The June Ball

Dahlgren Hall at night was a different building.

The class had been at it since five. The iron girders were hung with bunting, blue and gold, in long swags from one end of the hall to the other, and from the roof hung flags, every flag the Academy owned and several it had borrowed, the King’s and the Realm’s and the Navy’s and the signal flags of the whole alphabet in a long bright string that spelled out, if you knew how to read it, Class of 1926 Bids Farewell. The glass roof was black now, with stars in it. Under it, on the floor where four hundred and sixty-one young men had stood to attention in the sun that afternoon, four hundred and sixty-one young men in mess jackets were dancing with four hundred and sixty-one girls in pale dresses, to an orchestra from Philadelphia on a platform banked with hydrangeas, under eight hundred electric lamps, and the noise of it was like the sea.

Pershing stood at the edge of it, in a white tie, with the Lieutenant-Governor on his left and the Superintendent on his right, and watched.

He had never been good at balls. He had danced at them, when he was young, at the frontier posts, in the officers’ clubs in Manila, because it was expected and because he had been told he was a good dancer, which he had believed until somebody told him the truth and taught him properly. He did not dance now. A Governor-General did not dance at the June Ball, except once, with his hostess, which was in the programme at a quarter to ten.

“Wonderful,” said Tull, beside him, with deep content. “Isn’t it wonderful? Every year. Every year it’s wonderful.”

“It is very fine.”

“They make the punch themselves, you know, the class. It’s a tradition. Every class has its own recipe. They keep it secret. Hester and I had a cup when we came in.” He lowered his voice in a confiding way. “It’s a little sharp this year. I think it’s the lemons. The lemons from Florida have been very sharp.”

Pershing looked across the hall at the punch bowl.

It stood on a long table under the gallery on the far side, a silver bowl the size of a hip bath on a white cloth, with a block of ice in it the size of a man’s head, and a silver ladle, and a midshipman behind it in a white apron filling cups. There was a queue for it all the way along the wall. The queue was mostly midshipmen. It was moving very slowly, because every midshipman who reached the head of it filled his cup, and then, before he turned away, glanced across the hall, at the Governor-General.

Voss was beside the punch bowl.

He was in a dinner jacket that did not fit him and he had a cup of punch in his hand and he was not drinking it. He was holding a small glass thermometer in it, the kind used for photography, and reading the scale with his head on one side, and writing in his grey book, and a girl in yellow tulle was watching him do it with an expression of pure delight.

“Who is that young man?” said Tull. “With the thermometer?”

“Mr Voss,” said Pershing. “Of the Bureau.”

“Oh, yes. The young man with the theory.” Tull beamed across the hall at Voss, with great goodwill. “He came to see me this afternoon. Very polite. He asked me whether I had ever been offered liquor at Government House. I said certainly not. He asked whether I had any liquor at Government House. I said certainly not.” He shook his head admiringly. “Very thorough. Everybody from the capital is so thorough.”

At the punch bowl, Voss took the thermometer out of the cup, wiped it on his handkerchief, put it in his pocket, and then, with an air of a man doing something he would have to account for, very cautiously took a sip.

His face did nothing for a moment. Then it did a great deal.

---

The waltz was at a quarter to ten.

The orchestra from Philadelphia played the opening bars of it, and the floor cleared, as it had been told to, and the Governor-General of the Realm crossed it alone, under eight hundred lamps and nine hundred pairs of eyes, and bowed to the Lieutenant-Governor’s wife, and she rose and gave him her hand, and they danced.

Mrs Tull danced very well. She danced as she did everything, without fuss, and without any appearance of effort, and with a kind of dry attentiveness to what her partner was about to do that made him do it better. She was in grey again, a long dress of grey silk with a pattern of silver leaves, and she smelled of lavender water and nothing else, and after a turn of the floor she said, without moving her lips, exactly as the class of 1926 had said things that afternoon:

“You are a good dancer, Your Excellency.”

“I was taught.”

“One can always tell. A man who has learned from somebody who minded dances as if he is listening. A man who has learned from a sergeant dances as if he is on parade.” They turned. “You are listening.”

“I am.”

“Good. I have something to tell you, and this is the only place in Annapolis where I can tell it to you without being overheard.” They turned again, past the hydrangeas, past the orchestra. “The cellar.”

Pershing said nothing.

“Wesley’s predecessor,” said Mrs Tull, steadily, “was a man named Carroll. Old Maryland. Catholic. His family had been in the Province since Lord Baltimore and had been drinking Madeira in it for most of that time. When the Seventh Amendment carried, in the autumn of 1919, he had two hundred and forty bottles of it in the cellar of Government House. All lawful. All bought before the Act. All his own.” They turned. “He did not want to take them away. It would have meant transporting them, and he was not sure of the law, and he was seventy-four. And he did not want to leave them for his successor, because his successor was going to be a Methodist, the Premier had told him so. So he had a wall built. Across the end of the cellar. Brick. With the Madeira behind it. And he went home to Carrollton and died the following spring and never told anybody.”

