THE Rolfes’ door swung open and shut; bursts from the gramophone came
downhill like somebody coughing. As the Perkins’ party stepped up from
the duckboards Gerald spun past the door with the D.I.’s niece, in a
nimbus of gauze draperies. The room was sticky with strawberry light,
unlit lanterns wobbled between the electric light cords; the dancers
seemed to be moving slowly in jam. A group of young men stood by the
door, coughing. But one hadn’t yet made one’s official appearance:
Lois blinked and began to tug out her silver shoes from her pockets;
somebody pulled her on down a passage to change.
In what Denise called the kitchenette at the end of the passage the
five spare men were smoking, looking into their glasses of whisky and
wishing to play bridge. Lois looked in and they all waved to her, but
Livvy pulled her away quickly: she said that must be the gentlemen’s
cloak-room. Lois met, with surprise, her own eyes of interrogation in
six inches of mirror between the coats.
David came to claim Livvy, Betty went swooning off over the chalky lake
of the floor with Mr. Simcox, Mr. Daventry stared at the passage door
with severity, balanced his cigarette on the rim of the gramophone and
came up to Lois and frowned, without speaking. He opened his arms
slowly. They danced; she had no idea she could dance so beautifully. At
the end of the record Mr. Daventry impassively moved back the needle
again. “Tiring day,” he said.
“Oh, I don’t think so.” They went on dancing.
The D.I.’s niece picked off ends of her tangerine draperies from
various parts of Gerald and walked away with an aquiline-looking
gunner. Over Lois’s temple Mr. Daventry’s jaw moved slightly; his neck
muscles strained. Again he revived the gramophone. Lois, breathless,
said: “Isn’t there going to be an interval?” “Not necessarily,” replied
Mr. Daventry. Meanwhile, one wall of the hut seemed propped against
Gerald’s rigid, resentful back.
“What a crowd ...”
“I beg your pardon?”
She did not speak again. Anxiously dancing, she merely constituted
Mr. Daventry’s revenge. Mrs. Vermont, going past Gerald, said: “Oh,
diddums?” She asked Mr. Simcox if he had noticed, nice-looking boys
looked their nicest sulky? Mr. Simcox, looking round so carefully that
he missed a step, said he would not call that _sulky_ ... More worried.
“Nonsense, Tubby, what’s he got to worry about?”
“You never know.”
Mr. Simcox was a bit of a philosopher, because he was so fat. He gave
up Mrs. Vermont with a sigh to another young man and went across for
somebody’s young, shy sister. “No luck?” he said on the way, to Gerald.
And Gerald looked at him candidly, with despair.
The evening “went” with a rush, with a kind of high impetuousness out
of everybody’s control. Every one looked and spoke and danced close up
with a kind of exalted helplessness; intimacy tightened the very air.
Sandwiches were ambrosia, brightening the eyes; rims of plates went
electric where fingers touched. Mrs. Rolfe laughed all the time, you
would have said with despair. She climbed past couples very close up
at the darkest part of the passage, she entered the kitchenette with
a shriek and swept some cards from the table. The spare men danced
with each other. She ran in and out of her bedroom, shaking a plate of
chocolates at the couples sitting out on the chest-o’-drawers and on
the washstand covered with Turkish cushions. If the hut had risen and
soared up into the air, so that some one stepping out at the door had
to step back dizzily, she would hardly have been surprised. Indeed, two
subalterns running down to the mess for more siphons did leap to the
mud as from a great height.
The room was hot; they drew the curtains back and opened the windows,
then were stared in at oddly by hard little squares of night. Couples
went out for walks, to cool their faces. Livvy was kissed twice and
went off to powder her chin. “Of course, this is post-war madness,”
said Mr. Simcox, standing beside a window.
“Oh yes,” agreed Lois.
“Awful, really.... I expect _you_ understand what I mean?”
“Oh yes.” Wishing Mr. Simcox were not intrigued, she put her two hands
out of the window, as into a well, to feel wind cold on her wrists.
Gerald came up behind her.
“Mine next,” he said, as though they had just parted. “What a row!” he
yelled.
