Part 15

“Did once,” said De Petoburgh, smiling in sad retrospection.

“Or you may blow up in a motor,” went on Bobby.

“But in either case,” said Mrs. Gudrun, with point, “one is on the ground, not hanging between heaven and earth, like What’s-his-name’s coffin.”

“Brarro!” exclaimed De Petoburgh. “Encore! _Bis!_”

“Permit me to put in, dear lady,” said Teddy Candelish, with his best professional manner, “that if you fall out of an airship, you eventually finish on the ground!”

“Under,” gloomily interpolated De Petoburgh. “Under.”

“And, further,” said Bobby Bolsover, “the guide-rope is in connection with the ground all the time. Seventy feet of it, trailing like——”

“Snakes!” said the irrepressible De Petoburgh, with a glassy stare.

“And,” went on Bobby, “we will have four picked men from the Highfliers’ Club Grounds to run beside the guide-rope all the way and back.”

“Thus combining personal advertisement,” said Teddy Candelish, “with physical integrity.”

Mrs. Gudrun permitted her classical features to soften. “Now you’re talking!” the lady said. She smiled through the bottom of her champagne-glass as Teddy, bowed in acknowledgment of the compliment, and the trip was arranged forthwith. Thanks to the discretion of Teddy Candelish, the preparations were kept so profoundly secret that all Paris was on the alert when the eventful morning dawned. The Highfliers’ Club Grounds were literally besieged, and the intending sky-navigators fought their way to the aërodrome containing their vessel through a surging throng of scientists, editors, journalists, dandies, actresses, photographers, pickpockets, and politicians.

“Regular scrimmage—what?” panted Bobby Bolsover, as, bare-headed and disheveled, he reached the private side-door of the balloon-house.

“We ought to have slept here,” said Mrs. Gudrun, straightening her hat-brim as the breathless men collected her hairpins.

“Nothing but perches to sleep on,” objected Bobby Bolsover, indicating the skeleton arrangements of the vast interior.

Mrs. Gudrun, whose eye soared with Bobby’s, would have changed color had the feat been possible.

“Do we really climb up that awful ladder to get on board?” she inquired. “I have more nerve than any woman I know; but I wasn’t educated as an acrobat. _J’en suis tout baba_, Bobby, that you should have let us all in for a thing like this. We’re planted, however, and must go through. What crowds of smart women! What on earth has brought _them_ out so early in the morning? It must have got about that I’m going to be killed!” She gulped and clutched Teddy. “I c-can’t go on in this scene! Make an apology—make an apology and say I’m ill. I _am_ ill—horribly!”

“I feel far from frisky,” said Bobby Bolsover candidly. “Gout all last night in the head and eyes, and—every limb, in fact, that one relies upon in steering a motor. But, of course, I am ready to undertake the helm—unless anybody else would like to volunteer?”

He looked at Teddy, whose eye was clear, whose cheek was blooming, whose golden curls encroached upon a forehead unlined with the furrows of personal apprehension.

“W-what do you say, Teddy?” gasped Mrs. Gudrun.

“I deeply regret.... It is imperatively necessary, dear lady,” said Teddy glibly, “that in your absolute interests I should be at the ‘Fritz’ at twelve. The Paris representatives of the _Daily Yelper_, the _Morning Whooper_, and the _Greenroom Rag_, have appointed that hour to receive particulars of your start; three Berlin correspondents, one from Nice, and the editors of the _Journal Rigolo_ and the _Vie Patachon_ are to hole in ten minutes later; and there will be thousands of telegrams to open and answer. You know that the Syndicate of the Escurial Palace of Varieties have actually tendered to secure the turn. Therefore, though my heart will make the voyage in your company, I—cannot.”

Blue-eyed Teddy melted into thin air. Mrs. Gudrun, looking older than a professional beauty has any right to look, surveyed her companions with a hollow gaze of despair, while outside the aërodrome Paris roared and waited. Bobby, as green as jade, in a complete suit of motor armor, goggles included, leaned limply against the ladder that led upwards to the platform of the aërodrome. De Petoburgh, in foul-weather yachting kit, his glass fixed in his bloodshot left eye by the little mechanical contrivance that keeps it from tumbling, looked back. That debilitated nobleman, though shaky, was game to the backbone.

“I can’t drive a motor, Bolsover,” he said quite distinctly, “but I can drive _you_. Will you—oblige me—by climbing up that ladder? We follow. After you, dear lady!”

