Limehouse Nights

by Thomas Burke

  “Billie,” he cried to the red-nose bill-topper, “Billie, for Christ’s sake go on, and quiet ’em, there’s a good chap. This is the sack for me, if there’s a panic.”

  “No good, old boy. Sorry. Can’t do anything with a mixed gang like yours. Nearly got the blasted bird just now.”

  “Well—you—Miss Gutacre. For the Lord’s sake—go on. Give ’em anything. Give ’em He tickled the Lady’s Fancy.”

  “Oh, Jack, old man, I daren’t,” whimpered the stout soubrette. “I couldn’t hold ’em. I’ve never faced a gang like that. If Billie won’t go, I won’t. ’Tain’t fair to ask me.”

  “Well, you’re a couple of damn devils, that’s what you are—I beg pardon—I mean. No, but, look here. … If—”

  He broke off, suddenly aware that someone was peremptorily agitating his coat-tails.

  “What the blazes d’you want, kid?”

  “I’ll go on, sir,” said Gina placidly.

  “You? What the heaven d’you think a shrimp like you can do?”

  “I can hold ’em, sir. I know I can. Bet you what you like. Turn me loose, and see! Ring the orchestra for La Maxixe, one verse and dance.”

  “Mr Catanach!” A boy in a disordered uniform sprang from nowhere. “You’re wanted here—quick.”

  The manager swung four ways at once, unable to go one way for thought of the others. Then he gave two orders to the stage manager.

  “Ring through for the Masheesh. Then send that kid on.”

  Gina was one of those delightful people who believe in impulse rather than in consideration. What she had proposed to the manager was an impulse of the moment; it simply didn’t bear thinking about. She could hear the complaints, loud and cruel, of that brute which she had undertaken to tame—she heard scream and roar; stamp of nailed feet; fury of blow against blow; temper against temper; the fall of glass; the wail of the victim, the howl of the aggressor.

  But now, through the clamour, there came to her, faint and sweet and far away, the ecstatic wail of La Maxixe, swelling insistently as the curtain swung up. The first bars settled her fears. The music stole into her blood and possessed every nerve and tissue of her eager little body. It was in her feet and her hands and her heart. The stage manager gave her a gentle shove.

  “Get on, Kiddie. You got a rotten rough house. Good luck.”

  With a toss of her yellow head and a stamp of impetuous feet she dashed on. Along the stage she charged, in animal grace and bravery, once, twice, with loose heel dancing, and noted with approval that the clamour was a little less in volume and that many faces were turned to the stage to look at this small figure, immature yet cunningly finished. With as much clatter as her furious little shoes would produce, she ran to the back-cloth. The dust rose in answering clouds and was blown into the auditorium, where it mingled with the opiate haze and was duly swallowed by the gaping ones. The music surged over the footlights in a compelling flood. The chef d’orchestre had caught the idea, and she could see that he was helping her. The fiddles tossed it to her in a tempest of bows, the brass and wood-wind blared it in a tornado, the drum insisted on it, and, like a breaker, it seemed to rise up to her. Before her opened a cavern of purple, stung with sharp lamps in the distant dusks. It swayed and growled and seemed to open a horrid mouth. But between her and it, she thanked her Heavenly Father, was the music, a little pool of dream, flinging its spray upon her. The stage seemed drenched in it and, seizing the tactful moment, she raced down to the footlights and flung herself into it, caressing and caressed by it, shaking, as it were, little showers of sound from her delighted limbs.

  Every phrase of its wistful message was reflected in that marvellously expressive form, rosy and slender and taut. You would have said that each pulse of her body was singing for joy of it, and when her light voice picked up the melody with:

  “Oh, meet me in the Val-ley

  The hap-py Val-ley,”

  interpolated with back-chat to the front rows of the stalls, there was a movement towards repose and attention to this appealing picture.

  “Come on, Charl, while there’s a chance, case there’s a fire.”

  “No; ’alf a mo’, Perce. Ain’t no fire. I’m going to watch this. Looks like being funny. Got some pluck, y’know, that youngster.”

