“Oh, no, old W.G.’s far too sober for this sort of thing.”
“Sober?” repeated Mr. Ingleby. “Well, I suppose you will have to go; but I do hope—”
He didn’t say what he hoped; but Edwin knew, and was content to leave it at that.
The great day came, and Edwin found, as some compensation for the scoffing of W.G. and the superciliousness of Martin and Maskew, that his position was really one of some importance. All the first-year men, even the immaculate Harrop, had decided to go to the theatre, and up to the last minute Edwin was busy selling tickets. He had asked W.G. to put him up, and W.G., as a matter of form, had consented. “I don’t suppose I shall see you after midnight, my son,” he said. With his usual thoroughness in everything that he attempted, W.G. had determined to make a night of it. “It will do me good to make a damned fool of myself for once in a way,” he said, “if it’s only for the sake of realising it afterwards . . .”
They put in a hard afternoon’s work together first, and then he and Edwin and Maskew went together to W.G.’s rooms to change. They were all rather excited, and W.G. carried a bottle of whisky in each of his coat pockets, the first of which was broached as an aperitif while they were changing. In less than an hour they emerged, W.G. attired as nearly as convention would allow him, in the manner of his woaded ancestry: a splendid caveman with lowering black brows and hairy arms like those of a gorilla, a disguise that only called for a little accentuation of his natural characteristics to be made effective; Maskew, again in character, as a Restoration cavalier; and Edwin in the modest guise of Pierrot. In the foyer of the theatre they met Martin, who had driven down in a hansom from Alvaston clothed in six feet of baby linen, with a feeding bottle round his neck. The stalls were already full of a carnival crowd of students, and the rest of the house was crowded with spectators who had come to enjoy the rag, and other unfortunate people who had entered in ignorance of the festival and the fact that their form of entertainment was to be changed for one night only.
There, among the crowd, Edwin found Griffin, a fleshy and unsubtle Mephistopheles, the Mephistopheles of Gounod, not of Goethe, and Freddie St. Aubyn, romantically pale in a wig of black curls that he had procured for his presentation of Byron. Freddie, in the interests of verisimilitude, had even shaved his moustache.