“Absolutely right,” said the Lieutenant, champing a third peppermint patty.
“I do not quite ante-date the telephone,” said Mrs Bridgetower, “but in my youth it was employed with a keener discretion than is the case today.”
Meanwhile Solly, with the receiver at his ear, was listening to Humphrey Cobbler.
“Hello there, Bridgetower, what about coming to see me tonight?”
“Can’t. It’s the night of the Ball, you know.”
“What Ball? Oh, that thing. Well, you don’t want to go to that, do you?”
“Of course I do.”
“You amaze me. Oh, I suppose you’re protecting your interests, eh?”
“I do not understand you.”
“The hell you say. She’s going with Tasset, isn’t she?”
“I believe so.”
“And who, if I may ask, are you escorting to this dreary brawl?”
“Miss Vambrace.”
“Who’s she?”
“Miranda in the play.”
“Oh, her. Can’t say I know her. She doesn’t sing, does she?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, find out before you do anything silly. Remember my advice; take a woman with a good big mezzo range every time. Listen, how would it be if I came with you?”
“No.”
“I’ve got a dress suit.”
“You have no invitation.”
“A formality. We artists are welcome at all doors.”
“No; it wouldn’t do.”
“I could carry a fiddle case; pretend I belonged to the orchestra.”
“No.”
“Don’t you think you’re being just a teeny-weeny tidge snobbish and class-conscious?”
“No.”
“Very well, then; sweep on in your fine carriage over the faces of the humble poor. There’ll come a day…You don’t want to reconsider?”
“No.”
“Can’t you say anything but no?”
“No.”
“Very well then. Go ahead; plunge into a maelstrom of gaiety. And God forbid that, when the revel is at its height, your merriment should be dampened by thought of me, crouched over a dead fire in my sordid home, drinking gin out of a cracked cup.”
“God forbid, indeed.”
“In poverty, hunger and dirt.”
“As you say.”
“Well—good-bye.”
“Good-bye.”
The cards of invitation specified that the Ball would begin at nine o’clock. To Hector’s precise mind, unattuned to elegant delay, it was therefore important that he should appear upon the stroke of nine, and he was dressed in his hired evening suit by half-past eight. He was not happy about the suit. It was not the cut or the fit that bothered him, for he was not pernickety about such things; it was, rather, the material of which the suit was made; this was a face-cloth, which time had rendered not merely smooth, but slippery. The way in which the coat cut away to the tails, and the shortness of the tails themselves, seemed to him to be not quite right, but he assumed that there were many styles in evening coats. The old man from whom he had rented the suit had assured him that it was a splendid fit, and that he looked like a prince in it. There had been no white waistcoat to go with the suit, so Hector had purchased a smart one for himself, as well as a collar, a stiff shirt and a tie which was conveniently tied already, and fastened at the back with a secret hook. The obvious newness of his linen, he hoped, would take the eye of society from the curious shininess of his suit.
By a quarter to nine he was in the hall of the YMCA, waiting for his taxi. It was prompt to the minute, and at precisely five minutes to nine he found himself at the Ball.
Nobody was on hand to receive him. Nobody asked for his card of invitation. On a dais at one end of the room the band was chatting, and a couple of orderlies in the gallery were arranging chairs. There was no one else to be seen. Turning from the hushed splendour of the empty ballroom Hector sought and found a door marked “Gentlemen”; it was dark, quiet and comforting in there, and he settled himself to wait.
It was not a happy choice of a hiding place, for although nothing could be more natural than his presence there, and nothing less likely than that any official person, finding him, would ask to see his card of invitation, it was a retreat with humiliating associations for him. Was it not behind a similar door, similarly marked, that he had taken refuge so many years ago, at the Normal School “At Home”?
Here, in the darkness, he could not escape that recollection. Time had somewhat blunted the edge of it, and he had got into the habit of pushing it down into the depths of his mind whenever it troubled him, but tonight he was without defence. Sweating slightly, he faced the fact that he had made a fool of himself at the “At Home”, and that it was possible that he might make a fool of himself again at the Ball, and for a similar reason.
Hector had been a prominent figure in his year at the Normal School. By the time the annual “At Home” was due he was easily the leader among the young men of the class. Had he not been chosen by popular vote as “Student Most Likely to Become Deputy Minister of Education”? And as such he was the obvious person to invite Millicent Maude McGuckin to be his partner at the “At Home”. For in the atmosphere of the Normal School the cleverest boy and the cleverest girl were expected to appear together at this function; like crowned heads when a royal marriage is in prospect, they had little personal choice in the matter; their academic position determined their relationship to one another, and if either happened to have a morganatic attachment to some less brilliant member of the class, that unworthy affection had to be suppressed for the evening of the “At Home”.
Of those girls of Hector’s generation whom the chaste goddess of Primary Education called to her shrine, Millicent Maude McGuckin was the fairest and most proud. She wore glasses, it is true, but behind them her eyes were brown as the waters of a Highland stream. Her upper teeth were, perhaps, more prominent than those of the insipid stars of Hollywood, but they gave a swelling pride to her upper lip, and formed her mouth into a pout which fairly ached for kisses. Her curly hair was chestnut brown; her skin was dark and sweetly flushed over her cheeks. It was a time when the female bosom was rising again from the flatness to which the ‘twenties had condemned it, and Millicent Maude McGuckin’s bosom, swelling gently under the stimulus of a good mark on a test in Classroom Management, or heaving proudly in a debate on “Resolved: That Country Children Are Culturally Handicapped In Comparison With City Children” was a thing to make tears of ecstasy sting the eyeballs. The bosom was coming in, but the stress upon the female leg which was so characteristic of the ‘twenties had not diminished, and in this department of womanly beauty, too, Millicent Maude McGuckin was richly dowered.
ran a song popular at the time. The answer in her case was a breathless affirmative from all the young men of her year at the Normal School.
It was never doubted that Hector would escort her to the “At Home”. It would be his duty to call for her at her boarding house, walk her to the school, dance the first and last dances with her, squire her at supper and assist the Principal and staff in greeting the guests. But Hector boasted that he would do more. It must be remembered that he had never mixed on easy terms with boys and girls of his own age before he went to the Normal School, and his quick success there went a little to his head. He boasted to a group of other male students that in the Moonlight Waltz he would kiss Millicent Maude McGuckin. They expressed vehement and brassy doubt that he would do any such thing. He reaffirmed his intention; indeed, he took bets on it. It was the only time in his life that he bet on anything, and as it was himself, he considered it a certainty.
The night of the “At Home” came. Hector’s courage was shaky when he called for Miss McGuckin, for he scarcely knew her, and when she tripped down the stairs of her boarding house in a blue frock, looking more lovely than would be thought possible in the light of the ruby lamp which hung there, he wondered if he had not dared too much. This was not a girl to Get Fresh with, he thought. This girl was a Sweet Girl now, and the only change in her condition which was at all thinkable was the change to Wife and Mother. That he should debauch her, by so much as a single kiss, was an unnerving thought. To Hector a kiss was no trivial matter. He had never kissed anyone but his mother, and he had an unformed but insistent notion that a kiss was, among honest people, as binding as a proposal of marriage. And in his scheme of planning and common sense, marriage had as yet no place. Yet he ached to kiss her. He wanted to kiss her without being prepared to marry her. He was shocked and at the same time sneakingly proud of this voluptuousness in himself.