He was a pitiable object.
'I'm awfully sorry,' I said.
'Do you mind if I tell you about it?'
'No.'
It was not the moment for many words.
I suppose Carruthers was in the early forties.
He was a well-made man, athletic in his way, and with a confident bearing.
Now he looked twenty years older and strangely shrivelled.
He reminded me of the dead soldiers I had seen during the war and how oddly small death had made them.
I was embarrassed and looked away, but I felt his eyes claiming mine and I looked back.
'Do you know Betty Welldon-Burns?' he asked me.
'I used to meet her sometimes in London years ago.
I've not seen her lately.'
'She lives in Rhodes now, you know.
I've just come from there.
I've been staying with her.'
'Oh?'
He hesitated.
'I'm afraid you'll think it awfully strange of me to talk to you like this.
I'm at the end of my tether.
If I don't talk to somebody I shall go off my head.'
He had ordered double brandies with the coffee and now calling the waiter he ordered himself another.
We were alone in the lounge.
There was a little shaded lamp on the table between us.
Because it was a public room he spoke in a low voice.
The place gave one oddly enough a sense of intimacy.
I cannot repeat all that Carruthers said to me in the words he said it; it would be impossible for me to remember them; it is more convenient for me to put it in my own fashion.
Sometimes he could not bring himself to say a thing right out and I had to guess at what he meant.
Sometimes he had not understood, and it seemed to me that in certain ways I saw the truth more clearly than he.
Betty Welldon-Burns had a very keen sense of humour and he had none.
I perceived a good deal that had escaped him.
I had met her a good many times, but I knew her chiefly from hearsay.
In her day she had made a great stir in the little world of London and I had heard of her often before I met her.
This was at a dance in Portland Place soon after the war.
She was then already at the height of her celebrity.
You could not open an illustrated paper without seeing in it a portrait of her, and her mad pranks were a staple of conversation.
She was twenty-four.
Her mother was dead, her father, the Duke of St Erth, old and none too rich, spent most of the year in his Cornish castle and she lived in London with a widowed aunt.
At the outbreak of the war she went to France.
She was just eighteen.
She was a nurse in a hospital at the Base and then drove a car.
She acted in a theatrical tour designed to amuse the troops; she posed in tableaux at home for charitable purposes, held auctions for this object and that, and sold flags in Piccadilly.
Every one of her activities was widely advertised and in every new role she was profusely photographed.
I suppose that she managed to have a very good time.
But now that the war was over she was having her fling with a vengeance.
Just then everybody a little lost his head.
The young, relieved of the burden that for five years had oppressed them, indulged in one wild escapade after another.
Betty took part in them all.
Sometimes, for one reason or another, an account of them found its way into the newspapers and her name was always in the headlines.
At that time night clubs were in the first flush of their success and she was to be seen at them every night.