The Passion and the Flower Read online

  “Of course I am, but I can assure you, Hugo, that is not enough. I intend to find out a great deal more and nothing and no one will stop me from becoming acquainted with Lokita.”

  Lord Marston lay back in the carriage and chuckled.

  “I like to watch you when you are tracking down a prey, Ivan, but I have a feeling, although I may be wrong, that this time you will hunt in vain.”

  “God in Heaven!” the Prince remarked. “If any other man had said that to me I would call him a liar, but where you are concerned, Hugo, it is a challenge! How much do you bet that I do not succeed where all others have failed?”

  Lord Marston considered a moment.

  “I am not going to wager you in money, Ivan. That would be too easy for you, but I have a new hunter, a grey that I consider to be superlative. He has an Arab strain in him, of course, but it is his training that has been so exceptional.”

  “Well?” the Prince asked with a smile.

  Lord Marston said slowly,

  “I will wager Kingfisher against one of your finest stallions!”

  “I accept!” the Prince trumpeted. “If we ride tomorrow morning, you shall have a look at Suliman. He is a magnificent animal that cost me more than any other horse I have ever bought. What is more, I intend to keep him.”

  “I shall enjoy riding him in Rotten Row,” Lord Marston said confidently.

  “I am wondering how Lokita will look on Kingfisher!” the Prince retorted.

  Both men laughed and then the Prince said,

  “She is not English, whatever nationality her duenna may be – I would stake my life on that!”

  “I agree with you there,” Lord Marston replied, “and yet her hair is fair.”

  “But her eyes are dark. It is strange that they should be dark when she has fair hair and yet I would swear it was absolutely natural.”

  “It could be nothing else,” Lord Marston said simply “How could she have learnt to dance like that? There is no school that I know of in the whole world that teaches that type of dancing. You are asking the same question that every newspaper in Paris has asked. They have gone into rhapsodies over her and yet for the first time even the most ferrety reporter has found absolutely nothing to relate on her personally.”

  Lord Marston paused to add slowly,

  “They don’t know where she comes from, where she lives, what language she speaks or anything whatever about her!”

  “It’s unbelievable!” the Prince exclaimed. “If you had told me that about any dancer in any country I would not have believed you.”

  “Exactly what I felt myself,” Lord Marston agreed. “I have been to see Lokita four times and each time I have come away astonished that in this sophisticated City, which is a triumph of artificiality, there is something so fundamentally pure that one watches her with one’s heart rather than with one’s eyes.”

  “That is what I felt myself,” the Prince said in a low voice, “but it was more than that, Hugo. That girl spoke to my soul and I swear to you it is something that has never happened to me before!”

  Chapter Two

  The applause vibrated round the auditorium.

  Men and women were on their feet shouting and clapping.

  The noise was thunderous and as Lokita walked into the wings the Stage Manager rushed forward.

  “Take a curtain call, m’mselle. For God’s sake take a call! They’re tearing the place apart!”

  Before Lokita could reply Miss Anderson’s voice came sharply,

  “Certainly not! You know it is part of Mademoiselle’s contract that she should not take curtain calls.”

  As she spoke, she wrapped a woollen shawl around Lokita’s shoulders and drew her away down the passage that led to the dressing rooms.

  “Mon Dieu! C’est incroyable!” the Stage Manager muttered and hurriedly signalled to the orchestra to play something noisy and calm the excited audience.

  Lokita and Miss Anderson climbed the iron stairs to the dressing room she had been allotted on the first floor.

  It was a small square room with a very low ceiling and draped with a light brown cloth. Curtains of the same material hanging from a copper rod made a separate compartment at one end.

  The window opening onto a small courtyard looked onto a blank crumbling wall against which the lights from the dressing room threw yellow squares in the black of the night.

  The room was redolent with the fragrance of flowers that stood everywhere, on the floor, on the dressing table and on the chairs.

  There were baskets, bouquets and garlands, all carrying the cards of their donors and all betraying an extravagance that was characteristic of Paris.

  As Miss Anderson closed the door behind Lokita, she said,

  “You were very good tonight, my dear.”

  Lokita gave a little sigh almost as if she awoke from a dream.

  “I felt Papa near me,” she replied, “and I thought that he was pleased with me.”

  Miss Anderson knew that it was through her conviction of this that she had mesmerised the audience and left hardly a dry eye in the whole theatre.

  But she had no wish to make Lokita feel self-conscious about what she had portrayed on the stage and she was aware that the secret of her success lay in the fact that immersed in her own imagination she danced what she was feeling.

  Aloud she said simply,

  “I am sure that your father would have been very proud of you.”

  “I hope so,” Lokita murmured with a little catch in her breath. “He was closer to me tonight – than he has ever been before.”

  She moved through the forest of flowers behind the curtain to take off her Grecian robe and slip into the clothes that were hanging there.

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Who is it?” Miss Anderson asked sharply.

  “More flowers for M’mselle Lokita!” the pageboy answered.

  She opened the door, took a basket from him and put it down on the only space available, which was in the centre of the dressing table.

