A CHORUS GIRL AT SEBO’S
Sebo’s Club was crowded, for it was the dinner hour and Sebo’s is
the most extensively patronized of the dining clubs. Here, all that
was beautiful, all that was smart, all that was famous and brilliant
in the world of society, letters and the drama met on common
ground--the inherent and universal desire which humanity has for
careless comfort. A Cabinet Minister and his party sat at the next
table to that presided over by a great revue actress; the owner of a
Derby winner sat back to back against a famous Radical satirist. The
editor of a great London daily could look across his table and without
shifting his eyes could count in his field of vision the pretty dancer
from the Empiredrome, a royal physician, a peer of the realm and a
ragtime singer.
The big dining hall blazed with lights, the little tables were crowded
together so as to leave scarcely room for the waiters who, by some
mysterious dispensation of Providence, seemed able to thread their
ways through impossible spaces. The noisy coon band kept up its
rhythmic pandemonium in one corner of the room, but did not drown the
rippling laughter and the buzz of light-hearted talk.
In the little vestibule a young man, very tall and very thin, paced
the tesselated floor with that evidence of resignation which tells so
eloquently the story of the Unpunctual Guest. He was very fair and
very pink. His countenance was vacant and the vacancy was by no means
relieved when he screwed a gold-rimmed monocle into his right eye.
Presently the glass doors swung and a girl came hurriedly toward him,
holding out her gloved hand.
“I am awfully sorry I am late, Reggie,” she said with easy
familiarity.
“If you were an hour late or five hours late or a day late,” said the
young man with gentle ecstasy, “I should be content to wait, Miss
Flemming.”
She flashed a dazzling smile at him.
“I shouldn’t be horribly shocked if you called me Vera,” she said.
The young man went pinker than ever, coughed, stuttered, ran his
gloved finger inside the high upstanding collar about his thin throat,
dropped his eye-glass, retrieved it and did all this in the space of
four seconds, thereby betraying his perturbation and his gratitude.
“You have a table, I suppose?” said the girl when she had returned
from depositing her coat.
“Rather!” said the young man, and added after a second’s thought,
“Rather!”
He fussily shepherded her through the mass of tables where his own
attenuation enabled him to emulate the deeds of the agile serving man
and brought her to a corner table which was smothered with rare
flowers. Heads were turned, sharp eyes focussed the couple, some
smiled, though for the girl the glances held nothing but admiration or
cold-blooded appraisement, according to the sex of the observer.
“Reggie Boltover!” said one young man.
“Who is Reggie Boltover?” asked his companion.
“A human being loosely attached to a million,” was the laconic
description.
The girl was radiant, the smile hardly left her face and the eyes
which glanced shyly up to her tall companion were full of wonder and
delight.
“So this is Sebo’s,” she said. “Isn’t it a dreadfully wicked place?”
Reggie Boltover’s face creased alarmingly--he, too, was smiling.
“My dear Miss--my dear Vera,” he said boldly, “should I bring you to a
wicked place, now I ask you; should I bring you to a wicked place,
should I?”
His conversational powers were not brilliant but his heart was pure.
He was not really a wicked young man about town and his chief
wickedness lay in his implicit belief that he was. He had met the girl
one night by accident. A more daring friend of his, and nearer
approaching Reggie’s own ideal of doggishness, had induced him (he
protesting feebly) to call at a stage-door where he was meeting a
charming friend to take her to supper. The charming friend in the
generous large-hearted way of chorus girls had introduced _her_
friend, Vera Flemming, a new-comer to the ranks of the chorus, and
they had all supped together and Vera had been very charming to Mr.
Reggie Boltover and he had asked her to go with him up the river and
had serious thoughts, because of her evident refinement, of
introducing her to his mother, which shows that Reggie had reached the
most dangerous stage of infatuation. There was really nothing wrong
about Reggie Boltover and nothing remarkably terrible about this
strangely initiated friendship.
Chorus girls are merely shop-girls with a taste for caviare and
peaches. They are no more sinful than their sisters in the same social
strata and the only difference between them is that, whilst they are
exposed to similar temptations, the chorus girl has a larger field to
pick from and the candidates are much more presentable. A shop-girl
accepts the hospitality of a tea-shop, the chorus-girl goes to the
Ritz. Both have one consuming passion, a desire for good food, for
which they do not have to pay.
Reggie Boltover, who, to do him justice, knew everybody, entertained
the girl for half-an-hour by pointing out the various celebrities in
the room and Vera Flemming was interested without being
enthusiastically so.
“I would rather you talked about yourself,” she said, “you are ever so
much more interesting than these people.”
“Oh, no,” said Reggie, with a little giggle; “oh, no!”
“You are, indeed, you are,” she said earnestly.
“Oh, come,” said Reggie; “oh, come! no! I am not interesting; oh, dear
no!”
His life he admitted frankly was very ordinary. All that he did was to
sign a few cheques, liquidate a few debts, see a few “fellows” about
“things” and “there you are,” said Reggie.
“It must be wonderful to be in a position of power,” said the girl
musingly. “Of course, I come from a very poor family. We only think in
shillings where you think in thousands of pounds. And it is awfully
hard to realize what it feels like to order people to do things
instead of being ordered.”
