Chapter V: Romance

I

MR. INGLEBY wanted to know why he was so late. “I read a paper at the Literary Society,” he said, “and then went back to Alvaston with a man named Boyce. He’s a son of Arthur Boyce.”

“The auctioneer?” asked Mr. Ingleby.

“No . . . the poet.”

Mr. Ingleby’s features showed a faint anxiety, as though he doubted if such an influence were healthy. “Well, I hope your paper was a success,” he said.

“Oh, I think it went all right. Any letters?”

“Yes . . . two. Here they are.” He handed them to Edwin.

One of them was the invitation from Mawne. He showed it to his father.

“A dance—” said Mr. Ingleby.

“Yes. . . . I suppose I’d better go.”

“Your Aunt Laura told me about it. If it won’t interfere with your work, I don’t see why you shouldn’t.”

“I haven’t any proper clothes. Evening dress, you know”

“I suppose that is quite necessary,” said Mr. Ingleby regretfully.

Edwin could see that the question of expense was troubling his father’s mind. He wished to goodness he would say so outright, instead of looking vaguely distressed. It would be so much more satisfactory. As it was, he could only feel indefinitely in the wrong, as if the dance were a piece of reckless and inexcusable levity in which he had no right to take a part. The dress suit, the acquisition of which had been anticipated with some satisfaction, now appeared to him in the terms of an accumulation of small change hardly earned in his father’s dusty shop: as the outcome of pennyworths of Epsom Salts, sticks of liquorice, or teething powders. It was humiliating, and even distressing to realise that every single comfort or luxury that he enjoyed—even the prime necessities of life, had to be accumulated, literally scraped together from this incredibly humble source and by the personal exertions of this simple and pathetic person. With these conditions in his mind he could not bear accepting money from his father, the weight of his obligation was so overwhelming. Now he found it difficult to face the idea of a tailor’s bill that might represent the profit on at least three days of small trading in the shop.

“I don’t think I’d better go, father,” he said.

“It would be rather ungracious if you didn’t, Edwin,” his father replied. “It was extremely kind of the Willises to ask you. I think you’d better go and be measured to-morrow by Mr. Jones.”

The idea of a Halesby tailor’s cut was not inspiring and made Edwin inclined to press his refusal; but Mr. Ingleby went on to explain that Mr. Jones owed him a bill that he had begun to look upon as a bad debt, and that Edwin’s dress suit would be a way of working it off. This circumstance made the order less shameful, except in so far as it applied to the hateful penury of Mr. Jones, whom Edwin remembered as a man with a beard, as shabbily unlike a tailor’s dummy as it was possible for a man to be. The occurrence was unfortunate in another way; for such an addition to his wardrobe would almost certainly scotch the idea of asking for a dress allowance, a plan which had been maturing in his brain for some months and only needed a callous frame of mind for its performance.

Next evening, however, he went to see Mr. Jones, who measured him obsequiously, and assured him that in the happy days before he was his own master, he had actually cut morning-coats for Sir Joseph Astill, a gentleman who was very difficult to fit on account of a slight . . . er . . . fullness in the figure. Edwin, primed by the observations of The Major in _To-Day_, was able to tell Mr. Jones exactly what he wanted, and Mr. Jones’s manner, when he rubbed his hands over Edwin’s instructions, did not suggest for a moment the fact of which Edwin was all the time aware: that this was not a _bona-fide_ order, but a rather shabby way of making him pay a bill that he had scamped for a couple of years.

Stepping out of Mr. Jones’s melancholy shop, Edwin thanked heaven that his father had not wanted him to follow in his footsteps; for it seemed to him that the life of a struggling tradesman in a small town must be the most humiliating on earth. He was awfully sorry for all of them as he walked down the street and read their names on the boards above their windows. He had never quite realised their condition before he smelt the particular odour of lower middle-class poverty, vaguely suggestive of perambulators, aspidistras, and boiled mutton, that moved down the linoleum floored passage at the back of Mr. Jones’s shop.

