THE Rolfes’ door swung open and shut; bursts from the gramophone came downhill like somebody coughing. As the Perkins’ party stepped up from the duckboards Gerald spun past the door with the D.I.’s niece, in a nimbus of gauze draperies. The room was sticky with strawberry light, unlit lanterns wobbled between the electric light cords; the dancers seemed to be moving slowly in jam. A group of young men stood by the door, coughing. But one hadn’t yet made one’s official appearance: Lois blinked and began to tug out her silver shoes from her pockets; somebody pulled her on down a passage to change.

In what Denise called the kitchenette at the end of the passage the five spare men were smoking, looking into their glasses of whisky and wishing to play bridge. Lois looked in and they all waved to her, but Livvy pulled her away quickly: she said that must be the gentlemen’s cloak-room. Lois met, with surprise, her own eyes of interrogation in six inches of mirror between the coats.

David came to claim Livvy, Betty went swooning off over the chalky lake of the floor with Mr. Simcox, Mr. Daventry stared at the passage door with severity, balanced his cigarette on the rim of the gramophone and came up to Lois and frowned, without speaking. He opened his arms slowly. They danced; she had no idea she could dance so beautifully. At the end of the record Mr. Daventry impassively moved back the needle again. “Tiring day,” he said.

“Oh, I don’t think so.” They went on dancing.

The D.I.’s niece picked off ends of her tangerine draperies from various parts of Gerald and walked away with an aquiline-looking gunner. Over Lois’s temple Mr. Daventry’s jaw moved slightly; his neck muscles strained. Again he revived the gramophone. Lois, breathless, said: “Isn’t there going to be an interval?” “Not necessarily,” replied Mr. Daventry. Meanwhile, one wall of the hut seemed propped against Gerald’s rigid, resentful back.

“What a crowd ...”

“I beg your pardon?”

She did not speak again. Anxiously dancing, she merely constituted Mr. Daventry’s revenge. Mrs. Vermont, going past Gerald, said: “Oh, diddums?” She asked Mr. Simcox if he had noticed, nice-looking boys looked their nicest sulky? Mr. Simcox, looking round so carefully that he missed a step, said he would not call that sulky ... More worried.

“Nonsense, Tubby, what’s he got to worry about?”

“You never know.”

Mr. Simcox was a bit of a philosopher, because he was so fat. He gave up Mrs. Vermont with a sigh to another young man and went across for somebody’s young, shy sister. “No luck?” he said on the way, to Gerald. And Gerald looked at him candidly, with despair.

The evening “went” with a rush, with a kind of high impetuousness out of everybody’s control. Every one looked and spoke and danced close up with a kind of exalted helplessness; intimacy tightened the very air. Sandwiches were ambrosia, brightening the eyes; rims of plates went electric where fingers touched. Mrs. Rolfe laughed all the time, you would have said with despair. She climbed past couples very close up at the darkest part of the passage, she entered the kitchenette with a shriek and swept some cards from the table. The spare men danced with each other. She ran in and out of her bedroom, shaking a plate of chocolates at the couples sitting out on the chest-o’-drawers and on the washstand covered with Turkish cushions. If the hut had risen and soared up into the air, so that some one stepping out at the door had to step back dizzily, she would hardly have been surprised. Indeed, two subalterns running down to the mess for more siphons did leap to the mud as from a great height.

The room was hot; they drew the curtains back and opened the windows, then were stared in at oddly by hard little squares of night. Couples went out for walks, to cool their faces. Livvy was kissed twice and went off to powder her chin. “Of course, this is post-war madness,” said Mr. Simcox, standing beside a window.

“Oh yes,” agreed Lois.

“Awful, really.... I expect you understand what I mean?”

“Oh yes.” Wishing Mr. Simcox were not intrigued, she put her two hands out of the window, as into a well, to feel wind cold on her wrists. Gerald came up behind her.

“Mine next,” he said, as though they had just parted. “What a row!” he yelled.

“This jazz,” said Simcox. “They ought to have let me bring my band,” complained Gerald, “it wouldn’t have taken up much more room than Mrs. Fogarty.”

