As soon as the man with the empty sleeve came into the room, Firth instantly and mysteriously knew. Here was the moment of social embarrassment that Sir Horace Rumford had so sagely predicted. The donor had turned up, and in Firth’s own house.
The guests were already numerous, and there was no need to step forward at once. Instead, he retreated into a corner and tried to argue with himself. There must be hundreds, if not thousands, of one-armed men in London. Indeed, alerted in the matter as he was, he had lately been conscious of quite a number as he moved about the City and the Inns of Court. Messengers of various sorts tended in particular to have only one arm. (Not that this man could be a messenger; he was simply some acquaintance of Camilla’s unknown – as often happened – to Firth himself.) To suppose, therefore, that this man was his man was to predicate altogether too absurd a coincidence. Firth reminded himself of the totally irrational way in which his mind had sometimes worked when he was in hospital. What was threatening him now was something of the same sort.
Unfortunately he continued just to know – or at least to know that there was one way in which, without question asked or exposing himself in any way, he could obtain demonstrative proof. He moved out of the corner in which he had taken refuge, and edged across the room. Every now and then he had to stop and speak to somebody, and he was at once irritated by this necessity and thankful for it as postponing for a few minutes a kind of moment of truth. He didn’t on these occasions have to carry round drinks himself, since the reliable caterer sent in an elderly man called Puckrup to do the job. (Puckrup had great skill in the role of family retainer; he usually addressed Camilla as Madam but occasionally called her Miss Camilla, which somehow sounded extremely well.) Firth grabbed a drink from Puckrup – it was Camilla’s usual undistinguished champagne – and then executed a flanking movement on the man with the empty sleeve. He too was holding a champagne glass – in his surviving hand, which was the left. He raised it to his lips just as Firth came up on his left shoulder. And there could be no doubt about it at all. Firth had perforce given a good deal of study to the forefinger and thumb on his own right hand. The forefinger and thumb holding the stranger’s glass were a mirror image of them.
Obeying an absurd instinct for concealment, Firth transferred his own glass to his left hand, and thrust the right into a pocket. He reminded himself that the stranger could have no inkling of their bizarre relationship. It was even possible (Rumford had made no disclosure on the point) that he didn’t so much as know that not every scrap of his lost limb had gone into the incinerator. If he, the donor, didn’t know, this must mean that Rumford and his colleagues had allowed their professional zeal a little to sidestep their professional ethics. Or so Firth supposed. And if he didn’t know, ought he now to be told? Firth had a momentary revolting vision of himself as stepping forward, holding a forefinger and thumb up in air, and embarking upon a dramatically or even facetiously toned disclosure.
Even as this undisciplined fancy was in his head, the man with the empty sleeve turned round and looked at Firth at close quarters. It was immediately evident that he didn’t know he was in the presence of his host. Firth returned his gaze for the very brief space that politeness made possible without stepping forward and introducing himself; then he assumed the telegraphic smile, conventional at parties, of one who has made a pleasing recognition at the other end of the room, and moved away. He carried with him a vivid image of the stranger’s features. The picture was of one about his own age, but notably handsome (Firth himself was rather undistinguished) and with an expression suggesting great concentration and strength of will. Firth looked round for Camilla, and at once saw that she was the centre of so animated a group that breaking in upon it in search of information would be awkward. But Puckrup was passing, a bottle of champagne in each hand. Firth saw with some surprise that his own glass needed replenishing; he hadn’t been aware of gulping the stuff nervously down.
‘Puckrup,’ he asked, as he watched the old man pour, ‘do you happen to know the name of the fellow with a missing arm?’
‘Oh, yes, sir. Yes, sir, indeed. An artist, sir. Mr Cyprian Windingwood. A striking name for a striking gentleman would be my manner of expressing it, Mr Firth.’
‘I see.’ Firth found this unexpected news strangely staggering, as well as wholly unexpected. ‘Do you know how long he has been—like that?’
‘Only since earlier this year, it seems. One of those dreadful aeroplane accidents, sir. Only a minute ago, I happened to hear Mrs Firth talking to Lady Honeycombe about it. Everybody wants to meet Mr Windingwood. On account of its being so very sad, sir. A great misfortune for one who is, in a manner of speaking, a manual worker, sir.’
‘Yes, of course. I mustn’t keep you from your good work, Puckrup. Perhaps you should try Mr Windingwood. He may need all that he can get.’
‘Well, sir, so one might suppose. But you will remark that the gentleman’s glass is still fully charged. Of an abstemious habit, he would seem to be.’
Firth nodded, and again moved on. He supposed that he continued talking to people here and there, but in fact he was in a kind of dream. Once or twice he imagined himself conscious of the smell of ether and antiseptics, so that he feared some horrible disorder of the senses was going to overtake him again. There was even a moment during which he was convinced that Sir Horace Rumford was standing in a doorway, looking at him severely – but then Sir Horace’s figure simply dissolved into that of a successful barrister whom he had known for many years. Firth decided not to have a third glass of champagne.
‘Michael, darling, I don’t believe you’ve met Mr Windingwood. And it is so good of him to have come.’ It was clear that by good Camilla wished herself to be understood as saying brave. And she did seem to have a point. Windingwood had never been in the house before, and it was difficult to see why he should have turned up now. Camilla’s latest lion – it was perfectly evident – was rating as a lion at all only because he was a maimed lion; and moreover her thirst for topical celebrity must be sufficiently well known, surely, to have given a hint of the fact in advance to an intelligent man. There was only one reasonable explanation, Firth told himself as he glanced once more at the composed and rather austere features before him. Windingwood was the kind of man who sets himself tests and carries them through. If this were so, he must have a good deal on his hands just at present.
