A WATERLOO BALL
On this Sunday evening, the day before her ball, Dodo had been engaged
to dine at the German Embassy, but just as she was on her way upstairs
to dress, a message had come, putting off the dinner owing to the
Ambassador's sudden indisposition. Jack was dining elsewhere, so Dodo,
not at all ill-pleased to have an evening at home, secured Edith
Arbuthnot to keep her company. She had caught Edith on her return from
her golf at Mid-Surrey, and she soon arrived in large boots with three
golf-balls and a packet of peppermint bull's-eyes in her pocket, and an
amazing appetite. As Dodo had not waited to hear her Mass at St. Paul's
that morning, Edith consoled her after dinner by playing the greater
part of it on the piano, singing solo passages in a rich hoarse voice
that ranged from treble to baritone, with a bull's-eye tucked away in
her cheek where it looked like some enormous abscess on a tooth. When no
solo was going on she imitated the sounds of violin and bassoon and
'cello with great fidelity, and when it was over she arranged round her
cigarettes, bull's-eyes and a mug of beer, put her feet up on a chair of
Genoese brocade and lamented the frivolous complications of life. She
took as her text the insane multiplicity of balls; since the beginning
of June they had been like the stars on a clear night for multitude, and
every evening from Monday till Friday three or four had bespangled the
firmament. In spite of her general modernity, Edith was laudably
Victorian in regard to her maternal duties, and considered it incumbent
on her to chaperone her daughter wherever she went. As Madge was a firm,
tireless girl, who got no more fatigued with revolving than does the
earth, and as Edith wanted to marry her off wisely and well as soon as
possible, she had of late seen as many dawns as the driver of a
night-express.
"The whole thing is insane," she said. "We take a girl to balls every
night in order that as many young men as possible may see her and give
her lobster-salad and put their arms round her waist in the hopes that
one of them may want to marry her and take her away from her mother."
"You leave out the dancing," interrupted Dodo. "Dancing takes place at
balls."
"To a small extent, but the other is the real reason of them. Besides
you can't call it dancing when everybody merely strolls backwards and
forwards and yawns. It would be far more sensible to have a
well-conducted marriage-market at the Albert Hall, under the supervision
of a bishop and a countess of unimpeachable morals. The girls would sit
in rows mending socks and making puddings, with tickets round their
necks shewing what they asked and offered by way of marriage
settlements, also their age and a medical certificate as to their
general health and temper. Then the boys would go round and each would
taste their puddings and see how they sewed and have a little
conversation, and look at the ticket and find out if Miss Anna Maria was
within his means. Those are the qualities that really make for happy
marriages, pleasant talk and cooking and needlework. The market would be
open from ten to one every day except perhaps Saturday. Instead of
which," concluded Edith indignantly, "I have to sit up till dawn every
night with a host of weary hags, who are all longing to take off their
tiaras and their hair, and tumble into bed."
"Have a chaperone-strike instead," said Dodo. "You'll never get boys to
go to the Albert Hall in the morning. Besides, no one ever got engaged
in cold blood. But I really should recommend a chaperone-strike. It
isn't as if chaperones were the smallest good; no girl who wants to
flirt is the least incommoded by her chaperone, nor does the chaperone
take her away till she feels inclined to go. Get up an influential
committee, and arrange a procession to Hyde Park, with banners
embroidered with 'We won't go to more than five balls a week' and
'Shorter night-shifts for mothers.' 'We will go home before morning.'
I'll join that, for I do the work of half a dozen mothers who haven't so
fine a sense of duty as you. Or why shouldn't fathers take their turn
and chaperone boys instead? Girls don't want any chaperoning nowadays,
boys are much more defenceless. In a few years chaperones will be as
extinct as--as Dodos."
Edith refreshed herself in various ways, finishing up with a crashing
peppermint.
