B007TB5SP0 EBOK

by Firbank, Ronald

  ‘Ita thinks she drinks.’

  ‘I shouldn’t wonder,’ Miss Sinquier replied, covering her face with her hands.

  Through her fingers she could contemplate her accompanist’s lanky figure as he stood in the opposite wing busily powdering his nose.

  The moment, it seemed, had come.

  Yet not quite – the public, who loved tradition, was determined on obtaining an encore.

  Lady Mary was prepared to acquiesce.

  Curtseying from side to side and wafting kisses to the gods, she announced:

  ‘The Death of Hortense; by Desire.’

  XII

  The Source Theatre.

  DEAR MOTHER, – I saw your notice in a newspaper not very long ago, and this morning I came across it again in the Dispatch. Really I don’t know what there can be to ‘forgive’, and as to ‘coming back’! – I have undertaken the management of this theatre, where rehearsals of Romeo and Juliet have already begun. This is the little house where Audrey Anderson made her début, and where Avize Mendoza made such a hit. You could imagine nothing cosier or more intimate if you tried. Father would be charmed (tell him, for, of course, he sometimes speaks of me in the long triste evenings as he smokes a pipe) with the foyer, which has a mural design in marquetry, showing Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, sunning themselves by the side of a well. They say the theatre contains a well beneath the stage, which is why it’s known as the Source. I have left, I’m glad to say, the hotel, which was getting dreadfully on my nerves, for a dressing-room here, where I pass the nights now: an arrangement that suits me, as I like to be on the spot. A sister of Ita Iris of the Dream Theatre keeps me company, so that I’m not a bit solitary. We understand each other to perfection, and I find her helpful to me in many ways. She is such an affectionate child, and I do not think I shall regret it. I’ve decided to have half my teeth taken out by a man in Knightsbridge – some trial to me, I fear; but, alas, we’ve all to carry our cross! I seem to have nothing but debts. Clothes, as well as scenery, would ruin anyone.

  I’m allotting a little box to you and father for the opening night, unless you would prefer two stalls?

  The other afternoon I ‘offered my services’ and obtained three curtains at a gala matinée; I wish you could have been at it!

  Your devoted Daughter.

  I went to the oratory on Sunday; it was nothing but a blaze of candles.

  Remember me to Leonard and Gripper – also Kate.

  XIII

  An absence of ventilation made the room an oven and discouraged sleep. Through the width of skylight, in inert recumbence, she could follow wonderingly the frail pristine tints of dawn. Flushed, rose-barred, it spread above her with fantastic drifting clouds masking the morning stars.

  From a neighbouring church a clock struck five.

  Miss Sinquier sighed; she had not closed her eyes the whole night through.

  ‘One needs a blind,’ she mused, ‘and a pane—’

  She looked about her for something to throw.

  Cinquecento Italian things – a chest, a crucifix, a huge guitar, a grim carved catafalque all purple sticks and violet legs (Juliet’s) crowded the floor.

  ‘A mess of glass … and cut my feet …’ she murmured, gathering about her a négligé of oxydized knitted stuff and sauntering out towards the footlights in quest of air.

  Notwithstanding the thermometer, she could hear Miss May Mant breathing nasally from behind her door.

  The stage was almost dark.

  ‘Verona’, set in autumn trees, looked fast asleep. Here and there a campanile shot up, in high relief, backed by a scenic hill, or an umbrella-pine. On a column in the ‘Market Place’ crouched a brazen lion.

  An acrobatic impulse took her at the sight of it.

  ‘Sono pazza per te

  Si! Sono pazza, pazza, pazza …

  Pazza per amore,’

  she warbled, leaping lightly over the footlights into the stalls.

  The auditorium, steeped in darkness, felt extinguished, chill.

  Making a circuit of the boxes, she found her way up a stairway into the promenade.

  Busts of players, busts of poets, busts of peris, interspersed by tall mirrors in gilt-bordered mouldings, smiled on her good-day.

  Sinking to a low, sprucely-cushioned seat, she breathed a sigh of content.

  Rid of the perpetual frictions of the inevitable personnel, she could possess the theatre, for a little while, in quietude to herself.

  In the long window boxes, tufts of white daisies inclining to the air brought back to mind a certain meadow, known as Basings, a pet haunt with her at home.

