V
A Chorus Girl at Sebo’s
Sebo’s Club was crowded, for it was the dinner hour and Sebo’s is the most extensively patronized of the dining clubs. Here, all that was beautiful, all that was smart, all that was famous and brilliant in the world of society, letters and the drama met on common ground—the inherent and universal desire which humanity has for careless comfort. A Cabinet Minister and his party sat at the next table to that presided over by a great revue actress; the owner of a Derby winner sat back to back against a famous Radical satirist. The editor of a great London daily could look across his table and without shifting his eyes could count in his field of vision the pretty dancer from the Empiredrome, a royal physician, a peer of the realm and a ragtime singer.
The big dining hall blazed with lights, the little tables were crowded together so as to leave scarcely room for the waiters who, by some mysterious dispensation of Providence, seemed able to thread their ways through impossible spaces. The noisy coon band kept up its rhythmic pandemonium in one corner of the room, but did not drown the rippling laughter and the buzz of lighthearted talk.
In the little vestibule a young man, very tall and very thin, paced the tesselated floor with that evidence of resignation which tells so eloquently the story of the Unpunctual Guest. He was very fair and very pink. His countenance was vacant and the vacancy was by no means relieved when he screwed a gold-rimmed monocle into his right eye.
Presently the glass doors swung and a girl came hurriedly toward him, holding out her gloved hand.
“I am awfully sorry I am late, Reggie,” she said with easy familiarity.
“If you were an hour late or five hours late or a day late,” said the young man with gentle ecstasy, “I should be content to wait, Miss Flemming.”
She flashed a dazzling smile at him.
“I shouldn’t be horribly shocked if you called me Vera,” she said.
The young man went pinker than ever, coughed, stuttered, ran his gloved finger inside the high upstanding collar about his thin throat, dropped his eyeglass, retrieved it and did all this in the space of four seconds, thereby betraying his perturbation and his gratitude.
“You have a table, I suppose?” said the girl when she had returned from depositing her coat.
“Rather!” said the young man, and added after a second’s thought, “Rather!”
He fussily shepherded her through the mass of tables where his own attenuation enabled him to emulate the deeds of the agile serving man and brought her to a corner table which was smothered with rare flowers. Heads were turned, sharp eyes focused the couple, some smiled, though for the girl the glances held nothing but admiration or cold-blooded appraisement, according to the sex of the observer.
“Reggie Boltover!” said one young man.
“Who is Reggie Boltover?” asked his companion.
“A human being loosely attached to a million,” was the laconic description.
The girl was radiant, the smile hardly left her face and the eyes which glanced shyly up to her tall companion were full of wonder and delight.
“So this is Sebo’s,” she said. “Isn’t it a dreadfully wicked place?”
Reggie Boltover’s face creased alarmingly—he, too, was smiling.
“My dear Miss—my dear Vera,” he said boldly, “should I bring you to a wicked place, now I ask you; should I bring you to a wicked place, should I?”
His conversational powers were not brilliant but his heart was pure. He was not really a wicked young man about town and his chief wickedness lay in his implicit belief that he was. He had met the girl one night by accident. A more daring friend of his, and nearer approaching Reggie’s own ideal of doggishness, had induced him (he protesting feebly) to call at a stage-door where he was meeting a charming friend to take her to supper. The charming friend in the generous large-hearted way of chorus girls had introduced her friend, Vera Flemming, a newcomer to the ranks of the chorus, and they had all supped together and Vera had been very charming to Mr. Reggie Boltover and he had asked her to go with him up the river and had serious thoughts, because of her evident refinement, of introducing her to his mother, which shows that Reggie had reached the most dangerous stage of infatuation. There was really nothing wrong about Reggie Boltover and nothing remarkably terrible about this strangely initiated friendship.
Chorus girls are merely shopgirls with a taste for caviar and peaches. They are no more sinful than their sisters in the same social strata and the only difference between them is that, whilst they are exposed to similar temptations, the chorus girl has a larger field to pick from and the candidates are much more presentable. A shopgirl accepts the hospitality of a teashop, the chorus-girl goes to the Ritz. Both have one consuming passion, a desire for good food, for which they do not have to pay.
Reggie Boltover, who, to do him justice, knew everybody, entertained the girl for half-an-hour by pointing out the various celebrities in the room and Vera Flemming was interested without being enthusiastically so.
“I would rather you talked about yourself,” she said, “you are ever so much more interesting than these people.”
“Oh, no,” said Reggie, with a little giggle; “oh, no!”
“You are, indeed, you are,” she said earnestly.
“Oh, come,” said Reggie; “oh, come! no! I am not interesting; oh, dear no!”
His life he admitted frankly was very ordinary. All that he did was to sign a few cheques, liquidate a few debts, see a few “fellows” about “things” and “there you are,” said Reggie.
“It must be wonderful to be in a position of power,” said the girl musingly. “Of course, I come from a very poor family. We only think in shillings where you think in thousands of pounds. And it is awfully hard to realize what it feels like to order people to do things instead of being ordered.”
