LA CHICOT HAS HER OWN WAY.
Slowly, reluctantly, Winter crawled away to his hidden lair, and made
room for a chilly, uncomfortable spring. It had been the longest,
dullest winter that Jack Chicot had ever lived through. He did not
wonder that the Continental idea associated London fog and suicide
in a natural sequence. Never had he felt himself so inclined to
self-destruction as in the foggy December afternoons, the bleak January
twilights, when he paced the dull grey streets under the dull grey sky,
smoking his solitary cigar, and thinking what a dismal ruin he had made
of himself and his life; he who had entered upon the bustling scene
of manhood ten years ago, with such bright hopes, such an honourable
ambition, such an arrogant confidence in the future as the bringer of
all good things.
Now where was he? What was he? The husband of La Chicot, a being in
himself so worthless, so aimless and obscure that no one ever took
the trouble to inquire his real name. His wife’s name--the name made
notorious by a ballet-dancer, the goddess of medical students and
lawyers’ clerks--was good enough for him. In himself and by himself he
was nothing. He was only the husband of La Chicot, a woman who drank
like a fish and swore like a trooper.
It was a sorry pass for a man to have come to in whom the sense of
shame was not utterly dead. Perhaps it was something to be remembered
in Jack Chicot’s favour that at this time of his life, when despair
had fastened its claw upon his aching heart, when love and liking had
given place to a mute and secret abhorrence, he was not cruel or harsh
to his wife. He never said hard or bitter things to her: so long as he
had any lingering belief in her capability of amendment he remonstrated
with her on the folly of her ways, always temperately, often with much
kindness: and when he saw that reform was hopeless he held his peace
and did not upbraid her.
She had never done him that kind of wrong which honour forbids a
husband to forgive. So far she had been true to him, and loved him,
in her maudlin way, flying at him like a fury when she was betwixt
sobriety and intoxication, calling him her angel, or her cat, or her
cabbage, with imbecile tenderness, when she was comfortably tipsy. He
who had quarrelled with her a good deal before he began to hate her,
could now endure her utmost violence and keep calm. He dared not give
the reins to passion. It might carry him--he knew not whither. He felt
like a man standing on the edge of a black gulf, blindfolded, yet
knowing that the pit was there. One false step might be fatal. He had
been luckier in this gloomy London than in his much-regretted Paris,
so far as the exercise of his own small talents went. He had obtained
a regular engagement as draughtsman on one of the comic journals, and
his caricatures, pencilled on a wood block while his heart ached with
misery and his head burned with fever, amused the idle youth of London
with reminiscences of Cham and Gavarni. By the use of his pencil he
contrived to earn something like two pounds a week, more than enough
for his own wants; so La Chicot could spend every sixpence of her
salary on herself, an arrangement which suited her temper admirably.
She had a bottle of champagne in her dressing-room every night, and
finished it before she went on for her great pas. So long as she
abstained from brandy this meant sobriety. She was a woman of limited
ideas, and as in San Francisco champagne is ‘wine’ par excellence,
no meaner liquor being deemed worthy of the noble name, so, with La
Chicot, champagne was the only wine worth drinking. When she felt that
its sustaining power was insufficient she fortified it with brandy, and
then La Chicot was a creature to be shunned.
Winter lingered late that year. Though the green banks of every
country lane and every hollow of the leafless woodland were starred
with primroses and spangled with dog-violets, wintry winds were still
wracking the forest trees, and whistling shrill among the London
chimney-pots.
March had come in like a lion, and continued to roar and bluster in
leonine fashion to the very verge of April. A dry, dusty, bitter March,
dealing largely in death and shipwreck. A villainous March, better
calculated to inspire thoughts of suicide than even the fogs and
creeping mists of November.
But even this miserable March came to an end at last. The London
season had begun. La Chicot was attracting not only medical students
and lawyers’ clerks, the Stock Exchange and the War Office, but the
fine flower of the aristocracy--the topmost strawberries in the
basket--the Brobdingnagian Guardsmen, whose gloves were numbered nine
and a half at the little hosier’s in Piccadilly, the dainty foplings
who wore a lady’s six and three-quarters with four buttons, and who
were beings of so frail and effeminate a type that a whisper through
the telephone might blow them to the utmost ends of the earth. These
opposite species, the athletics and the æsthetics, the hammer throwers,
bicycle riders, boating men, hunting men, and pugilists, and the china
collectors, art lunatics, and tame-cat section of society, met and
mingled in the stalls at the Prince Frederick, and resembled each other
in nothing except their appreciation of La Chicot.
