Moustached and brilliantined, the conductor rose amid his stiffshirted orchestra, bowing deeply to the whistling and clapping. After a perfunctory overture, the electric candles of the chandeliers dimmed, the red curtain rose on a man in furs outside a stage-property igloo, with six seals who tossed brightly-coloured balls to each other, played tunes on a rack of rubber-bulbed motor-horns, climbed ladders, performed acrobatics and jumped into a glass water-tank.
Nancy was puzzled. She had steeled herself for an evening of blue jokes and girls with slashed skirts, like the burlesque shows in the Bowery, where she was no more likely to find herself than at a boxing-match. Nothing could be more respectable than performing seals. Crippen sat engrossed, hand limp on the plush edge of the box. Eliot fancied he had seen the same act as a carousing medical student, but perhaps it had been performing dogs.
The seals were followed by Weldon Atherstone, the monologuist, with top-hat, tails and ebony cane. Perfect tailoring was his trademark, like the black half-moons of George Robey's eyebrows, or Albert Chevalier's suit of Cockney costermonger's button-covered 'pearlies'. He did Fagin in the condemned cell from _Oliver Twist,_ the music-hall falling as silent as a church.
'The black stage, the cross-beam, the rope…' Atherstone's low voice seemed to ooze from him. 'All the hideous apparatus of…death.'
Violent applause. Only forty years ago, Eliot reflected, this audience in its ancestors' shoes waited excitedly through the night for the morning's execution outside Newgate Jail. Calls of 'Blackleg!' came from half-a-dozen voices-planted by the strike committee he suspected. Next appeared a pair of Chinese wire-walkers in kimonos and plate-like hats. Then the orchestra struck up Yankee Doodle. Belle had not seen the pinnacles of New York for thirteen years, but an American act was thought so smart on the London stage, some natives changed their accent to Brooklyn and their costume to Wild West.
Eliot saw Crippen's hand tighten on the plush.
Belle's waist was so pinched between bursting bosom and spreading hips, it looked to Eliot in danger of exploding like the bound-up barrel of some ancient siege-artillery pressed back to service. The skirt of her green silk gown foaming with lace trailed a yard behind her. Her hair was in bright blonde curls, as tight as the head of a cauliflower. Her heavy face was vivid with greasepaint, dusted with powder like an apple-dumpling with flour.
She stood between two vases of artificial red roses, holding a mirror edged with gold tassels, which she flashed along the stalls. Fixing on a sallow-faced man with a limp moustache, she started to sing, _Who'll be My Sweetheart Tonight?._
The thin notes fell into the auditorium like shot sparrows. 'Blackleg!' and 'Scab!' came from the same seats, whistling and hissing from the gallery. Belle interpreted the noise as shouts of approval and hoots of delight. She favoured her audience with repartee-not the daggered Cockney wit of Bessie Bellwood, the rabbit-skinner's daughter who lived with the Duke of Manchester, but 'Oh, you naughty boy!' and 'Wouldn't you like me to hold your hand?' Expression and utterance had the mawkish combination of ardent promise and coy chastity in equal proportions.
The conductor was looking nervously over his shoulder. Belle stopped. The house was in uproar. She nervously exchanged a word with him, smiled bravely and began _Something to Warm your Feet On._ Ha'pennies started to fly across the footlights. The strikers had come well armed. Coinage was augmented by eggs, one cracking against Belle's skirt. She burst into tears, rushing from the stage still clutching her mirror. The curtain fell. The noise coalesced to a chant, 'We want our money back!' Three rough-clothed men had quit the frustrating remoteness of the gallery to climb over the footlights. A rousing roll came on the drums.
'Stand up,' Eliot hissed at Nancy.
'Why?'
'The National Anthem. Always played after a show.'
Everyone in the house, even the intruders on the stage, stood stiffly while the orchestra on their own feet played _God Save the King._ The conductor cautiously signalled for another drum-roll and repeated the verse. The tension had gone. A heavily-moustached man in evening dress appeared gingerly through the curtain to announce hastily that money would be returned at the box-office.
'Belle's talents aren't suited to these audiences,' said Crippen. 'She was born for opera.'
His face was pink, his bland expression blighted with disappointment and shame. The evening had done Ethel good, Eliot thought.
13
'Well, Belle dear, I forgive you, though I daresay hundreds wouldn't,' said Clara Martinetti amiably.
'Oh, gee, don't go on about it,' Belle told her curtly.
'I shan't dear, I promise I'll not utter another word, now I've had my say. But you are Honorary Treasurer of the Music Hall Ladies' Guild, aren't you, dear? And to go strike-breaking-'
'Wasn't Belle punished enough on the night?' Paul Martinetti asked charitably.
'Getting the bird is the worst punishment in the whole world,' Clara agreed. 'I'm sure Peter could see that.'
'Oh, yes, I'd much rather be hanged,' Crippen assented mildly.
'But Clara sweetie, don't you see? I only got hissed because I was a blackleg. There were folk planted in the house for no other purpose than to wreck my act. I'm not downhearted, no sir!' Belle's voice rose. 'I've had offers last week from the Euston, from Collins's across in Islington, even from the Hippodrome. And I could take my pick of the provincial touring companies tomorrow. Couldn't I, Peter?'
Clara's expression indicated sour disbelief sugared with politeness.
It was a week later, just before ten on the evening of Monday, January 31, 1910. The four sat in the downstairs breakfast room at Hilldrop Crescent. They had just finished dinner-loin of pork with jacket potatoes, followed by blancmange with strawberry jam. Eliot and Nancy had been asked, too.
Crippen had called at the surgery with the invitation the morning after the fiasco. Eliot had politely declined it-he had stomached enough of the grotesque Crippens-but asked sympathetically after Belle.
'Not in bad shape. Mr Atherstone was wonderful last night, you know, comforting her. She bounced back, she's like a rubber ball.' He paused. 'Sometimes she's like a tiger.' He looked round the bleak consulting room, sitting in the spoke-backed chair. 'Do you use henbane in your practice, Dr Beckett?'
'Luckily, I have no maniacal patients.'
'I first learned of it at the Royal Bethlem Hospital for the Insane,' Crippen continued quietly. 'It's given a good deal in America, you know, in asylums. I've prescribed it as a nerve remedy, in a homoeopathic preparation. Very diluted, in sugared discs. Naturally, in its pure form, which the chemists call 'hyoscine'. The dose would equal l/3600ths of a grain.'
'Extremely minute.'
'As demanded by the laws of homoeopathy,' he asserted. 'I bought five, grains from Lewis and Burrows' chemist shop in Oxford Street last Friday.'
'Five grains!' Eliot exclaimed. 'That's enough to kill a platoon of guardsmen.'
'I also find it useful for spasmodic coughs and asthma,' he explained. 'And I am persuading Belle to take it.' He hesitated again. 'I can satisfy her demands in the way of clothes and jewellery. Others I cannot. You understand, Dr Beckett? I'm not a young man like you. And it is Ethel and I who are proper hub and wife.' He continued solemnly, 'Our wedding day was December 6, 1906. Seven years had passed since Ethel and I first met. It's a date I can never forget. It was a Thursday. It was the time Belle finally got rid of the Germans. It was rainy, but it was all sunshine in our hearts.'