by Grant Allen
“Very one-sided,” I gasped, for the first time realising that while I had been bent on sacrificing myself on John’s account, John had been bent on sacrificing himself on mine. “Continue. I follow you.” I dropped once more into his stilted manner.
“You are good enough to acquiesce. That renders my task easier.” He crossed his legs, and gazed fixedly at his yellow-striped socks. “You will understand that after what has happened our marriage becomes impossible. You chose — I will not say to disobey me, for you are no longer my ward, and I speak to you now as adult to adult — but to disregard my strongly expressed wishes. Considering what I have done for you, I look upon that conduct as equivalent to breaking off our engagement. It is broken off. Is that understood between us?”
“Absolutely,” I answered, quivering, and biting my lip hard. John saw me and misunderstood; I think he thought I was suffering acutely from disappointed ambition. I have remarked that he is a man who lacks emotional subtlety.
“That is well,” he went on, trying his best to let me down gently. “I am glad that you recognise it. But, at the same time, Rosalba, I want you to understand that I am not angry with you. Not angry; do not let us dissolve this engagement in anger. We part good friends — so far as we part — do we not?”
“John,” I said, taking his hand, “you have always been kindness and generosity itself to me. How could I part as anything but a friend from anyone who had shown me such invariable goodness?”
“Thank you, Rosalba,” he replied, clearing his throat “I rejoice to find my action is not misunderstood. But we could not be happy together in married life; and recognising that fact, it is lucky that we recognise it before, not after, marriage. Now, as to your future, my dear girl. I have incurred obligations towards you, I admit, by raising you into a station in life for which you were not — er — originally fitted. In doing this, I may have done right, or I may have done wrong; but, at any rate, I have done it, and I must take the consequences. I take them gladly. I am not going to marry you; but as that will throw you on your own resources without a means of livelihood” — unflinching rectitude accentuated his chin—” I propose to make you an allowance of — a hundred and fifty a year as long as you remain unmarried.”
“John,” I exclaimed, taken aback at his real munificence, “that is too kind, too generous of you! I have no right at all to expect anything of the kind, and I cannot—”
“My dear Rosalba,” he answered, brightening up and glowing with kindliness, “it is the merest justice. Anything else would be wrong of me. I educate you for a special purpose which you cannot fulfil. By your own act first, but by mutual consent afterwards, our bargain is rescinded. That closes the account, on the score of marriage. But that score is not all. There still remains the fact that I have educated you for a post in life which incapacitates you from returning to your primitive condition. You have now no natural place in the world. You might go out as’ a governess. You might take one of the clerkly posts, as secretary, librarian, or so forth, now so frequently — and so wisely — thrown open to women. You might marry. With your opportunities at Linda’s and your excellent education, chances of marriage still lie open before you. But all those are contingencies. I am bound to atone for my original error. I therefore propose to allow you, as I said, a hundred and fifty a year while you remain unmarried.”
I rose, very flushed. “John,” I said, faltering, “you misunderstand. I am a proud woman. You misconceive my nature. I owe you a great deal. I owe you in one sense more than I can ever repay you. You have been extremely good to me; you have behaved to me with kindness which I shall always remember. But, in another sense, I owe you directly all that you have expended on my education, and — I mean to repay it.”
“My dear child, how can you? Do not talk chimerically. You have no money, and I fear you do not realise how hard it is to earn any.”
“Mariana can earn it,” I answered; “and so can I.”
“Nature endowed Mariana with a splendid artistic gift — her voice; and she has seconded it by a technical training in music.”
“I waive that question,” I went on. “Let that stand over. I owe you this money, and I mean to repay it. I mean to repay it, to the very last farthing. But let us leave it aside for the present. I will only speak now about this unexpected offer of yours. Believe me, I appreciate the reasons that lead you to make it — your sense of justice, your instinct of generosity. But I must absolutely decline it. I shall earn my own living — of that I am not afraid — and I shall earn enough to repay you in full. Therefore, from my heart I thank you for this as for all your past kindness; but I distinctly, definitely, and finally refuse to avail myself of your thoughtful munificence.”
