Nothing very original about its being a masquerade, from Mr. Piper a courteously grey-haired mandarin in jade-green robes beside Mrs. Piper—lovely Mary Embree that was—in the silks of a Chinese empress, heavy and shining and crusted as the wings of a jeweler's butterfly, her reticent eyes watching the bright broken patterns of the dancing as impassively as if she were viewing men being tortured or invested with honor from the Dragon Throne, to Oliver, a diffident Pierrot who has discovered no even bearably comfortable way of combining spectacles and a mask, and Peter who [Illustration: THE LAST PIPER DANCE HAS BEEN THE OFFICIAL PERIOD TO THE SOUTHAMPTON SUMMER] is gradually turning purple under the furs of a dancing bear. Nothing much out of the ordinary in the tunes and the three orchestras and the fact that a dozen gentlemen dressed as the Devil are finding their tails very inconvenient as regards the shimmy and a dozen Joans of Arc are eying each other with looks of dumb hatred whenever they pass. Nothing singular about the light-heart throb of the music, the smell of powder and scent and heat and flowers, the whole loose drifting garland of the dancers, blowing over and around the floor in the idle designs of sand, floating like scraps of colored paper through a smooth wind heavy with music as the hours run away like light water through the fingers. But outside the house the Italian gardens are open, little lanterns spot them like elf-lights, shining on hedge-green, pale marble; the night is pallid with near and crowded stars, the air warm as Summer water, sweet as dear youth.
The unmasking is to take place at midnight and it is past eleven when Oliver drops back into the stag line after being stuck for a dance and a half with a leaden-footed human flower-basket who devoted the entire time to nervous giggles and the single coy statement that she just knew he never could guess who she was but she recognized him perfectly. He starts looking around for Ted. There he is, scanning the clown's parade with the eyes of an anxious hawk, disgruntled nervousness plain in every line of his body. Then Oliver remembers that he saw a slim Chinese girl in loose blue silks go off the floor ten minutes or so ago with a tall musketeer. He goes over and touches Ted on a particolored arm—the latter is dressed as a red and gilt harlequin—and feels the muscles he touches twitch under his hand.
“Cigarette? It's getting hotter than cotton in here—they'll have to open more windows—”
“What?” Then recognizing voice and glasses “Oh yeah—guess so—awful mob, isn't it?” and they thread their way out into the cool.
They wander down from the porch and into the gardens, past benches where the talk that is going on seems to be chiefly in throaty undertones and halts nervously as their steps crunch past.
“The beautiful and damned!” says Oliver amusedly, then a little louder “Amusez vous bien, mes enfants” at a small and carefully modulated shriek that comes from the other side of the low hedge, “The night's still young. But Good Lord, isn't there any place in the whole works where two respectable people can sit without feeling like chaperones?”
They find one finally—it is at the far end of the gardens—a seat the only reason for whose obvious desertion seems to be, comments Oliver, that some untactful person has strung a dim but still visible lantern directly above it—and relapses upon it silently. It is not until the first cigarettes of both are little red dying stars on the grass beside them that either really starts to talk.
“Cool,” says Oliver, stretching his arms. The night lies over them light as spray—a great swimming bath and quietness of soft black, hushed silver—above them the whole radiant helmet of heaven is white with its stars. From the house they have left, glowing yellow in all its windows, unreal against the night as if it were only a huge flat toy made out of paper with a candle burning behind it, comes music, blurred but insistent, faint as if heard over water, dull and throbbing like horse-hoofs muffled with leather treading a lonely road.
“Um. Good party.”
“Real Piper party, Ted. And, speaking of Pipers, friend Peter certainly seems to be enjoying himself—”