CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH ADOLESCENCE (continued 3)

“Oh, dance your old Fox-Trots,” she cried, with a gesture that seemed to motion Huntley and Hetty together. “Have 372your music all rattle and rag-time like sick people groaning in trains. That’s neither here nor there. I want to dance to better stuff than that. Come along, Willy.”

She seized on Wilmington’s arm.

“But where are you going?” cried Huntley.

“I’m going to dance Chopin in the hall—to the pianola.”

“You’re going to play,” she told Wilmington.

“But you can’t,” said Peter.

Joan disappeared with her slave. A light seemed to go out from the big library as she went. “Now we can get on,” said Hetty, laying hands on her Peter.

For a time the Fox-Trot ruled. The Vicarage girls didn’t do these things, and drifted after Joan. So did Oswald. Towards the end the dancers had a sense of a cross-current of sound in the air, of some adverse influence thrown across their gymnastics. When their own music stopped, they became aware of that crying voice above the thunder, the Revolutionary Etude.

There was a brief listening pause. “Now, how the deuce,” said Huntley, “can she be dancing that?”

He led the way to the hall....

“I’m tired of dancing,” whispered Hetty. “Stay back. They’re all going. I want you to kiss the little corner of my mouf.”

Peter looked round quickly, and seized his privilege with unseemly haste. “Let’s see how Joan is dancing that old row,” he said....

Animation, boldness, and strict relegation of costume to its function of ornament had hitherto made Hetty the high light of this little gathering. She was now to realize how insecure is this feminine predominance in the face of fresher youth and greater boldness. And Joan was full of a pretty girl’s discovery that she may do all that she dares to do. For a time—and until it is time to pay.

Life had intoxicated Joan that night. A derision of seemliness possessed her. She was full of impulse and power. She felt able to dominate every one. At one time or other she swept nearly every man there except Oswald and Peter and Pryce into her dancing. Two of the Braughing youths fell visibly in love with her, and Huntley lost his head, badgered 373her too much to dance, and then was offended and sulked in a manner manifest to the meanest capacity. And she kissed Wilmington.

That was her wildest impulse. She came into the study where he was playing the pianola for her dancing. She wanted him to change the roll for the first part of the Kreutzer Sonata, and found herself alone with him. She loved him because he was so completely and modestly hers. She bent over him to take off the roll from the instrument, and found her face near his forehead. “Dear old Willy,” she whispered, and put her hand on his shoulder and brushed his eyebrows with her lips.

Then she was remorseful.

“It doesn’t mean anything, Willy,” she said.

“I know it doesn’t,” he said in a voice of the deepest melancholy.

“Only you are a dear all the same,” she said. “You are clean. You’re right.”

“If it wasn’t for my damned Virtues——” said Wilmington. “But anyhow. Thank you, Joan—very much. Shall I play you this right through?”

“A little slowly,” she said. “It’s marked too fast,” and went towards the open door.

Then she flitted back to him.... Her intent face came close to his. “I don’t love any one, Willy,” she said. “I’m not the sort. I just dance.”

They looked at each other.

“I love you,” said Wilmington, and watched her go.

But she had made him ridiculously happy....

She danced through the whole Kreutzer Sonata. The Kreutzer Sonata has always been a little dirty since Tolstoy touched it. Tolstoy pronounced it erotic. There are men who can find a lascivious import in a Corinthian capital. The Kreutzer Sonata therefore had a strong appeal to Huntley’s mind. These associations made it seem to him different from other music, just as calling this or that substance a “drug” always dignified it in his eyes with the rich suggestions of vice. He read strange significances into Joan’s choice of that little music as he watched her over the heads of the Braughing girls. But Joan just danced.

374At supper she found herself drifting to a seat near Peter. She left him to his Hetty, and went up the table to a place under Oswald’s black wing. The supper at Pelham Ford was none of your stand-up affairs. Mrs. Moxton’s ideas of a dance supper were worthy of Britannia. Oswald carved a big turkey and Peter had cold game pie, and Aunt Phyllis showed a delicate generosity with a sharp carver and a big ham. There were hot potatoes and various salads, and jugs of lemonade and claret cup for every one, and whisky for the mature. Joan became a sober enquirer about African dancing.

“It’s the West Coast that dances,” said Oswald. “There’s richer music on the West Coast than all round the Mediterranean.”

“All this American music comes from the negro,” he declared. “There’s hardly a bit of American music that hasn’t colour in its blood.”

After supper Joan was the queen of the party. Adela was in love with her again, as slavish as in their schooldays, and the Sheldricks and the Braughing boys and girls did her bidding. “Let’s do something processional,” said Joan. “Let us dress up and do the Funeral March of a Marionette.”

Hetty didn’t catch on to that idea, and Peter was somehow overlooked. Most of the others scampered off to get something black and cast aside anything too coloured. Aunt Phyllis knew of some black gauze and produced it. There were black curtains in the common room, and these were seized upon by Huntley and Wilmington. They made a coffin of the big black lacquered post-box in the hall, and a bier of four alpenstocks and a drying-board from the scullery.

Joan was chief mourner, and after the Funeral March was over danced the sorrows of life before the bier to the first part of the Fifth Symphony.

Hetty and Peter sat close together and yet unusually apart upon the broad window-seat. Hetty looked tired and Peter seemed inattentive. Perhaps they had a little overdone each other’s charm that Christmas.

And only once more that evening did it happen that Peter and Joan met face to face. Nearly everybody poured out 375into the garden to see the guests go off. The Braughing people crowded hilariously into a car; the others walked. The weather had suddenly hardened, a clear dry cold made the paths and road very like metal, and not the littlest star was missing from the quivering assembly in the sky.

“We’ll have skating yet,” cried the Braughing party.

Adela and Joan and Wilmington and Pryce came with Huntley and Greene and the vicarage girls along the road and over the ice-bound water-splash as far as the vicarage gate. “Too cooold to say good-bye,” cried Joan. “Oh, my poor bare legs!” and led a race back.

Adela was left far behind, but neither Wilmington nor Pryce would let Joan win without a struggle. The three shot in through the wide front door almost abreast, and Joan ran straight at Peter and stopped short within two feet of him.

“I’ve won!” said Joan.

Just for an instant the two looked at one another, and it seemed to Joan afterwards that she had seen something then in Peter’s eyes, something involuntary that she had caught just once before in them—when she had come upon him by chance in Petty Cury when first she had gone up to Cambridge.

A silly thing to think about! What did it matter? What did anything matter? Life was a dance, and Joan, thank heaven! could dance. Peter was just nothing at all. Nothing at all. Nothing at all.

“I wonder, Joan, how many miles you have pranced tonight!” said Aunt Phyllis, kissing her good night.

“Joan,” said Adela, “you are The Loveliest.”...

For a minute or so Joan stood in front of her looking-glass, studying a flushed, candle-lit figure....

“Pah!” she said at last. “Hetty!” and flung her scanty clothes aside.

She caught the reflection of herself in the mirror again. She spread out her hands in a gesture to the pretty shape she saw there, and stood.

“What’s the Good of it?” she said at last.

As soon as Joan’s head touched the pillow that night she 376fell asleep, and she slept as soundly as a child that had been thoroughly naughty and all at sixes and sevens, and that has been well slapped and had a good cry to wind up with, and put to bed. In all the world there is no sounder sleep than that.

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