Mr. American

by George MacDonald Fraser

  incessantly, and yet managed to find time for eating and ensuring that nothing that happened in the crowded restaurant escaped her attention and comment. He could have closed his eyes and imagined himself back at the Monico again - but he would have had to close his eyes, for to look at her was to be reminded of how great a change five years had made.

  Knowing her, Mr Franklin had expected her to arrive at the Trocadero dressed in the height of theatrical extravagance; he discovered that the sophistication which he had noticed in her during the afternoon was emphasised in her evening dress. Where all around there were exotically feathered and tiaraed heads, and even one or two powdered according to the Paris fad, Pip wore her blonde locks neatly swept up and unadorned; where other ladies used a profusion of frills and lace and wispy chiffons, she wore a simple French evening gown of grey velvet, admittedly tight and smoothly-fitted, but of a plain elegance which proclaimed its expense, and contrived to make the competition look like carnival finery. It was not even unusually low cut, which did surprise him, knowing her particular vanity; he remarked on the subdued splendour of her appearance, and Pip sipped her champagne and winked.

  'Pile on the frills and ribbons when you're twenty,' she remarked, `but when you're twenty-four and look as much like a tart or a flapper as I do, then discretion's the thing, my dear - especially when it looks twice as fetchy as all the skimpy gauzes and silks. Besides, if Mr Mark Franklin, of Wilton Crescent, Belgravia, a respectable married gentleman, is to be seen dining out at at a fashionable restaurant with a companion not his wife, it's as well if she looks summat like a lady, and not a tarrarraboomdeeay with bells on. Oi, Ginger,' she added in a low voice to the passing waiter, 'got any nuts and olives, have you?'

  They toasted her forthcoming appearance at the Royal Academy, and Pip became confidential. 'It isn't definitely fixed yet, you see, 'cos the Hanging Committee or whatever they're called have to decide what gets shown and what doesn't. But my two pictures are as near a stone-ginger cert. as

  any can be - both well-known painters, see, so they're sure to get picked. And they're lovely pictures, both of 'em - not 'cos I'm in them, I mean, but because they're good; they really are.'

  'Are they portraits?'

  'No-o, not really,' said Pip. 'There's one which is very classical, called Carthage, and it's by this lovely Italian gentleman, Mr Matania - you'll see his drawings in the magazines. Ever so kind and polite, he is, and draws like a dream. This is a Roman picture, and there's two of us, me and another girl, and we've been captured by corsairs, or we're going to be, I'm not sure which, and I'm lying face down on a bed, in the altogether. So you couldn't say it was a portrait, exactly. And the other picture is me in a field in a bit of gauze, with the wind blowing, and it's called "Summer Zephyr", I think - something like that. You can see my face in that one, so it's more of a portrait, I suppose.'

  'Well, that's really something, Pip,' said Mr Franklin. 'Being hung at the Royal Academy - that's fame. It's more than that; it's immortality, because hundreds of years from now people'!! be looking at those pictures, and thinking, that's a real pretty girl.'

  'You think so?' Pip looked pleased, and sighed. 'Only thing is, I won't be able to wink back at 'em and give 'em sass over the footlights. I daresay it's nice having people like your picture centuries after, but it isn't the same as a real live audience.'

  'Don't tell that to an artist, whatever you do,' laughed Mr Franklin. 'Anyway, when those pictures go up, I'm going to insist on a personally conducted tour of the gallery. Is it a date?'

  'All right!' said Pip, delighted. 'Opening day, the model herself will show you round. Here,' she added, 'you don't think the suffragettes will have a go at 'em, do you?'

  'At your pictures? Heavens above, why should they?'

  'Didn't you see what they did to that picture of Venus, in the National Gallery?' said Pip anxiously. 'Made a hell of a mess of it, they did, just last month.'

  'Oh, the Rokeby Venus, by Velasquez. Yes, I read about that. But that's an old master, Pip - something famous and valuable, which is why they picked it. I'm not belittling your pictures, but I don't see any reason why the suffragettes should take a hatchet to them.'