“This jazz,” said Simcox. “They ought to have let me bring my band,”
complained Gerald, “it wouldn’t have taken up much more room than Mrs.
Fogarty.”
Mrs. Fogarty had indeed come in and sat at the end of the room in a
purple tea-gown. Her circumference was enormous, her feet stuck out
beyond it--but she was such a darling. Every time a couple stumbled
over her feet she beamed and nodded in the friendliest way. She had
just whispered to Gerald, who brought her a glass of lemonade: “Here,
where’s _your_ girl?” And her eyes had rolled at him, dark with worry.
Gerald could not have borne to disappoint Mrs. Fogarty.
Gerald did not dance silently. His hand supported her wrist, cool and
familiar. Lois felt she was home again; safe from deserted rooms, the
penetration of silences, rain, homelessness. Nothing mattered: she
could have gone to sleep. But he woke her.
“Look here: what have I done?”
“How--?” said she, quite inadequate.
“You _know_. But why are you--why must we--?”
“Gerald--oh, do be--sssh!”
A couple sheered off from them.
“I didn’t think you’d be cruel,” he said to her hair, almost
confidentially.
“But it’s you who’ve been cutting me.”
“But how? When? You’ve never once looked--Lois, you’re lovely, but
you’re so--”
“Look here, we can’t talk and dance.”
“Which does that mean you _don’t_ want to do?”
She looked at a button of his mess coat. “Talk,” she said after a
little contented interval. He slid his hand up her wrist, they danced
on. The D.I.’s niece trailed past them, laughing at Daventry: they
had a pool of space to themselves on the crowded floor. The pink room
melted round, beatific and syrupy. He was closer than ever under the
lovely compulsion of movement.
“You do dance divinely.”
“What?” he said, like the ghost of Daventry. Some one stopped the
gramophone, they looked at each other, shocked. Something had made him
absurdly unhappy: she would have liked to have comforted him.
“Let’s go out.”
“Won’t it be cold for you?”
“Gerald,” said she, discouraged, “don’t be an aunt.”
The wind whipped round the edge of the hut, ran through her hair at the
roots and stung her ears--a sinister energy in this fixed and angular
world, for one could not see anything moving. Gerald walked, unknown,
beside her, up in the dark. “At one time,” said Lois, wrapping her wild
skirts round her, “a girl would have died of this.”
“Cigarette?”
“Oh--will it light here?”
“I can light one most places.” So she bent over his hands, a cup of
fire. There were two bright specks in his eyes.--Then the match whirled
off and died on the dark. “I can’t think what you think has gone
wrong,” she said.
“You were so queer that Thursday. You’d been like part of me, the night
before; then everything seemed--wrong. I dare say I was a brute; I
oughtn’t to have--though as a matter of fact I’ll never be sorry.... If
you’d been just angry or anything ... But you seemed to go right away:
I didn’t know where I was. All lunch you were like a girl at a tennis
club. Then you left me down there with them all to talk rot and went
off with that beastly gramophone.”
“_That_ was not my fault--did you want me to listen to you talking
rot?--Gerald, I didn’t realize you were resentful; I didn’t think you
could be.... I was waiting for you to write.”
“I began so many letters, I used half a box of note-paper. I couldn’t
think what to say.”
“Still, you might have written.”
“But how?” he said candidly.
She could not remember, though she had read so many books, _who_ spoke
first after a kiss had been, not exchanged but--administered. The two
reactions, outrage, capitulation, had not been her own. “You were
hoping I would write?” she said, seeing light suddenly.
“You see, you had always been so understanding.”
“But, Gerald, I should have thought you’d have been shocked if I’d--”
“Oh?... Perhaps I would. But I wanted something to make things natural.
I shall never forget what I felt in that armoured car. You will always
be connected up in my mind with the smell of oil--Lois, do you think I
am terribly introspective?”
“You know, you were tired.”
“Perhaps it was that,” he said, puzzled. “But bumping along back to
barracks, and you going in again with that girl to that topping house
...”
“Do you think it’s a topping house?”
“It seems so to me.”
