A Mummer's Wife

by George Moore

He was never unkind to her; the soft sleek manner that had won her remained ever the same, but she would have preferred a blow. It would have been something to have felt the strength of his hand upon her. She wanted an emotion; she longed to be brutalized. She knew when she tortured him with reproaches she was alienating from herself any affection he might still bear for her; but she found it impossible to restrain herself. There seemed to be a devil within her that goaded her until all power of will ceased, and against her will she had to obey its behests. A blow might exorcise this spirit. Were he to strike her to the ground she thought she might still be saved; but, alas! he remained as kind and good-natured as ever; and to disguise her drunkenness she had to exaggerate her jealousy. The two were now mingled so thoroughly in her head that she could scarcely distinguish one from the other. She knew there were women all around him; she could see them ogling him out of the little boxes at the side of the stage. How they could be such beasts, she couldn't conceive. They stood for hours behind the scenes waiting for him, and she was told they had come for engagements. Baskets of food, pork pies and tongue, came for him, but these she pitched out of the window; and she soundly boxed the ears of one little wretch, whom she had found loitering about the stage-door. Kate was right sometimes in her suspicions, sometimes wrong, but in every case they accentuated the neurosis, occasioned by alcohol, from which she was suffering. Still, by some extraordinary cunning, she contrived for some time to regulate her drinking so that it should not interfere with business, and on the rare occasions when Dick had to apologize to the public for her non-appearance she insisted that it was not her fault; and from a mixture of vanity and a wish to conceal his wife's shame from himself, Dick continued to persuade himself that his wife had no real taste for drink, and never touched it except when these infernal fits of jealousy were upon her. But the words that had come into his mind—'except when these infernal fits of jealousy are upon her'—called up many vivid memories; one especially confounded him. He had seen her frightened to cross the dressing-room lest she might fall, glancing from the table to the chair, calculating the distance. It was on his lips to ask her if she did not feel too ill to appear that day: that perhaps it would be better for him to go before the curtain and apologize to the public. But he had not dared to say anything, and to his astonishment she was able to overcome the influence of the drink (if she had taken any), and he had never heard her sing and dance better. How she had managed it he did not know. 'All the same,' he said, 'drink will get the upper hand of her and conquer her if she doesn't make up her mind to conquer it. The day will come when she will not be able to go on the stage, or will go on and fall down.' Dick shut his eyes to exclude from them the horrible spectacle. She would then be an unmitigated burden on his hands. 'Not a pleasant prospect', he said to himself.

He had now been in the provinces for some years and had lived down the memory of many disastrous managements. He had managed the tour of the Morton and Cox's Opera Company very successfully till the crash came. 'But it will be the success that will be remembered and not the crash when I return to London. Many changes must have happened in town. Many new faces and many old faces that absence will make new again. If only Kate were not so jealous. If I could cure her of jealousy I could cure her of drink.' And he thought of all the notices she had had for Clairette, for Serpolette, for Olivette. He would like to see her play the Duchess. At that moment his thoughts returned to the last time he had seen her, about half an hour ago; the memory was not a pleasant one, and he was glad that he had run out of the house and come down to the pier. And in the silence and solitude of the pier at midday he asked himself again why he should not return to town and take his chance of getting into a new company or being sent out to manage another provincial tour. In London he might be able to persuade his wife to go into a home, and he fell to thinking of the men and women who he had heard had been cured of drunkenness. His thoughts melted into dreams and then, passing suddenly out of dreams into words, he said: 'She will never consent to go into a home, and if she did she would only be thinking all the time that I'd put her there so that I might be after another woman.' His thoughts were interrupted by a lancinating pain in his feet, and he withdrew into the shade, and resting the heel of the right boot on the toe of the left, a position that freed him from pain for the time being, he looked round and seeing everywhere a misted sky filled with an inner radiance, he said: 'To-day will be the hottest day we've had yet, and there won't be a dozen people in the theatre; everybody will be too hot to leave their houses.' There was languor in the incoming wave. 'We shan't have five pounds in the theatre,' he muttered to himself, and catching sight of one of the directors he continued, 'And those fellows won't think of the heat, but will put down the falling off in the audience to our performance. Never,' he added after a pause, 'have I seen the pier so empty,' and he wondered who the woman was coming towards him.

A tall, gaunt woman of about forty-five whose striding gait caused a hooped and pleated skirt of green silk, surmounted by a bustle, to sway like a lime-tree in a breeze, wore a bodice open in front, with short sleeves, the fag end of some other fashion, but the long draggled-tailed feather boa belonged to the eighties, as did the Marie Stuart bonnet. Her blackened eyebrows and a thickly painted face attracted Dick's attention from afar, and when she approached nearer he was struck by the dark, brilliant, restless eyes. 'A strange and exalted being,' he said to himself. 'An authoress perhaps,' for he noticed that she carried some papers in her hand; 'or a poet,' he added; and prompted by his instinct he began to see in her somebody that might be turned to account, and before long he was thinking how he might introduce himself to her.

'She's forgotten her parasol; I might borrow one for her from the girl at the bar,' and the project seeming good to him he rose, and with a specially large movement of the arm lifted his hat from his head.

'You will excuse me, I hope, madam, addressing you, and if I do so it is because I am in an official capacity here, but may I offer you a parasol?'

'It's very kind of you,' she replied with a smile that lighted up her large mouth, dispersing its ugliness.

'She's got a fine set of teeth,' Dick said to himself, and he answered that he would borrow a parasol for her in the theatre.

'It's very kind of you,' she returned, smiling largely and becomingly upon him. 'It's true I forgot to bring a parasol with me, and the sun is very fierce at this time. It will be kind of you,' and much gratified that his proposal had been so graciously received, he hobbled away in the direction of the theatre, to return a few moments after with the bar girl's parasol, which he had borrowed and which he opened and handed to the lady.

'Might I ask,' she said, 'if you're one of the directors of the theatre?'

'No,' he answered, 'I'm an actor.'