get on. Come round next Sunday night, and we’ll have some music. Y’ought
to hear her play. Rachmaninoff prelude, _Valse Triste_, Mozart sonatas.
Fairly tears the back hair off yeh. Got temperament, that kid. She’s
coming up, too, with her dancing. Oh, she’s hot.”
Mrs. Bertello would echo him, but a little sadly; for, as Gina grew, from
seven to thirteen, so did Mrs. Bertello fade and fade and withdraw more
and more up-stage. Gina was going to get on; she knew it. She knew, too,
that Gina would get on without any help from her; so she stood in the
background and grew careless about herself and her person. She wore old
clothes and old manners. She snuffled. She loafed about the house and in
bed, and she let things go. If only she could have felt that the getting
on of Gina depended upon her.... But by the time the child was seven
she realised that she stood in the presence of something stronger than
herself. It frightened and distressed her that she should have produced
something so sharp and foreign. She knew that she was loved and always
would be loved. But she wanted most of all to be wanted. And she wasn’t.
At twelve Gina was running the home. Old dad was dresser to a red-nose
bill-topper, which meant that he did not finish work until two o’clock
in the morning. It was Gina who sat up every night to serve his supper.
Mumdear toddled to bed with a little warm whisky, leaving Gina in the
kitchen with queer books—_Tennyson_, _Browning_, _Childe Harold_, _Lives
of the Composers_, _The Golden Treasury_, _Marcus Aurelius_, _The Faerie
Queene_. At two o’clock old dad would bounce in, full of anecdote and
reminiscence and original whimsy, and they would sup together, Gina,
from the age of eleven, always taking a glass of beer and a cigarette
with him. It was he who had bought her those books. It was he who had
interested his guv’nor in the kid, so that the guv’nor had handed him
money wherewith to get music lessons and to secure a practice piano.
It was he who had spoken to Madame Gilibert, controller of the famous
music-hall child-dancers, the Casino Juveniles; and Madame, recognising
that dad was dresser to a star, and might, in certain underground ways,
be useful, took the child and put her through a course. Within the first
week she thought she had found a Taglioni, and that hers would be the
honour—and the commission. Of course she hadn’t found a Taglioni, and
none knew that better than Gina, though she did not say so, for she
believed in taking what we can while we can.
It was old dad, too, who had made a companion of her and talked to
her, through those late hours, of the things that could be done in the
world—of the things that he himself had tried and failed to do. He had
talked to her of laughter and courage and endurance, and of “playing the
game.”
From him she had inherited a love of all raw and simple things, all
that was odorous of the flesh. She hated country solitudes, and she
loved Poplar and the lights and the noise of people. She loved it for
its blatant life. She loved the streets, the glamour, the diamond dusks,
the dirt and the perfume. She loved the shops and the stalls, with
their alluring treasures—treasures, moreover, that you could buy, not,
as in the West, priced beyond your maddest dreams. There was Salmon
Lane market. There were the docks. There were the fearsome Malays.
There was the Chinese quarter. There was the Isle of Dogs, with its
exciting bridges and waterways. There were the timid twilights and the
home-comings; the merry boys and girls of the pavements, and the softly
lighted windows.
She loved them all, and they became all part of her; and she was right in
loving them. For Poplar is a land of homes, and where a thousand homes
are gathered together, there do we find beauty and prayer. There, among
the ashpits and broken boats and dry canals, are girls and garlands and
all the old, lovely things that help the human heart to float along its
winding courses to the sea. The shapes, sounds, colours and silences of
the place shook her to wonder, and the flamboyant curves of the road to
Barking, where are lean grey streets of villas and vociferant markets,
were always to her the way to the Realms of Gold. Every street was a
sharp-flavoured adventure, and at night each had a little untranslatable
message for her. Everywhere she built romances. She was a mandarin’s
daughter in Pennyfields. She was a sailor’s wife in the Isle of Dogs.
In the West India Dock Road she was a South Sea princess, decked with
barbaric jewels and very terrible knives. She did not like western
London: it wasn’t homey. She loved only the common joys of the flesh
and the common joys of the heart; and these she found in Poplar. It was
all so cosy and sweet and—oh, everything that you couldn’t talk about.
The simple mateyness of it all sometimes made her cry. It made her cry
because she wanted to tell someone about it; and she couldn’t—until ... a
year later ... she began to dance. Then she told everything.