Mr. Smolendo produced a new ballet early in April, a ballet which was
as ridiculous and generally imbecile in plot and purpose as most of
its kind, but which for scenery, dresses, and effects was supposed
to surpass anything that had ever been accomplished at his theatre.
Everything in this ballet tended to the glorification of La Chicot. She
was the central figure, the cynosure: every crest was lowered to give
prominence to hers, principal dancers were her handmaidens, a hundred
ballet-girls prostrated themselves before her throne, a hundred and
fifty auxiliaries, specially engaged for this great spectacle, licked
the dust beneath her feet. The final tableau, which was to cost Mr.
Smolendo more money than he could calculate, was an apotheosis of La
Chicot, a beautiful, bold, half-tipsy peasant, going to heaven on a
telescopic arrangement of iron. It was a wonderful sight. The athletics
called it ‘no end of jolly.’ The æsthetics described it as ‘unspeakably
touching.’
This final tableau was supposed to represent the coral caves of the
Indian Ocean. La Chicot was a mermaid who lured mariners to their doom
beneath the wave. She lived in a jewelled cavern, a hall sparkling and
shining with sapphires and emeralds and lapis-lazuli, all flooded with
rainbow light, where she and her sister mermaidens, golden, glittering,
and scaly, danced perpetually. Then came the end, and she floated
upward through an ocean of blue gauze, in a moving frame of rosiest
coral.
The ironwork upon which she mounted was a somewhat complicated piece
of machinery, a telescope in three parts, requiring nice adjustment
on the part of the stage carpenter. It was perfectly safe if properly
worked; but a hitch, the slightest carelessness in the working, would
be perilous, and might be fatal.
‘I don’t like that business by any means,’ said Jack Chicot, when he
saw his wife ascending to the sky borders, in the dust and gloom of
rehearsal, clad in her practising petticoats, and with a lace-bordered
handkerchief tied under her chin, like a coquettish nightcap. ‘It looks
dangerous. Can’t you dispense with it, Smolendo?’
‘Impossible; it’s the great feature of the scene. Perfectly safe, I
assure you. Roberts is the best carpenter in London.’
Mr. Smolendo’s people were always the best. He had a knack of getting
first-rate talent in every line, from his prima donna to his gasman.
‘He seems clever, but rather a queer-tempered man, I hear.’
‘Talent is always queer-tempered,’ answered Smolendo, lightly.
‘Amiability is the redeeming virtue of fools.’
Mr. Chicot was not convinced. He took his wife aside presently in a
grove of dingy wings and side pieces, and entreated her to refuse that
ascent in the coral bower.
‘_Pas si bête_,’ she answered, curtly. ‘I know what suits me. I
shall look lovely in that coral frame with my hair down. You needn’t
be frightened, my friend. _Pas de danger._ Or, if I should be
killed--come, I don’t think that would break your heart. It’s a long
time since you’ve left off caring for me as much as that.’
She snapped her fingers under his nose, with one of those little
audacious movements of hers which were infinitely fascinating--to
strangers. Jack Chicot shuddered visibly. Yes, it was horribly true.
Her death would be his release from bondage. Her death? Would he know
himself, believe in his own identity, if she were gone, and he was free
to walk the world again, his own master, with hopes and ambitions of
his own, bearing his own name, not ashamed to look mankind in the face,
no longer known as the husband of La Chicot?
He persuaded her earnestly to have nothing to do with the ironwork that
had been made to bear her to the theatrical skies. Why should she run
such a risk? Any ballet-girl would do as well, he argued.
‘Yes, and the ballet-girl would show off her good looks, and get all
the applause. I am not such a fool as to give her the chance. Don’t
waste your breath in talking about it, Jack. I mean to do it.’
‘Of course,’ he said bitterly. ‘When did you ever renounce a caprice to
please me?’
‘Perhaps never. I am a creature of caprices. It was a caprice that made
me marry you, a caprice that made you marry me, and now we are both
honestly tired. That’s a pity, isn’t it?’
