The Diamond Waterfall Page 4

  Next morning I told an uninterested reception clerk that I had to catch the boat train (let them look for me in Calais, I thought. In Paris!), then took cab, and made for the first address I had. Theatrical lodgings, in Westminster.

  When I was almost there (and how would my money do, if I must be always taking cabs?) I thought, perhaps they will ask me what play I am in, and I have no fiction ready. I turned the cab back, deciding to wait until I could speak to Miss Grey. (But would she find me work at once?) Fatigue, indecision. I changed the order, and then changed it back again. I had lost the cabby’s goodwill. If I was traced, he would certainly remember me. By the time I reached the address, I could not decide whether I should ask him to wait. I could decide nothing.

  I stood on the step with my hamper. A great battle-ax of a woman opened the door.

  “Yes?”

  “I want—you keep lodgings, theatrical lodgings?”

  I thought she was going to hit me: her hand went up—but she used it only to swipe at a cat scuttling from under a bush toward the door.

  “Not a room, no. You might get, perhaps, half a room.”

  It had begun to rain, the same sad summer drizzle which had greeted me at Kings Cross.

  “Well—yes or no? Yes or no?”

  “Yes. I mean—”

  “Come in then, if you’re coming.” She led me into a parlor. I remember it as horrible, with a smell of cold cabbage seeming to come from the upholstery.

  I agreed to everything. To paying at once, to sharing a room, to buying food for this evening, to waiting in this unpleasant parlor till she would agree to show me the room.

  “Of course they’re all out. They had rehearsals at ten. How is you’re alone then?”

  I had come, I said, to see a certain well-known actress, who would be arranging work for me.

  Half an hour later she took me upstairs. The room was small and dark. In the double bed was a large hump. “Miss Malcolm!” She shook and prodded the hump. I stood in the doorway uncertainly, arm aching from bringing up my hamper. “You should be out. Wake up at once!”

  “Never,” said a muffled voice. “Nevermore. Nevermore.” The sheet covered her face.

  “If you’re sick—this is no infirmary, Miss Malcolm—” She pushed past me at the door. “Please yourself, Miss Malcolm, do. And you, Miss Greene, can wait till her ladyship decides she’ll speak. It’s her you’ve to sleep along of.”

  As the landlady’s footsteps died away, Miss Malcolm (how could I ever, did I ever think of her as “Miss Malcolm?”), stirred. She lifted a ravaged face from beneath the bedclothes. Her dark, waving hair had not been tied back; instead it stood out from her face, wildly.

  “Dear Lord, I have lost it, you know. Gone, gone, gone. I am undone.”

  It was a deep voice of great beauty even when, as now, she was overemphasizing. Dear Vicky—larger than life (too large for little life). She had sat up and was pulling her fingers through the tangled forest. “Oh dear God—I must take your name in vain. Gone, all lost.”

  I said, and felt foolish, “Is something wrong?”

  “But absolutely a disaster, I couldn’t sleep for thinking about it. Now I sleep too heavily. I lost it.”

  “Lost what?”

  “It wasn’t very large,” she said desperately, “it wasn’t as if it were important —but I have lost it.” Just as I was about to ask further, she went on, “My part—the little part that I had—it is gone.”

  “You are unemployed—does it mean that?”

  She said dramatically, “Indeed I have the frost.” She had climbed out of bed, pulled on a wrap. Suddenly, looking at me for the first time: “Tell me,” she said, “oh tell me—what are you in?”

  “Nothing,” I said, “I am in nothing.” Enough, but I had had to spoil it then with a little arrogant turn of phrase. “Miss Grey, Sylvia Grey. I have an introduction to her. I expect soon to be engaged.”

  “No, but you are very fortunate.” She looked, it seemed to me, suitably impressed. “When do you take this up?”

  I explained that I would go to the Lyceum today. She nodded, all the time moving about the room, which was in an incredible confusion. Clothes and underclothes on every chair. “I shall move all these for you,” she said. “And in any case I shall not be here long. I cannot be here long.”

  Presently she went downstairs for hot water. She washed behind the flimsy Japanese screen, telling me all the while about everybody in the house. Then she attended to her hair, while I sat in the basket chair watching her. She had not asked me of my previous experiences. Overconfident, I would surely be found out soon.

