The Cloven Foot

letters to old friends in London⁠—men more or less connected with the press or the theatres⁠—asking them to get La Chicot an engagement. In these letters he wrote of her only as a clever woman in whose career he was interested, he shrank curiously from acknowledging her as his wife. He took care to enclose cuttings from the Parisian journals in which the dancer’s beauty and chic, talent and originality, were lauded. The result of this trouble on his part was a visit from Mr. Smolendo, the enterprising proprietor of the Prince Frederick Theatre, who had come to Paris in search of novelty, and the engagement of Smolendo had been going in strongly for ballet of late. His scenery, his machinery, his limelight and dresses were amongst the best to be seen in London. Everybody went to the Prince Frederick. It had begun its career as a music hall, and had only lately been licensed as a theatre. There was a flavour of Bohemianism about the house, but it only gave a zest to the entertainment. All the most notorious Parisian successes in the way of spectacular drama, all the fairy extravaganzas and demon ballets and comic operettas were reproduced by Mr. Smolendo at the Prince Frederick. He knew where to find the prettiest actresses, the best dancers, the freshest voices. His chorus and his ballet were the most perfect in London. In a word, Mr. Smolendo had discovered the secret of dramatic success. He had found out that perfection always pays.

La Chicot’s beauty was startling and incontestable. There could not be two opinions about that. Her dancing was eccentric and clever. Mr. Smolendo had seen much better dancing from more carefully trained dancers, but what La Chicot wanted in training she made up for with dash and audacity.

“She won’t last many seasons. She’s like one of those high-stepping horses that knock themselves to pieces in a year or two,” Mr. Smolendo said to himself, “but she’ll take the town by storm, and she’ll draw better for her first three seasons than any star I’ve had since I began management.”

La Chicot was delighted at being engaged by a London manager, who offered her a better salary than she was getting at the students’ theatre. She did not like the idea of London, which she imagined a city given over to fog and lung disease, but she was very glad to leave the scene where she felt that her laurels were fast withering. She gave her husband no thanks for his intervention, and went on railing at him for not having got her an engagement on the Boulevard.

“It is to bury myself to go to your dismal London,” she exclaimed, “but anything is better than to dance to an assembly of idiots and cretins.”

“London is not half a bad place,” answered Jack Chicot, with his listless air, as of a man long wearied of life, and needing a stimulant as strong as aquafortis to rouse him to animation. “It is a big crowd in which one may lose one’s identity. Nobody knows one, one knows nobody. A man’s sense of shame gets comfortably deadened in London. He can walk the streets without feeling that fingers are being pointed at him. It is all the same to the herd whether he has just come out of a penitentiary or a palace. Nobody cares.”

The Chicots crossed the Channel, and took lodgings in a street in the neighbourhood of Leicester Square, near which, as everyone knows, the Prince Frederick is situated. It was a dingy street, offering scanty attractions to the stranger, but it was a street which from the days of Garrick and Woffington had been favoured by actors and actresses, and Mr. Smolendo recommended the Chicots to seek a lodging there. He gave them the name of three or four householders who let lodgings to “the profession,” and among these Madame Chicot made her choice.

The apartments which pleased her best were two fair-sized rooms on a first floor, furnished with a tawdry pretentiousness which would have been odious to a refined eye, and which was particularly offensive to Jack’s artistic taste. The cheap velvet on the chairs, the gaudy tapestry curtains, the tarnished ormolu clock and candelabra, delighted La Chicot. It was almost Parisian, she told her husband.

The drawing-room and bedroom communicated with folding-doors. There was a little third room⁠—a mere hole⁠—with a window looking northward, which would do for Jack to paint in. That convenience reconciled Jack to the shabby finery of the sitting-room, the doubtful purity of the bedroom, the woebegone air of the street, with its half-dozen dingy shops sprinkled among the private houses, like an eruption.

“How it is ugly, your London!” exclaimed La Chicot. “Is it that all the city resembles this, by example?”

“No,” answered Jack, with his cynical air. “There are brighter looking streets where the respectable people live.”

“What do you call the respectable people?”

“The people who pay income tax on two or three thousand a year.”

Jack inquired as to the other lodgers. It was as well to find out what kind of neighbours they were to have.

“I am not particular,” said Jack, in French, to his wife, “but I should not like to find myself living cheek by jowl with a burglar.”

“Or a spy,” suggested Zaϊre.

“We have no spies in London. That is a profession which has never found a footing on this side of the Channel.”

The landlady was a lean-looking widow, with a false front of gingery curls, and a cap that quivered all over with artificial flowers on corkscrew wires. Her long nose was tinted at the extremity, and her eyes had a luminous yet glassy look, suggestive of ardent spirits.

“I have only one lady in the parlours,” she explained, “and a very clever lady she is too, and quite the lady⁠—Mrs. Rawber, who plays leading business at the Shakespeare. You must have heard of her. She’s a great woman.”

Mr. Chicot apologized for his ignorance. He had been living so long in Paris that