THE BACHELORS' BALL
The rhythm of the immortal "Blue Danube" waltz swung through the big
Indian ballroom. It was long before two-steps, Bostons, tangos were
dreamed of, when, at any rate in India, the _pas de quatre_ was still a
novelty, and the "Washington Post" had not yet been introduced. Almost
everyone was dancing; the only onlookers were a few partnerless, or
non-dancing men, and a sprinkling of senior people whose exile in the
East was nearly over. The aged white man or woman is seldom to be
encountered in India; they have "done their time" and gone home--or to
their graves. Sometimes they stay to live out last years in some more or
less salubrious region, but such settlers are dying out, and, with
easier transit home, are not replaced; for though living may be less
expensive, and cheap luxuries attractive, there is always the loss of
prestige and the desire to end their days in England.
There seemed no doubt that the final ball of the cold weather season was
a triumphant success. The bachelor hosts had spared neither effort nor
money to perfect every arrangement, from the par excellent supper
upstairs to the most trifling detail below. The compound of the public
building was illuminated with row upon row of little lights in coloured
glass receptacles, verandas were enclosed and decorated, tents were
added too, carpeted and furnished, for the benefit of sitters-out;
plants were in profusion, flowers, Chinese lanterns, casual buffets for
promiscuous refreshment--nothing was forgotten.
Every girl had partners, the programmes of the more popular spinsters
had been filled for days, and usually hopeless wallflowers were not
allowed to sit neglected as long as a man who could dance was unwary
enough to remain unattached in the ballroom. Even the most unattractive
of the three Miss Planes ("Plain," "Plainer," "Plainest," as they were
called by irreverent subalterns) had been dancing all night, and as a
result of enjoyment looked almost attractive.
Among the non-dancing men was Captain Coventry; entertainments of this
description bored him unutterably. Polo and sport were his recreations,
and he could not and would not dance; it was a form of amusement he held
in contempt. To-night he felt more disinclined than usual to make
himself useful or pleasant. Sullen and solitary, he leaned against the
wall in gloomy contrast with the gay festoons of muslin, blue and white
and yellow, draped behind him. He was a man not seen at his best in a
ballroom, and just at that moment he appeared at his worst, for his wife
had danced four times already with the man he most loathed in the
station, and again she was dancing with him now. The pair swept by,
Kennard tall and dark and serene, Rafella radiant, flushed, abandoned to
pleasure, both of them regardless of the sombre, jealous eyes that
watched them from the wall.
Mrs. Greaves, having twisted her ankle romping through a set of lancers,
had now taken refuge on the dais for a precautionary rest; and she also
watched the fairy figure floating round the room. Her neighbour on the
red velvet settee happened to be the consort of a high official, a wise
and benevolent lady, whose long experience of Indian life had only
increased her natural kindness of heart and broadened her tolerant
views.
"You know the Coventrys rather well, don't you, Mrs. Greaves?" she
asked, as she followed the direction of the other woman's eyes. The
question was not prompted by trivial curiosity, nor by any desire for
ungenerous gossip, and of this Mrs. Greaves was fully aware, knowing her
companion's disposition.
"I thought I knew Mrs. Coventry well," she said doubtfully, "but lately
I've not felt quite sure. Can you believe that when she came out she
considered it wrong to dress becomingly, or to do anything that might
improve her appearance? And she thought we were all so fast and
frivolous! She has altered so curiously."
"I am sorry for her, poor, pretty little person." The elder woman's
placid face grew sad. "She is a typical example of the kind of girl who
deteriorates rapidly in India; and then people at home, who won't try to
understand, think India is to blame. She would have been just the same
in England, or anywhere else, if she had been pitchforked into a
different kind of life. If she doesn't come to grief, as I fear seems
likely, she will probably go home and talk about her servants and her
carriage and her men friends, and help to spread the false impression
that out here all English women live like princesses and are nothing but
brainless butterflies. It is such a mistake! She means no harm, I am
sure, which makes it all the more regrettable."
"I also think she is far more to be pitied than blamed," agreed Mrs.
Greaves. "She led such a narrow little life at home in a country
vicarage, as far as I can gather from what she has told me at different
times; and somehow it does seem to have unbalanced her to have a lady's
maid, as she would call her ayah at first, and a smart dog-cart and big
rooms, and plenty of society, and to discover that she was pretty and
attractive. The worst of it is Captain Coventry doesn't understand the
situation in the least, and makes no allowance."
"He ought not to leave her so much to look after herself. He appears to
be always out shooting, or playing cricket or racquets or polo, when he
isn't on duty. I suppose he's the wrong kind of husband for an
undeveloped creature like that. She ought to have married a curate at
home, or a small country squire; then she would probably have remained
contented all her life, teaching in the Sunday school, and visiting the
cottagers, and doing good according to her own ideas."
"You see," explained Mrs. Greaves, "at first Captain Coventry was only
rather amused at the way many of her little scruples fizzled out, and
treated her like a child--after all, in some ways she isn't much
more--until she began to do things that most of us deprecate, though we
know they are probably harmless enough. When she took up with this
horrible man he got angry, and they had rows. You know, I dare say, how
intolerant he is; he always thinks the worst of women. I have never
really liked him, and I'm afraid, if it were not for Rafella's sake, I
should feel rather pleased, in a way, that his selection had not turned
out quite the paragon of propriety he expected."
"Can't you do anything? Can't you speak to her? I don't feel I know her
sufficiently well to interfere."
"I did try, but it was hopeless. She seemed to think she was the only
person with any principles in the station. She said I had an evil mind,
that we all had evil minds, and she stuck to it that she was doing
nothing wrong; and, literally speaking, I am sure she isn't; she's only
being foolish. She declared that as long as her conscience was clear she
did not see why she should give up her friendship with Mr. Kennard."
"I cannot abide that man! What on earth do some women see in him--or
some men either, for that matter? It makes me so angry to hear them
alluding to 'dear old Kennard.' No doubt he is clever--all barristers
are; but I consider that no woman can be seen about with him and keep
her reputation. I don't wonder Captain Coventry looks like a bear with a
sore head. I hope he will soon put his foot down and stop the flirtation
altogether."
"Yes, if he only does it the right way," said Mrs. Greaves doubtfully;
and as the music ceased she observed, with apprehension, that Mr.
Kennard and Mrs. Coventry were making for a screened-in, dimly lit
veranda, and that Captain Coventry was following the couple with slow,
determined steps.
"Oh!" she exclaimed involuntarily, below her breath, "I hope there isn't
going to be a row!"
"My dear," the Commissioner's wife assured her, "Mr. Kennard will take
care there is no row--in public, at any rate. That would not suit him at
all."
"But Rafella is so silly, and Captain Coventry is so hard and
vindictive. What will be the end of it?"
"If anyone goes to the wall, it will without question be the woman,"
said the other grimly; "that is what always happens in these deplorable
cases."
Captain Coventry came upon his wife and her partner seated in an alcove.
The pink glow from a paper lantern fell on the woman's fair head and
delicate neck. She looked the picture of purity and innocence. The pair
might have sat as models for Faust and Marguerite. Rafella glanced up
quickly as her husband approached, walking slowly, evenly, along the
veranda between the rows of sitting-out couples. She avoided his eyes as
he came to a halt in front of her. Apparently Mr. Kennard did not see
him.
"Are you ready to come home?" he asked in a cold, level voice.
Then she looked up in nervous appeal. "Oh, George, there are three more
dances besides the extras on the programme!" She turned as though for
sympathy and support to the man who sat silent at her side, toying with
her fan. He only smiled inscrutably, and his eyes held the expression of
one looking on at a comedy.
Captain Coventry stood rigid; his hands were clenched, his face hard and
set.
"It is time for us to go home," he said, with a faint though
unmistakable emphasis on the pronoun.
