Part 2

The Pall Mall, De Freyne, its lessee and manager, and the Pall Mall chorus are a trinity known the world over. Productions at the Pall Mall invariably enjoy success. Long runs prevail there. That was one of the reasons why Maggy looked forward to an engagement at that theater. Another was the pay, rather more than was obtainable elsewhere. In other respects it offered her no advantages and some drawbacks. She had, for instance no aspiration to become one of a chorus whose unrivaled attractions marked it out as a sort of human _delicatessen_ for the consumption of epicurean males. On the other hand, De Freyne was indifferent to expense on the question of costume, and that had had considerable weight with Maggy. Like any other pretty girl she reveled in beautiful clothes, even though they should only be on loan to her for an hour or two out of the twenty-four. On tour the dresses were often effective enough at a distance, but either of inferior material or their pristine freshness considerably depreciated by having seen previous service in a London theater. That militated against the pleasure of wearing them. At the Pall Mall everything would be new and the best that money could buy.

That De Freyne's object in dressing his chorus regardless of cost was a licentious one, the desire to make his two-score of attractive-looking girls still more attractive in the eyes of the _jeunesse doree_, who filled his stalls, was no deterrent to Maggy on her own account. She did think of it in regard to Alexandra. She wondered whether Alexandra would be affected by the demoralizing influence of those beautiful clothes which at the Pall Mall were fashioned to display a girl's physical charms to the very limit of decency. It ended in her being almost sorry that Alexandra's innocence and the callousness of an agent should have sent her to the voice trial.

How Alexandra was to make a good impression on the public by posturing in the chorus was not explained to her. It was the expression of an opinion which she could take or leave. In her innocence she made the common error of imagining that the public chooses its plays, its novels, its pictures, its music and its actors and actresses for itself. She did not stop to think that there might be gradations in that public or that the vast majority of it is deprived of selective taste by the interested parties who cater for it. Generalizing by the noise the public makes with its hands when it approves of anything, she argued that everything it applauds must be good. The noise is there right enough and the approval is genuine; but that has to be discounted by the fact that the public has nothing better to approve of. For the public--the crowd--is a led horse most of the time. It is enormously manageable. It does what it is told and goes where it is taken. Its taste has never been given a chance of becoming educated because of the fare that has been forced upon it. Its purveyors feed it as injuriously as an ignorant man will a horse. For the want of anything better the horse will eat what is given it. So with the public. Obviously the public never has anything to do with the choice of a play. Nobody has except the man who buys it and puts it on the stage.

Following the simile of the led horse and the proverb that, though you may take it to the water you cannot make it drink, the public likewise will once in a way evince the same sort of stubbornness. Then the play that failed to "go down" is unostentatiously withdrawn, or the pretender to histrionic laurels unable to obtain them will try his or her luck again in another piece with another's money behind it.

After all, it is but a question of credulity. Even Alexandra had to conform to it. She was advised to apply for a place in the chorus and she did so. With her necessarily vague ideas about the chorus she did not think of it as anything very dreadful. It did not offer so good a footing on the stage as she desired, that was all. She did not, for instance, believe all the disparaging things Maggy said about the stage. She appreciated that on the stage a girl might be unduly exposed to temptation, but in her austerity that was no reason for yielding to it. In her Arcadian purity she could not conceive of circumstances, however degrading, having any adverse effect on herself. Nor could she credit Maggy's insistent assertion that without money or influence an actress must remain in the depths. She believed, as inexperience always does, that talent is bound to be recognized sooner or later. The creed of the chorus girl, unspoken, unwritten, was yet hers to learn.

For ten days the two girls heard nothing from the Pall Mall Theater. It was possible, if not probable, that they might not hear at all. Meanwhile Maggy went about with Alexandra looking for an engagement in some other direction. It was a matter of urgency to both of them to get something to do. Maggy had been out of an engagement for two months. She was in Mrs. Bell's debt, and she owed money to a doctor. Alexandra was little better off. As the orphaned daughter of an officer she had a pension of L40 a year so long as she remained unmarried. But with the expense she had been put to in coming to town and in spite of the strictest economy it was not enough to live on.

She could not help being anxious about the future; more so than Maggy. Maggy, though she chafed at them, was accustomed to bad times: Alexandra had never struck them before. Hardly had she got over the illusion of imagining that a small part in a London theater was obtainable than she found herself in no request even for the chorus. It was terribly disappointing. They were forever haunting stage-doors and the crowded waiting rooms of theatrical agencies. For hours every day they wandered about the Strand and its environs.

But for the prospect of sheer want confronting them they would have been quite happy. The bond that united them was based on mutual respect as well as affection. Disappointment and privation only cemented it. In these days when the stale breakfast egg was a comestible to be shared, when anything better than canned food became a luxury, their friendship remained free from any of the pettinesses which generally characterize the intimacy of people living under conditions of hardship.