In the Chinatown Causeway, too, were half-tones of rose and silver,
stately moving cut-throats, up from the great green Pacific, and the
muffled wail of reed instruments in a song last heard in Formosa.
Cinnamon and aconite, betel and bhang hung on the air. There was the
blue moon of the Orient. There, for the bold, were the sharp knives, and
there, for those who would patiently seek, was the lamp of young Aladdin.
I think Gina must have found it.
She loved Poplar, and, loving so, she commanded love, as you will learn
if you inquire concerning her. When she danced it was Poplar that she
expressed, and Poplar worshipped her for it.
At twelve years old she was dismissed from the local Board School for the
sound reason that the teachers confessed their inability to teach her
anything more. She was too sharp for them. Her morality she summed up in
answer to a teacher’s question as to what she understood by religion.
“I believe in enjoying yourself, dears, and enjoying other people as
well, and making them enjoy you.”
That was her creed, and as to her adherence to it and the efficacy of it
you must ask the people of Acacia Grove and thereabouts. Old dad shrugged
his shoulders, and in the saloon of the Blue Lantern he explained:
“Ah—when you’ve got anything as hot as our Gina, it don’t do to try and
learn ’em things. You can’t. They knew it all centuries before you was
born. And what they don’t know they’ll find out without bothering anyone.
Give ’em their heads—that’s all you can do with that kind of kid. Stand
aside; she’ll develop herself.”
Gina was thirteen years and six months when news was brought one morning
to the narrow fastnesses of Acacia Grove that old dad had been killed in
a street accident. At that moment she was standing at the gate nursing
Philip, the next-door baby.
She stared. She caught her breath as from a sharp blow. Her face was,
for the first and only time in her life, expressionless. Then, with a
matter-of-fact movement, she deposited Philip on the cold kerb, looked
up, addressed the eternities, and for one minute told God, in good set
terms, exactly what she thought about Him. When thus relieved, she
shrugged her little shoulders and gathered up the baby.
“Ah, well. Hearts are trumps. Globe Polish is the best. The Lord Mayor’s
coach-man says so, Philip of Macedon. Looks from here, Philip of Macedon,
as though I’d have to get busy.”
A week after the funeral, she stood in her dingy bedroom, and posed
herself before the mirror with a graceful egotism. The slender
stockinged legs looked that morning singularly pert and self-sufficient.
The black satin jacket had an air of past adventure amid large things.
She adjusted the black lace hat the tiniest shade to the left of the
luscious curls, and nodded.
“Well. Something’s got to be done, and if I don’t do it no one else will.
Don’t believe in waiting for your ship to come in. Only thing to do is to
get a bally boat and row out to meet it. Laugh and the world laughs with
you. Weep and you’ll get a red nose, Gina, my darling. Now off we go to
make ourselves as welcome as a snowflake in hell.”
An hour later she was a member of the Casino Juveniles, under the
direction of Madame Gilibert, and three hours later was hard at work
rehearsing.
Many folk of Poplar must have experienced only a mixed sorrow at the
sudden end of Batty Bertello. For if the old dad had not gone out so
suddenly Gina would never have been forced to start work to support
Mumdear; and had she not started just at that moment, she would never
have become a public character; and in that event we should have
lost—what should we have lost?
Well, everything that in those days made life worth living. For it was
Gina, that mop-haired, fragile baby, who taught thousands of us how to
live.
And her beginnings as a public character were in this wise.
The turn of the Casino Juveniles consisted of vocal _soli_, concerted
numbers, _pas seuls_, and ensembles, in the costumes of the early
nineteenth century. It was entitled _Old-fashioned Flowers_ (you may
remember it), and, with a nice catholicity, it embraced the minuet and
the pavane no less than the latest coon song and dance. At the end of the
first show, Madame expressed herself as well satisfied with Gina.
“Seems to have a real—what you might call flare—for the stage.
Understands what she’s doing. Made for a dancer. Let’s hope she don’t
grow.”
For the tragedy of the good lady’s life was that her children would grow,
and every two years or so they had to be weeded out and new little girls
laboriously trained to take the places of those who possessed neither the
divine grace of the juvenile nor the self-assurance of the adult. She had
a much-furrowed face, and swore hybrid oaths at electricians and stage
hands. They understood.
For the first week, Gina thoroughly enjoyed herself, and, true to her
creed, forced the rest of the company to enjoy her.
