Young Callendar was tall, with dark skin, closely cropped black hair and a wiry kind of strength that was an heritage of his green-eyed grandfather, the Banker of Pera. When Sabine said “Boadicea,” he laughed and showed a row of fine teeth set white against an olive skin. It was this same dark skin which gave his eyes a look of strangeness. The eyes should have been brown or black; instead they were a clear gray and had a way of looking at a person as if they bored quite through him. People said he was fascinating or wild or vicious, according to their standards of such things. The women morbidly watched his greeting of Mrs. Sigourney and Lorna Vale, but they discovered nothing. All the talk may only have been gossip. He was, after all, only twenty-four ... a boy. But, of course, he had French and Greek blood and had lived on the continent. “That,” said Mrs. Mallinson, the escaped novelist, with an old world air, “makes a difference.”
Behind the screen, the Hindu dancer had begun to droop a little with boredom, like a dark flower turning on its stem. Close by her side the bear-like Russian tenor had fallen asleep, his enormous blond head bent forward against his rumpled shirt front; his enormous hands, bursting the seams of his civilized white kid gloves, hung limp between Herculean thighs clad in black broadcloth that would have benefited by a visit to the cleaners.
Only Ellen remained alert and nervous, peering through her crevice, all interest now in the handsome young man and the bizarre red-haired woman at his side. These, her instinct told her, were characters, individuals, powerful in the same fashion that the plump little woman covered with dirty diamonds was powerful. And deep down in her heart a tiny voice kept saying, “This is the great world. Some day I shall be on the other side of the screen, seated no longer with mountebanks.”
Behind the screen she experienced a swift tumult of emotions, confused and ecstatic like the sensations she had known on sight of her first play in a real theater. The scene was glamorous, extravagant. Perhaps for an instant she caught a sense of what was really passing before her eyes; it may have been that she understood the spectacle even more clearly than any of the participants save only Thérèse Callendar ... that these people were not gathered in the tomb-like room because they were drawn by any bond of affection, but rather because they had been summoned, each of them, to play his little rôle in a comedy of manners which the world called fashionable life. There was the Bishop who played a part quite his own (two bishops would have been too many and so, by giving the evening a clerical aspect, have dulled the edge of its chic). Mrs. Sigourney, wicked and painted, played the rôle of Sin, a fascinating and indispensable part, just as Mrs. Champion and her virgins as Virtue, Purity and Chastity, were her foil; and Mrs. Mallinson and Lorna Vale were the Muses of Literature and the Drama. Others stood for Family, and Wealth and what-not, while Mrs. Callendar, hidden behind the drooping lids of her near-sighted green eyes, understood all this and pulled the strings. She made for the piece an admirable showman.
Ellen, watching them, grew excited, and out of this excitement there emerged slowly a new ambition, which had nothing to do with a career in music. It was, rather, a passionate desire to conquer this world as well, so that she might fling her triumph back into the world of the Town; it would serve as an admirable weapon to flaunt in the faces of those who had mocked her poverty. For she had not yet escaped the Town; she had not even learned how difficult it would be ever to escape.
The Russian tenor was a dismal failure. Save for the fact that he was Russian and therefore wildly exotic, he would have been impossible, for he sang in a bleating voice a popular ballad or two by Tosti and a dreary bit of folk music, still half-caught in the mists of slumber. In the back of the room, seated against the wall so that the figures of the other guests rose in silhouette between them and the lights of the low stage, Richard Callendar and the ugly Sabine sat like naughty children, jeering. They were bored by such spectacles; they were interested only in the individuals which comprised it. They saw that the others were a little restless.
And then there was a brief hush broken presently by the music of the Tzigane orchestra augmented by drums and clarinets, rising slowly at first and then breaking into a crescendo of Arab music, filled with insinuating and sensual rhythms, accentuated by the beating of a tom-tom, and from behind the lacquered screen there arose a faint tinkling sound like the music of a million tiny bells heard from a great distance. Then as the music rose to a climax the sound grew suddenly more and more clear and from behind the screen sprang the Javanese dancer, gyrating, now bending low, now rising with a motion of a tawny lily swept by a breeze. It was a beautiful body, soft yet muscular, wild yet restrained. She wore the costume of a Burmese dancer, all gold with a towering hat like a pagoda made all of gold. Her breasts were covered with gold and her thighs, and on her hands she wore gauntlets of gold that ran out into long tapering pinnacles; but the rest of her was naked. The skin of café au lait satin glistened, voluptuous and extravagant. There were tiny gold bells on her wrists and ankles.
For an instant a faint gasp, barely audible, swept the little group seated on collapsible chairs. From her hiding place in the shadows Sabine Cane nudged her companion and whispered again, “Look at Boadicea!”
Before her eyes, between her and the dancer, Mrs. Champion had raised her fan; her daughters had done likewise. Between her and “his wa’am friend” Mrs. Mallinson, the Bishop stirred uneasily. Some leaned forward; others feigned indifference. One or two of the men assumed expressions of boredom. For none of them, save in brothels in Paris, had ever seen a woman dancing without tights, utterly naked.
Withdrawn a little from the others Thérèse Callendar sat staring at the dancer through her lorgnettes. She was immovable but interested, as if the barbaric music and the sight of the Hindu woman’s naked body roused in her a train of dim racial memories. And slowly in another part of the room Sabine Cane became aware that Thérèse Callendar’s son no longer had any interest in her. He no longer heard the malicious sallies she uttered in a whisper. He had risen now and was standing so that he might have a clearer view of the little dais bathed in light where the golden dancer swayed and whirled to the wild music of the Tziganes. Slowly his body stiffened and into the weird gray eyes there came a look of fierce concentration. The dark muscular hands, clasping the chair, so near to Sabine that she could have touched them, grew taut and white. It was not mere sensuality that was roused by the sight; Sabine, with her hard intelligence, must have known that it was something more profound, something that savored of a passionate and barbaric excitement, as if the man was stirred in the depths of his spirit. She must have understood then for the first time that he was of a race so different, so alien that there was a part of him forever beyond comprehension.