Seven

Then Adam became Mr. Chatterbox.

He and Nina were lunching at Espinosa’s and quarreling halfheartedly when a businesslike, 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 anyone 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 anyone?”

“I’d do it myself for that.”

“You?” The social editress looked at him skeptically. “Would you be any good?”

“I’ll try for a week or two.”

“That’s about as long as anyone 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 paralyzed 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 sympathique 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 a prisoner being sentenced to a fine of ten pounds or seven days’ imprisonment for contempt of court.

The proceedings were considerably complicated by the behavior 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 Endeavor 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 neighbor 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).

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 plow 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 unequaled 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 two-penny 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.”^*

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 saber 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 tenderhearted; 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 suede 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 suede 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 readymade clothes in Regent Street had transposed their tickets in the windows and arranged rows of black suede shoes on a silver step labeled “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 gray 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 center 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 toper 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 totalizator 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 mustache.

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; everyone 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 today. 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 a bit red, 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 license 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 colored singer appeared, paddling his black suede 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 favored 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 rumored 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 Singhalese 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.”