Mrs. Fogarty had indeed come in and sat at the end of the room in a purple tea-gown. Her circumference was enormous, her feet stuck out beyond it—but she was such a darling. Every time a couple stumbled over her feet she beamed and nodded in the friendliest way. She had just whispered to Gerald, who brought her a glass of lemonade: “Here, where’s your girl?” And her eyes had rolled at him, dark with worry. Gerald could not have borne to disappoint Mrs. Fogarty.

Gerald did not dance silently. His hand supported her wrist, cool and familiar. Lois felt she was home again; safe from deserted rooms, the penetration of silences, rain, homelessness. Nothing mattered: she could have gone to sleep. But he woke her.

“Look here: what have I done?”

“How⁠—?” said she, quite inadequate.

“You know. But why are you—why must we⁠—?”

“Gerald—oh, do be—sssh!”

A couple sheered off from them.

“I didn’t think you’d be cruel,” he said to her hair, almost confidentially.

“But it’s you who’ve been cutting me.”

“But how? When? You’ve never once looked—Lois, you’re lovely, but you’re so—”

“Look here, we can’t talk and dance.”

“Which does that mean you don’t want to do?”

She looked at a button of his mess coat. “Talk,” she said after a little contented interval. He slid his hand up her wrist, they danced on. The D.I.’s niece trailed past them, laughing at Daventry: they had a pool of space to themselves on the crowded floor. The pink room melted round, beatific and syrupy. He was closer than ever under the lovely compulsion of movement.

“You do dance divinely.”

“What?” he said, like the ghost of Daventry. Some one stopped the gramophone, they looked at each other, shocked. Something had made him absurdly unhappy: she would have liked to have comforted him.

“Let’s go out.”

“Won’t it be cold for you?”

“Gerald,” said she, discouraged, “don’t be an aunt.”

The wind whipped round the edge of the hut, ran through her hair at the roots and stung her ears—a sinister energy in this fixed and angular world, for one could not see anything moving. Gerald walked, unknown, beside her, up in the dark. “At one time,” said Lois, wrapping her wild skirts round her, “a girl would have died of this.”

“Cigarette?”

“Oh—will it light here?”

“I can light one most places.” So she bent over his hands, a cup of fire. There were two bright specks in his eyes.—Then the match whirled off and died on the dark. “I can’t think what you think has gone wrong,” she said.

“You were so queer that Thursday. You’d been like part of me, the night before; then everything seemed—wrong. I dare say I was a brute; I oughtn’t to have—though as a matter of fact I’ll never be sorry.... If you’d been just angry or anything ... But you seemed to go right away: I didn’t know where I was. All lunch you were like a girl at a tennis club. Then you left me down there with them all to talk rot and went off with that beastly gramophone.”

“That was not my fault—did you want me to listen to you talking rot?—Gerald, I didn’t realize you were resentful; I didn’t think you could be.... I was waiting for you to write.”

“I began so many letters, I used half a box of note-paper. I couldn’t think what to say.”

“Still, you might have written.”

“But how?” he said candidly.

She could not remember, though she had read so many books, who spoke first after a kiss had been, not exchanged but—administered. The two reactions, outrage, capitulation, had not been her own. “You were hoping I would write?” she said, seeing light suddenly.

“You see, you had always been so understanding.”

“But, Gerald, I should have thought you’d have been shocked if I’d⁠—”

“Oh?... Perhaps I would. But I wanted something to make things natural. I shall never forget what I felt in that armoured car. You will always be connected up in my mind with the smell of oil—Lois, do you think I am terribly introspective?”

“You know, you were tired.”

“Perhaps it was that,” he said, puzzled. “But bumping along back to barracks, and you going in again with that girl to that topping house ...”

“Do you think it’s a topping house?”

“It seems so to me.”

