CHAPTER IX

Willie Enslee brought the dancers off their pinions and back to earth by

a fretful reminder that the bouillon was chilling in the cups, and the

crab-meat was scorching in the chafing-dish.

The question of drinks came up anew. Forbes was in a champagne humor;

his soul seemed to be effervescent with little bubbles of joy. But Mrs.

Neff wanted a Scotch highball. Winifred was taking a reduction cure in

which alcohol was forbidden. Persis wanted two more cocktails. Ten Eyck

was on the water-wagon in penance for a recent outbreak. Bob Fielding

was one of those occasional beings who combine with total abstinence a

life of the highest conviviality. Offhand, one would have said that Bob

was an incessant drinker and a terrific smoker. As a matter of fact, he

had never been able to endure the taste of liquor or tobacco. When he

ordered mineral water, or even milk, nobody was surprised; even the

waiter assumed that the big man had just sworn off once more.

Forbes experienced a sinking of the heart as each of the guests named

his choice, and nobody asked for any of the waiting champagne.

Yet when Willie turned to him and said, "Mr. Forbes, you have the two

bottles of _brut_ all to yourself," Forbes felt compelled to shake his

head in declination. He never knew who got the champagne. He wondered if

the waiter smuggled it out or juggled it on the accounts. And Willie

forgot to ask Forbes what he would have instead! Willie ordered for

himself that most innocent of beverages which masquerades ginger ale

and a section of lemon peel under the ferocious name, the bloodthirsty

and viking-like title of "a horse's neck." There was a lot of it in a

very large glass, and Forbes noted how Willie's little hand looked like

a child's as he clutched the beaker. And he guzzled it as a child mouths

and mumbles a brim.

Forbes observed how variously people imbibed. There were curious

differences. Some shot their glasses to their lips, jerked back their

heads, snapped their tongues like triggers, and smote their throats as

with a solid bullet. Some stuck their very snouts in their liquor like

swine; others seemed hardly to know they were drinking as they flirted

across the tops of their glasses.

Persis did not raise her eyes as she sipped her cocktail. She looked

down, and her lips seemed to find other lips there. Forbes wondered

whose.

There was some rapid stoking of food against the next dance. When it

irrupted, Forbes, greatly as he longed to dance again with Persis,

invited Winifred for decorum's sake. Winifred speedily killed the

self-confidence he had gained from his first flight. His sense of rhythm

was incommensurate with hers. When she foretold his next step, she

foretold it wrong. He lost at once the power to act as leader, and when

she usurped the post he was no better as follower.

As Forbes wrestled with her he caught glimpses of Persis dancing with

Willie for partner. Little Willie's head barely reached her bare

shoulder. He clutched her desperately as one who is doomed from babyhood

not to be a dancer. Still he hopped ludicrously about, and almost made

her ludicrous.

Forbes longed to exchange partners with Willie, for he felt that he and

Winifred were equally ludicrous. They were making the heaviest of going.

He gave up in despair and returned to the table.

When the music stopped there was another interlude of supper. People

gulped hastily, as at a lunch-counter when the train is waiting. Forbes

intended to sit out the next dance; but he found himself abandoned as on

a desert island with Mrs. Neff.

"Come along, young man," she said.

"I'm afraid I don't know how."

"Then I'll teach you."

"But--"

"Don't be afraid of me. I've got a son as old as you, and I taught him."

Forbes had danced at times with elderly women, but not such a dance as

this. It was uncanny to be holding in his arms the mother of a grown

man, and to be whirling madly, dipping and toppling like wired puppets.

Mrs. Neff's spirit was still a girl's. Her body felt as young and

lissome in his arms as a girl's. Her abandon and frivolity were of the

seminary period. Now and then he had to glance down at the white hair of

the hoyden to reassure himself. The music had the power of an

incantation; it had bewitched her back to youth. It seemed to Forbes

that this magic alone, which should turn old women back to girlhood for

a time, could not be altogether accursed.

Perhaps the music had unsettled his reason, but in the logic of the

moment he felt that there was a splendid value in the new fashion, which

broke down at the same time the barriers of caste and the walls of old

age.

It was the Saturnalia come back. The aristocrats mingled as equals with

the commoners, and the old became young again for yet a few hours.

He had read so much about the cold, the haughty, and the bored-to-death

society of New York, yet here he was, a young lieutenant from the

frontier, and he was dancing a breakdown with one of the most important

matrons in America. And she was cutting up like a hired girl at a

barn-dance. Plainly the nation was still a republic.

When the music ended with a jolt Mrs. Neff clung dizzily to him, gave

him an accolade of approval with her fan, and booked him for the next

dance but one. If Forbes had had social ambitions, he would have felt

that he was a made man. Yet if he had had social ambitions he would

probably have betrayed and so defeated them.

