Have His Carcase

She got up from the table and made her way into a kind of large lounge, where the middle space was cleared for dancing. A select orchestra occupied a platform at one end, and small tables were arranged all round the sides of the room, where visitors could drink coffee or liqueurs and watch the dancing. While she took her place and gave her order, the floor was occupied by a pair of obviously professional dancers, giving an exhibition waltz. The man was tall and fair, with sleek hair plastered closely to his head, and a queer, unhealthy face with a wide, melancholy mouth. The girl, in an exaggerated gown of petunia satin with an enormous bustle and a train, exhibited a mask of Victorian coyness as she revolved languidly in her partner’s arms to the strains of the ‘Blue Danube’. ‘Autres temps, autres moeurs,’ thought Harriet. She looked about the room. Long skirts and costumes of the seventies were in evidence — and even ostrich feathers and fans. Even the coyness had its imitators. But it was so obvious an imitation. The slenderseeming waists were made so, not by savage tight-lacing, but by sheer expensive dressmaking. Tomorrow, on the tennis-court, the short, loose tunic-frock would reveal them as the waists of muscular young women of the day, despising all bonds. And the sidelong glances, the down-cast eyes, the mock-modesty masks, only. If this was the ‘return to womanliness’ hailed by the fashion-correspondents, it was to a quite different kind of womanliness — set on a basis of economic independence. Were men really stupid enough to believe that the good old days of submissive womanhood could be brought back by milliners’ fashions? ‘Hardly,’ thought Harriet, ‘when they know perfectly well that one has only to remove the train and the bustle, get into a short skirt and walk off, with a job to do and money in one’s pocket. Oh, well, it’s a game, and presumably they all know the rules.’

The dancers twirled to a standstill with the conclusion of the waltz. The instrumentalists tweaked a string and tightened a peg here and there and rearranged their music, under cover of perfunctory applause. Then the male dancer selected a partner from one of the nearer tables, while the petunia-clad girl obeyed a summons from a stout manufacturer in tweeds on the other side of the room. Another girl, a blonde.in pale blue, rose from her solitary table near the platform and led out an elderly man. Other visitors rose, accompanied; by their own partners, and took the floor to the strains of another waltz. Harriet beckoned to the waiter and asked for more coffee.

Men, she thought, like the illusion that woman is dependent on their approbation and favour for, her whole interest in life. But do they like the reality? Not, thought Harriet, bitterly, when one is past one’s first youth. The girl over there, exercising S.A. on a group of rather possessive-looking males, will turn into a predatory hag like the woman — at the next table, if she doesn’t find something to occupy her mind, always supposing that she has — a mind. Then the men will say she puts the wind up them.

The ‘predatory hag’ was a lean woman, pathetically made-up, dressed in an exaggeration of the fashion which it would have been difficult for a girl of nineteen to carry off successfully. She had caught Harriet’s attention earlier by her look of radiant, almost bridal exaltation. She was alone, but seemed to be expecting somebody, for her gaze roamed incessantly about the room, concentrating itself chiefly on the professionals’ table near the platform. Now she appeared to be getting anxious. Her ringed hands twitched nervously, and she lighted one cigarette after another, only to stub it out, half-smoked, snatch at the mirror in her handbag, read lust her make-up, fidget, and then begin the whole process again with another cigarette.

‘Waiting for her gigolo,’ diagnosed Harriet, with a kind of pitiful disgust. ‘The frog-mouthed gentleman, I suppose. He seems to have better fish to fry.’

‘The waiter brought the coffee, and the woman at the next table caught him on his way back.

‘Is Mr Alexis not here tonight?’

‘No, madam.’ The waiter looked a little nervous. No. He is unavoidably absent’

‘Is he ill?’

‘I’ do not think so, madam. The manager has just said he will not be coming.’

‘Did he send no message?’

‘I could not say, madam.’ The waiter was fidgeting with his feet, ‘Mr Antoine will no doubt be happy…’

‘No, never mind. I am accustomed to Mr Alexis. His step suits me. It does not matter.’

‘No, madam, thank you, madam’