by George Moore
Kate looked at him appealingly; but nothing more was said, and soon after Dick remembered he had to get the stage ready for the second act. As he hurried away, Hender appeared. She had been round to the ‘pub.’ to have a drink with Bill, and had been behind talking to her ladies, who, as she said, ‘were all full of Dick’s new mash.’
‘They’ve seen you, and are as jealous as a lot of cats.’
‘It’s very wicked of them to say there’s anything between Mr. Lennox and me,’ replied Kate angrily. ‘I suppose they think everybody is like themselves — a lot of actresses!’
Hender made no answer, but she turned up her nose at what she considered to be damned insulting to the profession.
However, in a few minutes her indignation evaporated, and she called Kate’s attention to what a splendid house it was.
‘I can tell you what; with a shilling pit, a sixpenny gallery, and the centre and side circles pretty well full, it soon runs up. There must be nigh on seventy pounds in — and that for Thursday night!’
They were now well on in the second act. The brilliancy of the ‘Choeur des Merveilleuses,’ the pleading pity of ‘She is such a simple little thing,’ the quaint drollery of the conspirators, made Kate forget the aspersions cast on Clairette’s character. The light music foamed in her head like champagne, and in a whirling sense of intoxication a vision of Dick in a red coat passed and repassed before her. For this she had to wait a long time, but at last the sounds of trumpets were heard, and those on the stage cried that the soldiers were coming. Kate’s heart throbbed, a mist swam before her eyes, and immediately after came a sense of bright calm; for, in all the splendour of uniform, Dick entered, big and stately, at the head of a regiment of girls in red tights. The close-fitting jacket had reduced his size, the top-boots gave a dignity to his legs. He was doubtless a fine man; to Kate he was more than divine. Then the sweet undulating tune he had sung in her ears began, and casting a glance of explanation in the direction of the gallery, he put his arm round Miss Beaumont’s waist. The action caused Kate a heart-pang, but the strangeness of the scene she was witnessing distracted her thoughts. For immediately the other actors and actresses in their startling dresses selected partners, and the stage seemed transformed into a wonderful garden of colour swinging to the music of a fountain that, under the inspiration of the moonlight, broke from its monotonous chant into rhythmical variations. Dick, like a great tulip in his red uniform, turned in the middle, and Miss Beaumont, in her long yellow dress, sprawled upon him. Her dress was open at both sides, and each time she passed in front, Kate, filled with disgust, strove not to see the thick pink legs, which were visible to the knees. Miss Leslie in her bride’s dress bloomed a lily white, as she danced with a man whose red calves and thighs seemed prolonged into his very chest. La Rivodière cast despairing glances at Lange, poor Pomponet strove to get to his bride, and all the blonde wigs and black collars of the conspirators were mixed amid the strange poke bonnets of the ladies, and the long swallow-tailed coats, reaching almost to the ground, flapped in and out of the legs of the female soldiers. Kate smiled feebly and drank in the music of the waltz. It was played over again; like a caged canary’s song it haunted Clairette’s orange-blossoms; like the voluptuous thrill of a nightingale singing in a rose-garden it flowed about Lange’s heavy draperies and glistening bosom; like the varied chant of the mocking bird it came from under Ange Pitou’s cocked hat. It was sung separately and in unison, and winding and unwinding itself, it penetrated into the deepest recesses of Kate’s mind. It seduced like a deep slow perfume; it caressed with the long undulations of a beautiful snake and the mystery of a graceful cat; it whispered of fair pleasure places, where scent, music, and love are one, where lovers never grow weary, and where kisses endure for ever. She was conscious of deep self-contentment, of dreamy idleness, of sad languor, and the charm to which she abandoned herself resembled the enervations of a beautiful climate, the softness of a church; she yearned for her lover and the fanciful life of which he was the centre, as one might for some ideal fatherland. The current of the music carried her far away, far beyond the great hills into a land of sleep, dream, and haze, and a wonderful tenderness swam within her as loose and as dim as the green sea depths, that a wave never stirs. She struggled, but it was only as one in a dream strives to lift himself out of the power that holds; and when the conductor waved his stick for the last time, and the curtain came down amid deafening applause, irritated and enervated, she shrank from Hender, as if anxious not to be wholly awakened.