  At the pond end, in a small coppice, doves cried ‘Coucoussoucoucoussou’ all the day long.

  Here, soon a year ago, while weaving herself a garland (she was playing at being Europa with the Saunders’ Fifeshire bull; flourishing flowers at it; tempting it with waving poppies; defying it to bear her away from the surrounding stagnance), the realization of her dramatic gift first discovered itself.

  And then, her thoughts tripped on, he came, the Rev. George – ‘just as I was wondering to whom to apply’ – and drew all Applethorp to St Ann-on-the-Hill by the persuasive magnetism of his voice; largely due – so he said – to ‘scientific production’. To the Bromley Breath! He never could adequately thank Elizabeth, Mrs Albert Bromley, for all she had done. No; because words failed … Her Institute, for him, would be always ‘top-o’-the-tree’, and when asked, by her, ‘What tree?’ he had answered with a cryptic look: ‘She trains them for the stage.’

  Dear heart! How much he seemed to love it. He had known by their green-room names all the leading stars, and could tell, on occasion, little anecdotes of each.

  It was he who narrated how Mrs Mary (as she was then), on the first night of Gulnara, Queen of the Lattermonians, got caught in the passenger-lift on the way from her dressing-room to the stage and was obliged to allow her understudy to replace her, which with the utmost éclat she did, while Mrs Mary, who could overhear the salvos from her prison, was driven quite distraught at a triumph that, but for the irony of things, would most certainly have been hers.

  Miss Sinquier sighed.

  ‘Which reminds me,’ she murmured, fixing her eyes upon the storied ceiling, ‘that I’ve no one at all, should anything happen to me.’

  She lay back and considered the inchoate imagery painted in gouache above her.

  Hydropic loves with arms outstretched in invitation, ladies in hectic hats and billowing silks, courtiers, lap-dogs, peacocks, etc., all intermingled in the pleasantest way.

  As she gazed a great peace fell upon her. Her eyelids closed.

  ‘Breakfast!’

  Miss May Mant woke her with a start.

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘I laid it to-day in the stalls.’

  ‘Extraordinary child.’

  ‘Crumbs in the boxes, I’ve noticed, encourage mice … They must come from the spring, I think, under the stage.’

  ‘One ought to set a trap!’

  ‘Poor creatures … they enjoy a good play, I expect, as much as we do,’ Miss Mant murmured, setting down the kettle she was holding and lowering her cheek graciously for a kiss.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘You were asleep.’

  ‘Was I horrid?’

  ‘You looked too perfectly orchidaceous.’

  ‘Orchidaceous?’

  ‘Like the little women of Outa-Maro.’

  Miss Sinquier sat up.

  ‘What is there for breakfast?’ she asked.

  ‘Do you like porridge?’

  ‘Oh, Réné!’

  Miss Mant raised a bare shoulder and crushed it to an ear.

  ‘Really,’ she remarked, ‘I’m at a loss to know what to give you, Sally; I sometimes ask myself what Juliet took …’

  ‘Why, potions.’

  ‘Ita takes tea luke with a lemon; and it makes her so cross.’

  ‘Disgusting.’

  ‘À la Russe.’r />
  ‘Is she still away?’

  ‘Yes … She writes from a toy bungalow, she says, with the sea at the very door and a small shipwreck lying on the beach.’

  ‘What of Paris?’

  ‘I’m Page to him, you said so!’

  ‘With her consent.’

  ‘Oh, Ita hates the stage. She’s only on it of course to make a match … she could have been an Irish countess had she pleased, only she said it wasn’t smart enough, and it sounded too Sicilian.’

  ‘Everyone can’t be Roman.’

  ‘… Oh, she’s such a minx! In her letter she writes, “I don’t doubt you’ll soon grow tired of the Sally-Sin Theatre and of dancing attendance on the Fair Sink.” ’

  ‘Cat.’

  ‘And her Manting ways just to annoy. Mant, Mant, Mant! She does it to humiliate. Whenever the Tirds are in earshot she’s sure to begin.’

  ‘The Tirds?’

