“No, I didn’t know there was anything wrong,” replied my hostess.
It was easy to realize that here in this stable converted into a club was an atmosphere and an environment without its like in London or elsewhere. The denizens of that little circle of Bohemia cared for absolutely nothing and nobody outside its own careless world whose boundaries were Chelsea and the Savoy Club.
Ordinary social distinctions were utterly and completely ignored. Gayety was supreme and in the merry throng I caught sight within a few minutes of a well-known London magistrate before whom I had often pleaded as a Solicitor, a famous scientist, the millionaire owner of a great daily paper. Several leading members of the Chancery Bar, an under-secretary of State and quite a sprinkling of young scions of patrician families.
They were men and women of the intellectual type who cared nothing for the vicious joys of the ordinary night club. They came in frank enjoyment of dancing and music and the fried kippers, as custom decreed, in order to comply with the kill-joy law that ordained that they must eat if they wanted a drink! Everything, apparently, was free and easy gaiety. Yet it was at least as difficult to become a member of the Ham-bone as to gain admission to any of the most exclusive clubs along Pall Mall. Money was no sort of passport: only personality, ability or the true inborn spirit of Bohemianism could open the portals of the Ham-bone.
The “master of ceremonies” was a well-known landscape painter, whom every one addressed as “George,” a smart figure in the brown velvet jacket of his profession. He chaffed and joked with every one in French, revealing a side of his nature certainly unsuspected by the general public to whom he usually presented a grave and austere front. But this was the key-note of the Ham-bone: every one seemed to “let himself go” and the stilted social etiquette of our ordinary world seemed as far off as if we had been in Limehouse or Poplar.
I was dancing with Mrs. Powell, when, suddenly, she halted before a small table in a corner where there sat alone a beautiful dark-haired girl in a smartly cut dance-frock of black charmeuse.
“Mr. Yelverton,” she said, “will you let me introduce you to my dearest friend, Marigold Day?” And to the girl she said, “Marigold, this is Mr. Rex Yelverton, the gentleman of whom I recently spoke to you.”
Somberly dressed, her white neck and bare arms in vivid contrast with her dead-black frock, she was almost wickedly beautiful. Her well-dressed hair, across which she wore a bandeau of golden leaves, was dark; her scarlet mouth was like the curling underleaves of a rose, her lips with the true arc-de-cupidon so seldom seen, were slightly apart, and between them showed strong white teeth. Her eyes were large and deeply violet and they held a fascination such as I had seldom before seen.
“We’ll be back presently,” said Mrs. Powell, as we slipped again into the dance. “I want to have a chat with you.”
“Who’s that?” I asked, as soon as we were a few feet away.