III
It was one o’clock on a late November morning and the first Assembly ball was in full swing in the ballroom of the Blackstone Hotel. The room was brilliantly lighted. Its gilded walls were hung with smilax and banked with palms and chrysanthemums. The floor was filled with dancers. A few elderly ladies, in full evening dress, were clustered in little groups on a row of gilt chairs, under the palms. A great crowd of young men were massed near the door. From that crowd, black broadcloth figures continually detached themselves, dashed into the revolving throng, tapped young women cavalierly on naked shoulders, drew them from their partners’ embrace and stalked solemnly off with them.
Modern dances always seemed stalking and solemn to Jane. She was sitting in the balcony that ran round the room, her arms on the smilax-hung railing gazing down at the kaleidoscope of light and movement and colour on the floor. She was wearing a new black velvet evening gown—everyone wore a new gown to the first Assembly—and she was vaguely wondering if the cane seat of her gilt chair was creasing the skirt. The balcony was crowded with other middle-aged women in other new evening gowns, sparsely attended by a sprinkling of middle-aged men.
Twenty feet away down the line of spectators sat Isabel, with Stephen, resigned and somnolent, standing behind her chair. Robin sat at Jane’s elbow. Jane knew everyone present and was tired of seeing them. She had seen them at an endless succession of first Assembly balls. Tonight they looked just as they always had. At the other balls they had worn other new evening gowns. That was the only difference. On an Oriental rug at the ballroom door a row of Jane’s contemporaries stood in line to receive the guests as they entered the room. Jane could remember when the hostesses at an Assembly ball had looked to her like a group of bedizened old ladies, pathetically tricked out in the garb of folly. Now the dancers seemed to her incredibly young.
Jane was watching Jenny, revolving on the floor beneath in the arms of what looked to Jane like an extremely Bacchic young man. She was wishing that Steve would cut in on her and take her away from him. Steve was a bit Bacchic, too, however. Too Bacchic to notice his sister’s predicament. He was standing by the receiving line, rallying Cora Delafield. Cora Delafield was at least five years Jane’s senior, but she rather specialized in Bacchic young men. Steve thought her very entertaining. Jane wished that Cicily would come. Her dinner-party was late. Jane wanted, ridiculously, to look just once at Cicily in her new white velvet, before taking Stephen home to bed.
Robin said something, but Jane could not hear it. She could not hear anything above the clash of the jazz orchestra at the end of the balcony. Modern balls were frightfully noisy. And there were always two orchestras, so you never had one single intermittent moment of peace. Stephen looked dog-tired. It was mean of her to keep him up a moment longer. It was mean of her to have brought him at all. Absurd to go to balls when you were fifty! You danced three times, perhaps, lumbering around the room with the more courteous men of your dinner-party, and then you retired to the balcony and talked to your brother-in-law, while you watched your own children.
Good gracious! Jenny’s young man had almost fallen down in negotiating a turn. He had torn the flounce of her blue chiffon gown. Steve had disappeared, taking Cora Delafield with him. Cora’s young men would do anything in reason, but they would not lead her out on the dancing floor. She tipped the scales at two hundred pounds.
Cora had the right idea, however. If you were going to go to balls in your fifth decade, it was much better to go in for Bacchic young men, on any terms, than to sit in the balcony, watching your own children and straining your ears to catch the amiable conversation of your brother-in-law, over the din of those infernal saxophones.
Why, there was Jack! Jack cutting in on Jenny, the darling! Jack could always be relied on. Jenny was talking and they were both laughing uproariously, casting discreet glances back at the Bacchic young man, left standing befuddled in the centre of the ballroom floor. Jenny was undoubtedly repeating some alcoholic anecdote! Girls did not care nowadays what they said, or what was said to them. Jane tried to imagine what would have happened to a Bacchic young man at a dance in Chicago in the middle nineties. Social ostracism—nothing less. Prohibition had turned ballrooms into barrooms.
But where was Cicily? There was Belle, lovely-looking, too, in that silver gauze gown. Could Isabel be right? Was she worried, was she really worried, over Cicily and Albert? She did not look as if she had a care in the world, one-stepping mystically, with sweet raised face and half-closed eyes, in the arms of Billy Winter. He was a nice young man. Why didn’t Jenny fancy him? Why didn’t Jenny fancy anyone? She was twenty-six years old. It was nonsense—it was utter nonsense—her talk of wanting to leave home and live in New York and run dog kennels in Westchester County with Barbara Belmont.
But where was Cicily? If Jack and Belle were here, Cicily and Albert must be somewhere in the offing. They had come up in a taxi together, perhaps, from some young married dinner. Stopped, possibly, at a night club. Jane suddenly realized how tired she was. And how tired of wondering, as she had wondered for two months, just what was happening to Cicily in taxis and in night clubs.
The lights were dimming. The lights were going out. The orchestra was silenced. A spotlight shone brilliantly down on the centre of the ballroom floor. A young man indistinguishable in the darkness, his shirtfront picked out startlingly in the silver radiance, was shouting that Miss Ivy Montgomery, from the company of “Hot Chocolates” now playing at the Selwyn, would offer a dance. A slender quadroon in a spangled evening gown slipped suddenly into the spotlight. Her sleek oiled hair was shining. She smiled hugely, good-humouredly, her white teeth gleaming in the brutal orifice of her thick rouged lips. The orchestra crashed into a barbaric orgy of sound.
Where was Cicily, thought Jane, as she watched the contorted evolutions of Miss Montgomery’s Charleston—or was it a Black Bottom?—as she listened to the applause that broke from the apparently spellbound audience at the end of the dance. Where was Cicily, she thought, as two darky comedians followed Miss Montgomery into the spotlight, and tapped their flapping shoes and cracked their age-old jokes, to the accompaniment of throbbing saxophones and bursts of appreciative laughter.
The lights flashed up. The darkies had vanished. The dancers, in twos and fours and sixes, took possession once more of the ballroom floor. Jane glanced at her wrist watch. It was almost two o’clock. But there was Cicily! Cicily, slim and slinky in the folds of the new white velvet, passing down the receiving line, bending her dandelion head in charming deference before the dowager hostesses. And Albert was behind her. Well—Jane had known he would be. He was good-looking. He stood waiting, tranquilly, under a palm, for Cicily to complete her amenities. Belle floated by, with Billy Winter again, her gauze flounces brushing her husband’s knee. She nodded serenely at him. Cicily abandoned the last dowager with a final radiant smile. There was a faint shadow of inattention in that radiance, however. It sprang from some inner joy. Jane shrewdly suspected that Cicily had not heard one word that the dowager had been saying. Albert stepped out to meet her. His fine young face was absolutely impassive. As Cicily moved into his arms, her glance swept the balcony. Meeting her mother’s eye, she smiled so innocently, so gaily, that no one but Jane herself would ever have sensed that there was something a bit unnatural in the innocence, in the gaiety, of that smile.
“She wishes that I weren’t watching her,” thought Jane, as she smiled and nodded brightly in response.