Ray, turning his head, saw in the face of the woman the same disgust he felt. Those monkey tricks were the special trademarks of the great fraternity of civilized touts and gigolos, born and trained to prey on the carnal passions of humanity.
A primitive person could not play the game as neatly as they. During a winter spent at Nice, he had found the cocottes and gigolos monkeying on the promenade more interesting to watch than the society people. The white monkeys were essential to the great passion play of life to understudy the parts of those who were holding the stage by power of wealth, place, name, title, and class—everything but the real thing.
And as there were civilized white monkeys, so were there black monkeys, created by the conquests of civilization, learning to imitate the white and even beating them at their game. He recalled the colored sweetmen and touts and girls with whom he had been familiar in America, some who lived in the great obscure region of the boundary between white and black. Following as they did their own shady paths, he had never been strongly repelled by their way of living, because it was a role that they played admirably, scavengers feeding on the backwash of the broad streaming traffic of American life. They were not very different from the monkeys of the French Antilles who carried on their antics side by side with the Provençals and Corsicans and others of the Mediterranean breed. They had acquired enough of civilized tricks to play their parts fittingly.
But not so the Africans, who were closer to the bush, the jungle, where their primitive sex life had been controlled by ancient tribal taboos. Within those taboos they had courted their women, married and made families. And so it was not natural for them, so close to the tradition of paying in cash or kind or hard labor for the joy of a woman, to live the life of the excrescences attaching like mushrooms to the sexual life of civilization. Released from their taboos, turned loose in an atmosphere of prostitution and perversion and trying to imitate the white monkeys, it was no wonder they were very ugly.
After the dinner the younger American created a problem. He was of middle build, wearing a fine New York suit, reddish-brown stuff. He was the clean-shaven, clean-cut type that might have been either a graduate student looking at the world with the confident air of one who is able to go anywhere, or a successful salesman of high-class goods. He wore no horn-rimmed glasses to hide his clear-seeing eyes, and his jaw was developing into the kind common to the men who are earnest, big, and prosperous in the ideals of Americanism.
“But this ‘Blue Cinema,’ what is it, really?” he demanded.
“I suppose it is a cinematic version of the picture cards the guides try to sell you in the street,” the leader answered. “You don’t have to go, you know.”
“Oh, I’d like to see the thing, all right,” replied the young man, “but—are there colored or white persons in the picture?”
“White, I suppose. The colored people are not as advanced and inventive as we in such matters. Excepting what we teach them,” the leader added, facetiously; “they often beat us at our game when they learn.”
“But she isn’t going, is she?” The American indicated the young woman. “They won’t let her in a maison de rendezvous.”
“Most certainly I am. Am I not one of the party? There isn’t anything I am not old enough to see, if I want to. Do you want to discriminate against me because I am a woman?”
“They’ll let her in any place if we pay the price,” said the Britisher.
“But she can’t go if he is going.” The young man looked at Ray.
“Oh, Ray!” The young woman laughed. “That’s what it’s all about. You needn’t worry about him. He has posed in the nude for my friends and he was a perfectly-behaved sauvage.” She stressed the word broadly.
“That’s all right,” said Ray to the young man. “I am not going if you go. I am full of prejudices myself.”
“Well, good night,” the young man said. Abruptly he left the party.
“My friend has done his bit for the honor of the Great Nordic race,” the remaining American remarked.
Nobody thought that the “Blue Cinema” would be really entertaining. The leader was blasé and desired anything that was merely different. But they were all curious, except the gentlemen bums, who had seen the show several times as guides and were indifferent. It was very high-priced, costing fifty francs for each person.
The fee of admission was paid. In the large dim hall they were the only audience.
Before the first reel had finished the leader asked the young woman if she preferred to go.
“No, I’d rather see it out,” she said.
There was no brutal, beastly, orgiastic rite that could rouse terror or wild-animal feeling. It was a calculating, cold, naked abortion.
The “Blue Cinema” struck them with the full force of a cudgel, beating them down into the depths of disgust. Ray wondered if the men who made it had a moral purpose in mind: to terrify and frighten away all who saw it from that phase of life. Or was it possible that there were human beings whose instincts were so brutalized and blunted in the unsparing struggle of modern living that they needed that special stimulating scourge of ugliness. Perhaps. The “Blue Cinema,” he had heard, was a very flourishing business.
He was sitting against a heavy red velvet curtain. Toward the end of the show the curtain was slightly agitated, as if someone on the other side had stirred it. He
