The Orient Palace of Varieties rose like a cliff from the drapery shops
of Piccadilly. On fine summer dusks, in a mist of golden light, it
possessed a certain magic of gayety; seemed to capture something of the
torch-lit merriment of a country fair. As one loitered on the island,
lonely and meditative, the Orient was alluring, blazed upon the vision
like an enchanted cave, or offered to the London wanderer a fancy of the
scents and glossy fruits and warblers of the garden where Camaralzaman
lost Badoura; and in autumn, stained by rosy sunsets, the theater
expressed the delicate melancholy of the season. But when the rain
dripped monotonously, when fogs transformed the town, when London was
London vast and gray, the Orient became unreal like the bedraggled
palaces of an exhibition built to endure for a little while. After all,
it was an exotic piece of architecture, and evoked an atmosphere of
falseness, the falseness of an Indian gong in a Streatham hall. Yet
fifty years it had stood without being rebuilt. In addition to having
seen two generations pass away, something in the character of its
entertainment, in the lavishness of its decoration, lent it the sacred
permanence of a mausoleum, the mausoleum of mid-Victorian amusement.
The Orient did not march with the times, rising from insignificance. It
never owned a chairman who announced the willingness of each successive
comedian to oblige with a song. Old men never said they remembered the
Orient in the jolly old days, for they could not have forgotten it. In
essentials it remained the same as ever. Dancers had gone; beauties had
shrivelled; but their ghosts haunted the shadowy interior. The
silver-footed _coryphees_ now kept lodging-houses; the swan-like
Ballerinas wore elastic stockings; but their absence was filled by
others: they were as little missed as the wave that has broken. The lean
old vanities quizzed and ogled the frail ladies of the Promenade and
sniffed the smoke-wreathed air with a thought of pleasures once worth
enjoyment. They spent now an evening of merely sentimental dissipation,
but because it was spent at the Orient, not entirely wasted; for the
unchanged theater testified to the reality of their youth. It may not
have been able to rejuvenate them, but, as by a handkerchief that
survives the departure of its owner, their senses were faintly
stimulated.
The Orient was proud because it did not enter into competition with any
other house of varieties; preened itself upon a cosmopolitan programme.
With the snobbishness of an old city firm, it declined to advertise its
ware with eye-arresting posters, and congratulated itself on the
inability to secure new clients. Foreigners made up a large proportion
of the audience, and were apparently contented by equestrian mistresses
of the _haute ecole_, by bewildering assemblages of jugglers, even by
continental mediocrities for the sake of hearing their native tongue.
They did not object to interminable wire-acts, and put up with
divination feats of the most exhausting dullness. After all, these
incidental turns must occur; but the ballets were the feature of the
evening. For many who visited the Orient, the stream of prostitutes
ebbing and flowing upon the Promenade was enough. Yet the women of the
Orient Promenade would strike a cynic with uneasiness.
Under the stars, the Piccadilly courtesans affect the onlooker less
atrociously. Night lends a magic of softness to their fretful beauty.
The sequins lose their garishness; the painted faces preserve an
illusion of reality. Moonlight falls gently on the hollow cheek;
kindles a spark of youth in the leaden eye. The Piccadilly courtesans
move like tigers in a tropic gloom with velvet blazonries and a stealthy
splendor that masks the hunger driving them out to seek their prey. On
the Orient Promenade, the finer animalism has vanished; it was never
more than superficially aesthetic. The daughters of pleasure may still be
tigers, but they are naphtha-lit, pacing backwards and forwards in a
cage. They all appear alike. Their hats are all too large, their figures
are too brutal, their cheeks too lifeless. They are automatic machines
of lust waiting to be stirred into action by pennies.
Under the stars they achieve a pictorial romance; but on the carpet of
the Promenade, they are hard and heartless and vile. Their eyes are
coins; their hands are purses. At their heels patter old men like
unhealthy lap-dogs; beefy provincials stare at them, their foreheads
glistening. Above all the frangipani and patchouli and opoponax and
trefle incarnat steals the rank odor of goats. The orchestra thunders
and crashes down below; the comfortable audience lean back in the
stalls; the foreigners jabber in the gallery; the Orient claque
interrupts its euchre with hired applause. The corks pop; the soda
splashes; money chinks; lechery murmurs; drunkards laugh; and down on
the stage Jenny Pearl dances.
The night wears on. The women come in continually from the wet streets.