  He waited and she knew that he expected to be tipped. She handed him some small coins and after he had thanked her he walked away whistling.

  “More flowers?” Lokita asked.

  Miss Anderson glanced at the basket that she had just set down.

  “White orchids.”

  “How lovely!”

  Lokita came from behind the curtain tying the sash she wore round the tiny waist of her plain white gown, which had only a suspicion of a bustle at the back.

  “Star orchids!” she exclaimed. “Andy, they are beautiful!”

  “You have plenty of flowers at home,” Miss Anderson said. ‘These can go with the rest to the hospital.”

  “No, I think I would like to keep these. They are so beautiful, more beautiful than anything else I have ever been given.”

  The basket certainly seemed unique. There was something fragile and classical about it unlike the flamboyant offerings that stood about the dressing room.

  Most of these were decorated with huge bows of satin ribbon and in contrast to the delicacy of the white orchids they seemed garish and vulgar.

  “I shall take these home with me,” Lokita decided. “I wonder who sent them.”

  She looked into the centre of the basket as she spoke and then gave a little exclamation.

  “There is something else here, Andy!”

  “What is it?” Miss Anderson asked.

  Lokita drew out a small white velvet box. Beside it was a card and as she handed the box to Miss Anderson she read aloud,

  “Prince Ivan Volkonski.”

  Miss Anderson made an exclamation that was half a cry and at the same time she opened the jewel box.

  Inside was a butterfly set in blue-white diamonds!

  There was no need to read the name on the box to know that it had come from Oscar Massin, who created jewellery that could compare with the finest work of the eighteenth century.

  His jewel, ‘lilac blossom
’, which had been bought by the Empress and was on show at the Exhibition was a triumph of the jeweller’s art.

  Massin was famous for his jewelled flowers and ears of corn and only the previous week Lokita had admired in his window a spray of lilies-of-the-valley that had seemed to shine with an iridescent light.

  Miss Anderson stood staring at the butterfly that glittered in the gaslights in the dressing room and seemed almost to flutter.

  “It really is lovely!” Lokita said looking at it too.

  Miss Anderson shut the case with a snap.

  “And an insult!” she said harshly.

  Lokita raised her eyes and there was a question in them.

  She had very expressive eyes of deep green and their emerald hue seemed to be flecked with gold.'

  Her dark lashes gave them a mystery that made them at times appear to hold the secrets of a forest pool.

  “An insult!” Miss Anderson repeated.

  “Perhaps the Prince did not mean it to be one,” Lokita responded softly.

  “I know exactly what he meant,” Miss Anderson replied grimly. “Put on your cloak. Pull the hood right over your face. We must leave immediately!”

  She spoke so commandingly that Lokita obeyed, putting on an enveloping cloak of deep blue velvet and pulling the hood over her face as she had been told, so that she was practically unidentifiable.

  As they left the dressing room, she gave one last look at the star orchids standing on the table and only as she went down the passage did she realise that she still held in her hand the card with the Prince’s name on it.

  Miss Anderson went ahead down the iron staircase and along the corridor crowded with actors and actresses moving towards the stage in readiness for the next act.

  The girls were laughing and giggling together and the men fidgeting with their elaborate costumes and their wigs.

  From the front of the house came the sound of the orchestra playing stridently and inevitably there were the raised voices of two people snarling at each other and losing their tempers over some incident that had happened on stage.

  Miss Anderson pushed her way through with Lokita just behind her and they reached the comparative quiet of the stage door.

  Only as they did so did they see a tall elegant man come in through the door.

  He wore his top hat at an angle on his dark head and a cloak lined with red satin swung from his shoulders.

  In the buttonhole of his evening coat there was not the usual gardenia that was the dernier cri amongst gentlemen of fashion but a star-shaped orchid.

  Miss Anderson turned back, seized Lokita by the arm and pulled her into the shadow of a doorway.

  “Mademoiselle Lokita is in her dressing room,” they heard the gentleman say.

  He had a deep resonant voice, Lokita noticed, and she thought, peeping at him from the darkness, that he was the most magnificent man she had ever seen in her whole life.

  Her father had been good-looking and she had always loved seeing him in evening dress with his spotless white shirt and his tight-fitting long-tailed evening coat.

  But this stranger wore his clothes with an air that was somehow regal and she thought too that his face, although not English, was proud, aristocratic and at the same time exceedingly attractive.

  “You sent my flowers to Mademoiselle?” the Prince asked the Stage Door Keeper.

  As he spoke, there was the glimpse of a golden louis passing from hand to hand.

  “They went upstairs a few minutes ago, Monsieur le Prince.”

  Lokita gave a little start.

  Now she knew who the stranger was! He was the Prince who had sent her the star-shaped orchids and the diamond butterfly that Miss Anderson still held in her hand.

  “Dressing room No. 29, monsieur,” the Stage Door Keeper told him.

  The Prince nodded an acknowledgement, then he turned and passed Lokita and Miss Anderson in the shadows without seeing them, walking swiftly down the now empty passage towards the iron staircase that they had just descended.

  No sooner was he out of sight than Miss Anderson walked to the box where the Stage Door Keeper sat.

