"Right you are. I"ll send him word to-night. Ta-ta!" He turned again in the moment of departing. "I say, he must send a good man down, you know. It"ll take an expert. There"s a lot of old things--Greek and Latin--that"s something in _your_ line, isn"t it?"
But Rickman"s line at present was the line of least resistance. It was ten past ten, and Poppy Grace was "on" from ten fifteen to ten forty.
CHAPTER IX
She was only an ordinary little variety actress, and he knew her little programme pretty well by heart. But her fascinations were independent of the glamour of the foot-lights. It was off the stage that he had first come to know her, really know her, a thing that at the first blush of it seems impossible; for the great G.o.ddess Diana is not more divinely secret and secluded than (to a young bookseller) a popular Dance and Song Artiste in private life. Poppy"s rooms were next door to the boarding-house balcony, and it was the balcony that did it.
Now, in the matter of balconies, if you choose to regard the receding wooden part.i.tion as a part.i.tion, and sit very far back behind it, you will have your balcony all to yourself, that is to say, you will see nothing, neither will you be seen. If, however, you prefer, as Mr.
Rickman preferred, to lean forward over the railings and observe things pa.s.sing in the street below, you can hardly help establishing some sort of communication with the next-door neighbour who happens to be doing the same thing. At first this communication was purely in the region of the mind, without so much as the movement of an eyelid on either side, and that made it all the more intimate and intense. But to sit there Sunday evening after Sunday evening, when the other boarders were at church, both looking at the same plane-tree opposite, or the same tail-end of a sunset flung across the chimney pots, without uttering a syllable or a sound, was at last seen by both in its true light, as a thing not only painful but absurd. So one evening the deep, full-hearted silence burst and flowered into speech. In common courtesy Mr. Rickman had to open his lips to ask her whether she objected to his smoking (she did not). Then it came to acknowledging each other in the streets; after that, to Poppy"s coming out and looking over the balcony about the time when Mr. Rickman would be coming home from the shop, and to Mr. Rickman"s looking to see if Poppy was looking; and so on, to that wonderful night when he saw her home from the Jubilee Theatre. The stars were out; not that Poppy cared a rap about the stars.
Her first appearance to-night was in the character of a coster-girl, a part well suited to her audacity and impertinent prettiness. Poppy was the tiniest dancer that ever whirled across a stage, a circ.u.mstance that somewhat diminished the vulgarity of her impersonation, while it gave it a very engaging character of its own. Her small c.o.c.kney face, with its impudent laughing nose, its curling mouth (none too small), its big, twinkling blue eyes, was framed in a golden fringe and side curls. She wore a purple velveteen skirt, a purple velveteen jacket with a large lace collar, and a still larger purple velveteen hat with white ostrich feathers that swayed madly from the perpendicular.
The secret of Poppy"s popularity lay in this, that you could always depend on her; she always played the same part in the same manner; but her manner was her own. To come on the stage quietly; to look, in spite of her coster costume, the picture of suburban innocence, and pink and white propriety; to stand facing her audience for a second of time, motionless and in perfect gravity--it was a trick that, though Poppy never varied it, had a more killing effect than the most ingenious impromptu.
"Sh--sh--sh--sh!" A flutter of programmes in the pit was indignantly suppressed by the gallery. There was a movement of Poppy"s right eyelid which in a larger woman would have been called a wink; in Poppy it appeared as an exaggerated twinkle. It was greeted with a roar of rapturous applause. Then Poppy, with her hands on her hips, and her head on one side, raised her c.o.c.kney voice in a high-pitched song, executing between each verse a slow, swinging cha.s.see to the stage Humorist with the concertina.
"Oh, she"s my fancy girl, With "er "air all outer curl, "Ooks orf, eyes orf, petticoats all awry.
For then she isn"t shy; She gives "er bangs a twirl, And it"s--"Kiss me quick!"--and--"That"s the Trick!"
--and--(_dim_)--"_Wouldn"t_ yer like to try?""
When the stage Humorist with the concertina stopped cha.s.seeing, and put his finger to his nose, and observed, "That"s wot you might call a dim innuender," Rickman could have kicked him.
(_cresc._), "But got up fit ter kill, In "er velverteen an" frill, It"s--"Ands orf!"--"Heyes orf!"--"Fetch yer one in the heye!"-- A strollin" down the "Igh, With "Enery, Alf an" Bill, It"s--"None er that!"--and "Mind my "at!"--and (_fortissimo_)--"WOULDN"T yer like to try!""