  `Don't you, though?' said Pip darkly. 'Well, I do. The picture they smashed was a nude, wasn't it, and you know why? Because these silly cows think that nude pictures of women are degrading -I read that in the paper. So they give 'em the axe and the acid. Well, those pictures of mine are about as nude as you can get, and if one of those mouldy old bags lays a finger on them, God help her.' Pip scowled fiercely at her champagne glass. 'Women's suffrage! They give me a pain!'

  'I can't say I've any sympathy with defacing pictures - even less than I have with bombing politicians' houses and shooting at trains,' said

  Mr Franklin. 'But the cause isn't a bad one, is it? Don't you want the vote?'

  'Come off it,' said Pip. 'What good's the vote to me - or anyone else, for that matter? It means you get a chance every few years to vote for one or other of a pair of boobies that they've picked beforehand. That's just bully, isn't it? It doesn't mean because you've got a vote that you can do anything, does it? Course it doesn't. Anyway - I'll tell you something. If Mr Asquith or Mr Lloyd George was to come in here now, and address the restaurant, how many votes d'you think he could swing? Precious few. But -'she raised a small finger and tapped her upturned nose in what she imagined was a gesture of conspiratorial cunning ' - give me the platform for five minutes, with a good drummer and a spotlight man who knows his stuff, and I could have every man-jack in the place voting for the Kaiser. D'you believe me?'

  'Every time,' confessed Mr Franklin. 'I think women will have to get the vote, if only so that you can enter politics.'

  'Fat chance,' said Pip. 'I wouldn't waste my time. I've got no use for these female agitators. You know why they do it - and why they go about defacing pictures? It's jealousy, that's all. Look at 'em - ugliest set of old hags you ever saw. That's what's wrong with them. They rant on about women being slaves to men - you can see the Maharajah of Astrakhan wanting that lot in his harem, can't you? They haven't got the thing that doesn't just make women equal to men, but makes 'em superior, and they know it, and it makes 'em sour and warped.'

  'What haven't they got, Pip?'

  'I dunno what you'd call it,' said Pip seriously, 'but it's what any woman's got - unless she really looks Godawful. It's being able to make men do what you want, I suppose. I can. So can your Peggy. And even more - it's being able to get men to do what the men want to do, but maybe don't know it. Even Godawful-looking women can do it, if they set their minds to it, instead of blowing up pillar-boxes and scratching policemen's faces. I'd flog those bitches,' said Pip relentlessly. 'I really would. Anyway, all this talk about equality's bunkum. There's things you can do that I can't - but I'd like to see you on the Hippodrome stage, second house Monday night, with the pit full of drunk sailors and the conductor's lost his music. Or let Mrs Ruddy Pankhurst try it, and I hope she gets a hole in her tights.'

  'Have some more champagne,' said Mr Franklin, 'or a liqueur. I hadn't realised what an anti-suffragette you were. By the way, they don't all look Godawful - I know one who's rather handsome.'

  'You would,' said Pip cynically. 'Well, you can tell her from me she's wasting her chances - if she's got looks she should use 'em, and be thankful, 'stead of yapping on about women's slavery. What do they know about it, anyway? Most of 'em are ladies, you'll notice, and never did a hand's turn in their lives, swanking about in their hundred-guinea sealskin coats, and bully-ragging poor little tweeny maids who don't earn in a year what those ... those old cows spend on a couple of dinners. They make me mad, honest! Sorry, I get worked up. I'll have a kummel, please.'

  She brooded, her pretty face overcast, and looked darkly at the surrounding tables, as though in the hope of surprising Mrs Pankhurst demanding women's rights. 'Slavery! Huh! I'd like to show 'em. Look here - what d'you think of this?' And to Mr Franklin's amazement she opene
d her mouth, leaned towards him, and put out her tongue. She made a muffled noise, realised she couldn't talk with her tongue out, withdrew it and said: 'Take a good look at it - notice anything?' She protruded it gently between her teeth.

  Mr Franklin took a quick look to see if anyone was noticing, and said hastily:

  'It's a very pretty little tongue. You have lovely teeth, too - ' 'Never mind my teeth. Notice anything odd about the tip of my tongue?'

  'No ... wait, though, it's shiny - as though it had been polished. That's strange.'

