You’ve altered so much since I saw you! It was odds against my recognizing you at all,” declared Cora, beaming forth into conversation before Christian had fairly grasped the significance of her identity.
“I should never have believed they would make such an Englishman out of you, in just these few months. Let’s see—it was October, wasn’t it? Yes, of course—the First.” She showed her beautiful teeth in a flash of gaiety. “The pheasants weren’t the only ones that got hit that day. But bygones are bygones.... And how do you like London? How do you find it compares with Paris? I always maintain that there’s more real life here, if you know where to look for it.... But I am afraid you’re not glad to see me.”
“There you are wrong. I am glad to see you,” Christian replied, with deliberation. He made his words good by thrusting his plate back upon the table and shaking her gloved hand. There was a frank smile in his eyes.
“Get my glass filled again,” she suggested—“and-your own too—and let’s get out of the way. These people push as if they had had nothing to eat since Christmas. Of all the hogs in evening clothes, the stage-supper hog is the worst. Well, and how have you been, all this time?”
They had moved across the stage to the entrance, and paused near it in a little nook of momentary isolation. Christian made conventional answer to her query, and to other remarks of hers calling for no earnest attention, the while he concentrated his thoughts upon the fact that they were actually standing here together, talking like old friends.
It was sufficiently surprising, this fact, but even more remarkable was the satisfaction he himself was getting from it. There was no room for doubt; he really enjoyed being with her. There was no special need to concern himself with what she was saying. She hardly paused for replies, and seemed not to mind in the least the automatic character of the few which came to her. He had only to smile a little, and nod, and let his eyes glow pleasurably, and she went blithely on. The perception came suddenly to him that he had been sorry also for her. Indeed, now that he reflected upon it, had not hers been the most cruel misfortune of all? The memory of the drawn, agonized mask of a face she had shown, over the tea-table in the conservatory at Caermere, rose in his mind’s vision. He looked up at the strips of canvas and lamps above, with half-closed eyes, recalling in reverie the details of this suffering face; then he turned abruptly to confront her, and observe afresh the happy contrast she presented to-night.
Cora was looking away for the instant, and apparently conveying by lifted eyebrows and shakes of the head a message of some sort to some person on the bustling stage unknown to him. He glanced instinctively in the direction of her signal, but gained no information—and indeed realized at once that he was not in search of any. Of course, she knew everybody here, and would be exchanging nods and smiles of recognition all the evening. It occurred to him to wonder if her husband, that Captain Edward of unpleasant memory, was on the stage, but he had the power to put the thought promptly out of his mind. It was only Cora that he was interested in, and that he wanted to talk with. And here she was, once more looking into his face, and restoring by her smile his almost jocund pleasure in the situation.
He still maintained the r?le of listener, but it grew increasingly clear to him that when his turn came he would have a good deal to say, and that he would say it well. He had never spoken on familiar terms with an actress before—and the experience put him wonderfully at his ease. He felt that he could say things to her; already he delighted in the assurance of her receptivity, her immunity from starched nonsense, her genial and comforting good fellowship. As he continued to look at her, and to smile, he remembered what people always said, or rather took for granted, about ladies on the stage. The consciousness shaped itself within him that she offered a timely and felicitous compromise—a sort of bridge between those formal, “gun-metal” women of society whom he desired never to see again, and those hapless, unblest creatures of the Empire.
