He applauded.... Everybody was applauding. The gyroscopic whirl of dancers had become stationary. All now were eager spectators. And the three couples from São Paulo had reached the culminating point of a uniquely curious and exotic figure. Savage and violent, sinuous and creeping; suggestive of the nocturnal gambols of enamoured jaguars, in the deep primeval forests of Brazil.
"Horrid! One expects them to lash tails and roar.... I've got what Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch called 'cold clams walking up my backbone.'" Lady Beauvayse shuddered and made a pretty grimace. "All the same I think I'll go down and look at them a little closer. Ah-h! ... Good grapes! Why, he simply picked her up by the scruff of the neck with his teeth and shook her.... I've just got to see that done over again!"
She was gone, with a whisk of the emerald bird of paradise and a waft of parfum très persistant. Captain Courtley vanished in her wake. Patrine made no motion to follow them.
The tense excitement, the pungent exhalations rising from the crowded ball-room were affecting her brain. She felt giddy, and the steady pressure of the crowd behind her was thrusting her to the very verge of the promenade. She yielded automatically, unconscious of danger near.
You are to see her there, poised on the verge of the rose-carpeted precipice, her hand gripping the velvet-covered railing, her wide nostrils distended, her broad bosom heaving as she inhaled the sultry, vitiated atmosphere, heavy with a myriad perfumes, tainted by a thousand breaths. Her stare, lifeless as the enamelled, glittering regard of some Princess-mummy of Old Egypt, was fixed upon the artists, of whom two couples had retired, as though in despair of competition with the chief favourites, leaving La Rivadavia and her comrade Herculano in possession of the floor.
And the passions expressed by the rhythmical, sinuous movements of these dancers grew moment by moment less human, and more bestial. Art of the most consummate was displayed and degraded. Beauty and Truth shone pre-eminent in the hideous display. Now the woman sank towards the ground, with supple limbs outstretched and her wild head thrown back in fierce surrender. Her white fangs gleamed, her dumb mouth seemed to roar. And as her conqueror crept stealthily towards her, the play of his great muscles could be seen beneath his civilised attire, as though his supple body had been clothed with the tawny-golden, black-dappled hide of the Brazilian jaguar.
As Herculano crouched and sprang, La Rivadavia's muscles visibly tightened. She bounded high, turned in the act.... Their gleaming fangs clashed in mid-air. And from the massed spectators came a hiss of excitement, "Th-h-h! ..." like the hissing of a thousand snakes.
"Great Scott!" Patrine heard herself saying. "Great—Scott!"
She no longer heard von Herrnung harshly breathing behind her.... He had moved to the leftward. His tall, broad-shouldered figure now stood against the railing some dozen feet away. His well-cut face, seen in profile, was purplish-red to the crisp, scarlet waves topping his high square forehead. The big white hands that held the glasses glued to his eyes, jerked, and as he pressed against the railing Patrine knew that he was shuddering. Now he looked at her, and his ravaged face was terrifying to the girl.
"Will you not..." he began, thickly.