A jungle of innumerable trees and dangling creepers -- it was in this form that parties always presented themselves to Walter Bidlake's imagination. A jungle of noise; and he was lost in the jungle, he was trying to clear a path for himself through its tangled luxuriance. The people were the roots of the trees and their voices were the stems and waving branches and festooned lianas -- yes, and the parrots and the chattering monkeys as well.
The trees reached up to the ceiling and from the ceiling they were bent back again, like mangroves, toward the floor. But in this particular room, Walter reflected, in this queer combination of a Roman courtyard and the Palm House at Kew, the growths of sound shooting up, uninterrupted, through the height of three floors, would have gathered enough momentum to break clean through the flimsy glass roof that separated them from the outer night. He pictured them going up and up, like the magic beanstalk of the Giant Killer, into the sky. Up and up, loaded with orchids and bright cockatoos, up through the perennial mist of London into the clear moonlight beyond the smoke. He fancied them waving up there in the moonlight, the last thin aerial twigs of noise. That loud laugh, for example, that exploding guffaw from the fat man on the left -- it would mount and mount, diminishing as it rose, till it no more than delicately tinkled up there under the moon. And all these voices (what were they saying? ". made an excellent speech. "; ". no idea how comfortable those rubber reducing belts are till you've tried them. "; ". such a bore. "; ". eloped with the chauffeur. "), all these voices -- how exquisite and tiny they'd be up there! But meanwhile, down here, in the jungle. Oh, loud, stupid, vulgar, fatuous!
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