"What's all this?" and der Vater stood in the doorway, heavy as lead, and red as a plum.
"Give her a bunch of flowers," he said simply, and as if by accident, and "Oh!…" said Elsa's mother, and disappeared. She came back with three blue cotton cornflowers out of Elsa's hat, and the gap in the bodice was hidden.
* * * * *
He was not there. Her eyes flew round the room, searching the shadows in the corners, searching the faces. In the bitterness of dismay she could not fully enter the door, but stood a little back, blocking the entrance, afraid of the certainty which was ready for her within; but others, less eager, and more hurried, pressed her on, drove her into the centre of the room, and with a voice of excitement and distress chattering within her, like some one who has mislaid all he has, she shook hands with the eighteenth-century general who shrouded the personality of the Commandant Dormans.
At first she could not recognise any one as she looked round upon Turks, clowns, Indians, the tinselled, sequined, beaded, ragged flutter of the room, then from the coloured and composite clothing of a footballer, clown or jockey grinned the round face and owlish eyes of little Duval, who flew to her at once to whisper compliments and stumble on the swelling fortress of her white skirt. She realised dimly from him that her dress was as beautiful as she had hoped it might be, but what was the use of its beauty if Julien should be missing? And, looking over Duval's head, she tried to see through the crowd.
Suddenly she saw him, dressed in the white uniform of a Russian, standing by a buttress of the wall. His uniform had a faint yellowish colour, as if it had been laid away for many years against this evening's dance; the light caught his knees and long boots, but the shadow of the buttress crept over his face, turned from her towards a further door. On his head he wore a white hat of curling sheep's wool, which made him seem fantastically tall.
When Fanny had surveyed him, from the tip of his lit hat to his lit feet, she was content to leave him in his shadowed corner, and turned willingly to dance with Duval. The little man offered an arm to hold her, and, as he came nearer to her, his feet pressed the bottom ring of wire about her skirt, and the whole bell of flowers and frills swung backwards and stood out obliquely behind her.
Presently the Jew boy, Reherrey, detached himself from the others and came out to stand by her and flatter her. He had wound the black stuff that he had bought three days before so cleverly round his slim body that he seemed no fatter than a lacquered hairpin. The cynical flattery of this nineteen-year-old Jew, the plunging admiration which Duval breathed at her side, the attentive look in the bright eyes of the Commandant Dormans, who had come near them and stood before her, filled her with joy. She looked about her, bright rat, tiny and enormous in her own sight, aware now of her outer, now of her inner life, and sipped her meed of success, full of the light happiness fashioned from the admiration of creatures no bigger than herself. She laughed at one and the other, bending towards them, listening to what they had to say, without denying, without doubts, with only triumph in her heart; and, the group shifting a little, a voice was able to say secretly at her ear, "You look beautiful, but you are not exclusive…." Her sense of triumph was not dimmed because her quick ear caught jealousy shading the reproach in his voice.
She did not answer him, except to look at him; but they seemed to forgive each other mutually as the figure of yellowish-white moved close enough to tilt the bell skirt and take the figure of bluish-white into his arms and dance with her. Calico and sheep's wool and painted flowers went down the room under the low gas brackets, and her eyes, avoiding his, looked out from a little personal silence into the far-off whirl of the room, and heard the dimmed music and the scrape of feet.
For him the world was a pale dumb-show, and she the absorbing centre. For her the world without was lit equally with his personality, the glamour of which hung over all the scenes before her eyes with the weight of the sky over the land. So long as he lit the horizon the very furthest object in it wore a shaft of his light upon its body.