"Gilbert, Gilbert!" begged his wife.
"Well, really, nowadays children behave in such an extraordinary fashion that it wouldn't surprise me at all to hear Norah was counting on my death."
"Gilbert, Gilbert!" she repeated, and looked in agony at the gas, as if she expected it to turn blue at such a horrible suggestion.
"If I don't marry Wilfred," Norah went on, "I must earn my own living."
"How?" inquired her father, with an assumption of blustering incredulity.
"By going on the stage."
"On the stage?" he repeated. "Do you realize that only yesterday I had to deal with the question of our attitude toward the posters of several theaters?"
"That wouldn't have anything to do with me," said Norah.
"But how are you going on the stage?" her father continued.
"I should try to get an engagement."
"Oh, would you, indeed? Ha-ha! Your mind seems to be running on engagements, my child. However, this engagement is even more visionary and improbable than the other one," said Mr. Caffyn, with a laugh. "I'm afraid you think it's easier than it is, my dear girl. I have a little experience of the stage—I regret to say chiefly of its worst side—and I can assure you that it's not at all easy, really."
"But if I can get an engagement?" persisted Norah.
"Why, in that case we'll talk about it," said her father. "Yes, yes, there'll be plenty of time to talk about that later on. And now if you have no objection I should like to read what Mr. Balfour is saying about Protection. It's a pity you don't try to take some interest in the affairs of your country instead of— However, I suppose that'stoomuch to expect from the younger generation."
"I must have your promise," Norah insisted. "If I write to Wilfred to-night and tell him he mustn't come to the house any more, will you let me go on the stage?"
"We'll see about it," parried Mr. Caffyn.
"No, I must have a definite promise."
"Must, Norah? Do, dear child, remember that you're speaking to your father," murmured her mother.
"Oh, that's the modern way we bring up our children," said Mr. Caffyn. "Before I know where I am I shall have Vincent ordering me up to bed."
His wife laughed with such conjugal enthusiasm at his joke that the last vestige of Mr. Caffyn's ill humor disappeared, and, being suddenly struck with the extreme beauty of his eldest daughter as she waited there bright-eyed in expectation of his answer, he promised her that if she would break off all communication with that confounded young Curlew and could obtain an engagement for herself, he would probably not create any difficulties. Her face lit up with satisfaction and, bending over, she kissed her father on the forehead with as much good will as a young woman kisses an elderly lover who has promised her some diamonds she has long desired.
Norah kept her word and wrote a letter to Wilfred Curlew in which she pointed out the impossibility of embarking on a prolonged and quite indefinite engagement, wished him good luck for the future, and made it clear that she did not intend to have anything more to do with him. The portion of the letter on which she most prided herself was the postscript: "Don't think that I bear you any ill will. I don't." The peace that had lately fallen over South Africa left Wilfred no opportunity of putting his despair at the service of his country; but Norah's behavior benefited the young journalist in the long run by teaching him to mistrust human nature as much as God, a useful lesson for a democrat. Norah, having disembarrassed herself of her suitor, set out in earnest to get on the stage and confided her ambition to Lily. Mrs. Haden's advice was asked, and Norah as a friend of her daughter was given lessons in elocution and deportment without being charged a penny. Mrs. Haden demonstrated to her that she stood very little chance of getting on the stage until she could recite "Jack Barrett Went to Quetta" or "Soldier, Soldier, Come from the Wars" with what she called as much intention as herself;in other words, until the story of Jack Barrett was awarded as much pomp of utterance as the Messenger's speech in Hippolytus and the demobilized soldier greeted with Ophelia's driveling whine. Mrs. Haden would not allow that her pupil's looks were nearly as important as her ability to mouth Rudyard Kipling—perhaps, the pupil thought, because her mistress had a pretty daughter of her own. September deepened to October, October dimmed to November while Norah was wrestling with her dread of seeming ridiculous and was acquiring the unnatural diction that was to be of such value to her first appearance. The lessons came to an abrupt end soon after Mrs. Haden had begun upon her deportment, which to Norah seemed to consist of holding her hands as if she were waiting to rinse them after eating bread and treacle, and of sitting down on a chair as if she had burst one suspender and expected the other to go every minute. One morning when she arrived at Shelley Mansions for her lesson Lily came to the door of the flat and with fearful backward glances cried out that her mother was lying dead in bed.
"Dead?" echoed Norah, irritably. She was always irritated by a sudden alarm. "I wish you wouldn't—" She was going to say "play jokes," but she saw that Lily was speaking the truth, and, having been taught by Mrs. Haden how to suit the action to the word, the expression to the emotion, she contrived to look sympathetic.
"She must have died of heart, the doctor says. I went to see why she didn't ring for her tea and she didn't answer, and when I thought she was asleep she was really dead."
Norah shuddered.
"I'm awfully sorry I've disturbed you in the middle of all this," she murmured.
"But I'm glad you've come," said Lily.
"It's awfully sweet of you, my dear, to be glad; but I wouldn't dream of worrying you at such a moment.And don't stand there shivering in your nightgown. Take my advice and dress yourself. It will distract your mind from other things. You must come round and see me this afternoon, and I'll try to cheer you up. I shall stay in for you. Don't forget."
Norah hurried away from Shelley Mansions, thinking while she walked home how easily this untoward event in the Haden household might hasten the achievement of her own ambition. Lily would obviously have to do something at once, and it would be nice for her to have a companion with whom she could start her career upon the stage. Norah had not intended to take any definite steps until her nineteenth birthday in March, but she was anxious to show her sympathy with Lily, and it was much kinder, really, to make useful plans for the future than to hang about the stricken flat, getting in everybody's light. If Lily came this afternoon they would be able to discuss ways and means; it would be splendid for Lily to be taken right out of herself; it would be nice to invite her after the funeral to come and stay in Lonsdale Road, so that they could talk over things comfortably without always having to go out in this wet weather; yet such an excellent suggestion would be opposed by the family on the ground that there was no room for a stranger. How intolerable that the existence of so many brothers and sisters should interfere with the claims of friendship! Perhaps she could persuade Dorothy to sleep with Gladys and Marjorie for a week or two. She and Lily should have so much to talk over, and if Dorothy were in the room with them it would be an awful bore. Full of schemes for Lily's benefit, she approached her sister on the subject of giving up her bed.
"Anything more you'd like?" asked Dorothy, indignantly.
"I think," said Norah, "that you are without exception the most selfish girl I ever met in all my life."
Dorothy grunted at this accusation, but she refusedto surrender her bed, and Norah soon gave up talking in general terms about people who were afraid to expose themselves to a little inconvenience for the sake of doing a kind action, because Lily arrived next day with the news that her sister had obtained leave to be "off" for a week and was advising her to do everything she could to get an engagement as soon as possible. There were problems of arrears of rent and unpaid bills from the solution of which it would be advantageous for Lily to escape by going on tour. The few personal possessions of their mother the sisters would divide between them, and the undertaker was to be satisfied at the expense of a fishmonger who, being new to West Kensington, had let Mrs. Haden run an account.
"And your father?" Norah could not help asking; but Lily avoided a reply, and Norah, who had been too well brought up to ask twice, formed her own conclusions.