The stoicism of a family of soldiers supported Alexandra. She had the pride of race that refuses to surrender to misfortune. Her grit, astonishing in one so delicately reared, surprised Maggy. She began to look up to Alexandra as a being of a superior world in which the virtues, being Anglo-Indian, were of a particularly high order. She had a very nebulous conception of the meaning of the term.

Just as Alexandra found it absorbing to listen to Maggy's stage talk, even though it was humorously misogynistic, so nothing pleased Maggy so much as to listen to Alexandra's narration of life in an Indian military station. It sounded to her like a history of the high gods: a medley of color, warmth and ease, good living and brass bands. She loved to hear of parades and polo, of the troops of servants, the gymkhanas and dances, all the social amusements and advantages of the sahib caste. From habit, Alexandra would use native words when talking of these things, and Maggy's unaccustomed brain never quite differentiated between syce, hazari, maidan, ayah, chit, durzi, kitmagar, butti, tikka-gari and such-like terms in common use with Anglo-Indians. But they impressed her immensely.

The amount of talk they got through in these early days of their friendship was stupendous. It helped to relieve the harassing search after employment and its invariable ill-success.

One morning, three weeks after their first meeting, Maggy sprang out of bed to gather up two letters which their landlady had pushed under the door. On the flaps were inspiring words in red lettering.

"Pall Mall Theater! Hooroo! One for each of us!" she cried, and danced about in her nightdress.

Alexandra, behind an improvised screen formed of a shawl over the towel rail, was having her morning bath in a zinc tub of inadequate size.

"Open mine," she called. "I'm wet."

She waited anxiously. There came the sound of tearing paper and then Maggy's voice, raised excitedly:

"Pull that old shawl down, Lexie! If you don't practise on me you'll die of shyness and no clothes at the Pall Mall. We're engaged! Rehearsal Thursday. Eleven o'clock!"

IV

It was past one o'clock. For over two hours without a pause the chorus had been going through their "business" in the new play with the reiteration that exasperates the teacher and the taught. The girls had relapsed into sulkiness, the stage-manager's temper was ruffled. Even the pianist in the O.P. corner by the footlights felt the reaction. His hands rested on the keys without energy.

Powell, the stage-manager, faced the forty girls standing in a semi-circle, three-deep. The majority of them were dressed in the ultra-fashionable style of the moment, some very expensively, a few with taste. The exceptions were Maggy and Alexandra. He knew they were all tired and rebellious; but he was concerned only with their recalcitrant feet.

"Now then, girls. Once more."

The pianist's hands came down heavily on the opening chords of a dance movement.

"La-la-la--da-di-dum--point! Step it out. Don't mince!"

A tall girl, gorgeously arrayed, brought the dance to a stop by leaving her position in the front row.

"I'm not going to stick here all day," she announced defiantly. "I'm lunching with my boy, and he won't wait."

"Get back to your place, Miss Mortimer," snapped Powell.

"Not me. I'm going."

As she began to cross the stage on her way out a voice came from the depths of the auditorium:

"Miss Mortimer, we're not concerned with your private appointments. If they're to interfere with your work here you can look for another engagement somewhere else."

The show-girl glanced in the direction of the voice and shrugged.

"Mean you'll fire me, Mr. De Freyne? Well, I don't care. Pa's rich!"

She walked off jauntily, her high heels clicking on the boards, a costly plume streaming over her left ear. The lessee of the Pall Mall Theater said nothing. He was mildly amused. He stood in the dark at the back of the dress circle complacently regarding his theatrical seraglio. All the girls were pretty, or if not pretty, showy. Some had been selected for their figures, some for their faces, some for both. No duchess, not even a fashionable duchess, was arrayed like one of these. Solomon in all his glory might perhaps have competed with them, but not the lilies of the field. Presently De Freyne's gimlet eyes picked out Maggy and Alexandra. Their appearance disturbed his equanimity.

He watched them attentively for ten minutes or so, at the end of which period the tired stage-manager dismissed the chorus for the morning. De Freyne's authoritative voice again made itself heard.

"Miss Delamere and Miss Hersey. Step up to my room before you go, please. I want to speak to you."

The girls exchanged scared glances. A special interview with De Freyne was sufficiently unusual to fill them with dismay. He was not in the habit of detaining members of his chorus for the fun of the thing.

They groped their way along dim, soft-carpeted passages to the front of the house and entered the managerial office. De Freyne was blunt to a degree. He wasted no time.

"You two girls have got to make more of a show," he told them. "I can't have shabby dresses at the Pall Mall."

Alexandra was too taken aback by this curt rebuke to make any reply; but Maggy lost her temper.

"Meaning flash clothes and jewelry?" she bit out. "How do you expect us to do it on thirty-five shillings a week, Mr. De Freyne?"