This new version of the changeable afternoon was a shock to her. It had gone on for him, too; doors that she had not thought of shutting and windows opening, the drone in the drawing-room, rain with a different importance. Might she perhaps have thought more about Gerald and wondered less? Splashing along the brown road to Clonmore she could now see the armoured car diminish—with Gerald its only nerve. But she thought of the empty spare room and how it avenged him.

“Marda’s gone, you know.”

“But she had just come to lunch, surely?”

“Gerald!... Can’t you feel any difference between some one to lunch and somebody staying?”

“She hadn’t a hat,” said Gerald after consideration.

“She went two days ago: she’s in Kent now.”

“I’m sorry,” said Gerald civilly. Feeling a strained, fierce pause, he added: “She seemed awfully nice, I thought.”

“Don’t you wonder at all if I miss her?”

“I expect you must. I always miss visitors, though they’re a bother beforehand.”

“She hadn’t any beforehand—that seems so odd now.”

“Lois ... you aren’t angry, then?”

“Oh?” Recollecting herself, she looked round the darkness vaguely. A couple were coming towards them; she put a hand on his sleeve to make him be quiet, his other hand came over it. They heard Daventry’s angry laugh, his partner’s feet ran stickily on the duckboards. Gerald and Daventry passed in the dark with, it seemed, a queer silent interchange.

“Mr. Daventry seems old to be a subaltern.”

“It’s absurd that he should be—all this peacetime bother. He had a company in France in 1916, later on he was acting major. He’s a splendid fellow, I’m sorry you haven’t seen more of him. He won’t go about much, outside barracks. The fact is,” he added apologetic, “he’s sick at being over here. It doesn’t seem to agree with him.”

“Do you really like it?”

“Oh, well, it’s a job. Though I rather see Daventry’s point—it doesn’t seem natural.”

They had come to the end of the huts—the foot of the steep slope a wall, the top heavily wired. Under the wall a sentry inhumanly paced like a pendulum. The country bore in it strong menace. Gerald looked out at it, his face blinking in and out of the dark, faintly red with the pulse of his cigarette. She nursed her bare elbows, unconsciously shivering. He seemed at once close and remote, known and un-personal; she understood why, up to now, she had searched for him vainly in what he said. He had nothing to do with expression. She put out a hand to where he was, shadowy and palpable. He threw his cigarette away, turned—and said nothing. The sentry passed.

They went back the way they had come, between the huts.

“Gerald, I wasn’t angry ... at what you did....”

“No, you were wonderful all the time.”

“Don’t you understand?” she said sharply—“Gerald?”

“Understand?... Lois!”

While they kissed, she heard, in the silence of their footsteps, some one moving about in a hut up the lines. The sound was a long way off, at the other side of a stillness.

“Your arms are so cold.”

“I’ve been so lonely.”

“They’re so cold.” He kissed them, inside the elbows. Later: “I like the back of your head,” she said with exploring finger-tips.

“I never thought you looked at me.”

“Gerald, I’ve been so ... vacant.”

“I never thought you wanted me.”

“I⁠—” she began. The soft sound of her dress in the wind became, by some connection of mood, painfully inexplicable to her—the pain was its own, from not being understood. “Gerald, your buttons hurt rather.”

“My darling⁠—” He let her go, but still, above consciousness, held one of her hands, solemnly. “Shall you really be able to marry me?”

“I don’t know till you’ve asked me.”

“Don’t laugh⁠—” he cried.

“Can’t you hear I’m not laughing?”

“Lois⁠—” Something more was coming; she waited, hearing him draw a breath. “Let’s go back and dance,” he said almost religiously—“shall we?”

The hut was compact with movement: she stood back in alarm, as before a revolving door in destructive motion. Now it was gone, she remembered sharply the smell of earth.... David Armstrong leaned from his partner wildly and struck Gerald over the head with a red balloon.

