PARIS ADVENTURES

Greymouth Evening Star, 26 April 1935, Page 3

PARIS ADVENTURES

A NIGHT-LIFE INCIDENT. The night life of Paris is of every kind and to suit all tastes. But among all the strange phases of it I have explored there is one that I can never forget (writes J. B. Morton in the “Manchester Guardian”). I may be wrong, but I think it was in the Boulevard de Clichy. I had come from Spain, and was at a loose end for the evening. ’ As I had never been inside any of the show places of the type of the Rat Mort, I decided to try the experience once. I forget what name my place bore, but I chose it for its mysterious and sinister look. Nobody appeared to be going in, yet ther was the door unmistakably open. I approached and paid a few francs at the box-office. But when I looked up to receive my change I received my first shock. The girl was like someone in a book. She had raven-black hair parted in the middle, and a chalk-white face. Her lips were scarlet, and set tightly together. She did not smile and, I thought, as I moved away, that she looked fiercely and cruelly at me, A small man showed me down a flight of stairs, tisted aside a heavy curtain, and ushered me into a little hall. No poster outside had announced what took place here, and I decided not to ask, but to see what happened. There were a few people sitting in the chair's, of which there vilere some dozen rows, and facing them was a black curtain cutting off one end of the hall. There was no stage or dias visible, so evidently I was not to see anything of a theatrical nature. The people in the seats sat motionless and did not speak. They looked to me like, honest middle-class men and women. But presently two artistic looking young men entered. They talked in whispers.

DEPRESSING 'ATMOSPHERE

The hall was lit by only two lights, one at each side, and the gloom was depressing, particularly as there seemed to be no attempt at decorations. The walls were plain grey, the carpet was black, the ceiling some dirty shade or other. The silence and the absence of animation among the audience were truly remarkable. Other people came in and took their seats quietly. There was a fat old man with white whiskers; an anaemic girl with pale gold hair sticking out like straw all ever her head; a cadaverous, tall man with protruding eyes aud a sharp nose; two buxom women in semievening dress, drenched in perfume; a respectable looking workman in a neat dark suit, with a scarf instead of a tie and collar. One of the buxom women laughed, and although the others took no notice it seemed to me that she had committed a gross breach of etiquette. The silence after that laugh seemed all the more solemn, and I was racking my brains for an answer to the riddle. What on earth was it all about? * When the hall was about half full an electric bell jangled somewhere or other and there was a rustling as * the people settled themselves comfortably in their seats. The little man who had shown me to my seat camo and stood inside the narrow curtain through which I had entered. He looked towards the great black curtain at the end of the hall, jmd I

said to myself: “Will it be a juggler? Is it a seance? A new religion? What the devil' can it be?” I looked/ at the faces in the dim light, but there was nothing to be learnt from them. They were all intent on the curtain at the end of the hall.

THE AUDIENCE. The bell jangled again, and very slowly the two halves of the black curtain began to part. The audience Showed no excitement.' I leaned forward with real curiosity, but all I saw as the curtain gaped wider and wider, was a single chair, draped in black, facing the audience. A single empty chair; and while I looked and made up my mind that we were here to have a seance, and so got ready to go, the lights went down, so that we were almost in the dark. As I still watched the chair the lights went up again, and there came from the wings a broad man with an untidy fair beard a,nd thick fair hair. He bowed to this side and that, sat down in the chair, and in a profound silence took from his side pocket ajittle book and began to read, in a colourless, sentimental voice, a French poem. It was not a very good poem, and when he finished it there was no applause. But he went on to read another, in the same dreary and monotonous voice, which was oddy weak for his strong frame. And as he read he looked up now and then, and fixed expressionless eyes now on one face and now on another.

I slipped out quickly and without any fuss, brushing past the little man who had shown me in. At the top of the short flight of stairs the mysterious girl sat at tlie “guichet,” and as I made for the door I thought she darted another of her fierce glances at me. When I looked back at the place it certainly had a more sinister air than any of the brilliantly lighted little cabarets where revues with indecent names Were being played. Such a place in England would be raided at sight, and I shou,ld like to see our police, who arc so used to taking names and tasting drinks, trying to make head or tail of that gloomy hall where so many apparently respectable citizens went to indulge their secret vice of listening to poetry.