1
NO—nothing to tell!... They talked about the ball, and the costumes they
were to wear; and in the profound reassuring consciousness that life is
something that need only be lived, that need not be discussed and
understood, he fell asleep.
The next morning he was sorry he had not told Rose-Ann. But the moment
to tell had passed.... Life was going on as usual, ignoring these
private crises. Yes—he and Rose-Ann and Phyllis, just as if nothing had
happened, were going to the Artists’ Theatre Ball! Rose-Ann was going in
a Spanish dress with a wonderful shawl for which she had long awaited
the proper occasion, and Felix as a pirate, in green sash and orange
shirt.... They were going to dance—instead of, as would have seemed most
fitting to Felix, to discuss their destinies.
2
It was precisely this mere matter of dancing that now incongruously
troubled him.
Felix was not a dancing man. And that would have been all right, if he
had not wanted to dance. But he did want to dance! Even at this moment,
with so much more important things to think about, it began to occupy
all his thoughts. He wanted to dance. It was annoying not to be able
to.... He had more than once gone through the excruciating agony of
trying to learn. He had, in fact, learned, so far as one can learn
anything against which there operates some mysterious inward paralysis.
He knew the steps as well as he knew the multiplication table. But just
as sometimes in school there had come upon him a fatal helpless
confusion in which he was unable to remember whether nine times seven
was eighty-one or sixty-four, so it was when he tried to put his
knowledge in practice in a ballroom. He reminded himself of nothing so
much as the hapless hero of that old joke, who said, “Yes, I can dance,
except that the music bothers me and the girl gets in my way!”
And he might have accepted his inability to dance as a fact, and let it
go at that—except that it wasn’t a fact! Somehow, heaven only knew how,
half a dozen times in his adult life he _had_ been able to dance—and not
badly. But what were the circumstances which magically operated to
liberate him from this mysterious paralysis, he did not know. He never
knew whether he was going to be able to dance or not. He always went
fearing the worst, and generally it happened. Rose-Ann could not
understand it, because once when there had been impromptu dancing to a
phonograph after a dinner party at some one’s home, he had danced with
her without the slightest awkwardness; but when, while dancing with her
a second time, she whispered to him to ask some of the other girls to
dance, he became embarrassed, and made protestations of his inability.
She knew that he _could_ dance, and she at first regarded his attitude
as a kind of stupid stubbornness. But no scoldings, nor any patient
gentleness for that matter, was able to change it.
Tonight Felix knew from the beginning that he was not going to be able
to dance. He sat in the box with Rose-Ann and Phyllis and Clive and
several of the players, utterly miserable. They had arrayed themselves
for the ball at the Artists’ Theatre, and that preliminary part of the
affair had been, as it always was, delightful. He wished one could dress
up to go to a ball, and then not go. The dressing, the showing off of
costumes, the banter, the laughter, the drinking of cocktails and black
coffee, all the preparations, had been good fun; but now commenced the
evening’s misery. Rose-Ann looked at him inquiringly as the orchestra
struck up a two-step, and he shook his head. No—he couldn’t do it
tonight. And so she stepped off in the arms of Clive. Phyllis—he had
never danced with Phyllis—was waiting, he thought, for him to ask her.
He doggedly leaned over the edge of the box and watched the dancers.
Why, he asked himself, had he come? He saw Phyllis a minute later,
dancing with a man in a pseudo-monkish costume, one of the actors. Elva
Macklin—had she taken that name Elva because she knew she was elvish, or
had the prevision of parents bestowed it upon her?—was dancing with
Gregory Storm. The box was vacated, except for Felix, who sat looking on
the scene with a jealous and angry eye.
