CHAPTER XII
LOOKING FOR WORK
There was not much money left when the funeral expenses had been paid and Nancy had bought her mourning—those poor black suits of woe that in their utter inadequacy even to symbolise still less to express her grief seemed like an insult to the beloved dead. It was a desperate challenge to fortune to abandon the Greenwich engagement. But Nancy could not bring herself to the point of returning to the cast of the pantomime. That was beyond the compass of her emotional endurance. The management offered her a larger salary to play the Fairy Queen only, without appearing as Columbine; but she refused. The Employers’ Liability Act did not exist at this date; and when the management suggested, as a reason for not paying her direct compensation, that the accident had already cost them dearly enough in the gloom it had shed over what promised to be a really successful production, Nancy’s grief would not allow her even to comment on such a point of view. Bram was dead. People told her that she had a good case against the theatre. But Bram was dead. He was dead. He was dead. All she wanted was to leave Greenwich for ever, and when Mrs. Pottage offered her hospitality she refused.
“It’s not pride, dear Mrs. Pottage, that prevents my staying on with you. You mustn’t think that. It’s simply that I could not bear to go on living alone where he and I lived together. I’m sure to find an engagement presently. I have enough money left to keep Letizia and myself for quite a little time.”
“Well, don’t let’s lose sight of each other for good and all,” said the landlady. “Let’s meet some day and godown to Margate together and have a nice sea blow. I’ve got a friend down there—well, friend, I say, though she’s a relation really, but she is a friend for all that, a good friend—well, this Sarah Williams has a very natty little house looking out on the front, and we could spend a nice time with her when she’s not full up with lodgers. I’d say ‘come down now,’ but Margate in January’s a bit like living in a house with the windows blown out and the doors blown in and the roof blown off and the walls blown down.”
So, Nancy left Starboard Alley and went to live in rooms in Soho, perhaps in the very same house where more than a century ago Letizia’s great-great-grandmother had been left with that cageful of love-birds and the twenty pairs of silk stockings.
The houses in Blackboy Passage were flat-faced, thin, and tall like the houses in Hogarth’s “Night.” At one end an archway under the ancient tavern that gave its name to the small and obscure thoroughfare led into Greek Street. At the other end a row of inebriated posts forbade traffic to vehicles from Frith Street. The houses had enjoyed a brief modishness in the middle of the eighteenth century, but since then their tenants had gradually declined in quality while at the same time steadily increasing in quantity. By this date nearly every one of the tall houses had a perpendicular line of bells beside its front door and a ladder of outlandish names. The house in which Nancy found lodgings was an exception, for all of it except the basement belonged to Miss Fewkes, who was her landlady. Miss Fewkes was a dried-up little woman of over fifty, with a long sharp nose, and raddled cheeks so clumsily powdered as to give to her face the appearance of a sweet which has lost its freshness and been dusted over with sugar. Incredible as it now might seem, Miss Fewkes had had a past. She had actually been in the Orient ballet once, and the mistress of several men, each of whom was a step lower in the scale than his predecessor. From each of these temporary supporters shehad managed to extract various sums of money, the total of which she had invested in furnishing this house in Blackboy Passage, where for many years she had let lodgings to the profession. In spite of her paint and powder and past, Miss Fewkes wore an air of withered virginity, and appeared to possess little more human nature than one of her own lace antimacassars. Her thin prehensile fingers resembled the claws of a bird; her voice was as the sound of dead leaves blown along city pavements. Letizia disliked Miss Fewkes as much as she had liked Mrs. Pottage. Nor did Miss Fewkes like Letizia, whose presence in her lodgings she resented in the same way that she would have resented a pet dog’s.
“I noticed your little girl’s finger-marks on the bedroom-door this morning. Two black marks. Of course, as I explained to you, Miss O’Finn, I don’t really care to have children in my rooms, but if I do take them in I rather expect that they won’t make finger-marks. It’s difficult enough to keep things clean in London, as I’m sure you’ll understand.”
Nancy would have left Miss Fewkes after a week if she had had to leave Letizia in her charge while she hung about in the outer offices of theatrical agents in Garrick Street and Maiden Lane. Fortunately, however, there were staying in the same house a Mr. and Mrs. Kino, who took a great fancy to Letizia and insisted on having as much of her company as they could obtain. Mr. Kino was the proprietor and trainer of a troup of performing elephants, which were then appearing at Hengler’s Circus. Mrs. Kino, a large pink and yellow woman, had domestic ambitions and a longing for children of her own. Possibly her dependency on elephants had begotten in her a passion for diminutiveness. At any rate, until Letizia won her heart, she spent all her time in stringing beads for little purses. Even when she made friends with Letizia, the toys she always preferred to buy for her were minute china animals and Lilliputian dolls, for which she enjoyed making quantities of tiny dresses.
