The Spring of the Tiger Read online

  Looking back over the sequence of events which brought me to that house of brooding myster}', of sinister undercurrents and disturbing echoes and an awareness of encroaching peril, I pause to marvel at the ingenuity of youth and inexperience, and how, as a girl in that other house, conveniently close to the theaters, it never entered my head to question the unconventional way of life into which I had been born.

  I remember waiting at dusk, watching from my window, for the lamplighter to come and light the lamps in the square, and waking in the mornings to the street sounds—the clop clop of horses' hoofs on the road, the sudden laugh of a servant girl exchanging pleasantries with the milkman as the jugs were filled, the scrubbing of doorsteps and the polishing of brass, all of which had to be done quietly and discreetly so that the gentry could be led to believe—if they ever thought about it—that that which was necessary to their comfort was brought about by magic.

  It was imperative in our house in Denton Square that we were especially quiet in the mornings because of my mother. She rarely rose until noon and the reason was that she would not have gone to bed until the early hours of the morning. Her rest was important for she was the center of the household. Our existence depended upon her, and her moods determined the atmosphere of the house. When she was gay we were very very gay; and when she was morbid or depressed, as she sometimes was, we moved about on tiptoe, talking in whispers, apprehensive, rather like, I said to Meg Marlow, people Hving on the edge of a volcano waiting for the eruption. I was constantly reading and had just learned of the destruction of Pompeii.

  Meg said: "We have to make allowances. It's her art." It was true that when she was not "resting" her art took her to the theater every night and some afternoons. It was those rest periods which I called times of threatened eruption—though it was not her anger we feared as much as her moody depression. One blessing was that none of her moods lasted long.

  "I'll have you remember who she is." That was what Meg always said if any of us showed a lessening of our adoration.

  My mother was Irene Rushton—at least that was her professional name. She was in fact Irene Ashington, wife of Ralph Ashington, whom she had left when I was two years old.

  Meg, my mother's dresser, lady's maid, part-time cook and devoted slave made me proud and happy when she told me how my mother had walked out. "She could stand it no more. The miracle is that she brought you with her. That was something, that was. A young child wasn't going to be much use to her career, was it? And she brought you with her!"

  It became the catch phrase of my youth. "She brought you with her."

  "Mind you," Meg once qualified, "it might have been better if she hadn't."

  I was puzzled, wondering where I should have been if she had left me behind.

  "Some outlandish place," Meg told me when I pestered her. "She should never have gone. No life for the likes of her, it wasn't. Hot . . . and not like England at all. Creepy crawlies everywhere. Spiders! Ugh!"

  Meg had a horror of spiders. She had once stayed in the country when my mother was on tour and there had been a spider in her bed. Meg never tired of recounting the horror of that occasion. "Give me London," she always finished up with, as though there was a law banning spiders from the capital.

  "So she came home and brought you with her. Of course she was a name before she went away and there were managers who were ready to welcome her back."

  "And she brought me with herl"

  "I Icnew that she never regretted it. She told me once: 'I always like coming home and it feels like coming home while I've got my little Siddons to come home to.'" My name was in fact Sarah Siddons Ashington, for she had called me after that member of her profession whom she considered its greatest ornament: Sarah Siddons.

  When she was in a good mood she called me Little Siddons. Sometimes that gave me a qualm of apprehension for I feared she planned to get me following her to the footlights, a profession for which, I was sure, I had no aptitude.

  Meg could tell me little about my mother's life during her marriage, for she was not with her then. Meg had been her dresser before her marriage and immediately resumed her old post when my mother came back to England. There had been a three-year interval.

  "I said she should never have gone," said Meg. "Marriage yes . . . but not that sort of marriage. I used to reckon it would be someone with a mansion in the country and a nice town house and maybe a title to go with it. Now that would have been nice. But then she goes for this Ralph Ashington. . . . Good family, mind you. Big place in the country. No town house though . . . only this whatever it was in foreign parts. She don't talk about it much, and that's a sign. 'And this is Irene Rush ton,' I said to myself. Well, when you think how it might have turned out ... I wouldn't have been all that surprised at a duke . . . and then Mr. Ralph Ashington, if you please, planting tea or something in the back of beyond."

  "He's my father."

  "Oh yes, he's your father all right." She looked at me distastefully. "And not a young man either. A widower. Well, how could she!"

  "You saw him, Meg? You saw my father?"

  "Twice. Once at the stage door, once in her dressing room. There was a regular retinue of them. He was the last I would have put my money on. But she made up her mind . . . quick . . . pronto . . . just like that. You know her. Tm going to,' she says. And there she is like a wild horse with the bit between her teeth . . . running on without looking where she's going."

  "He must have been very attractive because from all those dukes and things she chose him."

  "Never could understand it. Never could to this day. Well, she soon found her mistake, didn't she. 'No regrets/ she always said. 'After all he gave me Little Siddons.'"

  I used to get Meg to tell me the story over and over again just to hear the last line.

