Читать книгу Dancers in Mourning - Margery Allingham - Страница 3

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When Mr. William Faraday sat down to write his memoirs after fifty-eight years of blameless inactivity he found the work of inscribing the history of his life almost as tedious as living it had been, and so, possessing a natural invention coupled with a gift for locating the easier path, he began to prevaricate a little upon the second page, working up to downright lying on the sixth and subsequent folios.

The book appeared at eighteen and sixpence, with frontispiece, in 1934, and would have passed into the limbo of the remainder lists with thousands of its prototypes had not the quality of one of the wilder anecdotes in the chapters dealing with an India the author had never seen earned it a place in the news columns of a Sunday paper.

This paragraph called the memoirs to the attention of a critic who had not permitted his eminence to impair his appreciation of the absurd, and in the review which he afterwards wrote he pointed out that the work was pure fiction, not to say fantasy, and was incidentally one of the funniest books of the decade.

The public agreed with the critic and at the age of sixty-one William Faraday, author of Memoirs of an Old Buffer (republished at seven and six, seventy-fourth thousand), found himself a literary figure.

He almost succeeded in looking the part as he sat in his box at the Argosy Theatre, his small bright eyes fixed upon the stage where the three hundredth performance of The Buffer, the musical show which had been built on some of the bones of his book, was taking place.

Having seen the show some thirty or forty times, he naturally tended towards the critical, but he enjoyed it nevertheless.

The rest of the audience was not so surfeited. It exulted, hugged itself and, in the cheaper parts of the house, became a little hysterical.

Even the consciously intelligent element was happy, enjoying a rare burst of spiritual freedom. A Jimmy Sutane-Slippers Bellew show was a recognized intellectual leveller and provided one of those blessed Alsatias wherein the eyes of the moron and the highbrow meet and wink. There were Sutane fans in stalls and gallery; childlike spirits, hid in most unexpected bosoms, followed his angular ecstatic figure in its graceful yet faintly grotesque interpretation of Mercer’s music with all the heartrending pleasure of imprisoned birds observing flight.

It was an occasion, a night to be remembered and recalled with embellishments. A party spirit enveloped the old Argosy and even the florid goddesses above the candelabra in the auditorium seemed to infuse a new enthusiasm into their painted sports.

The various managerial staffs, gay if exhausted, wrestled twice as vigorously as was strictly necessary with the telegrams, the insufferable idiots expecting seats before Christmas, the flowers in ice from Australia, and the expensive and importunate Atlantic phone calls.

The programme girls in their fresh uniforms glanced at the stage with new interest even when Sutane was not upon it, while the orchestra, basking in an unfamiliar sense of security, became almost elated in spite of the new number in the second act.

That disturbing emotional experience, the first night, was a thing of the past. That had been a nightmare with a happy awakening. This, the three-hundredth performance, had the pleasant quality of reality about it. The “House Full” boards appeared to be a permanency outside the doorways in Shaftesbury Avenue and the library order was no longer a matter for prayer.

Mr. Faraday leant forward. His small bear’s body in its black-and-white elegance swayed to the fox-trot rhythm of the première hit of the show. The amusing backcloth of grotesque faces which Pavalini had designed hung across the back of the stage and habitués in the audience nudged their companions, whispering to them to notice the villainous caricature of the Doremus woman on the croupier’s extreme right.

As the light increased the chorus boys appeared in their twenty, fifty and a hundred franc plaque costumes. They came trotting on, more and more and more of them, drilled to automaton perfection, bobbing and clattering in carefully contrived disorder until the suggestion of a shower of counters on a boule table was complete.

The giant roulette wheel in the middle of the stage began to glow, the music softened, and the applause drowned the cue, as it always did, when the audience saw the familiar figure in the suit of white tails leaning on the silver turntable. Then came the cue again and the small, charming voice, which knew all there was to know about putting a song over and little enough about singing, pattered neatly through the first chorus.

“What’s the odds I’m on your number?

It’s a thousand—a million to one.

It’s a cert. It’s a twist.