They surge in the cloak-room, quarrel over carrion game, blaspheme,
fight and scratch. A door in the cloak-room (locked of course) leads
into the passage outside the dressing-room, where Jenny changes five or
six times each night. Every foul oath and every vile experience and
every detestable adventure is plainly heard by twenty ladies of the
ballet.
Dressing-room number forty-five was a long, low room, with walls of
whitewashed brick. There was one window, seldom opened. There was no
electric light, and the gas-jets gave a very feeble illumination, so
feeble that everybody always put on too much grease paint in their fear
of losing an effect. The girls dressed on each side of the room at a
wide deal board with forms to sit upon. There was a large wardrobe in
one corner, and next to Jenny's place an open sink. The room was always
dark and always hot. There were about eighty stone stairs leading up to
it from the stage, and at least half a dozen ascents in the course of
the evening. The dresser was a blowsy old Irish woman, more obviously
dirty than the room, and there were two ventilators, which gave a
perpetual draught of unpleasant air. The inspectors of the London County
Council presumably never penetrated as far as Room 45, a fact which
seems to show that the extent of municipal interference has been much
exaggerated.
The dressing-rooms were half on one side of the stage, half on the
other. Those on the side nearer to the stage-door were less unpleasant.
The architect evidently believed in the value of first impressions.
Anybody venturing into either warren without previous acquaintanceship
would have been bewildered by the innumerable rooms and passages, tucked
away in every corner and branching off in every direction. Some of the
former seemed to have been inhabited for years. One in particular
contained an ancient piano, two daguerrotypes and a heap of mouldering
stuffs. It might have been the cell where years ago a Ballerina was
immured for a wrong step. It existed like a monument to the despair of
ambition.
The Orient stifled young life. The _Corps de Ballet_ had the engulfing
character of conventual vows. When a girl joined it, she cut herself off
from the world. She went there fresh, her face a mist of roses, hope
burning in her heart, fame flickering before her eyes. In a few years
she would inevitably be pale with the atmosphere, with grinding work and
late hours. She would find it easy to buy spirits cheaply in the canteen
underneath the stage. She would stay in one line, it seemed, forever.
She would not dance for joy again.
When Jenny went to the Orient first, she did not intend to stay long.
She told the girls this, and they laughed at her. She did not know how
soon the heavy theater would become a habit; she did not realize what
comfort exists in the knowledge of being permanently employed. But not
even the Orient could throttle Jenny. She was not the daughter and
granddaughter of a ballet girl. She had inherited no traditions of
obedience. She never became a marionette to be dressed and undressed and
jigged, horribly and impersonally. She yielded up her ambition, but she
never lost her personality. When, soon after her arrival, the Maitre de
Ballet took her in his dark little corner and pinched her arm, she
struck him across the mouth, vowed she would tell the manager, and burnt
up his conceit with her spitfire eyes. He tried again later on, and
Jenny told his wife, a yellow-faced, fat Frenchwoman. Then he gave her
up, and, being an artist, bore her no malice, but kept her in the first
line of boys.
It is not to be supposed that the eighty or ninety ladies of the ballet
were unhappy. On the contrary, they were very happy, and, so far as it
accorded with the selfishness of a limited company, they were well
looked after. The managing director called them "Children," and was
firmly convinced that he treated them as children. Actually, he treated
them as dolls, and in the case of girls well into the thirties, with
some of the sentimental indulgence lavished on old broken dolls. Perhaps
it was the crowd of men who waited every night at the end of the long,
narrow court that led from Jermyn Street down to the Orient stage door,
which has helped to preserve the vulgar and baseless tradition of
frailty still sedulously propagated. Every night, about half-past
eleven, the strange mixture of men waited for the gradual exodus of the
ladies of the ballet. A group of men, inherently the same, had stood
thus on six nights of the week for more than fifty years.
They had stood there with Dundreary whiskers, in rakish full capes and
strapped overalls. They had waited there with the mutton-chop whiskers
and ample trousers of the 'seventies. Down the court years ago had come
the beauties, with their striped stockings and swaying crinolines and
velvety chignons. Down the court they had tripped in close-fitting
pleated skirts a little later, and later still with the protruding
bustles and skin-tight sleeves of the 'eighties. They had taken the
London starlight with the balloon sleeves of the mid-'nineties. They
took the starlight now, as sweet and tender as the fairs of long ago.