In due course the clothes arrived. On the whole, Mr. Jones had not done badly; but even so, Edwin was still scarcely qualified for the business in hand. He had never learned to dance, and it was necessary to acquire this accomplishment in a little more than a week. At first he had decided to pull his courage together and approach Martin, whose eligibility compelled him to be an expert dancing man; but, at the last moment, he funked a confession that would expose such depths of social ignorance, and went instead to a certain Professor Beagle, who advertised classes in dancing and deportment at the hour of five on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, in the Queen’s Assembly Rooms, next door to the theatre of the same name.

On the next Tuesday afternoon Edwin presented himself to Mr. Beagle at the advertised hour. He found him alone sitting on a platform at the end of a long room that smelt of dust and moth-eaten rep curtains. When Edwin appeared at the other end of the room the professor dismounted, cleared his throat, clasped his hands in front of him, and made a formal bow. He was a little man, and very fat. He wore a navy blue coat that was cut very short at the back, so that it ruckled up over his round haunches, and his collar rose so high and stiff above a white Ascot tie, that he was forced to carry his head tilted backwards in the direction of his waxed moustache. His face was purple and his watery eyes stared, whether as the result of the collar’s asphyxiation or his past manner of life it was difficult to say. His feet were excessively small, and his striped grey trousers tapered to the ankles in such a way that every step he made seemed a nice feat of balancing. He bowed to Edwin, and Edwin explained the urgent circumstances of his mission.

“I see,” said Professor Beagle. “I quite understand. You must not, ’owever, expect me to be able to turn you out as I should wish to in the time at our disposal. Perhaps you will be good enough not to mention my name in this connection, and keep my instructions, as it were, dark?”

Edwin assured him of secrecy, and the professor proceeded to ask him where the dance was to be held. “I do not wish to teach you anything that will not be useful,” he said. “In some circles the Quadrille, which I myself consider the most dignified of dances, is still in favour. In others the Valeta is coming into vogue. In different planes of society different conditions prevail.”

In the end the professor decided that Edwin’s case called for the Waltz, the Lancers, and the Polka, with the possible addition of the Pas de Quatre. He demonstrated to Edwin the position in which his feet should be placed, and then invited him to have a try at the waltz.

“You will take my harm, please, in the following way . . . so. . . . Now, neither grarsping nor clarsping, let the lady’s ’and lie gently in yours, with the fingers ’alf bent, and under no circumstances squeeze the figger. So . . . ”

Edwin placed his right arm above the ruckles in Professor Beagle’s broad back: into his left hand a podgy fist descended like a lump of moist dough, and from the little man’s back-tilted, strangled head a faint sound of whistling proceeded that raked Edwin’s own nostrils with a cross-fire of whisky and cachous. Then the professor began to revolve like a peg top, and Edwin felt himself swept round by the arm that lay upon his shoulder, to the rhythm of the whistled tune, which was sometimes suspended and replaced by: “Wonn-two-three. Wonn-two-three. Wonn-two-three. Gently now. Keep-on-the. Tips-of-your. WONN-two-three. Toes.”

In this manner they circled the room several times. Edwin was getting out of breath; but the professor, to whom this form of exercise was so usual as to be negligible, showed no signs of fatigue, except that his eyes became a little more glassy and his cheeks more purple. Indeed, the power by which he swung Edwin round the room was a thing of mystery; for his little feet did not seem to move, and the upper part of his body was rigid. He moved like a cyclone or a dust-storm, Edwin thought, revolving terrifically on its own axis.

“I am afraid,” said Professor Beagle formally at the end of the first lesson. “I am afraid you have no great natural gift. It is better that I should be candid with you. You will need half a dozen lessons at least before you can take your place with the young ladies in one of my advanced classes.”

Edwin stuck to it. On six more occasions he visited the Assembly Rooms, where, with exactly the same formalities, Mr. Beagle received him. With Mr. Beagle in his arms, prevented by sheer physical bulk from, in any circumstances, squeezing the figger, he revolved in the vortex of the waltz. In the Lancers he set to imaginary partners, or went “visiting” with Mr. Beagle’s hand lying gently in his, with the fingers ’alf bent. In the Pas de Quatre, where the draught of whisky and cachous was happily directed forwards, he pointed an awkward toe alongside Mr. Beagle’s tapered and elegant extremity. In the end the professor pronounced himself satisfied with him.