  The other member of our household vi'as Janet, who was Meg's sister. Janet would not have stayed if it had not been for Meg. She was the opposite of her sister—dour, but very efficient. She didn't approve of the household. She had been used to good service, she reminded us, where they kept a butler, footman and a host of maids, besides their own carriage. One day, she maintained, she and Meg were going to live with their sister Ethel, who had a nice little place in the country where she kept fowls and sold fresh eggs, vegetables and fruit, and she wanted to run her house as a hostel for travelers. She needed her sisters to help her before she could start.

  "Janet would be off hke a shot," said Meg, "but I could never bring myself to leave my lady and Janet can't bring herself to leave me. So here we are."

  That was our household—fust the four of us—Janet, Meg, my mother and myself. There was, of course. Uncle Everard, but he did not exactly live with us. He stayed now and then; and he and my mother loved each other very much.

  "They ought to be married," commented Meg, "and they would but for him and her"

  Him was my father, who was still married to my mother, and Her was Everard's wife, to whom he was still married. These two vague figures stood between us and a regular household of which Janet would have approved, apart from the fact that it would still have been too humble to please her entirely. Meg was less conventional.

  "This is Irene Rushton," she said. "It's different with theater folk. You get to understand them . . . living in the theater."

  My mother did not want me to go away to school. If I did she would have no Little Siddons to come home to. It was necessary, of course, that I should be educated so there was in a way another member of our household. This was Toby Mander, a young graduate just down from Oxford who would have been an actor if he had had any talent. "One of the multitude," my mother called him. "Dear Little Siddons, they are legion. They have a passion for the theater. They are t
he Not Quite brigade. They can almost act, but not quite. They can almost write plays, but not quite. With the right sort of talent they might direct or produce, but they haven't got it. . . not quite." Toby was one of those. He was in love with my mother. "And that," commented Meg, "is a complaint as common as measles. They come too near and get infected, you might say. Not many people have it as strong as your mother."

  "You mean the ability to infect."

  "That's it. I never saw anyone with as much as your mother . . . and I've spent a lifetime in the theater."

  "It could be said to be endemic to the theater," I said, for I had a passion for long words at this stage and was constantly reading the dictionary, discovering new ones and trying them out. "Like beriberi in Africa," I added.

  "You and your long words," sniffed Meg. "I don't know where you get it from. Not from your mother anyway."

  That was a term of reproach. Anything not inherited from my mother wasn't worth having.

  So there was Toby—Tobias Mander—my mother's devoted slave. She had maneuvered one or two walk-on parts for him and he could not show his gratitude enough. One of his ways of doing so was to spend each morning teaching her daughter. Having this love of words, I was an apt pupil and I looked forward to our sessions together. We were a pair of conspirators seeking to surprise my mother. We might have known that whatever academic heights I scaled she would not be impressed, for although she was completely poised and greatly sought after at the dinner tables of the dite, she was no scholar. What she really wanted Toby to do was to make me like her. She really was concerned about my welfare and I believe that I was more important to her than anyone—except Everard, of course, and sometimes I thought I was running level with him.

  So the days in Denton Square passed pleasantly. It was a cozy world made comfortable by the companionship of Toby Mander and Meg Marlow, the efficiency of Janet and illuminated by the glittering presence of my mother.

  There was the constant excitement of gathering information which I could prize from Meg. The past was like an immense jigsaw puzzle with great gaps in it which were vital to completing the picture.

  There was Uncle Everard, a kindly hazy figure in the background, who was something important in the House, which in due course I learned was Parliament. From the topmost window of the attic we could see the face of Big Ben and we used to look to see if the light was on at the top, which meant that the House was sitting and that Uncle Everard would be busy. He had a small house in Westminster and an estate in the country, I learned. He used to bring me boxes of chocolates tied up with many-colored ribbons. I was allowed to keep the ribbons but the chocolates were usually confiscated as being bad for my teeth.

  I must have realized when I was about eight years old that there was a plot afoot to make me like my mother. My teeth, preserved, so my mother said, by a slice of apple to be eaten last thing at night, were encased in a brace because there was a danger of the front ones becoming too prominent. "We don't want Little Siddons to turn into a rabbit, do we?" said my mother, and for a while I was called Little Rabbit or simply Bunny. She was a great bestower of nicknames. I hated the brace. Then there was my hair. "Straight as a packet of candles," grumbled Meg. My mother's hung in rippling curls down her back and she could sit on it. Mine being so different offended my mother and during rest periods Meg would put it into rags before I went to bed. They rarely stayed in place and I would get irritated with them and pull them off so that in the morning I would present a strange spectacle, being half straight and half curly. "You'll never make a beauty," mourned Meg, to which I retorted that if it meant suffering the nightly torture of lying on bundles of rags I would have to be plain, thank you.

  "It's nothing to thank anyone for," said Meg ominously.

  I was inclined to argue. It was due to Toby. He was a great believer in exercising the mind, and one of our lessons was to take a subject on which we did not agree and argue against what we really believed. One of his theories was that nothing was completely black or white. There were always many sides to every question so if you disagreed wholeheartedly with something you should try to see points in favor of it.