The third act passed she scarcely knew how. She was overborne and over-tempted; all her blood seemed to be in her head and heart, and from time to time she was shaken with quick shudderings.
When Dick came to see her she scarcely understood what he said to her, and it annoyed her not to be able to answer him. When the word ‘love’ was pronounced she smiled, but her smile was one of pain, and she could not rouse herself from a sort of sad ecstasy. Gay as the tunes were, there was in every one a sort of inherent sadness which she felt but could not explain to Dick, who began to think that she was disappointed in the piece.
‘Disappointed! Oh no,’ she said, and they stood for a long while staring at a large golden moon, lighting up the street like a bull’s-eye.
‘How nice it is to be here out of that hot stuffy theatre!’ said Dick, putting his arm round her.
‘Oh, do you think so? I could listen to that music for ever.’
‘It is pretty, isn’t it? I’m so glad you liked it. I told you the waltz was lovely.’
‘Lovely! I should think so. I shall never forget it.’
She lost her habitual shyness in her enthusiasm, and sang the first bars with her face raised towards her lover’s; then, gaining courage from his look of astonishment and pleasure, she gave all the modulations with her full voice.
‘By Jove! you’ve a deuced nice soprano, and a devilish good ear too. ‘Pon my soul, you sing that waltz as well as Beaumont.’
‘Oh, Dick, you mustn’t laugh at me.’
‘I swear I’m not laughing. Sing it again; nobody’s listening.’
They were standing in the shade of a large warehouse; the line of slates making a crescent of the full moon, and amid the reverberating yards and brickways Kate’s voice sounded as penetrating and direct as a flute. The exquisite accuracy of her ear enabled her to give each note its just value. Dick was astonished, and he said when she had finished:
‘I really don’t want to flatter you, but with a little teaching you would sing far better than Beaumont. Your ear is perfect; it’s the production of the voice that wants looking to;’ and he talked to her of the different tunes, listening to what she had to say, and encouraging her to recall the music she had heard. He would beg her to repeat a phrase after him; he taught her how to emphasize the rhythm, and was anxious that she should learn the legend of Madame Angot.
‘Now,’ said Dick, ‘I’ll sing the symphony, and we’ll go through it with all the effects — one, two, three, four, ta ra ta ta ta ta ta.’
But as Kate attacked the first bar it was taken up by three or four male voices, the owners of which, judging by the sound, could not be more than forty or fifty yards away.
‘Here’s Montgomery, Joe Mortimer, and all that lot. I wouldn’t be caught here with you for anything.’
‘By going up this passage we can get home in two minutes.’
‘Can we? Well, let’s cut; but no, they’re too close on us. Do you go, dear; I’ll remain and tell them it was a lady singing out of that window. Here, take my latchkey. Off you go.’
Without another word Kate fled down the alley, and Dick was left to explain whatever he pleased concerning the mythical lady whom he declared he had been serenading.
When Kate arrived home that night she lay awake for hours, tossing restlessly, her brain whirling with tunes and parts of tunes. The conspirators’ chorus, the waltz song, the legend, and a dozen disconnected fragments of the opera all sang together in her
ears, and in her insomnia she continued to take singing lessons from Dick. She was certain that he loved her, and the enchantment of her belief murmured in her ears all night long; and when she met Hender next morning, the desire to speak of Dick burnt her like a great thirst, and it was not until Hender left her to go to the theatre that she began to realize in all its direct brutality the fact that on the morrow she would have to bid him goodbye, perhaps for ever.
Her husband wheezed on the sofa, her mother-in-law read the Bible, sitting bolt upright in the armchair, and the shaded lamp covered the table with light, and fearing she might be provoked into shrieks or some violent manifestation of temper, she went to bed as early as she could. But there her torments became still more intolerable. All sorts of ideas and hallucinations, magnified and distorted, filled her brain, rendered astonishingly clear by the effects of insomnia. She saw over again the murders she had read of in her novels, and her imagination supplied details the author had not dreamed of. The elopements, with all their paraphernalia of moonlight and roses, came back to her…. But if she were never to see him again — if it were her fate to lie beside her husband always, to the end of her life! She buried her head in the pillows in the hopes of shutting out the sound of his snores.