“If I were you,” he said, “I think I should come along to my advanced class this evening and familiarise yourself with the proximity of young ladies. The fee is a purely nominal ’alf-crown.”

Edwin decided to do so, and walked up in the evening with his patent leather pumps in his pocket. He felt very shy. The place was lighted with flaring gas jets, and in a room marked Gentlemen, that he had always taken for a lavatory, a number of young men, who looked like shop assistants, were putting on white kid gloves. They all seemed to know one another and to look upon Edwin as an intruder. No one spoke to him, and he waited in the cloak room until the last had disappeared before he dared to emerge. From the room on the opposite side of the passage there issued a breeze of concentrated perfumes, and a round of subdued titters. This room was labelled “Ladies.”

While Edwin stood waiting and wondering if he dare risk an encounter, the door opposite opened and a bevy of bloused figures appeared. The sight of the first took him by surprise: it was the elder of the two anæmic young ladies in the drapery who travelled in the morning train with him from Halesby. She gave him a smile of recognition that revealed her defective teeth. This prospect was altogether too much for him. An acute shyness drove him back into the cloak room, and, as soon as he had taken off his pumps and put on his shoes again, he left the Queen’s Assembly Rooms and bolted down Sackville Row to his train.

II

The Willis’s dance, to which Edwin had looked forward with such mingled pleasure and anxiety, was destined to bring forth a violent emotional experience. Mr. Jones had not undergone the experience of cutting for the undulant figure of Sir Joseph Hingston for nothing. Apart from the fact that the sleeves were rather too long for his arms, Edwin’s dress coat was a success, and, as Aunt Laura benignantly pointed out, it was just as well that some allowance should be made for future growth. Mr. Jones had been extremely anxious that Edwin should be supplied with a magenta silk handkerchief, an ornament which, he was assured, all the best people wore stuffed in the corner of their waistcoats.

On this problem the Major had never delivered judgment, so Edwin mustered sufficient courage to approach Denis Martin for advice. Martin scornfully told him that the idea was preposterous. “It’s the kind of get-up that your friend Maskew would adopt,” he said. He also impressed upon Edwin the fact that the infallible index of a bounder in evening-dress was a ready-made tie. No doubt the advice was excellent; but it let Edwin in for an hour of agony on the evening of the dance, when the tie refused to answer to the Major’s printed instructions, and finished up by making him look as if he had gone to bed in his boots and slept on it.

He had never been to Mawne Hall before. That pretentious mansion with its castellated façade set on a steep bank above the valley of the Stour, in which the works that maintained it lay, was so brightly lit upon this evening that it glowed like a lantern through the bare boughs of the hanging wood beneath. In the gun-room at the side of the hall in which the hats and coats of the guests were being received by Bassett, the Willises’ coachman, he recognised a number of incredibly elegant creatures of his own sex with shining white waistcoats, pearl studs, and immaculate ties. He knew scarcely any of them, for they were mostly neighbouring ironmasters or professional people to whose society the Willises’ money had proved a sufficient introduction. Among them he recognised Sir Joseph Hingston, playing ducks and drakes with his aitches, and wearing, to Edwin’s encouragement, a flagrantly ready-made tie. In this particular, at any rate, he was one up on the baronet. He hoped that some one else would realise this fact. In the middle of these reflections he thought he heard a voice that he recognised, and turned to find himself rubbing shoulders with Griffin. Edwin said, “Good-evening.”

“Good Lord, Ingleby, are you here? I haven’t seen you since the pantomime night. What are you doing here? Do you know these people?”

It struck Edwin that he spoke rather contemptuously of his hosts.

“Yes. . . . I live near here, you know,” he replied. “I didn’t know the Willises were friends of yours.” As a matter of fact he knew nothing about the Willises’ friends; but it sounded rather well.