"Anyway, my dear," she assured her friend, "you can count on me. I hadn't intended to do anything definite until I was nineteen, but of course I'm not going to desert you. So we'll go and interview managers together."
"Doris advises me to try Walter Keal," said Lily. "Dick—her husband—has given me a letter for him which may be useful, he says."
"Who's Walter Keal?"
"Don't you know?" exclaimed Lily. "He sends out all the Vanity shows."
Norah bit her lips in mortification. She hated not to know things and decided to avoid meeting Doris, who as a professional actress of at least a year's standing would be likely to patronize her.
"You see," Lily went on, "he'll be sending out 'Miss Elsie of Chelsea' at the end of December, and if we could get in the chorus we should be all right till June."
"The chorus?" echoed Norah, disdainfully. "I never thought of joining the chorus of a musical comedy."
"It might only be for a few months, and when you'rewith Walter Keal there's always the chance of getting to the Vanity."
"A Vanity girl!" repeated Norah, scornfully. "For everybody to look at!"
Lily told her friend that it was better to be looked at as a Vanity girl than to spend her life looking at other people from a window in West Kensington.
"But I can't sing," Norah objected.
"Sing! Who ever heard of a chorus-girl that could sing?"
The lowly position of a Vanity girl was not proof against the alchemy of Norah's self-esteem; she made up her mind to renounce Pinero and all his works and go into musical comedy.
When the two friends reached the small street off Leicester Square and saw extending up the steps of the building in which the offices of Mr. Walter Keal were situated an endless queue of girls waiting to interview the manager, Norah was discouraged.
"Oh, he has lots of companies," Lily explained. Then she addressed herself to a dirty-faced man with a collar much too large for him who was in charge of the entrance.
"You give me your letter, and it'll be all right."
"But it's for Mr. Keal himself," Lily protested.
"That's all right, my dear; your turn'll come."
The women immediately in front looked round indignantly at Lily, and Norah, who was beginning to feel self-conscious, begged her not to make a fuss. This was advice Lily always found easy to take, and, the introduction from her brother-in-law stowed away in the dirty-faced man's pocket, she and Norah took their places in the queue. Every ten minutes or so a good-looking girl, obviously well pleased with herself, would descend briskly from the glooms above; but mostly at intervals of about thirty seconds depressed women, powdering their noses as nonchalantly as possible, came down more slowly. Foot by foot Norah and Lily, who by now had a trail of womenbehind them, struggled higher up the steps. There was a continuous murmur of sibilant talk punctuated by shrill laughter, and the atmosphere, thickly flavored with cheap scent, perspiration, damp, clothes, and cigarette smoke, grew more oppressive with each step of the ascent. At last they turned the corner of the first landing and saw ahead of them a shorter flight; half-way up this, another landing crowded with girls came into view, the three doors opening on which were inscribed "Walter Keal's Touring Companies" in white paint; a muffled sound of typewriting seemed auspiciously business-like amid this babbling, bedraggled, powdered mass of anxious women. By the central door another dirty-faced man was ushering in the aspirants one at a time.
"We ought to have given my letter to him," said Lily.
"Well, don't go back for it now," Norah begged, looking in dismay at the throng behind.
They must have been waiting over two hours when at last they found themselves face to face with the janitor. A bell tinkled as a bright figure emerged from the door on the left and hurried away down the steps without regarding the envious glances of the unadmitted; immediately afterward the door in front of them opened, and they passed through to the office.
"One at a time," the janitor called; but Norah quickly shut the door behind them, and she and Lily were simultaneously presented for the inspection of Mr. Walter Keal.
The office was furnished with a large roll-top desk, three chairs, and a table littered with papers which a dowdy woman in pince-nez was trying to put in some kind of order. The walls were hung with playbills; the room was heavy with cigar smoke. Mr. Walter Keal, a florid, clean-shaven man with a diamond pin in his cravat, a Malmaison carnation in his buttonhole, and a silk hat on the back of his head, was bending over the desk without paying the least attention to the new-comers. Standing behind him in an attitude that combined deference towardMr. Keal with insolence toward the rest of the world was a young man of Jewish appearance who stared critically at the two girls.
"You don't remember me, Mr. Keal," began Lily, timidly. "I was introduced to you once in the Strand by my brother-in-law, Richard Granville."
"I'm sure you were," interrupted Mr. Keal, curtly; but when he looked up and saw that Lily was pretty he changed his tone. "That's all right; don't be frightened. I've met so many girls in my time. Well, what can I do for you?"
"I had a letter of introduction from my brother-in-law, Mr. Granville," Lily began again.
"Never heard of the gentleman," said Mr. Keal.
Norah, feeling that she and Lily stood once more on an equality, came forward with assurance.
"We thought you were choosing girls for the chorus in 'Miss Elsie of Chelsea.'"
"Full up," the manager snapped.
The Jewish young man bent over and whispered something to his master, who took a long look at the girls.
"However, I might find you two extra places. What experience have you had? None, eh? Can you sing? You think so. Um—yes—all girls think they can sing. Well, I'll give you a chance, but I can't offer more than a guinea a week of seven performances. If you don't like to take that, there are plenty who will and be grateful. It's my Number One company."
Norah did not wait for Lily, but accepted for both of them.
"Are they going to let us have the club in Lisle Street, Fitzmaurice?" the manager turned to inquire of his assistant.
"Yes, Mr. Keal. The club has arranged to lend their concert-room every morning and afternoon this week, but if you want any evening calls we shall have to make other arrangements."
"But —— it all," Mr. Keal exclaimed, "when are we going to get the stage?"
"They won't be able to let us have it till the week before Christmas."
"That's a nice ruddy job," grumbled Mr. Keal. "All right, dears," he said, "go in there and get your contracts." He pointed to the room adjoining, where, amid an infernal rattle of typewriters, Lily and Norah sold their untried talents to Mr. Keal for a guinea a week of seven performances, extra matinées to be paid for at half rate, and a fortnight's salary in lieu of notice to be considered just. When she took up the pen to sign the contract Norah paused.
"You've put your own name, Lily," she said, doubtfully.
"Oh, I can't be bothered to think of a new name. Besides, my own is quite a good one for the stage."
"Yes, but I ought to change mine. I think I shall call myself Dorothy Lonsdale. Do you like that?"
"You've got a sister called Dorothy. Won't she be rather annoyed?"
Norah tried to think of another name, but she was confused by the noise of the typewriters, and at last she ejaculated, impatiently:
"Oh, bother, I must be Dorothy! I've always known it would suit me much better than her. I shouldn't mind if she called herself Norah. Besides, I sha'n't be Dorothy Caffyn, so what does it matter?"
They were told that their contracts would be handed to them at the rehearsal called for to-morrow morning at the Hungarian Artistes' Club, Lisle Street, Leicester Square.
"How easy it is, really," said Norah, when she and Lily were going down-stairs again, past the line of tired women still waiting to be admitted. "Though I thought his language was rather disgusting. Didn't you?"
"I didn't notice it," said Lily. "But you'll have to get used to bad language on the stage."
"I shall never get used to it," Norah vowed, with a disdainful glance at a particularly common-looking girl who, tossing the feathers in her hat like a defiant savage, called out:
"God! Flo, look at Mrs. Walter Keal coming down-stairs."