This new version of the changeable afternoon was a shock to her. It
had gone on for him, too; doors that she had not thought of shutting
and windows opening, the drone in the drawing-room, rain with a
different importance. Might she perhaps have thought more about Gerald
and wondered less? Splashing along the brown road to Clonmore she could
now see the armoured car diminish--with Gerald its only nerve. But she
thought of the empty spare room and how it avenged him.
“Marda’s gone, you know.”
“But she had just come to lunch, surely?”
“_Gerald!_... Can’t you feel any difference between some one to lunch
and somebody staying?”
“She hadn’t a hat,” said Gerald after consideration.
“She went two days ago: she’s in Kent now.”
“I’m sorry,” said Gerald civilly. Feeling a strained, fierce pause, he
added: “She seemed awfully nice, I thought.”
“Don’t you wonder at all if I miss her?”
“I expect you must. I always miss visitors, though they’re a bother
beforehand.”
“She hadn’t any beforehand--that seems so odd now.”
“Lois ... you aren’t angry, then?”
“Oh?” Recollecting herself, she looked round the darkness vaguely. A
couple were coming towards them; she put a hand on his sleeve to make
him be quiet, his other hand came over it. They heard Daventry’s angry
laugh, his partner’s feet ran stickily on the duckboards. Gerald and
Daventry passed in the dark with, it seemed, a queer silent interchange.
“Mr. Daventry seems old to be a subaltern.”
“It’s absurd that he should be--all this peacetime bother. He had
a company in France in 1916, later on he was acting major. He’s a
splendid fellow, I’m sorry you haven’t seen more of him. He won’t go
about much, outside barracks. The fact is,” he added apologetic, “he’s
sick at being over here. It doesn’t seem to agree with him.”
“Do _you_ really like it?”
“Oh, well, it’s a job. Though I rather see Daventry’s point--it doesn’t
seem natural.”
They had come to the end of the huts--the foot of the steep slope a
wall, the top heavily wired. Under the wall a sentry inhumanly paced
like a pendulum. The country bore in it strong menace. Gerald looked
out at it, his face blinking in and out of the dark, faintly red with
the pulse of his cigarette. She nursed her bare elbows, unconsciously
shivering. He seemed at once close and remote, known and un-personal;
she understood why, up to now, she had searched for him vainly in what
he said. He had nothing to do with expression. She put out a hand
to where he was, shadowy and palpable. He threw his cigarette away,
turned--and said nothing. The sentry passed.
They went back the way they had come, between the huts.
“Gerald, I _wasn’t_ angry ... at what you did....”
“No, you were wonderful all the time.”
“Don’t you understand?” she said sharply--“_Gerald?_”
“Understand?... _Lois!_”
While they kissed, she heard, in the silence of their footsteps, some
one moving about in a hut up the lines. The sound was a long way off,
at the other side of a stillness.
“Your arms are so cold.”
“I’ve been so lonely.”
“They’re so _cold_.” He kissed them, inside the elbows. Later: “I like
the back of your head,” she said with exploring finger-tips.
“I never thought you looked at me.”
“Gerald, I’ve been so ... vacant.”
“I never thought you wanted me.”
“I--” she began. The soft sound of her dress in the wind became, by
some connection of mood, painfully inexplicable to her--the pain was
its own, from not being understood. “Gerald, your buttons hurt rather.”
“My darling--” He let her go, but still, above consciousness, held
one of her hands, solemnly. “Shall you really be able to marry me?”
“I don’t know till you’ve asked me.”
“Don’t laugh--” he cried.
“Can’t you _hear_ I’m not laughing?”
“Lois--” Something more was coming; she waited, hearing him draw a
breath. “Let’s go back and dance,” he said almost religiously--“shall
we?”
The hut was compact with movement: she stood back in alarm, as before a
revolving door in destructive motion. Now it was gone, she remembered
sharply the smell of earth.... David Armstrong leaned from his partner
wildly and struck Gerald over the head with a red balloon.
