Martha ate the hotel dinner with appetite, if not with enjoyment. The menu was long and in French, and this was the most expensive meal the colony could offer.
They ate a thick white soup, which tasted of flour and pepper; round cheese puffs, the size of cricket balls and tasting of nothing in particular; boiled fish with gluey white sauce; roast chicken, hard white shreds of meat, with boiled stringbeans and boiled potatoes; stewed plums and fresh cream; and sardines on toast. They were all drinking brandy mixed with ginger beer. Halfway through, Binkie began urging them all to ‘put some speed into it, kids’ for he was already anxious because the dance might begin without him.
At the end, he flung down silver, handfuls of it, while the waiters smiled and bowed towards him, though their intent eyes were already calculating how much silver, and how it would divide between them. The girls were protesting, as usual, with maternal pride, that Binkie was a crazy kid. They returned in a body to the Sports Club. Martha was thinking, with guilty affection, of Donovan, but could not immediately find him. She was already claimed by Perry, the large blond athlete.
The Club was now filled with people in evening dress, and the band was playing. She found Donovan sitting with a girl whom Martha knew to be Ruth Manners. He waved his hand towards her, like an acquaintance, while he cast a disparaging look at Perry. Martha looked for help to Binkie, who said with that disconcerting frankness, ‘Better off with us, baby, he doesn’t even feed you properly.’ But her eyes were still appealing; and they groaned and sighed and shrugged, and fetched chairs and placed tables together, until Donovan was at the head of a large circle of people, and Martha was facing him.
Ruth Manners was a thin, delicate girl with a narrow white face, short dark springy hair, long nervous hands. Her features were irregular: the thin scarlet mouth twisted to one side when she smiled, her thin nose was a little crooked, her eyebrows were like circumflex accents, sharp and black over pale and watchful eyes. She spoke carefully, with controlled vowels, she moved with care; at every moment, she was conscious of how she must appear. And this consciousness, together with the delicate look—her eyelids were slightly reddened and heavy, the white cheeks had an irregular fading flush—gave her an intellectual look. Yet she was very elegant, with an elegance that none of the other women present could approach. She wore a jade-green dress of heavy thick crepe, which was pleated loosely from the waist, and held around the narrow figure with a flame-coloured sash. The top was cut low, front and back, the material lying lightly over small flat breasts that were like a child’s. Her shoulders and neck were thin and bony, of a frail whiteness that looked as if it might so easily flush, like her cheeks, into unbecoming red. And yet, though she was not pretty, and her body—so Martha jealously said to herself—would be better covered up, she undeniably possessed the quality that Donovan admired so much. Her assurance seemed to say, One doesn’t have to be attractive, one may have an undesirable body, but what of it? I have this other thing. And Martha, because of that assurance, lost hers. She felt herself to be dowdy and altogether lacking, in spite of the homage of the wolves.
Ruth and Donovan made a pair, and knew it. They talked easily to each other, where they sat side by side at the head of the table, in a light, flirtatious, bantering way that was so much not the way of the Club that the rest were a little subdued, listening with uncomfortable attention.
Seeing that he had an audience, Donovan leaned back in his graceful way, and took Ruth’s hand and said, ‘Well, girls and boys, we should all go to England. You see what it does for us? Now, look at Ruth’s dress, Matty dear—you see? It’s got what we poor colonials can’t achieve.’
Ruth laughed and said, ‘Poor Don, but you were in England yourself last year.’
Now, Martha had never been told that Donovan had been to England, and she found this extraordinary. She saw that he was annoyed; for he frowned, and hestitated, before making the best of it and saying, ‘Yes, Ruthie, but I had no opportunities to improve myself, for I went under escort with my mamma, and she was much too busy buying clothes in Harrods and Derry and Toms, and I had to go with her, because she can’t buy anything without me, as you know.’
These two shops, which had been presented to Martha all her childhood as synonyms for ‘niceness’, now lost their dull sound, for they could also provide Mrs Anderson’s conventional smartness. But Ruth looked amused and tolerant at the names; and there was an allowance of spite in her careful drawl, which said plainly that she found Donovan a little ridiculous. ‘But surely you couldn’t have spent three months doing nothing but buying clothes—even at Harrods?’