Or on his hand, Firth was instantly obliged to add to himself. For as Windingwood uttered with gravity a conventional ‘How do you do?’ he set down his glass neatly on a passing tray, and took the initiative in holding out his hand to his host. He had thought this out, one had to suppose, along with a number of weightier things, and had got the small answer right. Moreover, he had perfected the movement he made. His hand came to you in such a way that you could without awkwardness take it in your left hand or in your right. If you made a hesitating mess of this (which at least Firth managed to avoid), he would certainly betray no consciousness of noticing the fact.
‘I’m sure you two must have something to talk about, Camilla said brightly – and much as if her husband, equally with Windingwood, was a guest. She hurried off to a quartet in which languor appeared to threaten. For a moment Firth wildly supposed that there had been a sinister implication in her words; in fact, that she was up to something. But this was not really possible. Camilla had shown a disinclination to hear about his hospital period in detail, and there was no reason why she should connect it in any way with Windingwood’s having been in an aeroplane accident. There was nothing except sheer fatality in her having taken it into her head to secure the painter as a principal attraction at this party.
‘Can I get you another glass of champagne?’ Firth asked. He couldn’t, in these first seconds, think of anything better to say.
‘That would be very pleasant.’ Windingwood had the good manners to accept from a host who was a stranger a suggestion he might unobtrusively have turned down from a servant. ‘I haven’t,’ he added, ‘been to a party for some time.’
Firth went in search of a bottle. It gave him a further moment in which to think. It was possible, he realised, that Windingwood, far from having been kept in absolute ignorance by the doctors, had for some time known more than Firth himself did. Perhaps he had even come to this party out of a slightly morbid wish to glimpse what might be called his lost property. The grossness of this phrase, as it came unbidden into Firth’s mind, brought home to him the inescapable grossness – or perhaps it was indecency – of the sheer physical fact which had elicited it. He asked himself what was the civilised thing to do. The answer seemed to be that he should have the few minutes’ general conversation with Windingwood that courtesy required, and then take care not to meet him again. If, however, Windingwood knew the truth, or suspected the truth, and made the slightest tentative approach to it, Firth’s only honourable course would be to acknowledge what – so to speak – lay between them. For Windingwood carried instant weight as a serious and truthful person, and one would be letting oneself down if one failed to meet him on that ground.
Firth found a bottle on Puckrup’s buffet. He picked up a clean glass as well, for he remembered that Windingwood’s had been carried off. His own glass was still on the mantelpiece where he had set it down, and he resolved, after all, to replenish that too. So he carried both bottle and glass back to the painter, and poured champagne for him. Windingwood watched him thoughtfully.
The party was now thinning out, and in particular there was nobody in the small inner drawing-room where Camilla kept her piano. But the two men were standing under the archway giving on this, and visible on the farther wall was a painting, softly lit, of a Breton fishing-village.
‘How very jolly to have a Christopher Wood,’ Windingwood said. ‘May I look?’
‘Yes, do. We’re very fond of it. Camilla had it from an uncle as a wedding-present.’ Firth, who had uttered these words many times at parties in this room, followed his guest round the piano. Now quite isolated, they studied the painting for some moments in silence.
‘A wonderful talent,’ Windingwood said. ‘And so suddenly cut off.’
‘Cut off?’ Firth had rather forgotten about Christopher Wood, and the words jarred on him.
‘Came the blind Fury with the abhorred shears. Not that it was anything so poetic. He just fell under a railway engine. And he was still short of thirty.’
It was plain to Firth that Windingwood was in no sense consciously speaking in riddles. He was not that sort of person. Nevertheless the meaning of Windingwood’s next words was instantly plain to him, even although in formalitiy they were a mere repetition of those spoken in another context only a couple of minutes before.
‘May I look?’ Windingwood asked gently.
Without a word, Firth held out his right hand.
‘So you knew?’ Firth asked presently.
‘No, no – only that they had been made good use of. It was when you poured me this champagne. Perhaps it must be called an intuitive thing – although, after all, it would be an odd painter who didn’t know his own finger and thumb. Say, if you like, that I was just making an outrageous guess. A fool I’d have looked if I’d been wrong!’ Quite simply, Windingwood took Firth’s right hand again, and turned it palm upwards, where the scarlet hair-line showed. ‘It’s a great wonder,’ he said soberly. ‘And I am so very glad.’ He dropped Firth’s hand, lightly touched Firth’s shoulder, and then picked up his glass. ‘Firth,’ he said, ‘shall we drink together in honour of this extraordinary thing?’
‘Yes, of course.’ As he uttered these words, Michael Firth had his first glimpse of the fact that he wasn’t going to measure up to Cyprian Windingwood. He found himself, as he obediently raised his glass, trying to remember something in Shakespeare – something said by Macbeth, surely. And it came to him:
under him
My genius is rebuk’d: as, it is said,
Mark Antony’s was by Caesar.
That was it. He was in the presence of a man vastly more magnanimous than himself. He realised that this ought to be an edifying experience. It felt more like a disintegrative one.