"You'll give me a headache, you and your staying. I intend to enjoy myself. You're worse than a wet week, you are."
Jenny was standing by the window looking down into Cranbourne Street baking in the July heat.
"Isn't it shocking hot?" said Lilli.
"I think summer's simply lovely," Jenny answered.
Chapter XI: The Orient Palace of Varieties
THE Orient Palace of Varieties rose like a cliff from the drapery shops of Piccadilly. On fine summer dusks, in a mist of golden light, it possessed a certain magic of gayety; seemed to capture something of the torch-lit merriment of a country fair. As one loitered on the island, lonely and meditative, the Orient was alluring, blazed upon the vision like an enchanted cave, or offered to the London wanderer a fancy of the scents and glossy fruits and warblers of the garden where Camaralzaman lost Badoura; and in autumn, stained by rosy sunsets, the theater expressed the delicate melancholy of the season. But when the rain dripped monotonously, when fogs transformed the town, when London was London vast and gray, the Orient became unreal like the bedraggled palaces of an exhibition built to endure for a little while. After all, it was an exotic piece of architecture, and evoked an atmosphere of falseness, the falseness of an Indian gong in a Streatham hall. Yet fifty years it had stood without being rebuilt. In addition to having seen two generations pass away, something in the character of its entertainment, in the lavishness of its decoration, lent it the sacred permanence of a mausoleum, the mausoleum of mid-Victorian amusement.
The Orient did not march with the times, rising from insignificance. It never owned a chairman who announced the willingness of each successive comedian to oblige with a song. Old men never said they remembered the Orient in the jolly old days, for they could not have forgotten it. In essentials it remained the same as ever. Dancers had gone; beauties had shrivelled; but their ghosts haunted the shadowy interior. The silver-footed coryphées now kept lodging-houses; the swan-like Ballerinas wore elastic stockings; but their absence was filled by others: they were as little missed as the wave that has broken. The lean old vanities quizzed and ogled the frail ladies of the Promenade and sniffed the smoke-wreathed air with a thought of pleasures once worth enjoyment. They spent now an evening of merely sentimental dissipation, but because it was spent at the Orient, not entirely wasted; for the unchanged theater testified to the reality of their youth. It may not have been able to rejuvenate them, but, as by a handkerchief that survives the departure of its owner, their senses were faintly stimulated.
The Orient was proud because it did not enter into competition with any other house of varieties; preened itself upon a cosmopolitan programme. With the snobbishness of an old city firm, it declined to advertise its ware with eye-arresting posters, and congratulated itself on the inability to secure new clients. Foreigners made up a large proportion of the audience, and were apparently contented by equestrian mistresses of the haute école, by bewildering assemblages of jugglers, even by continental mediocrities for the sake of hearing their native tongue. They did not object to interminable wire-acts, and put up with divination feats of the most exhausting dullness. After all, these incidental turns must occur; but the ballets were the feature of the evening. For many who visited the Orient, the stream of prostitutes ebbing and flowing upon the Promenade was enough. Yet the women of the Orient Promenade would strike a cynic with uneasiness.
Under the stars, the Piccadilly courtesans affect the onlooker less atrociously. Night lends a magic of softness to their fretful beauty. The sequins lose their garishness; the painted faces preserve an illusion of reality. Moonlight falls gently on the hollow cheek; kindles a spark of youth in the leaden eye. The Piccadilly courtesans move like tigers in a tropic gloom with velvet blazonries and a stealthy splendor that masks the hunger driving them out to seek their prey. On the Orient Promenade, the finer animalism has vanished; it was never more than superficially æsthetic. The daughters of pleasure may still be tigers, but they are naphtha-lit, pacing backwards and forwards in a cage. They all appear alike. Their hats are all too large, their figures are too brutal, their cheeks too lifeless. They are automatic machines of lust waiting to be stirred into action by pennies.
Under the stars they achieve a pictorial romance; but on the carpet of the Promenade, they are hard and heartless and vile. Their eyes are coins; their hands are purses. At their heels patter old men like unhealthy lap-dogs; beefy provincials stare at them, their foreheads glistening. Above all the frangipani and patchouli and opoponax and trèfle incarnat steals the rank odor of goats. The orchestra thunders and crashes down below; the comfortable audience lean back in the stalls; the foreigners jabber in the gallery; the Orient claque interrupts its euchre with hired applause. The corks pop; the soda splashes; money chinks; lechery murmurs; drunkards laugh; and down on the stage Jenny Pearl dances.