CHAPTER XII
All London was placarded with that American play.
It ran through the streets in big letters on the omnibuses; it walked in tilting lines in the gutter; it stared out from all the hoardings with the wide smile of its principal actress ... Adelaide Fish.
And it was the gaudy poster that startled Susan out of the unhappy listlessness that had fallen on her. Facing her suddenly it arrested her wandering step.
Adelaide Fish.... Had the world stood still after all, and was it this morning that she had had a letter...?
"Hideously inartistic," said one passer-by to another.
"Still she's handsome. I've seen her. One of these big women——"
Yes, it was inartistic. Reds and blues and greens in vivid splashes, and the name writ large. A marvellous jump from the bankrupt shifts of the Tragedy Company to this smiling elevation. And Barnaby was still ignorant. He had not been warned.
She thought of him now. The passionate shame that had caught her up like a flame sweeping all before it had died out. She felt only a kind of wonder at herself, looking back. It was inevitable. The impossible situation could only have ended so.... But in the background all the while was the woman.
She tried to shake off the lassitude of despair. Why had she burned the letter? She had been going to tell Barnaby, although the writer had forbidden her to share its contents with him. It would have been simpler to let him—but no, she could never have put that letter into his hands. Hard enough to look him in the face and tell him what she could repeat;—that the woman who was his wife, the one in whose likeness she had been masquerading, had written, and was in England. But before she had spoken Julia had intervened and the waters of bitterness had closed over her head.
Barnaby must not be left in the dark. She had a wild and sudden longing to do something for him still; one last service. She could find out from this woman what were her intentions towards him and if it were a threat or a promise that had lurked in that ambiguous letter.
She must ask somebody where she was. For the first time she realized her surroundings, the roar of the traffic, the restless street.
*****
Outside the theatre an interminable train of people, wedged tightly, endured with their faces turned towards the gallery stair; another line, reaching far down the pavement and less good-humoured, guarded the entrance to the pit. The lights falling on their faces threw up a singular likeness in expression, a kind of touch-me-not attitude that defied their physical juxtaposition. Squeezed like herrings, their pained endurance was heightened by the universal lack of a smile. And the lines were haunted by a street musician strumming his lamentable tune.
As Susan went up the dark entry she was pursued by unfriendly glances, the quick suspicion that she was a late comer who must be turned back ignominiously in her base attempt to push in at the head of the line. As she vanished inside the stage door there was an interested murmur; here and there a man unbent and asked his neighbour which of them she was. Then there was a click and the crowd went surging forward. The doors were open.
Miss Fish was in her dressing-room.
Like one in a dream the girl was breathing that familiar atmosphere of the theatre. It seemed to shut off for ever all that was yesterday. She stumbled into a little room violently scented, full of blinding light. And a woman swung round and seized her hands.
"There you are!" she said. "I can't kiss you—my face is sticky. I've sent away my dresser. Wait till I shut that door!"
She made a dash and secured it, then pushed Susan into a chair.
"I'll have to make up while I talk," she said. "Go on; go on. I'm mad with curiosity! I am dying to hear it all."
"I had your letter," said Susan.
Adelaide laughed. Her warm voice had a note of banter.
"I didn't know but you had waxed fat like Jeshurun," she said. "Wasn't it he that kicked?—So I wrote that letter. I had to see you. You burnt it? You didn't tell him?"
"He does not know you are here," said Susan. "He has been ill." Her heart was beating painfully hard; the air in this close little room was suffocating her. It was not air....
"Yes?" said Adelaide. "That's how I know about you. My dear, don't tell me! I picked up a picture paper and saw a piece about him and his accident, and his devoted American wife!—I'd so often wondered what became of you. It's tremendous!"
There was admiration in her gaze as she turned unwillingly from her visitor to the glass, smearing her chin as she talked. "I did hear of him being alive," she said. "I saw that in one of our papers, 'English Gentleman Comes Back from the Grave' and so on. I was scared when I thought of you. They said what a joy it was to his wife and his mother, and I thought they had been too hasty. But there was never a word more, though I watched the paper. I decided he must have walked into the offices here and said—'I do not desire you to mention this'—I'd heard it was done sometimes by the upper classes. But—!"