She moved a small, satin-shod foot impatiently. "Oh, do let us stay a
little longer," she protested; "nobody is going yet."
"_We_ are," said her husband.
"Why?" she demanded in desperate defiance. Then she looked frightened,
and rose with reluctance from her seat.
For a moment she glanced from one man to the other, disconcerted because
Mr. Kennard had said nothing, had not asserted his claim to the dances
that still were his on her programme. Suddenly she felt helpless,
deserted, indignant. Mr. Kennard must think she was not her own
mistress, that she could not do as she chose, that she allowed herself
to be treated like a child. It was insufferable! Why couldn't George
trust her? He ought to be glad to see her receiving admiration and
attention. It was odious of him to place her in such a false and
unpleasant position. But while that hard, cruel look remained in his
eyes she dared not defy him. She would have to obey like a slave at the
moment, though she vowed to herself that she would demand an apology
once they were alone.
She rose with an air of offended pride, and held out her hand for her
fan. Kennard gave it to her with a bow, and a suppressed smile on his
face that made Coventry long to knock him down. They bade each other
formal good-nights, and Rafella stalked in the direction of the
cloakroom, her head held high, her husband following her close.
On their way back to their bungalow there was silence between the
Coventrys. They were driving in the cab of the country, a rough vehicle
that resembled a palanquin on wheels, with venetian shutters instead of
windows, and the noise it made would have rendered even the most amiable
of conversations impossible. The air outside was warm and still, and the
rattle of the wheels and the woodwork, and the clumsy harness, seemed
intensified by the surrounding silence of the Indian night. The stuffy
conveyance was filled with the scent of violets--lately Rafella had
taken to scent, strong scent that clung and impregnated everything she
wore. At her breast was a cluster of violets that had come from the pots
in Mr. Kennard's veranda, and now, dying, the flowers gave out a stale
fragrance. To the angry man at her side the concentrated perfume was
atrocious. It seemed to be connected in some subtle way with the
alteration in his wife's behaviour--to breathe of all that was false and
worthless in a woman's heart. Bitterly he blamed the follies and
temptations of Indian life, and her failure to withstand them. It did
not occur to him that, with her limited intelligence, her inexperience
of life, and her undeveloped outlook, things would have been the same in
any quarter of the earth, given the scope and opportunity. He was a man
who could not make allowances, who could perceive no point of view
except his own; yet withal he was a straight and honourable English
soldier, with high standards of right and wrong, and a deep sense of the
sanctity of marriage. Such people are often incapable of distinguishing
between mere foolishness and sin; they will argue that there are no
degrees of infidelity, and that a false step necessarily implies
complete downfall. Coventry had no sympathy with sexual temptation; in
his sight, if a married woman permitted a man who was not her husband to
make love to her, she was guilty of more than indiscretion.
His anger kept him silent as they entered their bungalow. He was afraid
to trust himself to speak.
It was his wife who precipitated the storm; she turned up the lamp that
was burning low on a table in the drawing-room, and threw her cloak on
to a chair with a petulant movement. The atmosphere of the room was
oppressive, yet Coventry had re-bolted the long glass door by which they
had entered. Mosquitoes, disturbed by the light, flew with thin
screamings around their heads.
For a moment they looked at each other. The man's eyes were cold and
contemptuous, and the woman's sense of injury and injustice increased
till she felt wellnigh desperate. To think that she should have been
dragged home like a naughty little girl from a party, who must be sent
to bed as a punishment, while everyone else was still dancing and
enjoying the ball!--and Mr. Kennard would have found another partner
whose husband was not a monster of unreasonable jealousy. Perhaps he
would smile and shrug his shoulders, and cease now to send her violets
every morning, and no longer single her out for special attention, or
send her little notes asking what were her plans for the afternoon--or
give her books with quotations inscribed by himself on the flyleaf:
quotations conveying a harmless though flattering homage. In short, all
the little inarticulate attentions that to the initiated are but the
preliminaries to a game that need be no more than an emotional pastime,
but may be fraught with peril to the flattered novitiate.
