LA CHICOT.
About this time there appeared among the multifarious placard which
adorned the dead walls and hoardings and railway arches and waste
spaces of London one mystical dissyllable, which was to be seen
everywhere.
Chicot. In gigantic yellow capitals on a black ground. The dullest eye
must needs see it, the slowest mind must needs be stirred with vague
wonder. Chicot! What did it mean? Was it a name or a thing? A common or
a proper noun? Something to eat or something to wear? A quack medicine
for humanity, or an ointment to cure the cracked heels of horses? Was
it a new vehicle, a patent cab destined to supersede the world-renowned
Hansom, or a new machine for cutting up turnips and mangold-wurzel? Was
it the name of a new periodical? Chicot! There was something taking
in the sound. Two short, crisp syllables, tripping lightly off the
tongue. Chicot! The street arabs shouted the word as a savage cry,
neither knowing nor caring what it meant. But before those six-sheet
posters had lost their pristine freshness most of the fast young men
about London, the medical students and articled clerks, the dapper
gentlemen at the War Office, the homelier youths from Somerset House,
the shining-hatted City swells who came westward as the sun sloped
to his rest, knew all about Chicot. Chicot was Mademoiselle Chicot,
premiere danseuse at the Royal Prince Frederick Theatre and Music-hall,
and she was, according to the highest authorities on the Stock Exchange
and in the War Office, quite the handsomest woman in London. Her
dancing was distinguished for its audacity rather than for high art.
She was no follower of the Taglioni school of saltation. The grace,
the refinement, the chaste beauties of that bygone age were unknown to
her. She would have ‘mocked herself of you’ if you had talked to her
about the poetry of motion. But for flying bounds across the stage--for
wild pirouettings on tiptoe--for the free use of the loveliest arms in
creation--for a bold backward curve of a full white throat more perfect
than ever sculptor gave his marble bacchanal, La Chicot was unrivalled.
She was thoroughly French. Of that there was no doubt. She was no
scion of the English houses of Brown, Jones, or Robinson, born and
bred in a London back slum, and christened plain Sarah or Mary, to be
sophisticated later into Celestine or Mariette. Zaïre Chicot was a
weed grown on Gallic soil. All that there was of the most Parisian La
Chicot called herself; but her accent and many of her turns of phrase
belied her, and to the enlightened ear of her compatriots betrayed her
provincial origin. The loyal and pious province of Brittany claimed
the honour of La Chicot’s birth. Her innocent childhood had been
spent among the fig-trees and saintly shrines of Auray. Not till her
nineteenth year had she seen the long, dazzling boulevards stretching
into unfathomable distance before her eyes; the multitudinous lamps;
the fairy-like kiosks--all infinitely grander and more beautiful
than the square of Duguesclin at Dinan illuminated with ten thousand
lampions on a festival night. Here in Paris life seemed an endless
festival.
Paris is a mighty schoolmaster, a grand enlightener of the provincial
intellect. Paris taught La Chicot that she was beautiful. Paris taught
La Chicot that it was pleasanter to whirl and bound among serried ranks
of other Chicots in the fairy spectacle of ‘The Sleeping Beauty,’
or the ‘Hart with the Golden Collar,’ clad in scantiest drapery,
but sparkling with gold and spangles, with hair flowing wild as a
Mænad’s, and satin boots at two napoleons the pair, than to toil among
laundresses on the quay. La Chicot had come to Paris to get her living,
and she got it very pleasantly for herself as a member of the _corps
de ballet_, a cypher in the sum total of those splendid fairy
spectacles, but a cypher whose superb eyes and luxuriant hair, whose
statuesque figure and youthful freshness did not fail to attract the
notice of individuals.