The girls round her laughed, and Norah hurried past angrily. She had been intending to patronize Lily; after that remark it was not so easy.
Just as they reached the foot of the first flight of steps the dirty-faced janitor bawled over the balustrade, "Mr. Keal can't see any more ladies to-day."
Sighs of disappointment and murmurs of indignation rose from the actresses; then they turned wearily round and prepared to encounter the December rain.
"You'd better come and call for me to-morrow," said Norah, "so that we can go to the rehearsal together. Think of me to-night when I'm trying to explain to father what I've done."
"Will he be very angry?"
"Yes, I expect he will, and though I know how to manage him it's always a nuisance having to argue," said Norah. "You're lucky not to have a father."
Lily looked at her friend quickly and suspiciously.
"I mean you're lucky to be quite on your own," she explained.
The moment Mr. Caffyn came home from the city that evening Norah revealed to him that she had got an engagement in a touring company and reminded him of his promise. As she had expected, he tried to go back on his word, and even brought up the old objection to a daughter of his going on the stage.
"Nobody will know that I'm your daughter," she said. "I shall change my name, of course."
"But people are sure to hear about it," Mr. Caffyn argued.
Norah pulled him up suddenly.
"It's no good going on about it, father. I've got an engagement and I'm going to accept it. If you try to prevent me I shall do something much worse."
Mr. Caffyn's dislike of the stage may not have been as deep as he pretended, or he may have thought that his daughter really intended to do something desperate and that he might be called upon to support her in married life, which would be more expensive than supporting her on the stage. Moreover, she seemed so confident that perhaps he might never have to support her on the stage, and what a delightful solution of her future that would be! After all, she was the eldest of six girls, and six girls rapidly growing up might become too much even for the secretary of the Church of England Purity Society to control successfully.
Mrs. Caffyn melted into tears at the idea of her eldest daughter's earning her own living, and Norah decided to profit by maternal weakness.
"The only thing, mother dear, is that I shall be very poor."
"Darling child!"
"You see, I don't like to ask father to make me a larger allowance than he makes at present."
"Oh no," agreed Mrs. Caffyn, apprehensively. "I beg you won't ask him to do that."
"So my idea was—" Norah began. She paused for a moment to think how she could express herself most tactfully. "Mother, you have a certain amount of money of your own, haven't you?"
"Yes, dear."
"And I suppose it's really you who makes me my allowance of twenty-five pounds a year? What I thought was that perhaps you'd rather give me a lump sum now when it would be more useful than go on paying me an allowance. Another thing is that I should hate to feel I was coming into money when you died, and, of course, if you gave me my money now I shouldn't feel that."
"My dear child, how am I to find any large sum of money now? It's very sweet of you to put it in that way, but you don't understand how difficult these matters are."
"How much money have you got of your own?" asked Norah.
Mrs. Caffyn thought this was rather an improper question; but Norah was looking so very grown up that she did not like to elude the answer as she had been wont to elude many answers of many childish questions through all these years of married life.
"Well, dear," she said, with the air of one who was revealing a dangerous family secret, "I suppose you're old enough to hear these things now. I have three hundred pounds a year of my own—at least, when I say of my own, you mustn't think that means three hundred a year to spend on myself. Your father is very just, and though he helps me as much as he is able, all the money is taken up in household expenses."
"Well, twenty-five pounds a year," said Norah, "at five per cent. is the interest on five hundred pounds."
"Is it, dear?" asked her mother, in a frightened voice.
"If you give me five hundred pounds now you wouldn't have to pay me twenty-five pounds a year. And if you lived for another twenty-five years you'd save one hundred and twenty-five pounds that way."
Mrs. Caffyn looked as if she would soon faint at these rapid calculations.
"How am I to get five hundred pounds?" she asked, hopelessly.
"You must go and see the manager of your bank."
"But Roland is a clerk in my bank," Mrs. Caffyn objected. "And what wouldhesay?"
"Roland!" repeated Norah, with scorn. "You don't suppose Roland knows everything that goes on in the bank?"
"No, I suppose he doesn't," agreed Mrs. Caffyn, wonderingly.
"If you likeI'llgo and see the bank manager," Norah offered. "He took rather a fancy to me, I remember, when he came to supper with us once."
"Norah, how recklessly you talk!" protested Mrs. Caffyn. But Norah was firm and she did not rest until she had persuaded her mother to ask for an interview with the manager, to whom she made herself so charming and with whom she argued so convincingly that in the end she succeeded in obtaining the £500.
"Though what your father will say I don't like to think, dear," said Mrs. Caffyn, as she tremblingly mounted an omnibus to go home.
"I don't see why father should know anything about it, and if he does he can't say anything. It's your money."
"Let's hope he'll never find out," Mrs. Caffyn sighed, though she had little hope really of escaping from detection in what she felt was something perilously like a clever bank robbery—the sort of thing one read about in illustrated magazines.
Norah determined to be very cautious at rehearsals and she advised Lily to be the same.
"Of course, we shall gradually make friends with the other girls, but don't let's be in too much of a hurry, especially as we've got each other. And if you take my advice you'll be very reserved with the men."
Since Norah had found how easy it was to get on the stage her opinion of Mr. Vavasour had sunk, and since she had found how easy it was to get out of love her opinion of men in general had sunk. On the other hand, her opinion of herself as an actress and as a woman had risen proportionately. Meanwhile the rehearsals proceeded as rehearsals do, and the No. I company of "Miss Elsie of Chelsea" was harried from club-room to club-room, from suburban theater to metropolitan theater, until it was ready to charm the city of Manchester on Boxing Night.
On Christmas Eve, the last evening that Norah would spend at home for some time, she decided in an access of honesty to tell Dorothy that she had taken her name for purposes of the stage. Most unreasonably, Dorothy protested loudly against this, and it transpired in the course of the dispute that she had all her life resented being the only one of the family who had not been given two names. Norah's own second name, Charlotte, which was also her mother's, had never struck her before as anything in the nature of an asset, but now with much generosity she offered to lend it to Dorothy, who refused it as scornfully as she could without hurting her mother's feelings.
"Why couldn't you have taken Lina or Florence or Amy or Maud?" Dorothy demanded. These were the second names of the other sisters. "And, anyway, what's the matter with your own name?"
"I don't know," said Norah. "Dorothy Lonsdale struck me as a good combination, and the more I think of it the better I like it."
"Lonsdale," everybody repeated. "Are you going to call yourself Lonsdale?"
"It's the family name," Norah reminded them.
This was quite true; Lonsdale had been the maiden name of Mrs. Caffyn's mother, who, according to a family legend, had been a distant kinswoman of Lord Cleveden. Indeed, before Mr. Caffyn was married he had often used this connection to overcome his father's opposition to a long engagement. When he had bought the house in Lonsdale Road he had liked to think for a while that in a way he was doing something to restore the prestige of a distant collateral branch; the transaction had possessed a flavor of winning back an old estate. Naturally, as he grew older, he ceased to attach the same importance to mere birth, especially when he found that he did not require any self-assertion to get on perfectly well with the bishops who came to consult him about diocesan scandals. Therefore he was inclined to take hiseldest daughter's part and applaud her choice of a stage name.
"But suppose I wanted to go on the stage myself?" Dorothy insisted. "I might want to use my own name."
