You’ve altered so much since I saw you! It was odds against my
recognizing you at all,” declared Cora, beaming forth into conversation
before Christian had fairly grasped the significance of her identity.
“I should never have believed they would make such an Englishman out
of you, in just these few months. Let’s see--it was October, wasn’t it?
Yes, of course--the First.” She showed her beautiful teeth in a flash of
gaiety. “The pheasants weren’t the only ones that got hit that day. But
bygones are bygones.... And how do you like London? How do you find it
compares with Paris? I always maintain that there’s more real life here,
if you know where to look for it.... But I am afraid you’re not glad to
see me.”
“There you are wrong. I am glad to see you,” Christian replied, with
deliberation. He made his words good by thrusting his plate back upon
the table and shaking her gloved hand. There was a frank smile in his
eyes.
“Get my glass filled again,” she suggested--“and-your own too--and let’s
get out of the way. These people push as if they had had nothing to eat
since Christmas. Of all the hogs in evening clothes, the stage-supper
hog is the worst. Well, and how have you been, all this time?”
They had moved across the stage to the entrance, and paused near it in
a little nook of momentary isolation. Christian made conventional answer
to her query, and to other remarks of hers calling for no earnest
attention, the while he concentrated his thoughts upon the fact that
they were actually standing here together, talking like old friends.
It was sufficiently surprising, this fact, but even more remarkable was
the satisfaction he himself was getting from it. There was no room for
doubt; he really enjoyed being with her. There was no special need to
concern himself with what she was saying. She hardly paused for replies,
and seemed not to mind in the least the automatic character of the few
which came to her. He had only to smile a little, and nod, and let his
eyes glow pleasurably, and she went blithely on. The perception came
suddenly to him that he had been sorry also for her. Indeed, now that he
reflected upon it, had not hers been the most cruel misfortune of all?
The memory of the drawn, agonized mask of a face she had shown, over the
tea-table in the conservatory at Caermere, rose in his mind’s vision.
He looked up at the strips of canvas and lamps above, with half-closed
eyes, recalling in reverie the details of this suffering face; then he
turned abruptly to confront her, and observe afresh the happy contrast
she presented to-night.
Cora was looking away for the instant, and apparently conveying by
lifted eyebrows and shakes of the head a message of some sort to some
person on the bustling stage unknown to him. He glanced instinctively
in the direction of her signal, but gained no information--and indeed
realized at once that he was not in search of any. Of course, she knew
everybody here, and would be exchanging nods and smiles of recognition
all the evening. It occurred to him to wonder if her husband, that
Captain Edward of unpleasant memory, was on the stage, but he had the
power to put the thought promptly out of his mind. It was only Cora that
he was interested in, and that he wanted to talk with. And here she was,
once more looking into his face, and restoring by her smile his almost
jocund pleasure in the situation.
He still maintained the rôle of listener, but it grew increasingly clear
to him that when his turn came he would have a good deal to say, and
that he would say it well. He had never spoken on familiar terms with an
actress before--and the experience put him wonderfully at his ease.
He felt that he could say things to her; already he delighted in the
assurance of her receptivity, her immunity from starched nonsense, her
genial and comforting good fellowship. As he continued to look at her,
and to smile, he remembered what people always said, or rather took
for granted, about ladies on the stage. The consciousness shaped itself
within him that she offered a timely and felicitous compromise--a sort
of bridge between those formal, “gun-metal” women of society whom he
desired never to see again, and those hapless, unblest creatures of the
Empire.
Presently she took his arm, and they moved round to the stalls in front,
and found seats a little apart from any one else. A large number of
young ladies, in white or light-hued evening dresses, were seated about
in the rows before them, and Cora pointed out this one and that among
them to Christian. “That is Dolly Montressor--the dancer, you know--her
photos are all the rage just now. The girl in pink, over there--just
turning round--she is the one who sued young Concannon for breach of
promise. You must remember. Her lawyers put the bailiffs in for what
she owed them, after they’d taken everything the jury gave her, and she
dressed the bailiffs in livery and had them wait at the table at a big
supper she gave. The little thicknosed dark man there--next but one to
her--he drew a check for the supper and the bailiffs too. You see the
small, thin girl with the tomato-colored hair--she didn’t bring _her_
suit into court--one isn’t fox-headed for nothing. She settled outside
at the last minute--the Lord Carmody case, you know--and no one’s ever
heard a whisper of any supper she ever gave. It isn’t at all her line.