Again her face expressed unqualified admiration. "You must have had a nerve," she said, "you poor kitten!"
The girl sprang up, her mouth proud, her eyes imploring.
"Adelaide," she said, "you were good to me once, you—you tried to help me. Won't you believe me when I tell you I am nothing to him? It was all acting, all acting from beginning to end. Never real, never what you said in your letter. I was only staying in his house playing—that—part till I could disappear without scandal."
"What?" said the woman bluntly. "Has he never said to you—'If I can free myself of the other I'll marry you?'"
"Oh, never; never!"
"Then," said Adelaide, "it's not for your sake his lawyers are getting busy, trying to find what they call flaws, trying to break his marriage? They can try.... You didn't know?"
She turned on the girl with a suddenness that took her unawares; read her face.
"He's not playing you fair!" she cried.
It was remarkable, just then, how she resembled Julia. Half dressed as she was, half made-up, her eyes darkened, and scorn on her carmined lip.
"I'll give you a hold over him," she said. "I'll stand by you. Wasn't it all my doing? Who's that knocking?—You can't come in."
Good-nature was back as she turned from the interruption. She smiled indulgently, as one who was hoarding a gift.
"I wouldn't lift a finger for him," she said. "But I'm silly over you. I'll tell you. And you can go back to him and make your bargain."
The girl shut her lips hard. She must listen;—for Barnaby's sake she must listen. The shamed colour ebbed in her cheek.
"I'm not mad, or bad,—at least not to speak of," said Adelaide, "but I'm careless.... Oh, I'll give you your Englishman, child; you needn't look so stricken! I once had a kind of a romance myself. When I was a young thing like you I married myself to a shabby little poet. But I grew tired of him muttering verses and dreaming things upside down; and we had a divorce, and I ran and left him and went on the stage. And all the while that little man kept on writing; and when he'd used up all his poetry, and all the dead kings and queens, he woke up and wrote a play."
A queer pride, not unmixed with tenderness, came into her voice at that.
"What do you think?" she said. "Nothing would move him but that they should find me out and give me the star part. 'I have had her in my mind all these years,' he said, 'and it is she. No one but she shall play it.'—All these years that I had forgotten him, he was building me a ladder—."
She laughed abruptly, banishing sentiment.
"I've done all the talking," she said, "and I must, while you sit there dumb with your big eyes asking me if it's to be the dagger or the bowl. D'you remember when I was Queen Eleanor, and you were the Rosamond, and the boys nearly shouted the roof down, begging you not to drink? Ah, those times, they were funny. I've shot up since, like a rocket into the sky."
Time was running out. Somewhere in the distance there was a blare of music. She had finished making up, and she must let in her dresser.
"Listen to me," she said. "His people haven't the clues to connect a Phemie Watson they never heard of with Adelaide Fish. You'll have the start of them. Make your terms; make your terms before James and I go to housekeeping again.... I daresay he'd never find it out for himself. About that divorce—it was never fixed. The lawyer wanted to go duck-shooting, and I was gone, and James,—why, they're unbusiness-like, these poets!—he says he had always hugged an inextinguishable spark——"
She paused, looking impatiently at her listener, who was so silent.
"Don't you understand?" she said. "I'm no more Mrs. John Barnabas Hill than you are. If you're wise you'll make him marry you to-morrow."
*****
Susan did not know which way to turn when she was in the street. It seemed much darker; it seemed as if she were lost.
She walked blindly on and on. The people were ghosts that were streaming by; their faces that gleamed and passed did not lighten her terrible loneliness. A straw in that human river, she was afraid.
There was a post-office on the other side of the street. She almost ran to it, unconscious of the swift perils of the crossing.
For she must write to Barnaby, and the thought of communicating with him, poignant as it was, had a strange touch of comfort. The bare office became a harbour.
They gave her a letter card, and she wrote at the counter, with the scratching office pen. That was why it was so ill written. It was ridiculous how such a trifle hurt her. Was it not the first and last time she would ever write to him, and did it matter how badly, since it was to tell him that there was no bar between him and Julia? ...
He would be glad to have it....
