Classic Works from Women Writers

by Editors of Canterbury Classics

  Helen swayed slightly as if she sat on wires.

  “I could dance forever!” she said. “They ought to let themselves go more!” she exclaimed. “They ought to leap and swing. Look! How they mince!”

  “Have you seen those wonderful Russian dancers?” began Mrs. Elliot. But Helen saw her partner coming and rose as the moon rises. She was half round the room before they took their eyes off her, for they could not help admiring her, although they thought it a little odd that a woman of her age should enjoy dancing.

  Directly Helen was left alone for a minute she was joined by St. John Hirst, who had been watching for an opportunity.

  “Should you mind sitting out with me?” he asked. “I’m quite incapable of dancing.” He piloted Helen to a corner which was supplied with two armchairs, and thus enjoyed the advantage of semi-privacy. They sat down, and for a few minutes Helen was too much under the influence of dancing to speak.

  “Astonishing!” she exclaimed at last. “What sort of shape can she think her body is?” This remark was called forth by a lady who came past them, waddling rather than walking, and leaning on the arm of a stout man with globular green eyes set in a fat white face. Some support was necessary, for she was very stout, and so compressed that the upper part of her body hung considerably in advance of her feet, which could only trip in tiny steps, owing to the tightness of the skirt round her ankles. The dress itself consisted of a small piece of shiny yellow satin, adorned here and there indiscriminately with round shields of blue and green beads made to imitate hues of a peacock’s breast. On the summit of a frothy castle of hair a purple plume stood erect, while her short neck was encircled by a black velvet ribbon knobbed with gems, and golden bracelets were tightly wedged into the flesh of her fat gloved arms. She had the face of an impertinent but jolly little pig, mottled red under a dusting of powder.

  St. John could not join in Helen’s laughter.

  “It makes me sick,” he declared. “The whole thing makes me sick … Consider the minds of those people—their feelings. Don’t you agree?”

  “I always make a vow never to go to another party of any description,” Helen replied, “and I always break it.”

  She leant back in her chair and looked laughingly at the young man. She could see that he was genuinely cross, if at the same time slightly excited.

  “However,” he said, resuming his jaunty tone, “I suppose one must just make up one’s mind to it.”

  “To what?”

  “There never will be more than five people in the world worth talking to.”

  Slowly the flush and sparkle in Helen’s face died away, and she looked as quiet and as observant as usual.

  “Five people?” she remarked. “I should say there were more than five.”

  “You’ve been very fortunate, then,” said Hirst. “Or perhaps I’ve been very unfortunate.” He became silent.

  “Should you say I was a difficult kind of person to get on with?” he asked sharply.

  “Most clever people are when they’re young,” Helen replied.

  “And of course I am—immensely clever,” said Hirst. “I’m infinitely cleverer than Hewet. It’s quite possible,” he continued in his curiously impersonal manner, “that I’m going to be one of the people who really matter. That’s utterly different from being clever, though one can’t expect one’s family to see it,” he added bitterly.

  Helen thought herself justified in asking, “Do you find your family difficult to get on with?”

  “Intolerable … They want me to be a peer and a privy councillor. I’ve come out here partly in order to settle the matter. It’s got to be settled. Either I must go to the bar, or I must stay on in Cambridge. Of course, there are obvious drawbacks to each, but the arguments certainly do seem to me in favour of Cambridge. This kind of thing!” he waved his hand at the crowded ballroom. “Repulsive. I’m conscious of great powers of affection too. I’m not susceptible, of course, in the way Hewet is. I’m very fond of a few people. I think, for example, that there’s something to be said for my mother, though she is in many ways so deplorable … At Cambridge, of course, I should inevitably become the most important man in the place, but there are other reasons why I dread Cambridge—” he ceased.

  “Are you finding me a dreadful bore?” he asked. He changed curiously from a friend confiding in a friend to a conventional young man at a party.

  “Not in the least,” said Helen. “I like it very much.”