She puts it all into South Africans; they say she’s good for thirty
thousand pounds, if she’s got a penny. It isn’t bad, you know, on a
salary of six quid, and only the pantomime season at that. Oh, there’s
Peggy Wiltshire--just in the doorway. She’s the most remarkable woman in
England. How old would you think she was? Forty? Why, my dear man, she
was billed as a star in the old original Black Crook--just about the
time I was born. She can’t be a minute under sixty. But look at her--the
neck and shoulders of a girl! Isn’t it amazing! Why, she was knocking
about town when your father was a youngster--and here she is still going
strong.”
The tables were being cleared from the stage, and the fringe of
gentlemen who remained hungry and thirsty was retiring slowly and with
palpable reluctance toward the wings. Some sad-faced musicians emerged
wearily from an unsuspected cave beneath the footlights, and exhibited
their violins and flutes to the general gaze with an air of profound
dejection. Their fiddle strings began to whine at one another, in a
perfunctory and bad-tempered groping about for something they were
expected to have in common. A stout man on the stage vigorously
superintended the removal of the last table, and warned off with a
comprehensive gesture the lingering remnant of unsated raveners; then,
turning, he lifted his hand. On the instant, some score and more of the
young ladies in white and pale pinks and blues and lavenders rose from
their front stalls, and moved toward the stage door at the left. They
pressed forward like a flock of sheep--and with faces as listlessly
vacant as any pasture could afford. Christian observed their mechanical
exit with a curling lip.
“If these are the renowned beauties, whose fascinations turn the heads
of all the young men about town,” he confided to his companion, “then it
says extremely little for the quality of what is inside those heads.”
“Yes, isn’t it extraordinary!” she mused at him, eyeing the bevy of
celebrities with a ruminating glance. “This must be somewhere near the
sixth or seventh lot of ’em that even I’ve seen passing through the
turnstile, as you might say. Where do they all come from?--and good
heavens! where do they all go to? It’s a procession that never stops,
you know. You’d think there was a policeman, keeping it moving. You have
these girls here--well, they’re the queens, just for the minute. They
own the earth. Nothing in the world is too good for them. Very well:
just behind them are some other girls, a few years younger. Goodness
knows where they were to-night--in the back ranks of the ballets,
perhaps, or doing their little turn at the Paragon or the Canterbury,
or doing nothing at all--nothing but keeping their toes pointed in this
direction. And they are treading close on the heels of these queens
you see here; and behind _them_ are girls of sixteen or so, and behind
_them_ the little chits of ten and twelve--and they’re all pushing
along--and in time each lot gets in front, out under the limelight, and
has its little year on the throne--and then gets shoved off to make room
for the next. You might have seen two-thirds of these men here ten years
ago. But not the women. Oh, no! Only here and there one--an old stager
like Polly Wiltshire--or a middle-aged stager like myself. But we’re
merely salt to the porridge.”
“But do you not wish to dance?” he asked her. The orchestra had begun a
waltz, and the young ladies from the front stalls, each now attached to
a stiffly gyrating male figure, were circling about on the stage, with
a floating, wave-like swing of their full skirts which revealed to those
below in the stalls rhythmic glimpses of whisking feet and trim black
ankles.
“I will dance with you with pleasure,” she replied, promptly.
“Unfortunately”--he began with confusion--“it is ridiculous of me, but I
never learned.”
“Oh, then, we will sit here and talk,” she insisted. “I truly don’t want
to dance. It’s ever so much cooler and more comfortable here. One has to
come to these things, you know--you have to show yourself or you’re like
the man who fell out of the balloon--simply not in it. But they’re all
alike--all deadly stupid unless you’re young and want to kick your legs
about--or unless you find some one you’re particularly glad to see.”