She was soon known as the belle of the ballet, and speedily made
herself obnoxious to the principal dancers, who resented her superior
charms as an insolence, and took every occasion to snub her. But while
her own sex was unkind, the sterner sex showed itself gentle to la
belle Chicot. The ballet-master taught her steps which he taught to
none other of the sisterhood under his tuition; he made opportunities
for giving her a solo dance now and then; he pushed her to the
front; and at his advice she migrated from the large house where she
was nobody, to a smaller house in the students’ quarter, a popular
little theatre on the left bank of the Seine, amidst a labyrinth of
narrow streets and tall houses between the School of Medicine and the
Sorbonne, where she soon became everybody. _C’était le plus gentil
de mes rats_, cried the ballet-master regretfully, when La Chicot
had been tempted away. _Cette petite ira loin_, said the manager,
vexed with himself for having let his handsomest coryphée slip through
his fingers; _elle a du chien_.
At the Students’ Theatre it was that La Chicot met with her fate, or
in other words, it was here that her husband first saw her. He was an
Englishman, leading a rather wild life in this students’ quarter of
Paris, living from hand to mouth, very poor, very clever, very badly
qualified to get his own living. He was gifted with those versatile
talents which rarely come to a focus or achieve any important result.
He painted, he etched, he sang, he played on three or four instruments
with taste and fancy, but little technical skill; he wrote for the
comic papers, but the comic papers generally rejected or neglected
his contributions. If he had invented a lucifer match, or originated
an improvement in the sewing-machine, he might have carved his way to
fortune; but these drawing-room accomplishments of his hardly served to
keep him from starving. Not a very eligible suitor, one would imagine,
for a young lady from the provinces who wished to make a great figure
in life; but he was handsome, well-bred, with that unmistakable air of
gentle birth which neither poverty nor Bohemianism can destroy, and in
the opinion of La Chicot the most fascinating man she had ever seen.
In a word, he admired the lovely ballet-dancer, and the ballet-dancer
adored him. It was an infatuation on both sides--his first great
passion and hers. Both were strong in their faith in their own talents
and the future; both believed that they had only to live in order to
become rich and famous. La Chicot was not of a calculating temper.
She was fond of money, but only of money to spend in the immediate
present; money for fine dresses, good dinners, wine that foamed and
sparkled, and plenty of promenading in hired carriages in the Bois
de Boulogne. Money for the future, for sickness, for old age, for the
innumerable necessities of life, she never thought of. Without having
ever read Horace, or perhaps ever having heard of his existence, she
was profoundly Horatian in her philosophy. To snatch the pleasure of
the day, and let to-morrow take care of itself, was the beginning and
end of her wisdom. She loved the young Englishman, and she married him,
knowing that he had not a napoleon beyond the coin that was to pay
for their wedding dinner, utterly reckless as to the consequences of
their marriage, and as ignorant and unreasoning in her happiness as a
child. To have a handsome man--a gentleman by birth and education--for
her lover and slave,--to have the one man who had ensnared her fancy
tied to her apron-string for ever,--this was La Chicot’s notion of
happiness. She was a strong-minded young woman, who to this point had
made her way in life unaided by relatives or friends, uncared for,
uncounselled, untaught, a mere straw upon the tide of life, but not
without a fixed idea of her own as to where she wanted to drift. She
desired no guardianship from a husband. She did not expect him to
work for her, or support her; she was quite resigned to the idea that
she was to be the breadwinner. This child of the people set a curious
value upon the name gentleman. The fact that her husband belonged to
a superior race made up, in her mind, for a great many shortcomings.
That he should be variable, reckless, a creature of fits and starts,
beginning a picture with zeal in the morning, to throw it aside with
disgust in the evening, seemed only natural. That was race. Could you
put a hunter to the same kind of work which the patient packhorse
performs without a symptom of revolt? La Chicot hugged the notion of
her husband’s superiority to that drudging herd from which she had
sprung. His very vices were in her mind virtues.
They were married, and as La Chicot was a person of some importance in
her own small world, while the young Englishman had done nothing to
distinguish himself, the husband came somehow to be known by the name
of the wife, and was spoken of everywhere as Monsieur Chicot.