Mrs. Rolfe had had an idea that the dance might well finish up with a
cotillion. She was vague about cotillions, but towards this end she
had distributed balloons, whistles that ran out long tongues when
you blew them, and streamers from striped cardboard batons with which
dancers might hit one another over the head. Mrs. Vermont thought these
things went better with fancy dress, but Denise said a rag was a rag
at any time. Girls ducked and shrieked and waved their streamers over
their partners’ shoulders. Denise, radiant in black with a trail of
nasturtiums, was waltzing--affair of prolonged “hesitations”--with
Betty’s husband. She bit off a streamer, spat out a mouthful of paper
and said, with a shiver of happiness: “Isn’t it marvellous, Timmy? I
can hardly believe I’m awake!”
“Ra-_ther!_” replied Captain Vermont, with blurred enthusiasm. He was
being buffeted by Mr. Simcox and somebody’s sister.
“Betty’s been just too marvellous,” went on Denise--“Oh, Timmy, do have
a shot at Reggie Daventry--there, with the girl in scarlet. He looks
just too refined!”
But Timmy failed to find Daventry. “Betty’s _tons_ the prettiest here,”
cried Denise, ecstatic.
“Oh, come!” expostulated Captain Vermont, squeezing her waist. It gave
him a warm, tender feeling to think how fond she and Betty were of each
other.
“Tell me,” said Denise, as nearly as possible snuggling, “are we
terribly reckless? Would this annoy the Irish?”
“They won’t know.”
“They have heaps of spies.”
“I say, _sssh_, Denise, there are heaps of them here to-night.”
“Spies?”
“Irish--the Raltes and Co.”
“They’re different.”
“Still, they’ve got feelings.”
Denise sighed. “I could go on like this for ever.” But Captain Vermont
rather thought he would like a drink. A balloon exploded. “Glory!”
cried Mrs. Fogarty. So they burst four more to keep her amused.
“Is this like a bombardment?” asked Moira Ralte.
“No,” said Mr. Simcox.
If they were not careful, they would knock over the gramophone. Mr.
Daventry thought it was time they did. It was time something happened.
He danced the D.I.’s niece down the passage and kissed her with her
head pressed back in the coats. She struggled, futile, slippery as a
weasel. As he kissed again her face went stiff and she shut her eyes.
When these opened, they were as shrewd as ever: still he did not know
what she thought. The drums in his temples were now insistent; he could
not forget them even while he was dancing. She had dabbed herself over
with White Rose. Her frizzy hair tickled his mouth as he bent close to
her.
“Do you get kissed a lot?”
“Englishmen never could keep their mouths to themselves.”
“You won’t know yourself when we’re gone!”
“You should get back home while you can, the lot of you.”
“What would become of Uncle?”
“Did you like your whisky?” She put a hand up rudely to shield herself
from his breath. This reminded Daventry, who let go of the common
little hell-cat abruptly and walked away to the kitchenette, where he
heard a siphon. Lois stood in the door, waiting while David got her
some soda-water. But wouldn’t she try a little something? Just a little
something to dance on--no? Daventry, standing back and tilting his
drink about in his glass, stared at her feet with owlish ferocity.
“Sorry about your silver shoes, Miss Farquar.”
“There are some beautiful walks round here,” said David, grinning.
“Miss Farquar should float, not walk; she looks like a water-lily,”
said Daventry, looking over her green frock with his discomforting
eyes. “Come on and dance,” said David, taking her empty glass. Lois
began to say she was keeping the next for Gerald. But: “Miss Farquar
and I are hungry, we are going to find a sandwich,” said Daventry.
In the box of a dining-room plates of dishevelled sandwiches sat in
unmasked electric light. There was no one there. Mr. Daventry, looking
hard at her, put the palm of his hand to his left temple with a
curious, listening air, as though to see if a watch had stopped.
“Chicken and ham,” he said, “tongue and turkey; they’re all cat, they
say.” (“What shall I say?” thought Lois.) He looked at a chair with
contempt, then sat down on it. “I don’t think I’ve met you before,” he
continued.
“Perhaps you didn’t notice.”
“Dear me,” said Mr. Daventry, looking into a sandwich. “No, I don’t
think it could have been that.”
“Then it can’t be explained,” said Lois, and (she felt) glittered
excitedly. He suggested the army of Wellington; buckskins. Looking
up thoughtfully, he directed upon the wall just over her head his
strained dark look that was almost a squint. “You live round here?”
“More or less--” She was startled to meet the dark look on a level.
