Upon the conclusion of the phenomenally brief run of The Poisoned Kiss at the Sceptre Theatre, Mrs. Gudrun, who had sustained the heroic rÔle of Aldapora “with abounding verve and true histrionic inwardness” (to cull a quotation from the enthusiastic notice which appeared in the Theatrical Piffer), and whose sculpturesque temples throbbed no less with the weight of the dramatic laurels heaped upon them than with the heady quality of the champagne with which those laurels had been liberally drowned—Mrs. Gudrun left the author and the Syndicate, per their Business Representative, exchanging poignant personalities over a non-existent percentage, and hied her to the Gallic capital for recreation and repose; bearing in her train the leading man, Mr. Leo De Boo, a young actor who had chipped the egg of obscurity in the recent production. De Boo was “a splendid specimen of virile beauty,” according to the Greenroom Rag—all shoulders, legs, nose, and curls, without any perceptible forehead; and Teddy Candelish, most ubiquitous of acting-managers, came within an appreciable distance of being epigrammatic when he termed him “a chronic cad in beautiful boots.” For more exquisite foot-gloves than those De Boo sported were never seen, whoever made and gave credit for them; and De Boo was said to have a different pair for every day in the month and every imaginable change in the weather.

“Nearly threw up his part in The Poisoned Kiss,” said Teddy afterwards, at the club, “when he discovered that it was to be a sixteenth-century production; took me aside, and told me in confidence afterwards, that if he’d been allowed to play Hermango in gray suÈde tops with black pearl buttons and patent leather uppers, the piece would have been a colossal monetary, as well as artistic, success.”

“Schwerlich! Who konn bretend to follow de workings of a mind like dot jung man’s,” said Oscar Gormleigh, “vidout de assisdance of de migroscope? Und hof I not known a brima donna degline to go on for Siebel begause she hodd been kifen brown insdead of violet tights? It vas a tam gonsbiracy, she svore py all her kodds! In prown legs she vould groak like von frog mit kvinsy—mit violet she always varble like de nachtigall. De choke of it vas”—the talented stage-director laid a hairy finger archly against his Teutonic nose—“dat voman always groak—not never varble—tights or no tights!”

“De Boo is a rank bounder,” said Candelish decidedly.

“He has pounded from de ranks,” pronounced Gormleigh, “und he vill go on pounding—each pound so motch higher dan de last von, oontil he drop splosh into de kutter akain. He who now oggupies a svell mansion-flat in Biccadilly, ach ja!—he vill end vere he bekan—in de liddle krubby sit-bedding-room over de shabby shop vere dey let out segond hond boogs on hire mit segond hond furnidure.”

Mrs. Gudrun would have been deeply incensed had she heard this unlicensed expression of opinion from one whom she had always kept in his place as a paid underling. For six nights and a matinÉe she had, in the character of Aldapora, elected to poison herself in the most painful manner rather than incur the loss of De Boo’s affections, and, with the “true histrionic inwardness” so belauded by the Theatrical Piffer, she had identified herself with the part. So she took a blazing comet flight to Paris with the actor in her train, and paragraphs announcing their arrival at the Hotel Spitz appeared in the London papers.

“Listen to this, Jane Ann,” said the paternal De Boo, whose name was Boodie—and when I add that for twenty years the worthy father had been employed as one of the principal cutters at Toecaps and Heels, that celebrated firm of West-End bootmakers, it will be understood whence the son obtained his boots. “To think,” Mr. Boodie continued, “that Alfred—our Alfred, who sp’iled every particle of leather he set his knife to, and couldn’t stitch a welt or strap a seam to save his life—should ever have lived to be called a rising genius!”

“The ways of Providence are wonderful, father!” returned the said Alfred’s mother dutifully. Mrs. Boodie was an experienced finisher herself, and had always lamented Alfred’s lack of “turn” in the family direction. “An’, if I was you, I wouldn’t mention that bit in the paper to Aphasia Cutts. She’s dreadful jealous over our Alfred, even now, though he hasn’t bin to see ‘er or wrote for two years. As good as a break off, I should a-regarded it, ’ad I bin in her place. But she’s different to what I was.”

“So are all the gals,” said Mr. Boodie with conviction, bestowing upon his wife a salute flavored with Russia leather and calf.

“Well, I’m sure. Go along, father, do!” said Mrs. Boodie, with a delighted shove.

But of course Aphasia—so christened by an ambitious mother in defiance of the expostulations of a timid curate—had already seen and cried over the paragraph. She had loved Alfred and stood up for him when he was a plain, stupid boy with an unconquerable aversion to work. She had been his champion when he grew up, no longer plain, but as pronounced a loafer as ever. She had given up, in exchange for his loutish affections, the love of an honest and hard-working man.