Donovan was annoyed, but he maintained the light note. ‘My dear Ruthie, you have the advantage of a mamma who wants to do her best for you. You should have pity for us less fortunate breeds.’
‘Poor Donny-boy,’ said Ruth, with her short laugh.
‘Yes,’ said Donovan, now launching himself on the effort to be amusing even at his own cost. ‘Yes, it was a great disillusion to me, going to England. You know the way we all think of it—but after all, when one gets there, there are certain limitations one overlooks beforehand. I sat in the Cumberland—because we colonials always go to the Cumberland, and nothing will make my mamma see that there is no need to emphasize an already too obvious fact—and I ate ravishing cream cakes all day, with my father, who grumbled all the time because he said England was over-civilized, though I don’t think for a moment he knew what he meant by that. We sat and waited for Mamma to return, laden with yet fresh parcels, from various little expeditions of her own—because my mamma can always be trusted to amuse herself, wherever she is. It was the only time I can ever remember that my papa and myself had anything in common. I said, ‘Papa dear, you may like the wide open spaces, and you’re welcome to them, but as for me, I’m simply made for decadence. Why don’t you give me some money, and I shall apprentice myself to some dress designer, and thus find my niche.’
‘Poor Donny-boy,’ said Ruth again, this time sincerely.
‘So my papa said nothing would give him greater pleasure, he disliked anomalies like myself, but unfortunately, since Mamma had spent the money destined to last three months in the first three weeks, and he had had to cable for more, there was none left over for either of us.’ Donovan ended on a squeal of laughter, which sounded so resentful that only Ruth was able to join him. The others sat silently watching; and Martha heard Perry mutter, ‘For crying out loud, for crying out loud, come and dance, I can’t take it.’ He roughly pulled Martha up, and they went inside to dance; and again he complained, ‘For crying out loud,’ with a reminiscent disgust, as they took the floor.
Perry, because of the character imposed on him, was obliged to stop every few moments, shoot up his arms, and yell like a tormented soul, while people turned to laugh; or he broke suddenly into writhing give, his head crushed back on his neck, his eyes closed, while he crooned, in a thick, blind, whining voice, in imitation of a Negro singing. In between, he pushed Martha conventionally around the room, in a rectangular progress, and the straight blue eyes assessed her, while his face held its sentimental look.
Martha watched his eyes; she was becoming obsessed by the need to look at the eyes of these people and not their bodies; for they were serious, anxious, even pleading; while all the time their bodies, their faces, contorted into the poses required of them. It was as if their surfaces, their limbs, their voices, were possessed, it was an exterior possession that did not touch them, left them free to judge and comment. Martha continually felt a shock; looking from Perry’s eyes to his jerking, shuddering impersonations of Negro singing, she felt uneasy. In the meantime, she danced, smiling brightly, replying to him in the jargon. Towards the end of the dance, encouraged by the intelligent seriousness of the blue eyes, she rebelled, and talked in her normal voice about Donovan, about Ruth, while she felt his arms tightening, his eyes clouding. But she went on; she was resentful because he would not accept her as herself—whatever that might mean; for was
she not continually at sea, because of the different selves which insisted on claiming possession of her? She meant, she wanted to establish contact with him, simply and warmly; she wanted him to recognize her as a reasonable being. When he rolled up his eyes, and pretended to shudder, and said, ‘Oh, baby, but the way you talk,’ she kept a determined smile, and waited until he finished, and continued with what she was saying. And, slowly, she succeeded. He was beginning to talk normally, if in a gruff and unwilling voice, when the music stopped, and they had to return to the veranda. There Ruth and Donovan still sat by themselves; and now their voices were lowered, and they looked unwelcomingly around at the invasion of returning dancers. They went on talking. But if their earlier sophisticated talk had upset Binkie because it disturbed the atmosphere, this exclusiveness was much worse. When the music struck up again, Binkie went to dance with Ruth. He hated dancing, but it was his duty; he never danced unless there was a couple too much occupied with each other.