And the three negotiated the giddy ascent. Upon the platform they found the owner of the airship and the four workmen who, under promise of reward and threat of punishment, were to attend the guide-rope. The airship itself, a vast sausage-shaped silk bag of hydrogen, from which depended by rubber-sheathed piano wires a framework of proven bamboo supporting three baskets—one forward, one amidships, and one aft—hovered over the heads of the three depressed adventurers like a shapeless embodiment of adverse Fate. And Paris was growing impatient.

“Tell ’em to stick to the guide-rope, De Croqueville, for their lives,” urged Bobby feverishly, squeezing the hands of the owner of the machine. “Give it ’em in their own lingo; my French isn’t fluent to-day. They’re not to trust to my steering, but just tow us to the Tower and back.”

De Croqueville squeezed back, and embraced Bobby on both cheeks. “My brave, my very dear, rely upon me. Madame”—he kissed the jeweled knuckles of Mrs. Gudrun—“all Paris is assembled to behold the most beautiful woman prove herself also to be of the most brave. M. le Duc,” he saluted De Petoburgh distantly, and then cordially shook hands, “I am as kin a sportsman as how you. I have plank my egg—my oof—a thousand francs you circulate the Tour Eiffel, in spite of the wind, which blows from the wrong quarter. Adieu!”

“Blows from the wrong quarter!” gasped Bobby Bolsover. The eyeglass of De Petoburgh turned in his direction, and he immediately climbed the forward ladder and got into the steersman’s creaking basket, and grasped the wheel with an awful sinking immediately below the heart.... The Duke helped Mrs. Gudrun to assume the central position, and got in astern. Just before the starting word was given and the great doors of the aërodrome rolled apart in their steel grooves, he leaned over to De Croqueville, addressing that gentleman in his own language:

“One supposes she”—he alluded to the vessel—“is—sea—I mean air-worthy—eh, my friend?”

De Croqueville shot up his eyebrows and spread his hands.

“One supposes.... Truly, dear friend, I know not!... The vessel is newly complete—this is what in English you call the try-trip. That is why I hedge my bet. One thousand francs you round the Tour Eiffel and return uninjure—two thousand you do not return uninjure—whether you round the Tour or no. _Adieu-dieu!_”

The electric signal rang. The colossal doors groaned apart. The four workmen scuttled down the ladders like frightened mice, seized the guide-rope, and towed the airship out of dock. Paris waved handkerchiefs, cheered. Bobby Bolsover, ghastly behind his goggles, pressed the pedal and manipulated the wheel. The engine throbbed, the tail-shaft screw revolved. The adventurers had started.

“Qui-quite nice,” gulped Mrs. Gudrun tremulously, as the keen wind toyed with her silk veil and fluttered her fur boa.

“She pitches,” said De Petoburgh briefly. “Keep her head to it, Bolsover.”

There was a sickening moment as the airship mounted obliquely upward.... Then a tug at the guide-rope brought her nose down, pointing to the sea of fluttering handkerchiefs beneath. Mrs. Gudrun groaned and clung to the sides of her padded basket. De Petoburgh swore.

“I can’t—manage her. My—my nerve has gone. Let’s put about and take her back to dock again,” gasped Bobby.

“For—for Heaven’s sake, do!” groaned Mrs. Gudrun. But again that new voice spake from the blue lips of De Petoburgh, and——

“I’ve lived like a dashed blackguard, but I’m not going to die like a cowardly cad. Curtain’s up—go through with the show. Bolsover, you bragging, white-livered idiot, you can steer an electric launch and drive a motor-car. If I’d ever learned to do either, I’d take your place. But as I can’t—go ahead, and keep on as I direct, or I’ll shoot you through your empty skull with this revolver”—the click of the weapon came stimulatingly to the ears of the scared helmsman—“and swear I went mad and wasn’t responsible. They—they’d believe me! Mabel, if you sit tight and go through with this, I’ll stand you that thousand-guinea tiara you liked at Alphonse’s, if we—when we get safe to ground. Now, Bolsover, drive on, or take the consequences!”

Perhaps the familiar terms employed restored Bobby to the use of his suspended faculties. Certain it is that the airship began to forge steadily ahead at the rate of some twenty miles an hour—but _not_ absolutely in the direction of the vast spidery erection of metal which was its destined goal. It skimmed in the direction of the Bois de Boulogne, keeping at so lofty an altitude that of the end of the guide-rope merely a length of some six feet trailed upon the ground.

“Those—those men l-look so funny running after it,” said Mrs. Gudrun, upon whom the promise of the tiara had acted as a stimulant.

“I hope they may keep up with it,” muttered De Petoburgh as the airship sailed over the humming streets of the gay city, and tiny men and women turned white specks of faces upwards to stare. “Ease her, Bolsover,” he commanded.

“Oh, we’re going right up again!” gasped Mrs. Gudrun. Then, as the airship regained the horizontal: “This isn’t half bad,” she said in a more cheerful tone, “but the housetops with their spiky chimney-pots look dreadfully dangerous. The guide-rope has knocked a row of potted geraniums off a third-floor balcony, and the old man who was reading the paper in the cane chair must be swearing awfully. But where are the men? I don’t see them; do you?”

The four workmen were at that moment heatedly cursing the Municipal Council of Paris at the bottom of a very long, very deep trench which had been excavated across a certain street for the accommodation of a new drain. The guide-rope pursued its course without them, now sweeping a peaceful citizen off his legs, now covering the occupants of a smart victoria with mud, now trailing over a roof or coiling serpent-wise around the base of a block of chimneys. In the distance loomed the Eiffel Tower, but in answer to De Petoburgh’s repeated requests that he should steer thither, Bobby Bolsover only groaned. And the airship, after navigating gracefully over the green ocean of the Bois de Boulogne, continued her trip over the Longchamps racecourse, veered to the south at the pleasure of a shifting current of air, and, having leaked much, began plainly to buckle and bend.

De Petoburgh, uncomfortably conscious of a misspent existence and wasted opportunities, looked at the back of Mrs. Gudrun’s head, and wondered whether she knew any prayers.

“The trees are coming awfully close, aren’t they?” said the unconscious beauty.

“Awfully!” said the Duke, as the capricious motor stopped.

Then Mrs. Gudrun screamed, and Bobby Bolsover, casting his goggles to the winds, huddled in the bottom of his basket, and the debilitated but plucky nobleman shut his eyes and thought of his long-dead mother as the airship hurtled downwards ... crash into the top of the tallest of the giant oaks in the magnificent park of H.S.H. Prince Gogonof Babouine.

The Prince has the reputation of being excessively hospitable. When the three passengers recovered from the shaking, the top of a long ladder pierced the thick foliage beneath the wrecked vessel, and the Prince’s major-domo, a stout personage in black with a gold chain, came climbing up with a courteous message from the Prince. Would Madame and M. le Duc and the other gentleman descend and partake of the second _déjeuner_, which was on the point of being served, or would they prefer to remain on board their vessel?

“Stop up here? Does the man take us for angels?” snorted Mrs. Gudrun indignantly.

The descent was not without danger, but with the aid of De Petoburgh and the major-domo, she braved and completed it without injury either to her long celebrated limbs or her famous features. Bobby followed.

The Prince entertained the shipwrecked castaways in princely fashion, and drove the party back to Paris on his drag, the wonderful yellow coach with the team of curly Orloffs. And he consented to dine; and that night Mrs. Gudrun held a reception behind the illuminated balconies of the Hotel Fritz, while the London newsboys were yelling her familiar name, and the evening papers containing the most ornamental particulars of her adventure went off like hot cakes.

According to the most reliable account garnered by our special correspondent from the lovely lips of the exquisite aëronaut, she had never quailed in the moment of peril, and, indeed, upon the distinguished authority of the Hon. R. Bolsover: “One is never frightened while one can rely upon one’s own pluck!” Nobody interviewed De Petoburgh, leaning vacuously smiling against the wall. Indeed, he had developed another of his attacks, and could not have responded with any coherence.

“Wonderful fellow, Bolsover,” Teddy Candelish gushed, Teddy, all smile and sparkle, “so brainy and resourceful!”

“Rath’ ...” assented De Petoburgh fragmentarily.

“And Her Nibs—a heroine—positively a heroine!”

“Ra’!” assented De Petoburgh, as the heroine swept by, making magnificent eyes at the palpably enamored Prince, while Paris murmured indiscreet admiration.

“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!”

“The ways of Providence are wonderful, father!” returned the said Alfred’s mother dutifully. Mrs. Boodie was an experienced finisher herself, and had always lamented Alfred’s lack of “turn” in the family direction. “An’, if I was you, I wouldn’t mention that bit in the paper to Aphasia Cutts. She’s dreadful jealous over our Alfred, even now, though he hasn’t bin to see ‘er or wrote for two years. As good as a break off, I should a-regarded it, ’ad I bin in her place. But she’s different to what I was.”

“So are all the gals,” said Mr. Boodie with conviction, bestowing upon his wife a salute flavored with Russia leather and calf.