“I can’t ’elp it!” she had said; “you can get on without me, and Alfred can’t, pore chap. His Par calls ’im a waster—I believe ’e’d give ’im the strap if ’e wasn’t six foot ’igh. But I’ve got ’im an opening in the theatrical line, through a friend of mine as does fancy braiding at Buskin’s, the stage shoemaker’s in Covent Garden. It’s only to walk on as one of the Giant’s boy-babies in the Drury Lane panto.—eighteen pence a night and matinÉes—but his Mar will be thankful. If only ’is legs are long enough for the part——”

They were, and from that hour Alfred had embarked on a career. When entrusted with a line to speak, it was Aphasia who held the grimy slip of paper on which it was written and aided the would-be actor with counsel and advice.

“And ’old up your ’ead, do, as if you was proud of yourself, and don’t bend at the knees; and whether you remember your words or not, throw ’em out from your chest as if you was proud of ’em. An’ move your arms from the shoulder like as if you was swimmin’—don’t crook your elbers like a wooden doll. And throw a bit o’ meanin’ into your eye. You took me to see that Frenchman, Cocklin ’e calls ’imself; as played the chap with the boko ’e wouldn’t let the other chaps make game of.... French or Japanese, they’re both Dutch to me, but I watched Cocklin’s eye, and I watched ’is ’ands, an’ I could foller the story as if it was print, an’ plainer. I’ve went to see an actor since what folks said was a great artis’, and if ’e did talk English, ’is eye was as dumb as a boiled fresh ’addock’s an’ ’s ’ands was like slices of skate. Now say your bit over again.”

And Alfred said it, this time to the satisfaction of his instructress. When he got a real part Aphasia coached him, and rode down from Hammersmith with him on the bus, and was waiting for him at the stage-door when he came out, the tears of joy undried on her pale cheeks. And that was the night upon which she first noticed a coldness in the manner of her betrothed.

“An’ now I’m not good enough for him to wipe his boots on,” she sobbed, sitting on her bed in the single room lodging off the roaring, clanging Broadway—“the boots ’is Par cut an’ welted, an’ ’is Mar stitched, an’ I finished. But I won’t stand in ’is light. I’ve my pride, if I am a boot-finisher. I’ll see that Mrs. What’s-her-name face to face, an’ ’ave it out as woman to woman, an’ tell ’er she’s welcome to marry ’im for me.”

And Aphasia dried her poor red eyes and took off Alfred’s betrothal ring—a fifteen-carat gold circlet with three real garnets, bought in the Broadway one blushful, blissful Saturday night—and evicted his photographs from their gorgeous cheap frames, and made a brown-paper parcel of these things, with a yellow leather purse with a blue enamel “A” on it, and tied it up with string.

Perhaps something of her fateful mood was telepathically conveyed to Mr. Leo De Boo at that moment, for he shivered as he sat at the feet of Mrs. Gudrun upon the balcony of a private suite at the Hotel Spitz, and turned up eyes that were large and lustrous at that imperishable image of Beauty, exhaling clouds of fashionable perfume and upborne on billows of chiffon and lace. Mrs. Gudrun, who naturally mistook the spasms of a genuine plebeian British conscience for the pangs of love, lent him her hand—dazzlingly white, astonishingly manicured, jeweled to the knuckles, and polished by the devout kisses of generations of worshipers—and De Boo mumbled it, and tried to be grateful and talk beautifully about his acting. But this bored Mrs. Gudrun, who preferred to talk about her own.

“I have often felt that myself,” she said—“the conviction that a crowded audience hung upon my lips and saw only with my eyes, and that I swayed them as with a magic thingumbob, by the power of a magnetic personality.”

“It is a mystery,” said De Boo, passing his long fingers through his clustering curls, “that once in a century or so a man should be born——”

“Or a woman. Marvelous!” agreed Mrs. Gudrun. “Marvelous! the man who runs the Daily Tomahawk said that when I made my first appearance on the stage.”

“Genius is a crown of fire,” said De Boo, who had read this somewhere. “It illuminates the world, yet scorches the wearer to the bone. He——”

“She suffers,” said Mrs. Gudrun, neatly stopping the ball and playing it on her side. “You may bet she suffers. Hasn’t she got the artistic temperament? The amount of worry mine has given me you would never believe. Cluffer, of the Morning Whooper, calls me a ‘consolidated bundle of screaming nerves.’ When I’ve sat down to dinner on the eve of a first night, De Petoburgh—you’ve met the Duke?—has had to hold me in my chair while Bobby Bolsover gave me champagne and Angostura out of the soup-ladle. And I believe I bit a piece out of that. And afterwards—ask ’em both if I wasn’t fairly esquinte.”