"I shall revolt next year," she said, "for I won't go through another
season like this. Dodo, does it ever strike you that we're all mad this
year? We're behaving as we behave when the ice is breaking up, and we
will have one minute more skating. Thank goodness your ball to-morrow is
the last, and there positively isn't another one the same night. There
were to have been two so I thought I should have had to take Madge to
three, but they have both been cancelled. I suppose it was found that
everyone would stop all night at yours."
"I hope so," said Dodo greedily. "It's delicious to make other
competitors scratch on your reputation."
Edith pointed an accusing finger at her.
"Now you've said competitors," she announced. "What's the competition?
What's this insane will-o'-the-wisp that's being hunted?"
Dodo considered this direct and simple question.
"Oh, it's an art," she said. "It's a competition to see who can give
most pleasure to the greatest number of people. That sounds as if it
were something to do with a fine moral quality, but I don't claim that
for it. It's partly a competition in success too, and Grantie, the sour
old angel, would say that it is a competition in imbecile expenditure,
and just for two minutes I should agree with her."
Dodo gave a great sigh, and shifted the subject of the conversation a
little.
"And it concerns burning candles at both ends and in the middle," she
said, "and seeing how many candles you can keep alight. It's squeezing
things in, and don't you know what a joy that always is, even when it
concerns nothing more than packing a bag and squeezing in something
extra which your maid says won't go in anyhow, my lady?"
"My maid never says that," remarked Edith. "I'm a plain ma'am."
"The principle is the same, darling, however plain you are. Life in
London is like that. We are all trying to squeeze something else into
it, and to extract the last drop of what life has to give. You are just
the same, with your bull's-eyes and your beer and your golfing-boots and
your cigarettes. You're making the most of it, too. What will our
luggage look like when it comes to be unpacked at the other end?"
"I don't care what mine looks like," said Edith. "I only do things
because I think it's right for me to do them."
"My dear, how noble! But isn't it faintly possible that you may be
mistaken?" asked Dodo. "You seem to think it right to cover that chair
with large flakes of mud from your boots, but I'm not sure that it is.
Oh, my dear, don't move your feet; I only took that as the first
instance that occurred to me. Naturally, we don't deliberately do what
we believe to be wrong, but then that's because we none of us ever stop
to consider whether it is. When we want a thing we go and take it, and
only wonder afterwards whether we should have done so."
"If you wonder afterwards whether you should have done anything," said
Edith austerely, "it means that you shouldn't."
"Oh, I don't agree. It probably means that you are not certain that you
wouldn't have enjoyed yourself more wanting it, than getting it. Nothing
is really as nice when you have got it--I'm talking of small things, of
course--as you thought it was going to be. Acquisition always brings a
certain disillusionment, or if not quite that, you very soon get used to
what you have got."
Again Edith pointed an accusing finger at her.
"That's the worst of you," she said. "You have a fatal facility. You
have always got what you meant to get. You've never had to struggle.
Probably that means that you have never had high enough aims. What will
the world say about you in forty years?"
"Darling, it may say exactly what it pleases. If in forty years' time
there is anybody left who remembers me at all, and he tells the truth,
he will say that I enjoyed myself quite enormously. But why be
posthumous? Have another peppermint and tell me about your golf."
Edith did not have any more peppermints, so she took a cigarette
instead.
"I have a feeling that we are all going to be posthumous with regard to
our present lives long before we are dead," she remarked. "We can't go
on like this."
"I don't see the slightest reason for not doing so," said Dodo. "I
remember we talked about it one night at Winston when you fished in my
tea-gown."
"I know, and the feeling has been growing on me ever since. There have
been a lot of straws lately shewing the set of the tide."
"Which is just what straws don't do," said Dodo. "Straws float on the
surface, and move about with any tiny puff of air. Anyhow, what straws
do you mean? Produce your straws."
She paused a moment.
"I wonder if I can produce some for you," she said. "As you know, I was
to have dined with the Germans to-night and was put off. Is that a
straw? Then, again, Jack told me something this evening about an
Austrian ultimatum to Servia. Do those shew the tide you speak of?"