  ‘Llewellyn and Lydia. Lydia Tird has an understanding with my big brother. Poor lad! Just before I left home he took the name of Isadore: Isadore Iris. Oh, when Ita heard! Bill Mant she said and made Llewellyn laugh.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘And now that Mrs Sixsmith “Mants” me almost as much as Ita.’

  ‘Why do you dislike her so much?’

  ‘Cadging creature!’

  ‘Réné?’

  ‘Limpet.’

  ‘Réné?’

  ‘Parasite.’

  ‘Réné—!’

  ‘Scavenger.’

  ‘Basta!’

  ‘I know all about her.’

  ‘What do you know?’

  ‘If I tell you, I’ll have to tell you in French.’

  ‘Then tell me in French.’

  ‘Elle fait les cornes à son mari!’

  ‘What next?’

  ‘She’s divorcée!’

  ‘Poor soul.’

  ‘Out at Bois St Jean – St John’s Wood – she has a villa.’

  Miss Sinquier got up.

  ‘Anyway,’ she murmured.

  ‘Oh, Sally …’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘You do love me?’

  ‘Why, of course.’

  ‘Let’s go presently to a Turkish bath – after rehearsal.’

  ‘Not to-day.’

  ‘… Just for a “Liver Pack”?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because … and when you’re out, don’t, dear, forget a mousetrap!’

  XIV

  To bring together certain of the dramatic critics (such high arbiters of the stage as Sylvester Fry of the Dispatch, Lupin Petrol of Now, Amethyst Valer of Fashion, Berinthia of Woodfalls, the terrible, the embittered Berinthia who was also Angela) cards had been sent out from Foreign-Colony Street, in the comprehensive name of Sir Oliver Dawtry, the famous banker and financier, inviting them to meet the new lessee of the Source.

  It was one of those sultry summer nights of electricity and tension, when nerves are apt to explode at almost nothing. Beyond the iron Calvary on the Ursulines’ great wall, London flared with lights.

  Perched upon a parapet in brilliant solitude, her identity unsuspected by the throng, Miss Sinquier, swathed in black mousseline and nursing a sheaf of calla lilies, surveyed the scene with inexpressive eyes.

  ‘And there was the wind bellowing and we witches wailing: and no Macbeth!’ a young man with a voice like cheap scent was saying to a sympathetic journalist for whatever it might be worth …

  Miss Sinquier craned her head.

  Where were the two ‘Washingtons’? or the little Iris girl?

  By the Buddha shrine, festively decked with lamps, couples were pirouetting to a nigger band, while in the vicinity of the buffet a masked adept was holding a clairaudience of a nature only to be guessed at from afar. An agile negro melody, wild rag-time with passages of almost Wesleyan hymnishness – reminiscent of Georgia gospel-missions; the eighteenth century in the Dutch East Indies – charmed and soothed the ear.

  Miss Sinquier jigged her foot.

  At their cell windows, as if riveted by the lights and commotion, leaned a few pale nuns.

  Poor things!

  The call of the world could seldom wholly be quenched!

  She started as a fan of seabirds’ feathers skimmed her arm.

  ‘Sylvester’s come,’ Mrs Sixsmith in passing said.

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘Aren’t you scared?’

  ‘Scared?’

  ‘You know, he always belittles people. Sylvester traduces everyone; he even crabs his daughter; he damns all he sees.’

  ‘Boom!’

  ‘How he got up those narrow stairs is a mystery to me.’ Mrs Sixsmith smiled.

  Miss Sinquier raised her face towards the bustling stars. An elfish horse-shoe moon, felicitously bright, struck her as auspicious.

  ‘One should bow to it,’ she said.

  ‘Idolatry!’

  ‘There! look what nodding does.’

  A blanche bacchante with a top-knot of leaves venturesomely approached.

  ‘I’m Amethyst,’ she murmured.

  ‘Indeed?’

  ‘Of Fashion. You are Miss Sinquier, I take it, whose costumes for Romeo – Renaissance, and ergo à la mode! – I so long to hear about.’

  Miss Sinquier dimpled.

  ‘The frocks,’ she said, ‘some of them, will be simply killing.’

  ‘I want your first.’

  ‘Loose white.’

  ‘I suppose, coiffé de sphinx avec un tortis de perles?’

  Miss Sinquier shook her head.

  ‘No “Juliet-cap” of spurious pearls for me,’ she said.

