old customer of his would require a hat of that kind (though there was a sad case of an impoverished old beau who attempted to stain a grey hat with green ink, as once in years gone by he had been used to dye the carnation for his buttonhole).

As the days passed, Mr Chatterbox’s page became almost wholly misleading. With sultanesque caprice Adam would tell his readers of inaccessible eating-houses which were now the centre of fashion; he drove them to dance in temperance hotels in Bloomsbury. In a paragraph headed ‘Montparnasse in Belgravia’, he announced that the buffet at Sloane Square tube station had become the haunt of the most modern artistic coterie (Mr Benfleet hurried there on his first free evening, but saw no one but Mrs Hoop and Lord Vanburgh and a plebeian topper with a celluloid collar).

As a last resort, on those hopeless afternoons when invention failed and that black misanthropy settled on him which waits alike on gossip writer and novelist, Adam sometimes found consolation in seizing upon some gentle and self-effacing citizen and transfiguring him with a blaze of notoriety.

He did this with a man called Ginger.

As part of his duties, which led him into many unusual places, Adam and Nina went up to Manchester for the November Handicap. Here they had the disheartening experience of seeing Indian Runner come in an easy winner and the totalisator paying out thirty-five to one. It was during the bottle-green bowler campaign, and Adam was searching in vain for any sign of his influence when, suddenly, among the crowd, he saw the genial red face of the drunk Major to whom he had entrusted his thousand pounds at Lottie’s. It seemed odd that a man so bulky could be so elusive. Adam was not sure whether the Major saw him, but in some mysterious way Adam’s pursuit coincided with the Major’s complete disappearance. The crowd became very dense, brandishing flasks and sandwiches. When Adam reached the spot where the Major had stood he found two policemen arresting a pickpocket.

‘’Ere, who are you pushing?’ asked the spectators.

‘Have you seen a drunk Major anywhere?’ asked Adam.

But no one could help him, and he returned disconsolately to Nina, whom he found in conversation with a young man with a curly red moustache.

The young man said he was fed up with racing, and Adam said he was too; so the young man said why didn’t they come back to London in his bus, so Adam and Nina said they would. The bus turned out to be a very large, brand-new racing car, and they got to London in time for dinner. Nina explained that the young man used to play with her as a child, and that he had been doing something military in Ceylon for the last five years. The young man’s name was Eddy Littlejohn, but over dinner he said, look here, would they call him Ginger; every one else did. So they began to call him Ginger, and he said wouldn’t it be a good idea if they had another bottle of fizz, and Nina and Adam said yes, it would, so they had a magnum and got very friendly.

‘You know,’ said Ginger, ‘it was awful luck meeting you two to-day. I was getting awfully fed up with London. It’s so damn slow. I came back meaning to have a good time, you know, paint the place red a bit, and all that. Well, the other day I was reading the paper, and there was a bit that said that the posh place to go to dance nowadays was the Casanova Hotel in Bloomsbury. Well, it seemed a bit rum to me—place I’d never heard of, you know—but, still, I’d been away for some time and places change and all that, so I put on my bib and tucker and toddled off, hoping for a bit of innocent amusement. Well, I mean to say, you never saw such a place. There were only about three people dancing, so I said, “Where’s the bar?” And they said, “Bar!” And I said, “You know, for a drink.” And they said, well, they could probably make me some coffee. And I said, “No, not coffee.” And then they said they hadn’t got a licence for what they called alcohol. Well, I mean to say, if that’s the best London can do, give me Colombo. I wonder who writes things like that in the papers?’

‘As a matter of fact, _I_ do.’

‘I say no, do you? You must be frightfully brainy. Did you write all that about the green bowlers?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I mean to say, whoever heard of a green bowler, I mean. . . . I tell you what, you know, I believe it was all a leg pull. You know, I think that’s damn funny. Why, a whole lot of poor mutts may have gone and bought green bowlers.’

After this they went on to the Café de la Paix, where they met Johnny Hoop, who asked them all to the party in a few days’ time in the captive balloon.

But Ginger was not to be had twice.

‘Oh, no you know,’ he said, ‘not in a captive balloon. You’re trying to pull the old leg again. Whoever heard of a party in a captive balloon? I mean to say, suppose one fell out, I mean?’

Adam telephoned his page through to the _Excess_, and soon after this a coloured singer appeared, paddling his black suède shoes in a pool of limelight, who excited Ginger’s disapproval. He didn’t mind niggers, Ginger said; remarking justly that niggers were all very well in their place, but, after all, one didn’t come all the way from Colombo to London just to see niggers. So they left the Café de la Paix, and went to Lottie’s, where Ginger became a little moody, saying that London wasn’t home to him any more and that things were changed.

‘You know,’ said Ginger, ‘all the time I’ve been out in Ceylon I’ve always said to myself, “As soon as the governor kicks the bucket, and I come in for the family doubloons and pieces of eight, I’m going to come back to England and have a real old bust.” And now when it comes to the point there doesn’t seem to be anything I much want to do.’

‘How about a little drink?’ said Lottie.

