Ranny laughed. "By Jove, that tickles _me_!" he said.
"What does it mean, Ranny?"
"Why, I suppose it means they try it first and if they don"t like it they can chuck it."
"What an idea!"
"It"s a rippin" good idea, Winky. Shows what a thunderin" lot of sense these simple savages have got. You bet they"re not quite so simple as they seem. They know a thing or two. Why, they must be hundreds of years ahead of us in civilization, to have thought it all out like that. Think of it, that fellow Beda"s had a better chance than me."
They turned away from Beda and Kodpat, and presently Winny stood entranced before the little house that contained Baby Francis (born in the Exhibition) and his mother. She looked so long at Baby Francis that Ranny couldn"t bear it.
"Oh, look at him, Ranny! Isn"t he a little lamb?" Winny"s eyes were tender, and her face quivered with a little dreamy smile.
"D"you want to take him home and play with him? Shall I ask if he"s for sale?"
"Oh, Ranny!"
She turned away. And he drew her arm in his. "You won"t be happy till you"ve got him, Winky."
She said nothing to that; only her mouth, without her knowing it, kept for him its little dreamy smile.
"I believe," said Ranny, "you"ve never reelly got over Stanley"s goin"
into knickers."
"I _love_ his knickers," she protested.
"Yes, but you"d love _him_ better if he was that size, wouldn"t you?"
"I couldn"t love him better than I do, Ranny. You know I couldn"t. And I wouldn"t like him to be any different to what he is."
She was very serious, very earnest, almost as if she thought he"d really meant it.
Silent in the grip of an emotion too thick and close for utterance, they wandered back again to the enchanted garden where the band had played for them. The garden was silent, too. The bandstand was empty, black, unearthly as if haunted by some thin ghost of pa.s.sionate sound; and empty, row after row of seats in the great parterre, except for a few couples who sat leaning to each other, hand in hand, finding a happy solitude in that twilight desolation.
Like worshipers strayed into some church, they joined this enraptured, oblivious company of devotees, choosing seats as far as possible from any other pair.
"Hadn"t we better be going?"
They had sat there in silence, holding each other"s hands. The excitement, the delirious devil in them, had spent itself, and under it they felt the heaving, dragging groundswell of their pa.s.sion.
To Winny it had never come before like this. Up till now it had been enough simply to be with Ranny. Merely to look at him gave her profound and poignant pleasure. To touch him in those rare accidental contacts the adventure brought them, to feel the firm muscles of his arm under his coat sleeve, stopped her breath with a kind of awe and wonder, as if in Ranny"s body thus discerned she came unaware upon some transcendent mystery.
Yet Winny knew now why, in what way, and with what terrible strength she loved him and he her. She loved him, primarily and supremely, for himself, for the simple fact that he was Ranny. She loved him also for his body, for his slenderness, and for his strong-clipping limbs, and she loved him for his face because it could not by any possibility be anybody else"s.
And in her joy and tenderness, in their engagement and in the whole adventure, this going out with him and all the rare, shy contacts it occasioned, instalments of delight, windfalls of bliss that Heaven sent her to be going on with, in the very secrecy and mystery of it all, Winny felt that disturbing yet delicious sense of something iniquitous, something perilous, something, at any rate, unlawful. It was the same sense that she had known and enjoyed in the days when she went into the scullery at Granville to make beefsteak pies for Ranny; the same sense, but far more exquisite, far more exciting.
She did not connect it in any way with Violet. Violet had ceased to exist for them. Violet had of her own act annihilated herself. But Winny knew that until Ranny was divorced from his wife the law continued to regard him as married to her. So that, while firm land held and would always hold her, she was aware that he and she were walking on the brink, and that by the rule of the road Ranny went, so to speak, upon the outer edge where it was far more dangerous. She knew that he had more than once looked over; and she knew (though nothing would induce _her_ to look) that the gulf was there, not far from her adventurous feet.
Still, it was wonderful how all these years they had kept their heads.
So she said: "Hadn"t we better be going? I think we ought to."
She had unlaced her hand from his, and had turned in her seat to face him with her decision.
"Not yet."
"Well--soon. It"s getting rather chilly, don"t you think?"
At that he jumped up. "Are you cold, Winky?"
"My feet are, sitting."
"I forgot your little feet."
He raised her.
"It isn"t late," he said. "We can walk about a bit."
They walked about, for he was very restless again.
"Wherever does that music come from?" Winny said.
Sounds came to them of violins and "cellos, of trombones and clarinets, playing a gay measure, a dance, insistent, luring, irresistible.
They followed it.
In a vast room fronted by a latticed screen, all green and white, roofed by a green and white awning, and having a pattern of latticework, green and white, upon its inner walls, on a vast polished floor was a crowd of couples dancing to the music they had heard. It came loud through the open lattices, the insistent, luring, irresistible measure, violent now in solicitation, in appeal; and over it and under went the trailing, shuffling slur of the feet of the dancers and the delicate swish of women"s gowns as they whirled.
Standing close outside, they could see into the hall through the lattices of the screen. They saw forty or fifty couples whirling slowly round and round to the irresistible measure; some were stiff and awkward, palpably shy; some with invincible propriety whirled upright and rigid, like toys wound up to whirl; some were abandoned to the measure with madness, with pa.s.sion, with a corybantic joy. Here and there a girl leaned as if swooning in her lover"s arms; her head hung back; her lower lip drooped; her face showed the looseness and blankness of a sensuous stupor. Other faces, staring, upraised, wore a look of exaltation and of ecstasy. All were superbly unaware.
Winny"s face pressed closer and closer to the lattice. One of her little feet went tap-tapping on the gravel, beating the measure of the waltz.
For at the sound of the music, at the sight of the locked and whirling couples, her memory revived; she heard again the beating of the measure old as time; she felt in her limbs the start and strain of the wild energy; and instinct, savage and shy, moved in the rhythm of her blood, and desire for the joy of the swift running, of the lacing arms and flying feet.
In her body she was standing outside the Dancing Saloon at the Earl"s Court Exhibition, with her face pressed to the lattice; she was twenty-seven last birthday in her body; but in her soul she was seventeen, and she stood on the floor of the Polytechnic Gymnasium, beating time to the thud of the barbell. She was Winny of the short tunic and the knickers, and the long black stockings, and had her hair (tied by a great bow of ribbon) in a door-knocker plat.
"Oh, Ranny--" She looked at him with her shining eyes, half tender and half wild. "If we only _could_--"
Something gave way in him and dissolved, and he was weak as water when he looked at her.
The violins gave forth a penetrating, excruciating cry. And he felt in him the tumult evoked, long ago, one Sunday evening by the music in the Mission Church of St. Matthias"s.
Only he knew now what it meant.
His voice went thick in his throat.
"I mustn"t, Winky. I daren"t. Some day--you and I--"