  Her mouth full of hairpins, she asked, “Why should we not go together, now, to the Lyceum?”

  We took a cab. I clutched my note to Sylvia Grey. Oh, but I should have guessed, fool that I was, I had not looked in the newspapers, let alone the stage journals.

  “Miss Grey?” said the man in the deserted foyer of the Lyceum. “She’s on tour, miss.”

  On tour. On tour. Where? (Please God not Australia.) I took the note and all my foolish hopes to Miss Malcolm, waiting in the cab.

  “Well? You have left your letter?”

  “She’s not there. She is in Scotland.” And then it all came tumbling out. I said, “I have run away from home. Run away in the wrong direction!”

  I had not meant to tell anyone—or at least not so soon. But at once she was warmly sympathetic, giving directions to the cabby, then, clutching my arm: “Oh my dear,” she said, “we are both in such trouble.”

  She paid the cab, pushing my money away. “There’s a tea shop here. We must talk, at once. We are rowing the same boat, I think.”

  Inside, she asked, “What are you—or rather what are we —going to do now?” Adding, “You might as well tell me everything.” As I did so, she said, nodding, “Yes. That’s right. You did right. Especially everywhere to add to your age. It is wiser. And I had thought you twenty.”

  “But your trouble,” I said, “you have told me nothing of your trouble.”

  “Sacked. I lost my part yesterday and my place in the company. I answered back, you see. But it goes deeper than that. I tell you in confidence of course.” She said in a dramatic whisper, “Mr. Zulueta, the manager, wanted what I was not—what I should not—be prepared to give. I repulsed him. He has been waiting only for the moment to humiliate me.”

  She told me something of herself. Her father was a man of the Church in Scotland, in Linlithgow. She seemed more interested, though, in my tale than hers:

  “To have been locked up. Imprisoned,” she said in wonder. “You see, I knew nothing like that.”

  But of course our talk kept coming back to our plight, our joint plight. We discussed money:

  “Have you some savings?” I asked her.

  “For a week or two. And then I shall be in diffs.” She leaned forward.

  “I know,” she said with sudden resolution. “We must find something out of London. Immediately.”

  We took the night train to Scotland. Sylvia Grey was billed this week in Edinburgh, but I discovered all too soon that she was not there either. She had been taken ill in Liverpool.

  It really looked like trouble. That afternoon we walked disconsolately, visiting all the theaters. And then …

  A grubby building in the Old Town. Outside, a filthy and torn bill: “Jubilee Song and Dance.” We were trying to decipher the remainder when a man came out. He said, “Will ye buy your tickets now? We shall play tonight. Dinna fear.”

  A devil got into me. “We don’t watch shows,” I said haughtily. “We perform.”

  “What has happened,” said the man, “it’s this, see.” That very morning, it appeared, they had lost a couple of turns—one of which had been two sisters.

  “Tell your manager,” Vicky said grandly, “that two first-class artistes are by chance free, up here on holiday.”

  It was she who did all the talking. That afternoon we devised in the small front room of our l
odgings a double act: the Carruthers Sisters.

  We were a success in a small way. I never took up Sylvia Grey’s offer. The last night in Edinburgh we were approached by a man who had a small touring company. We spent two years with him, working hard, but having fun. Vicky was the friend I needed. When I had lost Daisy, I had lost sister and friend.

  So it was that although I was often homesick, it was never unbearable. I worried though for Daisy and Joszef. I wrote them, saying only, “I am well and happy.” I sent money and a small gift for Harry.

  I became seasoned, gained experience, all the while preparing myself for the lucky chance that would surely come. In the meantime it was not a bad life—this small enclosed world, more hard work than glamour, with its private language, its unsociable hours. A life of traveling Sundays, up and down and across Britain. We acted, sang, danced. Everything we did was of the lightest weight—however heavy the humor. I did not mind that often the work was well below what I felt certain I could do. Did not the road lead uphill all the way to Olympus? I was in no hurry. With greater beauty, I would perhaps have been sooner there. Vicky was beautiful—but had no ambition. When a chance came to her, she would forget to learn the lines: late for rehearsals regularly, she was as regularly fined. She seemed hardly to mind at all.

