2
It was precisely this mere matter of dancing that now incongruously troubled him.
Felix was not a dancing man. And that would have been all right, if he had not wanted to dance. But he did want to dance! Even at this moment, with so much more important things to think about, it began to occupy all his thoughts. He wanted to dance. It was annoying not to be able to.... He had more than once gone through the excruciating agony of trying to learn. He had, in fact, learned, so far as one can learn anything against which there operates some mysterious inward paralysis. He knew the steps as well as he knew the multiplication table. But just as sometimes in school there had come upon him a fatal helpless confusion in which he was unable to remember whether nine times seven was eighty-one or sixty-four, so it was when he tried to put his knowledge in practice in a ballroom. He reminded himself of nothing so much as the hapless hero of that old joke, who said, “Yes, I can dance, except that the music bothers me and the girl gets in my way!”
And he might have accepted his inability to dance as a fact, and let it go at that—except that it wasn’t a fact! Somehow, heaven only knew how, half a dozen times in his adult life he had been able to dance—and not badly. But what were the circumstances which magically operated to liberate him from this mysterious paralysis, he did not know. He never knew whether he was going to be able to dance or not. He always went fearing the worst, and generally it happened. Rose-Ann could not understand it, because once when there had been impromptu dancing to a phonograph after a dinner party at some one’s home, he had danced with her without the slightest awkwardness; but when, while dancing with her a second time, she whispered to him to ask some of the other girls to dance, he became embarrassed, and made protestations of his inability. She knew that he could dance, and she at first regarded his attitude as a kind of stupid stubbornness. But no scoldings, nor any patient gentleness for that matter, was able to change it.
Tonight Felix knew from the beginning that he was not going to be able to dance. He sat in the box with Rose-Ann and Phyllis and Clive and several of the players, utterly miserable. They had arrayed themselves for the ball at the Artists’ Theatre, and that preliminary part of the affair had been, as it always was, delightful. He wished one could dress up to go to a ball, and then not go. The dressing, the showing off of costumes, the banter, the laughter, the drinking of cocktails and black coffee, all the preparations, had been good fun; but now commenced the evening’s misery. Rose-Ann looked at him inquiringly as the orchestra struck up a two-step, and he shook his head. No—he couldn’t do it tonight. And so she stepped off in the arms of Clive. Phyllis—he had never danced with Phyllis—was waiting, he thought, for him to ask her. He doggedly leaned over the edge of the box and watched the dancers. Why, he asked himself, had he come? He saw Phyllis a minute later, dancing with a man in a pseudo-monkish costume, one of the actors. Elva Macklin—had she taken that name Elva because she knew she was elvish, or had the prevision of parents bestowed it upon her?—was dancing with Gregory Storm. The box was vacated, except for Felix, who sat looking on the scene with a jealous and angry eye.
A few pieces of coloured cloth, a bangle, some rouge, a military coat, a shawl, a sash, a bit of lace, a strain of music, and these people were transformed, one and all, out of their accustomed workaday mood, gone happily into an atmosphere of fantasy such as with infinite labour was created in the theatre. They were acting, all of them—not paying any attention to what part any one else was acting, but content to be in an environment in which their own play-impulses were released. They went as in a dream—smiling, moved by the music as the leaves of a tree are moved by the wind, surrendering themselves utterly to its influence. They were not here, not here in this plush and gilt room, amid commonplace mortals decorated with coloured cloth, but in some dreamland, some fairyland of their own wishes. The person whom one held in one’s arms was not a real person, in whom one was really interested, not a person to love or hate, but a part of the dream. A wand had been waved over this assemblage, commanding them to forget, to dream, to be free and happy and young. And all of them, except himself only, had obeyed. Why could he not surrender himself to this influence? Why must he remain, in spite of his sash and coloured shirt, so obstinately and awkwardly and unhappily himself? Why did not that music touch some secret spring in his soul, too, to make him its creature, a leaf wind-blown on the tree of life? Why did his eyes still see the persons underneath their costumes—the girls not as dancing partners but as “personalities”? Personalities, indeed!—these men and women had left their personalities gladly behind in the cloakroom; they were free of them for the evening; tomorrow they would go back to being lawyers and wives, clarks and poets and college students; tonight they were—
Well, what were they? If one chose to think so, bodies, merely that, bodies surrendering themselves to each other as shamelessly and frankly as to the music which swayed them.... But no, he knew better than that: they were—if ever, now, precisely now—immortal souls; this spectacle was spirit triumphing over flesh and using it for its own beautiful uses, the magic uses of a dream. These arms and bosoms and bodies were the instruments of a poetry which these couples created in a magnificently impersonal way—the poetry of beauty met with strength; it was not Dick and Jane, it was essential man and woman, in love with some eternal beauty in themselves and each other of which they were, as persons, the fleeting and mortal agents.
But why the devil couldn’t he feel that way? Each time that the girls of his party returned to the box, flushed and laughing in an interim between the dances, he felt their presence as a demand upon him, a demand which it was disgraceful not to meet. Every glance of Rose-Ann’s was a look, or so he interpreted it, of inquiry or reproach. She knew he could dance; that was the worst of it. He could dance—with her—easily enough; he would dance with her now, if there was no one else around that they knew. But if he danced with her, he would have no excuse for not dancing with the others—his last defence would be gone.... He fled from the box in the direction of the bar, was pulled down into a chair by Eddie Silver, who was buying drinks for a group of men and girls, and asked what he would have. “Whiskey straight,” he said humbly. Why, after all, should he despise this time-honoured refuge from the hardships of life, from problems too complex to be solved and responsibilities too great to be borne?