To Peter Blakeney, Rosemary Fowkes' engagement to his friend Tarkington seemed not only incredible, but impossible. The end of the world! Death! Annihilation! Hell! Anything!
But it could not be true.
He was playing at Lord's that day; Tarkington told him the news at the luncheon interval, and Peter had thought for the moment that for once in his life Tarkington must be drunk. But Tarkington looked just as he always did—grave, impassive, and wonderfully kind. Indeed, he seemed specially kind just then. Perhaps he knew. Perhaps Rosemary had told him. Women were so queer. Perhaps she did tell Tarkington that he, Peter, had once been fool enough to——
Anyway, Tarkington was sober, and very grave and kind, and he told Peter in his quiet, unemotional way that he considered himself the happiest man on God's earth. Of course he was, if Rosemary——But it was impossible! Impossible! IMPOSSIBLE!
That afternoon Peter hit many boundaries, and at the end of play was 148 not out.
In the evening he went to the Five Arts' Ball at the Albert Hall. He knew that Rosemary would be there; he had designed the dress she would be wearing, and Tarkington told him, sometime during that afternoon, that he was taking his fiancée to the ball.
His fiancée! Dear old Tarkington! So kind, so unemotional! Rosemary's husband presently! Ye gods!
At the Albert Hall ball Peter wore that beautiful Hungarian national dress that had belonged to his grandfather, a wonderful dress of semi-barbaric splendour, with the priceless fifteenth-century jewellery which he had inherited from his mother—the buttons, the sword-belt, the clasp for the mantle—they had been in the Heves family ever since it was fashioned by Florentine workmen imported into Hungary by a mediæval queen. Peter dressed himself with the greatest care. If a thing was worth doing at all, it was worth doing well, and Rosemary had said once that she would like to see him in the dress.
But during that hot afternoon at Lord's, while he dressed, and now inside the crowded, stuffy Albert Hall, Peter did not feel as if he were really alive. He did not feel like a personage in a dream, he only felt that the world as he had seen it since luncheon time, was not a real world. Someone had invented something altogether new in opposition to the Creator, and he, Peter, being no longer alive, was permitted a private view of the novelty.
It appeared to be a very successful novelty. At any rate, the numberless puppets who raised shrill voices so that Peter might hear what they said, all declared that this ball was incontestably the most successful function of the season.
Just as in the real world, Peter thought, where every function is always incontestably the most successful function of the season.
Other shrill voices declared in Peter's hearing that this function had been more than usually well-managed. It had been splendidly advertised, and the tickets had sold like the proverbial hot cakes.
And Peter was quite sure that somewhere in the dead, forgotten world of long ago he had heard such an expression of opinion over and over again.
Anyway, in this Albert Hall of the newly invented world things were much as they had been in the old. It was crowded. At one time there was hardly room enough to move, let alone to dance. Certain contortions of the body being called dancing, now as then, and certain demoniacal sounds made on hellish instruments by gentlemen of colour being called dance music, the floor of the hall, raised to the level of the lower-tier boxes, was given over to the performance of various gyrations more or less graceful, whilst Peter looked on, strangely familiar with this new world of unrealities, which had only been invented a few hours ago, when Tarkington told him of his engagement to Rosemary Fowkes.
He knew just how it would be!
In to-morrow's issue of the Morning Star or the Talk of the Town, the thousands who gyrated here or who looked on at the gyrations of others would be referred to as being "also present."
He, Peter Blakeney, the famous cricketer and distinguished V.C., would be referred to as being "also present," and there would be a photograph of him with a set grin on his face and his eyes staring out of his head like those of a lunatic at large, in all the illustrated weeklies. This was as it should be. It was well worth paying two guineas (supper included) for the privilege of being referred to as "also present" in this distinguished company of puppets that included both home and foreign royalties.
Of course there were others, the select few who would be referred to in the columns of the Morning Star or the Talk of the Town with charming familiarity as Lord Algy Fitznoodle, or Miss Baby Tomkins, or simply as Lady Poots or Lord Tim.
"While I was chatting with Lady Poots, etc."
"Lady Vi Dartmouth, with her beautiful hair shingled, etc., etc."
"The Marchioness of Flint came with her girls, etc."
All of which Peter knew by intuition would be vastly interesting to the suburban little madams who read the Talk of the Town in this world of unrealities, and he was willing to leave it at that, well knowing that the puppets named Miss Baby or Lady Vi would not think of being absent from the Five Arts' Ball. It was the acme of smartness, of Bohemian smartness, that is to say: the smartness of Chelsea and fashionable studios, which is so much smarter than the smartness of Mayfair.
And Peter—a kind of disembodied Peter—watched the throng. Ye gods! what a motley and a medley!
Polychromatic and kaleidoscopic, iridescent and prismatic, ceaselessly on the move, mercurial, restless, ever stirring, fluttering fans, fingering clothes, adjusting coiffures, lapels, frills, hair-ornaments and feathers! And talking! Talking incessantly, with voices hard and high-pitched trying to rise above other voices that were harder and higher of pitch. Dazzling to eye and ear; exciting to nerves and sense, the atmosphere a mixture of odours: of powders, cosmetics, perfumes, heat, gas, and a score of other indefinable scents.
The picture quite brilliant; not without touches of unconscious humour: Marie Antoinette flirting with Robespierre, Russian moujik in familiar converse with a jewelled Catherine, Queen Elizabeth condescending to pre-historic man. And then Pierrots, Pierrots everywhere, of every conceivable motley and shape. Blue Pierrots and yellow Pierrots! white or black, purple with orange frills, and orange with purple frills, black skull caps and tall white peaks. Pierrots of satin, and Pierrots of gingham! Cool and active! Ye gods! how active! Bohemian smartness, it seems, demanded that its Pierrots should be bright and amusing and active.
From his point of vantage on the floor of the hall Peter scanned the semicircle of boxes where sat more puppets, hundreds of them, watching the thousands down below.
What was the good of them? Peter thought. Why had God made them? What use were they in this new world which some wanton sprite had fashioned in opposition to the Creator? They fluttered their fans, they laughed, they jabbered, and did not seem to know that they, just like Peter, had become unreal and disembodied at the precise moment when Rosemary Fowkes promised to become Jasper Tarkington's wife.
And then suddenly the puppets all faded away. The new world ceased to be, there was no hall, no dancing, no music, no more puppets, no more Pierrots. There was only Rosemary, and she came up to Peter and said quite gaily, naturally, in a voice that belonged to the old world, not the new:
"Won't you ask me to dance, Peter?"
After that—well, dancing permits, necessitates, holding the partner in one's arm. And Peter danced with Rosemary.