‘Not like that,’ he replied, ‘no, ma’am. Where I come from you’d have to have a licence to dance that way.’
Her laugh was in three notes and she was like a swept tree. Her eyes, beneath lowered lids, her teeth, between her purple lips, glittered briefly.
‘I think that’s awfully clever. And Mr Jones doesn’t dance either, so all I have left is Lee.’
Lee — Mr Rivers — stood waiting, and Jones said heavily: ‘This is my dance.’
‘I’m sorry. I promised Lee,’ she answered swiftly. ‘But you cut in, won’t you?’ Her hand was briefly on his sleeve and Jones, contemplating Mr Rivers, yellowly repeated:
‘This is my dance.’
Mr Rivers looked at him and then looked quickly away.
‘Oh, beg pardon. Your dance?’
‘Lee!’ she said sharply, reaching her hand again. Mr Rivers met Jones’s stare once more.
‘Beg pardon,’ he muttered, ‘I’ll cut in.’ He lounged onward. Cecily let her glance follow him, then she shrugged and turned to Jones. Her neck, her arm, took faint light warmly, smoothly. She took Jones’s tweed sleeve.
‘Say,’ Gilligan murmured, watching their retreat, ‘you can see right through her.’
‘Dat’s de war,’ explained the Negro driver, sleeping again immediately.
13
Jones dragged her resisting among shadows. A crepe-myrtle bush obscured them.
‘Let me go!’ she said, struggling.
‘What’s the matter with you? You kissed me once, didn’t you?’
‘Let me go,’she repeated.
‘What for? For that goddam dead man? What does he care about you?’ He held her until her nervous energy, deserting her, left her fragile as a captured bird. He stared at the white blur which was her face and she was aware of the shapeless looming bulk of his body in the darkness, smelling wool and tobacco.
‘Let me go,’ she repeated piteously, and finding herself suddenly free, she fled across grass, knowing dew on her shoes, seeing gratefully a row of men sitting like birds on the balustrade. Mr Rivers’s iron face, above his immaculate linen, met her and she grasped his arm.
‘Let’s dance, Lee,’ she said thinly, striking her body sharply against him, taking the broken suggestion of saxophones.
14
Mrs Powers had a small triumph: the railbirds had given her a ‘rush’.
‘Say,’ they had nudged each other, ‘look who Rufe’s got.’
And while the hostess stood in effusive volubility beside her straight, dark dress, two of them, whispering together, beckoned Madden aside.
‘Powers?’ they asked, when he joined them. But he hushed them.
‘Yes, that was him. But that’s not for talk, you know. Don’t tell them, see.’ His glance swept the group along the rail. ‘Won’t do any good, you know.’
‘Hell, no,’ they assured him. Powers!
And so they danced with her, one or two at first, then having watched her firm, capable performance, all of them that danced at all were soon involved in a jolly competition, following her while she danced with another of their number, importuning her between dances: some of them even went so far as to seek out other partners whom they knew.
Madden after a time merely looked on, but his two friends were assiduous, tireless; seeing that she did not dance too long with the poor dancers, fetching her cups of insipid punch; kind and a little tactless.
Her popularity brought the expected harvest of feminine speculation. Her clothes were criticized, her ‘nerve’ in coming to a dance in a street dress, in coming at all. Living in a house with two young men, one of them a stranger. No other woman there . . . except a servant.
And there had been something funny about that girl, years ago. Mrs Wardle spoke to her, however. But she speaks to everyone who can’t avoid her. And Cecily Saunders stopped between dances, holding her arm, chatting in her coarse, nervous, rushing speech, rolling her eyes about at all the inevitable men, talking all the time. . . . The Negro cornetist unleashed his indefatigable pack anew and the veranda broke again into clasped couples.
Mrs Powers, catching Madden’s eye, signalled him. ‘I must go,’ she said. ‘If I have to drink another cup of that punch—’
They threaded their way among dancers, followed by her protesting train. But she was firm and they told her good night with regret and gratitude, shaking her hand.
‘It was like old times,’ one of them diffidently phrased it, and her slow, friendly, unsmiling glance took them all.
‘Wasn’t it? Again soon, I hope. Good-bye, good-bye.’ They watched her until her dark dress merged with shadow beyond the zone of light. The music swept on, the brass swooned away, and the rhythm was carried by a hushed plaintive minor of voices until the brass recovered.