They came out in couples, in laughing companies, and sometimes singly
with eager, searching glances. They came out throwing their wraps around
them in the sudden coolness of the air. They lingered at the end of the
court in groups delicate as porcelain, enjoying the freedom and reunion
with life. Their talk was hushed and melodious as the conversation of
people moving slowly across dusky lawns. They were dear to the
imaginative observer. He watched them with pride and affection as he
would have watched fishing-boats steal home to their haven about sunset.
Every night they danced and smiled and decked themselves for the
pleasure of the world. They rehearsed so hard that sometimes they would
fall down after a dance, crying on the stage where they had fallen from
sheer exhaustion. They were not rich. Most of them were married, with
children and little houses in teeming suburbs. Many, of course, were
free to accept the escort of loiterers by the stage-door. The latter
often regarded the ladies of the ballet as easy prey, but the ladies
were shy as antelopes aware of the hunter crawling through the grasses.
They were independent of masculine patronage; laughed at the fools with
their easy manners and genial condescension. They might desire applause
over the footlights, but under the moon they were free from the
necessity for favor. They had, with all its incidental humiliations, the
self-respect which a great art confers. They were children of Apollo.
The difference between the gorgeousness of the ballet and the dim air of
the court was unimaginable to the blockheads outside. They had seen the
girls in crimson and gold, in purple and emerald, in white and silver;
they had seen them spangled and glittering with armor; they had heard
the tinkle of jewelry. They had watched their limbs; gloated upon their
poses. They had caught their burning glances; brooded on their lips and
eyes and exquisite motion. Inflamed by the wanton atmosphere of the
Orient, they had thought the ladies of the ballet slaves for the delight
of fools, but round the stage-door all their self esteem was blown away
like a fragment of paper by a London night wind. Their complacent selves
by most of the girls were brushed aside like boughs in a wood. Some,
Jenny and Irene amongst them, would ponder awhile the silly group and
gravely choose a partner for half an hour's conversation in a cafe. But
somewhere close to twelve o'clock Jenny would fly, leaving not so much
as a glass slipper to console her sanguine admirer. Home she would fly
on the top of a tram and watch in winter the scudding moon whipped by
bare blown branches, in summer see it slung like a golden bowl between
the chimney stacks. The jolly adventures of youth were many, and the
partnership of Jenny and Irene caused great laughter in the
dressing-room when the former related each diverting enterprise.
The tale of their conquests would be a long one. Most of the victims
were anonymous or veiled in the pseudonym of a personal idiosyncrasy.
There was Tangerine Willy, who first met them carrying a bag of oranges.
There was Bill Hair and Bill Shortcoat and Sop and Jack Spot and Willie
Eyebrows and Bill Fur. They all of them served as episodes mirthful and
fugitive. They were mulcted in chocolates and hansoms and cigarettes.
They danced attendance, vainly dreaming all the time of conquest. Jenny
held them in fee with her mocking eyes, bewitched them with musical
derision, and fooled them as Hera fooled the passionate Titan.
In winter-time the balls at Covent Garden gave Jenny some of the
happiest hours of her life. Every Tuesday fortnight, tickets were sent
round to the stage-door of the Orient, and it was very seldom indeed
that she did not manage to secure one. On the first occasion she went
dressed as a little girl in muslin, with a white baby hat and white
shoes and socks, and, wherever they might attract a glance, bows of pink
silk. When the janitors saw her first, they nearly refused to admit
such youthfulness; could not believe she was really grown up; consulted
anxiously together while Jenny's slanting eyes glittered up to their
majesties. They were convinced at last, and she enjoyed herself very
much indeed. She was chased up the stairs and round the lobby. She was
chased down the stairs, through the supper-room, in and out of half a
dozen boxes, laughing and chattering and shrieking all the while. She
danced nearly every dance. She won the second prize. Three old men tried
to persuade her to live with them. Seven young men vowed they had never
met so sweet a girl.
To the three former Jenny murmured demurely:
"But I'm a good little girl; I don't do those things."
And of course they pointed out that she was much too young to come to so
wicked a place as Covent Garden. And of course, with every good
intention, they offered to escort her home at once.
With the seven young men's admiration Jenny agreed.
"I am sweet, aren't I? Oh, I'm a young dream, if you only knew."
And as a dream was she elusive. She gloried in her freedom. She was glad
she was not in love. She had no wish to do anything but enjoy herself to
the top of her bent. And she succeeded. Then at half-past six o'clock of
a raw November morning, she rumbled home to Hagworth Street in a
four-wheel cab with five other girls--a heap of tangled lace. She went
upstairs on tiptoe. She undressed herself somehow, and in the morning
she woke up to find on each wrist, as testimony of the night's
masquerade, a little pink bow, soiled and crumpled.