  'You bet your life it's strange,' said Pip. 'It's been polished all right - you know how? When I was seven years old, I was licking labels in a sweatshop for a penny an hour. Thirty gross of labels a day - know how many that is, six days a week, for two years? That's more than two and a half million labels - and I licked every one of 'em. That's why my tongue's got a polished tip - and always will have. That's nothing - it doesn't hurt, it won't kill me, it's no disfigurement. But I remember it - every time I clean my teeth. And they talk about slavery!'

  Mr Franklin sat silent for a moment. 'I thought that was illegal - sweated labour. Especially for children.'

  'Course it's illegal,' said Pip, and took a delicate sip at her liqueur. 'But if there's ten of you living in one room, like we were in Seven Dials, with one tap and one privy in the street, and Dad out of work - which he was for four years, until he got the fish-barrow, and nothing

  to live on, it doesn't matter whether it's legal or not, does it? We were meant to go to school - so we did, my sisters and me, but we had to work too, on the sly - "part-timers", they called us. If we stopped off school, the attendance officer was down on poor old Dad like a ton of bricks - he got jailed over it, twice. So we did it evenings, mostly - I can taste them labels yet. I've never licked one since, not even to seal an envelope or put on a stamp. My little sister died of it, I reckon, though they said it was consumption. Poor little soul - day she died, all she was worried about was missing the old Queen's jubilee procession.'

  'And you got out of it, in the end,' said Mr Franklin. 'You're quite a girl, Pip.'

  'It wasn't my fault I got out,' said Pip. 'I was lucky - bar the squint, I was the beauty of the family. At least, I had the figure, even when I was fifteen. I say a prayer of thanks each night that I didn't finish up on the game, like those poor little swine on the 'Dilly or the Empire Prom - and they're the cream of the crop, the five-pound jobs. You ought to see some of the others.' She shivered. 'It was the Salvation Army gave me my chance - I used to bang my little tambourine round the pubs and sing "Come and join us", and a scout told me to go and see Mr Edwardes - dear old Gaiety George. He was square, and he recommended me - I told you how I lied about my age, didn't I? They knew, the managers, but they were decent and didn't let on. And I didn't have to audition on an office couch with the blinds down, either - they weren't that sort. So I got started - and it was just blind luck, and what makes me so wild about these Women's Rights people is that if they had their way, I'd be an old woman this minute, worn out like Ma; I'd be in Seven Dials, scrubbing steps and waiting to die. I had my woman's looks - nothing else. Suppose I'd been flat-chested or skinny-legged? Lot of good the vote would have been to me, wouldn't it?'

  She took an angry sip at her kummel, and then suddenly threw off her gloom like a cloak and twinkled at Mr Franklin.

  'Here, I'm sorry! I'm just a pain in the neck! Going on about hard times, and Christmas Day in the workhouse, and we're meant to be celebrating. I dunno what got into me - yes, I do, though, it's those old bags slashing pictures of girls like me - wonder if your Rokeby Venus model was worried about the vote? Not half, I'll bet! Anyway, I'm here, and we're having a good time, and none of my family's going short, I can tell you. And if I thought they were going to, I'd take that job in Kismet tomorrow, or go back to the chorus, two shows a night, and high-kick my backside off six nights a week - and if I got tired and fed up, know what I'd do? Go to the nearest looking-glass and stick my tongue out.'

  She finished her liqueur and looked round the restaurant, listening to the hum of conversation and drinking in the scene. 'This is a dead-and-alive hole, this is, and we both need cheering up after Miss Delys's lecture on the Rights of Woman. Tell you what - how'd you like to come to a supper club? I don't feel like going home yet, and you deserve some fun after listening to me. I'm a member at the Lotus, and we can have a dance, and a late meal, and drink all night if we feel like it. What about it?'

  'It's your celebration party,' said Mr Franklin. 'I don't know about the late supper, though - '

  'Garn, the dinner's just the hors-d'oeuvres,' said Pip happily. 'A few two-steps, and some ragtime, a couple of snorts, and you'll be ready for poached turbot before one o'clock. Pay the bill, Mr American, and you can have the cocktails and late supper on me!'

