AN absence of ventilation made the room an oven and discouraged sleep.
Through the width of skylight, in inert recumbence, she could follow
wonderingly the frail pristine tints of dawn. Flushed, rose-barred, it
spread above her with fantastic drifting clouds masking the morning
stars.
From a neighbouring church a clock struck five.
Miss Sinquier sighed; she had not closed her eyes the whole night
through.
“One needs a blind,” she mused, “and a pane——.” She looked about her for
something to throw.
_Cinquecento_, Italian things—a chest, a crucifix, a huge guitar, a
grim, carved catafalque all purple sticks and violet legs (Juliet’s)
crowded the floor.
“A mess of glass ... and cut my feet ...;” she murmured, gathering about
her a _négligé_ of oxydized knitted stuff and sauntering out towards the
footlights in quest of air.
Notwithstanding the thermometer, she could hear Miss May Mant breathing
nasally from behind her door.
The stage was almost dark.
“Verona,” set in autumn trees, looked fast asleep. Here and there a
campanile shot up, in high relief, backed by a scenic hill, or an
umbrella-pine. On a column in the “Market Place” crouched a brazen lion.
An acrobatic impulse took her at the sight of it.
“_Sono pazza per te_
Si! _Sono pazza, pazza, pazza ...
Pazza per amore_,”
she warbled, leaping lightly over the footlights into the stalls.
The auditorium, steeped in darkness, felt extinguished, chill.
Making a circuit of the boxes, she found her way up a stairway into the
promenade.
Busts of players, busts of poets, busts of peris, interspersed by tall
mirrors in gilt-bordered mouldings, smiled on her good-day.
Sinking to a low, sprucely-cushioned seat, she breathed a sigh of
content.
Rid of the perpetual frictions of the inevitable _personnel_, she could
possess the theatre, for a little while, in quietude to herself.
In the long window boxes, tufts of white daisies inclining to the air
brought back to mind a certain meadow, known as _Basings_, a pet haunt
with her at home.
At the pond end, in a small coppice, doves cried “Coucoussou-coucoussou”
all the day long.
Here, soon a year ago, while weaving herself a garland (she was playing
at being Europa with the Saunders’ Fifeshire bull; flourishing flowers
at it; tempting it with waving poppies; defying it to bear her away from
the surrounding stagnance), the realization of her dramatic gift first
discovered itself.
And then, her thoughts tripped on, _he_ came: the Rev. George—“just as I
was wondering to whom to apply”—and drew all Applethorp to S.
Ann-on-the-Hill by the persuasive magnetism of his voice; largely due—so
he said—to “scientific production.” To the _Bromley Breath_! He never
could adequately thank Elizabeth, Mrs. Albert Bromley, for all she had
done. No; because words failed.... Her Institute, for him, would be
always “top-o’-the-tree,” and when asked, by her, “What tree?” he had
answered with a cryptic look: “She trains them for the stage.”
Dear heart! How much he seemed to love it. He had known by their
green-room names all the leading stars, and could tell on occasion,
little anecdotes of each.
It was he who narrated how Mrs. Mary (as she was then), on the first
night of _Gulnara, Queen of the Lattermonians_, got caught in the
passenger-lift on the way from her dressing-room to the stage and was
obliged to allow her understudy to replace her, which with the utmost
_éclat_ she did, while Mrs. Mary, who could overhear the salvos from her
prison, was driven quite distraught at a triumph that, but for the irony
of things, would most certainly have been hers.
Miss Sinquier sighed.
“Which reminds me,” she murmured, fixing her eyes upon the storied
ceiling, “that I’ve no one at all, should anything happen to me.”
She lay back and considered the inchoate imagery painted in gouache
above her.
Hydropic loves with arms outstretched in invitation, ladies in hectic
hats and billowing silks, courtiers, lap-dogs, peacocks, etc., all
intermingled in the pleasantest way.
As she gazed a great peace fell upon her. Her eyelids closed.
* * * * *
“Breakfast!”
Miss May Mant woke her with a start.
“Oh!”
“I laid it to-day in the stalls.”
“Extraordinary child.”
“Crumbs in the boxes, I’ve noticed, encourage mice.... They must come
from the spring, I think, under the stage.”
“One ought to set a trap!”
“Poor creatures ... they enjoy a good play, I expect, as much as we do,”
Miss Mant murmured, setting down the kettle she was holding and lowering
her cheek graciously for a kiss.
“Well?”
“You were asleep.”
“Was I horrid?”
“You looked too perfectly orchidaceous.”
“Orchidaceous?”
“Like the little women of Outa-Maro.”
Miss Sinquier sat up.
“What is there for breakfast?” she asked.
“Do you like porridge?”
“Oh, Réné!”
Miss Mant raised a bare shoulder and crushed it to an ear.
“Really,” she remarked, “I’m at a loss to know what to give you, Sally;
I sometimes ask myself what Juliet took....”
“Why, potions.”
“_Ita_ takes tea luke with a lemon; and it makes her _so_ cross.”
“Disgusting.”
“À la Russe.”
“Is she still away?”
“Yes.... She writes from a toy bungalow, she says, with the sea at the
very door and a small shipwreck lying on the beach.”
“What of Paris?”
“I’m Page to him, you said so!”
“With her consent.”
“Oh, Ita hates the stage. She’s only _on it_ of course to make a match
...; she could have been an Irish countess had she pleased, only she
said it wasn’t smart enough, and it sounded too Sicilian.”
“Everyone can’t be Roman.”
“... Oh, she’s such a minx. In her letter she writes, ‘I don’t doubt
you’ll soon grow tired of the Sally-Sin Theatre and of dancing
attendance on the Fair Sink.’”
“Cat.”
“And her Manting ways just to annoy. Mant, Mant, Mant! She does it to
humiliate. Whenever the Tirds are in earshot she’s sure to begin.”
“The Tirds?”
“Llewellyn and Lydia. Lydia Tird has an understanding with my big
brother. Poor lad! Just before I left home he took the name of Isadore:
Isadore Iris. Oh, when Ita heard! Bill Mant she said and made Llewellyn
laugh.”
“Oh!”
“And now that Mrs. Sixsmith ‘Mants’ me almost as much as Ita.”
“Why do you dislike her so much?”
“Cadging creature!”
“Réné?”
“Limpet.”
“Réné?”
“Parasite.”
“Réné——!”
“Scavenger.”
“_Basta!_”
“I know all about her.”
“What do you know?”
“If I tell you, I’ll have to tell you in French.”
“Then tell me in French.”
“Elle fait des cornes à son mari!”
“What next?”
“She’s _divorcée_!”
“Poor soul.”
“Out at _Bois St. Jean_—St. John’s Wood—she has a villa.”
Miss Sinquier got up.
“Anyway,” she murmured.
“Oh, Sally....”
“Well?”
“You do love me?”
“Why, _of course._”
“Let’s go presently to a Turkish bath—after rehearsal.”
“Not to-day.”
“... Just for a ‘Liver Pack’?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because ... and when you’re out, don’t, dear, forget a mousetrap!”
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