How can I describe my first impression of that room? it was something I would never forget. The sights, the sounds, the smells, the warmth, the textures, not one detail ever left me. I was kneeling (stark naked and filthy) on a thick deep blue carpet. People were laughing, not at me but because they were telling jokes to one another; others were talking, and in the background I could hear someone sobbing and weeping, and then someone singing in a rich contralto. I couldn’t deal with kneeling there and lifted my head, risking punishment. At first I couldn’t understand the noise, because the room seemed small, but then I saw that it wasn’t a wall some ten or fifteen feet in front of me, but a dark red curtain of thick velvet, and that beyond a scattering of sofas and chairs and stools the curtain ended, and gave way to a much larger open space. It was fairly dark near me; there was a dim light on the wall above and behind me. But beyond the curtain was lots of electric light, coming from chandeliers and wall-lamps. There was a thin haze of smoke in the air, but it was not from cigarettes: it was incense, possibly mixed with drugs. The wallpaper had a pattern made from deep red velvet with light green fleurs-de-lys flowers, the ceiling was white plaster with paintings of cherubs on it, and a mass of colour towards the open space, with baroque-style figures and scenes painted on it.
All of this took me but a second or two to absorb, but the noise, and the fact that all that furniture was strewn with people in various states of undress, all intently occupied with each other and ignoring me entirely, and the fact that people seemed to be dancing on a table in the far distance, and the faint smell of cooking that came to me, all this and more, it made me want to hide. I’d never thought to see anything like this, not even in my dreams.