  “When His Highness returns,” she said in a voice of steel, “hand him this and tell him that Mademoiselle Lokita considers it an insult!”

  She slapped the white velvet box down in front of the man as she spoke.

  Then, as Lokita opened her lips to protest, she found herself hurried out of the stage door and onto the pavement outside.

  The gas lamps revealed a long line of fiacres with their skinny horses waiting patiently for the performance to end.

  Miss Anderson helped Lokita into the nearest one, gave the cocher the address and they drove off without anyone observing their departure.

  It was too early for the crowd of gentlemen who waited for the chorus girls or the stage-struck women who wanted to see their idols offstage.

  “I feel that was rather rude, Andy,” Lokita pointed out as they drove away.

  “One has to be rude to those sort of people.”

  “The Prince is very handsome.”

  “Which doubtless accounts for his reputation!” Miss Anderson remarked sourly.

  “You know about him, Andy?” Lokita asked. ‘Tell me who he is. You know how interested I am in anything about Russia.”

  “There is good and bad in every country,” Miss Anderson replied, “and Prince Ivan Volkonski, thank goodness, is not typical of Imperial Russia.”

  “He is important?”

  “His family is. His mother was a Romanov.”

  “Then he is related to the Czar.”

  “A cousin, I believe, but that is no reason for you to be interested in him. When it is less crowded than it is at the moment, I will take you to see the Russian Pavilion at the Exhibition.”

  “I am longing to do that,” Lokita answered, “but how long have we to wait?”

  “The Exhibition was only opened on the 1st of April. At the moment, according to the newspapers, it is crowded to stupefaction. It will not be closed until November. There is plenty of time for you to see everything without being torn to pieces.”

  There was a little silence and then Lokita said,

  “Tell me more about Prince Ivan Volkonski.”

  “He is of no interest to you.”

  “But he is Russian! Oh, Andy, do you think I shall ever meet any Russians, except, of course, dear Serge?”

  Miss Anderson did not reply and after a moment Lokita added,

  “I want more books to read about St. Petersburg and Moscow. It will be amusing now to see if I can find the Volkonski name in them.”

  “I have told you. Forget him,” Miss Anderson replied harshly.

  “But why? Why?”

  “Because I say so!”

  Lokita laughed and it was a very musical sound.

  “Oh, Andy, you used to say that when I was a child. You forget I am now eighteen and grown up.”

  “All the more reason for me to take care of you,” Miss Anderson parried.

  Now there was a softness in her voice that had not been there before.

  “You have always done that, Andy dear, and often I wonder what I would do without you.”

  She was not aware that in the expression on the face of the woman sitting beside her there was a fear that always lurked at the back of her mind.

  Aloud Miss Anderson suggested,

  “Tomorrow after you have ridden in the Bois de Boulogne we might go driving outside Paris. I know you like being in the country.”

  Lokita was astute enough to realise that she was being offered a treat to take her mind off the Prince, but aloud she answered,

  “That would be lovely, Andy, but I think Madame Albertini is coming to give me a lesson.”

  “To my mind her lessons are a waste of time,” Miss Anderson said, the sharp note back in her voice. “There is nothing more Madame can teach you, as both you and she are well aware.”

  “But we owe her so much. It was through
her that I found this engagement in the theatre and the enormous salary they are now paying me.”

  “Every time we go to that place it takes years off my life,” Miss Anderson grumbled, as if she spoke to herself. “I cannot think what your father would have said if he knew.”

  “He does know,” Lokita said very quietly, “and when I felt him near me tonight I was so sure that he understood.”

  She spoke with such complete conviction that Miss Anderson did not reply.

  They drove in silence until, having passed up the Champs-Élysées and travelled on for some distance, they came on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne to a small house set in a garden that was filled with trees.

  It was small, grey and so symmetrical with its wooden shutters that it looked like a doll’s house.

  Lokita stepped out and opening the iron gate ran up the minute drive that led to the front door.

  Even as she reached it, the door opened and an elderly maid with a starched white cap and apron stood waiting for her.

  “It was a success, m’mselle?” she asked smiling.

  “A great success, Marie! I never heard the audience make such a noise.”

  “The newspapers will sing your praises again tomorrow,” Marie said with an unmistakable expression of admiration in her eyes.

  Lokita, however, was not listening.

  She took off her velvet cloak, laid it on a chair in the tiny hall and then walked into the salon ahead of Miss Anderson who stopped to speak to Marie.

  Quickly, with her back to the door, Lokita slipped the Prince’s card, which she still held in her hand, down the front of her gown.

  She could feel the cardboard hard against her breasts and she wondered why she wished to keep it.

  Then told herself that it was because it was Russian and anything to do with Russia was very close to her heart.

  The salon was fragrant with the scent of flowers. They were not the stiff, exotic hot-house flowers that had filled her dressing room, but flowers from the garden and from the countryside where she and Miss Anderson went for their drives.

  As she moved across the room, Lokita touched a blossom of white lilac that stood in a vase on a side table and then bent her head to sniff its subtle perfume.