Death of a Beauty Queen (2 page)

What was he doing there, she wondered? Anyhow, she had the money; and what did it matter if his glance beat upon hers with a hint of a force before which that of her beauty was as that of ice before fire? With an effort, but only with an effort, she averted her gaze.

In the wings, Mr Sargent, owner – under his bankers of course – of the cinema, and organizer of this Beauty Contest, with its prize of a film engagement, that had moved all Brush Hill to its depths, was beckoning to her to come off now the cheering was dying down, and Martin, the timekeeper, whose job it was to note with a stop-watch the duration of the applause each competitor earned, said to him: ‘You'll need a crowbar, Mr Sargent, to prise that girl off.'

‘She's a winner all right,' Sargent answered. ‘They're beginning clapping again.'

‘Asked 'em to, she did,' observed Martin; and added dispassionately: ‘Some of the rest of 'em aren't so dusty. Lilian Ellis, for one – that comes on next.' Then he said: ‘Someone told me Paul Irwin was in front.'

‘Irwin? Councillor Irwin?' Sargent repeated, startled. ‘Why, what's he snooping round for, the old killjoy? Wanting to make more mischief?'

‘His boy's behind,' Martin explained. ‘Young Leslie – sweet on this girl, they say, and likely old man Paul thought he would have a look at her.'

‘Half the young fools in the place are sweet on her,' growled the manager. ‘If it's only that – she's turned him down anyhow. I'll go and have a word with the old man, though,' he added, looking uneasy again.

For Paul Irwin, a member of the borough council, was no friend to cinemas, or, for that matter, to any other form of public entertainment, and had fought hard to get the Brush Hill cinemas closed on Sundays – indeed it was for that purpose he had been elected to the council to represent a group holding certain strict old-fashioned ideas. For Mr Irwin's powers and influence the cinema owner had considerable respect, and he hoped sincerely the old campaign was not going to be reopened.

Again he beckoned to the girl on the stage to come off, and again she took no notice, but, with a bow and a smile to right and left, appeared rather to invite renewed applause. Yet her glance that stabbed so keenly from under her half-closed eyes was again upon that tall and rigid figure of the man of whom Sargent and Martin had just been speaking.

‘Well, I don't care,' she was telling herself. ‘He can do what he likes – it's enough to pay my fare to Hollywood, and I can start to-morrow if I like.'

In the wings, Martin said to Sargent:

‘Well, you've got to get her off somehow or we shall be here all night – there's Lord knows how many of 'em waiting their turn.'

Sargent nodded, and walked out on the stage. He bowed to the audience, who stopped applauding, a little puzzled by his unexpected appearance. He bowed to Caroline, who understood it very well, and who turned on him angry eyes that did not harmonize too well with her smiling lips, and then he took her hand.

‘Got to give the others a chance, you know, my dear,' he said to her, in an undertone, as he conducted her off the stage to a fresh round of applause.

If Miss Caroline Mears had ever heard of that celebrated retort: ‘
Je ne vois pas la nécessité
,' she would probably have quoted it now – at any rate it very accurately represented her sentiments. As it was she said nothing, and consoled herself with the reflection that she had managed to stop on the stage longer than any of her rivals and so would probably be best remembered when it came to the voting.

‘Lilian Ellis next,' said Martin, in a loud voice. He was slightly bored with the whole business, and, besides, he knew Mrs Martin was keeping hot for him a nice plate of fried fish and chips. ‘Now where's she got to?' he demanded wearily.

‘I'm here,' a small voice answered, as there came forward – though looking more than half-inclined to run for it – a girl who had been standing and shivering and panicking in a corner close by, waiting for the summons that had seemed so long in coming, while the courage she had with pain and grief screwed up to sticking point oozed slowly, surely away, till now very little indeed of it was left her.

