1

NO—nothing to tell!... They talked about the ball, and the costumes they were to wear; and in the profound reassuring consciousness that life is something that need only be lived, that need not be discussed and understood, he fell asleep.

The next morning he was sorry he had not told Rose-Ann. But the moment to tell had passed.... Life was going on as usual, ignoring these private crises. Yes—he and Rose-Ann and Phyllis, just as if nothing had happened, were going to the Artists’ Theatre Ball! Rose-Ann was going in a Spanish dress with a wonderful shawl for which she had long awaited the proper occasion, and Felix as a pirate, in green sash and orange shirt.... They were going to dance—instead of, as would have seemed most fitting to Felix, to discuss their destinies.

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?

He could not, it seemed, get drunk. The whiskey only made him think with a preternatural clearness; and the more clearly he thought upon himself, as a straggler here in the bar-room from the battle-field of life out there on the dancing floor, the more he despised himself.... But he seemed to be despising some one else named Felix Fay, from whom he felt utterly detached and for whom he felt no responsibility. Funny Felix! In a way he could understand the poor devil.... He had been brought up in a puritanical way, and then had acquired a lot of romantic notions from poetry-books; and in spite of all his fine intellectual theories he was still just a romantic boy-prude, to whom the idea of taking a strange girl in his arms and walking her around the room to music would naturally be upsetting.... A funny boy, that Felix Fay! Why, he had been thinking quite seriously of making love to another girl besides his wife—and he would be quite equal to it, too ... after arguing it out theoretically and finding that it was his sociological duty or something of that sort!... He wanted things to be plain and straightforward, black and white; either he was making love to a girl or he wasn’t—it was the in-between things that confused and appalled him. To this Felix Fay person it would be simple enough to defy the conventions; what he couldn’t do was adjust himself to them like everybody else. He could intellectually conceive, and if it came to that, undertake to carry into practice, some preposterous theory of free-love that he had read about in Havelock Ellis or Ellen Key; but he couldn’t dance with a girl he liked! No, that was too difficult; it wasn’t a theory, and he hadn’t read about it in a book.... If people didn’t dance, and some one wrote a book and proved that they ought to, Felix Fay would believe it, and argue about it, and finally do it in a mood of stern conscientious futuristic morality—if they killed him for it! But do something that everybody else did—no. Not Felix. Somebody else would have kissed Phyllis long ago, and said nothing about it. If somebody else had thought of having a love-affair with Phyllis, the last person in the world he would have thought of discussing it with would have been his own wife. The world forgave people who kissed in corners, who had secret love-affairs while pretending to believe—while actually believing—in the ten commandments and the laws of the state of Illinois. If you accepted what everybody believed, you could have the same freedom as everybody else. It was only if you believed in freedom, really believed in it, that you couldn’t have any. Why couldn’t Felix Fay understand that?... Poor devil, he was going to get in trouble some time....

The being who thus in a state of utter detachment scornfully and sadly criticized Felix Fay, floated back airily, or at least with no sense of treading any actual floor with mortal feet, to the ballroom. Across the room he saw some one coming toward him, smiling. It was Elva Macklin; but it was not by that name, nor as the actress who had taken a part in his play, that he identified her; it was rather as a childhood playmate—a girl with whom he had once danced, long years ago, in a garret. She was dressed as a dryad, disguised in a leafy covering, but he recognized her well enough. It was clear to him that they had an engagement to dance together—an engagement that had waited all these years. The music struck up, he held out his arms, and she walked into them without a word. They floated off across the room, into the maze of dancers, threading their way among the others with that ease which comes of senses quickened with music, pausing and turning, drawing upon the floor an intricate pattern of movement born of fancy. The others in the room did not exist for him, save as shadows, bright shadows cast by the music. They were alone, in a dream, in a soft wordless dream; they did not so much listen to the music as create it by their own movements. They had left the world of reality, as if for ever, they were in some realm of golden light, a land of fruits and flowers, a place of quiet, triumphant happiness. This girl with him was no real girl, but a part of the dream; he had always known her; she was the companion of many wanderings through the lands of reverie; they understood each other too well to need words; she was his dream comrade. Not a girl, not any one that one must love or not love, fight for and work for, but a shadow like himself in this place of bright shadows, in this peaceful and happy realm beyond life and beyond death....

The music stopped, and he awoke with some astonishment to find that he, Felix Fay, had been dancing. Elva Macklin smiled, gave his hand a grateful pressure, and turned to the young man who came up asserting that the next dance was his.

Suddenly alarmed, Felix turned to flee from the ballroom; but it was too late. Phyllis had detached herself from her partner, and came over to him. “Aren’t you going to dance with me?” she asked. The handclapping died away as the musicians took up their instruments again. Phyllis faced him confidently—a lovely and to him at this moment a terrifying figure. All the sweetness of the love that might have been—that might be—his, kindled for him in her grave eyes. Dance with her? No, he couldn’t. But he must. Self-consciously, ashamed of himself, hating her, he took her hand, put his arm about her, and listening intently to the music, stepped off. But something was wrong; he could not get the rhythm; he stopped. She had surrendered herself to his guidance utterly, but now that that was at fault she began to try to guide him. That made him angry; he paused once more, listened to the music, and said, “Oh, confound it—it’s a waltz. I’m sorry—I can’t waltz.” She regretfully walked back with him to the edge of the dancing floor, where he tried desperately to think of something to say to her. It was shameful to be thus at a loss. Did she despise him? She ought to.... Some one else came along, and she danced off, leaving Felix furious and relieved. He went back to the box.

Rose-Ann was there, resting from innumerable dances, talking with Clive. “I see you’ve been dancing!” she said. “Yes,” he told her, “I don’t know how it happened. Will you try the next one with me?” At least, if he made a failure of it with Rose-Ann, she would forgive him.

“Yes,” she said. “Just this one more dance, and then we’ll go home.”

Because it was the last dance, because he need fear nothing more tonight, and because he had secretly resolved never to subject himself to this torment again, the demon in his mind that argued and discussed and made him awkward and afraid, went to sleep. His last dance, his last dance ever—and then ... back to a desk, where he belonged!

“Why!” said Rose-Ann, “you dance beautifully!” She said it in a puzzled tone.

Felix was annoyed. He lost the rhythm and stepped on her foot.

“It’s my fault!” she said. But he knew it wasn’t. Why did he try to dance when he couldn’t? Wouldn’t that music ever stop?

He wanted to tell Rose-Ann about—about Phyllis. She would understand.