“I’VE JUS’ REMEMBERED,” SAID WILLIAM, “THAT I SAW
SOMEONE AT THE FÊTE IN A COAT EXACTLY LIKE THAT
ONE WHAT YOU’VE GOT ON.”
She took it off, revealing a dress that was very short and very diaphanous and very, very pink, folded up the coat so as to show only the lining and handed it to William. William, though retaining his sphinx-like expression, heaved a sigh of relief, and Henry dropped behind Miss Poll to turn a cart wheel expressive of triumph in the middle of the road. They had reached the gate of the Vicarage now. They were only just in time....
William meant to thrust the coat into the arms of the Vicar’s wife and escape as quickly as he could, leaving Miss Poll (for whom he had already conceived a deep dislike) to her fate.
It had happened that the Member’s agent had with difficulty and with the help of great persuasive power and a megaphone, collected the majority of the attendants at the Fête into a large tent where the Member was to “say a few words” on the political situation. Many of those who had had experience of the Member’s “few words” on other occasions had tried to escape but the agent was a very determined young man with an Oxford manner and an eagle eye, and in the end he had hounded them all in. The Member was just buying a raffle ticket for a nightdress case and being particularly nice to the raffle ticket seller partly because she was pretty and partly because she might have a vote (one could never tell what age girls were nowadays). The agent was hovering in the background ready to tell him that his audience was awaiting him as soon as he’d finished being nice to the pretty girl, and at the same time keeping a wary eye on the door of the tent to see that no one escaped.... And then the contretemps happened. Miss Poll tripped airily up to the door of the tent in her pink, pink frock, peeped in, saw the serried ranks of an audience with a vacant place in front of them, presumably for the entertainer, and skipping lightly in with a “So sorry to have kept you all waiting,” leapt at once into her first item—an imitation of a tipsy landlady, an item that Miss Poll herself considered the cream of her repertoire. The audience (a very heavy and respectable audience) gaped at her, dismayed and astounded. And when a few minutes later the Member, calm and dignified and full to overflowing of eloquence and statistics, having exchanged the smile he had assumed while being nice to the pretty raffle ticket seller for a look of responsibility and capability, and having exchanged his raffle ticket for a neat little sheaf of notes (typed and clipped together by the ubiquitous agent), appeared at the door of the tent he found Miss Gertie Poll prancing to and fro before his amazed audience, her pink, pink skirts held very high, announcing that she was Gilbert the filbert, the colonel of the nuts. The agent, looking over his shoulder, grew pale and loose-jawed. The Member turned to him with dignity and a certain amount of restraint.
“What’s all this?” he demanded sternly.
The agent mopped his brow with an orange silk handkerchief.
“I—I—I’ve no idea, sir,” he gasped weakly.
“Please put a stop to it,” said the Member and added hastily, remembering that the tent was packed full of votes, “without any unpleasantness, of course.”
I have said that the agent was a capable young man with an Oxford manner, but it would have taken more than a dozen capable young men with Oxford manners to stop Miss Gertie Poll in the full flow of her repertoire. She went on for over an hour. She merely smiled bewitchingly at the agent whenever he tried to stop her without any unpleasantness, and when the Member himself appeared like a deux ex machina to take command of the situation, she blew him a kiss and he hastily retired.