“How do you know?”

“The bricklayer’s widow told me. In 1921. She came to the kitchen door for work, and we gave her work, and she told me.” Mrs Tull did not change her expression at all. “Wesley does not know. I have never told him. It is lawful to own. It is not his. It has been sitting behind that wall for six years, under his feet, while he gives his toast in grape juice, and if he knew he would have it taken out and poured into the Severn in front of the Sun and then he would be ill for a week.” She paused. “I put the bucket on top of it this evening. On the floor, in front of the wall. It seemed the right place.”

They turned. The floor went round them, and the lamps, and the faces.

“Why are you telling me?” said Pershing.

“Because you are the referee,” said Mrs Tull, “and there are two hundred and forty bottles of Madeira within sight of Government House, which is to say inside it, and somebody had better know who will not tell anybody.” She looked up at him for the first time. “And because I am on nobody’s side, Your Excellency. I have been on nobody’s side for six years. I find it very tiring. I wanted to tell somebody who knew how it felt.”

The waltz ended. The orchestra played the last chord. The hall applauded. Pershing bowed and Mrs Tull curtsied, very low and very straight, and as she rose she said, “There. I feel much better. Do you?” and he said, “No,” and she laughed, quite loudly, in front of everybody, and he took her back to her husband.

---

He looked for Warren after the waltz, and could not find him.

He looked along the galleries, and along the wall by the punch bowl, and among the young men in mess jackets and the girls in pale dresses going round and round under the lamps, and he looked for a tall boy in a white tie with a crooked bow and a burned neck. He did not find one. He found the member of the Assembly’s daughter from the dinner, who was dancing with a midshipman and looked up at him as she went past with an expression of great innocence. He found Abramowitz, in a mess jacket, with his mother on his arm, both of them standing at the edge of the floor looking at the dancers as though they had been put down in a foreign country, and he went across and spoke to them for three minutes, and Abramowitz’s mother wept again. He found Aldridge of the Sun behind a pillar with his notebook. He found Ruark.

Ruark was by the side door of the hall, the one that let out into the Yard toward the gate, with four other midshipmen, and when he saw the Governor-General coming toward them through the crowd he went the colour of his hair and then, with an effort, came to a kind of attention.

“Mr Ruark.”

“Sir.”

“Have you seen my son?”

There was the smallest pause. The four other midshipmen looked at the ceiling.

“Not tonight, sir,” said Ruark. “Not at the Ball, sir.”

It was true, and it was the precise and exact truth, and Pershing, who had been lied to by experts on four continents, recognised the very particular shape of a truth that has been chosen with care.

“Where, then?”

“I couldn’t say, sir.”

“Couldn’t, Mr Ruark? Or won’t?”

Ruark looked at him with a face of great misery and great resolution.

“Sir,” he said, “it’s twenty past ten. Sir. You said yourself, if there’s a question, you answer it.” He swallowed. “Sir, you’ll want to be on the step.”

---

He went to the step.

He did not run. He did not hurry. He walked out of Dahlgren Hall by the main door and across the Yard in the dark to the gate, and past the Marine sentry, who presented arms and was acknowledged, and up Maryland Avenue in his white tie at a steady pace under the trees and the street lamps, a quarter of a mile, and round State Circle, and up the steps of Government House, and turned on the top step, and stood there.

He did not take a lantern. He did not need one. Maryland Avenue was lit, every hundred yards, by an electric street lamp on an iron post, and from the step he could see the whole of it, as he had seen it at midnight, straight down between the trees to the gate in the grey wall and the lamps on either side and the sentry box.

It was twenty-six minutes past ten.

There was a white figure under the street lamp at the corner of Prince George Street.

It was not a midshipman. It was short, and wide, and it was wearing a black suit and holding a black hat against its chest, and it was standing quite still on the corner with its face turned down the avenue toward the Academy, waiting. It was a hundred and fifty yards from the step. It was in the full light of the lamp. It was, by the referee’s own ruling of the previous night, which Bramwell had written down, within sight.

And down the avenue, beyond it, there were others.

There was a white figure under the next lamp, at the corner of King George Street. There was a white figure under the lamp after that, halfway to the gate. There was a white figure under the lamp beyond it. There was a white figure, very small, just inside the gate itself, under the gate lamps, and Pershing, standing on the step of Government House in his white tie, understood that he was looking at a line, and that it ran from the corner of Prince George Street to the gate, and that it ran on beyond the gate, out of his sight, through the Yard in the dark, to the side door of Dahlgren Hall, where Ruark had been standing with four other midshipmen; and that every man in it was a hundred yards from the next; and that every man in it had been commissioned that afternoon by the Governor-General, who had shaken his hand and said something to him that was not the same thing twice.

The white figure inside the gate moved.