  ‘You dare to abolish it?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘You excite me.’

  ‘Unless the bloom is off the peach, Juliet needs no nets.’

  Miss Valer lowered discreetly her voice.

  ‘And your Romeo?’ she queried. ‘He must make love angelically?’

  ‘He does.’

  ‘I admire enormously his friend.’

  ‘Mr Nice?’

  ‘He has such perfect sloth. I love his lazaroni-ness, his Riva-degli-Schiavoni-ness … He’s very, very handsome. But, of course, it cannot last!’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Like an open rose. Have you no sympathy yourself?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘That’s a pity. An actress … she needs a lover: a sort of husbandina, as it were … I always say Passion tells: L’amour!’

  Miss Sinquier threw a glance towards Mrs Sixsmith, who stood listlessly flirting her fan.

  ‘I’m going to the buffet, child,’ she said.

  ‘Then I think I’ll join you.’

  And drawing her friend’s arm within her own, Miss Sinquier moved away.

  ‘She must belong to more than one weekly!’ she reflected.

  ‘You didn’t mention your Old Mechlin scarf, or your fox-trimmed nightie,’ Mrs Sixsmith murmured, dexterously evading the psychic freedoms of the masked adept.

  ‘Have you no shame, Paul?’ she asked.

  ‘Paul!’

  Miss Sinquier wondered.

  ‘Mephisto! I know his parlour tricks … though it would only be just, perhaps, to say he did foresee our separation some time before it occurred.’

  ‘Oh, how extraordinary.’

  ‘Once as I was making ready to pay some calls, in order to frighten me, he caused the hare’s foot on my toilet-table to leave its carton sheath and go skipping about the room.’

  ‘What ever did you do?’

  ‘My dear, I was disgusted. It really seemed as if the whole of Womanhood was outraged. So, to punish him – for revenge – instead of going to a number of houses that day, I went to only one.’

  ‘There wouldn’t be time?’

  ‘I shall always blame myself …’

  ‘Why?’

  But a lanthorn falling in flames just then above them put an end to the conversation.

  ‘That’s the second I�
��ve seen drop,’ Miss May Mant exclaimed, darting up.

  ‘What have you been up to?’

  ‘Having my bumps examined.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘By the masked professor … Oh, the things he said; only fancy, he told me I’d cause the death of one both near and dear! Ita’s near … but she certainly isn’t dear – odious cat.’

  ‘He must have thought you curiously credulous,’ Miss Sinquier murmured, turning her head aside.

  To her annoyance she perceived the scholarly representative of the Dispatch – a man of prodigious size – leaning solidly on a gold-headed cane while appraising her to Sir Oliver Dawtry, from her bebandeaued head to her jewelly shoes.

  ‘She reminds me just a little of some one de l’Évangile!’ she could hear the great critic say.

  ‘Sylvester!’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Should he speak,’ Mrs Sixsmith murmured, wincing at the summer lightning that flickered every now and then, ‘don’t forget the mediaeval nightie or the Mechlin lace! Five long yards – a cloud …’

  Miss Sinquier buried her lips in her flowers.

  Through the barred windows of the convent opposite certain novices appeared to be enjoying a small saltation among themselves.

  Up and down the corridor to the yearning melody of the minstrel players they twirled, clinging to one another in an ecstasy of delight.

  Her fine eyes looked beautiful as, raising them fraught with soul, they met the veteran critic’s own.

  XV

  ‘O, dear God, help me. Hear me, Jesu. Hear me and forgive me and be offended not if what I ask is vain … soften all hostile hearts and let them love me – adore me! – O Heaven, help me to please. Vouchsafe at each finale countless curtains; and in the “Potion Scene”, O Lord, pull me through …’

  Unwilling to genuflect in the presence of her maid, who would interpret any unwontedness of gesture as first-night symptoms of fear, Miss Sinquier lifted her face towards the bluish light of day that filtered obliquely through the long glass-plating above.

  ‘There’s a cat on the skylight, Smith,’ was what she said as her maid with a telegram recalled her wandering gaze to earth.

  It was a telegram from her father.

  ‘Missed conveyance York,’ she read. ‘Bishopthorpe to-night archiepiscopal blessings.’