He gazed at me uneasily. “I hope,” he interposed, “you don’t say this under the impression that — that by your future conduct you may perhaps induce me to rescind my determination. I ought to tell you plainly that our engagement is broken off, once for all, and will not be renewed.”
I drew back as if he had stung me. “John,” I cried, with a sudden revulsion, “you insult me!”
He saw he had gone too far, and he was profusely apologetic. “But in order that there may be no mistake,” he went on, in his Grandisonian way, though evidently awkward, “I — I think I ought to apprise you at once of a slight event which took place during your absence from England. I believe — I may say I believe — in the policy of striking while the iron is hot.” He sat uneasily. Crossed his legs. Uncrossed them. Fingered his hat. Fumbled about through several unimportant sentences. At last, plunged and said it “I had long come to the conclusion, Rosalba, that you and I were not naturally adapted for each other. I had long admired the classical beauty and the trained intellect of another lady. But honour intervened. I had given you my word and would not retract it. When you quitted me, in opposition to my expressed wishes, however, I felt that honour need intervene no longer. I asked — and obtained—” — He plunged once more. “I am engaged to be married; this time the ceremony is to take place at once — as soon, that is to say, as the necessary arrangements can be completed — such arrangements as are needful for a lady in my future wife’s position.” He made a rhetorical pause. “I am about to marry — Miss Gwendoline Duddleswell — I need hardly say, the daughter of a Cabinet Minister.”
I seized both his hands with sincere delight. If only he knew what a load he had taken off my mind! I felt as Isaac must have felt when the ram, caught by the horns in the thicket, appeared to Abraham. “John,” I cried in a voice whose heartiness was too unfeigned for any doubt to exist as to its genuine character, “I am so glad! Miss Duddleswell! I congratulate you!”
He bloomed into geniality. “Thank you, Rosalba,” he answered, wringing my hand in return. “It is nice of you to receive this news in so friendly a spirit.”
“John,” I exclaimed with conviction, as the fitness of the substitution dawned by degrees upon me, “she is the very wife for you! You could not have selected better. Your chosen bride is a lady; she is educated; she is intellectual; she is extremely well read; she interests herself in your problems; she sympathises with your aims; she moves in your own circle. If I had been asked to choose out of all the world the exact help that was meet for you, I think I should have said, ‘Why, Gwendoline Duddleswell!’ In the wise provision of Providence, she was made for you.”
He was really charmed. He shook my hand once more. “Rosalba,” he cried, unbending, “this only shows me again what I knew long ago, that in spite of much flightiness of speech and manner, your judgment is excellent and your heart sound to the core. You are totally free from the faintest tinge of petty feminine or feline jealousy.”
“I hope so!” I answered.
“And remember,” smoothing his hat, and pulling on one glove, “if ever you want that hundred and fifty—”
I accompanied him to the door. “Dear John!” I answered, “you are most good and kind. I know you mean it well. But for my sake, I implore you,
never allude again to that unhappy offer. ‘T is generosity itself — but it grates like a discord.”
Auntie said to me later, “Rosalba, ‘t is a slight upon you! He might at least have waited, for decency’s sake, another week or two, before announcing his engagement.”
“Oh no, dearie!” I cried. “That is just A Transference of Feeling 353
John’s nature. He has a need for affections: diluted, milk-and-watery affections, but still affections. They saturate an affinity. One object being withdrawn, he immediately requires another on which to fix them. When one canary in a cage dies, its mate mourns — till you introduce a fresh companion. Then it perks up again and is happy. John is at the canary stage of the tender emotions.”
CHAPTER XXV
I TEST MY MARKET VALUE
I HAD to earn my living.
I faced the situation, like a man — or at least like a woman.
Auntie pressed me hard to marry Dudu at once. To this course I saw one fatal objection — Dudu had not asked me. Besides, I could not marry him. I owed John Stodmarsh too much; and I meant to repay him. I would decide on nothing which did not enable me to earn my own livelihood and leave a surplus sufficient to save up for that repayment. Otherwise, it would have been beyond doubt a most suitable match; for we had neither of us a penny.