It was an odd kind of life which these two led in their
meagrely-furnished rooms on the third floor of a dingy house in a
dingy street of the students’ quarter; an odd, improvident, dissipated
life, in which night was turned into day, and money spent like water,
and nothing desired or obtained out of existence except pleasure, the
gross, sensual pleasures of dining and drinking; the wilder pleasure
of play, and moonlight drives in the Bois; the Sabbath delights of
free-and-easy rambles in rural neighbourhoods, beside the silvery
Seine, on the long summer days, when a luxurious idler could rise at
noon without feeling the effort too hard a trial; winding up always
with a dinner at some rustic house of entertainment, where there was
a vine-curtained arbor that one could dine in, and where one could
see the dinner being cooked in a kitchen with a wide window opening
on yard and garden, and hear the balls clicking in the low-ceiled
billiard-room. There were winter Sundays, when it seemed scarcely worth
one’s while to get up at all, till the scanty measure of daylight had
run out, and the gas was aflame on the boulevards, and it was time to
think of where one should dine. So the Chicots spent the first two
years of their married life, and it may be supposed that an existence
of this kind quite absorbed Madame Chicot’s salary, and that there was
no surplus to be put by for a rainy day. Had La Chicot inhabited a
world in which rain and foul weather were unknown, she could not have
troubled herself less about the possibilities of the future. She earned
her money gaily, and spent it royally; domineered over her husband on
the strength of her superb beauty; basked in the sunshine of temporary
prosperity; drank more champagne than was good for her constitution or
her womanhood; grew a shade coarser every year; never opened a book or
cultivated her mind in the smallest degree; scorned all the refinements
of life; looked upon picturesque scenes and rustic landscapes as a
fitting background for the riot and drunkenness of a Bohemian picnic,
and as good for nothing else; never crossed the threshold of a church,
or held out her hand in an act of charity; lived for herself and her
own pleasure; and had no more conscience than the butterflies, and less
sense of duty than the birds.
If Jack Chicot had any compunction about the manner in which he and
his wife were living, and the way they spent their money, he did not
give any expression to his qualms of conscience. It may be that he was
restrained by a false sense of delicacy, and that he considered his
wife had a right to do what she liked with her own. His own earnings
were small, and intermittent--a water-colour sketch sold to the
dealers, a dramatic criticism accepted by the director of a popular
journal. Money that came so irregularly went as it came.
‘Jack comes to have sold a picture!’ cried the wife; ‘that great
impostor of mine has taken it into his head to work. Let us go and dine
at the “Red Mill.” Jack shall make the cost.’
And then it was but to whistle for a couple of light open carriages,
which, in this city of pleasure, stand in every street, tempting the
idler to excursionize; to call together the half-dozen chosen friends
of the moment, and away to the favourite restaurant to order a private
room and a little dinner, _bien soigné_, and one’s particular
brand of champagne, and then, hey for a drive in the merry green wood,
while the _marmitons_ are perspiring over their _casseroles_,
and anon back to a noisy feast, eaten in the open air, perhaps, under
the afternoon sunshine, for La Chicot has to be at her theatre before
seven, since at eight all Bohemian Paris will be waiting, eager and
open-mouthed, to see the dancer with wild eyes and floating hair come
bounding on to the stage. La Chicot was growing more and more like
a Thracian Mænad as time went on. Her dancing was more audacious,
her gestures more electrical. There was a kind of inspiration in
those wild movements, but it was the inspiration of a Bacchante, not
the calm grace of dryad or sea-nymph. You could fancy her whirling
round Pentheus, mixed with the savage throng of her sister Mænads,
thirsting for vengeance and murder; a creature to be beheld from afar
with wondering admiration, but a being to be shunned by all lovers of
peaceful lives and tranquil paths. Those who knew her best used to
speak pretty freely about her in the second year of her wedded life,
and her third season at the Théâtre des Etudiants.
‘La Chicot begins to drink like a fish,’ said Antoine, of the
orchestra, to Gilbert, who played the comic fathers. ‘I wonder whether
she beats her husband when she has had too much champagne?’
‘They lead but a cat-and-dog sort of life, I believe,’ answered the
comedian; ‘one day all sunshine, the next stormy weather. Renaud, the
painter, who has a room on the same story, tells me that it sometimes
hails cups and saucers and empty champagne-bottles when the weather is
stormy in the Chicot domicile. But those two are desperately fond of
each other all the same.’