“Too large, duckie, much too large,” was her comment when Letizia showed her the cargo of her Christmas stocking.
Miss Fewkes sniffed when she saw the china animals.
“Silly things to give a child,” she said. “Next thing is she’ll be swallowing them and have to be taken in a cab to the hospital, but, then, some people in this world go about looking for trouble and, when they get it, expect every one else to sympathise. Ugh! I’ve no patience with them, I haven’t.”
Nancy had found it impossible to persuade Letizia that she would never see her father again in this world.
“I aspeck he’s only wented away,” she insisted. “I aspeck he’ll come back down the chiminy one night. My lamb what Santy Claus gave me saided he was perfickatally sure faver would come back down the chiminy one night. So, I fink we’d better leave the gas burning, don’t you, because he wouldn’t like to come back all in the dark, would he?”
Mrs. Kino was in the room when Letizia put forward this theory and with a dumpy hand she silently patted the black sleeve of Nancy, who had turned away to hide the tears.
Perhaps the kindest thing that fortune could have done for the young widow was to throw difficulties in the way of her obtaining an engagement. Had she found a “shop” immediately and gone out on tour alone after those happy years of joint engagements the poignancy of her solitude might have overwhelmed her. The battle for a livelihood kept her from brooding.
But it was a battle through that icy winter, with the little pile of sovereigns growing shorter and shorter every day and Nancy nearly starving herself that Letizia might lack nothing.
“Some people burn coal as if it was paper,” Miss Fewkes sniffed. She did not know that every half-hundredweight meant no lunch for her lodger, and if she had, she would only have despised her for it.
“Nothing this morning, I’m afraid,” the agent would say. “But something may be turning up next week. Two or three companies will be going out presently. Look in again, Miss O’Finn. I’m not forgetting you. You shall have a chance for the first suitable engagement on my books. Cold weather, isn’t it? Wonderful how this frost holds. Good morning.”
Down one long flight of draughty stone stairs in Garrick Street. Up another flight of tumbledown wooden stairs in Maiden Lane. Two hours’ wait in an icy room with nothing to warm one but the flaming posters stuck on the walls.
“Ah, is that you, Miss O’Finn? I’m glad you looked in to-day. Mr. Howard Smythe is taking outThe New Dress. Have you seen it? Capital little farce. There’s a part that might suit you.”
Any part would suit her, Nancy thought, for she was beginning to lose hope of ever being engaged again.
“Look in this afternoon, Miss O’Finn, round about three. Mr. Howard Smythe will be here then to interview a few ladies.”
Down the long flight of tumbledown wooden stairs and out past the Adelphi stage-door into the Strand. What was the time? Half-past one. Mrs. Kino was taking Letizia to the circus. Not worth while to go home. She would find a tea-shop for lunch. A damp bun and a glass of London milk. A greasy marble table, and opposite a hungry-eyed clerk reading Gibbon’sDecline and Fall of the Roman Empirewhile he eked out his bun and glass of milk. The waitress, who had nine warts on her fingers, flung down the skimpy bills with equal disdain for both these customers. Outside, the roar of the Strand on the iron-bound air. Inside, the rattle of plates and the harsh giggles of the waitresses. Outside, the grey frozen sky. Inside, leathery poached eggs and somebody arguing in a corner of the shop that he had ordered coffee.
“That is coffee,” said the waitress, tossing her head.
“Is it? Well, I must have meant tea.”
After lunch a walk along the Embankment to get warm. Gulls screaming and quarrelling for the crusts that were being flung to them. Wretched men and women freezing on the benches. Plane-trees hung with their little black balls that stirred not in this immotionable and icy air. Back to Maiden Lane, and up the tumbledown wooden stairs once more. Another endless wait in the cold anteroom.
“Ah, good afternoon, Miss O’Finn. I’m sorry, but Mr. Howard Smythe has filled up the vacancies in his cast. But if you look in again next week, perhaps I shall have something that will suit you.”
“Anything will suit me,” Nancy sighed.
“Ah, but you won’t suit everything,” the agent laughed. “You’re so tall, you know. The real tragedy queen, eh? And managers do not want tragedy queens these days.”
“Och, damn it, don’t try to be funny,” Nancy burst out. “You know I’m not a tragedy queen.”
“Sorry, I was only making a little joke.”
“Well, after a month of agents in this weather one loses one’s sense of humour,” Nancy replied.
At home Nancy found Letizia in a tremendous state of excitement after her visit to the circus which had concluded with an introduction to Mr. Kino’s elephants.
“And I touched Jumbo’s trunk, muvver, and it was all hot. And he wagged his tail. And Mrs. Jumbo opened her mouf as wide as that.”
Here Letizia endeavoured to give an elephantine yawn to illustrate her story.
“Yes, she took to my elephants,” said Mr. Kino. “In fact, I was nearly offering her an engagement to appear with them.”