‘I try to do my duty to you, my dear,’ he answered gravely, with a sigh.
La Chicot had her own way, naturally, being one of those women who,
once having taken their bent, are no more to be diverted than a
mountain torrent which the rains have swollen. The new ballet was a
success; the final tableau was a triumph for La Chicot. She looked
lovely, in an attitude more perfect than anything that was ever done
in marble--her round white arms lifted above her head, flinging back
the loose branches of coral, her black hair covering her like a mantle.
That long rich hair was one of her chief beauties--something to be
remembered where all was beautiful.
The machinery worked splendidly. Jack was at the wings the first night,
anxious and watchful. A fragment of conversation which he heard just
behind him while the coral bower was rising, did not tend to reassure
him.
‘It’s all very well to-night,’ said one of the scene-shifters to his
mate, ‘they’re both sober; but when she’s drunk, and he’s drunk, God
help her.’
Jack went to Mr. Smolendo directly the curtain was down.
‘Well,’ cried the manager, radiant, ‘a screaming success. There’s money
in it. I shall run this three hundred nights.’
‘I don’t like that ascent of my wife’s. I hear that the man who works
the machinery is a drunkard.’
‘My dear fellow, these men all drink,’ answered Smolendo, cheerfully.
‘But Roberts is a treasure. He’s always sober in business.’
Again Jack tried the effect of remonstrance with his wife, just as
vainly as before.
‘If you weren’t a fool you would make Smolendo give me an extra five
pounds a week on account of the danger, instead of worrying me about
it,’ she said.
‘I am not going to make the safety of your life a question of money,’
he answered; and after this there was no more said between them on the
subject of the coral bower, but that speech of the scene-shifter’s
haunted Jack Chicot.
‘When she is drunk.’ The memory of that speech was bitter. Though his
wife’s habits had long been patent to him, it was not the less galling
to think that everyone--the lowest servant in the theatre even--knew
her vices.
Towards the end of April, Chicot and his wife had a serious quarrel.
It arose out of a packet which had been left at the stage door for the
dancer--a packet containing a gold bracelet, in a morocco case, bearing
the name of one of the most fashionable and expensive jewellers at the
West End. There was nothing to show whence the offering came; but on a
narrow strip of paper, nestling under the massive gold band, there was
scrawled in a mean little, foreign-looking hand:--
‘Homage to genius.’
La Chicot carried the gift home in triumph and exhibited it to her
husband, clasped upon her round white arm, a solid belt of gold, flat,
wide, and thick, like a fetter, severely simple, an ornament for the
arm of a Greek dancing-girl.
‘You will send it back, of course,’ said Jack, frowning at the thing.
‘But, my friend, where should I send it?’
‘To the jeweller. He must know his customer.’
‘I am not so stupid. There can be no harm in accepting an anonymous
gift. I shall keep it, of course.’
‘I did not think you had fallen so low.’
Upon this La Chicot retorted insolently, and there were very hard words
spoken on both sides. The lady kept the bracelet, and the gentleman
went next day to the jeweller who had supplied it, and tried to
discover the name of the purchaser.
The jeweller was studiously polite, but he had no memory. Jack Chicot
minutely described the bracelet, but the jeweller assured him that he
sold a dozen such in a week.
‘I think you must be mistaken,’ said Chicot; ‘this is a bracelet of
very uncommon form. I never saw one like it,’ and then he repeated his
description.
The jeweller shook his head with a gentle smile.
‘The style is new,’ he said, ‘but I assure you we have sold several
exactly corresponding to your description. It would be quite impossible
to recall----’
‘I see,’ said Chicot; ‘you would not like to disoblige a good customer.
I dare say you know what the bracelet was meant for. Such shops as
yours could hardly thrive unless they were indulgent to the vices of
their patrons.’
And after launching that shaft Mr. Chicot left the shop.
He returned to his lodgings to pack a small portmanteau, and then went
off to take his own pleasure. What need had such a wife as his of a
husband’s care? She would not accept his advice, or be ruled by him.
She had chosen her road in life, and would follow it to the fatal end.
Of what avail was his weak arm to bar the path? To this daughter of
the people, with her deadened conscience and indomitable will, that
interposing arm was no more than a straw in her way.
