Now Chattie asked:
‘Are you not enjoying yourself, Laura?’
‘Not particularly,’ answered Laura. ‘To be perfectly candid.’
Chattie giggled. To confess to the sin of not enjoying was something she would never have dared, so she pretended that she did not believe.
‘Are you not well, perhaps? There is quite a respectable sofa in the retiring-room. Quite clean. You could put your feet up for a little. I will come and sit with you, if you like.’
Chattie was most anxious to be of service to her friend, for, in spite of her relentless pursuit of enjoyment, at times she did suspect that enjoyment refused as relentlessly to be pursued.
Then Laura replied:
‘Are you really able to lie down on the sofa and be cured? Ah, Chattie, how I do envy you!’
This was the sort of thing that people did not like in Laura, and Chattie giggled, and dabbed with her handkerchief at the perspiration on her upper lip.
‘Oh, well,’ she said, and giggled again to stop the gap.
But Laura was grateful to her rather suety friend.
‘Come,’ she said, touching Chattie, because it cost her an effort. ‘Let us stand over there and watch, near that column, where we shall not be seen.’
‘Oh, dear, no,’ said Chattie, for whom it was a first duty to be noticed, and was propelling her friend up a short flight of steps leading to a little dais, from which prizes were distributed after the term’s dancing classes, and on which chairs had been arranged in a bower of flowers. ‘One does not accept to go to a ball simply to hide behind a column.’
‘Will it do us any good to sit exposed in the open, like a target?’ Laura asked.
Chattie knew that targets were designed for arrows, but contained her thoughts.
‘If we do not actually benefit by it, we can come to no positive harm,’ she was careful to observe.
So they seated themselves.
It was Belle’s night. Belle was everywhere, in her white dress, almost always and inevitably in the arms of Tom Radclyffe. Other dancers made way, encouraging her presence in their midst, as if she had been a talisman of some kind, and they would have touched her magic dress. As she danced, sometimes she would close her eyes against the music, although more often she would hold them open, expressing her love in such lucid glances that some mothers considered it immodest, and Laura, intercepting the touching honesty of that almost infinite blue, was afraid for her cousin’s safety, and wanted to protect her.
Or herself. She shuddered to realize that love might not remain hidden, and was nervously turning her head this way and that. She was most alarmingly, chokingly exposed. Her neck had mottled.
When the man approached so quietly, and bowed so civilly, she could have cried out, to ward off that being who, from his very modesty and reasonableness, might possibly have understood.
‘It is very kind,’ she said, in a loud, ugly voice. ‘Thank you. But I am not dancing.’
‘I do not blame you,’ he replied. ‘I am never surprised at any person not wishing to dance. It is not sociable, for one thing. It is not possible to jig up and down and express one’s thoughts clearly at the same time.’
‘Oh,’ said Laura, ‘I had always been led to understand that the expression of thought was the height of unsociability.’
Chattie Wilson laughed rather bitterly. She was hating everything.
Then Laura Trevelyan introduced Dr Badgery, surgeon of Nautilus, to Miss Chattie Wilson, and felt that she herself was absolved from further duty.
But his expression would not leave her in peace. Although his voice would be engaged with Chattie Wilson, it was not Chattie whom he was questioning.
‘Tell me, Miss Wilson,’ he said, ‘are you well acquainted with the country?’
‘Oh, dear, no. I have been very seldom into the bush. It is different, of course, if one marries; then it may become a matter of necessity.’
Miss Wilson did not intend to waste much time on Dr Badgery, who was neither young, nor handsome, of moderate means, she suspected, and not quite a gentleman. If she did not also recognize sympathy, it was because she was not yet desperate enough.
‘I would give anything to satisfy my curiosity,’ he said.
‘You should join some expedition,’ advised Chattie, and tried anxiously to be recognized by someone nice.
‘Such as left last year,’ she added, for she had been well trained, ‘under the leadership of that German, Mr Voss.’
No expedition, it appeared, would be led to the rescue of Chattie Wilson.
‘Ah,’ said Dr Badgery. ‘So I have heard. Tell me about him.’