Mrs. Neff having granted him a reprieve of one dance, Forbes made haste

to ask Persis for the next. She smiled and gave him that wren-like nod.

His heart beat with syncopation when he rose at the first note of music.

How differently she nestled and fitted into his embrace. Winifred had

been more than an arm-load, and gave the impression of an armor of silk

and steel and strained elastic. Mrs. Neff was too slender for him, and

for all her agility there was a sense of bones and muscles. But Persis

was flesh in all its magic. She was not bones nor muscles nor corsets,

she was a mysterious embodiment of spirit and beauty, fluid yet shapely,

unresisting yet real, gentle and terrible.

By now Forbes was familiar enough with the trickeries of the steps to

leave his feet to their own devices. He was a musician who knows his

instrument and his art well enough to improvise: soul and fingers in

such rapport that he hardly knows whether the mood compels the fingers

or the fingers suggest the mood.

And the same rapport existed with Persis. They evaded collisions with

the other dancers and with the gilded columns by a sort of instinct;

they sidled, whirled, dipped, pranced, or pirouetted, composed strange

contours of progress as if with one mind and one body.

And now the rapture of the dance was his, and he was enabled to play

upon her grace and her miraculously pliant sympathy. Her brow was just

at the level of his lips, and he began to wish to press his lips there.

Now and then her eyelids rose slowly and she looked up into his downward

gaze. They were mysterious looks she gave him. They were to her as

impersonal and vague as the rapture that fills the eyes when the west is

epic with sunset, or when an orchestra pours forth a chord of unusual

ecstasy, or a rose is so beautiful that it inspires a kind of heavenly

sorrow.

But Forbes misunderstood. He usurped to himself the tribute she was

unconsciously paying to the mere beatitude of being alive and in

rhythmic motion to music.

We have built up strange subtleties of perception. The most intolerable

discords are those of tones that lie just next each other; the harshest

of noises rise when an instrument is only a little out of tune or a

voice sings a trifle off the key.

Persis had accepted Forbes at Ten Eyck's rating as a gentleman to whom

she could intrust her body to embrace and carry through the complex

evolutions of a dance on a floor whose very throngs made a solitude and

concealment for wantonness of thought and carriage.

So intimate a union is required when two people dance that it is easy to

understand why the enemies of the dance denounce it as shameless

carnality. It is hard to explain to them how potently custom and minute

restraints permit an innocent dalliance with the materials of passion.

One can only compare it to skating over thin ice, and say that so long

as one keeps on skating a tiny crust of chill permits a joyous exercise

without a hint of the depths beneath. And the ice itself gives warning

when the danger is too close; its tiny crackling sound is thunder in the

ears.

This was Forbes' experience. A beautiful woman of exquisite breeding

gave him a certain enfranchisement of her person. He could take her in

his arms, and she him in hers. She would make herself one flesh with

him; he could sway her this way and that, drag her forward or backward,

co-exist with her breast to breast, thigh to thigh, and knee to knee.

But he must not ever so slightly take advantage of her faith in him. He

must not by the most delicate pressure or quirk of muscle imply anything

beyond the nice conventions and romantic pretenses of the dance.

Actresses make the same distinctions with stage kisses, and endure with

pride before a thousand eyes what they would count a vile insult in the

shadow of the wings or at a dressing-room door.

Forbes made the old mistake. Nothing venture, nothing gain, is a risky

proverb. He ventured almost unconsciously, without any baseness of

motive. Or, rather, he did not so much venture as relax his chivalry. He

breathed too deeply of her incense, paid her the tribute of an enamored

thought, constrained her with an ardor that was infinitesimally more

personal than the ardor of the dance.

Somehow she understood. Instantly she was a little frightened, a little

resentful. As subtle as the pressure of his arm was the resistance of

her body. The spell of the dance was dissolving, the thin ice crackling.

He whispered hastily:

"Forgive me!"

She simply whispered:

"All right."

And the spirit of the temple of dance was rescued and restored. He had

sung a trifle sharp, and she, like a perfect accompanist, had brought

him back to the key.

But even as they whirled on and hopped and skipped in the silly

frivolity of the turkey-trot he was solemnly experiencing an awe of her.

And now her beauty was less victorious over him than that swift pride

which could rebuke so delicately, that good-sportsmanship which could so

instantly accept apology.

When the music ended he mumbled:

"Will you ever dance with me again?"

She abashed him with the true forgiveness that forgets, and spoke with

all cheerfulness:

"Of course! Why not?"

The incident was closed in her heart. Its influence had just begun in

his.