She held it fast an instant before letting it fall into the yawning slit. She liked holding it in her hand, because it was a link between her and all that lay behind that curtain of loneliness; because it was going to him. In a little while he would touch it, would wonder, perhaps, at the unknown hand, hat poor scribble—! She dropped it in and it went like her own life into the dark.
For awhile she hurried, fighting her choking terror of the emptiness that was left. Why was it worse now than it used to be? She had been in strange cities, she had been friendless.... And somewhere behind in the glitter that mocked the darkness there was still one person who would help her, if she asked help; who would be kind to her lavishly, without understanding. She did not ask herself why it was impossible to turn in her rudderless flight and appeal to the woman from whom she had tried to guard her heart. There was a gulf between her and Adelaide. Little by little the fear driving her seemed to fail, and all other emotions grew indistinct, crushed by an infinite weight of fatigue. At last she could not think, could not suffer. She only wanted to go to sleep.
*****
It was a frost in Leicestershire. There would be no hunting.
That first irrelevant thought struck Susan as she felt the sharpness of the air breathing in on her face. The narrow window above her head had been propped a little way open with a hair-brush, and the curtain that divided her bed from the next was agitated; she had a neighbour who was astir.
With her eyes shut the girl imagined the grass frozen white, and the branches silver; heard the rapping trot of a string of hunters exercising in the long road beneath the park.
But this was not Leicestershire; it was London, and she was lying in a narrow bed in a small square attic. At the foot stood a washing stand, with a jug and basin, at the head a chest of drawers. There was not room for a chair.
Was it last night she had followed a stranger bearing a candle up flights and flights of uncarpeted wooden stairs? The weariness of that pilgrimage obliterated her stupefied sense of relief when the kind, worn woman had consented to take her in, her absurd inclination to sink down on the chair in the passage and fall asleep. She had thought she would never, never cease climbing stairs.
She remembered now.
Lady Henrietta had asked her once, when she and Barnaby had run up for the day to London, to call on an old governess who was ill. "In a sort of lodging-house," she had said. "One of these places where women live in hutches and eat in the basement." And the dreariness of it had haunted her. Somehow she had found her way there again. The old governess was gone, but the manageress recalled her face. They would not have taken her in without luggage at an hotel.
With that came the recollection that she was penniless. The few chance shillings that she had with her she had spent on her railway ticket. She remembered thinking of that in the train;—she remembered finding Lady Henrietta's battered brooch that she had pinned in her dress to take to the jeweller,—and the diamond star that was the one thing she had to sell. Ah, that was between her and destitution. She started up. What had she done with it? She had been too utterly weary to think or care.
The draught was beating the dingy dividing curtain that swung on its iron rod; it bulged like a sail over the top of the chest of drawers, sweeping it clear; and it parted, giving a glimpse of a girl beyond with the star in her hands. She started.
"I was just putting it back," she said. "The curtain knocked it off on my side. How it sparkles!"
Susan stretched out her fingers, a little too eagerly.
"You needn't be so sharp," said the girl, disconcerted. "I could buy heaps like it for a shilling apiece at a shop in the Edgware Road," and she threw it back carelessly, and began to whistle to show she was not abashed.
She had a plain, good-humoured, impudent face and dusty hair. On her arms she wore a pair of black stockings with the feet cut off, fastened by safety pins to her under bodice. She was tying her petticoat.
"I want to sell this," said Susan. In her loneliness she was loth to offend a stranger.—"But I hope I shall get more than a shilling for it."
"I'll give you three," said the girl, and then was all at once smitten with awe. "I say—you don't mean to say it's real?"
Her off-hand manner became subdued; she looked curiously but respectfully at Susan.
"You came here unexpectedly, didn't you?" she said. "Did you know you had slept all Sunday? Mrs. White said you were dead tired, and that you were a lady. I'll lend you my brush, if you like;—and a bit of soap."
Susan smiled at this proof of confidence.
"I'll shut the window, shall I?" the girl went on, letting it slam as she withdrew the hair-brush. "I was airing my bed. I always make it before I go down because I'm anæmic, and I've no breath to run up all these flights of stairs after breakfast.—If you want to be private you can pull the curtain."
That was the one thing she would not willingly do for her; with her own hands shut out the view of one so mysterious.
