“That’s all right,” said he. “It is slightly discommoding.”
Hamilton flushed and stumbled about to find the right words. Condescension, patronage, a sense of his own awkwardness, genuine thankfulness appeared in his voice. But the man who had saved his life grinned good-naturedly and nodded. He was used to this air of patronage on the part of white men. He understood.
VIII
Both Hamilton and McCall obtained sick leaves and spent them in savoring Paris and Parisian life. There were days of strolling down the boulevards, McCall limping at Hamilton’s side, and “drinking in” the life of which they had been deprived for so many months. “Drinking in” was McCall’s own phrase, and it described better than anything else the eagerness with which each new sight, each fresh impression, was seized. There were wonderful afternoons in the art galleries, with Hamilton absorbing his fill of the old masters and McCall revelling in the modernists. There were tramps through the public gardens, and visits to the places of historical interest—the Bastile, the palaces at Versailles, the public buildings. There were nights at the music-halls and cabarets, where pleasure-seeking men and women, casting convention to the winds, sought to crowd into a few hours of drinking and dancing, all that they had missed since the beginning of the war. Hamilton and McCall were in a mad world, a world of jazz-crazed mockers at morality, of civilized men and women suddenly reverting to barbaric pleasures. The American craze was at its height and in deference to it, negro musicians, dressed in brilliant red and yellow, blared and sobbed weird melodies to wild African rhythms. Prostitutes, with thin veils to hide their nakedness, quivered and undulated to the minor strains. Men and women danced in pantomimic obscenities and suggested perversions.
“Let’s get out of this,” exclaimed Hamilton, “I’m no tin angel, but, thank God, they don’t do this in America.”
“The funny thing about these frogs is that they think they’re being American,” said McCall. “That’s all put on for our benefit. Didn’t you notice how sweet everybody has been to us here?”
Whenever Levin accompanied the two, he would point to the jazz music and dancing as an example of the moral reaction that follows every war.
“It’s a sort of relapse, following a major operation,” he explained. “We’ve cut out the Kaiser and perhaps Kaiserism, although you can’t tell, the roots sometimes spread all over the body, like a cancer. No, all the Kaiserism is not in Germany. It’s here. It’s in England. It’s in America, just trying to get a start. But whether the disease has been definitely checked or not, we are going to pass through a relapse. This is the social phase of it.”
There was a visit to a theatre, where a series of short plays were being acted. There was a hideous horror play, followed by the conventional adultery farce and then a silhouette novelty—nude women dancing behind a sheet so that their figures were projected by bright lights upon it.
Hamilton was disgusted. Dr. Levin simply classified it as another symptom of relapse—he avoided the term “decadence”; but McCall was amused.