He was looking most intently at Chattie, but would be turned at any moment, Laura knew, to intercept her distress.
‘I did not make his acquaintance,’ Chattie replied, but remembered at once. ‘Laura did, though.’
Then Dr Badgery turned, straining a little, as well-fleshed men of forty will, and was looking at Laura with the highest hopes. He would have been singularly unsurprised at anything of an oracular nature that might have issued from the mouth of that dark young woman.
Laura, who had looked away, remained conscious of his rather heavy eyebrows.
‘Did you?’ he asked.
And waited.
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘That is to say, my uncle was one of those who subscribed to Mr Voss’s expedition.’
‘And what manner of man is this German?’
‘I do not know,’ said Laura. ‘I cannot judge a person on superficial evidence. Sometimes,’ she added, for she had by now lived long enough, ‘it will even appear that all evidence is superficial.’
‘I have heard the most extraordinary things,’ said the surgeon, ‘of Mr Voss.’
‘Then, no doubt,’ said the young woman, ‘you are better informed than I.’
It was at this point that Dr Badgery realized he should ask Miss Wilson to dance, and she, for want of better opportunities, accepted graciously enough. They went down. Now the surgeon, that ordinarily jolly man, who wrote affectionate letters to young girls long after their mothers had given him up, was engulfed in the tragic hilarity of the polka, as if rivers of suffering had gushed to the surface from depths where they had remained hitherto unsuspected, or he, perhaps he alone had not tapped them.
This was before his sense of duty returned.
‘Do you know Waverley?’ asked the jigging surgeon.
‘Oh, dear, yes. Waverley,’ sighed, and jigged Miss Chattie Wilson. ‘I know everywhere round here. Although, of course, there are some places where one cannot go.’
‘I was at Waverley recently, in the garden of a Judge de Courcy. Do you know him?’ asked the surgeon, who had heard it done this way.
‘His wife is my aunt’s second cousin.’
‘Is everybody related?’
‘Almost everybody.’ Chattie sighed. ‘Of course, there are some people who cannot be.’
‘I was at Waverley with the Pringles. Miss Bonner and her mother happened to be of the party.’
‘Belle,’ said Chattie, ‘is the sweetest thing. And so lovely. She deserves every bit of her good fortune. Nobody could envy Belle.’
‘And Miss Trevelyan,’ the surgeon suggested.
‘Laura is sweet, too,’ Chattie sighed. ‘But peculiar. Laura is clever.’
They continued to dance.
Or the surgeon was again threading the dark maze of clipped hedges at Waverley. He knew that, already the first day, he was dedicated to Laura Trevelyan, whatever the nature of her subterranean sorrows. So they sailed against the dark waters, trailing hands, she holding her face away, or they walked in the labyrinth of hedges, in which, he knew from experience, they did not meet.
From where she had continued to sit, Laura Trevelyan watched the antics of the fat surgeon, an unlikely person, whom she would have learnt to love, if seas of experience and music had not flowed between them.
Then the dancers stopped, and everybody was applauding
the capital music with their hot gloves.
Laura was for the moment quite separate in the roomful of human beings, but as she had outlived the age of social panic, she did not try to burrow in, and presently she saw Willie Pringle, on whom the hair had begun to sprout in unsatisfactory patches.
Willie wandered through his own party, and finally arrived at Laura.
‘I do not care for a ball, Laura, do you?’ the young man asked, with his silly, loose mouth.
‘You are my host,’ Laura answered, kindly.
‘Good Lord, I do not feel like one. Not a bit. I do not know what I feel like.’
Without realizing that this is frequently the case before the yeast begins to work, his mother was in the habit of blaming his ineffectuality on the fact that he had outgrown his strength.
‘Perhaps you will discover in time, and do something extraordinary,’ Laura suggested.
‘In a solicitor’s office?’
