That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day
yellow, nor yet orange--nor even flame.... The colour of beech-leaves
in winter, as one sees them burning against a snow-bank. And--all the
women would be crazy with jealousy--and all the men would be dying at
your feet! For you would be Isis then--you would be the Sphinx-woman of
whom La Forgue wrote and Colette has sung to us. You would be
hellishly, divinely beautiful!"
"Hellish again." She gave her low, deep laugh, prolonging it a trifle
stagily. "What do you bet me I don't--do what you said?"
"Bleach and dye...?"
"That's it." She nodded. "To the colour of--what was it?
'Beech-leaves in winter.' ..."
"Against a snow-bank." He added: "The snow is your wonderful skin. And
I will bet you four hundred and twenty marks--that is twenty pounds
English. Is it agreed? ... Do you not say--Done? ..."
"Twenty pounds...." She shrugged her big white shoulders. "My dear
man, I haven't got twenty pounds in this blessed old world!"
He hesitated; finally said with reluctance:
"I will lend you twenty pounds--it will cost you twenty pounds to have
your hair done here in Paris.... But you will be _sehr schoen_--the
money will be well spent. No? ..."--for she had shaken her head,
frowning. "It is offered--why will you not accept?"
"Because I won't.... There are some things I draw the line at.
Borrowing money's one of them."
"Then I will bet you my magpie pearl--you may have seen it"--he
displayed the ornamented little finger--"against that not-very-good
diamond you wear on your left hand."
She burst out laughing and repeated through her laughter: "'Not very
good.' I call that insulting.... When it cost me fifteen francs in the
Palais Royal. Well, done with you!"
"It is done! But you have not done with me." Von Herrnung's tone had a
new note of triumph. He urged: "You go back to London--when? ... The
day after to-morrow.... _Gut!_ ... I have myself to visit London upon
business--I shall see Isis with her beautiful new hair. One thing more.
An address where I may call and see it. Be quick! We turn down here!
..."
Patrine protested, peering with narrowed eyes through the dusk-blue
twinkling semi-darkness. "But no! ... That big marquee-thing at the end
of this avenue--with all the festoons of lights and the ring of
promenade about it--surely that's the _Pavilion de la Danse_?"
"_Halt den Mund!_" His hand closed peremptorily on her arm: he hurried
her down the trellised vine walk that invited on the left of them, as
light measured footsteps padded on the gravel, and a man ran past
calling, as it seemed, to somebody ahead:
"Miss Saxham ahoy! ... Lady Beauvayse----"
"He's calling me. It's Captain Courtley...." Patrine persisted.
"Let him call! Are you not with me?" Von Herrnung's tone was
masterful. "You shall go to him when you have given me that London
address!"
She was amused and yet annoyed by his persistency.
"Oh, all right! 'The Ladies' Social Club, Short Street, Piccadilly,
West.' That's where I'm generally to be found when I'm in town."
"_Sehr gut_! Tell me once again, then I shall not forget, no!"
"Write it on your cuff!"
"It is written in a safer place," he told her. "We Prussian officers
are trained to remember without writing things down. A face, an
address, a conversation, the outlines of a country. Though for
_reconnaissance_ there is nothing like _die Photographie_." He added:
"When we meet in London I shall be able to tell you everything you wore
to-night."
"Really! ... How flattering! ... You've made a mental inventory?"
They were retracing their steps to the avenue recently quitted. He
walked with noiseless strides behind the tall, supple figure as it moved
between the trellised vines and roses, gowned with its flaunting diadem,
robed in the insincere splendours of the opera-mantle already described.
"As you say. I shall be able to tell you that the back of your _mantel_
was cut in a V-shape nearly reaching to your waist-line. Shall I tell
you why?"
"If you're keen to...." She felt a scorching breath between her
shoulders and quickened her pace, making for the avenue. But he moved
with her, his voice came thickly: "Because your back is so superbly
beautiful you cannot bear to hide it from men!"
"_Ah-h!_"
She whirled about, glaring like an angry leopardess, her strong white
arm upraised to strike. Face, throat, and bosom glowed with painful
crimson. Between her violated, insulted shoulders, his furious kiss
still burned and stung.
"How dare you touch me!" she gasped. But he had shot past her even as
she turned. He was running towards the avenue, calling gaily:
"Were you looking for us, Lady Beauvayse? Here we are!"
"Cad, cad!" she stammered. "Insufferable! beastly!" Then, because a
scene was quite out of the question, she went forward with head held
high, and resentment heaving her broad bosom, to meet Lady Beauvayse.
"Pat! You needle in a haystack," cried her friend, "where did you get
to?"
"Nowhere. We missed you at the Cafe Concert," Patrine began.
"And then," von Herrnung explained, "we happened to take the wrong turn.
But we have not gone far before we are recalled."
"--To the path of probity," suggested Lady Beauvayse, adding: "And in
this instance the path of probity leads to the _Pavilion de Chahut_."
She explained to Patrine: "_Chahut_ is the modern version of the
_can-can_--famous in the days of the Second Empire; when the great
cocodettes of the Court of the Tuileries--rivals of Cora Pearl and
Skittles and other naughty persons--did high-kicking under the rose
here, and they called the place Mabille."
It was not easy to get near the Pavilion, so dense and variegated a
crowd had congregated before its illuminated entrance. But the entrance
fee was doubled. Gold must be paid to see the famous Sao Paulo dance.