  The Lotus Club was in Knightsbridge, one of that spreading number of all-night establishments catering for a generation of pleasure-seekers to whom time meant very little now that the ever-present motor car could whirl them from one end of the metropolis to the other in a matter of minutes, and who were in the grip of the latest dancing craze which, perhaps more than anything else, had wrought the great change in manners and style and spirit which Mr Franklin had pondered on earlier that evening. The genteel ballroom exercises of waltz and polka had been invaded from across the Atlantic by the more intricate and intimate patterns of the Boston, the one and two steps, and that extraordinary fusion of the classical and the abandoned, improvised originally by dockers on the Buenos Aires waterfront, and now such a passion with the smart set that it had become a national joke-the tango.

  Mr Franklin knew them, and had been able to hold his own on those occasions when he had accompanied Peggy to dances and parties, but like everyone else in Europe who was not stone-deaf he was aware that even these new rages were becoming old hat, not just with the ordinary public but also at the exclusive dances which were something of a mania with fashionable hostesses that year, from four to six-thirty every evening, and which were threatening to sweep away for ever that sacred ritual of polite society, afternoon tea. Even the latest sensation, the fox-trot, was positively sedate beside some of the ragtime rhythms which had come blaring out of the West, to be insistently amplified by every gramophone and dance orchestra in the land, and convince the older generation that Babylon and Sodom were come again. The spectacle of young men and women (some of the latter quite obviously unencumbered by corsets) quivering and gyrating wildly to the insistent beat of Negro music, with its suggestion of the bordello and the jungle, was a scandalous symptom of the new decadence but what could one expect of a society in which even Bishops could be seen smoking in public?

  Mr Franklin paid off the taxi outside the Lotus Club, while Pip tapped her feet to the muted, lively strains emerging from the brightly-lit doorway where well-built, battered young men in incongruous dinner jackets were checking the credentials of those going in. Mr Franklin took her arm and was making for the door when a late news bill caught his eye: 'Ulster: Latest Threat'; he bought a paper and while Pip, cheerfully impatient, peered past his shoulder, scanned the front page to see if the news had anything to do with Arthur and the Curragh. But on that topic there was nothing that he did not already know; the latest threat had to do with an incident off the Scottish coast in which a suspected gun-runner had slipped past a Royal Navy destroyer; it was alleged that rifle-shots had been exchanged, and a cartoon on the front page commented scathingly that if a Navy which had just been the recipient of the unprecedented expenditure of £48 million could not hold up a tramp steamer manned by Carson's volunteers, what could it hope to accomplish against the might of the German High Seas Fleet? Mr Churchill was depicted in sailor suit, playing with toy ships in the Round Pond, while behind his back Sir Edward Carson armed with a club labelled `Illegal arms shipments', was shown belabouring a ragged and tearful urchin representing Ireland.

  'Come on, what is it, then?' demanded Pip, skipping urgently at his
elbow. 'Oh, blinking Irishmen again! Who cares? Let's get inside!'

  The Lotus Club came as a pleasant surprise to Mr Franklin. It was bright and commodious and as well-appointed as a first-class restaurant - which in fact is what it was. There was a large dining-room upstairs which would have done credit to an exclusive hotel, where anything from a large dinner to a substantial breakfast could be had, and downstairs was the dancing-floor, surrounded by tables to which waiters and waitresses kept up a running service from the well-stocked bar. A large orchestra was going full blast at one end, with a cheerful black pounding the piano, and rasping out 'Oh, you beautiful doll' in accompaniment to a trio of girl dancers on the stage, one dressed in black face as a golliwog, another as a pierrot, and the third in the frilly costume and exaggeratedly long lashes of a baby doll. They jerked gaily as though to the directions of an invisible puppet-master, and as the number reached its climax to a thunder of applause, all three bowed mechanically and squealed: 'Mummy, I'm going to be thick!' before skipping off.

  'That's Jessie Mount, in the pierrot rig - with me in Keep Smilin',' said Pip, as a waiter showed them to a table. 'And Rosie Sweet in the golliwog get-up. She used to be my stand-in at the Folies. Nice pay to be picked up in these places.' She glanced round the crowded room, waving to friends. 'Let's start off with a cocktail, shall we?' She clicked her fingers to a waiter. 'No, no, Mr American - you keep your wallet to yourself. This is on me. Anyway, you can't pay, 'cos you're not a member, see? Two John Collins, Charley, and don't go easy on the gin.' She surveyed the dance-floor, which was filling up for a fox-trot. 'Nice crowd, aren't they? Not what you expected, I'll bet!'