An Introduction To The Eternal Collection Jubilee Edition (80 page)

Large though it was, the Rajah had found himself the previous year cramped for space when he had accommodated not only his official staff with its crowd of
Aides-de-Camp
, Secretaries, Major Domos and their personal attendants, but also the lady of his choice, who invariably accompanied him on his annual visits to Monte Carlo. And so at great expense the Rajah purchased the Villa Mimosa and with some architectural ingenuity, for the Villas were on different levels, had it joined to the Villa Shalimar.

The Villa Mimosa this year housed Miss Stella Style.

She was large, blonde, and extremely decorative. The Rajah had seen her in the chorus of one of the big London theatres and had lost his heart from the moment she swept on to the stage with her fair hair hanging loose over her naked shoulders.

The Rajah had pursued his usual and invariably successful method of wooing.

He sent Stella a basket of orchids which required two attendants to carry it into the already overcrowded dressing room she shared with a dozen other girls, and when she had recovered sufficiently from her astonishment to examine the basket more closely, she found a diamond bracelet concealed among the blooms and a note from the Rajah asking her out to supper.

As Chrissie pointed out, the Rajah’s invitation could not have come at a better time. Stella agreed with her, of course, for she invariably agreed with Chrissie, but she did think it was unnecessary to have too much emphasis laid on the fact that her admirers were getting fewer and that she was finding it increasingly difficult to keep them interested.

This, as Chrissie also told her not for the first time, was due entirely to her own laziness.

Stella at twenty-seven was as pretty as she had been at seventeen. Her looks had never been anything but of the pink and white china doll variety, which in London was too commonplace to cause much comment, but which abroad proved almost sensational. Her figure was perfect although slightly on the large side, which fortunately appeared at the moment to be on the verge of becoming fashionable. And her hair, although it owed much of the brilliance of its colour to a skilful coiffeur in Wardour Street, was nevertheless long and luxuriant enough to ensure its being one of the assets which kept her on the pay roll of the more popular West End theatres.

Stella was lazy, and if Chrissie bewailed the fact once, she bewailed it over a dozen times a day. Sometimes she felt as if she could strike Stella for her good humoured stupidity, for the smile which was her invariable response to the most acid criticism, for the carefree, unworried manner in which she invariably received the information that yet another admirer had departed or been filched away from her by a more assiduous rival.

A conversation between the sisters a week before the Rajah appeared so providentially was typical of a hundred others.

‘You haven’t had a flower of any sort for over a fortnight,’ Chrissie had said. Not even a dead daisy has turned up with your name on it. What’s happened to young Lord Ripon? Is he out of town?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Stella replied. ‘Dilly said she was supping with him last night after the show.’

So Dilly’s got him, has she?’ Chrissie said, her voice hard and bitter. ‘Why did you let her take him? She set her cap at him from the moment he set foot inside the Stage Door.’

‘She can have him,’ Stella answered, yawning a little. ‘He was a bore anyway, always talking about racing. I never did care for horses.’

‘But you could pretend, couldn’t you?’ Chrissie asked.

Stella laughed.

‘I did try, but I got their anatomy all muddled up. Funny things, horses, they have different names from us for what appears to me to be a very similar part of the body – ’

‘Oh, damn the horses!’ Chrissie stamped her foot. ‘It’s his lordship I’m thinking about. He’s rich, Stella, rich and generous. But what have you got out of it I’d like to know! A brooch that won’t fetch more than ten pounds, gloves that you didn’t want and half a dozen boxes of chocolates. Chocolates, I ask you!’

‘They’re good ones at any rate,’ Stella remarked good humouredly. ‘Why don’t you have one?’

But Chrissie had stamped her foot and nagged at Stella until the latter fell asleep still with a smile on her lips.

Nothing seemed to perturb Stella’s good humour and she had learned long ago not to listen to Chrissie when she was annoyed.

Sometimes after one of these scenes Chrissie would look at herself in the mirror and wonder why Providence in the creating of herself and Stella had been so cruel. For cruel it was to give Chrissie a shrewd, quick brain with a deformed hunchbacked body and to dole out to Stella a beautiful body and no brain whatsoever.