Christian did not seek to evade the implication of the genial glance
with which she pointed this last remark. “Yes, it is good of you to stay
here with me,” he declared. “Except you and my friend who brought me
here--I thought I saw him dancing a moment ago--I don’t know a soul. I
have been saying to-day,” he continued, settling down in his seat toward
her, “that I make friends badly--I remain here in England almost a
stranger.”
“Why, I thought you went everywhere. I know I’m forever seeing your name
in the ‘Morning Post.’ You spell it Tower, I notice.”
“Oh, yes, I have been going everywhere--but going as one goes alone
through a gallery of pictures. I do not bring out any friends with me.”
She stole a swift glance at him, as she fanned herself. “You surprise
me,” she commented. “I should have thought everybody would be running
after you.”
“Do they? I am not conscious of it.” He spoke wearily. “If they do, it
does not interest me. They are not my kind of people. They take no hold
whatever upon my sympathy. They make no appeal to the imagination.”
“You could hardly say that about those ladies’ skirts up there,” she
jocosely remarked. “I had no idea silk petticoats flapped so.”
He was not to be diverted from his theme. “It is very funny about me,”
he went on. “I seem to make no friends among men, of my own age or any
other. Of course there are two or three exceptions--but no more. And as
for the majority of women, they attract me still less. Yet when, once in
a great while, I do meet some one who really interests me, it is always
a woman. These few women whom I have in mind--oh, I could count them
on the fingers of one hand--they make a much deeper and more lasting
impression on me than any man can make.”
“I believe that frequently happens,” she put in lightly. She did not
seem to him to be following his thread of reasoning with conspicuous
closeness, but her pleasant smile reassured him.
“I think I am most readily moved on the side of my compassion,” he
continued, intent upon the development of his self-analysis. “If I am
sorry for the people, it is easier for me to like them--that is, if they
are young and pretty women.”
Cora laughed aloud at this, then lapsed abruptly into thoughtfulness.
“How do you mean?” she asked.
“To-night I went to the place of the--the promenade--the Empire, is it
not? And the sight of the young women there--it terribly affected me. I
wanted to shout out that they were all my sisters--that I would protect
them all--that they should never be forced by poverty and want to face
that miserable humiliation again.” She looked at him, her lips parted
over the beautiful teeth, a certain blankness of non-comprehension in
the beautiful eyes. As she slowly grasped the drift of his words, the
eyes and lips joined in a reserved and baffling smile. “You’re a nice
boy,” she decided, “but you’re tremendously young. Those girls are lazy,
greedy, good-for-nothing hussies. They wouldn’t do honest work for a
living if it was brought to them on a silver salver. They haven’t an
idea in their empty painted heads except to wheedle or steal money from
drunken fools. They’re nothing but--what d’ye call ’em?--parasites. I’d
put ’em all on the treadmill, if I had my way.”
Christian sat up a little, and she was alert in noting the signs of
disaffection on his mobile face. “Nevertheless, there is a great sorrow
and a great shame in it all,” he said, gravely.
“Oh, that I admit,” she declared, making busy work with her fan. “Of
course! Perhaps I spoke more sharply than I meant. Every one is sorry
for the poor creatures--but--but I confess I’m sorrier still for the
girls who have to work like slaves for the barest necessities of life.
Why, my dressmaker’s girls, two of ’em--poor little half-starved
sisters who may come at nine or ten o’clock at night to deliver things,
or try something on--they get twenty-five shillings a week between them.
That’s what gets on _my_ nerve.”
He preserved silence for a time, then suddenly sat upright and faced
her. A new light shone in his eyes. “I am the dullest person on earth,”
he protested. “All this time I have not thought of it. I want to ask you
a thousand things about your sister. Did you not know?--She is my oldest
friend in England.”
Cora drew a long breath, and held up her fan for a protracted and
attentive inspection. “Oh, yes--you mean Frank,” she said, tentatively.
“Frank? Is that her name? She works. She has a machine à écrire--a
typewriter it is called. You must tell me about her! Is she very well?