‘I should not appreciate such fondness,’ said the fiddler; ‘when I
marry it will not be for beauty. I would not have as handsome a wife
as La Chicot if I could have her for the asking. A woman of that stamp
is created to be the torment of her husband’s life. I find that this
Jack is not the fellow he used to be before he married. C’est un garçon
bémolisé par le mariage.’
When the Chicots had been man and wife for about three years--a long
apprenticeship of bliss or woe--the lady’s power of attracting an
audience to the little theatre in the students’ quarter began visibly
to wane. The parterre grew thin, the students yawned or talked to
each other in loud whispers while the dancer was executing her most
brilliant steps. Even her beauty had ceased to charm. The habitués of
the theatre knew that beauty by heart.
‘C’est cliché comme une tartine de journal,’ said one. ‘C’est connu
comme le dôme des Invalides,’ said another. ‘Cela fatigue; on commence
à se désillusionner sur La Chicot.’
La Chicot saw the decline of her star, and that lively temper of hers,
which had been growing more and more impulsive during the last three
years, took reverse of fortune in no good spirit. She used to come
home from the theatre in a diabolical humour, after having danced to
empty benches and a languid audience, and Jack Chicot had to pay the
cost. She would quarrel with him about a straw, a nothing, on these
occasions. She abused the students who stayed away from the theatre in
roundest and strongest phraseology. She was still more angry with those
who came and did not applaud. She upbraided Jack for his helplessness.
Was there ever such a husband? He could not advance her interests in
the smallest degree. Had she married any one else--one of those little
gentlemen who wrote for the papers, for instance--she would have been
engaged at one of the boulevard theatres before now. She would be the
rage among the best people in Paris. She would be earning thousands.
But her husband had no influence with managers or newspapers, not
enough to get a puff paragraph inserted in the lowest of the little
journals. It was desolating.
This upbraiding was not without its effect upon Jack Chicot. He was
a good-tempered fellow by nature, prone to take life easily. In all
their quarrels it was his wife who took the leading part. When the
cups and saucers and empty bottles went flying, she was the Jove who
hurled those thunderbolts. Jack was too brave to strike a woman, too
proud to lower himself to the level of his wife’s degradation. He
suffered and was silent. He had found out his mistake long ago. The
delusion had been brief, the repentance was long. He knew that he had
bound himself to a low-born, low-bred fury. He knew that his only
chance of escaping suicide was to shut his eyes to his surroundings,
and to take what pleasure he could out of a disreputable existence.
His wife’s reproaches stung him into activity. He wrote half-a-dozen
letters to old friends in London--men more or less connected with the
press or the theatres--asking them to get La Chicot an engagement. In
these letters he wrote of her only as a clever woman in whose career
he was interested; he shrank curiously from acknowledging her as his
wife. He took care to enclose cuttings from the Parisian journals
in which the dancer’s beauty and chic, talent and originality, were
lauded. The result of this trouble on his part was a visit from Mr.
Smolendo, the enterprising proprietor of the Prince Frederick Theatre,
who had come to Paris in search of novelty, and the engagement of
Mademoiselle Chicot for that place of entertainment. Mr. Smolendo had
been going in strongly for ballet of late. His scenery, his machinery,
his lime-light and dresses were amongst the best to be seen in London.
Everybody went to the Prince Frederick. It had begun its career as a
music-hall, and had only lately been licensed as a theatre. There was
a flavour of Bohemianism about the house, but it only gave a zest to
the entertainment. All the most notorious Parisian successes in the way
of spectacular drama, all the fairy extravaganzas and demon ballets
and comic operettas, were reproduced by Mr. Smolendo at the Prince
Frederick. He knew where to find the prettiest actresses, the best
dancers, the freshest voices. His chorus and his ballet were the most
perfect in London. In a word, Mr. Smolendo had discovered the secret of
dramatic success. He had found out that perfection always pays.
La Chicot’s beauty was startling and incontestible. There could not
be two opinions about that. Her dancing was eccentric and clever. Mr.
