Читать книгу The Vanity Girl - Compton Mackenzie - Страница 10

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THE ostriches of northern Patagonia are said to indulge in co-operative nesting: half a dozen hens one after another proceed to lay in a shallow cavity numerous eggs, the incubation of which is left to a male bird. Similarly, for the consummation of a musical comedy half a dozen lyrists, librettists, and composers lay their heads together in a shallow cavity and leave the result of their labor to be given life by a producer. "Miss Elsie of Chelsea," not being an exceptional musical comedy, will not repay a more thorough analysis. The first act developed in a painter's studio; in the second act everybody from the models in the chorus to the millionaire and his daughter whom the painter wanted to marry were transported to Honolulu. It was produced at the Vanity Theater under Mr. John Richards's management in the early autumn of the year 1902, and for many seasons it attracted large audiences all over the civilized world.

During the first fortnight of the tour, a fortnight of unending rain in Manchester, Dorothy, as she must be called henceforth, was inclined to think that life on the stage was not much more exciting than life in West Kensington, and certainly twice as tiring. It was holiday time, with two performances a day for eight days, and only in the second week—or more strictly in the third week, for Boxing Day fell upon a Friday that year—was she able to look about her in the small world where she must spend the next six months of her existence. She soon came to the conclusion that such an environment would not be tolerable for longer, and she made up her mind to escape from touring as soon as possible into a London engagement.

While she was still rehearsing in town she had paid one or two visits to the Vanity Theater, partly because it pleased her to hand in a card inscribed, "Miss Dorothy Lonsdale. Mr. Walter Keal's Miss Elsie of Chelsea Co.," but chiefly with the object of studying the demeanor, dress, appearance, and talents of the various members of the Vanity chorus, especially of the show-girls. The result of her observations was a strong belief that she was as graceful, as well able to set off clothes, as beautiful, and as good an actress as any of them. At the same time, she had begun to hear girls in the company talk about "getting across the footlights" and had realized that her own personality's powers of projection were still untested. If at the end of the tour it was brought home to her that with all her qualities "off" she lacked the most important one of all "on," she should immediately retire from the stage forever. The life itself did not attract her, and to spend years growing older and older in the environment of a provincial company seemed to Dorothy wilful self-deception; liberty at such a price would be worse than a comfortable servitude to suburban convention.

When on that wet Christmas morning at Euston she had seen the companions to close contact with whom she was bound for six months—a polychromatic group of crude pink complexions, mauve veils, electric seal, and exaggerated boots, looking in the mass like a shop-window in a second-rate thoroughfare, the sort of shop-window that has bundles of overcoats hanging outside the doorway, which indeed the men resembled—she had felt a sudden revulsion from them all, which those days in Manchester had done nothing to cure.

The first fortnight's bills for board and lodging had already shown Dorothy that existence on a guinea a week was not going to be easy; if she were ever engaged for London, she should require money to dress herself well at the beginning of her career, and it was imperative to save every penny she possibly could now in order to preserve intact the £500 she had obtained from her mother. An immediate economy would be effected in their weekly expenses if she and Lily could persuade another girl to share lodgings with them, and Dorothy began to study the ranks of the chorus for a suitable partner. Of course, from a social point of view she would have preferred to live with one of the principals, but the principals had not yet paid any attention to her, and she would not risk making advances first; besides, their standard of living might be too high for one who did not intend to waste money on the provinces. But when she considered her companions of the chorus, the dreadful language many of them used, the outrageous stories they told at the top of their voices, and, worst of all, their cockney accents, Dorothy shrank from extending the enforced intimacy of the dressing-room to her weekly home. This problem had not been solved when on the third Sunday after Christmas the company left Manchester for Birmingham, and by the newly arranged order of traveling Miss Dorothy Lonsdale found herself allotted to share a compartment with Miss Lily Haden, Miss Fay Onslow, and Miss Sylvia Scarlett.

