The same girl lost again; and amid shrill titterings the gorgeous scarlet kimono fell to the ground. She was left standing in a pretty blue under-kimono of light silk with a pale pink design of cherry-blossoms starred all over it.
Chonkina! Chonkina!
Round after round the game was played; and first one girl lost and then another. Two of them were standing now with the upper part of their bodies bare. One of them was wearing a kind of white lace petticoat, stained and sour-looking, wrapped about her hips; the other wore short flannel drawers, like a man's bathing-pants, coloured in a Union Jack pattern, some sailor's offering to his inamorata. They were both of them young girls. Their breasts were flat and shapeless. The yellow skin ended abruptly at the throat and neck with the powder line. For the neck and face were a glaze of white. The effect of this break was to make the body look as if it had lost its real head under the guillotine, and had received an ill-matched substitute from the surgeon's hands.
Chonkina! Chonkina!
Patterson had drawn nearer to the performers. His red face and his grim smile were tokens of what he would have described as pleasurable anticipation. Wigram, too, his flabby visage paler than ever, his large eyes bulging, and his mouth hanging open, gazed as in a trance. He had whispered to Geoffrey,—
"I've seen the danse du ventre at Algiers, but this beats anything."
Geoffrey from behind the fumes of the pipe-smoke watched the unreal phantasmagoria as he might have watched a dream.
Chonkina! Chonkina!
The dance was more expressive now, not of art but of mere animalism. The bodies shook and squirmed. The faces were screwed up to express an ecstacy of sensual delight. The little fingers twitched into immodest gestures.
Chonkina! Chonkina! Hoi!