"I'm not interested in your resources," was De Freyne's cold answer.

"You ought to be. You ought to get a pencil and slate and write down the cost of lodgings, food, boots, and all the rest of it, and figure out how little we've got left to buy clothes with--unless we don't care who buys them for us. _We're_ not that sort--not yet."

"You must look smarter," reiterated De Freyne, showing no resentment at this tirade. "You silly creatures, don't you want to attract attention?"

"We'll attract attention on the night. Don't worry," said Maggy. She was afraid of De Freyne, but she did not let her voice show it.

"That's all very well, but you know the unwritten clause of my agreement with you all. The ladies of my chorus have got to be dressed decently off the stage as well as on.... Anyhow, there it is. Take it or leave it." He dismissed them with a nod.

Neither said anything until they had passed out of the stage-door and were in the street.

"That means new clothes," said Alexandra in a tone of deep depression.

"Or Dick Whittington!" Maggy rejoined dryly. "Turn and turn again--our dresses. I'll have a go at yours to-night, Lexie. Look, there's Mortimer and her boy."

A big car slid past them, ridiculously upholstered in white velvet. An effete-looking youth and the girl who had stated that her "pa" was rich lolled in the back seat.

Maggy's eyes followed them speculatively.

"Wonder if there's anything in it?" she remarked.

"In what?"

"In that sort of a good time. Flat, money, pet dog, car, week-ends at Brighton--enough to eat."

"I don't want to think about it."

"Neither do I. But I have lately. I'm wondering what on earth we're standing out for. No one thinks any the better of us for it. The girls all think us fools, and the men just grin and wait."

"Don't talk about it. Talking makes it all seem worse."

"One day I shall do more than talk. I shall walk off."

Alexandra said nothing. She knew Maggy's mood. Maggy was hungry, tired, and cross. Motives of economy impelled them towards their lodgings, where half a tin of sardines was waiting to be consumed. Neither had had anything to eat since early morning. And when they had lunched they would have to walk back to the theater for rehearsal again at three. Maggy suddenly halted before a Lyons' depot.

"Come on in, Lexie," she said. "We can't wait. We shan't be home till past two. And if we're late back we'll be fined."

"There's the tin of--" Alexandra began and stopped.

Maggy had pushed open the swing doors. The grateful smell of hot and well-made coffee and savory, nourishing food, cheapness notwithstanding, made her surrender to temptation. Deprivation has this effect. De Freyne, lunching expensively at the Savoy, recognizing here and there approved members of his chorus and their cavaliers, could not be expected to know anything of empty stomachs. Besides, it was their own fault if the girls did not know which side their bread was buttered.

They sat down at one of the marble-topped tables. A waitress came towards them.

"Two cups of coffee, rolls and butter--"

This was Alexandra's order.

"Coffee, rolls, and two steak-and-kidney puddings," augmented Maggy recklessly.

Unmoved, the attendant went off to execute the order.

Maggy met Alexandra's startled eyes. Her own were defiant.

"Don't tell me," she said. "It'll cost us nearly eighteenpence. I don't care. _I'm_ going to pay, and if I don't go bust that way I shall do something worse. We're going to feed, dear!"

V

"Damn! She's turned off the gas!"

Maggy stopped machining. The small room was plunged in darkness. Alexandra groped for matches and lit the candles. It was not easy to work by the flickering light, but both girls went on with what they were doing. There was something grim about the task. One associates the alteration of frills and furbelows with some small pleasure to the adapter; but there was none here. Necessity impelled them, kept them out of their beds. They were heavy with sleep. The air of the room was close and unpleasant.

Maggy had all but finished turning Alexandra's coat and skirt. Alexandra had adapted two Indian shawls into an effective dress for Maggy. The work was too hastily done to bear inspection at close quarters or much strain by its wearer. They had been steadily at it for five hours.

It was Maggy who gave in first. She finished machining with a savage jerk, leaving the handle to revolve by itself.

"Let's go to bed," she said. "I'll get up half an hour earlier and finish that."

Alexandra went on. She was not going to be beaten for the sake of half an hour. Besides, she knew that Maggy in the cashmere shawl arrangement would please De Freyne. She, at any rate, would pass muster.

"I'm not so very tired now," she answered without looking up, "and I may be in the morning."

Maggy shook her hair down and slipped out of her clothes with the celerity that comes of practise between the acts. She did not even trouble to take the paint off her face. She got into bed and lay watching Alexandra working by the guttering candle-light. She did not talk. She was too utterly tired.

At last Alexandra's work was done. She hung up the dress and put away the needles and cotton. She had a strong inclination to get into bed without more ado than Maggy had shown; but habit was not to be denied. She knew she would not be able to rest properly unless she was clean and cool. She brushed her hair, washed her face and hands, brushed her teeth. A huge sigh from Maggy's bed made her turn.

