T WAS New Year's Eve at the Bal Tabarin in Vienna.
In the center of the long room the girl from Budapest was dancing. She was a tall girl, lithe and supple, and she danced to a clamor of little bells—bells on her garters, bells around her waist, bells concealed that tinkled as she swayed, and protested shrilly when she leaped. Her sensuous dancing pleased the crowd; as she ceased, smiling, with a flash of dark eyes and white teeth, a tipsy officer in uniform presented her with a glass of champagne.
The wild Hungarian music rioted. The musicians, in red coats, with swarthy faces, played furiously. With the near approach of midnight a frenzy seized the crowd. The merriment of the carnival was giving place to something less innocent. A man in a drank from a woman's slipper.
The loges circled the room. From their railings, red plush and gilt, streamed long thin festoons of colored paper. The air was filled with flying confetti. As a gong announced five minutes before the hour the crowd, tired of the decorum of the tables, surged toward the boxes, where women sat, smothered in flowers—fair women and dark, aigrettes and jewels, gleaming flesh and cool, amused eyes. Behind their white shoulders men lounged, men in court dress or uniform with medals of honor on their breasts.
UTSIDE, in the streets, and gathered before St. Stephen's Church, a reverent crowd stood in the snow. At the first stroke of midnight the people crossed themselves, and many knelt. But in the Bal Tabarin the noise only grew more boisterous, the music more riotous. Confetti were abandoned for flying flowers—roses and violets, carnations and lilies. The loges were ankle deep in crushed petals. Amid shrieks of laughter a chimney sweep, in official coat and rags, carried a squealing pig from loge to loge.
Behind the bar, at the top of the steps leading from the boxes to the main floor, an English barmaid was sharpening a lead pencil.
A thin young American girl in a dancing dress stood beside her, leaning both elbows on the bar and surveying the scene with frank curiosity.
"Look at the diamond collar on that woman over there with the bandeau!" she said. "Seems to me diamond collars are taking the place of necklaces this winter."
"I'm glad you spoke of that, Tilly." The barmaid yawned and stuck her pencil in her hair. "I'll have some of my stuff made over."
Tilly Reilly laughed. "What's the pig for?" she demanded.
"Luck. They don't look as if they needed it, do they?"
Tilly's eyes had gone back again to the woman with the bandeau.
"I wonder," she reflected, "how I'd look with a black velvet collar like that and a paste buckle on it. I'm so infernally thin!"
ILLY said "infernally." There is strong reason to believe that she would have said "damnably" had it occurred to her. The world had not been kind to Tilly in her nineteen years, and, although she was still sound and fine, there were scratches on her social veneer. Stranded in Europe by the failure of a roving company, in which she had belonged to the chorus, Tilly had refused with loathing the means many of the girls had chosen to get back, and had drifted into the cabarets as the best of a bad job.
For three months now she had been a part of the night life of the city, a dancer at the Tabarin, a familiar figure to rounders, an enigma to the other girls of the cabaret. For Tilly showed a curious willingness to live on her forty kronen a week salary, a hitherto unknown tendency to mind her own business, and an aloofness that was helped by her ignorance of the language.
O-NIGHT, on this Silvesterabend, Tilly's eyes, as she stared over the revelers, were somewhat clouded. For her contract at the Tabarin expired that night, and she had every reason to believe that it would not be renewed. And when one is making a conscientious effort to live on forty kronen a week and no extras, and has no one to cable to for money—or, for that matter, no money to cable—and has wasted one's substance in riotous living to the extent of a kronen or so every week, a kronen being twenty cents, losing one's job is serious enough.
Tilly's innocence was not ignorance. She knew why she was to be dismissed. Her graceful dancing, totally lacking in fire or sensuality, made no appeal to the satiated habitués of the Bal Tabarin: her aloofness irritated them. A man one night had held Tilly tight and tried to kiss her, whereat Tilly had bitten his hand until it bled.