  "Good for the soul," said Toby.

  He used to take me riding in the Row. My mother had said that I must learn to manage a horse, and I was sent to a local riding school where I used to go out on safe old hacks and be put through my paces with a group of young people about my age until I was considered safe. Then there were the rides with Toby. I enjoyed these very much. Toby was good fun when he stopped being broody about being not quite good enough for the stage. His panegyrics about my mother I accepted because I agreed with them.

  The most peacefully happy times of those years were spent in Toby's company.

  We read a great deal together and if my understanding of mathematics was nil, I had a good grounding in French, German and English literature.

  Toby taught me how to enjoy life. According to him, adaptation was the answer. "If you can't have something, learn to live without it and find something you can have," he used to say.

  I argued that this was a weak attitude and if you wanted something you should go out and get it.

  ''Others may be involved," he pointed out. "You must never ride rough-shod over others."

  He was certainly my mentor in those days.

  I tried to apply his theories to my life. During resting periods, which were when a play had finished its run and my mother was waiting for something else to turn up, she would be at home a great deal. At first it would be delightful to see more of her, but then I would find that she was not quite the same person as the one who could be glimpsed only for rare moments. The moods set in. Sometimes I would hear her shouting at Meg and Meg shouting back. "A littie more of that and I'll be off." Meg always stood up to her, but she never took the quarrels seriously. "Storm warning," she would say to me with a wink, and then I knew it was best to keep out of the way.

  People came to the house with plays for her to read to see if she considered a part suitable for herself. Tom Mellor, the agent, was constantly calling. Sometimes she would be angry because the part wasn't good enough. Bland producers, harassed authors, actors in varying stages of prosperity—they all came to the house. It was a time of turmoil.

  Then it would pass and she would be working again. The house would become quiet and empty. That could be depressing.

  Toby would take me out then and we would walk along Shaftesbury Avenue, past the theaters, until we came to the one at which she was playing. We would both gloat over her name—very large and always at the top. She insisted on that. Irene Rush ton in The Colleen Bawn by Dion Boucicault.

  I felt such a glow of pride to think that that Irene Rushton was my mother.

  Toby once took me to lunch at the Caf' Royal and there among the scarlet and gold decor he pointed out famous people. It was one of the memorable occasions of my life up to that time, but shattered by the sudden appearance of my mother squired by a languid gentleman with a most flowery cravat and a monocle. ("Member of the peerage," Meg told me afterward when I described him. "Lord Lummy or something. When I think of what she might have done for herself and she goes and marries that Ralph Ashington!")

  Toby went pink and stammered: "I ... I thought it would amuse Sarah."

  "Hardly the place to bring. . .a child."

  Then she swept out with people watching, pointing her out. "That's Irene Rushton." "The Irene Rushton?" "Yes, you know. She's in The Colleen Bawn. Wonderful, they say."

  Toby was uncomfortable—the outing spoiled because he had displeased her.

  I couldn't see why she should object. Toby had made me so analytical that I had to find the answer. Two unworthy ones kept coming up in my mind. One was that Toby clearly liked me and we had been laughing so much over my first efforts to sample champagne when she came up and she did not hke him to be so happy in the company of anyone else—not even her daughter. Another was that perhaps she did not hke the idea of my growing up and bein
g old enough to be taken to luncheon at the Caf' Royal. She was very conscious of her age and had been twenty-six for several years.

  This was a new view of her and myself. It seemed I could become an embarrassment to her.

  Toby was very subdued and next time he saw her he apologized. It seemed we had all been mistaken. She laughed about the matter.

  "So good of you to look after her, Toby," she said. "I hope it wasn't too boring for you."

  Toby said emphatically that it was far from boring. It had been the most enjoyable luncheon he had had since . . . since . . . Since she had descended from the heights and sat at his table. Afterward she said to me: "So you're stepping out into the world, eh, Siddons? Well, mild little Toby is a harmless escort."

  Mild! It sounded disparaging, I should hardly have called him that. And "little"! He was six feet tall. We used to laugh about his height. "Hurry up and grow a few more inches," he used to say. "I get backache stooping to you."

  I did not realize until they were over what happy days they were. I was to remember Toby's theories very often in the future and ask myself why it was that one realized how good things were only when they were past. One of the perversities of human nature, I supposed. Or is it that a scene looked back on is often set in a rosy light which heightens only the happy times?

  Happy times they undoubtedly were. Everything was fun; my mother's excitingly busy hfe and the bliss when she did have some time to spare for me; Meg's racy Cockney comments on life in general and my mother in particular; I was even amused by Janet's tight-lipped disapproval of "things" that went on in the house and her dark prophecies of people's supping sorrow with long spoons, fiddling when Rome was burning and hints of coming to No Good. In Janet's lugubrious manner. No Good seemed to indicate the utmost disaster. And always there was Toby—taken for granted, I fear—my indulgent tutor who did the work purely for love of my mother, and, I realized later, for me, too.

  His father was what is known as an industrialist—a man who had made a great fortune and couldn't stop enlarging it.