The Generalship of Angela
“Angela,” said Bredon when he found her, “I’ve got a job of work for
you.”
“Such as?”
“All you’ve got to do is to make Brinkman and Pulteney open their
cigarette-cases for inspection without knowing that they’re doing it.”
“Miles, it won’t do. You know I can’t work in blinkers. There’s
nothing I dislike so much as a want of complete confidence between
husband and wife. Sit down and tell me all about it. You’d better make
sure of the door first.” And she turned down the little shutter which
protected their keyhole on the inside.
“Oh, all right,” said Bredon, and told the story of their recent
alarms. “It almost must be somebody in the house. Brinkman and
Pulteney are both cigarette-smokers, and of course it would be easy
for me to cadge a cigarette by saying I’d run short. But that just
might put the mysterious gentleman on his guard. And I don’t want to
hang about picking up fags. So what you’ve got to do is to lead round
the conversation in such a way that we can have an opportunity of
finding out what cigarettes each of them smokes without his suspecting
anything.”
“Why not pinch some from their rooms?”
“It might work. But since people took to smoking all kinds of vile
cigarettes at the end of the war, one doesn’t trouble to carry one’s
own brand about. One buys them at the local shop. These Callipolis are
an oddity, but there probably aren’t many more where they came from,
and the safest place to look for them is inside somebody’s
breast-pocket. Anyhow, you might try.”
“Sort of salted almonds game?” said Angela reflectively. “All right, I
will. Don’t you try your hand at it; sit there and back me up.
Meanwhile, you’d better go down and have a pick-me-up at the bar,
because I’m going to dress for dinner.”
“Dress for dinner, in a hole like this? Whatever for?”
“You don’t understand the technique of the thing. If I’m to have
complete control of the conversation, I must be looking my best. It
makes all the difference with a susceptible old dear like Edward.”
She certainly had made herself look attractive, if a trifle exotic, by
the time she came downstairs. The maid all but broke the soup-plates
at the sight of her.
“Did you see much of Pullford, Mrs. Bredon?” asked Brinkman, on
hearing of their day’s expedition.
“Much of it? Why, I’m practically a native of the place by now. I
shall never see a perambulator again, I mean a drain-pipe, without a
sort of homely feeling. My husband left me alone for three solid hours
while he went and caroused with the hierarchy.”
“A very genial man, isn’t he, the Bishop,” said Brinkman, appealing to
her husband.
“What a poor compliment that word _genial_ is,” put in the old
gentleman. “I would sooner be called well-meaning, myself. You have no
grounds for saying that a man is really kind or charitable; you have
not personally found him attractive; and yet he has a sort of
good-natured way with him which demands some tribute. So you say he is
genial.”
“Like a Dickens character?” suggested Brinkman.
“No, they are too human to be called merely genial. Mr. Pickwick
genial! It is like calling the day of judgment a fine sight. How did
Pusey, by the way, ever have the wit to light upon such a comparison?”
“I think _witty_ is rather a dreadful thing to be called,” said
Angela. “I always think of witty people as people who dominate the
conversation with long anecdotes. How glad I am to have been born into
a world in which the anecdote has gone out of fashion!”
“A hemisphere, Mrs. Bredon,” said Brinkman in correction. “You have
not been to America? The anecdote there is in its first youth; the
anecdotes mostly in their extreme old age.”
“There is a pleasant dryness about American humour,” objected
Pulteney. “But I confess that I miss piquancy in it.”
“Like Virginian tobacco?” suggested Bredon, and was rewarded by a
savage kick from Angela under the table.
“The anecdote, however,” pursued Mr. Pulteney, “is the enemy of
conversation. With its appearance, the shadow of egotism falls over
our conviviality. The man who hoards up anecdotes, and lets them loose
at intervals, is a social indecency; he might as well strip and parade
some kind of acrobatic feat. See how your anecdotist lies in wait for
his opportunity, prays for the moment that will lend excuse to his
‘That reminds me.’ There is a further pitch of shamelessness at which
such a man will assault you openly with ‘Have you heard this one?’ But
as long as men have some rags of behaviour left to them your sex, Mrs.
