Everard Webley laughed. “Oh, certainly, certainly.”
“Because, you see,” Lady Edward explained, turning confidentially to Illidge, “this is Mr. Everard Webley. The head of the British Freemen. You know those men in the green uniform? Like the male chorus at a musical comedy.”
Illidge smiled maliciously and nodded. So this, he was thinking, was Everard Webley. The founder and the head of the Brotherhood of British Freemen—the B.B.F.’s, the “B⸺y, b⸺ing, f⸺s,” as their enemies called them. Inevitably; for, as the extremely well-informed correspondent of the Figaro once remarked in an article devoted to the Freemen, “les initiales B.B.F. ont, pour le public anglais, une signification plutôt péjorative.” Webley had not thought of that when he gave his Freemen their name. It pleased Illidge to reflect that he must be made to think of it very often now.
“If you’ve finished being funny,” said Everard, “I’ll take my leave.”
“Tinpot Mussolini,” Illidge was thinking. “Looks his part, too. [He had a special personal hatred of anyone who was tall and handsome, or who looked in any way distinguished. He himself was small and had the appearance of a very intelligent street arab, grown up.] Great lout!”
“But you’re not offended by anything I said, are you?” Lady Edward asked with a great show of anxiety and contrition.
Illidge remembered a cartoon in the Daily Herald. “The British Freemen,” Webley had had the insolence to say, “exist to keep the world safe for intelligence.” The cartoon showed Webley and half a dozen of his uniformed bandits kicking and bludgeoning a workman to death. Behind them a top-hatted company director looked on approvingly. Across his monstrous belly sprawled the word: intelligence.
“Not offended, Webley?” Lady Edward repeated.
“Not in the least. I’m only rather busy. You see,” he explained in his silkiest voice, “I have things to do. I work, if you know what that means.”
Illidge wished that the hit had been scored by someone else. The dirty ruffian! He himself was a communist.
Webley left them. Lady Edward watched him ploughing his way through the crowd. “Like a steam engine,” she said. “What energy! But so touchy. These politicians—worse than actresses. Such vanity! And dear Webley hasn’t got much sense of humour. He wants to be treated as though he were his own colossal statue, erected by an admiring and grateful nation. [The r’s roared like lions.] Posthumously, if you see what I mean. As a great historical character. I can never remember, when I see him, that he’s really Alexander the Great. I always make the mistake of thinking it’s just Webley.”
Illidge laughed. He found himself positively liking Lady Edward. She had the right feelings about things. She seemed even to be on the right side, politically.
“Not but what his Freemen aren’t a very good thing,” Lady Edward went on. Illidge’s sympathy began to wane as suddenly as it had shot up. “Don’t you think so, Mr. Babbage?”
He made a little grimace. “Well …” he began.
“By the way,” said Lady Edward, cutting short what would have been an admirably sarcastic comment on Webley’s Freemen, “you must really be careful coming down those stairs. They’re terribly slippery.”
Illidge blushed. “Not at all,” he muttered and blushed still more deeply—a beetroot to the roots of his carrot-coloured hair—as he realized the imbecility of what he had said. His sympathy declined still further.
“Well, rather slippery all the same,” Lady Edward politely insisted, with an emphatic rolling in the throat. “What were you working at with Edward this evening?” she went on. “It always interests me so much.”
Illidge smiled. “Well, if you really want to know,” he said, “we were working at the regeneration of lost parts in newts.” Among the newts he felt more at ease; a little of his liking for Lady Edward returned.
“Newts? Those things that swim?” Illidge nodded. “But how do they lose their parts?”
“Well, in the laboratory,” he explained, “they lose them because we cut them off.”
“And they grow again?”
“They grow again.”
“Dear me,” said Lady Edward. “I never knew that. How fascinating these things are. Do tell me some more.”
She wasn’t so bad after all. He began to explain. Warming to his subject, he warmed also to Lady Edward. He had just reached the crucial, the important and significant point in the proceedings—the conversion of the transplanted tail-bud into a leg—when Lady Edward, whose eyes had been wandering, laid her hand on his arm.
“Come with me,” she said, “and I’ll introduce you to General Knoyle. Such an amusing old man—if only unintentionally sometimes.”
Illidge’s exposition froze suddenly in his throat. He realized that she had not taken the slightest interest in what he had been saying, had not even troubled to pay the least attention. Detesting her, he followed in resentful silence.
General Knoyle was talking with another military-looking gentleman. His voice was martial and asthmatic. “ ‘My dear fellow,’ I said to him [they heard him as they approached], ‘my dear fellow, don’t enter the horse now. It would be a crime,’ I said. ‘It would be sheer madness. Scratch him,’ I said, ‘scratch him!’ And he scratched him.”
Lady Edward made her presence known. The two military gentlemen were overwhelmingly polite; they had enjoyed their evening immensely.
“I chose Bach specially for you, General Knoyle,” said Lady Edward with something of the charming confusion of a young girl confessing an amorous foible.
“Well—er—really, that was very kind of you.” General Knoyle’s confusion was genuine; he did not know what to do with the musical present she had made him.
“I hesitated,” Lady Edward went on in the same significantly intimate tone, “between Handel’s Water Music and the B Minor Suite with Pongileoni. Then I remembered you and decided on the Bach.” Her eyes took in the signs of embarrassment on the General’s ruddy face.
“That was very kind of you,” he protested. “Not that I can pretend to understand much about music. But I know what I like, I know what I like.” The phrase seemed to give
