XIII
Paul moved one hand: and again Ruth cried in excitement—he was coming back to life! But the nurse said that meant nothing, the doctors had said he might move. They must not let him move his head. She took his temperature, but told them nothing.
Paul’s hands were straying over the sheet that covered him; aimlessly, here and there, as if he were picking at insects on the bed. His voice rose louder—Russian, always Russian, and Gregor would tell what the words meant. They were in the red square, and saw the armies marching, and heard the working masses shouting their slogans: they were on the playing fields with the young workers; they were in Siberia, with Mandel playing the balalaika, and having his eyes eaten out by ants. “Da zdrávstvooyet Revolútziya!”—that meant “Long live Revolution!” “Vsya vlast Soviétam!—All power to the Soviets!”
And from there they would be swept to the ballroom of the Emperor Hotel, Angel City, Radio RWKY, the Angel City Patriot broadcasting by direct control. Or was it to the heart of the Congo, where the naked savages danced to the music of the tomtom, their black bodies, smeared with palm oil, shining in the light of blazing fires? For a hundred centuries these savages had paddled the river, and never to the mind of one of them had come the thought of an engine; they had stood on the shores of mighty lakes, and never dreamed a sail. The weight of nature’s blind fecundity rested upon them, stifling their minds. And now capitalist civilization, rushing to destruction with the speed of its fastest battle-planes, cast about to find a form of expression for its irresistible will to degeneracy, and chose the tomtom of the Congo for its music, and the belly-dances of the Congo for its exercise, and so here was America, Land of Jazz.
A voice from the megaphone, raucous, shrill, and mocking:
“There’s where mah money goes,
Lipsticks and powderpuffs and sucha things like that!”
And Bunny was in that great “Emperor” ballroom, where he had danced so many a night, first with Eunice Hoyt and then with Vee Tracy. All his friends would be there tonight—Verne and Annabelle and Fred Orpan and Thelma Norman and Mrs. Pete O’Reilly and Mark Eisenberg—the cream of the plutocracy, celebrating their greatest triumph to date. There would be American flags and streamers on the walls, and some would wave little flags—a great patriotic occasion—nothing like it since the Armistice—ray for Coolidge, keep cool with Cal! The room would be crowded to suffocation, and by this hour nine-tenths of the dancers would be staggering. Large-waisted financiers with crumpled shirt-fronts, hugging stout wives or slender mistresses, with naked backs and half-naked bosoms hung with diamonds and pearls, red paint plastered on their lips and platinum bangles in their ears, shuffling round and round to the thump of the tomtom, the wail of the saxophone, the rattle and clatter of sticks, the banging of bells and snarl of stopped trumpets. “She does the camel-walk!” shrilled the singer; and the hip and buttock muscles of the large-waisted financier would be alternately contracted and relaxed, and his feet dragged about the floor in the incoordinate reactions of locomotor ataxia and spastic paraplegia.