Smolendo had seen much better dancing from more carefully-trained
dancers, but what La Chicot wanted in training she made up for with
dash and audacity.
‘She won’t last many seasons. She’s like one of those high-stepping
horses that knock themselves to pieces in a year or two,’ Mr. Smolendo
said to himself; ‘but she’ll take the town by storm, and she’ll draw
better for her first three seasons than any star I’ve had since I began
management.’
La Chicot was delighted at being engaged by a London manager, who
offered her a better salary than she was getting at the students’
theatre. She did not like the idea of London, which she imagined a city
given over to fog and lung disease, but she was very glad to leave the
scene where she felt that her laurels were fast withering. She gave her
husband no thanks for his intervention, and went on railing at him for
not having got her an engagement on the boulevard.
‘It is to bury myself to go to your dismal London,’ she exclaimed; ‘but
anything is better than to dance to an assembly of idiots and cretins.’
‘London is not half a bad place,’ answered Jack Chicot, with his
listless air, as of a man long wearied of life, and needing a stimulant
as strong as aquafortis to rouse him to animation. ‘It is a big crowd
in which one may lose one’s identity. Nobody knows one, one knows
nobody. A man’s sense of shame gets comfortably deadened in London. He
can walk the streets without feeling that fingers are being pointed at
him. It is all the same to the herd whether he has just come out of a
penitentiary or a palace. Nobody cares.’
The Chicots crossed the Channel, and took lodgings in a street in the
neighbourhood of Leicester Square, near which, as everyone knows, the
Prince Frederick is situated. It was a dingy street, offering scanty
attractions to the stranger, but it was a street which from the days of
Garrick and Woffington had been favoured by actors and actresses, and
Mr. Smolendo recommended the Chicots to seek a lodging there. He gave
them the names of three or four householders who let lodgings to ‘the
profession,’ and among these Madame Chicot made her choice.
The apartments which pleased her best were two fair-sized rooms on a
first floor, furnished with a tawdry pretentiousness which would have
been odious to a refined eye, and which was particularly offensive
to Jack’s artistic taste. The cheap velvet on the chairs, the gaudy
tapestry curtains, the tarnished ormolu clock and candelabra, delighted
La Chicot. It was almost Parisian, she told her husband.
The drawing-room and bedroom communicated with folding-doors. There
was a little third room--a mere hole--with a window looking northward,
which would do for Jack to paint in. That convenience reconciled Jack
to the shabby finery of the sitting-room, the doubtful purity of the
bedroom, the woe-begone air of the street, with its half-dozen dingy
shops sprinkled among the private houses, like an eruption.
‘How it is ugly, your London!’ exclaimed La Chicot. ‘Is it that all the
city resembles this, by example?’
‘No,’ answered Jack, with his cynical air. ‘There are brighter-looking
streets, where the respectable people live.’
‘What do you call respectable people?’
‘The people who pay income-tax on two or three thousand a year.’
Jack inquired as to the other lodgers. It was as well to find out what
kind of neighbours they were to have.
‘I am not particular,’ said Jack, in French, to his wife, ‘but I should
not like to find myself living cheek by jowl with a burglar.’
‘Or a spy,’ suggested Zaïre.
‘We have no spies in London. That is a profession which has never found
a footing on this side of the Channel.’
The landlady was a lean-looking widow, with a false front of gingery
curls, and a cap that quivered all over with artificial flowers on
corkscrew wires. Her long nose was tinted at the extremity, and her
eyes had a luminous yet glassy look, suggestive of ardent spirits.
‘I have only one lady in the parlours,’ she explained, ‘and a very
clever lady she is too, and quite the lady--Mrs. Rawber, who plays
leading business at the Shakespeare. You must have heard of her. She’s
a great woman.’
Mr. Chicot apologized for his ignorance. He had been living so long in
Paris that he knew nothing of Mrs. Rawber.
‘Ah,’ sighed the landlady, ‘you don’t know how much you’ve lost. Her
Lady Macbeth is as fine as Mrs. Siddons’s.’
‘Did you ever see Mrs. Siddons?’