"Well, so you could," Norah urged. "You could be Miss Dorothy Caffyn. But you won't go on the stage, so what's the good of arguing like that? Anyway, I've signed the contract as Dorothy Lonsdale, so there's nothing to be done.Ican't change."
"I do think it's mean of you," expostulated the real Dorothy, bursting into tears.
Norah would not allow anybody to come and see her off at Euston on Christmas morning, and Mr. Caffyn, who did not at all like the idea of a four-wheeler's waiting outside his house on such a day, helped his daughter's plans by marshaling the whole family for church half an hour earlier than usual, so that the farewells were said indoors. Lily had left the flat a fortnight ago and, having been staying in some Bloomsbury lodgings recommended by her sister, was to meet her friend at the station. At a quarter to eleven, amid the clangor of church bells, the cab of Norah Caffyn turned out of Lonsdale Road into the main street of West Kensington, and at noon on the platform at Euston Miss Lily Haden wished a Merry Christmas to Miss Dorothy Lonsdale.
THE ostriches of northern Patagonia are said to indulge in co-operative nesting: half a dozen hens one after another proceed to lay in a shallow cavity numerous eggs, the incubation of which is left to a male bird. Similarly, for the consummation of a musical comedy half a dozen lyrists, librettists, and composers lay their heads together in a shallow cavity and leave the result of their labor to be given life by a producer. "Miss Elsie of Chelsea," not being an exceptional musical comedy, will not repay a more thorough analysis. The first act developed in a painter's studio; in the second act everybody from the models in the chorus to the millionaire and his daughter whom the painter wanted to marry were transported to Honolulu. It was produced at the Vanity Theater under Mr. John Richards's management in the early autumn of the year 1902, and for many seasons it attracted large audiences all over the civilized world.
During the first fortnight of the tour, a fortnight of unending rain in Manchester, Dorothy, as she must be called henceforth, was inclined to think that life on the stage was not much more exciting than life in West Kensington, and certainly twice as tiring. It was holiday time, with two performances a day for eight days, and only in the second week—or more strictly in the third week, for Boxing Day fell upon a Friday that year—was she able to look about her in the small world where she must spend the next six months of her existence. She soon came to the conclusion that such an environment would not betolerable for longer, and she made up her mind to escape from touring as soon as possible into a London engagement.
While she was still rehearsing in town she had paid one or two visits to the Vanity Theater, partly because it pleased her to hand in a card inscribed, "Miss Dorothy Lonsdale. Mr. Walter Keal's Miss Elsie of Chelsea Co.," but chiefly with the object of studying the demeanor, dress, appearance, and talents of the various members of the Vanity chorus, especially of the show-girls. The result of her observations was a strong belief that she was as graceful, as well able to set off clothes, as beautiful, and as good an actress as any of them. At the same time, she had begun to hear girls in the company talk about "getting across the footlights" and had realized that her own personality's powers of projection were still untested. If at the end of the tour it was brought home to her that with all her qualities "off" she lacked the most important one of all "on," she should immediately retire from the stage forever. The life itself did not attract her, and to spend years growing older and older in the environment of a provincial company seemed to Dorothy wilful self-deception; liberty at such a price would be worse than a comfortable servitude to suburban convention.
When on that wet Christmas morning at Euston she had seen the companions to close contact with whom she was bound for six months—a polychromatic group of crude pink complexions, mauve veils, electric seal, and exaggerated boots, looking in the mass like a shop-window in a second-rate thoroughfare, the sort of shop-window that has bundles of overcoats hanging outside the doorway, which indeed the men resembled—she had felt a sudden revulsion from them all, which those days in Manchester had done nothing to cure.
The first fortnight's bills for board and lodging had already shown Dorothy that existence on a guinea a week was not going to be easy; if she were ever engaged forLondon, she should require money to dress herself well at the beginning of her career, and it was imperative to save every penny she possibly could now in order to preserve intact the £500 she had obtained from her mother. An immediate economy would be effected in their weekly expenses if she and Lily could persuade another girl to share lodgings with them, and Dorothy began to study the ranks of the chorus for a suitable partner. Of course, from a social point of view she would have preferred to live with one of the principals, but the principals had not yet paid any attention to her, and she would not risk making advances first; besides, their standard of living might be too high for one who did not intend to waste money on the provinces. But when she considered her companions of the chorus, the dreadful language many of them used, the outrageous stories they told at the top of their voices, and, worst of all, their cockney accents, Dorothy shrank from extending the enforced intimacy of the dressing-room to her weekly home. This problem had not been solved when on the third Sunday after Christmas the company left Manchester for Birmingham, and by the newly arranged order of traveling Miss Dorothy Lonsdale found herself allotted to share a compartment with Miss Lily Haden, Miss Fay Onslow, and Miss Sylvia Scarlett.
Miss Onslow was unmistakably the senior member of the chorus and had reached the happy period of an actress's life when she has no more need to bother about keeping her reminiscences too nicely in focus. She was, in fact, as even she herself admitted, not far off forty; in a railway train on a wet January afternoon the kindest observer would have assumed that her next landmark was fifty. A month ago Dorothy would have shuddered to find herself on an equality with such a person; but asperous is the astral road, and she had to make the best of Miss Onslow by treating her with at least as much cordiality as she would have shown to a small dressmakerfrom whom she wanted a dress by the end of the week. Gradually, as her new surroundings became familiar, Dorothy had brought herself to call Miss Onslow "Onzie," and though the abbreviation made her gorge rebel as from cod-liver oil, she bravely persevered. Instinctively she knew that this was the only woman in the chorus whose counsel she could trust, the only one who would honestly tell her if she looked better with or without an artificial teardrop. The sum of Onzie's experience was hers for the asking; the middle-aged actress was an academician of grease-paint, serving alike as a warning and an example to the student; while her knowledge of the various towns in which the company had dates was evidently profound. Already she had provided Dorothy with an address for Birmingham; but these rooms to be enjoyed without the prickings of extravagance required a third partner. Dorothy, anxious to profit still further by Onzie's experience, suggested that she should join Lily and herself; but that very experience for which the novice was greedy made the old professional shake her head:
"No, thank you, ducky," she said. "I always live alone nowadays. You see, I've got my own little peculiarities. Besides, when my best boy comes down to see me he likes to see me alone. When I was with the 'Geisha' crowd last year I obliged one of the girls by sharing rooms with her in Middlesbrough, and as luck would have it George selected Middlesbrough to pay me a little visit. He was really very aggravated indeed, and he said to me, 'Fay,' he said, 'whatever's the use of me coming all the way up to Middlesbrough if I can't ever see you?' So I had to tell the other girl—Lexie Sharp her name was—that the arrangement didn't work, and what do you think she did? Well, if you'll believe me, she went about telling everybody that I was jealous of her over George! Luckily for me she was a girl who was very well known for her tongue and nobody paid anyattention to her; still, it was uncomfortable for me, though I deserved it for breaking one of my rules. Who knows? George may come up to Birmingham. It's just the sort of place he would select for a visit, because, being a London fellow, he feels out of it in too small a town. Of course, he has nothing to do with the stage himself. Oh dear me, no, nothing whatever! He lives at Tulse Hill with two aunts, one of which has a growth in the throat and may go off at any moment, which prevents George working, as she's so particular about having him always close at hand. Well, any one ought to understand an aunt's feelings—I'm sure I can—but some of the girls last year used to criticize him something dreadful behind my back, until really I was glad to say good-by to them all. But this seems a much nicer crowd we're in now."