She went often after that first visit and had many adventures. On one
occasion she fell in with the handsome wife of a Surrey publican, and
drove back after breakfast beside her to whatever Surrey village Mrs.
Argles astonished with her figure and finery. Irene came, too, and the
girls went to bed in a dimity-hung bedroom and were taken for a drive in
the afternoon and sat so long in the cosy bar-parlor watching the dusk
stealing through the misted trees that they decided to send a telegram
to the theater announcing their illness. Then they stayed another night
and went for another drive, laughing and chatting down the deep Surrey
lanes. After dinner Jenny went back to Hagworth Street, and had a
flaming quarrel with her mother, who accused her of "going gay";
demanded to know how she dared put in an appearance dressed in another
woman's clothes; insisted that she was to come home immediately after
the theater; forbade a hundred things, and had the door slammed in her
face for the advice. There were mad days as well as spangled nights.
There were days at the Zoo with Bill Fur, a schoolmaster always full of
information until he found his hat in the middle of the giraffes'
enclosure, or perceived his gloves viewed with dislike by a cassowary.
Bill Fur, however, would gladly have lost more than gloves or hat to be
free for a while from the Margate school where he taught delicate boys
the elements of Latin. To himself he was Don Juan in bravery of black
satin slashed with purple. To the girls he was, as Jenny put in, a
scream. To the world, he was a rather foolish middle-aged schoolmaster.
Perhaps it was Colonel Walpole who first suggested to Jenny that all men
were not merely ridiculous. From his seat in the front row of stalls, he
perceived her charm; sent round a note to the stage door; took her out
to supper and champagne. When he found she was a good girl, he seemed to
like her more than ever, and gave her tea in the flat whose windows
looked over the sunlit tree-tops of Green Park. He also gave her some
pretty dresses and hats. The other girls whispered and giggled when
Jenny's back was turned. Her mother was sharply inquisitive and
extremely suspicious.
"Who cares?" said Jenny. "There's _nothing_ in it."
Colonel Walpole took her for long motor drives, gave her salmon
mayonnaise at Weybridge, chicken mayonnaise at Barnet, salmon mayonnaise
at Henley, chicken mayonnaise at Cobham, and lobster _au gratin_ at
Brighton. Colonel Walpole was very paternal, and Jenny liked him. He had
a cool, clean appearance and a pleasant voice. Whatever may have been
his ultimate intentions, he behaved very well, and she was sorry when he
went away on a Tibetan shooting expedition.
"My friend, the Prince, has gone away," she told the girls; and "don't
laugh," she added, "because I _don't_ like it."
Jenny was nineteen. The mark of the Orient was not yet visible. A few
roses had withered, but eighteen months of the fusty old theater had
been balanced by laughter outside. There seemed to be no end of her
enjoyment of life. In essentials she was younger than ever. Mrs. Raeburn
worried ceaselessly; but her daughter was perfectly well able to look
after herself. Indeed, the mistakes she made were due to wisdom rather
than folly. She knew too much about men. She had "properly rumbled" men.
She was too much of a cynic to be taken in. Her only ambition was
excitement; and love, in her opinion, did not provide it. She was always
depressed by the sight of lovers. She hated the permanency of emotion
that their perpetual association implied. She and Irene liked to choose
a pair from the group of men who waited by the stage door, as one picks
out two horses for a race. The next evening the pair of last night would
be contemptuously ignored, and a fresh couple dangled at the end of a
string as long as their antics were novel enough to divert.
Jenny still vowed she had no intention of remaining at the Orient, and
if people asked her about her dancing, she mocked.
"What's the good of working? You don't get nothing for it. I _could_
have danced. Yes, once. But now. Well, I can now, only I don't want to.
See? Besides, what's the good?"
If anyone had foretold a career, she would have mocked louder.
"You don't know the Orient; I reckon they don't _want_ to see a girl get
on at the Orient. If you make a success in one ballet, you're crushed in
the next."
One morning Jenny looked at herself in the glass.
"May," she called out, "I think if I was to get old, I'd drown myself.
I would really. Thirty! What a shocking idea!"
"Why, you're only nineteen."
"Yes, I know, but I _shall_ be thirty. Thirty! What an unnatural age!
Who cares? Perhaps I sha'n't never be thirty."