Hers was, he said, a remarkably beautiful country.
“I am afraid _you_--”
He affably shrugged. Did that matter? He stared at her arms, at the
inside of her elbows, with such intensity, she felt Gerald’s kisses
were printed there. Was this a bounder?--She knew she had no criterion.
“Have a nice walk?” he inquired.
“Did you?” she countered.
“I expect so,” said Mr. Daventry, after consideration. “As a matter
of fact, I am not quite at my best.” They looked hard at each other.
“Nothing,” he said, “appeals to me.” She moved her arms nervously on
the silk of her dress. For she saw there was not a man here, hardly
even a person.
“How do you mean ‘more or less’?” he said suddenly.
“Well, I don’t live anywhere, really.”
“I do: I live near Birmingham.” He put the half-eaten sandwich down,
with distaste, on the edge of the cloth and pulled up a plate to cover
it. She felt she was quite finished with. Suppose, she thought, they
were all like this! Should she go? She made a movement, he did not see;
she was disappointed. He put the hand to his temple, again listening.
“Tired?”
“Oh no,” he said, with irony.
“I’m going back now.”
“Such a pity. Anyone so charming ...”
“Well, I’m bored,” she said.
“It’s a pity you don’t know about my head, it’s a most curious head,
it would interest you.... How shall I keep you? Look here, seriously,
about Lesworth--”
“Oh?” she inquired, suddenly cold inside.
“About our young friend--” He pulled up his chair close; she had a
feeling like gates shutting. “Tell me this--”
But the roar of merriment, solid and swerving evenly as a waterfall
past the door, splintered off in a crash. Silence came, with hard
impact. “Thank God, _they’ve upset the gramophone!_” Daventry smacked
his knee, remotely, as though rehearsing the gesture. His look
decomposed in laughter. “Done in,” he said, drawing life from the
thought. Simultaneously, a universal shriek went up: it was smashed,
finished. “Really,” she thought, “you laugh like Satan!”
“Well, well,” said Daventry, tilting his drink about, “it’s been a
pleasant evening.” Here they all came--a stampede in the passage. She
was glad of them, for under the storm of his mirth that swept their
island, disarranging the interlude, she had sat cold and desolate. A
gramophone passing, a gramophone less in the world, it was not funny.
But between bursts of laughter she had felt him look at her lips,
at her arms, at her dress, like a ghost, with nostalgia and cold
curiosity. About their young friend?--she wasn’t to know.
Mrs. Vermont seemed broken also, she leaned on the adjutant. “Stay her
with sandwiches,” called out somebody, “comfort her with--with--more
sandwiches!” Moira mopped her eyes with a trail of her dress, but
nobody noticed. They jostled about the table. Plates rang, shunted in
all directions. “Sitting in here?” cried Gerald, exalted, “splendid!”
Somebody waved a mouth-organ: could one dance to that? More and more
squeezed in at the door: the room would burst. The cracks of the
walls that had been straight a minute ago like bars now seemed to
bulge out visibly: light glared down on the resolution of backs and
pink, reaching arms. “_Our_ young friend, our _young_ friend, our
young _friend_,” thought Lois, and watched Gerald. Though she watched
wherever he went, she could not see him. There was nothing, in fact,
to which to attach her look except his smoothness and roundness of
head, which seemed for the first time remarkable. She looked for his
mouth--which had kissed her--but found it no different from mouths of
other young men who had also been strolling and pausing between the
huts in the dark. The page of the evening was asterisked over with
fervent imaginary kisses. And one single kiss in the wind, in the
dark was no longer particularized: she could not remember herself, or
remember him.
As he came up, she looked quickly away. She looked at an empty plate
down on the floor, at a thin disk of cucumber flaccid against its rim.
“What have I done?” she thought: she looked at the plate with dread.
And: “Oh, sandwich?” said Gerald, turning to bring up some more. “...
Or perhaps it will seem natural to-morrow?” Nothing could keep her from
having to eat a sandwich. “Darling ...” he whispered, brushing against
her shoulder.
“Tired?” asked Mr. Simcox, seeing her face.
“Oh no,” she said, with Mr. Daventry’s best irony.