CHAPTER IV—MR. CHOWN OF LONDON
THE best that could be said about the Wheatsheaf Hotel at Staithley Bridge was very good indeed; it was that when a certain eminent actor-manager was appearing in Manchester, he put up at the Wheatsheaf in Staithley and motored in and out. It is thirty miles each way, there is a Midland Hotel in Manchester, and actor-managers know all there is to know about personal comfort. That places the Wheatsheaf.
It was Staithley’s sporting hotel, and golf club-houses, not to mention the habit of golfers of motoring to their sport, have dispelled the illusion that sportsmen are a hardy race. The Wheatsheaf had its crowded hour when the visiting teams of professional footballers who came to oppose Staithley Rovers arrived in a charabanc, and attracted customers, who paid reckless prices for drinks in a place where they could get near views of authentic heroes: but for the most part, solid, quiet comfort was the keynote of the Wheatsheaf and commercial travelers knew it.
Those of them who were not victims of the falling status of the traveler, and the too closely scrutinized expense accounts, went to the Wheatsheaf; the others envied them and went where they could afford to go. The uninstructed Londoner would have passed it by without a second glance; the Wheatsheaf did not advertise. It was innocent of gilt, and its whisky was unwatered. It was a very good hotel.
Nevertheless, Mr. Alastair Montagu, who always stayed there when his company was at the Theater Royal, was surprised to see Lexley Chown in the smoking room of the Wheatsheaf. He remembered the eminent actor-manager, and his surprise was not that Chown, being in Staith-ley, should have the discrimination to stay at the Wheatsheaf, but that Chown should be in Staithley. Chown was a figure in the profession, but emphatically a London figure.
The business of Mr. Chown was that of an “artiste’s agent.” A middleman trading in human flesh and blood? Perhaps; but Chown was a useful clearing-house. He was an impressive person, floridly handsome, beautifully dressed, and the routine work which kept him and the expensively rented, exquisitely furnished suite of offices near Leicester Square was something like this. A manager would ring up and say that by to-morrow he must have a snub-nosed actor, six feet tall, with red hair and a cockney accent to play a part worth seven pounds a week. Mr. Chown, or Mr. Chown’s secretary, consulted the card index and, by its means, collected half a dozen unemployed actors who answered, roughly, to the manager’s specification, and sent them to see the manager, who might choose one of them but more probably would not. He would probably ring up and say, “I say, Chown, I’ve looked over this bunch. Not one of them a bit like it.” Chown would reply, truthfully, that each of his applicants had a snub nose, red hair, was six feet high and a cockney who was prepared to act for seven pounds a week, and that these were the qualifications the manager had demanded. The manager would not deny it, but “I had a brain-wave last night. Billy Wren is the man I want for that part. He was born to play it, only,” pathetically, “I don’t know where he is.”
“I do,” Mr. Chown would say calmly. “He’s in ‘The Poppy Plant,’ which is at Eastbourne this week and at Torquay next week.”
“Get him out of that for me, old man.”
“I’ll try, but Billy is five feet six, his hair is black and he’s got a Roman nose.”
“I don’t care: I want him.”
“And his salary is sixteen.”
“Who cares?” Billy would be wired for, cajoled into giving up the certainty of his tour for the uncertainty of a London run, his touring manager would be placated with a substitute at half Billy’s salary, and the London Manager would pay Mr. Chown precisely nothing for these services. Did Mr. Chown, then, help lame dogs over stiles for nothing? Not at all: he received ten per cent of the actor’s salary for the first ten weeks of a run, from the actor. His brains and his system were at the service of the manager, but it was the actor who paid all while receiving certainly not more than the manager who paid nothing, not even compliments to Mr. Chown on the astonishing efficiency of that compilation of many years, his card index.
That was the bread and butter work of Mr. Lexley Chown, but his portly form was not nourished on Lenten fare, nor was his wine bill paid out of his card index. He was an industrious seeker after talent buried in the English provinces; he had the flair—not the nose, for, remarkably, Mr. Chown was not a Jew—for discovering young people of merit whose market value, under intelligent handling, would in a few years be in the neighborhood of a hundred pounds a week. It is a profitable thing to be sole agent of a number of people each earning a hundred pounds a week.
