“Steady! Steady!” said Tony, opening the telegram with unfaltering fingers. “Take some more fizz. And give brother Bundock a glass.”
He read the fateful message, and the anxious watchers saw strange thoughts and feelings passing in lines across his forehead, and in waves across the folds of his flabby clean-shaven jowl. Then his emotions all coalesced and crashed into laughter, noisy, but not devoid of grimness. “Listen to this!” he cried. “‘Sincere condolences. Married Polly this morning. Duke.’”
Mrs. Flippance turned scarlet. “He’s married Polly!” she shrieked. “The beast! The insulting beast!”
“Easy! Easy!” said the bridegroom to this second perturbed female. “It isn’t him Polly’s married—it’s his marionettes. Chingford, the telegram is marked. I expect the caravan is honeymooning in Epping Forest. Give me Boulogne.”
But nobody was listening to him any longer. The hysterics that had been only a rumour in church became a reality now. Miss Gentry had produced salts for her darling and was calling for burnt feathers, and Blanche and Barnaby, tumbling over each other kitchenwards, only set their mother’s tongue clacking fortissimo. Even Mr. Purley was slapping the bride’s hands as she shrieked on the sofa—he was deeply moved by her convulsions, never having seen a doll in distress. Bundock alone remained petrified, the empty champagne-glass in his hand, his eyes still glued on Miss Gentry, and the bubbles in his veins re-evoking that effervescence of the Spring in which even a rear-ward consciousness of green mud had not availed to blunt the charm of opulent beauty. Through the tohu-bohu Mr. Flippance calmly scribbled a counter-telegram: “Congratulations on your marriage. Condolences to Polly.”
“Pity we ain’t got some of that Scotch stuff to quiet her,” said the agitated hurdle-maker.
“Whisky, do you mean?” said Tony.
“No, no! That new stuff they should be telling of—discovered by that Scotch doctor—puts you to sleep, like, and onsenses you.”
“Oh, chloroform!” said Tony.
“Ay, that’s the name. Masterous stuff for females to my thinking.”