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 from their point of view, 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 banjoes, 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 America, 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 an endless variety of
extraordinary postures. Some of them shuffled secretly along the edge 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 for ever before them, as the Prussians
thrust the villagers in the face of the enemy, and some for ever navigated
themselves backwards like moving breakwaters to protect their darlings from
the 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 particularly spacious manoeuvre, 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 till 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 vast 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.