Crossing the Promenade to the less crowded pavement beyond, John Willie and Percy strode the half-mile to the Kursaal. There was a queue about the turnstiles, but John Willie made a sign to an attendant, who flung up the Exit Only barrier. They passed under trees with many-coloured electric lights among the branches, and the slowly turning Big Wheel, which made a quarter-arch of lights over the tower of the Central Hall, dipped behind it again as they reached the steps that led to the vestibule.
For size alone, apart from any other consideration, the dancing-hall of the Llanyglo Kursaal is one of the wonders of the North. It cost a hundred thousand pounds to build, and since it can dance a thousand couples, to seek anybody there without going up into the balconies is like looking for a needle in a bottle of hay. The band was not playing at the moment when Percy and John Willie entered; but before they had reached the top of an empty half-lighted series of staircases the distant strains of a Barn Dance had broken out. Then, with the pushing at a door, it burst loudly upon them. John Willie strode down the shallow gallery steps, made for a front seat whence he could see the whole length of the vast oblong below, spread out his elbows and set his chin on his wrists, and, once more muttering "You go and get your drink if you want," began to search the hall with gloomy blue eyes, very much as a boy flashes a bit of looking-glass hither and thither in the sun.
Now when the Wakes people come to Llanyglo, and the pleasant family parties yield place a little, and drive in the mountains more frequently, and leave the Pier and Promenade a little earlier, and gather more often at one another's hotels—even then that dancing-hall is so vast that twenty different elements can be accommodated there without mixing or encroachment. But that series of precipitations had not yet taken place. That night all was homogeneous. Perhaps here and there other contacts had sparsely "crossed," as it were, that fresh blooming, as the white hawthorn takes on faintly the hue of the pink in the spring, but that was probably rare. John Willie, had he had eyes for it, looked down upon a wonderful sight. The hall was a creamy gold, with bow after bow along its balcony tiers; without its other innumerable clusters of lights, the eight arc-lamps in its high roof would have lighted it no better than a railway station is lighted; and the mirrors on the walls were hardly more polished than its satiny floor. A fully appointed stage half-way down one of the sides held an orchestra of thirty performers; walking across that wonderfully swung floor you felt something almost alive under your feet; and four thousand feet moved upon it that night.
It was beautiful. The band was playing, slowly, as is the dancing-fashion of the North, that Barn Dance; and almost every girl was in white. The whites were the whites of flowers—the greenish white of guelder-roses, the yellow white of elder or of meadow-sweet, the pinkish white of the faintest dog-rose, the dead white of narcissi, but little that was not white. And because of all that soft whiteness, faces caught by the sun were browner, and hair that the wind had blown through all day glossier, and eyes brighter, and perhaps blushes quicker and more readily seen. And to the whole bright spectacle was added the impressiveness of unfaltering rhythm and simultaneousness of movement. The Colour on the Horse Guards' Parade is not honoured with greater precision of physical movement than these disciplined feet, these turning bodies; the pulsing floor itself answered to the delicate dip of the conductor's stick. For two bars ... but look at them as they pour towards you down the left side of the room. Every face is towards you, forty abreast, and forty following those, and more forties, columns and squadrons of them, coming forward as grain comes down a channel, as graded fruit pours down a shoot. You do not see where they come from—their turn is far away under the pillars there; you do not see where they go to—they pass away out of sight again beneath you. They do not seem the same over and over again, but all the youths and maidens of the world, coming on and on, and new, always new.... Then you look to the right, and instantly your eyes are sensible of a darker ensemble. That is because you see, not faces now, but the backs of heads; not gaily striped shirts and bright ties, but plain shoulders only. And they pass away as they came, all the youths and maidens of the world with their backs to you. Not one turns for a look at you, not one nods you farewell. It is like your own youth leaving you.... And then magically all alters. Two more bars and, as if some strange and all-potent and instantaneously acting element had been dropped into the setting and returning human fluid, of a sudden it all breaks up. It effervesces. Every couple is seen to be waltzing. Two by two they turn, and your youth is no longer coming to you nor departing from you, but stops and plays. It stops and plays—for two bars—and lo, the other again. Once more they troop towards you with their faces seen, once more troop away with faces averted. The illusion becomes a spell. Coming, going, all different, all the same, parallel legions with faces to the future and faces to the grave—it is a little like Llanyglo itself. Suddenly you find yourself drawn a little closer to John Willie Garden. You do not want to look down from a balcony on all the young manhood and young womanhood of the world. One, one only, will suffice you, and with her you will come brightly down, all eyes and rosiness and laughter, and with her go in a soberer livery away again.... But luckier you than John Willie if you find that one. His eyes, practised as they were in scanning the Kursaal throng, did not see her. The coda came; the vast oblong well lighted up for a moment as a poplar lights up when the wind blows upon it—it was the slightly wider swing of skirts seen from above as the dance quickened to its finale; and then, as if something else potent and inimical had been dropped into the solution, there was a break for the sides, and the shining floor was seen again.
"Damn!" muttered John Willie Garden.
Percy, relishing the spectacle of John Willie on the hunt, was in no hurry. "The arbours?" he suggested laconically as John Willie rose; but again John Willie did not reply. For one thing, it was a little difficult to see into those dark nooks among Philip Lacey's barrows and planks and new larches and heaps of upturned earth; for another, he had an assurance that she he sought would not be there.
"Come on," he grunted.
"Ah!" said Percy, with an exaggerated shake of himself. "Has the moment at last arrived when we quaff?"
But already John Willie had stridden on ahead.
They took a known short cut through dark and obstructed windings, and presently reached the side-door of the adjoining hotel. It had certain rooms where ladies unaccompanied might get a drink, but into these they barely glanced. Percy grinned. Should John Willie find the object of his search in one of the other rooms, then there was reasonable hope of a row. He had never before seen John Willie so persistently asking for trouble.