Sharp at five every afternoon, she had to appear at the centre where
the private omnibus collected the children and whisked them away to the
first hall, where they were an early number—on at seven-five—for the
first house. Then, out of that hall to another at the far side of London,
where they were a concluding number for the first house. Then back to
the starting-place for the second house, and off again to finish at the
distant hall. At about one in the morning she would trip home to supper,
which Mumdear left in the kitchen oven. So to bed. At ten o’clock next
morning Mumdear would bring her a cup of tea and a cigarette, and at
about noon she would descend, unless a rehearsal were called for eleven.
Then, one brave night, came her chance to display that Ginaesque
quality that made her loved and admired by all who knew her. In a low
river-side hall in the Blackhall direction the Casino Juveniles were
the bill-footers. This hall was a relic of the old times and the old
manners—a plaintive echo of the days when the music hall was little more
than a cave of harmony, with a saw-dusted floor, a husky waiter, and a
bull-throated chairman. Efforts to bring it up to date by renovation and
structural alteration had only had the effect of emphasising its age, and
its threepenny gallery and its fourpenny pit told their own tale.
By this time Gina had, by some subtle means, unknown to herself or to
others, established herself as leader of the Casinos. Her compelling
personality, her wide knowledge of “things” as well as matters of general
interest, and her confident sagacity, had, together, drawn even those
youngsters who had been two years with the turn to look to her as a
final court of appeal in all questions and disputes. They listened to
her ideas of dance, and took cues from her that rightly should have
come from the titular leader. Perhaps it was the touch of devil which
alternately smouldered and flamed in Gina’s eyes that was the real secret
of her domination of her fellows; a touch that came from the splash of
soft Southern blood in her veins, bequeathed by a grandfather who, in his
early twenties, mislaid his clasp-knife somewhere between the ribs of
a neighbour on the island of Sicily, and found it expedient to give up
the search for it and come to England. This languorous, sun-loved blood,
fused with the steady blood of the North, resulted in a mixture which
raced under her skin with the passion and energy of a greyhound, and gave
her that mysterious _élan_ which decided, as soon as she could walk, that
she was born for dance.
On the big night—a Wednesday: early-closing night—the hall was playing to
good business. It was lit with a suave brilliance. Gallery packed, pit
packed, stalls packed, and the gangway by the babbling bar packed close
with the lads of the water-side—niggers, white toughs, and yellow men.
The air was mephitic: loud with foot and voice and glass. It stunk of
snarling song. Solemn smokes of cut plug swirled in a haze of lilac up
to the dreary rim of gallery and the chimera of corpse faces that swam
above it. At nine-ten Gina and the rest of the Casinos stood in the
wings, watching the turn that preceded them on the bill—Luigi Cadenza,
the world-renowned Italian tenor: salary three guineas per week for
thirteen shows a week—who was handing _Santa Lucia_ and _O sole mio_
to an indifferent audience; for in vaudeville it is the early turn that
gets the bird. Near them stood the manager, discussing the Lincolnshire
probables with the stage manager. Much dirty and faded scenery, alleged
fireproof, was piled to the flies, and on either side were iron doors and
stone staircases. Everywhere were strong draughts and crusted dirt.
Suddenly, from behind a sweep of canvas, leapt an antic figure,
dishevelled, begrimed, inarticulate. It plucked the manager by the sleeve.
“Wire’s fused, sir. Caught oner the flies. Blazing like old hell.”
The manager jerked his neck at the stage manager.
“Ring down!”
A bell tinkled, and the shabby purple curtain dropped on the
world-renowned tenor in the midst of his _Santa Luci-i-i-a_, and
smothered him with confusion and with its own folds.
The neck jerked again.
“Ring down safety, too.”
He shot a hand to the telephone, rang through to the orchestra and spoke
two words.
The conductor in front saw the flash of the light at his desk. He bent
to the receiver. Two words snapped from it: _The King_. He replaced the
receiver. His baton fell, and the symphony of _Santa Lucia_ dribbled away
to rubbish. He mouthed at his leader: _The King_. He rose in his chair
and tapped; and the band blared the first bar of the National Anthem when
again the bell tinkled. Again he snatched the receiver: “Cut _The King_,”
snapped a blasphemous voice. “Keep going on Cadenza.”
Behind, things were happening.
“Where’s that damn ’lectrician?” The manager appealed, exhorted and
condemned. The electrician, having carried the bad news, had vanished;
but the typhoon of language whirled him back again.
“’Sall right, guv’nor. ’Sall right now. We got it under. You can ring up
again.”
