The Fancy Dress Ball

There was a young fellow named Bugloss. He wore cufflinks made of agate with studs to match but was otherwise an agreeable person who suffered much from a remarkable diffidence, one of nature’s minor inconsistencies having been to endow him with a mute desire for romantic adventure and an entire incapacity to inaugurate any such thing.

It was in architecture that he found his way of life, quite a profitable and genteel way; for while other hands and heads devised the mere details of drainage, of window and wall, staircase, cupboard, and floor, in fact each mechanical thing down to the hooks and bells in every room, he it was who painted those entrancing draughts of elevation and the general prospect (with a few enigmatic but graceful trees, clouds in the offing, and a tiny postman plodding sideways up the carriage drive) which lured the fond fly into the architectural parlour. It must be confessed that he himself lived in rooms over the shop of a hairdresser, whose window displayed the elegantly coiffed head and bust of a wax lady suffering either from an acute attack of jaundice or the effects of a succession of late nights: next door was an establishment dealing exclusively, but not exhaustingly, in mangles and perambulators. In Bugloss’s room there were two bell handles with wires looking very handy and complete, yet whenever he desired the attendance of the maid he had (a) to take a silver whistle from his pocket; (b) to open the door; and (c) to blow it smartly in the passage.

His exceeding shyness was humiliating to himself and annoying to people of friendly disposition, it could not have been more preposterous had he been condemned to wear a false nose; he might have gone (he may even now be going) to his grave without once looking into a woman’s eyes. What a pity! His own eyes were worth looking at; he was really a nice young man, tall and slender with light fluffy hair, who if he couldn’t hide his amiable light under a bushel certainly behaved as if it wasn’t there. Things were so until one day he chanced to read with envious pleasure but a good deal of scepticism a book called Anatol by a Viennese writer; almost immediately the fascinating possibilities of romantic infidelity were confirmed by a quarrel which began in the hairdresser’s house between the young hairdresser and his wife, Monsieur and Madame Rabignol, and lasted for a week in the course of which Bugloss learned that the hairdresser was indulging in precisely one of those intrigues with an unknown lady living somewhere near by; Madame Rabignol, charming but virulent, protested a thousand times that it must be a base woman who walked the streets at night, and that Monsieur Rabignol was a low pig. The fair temptress, it appeared, was given to the use of a toilet unguent with the beguiling misdescription of “Vanishing Face Cream”; that was an unfortunate circumstance, because the wife of the hairdresser, a very cute woman, on her husband’s return from an evening’s absence, invariably kissed him and smelt him.

“Evil communications,” saith St. Paul (borrowing175 the phrase from Menander), “corrupt good manners,” and his notion must have something of truth in it, for these domestic revelations produced an unusual stir in the Bugloss bosom—he bought a ticket for a popular fancy dress ball and made a mighty resolve to discard his pusillanimous self with one grand gesture and there and then take the plunge. At a fancy dress ball you could do that; everyone made a fool of himself more or less; and Bugloss determined to plunge into whatever there was to plunge in. This was desperately unwise, but you are not to suppose that he harboured any looseness or want of principle; he was good and modest, and virtuous as any young man could possibly be; he only hoped, at the very least, to look some fair girl deep in the eyes. So he designed an oriental costume, simple to make (being loose-fitting), and having bought quantities of purple and crimson fabric he wrapped them up and sent the office-boy with his design, materials, measurements, and instructions to a dressmaker in the neighbourhood, whom he wisely thought would make a better job of it than a tailor. When the costume was finished he was delighted; it was magnificent, resplendent, artistic, and the dressmaker’s charge was moderate.

On the night of the ball, a warm August night with soft thrilling air and a sky of sombre velvet, he drove in a closed cab. Dancing was in the open, the lawns of a mansion were lent for the occasion, and Bugloss went rather late to escape notice—nearly eleven o’clock—but in the cab his timorousness conspiring against him had deepened to palpitating dejection; he was176 afraid again, the grand gesture was forgotten, and his attire was fantastically guarded from the public eye. From his window he had watched the arrival of the cab and had slunk down to it secretly—not a word to the Rabignols!—in a bowler hat and a mackintosh that reached to his feet; his fancy shoes were concealed under a pair of goloshes, the bright tasselled cap was in his pocket.

Heavens! It was too painful. This was no plunge, this miserable sink or swim—it was delirium, hell—what a stupid man he had been to come—it was no go, it was useless—and he was about to order the cabman to turn back home when the cab stopped at the gates of the mansion, the door was flung open and a big policeman almost dragged him out upon the carpeted pavement. A knot of jocular bystanders caused him to scurry into the grounds where three officials—good, bad, and indifferent—examined his ticket and directed him onwards. But the cloak rooms were right across the grounds, the great lawn was simply a bath of illumination, the band played in the centre and the dancers, madly arrayed, were waltzing madly. Bugloss, desiring only some far corner of darkness to flee into, saw on all sides shadowy trees, dim shrubs, and walks that led to utter gloom—thank God!—and there was a black moonless sky, though even that seemed positively to drip with stars.

