Twilight Sleep (Wharton)/Chapter 7
VII
AT least you'll take a turn?" Heuston said; and Nona, yielding, joined the dancers balancing with slow steps about the shining floor.
Dancing meant nothing; it was like breathing; what would one be doing if one weren't dancing? She could not refuse without seeming singular; it was simpler to acquiesce, and lose one's self among the couples absorbed in the same complicated ritual.
The floor was full, but not crowded: Pauline always saw to that. It was easy to calculate in advance, for every one she asked always accepted, and she and Maisie Bruss, in making out the list, allotted the requisite space per couple as carefully as if they had been counting cubic feet in a hospital. The ventilation was perfect too; neither draughts nor stuffiness. One had almost the sense of dancing out of doors, under some equable southern sky. Nona, aware of what it cost to produce this illusion, marvelled once more at her tireless mother.
"Isn't she wonderful?"
Mrs. Manford, fresh, erect, a faint line of diamonds in her hair, stood in the doorway, her slim foot advanced toward the dancers.
"Perennially! Ah—she's going to dance. With Cosby."
"Yes. I wish she wouldn't."
"Wouldn't with Cosby?"
"Dear, no. In general."
Nona and Heuston had seated themselves, and were watching from their corner the weaving of hallucinatory patterns by interjoined revolving feet.
"I see. You think she dances with a Purpose?"
The girl smiled. "Awfully well—like everything else she does. But as if it were something between going to church and drilling a scout brigade. Mother's too—too tidy to dance."
"Well—this is different," murmured Heuston.
The floor had cleared as if by magic before the advance of a long slim pair: Lita Wyant and Tommy Ardwin. The decorator, tall and supple, had the conventional dancer's silhouette; but he was no more than a silhouette, a shadow on the wall. All the light and music in the room had passed into the translucent creature in his arms. He seemed to Nona like some one who has gone into a spring wood and come back carrying a long branch of silver blossom.
"Good heavens! Quelle plastique!" piped the Marchesa over Nona's shoulder.
The two had the floor to themselves: every one else had stopped dancing. But Lita and her partner seemed unaware of it. Her sole affair was to shower radiance, his to attune his lines to hers. Her face was a small still flower on a swaying stalk; all her expression was in her body, in that long legato movement like a weaving of grasses under a breeze, a looping of little waves on the shore.
"Look at Jim!" Heuston laughed. Jim Wyant, from a doorway, drank the vision thirstily. "Surely," his eyes seemed to triumph, "this justifies the Cubist Cabaret, and all the rest of her crazes."
Lita, swaying near him, dropped a smile, and floated off on the bright ripples of her beauty.
Abruptly the music stopped. Nona glanced across the room and saw Mrs. Manford move away from the musicians' balcony, over which the conductor had just leaned down to speak to her.
There was a short interval; then the orchestra broke into a fox-trot and the floor filled again. Mrs. Manford swept by with a set smile—"the kind she snaps on with her tiara," Nona thought. Well, perhaps it was rather bad form of Lita to monopolize the floor at her mother-in-law's ball; but was it the poor girl's fault if she danced so well that all the others stopped to gaze?
Ardwin came up to Nona. "Oh, no," Heuston protested under his breath. "I wanted—"
"There's Aggie signalling."
The girl's arm was already on Ardwin's shoulder. As they circled toward the middle of the room, Nona said: "You show off Lita's dancing marvellously."
He replied, in his high-pitched confident voice: "Oh, it's only a question of giving her her head and not butting in. She and I each have our own line of self-expression: it would be stupid to mix them. If only I could get her to dance just once for Serge Klawhammer; he's scouring the globe to find somebody to do the new 'Herodias' they're going to turn at Hollywood. People are fed up with the odalisque style, and with my help Lita could evolve something different. She's half promised to come round to my place tonight after supper and see Klawhammer. Just six or seven of the enlightened—wonder if you'd join us? He's tearing back to Hollywood to-morrow."
"Is Lita really coming?"
"Well, she said yes and no, and ended on yes."
