In the middle of the dazzling cocoon-shaped patch of brightness thus created, Patrine recognized the outlines of an ornamental fountain that occupied the centre of the vestibule leading to the supper-room of the Upas Club. Executed in the New Art style of sculpture, of white and black, and tawny marble, it was shaded by tall palms with gilded leaves.
On low pedestals rising from the rim of the shallow oval basin of the fountain were three nude life-sized shapes delicately tinted, with gilt hair, carmined lips, darkened eyebrows, vague round eyes of pale blue. They had the flattened breasts and narrow hips of masculine adolescence with women's faces and shoulders, arms and thighs. One held a finger hushingly on its lip; another was putting on a black vizard through which its pale eyes peeped slyly, the third was smiling over the rim of a golden drinking-cup. The Three were sharing a pleasant secret between them—or so it had seemed that night to Patrine.
After complying with certain formalities, and paying a heavy fee for admission, Patrine with her friend had passed through to a wonderfully decorated supper-room with a big grill at the end, where white-capped cooks were busy with savoury things. Wind and strings filled the room with great waves of music. Liveried attendants were serving champagne in crystal jugs to men and women seated supping at the daintily-appointed tables. The hot eyes and lividly-pale or purple-flushed faces of many of the revellers, already told their tale of excess.
The champagne at a guinea a jug, a speciality of the Upas, had seemed excellent to Patrine. She was out for enjoyment, and fizz made you feel top-hole. They had supped—was it lobster Américaine or grilled oysters that had preceded the other things?—when there came a change in the music. The unseen orchestra sighing and thrilling forth the amorous phrases of Samson et Dalila, leaped all at once into another familiar theme. To wit, the dance of the Jaguars in the Jungle, with its wail, clang, clash and growl as of strange, discordant, exotic instruments.
"Drums covered with serpent-skin, gombos of elephant-tusk, human skull-rattles and all the paraphernalia of Voodoo," to quote Lady Beauvayse.
Couples rose, and began passing out through a wide curtained exit at the farther end of the supper-room. The music grew madder. Patrine, laughing, took von Herrnung's offered arm.
"Now," he told her, "you are going to see something that is very chic! We shall dance in the Hall of the Hundred Pillars!"
"How frightfully ripping!" said Patrine.
Thus they joined the mob of people—a singularly quiet mob,—and passed through the heavy, curtained entrance. The much-talked-of Hall was merely a big circular ballroom, lighted by groups of electric lilies, set about with pillars of tinted glass, slanting from a dado of black marble, ending at a broad frieze of black beneath the ceiling-dome. Theatrical and tawdry, gaudy and glittering, the scheme of decoration reminded Patrine of the inside of a solitaire marble. The walls of fierce bright orange were striped in curving oblique and transverse lines of black-and-silver, the silver dome was decorated with similarly curving lines of orange-and-black.
To the strange barbaric music of the dance from São Paulo men and women were gyrating and posturing, gliding and pausing, as other men and women had done at the Milles Plaisirs. Presently Patrine and her friend were revolving like the others, in the Valse with the hesitations and the Tango steps in it. You had only to know Tango and the thing came easily—or you imagined it did, after so much champagne. Reflected in the wall and ceiling-mirrors the girl had seen herself, twisting and twirling amidst the mob of dancers, with her head thrown back, and her long eyes blazing, and her wide red mouth laughing wantonly, before the black-and-orange-and-silver walls, the silver-and-black-and-orange dome spun giddily round her with the mob of dancers. Dazed, she had shut her eyes. She had felt herself being hurried somewhere—out of the pillared dancing-hall....