Presently she took his arm, and they moved round to the stalls in front, and found seats a little apart from any one else. A large number of young ladies, in white or light-hued evening dresses, were seated about in the rows before them, and Cora pointed out this one and that among them to Christian. “That is Dolly Montressor—the dancer, you know—her photos are all the rage just now. The girl in pink, over there—just turning round—she is the one who sued young Concannon for breach of promise. You must remember. Her lawyers put the bailiffs in for what she owed them, after they’d taken everything the jury gave her, and she dressed the bailiffs in livery and had them wait at the table at a big supper she gave. The little thicknosed dark man there—next but one to her—he drew a check for the supper and the bailiffs too. You see the small, thin girl with the tomato-colored hair—she didn’t bring her suit into court—one isn’t fox-headed for nothing. She settled outside at the last minute—the Lord Carmody case, you know—and no one’s ever heard a whisper of any supper she ever gave. It isn’t at all her line. She puts it all into South Africans; they say she’s good for thirty thousand pounds, if she’s got a penny. It isn’t bad, you know, on a salary of six quid, and only the pantomime season at that. Oh, there’s Peggy Wiltshire—just in the doorway. She’s the most remarkable woman in England. How old would you think she was? Forty? Why, my dear man, she was billed as a star in the old original Black Crook—just about the time I was born. She can’t be a minute under sixty. But look at her—the neck and shoulders of a girl! Isn’t it amazing! Why, she was knocking about town when your father was a youngster—and here she is still going strong.”
The tables were being cleared from the stage, and the fringe of gentlemen who remained hungry and thirsty was retiring slowly and with palpable reluctance toward the wings. Some sad-faced musicians emerged wearily from an unsuspected cave beneath the footlights, and exhibited their violins and flutes to the general gaze with an air of profound dejection. Their fiddle strings began to whine at one another, in a perfunctory and bad-tempered groping about for something they were expected to have in common. A stout man on the stage vigorously superintended the removal of the last table, and warned off with a comprehensive gesture the lingering remnant of unsated raveners; then, turning, he lifted his hand. On the instant, some score and more of the young ladies in white and pale pinks and blues and lavenders rose from their front stalls, and moved toward the stage door at the left. They pressed forward like a flock of sheep—and with faces as listlessly vacant as any pasture could afford. Christian observed their mechanical exit with a curling lip.
“If these are the renowned beauties, whose fascinations turn the heads of all the young men about town,” he confided to his companion, “then it says extremely little for the quality of what is inside those heads.”
“Yes, isn’t it extraordinary!” she mused at him, eyeing the bevy of celebrities with a ruminating glance. “This must be somewhere near the sixth or seventh lot of ’em that even I’ve seen passing through the turnstile, as you might say. Where do they all come from?—and good heavens! where do they all go to? It’s a procession that never stops, you know. You’d think there was a policeman, keeping it moving. You have these girls here—well, they’re the queens, just for the minute. They own the earth. Nothing in the world is too good for them. Very well: just behind them are some other girls, a few years younger. Goodness knows where they were to-night—in the back ranks of the ballets, perhaps, or doing their little turn at the Paragon or the Canterbury, or doing nothing at all—nothing but keeping their toes pointed in this direction. And they are treading close on the heels of these queens you see here; and behind them are girls of sixteen or so, and behind them the little chits of ten and twelve—and they’re all pushing along—and in time each lot gets in front, out under the limelight, and has its little year on the throne—and then gets shoved off to make room for the next. You might have seen two-thirds of these men here ten years ago. But not the women. Oh, no! Only here and there one—an old stager like Polly Wiltshire—or a middle-aged stager like myself. But we’re merely salt to the porridge.”
“But do you not wish to dance?” he asked her. The orchestra had begun a waltz, and the young ladies from the front stalls, each now attached to a stiffly gyrating male figure, were circling about on the stage, with a floating, wave-like swing of their full skirts which revealed to those below in the stalls rhythmic glimpses of whisking feet and trim black ankles.
“I will dance with you with pleasure,” she replied, promptly.
“Unfortunately”—he began with confusion—“it is ridiculous of me, but I never learned.”
“Oh, then, we will sit here and talk,” she insisted. “I truly don’t want to dance. It’s ever so much cooler and more comfortable here. One has to come to these things, you know—you have to show yourself or you’re like the man who fell out of the balloon—simply not in it. But they’re all alike—all deadly stupid unless you’re young and want to kick your legs about—or unless you find some one you’re particularly glad to see.”
Christian did not seek to evade the implication of the genial glance with which she pointed this last remark. “Yes, it is good of you to stay here with me,” he declared. “Except you and my friend who brought me here—I thought I saw him dancing a moment ago—I don’t know a soul. I have been saying to-day,” he continued, settling down in his seat toward her, “that I make friends badly—I remain here in England almost a stranger.”
“Why, I thought you went everywhere. I know I’m forever seeing your name in the ‘Morning Post.’ You spell it Tower, I notice.”
“Oh, yes, I have been going everywhere—but going as one goes alone through a gallery of pictures. I do not bring out any friends with me.”
She stole a swift glance at him, as she fanned herself. “You surprise me,” she commented. “I should have thought everybody would be running after you.”
“Do they? I am not conscious of it.” He spoke wearily. “If they do, it does not interest me. They are not my kind of people. They take no hold whatever upon my sympathy. They make no appeal to the imagination.”
“You could hardly say that about those ladies’ skirts up there,” she jocosely remarked. “I had no idea silk petticoats flapped so.”
He was not to be diverted from his theme. “It is very funny about me,” he went on. “I seem to make no friends among men, of my own age or any other. Of course there are two or three exceptions—but no more. And as for the majority of women, they attract me still less. Yet when, once in a great while, I do meet some one who really interests me, it is always a woman. These few women whom I have in mind—oh, I could count them on the fingers of one hand—they make a much deeper and more lasting impression on me than any man can make.”
“I believe that frequently happens,” she put in lightly. She did not seem to him to be following his thread of reasoning with conspicuous closeness, but her pleasant smile reassured him.
“I think I am most readily moved on the side of my compassion,” he continued, intent upon the development of his self-analysis. “If I am sorry for the people, it is easier for me to like them—that is, if they are young and pretty women.”
Cora laughed aloud at this, then lapsed abruptly into thoughtfulness. “How do you mean?” she asked.
“To-night I went to the place of the—the promenade—the Empire, is it not? And the sight of the young women there—it terribly affected me. I wanted to shout out that they were all my sisters—that I would protect them all—that they should never be forced by poverty and want to face that miserable humiliation again.” She looked at him, her lips parted over the beautiful teeth, a certain blankness of non-comprehension in the beautiful eyes. As she slowly grasped the drift of his words, the eyes and lips joined in a reserved and baffling smile. “You’re a nice boy,” she decided, “but you’re tremendously young. Those girls are lazy, greedy, good-for-nothing hussies. They wouldn’t do honest work for a living if it was brought to them on a silver salver. They haven’t an idea in their empty painted heads except to wheedle or steal money from drunken fools. They’re nothing but—what d’ye call ’em?—parasites. I’d put ’em all on the treadmill, if I had my way.”
Christian sat up a little, and she was alert in noting the signs of disaffection on his mobile face. “Nevertheless, there is a great sorrow and a great shame in it all,” he said, gravely.
“Oh, that I admit,” she declared, making busy work with her fan. “Of course! Perhaps I spoke more sharply than I meant. Every one is sorry for the poor creatures—but—but I confess I’m sorrier still for the girls who have to work like slaves for the barest necessities of life. Why, my dressmaker’s girls, two of ’em—poor little half-starved sisters who may come at nine or ten o’clock at night to deliver things, or try something on—they get twenty-five shillings a week between them. That’s what gets on my nerve.”
He preserved silence for a time, then suddenly sat upright and faced her. A new light shone in his eyes. “I am the dullest person on earth,” he protested. “All this time I have not thought of it. I want to ask you a thousand things about your sister. Did you not know?—She is my oldest friend in England.”
Cora drew a long breath, and held up her fan for a protracted and attentive inspection. “Oh, yes—you mean Frank,” she said, tentatively.
“Frank? Is that her name? She works. She has a machine à écrire—a typewriter it is called. You must tell me about her! Is she very well? And where is she to be found? How shall I go ab............