"All right—I will." Nona hated Ardwin, his sleekness, suppleness, assurance, the group he ruled, the fashions he set, the doctrines he professed—hated them so passionately and undiscerningly that it seemed to her that at last she had her hand on her clue. That was it, of course! Ardwin and his crew were trying to persuade Lita to go into the movies; that accounted for her restlessness and irritability, her growing distaste for her humdrum life. Nona drew a breath of relief. After all, if it were only that—!
The dance over, she freed herself and slipped through the throng in quest of Jim. Should she ask him to take her to Ardwin's? No: simply tell him that she and Lita were off for a final spin at the decorator's studio, where there would be more room and less fuss than at Pauline's. Jim would laugh and approve, provided she and Lita went together; no use saying anything about Klawhammer and his absurd "Herodias."
"Jim? But, my dear, Jim went home long ago. I don't blame the poor boy," Mrs. Manford sighed, waylaid by her daughter, "because I know he has to be at the office so early; and it must be awfully boring, standing about all night and not dancing. But, darling, you must really help me to find your father. Supper's ready, and I can't imagine. . ."
The Marchesa's ferret face slipped between them as she trotted by on Mr. Toy's commodious arm.
"Dear Dexter? I saw him not five minutes ago, seeing off that wonderful Lita—"
"Lita? Lita gone too?" Nona watched the struggle between her mother's disciplined features and twitching nerves. "What impossible children I have!" A smile triumphed over her discomfiture. "I do hope there's nothing wrong with the baby? Nona, slip down and tell your father he must come up. Oh, Stanley, dear, all my men seem to have deserted me. Do find Mrs. Toy and take her in to supper. . ."
In the hall below there was no Dexter. Nona cast about a glance for Powder, the pale resigned butler, who had followed Mrs. Manford through all her vicissitudes and triumphs, seemingly concerned about nothing but the condition of his plate and the discipline of his footmen. Powder knew everything, and had an answer to everything; but he was engaged at the moment in the vast operation of making terrapin and champagne appear simultaneously on eighty-five small tables, and was not to be found in the hall. Nona ran her eye along the line of footmen behind the piled-up furs, found one who belonged to the house, and heard that Mr. Manford had left a few minutes earlier. His motor had been waiting for him, and was now gone. Mrs. James Wyant was with him, the man thought. "He's taken her to Ardwin's, of course. Poor father! After an evening of Mrs. Toy and Amalasuntha—who can wonder? If only mother would see how her big parties bore him!" But Nona's mother would never see that.
"It's just my indestructible faith in my own genius—nothing else," Ardwin was proclaiming in his jumpy falsetto as Nona entered the high-perched studio where he gathered his group of the enlightened. These privileged persons, in the absence of chairs, had disposed themselves on the cushions and mattresses scattered about a floor painted to imitate a cunning perspective of black and white marble. Tall lamps under black domes shed their light on bare shoulders, heads sleek or tousled, and a lavish show of flesh-coloured legs and sandalled feet. Ardwin, unbosoming himself to a devotee, held up a guttering church-candle to a canvas which simulated a window open on a geometrical representation of brick walls, fire escapes and back-yards. "Sham? Oh, of course. I had the real window blocked up. It looked out on that stupid old 'night-piece' of Brooklyn Bridge and the East River. Everybody who came here said: 'A Whistler nocturne!' and I got so bored. Besides, it was really there: and I hate things that are really where you think they are. They're as tiresome as truthful people. Everything in art should be false. Everything in life should be art. Ergo, everything in life should be false: complexions, teeth, hair, wives . . . specially wives. Oh, Miss Manford, that you? Do come in. Mislaid Lita?"
"Isn't she here?"
"Is she?" He pivoted about on the company. When he was not dancing he looked, with his small snaky head and too square shoulders, like a cross between a Japanese waiter and a full-page advertisement for silk underwear. "Is Lita here? Any of you fellows got her dissembled about your persons? Now, then, out with her! Jossie Keiler, you're not Mrs. James Wyant disguised as a dryad, are you?" There was a general guffaw as Miss Jossie Keiler, the octoroon pianist, scrambled to her pudgy feet and assembled a series of sausage arms and bolster legs in a provocative pose. "Knew I'd get found out," she lisped.
