The Hippodrome Part 15

Restored to good-humour, the audience had forgotten the disgrace and failure of their favourite _equestrienne_.

CHAPTER XI

"I am tired of tears and laughter And men that laugh and weep, Of what may come hereafter For men that sow and reap.

I am weary of days and hours, Blown buds of barren flowers, Desires and dreams and powers, And everything but sleep."

SWINBURNE.

If anyone had told Arith.e.l.li that she was in for a sharp attack of diphtheria, she would have felt surprised and not very much enlightened. Her ignorance of everything connected with illness was supreme, and since childhood she had had no recollection of medicine and doctors. Her parents indulged in theories on the subject of complaints, the princ.i.p.al one being a large disbelief in their existence. To them anything unhealthy or ailing was an aversion, a thing to be avoided rather than pitied.

For accidents, sprains and breakages their pharmacopoeia suggested and did not go beyond two ideas,--salt and water and Nature.

The Oriental strain in her character helped her to endure where an ordinary woman would have fussed, cried, or grumbled. At home if she had had a fall or did not look her best she had been expected to consider herself in disgrace, and to keep out of the way till such time as she had completely recovered her looks and spirits.

When she returned to her lodgings, it did not occur to her to rouse the landlady and demand remedies or attentions. The walk home had been a nightmare, and now she had all she wanted--solitude and the blessed darkness. She threw off her dress and boots, and walked the room hour after hour. She still heard the brazen band, and saw the flaming lights and her ears echoed to the dreadful sounds of hissing.

Sometimes she had drunk feverishly of the very doubtful water against which Emile had so often cautioned her. When it was nearly dawn she gave in, and lay huddled up on the bed, half-delirious with the pain and feeling of suffocation.

Two streets away, and in a room more squalid than her own, Vardri was also enduring his own private Purgatory. Hers was physical, his mental. That was all the difference.

Long before half-past eight he was down at the stables and there received the dismissal he had fully expected, being ordered off the premises by the head groom, who had received directions the night before to give Vardri a week's wages, and turn him out of the place without delay. It was no use protesting. The Manager was not yet visible, and even if he had been Vardri knew there was no appeal.

There had been complaints about his negligence more than once, and of course he had been missed on the previous evening. None of the "strappers" would have reported him, but one of the clowns, a Spaniard with whom he had fought for ill-treating a horse, had seen him leaving the vicinity of the dressing-rooms, and had carried the information to headquarters.

The informer had chosen his time well, and had found the Manager raging over Arith.e.l.li's mishap, and ready to dismiss anyone with or without reason.

Vardri turned his back on the place whistling defiance, and with his courage fallen below zero. He would have liked to say good-bye to the horses, and to some of the men who were his friends. He had never disliked the actual work, and it was at the Hippodrome that he had first met Arith.e.l.li. Her misfortune and his had come together. At any other time it would not have been quite so bad. A few months ago he would not have cared whether he lost his place or not.

There had been nothing much in life then, and one could always find a short way out of it _via_ the water or an overdose of something.

But now the world was changed, and he craved for Life and the fulness of Life, for he had tasted happiness and stood for a moment in the outer courts of the House of Love. He had no friends who could have helped him, and no qualifications for earning his living at any other trade or profession. He had begun life with a luxurious home, a refined and useless education, and the mind of a dreamer, an idealist.

None of these things were valuable a.s.sets in his present career.

Like Arith.e.l.li he spoke several languages more or less fluently, and like her again possessed both understanding and a love of horses, but what avail were these things when he had neither money, references nor influence, and as a further disadvantage he was known to be an a.s.sociate of the revolutionaries, and his tendency to consumption would keep him out of many kinds of employment.

He turned over the few coins in his hand. Just enough to keep him for a week and then--the deluge!

He waited, prowling up and down the street, impatiently until Emile appeared in the distance.

A few minutes later, the two men were at the door of Arith.e.l.li's lodgings. The landlady met them on the stairs, hag-like in the disarray of the early morning, and evidently terrified out of such humanity as she possessed by the fear of infection. She had gone up with the early morning coffee and found Arith.e.l.li raving aloud and tearing at her throat. Her first thought had been to turn the girl out of doors, or, as she was obviously incapable of moving, to send for a priest and a nursing sister, and have her taken to the public hospital.

A wholesome fear of Emile prevented her from giving utterance to these charitable impulses.

She invoked every saint in the calendar, whose name she could remember, and crossed herself with automaton-like energy.

She could not, she protested, be expected to nurse such a dangerous case of fever as this undoubtedly was. There was her son, the adored of her old age. _Santa Maria_! If he also were stricken!

Emile pushed her on one side. "I'll talk to you presently," he said in her own dialect. "If you are going into hysterics with fright you'll catch anything that is catching. If you behave sensibly you won't."

