Part 16

“She suffers,” said Mrs. Gudrun, neatly stopping the ball and playing it on her side. “You may bet she suffers. Hasn’t she got the artistic temperament? The amount of worry mine has given me you would never believe. Cluffer, of the _Morning Whooper_, calls me a ‘consolidated bundle of screaming nerves.’ When I’ve sat down to dinner on the eve of a first night, De Petoburgh—you’ve met the Duke?—has had to hold me in my chair while Bobby Bolsover gave me champagne and Angostura out of the soup-ladle. And I believe I bit a piece out of that. And afterwards—ask ’em both if I wasn’t fairly _esquinte_.”

“But the possessor of an artistic temperament—such as mine—even though the fairy gift entails the keenest susceptibility to anguish,” quickly continued De Boo, “enjoys unspeakable compensation in the revelation to him alone of a kingdom which others may not enter. Looking upon the high mountains in the blush of dawn, I have shouted aloud with glee——”

“The first time I ever went into a southern Italian orange-grove in full bloom,” acquiesced Mrs. Gudrun, “the Prince of Kursaal Carle Monto, who was with me, simply sat down flat. He said Titian ought to have been alive to paint my face and form against that background.... By the way, the first act of that new play, the title of which I’ve forgotten, and which I’ve leased from a scribbling idiot whose name don’t signify, takes place in a blooming orange-grove. I’ve cast you for the leading man’s part, Leo, and I hope you will be properly grateful for the chance, and conquer that nasty habit you have of standing leering at the audience in all my great moments.”

“Dearest lady,” De Boo argued glibly, “does it not increase the dramatic poignancy of such moments if the spectators are enabled to read in the varying expressions pictured on _my_ face the feelings your art inspires?”

But Mrs. Gudrun was inexorable. “They can read ’em in the back of your head if they’re anxious,” said she, “or they can take the direct tip from me. I hope that’s good enough. I don’t see the cherry-bun of running a theater to be scored off by other people, and so you know! And now that’s settled, let us go and have stuffed oysters and roast ices at Noel Peter’s, and see Sarah afterwards in her new tragedy _rôle_. I’m the only woman she’s really afraid of, you know, and I feel I’m bound to romp in in front of her before long. She says herself that acting like mine cannot be taught in a conservatoire, and that I constitute a complete school in myself. Have you ever seen me play Lady Teazle?”

“Unhappily I have not. It is a loss,” said De Boo, “a distinct loss. By the way, when I scored so tremendously as Charles Surface at Mudderpool——”

“Hell is full of men who have scored as Charles Surface at Mudderpool,” said Mrs. Gudrun crushingly. “That sounds like a quotation, doesn’t it? Only it must be mine, because I never read. You’re a charming fellow, and a clever boy, Leo, but, as a friend, let me tell you that you talk too much about yourself. It’s bad form; and the truly great are invariably the truly modest. I must save up that epigram for my next interview, I think. There’s the auto-brougham.”

And De Boo enfolded the renowned form of his manageress in a point lace and sable wrap, and they went off to Noel Peter’s, and saw La Gr-r-ande perform.

Rehearsals of the new play, _Pride of Race_, at the Sceptre had scarcely commenced when in upon Teddy Candelish, laboriously smoking in his sanctum and opening the morning’s mail, swept Mrs. Gudrun.

“I haven’t a moment to breathe,” she said imperially, accepting the chair Teddy acrobatically vacated. “Come in, De Petoburgh—come in, Bobby; you are in the way, but I’m used to it. No, De Petoburgh, that cellaret’s tabooed; remember what Sir Henry said to you about liqueurs before lunch. Are there any letters of importance, Teddy, to my cheek?”

“Several bundles of press-cuttings from different firms, thirty or forty bills, a few tenders from photographers, and—and some love-letters,” replied Candelish, pointing to some neat piles of correspondence arranged on the American roll-top desk. “Usual thing—declarations, proposals, and so forth.”

“Always plenty of those—hey?” chuckled De Petoburgh, sucking a perfunctory peptoid lozenge in lieu of the stimulant denied.

“Plenty, b’Jove!” echoed Bobby Bolsover.

“Not so many as there used to be,” responded Candelish with tactless truthfulness, rewarded by the lady with a magnificent glare. “By the way, there’s one odd letter, from a girl or a woman who _isn’t_ quite a lady, asking for an interview on private business. Signs herself by the rummiest name—Aphasia Cutts.” He presented the letter.