‘No, but I’ve heard my mother talk about her. She couldn’t have been
greater in the part than Mrs. Rawber. You should go and see her some
night. She’d make your flesh creep.’
‘And a respectable old party, I suppose,’ suggested Jack Chicot.
‘As regular as clockwork. Church every Sunday morning and evening. No
hot suppers. Crust of bread and cheese and glass of ale left ready
on her table against she comes home--lets herself in with her key--no
sitting up for her. Chop and imperial pint of Guinness at two o’clock,
when there ain’t no rehearsal; something plain and simple that can be
kept hot on the oven top, when the rehearsal’s late. She’s a model
lodger. No perquisites, but pay as regular as the Saturday comes round,
and always the lady.’
‘Ah,’ said Jack, ‘that’s satisfactory. How about upstairs? I suppose
you’ve another pattern of commonplace respectability on your second
floor?’
The landlady gave a faint cough, as if she were troubled with a sudden
catching of the breath, and her eyes wandered absently to the window,
where she seemed to ask counsel from the grey October sky.
‘Who are your upstairs lodgers?’ asked Jack Chicot, repeating his
inquiry with a shade of impatience.
‘Lodgers? No, sir. There’s only one gentleman on my second floor. I
have never laid myself out for families. Children are such mischievous
young monkeys, and always tramping up and down stairs, or endangering
their lives leaning out of winder, or leaving the street door open.
And the damage they do the furniture! Well, nobody can understand that
except them as have passed through the ordeal. No, sir, for the last
six years I haven’t had a child across my threshold.’
‘I wasn’t inquiring about children,’ said Mr. Chicot; ‘I was asking
about your upstairs lodger.’
‘He’s a single gentleman, sir.’
‘Young?’
‘No, sir; middle-aged.’
‘An actor?’
‘No, sir. He has nothing to do with the theatres.’
‘What is he?’
‘Well, sir, he is a gentleman--everyone can see that--but a gentleman
as has run through his property. I should gather from his ways that he
must have had a great deal of property, and that he’s run through most
of it. He is not quite so regular in his payments as I could wish--but
he does pay,--and he’s very little trouble, for he’s often away for a
week at a time, the rent running on all the same, of course.’
‘That would hardly matter to him if he doesn’t pay it,’ said Chicot.
‘Oh, but he does pay, sir. He’s dilatory, but I get my money. A poor
widow like me couldn’t afford to lose by the best of lodgers.’
‘What is the gentleman’s name?’
‘Mr. Desrolles.’
‘That sounds like a foreign name.’
‘It may, sir, but the gentleman’s English. I haven’t in a general way
laid myself out for foreigners,’ said the landlady, with a glance at La
Chicot, ‘though this is rather a foreign neighbourhood.’
The lodgings were taken, and Jack Chicot and his wife began a new
phase of existence in London. The life lacked much that had made their
life in Paris tolerable--the careless gaiety, the brighter skies,
the Bohemian pleasures of the French city--and Jack Chicot felt as
if a dense black curtain had been drawn across his youth and all
its delusions, leaving him outside in a cold, commonplace world, a
worn-out, disappointed man, old before his time.
He missed the gay, happy-go-lucky comrades who had helped him to forget
his troubles. He missed the drives in the leafy wood, the excursions
to suburban dining-houses, the riotous suppers after midnight, all the
merry dissipations of his Parisian life. London pleasures were dull and
heavy. London suppers meant no more than eating and drinking too many
oysters and too much wine.
Mr. Smolendo’s expectations were fully realised. La Chicot made a hit
at the Prince Frederick. Those flaming posters under every railway
arch and on every hoarding in London were not in vain. The theatre was
crowded nightly, and La Chicot was applauded to the echo. She breathed
anew the intoxicating breath of success, and she grew daily more
insolent and more reckless, spent more money, drank more champagne,
and was more eager for pleasure, flattery, and fine dress. The husband
looked on with a gloomy face. They were no longer the adoring young
couple who had walked away arm-in-arm from the Mairie, smiling and
happy, to share their wedding dinner with the chosen companions of the
moment. The wife was now only affectionate by fits and starts, the
husband had a settled air of despondency which nothing but wine could
banish, and which, like the seven other spirits, returned with greater
power after a temporary banishment. The wife loved the husband just
well enough to be desperately jealous of his least civility to another
woman. The husband had long ceased to be jealous, except of his own
honour.
