Carnival Part 22

"What did he say?"

"What did he say? He said, 'Charlie, is your daughter a---- princess?'"

"Well, you ought to have been very proud," said Jenny.

"Proud, with all the men in the shop laughing at me? Why, they'll think I've no business to be working."

"Oh!"

"And don't you never recognize me in the street," went on Charlie.

"Why ever not?"

"Well, look at you; look at your hat. People, I know, wonders whatever on earth you are."

"Oh, my own father's ashamed of me now; and what about you? Beer and bed's all you think about."

Jenny thought she would go and see Lilli Vergoe, in Cranbourne Street, and tell her of the engagement.

Lilli sat with her feet on the mantelpiece, smoking a cigarette.

"I've joined the ballet," said Jenny.

"Where?"

"At the Orient."

"You won't like it."

"Who cares? I sha'n't stay if I don't."

"Yes, you will. You'll stay. Everybody stays in the Orient. I've stayed there twelve years, and I'm still a second-line girl. You'll stay twelve years and, if you don't get fat, you'll still be a second-line boy."

"What about if I get married?"

"You'll still stay."

"You'll give me a headache, you and your staying. I intend to enjoy myself. You're worse than a wet week, you are."

Jenny was standing by the window looking down into Cranbourne Street baking in the July heat.

"Isn't it shocking hot?" said Lilli.

"I think summer's simply lovely," Jenny answered.

Chapter XI: _The Orient Palace of Varieties_

The Orient Palace of Varieties rose like a cliff from the drapery shops of Piccadilly. On fine summer dusks, in a mist of golden light, it possessed a certain magic of gayety; seemed to capture something of the torch-lit merriment of a country fair. As one loitered on the island, lonely and meditative, the Orient was alluring, blazed upon the vision like an enchanted cave, or offered to the London wanderer a fancy of the scents and glossy fruits and warblers of the garden where Camaralzaman lost Badoura; and in autumn, stained by rosy sunsets, the theater expressed the delicate melancholy of the season. But when the rain dripped monotonously, when fogs transformed the town, when London was London vast and gray, the Orient became unreal like the bedraggled palaces of an exhibition built to endure for a little while. After all, it was an exotic piece of architecture, and evoked an atmosphere of falseness, the falseness of an Indian gong in a Streatham hall. Yet fifty years it had stood without being rebuilt. In addition to having seen two generations pa.s.s away, something in the character of its entertainment, in the lavishness of its decoration, lent it the sacred permanence of a mausoleum, the mausoleum of mid-Victorian amus.e.m.e.nt.

The Orient did not march with the times, rising from insignificance. It never owned a chairman who announced the willingness of each successive comedian to oblige with a song. Old men never said they remembered the Orient in the jolly old days, for they could not have forgotten it. In essentials it remained the same as ever. Dancers had gone; beauties had shrivelled; but their ghosts haunted the shadowy interior. The silver-footed _coryphees_ now kept lodging-houses; the swan-like Ballerinas wore elastic stockings; but their absence was filled by others: they were as little missed as the wave that has broken. The lean old vanities quizzed and ogled the frail ladies of the Promenade and sniffed the smoke-wreathed air with a thought of pleasures once worth enjoyment. They spent now an evening of merely sentimental dissipation, but because it was spent at the Orient, not entirely wasted; for the unchanged theater testified to the reality of their youth. It may not have been able to rejuvenate them, but, as by a handkerchief that survives the departure of its owner, their senses were faintly stimulated.

The Orient was proud because it did not enter into compet.i.tion with any other house of varieties; preened itself upon a cosmopolitan programme.

With the sn.o.bbishness of an old city firm, it declined to advertise its ware with eye-arresting posters, and congratulated itself on the inability to secure new clients. Foreigners made up a large proportion of the audience, and were apparently contented by equestrian mistresses of the _haute ecole_, by bewildering a.s.semblages of jugglers, even by continental mediocrities for the sake of hearing their native tongue.

They did not object to interminable wire-acts, and put up with divination feats of the most exhausting dullness. After all, these incidental turns must occur; but the ballets were the feature of the evening. For many who visited the Orient, the stream of prost.i.tutes ebbing and flowing upon the Promenade was enough. Yet the women of the Orient Promenade would strike a cynic with uneasiness.

Under the stars, the Piccadilly courtesans affect the onlooker less atrociously. Night lends a magic of softness to their fretful beauty.