  She stamped along the stage in a cloud of lace and tossing frock; then, seeing that they were still moving and, in the far reaches, struggling, she loosened her heel and suddenly—off went one shoe to the wings, prompt side. Off went the other to the wings, o.p. This bit of business attracted the attention of Charl and Perce and others. They closed in. Now it was heel-and-toe dancing, and suddenly a small hand shot to her knee. Off came a little crimson garter. With an airy turn of her bare and white-powdered arm she sent it spinning into the stalls. “Scramble for it, darlings!”

  “I’ll—tell—you—how I love you—

  Down in the Valley.”

  The wicked little head ogled, now here, now there.

  They scrambled, and while they scrambled and she danced, she bent to her right knee, and off came a blue garter, and away that went, too.

  “Share and share alike, old dears.”

  This time she had the pit as well.

  “My word. She’s a corker, eh?”

  “I should say so.”

  “Quite right, Augustus,” she cried. “There isn’t a fire here, but I’m hot enough to start one. I love my molten lava, but what price Gina?”

  They chuckled. They cheered. They chi-iked.

  “Gaw—fancy a kid like that. … If she was a kid of mine I’d learn ’er something.”

  In the vaudeville phrase, she had got ’em with both hands.

  The lights died down again. The turmoil was confined to the gallery. A lone chucker-out implored them to observe that everything was all right and “Order, please, for the artiste.” The Maxixe swallowed him up.

  “Come along, boys!” cried Gina. “Chorus, this time. Now then—one—two—

  “‘I’ll … Meet …

  You …

  In … the

  Valley …’”

  Very uncertainly and timidly a few at the back of the hall picked it up. They hummed it in the self-conscious voice of the music-hall audience before it is certain that it is not alone. The next few lines were taken with more confidence, and by those in front as well, and the last lines, encouraged by the band and the shrill abandon of Gina, they yelled defiantly, exultingly, with whistles and cheers for the kid.

  Those standing up were pressed forward as those behind strove to catch her back-chat with stalls and orchestra.

  “Holler, boys,” she cried, shaking her dusty golden head from side to side. “Holler! All together—tenors—basses—Worthingtons. More you holler the more money I get. And if I don’t take some home to my old man to-night I shall get it where Susie wore the beads! Holler, boys: it’s my benefit! Edison-Bell record!”

  And they did holler. Away they went in one broad roar. There was no doubt as to whether Gina had fulfilled her promise of holding them. There was no doubt as to whether she had a stage personality. That holler settled it. Gina’s vocation lay in the stress and sacrifice of the vulgar world.

  “My word, she’s a little goer, eh?”

  “You’re right. At that age, too! Fast little cat. She wants a spanking. And if she was a kid o’ mine she’d get it.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Fourteen, they say.”

  “Lord, she’ll be a corker in a year or two’s time.”

  “Year or two’s time. Hot stuff now if you ask me.”

  Perhaps she was. But she had saved the situation. She had averted a panic. She had saved the loss of life inseparable from a theatre stampede. And she knew it. As the audience settled down to be amused by her, or by the next turn for whom she had prepared the way, she gave the c
onductor the cue for the coda, and, with a final stamp of those inspired feet, she leapt into the wings, where the rest of the Casinos awaited her. She was gasping, with drawn face. Two light blue stockings, robbed of their garters, were slipping half-way down her delicately rounded legs. The dust from the stage had gathered on her warm arms. She was plainly “all gone.” But there was a light in her eye and that in her manner that shrieked: “What did I tell you?”

  The manager came to meet her.

  “You glorious kid!”

  Pertly she looked up at him.

  “Yes, ain’t I? Going to push a boat out for me?”

  “Push a boat out?”

  “Yes; I’m dry after that. Mine’s a claret and soda.”

  He rumpled his hair to bring it into keeping with his unhappy evening-clothes. He gestured operatically. He embraced the universe. He addressed the eternal verities.

  “I’m damned,” he exclaimed, “I’m damned if I don’t book that kid for six months.”