But it was too late. The sudden dropping of the curtain, the incipient
glide and recovery of the safety, the cessation and hurried resumption
of the music, had disturbed the house. There were sounds of many moving
feet, an uneasy rustle, as when a multitude of people begin to pull
themselves together. Then the inevitable fool made the fool’s remark.
“There’s something wrong somewhere. _Fire_, shouldn’t wonder.”
That word did it.
The house rose to its feet. It swayed in two vast presses to right and
left. A woman screamed. Feet scraped and stamped. The chuckers-out bawled:
“Order, there. Kepp yeh seats, cancher! Nothing ain’t wrong!”
The conductor rose and faced the house.
“Resume your seats, _please_. There’s no danger of any kind. The band
will now play _Hiawatha_. Give ’em a few chords!” he called to his brass
and drums, and half-a-dozen tantararas drowned the noise of the struggles
and counter-struggles of those who would go and those who would urge them
to stay.
A panicky stripling, seeing a clear way, vaulted the partition between
pit and stalls, and was promptly floored by one on the jaw from Hercules
in uniform. He howled. Stalls struggled to see him, and the pit pushed
the stalls back. Many women screamed. They were carried out, kicking.
Men told other men that there was nothing the matter. They clambered on
seats to say it. They struck with fist and boot other men who disagreed
with them. The yellow and black men dashed hither and thither, receiving
many blows but never ceasing to run. They did not know for what or from
what they ran. They ran because they ran. A group of lads raided the bar.
They helped themselves and they smashed many glasses and bottles. The
chuckers-out became oathful and malevolent. They hit right and left.
In the wings, the manager was dumb. His mouth had vomited the entire
black vocabulary. He had nothing more to say. The skirts of his dress
coat had the appearance of two exhausted tongues. The position of his tie
showed that he was a man smitten and afflicted: one who had attempted
large things while knowing himself to lack the force necessary to achieve
them; one who had climbed the steeps of pain to the bally limit; one who
was no longer a man but a tortured organism.
“Billie,” he cried to the red-nose bill-topper, “Billie, for Christ’s
sake go on, and quiet ’em, there’s a good chap. This is the sack for me,
if there’s a panic.”
“No good, old boy. Sorry. Can’t do anything with a mixed gang like yours.
Nearly got the blasted bird just now.”
“Well—you—Miss Gutacre. For the Lord’s sake—go on. Give ’em anything.
Give ’em _He tickled the Lady’s Fancy_.”
“Oh, Jack, old man, I daren’t,” whimpered the stout soubrette. “I
couldn’t hold ’em. I’ve never faced a gang like that. If Billie won’t go,
I won’t. ’Tain’t fair to ask me.”
“Well, you’re a couple of damn devils, that’s what you are—I beg pardon—I
mean. No, but, look here.... If——”
He broke off, suddenly aware that someone was peremptorily agitating his
coat-tails.
“What the blazes d’you want, kid?”
“I’ll go on, sir,” said Gina placidly.
“You? What the heaven d’you think a shrimp like you can do?”
“I can hold ’em, sir. I know I can. Bet you what you like. Turn me loose,
and see! Ring the orchestra for _La Maxixe_, one verse and dance.”
“Mr Catanach!” A boy in a disordered uniform sprang from nowhere. “You’re
wanted here—quick.”
The manager swung four ways at once, unable to go one way for thought of
the others. Then he gave two orders to the stage manager.
“Ring through for the _Masheesh_. Then send that kid on.”
Gina was one of those delightful people who believe in impulse rather
than in consideration. What she had proposed to the manager was an
impulse of the moment; it simply didn’t bear thinking about. She could
hear the complaints, loud and cruel, of that brute which she had
undertaken to tame—she heard scream and roar; stamp of nailed feet; fury
of blow against blow; temper against temper; the fall of glass; the wail
of the victim, the howl of the aggressor.
But now, through the clamour, there came to her, faint and sweet and
far away, the ecstatic wail of _La Maxixe_, swelling insistently as the
curtain swung up. The first bars settled her fears. The music stole into
her blood and possessed every nerve and tissue of her eager little body.
It was in her feet and her hands and her heart. The stage manager gave
her a gentle shove.
“Get on, Kiddie. You got a rotten rough house. Good luck.”
