Through two heavy identical magnolias the lighted porch was like a stage. The dancers moved, locked two and two, taking the changing light, eluding it.
‘. . . shake it and break it, don’t let it fall. . . .’
Along the balustrade they sat like birds, effacingly belligerent. Wallflowers.
‘No, no, I mean those ex-soldiers there. Look at them. Sitting there, talking their army French, kidding themselves. Why did they come, Joe?’
‘Same reason we come. Like a show, ain’t it? But how do you know they’re soldiers? . . . Look at them two there,’ he crowed suddenly, with childish intentness. The couple slid and poised, losing the syncopation deliberately, seeking and finding it, losing it again. . . . Her limbs eluded his, anticipated his: the breath of a touch and an escape, which he, too, was quick to assist. Touch and retreat: no satiety. ‘Wow, if that tune ever stops!’
‘Don’t be silly, Joe. I know them. I have seen their sort at the canteen too often, acting just that way: poor kind dull boys going to war, and because they were going girls were nice to them. But now there is no war for them to go to. And look how the girls treat them.
‘What was you saying?’ asked Gilligan with detachment. He tore his eyes from the couple. ‘Wow, if the Loot could see this it’d sure wake him up, wouldn’t it?’
Mahon sat quietly beside Mrs Powers. Gilligan turning in his seat beside the Negro driver looked at his quiet shape. The syncopation pulsed about them, a reiteration of wind and strings warm and troubling as water. She leaned toward him.
‘Like it Donald?’
He stirred, raising his hand to his glasses.
‘Come on, Loot,’ said Gilligan quickly; ‘don’t knock ’em off. We might lose ’em here.’ Mahon lowered his hand obediently. ‘Music’s pretty good, ain’t it?’
‘Pretty good, Joe,’ he agreed.
Gilligan looked at the dancers again. ‘Pretty good ain’t the half of it. Look at ’em.’
‘. . . oh, oh, I wonder where my easy rider’s gone. . . .’
He turned suddenly to Mrs Powers. ‘You know who that is there?
Mrs Powers saw Dr Gary, without his glass of water, she saw a feather fan like a willow at evening and the luminous plane of a bare arm upon conventional black. She saw two heads as one head, cheek to cheek, expressionless and fixed as a ritual above a slow synchronization of limbs. ‘That Saunders lady,’ Gilligan explained.
She watched the girl’s graceful motion, a restrained delicate abandon, and Gilligan continued; ‘I think I’ll go closer, with them birds sitting there. I got to see this.’
They greeted him with the effusiveness of people who are brought together by invitation yet are not quite certain of themselves and of the spirit of the invitation; in this case the eternal country boys of one national mental state, lost in the comparative metropolitan atmosphere of one diametrically opposed to it. To feel provincial: finding that a certain conventional state of behaviour has become inexplicably obsolete overnight.
Most of them Gilligan knew by name and he sat also upon the balustrade. He was offered and accepted a cigarette and he perched among them while they talked loudly, drowning the intimation of dancers they could not emulate, of girls who once waited upon their favours and who now ignored them — the hang-over of warfare in a society tired of warfare.
Puzzled and lost, poor devils. Once Society drank war, brought them into manhood with a cultivated taste for war; but now Society seemed to have found something else for a beverage, while they were not yet accustomed to two and seventy-five per cent.
‘Look at those kids that grew up while we were away,’ one advised him with passion. ‘The girls don’t like it. But what can they do? We can’t do them dances. It ain’t just going through the motions. You could learn that, I guess. It’s — it’s—’ he sought vainly for words. He gave it up and continued: ‘Funny, too. I learned things from French women. . . . Say, the girls don’t like it, do they? They haven’t changed that much, you know.’
‘Naw, they don’t like it,’ Gilligan answered. ‘Look at them two.’
‘Sure, they don’t like it. These are nice girls; they will be the mothers of the next generation. Of course they don’t like it.’
‘Somebody sure does, though,’ Gilligan replied. Dr Gary passed, dancing smoothly, efficiently, quite decorous, yet enjoying himself. His partner was young and briefly skirted: you could see that she danced with him because it was the thing to dance with Dr Gary — no one knew exactly why.
She was conscious of physical freedom, of her young, uncorseted body, flat as a boy’s and, like a boy’s, pleasuring in freedom and motion, as though freedom and motion were water, pleasuring her flesh to the intermittent teasing of silk. Her glance followed over Dr Gary’s shoulder (it was masculine because it was drably conventional in black) and arrested seeking for a lost rhythm, lost deliberately. Dr Gary’s partner, skilfully following him, watched the other couple, ignoring the girl. (If there’s justice in heaven, I’ll get him next time.)
