XI

On the night of Ronald’s arrival a dance was taking place in the Hotel

dining-room. Chairs and tables had been stacked away in one corner, the

floor polished and the walls festooned with paper flags and specially

illuminated. The music audible in every part of the Hotel, though

generally as a sustained thin humming with the pianist’s undertone as an

irregular and tuneless pulse-beat, had drawn everybody; lounge and

drawing-room had been drained of their usual occupants. Dances at the

Hotel were not usual and this was in the nature of a gala night. The

concierge’s face was wreathed in smiles but Ronald felt his manner

lacked _empressement_. It was irritating, when one had enquired for

one’s mother, to be told with an appearance of indifference that she too

would be also at the ball. He had been sustained till now by the

brilliant certainty of being expected and waited for, but he was tired

after the journey and the lounge from which the palms had all been taken

away to decorate the dining-room did now seem repellent, mean and

artificial.

“Tell my mother I have come,” he said to the concierge and sat down in a

wicker-chair while the dance music throbbed at him. The concierge went

away but nobody came, though he waited; so at last he walked over to the

dining-room door and, unable to see anything through the blind but

twirling forms and wavering shadows, opened the door sharply and

surveyed the scene from the threshold.

It must be admitted that the impressions he received were coloured for

him by a prejudice against the Riviera which he had cultivated from his

childhood and believed to be innate.

Veronica Lawrence was the first to remark and point out to her partner

that a young man, probably Ronald Kerr, was standing in the doorway. She

was wearing a tight green dress like a sheath and every time she passed

she looked thoughtfully at Ronald over her partner’s shoulder and once

even smiled. Girls and young men had been asked in from the other hotels

and the floor was crowded, while a close-packed row of onlookers sat or

stood along the walls, pressing up so near to the band that the

red-coated fiddlers began to look desperate, having scarcely elbow-room.

The sexes were unequally represented, several couples of girls were

dancing together. Some of the elder ladies had also taken the floor and

were spinning round at a high velocity in the arms of their usual

bridge-partners whose coat-tails whirled horizontally to the constant

danger of more modern dancers whose poised totterings, hesitations and

smooth forward rushes they perpetually interrupted.

“He’s _rather_ decorative,” said Veronica. She had at last elicited a

bow from Ronald, who felt convinced that the girl must know him.

“Oh well,” said Victor coldly, “if you like ’em floppy—” He set his jaw

again and silent as ever they flitted across a pool of floor that opened

for them, light as moths above their shadows. The Lawrences were

remarkable everywhere with their burnished hair brushed up into haloes;

they trailed enormous feather fans across their partners’ shoulders

negligently, and refused to waltz with elderly men, though they would

make an exception in favour of Colonel Duperrier.

Mrs. Duperrier sat against one of the walls, following couple after

couple round with her eyes. Now and again she would smile metallically

at a girl she knew and ask her whether she were having a good time.

Though she never seemed to be watching Colonel Duperrier she knew where

he was all the time and could have pointed him out immediately. She had

trained herself to remember distinctly whichever scene from her past had

at the moment most torturous significance for her; now she could see

herself at nineteen, admired to satiation, waltzing with a Captain

Duperrier at Darjeeling. A French window stood open on to a balcony

whence steps led down into the black-dark garden; couples dived in and

out of the window perpetually and presently Mrs. Duperrier who had been

expecting this the whole evening saw her husband disappear with one of

the Lawrences and waited in vain for him to come back. Mr. Lee-Mittison,

who had been working his way round the room, bumped down beside her

abruptly with his hands on his parted knees.

“I hope you agree with me that our girls are doing us credit? There

isn’t a girl in the room that can hold a candle to one of the Lawrences;

Sydney Warren’s looking very distinguished (—I can’t honestly tell you I

care for this thing they’re all dancing—) and even the little Bransomes

light up well. Mark my word——”

Mrs. Duperrier suddenly felt she could not bear this, made a queer

little sound and shot up from her place. After one last look through the

window she pushed her way between the dancers and out of the

dining-room. She passed Ronald Kerr in the doorway and looked at him in

amazement, then rushed past him and shut herself up in her room.