"Am I keeping you awake?"

"No. I sighed because you're so different to me. _I_ couldn't wash to-night. And I knew my hair'd be a mat in the morning and the pillow pink from my cheeks."

"I wish you didn't paint. There's no harm in girls doing it if they need it, but you spoil yourself."

"Force of habit. Mother made up my face from the time I was ten."

Alexandra in her nightdress knelt down at the side of her bed. Maggy never said prayers. To see Alexandra say them, she said, was the nearest she would ever get to such things. She had never been taught to pray when a child.

"Might as well drop Him a hint that we're at the end of our tether," she suggested presently.

When Alexandra rose from her knees Maggy was sitting up in bed watching her, her hands clasping her legs.

"And you mean to say that you believe somebody hears you!" she said wonderingly.

"Yes."

"And does what you ask?"

"Yes--in the end."

"Then He must be pretty deaf.... You look nice saying your prayers. If I were God I couldn't refuse you anything. P'raps He's a woman-hater. Women get the worst of it everywhere, I think. If we do wrong, we have to pay for it. If we don't do wrong, we have to pay just the same. We're made so that we're not fit to be working all the time. Oh, it's a hell of a world for women! I can stand anything when I feel it's fair and just. I can't see any justice where we're concerned. They have an inspector Johnnie to see that the scales in the grocery-shops are fair, but if a woman wants to make a bargain she's got to do it on the heavy side."

"The law courts are the scales."

"The law? Aren't the scales against us there too? If we want a divorce we've got to be knocked about as well as--other things. If we're deserted and ruined before we're married we can get so many shillings a week until the kid's in his teens. And if there's no kid or it dies, well, p'raps your God'll help us, but the law won't. It's all too hard to fight against, and one can't make head or tail of it. Look at the White Slave Traffic. They'll flog a man if they catch him at it, but they won't flog De Freyne and give him hard labor for the dirty work he's doing every day of his life, though everybody knows about it. Why, he's only a--what's it called?--procurer for the nobility and gentry and all the rich bounders. And we're not all in yet, but we shall be. My word, one hears a lot about the chorus-girl being on the make-haste and living you-know-how. One doesn't hear how she's driven into it, like cattle into a dirty pen. I'm done, Lexie. I shan't hold out long."

Alexandra blew out the remaining candle. In the darkness one could just make out the two narrow beds and the glimmer of the window.

"You mustn't give in, Maggy," came Alexandra's voice after a pause. "When one meets the man one cares about one doesn't want to come to him with nothing to give."

"Why not? There isn't a man in a hundred who comes to a woman with a clean slate. Why should they expect us to have nothing written on ours?"

"Because when a man marries nature makes him want a pure woman, not for his own sake but because of the children she will probably have. For myself, I know I would rather show a clean slate to the man I loved and who loved me in a decent way whatever his life had been, than let a man who was nothing to me write his name there first. That must be wrong because it's against nature."

"Is it? I don't know. You can argue better than I can. You don't lose your temper. Let's bring it down to ourselves and our difficulties. The stage is a honey-pot and we girls are the honey in it, and the men are the flies buzzing round. They won't leave us alone. They make it almost impossible for us to live a decent life. And if it's decent it isn't beautiful. You can't call it beautiful, Lexie. This room's the limit. Think of the food we eat. Generally beastly. And our clothes. Everything's ugly and makeshift, and yet we've only got to stretch out our little fingers--"

"More than our little fingers."

"Well, if you like. Anyway, what are we waiting for? There's no sense in it. It won't get us any forrader. Why don't you leave me alone? I'd almost made up my mind to give in when I met you. I should rather enjoy cutting a dash and having everything I want and going one better than the other girls who crow over us, and snapping my fingers at the management like Mortimer did to-day. If a man was going to marry me and give me a nice broad ring and a little home there'd be some reason for going on like this and keeping good; but men don't ask chorus-girls to marry them, as a rule--not by a long chalk! Oh, goodnight!"

She twisted on to her side, and the bedsprings groaned.

From neighboring churches clocks began striking twelve. The noises from the street subsided. Only an occasional footfall was heard or a cart rumbling past. Sometimes a shrill voice broke the stillness, sometimes a drunken song.

The girls slept.

At dawn a cool breeze moved the dingy window curtain. Maggy woke and peered through the gray light at Alexandra, sleeping.

She looked as though she were dead and at peace.

Maggy wondered if that was the better fate.

VI

De Freyne did not seem to notice the efforts of the two girls in obeying his instructions to smarten up their appearance: he said nothing. But for all that, the change did not escape him. Maggy, in the draped cashmere affair struck him as likely to appeal to a Jew or a gentleman from Manchester. He had a particular individual of each type in his mind, and awaited a propitious moment for exploiting her to one or the other. For the next few days the attention of the girls would have to be devoted to rehearsals, not men.