  We giggled together backstage, flirting from time to time with good-looking or not-so-good-looking men in the company. Sometimes we were escorted out by some admirer in the current town. We went whenever we could in foursomes. Very innocent. Very happy.

  In March of 1890 our manager told us he had secured the services of a great singer. He mentioned no name. Offstage, rumor proliferated. It was, must be, Hayden Coffin, Frank Leslie. When we at last heard, we did not know him at all. Frank Donovan? Frank Donovan?

  It appeared that Mr. Donovan had once understudied Hayden Coffin and had on two consecutive nights gone on for him. But since then, nothing. We learned soon that the money for him had come from the wife of our new romantic juvenile, Laurence Wheldon, a blond and willowy man whose good looks far exceeded his acting powers but whose wife’s money was underwriting the company, to say nothing of her husband’s ambitions. Laurence Wheldon. I did not care for him. I did not like the calculating way in which his cold blue eyes appraised each girl in the company.

  Frank joined us together with his wife two weeks later. He would be playing only male leads: Mrs. Donovan made that clear. She did not play opposite him, but was second soubrette usually. I did not like her, nor did Vicky. Perhaps because Mrs. Donovan snipped at her:

  “Miss Malcolm, I’m surprised that such a powerful voice, that we should not hear it out of the chorus.” Or: “Frank, Frank, do look! There is Miss Malcolm blown in late again. In total disarray.” And she would fall about laughing.

  Me, she scarcely noticed. “The little one,” she called me. When she was not drawing Frank’s attention to Vicky’s faults, she was correcting him for his, her high-pitched voice shrill with reprimand. “Just remember,” she would say very loudly, wagging her finger at him, “we don’t want your trouble again.” And she would turn for confirmation to Reginald Forrest, who played the comic characters or heavy villains and whose deep voice could often be heard singing, falsetto, some of the women’s songs. Constance Donovan thought him extremely amusing.

  Once, Frank must have been very good-looking, with his head of curly hair, gray now, and his tall athletic build, grown heavy but still impressive. His voice, ah yes, his voice. A light but strong, caressing tenor and, even if past its prime, still an instrument of beauty. Certainly, it seemed to me, he deserved better than our little company.

  We toured Scotland in a bitterly cold spring. We played Linlithgow, Vicky and I staying with her family. It was about this time she began seeing more and more of Laurence Wheldon.

  At first it was just to help hear his part. “Darling, he looks so utterly beautiful just reciting—and getting wrong—those quite ridiculous lines. He really cannot act at all. But”—and here she sighed—“Lily darling, I could look and look at him the whole day.”

  “Well, if that’s all you do,” I said easily.

  “Ah, if he touched me,” she said. “Then, then I think—I think that I might burst into flames.” She waved her arms histrionically to mimic raging fire.

  A week later I fell ill and had to stay behind in Newcastle, in the hospital. Vicky wrote me regularly, giving colorful accounts of everyone, but saying little of herself. In her last letter she had announced, “SCANDAL!!! Can you believe—Mrs. Donovan has run off with Reginald! It is truly the greatest excitement. And by the way, Laurence advises you to hurry back, as you may have the chance of a part.”

  I hurried south, joining them in Gloucester, where they were playing a particularly foolish burlesque. The next show was to be Frank Cellier’s Dorothy. Because I had been understudying Mrs. Donovan I was now to play Lydia, the second lead. Vicky was happy, so happy for me. “It is your chance. You will never look back.” She spoke from her place in the chorus without envy. And at that time, loving Laurence, did she not love everyone? “Oh, I love, I love,” she told me over and over, “though I put nothing in my letters, darling Lily, I love.”

  “But Vicky—he is married.” (I was ever the shocked little Yorkshire Puritan.)

  Her eyes opened in wonder. “He loves me though!” She frowned. “Passion, Lily. It is a great love!”

  “And his wife?”

  “Oh—but she doesn’t care for him at all. She cannot even bother these days to tour with him. He has told me that.”

