a panic. She had saved the loss of life inseparable from a theatre
stampede. And she knew it. As the audience settled down to be amused by
her, or by the next turn for whom she had prepared the way, she gave
the conductor the cue for the coda, and, with a final stamp of those
inspired feet, she leapt into the wings, where the rest of the Casinos
awaited her. She was gasping, with drawn face. Two light blue stockings,
robbed of their garters, were slipping half-way down her delicately
rounded legs. The dust from the stage had gathered on her warm arms. She
was plainly “all gone.” But there was a light in her eye and that in her
manner that shrieked: “What did I tell you?”
The manager came to meet her.
“You glorious kid!”
Pertly she looked up at him.
“Yes, ain’t I? Going to push a boat out for me?”
“Push a boat out?”
“Yes; I’m dry after that. Mine’s a claret and soda.”
He rumpled his hair to bring it into keeping with his unhappy
evening-clothes. He gestured operatically. He embraced the universe. He
addressed the eternal verities.
“I’m damned,” he exclaimed, “I’m damned if I don’t book that kid for six
months.”
* * * * *
He kept his promise. She was booked at three pounds per week for six
months, and she thought she was in heaven. She had never dreamed that
there was so much money in the world. Then there was a hurrying to and
fro in Acacia Grove. She had to work up an act of her own and provide her
own make-up box and dresses. In the former she was assisted by Madame
Gilibert and the _chef d’orchestre_; in the latter by Mumdear and the
whole female population of Acacia Grove. Band parts had to be arranged
and collected, each instrumental part secured in a neat stiff cover,
engraved in gilt letters:
GINA
_Piccolo_
and
GINA
_Cornet_
Madame Gilibert sent invitation cards to all managers, and even booked
one of the inch-square spaces on the back cover of _The Encore_, where
Gina’s picture duly appeared:
GINA
_The Marvellous Child Dancer_
The Pocket Kate Vaughan
All com. Gilibert
amid that bewildering array of faces which makes the cover of that
journal so distinctive on the bookstall and so deeply interesting to the
student of physiognomy and of human nature. So she started as a gay
fifth-rate vaudevillian.
A queer crowd, the fifth-rate vaudevillians. They are the outcasts.
Nobody wants them. They live in a settlement of their own, whose
boundaries are seldom crossed by those from the sphere of respectability.
They are unconsidered. They appear; they pass; unmourned, unhonoured
and unremembered. The great actor of the “legitimate” is knighted; the
musical comedy star is fêted and received everywhere by the Best People;
even the red-nose star of the halls is well seen. But the unsuccessful
amusers of the public—their portion is weeping and gnashing of teeth.
They are by turns gay and melancholy, with the despairing gaiety of the
abandoned, the keen melancholy of the temperamental. They are the people
who bring us laughter, who help us to forget. They invent and sing songs
that put a girdle round the globe, that bring men cheerfully together in
Singapore and Tobago and Honolulu and Trinidad, and are shouted under
skies East and West and South; and their reward is neither here nor
there; not applause or glory or motor cars or a hundred pounds a week.
No; four pounds a week is theirs, with reduced rates on the railway and
expenses double those of any workman or clerk. To the thoughtful person
there is something infinitely pathetic in this; but by the mercy of God
your fifth-rate vaudevillians are not thoughtful people. They live in,
for, and by the moment; and, be their lives what they may, they are
happy; for theirs is the profound wisdom of perpetual youth.
Gina’s six months were filled either at the Blackwall house or at other
independent halls, not controlled by the syndicates, to which her manager
leased her. When not working—for the twenty-six weeks were to be filled
as and when she was called—she spent her time in inspecting other shows
and dancers, by the simple use of her professional card. From time to
time she varied her turn, as dictated by her own moods and the vagaries
of the management. Sometimes she would dance excerpts from _Coppèlia_ or
_Sylvia_; sometimes Dvorâk’s _Humoreske_ or _L’Automne Bacchanale_, or
odds and ends from French and Russian music. But it was the sparkling
sun-soaked melodies of the South, laughing of golden days and silver
nights, white towns and green seas, that really held her; for to her
music was melody, melody, melody—laughter, quick tears, the graceful
surface of things; movement and festal colour. By instinctive choice
she had already taken to her heart all Italian music—_Pagliacci_, _La
Bohème_, _Rusticana_, _Manon_, and much of the humbler Neapolitan stuff
that somehow finds its way to London. And what music was to her, so was
life, and so she interpreted it to others.
