Chapter XI

Mrs. Bell came into the room with the supper tray. It was mostly tray. The supper consisted of two cups of cocoa, half a loaf of bread and an atom of butter. She gave her lodger an inquisitive glance as she spread the tablecloth. Alexandra had Maggy's letter in her hand, and her face was woefully sad.

"You need not lay for two," she said quietly. "Miss Delamere won't be here in future."

The bald statement was sufficient for Mrs. Bell. Ever since the day when Maggy had been brought to her door in a private car she had more or less been prepared for this denouement. The association of chorus-girls and cars in her experience had but one meaning: a rise for the former in the plane of life with a concomitant and much-to-be-desired acceleration of the pace at which it may be lived.

"I'm glad she's found a friend," she observed cheerfully. "She's the sort that's made for a man to look at. Have you seen her chap yet, Miss Hersey?"

"I don't want to talk about Miss Delamere's affairs," winced Alexandra.

"You're upset, I can see. I'm not denying it's hard to see a friend carried off like that." Mrs. Bell Bell shook her head deprecatingly. "It's a trying place, the stage. I wouldn't go back to it myself, not if I was paid like a Pavlova. I'd rather toil and moil for Mr. Bell downstairs all the days of my life." And having thus asserted her claim to respectability, conjugal endurance and a taste for sour grapes, with admirable conciseness she felt she was privileged to ask another question: "Have you got a shop yet, dear?"

"No, it's the wrong time of year."

"You can't wait till the autumn?"

"No."

"Then what'll you do?"

"I'm not thinking of myself just now. It doesn't matter," said Alexandra wearily.

"I know. You're bothering your poor head about Miss Delamere. Don't you fret. She's got some one to look after her. That's better than looking after yourself. I daresay she's sleeping in a creep de sheeny nightdress to-night with real lace on her pillows."

"Don't talk like that!" Alexandra shuddered.

"Well, it's no good trying to walk clean on a muddy road. Drink your cocoa while it's hot, dearie. If you're on the stage you must go on like the angels in heaven, doing what Rome does, where there's very little marriage or giving in marriage." Mrs. Bell's metaphor was mixed, but her views were definite. "That's why I would rather see my own girl lying here at my feet dead and smiling in her coffin than in the profession. She's a respectable upper housemaid," she finished comfortably, as she closed the door behind her.

Alexandra tried to eat a little dry bread. The butter was rancid. She ended by giving up the attempt. Her throat ached. She leant her head on the table. It ached as much as her heart and throat did. Her whole body was permeated with the pain of unshed tears.

Maggy had gone.

Except for the letter, which was final enough, it was difficult to realize. She had not even taken her box, only a small handbag. Her possessions had been so pitifully meager. Her wooden-backed brush and a metal comb were still on the dressing-table, but the cheap German silver powder box and her rouge and cream pots were gone; there was the nightdress case on her bed in the crochet work that was Maggy's hobby with the big badly-worked M in washed-out greens and pinks. Wrapped in a little screw of paper was the money she had left behind. She had taken Alexandra's photograph, and for some reason she had turned the face of her own to the wall.

A wild desire came to Alexandra to run out, late as it was, go to Maggy and bring her back. Then she remembered that she did not even know where Maggy was. She was gone and that was all; swallowed up in the immensity of London; captured by some man unknown.

The realization that Maggy had deliberately stolen away at the call of exigency hurt her acutely. Passion had never touched Alexandra. Just now she could only feel impatience with one who was moved by it to extremes. But mingled with the distaste for a thing she could not comprehend was compassion for her friend. Some part of Maggy must be suffering, sorry. No woman surrenders herself without some secret, sacred regret.

She sat thinking, trying not to think, for hours. Finally, she undressed and, in the darkness, said her prayers. She felt they were futile, childish.... She turned her face to the wall so that she should not see the ghostly outline of Maggy's narrow, empty bed.

As the hours passed and sleep did not come she began to wonder if it were not all a dream. The idea took hold of her. Of course, Maggy had not gone....

She sat up and spoke her name across the darkness.

"Maggy!"

Although there was no answer, the tantalizing obsession was still upon her. She got out of bed and crossed over to Maggy's, feeling above the coverlet for the comforting touch of the warm, sleepy body. The coverlet was flat, the sheets cool. Maggy had gone.

She groped her way back to her own bed, and at last tears came, and with tears, sleep.

By the morning, the sharp edge of her feelings was somewhat blunted. She was still sorry, but not passionately sorry. Those who have wept for their dead with the poignancy of first grief experience much the same dulling of the emotions. It precedes the inevitable resignation, without which they could not again take up the lonely burden of life.