"We've only been in it a fortnight," said Miss Scarlett from the other corner of the carriage.
Dorothy looked at the speaker curiously. She was a girl who had joined the company for the last three rehearsals and during this first fortnight in Manchester had kept herself apart. Lily had spoken to her once or twice, but Dorothy, who was afraid there might be an unpleasant reason for such deliberate seclusion, had begged Lily not to be in too great a hurry to make friends with her. During Onzie's monologue Miss Scarlett had apparently been unconscious of what was happening in the compartment, and from the corner opposite Lily she had been staring out at the landscape, that was scarred and grimed and misshapen by industry like the hands of the toilers who lived in it. She was different from all the other girls, Dorothy was thinking—rather foreign-looking with her deep, brown, slanted eyes and mass of untidy brown hair, her wide nose, high cheek-bones, and distinctly ugly mouth, the underlip of which only just escaped protruding. She was dressed, too, in a style that was quite unlike that of anybody else and without any regard for the prevailing fashion. Dorothy remembered with aflickering smile that when she had first seen her at rehearsals she had thought she was one of the Hungarian artistes who had come to see why her club-room was being used by a theatrical company. Now when in a deep voice she suddenly turned round and commented on Fay Onslow's last remark Dorothy was astonished to hear that she spoke the same kind of English as herself; she indeed, in her surprise, almost gave utterance aloud to her thought that this gipsy creature was a lady.
"Hell! I've left my cigarettes behind," the lady ejaculated.
"There now, what a nuisance for you!" said the good-natured Onzie. "Have one of mine, dear."
"Which are they? Turks or Virgins?" asked Miss Scarlett, leaning over and screwing up her eyes to see what Onzie was offering.
Dorothy corrected her opinion and decided that Miss Scarlett had been a lady once upon a time; yet even while she was condemning her vulgarity she was thinking that her ladyhood was not so far away in the past. Her speech and manner had the assurance of age, but she could not be much more than twenty-two or twenty-three, perhaps not even so much as that.
Presently the train stopped for a dreary Sunday wait, and while some of the gentlemen of the company, with a view to future favors, were scuttling about the platform in search of tea for the ladies from whom they would demand them, Dorothy took this opportunity of asking Lily what she thought about inviting Sylvia Scarlett to share their rooms at Birmingham.
"She seems quite different from the other girls," Dorothy explained. "I mean, she talked as if she was a lady. Don't you think so? And really, you know, we can't afford these rooms unless we do get a third person."
Lily was quite ready to accept Miss Scarlett's company, though, as Dorothy thought impatiently, she would have been equally willing to accept the dresser's, if Dorothyhad thought of inviting the dresser to share rooms with them.
"Do you want a cup of tea, Lil?" a young man came along and asked at this moment. When Lily declared that she should love a cup of tea, he hurried off toward the buffet.
"Do you know him?" asked Dorothy, in surprise.
"Only since we joined the company."
"But he's one of the chorus-boys, isn't he?"
"Yes."
"And you let him call you Lily already?" Dorothy hoped it was no worse than Lily; it had sounded dreadfully like Lil.
"Why shouldn't I?"
"Of course, it's your own business," said Dorothy, turning coldly away to eye Sylvia Scarlett, who was striding up and down the platform with both hands in the pockets of a frieze overcoat and looking so independent of everybody in the world that she felt shy of interrupting her. At that moment Lily was carried off by the chorus-boy for a cup of tea, which, had it been arsenic, Dorothy could not have declined more indignantly, and she found herself alone upon the platform and exposed to the glances of the comedian, a debased sport from the famous Vanity comedian whose mannerisms he had reproduced in the provinces as well as he was able for fifteen years, and would probably continue to reproduce for as many more. A small and ugly man, Joe Wiltshire had become so hardened to women's snubs that by sheer recklessness and indiscrimination he managed to fill his bag. If he was weak with rocketing pheasants he never hesitated to pot a sitting rabbit; in other words, he made love to every woman he met and found 5 per cent. of them amenable. Now with a view to impressing the prettiest girl in the chorus he was being funny with two bottles of stout and a corkscrew; but though he managed to cheer up the porter on duty,he failed to amuse Dorothy, who seized an opportunity of escaping from the performance by attaching herself to Sylvia Scarlett on her return promenade.
"I say," she began, in her best West Kensington manner. "I hope you won't think it awful cheek on my part, but my friend and I—you know, that pretty, fair girl who was in our carriage—would be awfully glad if you'd join us this week in our digs. Awfully nice rooms, but rather expensive for two, though we ought to be able to manage quite reasonably with three. Of course, if you're already fixed—"
"I've never been fixed in my life," said Miss Scarlett, sharply, "and I certainly don't intend to be fixed in Birmingham."
"No, I say, shut up; don't laugh. Have you been on the stage long?"
"Two weeks and two days."
"Oh, I say, really, then this is your first shop?"
Dorothy felt more at ease now that she knew she had not got to deal with a veteran of the profession; this new girl was obviously not one to be patronized, but there was now no reason to anticipate patronage on her side. With the removal of this danger Dorothy became more natural in her manner, and by the time the line was cleared for the theatrical special to proceed the bargain had been struck by which Sylvia Scarlett would share rooms with herself and Lily.
"I say, I hope you don't mind my making personal remarks," said Dorothy, "but you're looking most awfully tired."
She had intended this remark to effect a breach in the other girl's reserve, but it apparently had the contrary effect of raising the barrier still higher. She drew back slightly huffed, and Sylvia, leaning over, with a quick expansive gesture put a hand on her arm and told her not to be offended if she was not being confidential, but that she was enjoying the luxury of complete privacyafter a period of disagreeable publicity. Dorothy would have preferred more exact information; even in childhood she had always felt inclined to cry when people had asked her riddles, and Roland's favorite way of teasing her had been to invent riddles without answers; however, she comforted herself with the reflection that Sylvia really was a lady, which at any rate ought to be a guaranty that the answer to that conundrum was not vulgar like the dreadful answers to dressing-room conundrums.
The train dragged on through the wet January dusk and into the dripping night of blurred lamps and distant furnaces, of ghostly Sunday travelers and long platforms like stagnant streams. Conversation in the compartment hung heavily upon the air like the moist breath of the tired women in the four corners of it. Dorothy, whose touchstone of behavior was self-respect, asked herself why Fay Onslow should mind living with other girls, such intimate revelations of her private habits was she making in the course of this journey. If a woman as fat as she was did not feel the loss of her dignity in searching for a flea like that, why should she want to live alone? And that was by no means the least dignified thing she had done. This ostentatious disregard of life's little decencies was certainly a regrettable side of theatrical life. However, the fact that she herself had gone on the stage prevented Dorothy from betraying her disapproval of such behavior. It would have been contrary to her method of dealing with life to admit that she could even expose herself to anything unseemly, still less that she might succumb to it. From the moment that Dorothy went on the stage the profession became above criticism, and the sense of collective propriety that she inherited as her father's daughter was no longer capable of being shocked. She crucified her fastidiousness; she was persecutor and martyr at the same time and derived an equal consciousness of superiority from either aspect of herself; in fact, the only thing in life that seriously troubledDorothy was a minute bleb of skin on her left eyelid, and even that could be removed by a beauty doctor.