‘Henceforth I have done with her,’ he said to himself. ‘The law could
desire no stronger divorce between us than this which she has made. And
if she does me wrong the law shall part us. I will have no mercy.’
While he was packing his portmanteau an idea flashed into his mind. It
was a horrible notion, and his cheek paled at the first aspect of it,
but he took it to his heart nevertheless.
He was going away, for an indefinite time, perhaps. He would set a
watch upon his wife. Her audacity, her insolence, had aroused the
darkest suspicions. A woman who thus openly defied him must be capable
of anything.
‘Whom can I trust?’ he asked himself, pausing in his preparations, on
his knees before the open portmanteau. ‘The landlady, Mrs. Evitt? No,
she is sly enough, but she has too long a tongue. A glass of grog would
loosen that tongue of hers at any time, and she would betray me to my
wife. It must be a man. Desrolles. Yes, the very man. He has all the
qualities of the trade.’
Chicot locked his portmanteau, strapped it, and carried it out on to
the landing. Then he ran up to the second floor, and knocked at the
door of the front room.
‘Come in,’ said a languid voice, and Jack Chicot went in.
The room smelt of brandy and stale cigars. It was shabbier and tawdrier
than the sitting-room on the first floor--a sordid copy of that sordid
original. There was the same attempt at finery, tarnished ormolu, gaudy
chintz curtains and chair-covers, where roses and lilies were almost
effaced by dirt. The cheap tapestry carpet was threadbare, a desert
of arid canvas, with here and there an oasis of faded colour, which
hinted at the former richness of the soil. The windows were clouded
with London grime and London smoke, and lent an additional gloom to the
chilly sky and the dingy street upon which they looked. The cracked
and bulging ceiling was brown with the smoke of ages. Dirt was the
pervading impression which the room left upon the stranger’s mind.
On a rickety old sofa lay the present proprietor of the apartment,
dozing gently at noontide, with the _Daily Telegraph_ slipping
from his loosened grasp. The remains of a bachelor breakfast, a
half-empty eggshell, a fragment of toast, and a cracked coffee-cup,
indicated that he had but lately taken his morning meal.
He lifted himself lazily from the crumpled pillow, and confronted his
visitor with a prolonged and audible yawn.
‘Dear boy!’ he exclaimed, ‘what an untimely hour! What has happened
that you are astir so early?’
He was not a common-looking man. He was tall, broad, and deep of
chest, with lean, muscular arms, an aquiline nose, large and somewhat
prominent eyes, bloodshot and tarnished by long years of evil
experience, thin iron-gray hair, worn unduly long to conceal its
scantiness, a complexion of a dull leaden hue, stained with patches
of bistre--the complexion of a man to whom fresh air was an unusual
luxury--thin lips, a high, narrow forehead. He wore a threadbare frock
coat, closely buttoned, a frayed black satin stock, gray trousers,
tightly strapped over well-worn boots, boots that had begun their
career as dress boots.
Despite the shabbiness of his attire the man looked every inch a
gentleman. That he was a gentleman who had fallen about as low as
gentle breeding can fall, outside the Old Bailey, there was no doubt.
Vice had set its mark upon him so deeply that the brand of crime itself
could scarcely have done more to separate him from respectability.
A man must have been very young indeed, and utterly unlearned in
the experience of life, who would have trusted Mr. Desrolles in any
virtuous enterprise. But Jack Chicot showed himself by no means
wanting in penetration when he pitched upon Mr. Desrolles as a likely
instrument for doing dirty work. He was the material of which the
French _mouchard_ is made.
‘I’ve been worried, Desrolles,’ answered Jack, dropping wearily into a
chair.
‘My dear fellow, the normal condition of life is worry,’ replied
Desrolles, languidly. ‘The wisest of Jews knew all about it. Man was
born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. The most that philosophy can
suggest is to take trouble easily, as I do. All the Juggernaut cars of
life have gone over me, but I am not crushed.’
