CHAPTER XI
THE HEELS OF MERCURY
This injunction Gwenna carried out to the letter a week later. Never had she looked so pretty as when she smiled at her own reflection in her bedroom mirror above the cherub's ruff of wings on the evening of the dance.
It was given by some wealthy theatrical people whose "set" often intermingled with that to which Hugo Swayne belonged. And it was held in a couple of big marquees that had been set up on the lawn behind their house; a lawn of which the banks sloped down to the willows that fringed the river. There was a houseboat as buffet. There were Japanese lanterns and fairy-lights. Red carpet had been put down to save costumes from dewy grass or gravel.
For this dance was held at the height of that brief and grotesque period in the English history when dancing and costume—more particularly when the two were combined—became an affair of national moment. That was the time when tickets for an Artists' Ball were gambled with even as stocks and shares; when prizes for costume were given of which the value ran into hundreds of pounds. When columns of responsible newspapers were given up to descriptions of some "brilliant carnival." When Society, the Arts, Commerce, the Stage and the Middle Class joined hands to dance the maddest ring-o'-roses round some mulberry bush rooted in Heaven knew what soil of slackness. That was the time when women who were mothers and able-bodied men were ready to fritter away the remnant of their youth on what could be no longer pleasure, since they chased it with such deadly ardour, discussing the lightest types of merrymaking as if thereupon hung the fate of an empire!
Even little cherub-headed Gwenna Williams found something disquieting about the sight of this throng as she scanned it with anxious eyes, for—no, HE hadn't come! He was late. Not here. Perhaps it was merely this that caused her to dislike the look of some of these other people? That buxomly-formed young woman of twenty-five tricked out in the costume of a child of three! That tall, fragile youth in black grave-clothes, mouthing falsetto patter! That pretty "lady" in spreading Georgian brocade and a white wig, from whose crimsoned lips there came presently a robust masculine shout! That Madame Potiphar in the—Good gracious!—it was another boy! No! Gwenna didn't like them, somehow.... Perhaps it was just because they were here and he, the only partner she wished for, had not arrived. Oh, supposing he were not coming, after all?
Under the canvas roof where garlands swung and an installation of electric light had been improvised, the crowd eddied and chattered and laughed from one end to the other of the marquee where the long tables were laid out. For it was a theatrical ball, late in beginning. Supper was to come first. Gwenna, sitting beside a Futurist Folly whom her friend Leslie had introduced vaguely as "one of my medical students," watched that supper-crowd (still he did not come), as they feasted, leaning across the tables to laugh and shriek to acquaintances. It was not the girls or the younger men who seemed most boisterous, but those well over thirty. This surprised her. And even when they were most unrestrained "they seemed," as the Welsh girl put it, "to be making themselves do it, like." ...
Then she saw, by an opening in the canvas of the marquee, the apparition of a steady man's figure, dead-white against the purple gloom outside. A figure erect and neatly-shouldered under the close linen jacket of a Continental waiter. Gwenna wondered where she had seen him before? In a photograph? Or perhaps attending to one of the tables at Appenrodt's, when she and Leslie had had tea after a matinée somewhere? She had seen that young waiter, whose appearance was in such arresting contrast to the bizarre costumes and painted faces of the noisy, laughing rabble about him. His face was restrained and grave as that of some very young Daniel at the feast of some modern Belshazzar.