It was quite early; people were still arriving, and remained, as they settled themselves, in their parties or couples, though these couples might join others, or a girl from one group pass naturally to another. It was all so easy and friendly and informal. The waiters came with tray after tray of beer and brandy. Martha, drinking brandy and ginger beer as usual, was instinctively regulating the flame of her intoxication: the men might get staggeringly drunk, the girls should be softened by alcohol, not dissolved in it. Binkie, having returned Ruth to Donovan, switched the lights out in the big dance room, and swirled coloured lights steadily across it, in a slow persistent rhythm, which dulled the mind and heightened the senses.
Martha danced in turn with Binkie, who seemed to think that more than one dance with Perry was dangerous, with Perry, with Donovan. But it did not matter with whom one danced; it was all impersonal: one moved trancelike from one man to the next, one danced cheek to cheek, intimately, body to body, and then the music stopped, one drank again, chattered a little, and plunged back into the hot, coloured darkness of the dance room, while the music throbbed. Three times Martha found herself drawn onto the veranda by one or other of the wolves (afterwards she had to remind herself who they had been) and kissed; and always in the same way. Abruptly, without any sort of preface, she was held rigid against a hard body, whose lower half pushed against hers in an aggressive but at the same time humble way; and her head was bent back under a thrusting, teeth-bared kiss. Afterwards, he breathed heavily, like a runner, and sighed, and said, ‘I’m terrible, hey? Forgive me baby, you’ll forgive me.’ And to this the spirit of the place made Martha reply graciously, ‘It’s all right, Perry,’ or Douggie or Binkie; ‘it’s all right, don’t worry.’ She should have said, ‘Don’t worry, kid’ but that word would not come off her tongue. She wanted to laugh; at the same time she found it revolting that they should become so humble and apologetic, while in those humble eyes was such an aggressive gleam. Each kiss was a small ceremony of hatred; and at the fourth occasion, when some anonymous youth began compulsively tugging her towards the veranda, she resisted, and saw his baleful glance.
‘Toffee-nosed, hey?’ he demanded. And afterwards, at the table, he indicated Martha to the others, and said, ‘This baby’s toffee-nosed, she’s…’ And he made a show of shivering and holding a coat around him and chattering his teeth.
Donovan suddenly called, ‘Well, Matty dear, and how are you?’ and it was only after she had seen a couple of the young men exchange grimaces in the direction of Donovan that she understood Donovan had been watching her all evening, that for some reason these young men’s attentions to her were a challenge to Donovan. She saw, too, that he was pleased because she had been found lacking. She sat quietly at the end of the table, feeling hurt, and confused; her own idea of herself was destroyed. That other veiled personage that waits, imprisoned, in every woman, to be released by love, that person she feels to be (obstinately and against the evidence of all experience) what is real and enduring in her, was tremblingly insecure. She hated Donovan, with a pure, cool contempt; she looked at the young men, and despised them passionately.
When Perry, for the second time, danced her out of the big room, through the dancing couples on the veranda, and to the steps, she went with him easily. ‘But it’s muddy,’ she said, laughing nervously, looking out at the playing fields, which were saturated with water and moonlight.
‘Never mind,’ said Perry. ‘Never mind, baby.’ He tugged at her arm, and when she did not follow him, picked her up, and lifted her down. She could hear his feet squelching through the heavy mud. He carried her around the corner of the building, and without putting her down kissed her.
This was something different, being suspended strongly, in space. Perry, the individual, was merging easily into that ideal figure, a young strong man, who wooed that other ideal person within her (veiled, but certainly lovely), when she suddenly cried out, ‘Perry, my dress!’
‘What’s the matter, kid?’ asked Perry, annoyed but devoted. ‘What have I done?’
She felt a coldness strike down her thigh, and, peering with difficulty over the thick curve of his arm, said, ‘My dress is torn.’ And it was.