‘If only I could look like Stella,’ Chrissie would think. ‘I could get anywhere – anywhere.’

Instead the role she had to play was to propel, push and nag the lazy, unambitious Stella into taking advantage of her very obvious attractions.

But time and time again Chrissie’s plans came to nothing simply through Stella’s natural inertia. If Chrissie had been born rapacious, Stella had been born happy.

Whatever happened, however much they were up against it, Stella remained the same. She simply did not know the meaning of the word ‘envy’ and she had never been jealous of anyone in her life. She had no ambitions whatsoever, and when she was out of a job it was doubtful if she could have ever had the sense to find another had it not been for Chrissie.

It was Chrissie who made her work, Chrissie who made her take trouble over her appearance, who reminded her to speak with a refined accent, who made her accept invitations. It was even Chrissie who forced Stella into keeping appointments with her various admirers who, having viewed her through their opera glasses from the front of the house, came hurrying round to the Stage Door when the performance was ended.

It was Chrissie who answered their notes, who wrote and thanked them for their flowers, and when there were a number of them, it was Chrissie who remembered which was which.

Not that Stella did not like having admirers, she did. She liked everybody!

She liked the smart, well turned out gentlemen with their private hansoms who waited for her at the Stage Door, but she liked equally well the men who moved the scenery, the boys who carried up the bouquets of flowers, the members of the orchestra and even the disagreeable, wizened old door keeper for whom nobody else had a good word.

It was not only men who found a place in her affections. She liked the girls with whom she acted, the wardrobe mistress, the dressers, the chars who cleaned out the theatre, and the smart, fluffy little programme sellers who would sometimes bring messages back stage. Stella like them all, in fact, as Chrissie used to say with exasperation, she would like the Devil himself if he turned up at the theatre.

Long ago Chrissie had really learned that it was useless to lecture Stella, but she really could not help doing it continually and unceasingly. From the moment the sisters got up in the morning to the moment they went to bed at night Chrissie’s high, sharp, bitter voice would be nattering at Stella like the yapping of a toy terrier. But nothing she said seemed to have the slightest effect.

Stella would give away her week’s wages without a second thought as to how she and Chrissie would manage the following week. Stella would lend her best evening gown, her slippers, her gloves or her mantle to any chorus girl who told her a hard luck story about an invitation from a Duke and nothing to wear if she accepted it. Stella found it impossible to pass a beggar in the street or a child looking into a sweet shop without opening her purse. And so Chrissie had to be ceaselessly protecting not only Stella’s interests but her own, for they rose and fell together.

Few people believed they were sisters, indeed, whenever Stella had a gentleman friend with a proprietary interest in her affairs, Chrissie was invariably introduced as ‘my dresser’, a pretence which never lasted long because Stella was too lazy to keep it up and inevitably gave the game away.

Chrissie was well aware that in appearance she was no asset to Stella. Men were inclined to look slightly disgusted or uncomfortable when they learned that this small, wizened creature was Stella’s sister, and it made them even more embarrassed when they learned that there were only two years difference in age between the girls.

‘You’re not to tell him who I am,’ Chrissie would say to Stella time and time again.

‘Why not?’ Stella would reply. I’m not ashamed of you, Chrissie. You’re worth fifty of me.’

In her heart of hearts Chrissie agreed with her, but men were not interested in brains, not the type of men they met anyway, and so they went on year after year, Chrissie making plans for Stella and Stella destroying them or making them unworkable from the very beginning by her sheer good humoured laziness.

The appearance of the Rajah of Jehangar was an unprecedented piece of good fortune. Bad luck had seemed to haunt Stella for months.

A show at the Gaiety Theatre, in which she had had a real chance to show her physical attractions, closed down after a month. There had been some delay before she was re-engaged at
Daly’s
, and then, three weeks after they had opened, she went down with such a bad cold and a high temperature that Chrissie was forced to keep her at home.

This was a double tragedy, for just before Stella fell ill she had attracted the attention of a South African millionaire who was visiting London. His affections were not seriously engaged, and when she failed to appear at a supper party he was giving for her, he speedily transferred his attention to one of the other girls in her act.

