FANCY DRESS
Just as the café-restaurant had been an intensification of ordinary life, so was the ball in Dauphin’s studio an intensification of the café-restaurant. It had more colour, more noise, more music, more heat, more varied kinds of people, and, of course, far more riotous movement than the café-restaurant. The only quality in which the café-restaurant stood first was that of sustenance. Monsieur Dauphin had not attempted to rival the café-restaurant in the matter of food and drink. And that there was no general hope of his doing so could be deduced from the fact that many of the more experienced guests arrived with bottles, fruit, sausages, and sandwiches of their own.
When Audrey and her friends entered the precincts of the vast new white building in the Boulevard Raspail, upon whose topmost floor Monsieur Dauphin painted the portraits of the women of the French, British, and American plutocracies and aristocracies, a lift full of gay-coloured figures was just shooting upwards past the wrought-iron balustrades of the gigantic staircase. Tommy and Nick stopped to speak to a columbine who hovered between the pavement and the threshold of the house.
“I don’t know whether it’s the grenadine or the lobster, or whether it’s Paris,” said Miss Ingate confidentially in the interval; “but I can scarcely tell whether I’m standing on my head or my heels.”
Before the Americans rejoined them, the lift had returned and ascended with another covey of fancy costumes, including a man with a nose a foot long and a girl with bright green hair, dressed as an acrobat. On its next journey the lift held Tommy and Nick’s party, and it held no more.
When the party emerged from it, they were greeted with a cheer, hoarse and half human, by a band of light amateur mountebanks of both sexes who were huddled in a doorway. Within a quarter of an hour Audrey and Miss Ingate, after astounding struggles in a dressing-room in which Nick alone saved their lives and reputations, appeared in Japanese disguise according to promise, and nobody could tell whether Audrey was maid, wife, or widow. She might have been a creature created on the spot, for the celestial purpose of a fancy-dress ball in Monsieur Dauphin’s studio.
The studio was very large and rather lofty. Its walls had been painted by gifted pupils of Monsieur Dauphin and by fellow-artists, with scenes of life according to Catullus, Theocritus, Propertius, Martial, Petronius, and other classical writers. It is not too much to say that the walls of the studio constituted a complete novelty for Audrey and Miss Ingate. Miss Ingate opened her mouth to say something, but, saying nothing, forgot for a long time to shut it again.
Chinese lanterns, electrically illuminated, were strung across the studio at a convenient height so that athletic dancers could prodigiously leap up and make them swing. Beneath this incoherent but exciting radiance the guests swayed and glided, in a joyous din, under the influence of an orchestra of men snouted like pigs and raised on a dais. In a corner was a spiral staircase leading to the flat roof of the studio and a view of all Paris. Up and down this corkscrew contending parties fought amiably for the right of way.
Tommy and Nick began instantly to perform introductions between Audrey and Miss Ingate and the other guests. In a few moments Audrey had failed to catch the names of a score and a half of people—many Americans, some French, some Argentine, one or two English. They were all very talented people, and, according to Miss Ingate, the most characteristically French were invariably either Americans or Argentines.
A telephone bell rang in the distance, and presently a toreador stood on a chair and pierced the music with a message of yells in French, and the room hugely guffawed and cheered.