She jumped into the incessant music as a child jumps into a whirling skipping-rope. She had a quaint French accent, but she couldn't sing. She had no voice. And after that one doggerel verse she made a gesture of good-humoured contempt and danced. But she couldn't dance either. It was a wild gymnastic—a display of incredible, riotous energy, the delirious caperings of a gutter-urchin caught in the midst of some gutter-urchin's windfall by a jolly tune. A long-haired youth leapt on to the stage from the stage-box, and caught her by the waist and swung her about him and over his shoulder so that her plumes swept the ground and the great chain of pearls made a circle of white light about them both.
"Those pearls!" Stonehouse heard a man behind him say loudly. "Prince Frederick gave them to her. And then he shot himself. They belonged to the family. He had no right, of course, but she wanted them."
He could feel Cosgrave stir impatiently.
It went on, as it seemed to him, for an incredible length of time. It was like a prairie fire that spread and blazed up, higher and brighter. And there was no escape. He had a queer conviction that his was the only static spirit in the whole theatre, that secretly, in their hearts, the audience had flung themselves into the riot with her, the oldest and staidest of them, as perhaps they had often wanted to do when they heard a jolly tune like that. It was artless, graceless. One only needed to let oneself go.
"I'm Gyp Labelle,
Come dance with me."
The jaded disgust and weariness were gone. Something had come into the theatre that had not been there before. Nothing mattered either so much or so little. The main business was to have a good time somehow—not to worry or care.
She had whirled catherine-wheel fashion, head over heels from end to end of the stage. The long-haired youth swept the hair from his hot, blue-jowled face in time to catch her, and they stood side by side, she with her thin arms stretched up straight in a gesture of triumph, her lips still parted in that curiously empty, expectant smile.
Then it was over. Once the curtain rose to perfunctory applause. People settled back in their seats, or prepared to go. It was as though the fire had been withdrawn from a molten metal which began instantly to harden. A woman next to Stonehouse tittered.
"So vulgar and silly—I don't know what people see in her."
"I want to get away," Cosgrave said sharply. "It's this beastly closeness."