‘Say, you could see right through her,’ Gilligan remarked with interest as they came up. Madden opened the door and helped her in, needlessly.
‘I’m tired, Joe. Let’s go.’
The Negro driver’s head was round as a capped cannon-ball and he was not asleep. Madden stood aside, hearing the spitting engine merge into a meshed whine of gears, watching them roll smoothly down the drive.
Powers . . . a man jumping along a trench of demoralized troops caught in a pointless hysteria. Powers. A face briefly spitted on the flame of a rifle: a white moth beneath a reluctant and sorrowful dawn.
15
George Farr and his friend the soda clerk walked beneath trees that in reverse motion seemed to swim backward above them, and houses were huge and dark or else faintly luminous shapes of flattened lesser dark where no trees were. People were asleep in them, people lapped in slumber, temporarily freed of the flesh. Other people elsewhere dancing under the spring sky: girls dancing with boys while other boys whose bodies had known all intimacies with the bodies of girls, walked dark streets alone, alone. . . .
‘Well,’ the friend remarked, ‘we got two more good drinks left.’
He drank fiercely, feeling the fire in his throat become an inner grateful fire, pleasuring in it like a passionate muscular ecstasy. (Her body prone and naked as a narrow pool, flowing away like two silver streams from a single source.) Dr Gary would dance with her, would put his arm around her, anyone could touch her. (Except you: she doesn’t even speak of you who have seen her prone and silver . . . moonlight on her like sweetly dividing water, marbled and slender and unblemished by any shadow, the sweet passion of her constricting arms that constricting hid her body beyond the obscuring prehensileness of her mouth — ) Oh God, oh God!
‘Say, whatcher say we go back to the store and mix another bottle?’
He did not answer and his friend repeated the suggestion.
‘Let me alone,’ he said suddenly, savagely.
‘Goddam you, I’m not hurting you!’ the other answered with justifiable heat.
They stopped at a corner, where another street stretched away beneath trees into obscurity, in uncomfortable intimacy. (I’m sorry: I’m a fool. I’m sorry I flew out at you, who are not at all to blame.) He turned heavily.
‘Well, I guess I’ll go in. Don’t feel so good tonight. See you in the morning.
His friend accepted the unspoken apology. ‘Sure. See you tomorrow.’
The other’s coatless figure faded and after a while his footsteps died away. And George Farr had the town, the earth, the world, to himself and his sorrow. Music came faint as a troubling rumour beneath the spring night, sweetened by distance: a longing knowing no ease. (Oh God, oh God!)
CHAPTER SIX
1
AT LAST GEORGE Farr gave up trying to see her. He had phoned vainly and time after time, at last the telephone became the end in place of the means: he had forgotten why he wanted to reach her.
Finally he told himself that he hated her, that he would go away; finally he was going to as much pains to avoid her as he had been to see her. So he slunk about the streets like a criminal, avoiding her, feeling his very heart stop when he did occasionally see her unmistakable body from a distance.
And at night he lay sleepless and writhing to think of her, then to rise and don a few garments and walk past her darkened house, gazing in slow misery at the room in which he knew she lay, soft and warm, in intimate slumber, then to return to home and bed, to dream of her brokenly.
When her note came at last, he knew relief, sharp and bitter as the pain had been. When he took the square white paper from the post office, when he saw her nervous spidery script sprawled thinly across it, he felt something like a shocking silent concussion at the base of his brain. I won’t go, he told himself, knowing that he would, and he reread it, wondering if he could bear to see her, if he could speak to her, touch her again.
He was ahead of the appointed time, sitting hidden from view at a turn of the stairs ascending to the balcony. The stairs were enclosed by a solid wood balustrade and from the foot of the steps the long tunnel of the drugstore swept towards light and the entrance, a tunnel filled with the mingled scents of carbolic and sweet syrups: a medicated, a synthetic purity.
He saw her as she entered the door and, rising, he saw her pause on seeing him, then, as in a dream, silhouetted against the door, with light toying with her white dress, giving it a shallow nimbus, she came tap-tapping on her high heels towards him. He sat back trembling and heard her mount the steps.
He saw her dress, and feeling his breath catch, he raised his eyes to her face as without pausing she sank
