The Town By The Sea

ALL RIGHT, MADAME!

Even from a distance young people could be seen crowding round Madame Rogale-Piontkovskaya's establishment. Some lazily nibbled sunflower seeds as they watched the lucky ones who strode in through the open doors without bothering about the price. Others, more impatient, stepped, back to the fence on the other side of the road and stood on tip-toe to see through the high windows into the hall, whence came the sound of music and the shuffle of dancing feet.

After paying the ticket-seller in the plaid frock a whole fifty kopeks, I entered a long hall with cracked papier mache columns. The air was stuffy and reeked of powder and cheap scent.

A few couples were moving stiffly up and down the middle of the hall in a sort of march, which I afterwards discovered was called a "fox-trot."

Young men with blank, pompous faces, now rising on their toes and stepping forward, now taking two steps back piloted their wilting girl friends round the stuffy hall. They seemed very proud of being able to walk round like this, keeping up the monotonous rhythm and performing a few simple steps before an audience of resting dancers and people like myself who had merely come to look on. I could not see anyone who looked like the owner of the establishment and I waited impatiently for Madame Rogale-Piontkovskaya to appear.

As I watched Madame Rogale-Piontkovskaya's clients amusing themselves, I could not help remembering the dances that used to be held at the Party School in our town. I often used to go to them before I joined the factory-training school. They were quite different.

The student musicians would take their places on the platform and their brass band would rock the lofty ceiling of the former convent chapel, which had now been made into a club. Everything was so jolly and gay that even the saints whose faces still adorned the walls seemed to enjoy the blaring music, while the Lord of Sabaoth, standing in his sandaled feet above the slogan "Peace to the cottage, war to the palace!" looked ready to bound into the dance himself, together with his winged angels and Moses the Prophet.

The students and their girl friends from the suburbs danced the mazurka in proper ballroom style and no one, of course, paid any particular attention to the patched, down-at-heel boots of the men and the wooden clogs that some of the girls were wearing.

There were swift Hungarian dances and smooth graceful waltzes. Gay Cracoviennes followed the Pas

d'Espagne, and if Boiko, the natural history lecturer, asked the band to play his favourite "Chinese polka," with its crouching down and other antics, there was not a person in the hall who would not join the line of dancers.

I, too, joined in that dance, bending my knees and waddling across the hall, with my fingers pointing now to the right, now to the left.

Once I found myself paired up with the old cook Makhteich. He had come to ask the duty man when to ring the bell for supper and Boiko had dragged him into the dance. To the tap of the kettle-drums, Makhteich and I whirled round the hall, nearly cannoning into the platform with its glittering array of brass trumpets. I noticed the smell of buckwheat porridge, fried meat and onions coming from my "lady" and guessed for certain what the students were going to have for supper.

There was much fun and Laughter at those student dances. Friendly land unrestrained, they made you feel gay. They bubbled with youth. They were the dances of a brave, active body of men who wanted to relax and have a good time.

But what was it here? Could you call this a dance? These people were like a lot of statues walking about! No one had anything to do with his neighbour and they all seemed to think they were dancing better than anyone else. But there wasn't any real dancing at all!

Suddenly I burst out laughing. One of the dancers— a sallow-faced man with la pointed black moustache— seemed to think I was laughing at him and glanced threateningly in my direction.

"My dear neighbour, can it be you? What progress you're making!" exclaimed a voice at my elbow.

I turned round. It was Angelika. She stood before me in a spotted green dress, her white even teeth gleaming in a smile. Now I was cornered.

"Good evening!" I said holding out my hand.

"Do you dance? I'd never have thought it! A quiet boy like you..."

"I just came to have a look," I grunted, glancing round to see if there was anyone else who knew me in the hall.

"Now, now!" Angelika wagged her finger at me. "You can't fool me... Oh, good, here's Madame Rogale-Piontkovskaya. She'll play now instead of that awful pianist." And standing on her toes she cupped her hands round her mouth and called out: "Glafira Pavlovna, we should like a Charleston!"

A stout, grey-haired woman in a black dress with very pink cheeks looked round at the shout. No, she was not a bit like the skinny countess of Zarechye! This "Madame" looked more like the owner of a butcher's stall.