Whenever she was billed, all Poplar crowded to see her; and there are
still many who remember with high gratitude this lovely flower from their
own gutters, and the little escapes from their sorrows that she found for
them. They still remember how, passing them in the street, she, clear
and steady as the dew at dawn, would but look upon them with roguish
nonchalance, compel smiles from them and leave them feeling richer and
stronger.
“That girl’s got a heart,” they would say. She shook them from pondering
on their problems, lifted them into a rare, bold atmosphere, taught them
how to laugh and how to feast; carried to their hearts little bouquets
of solace smelling of April and May. She seemed to be born afresh each
morning, so sharp and undimmed were her delight and wonder in life.
She lit the whole of Poplar with her personality. The flashing of her
number in the electric screen was the signal for handfuls of applause.
Even those of her audience who had never before seen her went about
their routine next day feeling better by remembering her. She splashed
colour on their drabbery. She forced them to forget old fusty creeds of
conduct, and awoke echoes in them of things that should not have been
forgotten; fused into the thin body of their days something ripe and
full and clustering; something, as they said, that gave ’em things to
think about where before they had been fed up. She tempted them with the
lure of the moment, and they followed and found that it was good. She
opened new doors to them, showing them the old country to which to-day
excursions are almost forbidden; the country of the dear brown earth
and the naked flesh, of the wine-cup and flowers and kisses and Homeric
laughter. She could have made a Calvinist laugh at sin. Young and wise
and understanding, she would sprinkle upon it the dew of her kindly
smile, and what had been bare and reprehensible a moment ago was then
something tender and full of grace. Through her, all little lapses and
waywardnesses became touched with delicacy. We live, we love, we die. A
little while we sing in the sun, and then ... we are gone. So let’s be
kind to one another; let’s forgive everything; there’s always an excuse.
That was the Ginarian philosophy.
Twice every night she danced, and never once did she seem to “slack.”
After the applause welcoming her number, silence would fall on the house.
The hall would be plunged sharply in a velvet gloom, through which the
lights of the orchestra would gleam with subtle premonition. At a quick
bell the band would blare the chord on, and the curtain would rush up on
a dark blank stage. Then from between the folds of the back-cloth would
steal a wee slip of a child in white, to stand poised like a startled
faun. Three pale spot-lights would swim from roof and wings, drift a
moment, then pick her up, focusing her gleaming hair and alabaster arms.
With the conductor’s tap the hall would be flooded with the ballet music
of Delibes, and the dance would begin, and Gina would turn, for our
delight, the loveliest pair of legs in Poplar. On the high vast stage,
amid the crashing speed of the music, and the spattering fire of the
side-drums, she would seem so fragile, so lost, so alone that one almost
ached for her. But if she were alone at first, it was not so when she
danced. At the first step she seemed to people the stage with little
companies of dream. She gave us dance—and more than dance; no business of
trick and limelight, but Infant Joy materialised, the lovelier because of
its very waywardness. She was a poem. She was the child—naughty and bold
and hungry for the beauty of life—and, through her, the audience would
touch finger-tips with all that was generously pure and happy. Many calls
she would have at the end of her turn, and the people thought they were
applauding her skill as a dancer. But a few of us knew better.
There may have been finer artists. There may have been more finished
dancers. There may have been more beautiful children. But certainly
never was there another woman or child who so touched her surroundings
with herself, so held her audience as to send people away, full—they
knew not how—of the intense glee of living. This little girl spoke to
them in a language they knew, and thereby achieved the highest purpose
of all art; she made others happy and strong. She changed their smiles
to scowls; made them glad to meet one another. Strangers were known to
speak to strangers under the spell of her dancing. Everything that is
young and fresh and lovely and brave was in her message. She did so enjoy
it all. That elfish little face, that lyrical body, and those twinkling
toes made for the manager of the dirty hall a small fortune. Nightly
she flung herself in delicate abandon through her dances, and her laugh
thrilled and tickled you as does the best and gayest music. It was not
the laughter of frivolity, for frivolity is but the corpse of joy; but
that finer laughter expressing the full acceptance of life and all that
it gives us of tears and laughter; hoping nothing, fearing nothing, but
rejoicing, with sweet cynicism, in everything. It is the most heroic
front that man can present to the gods that be, and Gina taught us what
no school could teach us; she taught us how to wear this armour and, with
its protection, to play the great game.
