Dancers in the Dark. Dorothy Speare
out.
Once in the cool night air, with Tom by her side keeping a comfortable silence, she felt free and almost happy. It was something to have left Jack Barnett—and soon she would have those silver slippers off.
The fraternity house was dark and empty. It was an effort to climb the steps—her last silver-slipper effort, she told herself. She watched Tom go back down the road, then sat down and pulled off her slippers. She couldn’t have kept them on another minute. Then slowly, painfully, she went in and upstairs.
The room was a wilderness of clothes and hairbrushes, powderboxes and wardrobe-trunk-drawers scattered here and there at inconsequential places, and she had hard work to guide her sore feet to the bureau. Her buoyant cheeks, waving twin flags of crimson joy while all the rest of her betrayed the weariness in which she was steeped, drew her first attention. That rouge must be wiped off—as the rest of the evening could not be. She took a limp handkerchief that trailed whiteness amid the disorder of the tools on the bureau, and scrubbed one cheek with concentrated energy. And as the handkerchief marched in its path of elimination, she heard the door swing open behind her.
She looked in the mirror, her hand frozen to her cheek; then became rigid with the shrieks and shrieks of terror that were so many and so fearful that they choked together in a hideous little rattle before they reached her throat. For Jack Barnett stood on the threshold. To her fevered fright, he towered as vast and menacing as the prehistoric man who swung a club and took what he wanted always. His eyes were swimming in red; his lips had lost the fine-chiseled lines into which they had been schooled by sobriety and civilisation, and sagged loosely back from his teeth.
“Ah-h!” Again that queer little rattle, that could not even come up in her throat. But what did it matter, whether or no she could cry aloud? They were alone; the fraternity house was dark and empty. The nearest help was half a mile away at the Prom, where jazz was shrieking its deafening stimulus.
He lurched forward into the room; she turned to confront him. He was talking in a thick, rough voice that sounded as if all thought but the actual effort of speech had left him. “Surprised, see me? … we’re going to … finish … now! Girls—sh’d never start anything … can’t finish!”
Still she could bring no sound in her throat. He stumbled over a box, kicked it aside, and said “Damn!” He was almost upon her; and she could not move, nor cry out, although what help was there in either?
Then, suddenly, a whirlwind seemed to strike the room. A figure shot in from the black hole that was the door. … There was but a moment of clashing, a moment full of the sound of flesh in sharp impact, of sinews cracking—and then the magnificence of Jack Barnett’s body was hurled from its massive menace and lay, a thing of sodden incompetence, spilled over a wardrobe-trunk drawer and some corsets. Jim Dalton stood over him, breathing fast, his tie riding under one ear, his usually well-subdued hair going off on several tangents.
There was a swift pause in the room. Then speech poured from Joy’s relaxed throat. “Is he—is he dead?” she quavered. “What did you do to him? He’s so—so big!”
“But drunk,” Jim responded, looking down at the incoherence stretched on the floor. “He’s only knocked out. Now to get him out of here.”
That brought her back to the situation. “Oh—and you—how did you know that I—that he——”
“I saw you leave the gym; I—was watching you. And I saw Barnett follow. I had a hunch—and so I went after him. He waited down by the corner till Tom left you—and then went on up to the house. I didn’t say anything to him, because I thought maybe he was going out to the fraternity kitchen to get something to eat—but when I blew in he’d come upstairs here—so I came too.” He bent over Barnett for a perfunctory look. “He’s all right; he’ll sleep it off now, and won’t remember a thing about it in the morning.”
“How can I thank you ever——” Joy’s voice faltered weakly. She had become so faint that she could scarcely stand, even with both hands clinging to the bureau top.
“You can thank me—by not forgetting—what nearly happened!” he said, in a low, even voice. “By remembering it—in connection with everything else!”
Then he looked at her, as if for the first time since he had entered the room, and grinned irrepressibly: “Excuse me—but you certainly do look funny, with one side of your face so red and one side so white.”
She wheeled to the mirror, and confronted her uncompleted task. Terror had struck her white as the sheets on her little cot. The splotch of rouge on one cheek, gave a ludicrous, clown-like effect. She laughed shakily. It seemed impossible in the face of her comic appearance and Jim Dalton’s matter-of-fact manner, that but five minutes ago tragedy and ruin had been stalking in upon her. When she turned again, Jim had drawn Barnett up onto his shoulder, and was moving from the room.
“I’ll get him to the Delta-Delta house somehow,” he said in muffled tones—“and anyway, he’ll reach downstairs without being seen.”
The door was closed, and Joy sunk to the floor, whither she had been impending for several moments. In twenty-four hours she had run the gamut of emotions. She had gone through fearsome revelation of what can seem like love to a girl and spell something different indeed to a man. She had seen how the thrills of innocence that scarcely knows why it is thrilling, are as tinder to the flame of desire kindled by that same innocence. She had enveloped man in the white mist of maiden’s dreams—and then the mist had been torn away, leaving reality so terrible that she felt she must go mad if she could not forget. Yet Jim Dalton had told her not to forget … to remember it—in connection with everything else! What had he meant? As if she could forget. … Love was an idle dream; the reality, a hideousness that could not be borne.
There was really nothing left in life—except to laugh and be gay!
It was half-past six before the orchestra played “The End of a Perfect Day,” and hilarious groups began to straggle toward the fraternity houses. The sun was trying to break through the heavy mists that hung over the valley. Jerry halted her group on the crest of Chapel Hill to enjoy the beauty of the country below; and while everyone gazed at the valley wreathed in delicate mist split with traceries of gold, Jerry looked wistfully down the long slope to the Kappa Beta house. In this life, one has to restrain one’s impulses at times—but the question that always seems to be coming up is, is this one of those times? Jerry decided not, and shaking off her slippers, beat one of the track athletes down the hill.
Having thus ended Prom, Jerry did not stop to wait for the others to come and have breakfast on the fraternity porch. No anticlimaxes for her. She dashed in the house, and up the stairs; but when she opened the door to her room, she paused and whistled. Joy was putting the last stages of a brisk morning make-up together, in front of the mirror.
“Well—take a slant at Foxhollow Corners, New England,” Jerry announced, coming in and regarding Joy with increased respect. “I wondered where you’d gone—of all good lines to pull!”
Joy met her respect with the quiet pride of a good pupil under the approval of his master. “Are they starting breakfast?”
Jerry sank down on the bed. “Good or not—I bite—to leave Prom early, get everyone missing you and all the more keen to see you, meanwhile getting some sleep while the rest of us jazz away the morning hours! And now, when all the beauty of America looks and feels like a dish-rag—when rouge shows up like poison-ivy in the glorious morning hours—when even I don’t care to go through the let-down of breakfast with my pep trickling away—to sail down like this!”
“Does my skirt sag?” Joy asked.
“No. Does anything look worse than Prom-shot evening dresses at breakfast? And now you sail down in a little sporting model—why did I need to do anything to you?”
“Well,” said Joy defensively, “I woke up and couldn’t sleep, and I knew you’d all be coming in soon, and I didn’t want to miss any more of it than I had to. That’s all there is to it.”
Jerry