  “You can’t think,” he exclaimed, speaking almost with emotion, “what a difference it makes finding someone to talk to! Directly I saw you I felt you might possibly understand me. I’m very fond of Hewet, but he hasn’t the remotest idea what I’m like. You’re the only woman I’ve ever met who seems to have the faintest conception of what I mean when I say a thing.”

  The next dance was beginning; it was the Barcarolle out of Hoffman, which made Helen beat her toe in time to it; but she felt that after such a compliment it was impossible to get up and go, and, besides being amused, she was really flattered, and the honesty of his conceit attracted her. She suspected that he was not happy, and was sufficiently feminine to wish to receive confidences.

  “I’m very old,” she sighed.

  “The odd thing is that I don’t find you old at all,” he replied. “I feel as though we were exactly the same age. Moreover—” here he hesitated, but took courage from a glance at her face, “I feel as if I could talk quite plainly to you as one does to a man—about the relations between the sexes, about … and …”

  In spite of his certainty a slight redness came into his face as he spoke the last two words.

  She reassured him at once by the laugh with which she exclaimed, “I should hope so!”

  He looked at her with real cordiality, and the lines which were drawn about his nose and lips slackened for the first time.

  “Thank God!” he exclaimed. “Now we can behave like civilised human beings.”

  Certainly a barrier which usually stands fast had fallen, and it was possible to speak of matters which are generally only alluded to between men and women when doctors are present, or the shadow of death. In five minutes he was telling her the history of his life. It was long, for it was full of extremely elaborate incidents, which led on to a discussion of the principles on which morality is founded, and thus to several very interesting matters, which even in this ballroom had to be discussed in a whisper, lest one of the pouter pigeon ladies or resplendent merchants should overhear them, and proceed to demand that they should leave the place. When they had come to an end, or, to speak more accurately, when Helen intimated by a slight slackening of her attention that they had sat there long enough, Hirst rose, exclaiming, “So there’s no reason whatever for all this mystery!”

  “None, except that we are English people,” she answered. She took his arm and they crossed the ball-room, making their way with difficulty between the spinning couples, who were now perceptibly dishevelled, and certainly to a critical eye by no means lovely in their shapes. The excitement of undertaking a friendship and the length of their talk, made them hungry, and they went in search of food to the dining-room, which was now full of people eating at little separate tables. In the doorway they met Rachel, going up to dance again with Arthur Venning. She was flushed and looked very happy, and Helen was struck by the fact that in this mood she was certainly more attractive than the generality of young women. She had never noticed it so clearly before.

  “Enjoying yourself?” she asked, as they stopped for a second.

  “Miss Vinrace,” Arthur answered for her, “has just made a confession; she’d no idea that dances could be so delightful.”

  “Yes!” Rachel exclaimed. “I’ve changed my view of life completely!”

  “You don’t say so!” Helen mocked. They passed on.

  “That’s typical of Rachel,” she said. “She changes her view of life about every other day. D’you know, I believe you’re just the person I want,” she sai
d, as they sat down, “to help me complete her education? She’s been brought up practically in a nunnery. Her father’s too absurd. I’ve been doing what I can—but I’m too old, and I’m a woman. Why shouldn’t you talk to her—explain things to her—talk to her, I mean, as you talk to me?”

  “I have made one attempt already this evening,” said St. John. “I rather doubt that it was successful. She seems to me so very young and inexperienced. I have promised to lend her Gibbon.”

  “It’s not Gibbon exactly,” Helen pondered. “It’s the facts of life, I think—d’you see what I mean? What really goes on, what people feel, although they generally try to hide it? There’s nothing to be frightened of. It’s so much more beautiful than the pretences—always more interesting—always better, I should say, than that kind of thing.”

  She nodded her head at a table near them, where two girls and two young men were chaffing each other very loudly, and carrying on an arch insinuating dialogue, sprinkled with endearments, about, it seemed, a pair of stockings or a pair of legs. One of the girls was flirting a fan and pretending to be shocked, and the sight was very unpleasant, partly because it was obvious that the girls were secretly hostile to each other.