"You know it yourself," said Edith. "We're on the brink of the
stupendous catastrophe, and we're quite unprepared, and we won't attend
even now. We shall be swept off the face of the earth, and if I could
buy the British Empire to-day for five shillings I wouldn't pay it."
Dodo got up.
"Darling, I seem to feel that you lost your match at golf this
afternoon," she said. "You are always severe and posthumous and
pessimistic if that happens. Didn't you lose, now?"
"It happens that I did, but that's got nothing to do with it."
"You might just as well say that if you hit me hard in the face," said
Dodo, "and I fell down, my falling down would have nothing to do with
your hitting me."
"And you might just as well say that your dinner was put off this
evening because the Ambassador really was ill," retorted Edith.
* * * * *
Dodo woke next morning to a pleasant sense of a multiplicity of affairs
that demanded her attention. There was a busy noise of hammering in the
garden outside her window, for though she was the happy possessor of one
of the largest ballrooms in London, the list of acceptances to her ball
that night had furnished so unusual a percentage of her invitations,
that it had been necessary to put an immense marquee against the end of
the ballroom fitted with a swinging floor to accommodate her guests. The
big windows opening to the ground had been removed altogether, and
there would be plenty of rhythmical noise for everybody. At the other
end of the ballroom was a raised dais with seats for the mighty, which
had to have a fresh length put on to it, so numerous had the mighty
become. Then the tables for the dinner that preceded the ball must be
re-arranged altogether, since Prince Albert, whom Dodo had not meant to
ask to dine at all, had cadged so violently on the telephone through his
equerry on Sunday afternoon for an invitation, that Dodo had felt
obliged to ask him and his wife. But when flushed with this success he
had begun to ask whether there would be bisque soup, as he had so well
remembered it at Winston, Dodo had replied icily that he would get what
was given him.
These arrangements had taken time, but she finished with them soon after
eleven, and was on her way to her motor which had been waiting for the
last half-hour when a note was brought her with an intimation that it
was from Prince Albert.
"If he says a word more about bisque soup," thought Dodo, as she tore it
open, "he shall have porridge."
But the contents of it were even more enraging. The Prince profoundly
regretted, in the third person, that matters of great importance
compelled him and the Princess to leave London that day, and that he
would therefore be unable to honour himself by accepting her invitation.
"And he besieged me for an invitation only yesterday," she said to Jack,
"and I've changed the whole table. Darling, tell them to alter
everything back again to what it was. Beastly old fat thing! Really
Germans have no manners.... Daddy has been encouraging him too much. If
he rings up again say we're all dead."
Dodo instantly recovered herself as she drove down Piccadilly. The
streets were teeming with happy, busy people, and she speedily felt
herself the happiest and busiest of them all. She had to go to her
dressmakers to see about some gowns for Goodwood, and others for Cowes;
she had to go to lunch somewhere at one in order to be in time for a
wedding at two, she had to give half an hour to an artist who was
painting her portrait, and look in at a garden party. Somehow or other,
apparently simultaneously, she was due at the rehearsal of a new Russian
ballet, and she had definitely promised to attend a lecture in a remote
part of Chelsea on the development of the sub-conscious self. Then she
was playing bridge at a house in Berkeley Square--what a pity she could
not listen to the lecture about the sub-conscious self while she was
being dummy--and it was positively necessary to call at Carlton House
Terrace and enquire after the German Ambassador. This latter errand had
better be done at once, and then she could turn her mind to the task of
simplifying the rest of the day.
There were entrancing distractions all round. She was caught in a block
exactly opposite the Ritz Hotel, and cheek to jowl with her motor was
that of the Prime Minister, and she told him he would be late for his
Cabinet meeting. He got out of the block first by shewing an ivory
ticket, and Dodo consoled herself for not being equally well-equipped by
seeing a large flimsy portmanteau topple off a luggage trolley which was
being loaded opposite the Ritz. It had a large crown painted on the end
of it in scarlet, with an "A" below, and it needed but a moment's
conjecture to feel sure that it belonged to Prince Albert. Whatever was
the engagement that made him leave London so suddenly, it necessitated
an immense amount of luggage, for the trolley was full of boxes with
crowns and As to distinguish them. The fall had burst open the flimsy
portmanteau, and shirts and socks and thick underwear were being picked
off the roadway.... Dodo wondered as her motor moved on again if he was
going to quarter himself on her father for the remainder of his stay in
England.