There were Doctors’ bills, medicines and special food to be paid for, and the rent was overdue by several weeks before Stella went back to the theatre again. The only good effect of her illness was that it seemed to make her prettier than she had been before. At times she was almost too buxom. As Chrissie said when she was angry, she looked and behaved like ‘a fat cow’. With her face a little thinner and her waist several inches smaller from enforced starvation Stella appeared more than usually dazzling.

The Rajah thought so, anyway.

To Chrissie it was a miracle that, from having been in dirty, smoky London, hard up and in debt six weeks ago, they should now find themselves in the sunshine at Monte Carlo, living in luxurious surroundings which even exceeded her wildest dreams.

Many people would have found the Villa Mimosa rather vulgar, but to Chrissie it was a veritable fairyland. The softness of the beds, the curtains of silk and brocade, the thick pile of the carpets, the ornate, gaudy decorations were to Chrissie all objects of unparalleled beauty.

Stella liked them too, but then Chrissie had known her like their lodgings in a back room in Manchester or a dingy attic overlooking the docks at Liverpool. She had long ago ceased to pay much attention to Stella’s opinion about anything.

‘He’s crazy about you, that’s certain sure,’ she said now, standing in the window of their sitting room at the Villa Mimosa, her hunched back sharply silhouetted against the blue sky outside.

Stella, lying on the sofa, reading a yellow-backed novel and with a huge box of chocolates at her side, did not answer. Chrissie waited for a moment, then turned towards her.

‘Did you hear what I said?’ she asked.

Stella looked up from her novel reluctantly. As she did so, she reached out her hand for another chocolate – a large one, ornamented with a crystallised violet on the top. She was extremely pretty as she lay there, dressed in a pink satin gown which the Rajah had brought her in Paris. It threw a delicate flush over her white skin and brought into prominence the blue of her eyes. It also accentuated very noticeably the curves of her figure, which seemed to Chrissie to have grown even more pronounced during the last few days at the Villa.

‘Stop eating chocolates and listen to me, Stella. You’ll be getting as fat as a porker if you go on like that. The food here is too rich.’

‘It’s jolly good,’ Stella replied, ‘and I like François.’

‘He talks too much,’ Chrissie snapped more from habit than conviction, for like Stella she had discovered that François, who was Chef at the Villa, was an unfailing source of information about everything and everybody at Monte Carlo.

‘He’s promised to buy me some truffles when he goes into the town today,’ Stella remarked dreamily. ‘I adore truffles.’

‘Instead of thinking about food, listen to me,’ Chrissie said. ‘The Rajah is crazy about you.’

‘You said that before.’

‘You didn’t reply.’

‘It didn’t seem to need a reply,’ Stella smiled. ‘We shouldn’t be here if he wasn’t fond of me.’

‘I know that,’ Chrissie said. ‘People get crazy about you,

Stella, but they don’t stay crazy. If you lose the Rajah, I think I’ll murder you with my own hands.’

Stella laughed.

‘Then you’d better start eating more and getting your strength up,’ she said. ‘Do you know how many women have stayed in this Villa before us?’

‘I don’t know and I don’t care,’ Chrissie answered.

‘Well, François will tell you.’ Stella said. ‘He says the Rajah gets bored with women quicker than anyone he’s ever met, and he’s worked for several Rajahs and Maharajahs. He was telling me what they have to eat. Goodness, Chrissie, you wouldn’t believe that people could eat so much and yet be able to walk about on two legs.’

Stella, will you pay attention to what I’m saying to you?’ Chrissie asked, her voice almost ominously quiet.

‘Go ahead, I’m all ears,’ Stella replied, selecting another chocolate with care, this time one decorated with crystallised rose leaves.

‘This is our one chance,’ Chrissie said, ‘and maybe our last – who knows?’

‘Chance of what?' Stella asked, her mouth full.

‘Of security, of being unafraid in the future, of knowing that whatever happens we shan’t starve,’ Chrissie said. ‘The Rajah is generous, Stella, there’s never been a man like him, not in your life at any rate. Do you know how much that diamond necklace is worth, the one he bought you in Paris?’

‘I’ve no idea.’