Tipping the Velvet (17 page)

was, finally, a bubbling cascade of cheers and laughter from I had, in short, found my vocation.

gallery to pit.

Next day, rather appropriately, I got my hair cut off, and The sound affected me like nothing I had ever known changed my name.

before. At once, I remembered the foolish dance that I had The hair I had barbered at a house in Battersea, by the same failed, all day, to learn, and left off leaning on my stick to theatrical hairdresser who cut Kitty's. He worked on me for join Kitty in her stroll before the footlights. I understood, an hour, while she sat and watched; and at the end of that too, what Walter had wanted of us in the wing: as the new time I remember he held a glass to his apron and said song drew to a close I advanced with Kitty to the front of warningly: 'Now, you will squeal when you see it — I 139

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never cropped a girl before who didn't squeal at the first For our debut at Camberwell we had thought that our look,' and I trembled in a sudden panic.

ordinary names would do as well as any, and had been But when he turned the glass to show me, I only smiled to billed by the chairman as 'Kitty Butler and Nancy Astley'.

see the transformation he had made. He had not clipped the Now, however, we were a hit: Walter's manager friend had hair as short as Kitty's, but had left it long and falling, offered us a four-week contract, and needed to know the Bohemian-like, quite to my collar; and here, without the names he should have printed on the posters. We knew we weight of the plait to pull it flat and lank, it sprang into a must keep Kitty's, for the sake of her successes of the past slight, surprising curl. Upon the locks which threatened to half-year; but Walter said 'Astley' was rather too common, tumble over my brow he had palmed a little macassar-oil, and could we think of a better one? I didn't mind, only said which turned them sleek as cat's fur, and gold as a ring.

I should like to keep 'Nan' -since Kitty herself had re-When I fingered them - when I turned and tilted my head -I christened me that; and we took our lunch, in consequence, felt my cheeks grow crimson. The man said then, 'You see, with everybody volunteering names they thought would you will find it queer,' and he showed me how I might wear match it. Tootsie said 'Nan Love', Sims 'Nan Sergeant'.

my severed plait, as Kitty wore hers, to disguise his Percy said, 'Nan Scarlet - no, Nan Silver - no, Nan Gold ..."

barbering.

Every name seemed to offer me some new and marvellous I said nothing; but it was not with regret that I had blushed.

version of myself; it was like standing at the costumier's rail I had blushed because my new, shorn head, my naked neck, and shrugging on the jackets.

felt saucy. I had blushed because - just as I had done when I None, however, seemed to fit - till the Professor tapped the first pulled on a pair of trousers - I had felt myself stir, and table, cleared his throat, and said: 'Nan King'. And although grow warm, and want Kitty. Indeed, I seemed to want her I should like to be able to say - as other artistes do - that more and more, the further into boyishness I ventured.

there was some terribly clever or romantic story behind the Kitty herself, however, though she also smiled when the choosing of my stage-name - that we had opened a special barber displayed me, smiled more broadly when the plait book at a certain place, and found it there; that I had heard was re-affixed. 'That's more like it,' she said, when I stood the word 'King' said in a dream, and quivered at it - I can and brushed my skirts down. 'What a fright you looked in give no better account of the matter than the truth: which short hair and a frock!'

was only that we needed a name, and the Professor said

'Nan King', and I liked it.

Back at Ginevra Road we found Walter waiting for us, and It was as 'Kitty Butler and Nan King', therefore, that we Mrs Dendy dishing up lunch; and it was here that I was returned to Camberwell that evening - to renew, and given a new name, to match my bold new crop.

improve upon our success of the night before. It was 'Kitty Butler and Nan King' that appeared on the posters; and 141

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'Kitty Butler and Nan King' that began to rise, rather Kitty; now I received invitations to dinner, and requests and steadily, from middle-billing, to second-billing, to top-of-autographs, and letters ...

the-list. Not just at the Camberwell hall but, over the next It took me weeks to understand that it was really happening, few months, at all the lesser London halls and - slowly, and to me; weeks to let myself believe in it, and to trust the slowly - some of the West End ones, too . . .