Miss Onslow was unmistakably the senior member of the chorus and had reached the happy period of an actress's life when she has no more need to bother about keeping her reminiscences too nicely in focus. She was, in fact, as even she herself admitted, not far off forty; in a railway train on a wet January afternoon the kindest observer would have assumed that her next landmark was fifty. A month ago Dorothy would have shuddered to find herself on an equality with such a person; but asperous is the astral road, and she had to make the best of Miss Onslow by treating her with at least as much cordiality as she would have shown to a small dressmaker from whom she wanted a dress by the end of the week. Gradually, as her new surroundings became familiar, Dorothy had brought herself to call Miss Onslow "Onzie," and though the abbreviation made her gorge rebel as from cod-liver oil, she bravely persevered. Instinctively she knew that this was the only woman in the chorus whose counsel she could trust, the only one who would honestly tell her if she looked better with or without an artificial teardrop. The sum of Onzie's experience was hers for the asking; the middle-aged actress was an academician of grease-paint, serving alike as a warning and an example to the student; while her knowledge of the various towns in which the company had dates was evidently profound. Already she had provided Dorothy with an address for Birmingham; but these rooms to be enjoyed without the prickings of extravagance required a third partner. Dorothy, anxious to profit still further by Onzie's experience, suggested that she should join Lily and herself; but that very experience for which the novice was greedy made the old professional shake her head:

"No, thank you, ducky," she said. "I always live alone nowadays. You see, I've got my own little peculiarities. Besides, when my best boy comes down to see me he likes to see me alone. When I was with the 'Geisha' crowd last year I obliged one of the girls by sharing rooms with her in Middlesbrough, and as luck would have it George selected Middlesbrough to pay me a little visit. He was really very aggravated indeed, and he said to me, 'Fay,' he said, 'whatever's the use of me coming all the way up to Middlesbrough if I can't ever see you?' So I had to tell the other girl—Lexie Sharp her name was—that the arrangement didn't work, and what do you think she did? Well, if you'll believe me, she went about telling everybody that I was jealous of her over George! Luckily for me she was a girl who was very well known for her tongue and nobody paid any attention to her; still, it was uncomfortable for me, though I deserved it for breaking one of my rules. Who knows? George may come up to Birmingham. It's just the sort of place he would select for a visit, because, being a London fellow, he feels out of it in too small a town. Of course, he has nothing to do with the stage himself. Oh dear me, no, nothing whatever! He lives at Tulse Hill with two aunts, one of which has a growth in the throat and may go off at any moment, which prevents George working, as she's so particular about having him always close at hand. Well, any one ought to understand an aunt's feelings—I'm sure I can—but some of the girls last year used to criticize him something dreadful behind my back, until really I was glad to say good-by to them all. But this seems a much nicer crowd we're in now."

"We've only been in it a fortnight," said Miss Scarlett from the other corner of the carriage.

Dorothy looked at the speaker curiously. She was a girl who had joined the company for the last three rehearsals and during this first fortnight in Manchester had kept herself apart. Lily had spoken to her once or twice, but Dorothy, who was afraid there might be an unpleasant reason for such deliberate seclusion, had begged Lily not to be in too great a hurry to make friends with her. During Onzie's monologue Miss Scarlett had apparently been unconscious of what was happening in the compartment, and from the corner opposite Lily she had been staring out at the landscape, that was scarred and grimed and misshapen by industry like the hands of the toilers who lived in it. She was different from all the other girls, Dorothy was thinking—rather foreign-looking with her deep, brown, slanted eyes and mass of untidy brown hair, her wide nose, high cheek-bones, and distinctly ugly mouth, the underlip of which only just escaped protruding. She was dressed, too, in a style that was quite unlike that of anybody else and without any regard for the prevailing fashion. Dorothy remembered with a flickering smile that when she had first seen her at rehearsals she had thought she was one of the Hungarian artistes who had come to see why her club-room was being used by a theatrical company. Now when in a deep voice she suddenly turned round and commented on Fay Onslow's last remark Dorothy was astonished to hear that she spoke the same kind of English as herself; she indeed, in her surprise, almost gave utterance aloud to her thought that this gipsy creature was a lady.

"Hell! I've left my cigarettes behind," the lady ejaculated.

"There now, what a nuisance for you!" said the good-natured Onzie. "Have one of mine, dear."

"Which are they? Turks or Virgins?" asked Miss Scarlett, leaning over and screwing up her eyes to see what Onzie was offering.

Dorothy corrected her opinion and decided that Miss Scarlett had been a lady once upon a time; yet even while she was condemning her vulgarity she was thinking that her ladyhood was not so far away in the past. Her speech and manner had the assurance of age, but she could not be much more than twenty-two or twenty-three, perhaps not even so much as that.

Presently the train stopped for a dreary Sunday wait, and while some of the gentlemen of the company, with a view to future favors, were scuttling about the platform in search of tea for the ladies from whom they would demand them, Dorothy took this opportunity of asking Lily what she thought about inviting Sylvia Scarlett to share their rooms at Birmingham.