"To try! To try!" Her cha.s.see quickened ever so little, doubled on itself, and became a tortuous thing. Poppy"s feet beat out the measure that is danced on East End pavements to the music of the concertina.
In the very abandonment of burlesque Poppy remained an artist, and her dance preserved the gravity of the original ballet, designed for performance on a flagstone. Now it unfolded; it burst its bounds; it was a rhythmic stampede. Louder and louder, her clicking heels beat the furious time; higher and higher her dexterous toes flew to her feathers that bowed to meet them, and when her last superhuman kick sent her hat flying, and the Humorist caught it on his head, they had brought the house down.
Rickman went out to the bar, where he found d.i.c.ky Pilkington, and at d.i.c.ky"s suggestion he endeavoured to quench with brandy and soda his inextinguishable thirst.
He returned to the storm and glare of the ballet, the last appearance of that small, incarnate genius of Folly. There were other dancers, but he saw none but her. He knew every pose and movement of her body, from her first tentative, preluding pirouette, to her last moon-struck dance, when she tossed her tall grenadier"s cap to the back of the stage, and still spinning, shook out her hair, and flung herself backwards, till it streamed and eddied with the whirlwind of her dance. In her fantastic dress (she wore her colours, the red and black) her very womanhood had vanished, she was a mere insignificant morsel of flesh and blood, inspired by the dizzy, reckless Fury of the foot-lights.
There was a noise of many boots beating the floor of the house; it grew into a thick, solid body of sound, torn at intervals by a screaming whistle from the galleries. Someone up there shouted her name--"Poppy--Poppy Grace!" and Rickman shivered.
To Rickman"s mind the name was an outrage; it reeked of popularity; it suggested--absurdly and abominably--a certain cheap drink of sudden and ephemeral effervescence. He never let his mind dwell on those dreadful syllables any longer than he could help; he never thought of her as Poppy Grace at all. He thought of her in undefined, extraordinary ways; now as some nameless aerial spirit, unaccountably wandering about in a world too gross for it; and now as the Young Joy, the fugitive actuality. To-night, after brandy and soda, his imagination possessed itself of Poppy, and wove round her the glory and gloom of the world. It saw in her, not the incarnation of the rosy moment, but the eternal sacrifice of woman, the tragedy of her abas.e.m.e.nt, her obedience to the world. Which, when he came to think of it, was really very clever of his imagination.
Meanwhile Poppy was behaving, as she had behaved for the last fifty nights, like a lunatic humming top. Now it had steadied itself in the intensity of its speed; the little humming-top was sleeping. Poppy, as she span, seemed to be standing, her feet rooted, her body swaying delicately from the hips, like a flower rocked by the wind, the light of her flickering flamewise. There was a stir, a wave, as if the heart of the house had heaved. Pit and gallery breathed hard. Rickman leaned forward with clouded eyes and troubled forehead, while the young shop-men--the other young shop-men--thrilled with familiar and delicious emotion. Now she curtsied, as she had curtsied for the last fifty nights, bowing lower and lower till her hair fell over her face and swept the stage; and now she shook her head till the great golden whorl of hair seemed the only part of her left spinning; then Poppy folded her arms and sank, sank till she sat on her heels, herself invisible, curtained in modest and mystic fashion by her hair.
"Bravo! Bravo!" "That"s the trick!"--"Encore!"--"Oh, _she"s_ my fancy girl!"--"Encore-ore-ore-ore-ore!"
It was all over.
CHAPTER X
He hurried back to Bloomsbury, in the wake of her hansom, to the house of the balcony opposite the plane-trees. The plane-tree was half-withdrawn into the night, but the balcony hung out black in the yellow light from its three long windows. Poppy was not in the balcony.
He went up into the room where the light was, a room that had been once an ordinary Bloomsbury drawing-room, the drawing-room of Propriety. Now it was Poppy"s drawing-room.
You came straight out of a desert of dreary and obscure respectability, and it burst, it blossomed into Poppy before your eyes. Portraits of Poppy on the walls, in every conceivable and inconceivable att.i.tude. Poppy"s canary in the window, in a cage hung with yellow gauze. Poppy"s mandoline in an easy chair by itself.
Poppy"s hat on the grand piano, tumbling head over heels among a litter of coffee cups. On the tea-table a pair of shoes that could have belonged to n.o.body but Poppy, they were so diminutive. In the waste paper basket a bouquet that must have been Poppy"s too, it was so enormous. And on the table in the window a j.a.panese flower-bowl that served as a handy receptacle for cigarette ash and spent vestas.
