"Humph! Good night," and Charles went out into the drizzle.
On his way home, he saw the Exquisite Mob and the Exquisite Mob-master grouped before a satirist; and very soon he saw them performing their anticks thinly disguised by initials and asterisks.
That is how Mr. Charles Lovely sat down to indite
CURTAIN POLLS
severely lashed
by a
Curtain Rod.
Chapter the Sixteenth
THE CHINESE MASQUERADE
THE Chinese Masquerade was the outstanding event of early Spring at Curtain Wells. It was the quintessence of refined affectation, the great fount in which many tributary delights found their source. Moreover, in its character there was a national significance. It was not held merely to emphasize the importance of being seriously amused; it was not one of many entertainments sacred to Epicurus; it did not serve to commemorate the fleetingness of life; it was no Burial Service with a ritual of flung roseleaves and spilt wine. The Chinese Masquerade of Curtain Wells was something far more grand than any of these, being a great national act of homage to the beverage of Tea. Of old, Bacchus was saluted in Samothrace, and the festival of wine was celebrated with all the absence of restraint that might be expected from the past. Nymphs raved, Satyrs danced, and garlanded leopards jigged to one wild inspiration. Phrenzy footed it; troop followed troop, broke and dissolved in flashes of white limbs when Dionysus of the sly smile and rosy cheeks bewitched thousands with his strange madness. In fact, the whole affair was an intolerable concession to Nature. At Curtain Wells you saw the centuries at work. There the Bacchantes were corseted and hooped to primness; the Satyrs had high red heels for hoofs, silken breeches for the fur of goats. Instead of velvety leopards that used to amble over tuffets of fragrant thyme, each with a hussy astride his supple back, went greasy chairmen in lurching escort of dowagers and misses. Dionysus himself was changed. He had kept his sly smile and rosy cheeks, but his vine wreaths were become ruffles and ties, while his body glittered, not with youth and health and immortality, but with paste buckles and brooches and solitaires. The crashing cymbals of Thrace found a thin echo in the delicate tinkle of tea-spoons and frail sounds of porcelain. To be sure, the whole of the difference between the worship of Wine and the worship of Tea was expressed by the fact that to honour the former, society took off its cloaths, whereas in order to celebrate the latter, all the world dressed itself up.
Mr. Ripple wore above his suit of amber a robe resembling a golden dressing-gown. He was the Gold Mandarin, decorated with dragons, tall pagodas, flowers and fireworks. The Blue Mandarin, whose robe concealed the pearl-grey suit of Mr. Charles Lovely, seemed as he moved across the room like a blue garden, so many small landskips wrought in azure silks trembled in the folds of his garment. Only these two officers of the Pageant were privileged to remain unmasked. The rest of the company wore yellow vizards whose painted eyebrows soared at a celestial angle over eyeslits, cut almondwise. The general effect was of animated Ming laughing, jesting, talking, and dancing with the lacker cabinets that were used to contain it.
The ballroom had pagodas in each of the corners where the children of the Exquisite Mob dressed to a more exact replica[1] of the farthest Orientals, nodded and peeped and chirped the austere maxims of Confucius without the slightest idea of their meaning, but all convinced that it was extremely diverting to partake of a grown-up entertainment, and far better to drink real tea out of real cups in a delightful palace of their own, than to play with acorns and ditchwater in the mildewed Dorick summer-house at the head of the Park avenue.
[1] They wore pigtails, which were considered unbecoming by the older Follies. Besides, head-dresses were too elaborate to be ruined for the sake of one entertainment.