By this time she was gone from the table, and had joined the other
"ladies of the orchestra." They trooped towards the platform, driven in
truculently by the haughty mate of Zangiacomo, who looked as though
she were restraining herself with difficulty from punching their backs.
Zangiacomo followed, with his great, pendulous dyed beard and short
mess-jacket, with an aspect of hang-dog concentration imparted by his
drooping head and the uneasiness of his eyes, which were set very close
together. He climbed the steps last of all, turned about, displaying
his purple beard to the hall, and tapped with his bow. Heyst winced in
anticipation of the horrible racket. It burst out immediately unabashed
and awful. At the end of the platform the woman at the piano, presenting
her cruel profile, her head tilted back, banged the keys without looking
at the music.
Heyst could not stand the uproar for more than a minute. He went out,
his brain racked by the rhythm of some more or less Hungarian dance
music. The forests inhabited by the New Guinea cannibals where he had
encountered the most exciting of his earlier futile adventures were
silent. And this adventure, not in its execution, perhaps, but in its
nature, required even more nerve than anything he had faced before.
Walking among the paper lanterns suspended to trees he remembered with
regret the gloom and the dead stillness of the forests at the back of
Geelvink Bay, perhaps the wildest, the unsafest, the most deadly spot
on earth from which the sea can be seen.
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