Some hours later, when Philip wound his watch and put it under his pillow, preparatory to undressing and going to bed, its hands were pointing to midnight. With creeping shudders of repulsion he was telling himself that in the time intervening between the half-hesitant accession to Bromley’s suggestion and their return to the hotel he had not only seen humanity at its lowest ebb, but had also besmeared his own body and mind with the reeking mud of the tide flats.
A long, narrow, shop-like room, with a tawdry stage at one end, a seated lower floor, and a row of curtained gallery boxes running along both sides; on the main floor, filling the seats, a rough audience, strictly masculine, uproariously applauding a painted woman on the stage who was singing “Only a Pansy Blossom”: this was what they had seen and heard upon making their way past the bar in the Corinthian.
For a time they had looked on from the rear of the lower floor, while the five-piece orchestra blared and drummed and squeaked, and aproned waiters came and went with liquor-bearing trays, and the air grew foggy with tobacco smoke rising in a dim nimbus over the booted and hatted crowd jamming the narrow room to suffocation. There had been other numbers to follow that of the sentimental singer, most of them suggestive, some of them baldly obscene. Then Bromley, with the impish grin now in permanence, had proposed a retreat to the more select surroundings of the gallery boxes, and they had gone up-stairs.
Philip, sitting on his bedside chair with one shoe off, was telling himself, with a recurrence of the creeping shudder, that he should never live long enough decently to efface the degrading experience of the next hour. They had scarcely seated themselves in one of the boxes before a woman came in—a woman without shame. Bromley, still grinning amiably, had waved her aside, and had passed a friendly signal of warning to him—Philip. But when the woman came to perch on his knee, he did not know how to repulse her.
There was still a dingy smudge of rice powder on the breast of his waistcoat, and he flung the garment across the room with an angry curse. For the first time in his life he had held a wanton woman in his arms, had talked to her, had yielded to her persuasions and bought liquor for her. And it was small comfort now to remember that he had refused to drink with her when the liquor came; or that—backed by Bromley in this—he had refused to stay until the close of her working day and go home with her.
“My God!” he exclaimed, as he turned off the gas and crept into bed to lie wide-eyed and staring in the darkness: “My God! if I’d been alone—if Bromley hadn’t been there to drag me out.... And all along I’ve been calling myself a decent man and Harry’s keeper!”
XIII
The next morning at breakfast, with the midnight reaction still daggering him, Philip was shamefacedly reticent until after he found that Bromley, charitably or otherwise, was completely ignoring the Corinthian episode. Though he was far from being capable of banishing it himself, he contrived to push it aside sufficiently to enable him to carry his part in the table talk.
“No, I hadn’t thought of camping down in a hotel,” was his reply to Bromley’s question as to his plans for the summer. “Comfortable as this place is, it isn’t quite my idea of living: too monotonous. What I’m thinking of is a bachelor apartment in one of the down-town buildings, with meals wherever the eating is best; something of that sort for the present, at least. How about you?”
“To tell the truth, I haven’t been thinking much more than a minute or so ahead,” the play-boy confessed, with his disarming smile at its attractive best. “This sudden cataracting of filthy lucre has a tendency to make me lightheaded—that is, more lightheaded than usual, which you will say is gilding the lily. I did have some vague notion of taking a trip back home and astonishing the natives. It would astonish them, you know.”