He turned his head impatiently and tried to take an interest in the jugglers, without success. There was something deeply irritating about the scene of frivolity in which Fate had staged the last scenes of the most important act in his life.
The Empress of Japan sailed at eight on the morrow morning, and as yet he had made no movement as regards Jane. All this trifling was but a bad prelude to those words so soon to be spoken.
He little knew that Tragedy stood at his elbow in the form of James Anderson, manager to M’Cormick, the great silk dealers on the Bund.
“Why, Leslie, man! I thought I knew the nape of your neck. How are you?”
“Hullo, Anderson!” said Leslie, returning the other’s hand-grip. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m just looking round,” said Anderson. “I’m just looking round, and you’ll admit it’s worth the turning of one’s head. I shouldn’t mind exchanging places with Kamamura. It’s not a bad life, his, by a long penny. This affair will bang a hole through a good pile of ten pun notes. They tell me those balloons made like dicky-birds cost—I forget now, but it’s a good pile of dollars a-piece, for every feather is painted correct, and that’s just like the Japs—make a pretty thing, and then stick it away in some hidey-hole where no one can see it, or burn it—What’s agate now?”
The crowd was in motion, flooding towards a part of the grounds where a little stage had been erected, backed and half surrounded by cypress trees. On the stage, against the dark-green background, could be seen the graceful figure of a girl.
She was dancing. It was a dance that at first insipid, became after a few moments fascinating, lulling, exquisite to watch as the movements of a flower blown by the wind.
They drew close and stood to look. The girl was dressed in amber and scarlet, with a scarlet flower in the night of her hair—a bijou rose et noir, recalling Baudelaire’s Lola de Vallence.
Her supple body seemed inspired by the mysterious music we hear wandering through the land of spring, and expressing itself in the voices of the wind and the birds and the streams.