“You’ll write books!”
“Who knows! We must celebrate. We’ll dine at the Hotel d’Italie, and go and see Pavlova at the Palace. It’s my day.”
Despite her delight in Kate’s good fortune, Eve had a personal regret haunting the background of her consciousness. Kate Duveen was her one friend in London. She would miss her bracing, cynical strength.
They dined at the Hotel d’Italie in one of the little upper rooms, and Kate talked Italian to the waiters, and made Eve drink her health in very excellent Barolo. She had been lucky in getting seats at the Palace, two reserved tickets having been sent back only ten minutes before she had called.
Eve had never seen Pavlova before, and the black-coated and conventional world melted out of her consciousness as she sat and watched the Russian dancer. That fragile, magical, childlike figure seemed to have been conceived in the heart of a white flame. It was life, and all the strange and manifold suggestions of life vibrating and glowing in one slight body. Eve began to see visions, as she sat in the darkness and watched Pavlova moving to Chopin’s music. Pictures flashed and vanished, moods expressed in colour. The sun went down behind black pine woods, and a wind wailed. A half-naked girl dressed in skins and vine leaves fled from the brown arms of a young barbarian. A white butterfly flitted among Syrian roses. She heard bees at work, birds singing in the dawn. And then, it was the pale ghost of Francesca drifting through the moonlight with death in her eyes and hair.
Then the woman’s figure was joined by a man’s figure, and Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody was in the air. The motive changed. Something bacchic, primitive, passionate leapt in the blood. Eve sat thrilled, with half-closed eyes. Those two figures, the woman’s and the man’s, seemed to rouse some wild, elemental spirit in her, to touch an undreamt-of subconsciousness that lay concealed under the workaday life. Desire, the exultation of desire, and the beauty of it were very real to her. She felt breathless and ready to weep.
When it was over, and she and Kate were passing out with the crowd, a kind of languor descended on her, like the languor that comes after the senses have been satisfied. It was not a sensual feeling, although it was of the body. Kate too was silent. Pavlova’s dancing had reacted on her strangely.
“Let’s walk!”
“Would you rather?”
“Yes.”