A few minutes later she drew up at the door of the German Embassy, and
sent her footman with her card to make enquiries. Even as he rang the
bell, the door opened, and Prince Albert was shewn out by the
Ambassador. The two shook hands, and the Prince came down the three
steps, opposite which Dodo's motor was drawn up. It was open, there
could have been no doubt about his seeing her, but it struck her that
his intention was to walk away without appearing to notice her. That, of
course, was quite impermissible.
"Bisque soup," she said by way of greeting. "And me scouring London for
lobsters."
He gave the sort of start that a dramatic rhinoceros might be expected
to give, if it intended to carry the impression that it was surprised.
"Ah, Lady Dodo," said he. "Is it indeed you? I am heartbroken at not
coming to your house to-night. But the Princess has to go into the
country; there was no getting out of it. So sad. Also, we shall make a
long stay in the country; I do not know when we shall get back. I will
take your humble compliments to the Princess, will I not? I will take
also your regrets that you will not have the honour to receive her
to-night. And your amiable Papa; I was to have lunched with him to-day,
but now instead I go into the country. And also, I will step along. _Auf
wiedersehen_, Lady Dodo."
Suddenly a perfect shower of fresh straws seemed to join those others
which she and Edith had spoken about last night, and they all moved the
same way. There was the note which she had received half an hour ago
saying that the Prince could not accept the invitation he had so
urgently asked for; there was the fact of those piles of luggage leaving
the Ritz; there was his call this morning at the German Embassy, above
all there was his silence as to where he was going and his obvious
embarrassment at meeting her. The tide swept them all along together,
and she felt she knew for certain what his destination was.
"Good-bye, sir," she said. "I hope you'll have a pleasant crossing."
He looked at her in some confusion.
"But what crossing do you mean?" he said. "There is no crossing except
the road which now I cross. Ha! There is a good choke, Lady Dodo."
Dodo made her face quite blank.
"Is it indeed?" she said. "I should call it a bad fib."
She turned to her footman who was standing by the carriage door.
"Well?" she said.
"His Excellency is quite well again this morning, my lady," he said.
That too was rather straw-like.
"Drive on," she said.
* * * * *
Just as impulse rather than design governed the greater part of Dodo's
conduct, so intuition rather than logic was responsible for her
conclusions. She had not agreed last night with Edith's reasonings, but
now with these glimpses of her own, she jumped to her deduction, and
landed, so to speak, by Edith's side. As yet there was nothing definite
except the unpublished news of an Austrian ultimatum to Servia, and the
hurried meeting of the Cabinet this morning to warrant grounds for any
real uneasiness as to the European situation generally, nor, as far as
Dodo knew, anything definite or indefinite to connect Germany with that.
But now with the fact that her dinner had been put off last night and
the ambassador was quite well this morning, coupled with her own sudden
intuition that the Allensteins were going back post-haste to Germany,
she leaped to a conclusion that seemed firm to her landing. In a flash
she simply found herself believing that Germany intended to provoke a
European war.... And then characteristically enough, instead of dwelling
for a moment on the menace of this hideous calamity or contemplating the
huge unspeakable nightmare thus unveiled, she found herself exclusively
and entrancedly interested in the situation as it at this moment was.