“No . . . I don’t know them,” said Griffin, “but the old man is a business friend of my uncle’s, and apparently they were rather hard up for men.” The sound of waltz music was heard, and Griffin left him hurriedly. “See you later,” he said.

Edwin, anxious not to be left behind, pulled on his gloves and split the thumb of one of them. He passed through the hall, where his name was announced, rather contemptuously, as he thought, by Hannah, the Willises’ tall and starchy servant, and was received in a manner that was reassuring and homely by Mrs. Willis. She spoke for a moment of his mother, and tears gathered in her rather watery eyes; then she introduced him to her small daughter Lilian, very self-conscious in a white party frock with a pale blue waistband, and another dark girl with beautiful grey eyes and a creamy rather than pale complexion, who was standing beside her. Miss Dorothy Powys, she said. Edwin, hedging for safety, booked a dance with Lilian, who took the matter as seriously as himself. Next, no doubt, he must have a shot at Miss Dorothy Powys, in spite of the disturbing beauty of her eyes; but when he came to ask her for a dance, he saw that Griffin was talking to her.

“May I have another—number sixteen?” Edwin heard him ask easily. She smiled and nodded. Her smile seemed to Edwin very beautiful: so beautiful, indeed, that he couldn’t possibly bring himself to approach her when Griffin turned away. It was awfully silly of him, he thought.

The evening was not exactly a success. He polkaed with Lilian, and took his place in the Lancers with several mature ladies to whom Mrs. Willis introduced him. Luckily none of these belonged to Halesby, a circumstance that must be attributed to Mrs. Willis’s tact, so that the question of his origin never arose. He danced according to the letter of Professor Beagle’s instructions. Neither grasping nor clasping, he let the ladies’ hands lie gently in his with the fingers half bent, and in no circumstances did he squeeze the figger. What he missed was the terrific motive power that the unladylike Professor Beagle had applied to his revolutions. It now appeared to him that to supply this was the part of the male; and as most of the matrons with whom Mrs. Willis supplied him were bulky, he had his work cut out. Once, returning thoroughly blown from one of these adventures he caught the eye of Dorothy Powys; and he thought she smiled. Could this be true? He wondered. . . . During the greater part of the evening when he had not been dancing he had found himself following her movements with his eyes. He had decided that she must be at least a year or two older than himself; but that didn’t really matter, for she seemed to him a creature of such very perfect grace, and her eyes, in the moment when he caught them, had been so wonderful. After the next dance, which was the one that she had booked with Griffin, he watched them disappear into the library.

It made him feel sick with himself that he hadn’t taken the opportunity of his introduction. What a damned fool he was! And afterwards, when he watched her, she did not smile at all, either for him or for any one else. Indeed, she seemed pale, and anxious, as if something had happened to upset her. In despair Edwin wandered off into the card-room, where he saw Lady Hingston, who was partnering Mr. Willis at bridge, revoke three times in two games, to the intense annoyance of her husband. From the card-room he strolled on to the buffet, where he found Griffin absorbing quantities of whisky and soda. He begged Edwin to join him; but Edwin, who was particularly anxious to behave himself, struck to claret-cup.

“Well, have you struck any cuddle?” said Griffin brutally, with his mouth full.

“Any what?”

“Cuddle. . . . Girls. . . . What the devil do you think one comes to a dance for?”

“No. . . . I haven’t,” said Edwin.

“Well, they are a pretty scratch lot,” Griffin confessed. “That Powys girl’s all right though.”

Edwin blushed furiously. He suddenly wanted to throw his glass of claret-cup at Griffin’s head. Why? . . . He calmed himself.

“Do you know her?” he asked.

“Never met her before to-night. She’s got a topping figure. She must be pretty well connected. Lord Alfred Powys is one of their directors here.”

“But you don’t mean to say—” Edwin began.

“The night is yet young,” said Griffin, gulping another whisky. “God, there’s number twelve! I must hook it.”