Mrs. Rolfe had had an idea that the dance might well finish up with a cotillion. She was vague about cotillions, but towards this end she had distributed balloons, whistles that ran out long tongues when you blew them, and streamers from striped cardboard batons with which dancers might hit one another over the head. Mrs. Vermont thought these things went better with fancy dress, but Denise said a rag was a rag at any time. Girls ducked and shrieked and waved their streamers over their partners’ shoulders. Denise, radiant in black with a trail of nasturtiums, was waltzing—affair of prolonged “hesitations”—with Betty’s husband. She bit off a streamer, spat out a mouthful of paper and said, with a shiver of happiness: “Isn’t it marvellous, Timmy? I can hardly believe I’m awake!”

“Ra-ther!” replied Captain Vermont, with blurred enthusiasm. He was being buffeted by Mr. Simcox and somebody’s sister.

“Betty’s been just too marvellous,” went on Denise—“Oh, Timmy, do have a shot at Reggie Daventry—there, with the girl in scarlet. He looks just too refined!”

But Timmy failed to find Daventry. “Betty’s tons the prettiest here,” cried Denise, ecstatic.

“Oh, come!” expostulated Captain Vermont, squeezing her waist. It gave him a warm, tender feeling to think how fond she and Betty were of each other.

“Tell me,” said Denise, as nearly as possible snuggling, “are we terribly reckless? Would this annoy the Irish?”

“They won’t know.”

“They have heaps of spies.”

“I say, sssh, Denise, there are heaps of them here to-night.”

“Spies?”

“Irish—the Raltes and Co.”

“They’re different.”

“Still, they’ve got feelings.”

Denise sighed. “I could go on like this for ever.” But Captain Vermont rather thought he would like a drink. A balloon exploded. “Glory!” cried Mrs. Fogarty. So they burst four more to keep her amused.

“Is this like a bombardment?” asked Moira Ralte.

“No,” said Mr. Simcox.

If they were not careful, they would knock over the gramophone. Mr. Daventry thought it was time they did. It was time something happened. He danced the D.I.’s niece down the passage and kissed her with her head pressed back in the coats. She struggled, futile, slippery as a weasel. As he kissed again her face went stiff and she shut her eyes. When these opened, they were as shrewd as ever: still he did not know what she thought. The drums in his temples were now insistent; he could not forget them even while he was dancing. She had dabbed herself over with White Rose. Her frizzy hair tickled his mouth as he bent close to her.

“Do you get kissed a lot?”

“Englishmen never could keep their mouths to themselves.”

“You won’t know yourself when we’re gone!”

“You should get back home while you can, the lot of you.”

“What would become of Uncle?”

“Did you like your whisky?” She put a hand up rudely to shield herself from his breath. This reminded Daventry, who let go of the common little hell-cat abruptly and walked away to the kitchenette, where he heard a siphon. Lois stood in the door, waiting while David got her some soda-water. But wouldn’t she try a little something? Just a little something to dance on—no? Daventry, standing back and tilting his drink about in his glass, stared at her feet with owlish ferocity.

“Sorry about your silver shoes, Miss Farquar.”

“There are some beautiful walks round here,” said David, grinning.

“Miss Farquar should float, not walk; she looks like a water-lily,” said Daventry, looking over her green frock with his discomforting eyes. “Come on and dance,” said David, taking her empty glass. Lois began to say she was keeping the next for Gerald. But: “Miss Farquar and I are hungry, we are going to find a sandwich,” said Daventry.

In the box of a dining-room plates of dishevelled sandwiches sat in unmasked electric light. There was no one there. Mr. Daventry, looking hard at her, put the palm of his hand to his left temple with a curious, listening air, as though to see if a watch had stopped.

“Chicken and ham,” he said, “tongue and turkey; they’re all cat, they say.” (“What shall I say?” thought Lois.) He looked at a chair with contempt, then sat down on it. “I don’t think I’ve met you before,” he continued.

“Perhaps you didn’t notice.”

“Dear me,” said Mr. Daventry, looking into a sandwich. “No, I don’t think it could have been that.”

“Then it can’t be explained,” said Lois, and (she felt) glittered excitedly. He suggested the army of Wellington; buckskins. Looking up thoughtfully, he directed upon the wall just over her head his strained dark look that was almost a squint. “You live round here?”