With a toss of her yellow head and a stamp of impetuous feet she dashed
on. Along the stage she charged, in animal grace and bravery, once,
twice, with loose heel dancing, and noted with approval that the clamour
was a little less in volume and that many faces were turned to the stage
to look at this small figure, immature yet cunningly finished. With as
much clatter as her furious little shoes would produce, she ran to the
back-cloth. The dust rose in answering clouds and was blown into the
auditorium, where it mingled with the opiate haze and was duly swallowed
by the gaping ones. The music surged over the footlights in a compelling
flood. The _chef d’orchestre_ had caught the idea, and she could see
that he was helping her. The fiddles tossed it to her in a tempest of
bows, the brass and wood-wind blared it in a tornado, the drum insisted
on it, and, like a breaker, it seemed to rise up to her. Before her
opened a cavern of purple, stung with sharp lamps in the distant dusks.
It swayed and growled and seemed to open a horrid mouth. But between her
and it, she thanked her Heavenly Father, was the music, a little pool
of dream, flinging its spray upon her. The stage seemed drenched in it
and, seizing the tactful moment, she raced down to the footlights and
flung herself into it, caressing and caressed by it, shaking, as it were,
little showers of sound from her delighted limbs. Every phrase of its
wistful message was reflected in that marvellously expressive form, rosy
and slender and taut. You would have said that each pulse of her body was
singing for joy of it, and when her light voice picked up the melody with:
“Oh, meet me in the Val-ley
The hap-py Val-ley,”
interpolated with back-chat to the front rows of the stalls, there was a
movement towards repose and attention to this appealing picture.
“Come on, Charl, while there’s a chance, case there’s a fire.”
“No; ’alf a mo’, Perce. Ain’t no fire. I’m going to watch this. Looks
like being funny. Got some pluck, y’know, that youngster.”
She stamped along the stage in a cloud of lace and tossing frock; then,
seeing that they were still moving and, in the far reaches, struggling,
she loosened her heel and suddenly—off went one shoe to the wings,
prompt side. Off went the other to the wings, o.p. This bit of business
attracted the attention of Charl and Perce and others. They closed in.
Now it was heel-and-toe dancing, and suddenly a small hand shot to her
knee. Off came a little crimson garter. With an airy turn of her bare
and white-powdered arm she sent it spinning into the stalls.
“Scramble for it, darlings!”
“I’ll—tell—you—how I love you—
Down in the Valley.”
The wicked little head ogled, now here, now there.
They scrambled, and while they scrambled and she danced, she bent to her
right knee, and off came a blue garter, and away that went, too.
“Share and share alike, old dears.”
This time she had the pit as well.
“My word. She’s a corker, eh?”
“I should say so.”
“Quite right, Augustus,” she cried. “There isn’t a fire here, but I’m hot
enough to start one. I love my molten lava, but what price Gina?”
They chuckled. They cheered. They chi-iked.
“Gaw—fancy a kid like that.... If she was a kid of mine I’d learn ’er
something.”
In the vaudeville phrase, she had got ’em with both hands.
The lights died down again. The turmoil was confined to the gallery. A
lone chucker-out implored them to observe that everything was all right
and “Order, please, for the artiste.” The _Maxixe_ swallowed him up.
“Come along, boys!” cried Gina. “Chorus, this time. Now then—one—two——
“‘I’ll ... Meet ...
You ...
In ... the
Valley....’”
Very uncertainly and timidly a few at the back of the hall picked it up.
They hummed it in the self-conscious voice of the music-hall audience
before it is certain that it is not alone. The next few lines were taken
with more confidence, and by those in front as well, and the last lines,
encouraged by the band and the shrill abandon of Gina, they yelled
defiantly, exultingly, with whistles and cheers for the kid.
Those standing up were pressed forward as those behind strove to catch
her back-chat with stalls and orchestra.
“Holler, boys,” she cried, shaking her dusty golden head from side to
side. “Holler! All together—tenors—basses—Worthingtons. More you holler
the more money I get. And if I don’t take some home to my old man
to-night I shall get it where Susie wore the beads! Holler, boys: it’s
my benefit! Edison-Bell record!”
And they did holler. Away they went in one broad roar. There was no doubt
as to whether Gina had fulfilled her promise of holding them. There was
no doubt as to whether she had a stage personality. That holler settled
it. Gina’s vocation lay in the stress and sacrifice of the vulgar world.
“My word, she’s a little goer, eh?”
“You’re right. At that age, too! Fast little cat. She wants a spanking.
And if she was a kid o’ mine she’d get it.”
“How old is she?”
“Fourteen, they say.”
“Lord, she’ll be a corker in a year or two’s time.”
“Year or two’s time. Hot stuff _now_ if you ask me.”