She expected the entire diplomatic world, German and Austrian included,
at her ball that night; already the telegraph wires between London and
the European capitals must be tingling and twitching with the cypher
messages that flew backwards and forwards over the Austrian ultimatum,
and her eyes danced with anticipation of the swift silent current of
drama that would be roaring under the conventional ice of the mutual
salutations with which diplomatists would greet each other this evening
at her house. Hands unseen were hewing at the foundations of empires,
others were feverishly buttressing and strengthening them, and all the
hours of to-night until dawn brought on another fateful day, those same
hands, smooth and polite, would be crossing in the dance, and the voices
that had been dictating all day the messages with which the balance of
peace and war was weighted, would be glib with little compliments and
airy with light laughter. She felt no doubt that Germans and Austrians
alike would all be there, she felt also that the very strain of the
situation would inspire them with a more elaborate cordiality than
usual. She felt she would respect that; it would be like the well-bred
courtesies that preceded a duel to the death between gentlemen. Prince
Albert, it is true, in his anxiety to get back without delay to his
fortressed fatherland had failed in the amenities, but surely Germany,
the romantic, the chivalrous, the mother of music and science, would,
now and henceforth, whatever the issue might be, prove herself worthy of
her traditions.
Once more Dodo was caught in a block at the top of St. James's street,
and she suddenly made up her mind to stop at the hotel and say good-bye
to Princess Albert. Two motives contributed to this, the first being
that though she and he alike had been very rude throwing her over with
so needless an absence of ceremony and politeness, she had better not
descend to their level; the second, which it must be confessed was far
the stronger, being an overwhelming curiosity to know for certain
whether she was right in her conjecture that they were going to get
behind the Rhine as soon as possible.
Dodo found the Princess sitting in the hall exactly opposite the
entrance, hatted, cloaked, umbrellaed and jewel-bagged, with a
short-sighted but impatient eye on the revolving door, towards which,
whenever it moved, she directed a glance through her lorgnette. As Dodo
came towards her, the Princess turned her head aside, as if, like her
husband, seeking to avoid the meeting. But next moment, even while Dodo
paused aghast at these intolerable manners, she changed her mind, and
dropping her umbrella, came waddling towards her with both hands
outstretched.
"Ah, dear Dodo," she said, "I was wondering, just now I was wondering
what you thought of me! I would have written to you, but Albert said
'No!' Positively he forbade me to write to you, he called on me as his
wife not so to do. Instead he wrote himself, and such a letter too, for
he shewed it me, all in the third person, after he had asked for bisque
soup only yesterday! And I may not say good-bye to your good father or
anyone; you will all think I do not know how to behave, but I know very
well how to behave; it is Albert who is so boor. I am crying, look, I am
crying, and I do not easily cry. We have said good-bye and thank you to
nobody, we are going away like burglars on the tiptoe for fear of being
heard, and it is all Albert's fault. In five minutes had our luggage to
be packed, and there was Albert's new portmanteau which he was so proud
of for its cheapness and made in Germany, bursting and covering
Piccadilly with his pants, is it, that you call them? It was too
screaming. I could have laughed at how he was served right. All Albert's
pants and his new thick vests and his bed-socks being brought in by the
porter and the valets and the waiters, covered with the dust from
Piccadilly!"
"Yes, ma'am, I saw it myself," said Dodo, "when I was passing half an
hour ago."
The Princess was momentarily diverted from the main situation on to this
thrilling topic.
"Ach! Albert would turn purple with shame," she said, "if he knew you
had seen his pants, and yet he is not at all ashamed of running away
like a burglar. That is his Cherman delicacy. 'Your new bed-socks,' I
said to him, 'and your winter vests and your pants you must have made of
them another package. They will not go in your new portmanteau; there is
not room for them, and it is weak. It has to go in the train, and again
it has to go on the boat, and also again in the train.' It is not as if
we but went to Winston--ah, that nice Winston!--but we go to Chermany.
That is what I said, but Albert would not hear. 'By the two o'clock
train we go,' he said, 'and my new vests and my socks and my pants go in
my new Cherman portmanteau which was so cheap and strong.' But now they
cannot go like that, and they will have to go in my water-proof sheet
which was to keep me dry on the boat from the spray, for if I go in the
cabin I am ill. It is all too terrible, and there was no need for us to
go like this. We should have waited till to-morrow, and said good-bye.
Or perhaps if we had gone to-morrow we should not go at all. What has
Chermany to do with Servia, or what has England either? But no, we must
go to-day just because there have been telegrams, and Cousin Willie
says, 'Come back to Allenstein.' And here am I so rude seeming to all my
friends. But one thing I tell you, dearest Dodo; we chiefly go, because
Albert is in a Fonk. He is a Fonk!"
"But what is he frightened of?" asked Dodo. The Princess was letting so
many cats out of the bag that she had ceased counting them.
"He is frightened of everything. He is frightened that he will be pelted
in the London streets for being a Cherman prince, just as if anybody
knew or cared who he was! He is frightened of being put in prison. He is
frightened that the Cherman fleet will surround England and destroy her
ships and starve her. He is frightened of being hungry and thirsty. He
is as a pig in a poke that squeals till it gets out."
This remarkable simile was hardly out of the Princess's mouth before she
squealed on her own account.
"Ach, and here he is," she said. "Now he will scold me, and you shall
see how I also scold him."
He came lumbering up the passage towards them with a red, furious face.
"And what did I tell you, Sophy?" he said. "Did I not tell you to sit
and wait for me and speak to no one, and here are you holding the hand
of Lady Dodo, to whom already I have said good-bye, and so now I do not
see her. It is done, also it is finished, and it is time we went to the
station. You are for ever talking, though I have said there shall be no
more talking. What have you been saying?"
Princess Albert still held Dodo's hand.
"I have been saying that your new portmanteau burst, and I must take
your vests and your socks and your pants in my water-proof sheet. Also I
have been saying----"
"But your water-proof sheet, how will your water-proof sheet hold all
that was in my portmanteau? It is impossible. Where is your water-proof
sheet? Show it me."
"You will see it at Charing Cross. And if it is wet on the boat I will
take out again your vests and your socks and your pants, and they may
get wet instead of me."
"So! Then I tell you that if it is wet on the boat, you will go to your
cabin, and if you are sick you will be sick. You shall not take my
clothes from your water-proof sheet."
"We will see to that. Also, I have been saying good-bye to dearest Dodo,
and I have been saying to her that it was not I who was so rude to her,
but also that it was you, Albert. And I say now that I beg her pardon
for your rudeness, but that I hope she will excuse you because you were
in a fonk, and when you are in a fonk, you no longer know what you do,
and in a fonk you will be till you are safe back in Germany. All that I
say, dearest Albert, and if you are not good I will tell it to the mob
at Charing Cross. I will say, 'This is the Prince of Allenstein, and he
is a Prussian soldier, and therefore he is running away from England.'
Do not provoke me, heart's dearest. You will now get them to send for a
cab, and we will go because you are a fonk. There will be no special
train for us, there will be no one of our cousins to see us off, there
will be no red carpet, and it is all your fault. And as for dearest
Dodo, I kiss her on both cheeks, and I thank her for her kindness, and I
pray for a happier meeting than is also our parting."
* * * * *
That afternoon there began to be publicly felt the beginning of that
tension which grew until the breaking-point came in the first days of
August, and but for Dodo's shining example and precept, her ball that
night might easily have resolved itself into a mere conference. Again
and again at the beginning of the evening the floor was empty long after
the band had struck up, while round the room groups of people collected
and talked together on one subject. But Dodo seemed to be absolutely
ubiquitous, and whenever she saw earnest conversationalists at work, she
plunged into the middle of them, and broke them up like a dog charging a
flock of sheep. To-morrow would do for talk, to-night it was her ball.
