CHAPTER XVI
Eight o'clock had just struck when Conrad arrived at the slum where he was to spend the evening. The exterior of the hall had no sanguine air. Four opaque gas globes glimmered over a narrow entrance, and, in the obscurity, a written appeal affixed by wafers was barely legible. He made it out to be:
"Help the Poor Kiss-and-Tell Girls.
Stranded in the Town through No Fault of their Own.
Show your Sympathy by Patronising us."
Behind a portière a disreputable-looking man, wearing a queer overcoat, sat at a small table with tickets. He asked, "Sixpence, or a shilling?" and Conrad said, "A shilling," and the man said, "Front row."
There was a piano on a shallow platform. In lieu of footlights, some pots of ferns had been disposed at wide intervals. There was no curtain, but a screen, behind which giggles were audible, turned a corner of the hall into the most limited of artists' rooms. Those artists who were not making their toilettes, sat quietly among the audience. Perhaps two hundred chairs were ranged across the hall, and about fifty of them were occupied. One of them was occupied by Rosalind.
"Good evening," she said.
"Good evening," said Conrad. "May I sit down?"
"These are the shilling ones," said she. "Oh, of course, if you have! I'm afraid we're leading you into awful extravagance? ... It isn't very full?"
"No, I'm sorry. I wish I could have sent some people. Have you got another concert to-morrow?"
"They're talking about it—they've got the hall very cheap."
"I might take some tickets, and see what I can do with them. I suppose that would be a good plan, wouldn't it?"
"Perhaps," said Rosalind, doubtfully.
"Why 'perhaps?' I thought it was to help you all?"
"Yes," she answered. "Oh, it's meant to."
"There's a reservation in your manner," he said, "that— What's the use of our being such old friends if you don't confide in me?"
"Ah, I didn't think of that," she laughed. "Well, did you see the man with a coat?"
"I saw him with aversion."
"I thought it would please you! That's the manager, Mr. Quisby."
"Your manager, do you mean?"
"I'm telling you—the manager of the Company that came to grief. The girls are supposed to have got this up for themselves; but you may have noticed that you paid your shilling to Mr. Quisby."
"A—ah!" said Conrad. "There seems a weak spot in the business arrangements. Well, what do you propose?"
A youth in a very shabby tweed suit came on to the platform. He sat down at the piano, and rattled the introduction to the well-known music hall song entitled My Little Baby Boy. On bounced the golden-haired brunette. She wore a skirt to the knees, and had made up her face as if for the glare of a theatre. Her appearance lowered the concert to the level of a penny gaff. Several women of the shop-keeping class, hitherto sympathetic, murmured "Oh!" and tightened their mouths.
"Isn't the costume a mistake?" whispered Conrad.
"Do you think so? How would you have dressed her?"
"Well," said Conrad, "a long frock."
"Mm. What sort of frock?"
"Well, I should have made her look quiet, and very—er——"
"Respectable. I know! ... Go on."
"I should have said, 'Be pale, and pathetic!'
"That's right, I wanted them to; but they've all got themselves up wrong, except my friend Miss Lascelles. Sh!"
The vocalist's blackened eyelids drooped to the paper that she held;—
"'Some folks want power and riches, and really will not
be denied,
And when they've accomplished their object, they are
very far from satisfied;
A fig for your wealth and your power, for riches I care
not a jot;
Contented am I—yes! and happy—I'm quite satisfied
with my lot.'"
"Inappropriate," said Rosalind under her breath, "isn't it?"
The vocalist looked up again, for now she knew the words;—
"'I'm not tired of England, I've no wish to roam,
There's a little six-roomed house that's my home, sweet home;
My house is my castle—who is my pride and joy?
Why! his Royal Highness the King of the Castle, my little baby boy.'"
When she had shrilled the chorus times without number she withdrew, and Conrad said,
"Can't we go and sit further back where we can talk? Look at all those chairs over there."
"If you like. What do you think of her?"
"She can't sing."
"Oh, that's a detail. But she doesn't work the song."
"How do you mean?"
"Didn't you feel what she ought to do? Well, of course you wouldn't! 'His Royal Highness the King' line ought to bring the house down. Wouldn't I make it 'go!'"
"Show me," he begged. "There's nobody looking."
So in the corner that they had found, she hummed the bars, and showed him.
"Oh, aren't you clever!" he exclaimed. "What a pretty voice you have! Perhaps you're—er—fond of babies?"
"If you mean 'have I got any children?' no, I haven't. That was an actress, not a mother. I've no ring on—did you think I was married?"
"Well, you looked so very devoted, I wondered for a moment."
"Are you?"