Bredon, saves us from this conversational horror. When the ladies
leave us, anecdotes flow out as from a burst dam.”
“That’s because we don’t know how to tell stories; we don’t drag them
out enough. When I try to tell a story I always find I have got to the
point when I’ve only just started.”
“You are too modest, Mrs. Bredon. It is your essential altruism which
preserves you. You women are always for helping out the conversation,
not strangling it at birth. You humour us men, fool us to the top of
our bent, yet you always restrain conversation from its worst
extravagances—like a low organ accompaniment you unobtrusively give us
the note. All praise to your unselfishness!”
“I expect we are trained that way, or have trained ourselves that way.
Civilization has taught us, perhaps, to play up to the men.”
“Indeed, no,” chirped Mr. Pulteney, now thoroughly enjoying himself.
“Conversational receptivity is a natural glory of your sex. Nature
itself, which bids the peacock strut to the admiration of the hen,
bids you evoke the intellectual powers of the male. You flatter him by
your attention and he basks unconsciously in your approval. How much
more knowledge of human nature had Virgil than Homer! Alcinous would
never have got all that long story out of Ulysses; challenged by a
direct question the hero would probably have admitted, in a gruff
voice, that he had been fooling around somewhere. It was a Dido that
was needed to justify the hysteron proteron—‘Multa super Priamo
rogitans, super Hectore multa’—she knew how to do it! But I become
lyrical.”
“Do please be lyrical, Mr. Pulteney. It’s so good for Miles; he thinks
he’s a strong, silent man, and there’s nothing more odious. The
trouble is, of course, he thinks he’s a kind of detective, and he has
to play up to the part. Look at you, Mr. Leyland, you’ve hardly
uttered.”
“Is this helping us out in conversation, Mrs. Bredon? You seem to be
flogging us into it.”
“The strong silence of the detective,” explained the old gentleman,
“is a novelists’ fiction. The novelist must gag his detective, or how
is he to preserve his secret till the last chapter? No, it is Mr.
Brinkman who should be professionally silent; for what is a secretary
if he does not keep secrets?”
“I am not silent, I am silenced,” said Brinkman. “The second best
peacock dare not strut for fear of an encounter.”
“I find in silence,” said Bredon, “a mere relief from the burden of
conversation. I am grateful to the man who talks, as I should be
grateful to the man who jumped in before me to rescue a drowning baby.
He obviates the necessity for effort on my part. I sometimes think
that is why I married.”
“Miles,” said Angela, “if you are going to be odious, you will have to
leave the room. I suppose you think you can be rude because the
detectives in fiction are rude? Mr. Leyland may be silent, but at
least he’s polite.”
“Mr. Bredon is married,” suggested Pulteney. “The caged bird does not
strut. His are golden chains, I hasten to add, but they take the
spring out of him none the less. For all that, I have some contempt
for the man who does not take his share in shouldering the burden of
conversation. He puts nothing into the common pot. Mr. Brinkman, I
resign the strutting-ground. Tell us whether you think detectives
should be strong, silent men or not.”
“I’m afraid I haven’t read much in that direction, Mr. Pulteney. I
should imagine it was an advantage to the detective to be silent, so
that he can be in a good position to say ‘I told you so’ when the
truth comes out.”
“Oh, but a detective ought to be talking all the time,” protested
Angela. “The ones in the books always are. Only what they say is
always entirely incomprehensible, both to the other people in the book
and to the reader. ‘Let me call your attention once more,’ they say;
‘to the sinister significance of the bend in the toast-rack,’ and
there you are, none the wiser. Wouldn’t you like to be a detective,
Mr. Pulteney?”
“Why, in a sense I am.” There was a slight pause, with several mental
gasps in it, till the old gentleman continued, “That is to say, I am a
schoolmaster; and the two functions are nearly akin. Who threw the
butter at the ceiling, which boy cribbed from which, where the missing
postage-stamp has got to—these are the problems which agitate my
inglorious old age. I do not know why headmasters allow boys to
collect postage-stamps; they are invariably stolen.”