And where is she to be found? How shall I go about it to recall myself
to her?” As there came no immediate response, he put his further
meditations into dreamy words: “She spoke the first kind words to me,
here in England. I bade farewell to France and the old hard life, in her
company. It was she who pointed with her finger for me to have my first
look at England--the little, rose-colored island in the green water,
with the purple clouds above it. It seemed that we were very close
together--on that one day. And I was so full of the thought of seeing
her very soon again! And that was September--and now it is very nearly
May!. . . But you have not told me! Where is it that she is to be found?
Where does she live?”
“She lives at home with my people,” Cora replied, still with reflective
deliberation. It was with a visible effort that she shook off the
preoccupied air into which she had lapsed. “But you don’t want to go
there--it’s out of the world--red-busses and green-busses and a tram and
that sort of thing. But she has an office now of her own; that’s where
you’d find her most easily. Bless me if I know where it is--it’s between
the Strand and the Embankment, but I never can remember which is Norfolk
Street and which Arundel Street--and really I’m not sure she’s on
either. But my brother is here. I’ll ask him, presently. And so you know
Frank?”
“Ah, yes, but you know her better still,” said Christian, softly,
nestling again into the corner of his chair nearest her. “I wanted you
to tell me about her.”
“Oh, well--but what is there to tell?” she made answer, vaguely. “She
is a good girl; she’s frightfully clever; she works very hard, and gives
most of her money to her mamma; she’s successful, too, because she’s got
a shop of her own, at last--and--and--that’s about all, isn’t it? You
know, we’re not by way of seeing much of each other. There’s no quarrel,
of course--not the least in the world--but I’m too frivolous to be in
her class at all. I dare say it’s my fault--I ought to go and look her
up. That’s what I will do, too, one of these days. But--you mustn’t
misunderstand me--she’s an awfully good girl, that is, of course, if you
like that sort of girl. And she’s pretty, too, don’t you think?”
“Yes, I think so,” affirmed Christian, almost with solemnity. “What time
would she come to her office--in the morning, I mean?”
“Oh, don’t ask me!” laughed Cora. “At some ghastly hour, when they have
breakfast, I believe, in cabmen’s shelters, and the streets haven’t been
swept. I know it only by hearsay. I’ve never stopped up quite as late as
that, you know. But you see something like it, driving round by Covent
Garden on your way home from a late dance, to see the flowers. Have you
ever done that?”
Christian shook his head. The idea attracted him, apparently. “At what
hour is it?” he asked, with interest.
“Oh, four or five or something like that. It’s really the prettiest
sight you ever saw. I used to go often, at this time of year, and
take home a cabload of flowers. But I am getting too old now--and too
serious-minded. The mother of a family--you know.”
Christian looked at his watch. “It has occurred to me”--he suggested,
hesitatingly--“it is now after two--perhaps we could make a party to go
this morning. The dancing will not stop earlier, will it?”
On the stage nothing seemed further from any mind than stopping. There
was some complicated kind of set dance in progress, which at the moment
involved the spectacle of some score of couples, hands all joined,
romping madly around in a gigantic ring. The dresses whirled more wildly
than ever; the men crooked their legs and hung outward from the circle
as they went, stamping their feet and laughing boisterously. Christian’s
eyes singled out one young man who seemed to be making most noise of
all--and then he perceived that it was Dicky Westland.
“Perhaps it might be arranged,” Cora replied, after consideration, and
with a sidelong eye upon her companion. “I will go behind for a moment,
and find my brother, and see what he says. No, you stop here. I will
come back again.”
So many people were moving about with entire individual freedom, that
he offered no objection to her departure. She pushed her way confidently
yet affably past the others in the row, and disappeared at the stage
door. He had no clues by which to follow her in fancy after that. Once
he thought he distinguished her at the back of the stage--but for the
rest it was her sister rather than the friendly Cora who engaged his
thoughts. The idea that he was to see her again, quite without delay,
seemed to illuminate his whole mind.