Instinctively her hand rested on a small, beautifully bound volume that
had come this morning with the violets she wore, whose perfume stirred
her senses even at this moment as it floated out into the room. On the
title page was traced in Kennard's peculiar writing:
"A book of verses underneath the bough,
A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and _thou_
Beside me, singing in the wilderness--
Oh! wilderness were paradise enow."
"Aren't you going to explain?" she demanded in a stifled voice. "You
have made me the laughing-stock of the station. You have spoilt my
evening. Do you expect me to submit without a word? I am not a child,
let me tell you; I am capable of taking care of myself."
"Apparently that is just what you are not capable of doing," said
Coventry. "Unless you promise me to behave decently in future, and
unless you do so, I shall send you home to your father until my time is
up in India."
A sudden remembrance of the shabby vicarage assailed her, and the dull
little village, and the routine of housework, and economy; Sunday
school, choir practice, parish duties, old people, the long dark
winters, and the cold, and the rain, and the solitude. It chilled her
spirit, and filled her with a sickening dread. Yet how could she bring
herself to promise "to behave with decency," when, in her own opinion,
she had done nothing reprehensible? Her "friendship" with Mr. Kennard
was blameless on both sides. It might be true that he did not bear the
best of characters; Mrs. Greaves had warned her, most officiously, of
that, and had cited one or two so-called scandals in which he had been
concerned, to all appearances, discreditably. But had he not told her
himself, repeatedly, that it had all been the fault of the women, which
she could quite believe, and that her influence on his life was the one
good thing that had ever come his way? Had he not declared that for her
sweet sake there should be no more "stories," that because of her he
would be strong? Surely that was something to be proud of! Therefore,
how could she turn and treat him as though he were a blackguard, and
deny him the first incentive he had ever known to rectitude of life?
Why, every Sunday lately he had gone to church at her behest, and he
said he had given up gambling at the club, assured her that every night
he read a chapter of the Bible she had lent him--a worn little volume
that had been hers since childhood, with notes in the margins, and
flowers pressed between the pages to mark the anniversaries of her
life's rare events--her mother's death, her confirmation, her first
communion, and her marriage.
"Well?" Her husband's voice cut sharply through her thoughts.
Now she gazed at him with large, distressed blue eyes.
"Oh, George, do try to understand! There is really nothing wrong. We are
only friends, and he _needs_ my friendship; it helps him, it does him
good."
Rage and disgust almost choked him. "Bah!" he exclaimed furiously,
"don't talk rot like that to me." He took a step forward, and seized her
wrist. "Can you swear to me that the beast has never attempted to make
love to you? Can you deny that he follows you about, and writes you
notes, and gives you presents, and that you have never tried to stop
him? The fellow is notorious, and only a man who was a fool or a
blackguard would stand by and see his wife go to the devil with him or
with anyone else."
She trembled, terrified, and her face became distorted with tears. "You
are cruel and unjust," she sobbed. "I will not bear it."
He dropped her arm, and paced backwards and forwards among the
furniture. Then he stopped by the table and picked up a book--the
daintily bound little volume that had come for Rafella this morning. He
looked at it with contempt.
"This is the kind of unwholesome rot he tries to poison your mind with."
He opened the cover, and read the verse on the fly-leaf; next moment he
flung the book to the farther end of the room.
"That is enough," he said. "Listen to me! If you don't promise me this
instant never to speak to the man again, I'll--I'll kill you."
Coventry was beside himself with passion, for it seemed to him that his
honour, his home, his name was besmirched. He felt humiliated, wronged;
and the primitive sense of outraged possession had him in its grip.
Nothing could ever be the same again between his wife and himself. It
was all he could do not to strike her as she stood there, white, and
fair, and weak, at his mercy, yet still with a frightened defiance in
her childish blue eyes.