When business was good—and Staithley was a good “No. 2” town—Mr. Alastair Montagu was capable of believing what his posters asked the public to believe about the merits of his company, but in his most optimistic, his most characteristically showman-like mood, he could not persuade himself that Lexley Chown had come from London to Staithley looking for stars of the future amongst the sprightly old women and elderly young men of “The Woman Who Paid” company. There was old Tom Hall, of course, a sound actor who ought to be in London, but Chown knew all about Tom, and about Tom’s trouble, too. Whisky drinkers on Tom’s scale weren’t Chown’s quarry, nor, indeed, he reflected, were sound actors either. To be a “sound actor” is to be damned with faint praise and a mediocre salary. No: Chown must be after something at the music-hall, and Montagu had “popped in” the other evening without seeing anything extraordinary. But that was just it, with Chown. There was nothing extraordinary about the people he discovered until after he discovered them; then every one saw how extraordinary they were.
Chown, shaking Montagu’s hand and bending over it with an inclination of the body which seemed derived from Paris rather than London, was merely Chown not differentiating between this unimportant touring manager and the great ones of the earth who paid high salaries to established reputations. But Mr. Montagu was flattered, he had a fine capacity for flattery.
“My dear Montagu, I’m delighted,” said Mr. Chown. “You will honor me by dining with me? They have a Chablis here that really is not unworthy of your acceptance.”
It was flattering to be thought a connoisseur of wine, and Chown had skillfully mentioned a wine that couldn’t go beyond Montagu’s savoir vivre, instead of the more esoteric drinks of his own preferring. Yet Mr. Chown, taking trouble to secure a guest, wanted nothing of Montagu but his company. The theater is at once convivial and self-insulating. Chown hated solitude, and though there were hail-fellow-well-met commercial travelers in the hotel whose conversation would have been a tonic, he preferred the limited Mr. Montagu. Erroneously, Mr. Chown despised commercial travelers.
Mr. Montagu, in gratitude, decided to give Mr. Chown a hint. Mr. Chown was in evening dress.
“I am glad to hear,” said Mr. Chown, who had heard nothing at all, “that you are having excellent houses.”
The houses were no better than Montagu’s inexpensive company deserved. “I am not,” he confessed, “doing musical comedy business. Still, they have a feeling for the legitimate here. Staithley’s a good town, if,” he added, trying to give his kindly hint, “it isn’t dressy.”
“No. I suppose one mustn’t judge these people by their clothes. They don’t put their money on their backs in the North. They’ve more left to spend on the theater, Montagu.”
“And the music-hall.”
“Ah! You feel the competition?”
“I wasn’t meaning that. Look here, Chown, are you coming in to see my show to-night?”
“Well—” Mr. Chown’s whole anatomy, as seen above the table, was apology incarnate.
“No. You’re not. I didn’t think it and that’s why I didn’t ask at once. It’s some one at the Palace you’ve come to see, isn’t it?”
“What makes you think so?”
“Well, there’s nothing else in Staithley.” The theater is self-insulating. “And you haven’t come here for your health. But, if you’ll excuse my saying it, they don’t dress for the theater, let alone the Palace, and if you go there as you are, they’ll throw things at you from the gallery.”
“Montagu, I shan’t forget this kindness,” said Chown.
“You put me under obligation to you. But—did you never hear of an Eisteddfod?”
“Is it a new act on the halls?” asked Mr. Montagu, who did not rapidly clear his mind of an obsession.
Mr. Chown smiled. “Not yet,” he said, but “out of the mouths of babes and sucklings,” he thought, mentally filing an idea for future reference.
“Wait a moment,” said Mr. Montagu. “Why am I thinking of Lloyd George?”
