The Hippodrome Part 7

Success was a sure road to approbation. If she had failed she would not have written.

The Hippodrome engagement could not last forever. A little carelessness, a loss of nerve, and her career would be at an end.

Sometimes when she had been singing "_Le Reve_," she had really meant it all.

"_S'il faut, ah, prends ma vie_!"

Only a few days ago Emile had stormed at her in his rasping French, because she had, with the vehemence of youth, denounced the Anarchist leader as a relentless brute.

"You think yourself over-worked and ill-used--you!" he said as he strode up and down the room twisting his fiercely pointed moustache.

"Look at Sobrenski. He works us all, but does he ever spare himself?

Look at Vardri? Rich, well-born, starving at the Hippodrome on a few _pesetas_ a week. I thought you had better stuff in you. Are you going to turn out English milk-and-water? You're _not_ English, you say? No, I suppose you're not, or you wouldn't talk about 'dirty Gentiles.' If you think Anarchy is all '_Le Reve_' you'll soon find yourself mistaken. If some of us dream dreams we have also to face actions and realities."

Perhaps the episode of Marie Roumanoff belonged to the days before he joined the Brotherhood and became an exile from his country.

She knew that once upon a time he had owned land and estates in Russia, and Emile the Anarchist of Barcelona had been known as Count Poleski.

She kept her discoveries to herself, and when Emile returned he found her crooning over the piano. She appeared to have quite recovered her boyish good spirits, and demanded a singing lesson, for under his tuition her pa.s.sion for music had developed and increased.

"It's so nice to have a change from the heat and dust and those horrible electric lights," she said. "Let's enjoy ourselves and try over all your music. What a lot you have, and it all seems to have been bought in different places. Rome, Paris, Vienna, Dieppe, London!

Fancy your having been in London!"

Emile's collection of songs covered a wide field and ranged from the gypsy ballad of "The Lost Horse," to "The Bridge," in the performance of which he revelled.

Arith.e.l.li sat in a corner and rocked with inward laughter over his atrocious English, and evident enjoyment of the morbid sentiments. For in spite of her face Arith.e.l.li had a fine sense of the ridiculous.

"You don't say the words properly," she said. "You make such mouthfuls out of them!"

"And what of you?" Emile retorted in great wrath. "You with your French all soft, soft like oil!"

"Yes, that's the Irish half of me."

"And your Italian so _rauque_ so hard--!"

"That's the Jewish half of me. Oh, don't let's quarrel! I do want to learn to sing properly."

"Then don't fold your arms," her instructor said sharply. "I suppose you think it looks dramatic, but how can you learn to sing what you call 'properly,' with your chest all crushed up like that?"

CHAPTER VI

"When I look back on the days long fled, The memory grows still dreamier.

Oh! what fantastic lives they led, Far away in Bohemia.

"There were laws that were only made to break, In a world that never seems half awake Till the lamps were lit--there were souls at stake.

Far away in Bohemia."

DOLF WYLLARDE.

Barcelona in August was like the h.e.l.l to which Emile likened it.

The rich escaped from the heat to their villas up in the mountains, those whom business, or lack of money, kept in the city, existed in a parched and sweltering condition. Arith.e.l.li still kept her place among the performers at the Hippodrome, though after the fas.h.i.+on of circus artists her name had been changed.

She was now "Madame Mignonne" from Paris, and wore a golden wig, and came on the stage riding a lion in the character of a heathen G.o.ddess in the spectacular display which always ended the performance.

She pined for the _haute ecole_ and trick riding in which she so excelled, and felt unholy pangs when she saw her beloved white horses being driven in a chariot by a fat, vulgar English woman, arrayed in scanty pink tunic and tights.

She was not afraid of the lion, who was old and toothless enough to be absolutely safe, but her new role was not a great success.

The golden hair did not suit her any better than did the cla.s.sical draperies, and she grew daily thinner. As a matter of fact she was practically going through the process of slow starvation.

She had never, even in her healthily hungry days, been able to eat the abominable Spanish dishes--meat floating in oil, and other things which she cla.s.sed together under the heading of _cochonneries_.

She generally lived on fruit, a little black bread, coffee, and _absinthe_.

Emile would try and bully her into eating more, and occasionally essayed his talents as a _chef_, and cooked weird looking things in his rooms over a vilely smelling English oil stove, but the Jewess in Arith.e.l.li found him wanting in the "divers was.h.i.+ngs" she required of the saucepans, and they generally ended these Bohemian repasts with a quarrel.

She went about her work in a half-stupefied state, as one who is perpetually in a trance. She was past fear now. Nothing mattered.

Midnight rides on a mule up in the mountains, meetings in the low quarter of the town, the danger of being arrested while carrying a despatch.

"_C'est ainsi que la vie_!" Emile's motto had become also her own.

She was once more a perfect machine. Even the only thing that Sobrenski could find to say against her was that her appearance was too conspicuous for a conspirator and that her hands and feet would betray her through any disguise.

Emile, though still outwardly as unsympathetic as ever, was not blind to the change in her looks and manner.

Putting the Cause out of the question, he did not wish "Fatalite" to get ill. Her company amused and distracted him.

He liked to hear her views on life, and to colour them with his own cynicism, and he enjoyed teaching her to sing and hearing her argue.

For all her quiet she was curiously magnetic and had a way of making her absence felt. She was never noisy or exacting and had none of the pride or vices of her s.e.x, and though she was often depressed she was never bored, and in consequence bored no one.

They had many traits in common, including fatalism and morbidity, for the Slav temperament is in a hundred ways akin to that of the Celt.

In spite of his jeering remarks Emile thoroughly appreciated the girl's pluck, and knew that if she failed it would be purely from physical reasons.

"Iron in a velvet sheath," he had described her, and iron did not bend--it broke.

After some consideration he approached the very unapproachable Manager.

"It's time you gave your leading _equestrienne_ a holiday," he observed. "She's getting ill. If you don't let her have a rest soon she'll be falling off in public, or having some fiasco. She was half dead the other night after the performance."

The Manager made profane remarks in the dialect of Silesia, of which place he was a native. He was fresh from quarrelling for the hundredth time with Estelle, and was in the last frame of mind to desire rest or peace for any inhabitant of the globe.

By himself and everyone else at the Hippodrome, Arith.e.l.li was considered the property of the Anarchist, and Emile had taken very good care to disabuse no one of the idea, but had rather been at some pains to create such an impression.

For her it was the best protection, and kept her free from the insults and attentions of other men.