The sequins lose their garishness; the painted faces preserve an illusion of reality. Moonlight falls gently on the hollow cheek; kindles a spark of youth in the leaden eye. The Piccadilly courtesans move like tigers in a tropic gloom with velvet blazonries and a stealthy splendor that masks the hunger driving them out to seek their prey. On the Orient Promenade, the finer animalism has vanished; it was never more than superficially aesthetic. The daughters of pleasure may still be tigers, but they are naphtha-lit, pacing backwards and forwards in a cage. They all appear alike. Their hats are all too large, their figures are too brutal, their cheeks too lifeless. They are automatic machines of l.u.s.t waiting to be stirred into action by pennies.

Under the stars they achieve a pictorial romance; but on the carpet of the Promenade, they are hard and heartless and vile. Their eyes are coins; their hands are purses. At their heels patter old men like unhealthy lap-dogs; beefy provincials stare at them, their foreheads glistening. Above all the frangipani and patchouli and opoponax and trefle incarnat steals the rank odor of goats. The orchestra thunders and crashes down below; the comfortable audience lean back in the stalls; the foreigners jabber in the gallery; the Orient claque interrupts its euchre with hired applause. The corks pop; the soda splashes; money c.h.i.n.ks; lechery murmurs; drunkards laugh; and down on the stage Jenny Pearl dances.

The night wears on. The women come in continually from the wet streets.

They surge in the cloak-room, quarrel over carrion game, blaspheme, fight and scratch. A door in the cloak-room (locked of course) leads into the pa.s.sage outside the dressing-room, where Jenny changes five or six times each night. Every foul oath and every vile experience and every detestable adventure is plainly heard by twenty ladies of the ballet.

Dressing-room number forty-five was a long, low room, with walls of whitewashed brick. There was one window, seldom opened. There was no electric light, and the gas-jets gave a very feeble illumination, so feeble that everybody always put on too much grease paint in their fear of losing an effect. The girls dressed on each side of the room at a wide deal board with forms to sit upon. There was a large wardrobe in one corner, and next to Jenny's place an open sink. The room was always dark and always hot. There were about eighty stone stairs leading up to it from the stage, and at least half a dozen ascents in the course of the evening. The dresser was a blowsy old Irish woman, more obviously dirty than the room, and there were two ventilators, which gave a perpetual draught of unpleasant air. The inspectors of the London County Council presumably never penetrated as far as Room 45, a fact which seems to show that the extent of munic.i.p.al interference has been much exaggerated.

The dressing-rooms were half on one side of the stage, half on the other. Those on the side nearer to the stage-door were less unpleasant.

The architect evidently believed in the value of first impressions.

Anybody venturing into either warren without previous acquaintances.h.i.+p would have been bewildered by the innumerable rooms and pa.s.sages, tucked away in every corner and branching off in every direction. Some of the former seemed to have been inhabited for years. One in particular contained an ancient piano, two daguerrotypes and a heap of mouldering stuffs. It might have been the cell where years ago a Ballerina was immured for a wrong step. It existed like a monument to the despair of ambition.

The Orient stifled young life. The _Corps de Ballet_ had the engulfing character of conventual vows. When a girl joined it, she cut herself off from the world. She went there fresh, her face a mist of roses, hope burning in her heart, fame flickering before her eyes. In a few years she would inevitably be pale with the atmosphere, with grinding work and late hours. She would find it easy to buy spirits cheaply in the canteen underneath the stage. She would stay in one line, it seemed, forever.

She would not dance for joy again.

When Jenny went to the Orient first, she did not intend to stay long.

She told the girls this, and they laughed at her. She did not know how soon the heavy theater would become a habit; she did not realize what comfort exists in the knowledge of being permanently employed. But not even the Orient could throttle Jenny. She was not the daughter and granddaughter of a ballet girl. She had inherited no traditions of obedience. She never became a marionette to be dressed and undressed and jigged, horribly and impersonally. She yielded up her ambition, but she never lost her personality. When, soon after her arrival, the Maitre de Ballet took her in his dark little corner and pinched her arm, she struck him across the mouth, vowed she would tell the manager, and burnt up his conceit with her spitfire eyes. He tried again later on, and Jenny told his wife, a yellow-faced, fat Frenchwoman. Then he gave her up, and, being an artist, bore her no malice, but kept her in the first line of boys.

It is not to be supposed that the eighty or ninety ladies of the ballet were unhappy. On the contrary, they were very happy, and, so far as it accorded with the selfishness of a limited company, they were well looked after. The managing director called them "Children," and was firmly convinced that he treated them as children. Actually, he treated them as dolls, and in the case of girls well into the thirties, with some of the sentimental indulgence lavished on old broken dolls. Perhaps it was the crowd of men who waited every night at the end of the long, narrow court that led from Jermyn Street down to the Orient stage door, which has helped to preserve the vulgar and baseless tradition of frailty still sedulously propagated. Every night, about half-past eleven, the strange mixture of men waited for the gradual exodus of the ladies of the ballet. A group of men, inherently the same, had stood thus on six nights of the week for more than fifty years.

They had stood there with Dundreary whiskers, in rakish full capes and strapped overalls. They had waited there with the mutton-chop whiskers and ample trousers of the 'seventies. Down the court years ago had come the beauties, with their striped stockings and swaying crinolines and velvety chignons. Down the court they had tripped in close-fitting pleated skirts a little later, and later still with the protruding bustles and skin-tight sleeves of the 'eighties. They had taken the London starlight with the balloon sleeves of the mid-'nineties. They took the starlight now, as sweet and tender as the fairs of long ago.

They came out in couples, in laughing companies, and sometimes singly with eager, searching glances. They came out throwing their wraps around them in the sudden coolness of the air. They lingered at the end of the court in groups delicate as porcelain, enjoying the freedom and reunion with life. Their talk was hushed and melodious as the conversation of people moving slowly across dusky lawns. They were dear to the imaginative observer. He watched them with pride and affection as he would have watched fis.h.i.+ng-boats steal home to their haven about sunset.

Every night they danced and smiled and decked themselves for the pleasure of the world. They rehea.r.s.ed so hard that sometimes they would fall down after a dance, crying on the stage where they had fallen from sheer exhaustion. They were not rich. Most of them were married, with children and little houses in teeming suburbs. Many, of course, were free to accept the escort of loiterers by the stage-door. The latter often regarded the ladies of the ballet as easy prey, but the ladies were shy as antelopes aware of the hunter crawling through the gra.s.ses.

They were independent of masculine patronage; laughed at the fools with their easy manners and genial condescension. They might desire applause over the footlights, but under the moon they were free from the necessity for favor. They had, with all its incidental humiliations, the self-respect which a great art confers. They were children of Apollo.

The difference between the gorgeousness of the ballet and the dim air of the court was unimaginable to the blockheads outside. They had seen the girls in crimson and gold, in purple and emerald, in white and silver; they had seen them spangled and glittering with armor; they had heard the tinkle of jewelry. They had watched their limbs; gloated upon their poses. They had caught their burning glances; brooded on their lips and eyes and exquisite motion. Inflamed by the wanton atmosphere of the Orient, they had thought the ladies of the ballet slaves for the delight of fools, but round the stage-door all their self esteem was blown away like a fragment of paper by a London night wind. Their complacent selves by most of the girls were brushed aside like boughs in a wood. Some, Jenny and Irene amongst them, would ponder awhile the silly group and gravely choose a partner for half an hour's conversation in a cafe. But somewhere close to twelve o'clock Jenny would fly, leaving not so much as a gla.s.s slipper to console her sanguine admirer. Home she would fly on the top of a tram and watch in winter the scudding moon whipped by bare blown branches, in summer see it slung like a golden bowl between the chimney stacks. The jolly adventures of youth were many, and the partners.h.i.+p of Jenny and Irene caused great laughter in the dressing-room when the former related each diverting enterprise.

The tale of their conquests would be a long one. Most of the victims were anonymous or veiled in the pseudonym of a personal idiosyncrasy.

There was Tangerine w.i.l.l.y, who first met them carrying a bag of oranges.

There was Bill Hair and Bill Shortcoat and Sop and Jack Spot and Willie Eyebrows and Bill Fur. They all of them served as episodes mirthful and fugitive. They were mulcted in chocolates and hansoms and cigarettes.

They danced attendance, vainly dreaming all the time of conquest. Jenny held them in fee with her mocking eyes, bewitched them with musical derision, and fooled them as Hera fooled the pa.s.sionate t.i.tan.

In winter-time the b.a.l.l.s at Covent Garden gave Jenny some of the happiest hours of her life. Every Tuesday fortnight, tickets were sent round to the stage-door of the Orient, and it was very seldom indeed that she did not manage to secure one. On the first occasion she went dressed as a little girl in muslin, with a white baby hat and white shoes and socks, and, wherever they might attract a glance, bows of pink silk. When the janitors saw her first, they nearly refused to admit such youthfulness; could not believe she was really grown up; consulted anxiously together while Jenny's slanting eyes glittered up to their majesties. They were convinced at last, and she enjoyed herself very much indeed. She was chased up the stairs and round the lobby. She was chased down the stairs, through the supper-room, in and out of half a dozen boxes, laughing and chattering and shrieking all the while. She danced nearly every dance. She won the second prize. Three old men tried to persuade her to live with them. Seven young men vowed they had never met so sweet a girl.

To the three former Jenny murmured demurely:

"But I'm a good little girl; I don't do those things."