“I’m taking her to the Ball,” said Roger.

“I shall see you there,” said Solly, who had not until that moment had any intention of going to the Ball.

An hour later two further rounds of toddy had made a great difference to Solly’s party. On the floor below Mrs Bridgetower was in such a sleep as only one of her white tablets, washed down with hot milk, could give her. Upstairs in the attic sitting-room three of the four men were talking animatedly and Humphrey Cobbler was holding forth to Hector on education.

“Of formal education,” said he, “I have had but little. When I was a lad I was sent to a choir school. I had, if I may be permitted to say so, an exceptional soprano voice. They needed me, Mackilwraith; they needed me. And if there is one thing which utterly destroys a boy’s character, it is to be needed. Boys are unendurable unless they are wholly expendable.”

“Funny thing, when you flushed your closet just now,” said Roger to Solly, “it put me in mind of a wonderful Dominion Day celebration we put on a couple of years ago when I was stationed out on the West Coast.”

“All celebrations should be wonderful,” said Solly, putting more sugar in his drink. “And that is one of the big troubles with Canada; we have very little ceremonial sense. What have we to compare with the Mardi Gras, or the Battle of Flowers? Nothing. Not a bloody thing.”

“Because I was needed, I was impossible. I never worked at my school lessons, but I worked like a black at my music. And whenever I had to sing in Service, I put on a superb show. Well—what could they do? The Dean was headmaster of the school; was he going to boot his best soprano boy out into a cold world because he didn’t do his sums? You see the situation?”

“Well, now, we had to parade on Dominion Day of course, and it was a hot day and we were all pretty well browned off. And we were worse than browned off—in fact you could pretty well say we were completely cheesed off—when an order came round that the OC wanted all the junior officers to remain in barracks that night—Dominion Day night you see—because some bigwig from Ottawa wanted to have a look around, you see?”

“Our national dislike for doing things on a really big and spectacular scale, shows up in this play. You heard that row a couple of weeks ago when old Vambrace and Eva Wildfang were carrying on about the beauty of simplicity? They think Shakespeare can be run entirely under his own steam. He can’t. You’ve got to have as much lavishness in costume and setting as you can, or your play will be a flop. The day of Shakespeare in cheesecloth costumes and a few tatty drapes is done.”

“Of course I knew that I had the Dean right where I wanted him. Well, suddenly some American impresario got a notion that he wanted to take part of our choir to the States for a tour. The Dean said that only boys who had achieved a scholarly record of such-and-such could go. But ha! The impresario had been to Service. ‘Of course I’ve got to have that solo boy,’ says he. ‘That boy isn’t eligible to go,’ says the Dean. ‘Then I’ll have to think again,’ says the impresario. You know, I’ve always thought that fellow must have been a bit of a pansy. I was good, but I couldn’t have been that good.”

“There we were, you understand, cooped up in barracks, on a holiday, after a heavy afternoon in the sun. I suppose they thought we gave the damn place a lived-in look, or something. So we thought up a scheme. Or really—give the devil his due—it was a fellow named O’Carroll worked it out and when the evening came we were ready.”

“Taste is at the bottom of everything. Given taste, you can go to any lengths. For instance, you remember the row about those costumes that old Ma Crundale designed? The ones with no fronts in them? They were tossed out because the girls couldn’t wear them. But given enough taste, it could be done, and it would be a knockout! In fact, if I were given a completely free hand, I think I could work a completely naked Ariel painted gold into The Tempest and there wouldn’t be a word of complaint. Just breathless admiration! But it would all be done with taste, you see?”

“The upshot was that the Dean gave way; he didn’t want to lose the publicity or the big fee, either. So away we went to the States for six months. You should have seen us, Mackilwraith! For the first part of the programme we wore our blue cassocks and our ruffs, and sang Byrd and Tallis and all that. Then for the secular stuff in Part Two we switched into evening dress, with Eton suits for us boys. Ah, Mackilwraith, if you could but once have seen me in a bumfreezer and a clean collar, singing “Love was once a little boy”, it would have made a better man of you!”

“As soon as dinner was over we made our excuses and got out of the mess as fast as we could. It was easy, because the OC was dining with the bigwig. We got over to the men’s quarters, which were empty; everybody was out on the town. Some of us who were engineers arranged wires on the handles of all the water closets on each floor. Then we did the same in every other building where there were any. Then we established a central control in the administration building in the dark, and waited.”

“Given taste, you can then go as far as you like with your big stage effects. Hundreds of people milling about if you like. Fill the stage with horses and dogs. Pageantry in a big way. Make it complex! Let it fill the eye! Let it be enriched, bejewelled, Byzantine! The parrot-cry that simplicity is one with good taste comes from people who cannot trust their taste in anything which is not simple. Shakespeare demands all the opulence that we can give him!”

“The man who had charge of us boys was one of the counter-tenors, a dear little chap named Thickpenny—Roland Thickpenny. You know what a counter-tenor is? No, I thought not. You’ve lived a dreadfully meagre life, Mackilwraith. A counter-tenor is a male alto. He is a tenor who has trained and enriched his falsetto register so that he can sing in a lovely, clear voice, and fill in the alto part in the male choir in a cathedral. You can’t have women in Church choirs; they sour the Communion wine, or something. They’re damned nuisances, anyhow. Well, Thickpenny was a dear—a chubby, red-faced little fellow, with a lovely voice. Women in the States went wild over him. Wanted to see what made him sing like that. Thought he was a eunuch, or something. Dear old Thickers was always being chased by some orgulous hag. But he was true to Mrs Thickpenny and all the little Thickpennies at home.”

“At last the great moment came. The OC walked out into the barrack yard with the bigwig. Every window in every building was open. We pulled all the wire controls. There was a perfect Niagara of flushing closets. We did it again. And again. It was a feu de joie of WCs. The OC and the bigwig scampered inside again. We never heard a word about it. That taught him to keep us in on Dominion Day.”

“Tasset, I’m going to make a life’s work out of it! If it kills me I’m going to squelch this notion that there is anything meritorious about simplicity on the stage. I proclaim the Baroque, Tasset! I laud the daedal!”

“But if Thickpenny was a man of iron, Mackilwraith, I was not. For you must know that I, too, had my following. “That dear little boy,” ladies would exclaim, and want to kiss me. Now, Mackilwraith, it was in a place in Montana called Butte, that a very beautiful woman, a superb creature of about thirty-five, I suppose, caught me at a party and kissed me to such purpose that my voice broke on the voyage home. And that is why I refuse to get stewed up about any woman’s honour. What about my honour, such as it was at the age of eleven? Worse still, what about my voice? For once it was gone the Dean made my life a perfect misery. But you can’t say my American tour wasn’t educative.”