“Just look after my gal, will ye?
While I’m frontin’ the fire an’ the foe--
Like a good old pal, look after my gal--
An’ Gawd bless ye wheerever I go!”
Having got thus far, Mrs. Arteroyd paused and considered. She looked at
the clock and saw that its hands pointed to five, nearly the time for
afternoon tea. And she had been “making verses” ever since mid-day with
only a brief interval for lunch! Her face was hot and feverish, her
lips dry,--her brain--her brain?--yes, her brain was actually getting
“fagged.” She knew now what literary geniuses suffered when they
overtaxed their nervous forces.
“Positively I look quite tired!” she said, gazing at herself in the
convenient mirror to which she always turned in moments of harassment.
“I have worked hard! I don’t think I’ll do any more Tommy-poetry
now,--I can finish it to-morrow. I’d better go and see Mrs. Long-Adder
at once. She’s ‘off work,’ and as sick as she can be of not showing
herself. I’m sure she’ll be glad of a chance to come forward with
‘Tommy’s Gal.’ ‘Tommy’s Gal!’--that must be the title of the thing,
of course! That, and no other!” She wrote it down and smiled at it
admiringly. “Isn’t it splendid! ‘Tommy’s Gal!’ Won’t it just ‘draw’!
All the horrid men who have their own ‘gals’ on the sly will cough
with emotion over it,--and all the idiotic women who have managed to
get ‘left’ by Tommies, civil and military, will cry,--that is, if
Mrs. Long-Adder can be persuaded to recite it. Oh, she _must_ do
it! With that long peaky face of hers, and monstrous Chinese eyes,
and thick wedges of all-coloured hair coming over her ears, and her
wibbly-wobbly way of swinging her hips about, she will be a _succès
d’enthousiasme_! And so shall I!”
Her smile widened into an open dazzle of white teeth which irritable
and unimpressionable persons might have called a triumphant grin,--and
enveloping herself in a mysterious and wonderful cloak, all frills,
old lace, sable-tails and musk-rat odour, she drove off in a quick
hansom to a certain dubious little “flat” somewhere about Victoria
Street, which for the moment was the residence of the heart-enslaving,
eye-fascinating, purse-emptying, cheque-demanding “caprice” of the
stage, Mrs. Long-Adder. Much of the charm of this lady consisted in the
delicious vagueness and mystery of her surroundings. She came “from
America.” What part of America she came from did not transpire. She had
a husband,--somewhere,--but who he was, and how he “fixed up” things
for himself, also did not transpire. Suffice it to say of him that he
was never seen with his wife. Much may be comprehended in that brief
statement. Mrs. Long-Adder was by way of being an actress,--that is to
say she could not act. She wore gowns and glided about on the stage
in them. London went mad over her. The _Spread Eagle Conqueror_,
a society journal published in New York, called her “our matchless
American beauty,” like a new sort of cigarette. And she who was
“not received” in the intelligent circles of American culture, had
a distinctly “good time” of it in England. Mrs. Arteroyd found her
reclining in a long sofa-chair or chair-sofa, whatever the piece of
“Art” furniture may be called, arrayed in a serpentine tea-gown of
“diamanté” lace over satin “rayonnant,”--and if Mrs. Arteroyd smelt
like one musk-rat, Mrs. Long-Adder smelt like two. The celebrated
stage-siren rose as her visitor entered, and extended a white hand,
admirably manicured, and loaded with sparkling rings, the offerings
of “homage” from various adorers. And then both perfumed ladies
embraced,--that sisterly embrace of social feeling, in which the one
woman looks gracefully over the shoulder of the other and breathes a
gentle “Cat!” to the neutral air.
“How sweet of you to come!” murmured Mrs. Long-Adder cooingly,--“I
have been _so_ dull! Alone all day! Such an unusual thing for
_me_!”
And her sinuous form vibrated with a tremor of triumphant coquetry.
Mrs. Arteroyd smiled discreetly, but said nothing. Sitting down by the
chair-sofa she critically studied the woman, who was reported in club
parlance to “have old Dummer-Esel under her thumb.”
“Not a bit good-looking really,” she commented inwardly--“It’s all
her get-up. Put her hair quite plain and dress her like an ordinary
respectable matron and she’ll be downright ugly. Two of her front teeth
are false, I see--and her skin is simply _covered_,--_covered_ with
that new Paris mixture which “defies detection.” Her hair is certainly
_quite_ wonderful--she must have tried all the new tints on it in turn.
I suppose it’s the Chinese eyes that “take”--horrid Mongolian things!
They work long-wise into slits,--and that corner-look always fetches
the men. Anyway, she’s the only person possible for _my_ business.”
And, forthwith, putting on all her own airs and graces, and talking in
softly confidential tones, she “plucked out the heart of her mystery”
at once, and asked Mrs. Long-Adder to recite publicly the “poem” she
had written on “Tommy’s Gal.”
Mrs. Long-Adder looked at her in a sort of innocent childlike wonder.
“_You_ have written a poem?” she said, with just the faintest unkind
emphasis on the pronoun “you.”
Mrs. Arteroyd flushed and bit her lip. Then she laughed sweetly.
“Yes! It’s so easy, you know, to write about Tommy! Everybody can do
it!”
Mrs. Long-Adder laughed too. Not because she was particularly moved to
laughter, but because she wanted to show how much more artistic and
melodious _her_ laugh was in comparison to Mrs. Arteroyd’s.
“That is quite true!” she said, half-closing her “Mongolian” eyes in an
apparent voluptuous dream. “And ‘Tommy’s Gal’ is a good title. I like
it!”
She gently rolled herself to and fro on her sofa-chair or chair-sofa.
She was one of those women who glory in going without corsets, and
she had a marvellous way of writhing and twisting her figure under a
tea-gown, suggestive of the first stirrings of a snake in long grass.
She had paralyzed and stricken His Highness of Dummer-Esel into a
fatuous condition of senile rapture by that special twist of herself,
and had caused his little swine-like eyes to almost tumble out on
his fat cheeks with the intensity of his admiring leer. She did that
twist just now, and Mrs. Arteroyd instantly wondered whether she could
imitate it.
“Have you the poem with you?” she asked in rich drowsy accents, broken
by a half sigh.
“Only two verses,” answered Mrs. Arteroyd. “I thought it better to see
if you liked them before doing any more. But I can easily turn out half
a dozen--”
“Oh no! Please, no! Four will be quite sufficient,” said Mrs.
Long-Adder--“The public,--especially the cultured public--will never
stand more than four verses of anything. Let me hear the first two!”