Reggie Boltover, who had never ordered anybody to do anything in his
life and would not have dared to dispute the judgment of the
innumerable managers and directors whom his sainted father had
appointed in his life-time, wondered himself what it felt like. He had
often meditated, with a shudder, upon the necessity which might one
day arise, for his taking the initiative in the conduct of his
business. He dimly realized that, in time, all his managers and
directors would die and he had dimly speculated upon the question as
to who would replace them. He had a feeling that perhaps one might go
to Whiteleys and order some new ones, but it had never occurred to him
that at his autocratic word managers and people of that description
could be made out of mud, or that an order affecting the business
which he was supposed to control would be acted upon if he were to
give that order.
“Well, you know,” he said, “I never really tell people to do anything.
You see, I never see them except very occasionally. Of course, they
make reports and all that sort of thing and I have a man who reads
them so everything is all right and I just sign cheques and see a few
fellows and there you are.”
Under the genial influence of her sympathetic interest he expanded a
little and proved that he was not as wholly incompetent as he
pretended to be. For instance, he knew that the iron works and
ship-building yard which still bore his father’s name, and
incidentally his own, made “a deuced lot of money” every year and that
certain other properties made no money.
There was one property of which he spoke with great bitterness but
only because his father, in his life-time, had also spoken of that
matter with similar violence and asperity. Apparently, the one
redeeming feature about Boltover’s Cement Works lay in the fact that
it had no manager and therefore produced no reports. It was in fact a
deserted shell of a building so infamously unprofitable that Boltover
senior (now in Heaven) had directed almost with his last breath, if
you believed Reggie, that his name should be erased from the official
designation of the company.
“You see it was bad cement; you know how cement is made, don’t you?”
“I should love to,” said the girl, her eyes shining, “I have often
wondered.”
“Well,” said Reggie looking round the table for something to
illustrate the object lesson, “you dig in the river and you take out a
lot of stuff and you chuck it in a cart and then you chuck it into a
fire and you pull it out and do something to it and there you are!
That’s cement. Only our cement wasn’t cement, if you understand. That
is what made the beastly thing so awkward.”
“How wonderful!” said the girl. “I shall always remember that.”
“Of course, we’ve got our eyes open,” said Reggie now fairly launched
upon the story of his life, “and one of these days we shall catch a
mug.”
“Catch a--?” asked the girl, puzzled.
Reggie went very pink, but he was excited and grateful at this
demonstration of the girl’s refinement.
“Forgive the vulgarity, Miss--Vera; I mean we shall find a purchaser.
I once nearly sold the beastly thing for £10,000 and the day the deed
was to be signed, they took the poor chap away to a lunatic asylum,
poor old bird, not right in his head, you know. That is why he wanted
to buy our cement works. Comic, isn’t it?
“D’you know,” said Mr. Boltover, suddenly, “when I came round to the
stage door that night I never expected to meet you?”
She looked at him in innocent surprise.
“Didn’t you really?” she said incredulously as though the idea had
occurred to her for the first time, and then, thoughtfully, “I suppose
you didn’t.”
“I didn’t expect to meet you,” repeated Mr. Boltover, who, when he had
got hold of one complete sentence, held tight to it until his groping
mentality had reached out and securely grasped another. “No, I didn’t
expect to meet you, but I’m awfully glad. I feel I owe that young lady
more than I can ever repay.”
He said this with an unusual display of sentimentality.
“That young lady” was his companion’s chorus girl friend, who at that
moment was retailing to her youthful companion at the far side of the
room such details of Vera’s life as she had been able to secure in a
seven-day acquaintance.
“Vera’s not in our show now, of course,” she said; “I don’t think she
had ever been on the stage before. She’s an awfully fresh kid. Came
late to rehearsals and all that sort of thing, but I like her
immensely.”
She smiled and bowed to Vera who, at that moment, had caught her eye.
“She’s very pretty,” said her companion.
“Yes; isn’t she?” agreed the girl, her interest in her friend suddenly
evaporating.
But there was one in that crowded dining-room whose every disengaged
moment was employed in watching the girl and her companion. It
involved his getting into the way of other waiters and called down
upon his head execrations in Neapolitan, Sicilian and the choicest
slang of the Montmartre. He was a man who had prayed for two years for
such a moment as this, and his soul rejoiced in savage exaltation that
so Heaven-sent an opportunity had come.
As the night wore on his plan took a definite shape. For the
consequence he cared nothing. Here was his opportunity, here was his
enemy. He seized a moment, slipped through the service door and passed
down a flight of stone steps to the crowded kitchen filled at that
moment with a babble of sound as the orders were repeated across the
steaming brass pots and the blistering hot plates. He passed through
the kitchen to the larder department, and found what he sought in the
big cool vault where the butchers worked. It was a long thin knife. He
waited until the butcher’s back was turned and slipped it up his
sleeve, passed rapidly through the kitchen, ignoring the chef’s demand
as to his business, and reached the warm, bright restaurant again.
He had no time to waste.
The butcher might at any moment detect the theft and the thief hauled
into the service room to explain his conduct. He made his way across
the room to where Mr. Reginald Boltover and his fair companion sat.
Reggie thought the man had a message, but Vera, looking up, saw the
man’s evil face--and knew. She half twisted, half flung herself
against Reginald Boltover as the waiter’s hand came up to strike. She
saw the knife glitter for a space of a second and closed her eyes,
then there was the sound of a struggle and she opened them in time to
see the vengeful man flung backward to the floor and an immaculate
Michael Pretherston standing over him examining the knife with some
interest.
She met the inspector’s eye and smiled, though the smile was forced,
for even as he bowed, she heard the mockery of his surprise.
“Why, Kate!” he murmured. “I’m always meeting you.”