That he would find out and do something extraordinary was an eventuality of which Willie was afraid. But, in the meantime, he enjoyed the company of older girls. Not so much to talk to, as to watch. He sensed that mysticism which their presence bred, by secrets and silences, and music of dresses. Intent upon their own iridescent lives in the corners of a ballroom, or seated in a landscape, under trees, their purely formal beauty obsessed him. Often he would turn his back upon the mirrors that could not perpetuate their images.
‘Not in a solicitor’s office,’ he did hear Laura agree. ‘If we were bounded by walls, that would be terrible.’
She seemed to emphasize the we, which made Willie happy, although he wrinkled his forehead prodigiously to celebrate his happiness.
‘Should we dance, Laura?’ he asked, in some doubt.
This was a wholly and unexpectedly delightful prospect to Laura Trevelyan.
‘Do let us, Willie,’ she said, laughing for the approach of tenuous pleasure. ‘It will be fun.’
With Willie whom she had known since childhood. It was so blameless.
So they held hands. To move along the sunny avenues of rather pretty music, produced in the young woman such a sense of innocent happiness she did for a moment feel the pricking of tears. She glanced in a glass and saw that her eyelids had reddened in her pale face, and her nose was swollen. She was ugly tonight, but gently happy.
So the two peculiar people danced gently together. Nobody noticed them at first, except the surgeon, who had been reduced to the company of his own nagging thoughts.
Then Belle saw, and called, across several waves of other dancers, that were separating the two cousins, as at all balls.
‘Laura!’ Belle cried. ‘I am determined to reach you.’
She swam, laughing, through the sea of tulle, and was rising from the foam in her white, shining dress. Belle’s skin was permitted to be golden, while others went protecting their pink and white. At close quarters, changed back from goddess into animal, there were little, fine, golden hairs on what some people dared to refer to as Belle Bonner’s brown complexion. Indeed, there were mothers who predicted that Belle would develop a coarse look later on. But she smelled still of youth and flint, sunlight could have been snoozing upon her cheeks, and, amiably, she would let herself be stroked with the clumsiest of compliments. In which she did not believe, however. She laughed them off.
Now the cousins were reunited in midstream. Tugged at and buffeted, they swayed together, they clung together, they looked in through each other’s eyes, and rested there. All they saw most concerned themselves.
Until Belle had to bubble.
‘Remind me to tell you,’ she said, too loud, ‘about Mrs de Courcy’s hair. You are not moping?’
‘Why should I mope?’ asked Laura, whose sombre breast had begun to rustle with those peacock colours which were hers normally.
Then Belle was whisked away to dance gravely with the judge.
As Willie had wandered off, as he did on practically all occasions, particularly at balls, Laura was left with her own music, of which she dared to hum a few little, feverish phrases. The fringe of metal beads, that hung from the corsage of what had been her dull dress, glittered and chattered threateningly, and swords struck from her seemingly cavernous eyes, from beneath guarded lids.
In consequence, Tom Radclyffe was of two minds when approaching his cousin-to-be.
‘I presume you are not dancing,’ he began.
‘If you would prefer it that way,’ Laura smiled, ‘I am willing to set your feelings at rest.’
She knew that Belle, who was kind by instinct, had come to some arrangement with Tom.
‘You know it is not a question of that,’ he blurted. ‘I thought you would prefer to talk.’
‘That would be worse! Would it not?’ Laura laughed.
He might have ignored her more completely if he had not permitted himself to frown.
‘In that case,’ he said, and blushed, ‘let us, rather, dance.’
Were it not for his physical strength, one might have suspected Tom Radclyffe of being a somewhat frightened man. As it was, and taking into account his military career, such a suspicion could only have been absurd.
Laura said, as she touched his sleeve:
‘I cannot grow accustomed to this new disguise.’
‘I cannot grow accustomed to myself,’ he answered rather gloomily.
For Tom had resigned his commission, and was now plain man. That, perhaps, was most of his predicament. He was not yet reconciled to nakedness.
As they danced together, the man and woman could have been two swords holding each other.
‘Will you be kind to Belle?’ Laura asked. ‘I could never forgive you if you were not.’
Observed in a certain light, all the dancers wore bitter smiles. The heavy fringe of beads ornamenting her relentless dress was coldly metallic under his hand.
