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There were frequent all-night revelries reverberated down from the skylight room on the top floor, and one evening a passing group had beat a can-can of invitation on her doorway; but she could lock and bolt herself into her room, a box, it is true, at two dollars and a half a week, but it boasted half curtains of yellow scrim, a couch-bed with a moth-eaten but gay wool cover, and a small square of table with a reading lamp attached by a tube to the gas jet.
The change in Erik Dorn had come to him with a cynicism of its own. It laughed with its own laughter. A mind foreign to him spoke to him through the day.... "You would smile at life, Erik; well, here it is. Easy for a sleeper to smile. But smile now. Life is a surface, eh? shifting about into designs for the delectation of your eyes. Watch it shifting then. Darkness and emptiness in a can-can.
The streets are swarming with constantly arriving new-comers; the stores and saloons are literally crammed at all hours; dance-houses and can-can dens exist; hundreds of eager, expectant, and hopeful miners are working in the mines, and the harvest reaped by them is not at all discouraging.
It was a mercy he was only six. That is the can-can. The idea of it is to dance as wildly, as noisily, as furiously as you can; expose yourself as much as possible if you are a woman; and kick as high as you can, no matter which sex you belong to. There is no word of exaggeration in this.
I have ordered dinner at the Café des Ambassadeurs. I've got a table on the balcony. The balcony overlooks the garden, and the stage is at the end of the garden, so we shall see the performance as we dine. The comic songs, the can-can dancers and the acrobats will be a change after Wagner. I hope you'll like the dinner." He took a card from his pocket and read the menu.
In such phases of this kaiser city, one is removed from the so-called Tingel-Tangel, or variétés and cabarets, where the visiting narrverein is regaled with such integral and valid elements of Berlin "night life" as "der cake walk," "der can-can" and "die matschiche getanzt von original importierten Mexikanerinnen." The girls, alas, in these places are not unlovely.
He forgets the tune all the time and we laugh and hit him with pennies. The clerk with the shock of black hair who does an Apache dance, and does it well. Too well. And the female impersonator who does a can-can female dance very well. Much too well. Nobody wants them. We want Bertha, the Sewing Machine Girl. There was a thrill to her. The way she looked when the applause grew loud.
The large room was handsomely furnished with mahogany and lit by three large crystal chandeliers and many side brackets. It was about two thirds full. A band was playing and on a platform a woman in a Spanish costume of sorts was dancing the can-can, to the noisy appreciation of the male guests. Along one side of the room was a bar with a large painting above it of bathing nymphs.
"You're jaundiced, dad," laughed Sue. "You're looking at the place through a yellow film of prejudice. One must enter into the spirit of the thing!" Rushford groaned. "I'm afraid I'm too set in my ways, Susie," he said, dismally. "I've lived in America too long. You might as well ask me to dance the can-can, and be done with it!" "Besides," continued Sue, "it's just as Nell says.
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