Страница 53 из 68
“Take care of her, Bridgetower; take care of our little one,” said the Professor in a voice half jocular, half tearful. “It is the father’s heart which is broken at his daughter’s first ball.” This notion, he thought, was worthy of Barrie, and he was proud of it. He kissed Pearl, with his eyes shut, which may have been as well, and shortly afterward she was with Solly in his mother’s car. He said very little, and seemed to Pearl to be strangely apprehensive, but as she shared this feeling she decided that he, like herself, was worried about the evening before them.
“Good evening, my dear. You look sweetly pretty,” said Mrs Bridgetower, as she greeted Pearl in the hall. But Pearl could scarcely answer; she caught sight of herself in a full-length mirror. She looked ill and slightly crazed, with a pink bow on one side of her head, and her eyes aglare. The flush of tuberculosis was on her cheeks, and her mouth looked as though she had eaten untidily of the insane root which takes the reason prisoner.
And her gown! It looked like one of the crepe paper costumes which children wear at Hallowe’en. What should she do? What could she possibly do?
“Hello, Pearl! Gosh, anything for a laugh, eh? That’s the spirit!” The speaker was Bo
Pearl was stricken. When her hostess suggested that she leave her coat upstairs, she darted upward in unmistakable flight, without waiting for Ada, the elderly maid, to show her the way.
The Torso was a silly girl, and a hoyden, and unseemly in her desire for the attentions of the male. But like many silly, hoydenish, man-crazy girls, she had a great charity within her. One of her admirers had said that she had “a heart as big as a bull”, and if this special enlargement carries with it a certain sweetness and generosity of nature, the phrase may be allowed to stand. She ran up the stairs after Pearl. What she did ca
Mrs Bridgetower’s di
The Torso, however, was a girl of a great resource. She knew that the mothers of young men rarely liked her on sight, though she was not sure why this was so, and she had developed a ma
Lieutenant Swackhammer, too, was a success. He had a fund of small talk, and although he had lived inland for the first eighteen years of his life, he had subsequently developed a bluff, sailorly, salt-water ma
With such guests as these, Mrs Bridgetower blossomed. The Torso laughed at all her ironies, and whenever The Torso laughed, Lieutenant Swackhammer laughed too. Pearl Vambrace, though apt to be silent, was respectful and behaved nicely, and when she did speak, she said something sensible, and said it in a neatly rounded sentence, of which her hostess approved. In the atmosphere of success, Solly brightened up, and poured out the wine with a generosity begotten of relief.
The meal was a long and heavy one, and concluded with special glasses of ice-cream, into which a spoonful of crême de menthe had been injected, like a venom; with this, chocolate peppermint patties were served and Pearl, who was unaccustomed to rich food, began to feel a little unwell and sleepy. It was at this point that Ada a
“The telephone is the curse of the age,” said Mrs Bridgetower; “even our after-di
“Oh, how right you are,” said Bo
“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.”