At this marvellous statement Peter came to a pause in the music with a crashing chord, took the cigarette out of his mouth, and throwing up his hands, exclaimed:
"Going to play cricket with the Hungarians under Peter's direction! Oh, blessed people! Ye ghosts of Fitzgerald, Pycroft, and of Lillywhite, do ye hear them and writhe up there in Heaven?"
Then he struck up the "March of the Men of Harlech."
"If anyone says anything more about cricket," he said solemnly, "I shall force them to play with warped bats and golf-balls on a ploughed field."
Not a trace of anxiety or even preoccupation on any of those dear, beaming faces. Elza was as excited as any of them, worried to death because the carp they had got out of the lake for this evening's supper were not really fat.
"They're no bigger than a good-sized goldfish," she said to Rosemary with a note of real tragedy in her voice, and her blue eyes at once looked anxious and troubled, as if the matter of the carp was the only thing that could worry her.
Rosemary made a great effort not to be a wet blanket in the midst of all this gaiety. In this she succeeded admirably. All she had to do was to smile and to nod her head, and now and then to cry out, "How splendid!" The others did all the talking, and when conversation subsided for a moment Peter came down with a fresh, crashing jazz tune.
Rosemary would have thought the whole scene a phantasmagoria—illusive images that would presently be dispelled—only that she had known these people ever since she was a child. She had studied their curious psychology, half barbaric, with all the primitive disregard of danger and the passion for pleasure, even at the point of death. She gave ungrudging admiration to Elza—Elza who had sat in her room last night, rigid, dry-eyed, a living statue of despair. What went on behind that smooth, white brow of hers? What projects? What hopes? And little Anna? Anna knew. Anna guessed. She had spoken of her fears to Rosemary. Spoken of eyes that watched her, of eyes that were willing her to do something foolish that would compromise her irretrievably this time. Elza and Anna! What an example of self-possession, of self-control! Rosemary was almost ready to persuade herself that something had happened to reassure them both—that, in fact, they knew the danger to be past.
Only that Elza avoided her glance, and that the dear soul, usually so placid, so stable, was just a thought more restless than usual, and her gentle voice would from time to time become shrill.
At last, genuinely tired and bewildered by so much noise, Rosemary jumped up and, laughing, declared that she must escape out of the bear-garden for a moment and get a breath of fresh air in the park. In order to reach the glass door that gave on the veranda, Rosemary had to go past the piano. Quite close. Peter looked up when she was near him, and she said to him as she went past: "They are very gay, aren't they?"