There they stood together in the corner, hiding several of Rops’s eccentricities, ostensibly discussing art, charity, world-politics, the strategy of war, the casualty lists.

Chapter 23

THE CALL

Christine found the night at the guinea-fowl rather dull.  The supper-room, garish and tawdry in its decorations, was functioning as usual.  The round tables and the square tables, the tables large and the tables small, were well occupied with mixed parties and couples.  Each table had its own yellow illumination, and the upper portion of the room, with a certain empty space in the centre of it, was bafflingly shadowed.  Between two high, straight falling curtains could be seen a section of the ball-room, very bright against the curtains, with the figures of dancers whose bodies seemed to be glued to each other, pale to black or pale to khaki, passing slowly and rhythmically across.  The rag-time music, over a sort of ground-bass of syncopated tom-tom, surged through the curtains like a tide of the sea of Aphrodite, and bathed everyone at the supper-tables in a mysterious aphrodisiacal fluid.  The waiters alone were insensible to its influence.  They moved to and fro with the impassivity and disdain of eunuchs separated for ever from the world’s temptations.  Loud laughs or shrill little shrieks exploded at intervals from the sinister melancholy of the interior.

On Christine’s left, at a round table in a corner, sat G.J.; on her right, the handsome boy Molder.  On Molder’s right, Miss Aida Altown spread her amplitude, and on G.J.’s left was a young girl known to the company as Alice.  Major Craive, the host, the splendid quality of whose hospitality was proved by the flowers, the fruit, the bottles, the cigar-boxes and the cigarette-boxes on the table, sat between Alice and Aida Altown.

The three women on principle despised and scorned each other with false warm smiles and sudden outbursts of compliment.  Christine knew that the other two detested her as being “one of those French girls” who, under the protection of Free Trade, came to London and, by their lack of scruple and decency, took the bread out of the mouths of the nice, modest, respectable, English girls.  She on her side disdained both of them, not merely because they were courtesans (which somehow Christine considered she really was not), but also for their characteristic insipidity, lackadaisicalness and ignorance of the technique of the profession.  They expected to be paid for doing nothing.

Aida Altown she knew by sight as belonging to a great rival Promenade.  Aida had reached the purgatory of obesity which Christine always feared.  Despite the largeness of her mass, she was a very beautiful woman in the English manner, blonde, soft, idle, without a trace of temperament, and incomparably dull and stupid.  But she was ageing; she had been favourably known in the West End continuously (save for a brief escapade in New York) for perhaps a quarter of a century.  She was at the period when such as she realise with flaccid alarm that they have no future, and when they are ready to risk grave imprudences for youths who feel flattered by their extreme maturity.  Christine gazed calmly at her, supercilious and secure in the immense advantage of at least fifteen years to the good.