Tipping the Velvet (18 page)

‘With work, perhaps,' I said doubtfully. He shook his head.

‘Not even with that. Haven't you worked, these past six months - harder than Kitty, almost? You know the act as well as she; you know her songs, her bits of business - why, you taught them to her, most of them!'

‘I don't know,' I said. ‘This is all so new, and strange. All my life I've loved the music hall, but I never thought of getting up upon the stage, myself...'

‘Didn't you?' he said then. ‘Didn't you, really?' Every time you saw some little serio-comic captivate the crowd, at that Palace of yours, in Canterbury, didn't you wish that it was you? Didn't you close your eyes and see your name upon the programmes, your number in the box? Didn't you sing to your - oyster-barrel - as if it were a crowded hall, and you could make those little fishes weep, or shriek with laughter?'

I bit my nail, and frowned. ‘Dreams,' I said.

He snapped his fingers. ‘The very
stuff
that stages are made of.'

‘Where would we start?' I said then. ‘Who would offer us a spot?'

‘The manager here would. Tonight. I've already spoken with him -'

‘Tonight!'

‘Just one song. He'll find space for you in his programme; and if they like you, he'll keep you there.'

‘Tonight...' I looked at Walter in dismay. His face was very kind, and his eyes seemed bluer and more earnest than ever. But what he said made me tremble. I thought of the hall, hot and bright and filled with jeering faces. I thought of that stage, so wide and empty. I thought: I cannot do it, not even for Walter's sake. Not even for Kitty's.

I made to shake my head. He saw, and quickly spoke again - spoke, perhaps for the first time in all the months that I had known him, with something that was almost guile. He said: ‘You know, of course, that we cannot throw over the idea of the double act, now that we have hit upon it. If you don't wish to partner Kitty, there'll be some other girl who does. We can spread the word, place notices, audition. You mustn't feel that you are letting Kitty down...'

I looked from him to the stage, where Kitty herself sat on the edge of a beam of limelight, sipping at her cup, swinging her legs, and smiling at some word of the conductor's. The thought that she might take another partner - might stroll before the footlights with another girl's arm through hers, another girl's voice rising and blending with her own - had not occurred to me. It was more ghastly than the image of the jeering hall; more ghastly than the prospect of being laughed and hissed off a thousand, thousand stages...

 

So when Kitty stood in the wing of the theatre that night, waiting for the chairman's cry, I stood beside her, sweating beneath a layer of grease-paint, biting my lips so hard I thought they would bleed. My heart had beat fast for Kitty before, in apprehension and passion; but it had never thudded as it thudded now - I thought it would burst right out of my breast, I thought I should be killed with fright. When Walter came to whisper to us, and to fill our pockets with coins, I could not answer him. There was a juggling turn upon the stage. I heard the creaking of the boards as the man ran to catch his batons, the clap-gasp-clap-gasp-
cheer
of the audience as he finished his set; and then came the clack of a gavel, and the juggler ran by us, clutching his gear. Kitty said once, very low, ‘I love you!' - and I felt myself half-pulled, half-thrust beneath the rising curtain, and knew that I must somehow saunter and sing.

At first, so blinded was I by the lights, I couldn't see the crowd at all; I could only hear it, rustling and murmuring - loud, and close, it seemed, on every side. When at last I stepped for a second out of the glare of lime, and saw all the faces that were turned my way, I almost faltered and lost my place - and would have done, I think, had not Kitty at that moment pressed my arm and murmured, ‘We have them! Listen!' under cover of the orchestra. I did listen then - and realised that, unbelievably, she was right: there were claps, and friendly shouts; there was a rising hum of expectant pleasure as we worked towards our chorus; there was, finally, a bubbling cascade of cheers and laughter from gallery to pit.

The sound affected me like nothing I had ever known before. At once, I remembered the foolish dance that I had failed, all day, to learn, and left off leaning on my stick to join Kitty in her stroll before the footlights. I understood, too, what Walter had wanted of us in the wing: as the new song drew to a close I advanced with Kitty to the front of the stage, drew out the coins that he had tipped into my pocket - they were only chocolate sovereigns, of course, but covered in foil to make them glitter - and cast them into the laughing crowd. A dozen hands reached up to snatch them.