‘But Belle and I love each other.’
And men become as little children.
‘He who was not in love was never hurt,’ Laura said.
‘Let us be reasonable,’ he ordered, reasserting his masculinity. ‘Because you have been hurt, it does not follow that other people must suffer the same experience. Even though you may wish it.’
‘You misunderstand me,’ she said.
As she was looking over his shoulder it sounded humble, and her opponent, who had but recently lost his balance, was quick to take advantage.
‘You know I am an ordinary sort of fellow,’ he said; he could make cunning use of his simplicity. ‘My intelligence is of the practical kind. As for imagination, you will say that mine is not developed to the degree that you admire.’ Such was his haste, he scarcely paused for his due reward. ‘Or that I am even lacking in it. For which I am deuced glad. You see, it is a great temptation to live off one’s imagination, as some people do.’
His voice had risen too high and left him breathless, but he no longer paused; he rushed on, in fact, right over the precipice:
‘What do you expect of Voss?’
His stiff lips were grinning at his own audacity.
It was the first time that Laura Trevelyan had been faced with this phantom, and now that it had happened, the situation was made more terrible by the quarter from which it had come. The silly, invisible music was suddenly augmented by her own heartbeat. Great horns were fluctuating through the wood-and-plaster room.
‘Voss?’ she clattered discordantly.
Now the metal beads were molten under his fingers.
‘Expect?’ she responded. ‘I do not expect anything of anyone, but am grateful for the crumbs.’
Tom Radclyffe did not absorb this, but was still grinning stiffly.
The two people were dancing and dancing.
Now that he was master of all, the man offered:
‘If I could help you in any way, Laura, for Belle’s sake.’
‘You cannot help me,’ Laura replied, ‘for Belle’s, or anybody else’s sake. You could not even help me by your own inclination,
of your own will, for Mr Voss, Tom, is lost.’
Tom Radclyffe was quite shocked by the ugly music, and by the lurching movements of his partner. The truth that he had let loose made him protest and bluster.
‘If it is second sight that keeps you so well informed, then we are all threatened.’
Whether from emotion, or exertion, he emphasized every other word. But Laura did not defend herself. Almost at once, she left her partner, and went straight to the retiring-room. Chattie Wilson, noticing, wondered whether she should accompany her friend, whose face was shrunk to the extent that it resembled a yellow skull.
In the resilient hall the music continued to ache until it was time for supper.
Mrs Pringle’s triumph was complete when the doors were flung open and her guests burst into the supper-room. If burst is not a refined, it is yet an unavoidable word. For those well-conducted, but prudent people who had quietly stationed themselves in readiness, were propelled from behind by the feckless rout, which had continued to dance, and chatter, and fall in love. Suddenly the two parties were united in one thought, only differently expressed, and although the prudent were protesting, and even leaning back to restrain the flushed, impulsive horde of feckless that continued pushing from behind, their common thought did prevail, in final eruption, which brought them in a rush of churned bodies right to the edge of the long tables, threatening the rosy hams and great unctuous sirloins of bloody beef.
‘It is disgraceful,’ laughed Mrs Bonner, ‘that a gathering of individuals from genteel homes should behave like cattle.’
However, she did really rather approve of all signs of animal health, and might have been alarmed had the company behaved like human beings.
Her friend and hostess, Mrs Pringle, who had been frightened at first, for her condition, and who had sought protection behind a most convulsive palm, now emerged, and was walking amongst her guests, with advice such as:
‘Do let me press you to a little of this fish in aspic,’
or:
‘I can recommend the Salad à la Roosse, Miss Hetherington.’
By her very hospitality, Mrs Pringle, who had wounded many a friend in the name of friendship, was laying herself open to the most savage forms of counter-attack. Now, some of those friends might never have seen her before, while the expression of others suggested they had, indeed, recognized what they must force themselves to endure. As the resigned Mrs Pringle humbly went about her duties, always the servant of their pleasure, the guests were frowning at her from above their whiskers of crimped lettuce and lips of mayonnaise.
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