"Suddenly," said Conrad, gazing at her.
"'Suddenly'—what?"
"Devoted."
"I meant 'married,'" she explained.
"I?" he said. "Good heavens!"
"Don't be so astonished!—such a thing has happened to men."
"Yes, but I'm not a marrying man."
"I think most men say they aren't marrying men till they say, 'Will you marry me?' It's a pity they change their mind so often."
"I have pitied them myself."
"Them?" she said. "The girls, you mean! A man begins to be in love much sooner than a woman, but he finishes much sooner too."
"Well, that's why marriage was invented," said Conrad. "The man brings the fervour, and the woman brings the faithfulness. You can't combine better qualities."
"Yes, and what about his fervour afterwards? He wants to go and be in love all over again. Haven't I seen? In this profession, travelling about, a girl often meets a good fellow; I don't say he's often rich—the ones who mean well are generally hard up. Perhaps he's a clerk, or something, in the town. He's taken with her from the 'front,' and gets to know her. Then he waits for her at the stage door every evening, and sees her home, and makes her talk 'shop'—he always makes her talk 'shop,' that's the fascination to him. After she goes away, he writes to her, and by-and-by perhaps they marry. They do sometimes. Of course she's to leave the stage; he generally asks for that—the kind of man I'm talking about. Well, what's the result?"
"She's sorry she gave it up."
"No, she isn't. There are exceptions—don't I know it! but in most cases she's only too thankful to give it up. There's no glamour about it for the girl—she has lived all that out; the 'little six-roomed house and home sweet home' is the only ambition she has left. It's the man who finds the marriage dull. He was in love with being in love with an actress. He liked waiting for that smile over the footlights—about the middle of the first verse of her solo; it flattered him to know he was the one man in all the audience who was going to talk to her directly. When they're married she's just an ordinary girl—like Miss Smith, and Miss Brown, and the other girls he knew. The fairy has lost her wings. She's a very good little wife perhaps, but just a drab little mortal. He says, 'How romantic it used to be when she was a fairy!'—and goes fairy-catching outside another stage-door."
"Poor little mortal!"
"Men want romances. When you find them out, the most unlikely men are romantic; but when you find them out, nine hundred and ninety women in a thousand are domesticated."
"Are you?"
"There are the other ten," laughed Rosalind.... "And I'm not talking of society women—of course I don't know anything about them; I'm talking of every-day women, and us. Look at my friend! I suppose you'd take her for a bohemian through and through? She has had to earn her living in the Profession since she was sixteen, and she's slangy, and she'd shock your sort of woman out of her wits. Marriage is the last thing she thinks of now. But let a man she liked come along! She'd marry him on two pounds a week, and go through fire and water for him, and thank heaven for the joy of hanging up the washing in her own back yard."
Miss Lascelles, with a hint of coon steps, was singing—
"'What is the use of loving a girl
When you know she don't want yer to?'"
"I shouldn't have thought it," said Conrad. "She doesn't suggest domesticity in back yards."
"Does she suggest a boarding-school for young ladies?"
His eyebrows asked a question.
"There was a time when Tattie was among little girls who walked two and two in Kensington."
"Really? Do you know that hurts, rather? I'm sorry."
"I'm sorry," sighed Rosalind. "But her heart's sweet," she added; "it's only the bloom that has gone." She smiled. "Clap your hands! She's my pal—you've got to applaud her."
"She's very good," he said, applauding. "I thought she was going to do a flower song? But I like that one. Isn't it pretty? I like the way it goes."
"Yes, rag-time—all against the beat. Don't hum it out of tune!" she said plaintively. "She's going to do the flower song next. By-the-bye, I may have to introduce you to some of the girls. What shall I call you?"
"My name," Conrad answered deferentially, "is 'Warrener.'"
She bent her head;
"Thank you," said Lady Darlington.
When the concert was over he walked with her as far as Mrs. Cheney's. Tattie of course was with them. At the foot of the steps Tattie shook hands with him and went indoors, and he remained a minute saying 'good night' to Rosalind. The other girl might well have heard all they said, but the minute had charm to him because the other girl had left them. It implied something. And underneath, to both these shuttlecocks of temperament, there was another charm, not defined yet—to be savoured in the first moments of solitude—the charm of recapturing a mood of years ago. At a doorstep, late: "You look tired?" "Oh, it's nothing." A pause. "I shall see you to-morrow?" "Yes, come in to tea." A whiff of the fragrance of his youth, a touch of the sentimentality of her girlhood, idealised Corporation Road as they parted in the fog.
"I wish it were to-morrow! ... Good night."
"Do you? ... Good night."
The old tune was not classical, but it was pretty.