It’s a chance you have missed—

A thousand—a million to one.”

The face was a blur to eighty per cent of those in the theatre, a little white speck in a paper storm of subdued colours, but everybody knew the high forehead, the round mournful eyes, the long duck’s-bill nose and the mouth which widened so amusingly into a sophisticated smile.

As the chorus was taken up by the others the wheel began to turn and the tap dance, which had made stage gossip and was likely to make stage history, began for the three-hundredth time. The small white figure with the amazing feet ricocheted and pirouetted round the wooden slats, tapping out its own music with a quality in which mere accuracy merged into the miraculous. Faster, faster and faster! A thousand—a million to one ... a thousand—a million to one....

The crisis came in a breathless moment. The audience swayed, satiated and exquisitely at peace. The wheel began to slow down, the beat of the pattering feet became sparse, and the tune slurred agonisingly an octave lower. The chorus took up the song again, the lights turned the wheel into a vast zero, and applause, like the sound of wind passing through a cornfield magnified to terrifying proportions, swept down upon the white figure grinning in its midst.

William Faraday turned to the man who sat beside him.

“It’s a damned shame, Campion,” he murmured, the words rumbling between his lips. “Something’s got to be done, my boy. See that with half an eye. Means so much, you know.”

Mr. Campion nodded. The roar from the great pleased animal whose vastness filled the theatre, and of which he was so alarmingly a part, made conversation impossible. He sat leaning back in the shadows, the light from the stage catching his horn-rimmed spectacles and the unexpectedly strong line of his chin.

He was not a handsome man. There was a certain vacuity in his expression which counteracted the pleasant angles of his face and lent his whole appearance an indefinable quality, so that those who knew him were apt to find him hard to recollect and impossible to describe.

At the moment Mr. Faraday, who knew him well and had excellent personal reasons for believing in his resource, wondered if he had heard and, if so, had understood him.

“More trouble here, shouldn’t wonder,” he muttered a few minutes later as the curtain rose on the old-time music-hall scene and the music for the extra number inserted into the show in honour of the occasion began its lazy, insinuating measure. “Don’t understand why they want more dancing. Theatrical people beyond me—always were. Never liked this gel in the old days. Too damned highbrow by half. Must be an oldish woman by this time.”

He turned in his chair, the shortness of his neck making a rather complete movement necessary.

“Lookin’, Campion?”

“Naturally.” Mr. Campion seemed startled.

His host grunted. “Here she comes. Could tell you something about her.”

The art of Chloe Pye belonged to an earlier age than the inspired patterings of Jimmy Sutane, and Mr. Campion himself wondered why, on her return from a long colonial tour, she should have elected, much less been invited, to attempt a comeback in the midst of such strong competition. He had been a schoolboy when he had first seen her taking up a quarter of the bill at one of the better music halls, her rather mediocre talent helped out by a personality so feminine that her gentle seductiveness reached out well over the footlights. Her act had always been the same, a series of little dances each telling a story, each delivered in varying period costume, parts of which were discarded as the performance continued. The mild indelicacies involved were invariably excused by the dictates of the tale. Thus a vision of Chloe in Stuart underwear was archly exhibited under the title “Nell Gwyn Prepares for Court,” and Victorian petticoats and the pantalettes in entirety were displayed with equal timid vulgarity in “Morning, 1832.”

Her success in the days after the war when modern underclothes had reached an uninteresting minimum was considerable and her turn had borrowed an added glamour by the gossip which surrounded her private life.

In those days promiscuity had still the remnants of novelty and her affairs were eagerly discussed, but today, when the weary business of polyandry was arriving at the end of its melancholy cul-de-sac, her reputation, when it was remembered at all, detracted from rather than enhanced her appeal.

So, too, the return of underclothes in shop windows and on the familiar bodies of wives and sisters destroyed the attraction of the original idea, and tonight there was no murmur of tolerant protest as petticoat after petticoat dropped to the ground.

“Highbrow?” murmured Mr. Campion, harking back to his host’s earlier criticism.