I turned things over in my mind this way and that during those days at Auntie’s. I was further off from earning money now than in the dim past years when I danced and played on dusty French highways. How the sous rolled in! Day by day it dawned upon me more and more clearly that Miss Westmacott’s “toning down” had been a fatal error. My chance in life lay, not in “toning down,” but in tuning up; I ought to have developed my natural talents (if any) along my natural lines. Nature had endowed me with certain gifts of sprightliness and mimicry which I loved to exercise; John Stodmarsh and Miss Westmacott had conspired to dwarf them.
But they had not wholly succeeded. They tried a task beyond their strength. Turned out at the door, art came back by the window. Clandestinely and surreptitiously I had gone on playing my little plays before the girls and delivering my speeches. Auntie and Dudu had encouraged me in the holidays. I loved dressing up; I loved attitudinising. John did not care for me to go to the theatre; he said it “tended to unsettle me”; like all his kind, John had always a strange dread of that mysterious entity, unsettlement. But Auntie took me to the play from time to time; it was an epoch in my life when first I saw a real Juliet in a real balcony, and beheld a Romeo in trunk hose actually climbing up a real pasteboard wall to embrace her. I went away very much “unsettled.” I pined to play Juliet to crowded houses offhand. For when a girl says she “wants to go on the stage,” she does not mean she wants to begin, as begin she must, in the rôle of walking lady; she means she wants to begin as Mrs. Siddons in Lady Macbeth, or as Sarah Bernhardt in La Tosca.
The theatre was my first love. Had I not evolved it for myself, “antecedently of experience,” as the psychology-books say, from a tattered Shakespeare on the Monti Berici? But I did not now contemplate going on the stage, for all that. I had reasons for this resolve; among them, one was that preparation for the stage costs time and money. Now I wanted to economise time, because I wanted to begin repaying John Stodmarsh what I owed him. And I had no money. So, on various grounds, I rejected the theatre.
But on the very morning after my interview with John, and the decided snapping of that unlucky engagement, I went out by myself — in search of another. I had a scheme in my mind. It may have been a foolish one; but, at any rate, it amused me. To be amused is surely a great point in this dull world, where so many adverse forces — social, religious, pecuniary — seem banded together in one solid phalanx to prevent our enjoying ourselves.
I took a ‘bus into the Strand — or rather, two successive ‘bi, if that is the proper plural — and went to call on a famous music-hall proprietor.
“A music-hall!” you cry. “Oh, this is really too much! The moment she escapes from that excellent Mr. Stodmarsh’s restraining influence, what appalling developments may we not expect from this Bohemian young woman?”
Wait till you hear. ‘T is a lesson this book is bent on impressing upon you.
Mr. Henry Burminster is a very famous man. He has controlled in his time half the music-halls of London. He is short, fat, more than middle-aged, somewhat unctuous. Not red-faced — a worse type, white and flabby, with parboiled cheeks: a sated sensualist. Innumerable crow’s-feet pucker the corners of his deep-set eyes; the eyes themselves twinkle with humour, but convey strange undertones of shrewdness, of worldly wisdom, of hard, business-like cruelty. The sort of man to enjoy a good dinner and run a show which uses up its artistes — that is the accepted word — with ruthless rapidity. Each takes his “turn”; and after a few “turns” his vogue is over. Mr. Burminster uses them up as omnibus companies use horses; and when they are done for, no doubt ships them over to Antwerp to be slaughtered.
