And yet he was sick at heart. In flashes he saw his own attitude as something hideous and abnormal. Then again he justified it, as he had always justified it. He found himself arguing the whole matter out with Francey Wilmot—a cool and reasoned exposition such as he had been incapable of at the crisis of their relationship. ("This woman is a malignant growth. Nature destroys her. Do you pretend to feel regret or pity?") But though he imagined the whole scene—saw himself as authoritative and convincing—he could not re-create Francey Wilmot. She remained herself. Her eyes, fixed on him with that remembered look of candid and questioning tenderness, blazed up into an anger as unexpectedly fierce and uncompromising. And he was not so strong. He had overworked all his life. Starved too often. The ground slipped from under his feet.
It was a poor, vulgar show—a pantomime jerry-built to accommodate her particular talent. She walked through it—the dumb but irresistible model of a French atelier, who made fools of all her lovers, cheated them, sucked them dry and tossed them off with a merry cynicism. When the mood took her she danced and her victims danced behind her, a grotesque ballet, laughing and clapping their hands, as though their cruel sufferings were, after all, a good joke. Neither they nor the audience seemed to be aware that she could not dance at all, and that she was not even beautiful.
It was an old stunt, disguised with an insolent carelessness. The producers had surely grinned to themselves over it. "We know what the public likes. Rubbish, and the older the better. Give it 'em." She even made her familiar entry between the curtains at the back of the stage, standing in the favourite attitude of simple, triumphant expectation, and smiling with that rather foolish friendliness that until now had never shaken her audiences from their frigidity. To them she had always been a spectacle, a strange vital thing with a lurid past and a dubious future, shocking and stimulating. They would never have admitted that they liked her. But tonight they gave her a sort of ashamed welcome. Perhaps it was the dress she wore—the exaggerated peg-top trousers and bonnet of a conventional Quartier Latin which made her look frank and boyish. Perhaps it was something more subtle. Stonehouse himself felt it. But then, he knew. He saw her as God saw her. If there was a God He certainly had His amusing moments.
But he found himself clapping her with the rest, and that made him angry and afraid. It seemed that he could not control his actions any more than his thoughts. The whole business had got an unnatural hold over him. He half got up to go, and then realized that he was trying to escape.
It was jolly music too. That at any rate her producers had toiled at with some zeal. Incredibly stupid and artless and jolly. Anyone could have danced to it. And she was a gutter-urchin, flinging herself about in the sheer joy of life (with death capering at her heels). He watched her, leaning forward, waiting for some sign, the faltering gesture, a twitching grimace of realization. Or was it possible that she was too empty-hearted to feel even her own tragedy, too shallow to suffer, too stupid to foresee? At least he knew with certainty that in that heated, exhausted atmosphere pain had set in.
He became aware that the sweat of it was on his own face—that he himself was labouring under an intolerable physical burden. He knew too much. (If God had His amusing moments he had also to suffer, unless, as Mr. Ricardo had judged, he was a devil.) She was facing what every man and woman in that theatre would have to face sooner or later. How? She at any rate danced as though there were nothing in the world but life. With each act her gestures, her very dress became the clearer expression of an insatiable, uncurbed lust of living. At the end, the orchestra, as though it could not help itself, broke into the old doggerel tune that had helped to make her famous:
"I'm Gyp Labelle."
She waltzed and somersaulted round the stage, and as the curtain fell she stood before the footlights, panting, her thin arms raised triumphantly. He could see the tortured pulse leaping in her throat. He thought he read her lips as they moved in a voiceless exclamation:
"Quand meme—quand meme."
The audience melted away indifferently. They, at any rate, did not know what they had seen.