[CHAPTER I]
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.