A few pieces of coloured cloth, a bangle, some rouge, a military coat, a
shawl, a sash, a bit of lace, a strain of music, and these people were
transformed, one and all, out of their accustomed workaday mood, gone
happily into an atmosphere of fantasy such as with infinite labour was
created in the theatre. They were acting, all of them—not paying any
attention to what part any one else was acting, but content to be in an
environment in which their own play-impulses were released. They went as
in a dream—smiling, moved by the music as the leaves of a tree are moved
by the wind, surrendering themselves utterly to its influence. They were
not here, not here in this plush and gilt room, amid commonplace mortals
decorated with coloured cloth, but in some dreamland, some fairyland of
their own wishes. The person whom one held in one’s arms was not a real
person, in whom one was really interested, not a person to love or hate,
but a part of the dream. A wand had been waved over this assemblage,
commanding them to forget, to dream, to be free and happy and young. And
all of them, except himself only, had obeyed. Why could he not surrender
himself to this influence? Why must he remain, in spite of his sash and
coloured shirt, so obstinately and awkwardly and unhappily himself? Why
did not that music touch some secret spring in his soul, too, to make
him its creature, a leaf wind-blown on the tree of life? Why did his
eyes still see the persons underneath their costumes—the girls not as
dancing partners but as “personalities”? Personalities, indeed!—these
men and women had left their personalities gladly behind in the
cloakroom; they were free of them for the evening; tomorrow they would
go back to being lawyers and wives, clarks and poets and college
students; tonight they were—
Well, what were they? If one chose to think so, bodies, merely that,
bodies surrendering themselves to each other as shamelessly and frankly
as to the music which swayed them.... But no, he knew better than that:
they were—if ever, now, precisely now—immortal souls; this spectacle was
spirit triumphing over flesh and using it for its own beautiful uses,
the magic uses of a dream. These arms and bosoms and bodies were the
instruments of a poetry which these couples created in a magnificently
impersonal way—the poetry of beauty met with strength; it was not Dick
and Jane, it was essential man and woman, in love with some eternal
beauty in themselves and each other of which they were, as persons, the
fleeting and mortal agents.
But why the devil couldn’t _he_ feel that way? Each time that the girls
of his party returned to the box, flushed and laughing in an interim
between the dances, he felt their presence as a demand upon him, a
demand which it was disgraceful not to meet. Every glance of Rose-Ann’s
was a look, or so he interpreted it, of inquiry or reproach. She _knew_
he could dance; that was the worst of it. He could dance—with her—easily
enough; he would dance with her now, if there was no one else around
that they knew. But if he danced with her, he would have no excuse for
not dancing with the others—his last defence would be gone.... He fled
from the box in the direction of the bar, was pulled down into a chair
by Eddie Silver, who was buying drinks for a group of men and girls, and
asked what he would have. “Whiskey straight,” he said humbly. Why, after
all, should he despise this time-honoured refuge from the hardships of
life, from problems too complex to be solved and responsibilities too
great to be borne?
3
He could not, it seemed, get drunk. The whiskey only made him think with
a preternatural clearness; and the more clearly he thought upon himself,
as a straggler here in the bar-room from the battle-field of life out
there on the dancing floor, the more he despised himself.... But he
seemed to be despising some one else named Felix Fay, from whom he felt
utterly detached and for whom he felt no responsibility. Funny Felix! In
a way he could understand the poor devil.... He had been brought up in a
puritanical way, and then had acquired a lot of romantic notions from
poetry-books; and in spite of all his fine intellectual theories he was
still just a romantic boy-prude, to whom the idea of taking a strange
girl in his arms and walking her around the room to music would
naturally be upsetting.... A funny boy, that Felix Fay! Why, he had been
thinking quite seriously of making love to another girl besides his
wife—and he would be quite equal to it, too ... after arguing it out
theoretically and finding that it was his sociological duty or something
of that sort!... He wanted things to be plain and straightforward, black
and white; either he was making love to a girl or he wasn’t—it was the
in-between things that confused and appalled him. To this Felix Fay
person it would be simple enough to defy the conventions; what he
couldn’t do was adjust himself to them like everybody else. He could
intellectually conceive, and if it came to that, undertake to carry into
practice, some preposterous theory of free-love that he had read about
in Havelock Ellis or Ellen Key; but he couldn’t dance with a girl he
liked! No, that was too difficult; it wasn’t a theory, and he hadn’t
read about it in a book.... If people _didn’t_ dance, and some one wrote
a book and proved that they ought to, Felix Fay would believe it, and
argue about it, and finally do it in a mood of stern conscientious
futuristic morality—if they killed him for it! But do something that
everybody else did—no. Not Felix. Somebody else would have kissed
Phyllis long ago, and said nothing about it. If somebody else had
thought of having a love-affair with Phyllis, the last person in the
world he would have thought of discussing it with would have been his
own wife. The world forgave people who kissed in corners, who had secret
love-affairs while pretending to believe—while actually believing—in the
ten commandments and the laws of the state of Illinois. If you accepted
what everybody believed, you could have the same freedom as everybody
else. It was only if you believed in freedom, really believed in it,
that you couldn’t have any. Why couldn’t Felix Fay understand that?...
