I had just gotten inside the telephone booth and was ringing up the number when there was a commotion in the upper end of the waiting room and a large party of people entered, men and women and soldiers and young girls, laughing and shrieking and pelting somebody with rice and old shoes. Soon they came past the booth and I caught a glimpse of the bride and groom. The telephone receiver fell out of my hand and my heart stopped beating. For there, in the midst of that crowd, laughing and dodging the showers of rice, and hanging for dear life to the arm of a pretty young girl in a traveling suit, was Captain Bannister, my Captain! I shrank back into the depths of the telephone booth and struggled to swallow the lump in my throat. Bits of talk floated in through the closed door.
“Thought you’d do it up quietly this morning and then sneak out this afternoon without anybody finding it out,” I heard a voice shout, as a fresh shower of rice flew through the air.
“Went out and made a speech this afternoon, too, just as unconcerned as if it wasn’t his wedding day,” said another voice. “Pretty sly, Captain. They ought to put you in the diplomatic service. You’d be an ornament.”
I crouched miserably in the telephone booth, trying to collect my scattered thoughts. My Captain was married this morning! How I hated that pretty girl clinging to him and laughing as the showers of rice fell around her!
Then all of a sudden my hand touched the bag on the floor. The papers! In the excitement of his wedding day he had forgotten them! Well, even if he had, I hadn’t. I would still serve my country if it did nearly kill me to go out there and face Captain Bannister. I shut my eyes and prayed for strength. It would have been so easy to slip out and throw the bag over the bridge into the river, and get Captain Bannister into a bad predicament. But I did not waver in my duty. Opening the door of the booth softly, I crept out. Resolutely I approached the crowd and walked right up to Captain Bannister.
“Here are the papers, Captain Bannister,” I said in a voice I tried to make coldly sarcastic, as is fitting when talking to a man who has let his wedding make him forget his country’s business.
Captain Bannister whirled around and faced me with a look of astonishment that changed to annoyance when he saw the bag. He did not offer to take it from my outstretched hand. He could not look into my eyes. He stood there, his face getting redder every minute, while the people stared curiously. At last he pulled himself together and took the bag. “Thank you,” he said in a flat voice.
A dozen hands pulled the bag away from him. “Let’s see the papers, Banny,” called several voices. “Are they the plans of your wedding journey or your new home?”
He made a desperate effort to regain possession of the bag, but they kept it away from him and opened it. Then such a roar of laughter went up as I have never heard. Everybody was laughing but the bride, and she looked like a thundercloud. Soon the things from the bag were being handed around and I saw what they were. They were a girl’s ballet dress, very flimsy and very short and very much bespangled; a pair of light blue silk stockings and a pair of high-heeled dancing slippers.
Standing on the edge of the crowd I heard one man explain to another, between snorts of laughter, how Captain Bannister had taken part in a show that the soldiers had given a week before and had worn that ballet dress. His bride-to-be had been at the show, and being a very straight-laced sort of a person had been very much shocked at the men dressed as girls. She didn’t know that Captain Bannister had been one of them, and he didn’t intend that she should find out. Some of his friends knew this and for a joke they got hold of the handbag in which he had packed his clothes for his wedding journey and hid them away, putting in the ballet dress instead. He found it out on the way out to the college, and conceived the brilliant idea of leaving it there. He figured that a suit like that found in a girls’ college would cause no commotion; nothing like what would happen if his bride should find it among his things. But of all things—here the man who was telling all this nearly turned inside out—somebody sees him leave the bag behind and chases after him with it!