All Poplar loved her. The manager loved her, the stage hands loved her,
the door-keeper loved her, even her agent loved her—but unless you are
of the profession, you will not appreciate the boundless significance
of that. And the conductor ... the young conductor worshipped her. He
had been on his knees to her ever since that great first night. It was
delicious agony for him to conduct for her. It was an irritation when
her turn did not get the masses of applause that belonged to her; it
was a still deeper irritation when the houseful of louts roared their
appreciation. At nights he wept for her. Her face was a flower which he
watered with his tears, and day by day she grew for him more and more
lovely and to be desired. He had told her that he was a broken-hearted
man, since the only woman he had loved, when he was eighteen, had
deceived him. Gina thereafter named him the Scorched Butterfly, and would
solace him with kisses.
“Makes me sick,” he used to say to his first fiddle, “when I think that
anything so—you know—kind of ... lovely ... as that should ever have to
die. To think that all that ... er ... you know ... glorious little body
... should ever ... er ... stop living. Don’t seem right. Seems like
a blasted outrage to me. Ought to live for ever—anything as lovely as
that. Gives me the fair fantods. And yet—of course—she will die, same as
all the blasted clods and rotters like you and me. Before long, too, I
shouldn’t wonder. Got a kind of feeling that she will, somehow. Every
time I look at her I think of it. Makes me damn sick with things. Wonder
what it’s all for—all this damn game of living?”
What Gina did to Poplar generally, she did also, in a more exact degree,
to her immediate circle. She took Acacia Grove in hand and woke it up.
She taught it how to release the flesh from its bondage and revel in
the bliss of mere living. There were suppers—or rather Suppers—with the
boys from one or other of the halls as guests, and cheap wine instead
of beer, and sometimes a sinister little bottle of liqueur; and kisses
and caresses were no longer venial sins, but little delicacies that
went round the tables at these festivals as naturally as the cruet. And
because Gina smiled and extolled it, they approved; and how they hastened
to condemn and abolish all that upon which she frowned! She first started
on Mumdear, and brought her away from the seventies and eighties into
these times.
“Now, Mumdear, pull yourself together, and listen to your little Gina.
In some places the younger generation knocks at the door, but in this
house it’s going to knock the bally door down and walk right in.
You’re outmoded. You’ve got to sit up and take notice of things more,
especially of me. Don’t be a back number. Come forward to the front of
the bookstall. Burn that bonnet. Sell those clothes. In a word, pull
yourself together. If you don’t, I shall kill you, and pin you to a cork,
wings extended.”
And when Mumdear protested that really Gina was too young to talk like
that, Gina took no notice.
“Fourteen is as fourteen does, Mumdear; and what I don’t know about
things a girl ought to know has been torn out of the book. I’ve been
through things with a small tooth-comb, and I know what’s there. I know
the words _and_ the music. I’ve read the book and seen the pictures. I’ve
got perfect control of the ball. Brace up, old darling, and watch your
Gina. It’s a wise mother who knows more than her own daughter.”
Thereafter there were no more newspapers for tablecloths; no more
scramble suppers; no more slovenliness; no more cheap and nasty food;
no more stodgy teas. The art of the Bertello home at that time was
represented by oleographs after originals of Marcus Stone and the Hon.
John Collier. Gina burnt them, and hung up cheap but serviceable
reproductions of Whistler, Manet and Renoir. She taught Mumdear to be
truly Bohemian and to entertain the boys from the profession. Mumdear
blossomed anew. One final protest she ventured.
“But, Gina, duckie, we can’t afford to be ikey.”
“Ikey?” snapped Gina. “Who’s going to be ikey, my lamb? It isn’t a
question of affording or of being ikey. It’s a question of being
comfortable. It won’t cost any more to have flowers on the table and to
eat something besides beef and mutton—probably less. And as for being
ikey—well, when you catch me going up in the air I’ll be much obliged if
you’ll stick pins in me so’s I can explode.”