‘Dancing with you,’ said Dr Gary, ’is like a poem by a minor poet named Swinburne. Dr Gary preferred Milton; he had the passages all designated, like a play.
‘Swinburne?’ She smiled vaguely, watching the other couple, not losing the rhythm, not cracking her paint. Her face was smooth, as skilfully done and as artificial as an orchid. ‘Did he write poems, too?’ (Is he thinking of Ella Wilcox or Irene Castle? He is a grand dancer: takes a good dancer to get along with Cecily.) ‘I think Kipling is awfully cute, don’t you?’ (What a funny dress Cecily has on.)
Gilligan, watching the dancers, said: ‘What?’
The other repeated defensively: ‘He was in a French base. Sure he was. Two or three years. Good fellow.’ He added: ‘Even if he can dance like they do.’
Light, motion, sound: no solidity. A turgid compulsion, passionate and evanescent. And outside spring, like a young girl reft of happiness and incapable of sorrow.
‘. . . throw it on the wall. Oh, oh, oh, oh . . .’ ‘. . . won’t never forget his expression when he said, “Jack, mine’s got syph. Had her . . .” ’ ‘shake it and break it, shake it. . . .’ ‘First night in Paris . . . then the other one. . . .’ ‘. . . don’t let it fall. . . .’ ‘. . . with a gun . . . twenty dollars in gold pinned to my . . .’ ‘I wonder where my easy, easy rider’s. . . .’
‘Sure,’ Gilligan agreed. He wondered where Madden, whom he liked, was, and not expecting an answer he was informed. There she is again. Her feather fan like a willow at evening, her arm crossing conventional black a slim warm plane. Jove would have said, How virginal her legs are, but Gilligan, not being Jove, said, For Christ’s sake, wishing Donald Mahon were her partner or failing this, being glad he couldn’t see her.
The music stopped. The dancers stood waiting its renewal. The hostess talking interminably appeared and, as before a plague, people scattered before her passage. Gilligan caught, submerged beneath waves of talk, suffered her, watching couples pass from the veranda on to the vague lawn. How soft their bodies look, their little backs and hips, he thought, saying yes ma’am or no ma’am. At last he walked away and left her talking, and in a swing he saw Madden and a stranger.
‘This is Mr Dough,’ Madden said, greeting him. ‘How’s Mahon?’
Gilligan shook hands. ‘He’s outside there, now, with Mrs Powers.’
‘He is? Mahon was with the British,’ he explained to his companion. ‘Aviation.’
He betrayed a faint interest. ‘R.A.F.?’
‘I guess so,’ Gilligan replied. ‘We brought him over to hear the music a while.’
‘Brought him?’
‘Got his in the head. Don’t remember much,’ Madden informed the other. ‘Did you say Mrs Powers is with him?’ he asked Gilligan.
‘Yeh, she came. Why not come out and speak to her?’
Madden looked at his companion. Dough shifted his cork leg. ‘I think not,’ he said. ‘I’ll wait for you.’
Madden rose. ‘Come on,’ Gilligan said, ‘she’ll be glad to see you. She ain’t a bad sort, as Madden can tell you.’
‘No, I’ll wait here, thanks. But come back, will you?’
Madden read his unexpressed thought. ‘She’s dancing now. I’ll be back before then.’
They left him lighting a cigarette. The Negro cornetist had restrained his men and removed them temporarily and the porch was deserted save for the group sitting on the balustrade. These, the hostess, with a renascence of optimism, had run to earth and captured.
Gilligan and Madden crossed grass, leaving lights behind. ‘Mrs Powers, you remember Mr Madden,’ Gilligan informed her formally. He was not big, yet there was something big and calm about him, a sense of competent inertia after activity. Madden saw her colourless face against the canopied darkness of the car, her black eyes and her mouth like a scar. Beside her Mahon sat motionless and remote, waiting for music which you could not tell whether or not he heard.
‘Good evening, ma’am,’ Madden said enveloping her firm, slow hand, remembering a figure sharp against the sky screaming, You got us killed and firing point-blank into another man’s face red and bitter in a relief of transient flame against a sorrowful dawn.
11
Jones, challenging the competition, danced with her twice, once for six