‘Baby, I’m sorry, I’m a clumsy brute,’ said Perry sentimentally; and he carried her back to the veranda, squelch, squelch, through the moon-gilded puddles. There she stood, on the steps, examining the damage.
She understood there was a silence, people were watching. Her spirits rose in a defiant wave of elation, and she cried gaily, ‘Don, you were quite right, my dress is torn.’ She walked calmly to the table, holding the gaping cloth together over her naked thigh, and stood beside Donovan, while Perry followed, muttering, ‘Kid, I’m sorry. You kill me. You’ll be the death of me.’
Donovan was silent for a critical moment, then he shrieked with laughter. Everyone joined in. It was a relieved laughter, a little hysterical. Donovan said, ‘Well, I can’t do anything without a needle and thread.’
Binkie told a waiter to go and get these things. The waiter protested, sulkily, that he did not know where to find them, and was dismissed peremptorily with ‘Go on, Jim. Don’t argue. If I say needle and thread, then get them.’ He waved his hand dismissingly, and the waiter went away; and returned after a few minutes with the things.
Donovan, again master of the situation, laughed, and stitched up Martha’s dress, while Ruth blinked her short-sighted eyes and watched in her quiet interested way, and Donovan said that Martha was a disgusting girl, she had mud on her dress. For some reason, this incident had released them all into gay amity. Martha sat beside Donovan, who held her hand; Ruth held Donovan’s on the other side; Perry lounged beside Martha, watching her curiously. Outside, between the veranda pillars, the moon flooded wild and fitful light over the ruffling dark water. The gum trees moved their black hulking shapes over the stars. The music came pulsing steadily from inside. It was midnight. Some of the older people were going home, smiling in a way which suggested that while youth must have its due, it should not, nevertheless, demand too much. Binkie was muttering, like a storm warning, ‘Let’s break it up, kids, come on, let’s break it up.’
Inside, during the next dance, they broke it up. Whooping and yelling, stamping and surging, they flung themselves indiscriminately around the room, while the band played and played and played, pulling rhythm from their instruments with steady fingers, smiling with conscious power, as if it were they, the human beings, who directed the movements of jerking, lolling marionettes below. Martha caught a glimpse, over Perry’s arm, of Donovan, dancing loose-limbed, like a jointed doll, flinging out his arms and legs around him, his black hair falling in thick locks over his face, and smiling in a way which plainly said, ‘This is quite idiotic, I’m doing it because it’s the thing.’ Ruth, now no longer cool and possessed, jerked unregarded in the pumping arms of Binkie, with a look of patient suffering on her face. And Martha realized that the ridiculous suffering look was the same as that on her own face; she did not like this, she could not let her
self go into it. At the moment she became aware of that critical and untouched person within herself, she looked at Perry, and thought in a flash, Despite what he wants us to think, it’s the same with him. Perry, apparently, was in a trance of violence. He was letting his shoulders rise and fall convulsively; his eyes rolled to the ceiling, darted sideways with a flash of white eyeball, and settled glazedly in a stare at the floor. His whole body shuddered and rocked and shook; and all the time he was quite unaffected, for when, by chance, Martha encountered for a moment those blue eyes as they rolled past her, she saw them possessed only on the surface, for underneath they were cool and observant, absorbed in appreciative direction of his frenzy. ‘Look how madly we are behaving,’ that deep gleam seemed to say. At the same time, it disliked being noticed: during that second when Martha’s eyes and Perry’s met, it was exactly as if two people supposed to be wholly absorbed in a religious ceremony, turn to spy on each other, and are annoyed and embarrassed to see the other’s treachery. She wanted to giggle; she did laugh, nervously; and he pressed her close, as if to say, ‘Do be quiet,’ and said, ‘Baby, you’re killing me.’ He let out an agonized groan, which made her laugh again.
No, like Ruth, she could not enjoy it. At the end of the first dance—that is, the first dance of abandon—she went back to the table on the veranda, leaving Perry to find someone else, and saw Donovan, already calm and composed, his black hair sleek as ever, sitting with Ruth.