As she ruled Mumdear, so did she rule others. At fourteen she had the
mature carriage of womanhood—a very valuable asset in her profession. She
could hold her own everywhere in the matter of back-chat, and there were
none who attempted liberties a second time. It is doubtful if she had
ever, at any age, had a period of innocence, using the word in the sense
of ignorance. She had that curious genius for life by which the chosen
divine its mysteries immediately where others perforce wait on long
years of experience. As she herself expressed it, she knew her way about
all the streets and wasn’t going to be driven down the wrong one by any
son of a gun. She might not be clever, but she thanked God she was clean.
Thus for twelve months she scattered laughter and love and kindness
around Poplar, Shadwell, Limehouse and Blackwall, carolling along her
amiable way, joy as her counsellor, courage as her guide. Her curl-clad
face at this time carried the marks of the fatigue peculiar to those
temperamental subjects who spend themselves to the last ounce in whatever
they set their hearts to—be it amusement, or love, or work. They live at
top pitch because nothing else is possible to them. Gina’s face, drawn
though it was, and permanently flushed, danced always with elfin lights,
and never were her limbs in repose. Even in sleep she was strangely
alive, with the hectic, self-consuming energy of the precocious.
Then, as suddenly as she appeared, she disappeared, and over everything
there fell a blank dismay. The light died from the streets. Laughter was
chilled. The joy of living withered as at a curse. Something tender and
gay and passionate had been with us; something strange and exquisitely
sweet was gone from us; and we grew sharply old and went about our work
without any song or jest or caress. Only we thanked God and the grey
skies that it had been given to us to recognise it while it was there.
There was some speculation, and at last, because she was so much a
part of Poplar and we of her, the truth was made known sorrowfully and
reverently.
A hurried night journey in a cab to a lying-in hospital; and this lovely
child, fifteen years old, crept back to the bluebell or the daffodil
which had lent her to us. All that remains to us is her memory and that
brave philosophy of hers which was sobbed out to a few friends from the
little white bed in the maternity home.
“Life’s very beautiful. It’s worth having, however it ends. There’s so
much in it. Wine and things to eat. Things to wear. Shops to look at.
Coming home to supper. Meeting people. Giving parties. Books to read.
Music to hear.
“I think we ought to be so happy. And so kind. Because people suffer such
a lot, don’t they?
“I’ve not been bad, Mumdear. I’m only in love with everything and
everybody. They’re all so ... oh, sweet—and all that. I’m not bad. I’ve
only loved life, and when things tempted me I said Yes. It’s so easy to
say No to temptation. Any coward can do that. Kiss me a little, Mum. I’m
so tired.
“I hope I haven’t been mean or greedy or cruel. I love the boys and girls
I work with, and I love the music I dance to, and ... Poplar.
“I don’t know whether I’ve kept the Ten Commandments. Don’t much care.
But if ever I’ve hurt anyone, if ever I’ve been unkind, I hope they’ll
forgive me. Because ... I ... love them so....
“Mumdear ... ask them for some more of that cocaine ... cos ... it ... it
hurts ... so.”
There is a grave in East Ham cemetery which the suns and showers seem
to love, so softly they fall about it. The young musical director who
had presaged her ending and expressed himself as feeling sick that so
fragrant a flower should ever come to die, leaves bunches of violets
there once a week. For it was he who brought her to the dust.
_The Knight-Errant_
You may know Henry Wiggin on sight: Henry, the sloppily robed, the
slippery faced, with hands deep in pockets, shuffling along the Limehouse
streets, hugging the walls in modest self-effacement, one eye sweeping
the scene before him, the other creeping sinuously to the rear; Henry,
the copper’s nark, the simple, the unsuspecting, knowing not the ways of
deceit or the speech of the unrighteous. But Henry has of late become
outmoded. After fifteen years of narking he finds that he is getting
stale; he is a back number. A new generation has arisen, and with it a
new school of nark diplomacy with principles very complex. Business has
fallen off, the slops no longer trust him; and the exhilarating pastime
of narking has become, for Henry, a weariness of the flesh. Time back,
his hands, as a nark, were clean; but in these troublous days he must
perforce touch jobs which, in his senescent youth, would have revolted
his quick sense of nark honour.
