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.