“And you may marry ’im whenever you like,” sobbed Aphasia.
“I never heard anything so indecent in the whole course of my life,” said Mrs. Gudrun, rising in offended majesty. “Marry Mr. De Boo, indeed! If I had married every leading man I’ve played love-scenes with since I adopted this profession, I should be a female Brigham Young! ‘In love with me!’ Perhaps he is; it’s rather a common complaint among the men I know. As for Mr. De Boo, if he has low connections and vulgar entanglements, they are nothing to me. Good-day! Stop! You had better take this parcel of rubbish with you. Dawkins—the stage-door!”
And Aphasia found herself being ushered along the passage. Bewildered and dazzled by the glaring lights, the excitement and the strangeness, she ran almost into the arms of De Boo himself as he emerged from his dressing-room next the manageress’s. Had he overheard? There had been a curtained-over door on that side. Under his paint his handsome features were black with rage; he caught the girl’s shoulders in a furious grip, and spluttered in her ear:
“Damn you! Damn you, you sneaking creature! You have made a pretty mess of things for me—haven’t you?—with your blab about my father and the boot-business, and my letters and the ring I gave you. To my dying day I’ll never speak to you again!”
He threw her from him savagely and strode away.
Aphasia stood outside the theater and shook with sobs. It chanced—or did not chance, so queer are the vagaries of Destiny—that Ulick Snowle, the president of the New Stage-Door Club, happened to be passing; he had just called in at the box-office to privately book the first three rows of the upper circle on behalf of the club, the Old Stage-Doorers having secured the gallery. Both clubs were originally one, the Old Stage-Doorers having thrown off the younger club as the cuttlefish gets rid of the supernumerary limb which in time becomes another cuttlefish. And the unwritten compact between both clubs is that if one applauds a new production, the other shall execrate the same—an arrangement which contributes hugely to the liveliness of first-nights.
No uninitiated person beholding Ulick, with his shaggy beard, aged felt-basin hat of Continental make, short nautical coat, and tight-fitting sporting trousers, would suppose him to be the great personage he really is. He came up to Aphasia, and bluntly asked her what was the matter, and if he couldn’t do something? In her overwhelming woe and desolation, she was like the soda-water bottle of the glass-ball-stoppered description—once push in the stopper, there is no arresting the escape of the aërated fluid. She told the sympathizing Ulick all before he put her into the Hammersmith bus, and when he would have handed in the fateful brown-paper parcel—“Keep it,” she said, with a gesture of aversion. “Burn it—chuck the thing in the dustbin. They’re no manner o’ use to me!” And away she rattled, leaving Ulick Snowle upon the pavement, in his hands an engine of destruction meet to be used in the extermination of the unfittest.
For the New Stage-Door Club did not love Mr. Leo De Boo, whose manner to old friends—whom he had often led around street corners and relieved of half-crowns—did not improve with his worldly prospects. And Ulick stood and meditated while the double torrent of the London traffic went roaring east and west; and as a charitable old lady was about to press a penny into his hand, Tom Glauber, the dandy president of the Old Stage-Doorers, came along, and the men greeted cordially. Von Glauber seemed interested in something that Ulick had to tell, and the two went off very confidentially, arm-in-arm.
“It would be a sensation if, for once, the O.S.D.’s and the N.S.D.’s acted in unison,” agreed Tom Glauber.
And on the night when Pride of Race was produced at the Sceptre, both clubs attended in full strength, every man with a crook-handled walking-stick, and a parcel buttoned under his coat. The piece had just concluded a run of three hundred nights, and every reader is acquainted with the plot, which is of modern Italy and Rome of to-day, to quote the programme. We all know how the young Marchese di Monte Polverino, in whose veins ran the bluest blood of the Latin race, secretly wedded Aquella Guazetta, the tripe-seller, who had won his lofty affections in the guise of a Bulgarian Princess, and how the dread secret of Aquella’s origin was revealed at the very moment when the loftiest and most exclusive of the Roman nobility were about to welcome the newly made Marchesa into their ranks.... Aquella, her brain turned by the acuteness of her mental suffering, greets the revelation with a peal of frenzied laughter. Now this laughter was a continual obstacle, during rehearsals, in the path of Mrs. Gudrun. Said she: