by George Moore
Dick did not understand, but the fact that a lady was going in for recitation argued that she was interested in theatricals, and with his ears pricked like a hound who has got wind of something, he said with a sweet smile that showed a whole row of white teeth:
‘Being an actor myself, I will take the liberty of asking you to allow me to look at your poem, and perhaps if you’re studying for recitation I may be of use to you.’
‘Of the very greatest use,’ the lady answered, and handed him her manuscript; ‘one of a set of classical cartoons,’ she added.
‘Humanity in large lines,’ he replied.
‘How quickly you understand,’ she rapped out; ‘removed altogether from the tea-table in subject and in metre. What have you got to say, my hero, to me about my rendering of these lines?
‘“The offspring of Neptune and Terra, daughters of earth
and ocean,
Dowered with fair faces of woman, capping the bodies
of vultures;
Armed with sharp, keen talons; crushing and rending
and slaying,
Blackening and blasting, defiling, spoiling the meats
of all banquets;
Plundering, perplexing, pursuing, cursing the lives of
our heroes,
Ever the Harpyiae flourish — just as a triumph of evil.”’
‘Hardly anything; and yet if I may venture a criticism — would you mind passing your manuscript on to me for a moment? May I suggest an emendation that will render the recitation more easy and more effective?’
‘Certainly you may.’
‘Then,’ Dick continued, ‘I would drop the words— “just as a triumph of evil,” and run on— “flourish from childhood, ensnaring the noble, the brave, and the loyal, spreading their nets for destruction,”
‘“Harpyiae flourish in ball-rooms, breathing fierce breath
that is poison
Over the promise of manhood, over the faith and the
lovelight
That glows in the hearts of our bravest for all of their
kind that is weaker — —”
‘All that follows,’ Dick added, ‘will be recited without emphasis until you come to these two magnificent lines:
‘“Harpyiae stand by our altars, Harpyiae sit by our
hearthstones,
Harpyiae suckle our children, Harpyiae ravish our
nation,” etc.’
Dick finished with a grand gesture.
‘I think you’re right. Yes, I understand that a point can be given to these verses that I had not thought of before. I hope my poem touched a chord in your heart? Do you approve of my manner of writing the hexameters?’
‘I think the idea very fine, but — —’
‘But?’
‘If you will permit me?’
‘Certainly.’
‘Well, there are questions of elocution that I would like to speak to you about. I’ve to run away now, but we’re sure to meet again.’
‘I’m on the pier every day at noon, or you will find me in my hotel at five. I hope you’ll come, for I should like to avail myself of your instruction.’
‘Thank you; I hope to have the pleasure of calling upon you to-morrow afternoon. Good-bye.’
‘You don’t know my name,’ she cried after him. ‘Heroes are full of forgetfulness and naturally, but in this tea-table world we can’t get on without names and addresses. Will you take my card?’
Dick took the card, thanked her and turned suddenly away.
‘Like a man filled with disquiet,’ the lady said, and she watched the burly actor hurrying up the pier. ‘Is this woman coming to meet him?’ she asked herself as Dick hurried away still faster, for in the distance the woman coming down the pier seemed to him like his wife, and if Kate caught him talking to a woman on the pier all chance of doing any business with his new acquaintance would be at an end. But the woman who had just passed him by was not Kate, and the thought crossed his mind that he might return to his new acquaintance with safety. But on the whole it seemed to him better to wait until to-morrow. To-morrow he would find out all about her. ‘Her name,’ he said, and taking the card out of his pocket he read: ‘Mrs. Forest, Mother Superior of the Yarmouth Convent, Alexandra Hotel, Hastings.’ ‘Mother Superior of a Convent! I should never have thought it. But if she is a nun, why isn’t she in a habit? Classical cartoons and nunneries. I think this time I’ve hit upon a strange specimen, one of the strangest I’ve ever met, which is saying a great deal, for I’ve met with a good few in my time. It will be better to tear up her card, for if Kate should find it — —’
And then, dismissing Mrs. Forest from his mind, he wondered if he should find Kate drunk or sober. ‘Quite sober,’ he said to himself as soon as he crossed the threshold; and in the best of humours his wife greeted him, and taking his arm they went down to the pier and gave an entertainment that was appreciated by a fairly large audience.
‘Why didn’t she ask me to come to her at five to-day?’ he asked himself as he returned home with his wife. ‘She may fall through my fingers,’ and he would have gone straight away to Mrs. Forest, if he had been able to rid himself of Kate.
