Upon the conclusion of the phenomenally brief run of The Poisoned Kiss at the Sceptre Theatre, Mrs. Gudrun, who had sustained the heroic r?le of Aldapora “with abounding verve and true histrionic inwardness” (to cull a quotation from the enthusiastic notice which appeared in the Theatrical Piffer), and whose sculpturesque temples throbbed no less with the weight of the dramatic laurels heaped upon them than with the heady quality of the champagne with which those laurels had been liberally drowned—Mrs. Gudrun left the author and the Syndicate, per their Business Representative, exchanging poignant personalities over a non-existent percentage, and hied her to the Gallic capital for recreation and repose; bearing in her train the leading man, Mr. Leo De Boo, a young actor who had chipped the egg of obscurity in the recent production. De Boo was “a splendid specimen of virile beauty,” according to the Greenroom Rag—all shoulders, legs, nose, and curls, without any perceptible forehead; and Teddy Candelish, most ubiquitous of acting-managers, came within an appreciable distance of being epigrammatic when he termed him “a chronic cad in beautiful boots.” For more exquisite foot-gloves than those De Boo sported were never seen, whoever made and gave credit for them; and De Boo was said to have a different pair for every day in the month and every imaginable change in the weather. “Nearly threw up his part in The Poisoned Kiss,” said Teddy afterwards, at the club, “when he discovered 206that it was to be a sixteenth-century production; took me aside, and told me in confidence afterwards, that if he’d been allowed to play Hermango in gray suède tops with black pearl buttons and patent leather uppers, the piece would have been a colossal monetary, as well as artistic, success.”
“Schwerlich! Who konn bretend to follow de workings of a mind like dot jung man’s,” said Oscar Gormleigh, “vidout de assisdance of de migroscope? Und hof I not known a brima donna degline to go on for Siebel begause she hodd been kifen brown insdead of violet tights? It vas a tam gonsbiracy, she svore py all her kodds! In prown legs she vould groak like von frog mit kvinsy—mit violet she always varble like de nachtigall. De choke of it vas”—the talented stage-director laid a hairy finger archly against his Teutonic nose—“dat voman always groak—not never varble—tights or no tights!”
“De Boo is a rank bounder,” said Candelish decidedly.
“He has pounded from de ranks,” pronounced Gormleigh, “und he vill go on pounding—each pound so motch higher dan de last von, oontil he drop splosh into de kutter akain. He who now oggupies a svell mansion-flat in Biccadilly, ach ja!—he vill end vere he bekan—in de liddle krubby sit-bedding-room over de shabby shop vere dey let out segond hond boogs on hire mit segond hond furnidure.”
Mrs. Gudrun would have been deeply incensed had she heard this unlicensed expression of opinion from one whom she had always kept in his place as a paid underling. For six nights and a matinée she had, in the character of Aldapora, elected to poison herself in the most painful manner rather than incur the loss of De Boo’s affections, and, with the “true histrionic inwardness” so belauded by the Theatrical Piffer, she had identified 207herself with the part. So she took a blazing comet flight to Paris with the actor in her train, and paragraphs announcing their arrival at the Hotel Spitz appeared in the London papers.
“Listen to this, Jane Ann,” said the paternal De Boo, whose name was Boodie—and when I add that for twenty years the worthy father had been employed as one of the principal cutters at Toecaps and Heels, that celebrated firm of West-End bootmakers, it will be understood whence the son obtained his boots. “To think,” Mr. Boodie continued, “that Alfred—our Alfred, who sp’iled every particle of leather he set his knife to, and couldn’t stitch a welt or strap a seam to save his life—should ever have lived to be called a rising genius!”
“The ways of Providence are wonderful, father!” returned the said Alfred’s mother dutifully. Mrs. Boodie was an experienced finisher herself, and had always lamented Alfred’s lack of “turn” in the family direction. “An’, if I was you, I wouldn’t mention that bit in the paper to Aphasia Cutts. She’s dreadful jealous over our Alfred, even now, though he hasn’t bin to see ‘er or wrote for two years. As good as a break off, I should a-regarded it, ’ad I bin in her place. But she’s different to what I was.”
“So are all the gals,” said Mr. Boodie with conviction, bestowing upon his wife a salute flavored with Russia leather and calf.
“Well, I’m sure. Go along, father, do!” said Mrs. Boodie, with a delighted shove.
But of course Aphasia—so christened by an ambitious mother in defiance of the expostulations of a timid curate—had already seen and cried over the paragraph. She had loved Alfred and stood up for him when he was a plain, stupid boy with an unconquerable aversion to work. She had been his champion when he grew up, no longer plain, but as pronounced a loafer as ever. She 208had given up, in exchange for his loutish affections, the love of an honest and hard-working man.
“I can’t ’elp it!” she had said; “you can get on without me, and Alfred can’t, pore chap. His Par calls ’im a waster—I believe ’e’d give ’im the strap if ’e wasn’t six foot ’igh. But I’ve got ’im an opening in the theatrical line, through a friend of mine as does fancy braiding at Buskin’s, the stage shoemaker’s in Covent Garden. It’s only to walk on as one of the Giant’s boy-babies in the Drury Lane panto.—eighteen pence a night and matinées—but his Mar will be thankful. If only ’is legs are long enough for the part——”
They were, and from that hour Alfred had embarked on a career. When entrusted with a line to speak, it was Aphasia who held the grimy slip of paper on which it was written and aided the would-be actor with counsel and advice.
