“And you, Duke, eh? Found it trying to your nerves, they tell me?” Teddy continued, twirling his golden mustache. “Such trips too costly, eh, to indulge in often?”
“Ra’!” agreed De Petoburgh, with a glance at the thousand-guinea diamond fender surmounting the most frequently photographed features in the world.
SIDE!
Upon the conclusion of the phenomenally brief run of The Poisoned Kiss at the Sceptre Theatre, Mrs. Gudrun, who had sustained the heroic rôle 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 that 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 herself 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!”