."That little fellow is your Madame Piontkovskaya's husband, I suppose?" I whispered to Lika, nodding towards the pianist.

"Goodness, no!" Lika exclaimed indignantly. "She used to be married to an engineer who got killed by a stray bullet lat Uman. Uman's somewhere in your part of the country, isn't it?"

"Nowhere near! It's another day's journey to Uman from us," I said and noted mentally that Golovatsky's story and what Lika had told me partially coincided.

The little pianist in a long greasy dress-coat reaching to his knees looked like a grasshopper perched on its hind legs. He obsequiously offered Madame Rogale-Piontkovskaya the piano stool. Madame gathered up her skirts and sat down. The stool groaned under her weight. Madame paused with her plump bejewelled fingers raised above the keys. "Do you Charleston?" Angelika whispered to me, but my reply was drowned by a thunderous chord. For a moment I could not decide whether this was the new dance or whether Madame had suddenly decided to break up her piano. "Come on, it's a

Charleston!" Lika cried. "But I don't know how..."

"Nonsense! It's a very easy dance. Just look at my feet and you'll soon learn."

Lika dragged me out into the middle of the hall and planted her hand on my shoulder.

Several couples were already jerking to and fro around us. Bright-coloured dresses whirled before my eyes.

I looked down and watched the long brown legs of my partner intently. It was as if Angelika had got tired of having any feet at all and was trying to kick them off. Her legs seemed to be hinged in two or three places; she kept throwing a leg up, waggling it and then stepping towards me.

"Saint Vitus's dance!" I thought, waggling my legs at the knees until the bones cracked. Then an idea occurred to me. Remembering the student dances back home, I grasped Angelika wildly round the waist and started whirling her across the floor, bobbing up and down, as we used to in the "Chinese polka."

She looked at me with startled and rather angry eyes. But just as I was going to take a sharp turn, my right foot trod on something soft and slippery. I staggered into Madame Rogale-Piontkovskaya, giving her a violent jab in the back with my elbow.

The tune of the Charleston broke off for a moment and in the silence that followed a word reached me which, though not very loud, stung me like a whip-lash.

"Lout!"

Jumping away from the piano, I saw the dancing mistress's rouged face twisted with annoyance. It must have been she who had flung that insulting word at me. But the anger on Madame's face was soon replaced by a set smile, and as if to make up for lost time, she strummed even louder and faster on the piano. Perhaps Angelika did not hear the insult directed at me, perhaps she simply pretended not to have heard it. I swung my partner to the right, towards the stream of fresh air flowing from the entrance, and led her off the floor.

"Well, you are a clod-hopper!" Lika said, halfjoking, half contemptuous. "The music plays one thing, and you just ignore the tune completely and start dancing some sort of barn dance. You've got no ear for music at all! No idea of rhythm!"

"I don't know about that, all I know is that people who like pushing round in heat like this must be mad!"

"They can do the Charleston, and you can't. But why get angry about it?" Lika said soothingly.

"Wouldn't it be better to go out in a boat on an evening like this?"

And as I spoke, my eye rested on an apple core squashed on the floor. So that was what had earned me the title of "lout!" All right, Madame! We'll see who's the lout. You charge fifty kopeks for admission, you old screw, and you can't even keep the place tidy!

"Do you like boating?" Lika asked, waving her scented handkerchief.

"Who doesn't?" I said unguardedly.

"Then you know what? Let's get away from here and go down to the sea!" And again Angelika seized my arm.

We had not walked five steps down Genoa Street when we ran into Zuzya.

"Where to, Lika?" the dandy asked spreading his arms.

"Down to the sea with a young man!" she flung out coquettishly. "By the way, do you know each other?"

"Trituzny!" the dandy drawled and without so much as a glance at me held out his big paw.

I shook it without pleasure and said my name.

"A thousand pardons, my dear! Ivan Fyodorovich detained me. Temper justice with mercy and come back. Today they'll be playing that tango My Heart's in Rags. We'll learn it together. The words..."

But I had had enough. The dandy was simply refusing to acknowledge my existence.

"Come on, Angelika, let's get going, or we'll be bitten all over by the mosquitoes later on!" I said gruffly, and she went with me.