It was raining harder than ever when the train reached Birmingham, and the girls decided to indulge in the luxury of a cab. The rooms looked as if they really would be very comfortable, and the landlady insisted proudly that managers had been known to stay in them, not mere business managers whose only aim in life seemed to be making fusses about the starching of their white shirts, but acting managers, one of whom had even brought his children, which, as she pointed out, proved that the lodgings were homely.
Sylvia was some time getting ready for supper, and Dorothy, thinking it would not be nice to begin without her, made Lily wait quite half an hour. When Sylvia did come down at last, Dorothy was nearly sure that she had been crying, and the mystery of her origin once more obtruded itself. Dorothy wished now that she had arranged for Sylvia and herself to share the second room instead of Lily and herself. This strange new girl perplexed her self-assurance, and she proposed that if the new association prospered—they drank to its success in the pale India ale which the landlady provided—they should take it week about to sleep in the single room. Dorothy tried to extract confidences from Sylvia by confiding in her the history of Lily as far as she knew it; when that did not elicit anything she offered a gilded version of her own prior circumstances. The following week at Derby she shared the bedroom with Sylvia and went so far as to give her an almost truthful account of the Wilfred Curlew business, but nothing could she get from Sylvia in return. Moreover, there was nothing in her belongings that afforded a clue to her history; there was not a single photograph or initialed ornament; all her possessions were left lying about the room, and her trunk was never locked; and when every morning the girls called at the stage door for their correspondence she onlyin the company never received a letter, nor even bothered to look if there was one waiting for her in the rack. But if Sylvia was mute about the past she was not at all reserved about the present. There was nobody like her for seizing upon the eccentricities of the various members of the company to make merry with, and if sometimes Dorothy felt that she went too far in laughing at herself, she could not be angry because she used to laugh as much, indeed more, at Lily. She was a match, too, for any landlady; and gradually, as the association begun at Birmingham hardened into permanency, Dorothy and Lily left the entire management of their weekly home to Sylvia: who had a delightful capacity for keeping the weekly bills reasonable without ever seeming to be economical.
Dorothy was too firmly convinced of the reality of her own beauty to be an idealist, but if in after life any portion of her early experience on the stage seemed to her worthy of idealization these first weeks with Sylvia and Lily seemed so. Partly this was due to her discovery that touring was not so unpleasant when she did not have to bother about anything except her own appearance; but chiefly it was due to her growing conviction of ultimate success. There was beginning to be no doubt that even from the chorus of a musical comedy company on tour her personality was getting across the footlights. Even Sylvia, the mercilessly critical Sylvia, had prophesied success for her, and Dorothy's dreams went past to the music of approaching triumphs. Her mind was all a pageant, and the commonplace of touring existence—the aroma of the theater, the flight from the great manufacturing towns on still Sabbath mornings of black frost, the kaleidoscopic mustering of the company at railway stations, the emptiness of new rooms untouched as yet by the transience of the three girls, the garish mirrors hung with velvet that held her beauty, the undulating horsehair sofas, the sea-shells on the mantelpiece, the fire glowing in the grate, the dim gas whenthey came home from the performance, the smell of Cheddar cheese in the little room, the bright gas shining on the three places laid for supper, the petticoats hanging over the bed up-stairs, the oil-cloth in the passages, the noise of the landlady's family in the stuffy kitchen—all these and a hundred more externals of touring existence were in the years to come regarded affectionately as winter is beheld from the radiance of a summer afternoon.
So from Derby "Miss Elsie of Chelsea" went to Leeds, from Leeds to Bradford, from Bradford to Liverpool, from Liverpool to Newcastle. Then from Newcastle the company ascended into Scotland, where genial landladies and cakes and enthusiastic audiences compensated for east winds.
Gradually, under the pressure of Sylvia's teasing, Dorothy allowed herself to make friends with the other girls and to be superficially polite with the men. She was never popular in the company in the way that for different reasons Sylvia and Lily were popular; but perhaps her disdain and conceit were pardoned as tokens of future success, because she was not ostracized as she certainly would have been ostracized without the fascination that favorites of fortune always exert upon the rest of mankind. Besides, people said such spiteful things behind her back that they had to be fairly pleasant to her face. The men in the chorus one after another tried in vain to attract her attention whenever the requirements of the scene gave them an excuse for talking to her. But Dorothy used to respond as if the dialogue could really be heard by the audience, which may have been artistic, but did not allow her admirers much opportunity of cultivating a friendship. Off the stage she would have nothing to do with any of them. The comedian made one or two more attempts to charm her with buffoonery, but she told him that he was even less funny off the stagethan on, upon which he lost his temper and swore she was a stuck-up cow; an alleged lack of humor in Scotland had recently deprived Mr. Wiltshire of some of his best laughs, and he was in no mood to be criticized by a chorus-girl.
"If you speak to me again like that," said Dorothy, primly, "I shall complain to Mr. Warren."
"Wow-wow-wow!" the comedian mimicked.
"Never mind, Joe," said Sylvia, who was standing close by in the wings. "If you manage to break your leg with your next entrance you'll get a laugh, all right."
"You think yourself very funny, don't you?" growled Mr. Wiltshire.
"Yes, but I haven't got to convince a Scotch audience that I am," said Sylvia.
The comedian's cue came before he could retort, and, falling over his feet in a way that would have made a more southerly audience rock with mirth, he took the stage.
"Vulgar little beast!" said Dorothy.
Mr. Wiltshire never relaxed his efforts to charm the people of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, and Aberdeen to laughter, but he gave up trying to amuse Dorothy, and thenceforth devoted himself to girls with a keener sense of humor.
Once when Dorothy had refused to go for a long walk in the country round Aberdeen, the glittering of the granite buildings on a fine March morning tempted her out too late, and she wandered by herself along the sea-shore toward the mouth of the Don until she was able, so windless was the day, so warm the sun against the low sandy cliffs, to sit down on the beach. It happened that Mr. David Bligh, the tenor in "Miss Elsie of Chelsea," passed that way, and, seeing Dorothy, took a seat beside her. She had never intended her reserve with the other men in the company to include David Bligh, and from having felt rather sad at being left behind by Sylvia and Lily she now congratulated herself on her good fortune.
"All alone?" asked the tenor, fluting with his voice, as he always did when he was speaking to a woman.
"All alone," said Dorothy. "Isn't it too bad?"
They discussed loneliness with poetic similes harvested from the sea, upon the horizon of which nothing but a solitary tramp, hull down, was visible. So long as Mr. David Bligh's attention had been devoted to Miss May Seymour, the leading lady, Dorothy had been inclined to think that he was not very good-looking, that he did not possess a very good voice, and that probably he was not quite a gentleman. Now that he was beside her on this lonely beach she was inclined to modify all these judgments in his favor, and when suddenly he burst forth into "Che gelido manino," suiting the action to the word by simultaneously taking hold of her hand, she decided that not merely was his voice rather good, but that it was lovely.