  He kept his promise. She was booked at three pounds per week for six months, and she thought she was in heaven. She had never dreamed that there was so much money in the world. Then there was a hurrying to and fro in Acacia Grove. She had to work up an act of her own and provide her own make-up box and dresses. In the former she was assisted by Madame Gilibert and the chef d’orchestre; in the latter by Mumdear and the whole female population of Acacia Grove. Band parts had to be arranged and collected, each instrumental part secured in a neat stiff cover, engraved in gilt letters:

  GINA

  Piccolo

  and

  GINA

  Cornet

  Madame Gilibert sent invitation cards to all managers, and even booked one of the inch-square spaces on the back cover of The Encore, where Gina’s picture duly appeared:

  GINA

  The Marvellous Child Dancer

  The Pocket Kate Vaughan

  All com. Gilibert.

  amid that bewildering array of faces which makes the cover of that journal so distinctive on the bookstall and so deeply interesting to the student of physiognomy and of human nature. So she started as a gay fifth-rate vaudevillian.

  A queer crowd, the fifth-rate vaudevillians. They are the outcasts. Nobody wants them. They live in a settlement of their own, whose boundaries are seldom crossed by those from the sphere of respectability. They are unconsidered. They appear; they pass; unmourned, unhonoured and unremembered. The great actor of the “legitimate” is knighted; the musical comedy star is fêted and received everywhere by the Best People; even the red-nose star of the halls is well seen. But the unsuccessful amusers of the public—their portion is weeping and gnashing of teeth. They are by turns gay and melancholy, with the despairing gaiety of the abandoned, the keen melancholy of the temperamental. They are the people who bring us laughter, who help us to forget. They invent and sing songs that put a girdle round the globe, that bring men cheerfully together in Singapore and Tobago and Honolulu and Trinidad, and are shouted under skies East and West and South; and their reward is neither here nor there; not applause or glory or motor cars or a hundred pounds a week. No; four pounds a week is theirs, with reduced rates on the railway and expenses double those of any workman or clerk. To the thoughtful person there is something infinitely pathetic in this; but by the mercy of God your fifth-rate vaudevillians are not thoughtful people. They live in, for, and by the moment; and, be their lives what they may, they are happy; for theirs is the profound wisdom of perpetual youth.

  Gina’s six months were filled either at the Blackwall house or at other independent halls, not controlled by the syndicates, to which her manager leased her. When not working—for the twenty-six weeks were to be filled as and when she was called—she spent her time in inspecting other shows and dancers, by the simple use of her professional card. From time to time she varied her turn, as dictated by her own moods and the vagaries of the management. Sometimes she would dance excerpts from Coppelia or Sylvia; sometimes Dvorak’s Humoreske or L’Automne Bacchanale, or odds and ends from French and Russian music. But it was the sparkling sun-soaked melodies of the South, laughing of golden days and silver nights, white towns and green seas, that really held her; for to her music was melody, melody, melody—laughter, quick tears, the graceful surface of things; movement and festal colour. By instinctive choice she had already taken to her heart all Italian music—Pagliacci, La Bohème, Rusticana, Manon, and much of the humbler Neapolitan stuff that somehow finds its way to London. And what music was to her, so was life, and so she interpreted it to others.

  Whenever she was billed, all Poplar crowded to see her; and there are still many who remember with high gratitude this lovely flower from their own gutters, and the little escapes from their sorrows that she found for them. They still remember how, passing them in the street, she, clear and steady as the dew at dawn, would but look upon them with roguish nonchalance, compel smiles from them and leave them feeling richer and stronger.