The other sleepers were stirring behind their enshrouding folds, like hidden moths preparing to burst from the chrysalis. In one quarter after another the heavy breathing was cut short by an awaking sigh. One or two emerged with their jugs and padded barefoot to the hot-water tap on the landing.
"I'll get you a jugful, shall I?" said Susan's friend, and having installed herself as mistress of the ceremonies, returned to the subject of the star.
"Mind you don't try a pawnbroker," she said. "If you take my advice you'll walk into the swaggerest shop in Bond Street, where they are used to ladies."
"Why?" asked Susan.
The girl assumed a great air of worldly wisdom, cocking her head on one side like a London sparrow.
"Oh," she said, "they won't be so likely to lose their heads over you, and perhaps ask you how you got it."
She had not considered that. Her dismayed look gratified the girl, who at once adopted the manner of a protector.
"You'll be all right," she said. "They'll know the difference in the Bond Street shops. It wouldn't do in the City."
*****
She had been in a jeweller's shop with Barnaby once, and it was in Bond Street. If she could find it ... the girl's suggestion had made her nervous; she would have more courage in going where she had been with him. Would they eye her askance even there? Would they make difficulties, ask questions? The thought harassed her.
She lingered a minute outside the shop, when she had found it; gazing into the glittering window, so preoccupied with her errand that it never entered her head that there might be anyone who would recognize her among the idle people that were abroad. Defending herself by a haughty carriage she took a long breath and went inside.
"How are you?"
She started as violently as if she had been a thief. She had never expected to meet this man again; and there he was, holding her limp hand in his.
"I saw you over the way," he said, "and plunged in here to catch you and ask about Barnaby. How is he getting on?"
At first she thought it must be in merciless irony he was speaking, and plucked up a spirit to defy him. He had glanced from her face to the counter; he was a witness of her singular transaction. She felt his glance burn her. What was he thinking of it?
"Oh, he is getting on very well," she said recklessly.
"Is he up here with you?" said Rackham. Was it possible that he did not know?—She gasped.
"No," she stammered. And now he looked at her more strangely. She was gathering up the price of her star and turning to leave the shop. They had made no demur; they had given her more than she dared to expect....
"Which way are you going?" said Rackham.
"Your way isn't mine," she said.
He was keeping at her side; she could not outstrip his strides with her flying little steps.
"But I want to talk to you," he said boldly. "You were a little beside yourself, weren't you, at our last meeting? I've not seen you since Barnaby's accident.... You blamed me for it, didn't you? My dear girl, if I had wanted to murder him I wouldn't have been so clumsy.—What are you doing in London all by yourself?"
That last question came suddenly, just when his bantering speech had roused her, and put her off her guard. He was watching her face; and it blanched.
"What's the trouble?" he said. "Confound—!"
He had cannoned into another man, whose approaching figure he had not marked. It was Kilgour, in London clothes, who blocked the way, with a growl for Rackham and a friendly hand-grip for Susan.
"Who's the man charging?" he grumbled. "Though you can't see daylight through me, still I'm not a bullfinch. Come along, Mrs. Barnaby; you are just the person I want. I've been praying my gods for a sympathetic eye. Come and look at my masterpiece in the window."
His large presence was a safeguard. She could have clung to him.
"Half Leicestershire is in Bond Street in a frost," he said. "I knew I'd run across somebody. I've been up myself since Friday. But what is Barnaby doing in town? What do the doctors say?"
What a fool she had been not to have dreaded this. Half Leicestershire in Bond Street! And she had fled to London, the great, engulfing city—! She could have laughed wildly at herself, at her childish want of precaution, her romantic imprudence in haunting places where she had been with him, where it was so likely that she would meet his acquaintances. But what would he think of her when he heard that she had been seen....?
Mechanically she walked on a few paces. Rackham was still at her right hand; he would not be shaken off. And Kilgour was talking in his loud, kind, friendly voice; taking it for granted that Barnaby and she were in town together. He did not guess that she was a runaway.
"It came to me in a vision on the top of Burrough Hill," he said. "Rain and mist and the setting sun.... A kind of greyish-black gauziness with a stripe of crimson. There! What do you think of that?"