Her special prey was any group which had as its centre an excited female
fount of gossip who began her sentences with "They tell me...." Whenever
that fatal phrase caught Dodo's remarkably sharp ears, she instantly
led the utterer of it away to be introduced to someone on the great red
dais, managed to lose her in the crowd, and "went for" the next
offender. The rumour that the Allensteins had left Charing Cross that
afternoon for Germany was a dangerously interesting topic, and whenever
Dodo came across it, she strenuously denied it, regardless of truth, and
asserted that as a matter of fact they were going down again to-morrow
to stay with her father at Vane Royal. Then perceiving him not far off,
looking at the dais with the expression of Dante beholding the Beatific
vision, she had dived into the crowd again, and told him that if he
would assert beyond the possibility of contradiction that this was the
case, she would presently introduce him to anyone on the red dais whom
he might select. As he pondered on the embarrassment of such richness,
she was off again to break up another dangerous focus of conversation.
An hour of wild activity was sufficient to set things really moving, and
avert the danger of her ball becoming a mere meeting for the discussion
of the European situation, and presently she found five minutes rest in
the window of the music gallery from which she could survey both the
ballroom and the marquee adjoining it. In all her thirty years'
experience, as hostess or guest, she had never been present at a ball
which seemed quite to touch the high-water mark here, and she felt that
without Lord Cookham's assistance she had provided exactly the sort of
evening that he had designed, in honour of Jumbo. It had happened like
that; everybody was present in that riot of colour and rhythm that
seethed about her, and at the moment the dais which stretched from side
to side of the huge room was empty, for every one of its occupants was
dancing, and she observed that even Lord Cookham (who had come in an
official capacity) had deserted his place behind the row of chairs, and
was majestically revolving with a princess, making little obeisances as
he cannoned heavily into other exalted personages. The whole of the
diplomatic corps was there, German and Austrian included, and there was
the German ambassador, quite recovered from his curious indisposition,
waltzing with the Italian ambassadress. The same spirit that had
animated Dodo in breaking up serious conjectures and conversation seemed
now to have spread broadcast; all were conspirators to make this ball,
the last of the year, the most brilliant and memorable. From a
utilitarian point of view there was no more to be said for it than for
some gorgeously-plumaged bird that strutted and spread its jewelled
wings, and yet all the time it was a symbol, expressing not itself alone
but what it stood for. The glory of great names, wide-world commerce,
invincible navies, all the endorsements of Empire, lay behind it. It
glittered and shone like some great diamond in an illumination which at
any moment might be obscured by the menace of thundercloud, but, if this
was the last ray that should shine on it before the darkness that even
now lapped the edge of it enveloped it entirely, that gloom would but
suck the light from it, and not soften nor crush its heart of
adamant....
* * * * *
From the moment that the ball got moving Dodo abandoned herself to
enjoying it to the utmost, wanting, as was characteristic of her, to
suck the last-ounce of pleasure from it. She had that indispensable
quality of a good hostess, namely, the power of making herself the most
fervent of her guests, and never had she appreciated a ball so much. Not
until the floor was growing empty and the morning light growing vivid
between the chinks of closed curtains did she realise that it was over.
"Jumbo, dear," she said, "why can't we double as one does at bridge, and
then somehow it would be eleven o 'clock last night, and we should have
it all over again? Are you really going? What a pity! Stop to
breakfast--my dear, what pearls! I can't believe they're real--and don't
let us go to bed at all. Yes, do you know, it's quite true--though I've
been lying about it quite beautifully--the Allensteins left for Germany
this afternoon, I mean yesterday afternoon. Oh, I don't want to begin
again.... What will the next days bring, I wonder?"
She stood at the street door a moment, while he went out into that
pregnant and toneless light that precedes sunrise, when all things look
unreal. The pavement and road outside were pearly with dew, and the
needless head-light of his motor as it purred its way up to the door
gleamed with an unnatural redness. In the house the floor was quite
empty now and the band silent, a crowd of men and women eager to get
away besieged the cloakroom, and in ten minutes more Dodo found herself
alone, but for the servants already beginning to restore the rooms to
their ordinary state.
She felt suddenly tired, and going upstairs drew down the blinds over
her open windows. She wanted to get to sleep at once, to shut out the
dawning day and all that it might bring.