Читать книгу Desert Love - Joan Conquest - Страница 12

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To natives, a dressed or undressed dancer is nothing more than a plaything, or something to help pass the hour; he will look at and criticise her with much less enthusiasm than he would a she-camel, and remunerate her or her owner according to the measure of pleasure he has found in her posturing.

But it is difficult, wellnigh impossible, to describe the feeling of the occidental women when three orientals of their own sex, without a vestige of clothing, suddenly one after the other, like ducks, sidled into the room.

They were none of them in their first youth, and the dragoman, after watching their movements, decided once and for all to withdraw his patronage from the house, and sat wondering how much he dared try to extract from his patron's pockets for such an exhibition, while Jill, who felt as though she had been suddenly struck between the eyes, sat hypnotised by the undulating forms before her, until she was overcome by a frantic desire to bury her face in a cushion and to give way to unrestrained hysterical laughter. This same feeling has been known to overcome one in Church when a hen, side-tracking through the open door, takes a constitutional up the aisle on a Sunday morning in the country; also it has been known to seize you in its grip at a levee, when your predecessor's shoe-buckles, not having been properly adjusted, flip up and down like shutters as their owner, in solitary state, stalks up the audience chamber; worse and stronger still is it when your revered bishop uncle, of whom you have great expectations, insists at morning prayers upon those things which have been left undone, when before your earthly eyes gapes the cotton dress of Eliza the cook, whose comfortable dorsal proportions have forbidden the matutinal union of a couple or so of buttons and buttonholes.

Try as she would she could not overcome it, neither could she remove her gaze from the three females who, poor things, were but doing their best to add to the family coffers. Up and down, and round and round they went, the string band twanging an accompaniment, until the gauze scarf of the middle lady catching in the hanging chandelier put an end to their rhythmical swayings, while like hens with a suspended cherry they hopped in turn off the ground in their effort to disentangle their one and only bit of covering.

Everyone sat still until the disentanglement had taken place, upon which event the dancers once more advanced in force, each selecting a special man victim, until Jill, absolutely helpless and afraid of raising native wrath by allowing even a glimmer of a smile to appear, buried her pretty head on the marchese's over-padded shoulder, which action he of course took for a sign of encouragement, responding to it by slipping his arm round the girl's waist, but circumspectly enough so that it should not be seen by the Can-King's relations, while Jill prayed for strength to resist until the end.

The end came in a positive Catherine-wheel exhibition of posturing, and a deathly silence on the part of the audience; the men not daring to make any comment, the women not daring to look at each other, until the widow, suddenly seizing upon the situation, clapped her little hands roguishly, and avowed in a babyish voice that "C'était bien gentil et original, n'est ce pas," which she didn't think at all really.

Anyway her opinion served as a break, so that on the exit of the dancers in single file, which was ten-fold more trying to the spectators than their entry, with stretching of cramped limbs and stereotyped utterances such as "how very Eastern," "so unexpected," the entire party rose to their feet, the dragoman holding a hurried whispered conversation with the men who each, and successively, and vehemently, shook their heads, leaving the women asking of themselves how on earth they were to continue existing relations with the men during the interminable weeks to Australia.

Jill, feeling almost faint from suppressed emotion and a revival of hunger, stood a little on one side watching them. An Eastern dancing house is a strange place in which to make the final decision of one's life, but in just such a spot she made hers. She knew that she had only to make up the tale of a lost boat, and something would be done for her; in fact she could probably go as lady's maid to the Americans on their tour de monde, having overheard them complaining bitterly of their own French maid who had not been retrieved at Algiers. But her whole soul suddenly rising in mutiny against the stultifying civilisation of the West, she finally made up her mind to stay with the strangers until the hour came when she could slip out of the hotel where they were staying the night, into oriental liberty, and glamour, and unknown possibilities. So she sat next the marchese at dinner, whose love-making was on exactly the same line as his clothes, and having found out from the maid in the ladies' room just how to get to the end of the town in which was situated the Camel King's house, she waited for a desirable opportunity, and slipped out of the hotel on the pretence of looking at the stars, knowing that her unwitting hosts would think she had simply gone to bed.