‘You’ll take me out to tea, Dick?’ she said, and to keep her sober he took her to tea. For the nonce Kate drunk would have suited him better than Kate sober, and he dared not go down to the pier next morning in search of Mrs. Forest, it being more than likely that Kate might take it into her head to sun herself on the pier, so he decided to wait; the pier was too dangerous. If he weren’t interrupted by Kate the directors might see them together, and they might know Mrs. Forest and tell her that he was a married man. No, he’d just keep his appointment with her at five. But to get rid of Kate required a deep plan. It was laid and succeeded, and at five he arrived at the Alexandra Hotel.
‘Is Mrs. Forest in?’
The hall porter told the page boy to take Mr. Lennox up to Mrs. Forest’s rooms.
‘All this smells money,’ Dick said to himself in the lift.
The page boy threw open the door, and after walking through a long corridor the boy knocked at a door, and Dick walked into a red twilight in which he caught sight of a green dress in a distant corner.
‘I hope you’re not one of those people who require the glare of the sun always. I like the sun in its proper place out of doors,’ and while thinking of an appropriate answer Dick strove to find his way through the numerous pieces of furniture littered over the carpet.
‘Come and sit on the sofa beside me.’
‘If you’ll allow me,’ he answered, ‘I will sit in this armchair. I shall be able to devote myself more completely to the hearing of your poem.’
It was not polite to refuse to sit beside the lady, but Dick contrived to convey that her presence would trouble his intellectual enjoyment, and the slight displeasure which the refusal had caused vanished out of the painted face. This first success almost succeeded in screwing up Dick’s courage to the point of asking her if he might remove the flower vase that stood on the cabinet behind him, but he did not dare, and at every moment he seemed to recognize a new scent. An odour of burning pastilles drifted from a distant corner into a zone of patchouli in which the lady seemed to have encircled herself and which her every movement seemed to spread in more and more violent flavours, till Dick began to think he would not be able to hold out till the end of the lady’s narrative. Patchouli always gave him a headache, but the word ‘opera’ restored him to himself, and with lips quivering like a cat watching a sparrow he heard that the subject of her opera was derived from her own life; and telling him that it could not be understood without a relation of the events that had given it birth, she drew her legs up on the sofa, and leaning her head against the back commenced in a low, cooing, but not disagreeable voice to tell of her first love adventure. ‘I might almost call my departure for Bulgaria, some ten years ago, a spiritual adventure,’ she said.
The departure for Bulgaria seemed full of interest, b
ut from Dick’s point of view the leading up to the departure was unduly prolonged, and he found it difficult to listen with any show of interest to Mrs. Forest’s assurances that until she met the Bulgarian she had thought that babies were found in parsley-beds or under gooseberry-bushes, and this innocence of mind was so inherent in her that the Bulgarian had not succeeded altogether in robbing her of it. ‘Nor, indeed, did he ever attempt to do so,’ she continued. ‘Our friendship was founded purely on the intellect.’
This admission was a disappointment to Dick, who had looked forward to the story of a novel love adventure which might easily be worked into a comic opera, Bulgaria offering a suitable background. With many pretty smiles he tried to lead the lady into the real story of her past, but Mrs. Forest insisted so well that he was fain to believe that there had been no past in her life suitable to comic opera. Her Bulgarian adventure had been animated by love of liberty and a noble desire to free an oppressed race from the ignoble rule of the Turks; ‘massacres,’ she said, ‘full of nameless horrors.’
Dick would have liked her to name these horrors, but before he could ask her to do so she was telling him of the instinct in every woman to mother something. The Bulgarians had appealed to her sympathies, and she had helped to bring about their liberation by her poetry. In three years she had learnt the language and had composed two volumes of poems in it.
‘I’ve looked out copies of my Bulgarian poems for you,’ and she leaned over the edge of the sofa towards a small table. The movement disarranged her skirt, and Dick’s eyes were regaled by the show of a thick shapeless leg, ‘doubtless swarthy,’ he said to himself.
‘The title of the first volume,’ she said, handing him the books, ’is, Songs of a Stranger. My friend the Bulgarian’ (and she mentioned an unpronounceable name) ‘contributed a preface. The second volume is entitled, New Songs by the Stranger. You will find a translation appended to each.’
Dick promised that he would read the poems as soon as he got home, and begged Mrs. Forest to proceed with her interesting story of the war in which she had lost her great friend, her spiritual adventure, as she called him.