“But the possessor of an artistic temperament—such as mine—even though the fairy gift entails the keenest susceptibility to anguish,” quickly continued De Boo, “enjoys unspeakable compensation in the revelation to him alone of a kingdom which others may not enter. Looking upon the high mountains in the blush of dawn, I have shouted aloud with glee——”

“The first time I ever went into a southern Italian orange-grove in full bloom,” acquiesced Mrs. Gudrun, “the Prince of Kursaal Carle Monto, who was with me, simply sat down flat. He said Titian ought to have been alive to paint my face and form against that background.... By the way, the first act of that new play, the title of which I’ve forgotten, and which I’ve leased from a scribbling idiot whose name don’t signify, takes place in a blooming orange-grove. I’ve cast you for the leading man’s part, Leo, and I hope you will be properly grateful for the chance, and conquer that nasty habit you have of standing leering at the audience in all my great moments.”

“Dearest lady,” De Boo argued glibly, “does it not increase the dramatic poignancy of such moments if the spectators are enabled to read in the varying expressions pictured on my face the feelings your art inspires?”

But Mrs. Gudrun was inexorable. “They can read ’em in the back of your head if they’re anxious,” said she, “or they can take the direct tip from me. I hope that’s good enough. I don’t see the cherry-bun of running a theater to be scored off by other people, and so you know! And now that’s settled, let us go and have stuffed oysters and roast ices at Noel Peter’s, and see Sarah afterwards in her new tragedy rÔle. I’m the only woman she’s really afraid of, you know, and I feel I’m bound to romp in in front of her before long. She says herself that acting like mine cannot be taught in a conservatoire, and that I constitute a complete school in myself. Have you ever seen me play Lady Teazle?”

“Unhappily I have not. It is a loss,” said De Boo, “a distinct loss. By the way, when I scored so tremendously as Charles Surface at Mudderpool——”

“Hell is full of men who have scored as Charles Surface at Mudderpool,” said Mrs. Gudrun crushingly. “That sounds like a quotation, doesn’t it? Only it must be mine, because I never read. You’re a charming fellow, and a clever boy, Leo, but, as a friend, let me tell you that you talk too much about yourself. It’s bad form; and the truly great are invariably the truly modest. I must save up that epigram for my next interview, I think. There’s the auto-brougham.”

And De Boo enfolded the renowned form of his manageress in a point lace and sable wrap, and they went off to Noel Peter’s, and saw La Gr-r-ande perform.

Rehearsals of the new play, Pride of Race, at the Sceptre had scarcely commenced when in upon Teddy Candelish, laboriously smoking in his sanctum and opening the morning’s mail, swept Mrs. Gudrun.

“I haven’t a moment to breathe,” she said imperially, accepting the chair Teddy acrobatically vacated. “Come in, De Petoburgh—come in, Bobby; you are in the way, but I’m used to it. No, De Petoburgh, that cellaret’s tabooed; remember what Sir Henry said to you about liqueurs before lunch. Are there any letters of importance, Teddy, to my cheek?”

“Several bundles of press-cuttings from different firms, thirty or forty bills, a few tenders from photographers, and—and some love-letters,” replied Candelish, pointing to some neat piles of correspondence arranged on the American roll-top desk. “Usual thing—declarations, proposals, and so forth.”

“Always plenty of those—hey?” chuckled De Petoburgh, sucking a perfunctory peptoid lozenge in lieu of the stimulant denied.

“Plenty, b’Jove!” echoed Bobby Bolsover.

“Not so many as there used to be,” responded Candelish with tactless truthfulness, rewarded by the lady with a magnificent glare. “By the way, there’s one odd letter, from a girl or a woman who isn’t quite a lady, asking for an interview on private business. Signs herself by the rummiest name—Aphasia Cutts.” He presented the letter.

“Aphasia?” said Mrs. Gudrun, extending heavily jeweled fingers for the missive. “Isn’t that what De Petoburgh has when he can only order drinks in one syllable and his legs take him where he doesn’t want to go? Eh, Bobby?”

“Yes; but remindin’ the Duke of that always brings on an attack,” said Bobby solicitously. “Look at him twitchin’ now.... Steady, Peto! Woa-a, old mannums!”

“Take him for a tatta while I finish the rehearsal,” commanded Mrs. Gudrun, rising from Teddy’s chair in an upsurge of expensive draperies. “Write to this Aphasia girl, Teddy, and say I’ll see her to-morrow, between three and four p. m. After all, the whole-souled adoration of one’s own sex is worth having,” the lady said, as, heralded by the rustling of silken robes, the barbaric clash of jeweled ornaments, and wafts of fashionable perfume, she sailed back to the boards.

When Aphasia got her reply, p.p. Teddy, some hours later, there was very little of whole-souled adoration in her reception of the missive.

“I s’pose she looks on me as the dirt under her feet, like Alfred. But I won’t let that put me off makin’ the sacrifice that’s for his good—the ungrateful thing! I ’ope she’ll make ’im a nice wife, that’s all,” she sobbed, as she took from her collar-and-cuff drawer the flat brown-paper parcel containing the garnet ring, the photographs, and the letters. And she dressed herself in her best, with a large lace collar over a cloth jacket, and the once fashionable low-necked pneumonia-blouse, to which the girls of her class so fondly cling, and went to meet the lady whom, in terms borrowed from the latest penny romance, she called her “haughty rival.”

Mrs. Gudrun received her with excessive graciousness. A costume rehearsal was in progress, and the lady was in the hands of her maids and dressers. “I suppose this is the first time you have ever been behind the scenes?” she inquired. “Look about you as much as you like, and then you will be able to say to your friends: ‘I have been in Mrs. Gudrun’s dressing-room.’ You see, I am in the gown I wear in the first act. It is by Babin; and if you write for a ladies’ paper, you will remember to say so, please.”

“I don’t write for any ladies’ paper,” said Aphasia. “I couldn’t spell well enough—not if they ast me ever so. But it’s a lovely gownd, and I suppose all that stuff on your face is what makes you look so young an’ ’andsome—from a long way off.”

Mrs. Gudrun’s famous features assumed a look of cold displeasure. She assumed the majestic air that suited her so eminently well, and asked the young person’s business.

“It’s quite private, and I’ll thank you to send away your maids, if you’ve no objection,” said the dauntless Aphasia. “The fact is,” she continued, when the indignant menials had been waved from the apartment, “as I’ve come to make you a present—a present of a young man——”

“Look here, my good young woman,” began the incensed manageress.

Aphasia suddenly handed her the brown-paper parcel, and the wrath of Mrs. Gudrun was turned to trembling. She was sure this was an escaped lunatic. Aphasia profited by the lull in the storm to explain. She had come to hand over her Alfred—stock, goodwill, and fixtures. He had forgotten to be off with the old love before he went on with the new, but the old love bore no malice. All was now over.

“And you may marry ’im whenever you like,” sobbed Aphasia.

“I never heard anything so indecent in the whole course of my life,” said Mrs. Gudrun, rising in offended majesty. “Marry Mr. De Boo, indeed! If I had married every leading man I’ve played love-scenes with since I adopted this profession, I should be a female Brigham Young! ‘In love with me!’ Perhaps he is; it’s rather a common complaint among the men I know. As for Mr. De Boo, if he has low connections and vulgar entanglements, they are nothing to me. Good-day! Stop! You had better take this parcel of rubbish with you. Dawkins—the stage-door!”

And Aphasia found herself being ushered along the passage. Bewildered and dazzled by the glaring lights, the excitement and the strangeness, she ran almost into the arms of De Boo himself as he emerged from his dressing-room next the manageress’s. Had he overheard? There had been a curtained-over door on that side. Under his paint his handsome features were black with rage; he caught the girl’s shoulders in a furious grip, and spluttered in her ear:

“Damn you! Damn you, you sneaking creature! You have made a pretty mess of things for me—haven’t you?—with your blab about my father and the boot-business, and my letters and the ring I gave you. To my dying day I’ll never speak to you again!”

He threw her from him savagely and strode away.

Aphasia stood outside the theater and shook with sobs. It chanced—or did not chance, so queer are the vagaries of Destiny—that Ulick Snowle, the president of the New Stage-Door Club, happened to be passing; he had just called in at the box-office to privately book the first three rows of the upper circle on behalf of the club, the Old Stage-Doorers having secured the gallery. Both clubs were originally one, the Old Stage-Doorers having thrown off the younger club as the cuttlefish gets rid of the supernumerary limb which in time becomes another cuttlefish. And the unwritten compact between both clubs is that if one applauds a new production, the other shall execrate the same—an arrangement which contributes hugely to the liveliness of first-nights.