“Historical,” explained Mr. Faraday briefly. “Don’t see why he put her in. Nothin’ to do with the book. They tell me she used to draw. Won’t sell a seat now.”

Looking at her, Campion was inclined to agree with him. The audience, thoroughly warmed and friendly, was kind, but it was obvious that its mood was anticipatory and it only awaited the return of Sutane and Slippers in their “Round the World in a Four-in-Hand” number, to the tune which Mercer had written one afternoon while Jimmy talked to him and which was now all over two continents.

“Don’t like the woman,” Mr. Faraday murmured. “Might have thought she was at the bottom of it if she hadn’t only just come back to England. Look at her—fifty if a day.”

With his eyes on the dark vivacious figure on the stage Campion reflected that he was wrong. Chloe Pye was forty-two and in excellent physical trim. It was her mind, not her body, that was so hopelessly vieux jeu.

His companion touched his arm.

“Come behind,” he whispered gustily. “Can’t stand this. Shouldn’t say so, of course. Want your help, my boy. Relyin’ on you. Come along.”

The Argosy was an old theatre and, true to its type, its backstage accommodation had never received any serious thought. Campion edged through a door which inconvenienced him in height almost as much as it incommoded Mr. Faraday in width, risked his neck by climbing down an iron staircase with a wobble, and came out into a corridor which looked and smelled like one of the less frequently used passages in a riverside tube station.

Mr. Faraday glanced over his shoulder, his eyes brightening.

“Used to come here to see Connie. Before your time,” he murmured. “Pretty little woman. Must be old now.” He sighed and added with a shy confiding which was almost the whole of his charm, “Still gives me a thrill, you know, this sort of thing. Vie de bohème, lights, far-off music, smell of the grease paint, women and so on.”

Fortunately Mr. Campion, who was somewhat at a loss, was spared the necessity of comment. One of the doors a little higher up the corridor burst open and a golden-haired young man in exquisite evening clothes appeared wheeling a silver-plated racing bicycle. He was very angry and the expression upon his face, which was a little too beautiful to be altogether pleasant, was sulky and absurd.

“It’s all very well for you to behave revoltingly, Richards, but I can bring my bicycle where I like,” he said over his shoulder. “You know it as well as anybody.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Konrad.” A harassed uniformed man with weary eyes and an untidy moustache came out of the door. “Mr. Webb told me himself to see nothing of the sort come into the theatre. There’s not enough room for the artists, let alone you bringing in bicycles.”

“But Miss Bellew brings in her great Dane.” The young man gripped his machine with something approaching ferocity, but the doorkeeper spoke with the obstinacy of old authority.

“Miss Bellew is a principal,” he said heavily.

The boy with the bicycle stiffened as the colour rose slowly over his face into the roots of his curling golden hair. For an embarrassing moment it seemed as if he were about to cry.

“This bicycle was presented to me by my admirers,” he said. “Why should I let pure jealousy on the part of some people”—he shot a waspish glance back through the doorway, presumably at some third person within—“prevent me from showing it to anyone I like? You’re making a fool of yourself. I shall certainly speak to Jimmy himself about it. Why don’t you keep your eye on the important things that keep happening?”

There was defiance in the last words, as though the speaker deliberately touched on a tabooed subject. A spot of colour appeared in the doorkeeper’s grey cheeks and he glanced behind him. Seeing Campion, he started forward angrily, only to fall back reassured at the sight of Mr. Faraday, to whom he nodded. Shaken but still obdurate, he returned to the job in hand.

“Now, Mr. Konrad,” he began, laying a heavy hand on the glittering machine, “we’ll have this outside, if you please.”

The boy with the golden hair relinquished it to him with a contemptuous shrug of his graceful shoulders.

“Oh, it’s Uncle William,” he said. “Do look here and see what the Speedo Club has insisted on sending me. Isn’t it too absurd?”