At last she felt him moving, and a moment afterwards she heard him say, ‘There’s Mr. Lennox at the door; he can’t get in. Do go down and open it for him.’
‘Why don’t you go yourself?’ she answered, starting up into a sitting position.
‘How am I to go? You don’t want me to catch my death at the front door?’ Ralph replied angrily.
Kate did not answer, but quickly tying a petticoat about her, and wrapping herself in her dressing-gown, she went downstairs. It was quite dark, and she had to feel her way along the passage. But at last she found and pulled back the latch, and when the white gleam of moonlight entered she retreated timidly behind the door.
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Dick, trying to see who the concealed figure was, ‘but I forgot my latchkey.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Kate.
‘Oh, it’s you, dear. I’ve been trying to get home all day to see you, but couldn’t. Why didn’t you come down to the theatre?’
‘You know that I can’t do as I like.’
‘Well, never mind; don’t be cross; give me a kiss.’
Kate shrunk back, but Dick took her in his arms. ‘You were in bed, then?’ he said, chuckling.
‘Yes, but you must let me go.’
‘I should like never to let you go again.’
‘But you’re leaving to-morrow.’
‘Not unless you wish me to, dear.’
Kate did not stop to consider the impossibility of his fulfilling his promise, and, her heart beating, she went upstairs. On the first landing he stopped her, and laying his hand on her arm, said, ‘And would you really be very glad if I were to stay with you?’
‘You know I would, Dick.’
They could not see each other, and after a long silence she said, ‘We mustn’t stop here talking. Mrs. Ede sleeps, you know, in the room at the back of the workroom, and she might hear us.’
‘Then come into the sitting-room,’ said Dick, taking her hands and drawing her towards him.
‘I cannot.’
‘I love you better than anyone in the world.’
‘No, no; why should you love me?’
‘Let us prove our love one to the other,’ he murmured, and frightened, but at the same time delighted by the words, she allowed him to draw her into his room.
‘My husband will miss me,’ she said as the door closed, but she could think no more of him; he was forgotten in a sudden delirium of the senses; and for what seemed to him like half an hour Ralph waited, asking himself what his wife could be doing all that time, thinking that perhaps it was not Lennox after all, but some rambling vagrant who had knocked at the door, and that he had better go down and rescue his wife. He would have done so had he not been afraid of a sudden draught, and while wondering what was happening he dozed away, to be awakened a few minutes afterwards by voices on the landing.
‘Let me go, Dick, let me go; my husband will miss me.’ She passed away from him and entered her husband’s room, and Ralph said: ‘Well, who was it?’
‘Mr. Lennox,’ she answered.
‘Our lodger,’ Ralph murmured, and fell asleep again.
X
‘IS THIS THE stage entrance?’
‘Yes, ma’am; you see, during the performance the real stage-door is used as a pit entrance, and we pass under the stage.’
This explanation was given after a swaggering attitude had been assumed, and a knowing wink, the countersign for ‘Now I’m going to do something for your amusement,’ had been bestowed on his pals. The speaker, a rough man with a beard and a fez cap, became the prominent figure of a group loitering before a square hole with an earthward descent, cut in the wall of the Hanley Theatre.
Kate was too occupied with her own thoughts to notice that she was being laughed at, and she said instantly, ‘I want to see Mr. Lennox; will you tell him I’m here?’
‘Mr. Lennox is on the stage; unless yer on in the piece I don’t see ’ow it’s to be done.’