The window was fully open and the green shutters thrown back, and the fierce sunlight streamed into Arith.e.l.li's room, which showed more than its normal disorder. The tray with the _cafe complet_ was on the floor where the landlady had left it on her hasty stampede downstairs, half-a-dozen turquoise rings lay strewn over a little table, where they had been thrown when they were dragged off, boys' clothes trailed over the back of one chair, and a blue skirt over another. The only orderly thing visible was the immaculate row of fine kid boots, long, narrow, pearl-grey, tan and champagne-coloured.

Arith.e.l.li lay on the big bed under the faded canopy. She had wrapped herself in a thin blue _peignoir_, and her face was half hidden in tangled hair. The tumbled bed-clothes were pulled to one side and dragging on the dusty boards. She was quite unconscious of anyone's presence, and moaned softly in a strangled fas.h.i.+on.

The two men stood without speaking, and watched the writhing, restless figure. Vardri turned away first with a smothered exclamation. Would he always be obliged to see her tortured in some way or another? The Fates were sending him more than any man could bear to look upon.

"What are you going to do?" he said roughly in French, "I can't stand seeing this!"

Emile showed no signs of surprise at the other's manifest anxiety, possibly because his own was as deep, though his method of expressing it was different. He felt helpless, and, being a man, resented the feeling, so by consequence his always rugged manner became even more unpleasant than usual.

"Well," he rejoined, "what can you expect in this filthy place? This street isn't so bad, but of course she has so often been down in those slums in the Parelelo. The Calle de Pescadores alone is enough to give anyone a fever. I think Sobrenski has made a point of sending her down every poisonous street in the place. Ireland's a clean country, you see, compared with this, so she hasn't much chance, and as she starves herself half the time that won't make things any better."

"She must have some woman to look after her. I suppose the landlady here will be no good?"

"Not unless you pay her.--Who's going to do that?"

"There's Estelle."

"Estelle!" Emile exploded a fierce Russian oath. "Do you want _more_ hysterics?" Vardri was tramping up and down the room with the noiseless agility of an animal, his fingers mechanically at work at a cigarette.

"She must have a doctor too. Isn't there an English doctor here?"

"Probably. Do you propose to pay him too?"

The dryly sarcastic voice, the practical question brought Vardri down from the clouds to the hard facts of life. Illnesses and doctors were expensive things. He had no money, and Emile very little.

"I'll get a _Soeur de Charite_ from one of the convents. She'll come for nothing. Nursing is their work. I was--I mean I'm a Catholic.

She's a Catholic, too, isn't she?"

"No, she hates them. She was educated in a convent, where as far as I can gather from her own account she acquired more learning than piety.

Under the present circ.u.mstances I can only suggest the horse-doctor."

"What's the use of--?"

"I believe he began by doctoring human beings, but like the rest of us out here, he is a little under a cloud. He prefers animals now. They don't tell tales. Human beings do. Besides, he's English, or rather, Irish. Better go and tell him to come up. You know his rooms. Tell him it's infectious, and he can bring up a few cigarettes for me if he feels generous. Don't trouble about your _Soeur de Charite_. I'll see that the woman here makes herself useful."

Vardri flung himself out of the room and down the rickety stairs at breakneck speed, thankful beyond measure for the relief of action.

Emile subsided into a chair and smoked furiously and meditated upon the untoward situation. Being of a practical turn of mind he began to make calculations. Vardri had told him briefly of how Arith.e.l.li had failed in the trick-riding, fallen off her horse, and been hissed out of the ring. The loss of popularity might mean the end of her career. In any case he could see she was desperately ill, and there was small chance of her being about under three weeks, and even then she would not be able to work at once. Meanwhile they had exactly two pounds a week to live upon.

Truly women added to the complications of life! He might borrow money, but that was a thing to be resorted to only in the last extremity.

Most of the members of his Circle were as poor as himself or poorer.

They were all bound together by the tie of brotherhood, and no one would have grudged or refused a loan, but Emile scrupled to borrow from those who were in greater privation than himself.

Sobrenski was fairly well off, but he lived like an ascetic and gave everything to the Cause; besides, Sobrenski was out of the question.

To appeal to him on Arith.e.l.li's behalf would only be to give him a chance for refusal and a jeer at female conspirators.

Her turquoise rings Emile collected from the table, and put them into his pocket; her collar of turquoises he rescued from the floor, where it had fallen when she took off her bodice. The jewels could all be turned into the money they needed so badly. Of course she had not saved a single _peseta_. Emile had the handling of her salary, and he knew that anything left over from the expenses of food and lodging went in clothes and her particular vanity, dainty boots.