Mr. Faraday coughed noisily. “Magnificent,” he said fiercely and, gripping Campion’s arm, he propelled him firmly down the corridor. “I hate those fellers,” he muttered in an all too audible undertone. “Called me Uncle William—did you hear him?—impudent little tick! Don’t mind it from my friends—rather like it. Used to it. Notice you’ve dropped it. Don’t hesitate, my dear feller. But a worm like that ... turns my stomach over, don’t mind tellin’ you. Golden curls! ... Come on, we’ll slip into the wings. Know my way about by this time. Want you to see Slippers. Nice girl. No damned nonsense about her. No sex appeal off, though,” he added regretfully and coughed again, as if he feared he had betrayed himself.

The “Round the World in a Four-in-Hand” number was at its height as they approached. Over Mr. Faraday’s shoulder Campion caught a glimpse of the two figures, so familiar to the fashionable audiences of both continents. Slippers Bellew was a pale gold flame flickering over a twilit stage, while beside her moved Sutane, faithful as a shadow, and contriving by his very sympathy of movement to convey the mute adoration which the song demanded of him and which was so great a part of his appeal.

The roar of the audience at the end was tremendous. The harsh sound swept in on them like a great hot breath, and they stepped back through the crowd of girls and small-part folk coming down for the “Little White Petticoats” finale.

The excitement which is never wholly absent from the theatre, even on the three-hundredth night, forced itself upon Campion and he, too, was aware of the power of the Sutane personality which dominated the house, both before and behind the curtain. He tried to analyse it as he followed Uncle William to the dressing room. There was grace and skill personified in the man, but that alone was not sufficient to make so deep an appeal. It was the sophisticated, amused but utterly discontented intelligence which constituted the real attraction, he decided, an ease and dignity which was yet emotionally unsatisfied—the old pull of the hero in love, in fact.

His companion was still talking.

“Wait for him in here,” he remarked, tapping at a door with a One on it. “Wants to see you. Promised I’d bring you along.”

They were admitted to a large room, overlit to the point of discomfort, by a stolid young man in a white coat and spectacles with very thick pebbles.

“Come in, sir. Glad to see you,” he said, conducting the elder man to an armchair beside the dressing table.

Uncle William grunted gratefully and sat down.

“This is Henry, Campion,” he said with a wave of a pudgy hand. “Good feller, Henry.”

The young man beamed and set a chair for the other guest. He managed to convey at once that he was not at all sure if he was behaving like a first-class manservant but thought that there was a very good chance that he was.

“A nice drop of whisky, sir?” he ventured hopefully.

Uncle William looked interested. “Good idea,” he said consideringly and Henry coloured as if he had received a compliment.

While the decanter was forthcoming Campion had leisure to observe the room, which displayed three different influences in sharp contrast. There was the florid taste of the original furnisher, which ran to Turkey carpet and a day bed with gilded legs; the somewhat militaristic neatness and a feeling for gadgets as expressed by the bar concealed in an old gramophone cabinet, which was obviously Henry’s contribution; and something else, not so easy to define. Apart from a mass of papers, photographs and telegrams mostly, there were several odd indications of Jimmy Sutane’s personal interests. Two or three cheap mechanical toys lay upon the dressing table beside a box of liquorice all-sorts and a bunch of white flowers, while on a shelf in the corner sat a very nice white Hotei and a tear-off calendar, complete with an astrological forecast for each day of the year.

Uncle William sat back in his chair, the bright lights glinting on the double row of near-white curls at the nape of his plump pink neck. He looked worldly and benign, and somehow bogus, with his watery blue eyes serious and his expression unwontedly important.

“Well,” he demanded, “anythin’ new?”

Henry paused in the act of laying out a suit but did not turn round.

“It just seems funny to me, sir,” he said sulkily. “Miss Finbrough may take it seriously but I don’t.”

“Miss Finbrough, eh?” Uncle William cleared his throat. “Things have to be pretty bad for her to get the wind-up, I should think.”

“You’d say so, sir.” Henry was deliberately noncommittal and still did not turn round.

The elder man was silent for a moment or so.

“May be nothin’ in it,” he said at last.

Henry swung round, his face red and unhappy.