Two immense mirrors facing each other reflected these objects and Poppy, when she was there, for ever and ever, in diminishing perspective. But Poppy was not there.
Pa.s.sing through this brilliant scene into the back room beyond, he found her finishing her supper.
Poppy was not at all surprised to see him. She addressed him as "Rickets," and invited him under that name to sit down and have some supper, too.
But Rickets did not want any supper. He sat down at the clear end of the table, and looked on as in a dream. And when Poppy had finished she came and sat by him on the clear end of the table, and made cigarettes, and drank champagne out of a little tumbler.
"Thought you might feel a little lonely over there, Ricky-ticky," said she.
Poppy was in spirits. If she had yielded to the glad impulse of her heart, she would have stood on one foot and twirled the other over Ricky-ticky"s head. But she restrained herself. Somehow, before Ricky-ticky, Poppy never played any of those tricks that delighted Mr.
Pilkington and other gentlemen of her acquaintance. She merely sat on the table. She was in her ballet-dress, and before sitting on the table she arranged her red skirts over her black legs with a prodigious air of propriety. Poppy herself did not know whether this meant that she wanted Ricky-ticky to think her nice, or whether she wanted to think Ricky-ticky nice. After all, it came to the same thing; for to Poppy the peculiar charm of Ricky-ticky was his innocence.
The clock on St. Pancras church struck half-past eleven; in his hanging cage in the front room, behind his yellow gauze curtain, Poppy"s canary woke out of his first sleep. He untucked his head from under his wing and chirrupped drowsily.
"Oh, d.i.c.ky," said Poppy, "it"s time you were in your little bed!"
He did not take the hint. He was intent on certain movements of Poppy"s fingers and the tip of her tongue concerned in the making of cigarettes.
He was gazing into her face as if it held for him the secret of the world. And that look embarra.s.sed her. It had all the a.s.surance of age and all the wonder of youth in it. Poppy"s eyes were trained to look out for danger signals in the eyes of boys, for Poppy, according to those lights of hers, was honest. If she knew the secret of the world, she would not have told it to Ricky-ticky; he was much too young. Men, in Poppy"s code of morality, were different. But this amazing, dreamy, interrogative look was not the sort of thing that Poppy was accustomed to, and for once in her life Poppy felt shy.
"I say, Rickets, there goes a quarter to twelve. _Did_ I wake him out of his little sleep?"
Poppy talked as much to the canary as to Rickets, which made it all quite proper. As for Rickman, he talked hardly at all.
"You"ll have to go in ten minutes, Rick." And by way of softening this announcement she gave him some champagne.
He had paid no attention to that hint either, being occupied with a curious phenomenon. Though Poppy was, for her, most unusually stationary, he found that it was making him slightly giddy to look at her.
He was arriving at that moment of intoxication when things lose their baldness and immobility, and the world begins to float like an enchanted island in a beautiful blood-warm haze. Nothing could be more agreeable than the first approaches of this blessed state; he encouraged it, antic.i.p.ating with ecstasy each stage in the mounting of the illusion. For when he was sober he saw Poppy very much as she was; but when he was drunk she became for him a being immaculate, divine.
He moved in a region of gross but glorious exaggeration, where his wretched little c.o.c.kney pa.s.sion a.s.sumed the proportions of a superb romance. His soul that minute was the home of the purest, most exalted emotions. Yes, he could certainly feel it coming on. Poppy"s face was growing bigger and bigger, opening out and blossoming like an enormous flower.
"Nine minutes up. In another minute you go."
It seemed to him that Poppy was measuring time by pouring champagne into little tumblers, and that she gave him champagne to drink. He knew it was no use drinking it, for that thirst of his was unquenchable; but he drank, for the sake of the illusion; and as he drank it seemed to him that not only was Poppy worthy of all adoration, but that his pa.s.sion for her was no mere vulgar and earthly pa.s.sion; it was a glorious and immortal thing.
Poppy looked at him curiously. She was the soul of hospitality, but it struck her that she was being a little too liberal with the champagne.
"No, Razors. No more fizz. If I were to drink a drop more it would spoil my little dance that always fetches the boys."
She turned her tumbler upside down in token of renunciation and led the way into the front room. He followed her with enchanted feet. He was now moving as in an Arabian Night"s dream.