The RUSSIA DANCER

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 121, 24 May 1932, Page 17

The RUSSIA DANCER

(SHORT STORY.)

(By H. E. BATES.)

Rain was slanting in cold streaks up the railway lines from the south-west. It beat in lashing gusts under the glass roofs of the platforms and tortured the steam of passing engines to fantastic shreds. Occasionally it drove down under the platform roofs clouds of greenisli-white smoke against which the passengers hunched their shoulders and groped briefly as though in a fog. It was half-past three in the afternoon, and the Sunday express for the North was due in twenty minutes. The <loor or the station restaurant was constantly opening and shutting, and often the wind would snatch th., door from a passenger's hand and close it with a crash. The door was massive and hung on a powerful spring, and the sound of it shutting made an empty, melancholy cclio. . . \ man and a woman were drinking tea at a tabic in the corner of the restaurant. Tlio woman often bit her lips and waited l'or the crash of the door to conic as though waiting for a blow, and once she began a complaint in a voice that was loud and husky. "That door'll drive me dotty. Why don't everybody have to work backstage for a month? I only slammed a door oncc and that was in 0 Neill s revue —the old O'Neill, you wouldn't remember him. I was only a kid myself. Just my luck, the manager happened to be walking past the dressing room. Talk about hair oIT! I was only a kid. O'Neill told me I could dance and that was all I thought about. Charlie Mace was manager then—don t suppose you'd remember him either. His wife shot herself—she was jealous of a tart Charlie was sweet on, and she wanted to show off, I suppose. But that was afterwards. I'd been Olga Ostrov-

sky a good while then, four years oi more. It had to be temper or nothing with old' Charlie. Ho camo ill and chalked me off till I cried my heart out. I was in the chorus in those days two shows a night and two matinees, and living in a bed-sitter at that and lio jam on it. I couldn't 6ing for a week after what Charlie said. I just used to open my mouth. I thought my heart would break." She ceased talking and picked up her cup and drank. She looked somewhere between forty-five and fifty, and hei skin, heavily powdered, hung in wrinkled, bluish-grey pouches under her chin and eyes. Age and hard work and indulgence had worn her lips until they were loose and drooping. She had tried to paint them into a firm lino again, but the colour of the rouge was livid and artificial, and the lips themselves were hard and pathetic in their falsity. She was wearing a cheap fur coat, which she had thrown back over her heavy shoulders, showing a bright crimson dress stretched tight over her heavy bosom. She did not look like a dancer. Her hair had been dyed a light red colour and a wisp or two of it had fallen from under her black hat, half hiding her long scarlet ear-rings. Sometimes she shook her head in a quick, curious way, and the ear-rings danced, making her look both absurdly coquettish and a littlo more vulgar. When she sat still and talked or when she drank and forgot herself ehe looked as though she were worried by something and very tired. "Mind you, I ain't saying that chorus work wasn't good for me," she went on. "I was only a kid, and it was the best thing for me. I was all silly kid's dreams when I first began dancing. You know —sort of thing that's no good to you or to anybody else, either, only a nuisance. You like another cup of tea? I'll 'ave another myself, then, if you won't. It's in the pot." She poured out the tea and looked at the rain slanting incessantly beyond the buffet windows. "Might as well be wet inside and out, what °do you say ? Seen your bags all safe?" "Oh, yes!" "Costs you a pretty penny for kit, I'll bet, don't it?"

The man did not answer. He was young, sleek, unusually elegant; his clothes seemed to have been sewn very tightly to his body, giving the impression that they could never crease or slip a fraction out of place; beside him, , the woman, with her cheap fur coat, her loud-coloured frock, and her dyed hair, looked like a caricature in unkind colours. He had listened to her long, garrulous speeches without a change :n his expression of frozen boredom. She had-sung the "Song at Twilight" the night before, and suddenly she turned to the young man and said: "You heard me give 'em 'Just a Song at Twilight' last night, didn't you? Tliey gave me a nice encore. Hear 'em whistling?" She paused and drained her cup and leaned forward on her elbows and said, intimately: "You know what fetches 'em, don't you? It's the name—the Russian touch, If I was plain Lily Miller they wouldn't look at me. Thanks, I don't mind if I do." The young man dangled a cigarette case in front of her, and she took a cigarette out of it and puffed a cloud of smoke into the air. "And you know what? You know what I should do if I were you? I'd be Italian —Mariano, something like that. It's your style. You're young—you ought to change now before you make your name. Think of Mariano in big letters on the Coliseum. Sec what I mean? It's romantic. It fetches 'cm. It pays, too. You don't want to bo drifting round the provinces all your life, do you? You can bo clever and all that, but if your name don't catch you're nowhere. Look at me. liver see a photo of mc when I was a kid? —with a face like I had I ought to have been in Royal Command. Instead, I never had a ghost until I changed from Lily Miller to Olga Ostrovsky. Half a minute, I'll show you that photo of me as a kid. The train ain't due, is it?" The young man looked at the watch on his wrist and then looked at the rain and then at the dancer, all without answering. He felt bored to exasperation. Her voice was loud and coarse, and he wondered if she would ever stop talking. The train was not due for ten minutes more. The dancer put her cigarette in a saucer and searched through her handbag. He kept thinking how unlucky it was that she should have chanced to come into the restaurant and see him sitting there, and he felt that he detested her. He looked at her as she searched through her handbag for the photograph, and he felt suddenly that she looked less like a dancer than a faded creature, overdressed and overpainted, worn out by more years of giving herself than perhaps she hereelf could remember. He

looked at his watch again, and, at the same moment she raised her eyes and reached for her cigarette and put it between her lips. She had found the photograph. "Don't rush off," she begged him. "The train ain't coming, is it? ,Pity we ain't goin' North together, I've got another half an hour to wait. Well, that's me. I was only a kid then. "I was 18 when that was took. I d been in old O'Neill's show a week and I had that done out of my first weeks screw." He looked at the photograph. For a whole minute he regarded it without raising liis eyes. It was the photograph I of a young girl, in a stiff-frilled dancing dress, standing quietly and unassumingly with her hands clasped before her. She was staring straight at him. He did not know what to think or to say. There was something marvellously enraptured and credulous about lier gaze, as though she were really watching some shy and tiny .bird in the eye of the camera. It was an unexpectedly thrilling and lovely face, delicate and proud, the big, vivacious dark-brown eyes warm and soft as bees, and tho skin as white and fresh as the peel of a young mushroom. He did not recognise the dancer. Iler figure was slight and slender; the shoulders were round and sloping, and the breasts were swelling firmly to life against her dress. Under the photograph was written, in black ink, "Lily Miller, 1003." She had the tiny waist of the period, and the dim tropical palms and ferns in the background had begun to yellow and fade.

"Not bad, is it?" she said. "I was only a kid, don't forget. But you see what I mean? —a pretty kid don't stand a chance without a name. A name s everything. You can't afford to be yourself in our profession. I was a pretty kid, but what chance did I stand with a name like Lily Miller i So I changed my name. And look at me." "Here's the train. Good-bye," he said. "Where are you going?" he asked. She had to catch a train to some obscure town in the south of Wales, and she would appear there for three nights, and after that she had no other engagement to keep. "Oh! I'm off West," she said, "I shall be in the North after that and then in London, and then I shall be on tho piers in the summer —all over the place, in fact. You know? Lord knows where I shall be." Ho took another look at the photograph of the young girl lying on the table, shook hands very hastily, and turned away to catch the train. She followed liim and walked beside the train and waved her hand in farewell.