  “In my old age, however,” Helen sighed, “I’m coming to think that it doesn’t much matter in the long run what one does: people always go their own way—nothing will ever influence them.” She nodded her head at the supper party.

  But St. John did not agree. He said that he thought one could really make a great deal of difference by one’s point of view, books and so on, and added that few things at the present time mattered more than the enlightenment of women. He sometimes thought that almost everything was due to education.

  In the ballroom, meanwhile, the dancers were being formed into squares for the lancers. Arthur and Rachel, Susan and Hewet, Miss Allan and Hughling Elliot found themselves together.

  Miss Allan looked at her watch.

  “Half-past one,” she stated. “And I have to despatch Alexander Pope tomorrow.”

  “Pope!” snorted Mr. Elliot. “Who reads Pope, I should like to know? And as for reading about him—No, no, Miss Allan; be persuaded you will benefit the world much more by dancing than by writing.” It was one of Mr. Elliot’s affectations that nothing in the world could compare with the delights of dancing—nothing in the world was so tedious as literature. Thus he sought pathetically enough to ingratiate himself with the young, and to prove to them beyond a doubt that though married to a ninny of a wife, and rather pale and bent and careworn by his weight of learning, he was as much alive as the youngest of them all.

  “It’s a question of bread and butter,” said Miss Allan calmly. “However, they seem to expect me.” She took up her position and pointed a square black toe.

  “Mr. Hewet, you bow to me.” It was evident at once that Miss Allan was the only one of them who had a thoroughly sound knowledge of the figures of the dance.

  After the lancers there was a waltz; after the waltz a polka; and then a terrible thing happened; the music, which had been sounding regularly with five-minute pauses, stopped suddenly. The lady with the great dark eyes began to swathe her violin in silk, and the gentleman placed his horn carefully in its case. They were surrounded by couples imploring them in English, in French, in Spanish, of one more dance, one only; it was still early. But the old man at the piano merely exhibited his watch and shook his head. He turned up the collar of his coat and produced a red silk muffler, which completely dashed his festive appearance. Strange as it seemed, the musicians were pale and heavy-eyed; they looked bored and prosaic, as if the summit of their desire was cold meat and beer, succeeded immediately by bed.

  Rachel was one of those who had begged them to continue. When they refused she began turning over the sheets of dance music which lay upon the piano. The pieces were generally bound in coloured covers, with pictures on them of romantic scenes—gondoliers astride on the crescent of the moon, nuns peering through the bars of a convent window, or young women with their hair down pointing a gun at the stars. She remembered that the general effect of the music to which they had danced so gaily was one of passionate regret for dead love and the innocent years of youth; dreadful sorrows had always separated the dancers from their past happiness.

  “No wonder they get sick of playing stuff like this,” she remarked reading a bar or two; “they’re really hymn tunes, played very fast, with bits out of Wagner and Beethoven.”

  “Do you play? Would you play? Anything, so long as we can dance to it!” From all sides her gift for playing the piano was insisted upon, and she had to consent. As very soon she had played the only pieces of dance music she could remember, she went on to play an air from a sonata by Mozart.

  “But that’s not a dance,” said someone pausing by the piano.

  “It is,” she replied, emphatically nodding her head. “Invent the steps.” Sure of her melody she marked the rhythm boldly so as to simplify the way. Helen caught the idea; seized Miss Allan by the arm, and whirled round the room, now curtseying, now spinning round, now tripping this way and that like a child skipping through a meadow.