Thus many would-be pleasure-seekers of the less affluent kind turned
back disappointed from the row of gilt turnstiles under the blazing
archway, compelled to content themselves with the outer promenade.
Breasting the human eddy caused by these, Patrine and her party passed
the barrier, climbed a flight of shallow gilt marble stairs carpeted
with pink plush and decorated with roses and tree-ferns and reached the
elevated promenade. Set within the circumference of the outer one, it
commanded a complete view of the circular ball-room, to whose level
descended from it at intervals yet other flights of broad gilt stairs,
similarly carpeted and flower-decked for the convenience of those who
wished to join the dancers, or return from the ball-room to the level of
the promenade.
The revels were in full swing. Standing upon the brink, looking down as
into a cockpit, you saw Patrine, superb in her false diadem and mock
ermines, leaning her bare white hand upon a velvet-covered rail. At
first she could only make out a giddying whirl of arms and heads and
shoulders. Presently, the picture began to clear.
To the wail, clang and clash of strange, discordant, exotic music,
rendered by an orchestra of coloured performers, two wide circles of
dancers rhythmically spun. The floors they danced on were set at
different levels, and rotated automatically,--each floor revolving in a
different direction. Coloured lights, flung at intervals from reflectors
in the ceiling, conveyed to Patrine the impression of staring down upon
the whirling planes of a huge gyroscopic top.
Only the central space of shining parquet was void within the double
circle of gyrating dancers. A crash from the orchestra and three
couples, oddly costumed, leaped suddenly out upon the floor. Patrine
could not make out where they had come from. They appeared, and there
was a slight commotion. A hedge of applauding spectators, four or five
deep, formed about the central, stationary patch of parquet. The music
changed, the six Brazilians began the famous dance.
They were not beautiful to look at it seemed to Patrine, the men,
familiarly styled by voices in the crowd as Lauro, Pedro, and Herculano,
being undersized, sleek-headed, lithe and sallow, attired in faultlessly
fitting evening dress-coats, white vests, black satin knee-breeches,
black silks, and buckled pumps. They wore shallow collars of curious
cut, lawn-frilled shirts and wide black neckties. Their female
companions were swarthy as Indians, even through their paint, and plain
of feature. But their superb hair and eyes, the rounded grace of hip
and waist and limb, the slenderness of throat and wrist and ankle,
testified, like their tiny feet and high-arched insteps, to a strain of
Spanish blood.
"La Rivadavia, Alexandrina, and Silvana," the eager spectators named
them. They wore transparent sheaths, and brief, oddly _bouffante_
overskirts, like flounced muslin lamp-shades with a boldly suggestive
forward tilt. They began the dance with some familiar Tango figures.
The poses, the approaches, the hesitations, were well known to Patrine.
"Nothing very new.... But--the music made by those buck niggers!
'_Bizzarramente_' isn't the word for it. One expects to see gombos
covered with serpent-skin, trumpets of elephant-tusk, skull-rattles, and
all the paraphernalia of Obeah in the orchestra, instead of those huge,
superb brass wind-instruments, cymbals as big as table-tops and ten-foot
silver trumpets, like poor de Souza's.... Raised in the States, but
wasn't he a Brazilian by birth?" It was the voice of Lady Beauvayse,
and von Herrnung's answered from behind Patrine:
"It may be so. But the _Blechinstrumente_ and the
_Blasinstrumente_--for the biggest of those they have to go to Germany.
Nowhere else can they be made as there.... Bravo! ... _Bis--bis!_"
He applauded.... Everybody was applauding. The gyroscopic whirl of
dancers had become stationary. All now were eager spectators. And the
three couples from Sao Paulo had reached the culminating point of a
uniquely curious and exotic figure. Savage and violent, sinuous and
creeping; suggestive of the nocturnal gambols of enamoured jaguars, in
the deep primeval forests of Brazil.
"Horrid! One expects them to lash tails and roar.... I've got what Mrs.
Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch called 'cold clams walking up my backbone.'"
Lady Beauvayse shuddered and made a pretty grimace. "All the same I
think I'll go down and look at them a little closer. Ah-h! ... Good
grapes! Why, he simply picked her up by the scruff of the neck with his
teeth and shook her.... I've just _got_ to see that done over again!"
She was gone, with a whisk of the emerald bird of paradise and a waft of
_parfum tres persistant_. Captain Courtley vanished in her wake.
Patrine made no motion to follow them.
The tense excitement, the pungent exhalations rising from the crowded
ball-room were affecting her brain. She felt giddy, and the steady
pressure of the crowd behind her was thrusting her to the very verge of
the promenade. She yielded automatically, unconscious of danger near.
You are to see her there, poised on the verge of the rose-carpeted
precipice, her hand gripping the velvet-covered railing, her wide
nostrils distended, her broad bosom heaving as she inhaled the sultry,
vitiated atmosphere, heavy with a myriad perfumes, tainted by a thousand
breaths. Her stare, lifeless as the enamelled, glittering regard of
some Princess-mummy of Old Egypt, was fixed upon the artists, of whom
two couples had retired, as though in despair of competition with the
chief favourites, leaving La Rivadavia and her comrade Herculano in
possession of the floor.
And the passions expressed by the rhythmical, sinuous movements of these
dancers grew moment by moment less human, and more bestial. Art of the
most consummate was displayed and degraded. Beauty and Truth shone