At this rebuff Kate looked round the grinning faces, but at that moment a rough-looking fellow of the same class as the speaker ascended from the cellar-like opening, and after nudging his ‘pal,’ touched his cap, and said with the politeness of one who had been tipped, ‘This way, marm. Mr. Lennox is on the stage, but if you’ll wait a minute I’ll tell ’im yer ’ere. Take care, marm, or yer’ll slip; very arkerd place to get down, with all ’em baskets in the way. This company do travel with a deal of luggage. That’s Mr. Lennox’s — the one as yer ‘and is on.’
‘Oh, indeed!’ Kate said, stopping on her way to read Mr. Lennox’s name on the basket.
‘We piles ’em ‘gainst that ’ere door so as to ‘ave ’em ‘andy for sending down to the station ter-morrow morning. But if you will remain here a moment, marm, I’ll run up on the stage and see if I can see ’im.’
The mention made by the scene-shifter of the approaching removal of Dick’s basket frightened her, and she remembered that she had scarcely spoken to him since last night. He had been obliged to go out in the morning before breakfast; and though he had tried hard to meet her during the course of the day, fate seemed to be against them.
She was in a large, low-roofed storeroom with an earthen floor. The wooden ceiling was supported by an endless number of upright posts that gave the place the appearance of a ship. At the farther end there were two stone staircases leading to opposite sides of the stage. In front of her were a drum and barrel, and the semi-darkness at the back was speckled over with the sparkling of the gilt tinsel stuff used in pantomimes; a pair of lattice-windows, a bundle of rapiers, a cradle and a breastplate, formed a group in the centre; a broken trombone lay at her feet. The odour of size that the scenery exhaled reminded her of Ralph’s room; and she wondered if the swords were real, what different uses the tinsel paper might be put to; until she would awake from her dream, asking herself bitterly why he did not come down to see her. In the pause that followed the question, she was startled by a prolonged shout from the chorus. The orchestra seemed to be going mad; the drum was thumped, the cymbals were clashed, and back and forward rushed the noisy feet, first one way, then the other; a soprano voice was heard for a moment clear and distinct, and was drowned immediately after in a general scream. What could it mean? Had the place taken fire? Kate asked herself wildly.
‘The finale of the act ‘as begun, marm; Mr. Lennox will be hoff the stage directly.’
‘Has nothing happened? Is the — ?’
The scene-shifter’s look of astonishment showed Kate that she was mistaken, but before they had time to exchange many words, the trampling and singing overhead suddenly ceased, and the muffled sound of clapping and applause was heard in the distance.
‘There’s the act.’ said Bill; ‘he’ll be
down now immediately; he’ll take no call for the perliceman,’ and a moment after a man attired in knee-breeches, with a huge cravat wound several times round his throat, came running down the stone staircase. ‘Oh, ’ere he is,’ said Bill. ‘I’ll leave yer now, marm.’
‘And so you found your way, dear?’ said Dick, putting out his arm to draw Kate towards him.
But he looked so very strange with the great patches of coarse red on his cheeks, and the deep black lines drawn about his eyes, that she could not conceal her repulsion, and guessing the cause of her embarrassment, he said, laughing:
‘Ah! I see you don’t know me! A good makeup, isn’t it? I took a lot of trouble with it.’
Kate made no answer; but the sound of his voice soothed her, and she leaned upon his arm.
‘Give me a kiss, dear, before we go up,’ he said coaxingly.
Kate looked at him curiously, and then, laughing at her own foolishness, said, ‘Wait until you have the soldier’s dress on.’
At the top of the staircase the piled-up side-scenes made so many ways and angles that Kate had to keep close to Dick for fear of getting lost. However, at last they arrived in the wings, where gaslights were burning blankly on the whitewashed walls. A crowd of loud-voiced, perspiring girls in short fancy petticoats and with bare necks and arms, pushed their way towards the mysterious and ladder-like staircases and scrambled up them. Ange Pitou had taken off his cocked hat and was sharing a pint of beer with Clairette. It being her turn to drink, she said:
‘Noe, hold my skirts in, there’s a dear; this beer plays the devil with white satin.’
‘It isn’t on your skirts it will go if you spill it,’ Ange replied, ‘but into your bosom. Stop a second, and I’ll give the bottom of the pot a wipe, then you’ll be all right.’
