"Was it because I seemed ungrateful for the little love you offered me?"

The two tears rolled down her cheeks and dropped upon his wrist. With quivering mouth she strove to frame what her face confessed would be a lie.

He no longer hesitated, but caught her to his breast and crushed the naughty falsehood with his lips.

How long the operation would have lasted it is impossible to guess, for two shining eyes set in slumber-flushed cheeks peered suddenly from the distant cot, and a prattling voice, unabashed and l.u.s.ty, shouted:--

"Tiss me too--Dot Dandy!"

Romance of the Coulisses.

"Menez moi dit ma belle A la rive fidele Ou l'on aime toujours."

The difficulty of apprehending the female character is well-nigh insurmountable. Woman has been called chameleon, weatherc.o.c.k, enigma; but an enigma has a solution which may be reached by patience or accident, a weatherc.o.c.k will confess the bent of the wind for however short a s.p.a.ce, and the colour of a chameleon can be periodically proved by its dietary. But woman--she is a reiterating question, an argument sans crux, a volume with uncut leaves dotted about through the most exciting chapters. Without the right clue you must dip and skip, now p.r.i.c.ked, now irritated, till you approach a frenzy bordering on madness.

For you like to know the sort of creature you are dealing with--a painter especially, since his fame hangs on his knowledge--hence these ruminations round Betty.

Betty? you say--do we not all know her? Does not her dimpled face peer out of the weekly papers, and do not their columns expose and magnify every little detail of her life--her fads, her fancies, and her follies?

Cannot we see her night after night whisking her mazy skirts in the limelight, and opening the carnation folds of her lips to patter enchanting nonsense and pout promises brittle as pie crust? Dear little Betty! How her twinkling feet make merry, light as sea-foam frothing on sh.e.l.ls; how our pulses throb and dance in pace with hers; how our ears dote on the fragile, cooing tones of her dainty voice as it coquettes with ba.n.a.lities, flirts with the very bars of melody that silly men have tried to make witty and pretty. But the prettiness and wittiness are Betty's; do we not all know that? Do we not know that the shiver of the violins is only quaint when Betty shudders at the whisper of a kiss, that the cyclone of strings and wind fades exquisitely, "like a rose in aromatic pain," simply because Betty, our whimsical dear, chooses to sigh for having shuddered? And when at last she cries, to think she sighs for that at which she shuddered, we all clap our hands to splitting--not, oh, not at the music, but in wild collective rapture over the vagaries of our Betty!

In this way I thought I knew her every trick and wile and whim, till I came to paint her picture, till one after another my charcoal lines were flicked from the canvas, and I succ.u.mbed to that paralysing sense of total defeat which is almost always the punishment of swollen ambition.

What was wrong? I asked myself. What had I missed? The pose, the expression, the throb of motion? Weeks pa.s.sed--then I worked again, made a new study, and consulted my cousin Laura. She knew something of dancing, and was at that time practising ballet steps, a necessary accompaniment--so she had been told--to her debut in comic opera.

"The face is perfection," she said. "The little droop in the left eye--she must have been born winking--and the upward curve at the corner of the lip, they couldn't be improved."

I shook my head. Laura's verdict was unsatisfactory. The human mind so often demands an opinion when it really wants a looking-gla.s.s.

"Perhaps if I could get more action--more of the warmth which goes with action----?"

"It would affect the flesh tint, certainly. You should see me pirouetting at Dupres'--a peony isn't in it."

"I should like to see you," I said, jumping at a probable solution of my difficulties, "particularly in daylight. One gets better to the core of----"

"With women," Laura interrupted, "it's safest to reject the core."

"Cynic. You admit the downiest have the hardest hearts--like peaches, eh?"

"I didn't mean to be cynical. You can avoid the hard part. It is better than choosing the human plantains that have none: smooth, soapy, insipid things, they clog in no time."

"But pears eat straight through--sweet to the pip," I said, gazing quizzically at my latest sketch. "Betty is a pear."

Laura laughed generously.

"Foolish boy, keep your illusions. You can clean your brushes in them.

Degas saw wonderful things in his models--things hidden from the vulgar eye."

"I am glad you mentioned Degas. I mean to see more than this Betty of the Ballet. Take me to your cla.s.s."

"Oh, I don't dance in the cla.s.s. I have a private lesson when the girls are gone. You can come this afternoon at four."

We made a long journey on the top of an omnibus to a hole somewhere in Lambeth. Squalor appeared to grope under railway arches, and penury to moan through flapping fragments of clothing that swung at intervals along the narrow paths, behind rows of second-hand furniture and groups of dishevelled infants.

"A choice locality," I growled.

"Cheap," exclaimed Laura. "When you put your shoulder to the wheel you mustn't mind greasing your jacket."

She was a plucky girl--glad, like many others, to grasp the only opportunity of self-support. My uncle, a Cheshire parson, had died peacefully, leaving four girls and six boys with bucolic appet.i.tes to the charge of Providence.

"Here we are at last," my cousin said, leaping down with agility, and hardly stopping the omnibus for her exit.