“Theatrical people aren’t like ordinary people, sir,” he burst out, blushing with shame at his own disloyalty. “I’m new to it and I notice it. They’re theatrical. Things mean more to them than they would to you or me—little things do. There’s not a nicer gentleman than Mr. Sutane anywhere; no one’s denying that. But he’s been in the theatre all his life and he hasn’t been about like an ordinary person. Suppose little things do happen now and again? Aren’t they always happening? Being in the theatre is like living in a little tiny village where everybody’s looking at everyone else and wondering what they’re going to be up to next. It’s small, that’s what it is. And Miss Finbrough ...” He broke off abruptly. Someone turned the door handle with a rattle and Jimmy Sutane came in.

He stood for a moment smiling at them and Campion was aware of that odd quality of overemphasis which there is about all very strong personalities seen close to for the first time. Confronted suddenly, at a distance of a couple of yards, Sutane presented a larger-than-life edition of his stage self. The lines of his famous smile were etched more deeply into his face than seemed possible in one so thin, and the heavy-lidded eyes beneath the great dome of a forehead were desperately weary rather than merely tired.

“Hallo, Uncle,” he said. “This Mr. Campion? Awfully good of you to come along. God, I’m exhausted! Henry, give me a drink. ’Fraid it’s got to be milk, damn it.”

The pleasant boyish voice was unexpectedly resonant, and as he closed the door and came into the room the place seemed to have become smaller and the walls more solid.

While Henry brought a glass of milk from the bar cupboard and assisted him out of his clothes and into a dressing gown there was a constant stream of interruptions. Excitable dinner-jacketed figures put their heads in, apologised and disappeared. More notes and telegrams arrived and the phone bell clamoured incessantly.

Campion sat back in his chair in the corner and watched. After the urbanity of his greeting Sutane seemed to have forgotten his guests. There was a nervous tension, a suppressed excitability, about him which had not been noticeable on the stage. He looked harassed and the nervous force which exuded from him like vibrations from a dynamo was not directed at any one thing but escaped abortively, creating an atmosphere which was uneasy and disquieting.

A minor climax came when he turned on an unsuspecting newcomer who was pushing the door timidly open and sent him scuttling off with a passionate protest.

“For God’s sake, Eddie!—give me ten minutes ...”

The explosion embarrassed him and he grimaced at Campion, his temporary audience.

“I’m going to pieces,” he said. “Henry, get on the other side of that door and put your back against it. Tell them I’m saying my prayers. Unhook the phone before you go.”

As the door closed behind the obedient dresser he turned to Campion.

“Come down tomorrow, can you? I’ve got conferences and things about this Swing Over show for the Orient, but Sunday is more of a breather than any other day. I don’t know what you’ll think of it all. Something’s going on; I know that. This fat ass here says I’ve got persecution mania ... my hat, I wish I had!”

He laughed and, although the familiar gaiety was there, the man watching him saw suddenly that it was a trick of line and feature rather than an expression of genuine feeling. It was typical of him, Campion reflected. His very skin and bone was make-up. The man himself was within, intelligent still but different.

“It began with the ‘House Full’ boards,” Sutane said slowly. “Someone stuck ‘Last Week’ slips across them. That was irritating but it didn’t mean anything. Then, as far as I remember, there was an outburst of the bird in the gallery one night. It was a claque and the rest of the house was annoyed. That didn’t matter in itself but little paragraphs about it got into the Press. I put Sock Petrie onto it at once and he traced one or two of them to phone calls put through the same night.”

He paused.

“It’s nothing much to talk about, I know, but it’s been so continuous. We’ve had to put fresh glass over my photograph outside almost every other day. Someone smashes it regularly. Never a trace of him. There have been dozens of other trivial little things too; nothing in themselves, you know, but alarming when they mount up.”

His dark eyes grew sombre.

“It’s now that it’s spread out to our place at home that it’s getting me down. Finding strangers in the garden with silly excuses and that sort of thing.”

He broke off lamely and turned to the elder man.

