Chapter 28

CHAPTER XXVIII.

Towards sunset the fair itself became quiescent. It was the hour
for the dancing to begin. At one side of the village of tents a
space had been roped off. Acetylene lamps, hung round it on
posts, cast a piercing white light. In one corner sat the band,
and, obedient to its scraping and blowing, two or three hundred
dancers trampled across the dry ground, wearing away the grass
with their booted feet. Round this patch of all but daylight,
alive with motion and noise, the night seemed preternaturally
dark. Bars of light reached out into it, and every now and then
a lonely figure or a couple of lovers, interlaced, would cross
the bright shaft, flashing for a moment into visible existence,
to disappear again as quickly and surprisingly as they had come.

Denis stood by the entrance of the enclosure, watching the
swaying, shuffling crowd. The slow vortex brought the couples
round and round again before him, as though he were passing them
in review. There was Priscilla, still wearing her queenly toque,
still encouraging the villagers--this time by dancing with one of
the tenant farmers. There was Lord Moleyn, who had stayed on to
the disorganised, passoverish meal that took the place of dinner
on this festal day; he one-stepped shamblingly, his bent knees
more precariously wobbly than ever, with a terrified village
beauty. Mr. Scogan trotted round with another. Mary was in the
embrace of a young farmer of heroic proportions; she was looking
up at him, talking, as Denis could see, very seriously. What
about? he wondered. The Malthusian League, perhaps. Seated in
the corner among the band, Jenny was performing wonders of
virtuosity upon the drums. Her eyes shone, she smiled to
herself. A whole subterranean life seemed to be expressing
itself in those loud rat-tats, those long rolls and flourishes of
drumming. Looking at her, Denis ruefully remembered the red
notebook; he wondered what sort of a figure he was cutting now.
But the sight of Anne and Gombauld swimming past--Anne with her
eyes almost shut and sleeping, as it were, on the sustaining
wings of movement and music--dissipated these preoccupations.
Male and female created He them...There they were, Anne and
Gombauld, and a hundred couples more--all stepping harmoniously
together to the old tune of Male and Female created He them. But
Denis sat apart; he alone lacked his complementary opposite.
They were all coupled but he; all but he...

Somebody touched him on the shoulder and he looked up. It was
Henry Wimbush.

"I never showed you our oaken drainpipes," he said. "Some of the
ones we dug up are lying quite close to here. Would you like to
come and see them?"

Denis got up, and they walked off