His Obesity received me at once in a cosy little study, half smoking-room, half office, with just a tinge of boudoir. Its odour vacillated between Turkish cigarettes and patchouli. He had received my card; but I do not think’t was that that secured me admission; the doorkeeper, I fancy, had been pleased to be gracious as to my external fitness for the musical profession. (I call it musical by courtesy, not knowing the appropriate adjective for music-hall.) Mr. Burminster leaned back in a capacious desk-chair, which (at some risk to itself) revolved on a pivot with his bulky person. His waist was convexity; an obtrusive diamond accentuated his fat fingers. He stared at me frankly; but there was nothing rude in his stare: to a great contractor in human flesh and blood a singer or a dancer is just so much stock-in-trade; he examines her points, not as person, but as saleable commodity. “Will she or will she not suit my public?” — that is the question. Of women as women he has seen more than enough; they do not interest him. Mr. Burminster had declined on dinners, wine, and Carlsbad.
I felt as much in the scrutinising glance with which he ran me up and down, and did not resent it.
“In the profession?” he asked at last, in a fat cracked voice, as unctuous as the face of him.
“Not yet. I may be.”
“You may be? So? What qualifications, young lady?”
“Innocence first,” I answered, taking my cue from his style. “That, you see, is a novelty.”
The crow’s-feet puckered still closer; the corners of the mouth twitched with a curious motion. “That — is — true,” His Obesity mused slowly. “So far — good. And next, combined with it?”
“Audacity. A rare combination!”
“Right again. You hit it in one. Anything else?”
“Mimicry.”
The swinging chair swung round. The dispenser of wealth surveyed me once more from hat to shoe with a most purchasing stare. “You put it short,” he commented. “You do not waste words. Most young women who come here on hire bore one with the exuberance of their voluble self-assertion. They have all the virtues — as understood on the music-hall stage — and they expatiate on them like Hamlet soliloquising. — Innocence — audacity — mimicry. Well, well. Experience?”
“None,” I answered. “In its place, freshness, originality, utter freedom from convention.”
“Trained?”
“Self-trained. Taught myself to act, tramping the highroads of France and Italy.”
“So! Educated on the Continent!”
“And at a High School for girls in Hampstead.”
“Aha! A new woman!”
“Do I look like an old one?”
He pursed his lips, set his teeth, or at least his jaws, half closed the sleepy, shifty fat eyes, and once more took stock of me. “My time is valuable,” he said at last, plagiarising Alice. “A hundred pounds a minute.”
“That is why I came to you,” I answered.
“I knew I had it in my power to offer you a good thing; and the man with capital is the man to put a good thing on the market.�
� I said it with the emphatic, jerky, convinced air of men in the City, whom I had often heard talk about something called Founders’ Shares at Auntie’s and Sir Hugh Tachbrook’s.
“That’s good!” he broke in, waking up. “Any more like it?”
“Plenty more where that cum from,” I answered, transforming myself at once into the person of a ‘bus-conductor. “Now then, old ‘un, git on! — Off side down, Bill!— ’Ere y’ are, mum! Westminster!”
“Ha! quick-change artiste, without the costume,” he exclaimed, catching at it. His crafty eyes gave a twinkle which said as clear as words, “There may be money in her. Investigate, but don’t let her think you think so.” He grew sleepier than ever, and lighted a lazy cigarette. “Let me see what you can do,” he drawled out, glancing at the heavy watch on his desk. “I have ten minutes I can spare. I assign you ten minutes.”
“One thousand pounds’ worth of that valuable time!” I cried. “Can’t you let me have it in money?”
He smiled a restrained smile. “Go on! go on! No tomfoolery!”
I went on, suppressing the tomfoolery as requested. I gave him in quick succession several of my little dramatic impersonations, as I had given them often before with great applause to the girls at school or to Auntie and Dudu. I passed from one sketch to the other hastily, without note or comment Some of my “turns” were monologues; others, battles of repartee between two contrasted speakers. Mr. Burminster leaned back torpid in his chair and pretended to close his eyes; but I knew through the eyelids — for he had no lashes — he was watching me, cat-like. At last His Obesity rose with an effort and opened the door. “Mr. Weldon, come in and hear this young lady.”
“Another thousand!” I murmured. “You see, I was right. Et pi-ti-ti, et pa-ta-ta! I told you this was money.”
He looked a little annoyed. “Proceed,” he said, waving one fat unimpressive hand. “Weldon, observe her.”
