Okewood of the Secret Service | Page 6

see the show
soon, though, for they tell me the lady is leaving the programme."
"No!" exclaimed Strangwise so suddenly that Desmond turned round
and stared at him. "I thought she was there for months yet..."
"They don't want her to go," answered Spencer, "she's a perfect
gold-mine to them but I gather the lady is difficult... in fact, to put it
bluntly she's making such a damn nuisance of herself with her artistic
temperament that they can't get on with her at all."
"Do you know this lady of the artistic temperament, Maurice?" asked
Desmond.
Strangwise hesitated a moment.
"I met her in Canada a few years ago," he said slowly, "she was a very
small star then. She's a very handsome and attractive girl, in spite of
our friend's unfavorable verdict. There's something curiously real about
her dancing, too, that you don't find in this sort of show as a rule!"
He stopped a moment, then added abruptly:
"We'll go along to the Palaceum to-night, if you like, Desmond," and
Desmond joyfully acquiesced. To one who has been living for weeks in
an ill-ventilated pill-box on the Passchendaele Ridge, the lights and
music and color of a music-hall seem as a foretaste of Paradise.
And that was what Desmond Okewood thought as a few hours later he
found himself with Maurice Strangwise in the stalls of the vast
Palaceum auditorium. In the unwonted luxury of evening clothes he felt
clean and comfortable, and the cigar he way smoking was the climax of
one of Julien's most esoteric efforts.
The cards on either side of the proscenium opening bore the words:

"Deputy Turn." On the stage wad a gnarled old man with ruddy cheeks
and a muffler a seedy top hat on his head, a coaching whip in his hand,
the old horse bus-driver of London in his habit as he had lived. The old
fellow stood there and just talked to the audience of a fine sporting
class of men that petrol has driven from the streets, without
exaggerated humor or pathos. Desmond, himself a born Cockney, at
once fell under the actor's spell and found all memories of the front
slipping away from him as the old London street characters succeeded
one another on the stage. Then the orchestra blared out, the curtain
descended, and the house broke into a great flutter of applause.
Desmond, luxuriating in his comfortable stall puffed at his cigar and
fell into a pleasant reverie.
He was contrasting the ghastly nightmare of mud and horrors from
which he had only just emerged with the scene of elegance, of
civilization; around him.
Suddenly, his attention became riveted on the stage. The atmosphere of
the theatre had changed. Always quick at picking up "influences,"
Desmond instantly sensed a new mood in the throngs around him. A
presence was in the theatre, an instinct-awakening, a material influence.
The great audience was strangely hushed. The air was heavy with the
tent of incense. The stringed instruments and oboes in the orchestra
were wandering into rhythmic dropped,
Maurice touched his elbow.
"There she is!" he said.
Desmond felt inclined to shake him off roughly. The interruption jarred
on him. For he was looking at this strangely beautiful girl with her skin
showing very brown beneath a wonderful silver tiara-like headdress,
and in the broad interstices of a cloth-of-silver robe with short, stiffly
wired-out skirt. She was seated, an idol, on a glittering black throne, at
her feet with their tapering dyed nails a fantastically attired throng of
worshipers.

The idol stirred into life, the music of the orchestra died away. Then a
tom-tom began to beat its nervous pulse-stirring throb, the strident
notes of a reed-pipe joined in and the dancer, raised on her toes on the
dais, began to sway languorously to and fro. And so she swayed and
swayed with sinuously curving limbs while the drums throbbed out
faster with ever-shortening beats, with now and then a clash of brazen
cymbals that was torture to overwrought nerves.
The dancer was the perfection of grace. Her figure was lithe and supple
as a boy's. There was a suggestion of fire and strength and agility about
her that made one think of a panther as she postured there against a
background of barbaric color. The grace of her movements, the
exquisite blending of the colors on the stage, the skillful grouping of
the throng of worshipers, made up a picture which held the audience
spellbound and in silence until the curtain dropped.
Desmond turned to find Strangwise standing up.
"I thought of just running round behind the scenes for a few minutes,"
he said carelessly.
"What, to see Nur-el-Din? By Jove, I'm coming, too!" promptly
exclaimed Desmond.
Strangwise demurred. He didn't quite know if he could take him: there