Sydney wore a scarlet dress and danced as though she had for once

forgotten herself. A young Italian whose name she did not know had

attached himself to her and she divided her dances between him and

Colonel Duperrier and a gingery Captain Somebody-or-other from another

hotel who thought her conversation smart and giggled ecstatically. The

Italian danced, as Veronica afterwards said, “like a seraphim”: he

taught Sydney the tango as it is danced in Rome, and it was while she

was standing balanced against him to the slow music that she looked

sideways and saw or rather for the first time apprehended Ronald: she

realized that he must have been there some time.

Cold all over and for a moment lost to the tango she thought: “Ronald!”

then returned her eyes to her partner’s dispassionate face and slid her

long step sideways across him; they both swung half round and balanced

again at the conclusion of the bar. The floor was emptier; all but a few

couples had been driven off it by the unnatural music; the remaining few

were visible from every part of the room and were reflected in the

twirling mirror. Ronald was watching her, and before the end of the

dance she excused herself to her partner and crossed the room to speak

to him.

“I beg your pardon—aren’t you Mr. Kerr?”

“I am,” said Ronald gloomily.

“Surely you have come early? Mrs. Kerr was not expecting you——”

“Oh thanks, but I happen to know my mother _is_ expecting me.”

“—not expecting you before half past eleven,” said Sydney, finishing her

sentence imperturbably. “The Paris train——”

“Excuse me, but I didn’t come from Paris. I’ve come from Genoa.”

“Really? You see you never said how you were coming, so we rather

assumed——”

Ronald’s long stare plainly enquired what right she had had to have

“rather assumed”; and more, what she could know about his mother’s

assumptions. It was diverted from Sydney by the arrival of Mr.

Lee-Mittison who hurried towards them, skidding slightly in his

eagerness on the polished floor. “Can _I_ do anything for you, my boy?”

said Mr. Lee-Mittison.

“Well, yes,” said Ronald turning towards him. “I am looking for Mrs.

Kerr who happens to be my mother. Perhaps you will be able to tell me

where——”

“Mr. Lee-Mittison will certainly be able to help you,” said Sydney; she

and Ronald bowed to one another and she walked away. “To the knife,” she

thought, surrendering herself to her next partner, the gingery captain,

who had waited meanwhile in the offing. In the succession of broken

glimpses she had of him subsequently she saw Ronald being led round the

edge of the room by Mr. Lee-Mittison, who had laid a hand on his

shoulder, with bowed head, but with every sign of complaisance to being

Mr. Lee-Mittison’s boy. After a few minutes’ conversation they left the

lounge together. Their exit was watched with an equal interest by James

Milton, who thought: “So that’s what Ronald is going to be like.”

Milton had spent the evening propped against the empty fireplace wishing

he could dance. The high mantelpiece caught uncomfortably just between

the shoulders, giving him a slight stoop forward. He was dissatisfied,

but did not wish to take a seat along the walls among the women and the

very old gentlemen. The men of his age were all dancing and his

isolation irked him, yet he could not tear himself away from the music

and the lit-up, hypnotizing circulation of the dancers. He had noticed

Ronald at once and wondered whether he ought to go across and speak to

him, but there was something about Ronald at once remote and ominous

which forbade the hazards of so public an encounter. He resembled, in

the cool wide stare across which the dancers were allowed to sweep while

it never singled out or followed any of them, in the backward tilt of

the head which sent the stare down over the modelled protrusion of

cheekbones, and in a droop down at the corners of the mouth that

lengthened the chin, a supercilious young Florentine among the retinue

of the Magi who stands apart and Gallio-like on its fringe, staring out

of the picture. Ronald was, however, never at any one moment entirely

superb; he could achieve a slouch in any attitude and the lock of hair

tumbling slantwise across his forehead towards one eyebrow broke up the

design of his features into something irregular and rather baffled.

There was a glitter about him which betrayed an embarrassing

cropping-out of the Shelley from behind the mask of Hellenic remoteness

so carefully worn.