With a grandiloquent gesture he pointed out a diminutive grey and black turban throned in solitary majesty in the middle of a shop-window. His shop; his personal achievement. A quaint pride sat on his good red face, roughened by wind and weather. It was somewhat akin to the pride great men feel in doing little things. The big successes in life are too overweighting; they oppress a man with the memory of his struggle, the long strain, the effort,—the troubling secret of how he has fallen short. Kilgour might have swelled with pride over greater matters, but when he thought of them he was humble.... He wagged a delighted forefinger at his creation, boasting.
"There isn't much of it," said Rackham.
Susan was between the two men; she felt like a caught bird that dared not flutter, and she had still a frantic desire to laugh.
"That's it," said Kilgour. "No feminine exaggeration. It's all idea and no trimming, instead of all trimmings and no idea. And as light as a feather. I tried it on myself."
She was laughing; not at the absurd image his speech called up, not at the picture of this bluff sportsman gravely regarding himself in a mirror, balancing his insecure idea on his close-cropped head;—but at the tragic absurdity of her own position. How little they knew, these men!
"Good-bye," she said. "I—I am in a hurry."
"Just wait a minute," said Kilgour. "There's another point in its favour. If you are in a hurry you can clap it on hind-before. Wait a bit and let me illustrate what I mean. Two or three doors up. You know this place? It's my rival Jane. Now, impartially, let's pick these hats to pieces."
But she interrupted his scientific disparagement rather wildly. She had not known how much she liked him, Barnaby's friend who might have talked to her of him if she had dared to loiter just for the sake of hearing his name spoken now and then.... She held out her hand to him wistfully.
"Good-bye, Lord Kilgour," she said hurriedly. "Good-bye!"
He squeezed the little hand kindly, not uttering his surprise till she had vanished from his ken.
"Bolted into the very shop!" he said. "How like a woman. Next time I meet her she'll have one of these monstrosities on her head."
He nodded carelessly at Rackham, to whom Susan had bidden no farewell, and strolled on, hailing his acquaintances, looking in the shops. Turning into Piccadilly he saw a face he knew coming towards him in a hansom, and raised his stick.
"Thought it was you," he said. "You don't look very fit to be out. What do you mean by it? I told your wife you had no business racketing in London."
The hansom had stopped. Barnaby was leaning out, staring at him.
"What did you say?" he asked. There was an incredulous eagerness in his voice.
"Eh?" said Kilgour, struck by his looks, and sorry. "Barnaby, old chap, you ought to be in bed. What's up? You haven't come to town to consult any fancy doctors? No complications, are there? It's generally when a fellow is mending that they crop up."
"No, it's not doctors," said Barnaby. "Look here, Kilgour——"
"Seems to me," said Kilgour, "as if you had been roped in by Christian Science. Don't you know what a battered-looking ghost you are?"
"I'm all right," said Barnaby impatiently. "Just answer me, Kilgour. What did you mean by saying you told my wife——?"
"I wasn't meddling," said Kilgour sagely, "I was offering a rational opinion——"
"Oh, stop fooling!" said Barnaby. "Do you mean you saw her?"
The other man was puzzled by the urgent note in his voice. Then he laughed.
"Missed her have you?" he said. "Oh, yes, you fractious invalid,—I saw her."
"When?"
There was no mistaking it. Barnaby was in earnest. For the second time Kilgour had a twinge, an uncomfortable recollection of a brown leather arm-chair in Wimpole Street and long white fingers handling one or two queer little scientific dodges that pried into hidden things. Once he had had to go with a friend. It had turned him sick, that minute or two of waiting in dead silence to hear the verdict.... Had Barnaby been there? ... He shook off the unwelcome fancy. If he knew anything of that girl she would not let Barnaby go into a lions' den without her.
"Half an hour ago," he said. "With your cousin in attendance. I met them coming out of What's-his-name's,—that jeweller's shop in Bond Street."
"What?" said Barnaby. He looked like a man whose wits were staggering under a mortal blow. Then his mouth set hard, in a fighting line.
"Bond Street," he called up the trap to the driver, and the hansom dashed jingling on. Kilgour was left marvelling on the kerb.
"By Jove!" he said to himself, proceeding to cool his perturbation in the peaceable atmosphere of his club, and stoutly refusing, though troubled in mind, to draw the inevitable conclusion.