There were calls for an encore, then; but we, of course, had none to make. We could only dance back beneath the dropping curtain while the crowd still cheered and the chairman called for order. The next act - a couple of trick-cyclists - was pushed hurriedly on to take our place; but even at the end of their set there were still one or two voices calling for us.

We were the hit of the evening.

Back stage, with Kitty's lips upon my cheek, Walter's arm about my shoulders, and exclamations of delight and praise greeting me from every corner, I stood quite stunned, unable either to smile at the compliments or modestly disclaim them. I had passed perhaps seven minutes before that gay and shouting crowd; but in those few, swift minutes I had glimpsed a truth about myself, and it had left me awed and quite transformed.

The truth was this: that whatever successes I might achieve as a girl, they would be nothing compared to the triumphs I should enjoy clad, however girlishly, as a boy.

I had, in short, found my vocation.

 

Next day, rather appropriately, I got my hair cut off, and changed my name.

The hair I had barbered at a house in Battersea, by the same theatrical hairdresser who cut Kitty's. He worked on me for an hour, while she sat and watched; and at the end of that time I remember he held a glass to his apron and said warningly: ‘Now, you will squeal when you see it - I never cropped a girl before who didn't squeal at the first look,' and I trembled in a sudden panic.

But when he turned the glass to show me, I only smiled to see the transformation he had made. He had not clipped the hair as short as Kitty‘s, but had left it long and falling, Bohemian-like, quite to my collar; and here, without the weight of the plait to pull it flat and lank, it sprang into a slight, surprising curl. Upon the locks which threatened to tumble over my brow he had palmed a little macassar-oil, which turned them sleek as cat's fur, and gold as a ring. When I fingered them - when I turned and tilted my head - I felt my cheeks grow crimson. The man said then, ‘You see, you will find it queer,' and he showed me how I might wear my severed plait, as Kitty wore hers, to disguise his barbering.

I said nothing; but it was not with regret that I had blushed. I had blushed because my new, shorn head, my naked neck, felt saucy. I had blushed because - just as I had done when I first pulled on a pair of trousers - I had felt myself stir, and grow warm, and want Kitty. Indeed, I seemed to want her more and more, the further into boyishness I ventured.

Kitty herself, however, though she also smiled when the barber displayed me, smiled more broadly when the plait was re-affixed. ‘That's more like it,' she said, when I stood and brushed my skirts down. ‘What a fright you looked in short hair and a frock!'

Back at Ginevra Road we found Walter waiting for us, and Mrs Dendy dishing up lunch; and it was here that I was given a new name, to match my bold new crop.

For our debut at Camberwell we had thought that our ordinary names would do as well as any, and had been billed by the chairman as ‘Kitty Butler and Nancy Astley'. Now, however, we were a hit: Walter's manager friend had offered us a four-week contract, and needed to know the names he should have printed on the posters. We knew we must keep Kitty‘s, for the sake of her successes of the past half-year; but Walter said ‘Astley' was rather too common, and could we think of a better one? I didn't mind, only said I should like to keep ‘Nan' - since Kitty herself had re-christened me that; and we took our lunch, in consequence, with everybody volunteering names they thought would match it. Tootsie said ‘Nan Love', Sims ‘Nan Sergeant'. Percy said, ‘Nan Scarlet - no, Nan Silver - no, Nan Gold ...' Every name seemed to offer me some new and marvellous version of myself; it was like standing at the costumier's rail and shrugging on the jackets.

None, however, seemed to fit - till the Professor tapped the table, cleared his throat, and said: ‘Nan King'. And although I should like to be able to say - as other artistes do - that there was some terribly clever or romantic story behind the choosing of my stage-name - that we had opened a special book at a certain place, and found it there; that I had heard the word ‘King' said in a dream, and quivered at it - I can give no better account of the matter than the truth: which was only that we needed a name, and the Professor said ‘Nan King', and I liked it.

It was as ‘Kitty Butler and Nan King', therefore, that we returned to Camberwell that evening - to renew, and improve upon our success of the night before. It was ‘Kitty Butler and Nan King' that appeared on the posters; and ‘Kitty Butler and Nan King' that began to rise, rather steadily, from middle-billing, to second-billing, to top-of-the-list. Not just at the Camberwell hall but, over the next few months, at all the lesser London halls and - slowly, slowly - some of the West End ones, too ...

 

I cannot say what it was that made the crowds like Kitty and me together, more than they had liked Kitty Butler on her own. It may just have been, as Walter had foreseen, that we were novel: for though in later years we were rather freely imitated, there was certainly no other act like ours in the London halls in 1889. It may also have been - again, as Walter had predicted - that the sight of a
pair
of girls in gentlemen's suits was somehow more charming, more thrilling, more indefinably saucy, than that of a single girl in trousers and topper and spats. We did, I know, go handsomely together -Kitty with her nut-brown crop, me with my head blonde and smooth and gleaming; she raised a little on her one-inch slippers, me in my flat effeminate shoes, my cleverly tailored suits that masked the slender angularity of my frame with girlish curves.

Whatever it was that made the change, however, it worked, and worked extraordinarily. We became not just rather popular, as Kitty had been, but really famous. Our wages rose; we worked three halls a night - four, sometimes - and now, when our brougham was caught in traffic, our driver would yell, ‘I've got Kitty Butler and Nan King in here, due at the Royal, Holborn, in fifteen minutes! Clear a way there, can't you ? - and the other drivers would shift a little to let us through, and smile and raise their hats to the windows as we passed! Now there were flowers for me, as well as for Kitty; now I received invitations to dinner, for requests and autographs, and letters...

It took me weeks to understand that it was really happening, and to me; weeks to let myself believe in it, and to trust the crowd that liked me. But when at last I learned to love my new life, I loved it fiercely. The pleasures of success, I suppose, are rather easy to understand; it was my new
capacity
for pleasure - for pleasure in performance, display and disguise, in the wearing of handsome suits, the singing of ribald songs - that shocked and thrilled me most. I had been content till now to stand in the wings, looking on while Kitty dallied, in the lime-light, with the vast, rumbustious crowd. Now, suddenly, it was I who wooed it, me at whom it gazed in envy and delight. I could not help it: I had fallen in love with Kitty; now,
becoming
Kitty, I fell in love a little with myself. I admired my hair, so neat and so sleek. I adored my legs - my legs which, while they had had skirts about them, I had scarcely had a thought for; but which were, I discovered, rather long and lean and shapely.

I sound vain. I was not - then - and could never have been, while Kitty existed as the wider object of my self-love. The act, I knew, was still all hers. When we sang, it was really she who sang, while I provided a light, easy second. When we danced,
it was she who did the tricky
steps: I only strolled or shuffled at her side. I was her foil, her echo; I was the shadow which, in all her brilliance, she cast across the stage. But, like a shadow, I lent her the edge, the depth, the crucial definition, that she had lacked before.

It was very far from vanity, then, my satisfaction. It was only love; and the better the act became, I thought, the more perfect that love grew. After all, the two things - the act, our love - were not so very different. They had been born together - or, as I liked to think, the one had been born of the other, and was merely its public shape. When Kitty and I had first become sweethearts, I had made her a promise. ‘I will be careful,' I had said - and I had said it very lightly, because I thought it would be easy. I had kept my promise: I never kissed her, touched her, said a loving thing, when there was anyone to glimpse or overhear us. But it was not easy, nor did it become easier as the months passed by; it became only a dreary kind of habit. How
could
it be easy to stand cool and distant from her in the day, when we had spent all night with our naked limbs pressed hot and close together? How could it be easy to veil my glances when others watched, bite my tongue because others listened, when I passed all our private hours gazing at her till my eyes ached of it, calling her every kind of sweet name until my throat was dry? Sitting beside her at supper at Mrs Dendy's, standing near her in the green-room of a theatre, walking with her through the city streets, I felt as though I was bound and fettered with iron bands, chained and muzzled and blinkered. Kitty had given me leave to love her; the world, she said, would never let me be anything to her except her friend.