  “That girl’s got a heart,” they would say. She shook them from pondering on their problems, lifted them into a rare, bold atmosphere, taught them how to laugh and how to feast; carried to their hearts little bouquets of solace smelling of April and May. She seemed to be born afresh each morning, so sharp and undimmed were her delight and wonder in life. She lit the whole of Poplar with her personality. The flashing of her number in the electric screen was the signal for handfuls of applause. Even those of her audience who had never before seen her went about their routine next day feeling better by remembering her. She splashed colour on their drabbery. She forced them to forget old fusty creeds of conduct, and awoke echoes in them of things that should not have been forgotten; fused into the thin body of their days something ripe and full and clustering; something, as they said, that gave ’em things to think about where before they had been fed up. She tempted them with the lure of the moment, and they followed and found that it was good. She opened new doors to them, showing them the old country to which to-day excursions are almost forbidden; the country of the dear brown earth and the naked flesh, of the wine-cup and flowers and kisses and Homeric laughter. She could have made a Calvinist laugh at sin. Young and wise and understanding, she would sprinkle upon it the dew of her kindly smile, and what had been bare and reprehensible a moment ago was then something tender and full of grace. Through her, all little lapses and waywardnesses became touched with delicacy. We live, we love, we die. A little while we sing in the sun, and then … we are gone. So let’s be kind to one another; let’s forgive everything; there’s always an excuse. That was the Ginarian philosophy.

  Twice every night she danced, and never once did she seem to “slack.” After the applause welcoming her number, silence would fall on the house. The hall would be plunged sharply in a velvet gloom, through which the lights of the orchestra would gleam with subtle premonition. At a quick bell the band would blare the chord on, and the curtain would rush up on a dark blank stage. Then from between the folds of the back-cloth would steal a wee slip of a child in white, to stand poised like a startled faun. Three pale spot-lights would swim from roof and wings, drift a moment, then pick her up, focusing her gleaming hair and alabaster arms.

  With the conductor’s tap the hall would be flooded with the ballet music of Delibes, and the dance would begin, and Gina would turn, for our delight, the loveliest pair of legs in Poplar. On the high vast stage, amid the crashing speed of the music, and the spattering fire of the side-drums, she would seem so fragile, so lost, so alone that one almost ached for her. But if she were alone at first, it was not so when she danced. At the first step she seemed to people the stage with little companies of dream. She gave us dance—and more than dance; no business of trick and limelight, but Infant Joy materialised, the lovelier because of its very waywardness. She was a poem. She was the child—naughty and bold and hungry for the beauty of life—and, through her, the audience would touch finger
-tips with all that was generously pure and happy. Many calls she would have at the end of her turn, and the people thought they were applauding her skill as a dancer. But a few of us knew better.

  There may have been finer artists. There may have been more finished dancers. There may have been more beautiful children. But certainly never was there another woman or child who so touched her surroundings with herself, so held her audience as to send people away, full—they knew not how—of the intense glee of living. This little girl spoke to them in a language they knew, and thereby achieved the highest purpose of all art; she made others happy and strong. She changed their scowls to smiles; made them glad to meet one another. Strangers were known to speak to strangers under the spell of her dancing. Everything that is young and fresh and lovely and brave was in her message. She did so enjoy it all. That elfish little face, that lyrical body, and those twinkling toes made for the manager of the dirty hall a small fortune. Nightly she flung herself in delicate abandon through her dances, and her laugh thrilled and tickled you as does the best and gayest music. It was not the laughter of frivolity, for frivolity is but the corpse of joy; but that finer laughter expressing the full acceptance of life and all that it gives us of tears and laughter; hoping nothing, fearing nothing, but rejoicing, with sweet cynicism, in everything. It is the most heroic front that man can present to the gods that be, and Gina taught us what no school could teach us; she taught us how to wear this armour and, with its protection, to play the great game.

  All Poplar loved her. The manager loved her, the stage hands loved her, the doorkeeper loved her, even her agent loved her—but unless you are of the profession, you will not appreciate the boundless significance of that. And the conductor … the young conductor worshipped her. He had been on his knees to her ever since that great first night. It was delicious agony for him to conduct for her. It was an irritation when her turn did not get the masses of applause that belonged to her; it was a still deeper irritation when the houseful of louts roared their appreciation. At nights he wept for her. Her face was a flower which he watered with his tears, and day by day she grew for him more and more lovely and to be desired. He had told her that he was a broken-hearted man, since the only woman he had loved, when he was eighteen, had deceived him. Gina thereafter named him the Scorched Butterfly, and would solace him with kisses.