LITMIR.BIZ

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      I remember her best in the early days when she was making her name. Grandpapa Has Done It Again, Jonah Likes a Little Bit of Pink, Forget It and Kiss Me Again—Lorn wrote all those songs for her and she ought to have married him. You must remember the act? First there’d be the little twiddly bit from the orchestra, then the red curtains’d go up, and there’d be the ‘Town Hall’ set with the piano and the potted palms, and Lorn himself in the early days sitting there playing. The house’d be clapping by this time, and then the silver curtains that she travelled with her would part over the archway centre-back and out she’d come, all twelve stone of her, silk stockings, petticoats, white skin, and eyes so blue they made the sapphires Jorkins gave her look like bits of glass, all twinkling and shaking, and giving off great waves of life like a dynamo going all out.

      They used to say she never had a voice, but she had. It was tuneful, and it filled the hall. She hadn’t any fancy notes, but she put the stuff over. And she never tired. They could shout for her again and again and she’d still give them a chorus and lead ’em over the difficult bits like kids at a singing class.

      They loved her and she loved them. Her turn was like a reunion.

      I haven’t described her now—I don’t suppose there’s any need to—but since you probably remember her when she was stouter and noisier, although she never lost her spirit, I may as well tell you how I saw her, and how I always think of her.

      She was tall and fair, with blue eyes and a wide mouth, and a figure that was fine and strong and very human, and she radiated affection. I think myself that was her great gift. You felt she loved you, everybody did; taxi-drivers, people in shops, the orchestra, the house itself, they all sat up and preened themselves when she smiled because it was a personal smile, if you understand me, meant for you and genuine because she liked you. It made her what she was and it kept her there for a long time.

      I’m telling you all this because I want you to understand why I did what I did do and where I made my mistake, my terrible mistake.

      She met him when she was at the top of her career. There were thousands of men she could have married, men with money, men who could have given her something. Or there was Lorn, if she wanted somebody to take care of. Lorn would have died for her—did die for her, when you come to think of it. She didn’t know he had consumption and that theatre up at—but it was pulled down a long time ago and there’s no need to rub it in—was a death-trap, notoriously.

      Still, that’s not the point. As I say, she might have married anybody and she chose Frank. I don’t know what he was. Something in the orchestra, in a little one-eyed town whose very name I’ve forgotten. I remember when she brought him round to my dressing-room—I was still in burlesque and only just out of the chorus. I looked at him and she said: ‘This is Frank Springer. We’re going to be married,’ and I waited for her to wink at me, but she didn’t.

      I didn’t like him even then, and her money hadn’t gone to his head at that time. He was an undersized, flashy little object with so much side you wondered he didn’t fall over. He could talk: I gave him that. There was nobody who could talk so well to people they didn’t know. The first half-hour you were with him made you think you’d discovered something, but all the other half-hours were a disillusionment.

      And she never saw through him. At least I don’t suppose that’s quite true. But she never saw right through him. It made me wild then, and it still makes me wild when I think of it. To everybody else in this blessed world that man was a four-flushing gasbag, a fellow with such an inferiority complex, as they say now, that his whole life was spent trying to boost himself up to himself, and the more weak and hopeless and inefficient he saw himself the wilder and more irritating his lies became.

      I had enough of him on the first evening, and when I got her alone I began to laugh at him, and that was the first time I ever saw her ‘funny.’

      She wasn’t angry, but a sort of obstinate look came into her face. I can’t describe it and I won’t try, but it was the one thing I never understood about her. He was the one subject on which we never were frank, and one is frank with pals one’s known and worked with.

      ‘You’re not really going to marry him, duck?’ I said at last. I was quite startled by this time.

      ‘Oh, don’t you like him?’

      It was all she said, but there was an appeal in it. She had a way of doing that, of saying ordinary things and making you feel they were important.

      ‘Yes, I do in a way,’ I said cautiously, because I didn’t want to hurt her. ‘But you’re not really going to marry him? Is he rich?’

      ‘He hasn’t got a brown,’ she said, and she sounded pleased and somehow complacent.

      I was younger then and I hadn’t learnt what I have now, so I’m afraid I said what I thought.

      She walked out on me and in the morning when I tried to get hold of her she told the old girl to say she was out. That was the first row we ever had, and when I met her again it was after her big hit at the Oxford with When Father Brings the Flowers Home With the Milk. We had a drink together and she said she was married.

      I said. I was sorry for what I’d said about her husband—after all, when a man’s a girl’s husband it makes him somebody—and she warmed up to me again and I felt things weren’t really so bad. I was out of a shop at the time and I saw her at the second house, and afterwards I met him again in the dressing-room.

      He was horrible.

      Even afterwards, when he was old and I knew him for what he was, I never really loathed him as much as I did at that first meeting after they were married. He took all the credit for her success, talked about her as though he’d made her, and he wore a diamond and chucked his weight about until it made everybody sick. There were a whole crowd of us there, her old friends and several new ones and a lot of smart people. They were nice to him because of her. But he took it all to himself and, although it was a jolly enough gathering, for the first time I saw her in that atmosphere which never deserted her all her life.

      It’s hard to describe it but it was a sort of pitying-polite atmosphere, almost as though she’d got a hump or a wooden leg, and everyone was too fond of her to let her know that they’d noticed it.

      Lorn was sitting in a corner. His illness had got hold of him by then, but we didn’t know it. Frank was rude to him and had the impudence to criticise the way he played one of his own songs, but he didn’t say anything. He just sat there shivering and sipping his glass of the champagne somebody’d brought in.

      He looked so miserable that I went over and joined him, and afterwards, when Louie had fixed up to go out to supper at some titled chap’s house and Frank had invited himself and promised that she’d give a show there, announcing he’d accompany her himself, Lorn and I went off and had a meal together.

      We went to a Sam Isaacs’—I don’t know if it’s still there—and had some fish and stout. I had a job to make Lorn eat; he just sat shivering. Neither of us mentioned Louie at first. I knew he was supposed to be in love with her, but then most people were. It became half habit, half affectation with every man who knew her, and I suppose Lorn knew her as well as anybody in the world.

      He sat playing with his food, turning it over and over on his plate and looking at it as though he were not at all sure what it was.

      ‘How d’you like him?’ I said at last when every other topic had failed.

      He put down his knife and fork and looked at me across the little table. Now that I’ve seen death in a man’s eyes I know what it was that shocked me so in his expression.

      ‘Oh, God, Polly!’ he said. ‘Oh, God!’

      ‘You eat your grub,’ I said, because I was flustered and embarrassed by him. ‘You mark my words, my lad, the time’s

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