“More or less⁠—” She was startled to meet the dark look on a level. Hers was, he said, a remarkably beautiful country.

“I am afraid you⁠—”

He affably shrugged. Did that matter? He stared at her arms, at the inside of her elbows, with such intensity, she felt Gerald’s kisses were printed there. Was this a bounder?—She knew she had no criterion.

“Have a nice walk?” he inquired.

“Did you?” she countered.

“I expect so,” said Mr. Daventry, after consideration. “As a matter of fact, I am not quite at my best.” They looked hard at each other. “Nothing,” he said, “appeals to me.” She moved her arms nervously on the silk of her dress. For she saw there was not a man here, hardly even a person.

“How do you mean ‘more or less’?” he said suddenly.

“Well, I don’t live anywhere, really.”

“I do: I live near Birmingham.” He put the half-eaten sandwich down, with distaste, on the edge of the cloth and pulled up a plate to cover it. She felt she was quite finished with. Suppose, she thought, they were all like this! Should she go? She made a movement, he did not see; she was disappointed. He put the hand to his temple, again listening.

“Tired?”

“Oh no,” he said, with irony.

“I’m going back now.”

“Such a pity. Anyone so charming ...”

“Well, I’m bored,” she said.

“It’s a pity you don’t know about my head, it’s a most curious head, it would interest you.... How shall I keep you? Look here, seriously, about Lesworth⁠—”

“Oh?” she inquired, suddenly cold inside.

“About our young friend⁠—” He pulled up his chair close; she had a feeling like gates shutting. “Tell me this⁠—”

But the roar of merriment, solid and swerving evenly as a waterfall past the door, splintered off in a crash. Silence came, with hard impact. “Thank God, they’ve upset the gramophone!” Daventry smacked his knee, remotely, as though rehearsing the gesture. His look decomposed in laughter. “Done in,” he said, drawing life from the thought. Simultaneously, a universal shriek went up: it was smashed, finished. “Really,” she thought, “you laugh like Satan!”

“Well, well,” said Daventry, tilting his drink about, “it’s been a pleasant evening.” Here they all came—a stampede in the passage. She was glad of them, for under the storm of his mirth that swept their island, disarranging the interlude, she had sat cold and desolate. A gramophone passing, a gramophone less in the world, it was not funny. But between bursts of laughter she had felt him look at her lips, at her arms, at her dress, like a ghost, with nostalgia and cold curiosity. About their young friend?—she wasn’t to know.

Mrs. Vermont seemed broken also, she leaned on the adjutant. “Stay her with sandwiches,” called out somebody, “comfort her with—with—more sandwiches!” Moira mopped her eyes with a trail of her dress, but nobody noticed. They jostled about the table. Plates rang, shunted in all directions. “Sitting in here?” cried Gerald, exalted, “splendid!” Somebody waved a mouth-organ: could one dance to that? More and more squeezed in at the door: the room would burst. The cracks of the walls that had been straight a minute ago like bars now seemed to bulge out visibly: light glared down on the resolution of backs and pink, reaching arms. “Our young friend, our young friend, our young friend,” thought Lois, and watched Gerald. Though she watched wherever he went, she could not see him. There was nothing, in fact, to which to attach her look except his smoothness and roundness of head, which seemed for the first time remarkable. She looked for his mouth—which had kissed her—but found it no different from mouths of other young men who had also been strolling and pausing between the huts in the dark. The page of the evening was asterisked over with fervent imaginary kisses. And one single kiss in the wind, in the dark was no longer particularized: she could not remember herself, or remember him.

As he came up, she looked quickly away. She looked at an empty plate down on the floor, at a thin disk of cucumber flaccid against its rim. “What have I done?” she thought: she looked at the plate with dread. And: “Oh, sandwich?” said Gerald, turning to bring up some more. “... Or perhaps it will seem natural to-morrow?” Nothing could keep her from having to eat a sandwich. “Darling ...” he whispered, brushing against her shoulder.

“Tired?” asked Mr. Simcox, seeing her face.

“Oh no,” she said, with Mr. Daventry’s best irony.