Dancers in the Dark. Dorothy Speare
“Why! how dare you——” came stuttering from her red lips.
“I say all this,” he continued doggedly, “because when you first came up here you were different. You didn’t look like the sort who gets herself up this way. You didn’t need to. With a lot of girls it’s the only way they can make any impression at all.”
She stopped dancing, and stepped back from the circle of his arm. “Will you please take me back to Tom? I don’t care to dance with you any longer, if that’s the way you feel about me.”
Great was the dignity of her delivery, but her under lip quivered as she stood there. His eyes softened. There was something very piteous in the quivering of that painted lip.
“Very well—but I shan’t beg your pardon or take back anything I’ve said. Thank heaven this Prom ends to-morrow!”
It was a disagreeable incident. Joy didn’t see how he could have been so unpleasant about her appearance, when everyone else was so exceedingly pleasant. And then Jack Barnett came striding across the floor, and took her from the arms of the boy she was dancing with—and they floated off together, and Joy forgot everything else.
“I thought this morning that you were the prettiest girl I’d ever seen,” he was whispering in her ear. “Now I know you’re the prettiest I ever want to see!”
They were near the orchestra at this point, and the saxophone was blaring extra loud; but Joy could hear only a sweet singing, somewhere inside.
“If they make ’em any prettier than you—I don’t want to see ’em. It would finish me! You’re ripping me all to pieces as it is.” His grasp tightened and grew hot on her bare skin. “Do you know you’re ripping me all to pieces?”
“What’s that?” she asked, still lost in the wonder and thrill of his admiration. They were near a door, and he stopped dancing. “I can see you’re tired,” he said. “They’ve kept you dancing every minute—most popular girl in the room—let’s go down to the swimming-pool and sit this out.”
She hesitated. “Tom won’t know where I am.”
“Oh, Tom!” He relegated that subject to oblivion with princely carelessness. “Look here, if we start dancing again, someone’s bound to cut in on me right off—and I want to talk to you!”
She followed him as he led the way downstairs to the dark, scented stillness that was the college swimming-pool in more unromantic times. Here and there along the sides she could see the glowing ends of cigarettes; but Barnett led her down to the end of the pool, where they were far from everyone, and found a sofa underneath some leafy thing that he told her was one of the many potted palms strewn around the place. They sat down. He sat very near her.
“How old are you?” he wanted to know. “No, don’t tell me—you might be any age. Yesterday, you might have been eighteen. To-night, you are twenty-five—at least that. By gad, I like a girl to vary!”
Somehow in the darkness his hand found hers. It was moist, hot; the sensation was very disagreeable; but Joy did not take hers away. She could not think quickly about anything at all—
“You—I never met anyone like you.” His voice was coming hurried, breathless; there was something in the contact of her hand that utterly changed the tone of it. “You—you’re ripping me all to pieces to-night!”
Before she could realize what was happening, he had his arms around her and had pressed her to him in the moist, warm darkness. She knew he was searching for her lips.
Joy closed her eyes in the palpitant blackness; his kiss would be mysterious, wonderful.
But when it came, it was neither mysterious nor wonderful. Cold with the shock, she tried to wrench herself free from the hideous reality of the thing; but he was holding her so tightly that she was powerless to move. She gasped for breath to speak, but he pressed her to him more closely than ever, and kissed her again and again.
When he finally released her, her breath was coming in painful sobs. “What’s the matter?” he said thickly. “Don’t you like me any more?”
“I—I—you’ve been drinking!”
She tried to cover her face there in the dark, to hide the shattering of her idol; but his hands caught hers and held them away so that he could find her lips again. In all her sheltered life, Joy had never known what it was to be afraid. But now she felt a chill, bewildering fear. She was absolutely helpless. Something her father had once said, came back to her as she gasped there in the darkness: “A girl should never be where the situation does not protect her.” She was where the situation protected her. All around there were others—within good hearing distance.
“If you don’t let me go,” she panted, “I shall scream so that everyone can hear——”
His grasp relaxed for a moment and she pulled herself free and ran away from him through the darkness—down the way that they had come, past the glowing cigarette ends, and gay little murmurs of conversation, until she came to the door and light. There she did not stop to take breath, but fled on up the stairs.
“Oh, there you are, Joy!” Tom was at the door, and hailed her as she came into the gym. “Where have you been? Fixing your hair, I know. I told you it’d come down that new way. Come on—this is the supper dance. Say, what’s the matter? You look as if you’d seen a ghost.”
She laughed, and was appalled at the ease with which the laugh came to her lips. “What time is it, Tom?”
“Oh, only a little after midnight.”
Only a little after midnight—and she had to dance and smile until morning. She was exhausted. Her silver slippers were stabbing her feet in long jabs which went quivering all through her body. And the sweet singing in her heart had gone. Joy had had little experience with men, the youths in Foxhollow Corners preferring to try their hand at more willing material when amorously inclined. She had made of herself and all she did a temple, kept for the Unknown God who would surely come some day. And from almost the first moment, she had been sure that Jack Barnett was The One. She had fitted the mantle of her dreams upon him, and then he had turned and rent the mantle. She had not known men could be like that.
As she danced with different men and smiled and talked automatically in answer to their sallies, she found herself inspecting them with a new and fearful curiosity. Were all men like that? The thought was revolting, but could not be dismissed. Even in the days of chivalry, when a maiden in distress was the first to be protected—even then there was said to be but one Perfect Knight.
In one of the spaces, when Tom danced with her, he said, “Barnett’s getting stewed as fast as he can pour ’em down. That’s the worst of not having a girl to Prom—got to drown your sorrows some way.”
She followed his gaze to the door, where Barnett was leaning up against the wall and talking somewhat unsteadily to a group of stags. His eyes met hers; even at that distance they were bloodshot, terrible. His eyes that had been so tender—and now—now, as they looked at her with a fierce intensity, they made her think of a dog before whom red meat is dangled. Under his look she felt the dripping ice of horror’s perspiration.
“Tom!” she cried suddenly. “I can’t—I just can’t!”
“Can’t what, Joy?” In surprise he looked down at her face, which was so white that the spots of rouge flared out like little danger signals.
“I—I can’t stay at the Prom a minute longer.” Then, with growing resolve, “I really am all in, Tom. You see, I’m not used to it, and my feet are killing me, and—I’m so awfully tired that if I dance any longer I won’t get any fun out of it!”
She did indeed look tragically tired, and Tom was all self-reproach for not seeing it coming. They went to the fraternity booth and she said good-night to the matrons, who looked mildly surprised. Barnett was still standing at the door as they approached it and broke away from the stags with a lurch.