What Will People Say? - The Original Classic Edition. Hughes Rupert
"You must lock knees with me."
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Somehow and quite suddenly he got the secret of it. The music took a new meaning. With a desperate masterfulness he swept her
from their back-water solitude out into the full current.
He was turkey-trotting with Persis Cabot! He wanted everybody to know it. This thought alone gave him the braggadocio necessary
to success.
Perhaps he was too busy thinking of his feet, perhaps the dance really was not indecent; but certainly his thoughts of her were as chivalrous as any knight's kneeling before his queen.
And yet they were gripping one another close; they were almost one flesh; their thoughts were so harmonious that she seemed to
follow even before he led. She prophesied his next impulse and coincided with it.
They moved like a single being, a four-legged--no, not a four, but a two-legged angel, for his right foot was wedded close to her left,
and her left to his right.
And so they ambled with a foolish, teetering, sliding hilarity. So they spun round and round with knees clamped together. So they seesawed with thighs crossed X-wise, all intermingled and merged together. And now what had seemed odious as a spectacle was only a sane and youthful frivolity, an April response to the joy of life, the glory of motion. David dancing before the Lord could not
have had a cleaner mind, though his wife, too, contemned and despised him, and for her contempt won the punishment of indignant
God.
Abruptly, and all too soon, the music stopped. The dancers applauded hungrily, and the band took up the[Pg 50] last strains again.
Again Forbes caught Persis to him, and they reveled till the music repeated its final crash.
Then they stood in mutual embrace for an instant that seemed a long time to him. He ignored the other couples dispersing to their tables to resume their interrupted feasts.
He was bemused with a startled unbelief. How marvelous it was that he should be here with her! He had come to the city a stranger, forlorn with loneliness, at noonday. And at noon of night he was already embracing this wonderful one and she him, as if they were plighted lovers.[Pg 51]
CHAPTER IX
WILLIE ENSLEE brought the dancers off their pinions and back to earth by a fretful reminder that the bouillon was chilling in the
cups, and the crab-meat was scorching in the chafing-dish.
The question of drinks came up anew. Forbes was in a champagne humor; his soul seemed to be effervescent with little bubbles of joy. But Mrs. Neff wanted a Scotch highball. Winifred was taking a reduction cure in which alcohol was forbidden. Persis wanted two more cocktails. Ten Eyck was on the water-wagon in penance for a recent outbreak. Bob Fielding was one of those occasional beings who combine with total abstinence a life of the highest conviviality. Offhand, one would have said that Bob was an incessant drinker and a terrific smoker. As a matter of fact, he had never been able to endure the taste of liquor or tobacco. When he ordered mineral water, or even milk, nobody was surprised; even the waiter assumed that the big man had just sworn off once more.
Forbes experienced a sinking of the heart as each of the guests named his choice, and nobody asked for any of the waiting cham-
pagne.
Yet when Willie turned to him and said, "Mr. Forbes, you have the two bottles of brut all to yourself," Forbes felt compelled to shake his head in declination. He never knew who got the champagne. He wondered if the waiter smuggled it out or juggled it on the accounts. And Willie forgot to ask Forbes what he would have instead! Willie ordered for himself that most innocent of[Pg 52] beverages which masquerades ginger ale and a section of lemon peel under the ferocious name, the bloodthirsty and viking-like title of "a horse's neck." There was a lot of it in a very large glass, and Forbes noted how Willie's little hand looked like a child's as he clutched the beaker. And he guzzled it as a child mouths and mumbles a brim.
Forbes observed how variously people imbibed. There were curious differences. Some shot their glasses to their lips, jerked back their heads, snapped their tongues like triggers, and smote their throats as with a solid bullet. Some stuck their very snouts in their liquor like swine; others seemed hardly to know they were drinking as they flirted across the tops of their glasses.
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Persis did not raise her eyes as she sipped her cocktail. She looked down, and her lips seemed to find other lips there. Forbes won-
dered whose.
There was some rapid stoking of food against the next dance. When it irrupted, Forbes, greatly as he longed to dance again with Persis, invited Winifred for decorum's sake. Winifred speedily killed the self-confidence he had gained from his first flight. His sense of rhythm was incommensurate with hers. When she foretold his next step, she foretold it wrong. He lost at once the power to act as leader, and when she usurped the post he was no better as follower.
As Forbes wrestled with her he caught glimpses of Persis dancing with Willie for partner. Little Willie's head barely reached her bare shoulder. He clutched her desperately as one who is doomed from babyhood not to be a dancer. Still he hopped ludicrously about, and almost made her ludicrous.
Forbes longed to exchange partners with Willie, for he felt that he and Winifred were equally ludicrous. They were making the heavi-
est of going. He gave up in despair and returned to the table.
When the music stopped there was another interlude of supper. People gulped hastily, as at a lunch-counter[Pg 53] when the train is
waiting. Forbes intended to sit out the next dance; but he found himself abandoned as on a desert island with Mrs. Neff. "Come along, young man," she said.
"I'm afraid I don't know how." "Then I'll teach you."
"But--"
"Don't be afraid of me. I've got a son as old as you, and I taught him."
Forbes had danced at times with elderly women, but not such a dance as this. It was uncanny to be holding in his arms the mother of a grown man, and to be whirling madly, dipping and toppling like wired puppets.
Mrs. Neff 's spirit was still a girl's. Her body felt as young and lissome in his arms as a girl's. Her abandon and frivolity were of the seminary period. Now and then he had to glance down at the white hair of the hoyden to reassure himself. The music had the power of an incantation; it had bewitched her back to youth. It seemed to Forbes that this magic alone, which should turn old women back to girlhood for a time, could not be altogether accursed.
Perhaps the music had unsettled his reason, but in the logic of the moment he felt that there was a splendid value in the new fashion, which broke down at the same time the barriers of caste and the walls of old age.
It was the Saturnalia come back. The aristocrats mingled as equals with the commoners, and the old became young again for yet a few hours.
He had read so much about the cold, the haughty, and the bored-to-death society of New York, yet here he was, a young lieutenant from the frontier, and he was dancing a breakdown with one of the most important matrons in America. And she was cutting up like a hired girl at a barn-dance. Plainly the nation was still a republic.
When the music ended with a jolt Mrs. Neff clung dizzily[Pg 54] to him, gave him an accolade of approval with her fan, and booked him for the next dance but one. If Forbes had had social ambitions, he would have felt that he was a made man. Yet if he had had social ambitions he would probably have betrayed and so defeated them.
Mrs. Neff having granted him a reprieve of one dance, Forbes made haste to ask Persis for the next. She smiled and gave him that
wren-like nod.
His heart beat with syncopation when he rose at the first note of music. How differently she nestled and fitted into his embrace. Winifred had been more than an arm-load, and gave the impression of an armor of silk and steel and strained elastic. Mrs. Neff was too slender for him, and for all her agility there was