I have been to a dance; or rather I have been to a fashionable
restaurant where dancing is done. I was not invited to a dance--there
are very good reasons for that; I was invited to dinner. But many of
my fellow-guests have invested a lot of money in dancing. That is
to say, they keep on paying dancing-instructors to teach them new
tricks; and the dancing-instructors, who know their business, keep
on inventing new tricks. As soon as they have taught everybody a new
step they say it is unfashionable and invent a new one. This is all
very well, but it means that, in order to keep up with them and get
your money’s worth out of the last trick you learned, it is necessary
during its brief life of respectability to dance at every available
opportunity. You dance as many nights a week as is physically possible;
you dance on week-days and you dance on Sundays; you begin dancing in
the afternoon and you dance during tea in the coffee-rooms of expensive
restaurants, whirling your precarious way through littered and
abandoned tea-tables; and at dinner-time you leap up madly before the
fish and dance like variety artistes in a highly polished arena before
a crowd of complete strangers eating their food; or, as if seized with
an uncontrollable craving for the dance, you fling out after the joint
for one wild gallop in an outer room, from which you return, perspiring
and dyspeptic, to the consumption of an ice-pudding, before dashing
forth to the final orgy at a picture-gallery, where the walls are
appropriately covered with pictures of barbaric women dressed for the
hot weather.
That is what happened at this dinner. As soon as you had started a nice
conversation with a lady a sort of roaring was heard without; her eyes
gleamed, her nostrils quivered like a horse planning a gallop, and in
the middle of one of your best sentences she simply faded away with
some horrible man at the other end of the table who was probably “the
only man in London who can do the Double Straddle properly.” This went
on the whole of the meal, and it made connected conversation quite
difficult. For my own part I went on eating, and when I had properly
digested I went out and looked at the little victims getting their
money’s worth.
From the door of the room where the dancing was done a confused uproar
overflowed, as if several men of powerful physique were banging a
number of pokers against a number of saucepans, and blowing whistles,
and occasional catcalls, and now and then beating a drum and several
sets of huge cymbals, and ceaselessly twanging at innumerable banjos,
and at the same time singing in a foreign language, and shouting curses
or exhortations or street cries, or imitating hunting-calls and the cry
of the hyena, or uniting suddenly in the war-whoop of some pitiless
Sudan tribe.
It was a really terrible noise. It hit you like the back-blast of an
explosion as you entered the room. There was no distinguishable tune.
It was simply an enormous noise. But there was a kind of savage rhythm
about it which made one think immediately of Indians and fierce men and
the native camps one used to visit at the Earl’s Court Exhibition. And
this was not surprising. For the musicians included one genuine negro
and three men with their faces blacked; and the noise and the rhythm
were the authentic music of a negro village in South Africa, and the
words which some genius had once set to the noise were an exhortation
to go to the place where the negroes dwelt.
To judge by their movements, many of the dancers had, in fact, been
there, and had carefully studied the best indigenous models. They were
doing some quite extraordinary things. No two couples were doing quite
the same thing for more than a few seconds so that there was endless
variety of extraordinary postures. Some of them shuffled secretly along
the edges of the room, their faces tense, their shoulders swaying like
reeds in a light wind, their progress almost imperceptible; they did
not rotate, they did not speak, but sometimes the tremor of a skirt
or the slight stirring of a patent-leather shoe showed that they were
indeed alive and in motion, though that motion was as the motion of a
glacier, not to be measured in minutes or yards.
And some in a kind of fever rushed hither and thither among the thick
crowd, avoiding disaster with marvellous dexterity; and sometimes they
revolved slowly and sometimes quickly and sometimes spun giddily round
for a moment like gyroscopic tops. Then they too would be seized with a
kind of trance, or it may be with sheer shortness of breath, and hung
motionless for a little in the centre of the room, while the mad throng
jostled and flowed about them like the leaves in autumn round a dead
bird.
And some did not revolve at all, but charged straightly up and down;
and some of these thrust their loves forever before them, as the
Prussians thrust the villagers in the face of the enemy, and some
forever navigated themselves backwards like moving breakwaters to
protect their darlings from the rude, precipitate seas.
Some of them kept themselves as upright as possible, swaying slightly
like willows from the hips, and some of them contorted themselves into
strange and angular shapes, now leaning perilously forward till they
were practically lying upon their terrified partners, and now bending
sideways as a man bends who has water in one ear after bathing. All of
them clutched each other in a close and intimate manner, but some, as
if by separation to intensify the joy of their union, or perhaps to
secure greater freedom for some particular spacious manœuvre, would
part suddenly in the middle of the room and, clinging distantly with
their hands, execute a number of complicated side-steps in opposite
directions, or aim a series of vicious kicks at each other, after which
they would reunite in a passionate embrace and gallop in a frenzy round
the room, or fall into a trance, or simply fall down. If they fell down
they lay still for a moment in the fearful expectation of death, as
men lie who fall under a horse; and then they would creep on hands and
knees to the wall through the whirling and indifferent crowd.
Watching them, you could not tell what any one couple would do next.
The most placid and dignified among them might at any moment fling a
leg out behind them and almost kneel in mutual adoration, and then,
as if nothing unusual had happened, shuffle onward through the press;
or, as though some electric mechanism had been set in motion, they
would suddenly lift a foot sideways and stand on one leg. Poised
pathetically, as if waiting for the happy signal when they might put
the other leg down, these men looked very sad, and I wished that
the Medusa’s head might be smuggled somehow into the room for their
attitudes to be imperishably recorded in cold stone; it would have been
a valuable addition to modern sculpture.
Upon this whirlpool I embarked with the greatest misgiving and a
strange young woman clinging to my person. The noise was deafening.
The four black men were now all shouting at once and playing all their
instruments at once, working up to the inconceivable uproar of the
finale; and all the dancers began to dance with a last desperate fury.
Bodies buffeted one from behind, and while one was yet looking round in
apology or anger more bodies buffeted one from the flank. It was like
swimming in a choppy sea, where there is no time to get the last wave
out of your mouth before the next one hits you.
Close beside us a couple fell down with a great crash. I looked at
them with concern, but no one else took any notice. On with the dance!
Faster and faster the black men played. I was dimly aware now that
they were standing on their chairs, bellowing, and fancied the end
must be near. Then we were washed into a quiet backwater, in a corner,
and from here I determined never to issue until the Last Banjo should
indeed sound. Here I sidled vaguely about for a long time, hoping that
I looked like a man preparing for some culminating feat, a side-step or
a buzz or a double Jazz-spin or an ordinary fall down.
The noise suddenly ceased; the four black men had exploded.
“Very good exercise,” my partner said.
“Quite,” said I.