His downfall began with that utter abandonment of principle in the Poppy
Gardens excitement. And, if you possess a sufficiently adventurous spirit
to penetrate into those strange streets where the prudent never so much
as peep, and to hazard inquiries concerning Henry the Blahsted Nark, the
full explanation, which follows below, will be given you—though in an
amplified form, richer in the vivid adjective.
It is now known that it was no professional point that led him to
slide back on the one person in the world who was more to him than
gold or silver or many beers. It was something more tremendous, more
incomprehensible, more ... you know. The two people concerned are
unfortunately inaccessible to the general public and even to the
ubiquitous pressman. Both of them, in their different ways, shrink from
notoriety with a timidity as sharp as that which distinguishes the lady
novelist. But pressmen are not the only people who can get stories. Here
is Henry’s.
Henry had a brother, a dearly loved companion, whom, from infancy, he
had cherished with a love that is not usual among brothers under the
Poplar arches. For this brother he had, when a nipper, pinched from
coffee-stalls, so that he should not go supperless to bed. He had
“raked” and “glimmed,” and on two occasions he was caught doing honest
work for his young brother. The one soft spot in his heart was for
brother Bert. But this brother.... Alas, how often does one find similar
cases in families! Two brothers may be brought up amid the same daily
surroundings, under the same careful parentage, enjoying each the same
advantages. Yet, while one pursues the bright and peaceful path of
virtue, the other will deviate to the great green ocean of iniquity. It
is idle to shirk the truth. Let the sordid fact be admitted. While Henry
Wiggin was a copper’s nark, brother Bert was a burglar. He stole things,
and sold them to Mr Fence Cohen round the corner, and was not ashamed.
Henry knew that this was wrong, and the dishonesty of his brother was
a load to him. Often he had sought to lead those erring feet into the
Straight Way, but his fond efforts were repulsed.
“’Enery—if yeh don’t stop shootin’ yeh mouth at me, I’ll push yeh blasted
face in!”
On the great night when Romance peeped coyly into the life of Henry
Wiggin, he and Bert were noisily guzzling fried fish and taters and
draught stout in their one-room cottage, back of the Poplar arches—Number
2 Poppy Gardens. Poppy Gardens, slumbrous and alluring as its name may
be, is neither slumbrous nor alluring. Rather, it is full of quick
perils for the unwary. It has not only its record of blood, but also its
record of strange doings which can only be matched by the records of
certain byways about Portman Square. The only difference is that in the
one place you have dirt, decay, and yellow and black faces. In the other,
you have luxury and gorgeous appurtenance.
Wherefore it was stupid, stupid, with that ostrich-like stupidity that
distinguishes the descendants of noble families who have intermarried
with their kind; I say it was stupid for Lady Dorothy Grandolin to choose
this, of all places, for her first excursion into slum-land, in order to
gather material for her great work: _Why I am a Socialist: a Confession
of Faith; Together with some Proposals for Ameliorating the Condition of
the Very Poor; with Copious Appendices by the Fabian Society_. Far better
might she have fared in the Dials; in Lambeth; even in Hoxton. But no; it
must be Limehouse—and at night. Really, one feels that she deserved all
she got.
With no other escort than a groom—who knew a chap down here—she stood
in West India Dock Road, near the Asiatics’ Home; and, to be strictly
impartial, she was a rather effective bit of colour, so far as raiment
went. You have certainly seen her photographs in the sixpenny weeklies,
or reproductions, in _The Year’s Pictures_, of those elegant studies by
Sargent and Shannon. It cannot be said that she is beautiful, though
the post card public raves about her; for her beauty is classical and
Greek, which means that she is about as interesting as a hard-boiled
egg. However, if we acknowledge her divinity we must regret that she
should ever have embraced the blue-serge god, and regret still more that
her waxen fingers should have itched with the fever of propagandist
authorship. However, she was determined to do a book on the Very Poor;
nothing would stop her. Her little soul blazed in a riot of fine fire for
the cause. Yesterday, it was Auction; the day before it was Settlements;
to-day, the Very Poor. And in papa’s drawing-room there was no doubt that
the Very Poor was a toy to be played with very prettily; for it is the
one success of these people that they can do things with an air.