LITMIR.BIZ

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was the first time Denry had seen the Countess, save at a distance. Assuredly she was finer even than her photographs. Entirely different from what one would have expected! So easy to talk to! (Yet what had he said to her? Nothing – and everything.)

      He nodded his head, and murmured, "No mistake about that lot!" Meaning, presumably, that all that one had read about the brilliance of the aristocracy was true, and more than true.

      "She's the finest woman that ever came into this town," he murmured.

      The truth was that she surpassed his dreams of womanhood. At two o'clock she had been a name to him. At five minutes past two he was in love with her. He felt profoundly thankful that, for a church tea-meeting that evening, he happened to be wearing his best clothes.

      It was while looking at her list of invitations to the ball that he first conceived the fantastic scheme of attending the ball himself. Mr. Duncalf was, fussily and deferentially, managing the machinery of the ball for the Countess. He had prepared a little list of his own, of people who ought to be invited. Several aldermen had been requested to do the same. There were thus about a dozen lists to be combined into one. Denry did the combining. Nothing was easier than to insert the name of E. H. Machin inconspicuously towards the centre of the list! Nothing was easier than to lose the original lists, inadvertently, so that if a question arose as to any particular name the responsibility for it could not be ascertained without enquiries too delicate to be made. On Wednesday Denry received a lovely Bristol board stating in copper plate that the Countess desired the pleasure of his company at the ball; and on Thursday his name was ticked off on the list as one who had accepted.

      IV

      He had never been to a dance. He had no dress-suit, and no notion of dancing.

      He was a strange inconsequent mixture of courage and timidity. You and I are consistent in character; we are either one thing or the other; but Denry Machin had no consistency.

      For three days he hesitated, and then, secretly trembling, he slipped into Sillitoe's the young tailor who had recently set up and who was gathering together the jeunesse dorée of the town.

      "I want a dress-suit," he said.

      Sillitoe, who knew that Denry only earned eighteen shilling a week, replied with only superficial politeness that a dress-suit was out of the question; he had already taken more orders than he could execute without killing himself. The whole town had uprisen as one man and demanded a dress-suit.

      "So you 're going to the ball, are you?" said Sillitoe, trying to condescend, but in fact slightly impressed.

      "Yes," said Denry, "are you?"

      Sillitoe started and then shook his head. "No time for balls," said he.

      "I can get you an invitation, if you like," said Denry, glancing at the door precisely as he had glanced at the door before adding 2 to 7.

      "Oh!" Sillitoe cocked his ears. He was not a native of the town, and had no alderman to protect his legitimate interests.

      To cut a shameful story short, in a week Denry was being tried on. Sillitoe allowed him two years' credit.

      The prospect of the ball gave an immense impetus to the study of the art of dancing in Bursley, and so put quite a nice sum of money into the pocket of Miss Earp, a young mistress in that art. She was the daughter of a furniture dealer with a passion for the bankruptcy court. Miss Earp's evening classes were attended by Denry, but none of his money went into her pocket. She was compensated by an expression of the Countess's desire for the pleasure of her company at the ball.

      The Countess had aroused Denry's interest in women as a sex. Ruth Earp quickened the interest. She was plain, but she was only twenty-four, and very graceful on her feet. Denry had one or two strictly private lessons from her in reversing. She said to him one evening, when he was practising reversing and they were entwined in the attitude prescribed by the latest fashion: "Never mind me! Think about yourself. It's the same in dancing as it is in life – the woman's duty is to adapt herself to the man." He did think about himself. He was thinking about himself in the middle of the night, and about her too. There had been something in her tone … her eye…! At the final lesson he enquired if she would give him the first waltz at the ball. She paused, then said yes.

      V

      On the evening of the ball, Denry spent at least two hours in the operation which was necessary before he could give the Countess the pleasure of his company. This operation took place in his minute bedroom at the back of the cottage in Brougham Street, and it was of a complex nature. Three weeks ago he had innocently thought that you had only to order a dress-suit and there you were! He now knew that a dress-suit is merely the beginning of anxiety. Shirt! Collar! Tie! Studs! Cuff-links! Gloves! Handkerchief! (He was very glad to learn authoritatively from Sillitoe that handkerchiefs were no longer worn in the waistcoat opening, and that men who so wore them were barbarians and the truth was not in them. Thus, an everyday handkerchief would do.) Boots!.. Boots were the rock on which he had struck. Sillitoe, in addition to being a tailor, was a hosier, but by some flaw in the scheme of the universe hosiers do not sell boots. Except boots Denry could get all he needed on credit; boots he could not get on credit, and he could not pay cash for them. Eventually he decided that his church boots must be dazzled up to the level of this great secular occasion. The pity was that he forgot – not that he was of a forgetful disposition in great matters; he was simply over-excited – he forgot to dazzle them up until after he had fairly put his collar on and his necktie in a bow. It is imprudent to touch blacking in a dress-shirt. So Denry had to undo the past and begin again. This hurried him. He was not afraid of being late for the first waltz with Miss Ruth Earp, but he was afraid of not being out of the house before his mother returned. Mrs. Machin had been making up a lady's own materials all day, naturally – the day being what it was! If she had had twelve hands instead of two, she might have made up the own materials of half a dozen ladies instead of one, and earned twenty-four shillings instead of four. Denry did not want his mother to see him ere he departed. He had lavished an enormous amount of brains and energy to the end of displaying himself in this refined and novel attire to the gaze of two hundred persons, and yet his secret wish was to deprive his mother of the beautiful spectacle!

      However, she slipped in, with her bag and her seamy fingers and her rather sardonic expression, at the very moment when Denry was putting on his overcoat in the kitchen (there being insufficient room in the passage). He did what he could to hide his shirt-front (though she knew all about it) and failed.

      "Bless us!" she exclaimed briefly, going to the fire to warm her hands.

      A harmless remark. But her tone seemed to strip bare the vanity of human greatness.

      "I 'm in a hurry," said Denry importantly, as if he was going forth to sign a treaty involving the welfare of nations.

      "Well," said she, "happen ye are, Denry. But the kitchen table's no place for boot-brushes."

      He had one piece of luck. It froze. Therefore, no anxiety about the condition of boots!

      VI

      The Countess was late; some trouble with a horse. Happily the Earl had been in Bursley all day and had dressed at the Conservative Club; and his lordship had ordered that the programme of dances should be begun. Denry learned this as soon as he emerged, effulgent, from the gentlemen's cloak-room into the broad red-carpeted corridor which runs from end to end of the ground-floor of the Town Hall. Many important townspeople were chatting in the corridor – the innumerable Sweetnam family, the Stanways, the great Etches, the Fearnses, Mrs. Clayton Vernon, the Suttons, including Beatrice Sutton. Of course everybody knew him for Duncalf's shorthand clerk and the son of the incomparable flannel-washer; but universal white kid gloves constitute a democracy, and Sillitoe could put more style into a suit than any other tailor in the Five Towns.

      "How do?" the eldest of the Sweetnam boys nodded carelessly.

      "How do, Sweetnam?" said Denry with equal carelessness.

      The thing was accomplished! That greeting was like a masonic initiation, and henceforward he was the peer of no matter whom. At first he had thought that four hundred eyes would be fastened on him,

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