From Bulgaria she had set forth on a long journey, visiting many parts of China, returning home full of love for Eastern civilization, and regret that Western influence would soon make an end of it. ‘But,’ she said, ‘when I think of my own life, my narrative seems but a faint echo of it all; only a fragment of it appears, whereas, if I could tell the whole of it — —’
But Dick inclined to the belief that her genius was dramatic rather than narrative, and to bring the autobiography to an end, he asked her how she had come to be the Mother Superior of the Yarmouth Convent. ‘If I can only get her to cut the cackle and get to the ‘osses,’ he said to himself, but this was not easy to do. Mrs. Forest had to relate her socialistic adventures, her engagement to Edgar Horsley.
‘For three years,’ she said, ‘I was engaged to him, and at the end of this time it seemed to me that we must come to an understanding. He was talking of going to Jamaica, and to go to Jamaica with him we would have to be married. So I went down to where he was staying in the country, a cottage in Somersetshire, at the end of a very pretty lane.’
‘Good God! if she’s going to describe the landscape to me,’ said Dick to himself. But Mrs. Forest had no eye for the appearance of trees showing against the sky, and she was quickly at the cottage door, which was opened to her, she said, by a suspicious-looking woman, who said, ‘I think I’ve heard of you. Mr. Horsley is out, but you can come in and wait,’ ‘and in about half an hour he came in and introduced me to the woman who had opened the door to me. “Isabel” is all that I can remember of her name. “Isabel,” he said, “has been living with me for the last ten years, but if you like to come with us to Jamaica you can join us.” This seemed to me to be an inacceptable proposition. “What you propose to me,” I said, “is unthinkable,” and I left the house, and have not seen or heard of Mr. Edgar Horsley since. I’ve looked at water, I’ve looked at poison, and I’ve looked at daggers.’
Dick asked her why she had meditated suicide and she answered:
‘Was not such an end to a three years’ engagement sufficient to inspire in any woman a thought of suicide? And I’m very exceptional.’
A great deal of Mrs. Forest’s life had been unfolded; the only thing that remained in obscurity was how she had come to be the Mother Superior of the Yarmouth Convent, and to make that plain, she said it would be necessary to tell the story of her conversion to the Catholic faith. ‘But that was after the convent; the convent was intended for the reformation of dipsomaniacs, female drunkards,’ she said; ‘but it was afterwards that I became a Roman Catholic.’
Dick had no wish to hear what dogma it was that had tempted her, but it amused him as he returned home to think of all the strange things that Mrs. Forest had told him; one thing especially amused him, that her real interest in Catholicism was the confessional. ‘How one does get back to oneself in all these things,’ he muttered as he panted up the hot steep road. ‘A convent for the reformation of female drunkards,’ he repeated. ‘It’s very strange: she can’t know anything about my wife. A strange woman,’ he continued, and fell to thinking if all that she had told him was the truth, or if it was one of those stories that people imagine about themselves, and imagine so vividly that after a few years they begin to believe that everything they have told has befallen them. He pulled the books from his pocket; they were evidently written in a strange language, but there were people who could learn languages and could do nothing else. Her Bulgarian poetry could not be better than her English, and he knew what that was like. ‘I suppose as soon as she hears I’m married, and she’s sure to find out sooner or later, she will be off on some other back. But is this altogether sure?’ He had not walked many steps before he remembered that the lecture she was giving at the Working Men’s Club was on the chastity of the marriage state; moreover, she had admitted to him that the Bulgarian adventure was a spiritual one. ‘I should say she was a woman with a big temperament which must have been worth gratifying when she went away with that Bulgarian; I wouldn’t have minded being in his skin. She hasn’t forgotten that she was once a beautiful girl, that’s the worst of it, she hasn’t forgotten,’ and Dick remembered that at parting she was a little demonstrative, saying to him on the staircase: ‘But we aren’t parting for long. You will be here tomorrow at my door at the same hour.’
XXVI
THE APPOINTMENT WAS for five o’clock, and Kate would have liked to remain on the pier with Dick enjoying the summer evening, but he seemed so intent on returning to their lodging that she did not like to oppose his wishes, and she allowed herself to be led all the way up the dusty town to their close, hot rooms that she might try over Fredegonde’s music. That he should wish to hear her voice again in this music flattered her, but she rose from the piano, her face aflame, when he began to mention an appointment.
‘It’s too bad of you, Dick, to bring me home and then remember an appointment.’
Dick overflowed with mellifluous excuses which did not seem to allay Kate’s anger, and as he hurried down the street it occurred to him that he might have thought of a better reason than Fredegonde for bringing her home. However this might be, his thoughts were now with Montgomery and Mrs. Forest rather than with Kate, and it was not till he drew the latchkey from his pocket that Kate’s singing of the waltz returned to him: he ascended the stairs singing it.
‘I think it will work out all right.’
‘What will work out all right? You’re an hour later than you said you’d be.’
