Point Counter Point

hoping that he might escape notice by acting as though the Gunpowder Plot were still unrolling itself according to plan. Illidge followed him. His face had gone very red with the embarrassment of the first moment; but in spite of this embarrassment, or rather because of it, he came downstairs after Lord Edward with a kind of swagger, one hand in his pocket, a smile on his lips. He turned his eyes coolly this way and that over the crowd. The expression on his face was one of contemptuous amusement. Too busy being the Martian to look where he was going, Illidge suddenly missed his footing on this unfamiliarly regal staircase with its inordinate treads and dwarfishly low risers. His foot slipped, he staggered wildly on the brink of a fall, waving his arms, to come to rest, however, still miraculously on his feet, some two or three steps lower down. He resumed his descent with such dignity as he could muster up. He felt exceedingly angry, he hated Lady Edward’s guests one and all, without exception.

IV

Pongileoni surpassed himself in the final Badinerie. Euclidean axioms made holiday with the formulae of elementary statics. Arithmetic held a wild saturnalian kermess; algebra cut capers. The music came to an end in an orgy of mathematical merrymaking. There was applause. Tolley bowed, with all his usual grace; Pongileoni bowed, even the anonymous fiddlers bowed. The audience pushed back its chairs and got up. Torrents of pent-up chatter broke loose.

“Wasn’t the Old Man too marvellously funny?” Polly Logan had found a friend.

“And the little carroty man with him.”

“Like Mutt and Jeff.”

“I thought I should die of laughing,” said Norah.

“Such an old magician!” Polly spoke in a thrilling whisper, leaning forward and opening her eyes very wide, as though to express in dramatic pantomime as well as words the mysteriousness of the magical old man. “A wizard.”

“But what does he do up there?”

“Cuts up toads and salamanders and all that,” Polly answered.

“Eye of newt and toe of frog.
Wool of bat and tongue of dog.⁠ ⁠…”

She recited with gusto, intoxicated by the words. “And he takes guinea pigs and makes them breed with serpents. Can you imagine it⁠—a cross between a cobra and a guinea pig?”

“Ugh!” the other shuddered. “But why did he ever marry her, if that’s the only sort of thing he’s interested in? That’s what I always wonder.”

“Why did she marry him?” Polly’s voice dropped again to a stage whisper. She liked to make everything sound exciting⁠—as exciting as she still felt everything to be. She was only twenty. “There were very good reasons for that.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“And she was a Canadian, remember, which made the reasons even more cogent.”

“One wonders how Lucy ever⁠ ⁠…”

“Sh-sh.”

The other looked round. “Wasn’t Pongileoni splendid?” she exclaimed very loudly, and with altogether too much presence of mind.

“Too wonderful!” Polly bawled back, as though she were on the stage at Drury Lane. “Ah, there’s Lady Edward.” They were both enormously surprised and delighted. “We were just saying how marvellous Pongileoni’s playing was.”

“Were you?” said Lady Edward smiling and looking from one to the other. She had a deep rich voice and spoke slowly, as though everything she said were very serious and important. “That was very nice of you.” The “r” was most emphatically rolled. “He’s an Italian,” she added, and her face was now quite grave and unsmiling. “Which makes it even more wonderful.” And she passed on, leaving the two young girls haggardly looking into one another’s blushing face.

Lady Edward was a small, thin woman, with an elegance of figure that, in a low-cut dress, was visibly beginning to run to bones and angles, as were also the aquiline good looks of a rather long and narrow face. A French mother and perhaps, in these later days, the hairdresser’s art accounted for the jetty blackness of her hair. Her skin was whitely opaque. Under arched black eyebrows her eyes had that boldness and insistence of regard which is the characteristic of all very dark eyes set in a pale face. To this generic boldness Lady Edward added a certain candid impertinence of fixed gaze and bright ingenuous expression that was entirely her own. They were the eyes of a child, “mais d’un enfant terrible,” as John Bidlake had warned a French colleague whom he had taken to see her. The French colleague had occasion to make the discovery on his own account. At the luncheon table he found himself sitting next to the critic who had written of his pictures that they were the work either of an imbecile or of a practical joker. Wide-eyed and innocent, Lady Edward had started a discussion on art.⁠ ⁠… John Bidlake was furious. He drew her aside when the meal was over and gave her a piece of his mind.

“Damn it all,” he said, “the man’s my friend. I bring him to see you. And this is how you treat him. It’s a bit thick.”

Lady Edward’s bright black eyes had never been more candid, nor her voice more disarmingly French-Canadian (for she could modify her accent at will, making it more or less colonial according as it suited her to be the simple-hearted child of the North American steppe or the English aristocrat). “But what’s too thick?” she asked. “What have I done this time?”

“None of your comedy with me,” said Bidlake.

“But it isn’t a comedy. I’ve no idea what’s thick. No idea.”

Bidlake explained about the critic. “You knew as well as I do,” he said. “And now I come to think of it, we were talking about his article only last week.”

Lady Edward frowned, as though trying to recapture a vanished memory. “So we were!” she cried at last, and looked at him with an expression of horror and repentance. “Too awful! But you know what a hopeless memory I have.”

“You have the best memory of any person I know,” said Bidlake.

“But I always forget,” she protested.

“Only what you know