“Well, I’m sure. Go along, father, do!” said Mrs. Boodie, with a delighted shove.

But of course Aphasia—so christened by an ambitious mother in defiance of the expostulations of a timid curate—had already seen and cried over the paragraph. She had loved Alfred and stood up for him when he was a plain, stupid boy with an unconquerable aversion to work. She had been his champion when he grew up, no longer plain, but as pronounced a loafer as ever. She had given up, in exchange for his loutish affections, the love of an honest and hard-working man.

“I can’t ’elp it!” she had said; “you can get on without me, and Alfred can’t, pore chap. His Par calls ’im a waster—I believe ’e’d give ’im the strap if ’e wasn’t six foot ’igh. But I’ve got ’im an opening in the theatrical line, through a friend of mine as does fancy braiding at Buskin’s, the stage shoemaker’s in Covent Garden. It’s only to walk on as one of the Giant’s boy-babies in the Drury Lane panto.—eighteen pence a night _and matinées_—but his Mar will be thankful. If only ’is legs are long enough for the part——”

They were, and from that hour Alfred had embarked on a career. When entrusted with a line to speak, it was Aphasia who held the grimy slip of paper on which it was written and aided the would-be actor with counsel and advice.

“And ’old up your ’ead, do, as if you was proud of yourself, and don’t bend at the knees; and whether you remember your words or not, throw ’em out from your chest as if you was proud of ’em. An’ move your arms from the shoulder like as if you was swimmin’—don’t crook your elbers like a wooden doll. And throw a bit o’ meanin’ into your eye. You took me to see that Frenchman, Cocklin ’e calls ’imself; as played the chap with the boko ’e wouldn’t let the other chaps make game of.... French or Japanese, they’re both Dutch to me, but I watched Cocklin’s eye, and I watched ’is ’ands, an’ I could foller the story as if it was print, an’ plainer. I’ve went to see an actor since what folks said was a great artis’, and if ’e did talk English, ’is eye was as dumb as a boiled fresh ’addock’s an’ ’s ’ands was like slices of skate. Now say your bit over again.”

And Alfred said it, this time to the satisfaction of his instructress. When he got a real part Aphasia coached him, and rode down from Hammersmith with him on the bus, and was waiting for him at the stage-door when he came out, the tears of joy undried on her pale cheeks. And that was the night upon which she first noticed a coldness in the manner of her betrothed.

“An’ now I’m not good enough for him to wipe his boots on,” she sobbed, sitting on her bed in the single room lodging off the roaring, clanging Broadway—“the boots ’is Par cut an’ welted, an’ ’is Mar stitched, an’ I finished. But I won’t stand in ’is light. I’ve my pride, if I am a boot-finisher. I’ll see that Mrs. What’s-her-name face to face, an’ ’ave it out as woman to woman, an’ tell ’er she’s welcome to marry ’im for me.”

And Aphasia dried her poor red eyes and took off Alfred’s betrothal ring—a fifteen-carat gold circlet with three real garnets, bought in the Broadway one blushful, blissful Saturday night—and evicted his photographs from their gorgeous cheap frames, and made a brown-paper parcel of these things, with a yellow leather purse with a blue enamel “A” on it, and tied it up with string.

Perhaps something of her fateful mood was telepathically conveyed to Mr. Leo De Boo at that moment, for he shivered as he sat at the feet of Mrs. Gudrun upon the balcony of a private suite at the Hotel Spitz, and turned up eyes that were large and lustrous at that imperishable image of Beauty, exhaling clouds of fashionable perfume and upborne on billows of chiffon and lace. Mrs. Gudrun, who naturally mistook the spasms of a genuine plebeian British conscience for the pangs of love, lent him her hand—dazzlingly white, astonishingly manicured, jeweled to the knuckles, and polished by the devout kisses of generations of worshipers—and De Boo mumbled it, and tried to be grateful and talk beautifully about his acting. But this bored Mrs. Gudrun, who preferred to talk about her own.

“I have often felt that myself,” she said—“the conviction that a crowded audience hung upon my lips and saw only with my eyes, and that I swayed them as with a magic thingumbob, by the power of a magnetic personality.”

“It is a mystery,” said De Boo, passing his long fingers through his clustering curls, “that once in a century or so a man should be born——”

“Or a woman. Marvelous!” agreed Mrs. Gudrun. “Marvelous! the man who runs the _Daily Tomahawk_ said that when I made my first appearance on the stage.”

“Genius is a crown of fire,” said De Boo, who had read this somewhere. “It illuminates the world, yet scorches the wearer to the bone. He——”