“Or why anybody wants to collect them?” suggested Angela. “Some of
them are quite pretty, of course. But I’ve no patience with all this
pedantry about the exact date of issue and the exact shape of the
water-mark. But I suppose the water-mark helps you in your
investigations, Mr. Pulteney?”
“I am hardly professional enough for that. I leave that to the
philatelist. A philatelist, by the way, means one who loves the
absence of taxes. It hardly seems to mark out the stamp-lover from his
fellows.”
“The detectives of fiction,” put in Leyland, “are always getting
important clues from the water-mark of the paper on which some cryptic
document is written, That is where they have the luck. If you pick up
the next four pieces of paper you see, and hold them up to the light,
you will probably find that three of them have no water-mark at all.”
“I know,” said Angela. “And I used to be told, when I was small, that
every genuine piece of silver had a lion stamped on it. But of course
they haven’t really. I should think it’s quite likely the wrist-watch
you gave me, Miles dear, has no lion on it.” She took it off as she
spoke. “Or it must be a teeny-weeny one if there is.”
“I think you’re wrong there, Mrs. Bredon.” It was Brinkman who offered
the correction. “If you’ll allow me to have a look at it. . . . There,
up there; it’s a little rubbed away, but it’s a lion all right.”
“I thought there always was a lion,” said Bredon, taking out a silver
pencil-case with some presence of mind. “Yes, this has got two, one
passant and one cabinet size.”
“Let’s see your watch, Mr. Leyland,” suggested Angela, “or is it
electro?”
“It should be silver; yes, there’s the little chap.” Immediately
afterward, Angela was rewarded by seeing Pulteney take a silver
cigarette-case out of his pocket, and handing it over to her. “It’ll
be on the inside of this, I suppose? Oh, no, it’s all gilt stuff; yes,
I see, here it is on the outside.” It is to be feared that she added
“Damn!” under her breath; the cigarette-case had been empty.
“I seem to be the only poor man present,” said Brinkman; “I am all
gun-metal.”
Angela did not trouble to influence the conversation further until the
“shape” course was finished. Then, rather desperately, she said, “Do
smoke, Mr. Leyland, I know you’re dying to. What is a detective
without his shag?” and was rewarded by seeing Brinkman take out the
gun-metal case and light up. Mr. Pulteney, after verifying his own
cigarettelessness, began slowly to fill a briar.
Brinkman’s cigarette, she had seen, was the last in the case; what if
it should be the last of its box or of its packet? “I wish I smoked,”
she said. “But if I did I would smoke a pipe; it always looks so
comfortable. Besides, you can shut your eyes and go to sleep with a
pipe, which must be rather dangerous with a cigarette.”
“You’d lose the taste of the pipe if you did,” objected Brinkman.
“It’s an extraordinary thing, how little satisfaction you can get out
of smoking in the dark.”
“Is that really true? I’ve always heard that about taste depending on
sight, and not being able to distinguish one wine from another with
one’s eyes shut. Miles, if I put a handkerchief over your eyes, could
you tell your beer from Mr. Brinkman’s cider? Oo, I say, let’s try!
I’ll give them you in spoonfuls.”
“I’ll shut my eyes, but play fair,” suggested Bredon. The idiocy of
men!
“No, you won’t, you’ll do what you’re told. Anybody got a clean hanky?
Thank you so much, Mr. Leyland. . . . There, that’s right. Now, open
your mouth, but not too wide, or you’ll choke. . . . Which was that?”
“Cider, I thought.”
“It was vinegar, really, with a little water in it.”
“Oh, shut up, that’s not fair.” Miles tore away the handkerchief from
his eyes. “Hang it all, I won’t strut; I’m a married man!”
“Then Mr. Brinkman shall try instead; you will, won’t you, Mr.
Brinkman?” It is to be feared that Angela favoured him with an
appealing look; at any rate, he succumbed. With the instinct of the
blindfolded man, he put his cigarette down on the edge of his plate.
It was easy work for Angela to drop the spoon, and set Mr. Pulteney
grovelling for it. Meanwhile, she hastily picked up Brinkman’s
cigarette, and read the word “Callipoli.”