“Because of a natural association of ideas. Staithley Eisteddfod, however, is a Lancashire occasion with a Welsh label that hasn’t much to do with it. You may recall the Hand Bell Ringers who were on the halls some years ago. I picked them up at Staithley Eisteddfod. It’s a sort of competitive festival of song, and if I were not dressed, I should not be admitted to the stalls.”
Staithley was, so to speak, on Montagu’s beat, and it was not on, obviously, Chown’s. Yet here was Chown telling Montagu something about Staithley quite material to his business, which he did not know. Staithley Eisteddfod did not advertise: the largest hall in the town was too small to hold the friends of the competitors, let alone the hardly more dispassionate public, and Chown had his ticket for the stalls because he was a subscriber to the funds. Short of theft, it was the only way by which one could become possessed of a ticket.
He did not add, though he knew, that Montagu’s second-rate company with their third-rate play was at the Staithley Theater Royal that week because more alert managers, with better attractions, steered clear of the place in that week of musical ferment, and the resident theater manager had to take what he could, by diplomatic silence, get. One lives and learns and Mr. Montagu would learn that week without a living wage; his moderate houses belonged with the early, pre-Eisteddfod nights of the week and though only the favored few would crowd into the Eisteddfod Hall, the rest of Staithley, hot partisans of the performers, watched and waited.
Music is music in Lancashire.
“Ah.” said the innocent Mr. Montagu, “if it’s music, and dressed at that, it’ll not affect me at the theater.”
“Let me fill your glass.” said Mr. Chown. “What’s your opinion of the cinemas?”
Mr. Montagu was of the opinion, current, in 1912. that, the cinemas were of no account. Revolutions in the making are apt to go unperceived by their contemporaries. Chown was less insular, but “Imagine.” he said, “the strangled emotions of the young man in the stalls who desires a woman he sees on the cinema and then realizes she is a shadow on a screen.” They finished dinner on a genially Rabelaisian note.
Chown chose this, the first evening of the Eisteddfod, because there were to be no Hand Bell Ringers and no instrumentalists: there was choral singing and there were soloists. He was going to hear Choral Societies from all over Lancashire sing, one after the other, the same chorus from “King Olaf,” and he was going to hear soloists, one after the other, sing the same song. It was, on the face of it, the dullest possible way of spending an evening, yet the packed audience in Staithley Drill Hall considered themselves privileged to be there. The official judges who were Walter Pate and two others (which meant, for practical purposes. Walter Pate alone) sat screened oft from view of the performers, lest prejudice should mar the fairness of their decisions. They heard but did not see.
The audience heard and saw, and the singers were not numbers to them but “our Annie”’ or “our Sam”’ or “our lot fra? Blackburn”’ and so on. Local feeling ran high under an affectation of cool discrimination and broke out in wild applause, intended to influence the judges’ verdict, coming, curiously localized, from parts of the hall where adherents had gathered together in the belief that union is strength. But they were, one and all, susceptible to fine shades of singing; they didn’t withhold applause from a fine rendering because the singers were of some other district than their own. Local patriotism was disciplined to their musical appreciations.
Mr. Chown, of London, had ceased, as an annual visitor, to be surprised by this musical cockpit, where not money but taintless glory was the prize. They competed for the honor of their birthplaces, and for the privilege of holding a “challenge shield,” inscribed with the winners’ names, until the nest contest. He had ceased even to wonder at that drastic rule of an autocratic committee imposing evening dress upon the occupants of the front seats and at its phenomenal results. He was a worker in research, he was scientifically unemotional about the motive of his research, but he was on fertile ground here, and if he drew blank at Staithley Eisteddfod, then Lancashire was not the county he took it for.
Yet his was not the point of view of Mr. Pate, and the capacity to sing was the least of the qualities for which he looked. To a sufficing extent, the capacity would be present in all of to-night’s competitors, even in those who sang only in chorus, and what Mr. Chown was looking for was best indicated by the algebraic symbol, X. He couldn’t, himself, have defined the quality he sought. The reflection of Mr. Montagu about the actor Tom Hall may be recalled. Tom Hall was a sound actor, lacking X. If there is a word for X, it is personality. Good locks went for something, and so did the evident possession of either sex but the whole of X depended neither upon good looks nor upon sex, and was a mystery of the stars whom Mr. Chown, with his trustworthy flair, discovered before they were stars. Technique could be acquired, and Mr.