“And ’old up your ’ead, do, as if you was proud of yourself, and don’t bend at the knees; and whether you remember your words or not, throw ’em out from your chest as if you was proud of ’em. An’ move your arms from the shoulder like as if you was swimmin’—don’t crook your elbers like a wooden doll. And throw a bit o’ meanin’ into your eye. You took me to see that Frenchman, Cocklin ’e calls ’imself; as played the chap with the boko ’e wouldn’t let the other chaps make game of.... French or Japanese, they’re both Dutch to me, but I watched Cocklin’s eye, and I watched ’is ’ands, an’ I could foller the story as if it was print, an’ plainer. I’ve went to see an actor since what folks said was a great artis’, and if ’e did talk English, ’is eye was as dumb as a boiled fresh ’addock’s an’ ’s ’ands was like slices of skate. Now say your bit over again.”
And Alfred said it, this time to the satisfaction of his instructress. When he got a real part Aphasia coached him, and rode down from Hammersmith with 209him on the bus, and was waiting for him at the stage-door when he came out, the tears of joy undried on her pale cheeks. And that was the night upon which she first noticed a coldness in the manner of her betrothed.
“An’ now I’m not good enough for him to wipe his boots on,” she sobbed, sitting on her bed in the single room lodging off the roaring, clanging Broadway—“the boots ’is Par cut an’ welted, an’ ’is Mar stitched, an’ I finished. But I won’t stand in ’is light. I’ve my pride, if I am a boot-finisher. I’ll see that Mrs. What’s-her-name face to face, an’ ’ave it out as woman to woman, an’ tell ’er she’s welcome to marry ’im for me.”
And Aphasia dried her poor red eyes and took off Alfred’s betrothal ring—a fifteen-carat gold circlet with three real garnets, bought in the Broadway one blushful, blissful Saturday night—and evicted his photographs from their gorgeous cheap frames, and made a brown-paper parcel of these things, with a yellow leather purse with a blue enamel “A” on it, and tied it up with string.
Perhaps something of her fateful mood was telepathically conveyed to Mr. Leo De Boo at that moment, for he shivered as he sat at the feet of Mrs. Gudrun upon the balcony of a private suite at the Hotel Spitz, and turned up eyes that were large and lustrous at that imperishable image of Beauty, exhaling clouds of fashionable perfume and upborne on billows of chiffon and lace. Mrs. Gudrun, who naturally mistook the spasms of a genuine plebeian British conscience for the pangs of love, lent him her hand—dazzlingly white, astonishingly manicured, jeweled to the knuckles, and polished by the devout kisses of generations of worshipers—and De Boo mumbled it, and tried to be grateful and talk beautifully about his acting. But this bored Mrs. Gudrun, who preferred to talk about her own.
“I have often felt that myself,” she said—“the conviction 210that a crowded audience hung upon my lips and saw only with my eyes, and that I swayed them as with a magic thingumbob, by the power of a magnetic personality.”
“It is a mystery,” said De Boo, passing his long fingers through his clustering curls, “that once in a century or so a man should be born——”
“Or a woman. Marvelous!” agreed Mrs. Gudrun. “Marvelous! the man who runs the Daily Tomahawk said that when I made my first appearance on the stage.”
“Genius is a crown of fire,” said De Boo, who had read this somewhere. “It illuminates the world, yet scorches the wearer to the bone. He——”
“She suffers,” said Mrs. Gudrun, neatly stopping the ball and playing it on her side. “You may bet she suffers. Hasn’t she got the artistic temperament? The amount of worry mine has given me you would never believe. Cluffer, of the Morning Whooper, calls me a ‘consolidated bundle of screaming nerves.’ When I’ve sat down to dinner on the eve of a first night, De Petoburgh—you’ve met the Duke?—has had to hold me in my chair while Bobby Bolsover gave me champagne and Angostura out of the soup-ladle. And I believe I bit a piece out of that. And afterwards—ask ’em both if I wasn’t fairly esquinte.”
“But the possessor of an artistic temperament—such as mine—even though the fairy gift entails the keenest susceptibility to anguish,” quickly continued De Boo, “enjoys unspeakable compensation in the revelation to him alone of a kingdom which others may not enter. Looking upon the high mountains in the blush of dawn, I have shouted aloud with glee——”
“The first time I ever went into a southern Italian orange-grove in full bloom,” acquiesced Mrs. Gudrun, “the Prince of Kursaal Carle Monto, who was with me, 211simply sat down flat. He said Titian ought to have been alive to paint my face and form against that background.... By the way, the first act of that new play, the title of which I’ve forgotten, and which I’ve leased from a scribbling idiot whose name don’t signify, takes place in a blooming orange-grove. I’ve cast you for the leading man’s part, Leo, and I hope you will be properly grateful for the chance, and conquer that nasty habit you have of standing leering at the audience in all my great moments.”
“Dearest lady,” De Boo argued glibly, “does it not increase the dramatic poignancy of such moments if the spectators are enabled to read in the varying expressions pictured on my face the feelings your art inspires?”
But Mrs. Gudrun was inexorable. “They can read ’em in the back of your head if they’re anxious,” said she, “or they can take the direct tip from me. I hope that’s good enough. I don’t see the cherry-bun of running a theater to be scored off by other people, and so you know! And now that’s settled, let us go and have stuffed oysters and roast ices at Noel Peter’s, and see Sarah afterwards in her new tragedy r?le. I’m the only woman she’s really afraid of, you know, and I feel I’m bound to romp in in front of her before long. She says herself that acting like mine cannot be taught in a conservatoire, and that I constitute a complete school in myself. Have you ever seen me play Lady Teazle?”
“Unhappily I have not. It is a loss,” said De Boo, “a distinct loss. By the way, when I scored so tremendously as Charles Surface at Mudderpool——”
“Hell is full of men who have scored as Charles Surface at Mudderpool,” said Mrs. Gudrun crushingly. “That sounds like a quotation, doesn&rsqu............