Nancy laughed.
“No, I’m serious, Miss O’Finn. What do you say to three pounds a week? And, of course, the missus and I would look after the kid as if she was our own.”
“Och, no, it’s very sweet of you both, but I couldn’t give her up like that.”
“Arthur’s joking about the performing part,” Mrs. Kino put in. “He knows very well I wouldn’t let her do any performing. But we would like to have her with us when we leave on Sunday week.”
“You’re leaving on Sunday week?” Nancy asked in alarm.
“Yes, we’re going out on a long tour.”
Nancy was terribly worried by the prospect of her fellow lodgers’ departure. It would mean asking Miss Fewkes to look after Letizia while she was out. In her bedroom she counted over the money she had left. Only seven pounds, and out of that there would be this week’s bill to pay. Thingsweregetting desperate.
Until now Nancy had avoided meeting her father in London, because she felt that she could not bear the scene he would be sure to play over her widowhood. Her life with Bram was too real and wonderful for histrionics. But matters were now so serious that she could not afford to let her own intimate feelings stand in the way of getting work. Her father might be able to help her to an engagement. He might even be able to lend her a little money in case of absolute necessity.
So Nancy sent a note to the Piccadilly Theatre, where he was playing, and three days later she received an answer from an address in Earl’s Court to say that owing to severe illness he had had to resign his part at the Piccadilly a week or two before. Would Nancy visit him, as he was still too unwell to go out?
“Mr. O’Finn?” repeated the slatternly girl who opened the door. “Can you see Mr. O’Finn? Who is it, please?”
“It’s his daughter, Miss O’Finn.”
The slatternly girl opened her eyes as wide as their sticky lids would let her.
“He’s not expecting anybody this afternoon,” she muttered.
“He may not be expecting anybody this afternoon,”said Nancy sharply, “but his daughter is not exactly anybody. He has been ill and I want to see him.”
The slatternly girl evidently felt incapable of dealing with this crisis, for she retreated to the head of the basement stairs, and called down:
“Mrs. Tebbitt, here’s somebody wants to see Mr. O’Finn. Will you come up and talk to her, please?”
A sacklike woman with a flaccid red face and sparse hair excavated herself slowly from the basement.
“I understand my father has been very ill,” Nancy began.
“Ill?” gurgled Mrs. Tebbitt breathlessly. “It’s an illness a lot of people would like to die of. He’s been on the drink for the last month. That’s what he’s been. He’s drunk now, and in another hour or so he’ll be blind drunk, because he’s just sent out for another bottle of brandy. If you say you’re his daughter and insist on seeing him, well, I suppose you’ll have to, but his room’s in a disgusting state and which is not my fault, for the last time the girl went up to give it a rout out he threw the dustpan out of the window and it hit a organist who was walking past—I know it was a organist, because he give me his card and said he’d lodge a complaint with the police, but we haven’t heard nothing more since, but I’ve forbid the girl to touch his room again till he’s sober, and which he won’t be to-day, that’s certain.”
Nancy’s heart was hardened against her father. In her present straits she could not feel that there was any kind of an excuse for behaviour like his.
“Thank you,” she said coldly to the landlady. “Perhaps when he can understand what you’re telling him you’ll be kind enough to say that Miss O’Finn called to see him, but would not come up.”
She turned away from the house in a cold rage.
In her bitterness she was tempted for a moment to accept the Kinos’ offer to adopt Letizia and take her away with them on their tour. The worthlessness of her own father was extended in her thoughts to include allparents including herself. It would be better to abandon Letizia lest one day she might fail her as to-day her father had failed herself.
Then she saw Bram’s whimsical face looking at her from the silver frame on her dressing-table, and she felt ashamed. She wondered again about that last unspoken wish of his. She had put out of her mind the idea of appealing to his brother to help in the guardianship of Letizia. But perhaps Bram had been really anxious that Letizia should heal the breach between them. Perhaps that had been his unspoken wish. He might have felt that she would be unwilling to ask a favour from his brother, and even with his dying breath have abstained from saying anything that she could construe into the solemnity of a last request, in case she should not like the idea of begging a favour from his relations. That would be Bram’s way. Just a diffident hint, but nothing that could involve her too deeply.
That Monday evening Nancy paid Miss Fewkes her bill and stared at the few pounds that remained. Of course, she could carry on for a little while by pawning, but had she any right to imperil by such methods Letizia’s well-being? Besides, now that the Kinos were going away, there was the problem of looking after Letizia during the day. At a pinch she could ask Mrs. Pottage to look after her for a week or two; but did not everything point to Brigham at this moment? Could she still have any pride after that account she had heard to-day of her father’s degradation? No, her duty was clear. She would make one more round of the agents, and then if she was still without an engagement on Thursday, she would take Letizia to her husband’s relations.