Beyond. Galsworthy John

it’ll be very soon. Will you come to my first night? Mother says I’ve got to be awfully careful. She only let me come this evening because you were going to be here. Would you like me to begin?”

      She slid across to Rosek, and Gyp heard her say:

      “Oh, Mrs. Fiorsen wants me to begin; a Chopin waltz, please. The one that goes like this.”

      Rosek went to the piano, the little dancer to the centre of the room. Gyp sat down beside Fiorsen.

      Rosek began playing, his eyes fixed on the girl, and his mouth loosened from compression in a sweetish smile. Miss Daphne Wing was standing with her finger-tips joined at her breast – a perfect statue of ebony and palest wax. Suddenly she flung away the black kimono. A thrill swept Gyp from head to foot. She COULD dance – that common little girl! Every movement of her round, sinuous body, of her bare limbs, had the ecstasy of natural genius, controlled by the quivering balance of a really fine training. “A dove flying!” So she was. Her face had lost its vacancy, or rather its vacancy had become divine, having that look – not lost but gone before – which dance demands. Yes, she was a gem, even if she had a common soul. Tears came up in Gyp’s eyes. It was so lovely – like a dove, when it flings itself up in the wind, breasting on up, up – wings bent back, poised. Abandonment, freedom – chastened, shaped, controlled!

      When, after the dance, the girl came and sat down beside her, she squeezed her hot little hand, but the caress was for her art, not for this moist little person with the lips avid of sugar-plums.

      “Oh, did you like it? I’m so glad. Shall I go and put on my flame-colour, now?”

      The moment she was gone, comment broke out freely. The dark and cynical Gallant thought the girl’s dancing like a certain Napierkowska whom he had seen in Moscow, without her fire – the touch of passion would have to be supplied. She wanted love! Love! And suddenly Gyp was back in the concert-hall, listening to that other girl singing the song of a broken heart.

           “Thy kiss, dear love —

           Like watercress gathered fresh from cool streams.”

      Love! in this abode – of fauns’ heads, deep cushions, silver dancing girls! Love! She had a sudden sense of deep abasement. What was she, herself, but just a feast for a man’s senses? Her home, what but a place like this? Miss Daphne Wing was back again. Gyp looked at her husband’s face while she was dancing. His lips! How was it that she could see that disturbance in him, and not care? If she had really loved him, to see his lips like that would have hurt her, but she might have understood perhaps, and forgiven. Now she neither quite understood nor quite forgave.

      And that night, when he kissed her, she murmured:

      “Would you rather it were that girl – not me?”

      “That girl! I could swallow her at a draft. But you, my Gyp – I want to drink for ever!”

      Was that true? IF she had loved him – how good to hear!

V

      After this, Gyp was daily more and more in contact with high bohemia, that curious composite section of society which embraces the neck of music, poetry, and the drama. She was a success, but secretly she felt that she did not belong to it, nor, in truth, did Fiorsen, who was much too genuine a bohemian, and artist, and mocked at the Gallants and even the Roseks of this life, as he mocked at Winton, Aunt Rosamund, and their world. Life with him had certainly one effect on Gyp; it made her feel less and less a part of that old orthodox, well-bred world which she had known before she married him; but to which she had confessed to Winton she had never felt that she belonged, since she knew the secret of her birth. She was, in truth, much too impressionable, too avid of beauty, and perhaps too naturally critical to accept the dictates of their fact-and-form-governed routine; only, of her own accord, she would never have had initiative enough to step out of its circle. Loosened from those roots, unable to attach herself to this new soil, and not spiritually leagued with her husband, she was more and more lonely. Her only truly happy hours were those spent with Winton or at her piano or with her puppies. She was always wondering at what she had done, longing to find the deep, the sufficient reason for having done it. But the more she sought and longed, the deeper grew her bewilderment, her feeling of being in a cage. Of late, too, another and more definite uneasiness had come to her.

      She spent much time in her garden, where the blossoms had all dropped, lilac was over, acacias coming into bloom, and blackbirds silent.

      Winton, who, by careful experiment, had found that from half-past three to six there was little or no chance of stumbling across his son-in-law, came in nearly every day for tea and a quiet cigar on the lawn. He was sitting there with Gyp one afternoon, when Betty, who usurped the functions of parlour-maid whenever the whim moved her, brought out a card on which were printed the words, “Miss Daphne Wing.”

      “Bring her out, please, Betty dear, and some fresh tea, and buttered toast – plenty of buttered toast; yes, and the chocolates, and any other sweets there are, Betty darling.”

      Betty, with that expression which always came over her when she was called “darling,” withdrew across the grass, and Gyp said to her father:

      “It’s the little dancer I told you of, Dad. Now you’ll see something perfect. Only, she’ll be dressed. It’s a pity.”

      She was. The occasion had evidently exercised her spirit. In warm ivory, shrouded by leaf-green chiffon, with a girdle of tiny artificial leaves, and a lightly covered head encircled by other green leaves, she was somewhat like a nymph peering from a bower. If rather too arresting, it was charming, and, after all, no frock could quite disguise the beauty of her figure. She was evidently nervous.