There followed a tense pause, as with set teeth he strove to master his
passion, holding his clenched hands down on the table before him.... And
suddenly the silence outside was broken by the sound of wheels and the
sharp trotting of a horse's hoofs that turned into the adjoining
compound and ceased. Instinctively Rafella turned her head and listened.
Mr. Kennard had come home from the ball. The knowledge that he was at
hand gave her a feeling of partial security. That, together with
indignation and resentment, kept her firm in her resolve not to be
browbeaten into a promise that could only be an admission of guilt. She
could not perceive that morally she had erred, though actually she was
innocent of wrongdoing. It was precisely what her husband could not
perceive either; to him there was little difference.
"Are you going to promise?" he asked, with menace in his voice.
She put up her hands as though to shield herself from violence.
"Are you going to promise?" he said again, and moved a little nearer.
Then her courage failed her. She was afraid of George, afraid of the
look on his face that reminded her of a savage animal--afraid of his
threats, and his voice, and his presence. She turned and ran to the door
that had been bolted by him as they entered. He followed her. She
screamed, stretching her white arms up to the bolt, dragging it down.
Next moment she was outside, running in silent terror towards the house
in the next compound. The lightly clad figure sped like a ghost through
the dim light of the coming dawn, and stumbled through the gap in the
low mud boundary, leaving George Coventry standing on the threshold of
his house as though he had been turned to stone.
Motionless he stood; then he laughed like a drunken man, and reeled back
into the room that smelt of matting and lamp-oil and--violets.
* * * * *
The disappearance of Mr. Kennard and Mrs. Coventry came as a veritable
bombshell to the station. Nobody knew exactly what had happened; there
were so many different stories. Hitherto people had noticed and talked,
some with jealous interest, others more or less good-naturedly, a few
with real regret, but none with any expectation of a serious scandal;
for domestic disaster is rare in India, in spite of popular delusion to
the contrary. And when it occurs, partly because of its rarity, partly
because in any community so intimate as one class of the same
nationality in exile, such an occurrence goes sharply home, and creates
a sensation at once so painful and exciting that it is not quickly
forgotten.
It was said that Mrs. Coventry had deliberately left her husband after a
terrible scene; another version was that she had confessed on the night
of the bachelors' ball to conduct such as had left Captain Coventry no
alternative but to allow her to go; again that he had turned her out,
and she had sought refuge in Mr. Kennard's bungalow. Someone had seen
the runaway couple leaving next day by the mail train for Bombay. The
more charitable maintained that the injured husband had been chiefly to
blame; he had made a mountain out of a molehill, would listen to no
explanation, nor give the benefit of any doubt, driving his wife to the
ruinous step she had taken.
All that remained evident was that Mrs. Coventry and Mr. Kennard were no
longer seen in the station, and that for a short space of time Captain
Coventry continued to perform his regimental duties, to play polo and
racquets and cricket, in taciturn silence. His bearing inhibited
questions, or mention to him of what had occurred; no one dared to
intrude on his secret, and his reticence was respected. A little later
he took leave on urgent private affairs and went home; and in due time
an undefended divorce case, with Mr. Kennard as co-respondent, was
reported without detail in the papers.
Mr. Kennard was eventually heard of in another Province, where, from all
accounts, he was as popular as ever with a certain section of society
always to be found anywhere, people who are attracted by good dinners
and a display of wealth and an apparently superior knowledge of the
world, who are content to ask no questions--which they call minding
their own business.
Gossip subsided with the fluctuation of the European population of a
large Indian station, where the military portion come and go, and civil
officials are constantly transferred. Captain Coventry did not come
back; he exchanged into the home battalion of his regiment. There came
echoes and whispers that little Mrs. Coventry had returned to India
after the decree had been made absolute, under the confiding impression
that Mr. Kennard would make her his wife. But some declared that, of
course, he was not such a fool; others that he had been blackguard
enough to refuse to marry her; and what became of her nobody knew, and
very few cared; for, after all, it was no one's immediate affair.