Edwin wandered back to the ballroom. He couldn’t keep away from it, but, at the same time, he was anxious not to appear disengaged, for fear that Mrs. Willis should induce some other heavy partner to abandon her arm-chair for his amusement. He hung about the pillars of the folding doors that led into the supper room, just out of range of Mrs. Willis’s maternal gaze. From this point he could watch the beautiful Miss Powys, and wonder, with a sort of bitter excitement, exactly what Griffin had meant by his suggestions. Watching her, he could not believe that she could be anything but graceful and beautiful in everything she did. The band started to play the music for waltz: number sixteen. He remembered it was the second dance that Griffin had booked with her. For some reason that he couldn’t imagine, he felt that he wanted to be near when Griffin came for her: perhaps he could tell her attitude towards him by something that she might say. He went over to the place where she was sitting next to Mrs. Willis. He tried not to look at her.

In a moment he heard Griffin’s voice. “Ours, I think.” The tone was a little blurred by Griffin’s potations.

“I think you’ve made a mistake,” she said.

Edwin turned round, and at the same moment she looked towards him. “Surely I am dancing this with you, Mr. Ingleby.”

“But look here, I’m sure these are your initials on my programme, Miss Powys. Let me look at yours.”

He tried to take the programme from her fingers, but she moved it away.

“Really, we mustn’t contradict each other, Mr. Griffin. The dance is Mr. Ingleby’s. Will you take me, please?” she said to Edwin.

In an ecstatic dream Edwin found himself walking away with her on his arm. It was a miracle, an astounding, beautiful miracle. She picked up her skirt by the loop of ribbon with which it was suspended and looked him full in the eyes, smiling. “Shall we start?” she said.

They started. In one fatal moment Edwin, who hadn’t been doing badly at the beginning of the evening, forgot every single precept that Professor Beagle had taught him.

“I say, what a shocking dancer you are,” she said with a laugh.

“I’m most awfully sorry, I only learnt this week.” Now that his mind was diverted by speaking to her the steps came more naturally.

“That’s better,” she said. “Who on earth taught you?”

He confessed to Professor Beagle, and she appeared to be amused.

“You see you’re dancing away from me all the time. Just as if you were afraid of me. You ought to hold me closer. It upsets the what d’you call it . . . centre of gravity.”

“I was told never under any circumstances to—” He couldn’t very well repeat Professor Beagle’s formula.

“Now you’re getting on beautifully. Don’t think about it. That’s the idea. Just dance.”

The music ended. “Where would you like to go?” he asked.

“Out into the hall, if you don’t mind . . . on the stairs. I want to explain to you. It was really awfully good of you to take me on.”

“It was a wonderful piece of luck for me.”

They sat together on the shallow oak staircase and she proceeded to tell him that Griffin had upset her in the dance before by trying to kiss her shoulder. “I really couldn’t stick a repetition of that,” she said. “Besides, I think the man had been drinking. So I just pitched upon your poor innocence and lied for all I was worth. Who are you, by the way? I only just remembered your name when Mrs. Willis introduced us. She’s rather a dear, isn’t she?”

The music of the next dance struck up. “Are you dancing?” Edwin asked eagerly.

“I don’t know, I expect so. Just look at my programme. It’s too dark for me to see.”

Edwin took the programme from her fingers. It was a thrilling moment. In the dusk he deciphered two initials, “E.W.,” he said.

“Oh, that’s only Edward Willis. He’s very shy of me. If you’ve nothing better to do I think we’ll stay here.”

It was so easy to talk to her. To Edwin, indeed, it seemed as if he had now become articulate for the first time in his life. She did not speak very much of herself; but she asked him many questions about his life at school, where, he confided to her, he had first known Griffin, and then again about his new work in North Bromwich. And when she did speak her voice was low, and her speech, to his ears, of an amazing limpid purity, more beautiful than any human speech he had ever heard. Edwin would have liked to listen to it for ever. He felt that he wanted words to describe its peculiar music, but no words came to him. He could only remember a line in Browning’s _Pauline_:—

“Her voice was as the voice of his own soul
Heard in the calm of thought. . . .”

