Mr. Prohack Part 33

Eve demanded.

"That's Enid."

"Enid?"

"Yes. You know the Enid stove, don't you? All ladies know the Enid stove. It's been a household word for forty years. That's the original Enid. Her father invented the stove, and named it after her when she was a girl. She never misses a first-night."

"How extraordinary! Is she what you call a celebrity?"

"Rather!"

"Now," said Mr. Prohack. "Now, at last I understand the real meaning of fame."

"But that's Charlie down there!" exclaimed Eve, suddenly, pointing to the stalls and then looking behind her to see if there was not another Charlie in the box.

"Yes," Ozzie agreed. "Lady Ma.s.sulam had an extra stall, and as five's a bit of a crowd in this box.... I thought he'd told you."

"He had not," said Eve.

The curtain went up, and this simple gesture on the part of the curtain evoked enormous applause. The audience could not control the expression of its delight. A young lady under a sunshade appeared; the mere fact of her existence threw the audience into a new ecstasy. An old man with a red nose appeared: similar demonstrations from the audience. When these two had talked to each other and sung to each other, the applause was tripled, and when the scene changed from Piccadilly Circus at 4 a.m. to the interior of a Spanish palace inhabited by ill.u.s.trious French actors and actresses who proceeded to play an act of a tragedy by Corneille, the applause was quintupled. At the end of the tragedy the applause was decupled. Then the Spanish palace dissolved into an Abyssinian harem, and Eliza Fiddle in Abyssinian costume was discovered lying upon two thousand cus.h.i.+ons of two thousand colours, and the audience rose at Eliza and Eliza rose at the audience, and the resulting frenzy was the sublimest frenzy that ever shook a theatre. The piece was stopped dead for three minutes while the audience and Eliza protested a mutual and unique pa.s.sion. From this point onwards Mr. Prohack lost his head. He ran to and fro in the bewildering glittering maze of the piece, seeking for an explanation, for a sign-post, for a clue, for the slightest hint, and found nothing. He had no alternative but to cling to Eliza Fiddle, and he clung to her desperately. She was willing to be clung to. She gave herself, not only to Mr. Prohack, but to every member of the audience separately; she gave herself in the completeness of all her manifestations. The audience was rich in the possession of the whole of her individuality, which was a great deal. She sang, danced, chattered, froze, melted, laughed, cried, flirted, kissed, kicked, cursed, and turned somersaults with the fury of a dervish, the languor of an odalisque, and the inexhaustibility of a hot-spring geyser.... And at length Mr. Prohack grew aware of a feeling within himself that was at war with the fresh, fine feeling of physical well-being. "I have never seen a revue before," he said in secret. "Is it possible that I am bored?"

III

"Would you care to go behind and be introduced to Miss Fiddle?" Ozzie suggested at the interval after the curtain had been raised seventeen times in response to frantic shoutings, cheerings, thumpings and clappings, and the mighty tumult of exhilaration had subsided into a happy buzz that arose from all the seats in the entire orange-tinted brilliant auditorium. The ladies would not go; the ladies feared, they said, to impose their company upon Miss Fiddle in the tremendous strain of her activities. They spoke primly and decisively. It was true that they feared; but their fear was based on consideration for themselves rather than on consideration for Miss Fiddle. Ozzie was plainly snubbed.

He had offered a wonderful privilege, and it had been disdained.

Mr. Prohack could not bear the spectacle of Ozzie's discomfiture. His sad weakness for pleasing people overcame him, and, putting his hand benevolently on the young man's shoulder, he said:

"My dear fellow, personally I'm dying to go."

They went by strangely narrow corridors and through iron doors across the stage, whose s.h.i.+rt-sleeved, ragged population seemed to be behaving as though the last trump had sounded, and so upstairs and along a broad pa.s.sage full of doors ajar from which issued whispers and exclamations and transient visions of young women. From the star's dressing-room, at the end, a crowd of all sorts and conditions of persons was being pushed. Mr. Prohack trembled with an awful apprehension, and asked himself vainly what in the name of commonsense he was doing there, and prayed that Ozzie might be refused admission. The next moment he was being introduced to a middle-aged woman in a middle-aged dressing-gown.