“That woman Chloe Pye is going down there tonight,” he said. She says my wife asked her and she’s going. I told her I’d rather she didn’t, but she laughed at me. Can’t chuck her out, can I?”

Uncle William made a depreciatory sound and Mr. Campion retained his habitual expression of polite interest. Sutane paused and reddened suddenly under his grease paint.

“I’m damned if it’s all coincidence!” he burst out. “You come down tomorrow, Mr. Campion, and see how it strikes you. It’s getting on all our nerves, these little petty digs at me. There was a rumour all over the place last week that I’d torn a muscle in my arm. Nine different people rang me up in one morning to sympathise.”

His voice had an edge to it, and his long fingers drummed on the glass top of the dressing table.

“It doesn’t matter so far,” he said, “but where’s it going to end? A reputation like mine, which depends on good will, can get pretty seriously damaged by a campaign like this. Yes?”

The final word was addressed to the doorway, where an apologetic Henry stood hesitating.

“It’s Mr. Blest,” he ventured. “I thought ...”

“Blest! Come in.” Sutane seemed relieved. “You know Mr. Faraday. Mr. Campion ...”

Ex-Inspector Blest grinned and nodded to the tall figure in the corner.

“Evenin’,” he said. “Didn’t expect to see you here, Mr. Campion. It’s as serious as that, is it? Well, Mr. Sutane, it’s all quiet tonight. Nothing to report at all. There’s not a word uttered out of place in the whole theatre. Ever since you engaged me to keep an eye on things I’ve been keeping my ears open, and you can take it from me, sir, there’s nothing but friendliness towards you everywhere.”

“Is that so?” With a movement so sudden and angry that the detective stepped back involuntarily, Sutane took up a face towel from the table and wiped his cheek. “What about that?”

The four men in the room looked at him curiously. From a point just below the left eye and following the line of the nose to the upper lip was a deep ragged scratch. Sutane ran his finger down it.

“D’you know what that is, Blest? That’s the oldest, dirtiest little theatre trick in the bag. A pin in the grease-paint stick. God knows how long it’s been there. One day I was certain to work down to it. It happened to be tonight.”

Blest was astonished in spite of himself. His round heavy face was crimson and he looked at Henry suspiciously.

“D’you know anything about this?” he demanded. “Who could have had access to your master’s paint?”

“Oh, don’t be a fool.” Sutane’s tone was weary. “The show has run for three hundred performances. My dressing room isn’t always locked. Hundreds of people have been in and out of here in the last eight months. It’s a long pin, you see, and it has been stuck up through the bottom of the stick. The head was buried in the silver-paper holder.”

He began to pile cream on his face to get the rest of the paint off.

“Then there’s the bouquet,” he went on lazily, half enjoying the sensation he was creating. “There it is. A messenger boy handed it in at the stage door just before the show began.”

“Flowers?” The ex-inspector was inclined to be amused. “I can’t say I see anything funny about that, sir.”

He took up the little white bunch gingerly and eyed it.

“Not very grand, perhaps. Star of Bethlehem, aren’t they? Country flowers. You’ve got a lot of humble admirers, you know.”

Sutane did not speak and, finding himself ignored, the ex-policeman raised the flowers to his nose and sniffed them idly. His sudden change of expression was ludicrous, and he dropped the bouquet with an exclamation.

“Garlic!” he ejaculated, his small eyes round with astonishment. “Garlic! Hey, what d’you know about that! A messenger brought it, did he? Well, I think I can check up there. Excuse me.”

He retrieved the flowers and plunged out of the room with them. Sutane caught Campion’s eye in the mirror and turned round to face him.

“It’s all trivial,” he said apologetically. “Little tuppenny-ha’penny squirts of malice. They’re negligible on their own, but after a month or so they get one down.”

He broke off and smiled. When he spoke again it was to reveal the essential charm of the man, a charm which was to puzzle and finally defeat an Albert Campion who was then barely in existence.

“It’s worse for me,” he said. “I’ve been such a blasted popular sort of fellow for so long.” His grin grew lopsided and his eyes were sad and childlike and intelligent.