At this moment the big policeman, following after him, said: “What about this cab, sir?”

“What—yes—this cab!” repeated Bugloss, and to his agonized imagination every eye in the grounds became ironically fixed upon him alone; even the177 music ceased, and there resounded a flutter of coruscating amiability.

“D’ye want him to wait?” the policeman was grinning—“He ain’t got any orders.”

“O, O dear, how much, what’s his fare? I don’t want him again and—gracious! I haven’t a cent on me—what, what—O, please tell him to call at my house to-morrow. Pay him then I will. Please!”

“Righto, my lord!” said the big policeman, saluting—he was a regular joker that fellow. Then Bugloss, trembling in every limb, almost leapt towards one of the dark walks, away from those grinning eyes. The shrubs and trees concealed him, though even here an odd paper lantern or two consorted with a few coloured bulbs of light. Shortly he began his observations.

The cloak rooms, he found, could be approached only by crossing the lawn. In a mackintosh, goloshes, and a bowler hat, that was too terrific an ordeal; the trembling Israelite during that affrighting passage of the Red Sea had all the incitements of escape and the comfort of friends, but this more violent ordeal led into captivity, and Bugloss was alone. What was to be done? The music began again and it was agreeable, the illuminations were lustrous and pretty, the dancers gay, but Bugloss was neither agreeable nor gay, and his prettiness was not yet on the surface. He was in a highly wrought condition, he was limp, and he remained in what seclusion he could find in the garden, peering like a sinner at some assembly of the blest. At last he snatched off his goloshes and stuffed them in his pocket. “So far,” he murmured,178 “so good. I will hide the mackintosh among the bushes, I can’t face that dressing room.” Just then the band gave a heightened blare, drum and cymbals were rapidly beaten and the music ceased amid clapping and polite halloing. “Dash it, I must wait till the next dance,” said Bugloss, “and, O lord, there’s a lot of them coming this way.” He turned to retreat into deeper darkness when suddenly, near the musicians, he saw a fascinating girl, a dainty but startling figure skimming across the lawn as if to overtake a friend. Why—yes—she had a wig of bright green hair, green; a short-waisted cherry silk jacket and harlequin pantaloons, full at the hips but narrowing to the ankles, where white stockings slipped into a pair of gilded leather shoes with heels of scarlet. Delicately charming were her face and figure, entrancing were her movements, and she tinkled all over with hidden bells.

“Sweet God, what beauty!” thought Bugloss, “this is She, the Woman to know, I must, I must ... but how?”

She disappeared. For the moment he could not rid himself of the bowler hat and mackintosh, so many couples roamed in the dark glades; wherever he went he could see the glow of cigarettes, generally in twos, and there were whispering or silent couples standing about in unexpected places. Retiring to the darkest corner he had previously found he was about to discard his mackintosh when he was startled by a cry at his elbow: “Lena, where are you, what’s that?” and a girl scuttled away, calling “Lena! Lena!” Her terror dismayed him, the little shock179 itself brought the sweat to his brow, but the music beginning again drew all the stragglers back to the lawn. There, from his gloomy retreat, he beheld the green-haired beauty in the arms of a pirate king who was adorned with an admiral’s hat and a dangerous moustache. “If,” thought Bugloss, still in his mufti, “I couldn’t have discovered a better get-up than that fellow, I’d have stayed away. There’s no picture in it, it’s just silly, I couldn’t wear a thing like that, I couldn’t wear it, I’d have perished rather than come.” And indeed there was an absence of imagination about all the male adornment; many of the ladies were right enough, but some were horrors, and most of the men were horrors; there was justification for Bugloss’s subsequent reflection: “I’ll show them, a little later on, what can be done when an artist takes the thing in hand; now after this dance is over.... etc., etc.”

Two lovers startled him by beginning to quarrel. They were passing among the trees behind him and talking quite loudly, both with a slight foreign accent. “But I shall not let you go, Johannes,” said the lady with a fierce little cry. Bugloss turned and could just discern a lady costumed as a vivandière; her companion was in the uniform Of a Danish soldier.

“If you forced me to stop I would kill you,” retorted the man.

“O, you would kill me!”

“If you forced me to stop.”

“You would kill me ... so!”

“Yes, I would kill you.”

“But you have told me that if I can keep you here in England I may do it. You know. If I can. You know that, Johannes!”

Bugloss was persuaded that he had heard her voice before, though he could not recognize the speaker.