Maggy was lost to her, as lost to her as if she had died. She had not the consolation of knowing that she would see her again, alive, exuberantly happy, unregretting, and that this feeling would pass. She did not know then that across the barrier of her frailty Maggy would hold out her strong, young, eager hands, and that she, Alexandra, would grasp them in unalterable love and friendship.

She put away the money Maggy had wanted her to take until she could give it back to her, and directly she had had her breakfast, started for the theatrical agents' offices. They opened at ten. She had small hope of obtaining anything at any of them. The principals did not know her by sight. When one of them made an occasional dart into the waiting room and gave a quick glance round she was only "one of a crowd."

At such times there would be a little stir and scrimmage amongst the men and women in which she would not share. Men would elbow women, women elbow men in their efforts to catch the agent's eye or better still his sleeve. And he would shake them off in a precipitate passage from his own room to that of his partner's at the other end of the waiting room. Alexandra knew his short, little, staccato, stock sentences by heart.

"Nothing for you to-day, dear." (Shake her off.)

"Sorry, my dear, I can't stop." (Shake her off.)

"No, my dear, I--oh, it's you. Stop behind. I'll see you later." (Pressure of the hand.)

"Nothing in your line to-day, old fellow." (Shake him off.)

Perhaps a fleeting look at Alexandra, so that she was in doubt as to whether she had been noticed or not.

Then the crowd would wait on, lessened by the few who lost heart and went on to other agencies. The assembly varied little in any of these refuges of the out-of-works. There you would find every specimen of stageland: the sprightly young man with an eye stimulated hopefully by sherry from the adjacent Bodega, dressed in the last fashionable suit left from his wardrobe, his waistcoat pocket bulging with pawntickets; the old actor with a blue chin, a red nose and a kindly smile, unctuously imparting the latest "wheeze" to a brother comedy-merchant; the hard-eyed woman of forty, rouged, smelling of spirits and patchouli, consumed with inward wrath because of the refusal of managers to entertain her applications for youthful parts; the fresh-looking girl with an air of country lanes and a pigtail, who nevertheless was bred and born at Stratford-at-Bow; the seedy advance-agent, vainly trying to adopt a managerial air; the plump and cheery chorister with no ambitions beyond thirty shillings a week and a long pantomime run; her male compeer nourishing a secret belief that he could "wipe the floor" with every tenor on the boards.

Eleven, twelve, one o'clock, and still the patient crowd would linger on in the agents' offices, chattering intermittently, giggling occasionally, desperately anxious all the same, eyes ever glancing toward the two shut doors.

At one would come the unwelcome news, spoken by the young man who kept the accounts and made out the contracts:

"Mr. Whitehead's gone to lunch. Won't be back to-day. No use waiting."

How quickly the room emptied! Alexandra did not know that a goodly proportion of its habitues would quickly foregather for consultation and refreshment in Rule's or the Bodega, where the atmosphere was redolent of alcoholic odors, curiously aromatic, sonorous with sustained conversation and the low chuckle of the comedians.

One saw the same faces again after the luncheon hour, at Denton's, at Hart's, at Paul Stannard's, a little less hopeful, a little more tired as the day went on.

Paul Stannard had got Alexandra her engagement at De Freyne's. She went to him again now. She liked him. He was a gentleman by birth, had drifted on to the stage, loathed it, could not get free of it, and ended by running a theatrical agency with fair success. He did not call all girls "dear," only the ones that liked it, and was more accessible to the rank and file than most agents.

"I thought I had fixed you up with De Freyne," he said. "His show's in for a long run. Couldn't stick it?"

"Mr. De Freyne told me to go."

Alexandra was tired. She could hardly stand.

"Sit down," invited Stannard. "Up against it?"

"Well, I've nothing to do. It's serious."

"I'm sorry." He turned over the leaves of a big book on his desk. "And I can't help you. Nothing's doing, except a sextette for Rio."

"Can't I go?" she asked eagerly.

"My God, no!"

He put his hands in his pockets and surveyed her compassionately. Belonging as he did to the class that shelters its women it still hurt him to see women engaged in fighting for bread. It was more desperate still when they fought for honor too, or held it above the price of bread.

"Why did you send me to the Pall Mall if you knew they wouldn't want--any one straight-laced?"

"I can't ask every girl who comes to me for a job to sign an affidavit concerning her morals. Why are you on the stage at all if you've got different ideas to the others? You haven't an earthly. Might as well buy a toothbrush."

"Buy a toothbrush?"

"To sweep out an Augean stable." He scribbled some addresses on a half sheet of paper. "There's just a chance these aren't filled up. Mention my name. I don't hold out any hope, though." He hesitated for a minute. "Are you bound to go on at this? Haven't you a home to go to?"

"I'm bound to go on," she said, trying to keep the desperate note out of her voice.

"Well, good luck." Stannard held open the door for her.

"Poor devil!" he said as he shut it.