The Vanity Girl Part 9

"Why on earth do managers dress actors up in yachting costume?" asked one of them. "I never saw such an a.s.s as that man looked--David Blighter or whatever he calls himself."

Dorothy could see Sylvia checking an impulse not to accentuate her discomfiture by announcing her friendship with the despised tenor; but she felt sufficiently humiliated without that, and when they got back to their rooms she implored Sylvia to speak to Lily on the subject of being too friendly with the men in the company.

"It makes us all so cheap," Dorothy pointed out. "Of course, we're on tour and not likely to meet many friends who know us in London. Still, it is unpleasant. You heard the way those boys talked about David? What would they have said to Tom Hewitt? Besides, I get worried about Lily.

She _is_ very weak and she has been badly brought up. I'm awfully fond of her, as you know, and I'd do anything for her; but really I cannot stand that Hewitt creature, and I don't see why Lily should force him upon us."

"I think it's rather foolish of her myself," agreed Sylvia. "At the same time, I'm afraid that with Lily it's inevitable."

"Yes, but she lets him make love to her," protested Dorothy. "She doesn't care a bit about him, really, but she's too lazy to say 'no'. I came down the other day to find her sitting on his lap! Well, I think that's disgusting. _You_ don't sit on people's laps; _I_ don't sit on people's laps. Why should she? I know perfectly well what it is to be in love; I've been in love lots of times. I don't want you to think I'm setting out to make myself seem better than I am. As I told you, the only reason I went on the stage was because I couldn't marry the man I loved. So who more likely to have sympathy with people in love than myself? What I object to is playing about with boys of the company. Look at them! The most awful set of bounders imaginable. It's so bad for you and me to have them coming in and out of our rooms at all hours. That Hewitt creature actually proposed to come back to supper the other night. However, I told Lily that if he did I should go to a hotel. After all, we are a little different from the other girls of the company."

"I wonder if we are?" Sylvia queried.

"Of course we are," said Dorothy. "You surely don't consider yourself on a level with Fay Onslow? Or with Sadie Moore and Clarice Beauchamp?

Those awful girls!"

"I think we're all about the same," said Sylvia. "Some of us drop our aitches, some of us our p's and q's, some of us sing flat and the others sing sharp; but alas! my dear Dorothy, we all look very much alike when we're waiting for the train on Sunday morning."

"I sing perfectly in tune," said Dorothy, coldly.

"Please don't snub, me, Dorothy," Sylvia begged. "I can hardly bear it."

"There's no need for you to be sarcastic; you must admit I'm right about Lily."

Sylvia suddenly produced an eye-gla.s.s and, fixing it in her eye, stared mockingly at Dorothy.

"What about David?" she asked.

"You can't compare me with Lily."

"No, but I might compare David with Tom," she said, letting the eye-gla.s.s drop in a way that Dorothy found extremely irritating.

After their host's remarks about the tenor Dorothy felt she could not argue the point farther, and now in addition to her anger against Lily she began to hate her singing-master. However, Sylvia must have felt that she was right and have spoken to Lily, because the following week at Leicester Lily, with most unwonted energy, attacked her on the subject:

"I don't know why you should grumble to Sylvia about me. I don't grumble to her about you. When have I ever grumbled about your practising? You say the only reason you let yourself get talked about with David Bligh is because he's useful to you. You say he's helping you with your voice.

Well, Tom helps me with my bag. What's the difference? It's only since you were asked out by those men who had a car that you suddenly discovered how impossible Tom was and began laughing at his waistcoats.

I didn't laugh at Cyril Vavasour's waistcoat, which was more extraordinary than Tom's."

"I've never grumbled about Tom's carrying your bag," Dorothy explained, patiently. "What I said to Sylvia was that I didn't think you ought to let him kiss you. I don't think it's dignified."

"Well, as long as he doesn't want to kiss you, I don't see what you've got to complain about."

The bare notion of Tom's wanting to kiss her was so unpleasant to Dorothy that she had to withdraw from the conversation. Thenceforth the breach between her and Lily began to widen; in fact, if it had not been for Sylvia she would have told Lily that she could not share rooms with her any longer. She was afraid, however, that Sylvia might be so sorry for Lily that she would find herself left alone, which would put her in an undignified position, because the other girls might say that it was because she wanted to carry on, as they would vulgarly express it, with Bligh; besides, living alone was too expensive.

Since Nottingham, Dorothy had been criticizing the tenor almost as sharply as she criticized Tom Hewitt, and she was in no mood to encourage the idea that there was anything between him and her; all her lessons now were merely repet.i.tions of what he had taught her already, and it became obvious to Dorothy that he was what he was in the profession simply because he was not good enough to be anything better.

He had so often bragged to her about his success with other girls that he deserved to suffer on her account, and she felt quite like Nemesis when soon after this, while they were walking in the town of Leicester, she told him that this was to be their last walk together.

"Don't stand still in that theatrical way," she commanded. "Everybody's looking at you."

The kidney-stones of the Leicester streets had been hurting her feet, and she was in no mood for mercy.

"So this is the end," fluted David Bligh, with such emotion that the top note narrowly escaped being falsetto. "After all these weeks you're going to throw me away like an old chocolate-box."