“Snubbed!” smiled James Milton, watching Sydney with a swirl of the red

skirts turn on her heel and return to her partner. The only sentiments

she did not at present arouse in him were those of protectiveness and

pity. His own sensitiveness, however, made him turn away from looking at

her at this crisis of discomfiture, and he caught instead the eye of

Eileen Lawrence who, disconcerted at finding herself without a partner,

was advancing towards him with the undulations of a Spanish dancer. She

looked in her bright black so very striking, so very unlike the sort of

young woman over whom he had even permitted his imagination to linger,

that he was gratified at her coming up to strike an attitude before him.

She said with a glance which in spite of his armour of subtlety did

elate and disturb him: “Now then, Mr. Milton, you’re very diffident:

aren’t you going to dance with me?”

“There’s nothing I should like better, but I _don’t_, unfortunately.”

“Oh, tut,” said Eileen. “But what a relief—I had been afraid we weren’t

beautiful enough for you. Very well then, take me out for a stroll in

the garden.”

“_Rather_,” said Mr. Milton, coming forward with alacrity. “But won’t

you be cold?” Though he did not mind this at all, he could not help

noticing that she had less on than he could have imagined possible. She

did not answer, only lashed her feather fan to and fro in a contemptuous

gesture; so he said no more and followed her through the window.

The Hotel garden, though not large, had been so laid out with screens of

trees and with circuitous paths as to afford visitors the maximum of

variety and exercise. It had taken on this evening from the insistent

music and from the light that splashed down on to the trees a character

so unusual, so vivid yet unearthly, that James Milton could hardly

recognize it for the place of gravel and thin foliage where some days

ago he had been talking to Miss Fitzgerald on an iron chair. There was

no moon, but the sky was pale with starshine. “I suppose,” said Eileen

Lawrence after a few moments, sniffing, “that this is what they’d call

in books ‘a balmy and languorous southern night.’”

“It certainly smells good. Perhaps the lemon trees....”

“‘A night made for love,’ that’s what they’d call it.”

“I suppose they would ... I say, are you certain you’re not cold?”

She had shivered, but at this delightful thought: “A night when men go

out with guns and shoot themselves on the Casino terrace—Heavens, if

this were Monte!”

“But it certainly _is_ the Riviera,” said James Milton, and he thought

of the whole band of white hotels like palaces along the line of coast

into which their own seemed now to be knitted, hotels with light

streaming out of them towards the tideless sea that never advancing on

the shore or receding from it was like an inexorable unfailing memory,

not worked upon by thought or changed by sleep. “The Church Militant,”

he thought ridiculously; then stared at a conviction which had stared at

him that there could be no closer One-ness than in this community of

desire and emotion, and that perhaps in this alone consisted....

Eileen Lawrence brushed against him as they turned a corner.

“What jolly arms you’ve got,” he, feeling still immeasurably far from

her, was moved to exclaim.

They strolled together amicably, following the doublings and twists of

the path, meeting or overtaking other couples and overhearing now and

then some scrap of conversation, some interchange of personalities from

behind a screen of trees or the depths of an occasional arbour. Their

cigarette ends glowing and fading preceded them like a pair of luminous

noses, and equidistant spots of light advertised that pairs of other

Dongs were promenading solemnly. “How ridiculous!” laughed James Milton

at the music, in sudden elation. He had not been to a dance for years,

he had forsaken even Christmas parties because they made him feel

avuncular: all this was new to him. Eileen, who thought this was the

dreariest dance she had ever been at, a travesty of all that was highest

in human enjoyment, was as near depression as the Lawrences ever

descended and replied: “Yes, it’s pretty futile, isn’t it? I suppose the

dowagers are enjoying it. Shall we go in?”

Milton who had been taking a keener pleasure than she understood in her

nearness, in the intimacy of the darkness, actually laid a hand on her

arm to detain her. He entreated, “Not till the end of this dance!”

His unwillingness to give her up was not decreased by a sharp irritation

that she with her white arms and her attractiveness (which he was

conscious of as something as material as phosphorescence, in which he

could have dipped a finger curiously) should have stopped short at being

Eileen Lawrence. He was convinced that if she had been anybody else, say

Sydney (now dancing, indifferent, in the room above) the situation would

have had a key for him; and he chafed with an indignant longing. “I say,

Eileen—” he began and determined to understand himself reached out a

hand for her.