  She was completely taken up—and I was excited by my new importance, playing opposite Frank Donovan. Occasionally I would notice he was not the jovial character I remembered from before my illness. The elopement must have hit him hard.

  The play was set in 1740. Dorothy and Lydia, the heroines, are at a country fair in disguise, calling themselves Dorcas and Abigail. They meet there Geoff (Laurence) and Harry (Frank). Geoff is on his way to marry the rich Dorothy, to pay off his debts. From then on, a tangle of marriage avoiding stratagems and faked robberies—all ending happily.

  Three days before the show opened, we were rehearsing, when suddenly Frank turned and walked offstage. Laurence said at once, “The bottle, the bottle. My God.” Then to Polly, who was playing Dorothy, “Dearie, run after him. Do.” She looked prettily blank. I said, “I will. Let me.”

  I found him near a pile of stacked props. He was holding a bottle, but I saw that it was almost full. I pulled at his arm. “Are you sick? Shall I say you’re sick, Frank?”

  “Yes—sick,” he said. “Sick. My soul Sick.”

  I heard the piano strike up: Polly was to go over again a difficult duet with Laurence.

  “You don’t need any of that,” I said. (Yorkshire temperance. Greenwood again.) “It won’t help your soul, you know. Or your body.” When he didn’t respond, taking his arm, I said, “Come back. Onstage. They need you. They love you. And the audience next week. You will see.” (And dear God, I thought, if this show doesn’t go on, I shall lose my chance.) “Please, Frank, Mr. Donovan—”

  “Yes,” he said, looking vague. “Yes. I could.”

  Back again, he behaved as if nothing had happened. Singing to me, faultlessly, the best-loved song of the show, “Queen of My Heart.”

  That evening, he asked me to walk in the town with him. “To keep me from temptation,” he said. We walked solemnly around Gloucester in and out of the cathedral precincts while he told me about his childhood. He did not mention Constance at all. The next evening and the next, the same.

  The performance itself—how he played! Even Laurence was agreeably surprised. I knew though that it was my doing—that Frank sang not for Lydia, but for Lily Greene. I knew myself to be, for those few hours, Queen of his heart. I felt pity then, immense pity. I could see, as he sang, the years drop away—so that I knew him: the young and hopeful singer, all the best to come, a bottle no more than something to be cracked among friends. “Queen of My
Heart,” he sang. I scarcely noticed Laurence and Vicky (passing of messages, quick touching of hands in the wings).

  After that, I thought my support of him could perhaps be less, that I had done the work. But it was only beginning. And I, I was not without feeling. A bond had been forged. Pity (mine), need (his)?

  “Help me,” he said, the second evening. “Walk. A short walk. A drink. No, no drink.”

  “No drink,” I echoed. We walked a little way out of the town. “It is not serious, my drinking,” he said. “I can live without it. Surely I can. If you help me.”

  The next time out with me he broke down and cried for Constance. “She has such little feet,” he wept. “Such pretty feet.” He was rather ridiculous. I wanted to take him in my arms, but did not. Instead (and I was to regret this) I said pertly, “I have pretty feet too.”

  “Be wise in time, O Phyllis mine,” Polly and I sang each evening. And each evening after the performance, Frank and I walked, and talked. He did not cry again. On the Friday morning we heard that by popular demand we were to stay on another week.

  The weather, which had been cold and damp, changed suddenly. Mild, sunny, St. Martin’s summer. Eyes sparkling, Vicky told me, “Laurence and I are to spend the whole day together.” Then: “And you, dearest, what shall you do?”

  But we had arranged already: luncheon in an inn, followed by a walk in the country, and then back to Frank’s lodgings for tea. The perfect weather held all day. Then, as the light began to go, teatime. Closed curtains, the kettle singing, warm room. Muffins on the hob. Their pleasant yeasty smell. The scent of the tea as I poured it.

  I should have thought—it is unbelievable that I did not. Frank, as we approached the house, had said, “Now you’ll not mind I’m sure—but my landlady, I told her it’s my wife come down for the day.”

  The key firmly turned in the lock, we sat over our cakes, our muffins. We spoke this time of my ambitions. Leading roles, visiting Paris, being seen in London. And, too, showing Leeds and Dad, especially Dad, that I had made good.