Chown did not condemn technique, but X was and it was not possible to acquire it. Add X to technique and the result was a hundred pounds a week: technique without X was Tom Hall, “The Woman Who Paid” and the whisky of conscious failure in life.
He sat down with a silent prayer that an X performer would appear on the platform and that he might not repeat his poignant disappointment of last year when he had found an unmistakable X only to learn that its possessor was a Wesleyan who looked upon a theater door as the main entrance to hell. “But you’re a great artist,” he had told her and “I’m a Christian woman,” she had replied and left him frustrate.
His program informed him that the first part of the evening would be occupied by choral singing, and he settled himself on a spartan chair to await, with what patience he might, the turn of the soloists. There were ten choirs on the program; at least two hours of it, he reckoned, but Mr. Chown was no quitter and the zeal of the conductors and the rusticity of the choirs’ clothing might be trusted to afford him some amusement. And yet he flagged; the monotony was drugging him, and the Wheatsheaf had done him very well....
Had he slept? That was the question he asked himself as he saw the girl. Had he slept through the choral and perhaps half of the solo singing? He sat up sharply, and, as he did so, realized that a full choir was on the platform. But his first impression had been that the girl was alone, and, even now, he found it difficult to see that there were thirty-nine other people with her.
She eclipsed them. “She’s got it,” he prevented himself with difficulty from shouting aloud—and Mr. Chown was no easy prey to enthusiasm. Still, a girl who could wipe out thirty-nine other people, who could glow uniquely in a crowd! “Put her on a stage,” he was thinking, “and they’ll feel her to the back row of the gallery.” He noted as additional facts, accidentals but fortifying, that she had youth and good looks. He tried, honestly, to fix his attention on a large-headed man in the choir who had a red handkerchief stuck into his shirt-front, and a made-up tie that had wandered below his ear. The fellow was richly droll, but it was no use: the girl drew him back to her. He tried again, with an earnest spinsterish lady who looked strong-minded enough for anything: and the girl had him in the fraction of a minute. “She’ll do,” he thought—“if she hasn’t got religion,” he added ruefully. “Number seven—Staithley Bridge Choral Society,” he read on his program. That was a simplification, anyhow: the girl must live in Staithley.
They were the home choir, Staithley’s own, and the applause was long, detaining them in embarrassed acknowledgment on a platform they vehemently wished to quit, but Mr. Chown, making for the pass-door under cover of the applause, observed that there was no embarrassment about the girl. “Um,” he thought, “no nerves. They’re better with them. Well, one can’t have everything.” At the pass-door, a steward stood sentinel. “Press,” said Mr. Chown with aplomb, using an infallible talisman, and the sentinel made way for him.
When the verdict was announced, the winning choir was to appear again on the platform to sing a voluntary and to receive acclamations and the challenge shield. Meanwhile, the whole four hundred contestants were herded together in the Drill Hall cellarage and Mr. Chown added himself inconspicuously to their number. Mistaken, as he hoped to be, for a Staithlwite just come off the platform, he found beer pressed fraternally upon him, and, heroically, he drank. Self-immolation and research are traditional companions. He felt that the beer had made him one of them, but could not withhold a backward glance at the vanity of West End tailoring. When he had said “Press” to the steward at the pass-door he had wondered if his costly cut were plausible and now that same cut was blandly accepted amongst the nondescript swallowtails of this unconforming mob. But he welcomed their inappreciation; he wanted to make the girl’s acquaintance first as one of themselves.
A press of women came down the stairs into the cellar and Mary Ellen was with them but not of them. They chattered incessantly, excitedly, letting taut nerves relax in a spate of shouted words; she was silent, unmoved by the ordeal of the platform and the applause, nursing her sulky, secret resentment of Walter Pate who had refused to let her compete amongst the soloists. Mr. Pate was guarding his treasure against premature publicity; he was guarding her, specifically, against Mr. Chown, that annual raider who had so damnably ruined the Staithley Hand Bell Ringers by taking them to the music-halls; he hid her in the Choral Society and he underrated Mr. Chown’s perceptiveness.
She had taken many things from Walter Pate—the good food which had so unrecognizably developed her, with the physical exercises he prescribed, from a sexless child into a woman of gracious curves; the good education, the good musical instruction; the good beginnings of every kind; and in return she gave him work. He was almost certain of her now: the tin was gone from her golden voice and when he let his hoarded secret loose upon the world he knew that, under God, he would be making a great gift to the concert-platform. He would give a glorious voice, perfectly trained, and perhaps more than that. But the more was still only “perhaps.”
“Art,” he had said, “is unguessable” and it remained unguessable. But, “she’s not awakened yet,” he thought, and hoped for a time when her voice would be more than well-produced.
It lacked color, warmth, feeling, but she was young and, meanwhile, he was doing his possible. It was the hardest thing to keep her back from public trial, both because of the girl herself and because of Tom Bradshaw, who was paying half her costs and didn’t share Walter’s faith. But they must wait, they must all wait, and if two years were not long enough they must wait longer.
Mr. Pate, who looked upon her as the great servant he would give to music, was screened away in the judges’ box: Mr. Chown, who looked upon her as an income, watched Mary Ellen take her cloak from a long row hanging on the wall and go towards the stairs she had just descended.
Evidently, she was for a breath of air and he thought it would be a shrewd air on his bare head, but the opportunity of private conversation was too good to be missed and he awaited her return at the foot of the stair.
“Oh, you are going out?” he said. “So’m I. It’s hot in here.” He modified the Gallicism of his bow.
“Yes,” she said, consenting to his escort. She knew, better than he did, that the sort of boisterous crowd which awaits the declaration of an election result was assembled round the Drill Hall; it would be convenient to have this big man with her to shoulder a way through it.
Their clothes stamped them as competitors and the crowd gave passage. Evening dress was licensed in Staithley that night, but his arm was agreeably protective till they were through the crush; then he withdrew it.
“I’m glad to be out of that,” he said.
“There’s too much crowd to-night,” said Mary Ellen.
“Ah, you feel that, do you?”
“Choral singing!” she said, with immense disgust.
“Yes, indeed. It does make one feel one of a crowd. I’ve often wondered, in my own case, if I shouldn’t have done better to have gone on the stage.”
She looked him over. “Well,” she said, “I suppose you weren’t always fat. It’s too late now.”
Mr. Chown swallowed hard. “Yes, for me,” he said. “Not for you. Would you care to go on the stage if the chance came?”
“Would a duck swim?”
Ducks, he thought, more often drowned than swam on the stage; that was why there was always so much room at the top. “It’s very hard work,” he said.
“I’m not afraid of work,” she said, and then remembered her grievance, “if I can see it leading anywhere. Work that only leads to singing with the crowd isn’t funny.”
“Oh, I can do better than that for you.”
“You can? You?”
“If you will work. If, for instance, you will get rid of your Lancashire accent.”
“Tha’ gornless fule,” she said, “if tha’ doan’t kna’ th’ differ ’atween Lankysheer an’ t’other A’ll show thee. Me got an accent? Me that’s worked like a Fury these last two years to lose my accent? Let me tell you I’ve had the best teachers in Staithley and—”
“Yes,” he interrupted. “The difference is amazing. I realize how you must have worked. It is only a question now of, so to speak, a finishing school. The best teachers in Staithley are, after all, Staithley teachers. I am thinking of London and perhaps not so much of conscious work as unconscious imitation of the speech of the people who are around you.”
“London!” she said. “London! Who are you?”
“I’m a well-known theatrical agent, and I became well-known by making the right people famous. You are one of the right people, but there is work before you. You can’t act yet. You have it all to learn, acting, dancing—”
“Not all,” she said. “I can sing.”
“In a Choral Society,” he said.
