Читать книгу How Like An Angel - A. G. Macdonell - Страница 6

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Felida Caliente was in a great rage, a roaring, cyclonic sirocco of a hot rage. She was, in fact, as cross as cross could be. And she had good reason, for had not her handsome young husband just deserted her? Had he not departed at five o’clock that morning leaving nothing behind save only a hundred and seventy-four suits and a note on the pin-cushion? And it was not as if he had deserted her for another woman. That would have been all right. A divorce case, with, say, Aurora Minnehaha as co-respondent, or La Tigrita de los Andes, or even this new copper-brunette from Lapland, would have been admirable for all parties concerned. The armoured-car pursuit across New Mexico, the serving of the writ by the sheriff from a helicopter at Phoenix, Arizona, the briefing of Clarence Darrow, the hotel in Reno, Nevada, and the final, passionate kiss of farewell in the court-room after the pronouncement of the divorce, all these had been exploited a thousand times for the benefit of the American public. But there was always room, as Scheherazade had found, for a thousand and first, and Felida would have made the most of it, and so would Arthur Ed. Dowley, her publicity agent. And this scum, this miserable wart upon the Body Celluloid, this international Plague-Spot, had sneaked away, with a couple of old school chums, to go snouting about for old ruins in Yucatan. Where was the publicity in old ruins unless it was you used them as backgrounds for the big shot? The Coliseum in Rome, Europe, and the Eiffel Tower in Paris, Europe, that was all you wanted. So what in hell’s name was the sense in digging up some more? And in Yucatan of all places? With a couple of fellows? She might have guessed that Mike was nothing but a hot-ziggety-dam highbrow from the way he whistled Sousa in the lapis-lazuli bath up at the shack in Beverly Hills every morning.

Thus Felida on the subject of her defaulting husband, and in the best American that she could lay her tongue round. It was not very good American, that most expressive and picturesque of languages, but then Felida was only three years out of Foch Street, Kennington, London (Europe), and more could not be expected of her. Her real name was Maud Princess Mary Maggs, from which it can be deduced that her parents were stout upholders of the Throne.

Felida’s career had been rather like the Wrath of God, slow to start with and pretty fierce once it had got under way. At eighteen years of age a typist in a city office, she had only yielded to the blandishments of the junior partner on condition that he got her an introduction, produced in advance, to someone in the film world or the theatrical world. The junior partner was so overwhelmed with Maudie’s dazzling beauty, for she really was exquisite, that he hustled around with a vigour that he but rarely displayed in the office, and in a short time he produced a middle-aged manufacturer of woollen yarn from Bradford who was toying with the idea of financing a revue. Miss Maggs persuaded him to toy with her as well, and the junior partner retired in high dudgeon to his desk with nothing for it but to reflect on the perfidy of women. The revue was a triumphant success and not even the acting of Miss Maggs—now Miss Felida Caliente—could prevent it from running for a year. During this year the beautiful actress refused no fewer than one thousand one hundred and forty-one offers of a change from her wool magnate, but she remained strictly faithful to him. Nor was it until the offer arrived from Hollywood which she had been so passionately longing for, that she deserted the Bradford citizen and departed for the Far West. It took exactly seventeen months from that first coy kiss behind the addressograph in the city office for Felida to reach her goal, stardom and an eighty-room shack in the Beverly Hills.

She was about five feet six inches in height. Her nose was deliciously tilted, her chin firm, very firm, her cheeks soft and curved. Her mouth was hard, but its hardness, and indeed its shape, was easily camouflaged beneath a cupid’s bow which was a triumph of the cupid’s-bowmaker’s art. A crown of rippling glory surmounted it all, now golden, now raven black, now platinum, and now tawny like the coppery glow of Carimata. All that was alluring. But the secret of Felida’s triumphant career was the extraordinary wizardry by which she made herself appear slim to her public and plump to her adorers.

This, then, was the World’s Adored, who had been so shamefully let down, betrayed, ruined, by Michael Seeley, formerly of Eton College and Oriel, Oxford, and now the latest comet to blaze on to the universal screen. Michael Seeley had been a vast success even before he married Felida. Afterwards, there was no holding him, and his salary was prodigious. Between them, husband and wife, they were touching about a million dollars a year, and as soon as they had undergone the regulation tour of Europe with its visits to the Old Home, its scattering of largesse to the mob, its receptions by Paderewski, Bernard Shaw, the Prince of Monaco, and the British Navy, its offer of the throne of Albania, its opinions of the London Policeman, and its reasoned appreciation of the art of Dame Sybil Thorndike, as soon as Mr. and Mrs. Seeley had complied with all these formalities, it was confidently predicted, particularly by Mr. Dowley, that their joint salaries would easily pass the million mark. And here was that goddam bum (to quote Madame again) falling down on it. Everything was set for the tour. Staterooms, railway trains, hotel suites, Rolls-Royces, all these had been chartered. Sixty cages of pets, from a snow-leopard down to a pair of “nude” mice, all of them the lifelong and inseparable companions of the great film actress, had arrived from the Natural History Corporation of Thirty-second Street. For a love of animals is essential to anyone visiting the Nordic countries. Eighteen orphans of veterans of the Great War had been collected and were ready to be shoved into the steerage at a moment’s notice to be sent gratis round the battlefields. Kindness to children is a certain winner, even in Latin countries. Typewritten slips had been prepared by Mr. Dowley for Felida to study and memorize on the voyage, containing statements such as: “I think the London police are too marvellous.” “It is lovely being at home again.” “Yes, the Prince of Wales was our ground-landlord in Kennington. He was always most considerate.” “I think the art of Dame Sybil is too marvellous.” “The talkies have come to stay.” “After all, there’s no place like England.”

