The Spy's Bedside Book - Anthology by Graham Greene

Author:Graham Greene
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Anthologies (Multiple Authors), True Crime, General, American, Espionage, English, Fiction, Spy Stories
ISBN: 9780553385908
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
Published: 1985-01-02T06:00:00+00:00

32. COLETTE AND MATA HARI

rom behind a screen of foliage a naked woman had appeared, riding on a white horse, its strappings studded with turquoises—a new dancer whose name was already known among the studio and drawing-room cliques: Mata Hari.

She was a dancer who did not dance much, yet at Emma Calvé’s, before the portable altar that she used as a background, supported by a little group of coloured attendants and musicians and framed in the pillars of a vast, white hall, she had been sufficiently snake-like and enigmatic to produce a good effect. The people who fell into such dithyrambic raptures and wrote so enthusiastically of Mata Hari’s person and talents must be wondering now what collective delusion possessed them. Her dancing and the naïve legends surrounding her were of no better quality than the ordinary clap-trap of the current ‘Indian turns’ in the music hall. The only pleasant certainties on which her drawing-room audiences could count were a slender waist below breasts that she prudently kept hidden, a fine, supple moving back, muscular loins, long thighs and slim knees. Her nose and mouth, which were both thick, and the rather oily brilliance of her eyes did nothing to alter—on the contrary—our established notions of the Oriental. It should be said that the finale of her dance, the moment when Mata Hari, freed of her last girdle, fell forward modestly upon her belly, carried the male—and a good proportion of the female—spectators to the extreme limit of decent attention.

In the May sunshine, at Neuilly, despite the turquoises, the dropping black mane of hair, the tinsel diadem and especially the long thigh against the white flanks of her Arab horse, the colour of her skin was disconcerting, no longer brown and luscious as it had been by artificial light but a dubious, uneven purple. Having finished her equestrian parade, she alighted and wrapped herself in a sari. She bowed, talked, was faintly disappointing. It was much worse on the day Miss Barney invited her as an ordinary guest to a second garden-party.

“Madame Colette Willy?”

A loud, strongly-stressed voice, calling me by my fancy name, made me turn round. I found a lady in a black and white check suit, her breasts held high by a boned cuirass of stays, a veil with velvet chenille dots upon her nose, holding out a hand tightly gloved in white glacé kid stitched with black. I also remember a frilled shirt with a stiff collar and a pair of shoes of a bright egg colour. I remember my amazement.

The lady laughed heartily, displaying a set of strong, white teeth, gave me her name, wrung my hand, expressed the hope that we might meet again and did not move a muscle as the voice of Lady W—— rose beside us, saying in clear, plain words:

“She an Oriental? Don’t be silly! Hamburg or Rotterdam, or possibly Berlin.”

COLETTE

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