Chapter Ninety-Five
The motive for holding a dance was uncertain (to all but La Paiva, who wasn’t saying): A sudden burst of magnanimity on Voot’s part? An earnest attempt to re-evoke conviviality at this late stage? A roguish gambit to provoke violence? An unconscious admixture of the above? Or, really, no reason at all?
Whatever the reason, Voot announced that night’s entertainment by way of leaflets pushed under guests’ doors. The guests having been slumping around the hotel as, not to mince words, slobs, it was left to them to search out and dust down the formal attire they were requested to wear. In they trooped, then, bristling with splendour, a ghostly palimpsest of a more civilised time overlying the futile floundering of late, until, before Voot and his fellow musicians had time to uncase their instruments to kick off the first dance, Mifkin and his gang charged in and began to punch Voot’s crew. Oaths, oofs, rude recriminations, blood and dislocated cartilage issued from the staff, whilst the guests stood on the dance floor with overwhelming indifference. The faintest intimation of a threat to the substructure of society—it could be expressed as, more or less, “Who will clean the hotel and serve us food if these underlings beat each other to death?”—troubled the more sensitive souls present among the upper classes, but the others hardly noticed, and the next morning, when they awoke to another day promising a relentless bombardment of tedium, they really couldn’t say how they’d found their way back to their beds.