“Well?” challenged Eileen, and they stared at the greyish blots of one

another’s faces in the darkness. After a moment her expectancy broke up

into laughter. “I really thought,” said she, “that you were going to

kiss me.”

“So did I,” said James Milton and following her back to the ball-room he

tried in vain to decide whether she and the mood to which she had given

colour had been base or very admirable. He gave her up to her next

partner and returned to the fireplace, but the dance became meaningless;

he could not see Sydney anywhere. Once he thought she appeared beyond

the window, half in the darkness, but she was shut away from him by the

spinning barrier. He determined to find her, to allay the restlessness

which was beginning to sap his benignity and make him look with contempt

at the older people and at the younger with resentment. If he did not

find her soon he would begin to believe that there was not a place in

the world for him—he started at a flash of red in one of the mirrors but

it was only the sweep of Eileen’s crimson fan. He felt that he could no

longer endure the ball-room and that even if by going he were to cut

himself off for ever from all it contained he must leave it to look for

her.

He went out into the lounge with his heart in his mouth but there was no

one there but Mr. Lee-Mittison, walking about and rubbing his hands, so

happy that he had had to expand here himself in solitude.

“Charming boy, that,” said Mr. Lee-Mittison. “Really an

acquisition—charming boy.”

“Indeed?” said Milton, who had forgotten Ronald.

“Found his mother for him. Nice woman, very nice woman. Pretty to see

’em together.” He beamed at Milton as he had not beamed for days.

“Was it?” said Milton. He stared again round the emptiness of the

lounge, went to the foot of the stairs and looked up, listened, and with

a last desperate inspiration looked into the drawing-room.

“Looking for anybody?” asked Mr. Lee-Mittison, observing this.

“No,” said Milton and nodding good-night to Mr. Lee-Mittison he went

down the basement stairs into the smoking-room and out by a glass door

into the garden again. Here he walked to and fro, repelled by the

darkness, peering angrily into the arbours which were now all empty and

silent and quickening his steps at every turn of a path. He looked at

the great sheer façade springing upright above him, where here and there

a light came out in a window, and thought, “Of course, she is tired; she

has gone up to bed.”

“But she was not tired at all: she did not look as though she would ever

sleep again,” his memory told him.

“I suppose I must love her?—But I cannot, she is so erratic and cold—”

“It is because she’s erratic and cold that you’ve been able to surprise

your own feeling.” “Oh, rats!” said James Milton, kicking a stone. A

figure that had come out on to one of the balconies started and peered

down into the garden.

The quick movement betrayed some high tension of fear or expectancy.

Mrs. Kerr, he thought in surprise, as having counted the windows up from

the ground and then along from left to right he located the balcony. Why

should she still and in such wretchedness be waiting for Ronald? He

listened and watched; the room behind her was empty. Then as the figure,

still with its arms stretched out, gripping the balcony, turned its head

sideways, he recognized Sydney. It was on the tip of his tongue to call

to her, as though she were a child for whose conduct he was somehow

responsible. She should have left them alone to-night, he thought, and

flamed with disinterested anger. He took a few steps backward, propped

himself against a tree and remained looking up at the balcony. She

shivered; he shivered in sympathy. How much (though how properly) Mrs.

Kerr had found to say to her son! It was long past midnight now and very

cold, the dance was over and the music silent some time ago. All the

other lights were out except one at the very top left-hand corner where

Ronald and his mother must still be talking.

“Damn Ronald!” thought James Milton. “She and I will be catching our

deaths.” A clock down in the town struck the half-hour and a bell from a

convent above them answered it. Emboldened by the breach these made in

the silence he called, “Good-night, Miss Warren!”

Sydney started violently and after one more fierce glance on to the

trees retreated from the balcony. He saw her pause a moment under the

light and look round as though to take a farewell of her expectations,

then the room was dashed from his sight by darkness. A panel of fresh

light shone for a moment as the door on to the corridor opened and shut.

Sighing, and with a sense of half-accomplishment, he too went in to bed.