But his manifest penitence earned him no more than a show of restoration
to favour. The heart in Lucinda's bosom felt hot and hard and heavy with
chagrin, she had banked so confidently on Dobbin's sympathy.... He might
be truly in love with her, she hadn't much doubt that he was, but the
understanding she had counted on was denied her, the sense of security
in his affection was no more. She felt cruelly bereft, more desolate
than at any time since the breach with Bel had begun to seem
unbridgeable.
It made no difference that she knew this feeling was unfair to both,
that its childishness was clear to her whom it victimized the most. The
day-long drain upon her emotions was inexorably exacting its due. With
no more provocation than a sting of puerile pique, she had lost her
temper, and all her efforts to retrieve it seemed unavailing. She felt
broken, beaten, and very tired, she wanted to creep away to bed and cry
herself asleep. Yet she must somehow find strength to hold up, or
forfeit self-respect, she dared not confess the stuff of her spirit as
mean as her heart's. She shook herself impatiently....
At the same time the band rewarded tireless hand-clapping by again
breaking loose in blasts of delirious cacophony, and Lucinda pushed back
her chair.
"Don't let's talk any more for a while, Dobbin--I'd rather dance."
Descending the several steps from the box level to the common, they
threaded their way through a jam of tables to the fringe of the
dance-mad mob, in whose closely-packed, rocking and surging rout
considerable imagination and ingenuity were required to find room.
Nevertheless Daubeney adroitly created a space where none had been, and
swinging smoothly away, they became one with and lost in the crush,
their progress of necessity slow but amazingly easy, for Daubeney led
with grace and skill.
Lucinda tried to forget her vexation in watching the faces of their
fellow dancers and their styles, a diversion which seldom failed to
flood her being, even when she was saddest, with sweetness and light.
All about them couples were practising every conceivable variety of step
that could be executed to the rhythm beaten out by tireless drums whose
timbre had all the grim and weirdly stimulating monotony of African
tom-toms. Many contented themselves with a solemn, wellnigh ritualistic
jigging by means of which they traversed the floor crab-wise, inch by
inch. Others charged short distances at headlong speed, checked short,
whirled madly, darted and swooped again with incredible agility, in a
sort of corybantic frenzy. Still others favoured a tedious twirling,
like amorous dervishes. Yet there were strangely few collisions....
Young things drifted by with faces buried in the shoulders of their
partners, whether for shame or in somnambulism it was impossible to say.
Those who are always with us, locked as in a death-grapple, ploughed
doggedly along with tense mouths and rapt eyes. Couples whose mutual
passion was stronger than feminine regard for the most carefully
composed complexion, moved as one, her cheek glued to his. Portly and
bedizened dowagers wore set smiles on lips that moved to inaudible
counting, and their paid partners, professional young male dancers, that
patient yet abstracted expression that tells of bandaged, swollen feet.
Little girls who apparently should have been at home, getting a good
night's rest in preparation for a long school-day tomorrow, lifted up
unformed, flower faces breathlessly to the hard, mature faces of the
vulpine men who held them.
Lucinda saw those to whom this was adventure, those to whom it was
romance, those to whom it was physical agony, and those to whom it was
a source of soul-destroying ennui. She smelt the breath of sticky bodies
and the cloying perfumes in which the optimistic reposed mistaken faith.
And all her movements were, like theirs, measured by the swing of that
giggling, grunting, whistling, clanging, moaning band....
Suddenly she knew she had had enough.
"It's too crowded," she told Dobbin; and he nodded agreement. "Shall we
stop when we get around to our box?"
Without warning more than a smothered cry of alarm in a woman's voice,
Lucinda was struck by a wildly careering body with such force that she
lost footing altogether and must have fallen but for Dobbin, who
instantly tightened his hold and braced himself against the dead drag of
her weight, this though the shock of collision almost carried him off
his own feet.
Simultaneously the floor shook with the impact of two heavy falls. And
clinging to Dobbin, a little dazed, Lucinda saw a strikingly pretty
young woman, stunningly undressed, sprawling at her feet, and at a
yard's distance a man in similar plight.
Derisive cackles and guffaws of clowns broke out on all sides, a space
was cleared round the unfortunates.
"Are you all right, Cinda?" Dobbin asked. She nodded and tried to smile.
"Sure you're not hurt?"
She shook her head vigorously, and by way of proof stood out of his
arms, but swayed dizzily and, with a little apologetic laugh, caught at
one of them again.
"All right," Dobbin said hastily. "Let's get out of this."
"No--wait!" Lucinda insisted. "Perhaps she's hurt."
She brushed his arm aside, only to discover that the overthrown woman
had regained her feet, and now stood watching her partner in shrewish
fury as, grinning foolishly, he scrambled up.
"You clumsy dumb-bell!" she stormed in a rasping voice that must have
carried clearly half across the room. "I hope to Gawd I got enough sense
not to dance with you again when you're pickled!"
And catching her first glimpse of the man's crimson face, Lucinda
yielded all at once to Daubeney's insistence.
But she never quite knew how they got back to their table.