When, with my wife and sister, reluctant and protesting, upon either arm, he erupted into the ballroom, giggling excitedly and crying "Votes for Women!" in a shrill treble, even the band broke down, so that the music died an untimely and tuneless death. When he danced a Tango with me, wearing throughout an exalted expression of ineffable bliss and introducing a bewildering variety of unexpected halts, crouchings and saggings of the knees—when, in the midst of an interval, he came flying to Daphne, calling her "Mother," insisting that he had been insulted, demanding to be taken home forthwith, and finally burying his face in her shoulder and bursting into tears—when, during supper, with a becoming diffidence, he took his stand upon a chair and said a few words about his nursing experiences in Mesopotamia and spoke with emotion of the happy hours he had spent as a Sergeant-Minor of the Women Police—then it became manifest that my brother-in-law's construction of the laws of hospitality had set up such a new record of generosity as few, if any, of those present would ever see broken.
"… Oh, and the flies, you know. The way they flew. Oh, it was dreadful. And, of course, no lipstick would stick. My dears, I was simply terrified to look in the biscuit box. And then we had to wash in bits—so embarrassing. Talk about divisional reserve…. And they were so strict with it all. Only ten little minutes late on parade, and you got it where auntie wore the gew-gaws. I lost my temper once. To be sworn at like a golf-sphere, just because one day I couldn't find my Poudre d'Amour…. And, when he'd quite finished, the Colonel asked me what powder was for. I just looked round and gave him some of his own back. 'To dam your pores with,' I said…."
It was past three o'clock before our departure was sped.
Comfortably weary, we reached our own villa's door to make the grisly discovery that no one had remembered the key….
There was no knocker: a feeble electric bell signalled out distress to a deserted basement: the servants were asleep upon the second floor.
After we had all reviled Berry and, in return, been denounced as 'a gang of mut-jawed smoke-stacks,' accused of 'blasphemy' and compared to 'jackals and vultures about a weary bull,' we began to shout and throw stones at the second-floor windows. Perhaps because their shutters were closed, our labour was lost.
To complete our disgust, for some mysterious reason Nobby refused to bark and so sound the alarm. In the ordinary way the Sealyham was used to give tongue—whatever the hour and no matter what indignation he might excite—upon the slightest provocation. This morning we perambulated the curtilage of the villa, alternately yelling like demoniacs and mewing like cats, without the slightest result.
Eventually it was decided that one of us must effect an entrance by climbing on to the balcony of my sister's room….
Jonah had a game leg: the inflexibility of my pantaloons put any acrobatics out of the question: Berry's action, at any rate, was more than usually unrestricted. Moreover, it was Berry whom we had expected to produce the key.
It became necessary to elaborate these simple facts, and to indicate most definitely the moral which they were pointing, before my brother-in-law was able to grasp the one or to appreciate the other. And when it had been, as they say, borne in upon him that he was for the high jump, another ten minutes were wasted while he made one final, frantic, solitary endeavour to attract the servants' attention. His feminine personality discarded, he raved about the house, barking, screeching and braying to beat the band; he thundered upon the door with his fists; he flung much of the drive in the direction of the second floor. Finally, when we were weak with laughter, he sat down upon the steps, expressed his great satisfaction at the reception of his efforts to amuse, and assured us that his death-agony, which we should shortly witness, would be still more diverting.