“Aphasia?” said Mrs. Gudrun, extending heavily jeweled fingers for the missive. “Isn’t that what De Petoburgh has when he can only order drinks in one syllable and his legs take him where he doesn’t want to go? Eh, Bobby?”

“Yes; but remindin’ the Duke of that always brings on an attack,” said Bobby solicitously. “Look at him twitchin’ now.... Steady, Peto! Woa-a, old mannums!”

“Take him for a tatta while I finish the rehearsal,” commanded Mrs. Gudrun, rising from Teddy’s chair in an upsurge of expensive draperies. “Write to this Aphasia girl, Teddy, and say I’ll see her to-morrow, between three and four p. m. After all, the whole-souled adoration of one’s own sex is worth having,” the lady said, as, heralded by the rustling of silken robes, the barbaric clash of jeweled ornaments, and wafts of fashionable perfume, she sailed back to the boards.

When Aphasia got her reply, p.p. Teddy, some hours later, there was very little of whole-souled adoration in her reception of the missive.

“I s’pose she looks on me as the dirt under her feet, like Alfred. But I won’t let that put me off makin’ the sacrifice that’s for his good—the ungrateful thing! I ’ope she’ll make ’im a nice wife, that’s all,” she sobbed, as she took from her collar-and-cuff drawer the flat brown-paper parcel containing the garnet ring, the photographs, and the letters. And she dressed herself in her best, with a large lace collar over a cloth jacket, and the once fashionable low-necked pneumonia-blouse, to which the girls of her class so fondly cling, and went to meet the lady whom, in terms borrowed from the latest penny romance, she called her “haughty rival.”

Mrs. Gudrun received her with excessive graciousness. A costume rehearsal was in progress, and the lady was in the hands of her maids and dressers. “I suppose this is the first time you have ever been behind the scenes?” she inquired. “Look about you as much as you like, and then you will be able to say to your friends: ‘I have been in Mrs. Gudrun’s dressing-room.’ You see, I am in the gown I wear in the first act. It is by Babin; and if you write for a ladies’ paper, you will remember to say so, please.”

“I don’t write for any ladies’ paper,” said Aphasia. “I couldn’t spell well enough—not if they ast me ever so. But it’s a lovely gownd, and I suppose all that stuff on your face is what makes you look so young an’ ’andsome—from a long way off.”

Mrs. Gudrun’s famous features assumed a look of cold displeasure. She assumed the majestic air that suited her so eminently well, and asked the young person’s business.

“It’s quite private, and I’ll thank you to send away your maids, if you’ve no objection,” said the dauntless Aphasia. “The fact is,” she continued, when the indignant menials had been waved from the apartment, “as I’ve come to make you a present—a present of a young man——”

“Look here, my good young woman,” began the incensed manageress.

Aphasia suddenly handed her the brown-paper parcel, and the wrath of Mrs. Gudrun was turned to trembling. She was sure this was an escaped lunatic. Aphasia profited by the lull in the storm to explain. She had come to hand over her Alfred—stock, goodwill, and fixtures. He had forgotten to be off with the old love before he went on with the new, but the old love bore no malice. All was now over.

“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:

“The peculiarity and originality of my genius, as Cluffer says, consists in the fact that I can’t do the things that might be expected of me—not for filberts; while I _can_ do the things that mightn’t. If I can’t really hit off that laugh, I’ll have a woman in the wings to do it for me. But my impression is that I shall be all right at night. Don’t forget, Gormleigh, that you’re not to tub the chandelier altogether; I hate to play to a dark house.”

“Py vich innovation,” said Gormleigh afterwards, “de gonsbirators vas enapled to garry out their blan. Himmel!” he cried, dabbing his overflowing eyes with an antediluvian silk pocket-handkerchief, “shall I effer forget—no, not vile I lif—de face of dot jung man!”

For at the moment when Monte Polverino’s scorn of the lovely plebeian he has wedded is expressed in words—when Aquella, pierced to the heart by being called “a low-born vulgarian” and a “peasant huckster,” is about to utter her famous yell of frenzied laughter, the Old Stage-Doorers and the New Stage-Doorers hung out their boots. A _chevaux de frise_ of walking-sticks, from each of which depended a pair of these indispensable articles of attire, graced the gallery, distinguished the upper circle, and appeared upon the level of the pit. Stricken to the soul, faltering and ghastly under his paint, and shaking in the most sumptuous pair of patent leathers, white kid topped, in which he had yet appeared, De Boo blankly contemplated the horrid spectacle; while Mrs. Gudrun, to whose somewhat latent sense of humor the spectacle appealed, burst into peal upon peal of the wildest laughter ever heard beyond the walls of an establishment for the care of the mentally afflicted. “The grandeur, poignancy, and reality of the acting,” wrote Cluffer, of the _Morning Whooper_, “was acknowledged by a crowded house with a deafening and unanimous outburst of applause.”