It came out of the gate at a run, past the sentry box, and the sentry came out of his box and stood and watched it go and did nothing at all; and it ran up Maryland Avenue under the trees, a white shape with something held out in front of it in both hands, carefully, level, the way a man carries a full cup; and it came into the light of the first lamp and stopped beside the man waiting there and put the thing into his hands, and that man turned and ran, carrying it level in both hands, up the avenue to the next lamp.

It was a relay. It was beautifully done. Pershing, who had organised the supply of two million men across an ocean, stood on the step and watched a cup of punch come up Maryland Avenue from the June Ball by hand, a hundred yards at a time, under the street lamps, and could not, in honesty, have faulted the staff work.

It reached the lamp at King George Street.

It left the lamp at King George Street.

It came up the last hundred yards toward the corner of Prince George Street, toward the short wide figure in the black suit waiting under the lamp, a white running shape with the cup held out in front of it, red-haired, Pershing could see that now, even from the step: Ruark, who must have run the whole way from Dahlgren Hall by the back of the Yard to take the last leg himself.

And from the other side of Prince George Street, from the right, walking slowly, with his top hat on his head and his overcoat over his arm and his face turned up to the stars, came the Lieutenant-Governor of Maryland, going home early from the Ball.

---

Tull did not see the relay. Pershing was sure of that afterwards and he was sure of it at the time. Tull came round the corner of Prince George Street at a stroll, humming, a round man in a tailcoat going home to bed at half past ten because he was a Methodist and had been up since five and had to give the lesson at chapel in the morning, and he came round the corner into the light of the lamp at exactly the moment that Ruark arrived at it from the other direction, running, with the cup held out level in both hands.

They met under the lamp. La Guardia was two yards away.

Ruark could not stop. He had been running for a quarter of a mile. He was going too fast and he had been told to put the cup into the hands of the man under the lamp at the corner of Prince George Street, and there were now two men under the lamp at the corner of Prince George Street, and one of them had his hands out, because he was La Guardia, and one of them had his hands out too, because he was Tull and somebody was running at him with a full cup and he was a kind man and his hands went out to catch it of their own accord.

Ruark put the cup into Tull’s hands.

It was very quiet on Maryland Avenue. Pershing could hear, from the step, the orchestra at the Ball a quarter of a mile away, faint and tinny, playing a foxtrot.

Tull looked down at the cup in his hands. He looked at Ruark. He looked at La Guardia, two yards away, with his hands still out and his mouth open. He did not look up the avenue at the step of Government House. He looked back down at the cup.

Then he lifted it, slowly, to his nose, and sniffed.

“Oh, dear,” Pershing heard him say, quite clearly, in his soft Eastern Shore voice, carrying up the avenue in the still night air. “Oh, dear. This has gone off.” He sniffed again, and shook his head with great sadness. “It’s the lemons. The Florida lemons. I said so to His Excellency. Such a pity. You young men work so hard on the punch.” And he stepped to the edge of the pavement, to the low railing in front of the corner house, where somebody had planted a row of azaleas, and tipped the cup over them, carefully, every drop, and then looked into the empty cup with his head on one side, and then handed it back to Ruark.

“Thank you, young man,” he said. “Very thoughtful. I’m not thirsty.” He looked at La Guardia. “Good evening, Mr La Guardia. Are you enjoying the Ball?”

La Guardia said something. Pershing could not hear what it was. It was short.

Tull nodded, kindly, and raised his top hat to both of them, and walked on up Maryland Avenue toward State Circle, humming, with his overcoat over his arm and his face turned up to the stars, and came round the circle, and up the steps of Government House, and found the Governor-General standing on the top one in the dark.

“Your Excellency!” he said. “You’re home early too.”

“Your Honour.”

“Wonderful ball. Wonderful. But I’m an old man and I have the lesson at chapel.” He stopped on the step below and looked out over the circle, down the avenue, with great contentment. There was nobody under the lamp at the corner of Prince George Street now. There was nobody under any of the lamps. There was only the avenue, long and quiet and empty, going down between the trees to the gate. “Some young man gave me a cup of punch on the corner. Very kind. It had gone off. I poured it on Mrs Brice’s azaleas.” He sighed. “I hope it won’t hurt them.”

“I expect they will survive,” said Pershing.

“I expect so. Azaleas are very hardy.” Tull went up the last step and in at the door, and turned in the lit hall, and smiled back at the Governor-General with complete and unclouded happiness. “Good night, Your Excellency. Maryland keeps the law.”

“Good night, Your Honour.”

The door closed.

Pershing stood alone on the step for a long time, looking down Maryland Avenue at the empty street lamps.

Then he drew the card from behind the programme and looked at clause one, in the light from the hall window. Served: handed to the party by another person, and drunk. He looked at it for some time. Then he put it away, and went in, and up the stairs, and along the corridor, and opened the door of the room at the front, the best room in the house, the one that looked at everything.

It was empty. The lamp was out. The window was wide open. And on the sill, set side by side as neatly as before, were a pair of patent leather evening shoes.