‘Never mind about the hour,’ he answered and began to weave a story about his meeting with a pal from London, as he was leaving the pier the other day: he hadn’t spoken to her about it before, not caring to do so until something definite had happened.
‘What has happened?’ Kate asked, and Dick, his face aglow, related how the pal had spoken of a great revival of interest in comic opera,
especially in French music, and that many city men with plenty of money were on the lookout for somebody who knew how to produce this class of work and was in sympathy with the Folies Dramatiques tradition.
Kate, who believed everything that Dick told her, listened with a heightened temperature. At Margate the admirer of Hervé’s music became an American who wished to see Chilpéric, Trône d’Écosse, Le Petit Faust, L’Oeil Crevé, Marguerite de Navarre, reproduced as they had been produced under the composer’s direction when Dick was stage-manager at that theatre. The American was interested in Hervé; for he not only wrote the music but also the words of his operas. Hervé was, therefore, the Wagner of light comic opera. And if the new venture received sufficient support from the public Dick would like to add other works by Hervé — La Belle Poule and Le Hussard Persecuté — and having puzzled Kate with many titles and an imaginary biography of this musical American he fell to telling her of Blanche D’Antigny, singing all the little tunes he could remember and branching off into an account of Le Canard à Trois Becs. This last opera was not by Hervé, but the American liked it and might be persuaded to produce it later on.
‘It contained a part,’ he said, ‘in which Kate would succeed in establishing herself one of London’s favourites;’ but his praise of her singing and acting set her wondering if he were gulling her once more, or if he still believed in her. It might be that her continued sobriety had reawakened his old love for her, and she remembered suddenly that she had never really cared for drink, and never would have touched drink if Dick had not driven her mad with jealousy. And the fact that her voice had returned to her helped her to believe that Dick was sincere when he told her that she would be a better Fredegonde than Blanche D’Antigny, who created the part originally. Montgomery endorsed this view one evening; he refused to take ‘no’ for an answer: she must sing the score through with him, and several times he stopped playing; and looking up in her face told her he had never known a voice to improve so rapidly and so suddenly. Dick nodded his acquiescence in Montgomery’s opinion and hoped there would be no more need to tell Kate lies once she was settled in a lodging behind the Cattle Market. But in this he was mistaken, for in London the need to keep up the fiction of Hervé’s American admirer was more necessary than at Margate. Dick had to relate his different quests every evening. He had been after the Lyceum, but was unable to get an answer from the lessee; he hoped to get one next week; and when next week came he spoke about the Royalty and the Adelphi and the Haymarket, neglecting, however, to mention the theatre in which he hoped to produce Laura’s opera. ‘The large stage of the Lyceum would be excellently well suited,’ he said, ‘for a fine production of Chilpéric,’ and he besought Kate to apply herself to the study of the part of Fredegonde. His imagination led him into dreams of an English company going over to Paris with all Hervé’s works, and Kate obliterating the Blanche D’Antigny tradition. Kate listened delighted, discovering in Dick’s praise of her singing a hope that his love of her had survived the many tribulations it had been through; and while listening she vowed she would never touch drink again. Nor did her happiness vanish till morning, till she saw him struggling into his greatcoat, and foresaw the long dividing hours. But he had said so many kind things overnight that she was behoven to stifle complaint, and bore with her loneliness all day long refusing food, for without Dick’s presence food had no pleasure for her, however hungry she might be. She would wait contented hour after hour if she could have him to herself when he returned. But sometimes he would bring back a friend with him, and the pair would sit up talking of women and their aptitudes in different parts. As none of them were known personally to Kate, the names they mentioned suggested only new causes for jealousy, and the thought that Dick was living among all these women while she was hidden away in this lodging from night till morning, from morning till night, maddened her. It seemed to her that having been out all day Dick might at least reserve his evenings for her; and one night she showed the man he had brought back to supper plainly that his absence would, so far as she was concerned, have been preferable to his company. ‘I wouldn’t have come back,’ he said, ‘only Dick insisted;’ and interrupting his regrets that she did not like him, she said: ‘It isn’t that I don’t like you, but you’re used to women who aren’t in love with their husbands, and I’m in love with mine.’ The friend repeated Kate’s words to Dick, who said he hadn’t a moment till the cast of the new piece was settled, and a few nights later he brought back some music which he said he would like her to try over. ‘But it’s manuscript, Dick. Why don’t you bring home the printed score?’ The lie that came to his lips was that the score of Trône d’Écosse had never been printed, and this seeming to her very unlikely she said she didn’t care whether it had or hadn’t, but was tired of living in Islington, and would like to see something of the London of which she had heard so much.
