Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  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 greenwood, 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 Mænadas 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 Étudiants.

  ‘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 désillusioner 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 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 incontestable. 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 every one 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
name 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 bed-room, 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 the 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 ZaÊre.

  ‘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 cork-screw 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. Kawber.

  ‘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.’

  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 mischievious 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 — every one 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 realized. 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?’