crowd that liked me. But when at last I learned to love my I cannot say what it was that made the crowds like Kitty new life, I loved it fiercely. The pleasures of success, I and me together, more than they had liked Kitty Butler on suppose, are rather easy to understand; it was my new her own. It may just have been, as Walter had foreseen, that capacity for pleasure — for pleasure in performance, we were novel: for though in later years we were rather display and disguise, in the wearing of handsome suits, the freely imitated, there was certainly no other act like ours in singing of ribald songs -that shocked and thrilled me most. I the London halls in 1889. It may also have been - again, as had been content till now to stand in the wings, looking on Walter had predicted - that the sight of a pair of girls in while Kitty dallied, in the lime-light, with the vast, gentlemen's suits was somehow more charming, more rumbustious crowd. Now, suddenly, it was I who wooed it, thrilling, more indefinably saucy, than that of a single girl me at whom it gazed in envy and delight. I could not help in trousers and topper and spats. We did, I know, go it: I had fallen in love with Kitty; now, becoming Kitty, I handsomely together - Kitty with her nut-brown crop, me fell in love a little with myself. I admired my hair, so neat with my head blonde and smooth and gleaming; she raised and so sleek. I adored my legs - my legs which, while they a little on her one-inch slippers, me in my flat effeminate had had skirts about them, I had scarcely had a thought for; shoes, my cleverly tailored suits that masked the slender but which were, I discovered, rather long and lean and angularity of my frame with girlish curves.

shapely.

Whatever it was that made the change, however, it worked, I sound vain. I was not - then - and could never have been, and worked extraordinarily. We became not just rather while Kitty existed as the wider object of my self-love. The popular, as Kitty had been, but really famous. Our wages act, I knew, was still all hers. When we sang, it was really rose; we worked three halls a night - four, sometimes - and she who sang, while I provided a light, easy second. When now, when our brougham was caught in traffic, our driver we danced, it was she who did the tricky steps: I only would yell, 'I've got Kitty Butler and Nan King in here, due strolled or shuffled at her side. I was her foil, her echo; I at the Royal, Holborn, in fifteen minutes! Clear a way there, was the shadow which, in all her brilliance, she cast across can't you?' -and the other drivers would shift a little to let us the stage. But, like a shadow, I lent her the edge, the depth, through, and smile and raise their hats to the windows as the crucial definition, that she had lacked before.

we passed! Now there were flowers for me, as well as for It was very far from vanity, then, my satisfaction. It was only love; and the better the act became, I thought, the more 143

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perfect that love grew. After all, the two things - the act, our these things were not so very different. A double act is love -were not so very different. They had been born always twice the act the audience thinks it: beyond our together - or, as I liked to think, the one had been born of songs, our steps, our bits of business with coins and canes the other, and was merely its public shape. When Kitty and and flowers, there was a private language, in which we held I had first become sweethearts, I had made her a promise. 'I an endless, delicate exchange of which the crowd knew will be careful,' I had said - and I had said it very lightly, nothing. This was a language not of the tongue but of the because I thought it would be easy. I had kept my promise: body, its vocabulary the pressure of a finger or a palm, the I never kissed her, touched her, said a loving thing, when nudging of a hip, the holding or breaking of a gaze, that there was anyone to glimpse or overhear us. But it was not said, You are too slow - you go too fast - not there, but here easy, nor did it become easier as the months passed by; it

— that's good - that's better! It was as if we walked before became only a dreary kind of habit. How could it be easy to the crimson curtain, lay down upon the boards, and kissed stand cool and distant from her in the day, when we had and fondled - and were clapped, and cheered, and paid for spent all night with our naked limbs pressed hot and close it! As Kitty had said, when I had whispered that wearing together? How could it be easy to veil my glances when trousers upon the stage would only make me want to kiss others watched, bite my tongue because others listened, her: 'What a show that would be!' But, that was our show; when I passed all our private hours gazing at her till my only the crowd never knew it. They looked on, and saw eyes ached of it, calling her every kind of sweet name until another turn entirely.

my throat was dry? Sitting beside her at supper at Mrs Well, perhaps there were some who caught glimpses . . .

Dendy's, standing near her in the green-room of a theatre, I have spoken of my admirers. They were girls, for most walking with her through the city streets, I felt as though I part- jolly, careless girls, who gathered at the stage door, was bound and fettered with iron bands, chained and and begged for photographs, and autographs, and gave us muzzled and blinkered. Kitty had given me leave to love flowers. But for every ten or twenty of such girls, there her; the world, she said, would never let me be anything to would be one or two more desperate and more pushing, or her except her friend.

more shy and awkward, than the rest; and in them I Her friend - and her partner on the stage. You will not recognised a certain -something. I could not put a name to believe me, but making love to Kitty - a thing done in it, only knew that it was there, and that it made their interest passion, but always, too, in shadow and in silence, and with in me rather special. These girls sent letters - letters, like an ear half-cocked for the sound of footsteps on the stairs -

their stage door manners, full of curious excesses or making love to Kitty, and posing at her side in a shaft of ellipses; letters that awed, repelled and drew me, all at once.

limelight, before a thousand pairs of eyes, to a script I knew

'I hope you will forgive my writing to say that you are very by heart, in an attitude I had laboured for hours to perfect -

handsome,' wrote one girl; another wrote: 'Miss King, I am 145

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in love with you!' Someone named Ada King wrote to ask if stage in trousers, singing of girls whose eyes I had sent we were cousins. She said: 'I do so admire you and Miss winking, whose hearts I had broken, what did they see? Did Butler, but especially you. Could you I wonder send a they see that - something -that I saw in them?

photograph? I would like to have a picture of you, beside

'They had better not!' said Kitty, when I put my idea to her; my bed ..." The card I sent her was a favourite of mine, a and though she laughed as she said it, the laughter was a picture of Kitty and me in Oxford bags and boaters, in little strained. She didn't like to talk about such things.

which Kitty stood with her hands in her pockets and I She didn't like it, either, when one night in the change-room leaned with my arm through hers, a cigarette between my of a theatre we met a pair of women - a comic singer and fingers. I signed it 'To Ada, from one "King" to another"; her dresser - who, I thought, were rather like ourselves. The and it was very odd to think that it would be pinned to a singer was flashy, and had a frock with spangles on it that wall, or put in a frame, so that unknown girl might gaze at it must be fastened very tightly over her stays. Her maid was while she fastened her frock or lay dreaming.

an older woman in a plain brown dress; I saw her tugging at Then there were other requests, for odder things. Would I the frock, and thought nothing of it. But when she had the send a collar-stud, a button from my suit, a curl of hair?

hooks fastened tight, she leaned and gently blew upon the Would I, on Thursday night - or Friday night - wear a singer's throat, where the power had clogged; and then she scarlet necktie - or a green neck-tie, or a yellow rose in my whispered something to her, and they laughed together with lapel; would I make a special sign, or dance a special step?

their heads very close . . . and I knew, as surely as if they

- for then the writer would see, and know that I had had pasted the words upon the dressing-room wall, that received her note.

they were lovers.

'Throw them away,' Kitty would say when I showed her The knowledge made me blush like a beacon. I looked at these letters. 'They're cracked, those girls, and you mustn't Kitty, and saw that she had caught the gesture, too; her encourage them.' But I knew that the girls were not cracked, eyes, however, were lowered, and her mouth was tight.

as she said; they were only as I had been, a year before - but When the comic singer passed us on her way to the stage, braver or more reckless. That, in itself, impressed me; what she gave me a wink: 'Off to please the public,' she said, and astonished and thrilled me now was the thought that girls her dresser laughed again. When she came back and took might look at me at all - the thought that in every darkened her make-up off, she wandered over with a cigarette and hall there might be one or two female hearts that beat asked for a light; then, as she drew on her fag, she looked exclusively for me, one or two pairs of eyes that lingered, me over. 'Are you going,' she said, 'to Barbara's party, after perhaps immodestly, over my face and figure and suit. Did the show?' I said I didn't know who Barbara was. She they know why they looked? Did they know what they waved her hand: 'Oh, Barbara won't mind. You come along looked for? Above all, when they saw me stride across the with Ella and me: you and your friend.' Here she nodded -