Poor devil, he was going to get in trouble some time....
The being who thus in a state of utter detachment scornfully and sadly
criticized Felix Fay, floated back airily, or at least with no sense of
treading any actual floor with mortal feet, to the ballroom. Across the
room he saw some one coming toward him, smiling. It was Elva Macklin;
but it was not by that name, nor as the actress who had taken a part in
his play, that he identified her; it was rather as a childhood
playmate—a girl with whom he had once danced, long years ago, in a
garret. She was dressed as a dryad, disguised in a leafy covering, but
he recognized her well enough. It was clear to him that they had an
engagement to dance together—an engagement that had waited all these
years. The music struck up, he held out his arms, and she walked into
them without a word. They floated off across the room, into the maze of
dancers, threading their way among the others with that ease which comes
of senses quickened with music, pausing and turning, drawing upon the
floor an intricate pattern of movement born of fancy. The others in the
room did not exist for him, save as shadows, bright shadows cast by the
music. They were alone, in a dream, in a soft wordless dream; they did
not so much listen to the music as create it by their own movements.
They had left the world of reality, as if for ever, they were in some
realm of golden light, a land of fruits and flowers, a place of quiet,
triumphant happiness. This girl with him was no real girl, but a part of
the dream; he had always known her; she was the companion of many
wanderings through the lands of reverie; they understood each other too
well to need words; she was his dream comrade. Not a girl, not any one
that one must love or not love, fight for and work for, but a shadow
like himself in this place of bright shadows, in this peaceful and happy
realm beyond life and beyond death....
The music stopped, and he awoke with some astonishment to find that he,
Felix Fay, had been dancing. Elva Macklin smiled, gave his hand a
grateful pressure, and turned to the young man who came up asserting
that the next dance was his.
Suddenly alarmed, Felix turned to flee from the ballroom; but it was too
late. Phyllis had detached herself from her partner, and came over to
him. “Aren’t you going to dance with me?” she asked. The handclapping
died away as the musicians took up their instruments again. Phyllis
faced him confidently—a lovely and to him at this moment a terrifying
figure. All the sweetness of the love that might have been—that might
be—his, kindled for him in her grave eyes. Dance with her? No, he
couldn’t. But he must. Self-consciously, ashamed of himself, hating her,
he took her hand, put his arm about her, and listening intently to the
music, stepped off. But something was wrong; he could not get the
rhythm; he stopped. She had surrendered herself to his guidance utterly,
but now that that was at fault she began to try to guide him. That made
him angry; he paused once more, listened to the music, and said, “Oh,
confound it—it’s a waltz. I’m sorry—I can’t waltz.” She regretfully
walked back with him to the edge of the dancing floor, where he tried
desperately to think of something to say to her. It was shameful to be
thus at a loss. Did she despise him? She ought to.... Some one else came
along, and she danced off, leaving Felix furious and relieved. He went
back to the box.
Rose-Ann was there, resting from innumerable dances, talking with Clive.
“I see you’ve been dancing!” she said. “Yes,” he told her, “I don’t know
how it happened. Will you try the next one with me?” At least, if he
made a failure of it with Rose-Ann, she would forgive him.
“Yes,” she said. “Just this one more dance, and then we’ll go home.”
Because it was the last dance, because he need fear nothing more
tonight, and because he had secretly resolved never to subject himself
to this torment again, the demon in his mind that argued and discussed
and made him awkward and afraid, went to sleep. His last dance, his last
dance ever—and then ... back to a desk, where he belonged!
“Why!” said Rose-Ann, “you dance beautifully!” She said it in a puzzled
tone.
Felix was annoyed. He lost the rhythm and stepped on her foot.
“It’s my fault!” she said. But he knew it wasn’t. Why did he try to
dance when he couldn’t? Wouldn’t that music ever stop?
He wanted to tell Rose-Ann about—about Phyllis. She would understand.
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