Watching Belle on the stage promised the fascination of watching Blondin cross Niagara Falls on a tightrope. He had picked up his hat and Burberry for the theatre when the doorbell jangled loudly. He wondered if Ruston had returned with a plot to kill the Czar as well. There was a timid tap at his door. He threw it open to reveal Nancy.
They grasped each other. For a minute, they were unable to speak.
'Why didn't you write or cable you were coming, dearest?' Eliot asked, still incredulous as they stood holding hands, staring at each other and laughing.
'Oh, I don't know…I wasn't sure I could go through with it, until I'd actually rung your doorbell.'
'You took a gamble. You might have found me living with another woman.'
'I didn't think you'd possibly find another to suit you. If you had, I'd have bowed out happily. After me, she would need to be a paragon.'
'How long are you staying?'
'I don't know.'
'Where?'
'I'm installed at the Savoy.'
'Move in here.'
'All right.'
Startled by the impulsiveness of invitation and acceptance, Eliot said, 'But your father. He wouldn't care for it at all.'
'I'll write I'm in clean lodgings for single ladies. He'll accept that. He accepted me walking the East Side slums this winter, climbing across tenement roofs with no more protection than a nurse's uniform.'
'You
'Being in love with someone always brings complications. Otherwise, wouldn't there be empty shelves in the circulating libraries?'
'Now we're going to the music hall.'
He took her arm, as he had when firmly piloting her round London. 'I'm committed. I never chuck up my obligations to my friends.'
'Surely you could find somewhere more romantic?' she protested.
'Tonight's a memorable theatrical occasion. Come on.'
They hurried downstairs. Ruston, Wince and the Kaiser vanished from Eliot's mind.
They laughed all the way in the hansom. The attraction was Belle, Eliot explained, sparkling in the footlights after three years in the domestic dark. The reason for her revival was apparent in half a dozen ladies wearing long fur coats and elaborate hats, standing in a line with top-hatted gentlemen outside the brilliantly lit music hall facade. Placards declared OFFICIAL PICKET, MANAGEMENT UNFAIR TO ARTISTES, PLAYERS NOT PAUPERS. Eliot's preoccupation with the oppressed masses overlooked that they included the music-hall performers.
There was a national music-hall strike. Like all strikes, its causes seemed to outsiders mystifyingly trivial. An arbitrator had awarded the artistes matinee pay at one-seventh of the evening performance rate in one-show-a- night houses, one-twelfth in two-show-a-night houses. 'Barring' an artiste for a fortnight, from appearing again within a mile radius, was to be abolished for those earning under Ј40 a week. The music-hall managers rejected it. A National Alliance of artistes held a mass meeting in The Surrey Theatre, Will Crooks MP in the chair rousing them to 'Stand up and stand firm.'
The managers determined on strike-breaking. 'The names are not those of artistes as well known as those which it is customary to find in the bill,'
Crippen was waiting in the foyer. He had a new grey frock coat with a bright orange tie and a lilac waistcoat. He was delighted to see Nancy. How gratifying for Belle to be viewed by a fellow-countrywoman on her great night. 'Haven't you noticed Belle's strong resemblance to Marie Lloyd?' he asked, leading them up the red-carpeted stairs to a two-guinea box. 'Do you know why she took the name 'Belle Elmore'? Because Marie Lloyd first appeared at the Royal Eagle calling herself 'Bella Delmere,'' he told them proudly.
They sat on red-plush chairs. The quack doctor leaves threadbare gentility to bask in the tarnished sun of his wife, Eliot thought. Ethel le Neve inhabited the real world, which the audience had entered the theatre to forget.
Nancy sat squeezing Eliot's hand. Before Baby's illness she was a regular New York theatregoer, always in a large party, all beautifully dressed, awarer of affording pleasure to the ordinary men and their wives peering at them through opera-glasses from the cheaper seats. It was a social gathering, Nancy could barely remember the plays. She supposed this theatre of faded plush and scratched gilt resembled that her friends' fathers recalled fondly, 'The Rialto' on Broadway south of 42nd Street.
The 'Met' was large, a 4000-seater, fifty years old, built over the White Lion pub, which had a reputation among Cockneys for sing-songs and knees-ups. The performers were in competition with its generous furnishing of bars. The West End theatres seemed as formal as visiting relatives on a Sunday afternoon. The flickering displays in the picture houses as lacklustre as a dance of ghosts. The music-hall was like a Bank Holiday outing, when everyone expected to enjoy themselves.
The songs and sketches went to the audiences' hearts, because they exhalted, lampooned or consoled their everyday joys and pains. All of them felt the relationship with lodger or landlord, mother-in-law or pawnbroker, what it was like to be stoney broke or rolling drunk. Everyone ate kippers and went to the seaside, knew husbands who were henpecked, or roving or cuckolds. Everyone knew they peopled the greatest country on earth, and that all foreigners were ridiculous, particularly as unable to speak English. When the Great Macdermott had his audiences at the London Pavillion thundering back, 'We don't want to fight, but, by Jingo, if we do!' it was a threat which deserved Britain's enemies taking seriously.
Moustached and brilliantined, the conductor rose amid his stiffshirted orchestra, bowing deeply to the whistling and clapping. After a perfunctory overture, the electric candles of the chandeliers dimmed, the red curtain rose on a man in furs outside a stage-property igloo, with six seals who tossed brightly-coloured balls to each other, played tunes on a rack of rubber-bulbed motor-horns, climbed ladders, performed acrobatics and jumped into a glass water-tank.
Nancy was puzzled. She had steeled herself for an evening of blue jokes and girls with slashed skirts, like the burlesque shows in the Bowery, where she was no more likely to find herself than at a boxing-match. Nothing could be more respectable than performing seals. Crippen sat engrossed, hand limp on the plush edge of the box. Eliot fancied he had seen the same act as a carousing medical student, but perhaps it had been performing dogs.
The seals were followed by Weldon Atherstone, the monologuist, with top-hat, tails and ebony cane. Perfect tailoring was his trademark, like the black half-moons of George Robey's eyebrows, or Albert Chevalier's suit of Cockney costermonger's button-covered 'pearlies'. He did Fagin in the condemned cell from _Oliver Twist,_ the music-hall falling as silent as a church.
'The black stage, the cross-beam, the rope…' Atherstone's low voice seemed to ooze from him. 'All the hideous apparatus of…death.'
Violent applause. Only forty years ago, Eliot reflected, this audience in its ancestors' shoes waited excitedly through the night for the morning's execution outside Newgate Jail. Calls of 'Blackleg!' came from half-a-dozen voices-planted by the strike committee he suspected. Next appeared a pair of Chinese wire-walkers in kimonos and plate-like hats. Then the orchestra struck up Yankee Doodle. Belle had not seen the pinnacles of New York for thirteen years, but an American act was thought so smart on the London stage, some natives changed their accent to Brooklyn and their costume to Wild West.
Eliot saw Crippen's hand tighten on the plush.
Belle's waist was so pinched between bursting bosom and spreading hips, it looked to Eliot in danger of exploding like the bound-up barrel of some ancient siege-artillery pressed back to service. The skirt of her green silk gown foaming with lace trailed a yard behind her. Her hair was in bright blonde curls, as tight as the head of a cauliflower. Her heavy face was vivid with greasepaint, dusted with powder like an apple-dumpling with flour.
She stood between two vases of artificial red roses, holding a mirror edged with gold tassels, which she flashed along the stalls. Fixing on a sallow-faced man with a limp moustache, she started to sing, _Who'll be My