Reggie Boltover, who had never ordered anybody to do anything in his life and would not have dared to dispute the judgment of the innumerable managers and directors whom his sainted father had appointed in his lifetime, wondered himself what it felt like. He had often meditated, with a shudder, upon the necessity which might one day arise, for his taking the initiative in the conduct of his business. He dimly realized that, in time, all his managers and directors would die and he had dimly speculated upon the question as to who would replace them. He had a feeling that perhaps one might go to Whiteleys and order some new ones, but it had never occurred to him that at his autocratic word managers and people of that description could be made out of mud, or that an order affecting the business which he was supposed to control would be acted upon if he were to give that order.
“Well, you know,” he said, “I never really tell people to do anything. You see, I never see them except very occasionally. Of course, they make reports and all that sort of thing and I have a man who reads them so everything is all right and I just sign cheques and see a few fellows and there you are.”
Under the genial influence of her sympathetic interest he expanded a little and proved that he was not as wholly incompetent as he pretended to be. For instance, he knew that the iron works and shipbuilding yard which still bore his father’s name, and incidentally his own, made “a deuced lot of money” every year and that certain other properties made no money.
There was one property of which he spoke with great bitterness but only because his father, in his lifetime, had also spoken of that matter with similar violence and asperity. Apparently, the one redeeming feature about Boltover’s Cement Works lay in the fact that it had no manager and therefore produced no reports. It was in fact a deserted shell of a building so infamously unprofitable that Boltover senior (now in Heaven) had directed almost with his last breath, if you believed Reggie, that his name should be erased from the official designation of the company.
“You see it was bad cement; you know how cement is made, don’t you?”
“I should love to,” said the girl, her eyes shining, “I have often wondered.”
“Well,” said Reggie looking round the table for something to illustrate the object lesson, “you dig in the river and you take out a lot of stuff and you chuck it in a cart and then you chuck it into a fire and you pull it out and do something to it and there you are! That’s cement. Only our cement wasn’t cement, if you understand. That is what made the beastly thing so awkward.”
“How wonderful!” said the girl. “I shall always remember that.”
“Of course, we’ve got our eyes open,” said Reggie now fairly launched upon the story of his life, “and one of these days we shall catch a mug.”
“Catch a—?” asked the girl, puzzled.
Reggie went very pink, but he was excited and grateful at this demonstration of the girl’s refinement.
“Forgive the vulgarity, Miss—Vera; I mean we shall find a purchaser. I once nearly sold the beastly thing for £10,000 and the day the deed was to be signed, they took the poor chap away to a lunatic asylum, poor old bird, not right in his head, you know. That is why he wanted to buy our cement works. Comic, isn’t it?
“D’you know,” said Mr. Boltover, suddenly, “when I came round to the stage door that night I never expected to meet you?”
She looked at him in innocent surprise.
“Didn’t you really?” she said incredulously as though the idea had occurred to her for the first time, and then, thoughtfully, “I suppose you didn’t.”
“I didn’t expect to meet you,” repeated Mr. Boltover, who, when he had got hold of one complete sentence, held tight to it until his groping mentality had reached out and securely grasped another. “No, I didn’t expect to meet you, but I’m awfully glad. I feel I owe that young lady more than I can ever repay.”
He said this with an unusual display of sentimentality.
“That young lady” was his companion’s chorus girl friend, who at that moment was retailing to her youthful companion at the far side of the room such details of Vera’s life as she had been able to secure in a seven-day acquaintance.
“Vera’s not in our show now, of course,” she said; “I don’t think she had ever been on the stage before. She’s an awfully fresh kid. Came late to rehearsals and all that sort of thing, but I like her immensely.”
She smiled and bowed to Vera who, at that moment, had caught her eye.
“She’s very pretty,” said her companion.
“Yes; isn’t she?” agreed the girl, her interest in her friend suddenly evaporating.
But there was one in that crowded dining-room whose every disengaged moment was employed in watching the girl and her companion. It involved his getting into the way of other waiters and called down upon his head execrations in Neapolitan, Sicilian and the choicest slang of the Montmartre. He was a man who had prayed for two years for such a moment as this, and his soul rejoiced in savage exaltation that so Heaven-sent an opportunity had come.
As the night wore on his plan took a definite shape. For the consequence he cared nothing. Here was his opportunity, here was his enemy. He seized a moment, slipped through the service door and passed down a flight of stone steps to the crowded kitchen filled at that moment with a babble of sound as the orders were repeated across the steaming brass pots and the blistering hot plates. He passed through the kitchen to the larder department, and found what he sought in the big cool vault where the butchers worked. It was a long thin knife. He waited until the butcher’s back was turned and slipped it up his sleeve, passed rapidly through the kitchen, ignoring the chef’s demand as to his business, and reached the warm, bright restaurant again.
He had no time to waste.
The butcher might at any moment detect the theft and the thief hauled into the service room to explain his conduct. He made his way across the room to where Mr. Reginald Boltover and his fair companion sat.
Reggie thought the man had a message, but Vera, looking up, saw the man’s evil face—and knew. She half twisted, half flung herself against Reginald Boltover as the waiter’s hand came up to strike. She saw the knife glitter for a space of a second and closed her eyes, then there was the sound of a struggle and she opened them in time to see the vengeful man flung backward to the floor and an immaculate Michael Pretherston standing over him examining the knife with some interest.
She met the inspector’s eye and smiled, though the smile was forced, for even as he bowed, she heard the mockery of his surprise.
“Why, Kate!” he murmured. “I’m always meeting you.”