All this had been done and much more. Seventy-eight thousand dollars had been expended by Mr. Dowley on advance publicity. Mr. Shaw had been insulted six times by cable in order to provoke him into giving a reception for the film stars. Their names had been entered for the Dunmow Flitch, and Piero della Francesca, Felida’s four-year-old champion racehorse, had been entered for the Derby. (The rejection of the latter by the obviously anti-American caucus which controlled these things, caused a good deal of bitterness in Hollywood.)

And now Michael, formerly president of the Oriel College, Oxford, Archaeological Society, had gone ruin-hunting in Yucatan with a couple of stiffs.

Felida gazed at Mr. Dowley. Mr. Dowley gazed at his pointed, patent-leather, suède-topped, button boots. Both had temporarily exhausted their vocabularies.

At last Mr. Dowley observed gloomily, “You’ll have to go alone.”

“Yus. I mean yeah,” Felida hastily corrected herself, and went on primly, “That’s O.K. by me, big baby boy.”

“I’ll get out a story how Mike is on some real romance,” said Arthur Ed. Dowley.

“How do you mean real romance?” snapped Felida. “I’m his real romance, you cow-faced pimple.”

“I mean some story about his being treasure-hunting, or in a secret mission for the Queen of Roumania, or been offered the Presidency of Ecuador.”

“All right, O.K.,” replied Felida, relapsing into listlessness. With the realization that the position was hopeless, all the snap had gone out of her. She didn’t care a row of dimes what Artie said about Mike.

The publicity agent went out of the hotel-suite in a thoughtful mood. He came back in forty-two seconds like a thunderbolt, waving aloft the latest edition of an evening paper and too full of emotion to speak. All he could do was to stand in the doorway, ankle-deep in carpet, and gibber like one of Felida’s lifelong pets.

“What the hell?” murmured the actress languidly.

“Double-crossed,” the publicity agent shrieked at last. “Look,” and he thrust the paper at her.

“Michael Seeley slips leash,” said the headline: “Quits John Bull’s Former Rum Store Under Alias,” and much more in the same dark monosyllabic vein. For the Lady Deirdre added to her slender income by occasional, opportunist journalism, and although there was a strong vein of sentimentalism in her, it was not strong enough to permit even a magic night at Heron Castle to obscure the main chance.

It was at crises like this that Mr. Dowley was at his best. In the humdrum, everyday business of persuading five continents that Felida was an unparalleled, God-given genius, he did not rise above the general level of his professional colleagues. But when the emergency came, when the Old Guard had to be flung in or held back, there was no one like Artie. He took off his coat, his collar, his tie, his dickey, and his cuffs, sat down at the telephone, and got to work.

He called up a friend at Nassau, John Bull’s Former Rum Store, and verified that an Englishman named Smith had sailed for England on the previous night in a returning rum-runner called the Pride of Glen Livet. He called up the office of the secretary of the Admiralty and offered a hundred thousand dollars for a month’s hire of a United States destroyer complete with personnel and cleared for action. Unappalled by the emphatic words with which this generous proposal was turned down, he tried the office of the United States War Stores Disposal Board, in case any destroyers or light cruisers might have been inadvertently left over from the World War, he tried the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, the United States Navy Yard at the Federal Prohibition-Enforcement Department, and Tammany Hall. All was in vain. Those who possessed warships were niggardly sweeps, while those who had the heart to help lacked the essential material. But Arthur Ed. was invincible. Officialdom had failed him. Very well, he would try unofficialdom. Within an hour he had clinched a bargain with Pugs D’Este, Autocrat of All the Hi-jackers from Penobscot Bay in Maine to the Laguna del Madre at the mouth of the Rio Grande. Artie was to put up eighty thousand dollars—forty down and forty on completion—and Pugs was to provide a small, fast motor-ship with eleven of a crew, three six-pounders, two hotchkiss machine-guns, and a hundred and twenty automatic pistols.

That night Felida, accompanied by a hastily acquired chaperone, alleged to be called Madame la Duchesse d’Argentat et Dôme, and Artie, went on board the motor-ship at the port of Newhaven, Connecticut. The eleven gentlemen who were contracted to navigate, run, and fight the vessel, bowed low with the profound courtliness of the Old World when Beautiful Youth and Titled Age stepped on deck, and Artie, supreme organizer in emergency, had even contrived for some pressmen, photographers, and a representative of the Mayor of Newhaven, to be present on the quay, so that it was to the white blaze of magnesium, the drone of cameras, and the rotund phrases of mayoral goodwill, delivered by proxy, that the great chase began. The press of five continents, for Artie had found time to circulate a news-story that afternoon, waited breathlessly for news.

The sixty cages of pets, inseparable from their mistress, travelled on the S.S. Aquitania, and the escape of a mottled Peruvian lizard on the third day out caused a certain amount of misunderstanding in the vicinity of the cocktail-bar.