The girl whose coat had been lying on the mattress we had taken apparently noticed WC had commandeered her place, and came flying up to see if her coat was still there. She was a bright-haired girl unfashionably dressed in a print frock, and her rounded breasts, not divided and pressed into a uniform pointedness by the American brassière that was accepted as a decree of desirability by Johannesburg women of all classes, suggested a farm girl. She was panting and warm from the dance and the twist and pressure of her body against her rumpled belt and the seams of her sleeves as she caught up the coat had something of the sensuous emanation of the bodies of children sweaty with hard play. She seemed to make nonsense of what John was saying. Not because she was Afrikaans, obviously poor, and neither suffering from nor even sufficiently burdened with sophistication to know that there was such a thing as a guilt feeling, but because she was in a moment of completely unthinking living, and he, a young, good-looking man, was capable only of dry observation.
I felt again the sense of drift, of alienation from the abstractions coming out of people’s mouths — my own and others — that came to me sometimes at the highest point of a discussion. It would seem to me that the creaking ropes that attached talk to living raveled out with a thin snap and what I was listening to and saying with such intensity floated away as unconnected with my living being as a kite to the earth from which its string has been cut. Now I felt myself living and aware as part of the dank, dusty dark where contact with other men and women was the brush of a hand or the momentary warmth of a thigh bumped against you, rather than speech. The way they managed to dance on the rough floor, cavorting breathlessly, or pressed together, the girl’s head limp on the man’s shoulder, the man’s face turned to her hair, in the spell of concentration desire puts suddenly upon people, gave the tomblike place a contrast of warm-blooded life, a sort of human impudence which made the air sensual. I felt closer to the young Afrikaans girl than to the friends with whom I lived.
Herby, too, seemed slightly excited by the Cellar, and gave only a distracted half-attention to John. He had managed to get some wine. There were no glasses so we had to gulp it out of the bottle, and it became clear from the teasing way he pressed it upon me and kept asking me what I thought of the place, that he intended to neglect the girl friend and attach himself to me. When he pulled me up to dance I found myself looking at the line of his jowl, the thick skin uneven with shallow shining holes like the bubble holes in a slice of cheese, and noting without pity or regret his complete lack of attraction and the way my body automatically held well away from his and even my hand, loosely in his, kept a withdrawn formality of its own. He would think that we were dancing like this out of respect for me because I was not an “easy” girl and he would not believe that I would dance pressed close with my legs interlaced with a man’s like the people around us. He would go on for years thinking this about all the girls of his own world, all the girls who were proud and good-looking and able to talk on his own level of intelligence: that casual love-making was only to be had where he got it, from girls who were inferior and did not interest him outside the relief of sex.
While I was thinking this about him and we were dancing he was talking to me and I was answering with a certain exertion of charm which was a little unkind, but which the atmosphere brought out in me almost without my volition. Every time we danced near the stair he would crane his neck to see the people still coming in although the place was already crowded, and when this had happened several times he explained: “Isa’s having some friends and she said she might come along. I promised I’d keep a look out so’s I could get them in.”
It seemed a very long time before they came.
They won’t come, I kept telling myself, make up your mind they’re not coming. I never took my eyes off the stair, through the well of which people appeared feet first, so that sometimes they paused with only the bottom half of their bodies visible and I had to wait to make sure that those were not the thin calves of Isa, the brogues of Paul. Jenny said: “Oh good! Do keep a watch out, Herby? They may not see us in this dingy hole.” But I did not know whether I wanted them to come or not: in case Paul should be with another girl; in case he should see me in the context of dancing with Herby. Yet the fact that he might be coming was hardly the surprise of something unimagined, to me. He had been in my mind in the power of his absence all the evening; my sympathetic pleasure in the atmosphere of the place, my warmth toward the odd-looking young men and the cheap, yearning girls, was the softening toward all human frailty that comes from one’s own sudden involvement in wanting and loving. Even the cold appraisement of the accepted for the outsider which I had given poor Herby had been really a measure of Paul’s irresistibility, of the eagerness of my response to Paul rather than the nonexistence of my response to Herby.
When they did come it must have been at a moment when politeness had forced me to look away from the stair to answer someone, for suddenly the American boy whom I had seen once with Edna Schiller caught Herby by the shoulder and said exasperatingly: “Good God. — You’re a bloody fool, Herb? We been battling half an hour to get in without your fraternity pin.” Herby broke out in fusses and apologies like a hen flying up off the nest but before he could convince the American that we had been watching, the rest of the party pushed their way up headed by an Isa stimulated by the argument at the door and glinting sharply, in the dimness and her dark dress, with earrings and some kind of broad metal belt. Her quick eyes and the whiteness of her small face and hands caught the light in the same way as her jewelry; darkness did not put her out, make her a vague shape and scent like the other women. The whole force of her personality was defined against the softness, a little knife showing steely and keen in a wicked ripple on dark ground. With her was Paul and a big, beautiful blonde girl.
We looked at each other for a moment like people who look across the water between the deck of a ship and the quayside and then he came over to me and sat down next to me. I had made some sort of conventional laughing greeting to him as well as to the others, but though he had answered the rest with his usual fluent gaiety, he had said nothing to me. He leaned across me to speak to them and his hand pressed down firmly on my thigh as he did so. The gesture was not expedience. The grip of his thumb and his four fingers on my flesh made that clear.
When the music started again he got up and held out his hand for me. He edged a way for us through the groups of men who stood laughing, arguing for attention around slowly smiling girls, and neither resisted nor moved as you pushed past, and as we went through a gauze of thin light I saw a girl turn her head swiftly to look at him; a look that opened her lips and showed a glint of teeth, like the hidden pistil in the softness of a flower. We were buffeted by the soft, blind shapes on the floor; now and then a voice said lightly — sorry! All the ugly, mysterious place turned slowly round us; Christ, the bulbous nude, the candles in their tin holders, the vents high up on the wall that, as you passed beneath them, breathed the fresh night like a queer reminder. Men without girls stood watching the dancers, their hands hanging as if something had just fallen from them.