Her face was thickly caked with paint and powder, her eyes surrounded with rings of deepest black, her finger-nails red. Mr. Prohack, not without difficulty, recognised Eliza. A dresser stood on either side of her. Blinding showers of electric light poured down upon her defenceless but hardy form. She shook hands, but Mr. Prohack deemed that she ought to bear a notice: "Danger. Visitors are requested not to touch."

"So good of you to come round," she said, in her rich and powerful voice, smiling with all her superb teeth. Mr. Prohack, entranced, gazed, not as at a woman, but as at a public monument. Nevertheless he thought that she was not a bad kind, and well suited for the rough work of the world.

"I hope you're all coming to my ball to-night," said she. Mr. Prohack had never heard of any ball. In an instant she told him that she had remarked two most charming ladies with him in the box--(inordinate faculty of observation, mused Mr. Prohack)--and in another instant she was selling him three two guinea tickets for a grand ball and rout in aid of the West End Chorus Girls' Aid a.s.sociation. Could he refuse, perceiving so clearly as he did that within the public monument was hiding a wistful creature, human like himself, human like his wife and daughter? He could not.

"Now you'll _come_?" said she.

Mr. Prohack swore that he would come, his heart sinking as he realised the consequence of his own foolish weakness. There was a knock at the door.

"Did you want me, Liza?" said a voice, and a fat gentleman, clothed with resplendent correctness, stepped into the room. It was the stage-manager, a G.o.d in his way.

Eliza Fiddle became a cyclone.

"I should think I did want you," she said pa.s.sionately. "That's why I sent for you, and next time I'll ask you to come quicker. I'm not going to have that squint-eyed girl on the stage any more to-night. You know, the one at the end of the row. Twice she spoiled my exit by getting in the way. And you've got to throw her out, and take it from me. She does it on purpose."

"I can't throw her out without Mr. Chown's orders, and Mr. Chown's in Paris."

"Then you refuse?"

A pause.

"Yes."

"Then I'm not going on again to-night, not if I know it. I'm not going to be insulted in my own theatre."

"It's not the girl's fault. You know they haven't got room to move."

"I don't know anything about that and I don't care. All I know is that I've finished with that squint-eyed woman, and you can choose right now between her and me. And so that's that."

Miss Fiddle's fragile complexion had approached to within six inches of the stage-manager's broad and s.h.i.+ny features, and it had little resemblance to any of the various faces which audiences a.s.sociated with the figure of Eliza Fiddle; it was a face voluptuously distorted by the violence of emotion. As Miss Fiddle appeared to be under the impression that she was alone with the stage-manager, Mr. Prohack rendered justice to that impression by softly departing. Ozzie followed. The stage-manager also followed. "Where are you going?" they heard Eliza's voice behind them addressing the stage-manager.

"I'm going to tell your under-study to get ready quick."

An enormous altercation uprose, and faces peeped from every door in the corridor; but Mr. Prohack stayed not. Ozzie led him to Mr. Asprey Chown's private room. The Terror of the departments was shaken. Ozzie laughed gently as he shut the door.

"What will happen?" asked Mr. Prohack, affecting a gaiety he did not feel.

"What do you think will happen?" simpered Ozzie blandly, "having due regard to the fact that Miss Fiddle has to choose between three hundred and fifty pounds a week and a law-suit with Chown involving heavy damages? I must say there's n.o.body like Blaggs for keeping these three hundred and fifty pound a week individuals in order. Chown would sooner lose forty of them than lose Blaggs. And Eliza knows it. By the way, what do you think of the show?"

"Will it succeed?"

"You should see the advance booking. There's a thousand pounds in the house to-night. Chown will be clearing fifteen hundred a week when he's paid off his production."

"Well, it's marvellous."

"You don't mean the show?"

"No. The profit."

"I agree," simpered Ozzie.

"I'm beginning to like this sizzling idiot," thought Mr. Prohack, as it were regretfully. They left the imperial richness of Mr. Chown's private room like brothers.

IV

When Mr. Prohack touched the handle of the door of the box, he felt as though he were returning to civilisation; he felt less desolated by the immediate past and by the prospect of the immediate future; he was yearning for the society of mere women after his commerce with a star at three hundred and fifty pounds a week. True, he badly wanted to examine his soul and enquire into his philosophy of life, but he was prepared to postpone that inquest until the society of mere women had had a beneficial effect on him.

Charlie, who had been paying a state visit to his mother and sister was just leaving the box and the curtain was just going up.