"She seems quite different from the other girls," Dorothy explained. "I mean, she talked as if she was a lady. Don't you think so? And really, you know, we can't afford these rooms unless we do get a third person."

Lily was quite ready to accept Miss Scarlett's company, though, as Dorothy thought impatiently, she would have been equally willing to accept the dresser's, if Dorothy had thought of inviting the dresser to share rooms with them.

"Do you want a cup of tea, Lil?" a young man came along and asked at this moment. When Lily declared that she should love a cup of tea, he hurried off toward the buffet.

"Do you know him?" asked Dorothy, in surprise.

"Only since we joined the company."

"But he's one of the chorus-boys, isn't he?"

"Yes."

"And you let him call you Lily already?" Dorothy hoped it was no worse than Lily; it had sounded dreadfully like Lil.

"Why shouldn't I?"

"Of course, it's your own business," said Dorothy, turning coldly away to eye Sylvia Scarlett, who was striding up and down the platform with both hands in the pockets of a frieze overcoat and looking so independent of everybody in the world that she felt shy of interrupting her. At that moment Lily was carried off by the chorus-boy for a cup of tea, which, had it been arsenic, Dorothy could not have declined more indignantly, and she found herself alone upon the platform and exposed to the glances of the comedian, a debased sport from the famous Vanity comedian whose mannerisms he had reproduced in the provinces as well as he was able for fifteen years, and would probably continue to reproduce for as many more. A small and ugly man, Joe Wiltshire had become so hardened to women's snubs that by sheer recklessness and indiscrimination he managed to fill his bag. If he was weak with rocketing pheasants he never hesitated to pot a sitting rabbit; in other words, he made love to every woman he met and found 5 per cent. of them amenable. Now with a view to impressing the prettiest girl in the chorus he was being funny with two bottles of stout and a corkscrew; but though he managed to cheer up the porter on duty, he failed to amuse Dorothy, who seized an opportunity of escaping from the performance by attaching herself to Sylvia Scarlett on her return promenade.

"I say," she began, in her best West Kensington manner. "I hope you won't think it awful cheek on my part, but my friend and I—you know, that pretty, fair girl who was in our carriage—would be awfully glad if you'd join us this week in our digs. Awfully nice rooms, but rather expensive for two, though we ought to be able to manage quite reasonably with three. Of course, if you're already fixed—"

"I've never been fixed in my life," said Miss Scarlett, sharply, "and I certainly don't intend to be fixed in Birmingham."

"No, I say, shut up; don't laugh. Have you been on the stage long?"

"Two weeks and two days."

"Oh, I say, really, then this is your first shop?"

Dorothy felt more at ease now that she knew she had not got to deal with a veteran of the profession; this new girl was obviously not one to be patronized, but there was now no reason to anticipate patronage on her side. With the removal of this danger Dorothy became more natural in her manner, and by the time the line was cleared for the theatrical special to proceed the bargain had been struck by which Sylvia Scarlett would share rooms with herself and Lily.

"I say, I hope you don't mind my making personal remarks," said Dorothy, "but you're looking most awfully tired."

She had intended this remark to effect a breach in the other girl's reserve, but it apparently had the contrary effect of raising the barrier still higher. She drew back slightly huffed, and Sylvia, leaning over, with a quick expansive gesture put a hand on her arm and told her not to be offended if she was not being confidential, but that she was enjoying the luxury of complete privacy after a period of disagreeable publicity. Dorothy would have preferred more exact information; even in childhood she had always felt inclined to cry when people had asked her riddles, and Roland's favorite way of teasing her had been to invent riddles without answers; however, she comforted herself with the reflection that Sylvia really was a lady, which at any rate ought to be a guaranty that the answer to that conundrum was not vulgar like the dreadful answers to dressing-room conundrums.

