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Thursday evening Gertie coached him in a new dance, the turkey trot. She also gave him a lesson in the Boston, with a new dip invented by Mme. Vashkowska, which was certain to sweep the country, because, of course, Vashkowska was the only genuinely qualified maîtresse de danse in America. It was a beautiful evening. Home! Ray came in, and the three of them had coffee and thin sandwiches.
Gaétan Vestris, the first of the family, known as the "Dieu de la Danse," and who held that there were only three great men in Europe, Frederick the Great of Prussia, Voltaire, and himself, dared to dictate even to Gluck. "Write me the music of a chaconne, Monsieur Gluek," said the god of dancing. "A chaconne!" said the enraged composer.
The "Danse Macabre" had come to a timely end, if that which is without tempo may be said to have any relation with time, and the trio of Chopin's "Funeral March" was already in uneven progress. The legless man sat on the bare pavement, his back against the handsome area railing of No. 1 Fifth Avenue, and steadily revolved the mechanism of the organ with his hairy, powerful hand.
Gounod had conducted the Funeral March of a Marionnette; Reyer, his beautiful overture to Siguar; Saint Saens, the Danse Macabre and a Reverie Orientale; Massenet, an unpublished Hungarian march; Guiraud, his Carnaval; Delibes, the Valse Lente from Sylvia and the Pizzicati from Coppelia. Mlle. Krauss had sung the bolero in the Vespri Siciliani; and Mlle.
Berry watched the towns-people go by, and, sensitively feeling his uncle's antipathy, it seemed he was watching a sort of danse macabre of ugly criminals. 'Did you ever see such a God-forsaken crew creeping about! It gives you the very horrors to look at 'em.
In Dostoievsky's books, madmen, idiots, drunkards, consumptives, degenerates, visionaries, reactionaries, anarchists, nympholepts, criminals and saints jostle one another in a sort of "Danse Macabre," but not one of them but has his moment of ecstasy.
"Well, poor old Sir Charles, one of the most modest and retiring men in existence, was standing the other night among the mob, in one of the drawing-rooms, while a waltzing-party were figuring away, at which, with that fondness for 'la danse' that characterizes every German of any age, he was looking with much interest, when my lady came tripping up, and the following short dialogue ensued within my ear-shot: "
Pasgrave replied, that he did look at it, he supposed; that he saw it was a ten-guinea note; it might be stained, it might not be stained; he could not pretend to be certain about it. He repeated his assurances that he was ignorant of business, and of every thing in this world but dancing. "Pour la danse, je m'y connois pour les affaires, je n'en sais rien, moi."
Five hundred francs for so small a danse! But he paid. Trust Millie Moran! Say, I collected a few glad rags over there too. What about this one?" "It don't need any Paris label," says I. "Don't see how you got upstairs in it, though." "I can do a cartwheel in it," says she. "We've learned to handle ourselves some, Tim and I. And now I guess I'll take him out of hock.
I cared for nothing, for no one, and my interest in living further had been suddenly swept away. Harry Hambledon, as we sat together at breakfast each day, tried in vain to interest me in various ways. He urged me one evening to go with him and Norah to the Palais de Danse, across Hammersmith Bridge, and I was forced to accept. But instead of dancing I sat at a side table and sipped ice drinks.
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