“Be quiet, you are a fool,” the man said. That was all Bugloss heard. It was brutal enough. If only a woman, any woman, had wanted him like that!

He wandered about during other dances. The green-haired girl was always with that idiotic pirate, and it made things very difficult, because although Bugloss had fallen desperately in love with her he could not, simply could not, march up and drag her away from her companion. He could not as yet even venture from his ambush among the trees, and they never wandered in the gloom—they were always dancing together or eating together. He, Bugloss, had no interest in any other woman there, no spark of interest whatsoever. That being so, why go to all the fuss of discarding the mackintosh and making an exhibition of himself? Why go bothering among that crowd, he was not a dancer at all, he didn’t want to go! But still ... by and by perhaps ... when that lovely treasure was not so extraordinarily engaged. Sweet God! she was just ... well, but he could not stand much more of that infernal pirate’s antics with her. Withdrawing his tantalized gaze he sat down in darkness behind a clump of yew trimmed in the shape of some fat animal that resembled a tall hippopotamus. Here he lit his tenth cigarette. At once a dizziness assailed him, he began to see scarlet splashes in the gloom, to feel as if he were being lacerated with tiny pins. Throwing the cigarette away he stretched181 himself at full length under the bush. Scarcely had he done so when he became aware that two others were sitting down on the other side of it, the same foreign couple, the vivandière and her threatening cavalier.

“Listen to me, Hélène,” the man was saying in a soft consoling voice, “you shall trust to me and come away. Together we will go. But here I cannot stay. It is fate. You love, eh? Come then, we will go to Copenhagen, I will take you to my country. Now, Hélène!”

The lady made no reply; Bugloss felt that she must be crying. The Dane continued to woo and the Frenchwoman to murmur back to him: “Is it not so, Johannes?” “No, Hélène, no.” But at last he cried angrily: “Pah! Then stop with your bandit, that pig! Pah!” and chattering angrily in his strange language he sprang up and stalked away. Hélène rose too and followed him beseechingly into the gloom: “No, no, Johannes, no!”

Bugloss got up from the grass; his dizziness was gone. He knew that voice, it seemed impossible, but he knew her, and he had half a mind to rush home: but being without his watch and unable to discover what o’clock it was, he did not care to walk out into the streets with the chance of being guyed by any half-drunken sparks passing late home. He would wait, he was sure it was past midnight now, there would be a partial exodus soon, and he would go off unnoticed in the crowd. There was no more possibility now of him shedding his coat and joining the revellers than there was of that beauteous girl182 flying into his arms; his inhibition possessed him with tenfold power, he was an imbecile. Sad, pitiful, wretched, outcast! Through the screen of foliage the music floated with exquisite faintness, luminous cadenzas from a gleaming but guarded Eldorado whose light was music, whose music was all a promise and a mockery; he was a miserable prisoner pent in his own unbearable but unbreakable shackles and dressed up like a doll in a pantomime! Many people had come in their ordinary clothes; why, O why had he put on this maddening paralysing raiment? Why had he come at all?

Some of the lights had begun to fade; at one end of the lawn most of the small lamps had guttered out, leaving a line of a dozen chairs in comparative obscurity. Weary of standing, he slunk to the corner chair and sat down with a sigh. Just beside him was a weeping ash that he supposed only looked happy when it rained, and opposite was a poplar straining so hard to brush the heavens that he fancied it would be creaking in every limb. By and by an elderly decorous lady, accompanied by two girls not so decorous—the one arrayed as a Puritan maiden and the other as a Scout mistress—came and sat near him, but he did not move. They did not perceive the moody Bugloss. The elderly lady spoke: “Do go and fetch her here; no, when this waltz is over. She is very rude, but I want to see her. I can’t understand why she avoids us, and how she is getting on is a mystery to everybody. Bring her here.”

The puritan maiden and the scout mistress, embracing each other, skipped away to the refreshment183 booth. Glorious people sat about there drinking wine as if they disliked it, sipping ices as if it were a penance, and eating remarkable food or doing some other reasonable things, but Bugloss dared not join them although he was very hungry. It was not hunger he wanted to avert, but an impending tragedy.

The hypersensitive creature sees in the common mass of his fellows only something that seeks to deny him, and either in fear of that antagonism or in the knowledge of his own imperfections he isolates and envelopes the real issue of his being—much as an oyster does with the irritant grain in its beard; only the outcome is seldom a pearl and not always as useful as a fish. Bugloss was still wholly enveloped, and his predicament gave a melancholy tone to his thoughts. He sat hunched in his chair until the dance ended and the two girls came back, bringing with them the lovely green-haired one!

“Hello, aunt,” she cried merrily enough, “why aren’t you in costume? Like my get-up?”