So Ginger had a drink, and then he and an American sang the Eton Boating Song several times. At the end of the evening he admitted that there was some life left in the jolly old capital of the Empire.

Next day Mr Chatterbox’s readers learned that: ‘_Captain “Ginger” Littlejohn, as he is known to his intimates, was one of the well-known sporting figures at the November Handicap who favoured the new bottle-green bowler. Captain Littlejohn is one of the wealthiest and best-known bachelors in Society, and I have lately heard his name spoken of in connection with the marriage of the daughter of a famous ducal house. He came all the way to yesterday’s races in his own motor omnibus, which he drives himself . . ._’

For some days Ginger’s name figured largely on Adam’s page, to his profound embarrassment. Several engagements were predicted for him, it was rumoured that he had signed a contract with a film company, that he had bought a small island in the Bristol Channel which he proposed to turn into a country club, and that his forthcoming novel about Singalese life contained many very thinly disguised portraits of London celebrities.

But the green bowler joke had gone too far. Adam was sent for by Lord Monomark.

‘Now see here, Symes,’ said the great man, ‘I like your page. It’s peppy; it’s got plenty of new names in it and it’s got the intimate touch I like. I read it every day and so does my daughter. Keep on that way and you’ll be all right. But _what’s all this about bottle-green bowlers_?’

‘Well, of course, sir, they’re only worn by a limited number of people at present, but . . .’

‘Have you got one? Show me a green bowler.’

‘I don’t wear one myself, I’m afraid.’

‘Well, where d’you see ’em? I haven’t seen one yet. My daughter hasn’t seen one. Who does wear ’em? Where do they buy ’em? That’s what I want to know. Now see here, Symes, I don’t say that there ain’t any such thing as a green bowler; there may be and again there mayn’t. But from now on there are going to be no more bottle-green bowlers in my paper. See. And another thing. This Count Cincinnati. I don’t say _he_ doesn’t exist. He may do and he mayn’t. But the Italian Ambassador doesn’t know anything about him and the Almanak de Gotha doesn’t. So as far as my paper goes that’s good enough for him. And I don’t want any more about Espinosa’s. They made out my bill wrong last night.

‘Got those three things clear? Tabulate them in the mind—1, 2, 3, that’s the secret of memory. Tab-u-late. All right, then, run along now and tell the Home Secretary he can come right in. You’ll find him waiting in the passage—ugly little man with a pince-nez.’

_Chapter Eight_

Two nights later Adam and Nina took Ginger to the party in the captive dirigible. It was not a really good evening. The long drive in Ginger’s car to the degraded suburb where the airship was moored chilled and depressed them, dissipating the gaiety which had flickered rather spasmodically over Ginger’s dinner.

The airship seemed to fill the whole field, tethered a few feet from the ground by innumerable cables over which they stumbled painfully on the way to the steps. These had been covered by a socially minded caterer with a strip of red carpet.

Inside, the saloons were narrow and hot, communicating to each other by spiral staircases and metal alleys. There were protrusions at every corner, and Miss Runcible had made herself a mass of bruises in the first half hour. There was a band and a bar and all the same faces. It was the first time that a party was given in an airship.

Adam went aloft to a kind of terrace. Acres of inflated silk blotted out the sky, stirring just perceptibly in the breeze. The lights of other cars arriving lit up the uneven grass. A few louts had collected round the gates to jeer. There were two people making love to each other near him on the terrace, reclining on cushions. There was also a young woman he did not know, holding one of the stays and breathing heavily; evidently she felt unwell. One of the lovers lit a cigar and Adam observed that they were Mary Mouse and the Maharajah of Pukkapore.

Presently Nina joined him. ‘It seems such a waste,’ she said, thinking of Mary and the Maharajah, ‘that two very rich people like that should fall in love with each other.’

‘Nina,’ said Adam, ‘let’s get married soon, don’t you think?’

‘Yes, it’s a bore not being married.’

The young woman who felt ill passed by them, walking shakily, to try and find her coat and her young man to take her home.

‘. . . I don’t know if it sounds absurd,’ said Adam, ‘but I do feel that a marriage ought to _go on_—for quite a long time, I mean. D’you feel that too, at all?’

‘Yes, it’s one of the things about a marriage!’

‘I’m glad you feel that. I didn’t quite know if you did. Otherwise it’s all rather bogus, isn’t it?’

‘I think you ought to go and see papa again,’ said Nina. ‘It’s never any good writing. Go and tell him that you’ve got a job and are terribly rich and that we’re going to be married before Christmas!’

‘All right. I’ll do that.’

‘. . . D’you remember last month we arranged for you to go and see him the first time? . . . just like this . . . it was at Archie Schwert’s party . . .’

‘Oh, Nina, _what a lot of parties_.’

(. . . Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris—all that succession and repetition of massed humanity. . . . Those vile bodies . . .)

He leant his forehead, to cool it, on Nina’s arm and kissed her in the hollow of her forearm.

‘I _know_, darling,’ she said, and put her hand on his hair.

Ginger came strutting jauntily by, his hands clasped under his coat-tails.

‘Hullo, you two,’ he said. ‘Pretty good show this, what.’

‘Are you enjoying yourself, Ginger?’