“You go and ask Walter Pate,” she said, professing a faith in Walter’s judgment which might, in her circumstances, have been to her credit, but that all Staithley shared that faith.
All Staithley and Mr. Chown who was at once impressed by her giving Walter Pate so confidently as reference for her abilities. “Does Mr. Pate believe in you?” he asked.
“Ask him yourself. Ask him why he keeps me and teaches me and when he’s told you that, ask him a question for me. Ask why he wouldn’t let me go in for the solo competition to-night when he says I’m to sing solo in the ‘Messiah’ at Christmas, and if you get the answer to that, tell me, for I don’t know.”
Chown thought he could tell her without asking, and marked, gladly, her bitterness. If Pate was training this girl, it was because he believed in her. Pate did not take all who came, and wasted no time on fools, but he had not let her sing as a soloist to-night, though she was to sing “The Messiah” in a few months. Why? Because tonight was Chown’s night for being in Staithley and Pate was afraid of Chown. Pate (the dog) had found something in this girl and was keeping it to himself. He imagined he had hidden her safely in that choir, did he? But old Chown had the flair, Chown had spotted the girl’s possession of something Pate did not know her to possess. Pate only knew she had a voice: Chown knew she had the stuff in her that stars were made of. Certainly her voice, a Pate-approved, Pate-produced voice, put an even better complexion on the matter than Chown had suspected; it meant that here was immediate, and not merely future, exploitability. She was ripe at once for musical comedy on tour and when she had shed her accent and picked up some tricks of the trade, he would stun London with her—if he could filch her from the wary Mr. Pate.
He did not think of it, precisely, as filching, because his conscience was quite clear that he, being Chown, could do immensely more for her than Pate. Pate would be thinking of the salary of a musical comedy star. Pate would do her positive damage by over-training her up to some impossible standard ridiculously above the big public’s head; and the big public was the only public that counted. Mr. Chown saw himself, in all sincerity, as the girl’s benefactor, if not as her savior.
A word of hers came back to him as a menace to his hopes. “Did I understand you to say that Mr. Pate keeps you?”
Mary Ellen nodded, and he felt he had struck a snag.
“You are a relative of his?”
“I’m not then. If you want to know, he found me singing in the streets.”
“And was this long ago?”
“Getting on for two years.”
Mr. Chown had the grace to feel a twinge: she was, beyond a doubt, Pate’s property. But he recovered balance, telling himself very firmly that Pate would mismanage the property; that life was a battlefield and that “Vae Victis” was its motto; that one must live and that if Pate had taken reasonable precautions, he would not have exposed the girl to the marauding Mr. Chown. And, anyhow, Pate was a provincial.
He asked her age, and “Twenty-one,” she said brazenly, aware of the trammels of minority. He guessed her eighteen at most, but she wasn’t impossibly twenty-one and he had his reasons for believing her.
“You couldn’t be a better age,” he said. “I have some doubt as to what Mr. Pate will say to my proposal of the stage for you.”
“Are you going to tell him about it?” she asked in alarm.
“I will tell you,” he said, “now. If you come with me to-morrow to London, you can begin at once in a musical comedy on tour.” She gave a gasp. “Oh,” he said, “you wish to hear no more. You are anxious to return to the Drill Hall. You are, perhaps, cold?” He was very cold, but not too cold to play his fish.
“Cold? I could listen all night to this.” Mr. Chown envied her the undistinguished cloak she wore: per ardua ad astra.
“Well,” he said, “it is true that the work I have to offer you is very different from the restrained, the almost caged existence you have been enduring. But you will begin in the chorus. You have stage fright to get over, and all the green sickness of a raw beginner. My friend Hubert Rossiter”—even Mary Ellen had heard of Rossiter—“will take you and I shall see that he passes you on from company to company. Soon you will play small parts, and then leading parts. Possibly, for experience, a pantomime at Christmas. And while you are learning your business in this way you will be paid all the time.”
“How much?” she asked promptly.
“Exactly what you are worth,” he said. “You won’t starve and I call your attention to this point. I act as your agent and I take a ten per cent commission of your salary. That is all I take, and you will see that it is to my interests that your salary shall be large. If I did not believe that your salary in a very few years will be considerable, I should not be standing bareheaded and without a coat in a Staithley by-street. The train to London leaves at ten in the morning. Am I to take a ticket for you?”
“Yes,” she said.
“It is a curious fact,” he remarked, “that I do not know your name. Mine is Chown. Lexley Chown.”
“Mine’s Mary Ellen Bradshaw,” she said, jettisoning the name of Pate as useless cargo now.
“Mary,” he mused. “I think we’ll keep the Mary. But we’ll improve the rest. And now that you and I have settled this between ourselves, when do I see Mr. Pate?”
“He’s very busy to-night,” said Mary Ellen, “and the train leaves early to-morrow.”
Mr. Chown looked hard at her, and she met his eye unflinchingly. It was perfectly understood between them that Walter Pate was a ladder by which she had reached a secure place. Having reached it, she could kick the ladder from her, and “Well,” thought Mr. Chown, “she can do it to Pate, but I’m forewarned.” He turned to go back to the Drill Hall expecting her to follow. She did not follow, she was gazing fixedly up the street in which they stood and when he returned, a trifle ill-tempered at being kept longer than need be in the chilling air, her remark was disconcerting.
The street ran uphill from the valley of the town, by daylight bleak and mean, each small house monotonously the repetition of its neighbor, but seen as she saw it now, blurred in the misty night, it led like an escape from man’s sordid handiwork to the everlasting hills beyond. Dimly the rim of Staithley Edge showed as she raised her eyes, vague blackness obscurely massed beneath a gloomy sky, and above it floated the trail of smoke emitted from some factory-stack where the night stokers fed a furnace. Chimneys, the minarets of Staithley; stokers, the muezzins; smoke, the prayer. Somewhere wind stirred on the blemished moors and a fresher air blew through the street. Mary Ellen breathed deeply, greedily filling her lungs as if she feared that to go from Staithley was to dive into some strange element which would suffocate her unless she had a stored reserve of vital air. But she was not thinking that.
Mr. Chown was watching her in some bewilderment. She brought her eyes down from Staithley Edge to the level of his face. “London’s flat,” asserted Mary Ellen.
“Not absolutely,” he assured her.
“It’s flat,” she insisted. “I’m going to miss the Staithley hills.”
It was right and proper for Mr. Chown, agent, to have his offices near Leicester Square and his beautifully furnished rooms in the Albany; but it was not right for Mary Ellen Bradshaw to adumbrate the instincts of the homing pigeon. In Mr. Chown’s opinion, home was a superstition of the middle-classes, and if an artist was not a nomad at heart, the worse artist she.
He returned to his seat in the Drill Hall, with his bright certainty of Mary Ellen a trifle dimmed by her unreadiness to forget the Staithley hills, just as Walter Pate announced the judges’ decision of the choral competition. Staithley Bridge were not the first; he faced an audience which was three parts Staithley and gave the verdict to another choir. It was wonderful proof of their opinion of Walter Pate that there was no disposition to mob the referee.
CHAPTER V—HUGH DARLEY’S HANDIWORK
IT is not to be gainsaid that Tom Bradshaw heard of the flight of Mary Ellen with relief. “I don’t know if I’m a doubting Thomas: I’m sure I’m a doubting Quixote,” had been his thought lately when he remitted Walter his half share of her expenses. He was very certain now that he was the one good Bradshaw, and whatever backward glances Walter might cast Tom closed the account of Mary Ellen with finality. He would neither see nor hear that young woman again. “I blame myself,” he wrote to Walter. “She is a Bradshaw and I ought to have stopped your foolishness instead of going shares in it. I’ll stop it now, though, and when you write of going to the police I say I won’t have it. Forget her. (If it comes to police, owd lad, what price yon pair of white-slaving procurers, thee and me?). This man Chown that you say you suspect. I’ve made enquiries and there’s nothing the matter with Chown. And if he looted her from us, who looted first? It’s a blow to you, but honestly, Walter, better sooner than later and she would have cut and run when it suited her. She’s a Bradshaw. Bar me, Bradshaws are muck.”
