"What, Judy? What"s that? You"re engaged for this? You can"t dance it with me?"
"No. No, I can"t."
Judith slipped past him, and started across the floor. The music was louder now, as if you were really meant to dance, and dance with the person you wanted to most. The floor was filling now with dancers stepping forward awkwardly, but turning into different creatures when they danced, caught by the light, sure swing of the music, whirling and gliding. The words sang themselves to Judith, the silly, beautiful words:
Please don"t keep me waiting.
Won"t you let me know That you really love me?
Tell--me--so.
A girl in red was dancing in a quick, darting sort of way, in and out, among the others, and her dress was beautiful, too, like a flower. The boy in the corner was watching it. He did not see Judith come.
"I thought you couldn"t be real. When I never saw you again I thought I had dreamed you."
Judith said it softly and breathlessly, and he did not hear. She put her hand on his arm, and he turned and looked at her.
"Don"t you remember me?" Judith was too happy to be hurt even by this.
The light, sweet music called to her. "Don"t you remember? Never mind!
Come and dance with me."
CHAPTER FOUR
Willard stood still and stared after Judith for one bewildered minute; that was as long as he could stand still. Odd Fellows" Hall had ceased to afford standing-room.
The floor was filling and more than filling with determined young persons who were there to dance, and looked as if they had never had any aim but to dance. The enthralled silence, which was more general than conversation, advertised it. Even acknowledged belles, like the girl in red, coquetted incidentally, with significant but brief confidences and briefer upward glances. There was an alarming concentration, intent as youth itself, to be read in their unsmiling faces and eager eyes.
They danced quite wonderfully, most of them, as only country-bred young people can, with free-limbed young bodies, more used to adventuring in the open air than to dancing, but attuned to the rhythm of the dance by right of their youth. The old-fashioned waltz, that our grandmothers lost their hearts to the time of, still prevailed in Green River; not the jerkier performance that was already opening the way for the one-step and the dance craze in larger centres, but the old waltz, with the first beat of each measure heavily emphasized--a slow swinging, beautiful dance, and they danced it with all their hearts.
In and out among them, two slender, quick-turning figures were making an intricate way. The girl danced delicately and surely, a faint, half smile parting her lips, her small, smooth head erect, the silvery gold hair that crowned it shimmering and pale in the uncompromising light of the newly installed electric chandeliers, her eyes intent on the boy.
His performance was not expert, but it had a charm all its own. He put a great deal of strength into it, and made it evident that he possessed still more; strength enough to master the art of dancing once and for all, by the sheer force of it, if he cared to exert it, and a laughing light in his eyes, as if dancing was not important enough for that, and nothing else was.
An ambitious pair, experimenting with the dip waltz, just introduced that year, and pausing on the most awkward spots in the crowded floor, blocked his path, and he swung heavily out of their way just in time, squaring his chin and holding his head a shade higher. The girl in red was whirled toward him in double-quick time, and he dodged, miscalculated his distance, but met the shock of her squarely, whisking Judith out of her way.
"Good try, Murph," her partner called.
Willard regarded the encounter disapprovingly from the door of the gentlemen"s dressing-room, to which he had edged his way. His was not an expressive countenance, and that was a protection to him just now. He was bewildered and deeply hurt, but he merely looked fat and slightly puzzled, as usual.
"Judy turn you down?" inquired his friend Mr. Ward, also watching from the dressing-room door, with the few other gentlemen who were without partners for this dance. It was the most important dance of the evening, for you danced it with the lady of your choice, or with n.o.body. It cemented new intimacies or foreshadowed the breaking of old; settled anew the continually agitated question of "who was going with who."
"Judy turn you down?" said Mr. Ward, but he meant it as a pleasantry.
Mr. Willard Nash was not often turned down, even at this early age. He was too eligible.
"Rena turn you down, Ed?"
"Yes." Mr. Ward became suddenly confidential, and lowered his voice.
"Mad. She wanted me to get her a shinguard to mount tintypes on--tintypes of the team."
"Buy it or steal it?" inquired Willard sarcastically.
"I offered to buy it," his friend confessed, "buy her a new pair, but she wants one that"s been used."
"You spoil Rena. You can"t spoil a girl." They laughed wisely. "It don"t pay."
"Mad with Judy?"
"Well--no," said Willard magnanimously. He thought quite rapidly, as his brain, not overworked at other times, could do in emergencies. "My feet hurt. Pumps slip at the heel. I"ve been stuffing them out. Judy came with me, but I had to be excused for this dance."
"Good thing for him."
"Who?"
"For Murph--for Neil Donovan. They"ll all dance with him if she does; though Judy don"t know that. She"s not stuck on herself, and never will be. I didn"t know she knew Murph."
"Well, you know it now," said Willard shortly, his man-of-the-world composure failing him. Judith was circling nearer now, slender and desirable. He hesitated between an angry glare and a forgiving smile, but she did not look to see which he chose. She whirled quickly by.
"Smooth little dancer, and she"s no sn.o.b. Judy"s all right," said Ed.
"Watch Murph! He"s catching on--never danced till last night. Some of the fellows taught him. He never danced with a girl before."
"If my feet hurt," remarked Mr. Nash irrelevantly, and without the close attention from his friend which this important announcement called for, "I may not dance at all to-night."
Willard stopped abruptly. "What do you know about that"; a voice was saying, in the rear of the dressing-room; he stiffly refrained from turning to see whose, "Judith is dancing the first dance with Neil Donovan!"
Judith was dancing the first dance with Neil Donovan. It was social history already, accepted as such, and not further discussed, even by Willard. But many epoch-making events are not even so much discussed, they look so simple on the face of them. We cross a room, and change the course of our lives by crossing it, and few people even observe that we have crossed the room.
If Judith had affected the course of her life materially by crossing the room to the strange boy, she did not seem to be thinking of it just now.
She was not thinking at all. She was only dancing, following her partner"s erratic course quite faithfully, and quite intent on doing so; feeling every beat of the music, and showing it, pink-cheeked and sparkling eyed, and pleasantly excited, but nothing more.
The wistful and dreamy look was gone from her eyes, and her half-formed desire for something to happen this evening, something that had never happened before, was gone from her, too. She felt content with whatever was going to happen, and deeply interested in it, and particularly interested in dancing.
They had danced almost in silence, rather a grim silence at first, but now that the boy could let the music carry him with it, and was beginning to trust it, too, the silence was comfortable. But the few words he managed to say were worth listening to and answering, not to be dreamed through and ignored, like Willard"s. His voice was not as she remembered it, and that was interesting, too, deeply significant, though she could not have said why. Everything seemed unaccountably interesting to-night.
"I thought it was louder," she said, "or higher--or something."
"What?"
"Your voice."
It was quite husky and low, and he p.r.o.nounced a word here and there with a brogue like Norah"s, only pleasanter, with a kind of singing sound.
It was never the word you expected. You had to watch for it. She could hear it now.
"Won"t you please tell me who you are?"
"I know who you are, and I know where you live."
"Where do I?"