‘_Rather._ I say, I’ve met an awful good chap called Miles. Regular topper. You know, _pally_. That’s what I like about a really decent party—you meet such topping fellows. I mean some chaps it takes absolutely years to know but a chap like Miles I feel is a pal straight away.’

Presently cars began to drive away again. Miss Runcible said that she had heard of a divine night club near Leicester Square somewhere where you could get a drink at any hour of the night. It was called the St Christopher’s Social Club.

So they all went there in Ginger’s car.

On the way Ginger said, ‘That cove Miles, you know, he’s awfully _queer_ . . .’

St Christopher’s Social Club took some time to find.

It was a little door at the side of a shop, and the man who opened it held his foot against it and peeped round.

They paid ten shillings each and signed false names in the visitor’s book. Then they went downstairs to a very hot room full of cigarette smoke; there were unsteady tables with bamboo legs round the walls and there were some people in shirt sleeves dancing on a shiny linoleum floor.

There was a woman in a yellow beaded frock playing a piano and another in red playing the fiddle.

They ordered some whisky. The waiter said he was sorry, but he couldn’t oblige, not that night he couldn’t. The police had just rung up to say that they were going to make a raid any minute. If they liked they could have some nice kippers.

Miss Runcible said that kippers were not very drunk-making and that the whole club seemed bogus to her.

Ginger said well anyway they had better have some kippers now they were there. Then he asked Nina to dance and she said no. Then he asked Miss Runcible and she said no, too.

Then they ate kippers.

Presently one of the men in shirt sleeves (who had clearly had a lot to drink before the St Christopher Social Club knew about the police) came up to their table and said to Adam:

‘You don’t know me. I’m Gilmour. I don’t want to start a row in front of ladies, but when I see a howling cad I like to tell him so.’

Adam said, ‘Why do you spit when you talk?’

Gilmour said, ‘That is a very unfortunate physical disability, and it shows what a howling cad you are that you mention it.’

Then Ginger said, ‘Same to you, old boy, with nobs on.’

Then Gilmour said, ‘Hullo, Ginger, old scout.’

And Ginger said, ‘Why, it’s Bill. You mustn’t mind Bill. Awfully stout chap. Met him on the boat.’

Gilmour said, ‘Any pal of Ginger’s is a pal of mine.’

So Adam and Gilmour shook hands.

Gilmour said, ‘This is a pretty low joint, anyhow. You chaps come round to my place and have a drink.’

So they went to Gilmour’s place.

Gilmour’s place was a bed-sitting room in Ryder Street.

So they sat on the bed in Gilmour’s place and drank whisky while Gilmour was sick next door.

And Ginger said, ‘There’s nowhere like London really you know.’

That same evening while Adam and Nina sat on the deck of the dirigible a party of quite a different sort was being given at Anchorage House. This last survivor of the noble town houses of London was, in its time, of dominating and august dimensions, and even now, when it had become a mere ‘picturesque bit’ lurking in a ravine between concrete skyscrapers, its pillared façade, standing back from the street and obscured by railings and some wisps of foliage, had grace and dignity and other-worldliness enough to cause a flutter or two in Mrs Hoop’s heart as she drove into the forecourt.

‘Can’t you just see the _ghosts_? she said to Lady Circumference on the stairs. ‘Pit and Fox and Burke and Lady Hamilton and Beau Brummel and Dr Johnson’ (a concurrence of celebrities, it may be remarked, at which something memorable might surely have occurred). ‘Can’t you just _see_ them—in their buckled shoes?’

Lady Circumference raised her lorgnette and surveyed the stream of guests debouching from the cloak-rooms like City workers from the Underground. She saw Mr Outrage and Lord Metroland in consultation about the Censorship Bill (a statesmanlike and much-needed measure which empowered a committee of five atheists to destroy all books, pictures and films they considered undesirable, without any nonsense about defence or appeal). She saw both Archbishops, the Duke and Duchess of Stayle, Lord Vanburgh and Lady Metroland, Lady Throbbing and Edward Throbbing and Mrs Blackwater, Mrs Mouse and Lord Monomark and a superb Levantine, and behind and about them a great concourse of pious and honourable people (many of whom made the Anchorage House reception the one outing of the year), their women-folk well gowned in rich and durable stuffs, their men-folk ablaze with orders; people who had represented their country in foreign places and sent their sons to die for her in battle, people of decent and temperate life, uncultured, unaffected, unembarrassed, unassuming, unambitious people, of independent judgment and marked eccentricities, kind people who cared for animals and the deserving poor, brave and rather unreasonable people, that fine phalanx of the passing order, approaching as one day at the Last Trump they hoped to meet their Maker, with decorous and frank cordiality to shake Lady Anchorage by the hand at the top of her staircase. Lady Circumference saw all this and sniffed the exhalation of her own herd. But she saw no ghosts.

‘That’s all my eye,’ she said.

But Mrs Hoop ascended step by step in a confused but very glorious dream of eighteenth-century elegance.

The Presence of Royalty was heavy as thunder in the drawing-room.

The Baroness Yoshiwara and the Prime Minister met once more.