He swished his cane with such demonstrative violence that, without seeing what he was doing, he cut a pa.s.ser-by hard on the knuckle and thereby provoked a scene of humble apologies that made Dorothy more furious than ever.

"At least you might not make me look a fool in a public thoroughfare,"

she told him.

"I'm awfully sorry, Dolly. I didn't know what I was doing for the moment."

"Don't call me Dolly," she said. "You know how I hate abbreviations."

"I don't seem to be able to do anything right this morning."

"Look at the ridiculous walk you've brought me! Nothing but cobble-stones, and pa.s.sers-by b.u.mping into one, and now we're getting down among the factories. You know how I hate being stared at."

"You didn't mind being stared at in Nottingham the week before last."

"Oh G.o.d! aren't you impossible!" cried Dorothy, herself now dramatically turning right round and leaving him undecided whether to follow her or retire in the opposite direction.

Half a dozen factory-girls, arm in arm, who, with the horrible quickness of their cla.s.s for anything that causes discomfort to other people, had noticed the quarrel, began to shout after Dorothy that her little boy was crying for his mother; while she, in torments of rage and humiliation, and of hatred for the man who was the cause of them, hurried uphill toward a more civilized quarter of the town. Five minutes later the tenor overtook Dorothy and begged pardon for losing her like that; he explained that, having got involved in a crowd of factory-girls, he could not hurry without making himself more ridiculous.

"You don't mind making me ridiculous," she said, bitterly.

"My dear girl, it was you that turned away, not me."

"Oh, go to the devil!" she burst out. "I'll have nothing more to do with you. You can console yourself with May Seymour."

The people who turned to stare after the lovely girl that seemed an incarnation of this blue-and-white April day might have been as shocked as Dorothy was at herself to think that she had just descended to the level of an actor by telling him to go to the devil.

III

The month of May found the "Miss Elsie of Chelsea" company billed to appear in the suburban theaters, and Dorothy was called upon to make up her mind whether she should take rooms with Sylvia and Lily in the center of London or economize for a few weeks by staying at home. Four months of separation from her family had not made her particularly anxious to return to them. At the same time, since she was not yet a London actress, it might be more prudent to wait a little while before she cut herself off too completely from Lonsdale Road. The only thing that worried her about staying at home was the thought that all the members of her family would inevitably insist on going to see her act during the week that they were to play at the Grand Theater, Fulham.

Even if her father should be shy of patronizing a musical comedy so near the Bishop of London's palace, she saw no way of preventing at any rate Roland and her sister Dolly from going; since she had stolen her sister's name, Dorothy, notwithstanding her dislike of abbreviations, had always managed to think of her as Dolly. Yes; it was obvious that whether she stayed up in town or stayed in West Kensington, she should be unable to prevent some of the family from going to see her, and, as they would not appreciate the fact that not even the greatest actresses begin by playing Lady Macbeth, she must make the best of their inspection.

So, one Sunday afternoon when the laburnum buds were yellowing in Lonsdale Road, Dorothy drove back to No. 17. Everything was much the same except that Dolly--Dorothy was firm from the moment she entered the house about refusing to answer any more to Norah--had, presumably in revenge for the loss of her name, taken her sister's bed. Mr. Caffyn was glad to hear that the difficulties and dangers of stage life had been exaggerated, and promised that he would warn the Bishop of Hampstead, who was billed to preside at a forthcoming meeting of the Church and Stage Society, not to make too much of them in his anxiety about theatrical souls. Dorothy succeeded in deterring her relations from going to the theater the first week at Camberwell; but the following week, when the playbills of "Miss Elsie of Chelsea" flaunted themselves in every shop-window of West Kensington, a large party, not merely of the immediate family, but of uncles and aunts and cousins raked together from every obscure suburb in London, swarmed for the Thursday matinee, and, what was worse, insisted on buzzing round Dorothy outside the stage-door in order to take her out to tea between the performances.

They alluded with some disappointment to the inconspicuousness of the part she played, and they all agreed that the outstanding feature of the performance was the comedian. They thought it must be very nice for Dorothy to have such a splendid humorist perpetually at hand.

"But he's not funny off the stage," explained Dorothy, crossly.

This seemed greatly to surprise the aunts and uncles, who evidently did not believe her. In the middle of tea the party was joined by Roland, Cecil, and Vincent; not having been able to get away for the matinee, they had arrived to swell the family reunion before going to the evening performance, for which they had booked stalls in the very front row, where, later on, to Dorothy's intense disgust, she saw Wilfred Curlew sitting with them'. However, he did have the decency not to wait after the play to accompany herself and her brothers back to West Kensington.

The next morning, before she was dressed, Dorothy was informed that a young gentleman was waiting to see her in the drawing-room, and discovered, when she got down, that a representative of a monthly magazine called _The Boudoir_ had come to ask for an interview. The young man, talking rather as if the magazine was a draper's shop, told her that his paper was making a special feature of beautiful actresses.

He cannonaded Dorothy with all sorts of questions, and forced her to surrender the information that her favorite parts were Lady Teazle, Viola, Portia, and Beatrice.

"Comedy, in fact?" said the young man.

"Oh yes, comedy," Dorothy agreed, after a moment's hesitation to decide whether Portia, whose speech about the quality of mercy she had once declaimed at a school breaking-up, ought to be considered a comic figure.