Yes, that was it: Sir Joseph and Lady Webling were protesting too well and too much. Marie Louise hated herself for even the disloyalty of such a criticism of them, but she was repelled somehow by such rhetoric, and she liked far better the dour silence of old Mr. Verrinder. He looked a bishop who had got into a layman’s evening dress by mistake. He was something very impressive and influential in the government, nobody knew just what.
Marie Louise liked still better than Verrinder’s silence 20 the distracted muttering and stammering of a young English aviator, the Marquess of Strathdene, who was recuperating from wounds and was going up in the air rapidly on the Webling champagne. He was maltreating his bread and throwing in champagne with an apparent eagerness for the inevitable result. Before he grew quite too thick to be understood, he groaned to himself, but loudly enough to be heard the whole length and breadth of the table: “I remember readin’ about old Greek witch name Circe––changed human beings into shape of swine. I wonder who turned those German swine into the shape of human beings.”
Marie Louise noted that Lady Webling was shocked––by the vulgarity, no doubt. “Swine” do not belong in dining-room language––only in the platters or the chairs. Marie Louise caught an angry look also in the eye of Nicholas Easton, though he, too, had been incisive in his comments on the theme of the dinner. His English had been uncannily correct, his phrases formal with the exactitude of a book on syntax or the dialogue of a gentleman in a novel. But he also was drinking too much, and as his lips fuddled he had trouble with a very formal “without which.” It resulted first as “veetowit veech,” then as “whidthout witch.” He made it on the third trial.
Marie Louise, turning her eyes his way in wonder, encountered two other glances moving in the same direction. Lady Webling looked anxious, alarmed. Mr. Verrinder’s gaze was merely studious. Marie Louise felt an odd impression that Lady Webling was sending a kind of heliographic warning, while the look of Mr. Verrinder was like a search-light that studies and registers, then moves away.
Marie Louise disliked Easton more and more, but Lady Webling kept recommending him with her solicitous manner toward him. She made several efforts, too, to shift the conversation from the Lusitania; but it swung always back. Much bewilderment was expressed because the ship was not protected by a convoy. Many wondered why she was where she was when she was struck, and how she came to take that course at all.
Lady Clifton-Wyatt, who had several friends on board and was uncertain of their fate, was unusually fierce in blaming 21 the government. She always blamed it for everything, when it was Liberal. And now she said:
“It was nothing short of murder to have left the poor ship to steal in by herself without protection. Whatever was the Admiralty thinking of? If the Cabinet doesn’t fall for this, we might as well give up.”
The Liberals present acknowledged her notorious prejudices with a sigh of resignation. But the Marquess of Strathdene rolled a foggy eye and a foggy tongue in answer:
“Darlling llady, there must have been war-ships waitin’ to convoy the Lusitania; but she didn’t come to rendezvous because why? Because some filthy Zherman gave her a false wireless and led her into a trap.”
This amazing theory with its drunken inspiration of plausibility startled the whole throng. It set eyeballs rolling in all directions like a break in a game of pool. Everybody stared at Strathdene, then at somebody else. Marie Louise’s racing gaze noted that Mr. Verrinder’s eyes went slowly about again, studying everybody except Strathdene.