*chapter Xv*

*THE BITE IN THE KISS*

But von Herrnung was saying, as they moved with a straggling procession of similar pleasure-seekers, over smooth sanded pathways between beds of geranium and verbena and lobelia, ivy-leaved geranium and gaily coloured foliage-plants, bordered with little twinkling lamps:

“Shall I tell you what I have just heard as those people passed us? The tall man with the white moustache, and the chic little woman in the Spanish mantilla. She told her friend that we make a handsome couple. Perhaps that makes you a little angry? … Shall I make you still more angry? Well then, listen? … If we were really a couple you would not have that so-black hair…”

“Why not?” He had roused her curiosity. She put away the little damp, laced handkerchief. “Would your cruel usage of me have turned it white?”

“Not that, but you would have added the one touch that makes perfection. You are too sombre—too much like a night in October with all that cloudy blackness… You would have bleached and dyed your hair—not 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 pre-eminent in the hideous display. Now the woman sank towards the ground, with supple limbs outstretched and her wild head thrown back in fierce surrender. Her white fangs gleamed, her dumb mouth seemed to roar. And as her conqueror crept stealthily towards her, the play of his great muscles could be seen beneath his civilised attire, as though his supple body had been clothed with the tawny-golden, black-dappled hide of the Brazilian jaguar.

As Herculano crouched and sprang, La Rivadavia’s muscles visibly tightened. She bounded high, turned in the act… Their gleaming fangs clashed in mid-air. And from the massed spectators came a hiss of excitement, “Th-h-h! …” like the hissing of a thousand snakes.

“Great Scott!” Patrine heard herself saying. “Great—Scott!”

She no longer heard von Herrnung harshly breathing behind her… He had moved to the leftward. His tall, broad-shouldered figure now stood against the railing some dozen feet away. His well-cut face, seen in profile, was purplish-red to the crisp, scarlet waves topping his high square forehead. The big white hands that held the glasses glued to his eyes, jerked, and as he pressed against the railing Patrine knew that he was shuddering. Now he looked at her, and his ravaged face was terrifying to the girl.

“Will you not…” he began, thickly.

She quivered, cast a look about; saw the ugly emotion under which he laboured reflected in every face within her range of vision, as round after round of plaudits rose to the roof of the pavilion, escaping through the wide-open spaces between its gilded, rose-twined pillars into the night. The rafters vibrated with demands for a repetition of the popular sensation. The dancers accepted the encore.

If von Herrnung beckoned now, asking Patrine to go down with him amongst the acrid exhalations of that cockpit of variegated lights, thronged with excited men and strangely-bedizened women, rent by devastating emotions, drunk with strange excitements, would Patrine say Yes or No? …

Ouf! but it was hot. How thick the air was with those illusion perfumes. And from whence was that cool breeze blowing that suddenly freshened the heavy air? …