  “This is the dance for people who don’t know how to dance!” she cried. The tune changed to a minuet; St. John hopped with incredible swiftness first on his left leg, then on his right; the tune flowed melodiously; Hewet, swaying his arms and holding out the tails of his coat, swam down the room in imitation of the voluptuous dreamy dance of an Indian maiden dancing before her Rajah. The tune marched; and Miss Allen advanced with skirts extended and bowed profoundly to the engaged pair. Once their feet fell in with the rhythm they showed a complete lack of self-consciousness. From Mozart Rachel passed without stopping to old English hunting songs, carols, and hymn tunes, for, as she had observed, any good tune, with a little management, became a tune one could dance to. By degrees every person in the room was tripping and turning in pairs or alone. Mr. Pepper executed an ingenious pointed step derived from figure-skating, for which he once held some local championship; while Mrs. Thornbury tried to recall an old country dance which she had seen danced by her father’s tenants in Dorsetshire in the old days. As for Mr. and Mrs. Elliot, they gallopaded round and round the room with such impetuosity that the other dancers shivered at their approach. Some people were heard to criticise the performance as a romp; to others it was the most enjoyable part of the evening.

  “Now for the great round dance!” Hewet shouted. Instantly a gigantic circle was formed, the dancers holding hands and shouting out, “D’you ken John Peel,” as they swung faster and faster and faster, until the strain was too great, and one link of the chain—Mrs. Thornbury—gave way, and the rest went flying across the room in all directions, to land upon the floor or the chairs or in each other’s arms as seemed most convenient.

  Rising from these positions, breathless and unkempt, it struck them for the first time that the electric lights pricked the air very vainly, and instinctively a great many eyes turned to the windows. Yes—there was the dawn. While they had been dancing the night had passed, and it had come. Outside, the mountains showed very pure and remote; the dew was sparkling on the grass, and the sky was flushed with blue, save for the pale yellows and pinks in the East. The dancers came crowding to the windows, pushed them open, and here and there ventured a foot upon the grass.

  “How silly the poor old lights look!” said Evelyn M. in a curiously subdued tone of voice. “And ourselves; it isn’t becoming.” It was true; the untidy hair, and the green and yellow gems, which had seemed so festive half an hour ago, now looked cheap and slovenly. The complexions of the elder ladies suffered terribly, and, as if conscious that a cold eye had been turned upon them, they began to say good-night and to make their way up to bed.

  Rachel, though robbed of her audience, had gone on playing to herself. From John Peel she passed to Bach, who was at this time the subject of her intense enthusiasm, and one by one some of the younger dancers came in from the garden and sat upon the
deserted gilt chairs round the piano, the room being now so clear that they turned out the lights. As they sat and listened, their nerves were quieted; the heat and soreness of their lips, the result of incessant talking and laughing, was smoothed away. They sat very still as if they saw a building with spaces and columns succeeding each other rising in the empty space. Then they began to see themselves and their lives, and the whole of human life advancing very nobly under the direction of the music. They felt themselves ennobled, and when Rachel stopped playing they desired nothing but sleep.

  Susan rose. “I think this has been the happiest night of my life!” she exclaimed. “I do adore music,” she said, as she thanked Rachel. “It just seems to say all the things one can’t say oneself.” She gave a nervous little laugh and looked from one to another with great benignity, as though she would like to say something but could not find the words in which to express it. “Every one’s been so kind—so very kind,” she said. Then she too went to bed.

  The party having ended in the very abrupt way in which parties do end, Helen and Rachel stood by the door with their cloaks on, looking for a carriage.

  “I suppose you realise that there are no carriages left?” said St. John, who had been out to look. “You must sleep here.”

  “Oh, no,” said Helen; “we shall walk.”

  “May we come too?” Hewet asked. “We can’t go to bed. Imagine lying among bolsters and looking at one’s washstand on a morning like this—Is that where you live?” They had begun to walk down the avenue, and he turned and pointed at the white and green villa on the hillside, which seemed to have its eyes shut.

  “That’s not a light burning, is it?” Helen asked anxiously.

  “It’s the sun,” said St. John. The upper windows had each a spot of gold on them.

  “I was afraid it was my husband, still reading Greek,” she said. “All this time he’s been editing Pindar.”

  They passed through the town and turned up the steep road, which was perfectly clear, though still unbordered by shadows. Partly because they were tired, and partly because the early light subdued them, they scarcely spoke, but breathed in the delicious fresh air, which seemed to belong to a different state of life from the air at midday. When they came to the high yellow wall, where the lane turned off from the road, Helen was for dismissing the two young men.