A short man with a deceptively blond head, thick lips under a stubby blond moustache, and eyes like needles behind tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses, stood before the fire, bulging a glossy shirtfront and solitaire pearl toward the company. "Don't this lady dance?" he enquired, in a voice like melted butter, a few drops of which seemed to trickle down his lips and be licked back at intervals behind a thickly ringed hand.
"Miss Manford? Bet she does! Come along, Nona; shed your togs and let's show Mr. Klawhammer here present that Lita's not the only peb—"
"Gracious! Wait till I get into the saddle!" screamed Miss Keiler, tiny hands like blueish mice darting out at the keyboard from the end of her bludgeon arms.
Nona perched herself on the edge of a refectory table. "Thanks. I'm not a candidate for 'Herodias.' My sister-in-law is sure to turn up in a minute."
Even Mrs. Dexter Manford's perfectly run house was not a particularly appetizing place to return to at four o'clock on the morning after a dance. The last motor was gone, the last overcoat and opera cloak had vanished from hall and dressing-rooms, and only one hanging lamp lit the dusky tapestries and the monumental balustrade of the staircase. But empty cocktail glasses and ravaged cigar-boxes littered the hall tables, wisps of torn tulle and trampled orchids strewed the stair-carpet, and the thicket of forced lilacs and Japanese plums in front of the lift drooped mournfully in the hot air. Nona, letting herself in with her latch-key, scanned the scene with a feeling of disgust. What was it all for, and what was left when it was over? Only a huge clearing-up for Maisie and the servants, and a new list to make out for the next time. . . She remembered mild spring nights at Cedarledge, when she was a little girl, and she and Jim used to slip downstairs in stocking feet, go to the lake, loose the canoe, and drift on a silver path among islets fringed with budding dogwood. She hurried on past the desecrated shrubs.
Above, the house was dark but for a line of light under the library door. Funny—at that hour; her father must still be up. Very likely he too had just come in. She was passing on when the door opened and Manford called her.
"'Pon my soul, Nona! That you? I supposed you were in bed long ago."
One of the green-shaded lamps lit the big writing-table. Manford's armchair was drawn up to it, an empty glass and half-consumed cigarette near by, the evening paper sprawled on the floor.
"Was that you I heard coming in? Do you know what time it is?"
"Yes; worse luck! I've been scouring the town after Lita."
"Lita?"
"Waiting for her for hours at Tommy Ardwin's. Such a crew! He told me she was going there to dance for Klawhammer, the Hollywood man, and I didn't want her to go alone—"
Manford's face darkened. He lit another cigarette and turned to his daughter impatiently.
"What the devil made you believe such a yarn? Klawhammer—!"
Nona stood facing him; their eyes met, and he turned away with a shrug to reach for a match.
"I believed it because, just afterward, the servants told me that Lita had left, and as they said you'd gone with her I supposed you'd taken her to Ardwin's, not knowing that I meant to join her there."
"Ah; I see." He lit the cigarette and puffed at it for a moment or two, deliberately. "You're quite right to think she needs looking after," he began again, in a changed tone. "Somebody's got to take on the job, since her husband seems to have washed his hands of it."
"Father! You know perfectly well that if Jim took on that job—running after Lita all night from one cabaret to another—he'd lose the other, the one that keeps them going. Nobody could carry on both."
"Hullo, spitfire! Hands off our brother!"
"Rather." She leaned against the table, her eyes still on him. "And when Ardwin told me about this Klawhammer film—didn't Lita mention it to you?"
He appeared to consider. "She did say Ardwin was bothering her about something of the kind; so when I found Jim had gone I took her home myself."
"Ah—you took her home?"
Manford, settling himself back in his armchair, met the surprise in her voice unconcernedly. "Why, of course. Did you really see me letting her make a show of herself? Sorry you think that's my way of looking after her."
Nona, perched on the arm of his chair, enclosed him in a happy hug. "You goose, you!" she sighed; but the epithet was not for her father.
She poured herself a glass of cherry brandy, dropped a kiss on his thinning hair, and ran up to her room humming Miss Jossie Keiler's jazz-tune. Perhaps after all it wasn't such a rotten world.