sibilantly crescendic with an occasional soberly clad male on the outer fringe of thecolorful clattering like rocks dumbly imponderable about the cauldron where seethed an hysterical tideflux. These men spoke to one another from the sides of their mouths and, when addressed by the ladies, with bleak and swift affability, from the teeth outward. Harry’s bald bullet head moved among his guests, borne hither and you upon the harsh uproar of his voice; presently, when the recital would have gotten underway and the ladies engaged, he would begin to lead the men one by one and on tiptoe from the room and up the back stairs to his apartments.
But now the guests stood, and drifted and chattered, anticipatory and unceasing, and every minuteor two Harry gravitated again to the diningroom,on the table of which his daughter’s gifts and flowerswere arrayed and beside which little Belle in her palelilac dress stood in a shining-eyed and breathless ecstasy.
“Daddy’s gal,” Harry, in his tight, silver-gray gabardine suit and his bright tie with the diamond stud, chortled, putting his short thick hands on her; then together they examined the latest addition to the array of gifts with utter if dissimilar sincerity—little Belle with quiet and shining diffidence, her father stridently, tactlessly overloud. Harry was smoking his cigarettes steadily, scattering ash; he had receptacles of them open on every available flat surface throughout the lighted rooms. “How’s the boy?” he added, shaking Horace’s hand.
“Will you look at that sumptuous bouquet Horace has brought your daughter,”Mrs. Marders said. “Horace, it’s really a shame. She’d have appreciated a toyor a doll much more, wouldn’t you, honey? Are you trying to make Belle jealous?”
Little Belle gave Horace her flying stars again. Harry squatted before her,“Did Horace bring daddy’s gal some flowers?” he brayed. “Just look at the flowers Horace brought her.” He put his hands on her again. Mrs. Marders said quickly:
“You’ll burn her dress with that cigarette, Harry.”
“Daddy’s gal don’t care,” Harry answered. “Buy her a new dress tomorrow.” But little Belle freed herself, craning her soft brown head in alarm, trying to see the back of her frock, and then Belle entered in pink beneath a dark blue frothing of tulle, and the rich bloody auburn of her hair. Little Belle showed her Horace’s bouquet, and she knelt and fingered and patted little Belle’s hair, and smoothed her dress.
“Did you thank him?” she asked. “I know you didn’t.”
“Of course she did,” Horace interposed. “Just as you thank providence for breath every time you breathe.” Little Belle looked up at him with her grave ecstatic shining. “We think girls should always have flowers when they play music and dance,” he explained, gravely too. “Don’t we?”
“Yes,” little Belle agreed breathlessly.
“Yes, sir,” Belle corrected fretfully. Patting and pulling at her daughter’s delicate wisp of dress, “with its tiny embroidered flowers at the yoke. Belle kneeling in a soft swishing of silk, with her rich and smoldering unrepose. Harry stood with his squat, tightly clothed body, looking at Horace with the friendly, bloodshot bewilderment of his eyes
“Yes, sir,” little Belle piped obediently.
Belle rose, swishing again. “Come on, sister. It’stime to begin. And don’t forget and start pulling atyour clothes.”
The indiscriminate furniture—dining-room chairs, rockers, sofas and all— Were ranged in semicircular rows facing the corner where the piano was placed Beside the piano and above little Belle’s soft brown head and her little -sheer frock and the tense, impotent dangling of her legs, the music teacher, a thin passionate spinster with cold thwarted eyes behind nose glasses, stood. The men clung stubbornly to the rear row of chairs, their sober decorum splotched sparsely among the cacophonous hues of the women’s dresses. “With the exception of Harry, that is, who now sat with the light full on his bald crag. Just beyond him and between him and Mrs. Marders, Horace could see Narcissa’s dark burnished head. Belle sat on the front row at the end, turned sideways in her chair. The other ladies were still now, temporarily, in a sort of sibilant vacuum of sound into which the tedious labored tinkling of lit* tie Belle’s playing fell like a fairy fountain.
The music tinkled and faltered, hesitated, corrected itself to the intent nodding of little Belle’s head and the strained meagre gestures of the teacher, tinkled monotonously and tunelessly on while the . assembled guests sat in a sort of bland, waiting inattention; and Horace speculated on that persevering and senseless urge of parents (and of all adults) for making children a little ridiculous in their own eyes and in the eyes of other children. The clothes they make them wear, the stupid mature things they make them do. And he found himself wondering if to be cultured did not mean to be purged of all taste; civilized, to be robbed of all fineness of objective judgment regarding oneself. Then he remembered that little Belle also had been born a woman.
The music tinkled thinly, ceased; the teacher leaned forward with a passionate movement and removed the sheet from the rack, and the room swelled with a polite adulation of bored palms. Horace too; and little Belle turned on the bench, with her flying eyes, and Horace grinned faintly at his own masculine vanity. Sympathy here, when she was answering one of the oldest compulsions of her sex, a compulsion that taste nor culture nor anything else would ever cause to appear ridiculous to her. Then the teacher spoke to her and the turned on the bench again, with her rapt laborious fingers and the brown, intent nodding of her head.
Belle sat sideways in her chair. Her head was bent and her hands lay idle upon her lap and she sat brooding and remote. Horace watched her, the fine of her neck, the lustrous stillness of her arm; trying to project himself into that region of rich and smoldering immobility into which she had withdrawn for the while. But he could not; she did not seem to be aware of him at all; the corridors where he sought her were empty, and he moved quietly in his seat beneath the tim tinkling of the music and looked about at the other politely attentive-heads and beyond them, in the doorway, Harry making significant covert signs in his direction. Harry jerked his thumb toward his mouth and moved his head meaningly, but Horace flipped his hand briefly in reply, without moving. When he looked doorward again Harry was gone.
Little Belle ceased again. When the clapping died the heavy thump-thump-thump of Harry’s heels sounded on the ceiling above. Ridiculous, like the innocent defenseless backside of a small boy caught delving into an apple barrel, and a few of the guests cast their eyes upward in polite astonishment. Belle raised her head sharply, with an indescribable gesture, then she looked at Horace with cold and blazing irritation, enveloping, savage, disdainful of who might see. The thumping ceased, became a cautious clumsy, tipping, and Belle’s anger faded, though her gaze was still full upon him. Little Belle played again and Horace looked away from the cold fixity of Belle’s gaze, a little uncomfortably, and so saw Harry and one of the men guests enter surreptitiously and seat themselves; he turned his head again. Beneath the heavy shadow of her hair Belle still watched him, and he shaped three words with his lips. But Belle’s mouth did not change its sullen repose, nor her eyes, and then he realized that she was not looking at him at all, perhaps had never been.
Later Belle herself went to the piano and played a trite saccharine waltz and little Belle danced to it with studied, meaningless gestures top thinly conceived and too airily executed to be quite laughable, and stood with her diffident shining among the smug palms. She would have danced again, but Belle rose from the piano, and the guests rose also with prompt unanimity and surrounded her in laudatory sibilance. Belle stood-moodily beside her daughter in the center of it, and little Belle pleasurably. Horace rose also. Above the gabbling of the women he could hear Harry again overhead: thump-thump-thump, and he knew that Belle was also listening although she responded faultlessly to the shrill indistinguishable compliments of her guests. Beside little Belle the teacher stood,