“Both Mrs. Gudrun and Mr. De Boo attained the highest level of dramatic expression,” pronounced Mullekens, of the _Daily Tomahawk_. “It was the touch of Nature which attunes the universe to one throb of universal relationship.”

The play was a success. Even the “Boo’s!” of both the clubs, united for the nonce in disapprobation, could not rob Leo of his laurels. He wears them to-day, for _Pride of Race_ has enjoyed a tremendous run.

“We’ve made the beggar’s reputation instead of sending him back to the boot-shop and that poor girl,” said Ulick Snowle to Tom Glauber next day.

“Possibly,” said Tom Glauber, sniffing at his inseparable carnation. “But it’s all the better for the girl, I imagine, in the long run.”

A SPIRIT ELOPEMENT

When I exchanged my maiden name for better or worse, and dearest Vavasour and I, at the conclusion of the speeches—I was married in a traveling-dress of Bluefern’s—descended the steps of mamma’s house in Ebury Street—the Belgravian, _not_ the Pimlican end—and, amid a hurricane of farewells and a hailstorm of pink and yellow and white _confetti_, stepped into the brougham that was to convey us to a Waterloo Station, _en route_ for Southampton—our honeymoon was to be spent in Guernsey—we were perfectly well satisfied with ourselves and each other. This state of mind is not uncommon at the outset of wedded life. You may have heard the horrid story of the newly-wedded cannibal chief, who remarked that he had never yet known a young bride to disagree with her husband in the early stages of the honeymoon. I believe if dearest Vavasour had seriously proposed to chop me into _cotêlettes_ and eat me, with or without sauce, I should have taken it for granted that the powers that be had destined me to the high end of supplying one of the noblest of created beings with an _entrée_ dish.

We were idiotically blissful for two or three days. It was flowery April, and Guernsey was looking her loveliest. No horrid hotel or boarding-house sheltered our lawful endearments. Some old friends of papa’s had lent us an ancient mansion standing in a wild garden, now one pink riot of almond-blossom, screened behind lofty walls of lichened red brick and weather-worn, wrought-iron gates, painted yellow-white like all the other iron and wood work about the house.

“Mon Désir” the place was called, and the fragrance of potpourri yet hung about the old paneled salons. Vavasour wrote a sonnet—I have omitted to speak before of my husband’s poetic gifts—all about the breath of new Passion stirring the fragrant dust of dead old Love, and the kisses of lips long moldered that mingled with ours. It was a lovely sonnet, but crawly, as the poetical compositions of the Modern School are apt to be. And Vavasour was an enthusiastic convert to, and follower of, the Modern School. He had often told me that, had not his father heartlessly thrown him into his brewery business at the outset of his career—Sim’s Mild and Bitter Ales being the foundation upon which the family fortunes were originally reared—he, Vavasour, would have been, ere the time of speaking, known to Fame, not only as a Minor Poet, but a Minor Decadent Poet—which trisyllabic addition, I believe, makes as advantageous a difference as the word “native” when attached to an oyster, or the guarantee “new laid” when employed with reference to an egg.

Dear Vavasour’s temperament and tastes having a decided bias towards the gloomy and mystic, he had, before his great discovery of his latent poetical gifts, and in the intervals of freedom from the brain-carking and soul-stultifying cares of business, made several excursions into the regions of the Unknown. He had had some sort of intercourse with the Swedenborgians, and had mingled with the Muggletonians; he had coquetted with the Christian Scientists, and had been, until Theosophic Buddhism opened a wider field to his researches, an enthusiastic Spiritualist. But our engagement somewhat cooled his passion for psychic research, and when questioned by me with regard to table-rappings, manifestations, and materializations, I could not but be conscious of a reticence in his manner of responding to my innocent desire for information. The reflection that he probably, like Canning’s knife-grinder, had no story to tell, soon induced me to abandon the subject. I myself am somewhat reserved at this day in my method of dealing with the subject of spooks. But my silence does not proceed from ignorance.