We alighted almost in front of a quaint building which looked like an excrescence--a wart--on the visage of a dilapidated chapel. Laura led the way up a garden in size somewhat larger than a postage-stamp, where two heartseases, sole invaders of the desolate gravel, tried to blink golden eyes through a canopy of dust. The door was opened by a youth who mingled an air of proprietorship with the aspect of a waiter at a third-rate cafe. He waved a hand to rooms, or rather cabins, on the right, through which Laura led me. Cabin the first contained a dining table and a fossil piano utilised as shelf for sundries and sideboard; cabin the second, apparently a sleeping chamber, held a bed, dressing table, and a diminutive bracket on which might have stood a hand basin; while cabin the third--little more than a wooden box papered with promiscuous remnants of a decorator's stock--stored a plank upraised by volunteer legs enlisted from haphazard sources, a basin, a bottle of cloudy water, and a cracked wall mirror.

There Laura slipped off her walking shoes, and announced her intention to make a change of toilette.

I forthwith escaped through the further door, and found myself in a large, bare room, facing a middle-aged man, who was evidently the dancing master, M. Dupres.

I explained my presence and my interest in the ballet.

"I am accompanying my cousin, Miss Lorimer"--this was the stage name by which she was known--"in order to paint the pose of one of my sitters. I want more vibrating actuality, and hope to sketch it here."

"Mais certainement--of course. Ze beauty of ze human form is never so fine as when it moves to my vish. You vill see."

Laura entered in a short, fan-pleated frock with black silk knickerbockers, and lacy frills shrouding the knees. Her silken hose and shiny pumps make her already graceful as she cha.s.sed by way of experiment across the bare boards from the orange-toothed piano at one end to the camp chairs at the other. The ballet-master made his way to a small conservatory--a hospital for effete bulbs and straggling, deformed geraniums--and s.n.a.t.c.hing up a watering-can laid the dust which already began to thicken the air.

Then operations began. To me they were deeply interesting, because Betty's face and form were continually before my eyes, and the one thing wanting to make my work a chef-d'oeuvre was, I hoped, on the verge of discovery. Laura placed herself in an att.i.tude, glanced at her instructor, who had armed himself with a fiddle, and with its first tones commenced a series of evolutions. Sketch-book in hand, I followed her movements, now noting a six-step shuffle straight a-down the length of the boards; now sketching the action of her arms, which, balancing that of the feet, swayed inversely with every bend of the knees. Then came an etherealised milkmaid step that might have been termed an arm akimbo gallop had not the two wrists been pressed abnormally forward against the waist, with their pink palms glowing outwards. In this pose poor Laura's limbs looked obdurate as sawdust, while Betty's had bent like wax to the will of the modeller. Meanwhile, the fiddle fluttered, and the master now and then exemplified the grace of any particular att.i.tude he desired. You could observe his beautiful build, the symmetry of every movement, despite the impediment of two gouty-looking feet encased in cloth-covered boots of original design. His features were certainly distinguished, and the trimness of his prematurely blanched hair made a curious contrast to the general dilapidation of the surroundings. His poses, one quickly following the other, were all picturesque. With every turn of the head, or bend of a knee, or stretch of an arm, some fresh revelation of physical equipoise delighted the eye.

Laura went through various new movements of a Spanish Carmen-like fandango with head uplifted and a bravura pout of the chin, after which we preceded her through the dressing-room, where she was left to readjust her walking dress. A sense of disappointment weighed on me. All these att.i.tudes, all these evolutions I had seen in their perfection through the medium of Betty. No grace of motion could equal hers, no actuality portrayed by another could be half as exquisite as even the baldest reminiscence of her.

On the wall of the little bed-chamber where M. Dupres courteously accompanied me were many photographs, faded but still recognisable, of himself dressed in tights or other theatrical frippery. He took evident pleasure in watching my appreciation of the curious att.i.tudes in which--to show off in their fullest perfection the lithe muscles and magnificent symmetry of his agile frame--he had been portrayed.

"You must have danced a great deal?" I questioned, seeing that some remark was required of me.

"Danced!" he said, lifting his eyes to the smudgy ceiling. "Yes, it is feefteen year ago, but I remember it like jesterday. All overe in vone moment; a coup de fouet ve call it."

I begged for an explanation.

"I vas ze first--ze very first. One leap into ze air I could do--so high," he said, lifting his hand descriptively; "a leap zat no vone vould dare--my fortune vas made. Pupils came from all ze countries to learn from me some leetle 'pas,' but zere vas no time. Zen, vone night zere came a king to see me--me, ze king of ze dance--ah! I may say zat now it is all gone! I danced; ze air vas no lighter zan I ... ze people shouted, zey called, zey encored. Again I danced, high, high, higher, and zen--crack!"

He brought his two hands together with a sharp click. His face was convulsed with emotion, and presently he took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the damp from his brow.

"Yes," he continued, "it is feefteen year--but to me it is to-day.

Zere--in my leg was a break"--he pointed to the place a little above his ankle and below the calf. "You could put a fingere into it--that vone muscle vas my fortune--it vas gone--split in vone moment."

His sad eyes stared blankly out from the cracked unclean window as though reviewing a vast panorama of his early years.