Fanny and Stella Read Online Free PDF Page A

certainties. Mrs Fanny was a man dressed as a woman. He felt sick.
    And if Mrs Fanny was a man, where did that leave Miss Stella? Was it possible that this beautiful young woman really was, as she herself had consistently, insistently proclaimed, really a man? ‘I am not a lady. I am a man,’ she had kept repeating. ‘I am not a lady. I am a man.’
    In the gaudy, mirrored saloon bar of the Strand Theatre, Hugh Mundell felt as if he had wandered into a waking nightmare, the distorted reflections of Fanny and Stella crowding in upon him, reproaching him, mocking him. He did not know what to do. He gulped his brandy and watched and waited while a gaggle of admirers surrounded Fanny and Stella. When Mrs Fanny commanded him in ringing tones to go and call a cab, it was a relief to get out into the chilly night air and try to clear his befuddled wits.
    A few moments later all hell broke loose.
    ‘There was a great deal of confusion,’ Mundell recalled, ‘and I hardly know what occurred, but I found myself in a cab on the road to Bow-street. I was very flurried. I don’t know how it was.’
    ‘I don’t know how it was’ was a metaphor for poor Hugh Mundell’s life. He found it hard to make sense of the world. He was constantly in a quandary: confused and perplexed – ‘quite in a myth’, as he put it – about everything to do with Fanny and Stella. It was as if the world had connived and conspired against him, to mislead him and to misdirect him. Again and again his complaint was that he had been ‘led on’, ‘led away’, ‘sold’, told or otherwise persuaded that Fanny and Stella were really women when it was he and he alone who had convinced himself that they were women. No wonder he was flurried.
    Barely a quarter of an hour later he was sharing a cell with two young men in female undergarments, trying to make some sense of the awful calamity that had overwhelmed him. 

3
    The Slap-Bum Polka
One day a cute detective chap,
Who of their game had smelt a rat.
Declared he would get on the track,
Of those two He-She ladies.
So he bolted up to Regent Square,
And soon espied this worthy pair.
They hailed a cab, who took his fare,
Says the police, ‘I am after you my dear’.
                            ‘The Funny He-She Ladies’
    A  t ten o’clock on the morning after the arrest of Fanny and Stella, in the first-floor front of an inconspicuous lodging house in Wakefield Street, Bloomsbury, Mr Amos Westropp Gibbings (known as Carlotta to all of her many friends) and Mr Martin Luther Cumming (or the Comical Countess) were in the middle of an extremely agitated conference with their landlady, Miss Martha Stacey, when they heard a loud and prolonged knocking on the front door.
    They froze and looked at each other. Carlotta Gibbings tiptoed to the window and carefully peered out to see a man standing on the doorstep. She guessed he was a detective in plain clothes. She knew the type. Tallish, shabby, sharp-eyed and shifty with a self-important, bullying air about him. A nasty piece of work and, nine times out of ten, corrupt and corrupting.
    ‘Police,’ she mouthed silently.
    There was an agonising wait while old Mrs Stacey, Martha’s arthritic mother, shuffled up from the basement kitchen and fumbled awkwardly with the locks on the front door. When she finally managed to open the door she found a grim-faced man planted firmly on the doorstep who said he was a policeman. Before she knew it and with hardly so much as a beg-your-pardon or a by-your-leave, he had unceremoniously pushed his way past her into the narrow hallway and begun firing off a series of questions to which old Mrs Stacey, flustered and agitated as she was, could give no coherent answers.
    Upstairs, Carlotta Gibbings and Martha Stacey looked at each other. The muffled exchanges from below were getting louder and more heated. Something had to be done. Martha Stacey nodded and, putting her finger to her lips, closed the door very quietly