No uninitiated person beholding Ulick, with his shaggy beard, aged felt-basin hat of Continental make, short nautical coat, and tight-fitting sporting trousers, would suppose him to be the great personage he really is. He came up to Aphasia, and bluntly asked her what was the matter, and if he couldn’t do something? In her overwhelming woe and desolation, she was like the soda-water bottle of the glass-ball-stoppered description—once push in the stopper, there is no arresting the escape of the aËrated fluid. She told the sympathizing Ulick all before he put her into the Hammersmith bus, and when he would have handed in the fateful brown-paper parcel—“Keep it,” she said, with a gesture of aversion. “Burn it—chuck the thing in the dustbin. They’re no manner o’ use to me!” And away she rattled, leaving Ulick Snowle upon the pavement, in his hands an engine of destruction meet to be used in the extermination of the unfittest.

For the New Stage-Door Club did not love Mr. Leo De Boo, whose manner to old friends—whom he had often led around street corners and relieved of half-crowns—did not improve with his worldly prospects. And Ulick stood and meditated while the double torrent of the London traffic went roaring east and west; and as a charitable old lady was about to press a penny into his hand, Tom Glauber, the dandy president of the Old Stage-Doorers, came along, and the men greeted cordially. Von Glauber seemed interested in something that Ulick had to tell, and the two went off very confidentially, arm-in-arm.

“It would be a sensation if, for once, the O.S.D.’s and the N.S.D.’s acted in unison,” agreed Tom Glauber.

And on the night when Pride of Race was produced at the Sceptre, both clubs attended in full strength, every man with a crook-handled walking-stick, and a parcel buttoned under his coat. The piece had just concluded a run of three hundred nights, and every reader is acquainted with the plot, which is of modern Italy and Rome of to-day, to quote the programme. We all know how the young Marchese di Monte Polverino, in whose veins ran the bluest blood of the Latin race, secretly wedded Aquella Guazetta, the tripe-seller, who had won his lofty affections in the guise of a Bulgarian Princess, and how the dread secret of Aquella’s origin was revealed at the very moment when the loftiest and most exclusive of the Roman nobility were about to welcome the newly made Marchesa into their ranks.... Aquella, her brain turned by the acuteness of her mental suffering, greets the revelation with a peal of frenzied laughter. Now this laughter was a continual obstacle, during rehearsals, in the path of Mrs. Gudrun. Said she:

“The peculiarity and originality of my genius, as Cluffer says, consists in the fact that I can’t do the things that might be expected of me—not for filberts; while I can do the things that mightn’t. If I can’t really hit off that laugh, I’ll have a woman in the wings to do it for me. But my impression is that I shall be all right at night. Don’t forget, Gormleigh, that you’re not to tub the chandelier altogether; I hate to play to a dark house.”

“Py vich innovation,” said Gormleigh afterwards, “de gonsbirators vas enapled to garry out their blan. Himmel!” he cried, dabbing his overflowing eyes with an antediluvian silk pocket-handkerchief, “shall I effer forget—no, not vile I lif—de face of dot jung man!”

For at the moment when Monte Polverino’s scorn of the lovely plebeian he has wedded is expressed in words—when Aquella, pierced to the heart by being called “a low-born vulgarian” and a “peasant huckster,” is about to utter her famous yell of frenzied laughter, the Old Stage-Doorers and the New Stage-Doorers hung out their boots. A chevaux de frise of walking-sticks, from each of which depended a pair of these indispensable articles of attire, graced the gallery, distinguished the upper circle, and appeared upon the level of the pit. Stricken to the soul, faltering and ghastly under his paint, and shaking in the most sumptuous pair of patent leathers, white kid topped, in which he had yet appeared, De Boo blankly contemplated the horrid spectacle; while Mrs. Gudrun, to whose somewhat latent sense of humor the spectacle appealed, burst into peal upon peal of the wildest laughter ever heard beyond the walls of an establishment for the care of the mentally afflicted. “The grandeur, poignancy, and reality of the acting,” wrote Cluffer, of the Morning Whooper, “was acknowledged by a crowded house with a deafening and unanimous outburst of applause.”

“Both Mrs. Gudrun and Mr. De Boo attained the highest level of dramatic expression,” pronounced Mullekens, of the Daily Tomahawk. “It was the touch of Nature which attunes the universe to one throb of universal relationship.”

The play was a success. Even the “Boo’s!” of both the clubs, united for the nonce in disapprobation, could not rob Leo of his laurels. He wears them to-day, for Pride of Race has enjoyed a tremendous run.

“We’ve made the beggar’s reputation instead of sending him back to the boot-shop and that poor girl,” said Ulick Snowle to Tom Glauber next day.

“Possibly,” said Tom Glauber, sniffing at his inseparable carnation. “But it’s all the better for the girl, I imagine, in the long run.”