"You really have a lovely voice," she told him.
He shrugged his shoulders, sighed, and with his stick drew some notes of music in the sand.
"I wonder why you never took up opera," she inquired, in tender astonishment.
"What's the good? The British public doesn't want British singers. Oh no," he said, with a glance full of reproach for the indifference of the sky, "I'm not fat enough for opera."
He went up the tonic scale to "la," frightening away some small sea-birds that had just alighted on the gleaming sand by the tide's edge.
"Let me hear your voice," he asked, abruptly.
Dorothy was gratified by this request. She had taken for granted the tenor's interest in her appearance, but that this should extend to her voice seemed to indicate something more profound than a casual attraction. She assured him that she was too shy, but he continued to persuade her, and at last she sang a part of one of the leading lady's songs.
"Yes, it would be worth while taking some trouble with it," he judged. "If you like I'll give you lessons. Have you got a piano in your rooms?"
"We have got a piano this week, as it happens," said Dorothy, "though I should doubt if it had ever been played on. Come to tea this afternoon, and we'll try it."
"You live with that Haden girl, don't you?"
"Do you think she's pretty?" Dorothy asked.
The tenor shrugged his shoulders.
"Oh yes, so-so. I really haven't noticed her much. She dyes her hair, I suppose."
"No, it's natural," said Dorothy, resisting the temptation to insert a qualifying, "I believe."
They discussed the varieties of feminine beauty; when the tenor had managed to convey without direct compliments that Dorothy had every feature a woman ought to have, she was convinced by his good taste that her voice must be out of the ordinary.
"Good gracious! It's past two o'clock," she exclaimed, at last, when her appetite began to assert itself in spite of ozone and flattery. "How time flies!"
"Idine at half past two. We'd better be strolling back."
It was after that hour when they reached Aberdeen, because David Bligh was continually stopping on the desolate roads that led across the low-lying lands between the city and the sea to illustrate with snatches of song many episodes of his adventurous life as an actor in musical comedy. Dorothy might have been bored by all this talk about himself if he had not made it so clear that he really did admire her; as it was, she assented warmly when he murmured, outside her lodgings:
"How quickly one can make friends sometimes!"
How quickly, indeed, when a man will show his admiration with his eyes and a woman with her ears.
The others had not returned from their expedition along Deeside when tea was finished, so Dorothy and the tenortook down the photographs and china ornaments from the top of the piano, and presently an unfamiliar sound brought in Mrs. Maclachlan, the landlady, to say that the piano had not been used since her eldest daughter died ten years ago, and that she would prefer that it was not used now. This was the kind of occasion on which Dorothy missed Sylvia, who would have known how to deal with the old woman; but David Bligh, without heeding her protests, continued to strum. Mrs. Maclachlan at once put the bass clef out of action by sitting down upon the notes, where, with arms akimbo, she maintained her position and poured forth a torrent of unintelligible Scots labials. Dorothy, horrified at the idea of a brawl with a woman who, even if she did let rooms, obviously belonged to the servant class, begged the actor not to play any more. In the end he agreed to resign from the contest with Mrs. Maclachlan on condition that Dorothy would try her voice on the piano in his rooms, where he was so encouraging about its quality that she gave herself up to serious study, one result of which was that henceforth she always had the second bedroom to herself, because her voice seemed to require most exercise when Sylvia and Lily required most sleep. The other girls in the company showed no inclination to believe that Dorothy's friendship with David Bligh was founded upon his skill in voice-production and they used to declare with conscious virtue that such singing-lessons were merely an excuse for making love.
"Be careful, dear, with Bligh," Fay Onslow warned Dorothy. "He's known all over the road for the way he treats girls. Look at May Seymour! Really, I'm quite sorry for the poor thing. I'm sure she's beginning to look her age."
This was good news about May Seymour, who had ignored her when she joined the company; but though in other respects the leading lady's fate might serve as a warning, Dorothy was much too secure of herself toneed any advice about David Bligh. To be sure, he had several times seized the opportunity of examining his pupil's throat to kiss her, but she had accepted the kisses with no more sense of their reality than if they had been a doctor's bill, which in a way they were. However, Dorothy was not accustomed to let herself be over-charged, and these kisses were the only honorarium Mr. Bligh ever got. He was so much piqued by her indifference that he mistook for a grand passion the mortification set up by his failure to get her hopelessly in love with him, and he made such a complete fool of himself over Dorothy that the girls of the company were more annoyed than ever, and from having at first been charitably anxious about her virtue they now became equally severe upon her cruelty.
"The poor boy's getting quite thin," Fay Onslow declared. "You really oughtn't to treat him like that. It's beginning to show in his acting."
Dorothy consulted Sylvia about David Bligh's decline, not because she cared whether he was declining or not, but because it was an excuse to talk about herself.
"Serve him right," said Sylvia.
"But I shouldn't like to think that he was really suffering on my account."
"Lily and I are the only people who really suffer," said Sylvia.
"What do you mean?"
"My dear Dorothy,wehave to listen to the practising."
"You don't really mind my practising, do you?"
"I get rather bored with it sometimes."
"Yes, I suppose it is rather boring sometimes."
Dorothy decided that it was also rather boring of Sylvia to switch the topic from her effect on David Bligh to the slight annoyance her practising might sometimes cause her friends. However, she forgave her by remembering that Sylvia had not the same inducement as herself to study singing.
Meanwhile, Dorothy's occupation of the leading man left Lily free to develop her deplorable taste for chorus-boys, and Dorothy found that her own habit of practising scales in the morning and going out for walks with David Bligh in the afternoon had resulted in continuous tea-parties at their rooms, to which, whenever she wanted to stay at home in the afternoon, she was most unfairly exposed. She might have put up with Lily's behavior for the rest of the tour if at last a moment had not come when it inconvenienced her personally. At Nottingham, which the company reached in mid-April, the weather was so fine that Dorothy accepted an invitation from an admirer in the front of the house to go for a picnic on the river Trent. Until now she had discouraged all introductions effected by the footlights, and she often marveled to Sylvia at the way other girls accepted invitations to private houses without knowing anything about their hosts. Perhaps she was already beginning to feel that David Bligh had taught her all he knew about voice-production, or perhaps the exceptionally smart automobile grumbling outside the stage-door struck her as a proper credential, or perhaps these April airs were irresistible.
"Really, you know, Sylvia," she said, "I think it would be rather fun to go. But I'm shocked at myself for suddenly breaking my rules like this. I wonder why I am breaking them. It must be the spring."
"The what?" repeated Sylvia.
"The spring," said Dorothy, hoping she did not look as affected as she felt.
"If you had said the springs," said Sylvia, "I would have agreed with you."
The owner of the car was the spoiled son of a rich lace manufacturer, and, according to the stage-door keeper, famous in Nottingham for his entertainment of actresses. What seemed more important to Dorothy was that he had just arrived from Cambridge for the Easter vacation, which decided her to accept his hospitality.
"You'll bring two friends?" suggested the young man.
"I'll bring the two girls with whom I share rooms."
"Topping!" he ejaculated, and with a sympathetic tootle of satisfaction the champing car leaped forward into the night.
"You can't come to-morrow?" gasped Dorothy, when with much graciousness she had advised Lily of the treat in store for her.