She was tall, too; nearly as tall as the magnificent Caroline herself, though built on much less generous lines – ‘scraggy' was in fact the description Caroline had done her best to broadcast of her – and she was as dark as Caroline was fair, with very large dark brown eyes and dark rippling hair. Her features were a little on the small side, though finely moulded and in perfect proportion, and, if it was the beauty of the soft radiance of her eyes that generally attracted attention first, a minor beauty she could equally have boasted was the perfection of her teeth. Their regular and pearly whiteness flashed like a ray of light through her rare smile, but unfortunately she had never learnt the trick of showing them to advantage. Her lips were generally pressed firmly together to express the resolution and distrust a hard, unlucky life had taught her, though it may be her smile was all the more captivating when it came because it so seldom lit up the gravity of her young face. At the moment she was perhaps hardly looking her best, for her nervousness was palpable, and had induced a slight perspiration, while a chilly draught, blowing straight into the corner where she had been waiting, had resulted in a certain unfortunate redness of the nose. Now, as she moved forward in answer to Martin's summons, she and Caroline came face to face, and, with real admiration, Lilian whispered:

‘You looked lovely. They did clap, didn't they?' Caroline's glance flashed over the other girl and recognized a dangerous rival. There was, it had to be acknowledged, something attractive, something in an odd contradictory way both appealing and compelling, about her. Feature by feature, item by item, Caroline was confident of her own superiority – with the possible exception of those lustrous teeth silly little Lilian had luckily no idea how to use to advantage. Not that Caroline was dissatisfied with her own, polished and shining and large and strong, real ‘ivory castles' of the advertisement that could crack a nut with ease but, if hers were ‘ivory castles,' Lilian's were like two rows of well-matched pearls, and added their share to that rather inexplicable attractiveness the child certainly possessed. People were such fools, too – Lilian's smile might win them to give her an applause to rival that just now awarded to Caroline. Like summer lightning across the sea all this flashed through her mind – though intensely felt rather than clearly thought – and showed her dream of Hollywood endangered. She said:

‘Disqualified – isn't it awful?'

Lilian looked bewildered.

‘Disqualified,' Caroline repeated, in a rapid whisper. ‘1 stopped too long on the stage – against the rules. You've got to run away just as soon as the clapping starts, or they disqualify you. Mind you're careful.'

‘Oh, I will – oh, I am sorry,' Lilian exclaimed, in consternation at such a catastrophe. ‘Oh, they won't really–'

‘Now then, Miss Ellis, stage waiting,' Martin bawled. ‘Come along there – got to finish some time to-night,' he protested, thinking longingly of fish and chips – so much more to a practical, middle-aged man than all the lovely ladies that are or ever were.

Lilian found herself on the stage. This surprised her, for she had no idea how she had got there. The one clear thought in her mind was that she must be careful not to get disqualified. If that happened she would lose her chance of getting the job as permanent mannequin at the Brush Hill Bon Marche she had applied for, and had been as good as promised if she met with any success to-night. Mr Ginn, the staff manager, was in front to-night, she knew, though of course it was quite impossible to distinguish him in that sea of white faces, all intimidatingly staring. She could only hope he thought she was satisfactory, for a job at the Brush Hill Bon Marche meant a lot to a girl with a fretful, invalid mother to support as well as two small brothers of inconceivable appetites and an absolutely bewildering habit of growing out of their clothes almost as soon as they put them on. At any rate, the one thing she had to be careful of was not to risk poor Carrie's fate and get herself disqualified.

No one was clapping as yet as they had clapped the unlucky Caroline. In point of fact, as she had only just stepped into their view, the spectators had as yet hardly had time, but to her it seemed that she had been standing there a hundred years or so. But, if they were not clapping, they were all, as she perceived to her extreme astonishment, staring their very hardest. It was rather awful. It needed courage to stand there and endure that. And she had never had much courage, only temper – as her mother had found out once or twice when she had pushed complaining a little bit too far, or those two boys of whom a shameful legend of her youth proclaimed that she had chased them with a dinner-knife all down the street merely because they had been having some fun with a lame kitten. Indeed in the school she had been attending at the time the shocking story was still repeated of how, when a horrified mistress asked her what she had been intending to do with the dinner-knife, she responded firmly:

‘I was going to chop them up.'

But, in an emergency like this, temper and fierce display of dinner-knives were no use, only firm courage was required, and, above all, care to run no risk of sharing Caroline's unhappy fate of disqualification.

The clapping started, a little hesitatingly, for no one was quite so sure about this thin and nervous-looking girl as they had been about the flamboyant, self-confident Caroline. But the clapping continued – it even grew in volume. Bewildered, Lilian listened. It seemed to her to have gone on for long, and vividly she remembered Caroline's warning. If she were not careful she would share the same unhappy fate. To avoid it, one had to run, it seemed, when the clapping started. And now it had started.

She ran.

The clapping stopped. Someone laughed. Laughter's infectious, and this audience was in a happy mood. It spread; it ran like the wind from one to another. A gust of uproarious merriment followed Lilian as she fled, till one might have thought it blew her from the stage. The judging committee in the big stage box shared in the general hilarity to such an extent that most of its members forgot even to mark her card. Mr Sargent said:

‘The little fool's ruined her chance all right.' He added reflectively: ‘I thought at first she was going to be the high spot of the evening.'

Martin called:

‘Next, please; next number.' He said to Lilian as, bewildered and breathless, she paused near by, ‘What in blazes made you play the giddy goat like that?'

Now, on the stage, there followed each other a somewhat monotonous procession of pretty girls, for so variable is the mind of man that, strange as it must seem, even pretty girls may come in time to bore. But this profound truth is not one that as yet has come to be recognized by the producers of musical comedies who still believe that true joy lies in endless repetition.

To each competitor in succession, however, good- natured spectators gave a round of applause that had generally a spear-head of enthusiasm in the one special spot in the auditorium where had assembled the friends and admirers of the girl at the moment apparent. But near where stood the silent, grim, watchful personage the keen eyes of Caroline Mears had picked out, whose presence, too, had been mentioned by Martin to Mr Sargent, such clapping and applause seemed always soon to die away. It was as though his mere presence – upright, immovable, and stern – spread a kind of unease around, acting as a check and a restraint.

‘Blooming block of ice,' Sargent muttered; and if ‘blooming' is not the most appropriate adjective to apply to a lump of ice, neither is it the one that the proprietor – under the bankers – of the cinema actually employed.

He had come round to the front of the house, and, having paused only to rebuke an attendant he found flirting in the corridors when she ought to have been selling ices in the auditorium, he was now, from behind a curtain hanging over a door at the back, regarding Councillor Paul Irwin with marked disfavour.

‘Even chances he's going to start another agitation – bring it up at the next council meeting, perhaps, and tell them a beauty contest's a public scandal,' he thought ruefully.

‘Well, I can tell him his precious boy has got the chuck from Caroline if that'll smooth him down, but I wish the old blighter would keep his nose out of the place.' He went through the door to where the councillor was standing. ‘Well, Mr. Irwin, sir,' he said warmly, ‘it's an unexpected honour to see you here to-night – a real pleasure.'

Paul Irwin turned his eyes slowly upon the other. They were strange eyes – deep-sunk and vivid – burning, if the expression may be allowed, with a kind of cold fire, as it is said that in extreme frost uncovered steel and glowing embers will each burn the incautious hand that touches them. His actual age was sixty, but he could easily have passed for a vigorous forty, so apparent were the strength and energy still showing in every gesture he made, every word he spoke. In his hair and trim beard – he was probably the only bearded man in the audience – not a single grey hair showed as yet, and, from each side of his great hooked nose, his deep-set eyes glowed with a kind of restrained and fierce energy that well held the passing years at bay. They gave him, indeed, with their far-off look as if they searched for distant, hidden things, something of the air of a watching, patient eagle waiting upon heights inaccessible to all but itself. The lines of the close-shut mouth were straight, as though a ruler had drawn them, and were pressed together as by a constant effort of the will. As a young man he must have been unusually handsome; now, in his maturity rather than his age, for of age his vigour gave no hint, he had a daunting and formidable air that came very largely from the impression of concealed tension that he gave, as if the very stillness of his attitude, the marked impassivity of pose and features alike, suggested some coiled spring the merest touch might release into fierce vehemence of action. He was dressed in well-worn clothes that were even a little shabby, but with a shabbiness that seemed of indifference rather than of poverty, and he had on a broad-brimmed hat of black felt – his one little affectation in dress, for no one, summer or winter, wet or fine, had ever seen him wearing any other kind. He said now, speaking very quietly, but still with that manner of force in reserve that seemed natural to the man: