CHAPTER NINE

Nellie Lovelace always felt a special energy sweeping through her at the close of an evening’s performance. It was as if the audience’s laughter and delighted applause were a kind of electricity, jolting her awake and making her feel like dancing, a boost that was almost always strong enough to keep her going until the next performance. In fact, it had begun to seem to Nellie that she pretty much lived from one performance to another, the time in between a monotonous stretch of gray humdrum when nothing of interest happened. Her life was on the stage and the stage was what she lived for.

Tonight, however, she had the feeling that her life was about to change, for as she took her final curtain, a little brown-skinned boy, dressed in red satin and wearing the turban of an Indian potentate, leapt lightly onto the stage and thrust a gigantic bouquet of roses into her arms. “Compl’ments of Mr. London,” he lisped, bowing so deeply that his turban touched the stage.

And then, returning to her dressing room, she found it actually banked with flowers, their scent so strong that she could scarcely catch her breath. And there was Mr. London himself lounging in the open door, dressed in smart formal attire, a silk hat under one arm. She pulled in her breath at the sight of the flowers and at the sight of him, for he was even more striking than she had remembered, and there was a crooked smile on his lips and an admiring glint in his daring dark eyes, fringed by marvelous long lashes.

“You were magnificent, Miss Lovelace.” He grinned and waved expansively at the flowers. “A small thanks for the sheer pleasure of watching you perform.” He paused. “I should very much like to invite you to dinner.”

“And I should be pleased to accept,” Nellie said eagerly, although some of her gaiety evaporated, as she realized from his flushed face and the easiness of his gesture that Mr. London was already a little drunk. But just a little, she told herself, as she slipped behind a screen and quickly exchanged her costume for a close-fitting, low-cut gown of garnet velvet that showed her voluptuous figure and smooth white shoulders to advantage, adding a matching fur-trimmed velvet cape. Anyway, men who drank too much were among the hazards of the acting profession, and one learned to manage them, if one wanted to be invited to dinner.

Nellie’s gaiety was fully restored by the time they got into the waiting four-wheeler, for they were going, Mr. London told her with a certain careless flair, to the Carlton. The Carlton! Nellie’s admirers had taken her to some of the best restaurants in the City, but not yet to the Carlton, and the anticipation made her breath come faster. She settled into the leather seat with a shiver of delight and gave herself over to the pleasure of a late-night ride through the streets of London.

The daytime city might be gritty and grimy, but at night it became a glittering fairyland. A misty fog hung like a diaphanous curtain over the streets, the starry gaslights shimmered on the damp pavement, and the arc lamps shone like haloed moons. The uncurtained windows of brilliantly-lit salons gave glimpses of handsomely-dressed high-spirited pleasure-seekers of all ranks, and strains of music floated through the open doors. Heedless of the misty damp, men in silk hats and women in evening gowns tripped lightly along the sidewalks in front of gaily-decked shop windows, and the streets were crowded curb to curb with bustling black carriages and sleek hansom cabs, with here and there a shiny motorcar.

“Quite a city,” Mr. London remarked, pursing his lips. “Not up to New York ’s mark, of course,” he added judiciously, “or even Frisco, which is still a bit raw. But quite a city nevertheless.”

Nellie felt at a disadvantage, since she had not been to New York or San Francisco. But she was stung by the condescension in his tone and observed tartly that many people seemed to prefer London to any city in the world. She softened her remark with a sideways smile, though, and the comment, “From the East End to the Carleton-you’re seeing quite a good deal of the City, Mr. London. The writing is going well, I hope?”

They talked about Mr. London’s new book, then, which he had described to her at length the other afternoon at tea at the Palmers’. He said he had spent the day doing research-tramping the docks, talking to dockworkers, and taking notes about their awful working conditions, as well as any number of photographs-and he gave her a detailed description of the dens and dives, as he called them, that he had explored. He had been glad to return to the Palmers’, where he could get a hot bath and change out of what he called his “slum costume” before coming out for the evening. He was writing steadily, he added with a conscious pride, working from notes he took on his expeditions into the East End and from some documents the Socialists had provided him, figures and statistics and the like. He expected to finish the book, which he was calling People of the Abyss, before he returned to New York.

“People of the Abyss?” Nellie repeated, not sure that she liked the sound of the title.

“People of the pit,” Mr. London said. He shrugged, his dark eyes glinting. “Hell, if you like that better.”

“Well, of course, some of Whitechapel is very bad,” Nellie conceded. “There’s no denying that. But I lived there myself for a time, and I-”

“Then you understand exactly what I’m talking about,” London said. He slipped an arm around her shoulders. “Now, Miss Lovelace, let’s talk about pleasanter things. You were a vision tonight, up there on that stage. The way you moved, I couldn’t keep my eyes off you.” His glance dropped to her breasts, and his lips to her mouth, forcibly. Nellie was decidedly relieved when the carriage jolted to a stop in front of the Carleton. Mr. London pulled back as a liveried valet opened the door.

And then they were entering the Carleton, and Nellie found herself surrounded by a wonderland of plush carpets, soft lights and music, sweet-scented flowers on the tables, and green palms in every corner. They were shown to a table covered by snowy damask linen and set with sparkling crystal and elegant china, where they quickly agreed to call each other Jack and Nellie, then lingered for a very long time over a lavish supper of rare roast duck (Jack’s favorite) and several bottles of Liebfraumilch (another of his favorites). Afterward, they floated (at least, that’s how Nellie remembered it) into a private lounge, where they sat together on a velvet settee with their coffees and liqueurs and cigarettes.

Jack was a marvelous conversationalist, as one might expect of a famous adventure writer, and the words flowed out of him in a wild torrent. He had sailed before the mast on the last of the seal-hunters to leave San Francisco Bay, he said, and felt “absolutely exalted” when he stood at the wheel of the wildly careering schooner, guiding it through a maelstrom of waves. “When I have done such a thing,” he said expansively, “I glow all over. Every fiber of me thrills with it.”

Nellie started to say that she felt exactly the same way when she was on the stage, but he was hurrying on to tell her about how he had nearly lost his life among the icebergs of the Bering Sea, and while she was still gasping at the brutal dangers of that desolate scene, he began to describe the harrowing winters he had spent searching for gold in the Klondike, where he had learned to love the loud, clear call of wolves in the echoing wilderness. She had barely transformed him in her mind from sailor and seal-hunter to gold-seeker, when he was describing how he had hitched his way right across the United States in a railway boxcar, and then had only just missed being elected Mayor of Oakland, California-in fact, he would have been elected if he hadn’t run on the Socialist ticket, because Socialists weren’t quite the thing in America just yet.