That was the nearest he could get to it; but the words, although they expressed a little of his absorption, did not convey the musical qualities that he wanted to describe. He tried to compare it with the tones of some instrument that he knew, but neither wood-wind nor strings suggested what he wanted. No . . . it was a sound nearer to nature than any man-made instrument. It was the voice of a Naiad: the sound of running water in a clear brookland. And all the time that he listened to her he was thrillingly conscious of her physical presence. She was sitting on the stair beneath him, and fortunately she could not see that he was gazing at her in the gloom, thinking how beautifully shaped was the nape of the neck from which her dark hair was drawn upwards; overcome by the loveliness and smoothness of her curved shoulder.

“I’m talking all the time,” he said, “and you’re saying nothing. It’s rather a shame . . . because you speak so beautifully.”

“Whatever do you mean?” For a moment her eyes were on his. He dared not look at them. He could not answer her, for the moment seemed full of such an overpowering sweetness.

“Do tell me.”

“Oh, I only mean that when you say a thing like that, it . . . it suggests that everything about you is marvellously clean and clear and musical—” He paused, for he felt that she might laugh at him.

“Yes . . . go on,” she said.

“Like water in a hill country. It makes me feel as if I weren’t within a hundred miles of North Bromwich.”

She laughed softly, but not unkindly.

“No, I’m not a bit like that. I’m really awfully hard and worldly—I wish I were the least bit what you imagine. You’re most awfully young, aren’t you?”

Perhaps she did not mean the word cruelly, but it seemed very cruel to Edwin. It was quite possible that she was a few years older than himself, if age were to be counted by years; but in reality he knew that she was beautifully young, certainly young enough to love and to be loved.

“Don’t let’s talk about me,” she said.

“But I want to talk about you.”

He wanted to talk about nothing else. His head was full of words that he wanted to throw before her like jewels, but he did not know how much he dared to say. He knew it was impossible for him to express a hundredth part of his delight in her. It would be nearly as bad as kissing her neck in the manner of Griffin, to say that the curve of it sent him delirious with joy. It would be indecency rather than candour to say that the faint scent of her intoxicated him. He was silent with tremulous emotion. He wondered if she could be conscious of it; and he could not guess, for she, too, did not speak. From the ballroom they heard the music of another dance begin. Two shadowy couples emerged from the passage beneath them. A curtain of Indian beading made a sound like dead leaves driven over a dry pavement by the wind. The intruders’ voices died away.

“I suppose we must go too,” she said with a sigh.

“Why must you go? Are you dancing?” Edwin asked, with a catch in his throat.

“No, I don’t think I shall dance any more. I was rather upset. It was silly of me. But I think we’d better go.”

Edwin offered her his arm in the best manner of Professor Beagle.

“Thank you,” she said in a low voice. For a moment she hesitated. She was smiling, and her eyes were wonderful in the gloom. Their faces were level with each other. And, suddenly, amazingly, she kissed him.

“I’m going,” she said. Edwin tried to take her hand as she moved away from him. For a second it lay in his, soft and small and warm. Then, before his arms had time to follow the impulse of his flaming brain, she had slipped away from him and passed into the shadow of the passage. He stood there at the foot of the stairs alone, his heart thudding like a steam-hammer in a bewildered, intoxicating elation. Why had she left him? Why? . . . unless it were only a part of her adorable modesty. That must be the reason: and yet it was hardly consistent with an exalted ideal of modesty to kiss a young man, whom she had only known for fifteen minutes, on the lips. A new aspect of the miracle presented itself to him. Was it possible, after all, that Griffin had been right, that she was really exactly what he had insinuated, a fast little baggage who had determined, in a sudden caprice, to throw Griffin over and try a new experiment?

He could not believe it. Everything that he had noticed and adored in her, her grey eyes, the delicious quality of her speech, her fragrance, the indescribable fineness—there was no other word for it—of her, denied the possibility. He found it difficult to realise that she had gone in the moment of such an astounding revelation. Such was the way of a Naiad, melting away out of her sweet mortality in the moment of possession. Standing alone at the foot of the gloomy staircase, listening in a dream to the luscious music of the Choristers’ waltz, he tried to recreate his dream out of memory. Nothing of her was left but her delicate perfume. On the stairs he saw a small crumpled muslin handkerchief from which the perfume came. He picked it up with the reverence of a pilgrim touching a relic, eagerly triumphant that he had managed to rescue a fragment of his dream. It did not strike him that this tiny square of scented muslin was presumably the instrument with which divinity blew its nose: and indeed its dimensions scarcely fitted it for this material function. He placed it in the satin-lined pocket of Mr. Jones’s creation. It pleased him to think that it lay near his heart.

This, of course, was only the beginning of a romance. No doubt, in the course of the evening, he would see her again. Somehow he must persuade her to see him alone, and then he would be able to do all the magnificently passionate things of which her flight had cheated him. He would kiss her; he would hold her exquisiteness in his arms; he would tell her all the glorious things that he had been fool enough to withhold.

He went back into the ballroom. Nobody seemed to notice him there. It pleased him to think that these ordinary people were too dull in their perceptions to guess at the wonder in his heart. It was a secret that he shared with only one other person in the world, and that secret had altered his whole outlook on life. He was no longer the timid boy, conscious of his social disadvantages and of his new dress clothes, who had entered the Willises’ house a couple of hours before, but a man, a lover, to whose passion the whole beauty of the world ministered, a creature miraculously placed beyond the reach of envy or of scorn. He was happy to wait patiently for the supreme moment when he should see her again. And so he waited, mildly tolerant of Griffin, over whom he had scored so easily, of Edward Willis, who performed with a set face his penitentiary programme of duty-dances, of Mrs. Willis, who watched the joy of her small daughter Lilian with the proud but anxious eyes of a mother hen, of Mr. Willis circulating among his guests with an expansive smile, of poor Lady Hingston, still revoking automatically in the card-room.

But Dorothy Powys never returned to the seat that she had occupied under the shadow of Mrs. Willis’s wings. She had told him that she didn’t mean to dance any more, but surely that didn’t mean that he was not to see her again. He grew uneasy. Of course she could easily escape if she wanted to do so, for she was staying in the house. He wondered if he dared ask Mrs. Willis what had become of her, but decided that this would certainly give him away.

Instead of doing this he posted himself in a corner from which he could hear everything that was said in Mrs. Willis’s circle. This was not a very profitable pursuit, for Mrs. Willis was not an interesting talker, and the only excitement that penetrated the broody calm that surrounded her was the arrival of her husband, very excited over a telephone message, that had no foundation in fact, announcing the relief of Ladysmith by General Buller. Edwin was beginning to give the business up as a bad job when he saw a tall, languid man, whom he considered to be rather shabbily dressed, approach Mrs. Willis and ask her what had happened to his niece.

“Oh, she was here half an hour ago,” said Mrs. Willis. “The poor child told me that she had a headache and was going to bed. I told Hannah to take her a hot water bottle. . . . I do hope you’re quite comfortable, Lord Alfred,” she went on. “It is nice, isn’t it? to see all these young people enjoying themselves. At least it would be, if one didn’t have to think of all the poor creatures in South Africa being fired at by these treacherous Boers.”

And the tall, shabby man mumbled, “Yes . . . yes, certainly. . . . Very,” in his beard.

It was enough for Edwin. He said good-bye to Mrs. Willis, who seemed only mildly surprised at his departure, and left the house. There was no reason now why he should stay. On the stone terrace he paused, listening for a moment to the muted music from within the house. In the upper stories only one window was lighted. He could see the glowing yellow pane beyond a bough of one of the cedars with which the lawn was shaded. He wondered if that window were hers. He would like, he thought, to stay there all night in the black shadow of the cedar, gazing at that window and feeling that he was near her. Later on, no doubt, the light would be extinguished, and then he would imagine her lying there asleep. How beautiful she must be when she lay there sleeping!

He sighed, and went on his way, under the wonderful night. He climbed the steep slope of Mawne Bank, under the smouldering pit-fires, in a dream, and found himself, surprised, beneath the walls of the cherry orchard at the back of Old Mawne Hall. Inside the walls the cherry-trees lay locked in a wintry sleep. He stopped, for the steepness of the hill had stolen his breath. He remembered a day when he walked there with his mother. “How mother would have loved her!” he thought. Yes . . . she was more wonderful than his mother. On the day that he remembered, so many years ago, it had been spring. The branches had been full of billowy bloom. Now, in the wintry night, he felt that spring was near: spring was in his blood, stirring it to new and passionate aspirations as in a few months time it would stir the dreamy sap of the cherry-trees. A strange, unseasonable miracle. Glorious, indefinite words formed themselves in his mind. Spring, with its warm, perfumed breath, triumphing beautifully over the powers of winter and death. Death at Colenso under those tawny kopjes. Love in his heart. A sublime, ecstatic muddle. . . . The Mawne furnaces leapt into a sudden flower of fire that made the sky above them tawny. Love was like fire . . . an exultant leaping flame.

He did not know where he was going until he found himself at home in his little shabby room taking off his dress-suit and staring at himself as a stranger in the dusty mirror. “Who am I?” he thought, “that this should have happened to me? I do not know myself. I am greater and more wonderful than the image that I see in the glass.”

He placed his precious talisman of muslin under his pillow, and wondered if he might be blessed with a dream of her. “She kissed me,” he thought. “She kissed my lips—”

III

It was evident that if he were to see her again he must make friends with Edward Willis. He was sorry that he had not done so before. For once in a way the recommendations of Aunt Laura had been prophetically right. His self-consciousness made it difficult for him to do so, for he felt certain that this cold, calculating young man would see through him. For two days he debated with himself on the various ways in which Mawne might be approached without coming to any satisfactory conclusion. On the third he was so lucky as to meet his victim on the Halesby train. Willis did not seem in the least anxious to renew their acquaintance; and it was at the expense of some awkwardness that Edwin managed to drag him into conversation.

They talked a little about the war, which Willis seemed to view from a remote and pessimistic angle. From that, by way of Mr. Willis’s Ladysmith rumour, they passed on to a discussion of the dance. Edwin was enthusiastic.

“I’m glad you enjoyed yourself,” said Willis. “I hate dancing.”

“I rather admired that Miss Powys,” said Edwin.

“Dorothy Powys? Yes, she’s a pretty girl, isn’t she?”

“Who is she?”

“Oh, she’s a niece of Lord Alfred Powys, one of our directors. Lives with him, I believe. I don’t really know her.”

“Isn’t she staying with you?”

“Oh, no. . . . She only stayed at Mawne for the night of the dance. Her uncle happened to be coming over for a directors’ meeting, and the governor asked him to bring her along with him as there was a dance on.”

This was all very discouraging.

“Where do they live?” Edwin asked.

“Somewhere over in the Teme valley, I think. Lord Alfred’s a great fisherman. He’s a nice chap.”

“And she lives with him?”

“Yes. . . . I think he’s sort of adopted her. But I understand she’s going to India sometime next month.”

“India? What on earth is she going to India for?”

“Going to be married to some fellow in the Indian army. A major, I think he is.”

“To be married—” said Edwin.

And the train pulled up at Mawne Hall.

IV

He took it very hardly. On the face of it, it seemed that her kiss had been no more than a piece of mad, cynical trifling; but his respect for himself—which was considerable, as became his years—would not allow him to believe this. He decided, instead, that Dorothy Powys’s kiss had been the symbol of a great and noble passion, fated, in the melancholy manner of nearly every legendary lore, to frustration. He was convinced that the unknown major in the Indian army would never be loved; that the memory of that intense moment on Mr. Willis’s back stairs would haunt his wife for ever, and temper with romance the vistas of an unhappy marriage. The main result of the incident in Edwin’s case was a spate of passionate but imitative verses, a new devotion to such music as repressed his particular portion of _weltschmerz_, and an anxiety to confide the story, with elaborations, to some sympathetic friend. He turned it on to W.G.

“Well, W.G., what do you think of it?” he asked, when he had finished.

W.G. sucked at his pipe and smiled good-humouredly.

“Better luck next time, old chap,” he said.