Knowledge came to me after this fashion. Though the April sun shone bright and warm upon Guernsey, the island nights were chill. Waking by dear Vavasour’s side—the novelty of this experience has since been blunted by the usage of years—somewhere between one and two o’clock towards break of the fourth day following our marriage, it occurred to me that a faint cold draft, with a suggestion of dampness about it, was blowing against my right cheek. One of the windows upon that side—our room possessed a rather unbecoming cross-light—had probably been left open. Dear Vavasour, who occupied the right side of our couch, would wake with toothache in the morning, or, perhaps, with mumps! Shuddering, as much at the latter idea as with cold, I opened my eyes, and sat up in bed with a definite intention of getting out of it and shutting the offending casement. Then I saw Katie for the first time.

She was sitting on the right side of the bed, close to dear Vavasour’s pillow; in fact, almost hanging over it. From the first moment I knew that which I looked upon to be no creature of flesh and blood, but the mere apparition of a woman. It was not only that her face, which struck me as both pert and plain; her hands; her hair, which she wore dressed in an old-fashioned ringletty mode—in fact, her whole personality was faintly luminous, and surrounded by a halo of bluish phosphorescent light. It was not only that she was transparent, so that I saw the pattern of the old-fashioned, striped, dimity bed-curtain, in the shelter of which she sat, quite plainly through her. The consciousness was further conveyed to me by a voice—or the toneless, flat, faded impression of a voice—speaking faintly and clearly, not at my outer, but at my inner ear.

“Lie down again, and don’t fuss. It’s only Katie!” she said.

“Only Katie!” I liked that!

“I dare say you don’t,” she said tartly, replying as she had spoken, and I wondered that a ghost should exhibit such want of breeding. “But you have got to put up with me!”

“How dare you intrude here—and at such an hour!” I exclaimed mentally, for there was no need to wake dear Vavasour by talking aloud when my thoughts were read at sight by the ghostly creature who sat so familiarly beside him.

“I knew your husband before you did,” responded Katie, with a faint phosphorescent sneer. “We became acquainted at a _séance_ in North-West London soon after his conversion to Spiritualism, and have seen a great deal of each other from time to time.” She tossed her shadowy curls with a possessive air that annoyed me horribly. “He was constantly materializing me in order to ask questions about Shakespeare. It is a standing joke in our Spirit world that, from the best educated spook in our society down to the most illiterate astral that ever knocked out ‘rapport’ with one ‘p,’ we are all expected to know whether Shakespeare wrote his own plays, or whether they were done by another person of the same name.”

“And which way was it?” I asked, yielding to a momentary twinge of curiosity.

Katie laughed mockingly. “There you go!” she said, with silent contempt.

“I wish _you_ would!” I snapped back mentally. “It seems to me that you manifest a great lack of refinement in coming here!”

“I cannot go until Vavasour has finished,” said Katie pertly. “Don’t you see that he has materialized me by dreaming about me? And as there exists _at present_”—she placed an annoying stress upon the last two words—“a strong sympathy between you, so it comes about that I, as your husband’s spiritual affinity, am visible to your waking perceptions. All the rest of the time I am hovering about you, though unseen.”

“I call it detestable!” I retorted indignantly. Then I gripped my sleeping husband by the shoulder. “Wake up! wake up!” I cried aloud, wrath lending power to my grasp and a penetrative quality to my voice. “Wake up and leave off dreaming! I cannot and will not endure the presence of this creature another moment!”

“_Whaa_——” muttered my husband, with the almost inebriate incoherency of slumber, “_whasamaramydarling?_”

“Stop dreaming about that creature,” I cried, “or I shall go home to Mamma!”

“Creature?” my husband echoed, and as he sat up I had the satisfaction of seeing Katie’s misty, luminous form fade slowly into nothingness.

“You know who I mean!” I sobbed. “Katie—your spiritual affinity, as she calls herself!”

“You don’t mean,” shouted Vavasour, now thoroughly roused, “that you have seen _her_?”

“I do mean it,” I mourned. “Oh, if I had only known of your having an entanglement with any creature of the kind, I would never have married you—never!”

“Hang her!” burst out Vavasour. Then he controlled himself, and said soothingly: “After all, dearest, there is nothing to be jealous of——”

“I jealous! And of that——” I was beginning, but Vavasour went on: