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“Listen, Carlos — ”
“I repeat, a great improvement.”
The pianist laughed pointedly and the others gri
“You make the suggestion to Lord Pastern,” said the tympanist. “He’s going to be your ruddy father-in-law. Make it and see how it goes.”
“I think we better do it like he says, Carlos,” said Mr. Bellairs. “I think we better.”
The two men faced each other. Mr. Bellairs’s expression of geniality had become habitual. He might have been a cleverly made ventriloquist’s doll with a pale rubber face that was constantly and arbitrarily creased in a roguish grimace. His expressionless eyes with their large pale irises and enormous pupils might have been painted. Wherever he went, whenever he spoke, his lips parted and disclosed his teeth. Two dimples grooved his full cheeks, the flesh creased at the corners of his eyes. Thus, hour after hour, he smiled at the couples who danced slowly past his stand; smiled and bowed and beat the air and undulated and smiled. He sweated profusely from these exertions and at times would mop his face with a snowy handkerchief. And behind him every night his Boys, dressed in soft shirts and sculptured di
His Boys were big noises. They were all specialists. He had selected them with infinite pains. They were chosen for their ability to make the hideous and extremely difficult rumpus known as the Breezy Bellairs Ma
He was being careful, now, with Carlos Rivera. Carlos was good. His piano-accordion talked in the Big Way. When his engagement to Félicité de Suze was a
“Listen, Carlos,” Breezy urged feverishly, “I got an idea. Listen, how about we work it this way? How about letting his lordship fire at you like what he wants and miss you? See? He looks surprised and goes right ahead pulling the trigger and firing and you go right ahead in your hot number and every time he fires, one of the other boys acts like he’s been hit and plays a queer note and how about these boys playing a note each down the scale? And you just smile and sign off and bow kind of sardonically and leave him flat? How about that, boys?”
“We-el,” said the Boys judicially.
“It is a possibility,” Mr. Rivera conceded.
“He might even wind up by shooting himself and getting carried off with the wreath on his breast.”
“If somebody else doesn’t get in first,” grunted the tympanist.
“Or he might hand the gun to me and I might fire it at him and it might be empty, and he might go into his act and end up with a fu
“I repeat,” Rivera said, “it is a possibility. We shall not quarrel in. this matter. Perhaps I may speak to Lord Pastern myself.”
“Fine!” Breezy cried, and raised his tiny baton. “That’s fine. Come on, boys. What are we waiting for? Is this a practice or is it a practice? Where’s this new number? Fine! On your marks. Everybody happy? Swell. Let’s go.”
“Carlisle Wayne,” said Edward Manx, “was thirty years old, but she retained something of the air of adolescence, not in her speech, for that was tranquil and assured, but in her looks and ma
“Her remote cousin, the Honourable Edward Manx,” Carlisle interrupted, “was a dramatic critic. He was thirty-seven years old and of romantic appearance but not oppressively so. His professional reputation for rudeness was cultivated with some pains for, although cursed with a violent temper, he was by instinct of a courteous disposition!”
“Gatcha!” said Edward Manx, turning the car into the Uxbridge Road.
“He was something of a snob but sufficiently adroit to disguise this circumstance under a show of social indiscrimination. He was unmarried — ”
“ — having a profound mistrust of those women who obviously admired him — ”
“ — and a dread of being rebuffed by those of whom he was not quite sure.”
“You are as sharp as a needle, you know,” said Manx, uncomfortably.
“Which is probably why I, too, have remained unmarried.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. All the same I’ve often wondered — ”
“I invariably click with such frightful men.”
“Lisle, how old were we when we invented this game?”
“Novelette? Wasn’t it the train when we came back from our first school holidays with Uncle George? He wasn’t married then so it must have been over sixteen years ago. Félicité was only two when Aunt Cécile married him and she’s eighteen now.”
“It was then. I remember you began by saying: ‘There was once a very conceited bad-tempered boy called Edward Manx. His elderly cousin, a peculiar peer — ’ ”
“Even in those days, Uncle George was prime material, wasn’t he?”
“Lord, yes! Do you remember — ”
They told each other anecdotes, familiar to both, of Lord Pastern and Bagott. They recalled his first formidable row with his wife, a distinguished Frenchwoman of great composure, who came to him as a widow with a baby daughter. Lord Pastern, three years after their marriage, became an adherent of a sect that practised baptism by total immersion. He wished his stepdaughter to be rechristened by this method in a sluggish and eel-infested stream that ran through his country estate. Upon his wife’s refusal he sulked for a month and then, without warning, took ship to India, where he immediately succumbed to the more painful austerities of the yogi. He returned to England loudly proclaiming that almost everything was an illusion and, going by stealth to his stepdaughter’s nursery, attempted to fold her infant limbs into esoteric postures, exhorting her, at the same time, to bend her gaze upon her navel and say “Om.” Her nurse objected, was given notice by Lord Pastern and reinstated by his wife. A formidable scene ensued.