In the labyrinth of shunted scenery behind the back-curtain, and
along the narrow corridors of dressing-rooms, now devoted to varying
hospitable uses, Cora prosecuted what was for a time a fruitless search.
“Where are the gentlemen getting their drinks?” she asked at last of a
cloak-room attendant, and the answer simplified her task. Downstairs, at
the door of the manager’s room, she was lucky enough to hit upon Major
Pirie. “Tell Eddy that’ I want him, will you, old man,” she said,
nodding with assurance toward the crowded, smoky little interior, “and
if that brother of mine is in there, I want to see him for a minute,
too.”
The brother came out first--a slender, overdressed youth, with a
face which suggested a cheap and inferior copy of Cora’s. It had the
self-complacency without the high spirits--the comeliness of line
without the delicacy of texture and charm of color. He was obviously
young in years, but he regarded her through the eyes of an elderly and
wearied person.
“Hello,” he said, amiably enough. “Goin’ to take Eddy home? He won’t be
the worse for a friendly lead. Oh, he’s all right, though, up to now.
He’s got rippin’ odds against Perambulator from Hoskins, seventy to
three, you know, in fivers. Try and get him to let me in on the bet,
will you? I offered to take half of it, the minute the bet was made--but
he didn’t answer me. You can work it, if you try, old girl.”
“What’s Frank’s address--her office, I mean?” she put in abruptly, “Got
a pencil? Go and get one from somebody. Thirty-two A, you say? Thanks!
Now tell Eddy to come out.”
“But what’s up? What do you want with Frank? Anything I can tell her?”
“Never you mind! And don’t lisp a word to her, or to Eddy or to any one
else. If it comes off, it’ll be a beano for the lot of us.”
“Right you are,” he assented, with a glimmer of animation. “But say,
you won’t forget about the Hoskins bet, will you? If I could even have
a third of it! I could do with some odd sovereigns just now, and no
mistake.”
“Sh-h! Here he comes. You run away-now, d’ye see; I want to talk with
Eddy.”
Captain Edward emerged from the haze of cigarette smoke which veiled the
throng within the manager’s room. “Well?” he demanded, with a kind of
sulky eagerness.
“I haven’t told him you were here,” Cora began, under her breath,
drawing her husband aside down the passage. “It didn’t seem to come into
the talk. He thinks I’m here with Tom.”
Edward looked down upon his wife, with a slow, ponderous glance of
mingled hope and uneasiness. He pulled at his small yellow mustache, and
aimlessly jingled some keys in his pocket.
“You’ve had nearly two hours with him, you know,” he protested,
doubtfully.
“_Don’t_ I know it!” she ejaculated, holding up her hands in mock pain
at the retrospect. “Good God! If I had a thousand pounds to show for it,
I’d say it was the hardest earned money _I_ ever handled.”
“Yes, but you haven’t got anything to show--so far’s I can make out,” he
commented with gloom. “You didn’t mention my name at all, eh? But that
was what you particularly set out to do, I thought.”
“Well, you thought wrong,” she responded briskly. “I set out to do
what was wisest under the circumstances, and I’ve done it. I’ve got an
inkling of a game to be played”--she let her eyes twinkle at him as she
made this tantalizing little pause--“a game, you old goose, worth seven
hundred thousand times anything you ever thought of.”
The ex-hussar regarded her fixedly, the while he pondered her words.
“I don’t think I’m very keen about games,” he remarked at last, with
obvious suspicion in his tone. “A married woman always gets the worst of
games, in the long run.”
She grinned affectionate contempt up at him. “Don’t be such a duffer,
Eddy!” she remonstrated with him. “If I had a notion of that sort--do
you suppose I’d come and give it away to you? What rot you talk!”
“Yes--but what _is_ your game?” he demanded, doggedly.
“I won’t tell you!” She spoke with great apparent decision. “You’d blab
it all over the place. You can no more keep a secret than you can keep a
ten-pound note.”
“Oh, I say, Cora,” he urged, in grieved protestation. “You know I’m a
regular bailey oyster, where a thing has to be kept dark. You’d better
tell me, you know. It’ll keep me from--imaginin’ things.”