"No; I've promised to go with Tom to Sherwood Forest."
"Never mind, Maid Marian," said Sylvia. "We shall get along without you. If you see the ghost of my namesake Will in the greenwood, give him my love."
Dorothy was too angry to speak, and her resentment against Lily was increased next morning when the big car arrived with three young men, one of whom would have to spend an acrobatic day balancing himself on tête-à-têtes. Nor was the picnic a great success; early in the afternoon it came on to rain, and anything more dreary than the appearance of the river Trent was unimaginable.
"Never mind," said the host, "you'll have to come up to Cambridge; we'll entertain you properly there."
Apart from the rain which spoiled her hat, and the absence of Lily which ruined any intimate conversation about herself, Dorothy was chiefly upset by the contemptuous way in which these young Cambridge men referred to the leading man.
"Why on earth do managers dress actors up in yachting costume?" asked one of them. "I never saw such an ass as that man looked—David Blighter or whatever he calls himself."
Dorothy could see Sylvia checking an impulse not to accentuate her discomfiture by announcing her friendship with the despised tenor; but she felt sufficiently humiliated without that, and when they got back to their rooms sheimplored Sylvia to speak to Lily on the subject of being too friendly with the men in the company.
"It makes us all so cheap," Dorothy pointed out. "Of course, we're on tour and not likely to meet many friends who know us in London. Still, it is unpleasant. You heard the way those boys talked about David? What would they have said to Tom Hewitt? Besides, I get worried about Lily. Sheisvery weak and she has been badly brought up. I'm awfully fond of her, as you know, and I'd do anything for her; but really I cannot stand that Hewitt creature, and I don't see why Lily should force him upon us."
"I think it's rather foolish of her myself," agreed Sylvia. "At the same time, I'm afraid that with Lily it's inevitable."
"Yes, but she lets him make love to her," protested Dorothy. "She doesn't care a bit about him, really, but she's too lazy to say 'no'. I came down the other day to find her sitting on his lap! Well, I think that's disgusting.Youdon't sit on people's laps;Idon't sit on people's laps. Why should she? I know perfectly well what it is to be in love; I've been in love lots of times. I don't want you to think I'm setting out to make myself seem better than I am. As I told you, the only reason I went on the stage was because I couldn't marry the man I loved. So who more likely to have sympathy with people in love than myself? What I object to is playing about with boys of the company. Look at them! The most awful set of bounders imaginable. It's so bad for you and me to have them coming in and out of our rooms at all hours. That Hewitt creature actually proposed to come back to supper the other night. However, I told Lily that if he did I should go to a hotel. After all, we are a little different from the other girls of the company."
"I wonder if we are?" Sylvia queried.
"Of course we are," said Dorothy. "You surely don't consider yourself on a level with Fay Onslow? Or with Sadie Moore and Clarice Beauchamp? Those awful girls!"
"I think we're all about the same," said Sylvia. "Some of us drop our aitches, some of us our p's and q's, some of us sing flat and the others sing sharp; but alas! my dear Dorothy, we all look very much alike when we're waiting for the train on Sunday morning."
"I sing perfectly in tune," said Dorothy, coldly.
"Please don't snub, me, Dorothy," Sylvia begged. "I can hardly bear it."
"There's no need for you to be sarcastic; you must admit I'm right about Lily."
Sylvia suddenly produced an eye-glass and, fixing it in her eye, stared mockingly at Dorothy.
"What about David?" she asked.
"You can't compare me with Lily."
"No, but I might compare David with Tom," she said, letting the eye-glass drop in a way that Dorothy found extremely irritating.
After their host's remarks about the tenor Dorothy felt she could not argue the point farther, and now in addition to her anger against Lily she began to hate her singing-master. However, Sylvia must have felt that she was right and have spoken to Lily, because the following week at Leicester Lily, with most unwonted energy, attacked her on the subject:
"I don't know why you should grumble to Sylvia about me. I don't grumble to her about you. When have I ever grumbled about your practising? You say the only reason you let yourself get talked about with David Bligh is because he's useful to you. You say he's helping you with your voice. Well, Tom helps me with my bag. What's the difference? It's only since you were asked out by those men who had a car that you suddenly discovered how impossible Tom was and began laughing at his waistcoats. I didn't laugh atCyril Vavasour's waistcoat, which was more extraordinary than Tom's."
"I've never grumbled about Tom's carrying your bag," Dorothy explained, patiently. "What I said to Sylvia was that I didn't think you ought to let him kiss you. I don't think it's dignified."
"Well, as long as he doesn't want to kiss you, I don't see what you've got to complain about."
The bare notion of Tom's wanting to kiss her was so unpleasant to Dorothy that she had to withdraw from the conversation. Thenceforth the breach between her and Lily began to widen; in fact, if it had not been for Sylvia she would have told Lily that she could not share rooms with her any longer. She was afraid, however, that Sylvia might be so sorry for Lily that she would find herself left alone, which would put her in an undignified position, because the other girls might say that it was because she wanted to carry on, as they would vulgarly express it, with Bligh; besides, living alone was too expensive.
Since Nottingham, Dorothy had been criticizing the tenor almost as sharply as she criticized Tom Hewitt, and she was in no mood to encourage the idea that there was anything between him and her; all her lessons now were merely repetitions of what he had taught her already, and it became obvious to Dorothy that he was what he was in the profession simply because he was not good enough to be anything better. He had so often bragged to her about his success with other girls that he deserved to suffer on her account, and she felt quite like Nemesis when soon after this, while they were walking in the town of Leicester, she told him that this was to be their last walk together.
"Don't stand still in that theatrical way," she commanded. "Everybody's looking at you."
The kidney-stones of the Leicester streets had been hurting her feet, and she was in no mood for mercy.
"So this is the end," fluted David Bligh, with such emotion that the top note narrowly escaped being falsetto. "After all these weeks you're going to throw me away like an old chocolate-box."
He swished his cane with such demonstrative violence that, without seeing what he was doing, he cut a passer-by hard on the knuckle and thereby provoked a scene of humble apologies that made Dorothy more furious than ever.
"At least you might not make me look a fool in a public thoroughfare," she told him.
"I'm awfully sorry, Dolly. I didn't know what I was doing for the moment."
"Don't call me Dolly," she said. "You know how I hate abbreviations."
"I don't seem to be able to do anything right this morning."
"Look at the ridiculous walk you've brought me! Nothing but cobble-stones, and passers-by bumping into one, and now we're getting down among the factories. You know how I hate being stared at."
"You didn't mind being stared at in Nottingham the week before last."
"Oh God! aren't you impossible!" cried Dorothy, herself now dramatically turning right round and leaving him undecided whether to follow her or retire in the opposite direction.
Half a dozen factory-girls, arm in arm, who, with the horrible quickness of their class for anything that causes discomfort to other people, had noticed the quarrel, began to shout after Dorothy that her little boy was crying for his mother; while she, in torments of rage and humiliation, and of hatred for the man who was the cause of them, hurried uphill toward a more civilized quarter of the town. Five minutes later the tenor overtook Dorothy and begged pardon for losing her like that; he explained that, having got involved in a crowd of factory-girls,he could not hurry without making himself more ridiculous.