The train dragged on through the wet January dusk and into the dripping night of blurred lamps and distant furnaces, of ghostly Sunday travelers and long platforms like stagnant streams. Conversation in the compartment hung heavily upon the air like the moist breath of the tired women in the four corners of it. Dorothy, whose touchstone of behavior was self-respect, asked herself why Fay Onslow should mind living with other girls, such intimate revelations of her private habits was she making in the course of this journey. If a woman as fat as she was did not feel the loss of her dignity in searching for a flea like that, why should she want to live alone? And that was by no means the least dignified thing she had done. This ostentatious disregard of life's little decencies was certainly a regrettable side of theatrical life. However, the fact that she herself had gone on the stage prevented Dorothy from betraying her disapproval of such behavior. It would have been contrary to her method of dealing with life to admit that she could even expose herself to anything unseemly, still less that she might succumb to it. From the moment that Dorothy went on the stage the profession became above criticism, and the sense of collective propriety that she inherited as her father's daughter was no longer capable of being shocked. She crucified her fastidiousness; she was persecutor and martyr at the same time and derived an equal consciousness of superiority from either aspect of herself; in fact, the only thing in life that seriously troubled Dorothy was a minute bleb of skin on her left eyelid, and even that could be removed by a beauty doctor.

It was raining harder than ever when the train reached Birmingham, and the girls decided to indulge in the luxury of a cab. The rooms looked as if they really would be very comfortable, and the landlady insisted proudly that managers had been known to stay in them, not mere business managers whose only aim in life seemed to be making fusses about the starching of their white shirts, but acting managers, one of whom had even brought his children, which, as she pointed out, proved that the lodgings were homely.

Sylvia was some time getting ready for supper, and Dorothy, thinking it would not be nice to begin without her, made Lily wait quite half an hour. When Sylvia did come down at last, Dorothy was nearly sure that she had been crying, and the mystery of her origin once more obtruded itself. Dorothy wished now that she had arranged for Sylvia and herself to share the second room instead of Lily and herself. This strange new girl perplexed her self-assurance, and she proposed that if the new association prospered—they drank to its success in the pale India ale which the landlady provided—they should take it week about to sleep in the single room. Dorothy tried to extract confidences from Sylvia by confiding in her the history of Lily as far as she knew it; when that did not elicit anything she offered a gilded version of her own prior circumstances. The following week at Derby she shared the bedroom with Sylvia and went so far as to give her an almost truthful account of the Wilfred Curlew business, but nothing could she get from Sylvia in return. Moreover, there was nothing in her belongings that afforded a clue to her history; there was not a single photograph or initialed ornament; all her possessions were left lying about the room, and her trunk was never locked; and when every morning the girls called at the stage door for their correspondence she only in the company never received a letter, nor even bothered to look if there was one waiting for her in the rack. But if Sylvia was mute about the past she was not at all reserved about the present. There was nobody like her for seizing upon the eccentricities of the various members of the company to make merry with, and if sometimes Dorothy felt that she went too far in laughing at herself, she could not be angry because she used to laugh as much, indeed more, at Lily. She was a match, too, for any landlady; and gradually, as the association begun at Birmingham hardened into permanency, Dorothy and Lily left the entire management of their weekly home to Sylvia: who had a delightful capacity for keeping the weekly bills reasonable without ever seeming to be economical.

Dorothy was too firmly convinced of the reality of her own beauty to be an idealist, but if in after life any portion of her early experience on the stage seemed to her worthy of idealization these first weeks with Sylvia and Lily seemed so. Partly this was due to her discovery that touring was not so unpleasant when she did not have to bother about anything except her own appearance; but chiefly it was due to her growing conviction of ultimate success. There was beginning to be no doubt that even from the chorus of a musical comedy company on tour her personality was getting across the footlights. Even Sylvia, the mercilessly critical Sylvia, had prophesied success for her, and Dorothy's dreams went past to the music of approaching triumphs. Her mind was all a pageant, and the commonplace of touring existence—the aroma of the theater, the flight from the great manufacturing towns on still Sabbath mornings of black frost, the kaleidoscopic mustering of the company at railway stations, the emptiness of new rooms untouched as yet by the transience of the three girls, the garish mirrors hung with velvet that held her beauty, the undulating horsehair sofas, the sea-shells on the mantelpiece, the fire glowing in the grate, the dim gas when they came home from the performance, the smell of Cheddar cheese in the little room, the bright gas shining on the three places laid for supper, the petticoats hanging over the bed up-stairs, the oil-cloth in the passages, the noise of the landlady's family in the stuffy kitchen—all these and a hundred more externals of touring existence were in the years to come regarded affectionately as winter is beheld from the radiance of a summer afternoon.

So from Derby "Miss Elsie of Chelsea" went to Leeds, from Leeds to Bradford, from Bradford to Liverpool, from Liverpool to Newcastle. Then from Newcastle the company ascended into Scotland, where genial landladies and cakes and enthusiastic audiences compensated for east winds.