The wife smiled. “It’s only a plant I’ve got in my mind,” she explained,
after consideration. “What’s the matter with my naming a wife for him,
eh?”
Edward, upon reflection, pouted his lips. “Probably you’d come a cropper
over it, in the first place,” he objected, slowly, “and then even if you
did name the winner, she’d probably welsh us out of our winnings--and
besides, what do we want of his marrying at all. The longer he puts off
getting married, the less the odds against us gets. I should think even
a woman could see that.”
Cora permitted herself a frank yawn. “I’ll explain it to you to-morrow,”
she said.
“And now I must go back to my Juggins for a few minutes. I’ll come and
fetch you when I’m ready to go.”
“I don’t fancy it much, you know,” he urged upon her as she turned. He
took a step toward her, and put his hand on her arm. “If your brother
Tom was any good”--he began, with a hard growl in his voice--“by God,
I’d have half a mind to talk with him about _my_ plan. Old Pirie’d be no
use--but if Tom had the sense and the nerve--why, we’d--”
She had held his eye with a steady, comprehending glance, under the
embarrassment of which his speech faltered and then lapsed altogether.
“No, the less either you or Tom have to do with your plan the better. Go
in now, and take a plain soda, and wait for me! You’ve got no plan, mind
you. You’ve simply been dreaming about it. Do you hear? You never had a
plan! You can’t have one!”
She spoke with significant authority, and he deferred to it with a
sullen upward wag of the head. “All right,” he muttered curtly, and
turned on his heel.
“Plain soda, mind!” she called after him, and without waiting for an
answer, ran briskly up the steps toward the stage.
Captain Edward’s plain soda had become a remote and almost wholly
effaced memory by the time his wife again summoned him from the
manager’s room.
“We’ll cut this now, if you don’t mind,” she remarked, in her most
casual tone. “I’m as tired as if I’d danced every minute.” She had put
on her wraps, and her small, pretty face, framed by the white down of
her hood, seemed to his scrutiny to wear an expression of increased
contentment.
“Anything fresh?” he asked, as they went in search of his coat and hat.
“Yes--fresh is the word,” she replied, with simulated nonchalance.
“Fresh, fresher, freshest--as we used to say at school.”
“Wha’ is it?” he inquired, when they were within touch of the open air.
The music was still audible behind them, broken by faint, intermittent
echoes of stamping feet and laughing voices.
“I’ll tell you about it in the morning,” she answered listlessly. “I
hope to heaven you’ve got a cab-fare.”
“Yes, tha’s all right,” said Edward, waving his stick toward the rank
in the dark middle distance of the street. “Whyn’t you tell me all about
it?”
“Oh, you wouldn’t get onto it now,” she replied, But later, in the
hansom, the desire to unburden her mind achieved the mastery.
“Are you awake?” she demanded, and went on: “He’s not a bad sort, that
boy, you know.”
“Damn him!” said Edward, breathing heavily.
“I rather like him myself,” she continued. “He’s a bit slow to talk to,
and he’s fresher than Devonshire cream, but there isn’t a drop of the
Johnnie in him. He’s as clean as my little girl.”
“Damn him,” repeated her husband, but in a milder and even argumentative
tone.
“He’s a proper bundle of nerves, that youngster,” she mused, as if
talking to herself. “And whatever those nerves of his tell him to do,
he’ll do it. And I’d lay odds he’s goin’ to surprise us all. He’s
got something boilin’ in his mind--something that’s just struck him
to-night--I could see that. Oh, if I was a man!--I’d get out of this
hansom now, and I’d follow that lad, and I’d get hold of him somehow,
and I’d bend him any way I chose--_that_ would be something like!--but
then again, you take him some other way, and he’s as stubborn as a moke.
But I like him, all the same.” She turned toward her husband, and lifted
her voice a little. “I like him so much, I’m thinkin’ of havin’ him for
a brother-in-law.”
“Strornary thing,” commented Edward, earnestly, “no man’er where I start
from, whenever I get t’ the Circus, I get the hiccups.”
Cora put her head back against the cushions, and closed her eyes.