Without a word the elderly lady kissed her, and all sat down within a few feet of Bugloss. It thrilled him to hear her voice; at least he would be able to recognize that when she turned back again to daylight’s cool civilities.

“Did you know that I had blossomed out in business?” she was saying. Bugloss thought it a beautiful voice.

“I heard of it,” said her aunt, whom you may figure as a lady with a fan, eyeglasses, and the repellant profile of a bird of prey,184 “about half an hour ago. I wish I had heard of it before.”

“I am a full-blown modiste.”

“Yes, you might have told me.”

“But I have told you.”

“You might have told me before.”

“But I haven’t seen you before, aunt.”

“No, we haven’t seen you. How is this business, Claire, is it thriving, making money?”

“O, we get along, aunt,” said the radiant niece in a tone of almost perverse amiability. “I have several assistants. Do you know, we made seven of the costumes for this ball—seven—one of them for a man.”

“I thought ladies only made for ladies.”

“So did I, but this order just dropped in upon us very mysteriously, and we did it, from top to toe, a most gorgeous arrangement, all crimson and purple and silver and citron, but I haven’t seen anybody wearing it yet. I wonder if you have? I’m so disappointed. It’s a sultan, or a nabob, or a nankipoo of some kind, I am certain it was for this ball. I was so anxious to see it worn. I had made up my mind to dance at least half the dances with the wearer, it was so lovely. Have you seen such a costume here?”

“No,” said the aunt grimly, “I have not, but I have noticed the pirate king—did you make his costume too? I hope not!”

“O no, aunt,” laughed Claire, “isn’t he a fright?”

“Who is he?”

“That? O, a friend of mine, a business friend.”

“He seems fond of you.”

“I have known him some time. Yes, I like him. Don’t you like my pirate king?” asked Claire, turning to her two cousins.

The cousins both thought he was splendid.

(“Good God!” groaned Bugloss.)

“I don’t,” declared auntie. “Do you know him very well, has he any intentions? An orphan girl living by herself—you have your way to make in the world—I am not presuming to criticize, my dear Claire, but is it wise? Who is he?”

“Yes, aunt,” said Claire. Bugloss could hear the tinkle of her bells as she moved a little restlessly.

“Are his intentions honourable? I should think they were otherwise.”

Claire did not reply immediately. It looked as if the musicians were about to resume. There was a rattle of plates and things over at the booth. Then she said reflectively: “I don’t think he has any—what you call honourable intentions.”

“Not! Is he a bad man?”

“O no, I don’t mean that, aunt, no.”

“But what do you mean then, you’re a strange girl, what could his intentions be?”

“He hasn’t any intentions at all.”

“Not one way or the other?”

Claire seemed vaguely to hover over the significance of this. She said calmly enough: “Not in any way. He’s my hairdresser, a Frenchman, and so clever. He made this beautiful wig and gave it me. What do you think of my beautiful wig, isn’t it sweet?”

There was a note of exasperation in the elder woman’s voice:186 “Why don’t you get married, girl?”

“I’d rather work,” said Claire, “and besides, he’s already married.”

The music did begin, and a gentleman garbed as a druid came to claim auntie for a dance. The three girls were left alone.

“Did he really give you that wig?” asked the puritan maiden.

“Yes, isn’t it bonny? I love it.” She shook the dangling curls about her face. “He’s frightfully clever with hair. French! You know his saloon probably, Rabignol’s in the High Street. His wife is here, you must have seen her too—a French soldier woman—what do you call them? She hates me. She’s with a Danish captain. He is a Dane, but he is really an ice merchant. He thinks she adores him.”

“O Claire!” cried the two shocked cousins.

“But she doesn’t,” said Claire. “Sakes, I’m beginning to shiver; come along.”

They all romped back towards the orchestra. Bugloss shivered too and was glad—yes, glad—that she had gone. The tragedy had floated satisfactorily out of his hands, thank the fates; it was Rabignol’s affair. Damn Rabignol! Curse Rabignol! the bandit, the pig! He hoped that Madame Rabignol would elope with Johannes. He hoped the green-haired girl—frail and lovely thing—would behave well; and he hoped finally and frenziedly that Rabignol himself would be choked by the common hangman. Bugloss then wanted to yawn, but somehow he could not. He put on his rubber goloshes again. With unwonted audacity he stalked off firmly, even a little fiercely, across the lawn in his187 mackintosh and bowler hat, passing round the fringe of the dancers but looking neither to the right nor to the left, then out of the gates into the dark empty streets and so home. There, feeling rather like a Cromwell made of chutney, he disarrayed himself and crept into bed yawning and murmuring to himself:188 “So that’s a fancy dress ball! Sweet God, but I’m glad I went! And I could have shown them something, I could have. Say what you like, but mine was the finest costume at the show; there’s no doubt about that, it was, it was! And I’m very glad I went.”