Among the frequenters of the Prince Frederick there was one who at
this time was to be seen there almost nightly. He was a man of about
five-and-twenty, tall, broad-shouldered, with strongly-marked features
and the eye of a hawk; a man whose clothes were well worn, and whose
whole appearance was slovenly, yet who looked like a gentleman;
evidently uncared for, possibly destitute, but however low he might
have sunk, a gentleman still.
He was a medical student, and one of the hardest workers at St.
Thomas’s--a man who had chosen his profession because he loved it, and
whose love increased with his labour. Those who knew most about him
said that he was a man destined to make his mark upon the age in which
he lived. But he was not a man to achieve rapid success, to distinguish
himself by a happy accident. He went slowly to work, sounded the bottom
of every well, took up every subject as resolutely as if it were the
one subject he had chosen for his especial study, flung himself into
every scientific question with the feverish ardour of a lover, yet
worked with the steadiness and self-denial of a Greek athlete. For all
the vulgar pleasures of life, for wine or play, for horse-racing, or
riot of any kind, this young surgeon cared not a jot. He was so little
a haunter of theatres, that those of his fellow-students who recognised
him night after night at the Prince Frederick were surprised at his
frequent presence in such a place.
‘What has come to Gerard?’ cried Joe Latimer, of Guy’s, to Harry Brown,
of St. Thomas’s. ‘I thought he despised ballet-dancing. Yet this is the
third time I have seen him looking on at this rot, with his attention
as fixed as if he were watching Paget using the knife?’
‘Can’t you guess what it all means?’ exclaimed Brown. ‘Gerard is in
love.’
‘In love!’
‘Yes, over head and ears in love with La Chicot--never saw such
a well-marked case--all the symptoms beautifully developed--sits
in the front row of the pit and gazes the whole time she is on
the stage--never takes his eyes off her--raves about her to our
fellows--the loveliest woman that ever lived since the unknown young
person who served as a model for the Venus that was dug up in a cave in
the island of Milo. Fancy having known that young woman, and put your
arm round her waist! Somebody did, I dare say. Yes, George Gerard is
gone--annihilated. It’s too pathetic.’
‘And Mademoiselle Chicot is a married woman, I hear?’ said Latimer.
‘Very much married. The husband is always in attendance upon her. Waits
for her at the stage door every night, or stands at the wing while she
dances. La Chicot is a most correct person, though she hardly looks it.
Ah! here comes Gerard. Well, old fellow, has the disease reached its
crisis?’
‘What disease?’ asked Gerard, curtly.
‘The fever called love.’
‘Do you suppose I’m in love with the new dancer, because I drop in here
pretty often to look at her?’
‘I don’t see any other motive for your presence here. You’re not a
play-going man.’
‘I come to see La Chicot simply because she is quite the most beautiful
woman in face and form that I ever remember seeing. I come as a painter
might to look at the perfection of human loveliness, or as an anatomist
to contemplate the completeness of God’s work, a creature turned out of
the divine workshop without a flaw.’
‘Did you ever hear such a fellow?’ cried Latimer. ‘He comes to look at
a ballet-dancer, and talks about it as if it were a kind of religion.’
‘The worship of the beautiful is the religion of art,’ answered Gerard,
gravely. ‘I respect La Chicot as much as I admire her. I have not an
unworthy thought about her.’
Latimer touched his forehead lightly with two fingers, and looked at
his friend Brown.
‘Gone!’ said Latimer.
‘Very far gone!’ replied Brown.
‘Come and try the Dutch oysters, Gerard, and let us make a night of
it,’ said Latimer persuasively.
‘Thanks, no. I must go home to my den and read.’
And so they parted, the idlers to their pleasure, the plodding
student--the man who loved work for its own sake--to his books.