The tone was at once friendly and familiar. Jack Chicot and the
second-floor lodger had become acquainted very soon after the Chicots’
advent in Cibber Street. They met each other on the stairs, first
smiled, then nodded, then loitered to discuss and generally to
anathematise the weather, then went a little further, and talked about
the events of the day--the shocking murder recorded in the morning
paper--the fire down Millwall way--the chances of war, or disturbances
in the political atmosphere. By-and-by Jack Chicot asked Desrolles into
his room, and they played a hand or two at écarté--first-rate players
both--for three-penny points. Soon the écarté became an institution,
and they played two or three times a week, while La Chicot was standing
on the tips of her satin-shod toes, and enchanting the gilded youth of
the capital. Jack found his acquaintance a man of infinite resources
and wide experience. He had begun life in a good social position,
had--according to his own account--distinguished himself as a soldier
under such men as Gough and Hardinge; and had descended slowly, step
by step, to be the thing he was. That gradual descent had carried him
through scenes so strange and varied that his experiences of all that
is oddest and worst in life would have made a book as big as ‘Les
Misérables.’ And the creature knew how to talk. He never told the same
story twice. Jack sometimes fancied this must be because he invented
his stories upon the spot, and forgot them immediately afterwards.
The man was no pretender to virtues which he did not possess, but
rather advertised his vices. The only redeeming qualities he affected
were a recklessness in money matters, which he appeared to consider
generosity, and a rough-and-ready notion of honour, such as is supposed
to obtain among thieves. Jack tolerated, despised, and allowed himself
to be amused by the man. If he had been a king he would have liked
such a fellow to lounge beside his throne, dressed in motley, flinging
Rabelaisian witticisms in the smug faces of the courtiers.
‘What’s the particular trouble to-day, Jack?’ asked Desrolles,
selecting a meerschaum from the litter on the mantelpiece, and lazily
filling the blackened bowl. ‘Financial, I conclude.’
‘No. I am anxious about my wife.’
‘The natural penalty for marrying the handsomest woman in Paris. What’s
the mischief you’re afraid of?’
‘She has received a present from an anonymous admirer; and because it
is anonymous, she imagines she is justified in receiving it.’
‘Where’s the harm?’
‘You ought to see it. The anonymous gift is the thin end of the wedge.
The giver will see my wife dancing with his bracelet on her arm, and
will believe her as venal as the girl who sold Rome for the same kind
of gewgaw. He will follow up his first offering with a second, and
then will come letters, anonymous at first, perhaps, like the bracelet,
but when by insidious flattery he has smoothed the way to dishonour, he
will declare himself--and then----’
‘Unless your wife is a better woman than you believe her, there will be
danger. Is that what you mean?’ asked Desrolles calmly, slowly puffing
at his meerschaum.
‘No,’ said Chicot, reddening indignantly. He had not fallen low enough
to hear his wife maligned, though he hated her. ‘No. If my wife were a
woman to be led away by temptation of that kind, she and I would have
parted long ago. But I don’t want to leave her exposed to the pursuit
of a scoundrel. She and I have quarrelled about this trumpery bracelet,
and I am going to leave her for a few days, till we are both in a
better temper. I don’t want to leave her unprotected, with some silky
rascal lying in wait for her between her lodgings and the theatre. I
want some one, a man I can trust----’
‘To keep an eye upon her while you’re away,’ said Desrolles. ‘My dear
fellow, consider it done. Madame Chicot and I are excellent friends.
I admire her; and I think she likes me. I will be her slave and her
guardian in your absence; a father, with more than a father’s devotion.’
‘She must not know,’ exclaimed Jack.
‘Of course not. Women are children of a larger growth, and must be
treated as such. The pills we give them must be coated with sugar, the
powders concealed in raspberry jam. I will make myself so agreeable to
Madame Chicot that she will be delighted to accept my escort to and
from the theatre; but I will keep her anonymous admirer at a distance
as thoroughly as the fiercest dragon that ever kept watch over beauty.’
‘A thousand thanks, Desrolles. You won’t find me ungrateful. Good-bye.’
‘Are you going across the Channel?’
Mr. Chicot did not say where he was going, and Desrolles was too
discreet to push the question. He was a man who boasted sometimes, when
drink had made him maudlin, that, whatever had become of his morals, he
had never lost his manners.
Jack Chicot left a brief pencilled note for his wife:--
‘DEAR ZAÏRE,--Since we get on so badly together, a few days’
separation will be good for both of us. I am off to the country for a
breath of fresh air. I sicken in the odour of gas and stale brandy.
Take care of yourself for your own sake, if not for mine.--Yours, ‘J.
C.’