Meanwhile, the organizer of victory was making first tactical moves in his Mary Ellen campaign. He made them in a spacious room whose admirable furniture suggested that this was the Holy of Holies of some eminent dealer in antiques until one noticed the large, floridly signed photographs on the walls and the parti-colored advertising sheet which announced all West End attractions and contradicted crudely the Persian rugs on the floor: the private office of Mr. Hubert Rossiter, that elderly miracle of youthful dapperness whose queer high-stepping walk suggested, especially when he rehearsed a crowd of chorus-girls, nothing so much as a bantam-cock. He had developed, to an extraordinary degree, the knack of knowing what the public wanted and of fitting together, like the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle, incongruous parts that merged under his touch into the ordered whole of a popular entertainment. He wasn’t, artistically, without scruple, but Hubert Rossiter with his two sweetstuff shops in town and his several touring companies in the country was a prophet of theatrical standardization: a safe man, with no highbrow pretensions about him, never short of other people’s money for the financing of his productions.
Chown had been called into the Presence about a matter which might have caused friction on any other day. Today, Chown wanted something of Rossiter and the threatening clouds dissolved in smiling sunshine. That affair settled, Chown took up his hat, then stopped.
“By the way, Hubert,” he said, “whom would you say is the toughest stage manager you’ve got on tour?”
“There’s Darley. Darley doesn’t wear kid gloves. He’s out with ‘The Little Viennese.’ I’m told they call that company ‘The Little Ease.’”
“Just what I’m looking for. That’s the South tour, isn’t it?” asked Chown who did not want Mary Ellen to visit Staithley.
“Yes.”
“Well, will you take a girl from me and put her in the chorus and ask Darley with my compliments to give her hell?”
“I conclude from this that you want to get back on some one who’s been pestering you to get a perfect lady on the stage.”
“If I were not an honest man, I’d let you go on thinking that. But when she’s had three months of Darley, I’m going to ask you to give her a part in another show and then a lead and—”
“My dear Lexley, you have only to command. I run my companies solely for your convenience.”
“Seriously, Hubert, you can have first option on this girl at a hundred a week in town two years hence, and she’ll be cheap at that. Would you like to see her now?”
“I hate looking at raw meat. What are her points?”
“She can sing.”
Mr. Rossiter shrugged his shoulders. “She’s nothing in my life for that,” he said.
“She’s got youth.”
“Flapper market’s depressed, Lexley. Give me experience all the time.”
“Darley’s seeing to the experience. I tell you, Hubert—”
“Oh, I know. The perfect Juliet. I’m always hearing of her. Never seen her yet.” Mr. Rossiter pressed a bell, and the immediacy of the response suggested that Mr. Claud Drayton, who entered, lived up to the part for which he was cast, of Field-Marshal to the Napoleon, Rossiter. “Got her with you, Chown?” asked Rossiter.
“I did venture to bring her.”
“You would. Drayton, Chown’s got a girl here. Chorus in ‘The Little Viennese’ for three months. Maisie in ‘The Girl from Honolulu’ after that. Get reports and let me see them. That’ll do. Good-by, Chown.” He pressed another bell and a shorthand typist appeared as if by magic: he was dictating letters to her before Chown and Drayton had left the room. It was efficiency raised to the histrionic degree.
Drayton had eliminated surprise from his official life, but he couldn’t restrain an instinctive gasp at the sight of Mary Ellen when Chown urbanely ushered her into his room. He gasped because she did not comply with, she violated, the first principle of an applicant for an engagement in the chorus. The first principle was that to apply with any chance of success for a job worth thirty-five shillings a week, you must wear visible clothing worth thirty-five pounds; and Mary Ellen was in the Sunday clothes of Staithley. Her costume was three seasons behind the fashions when it was new, her shoes were made for durability, and her hair-dressing made Mr. Drayton think of his boyhood, when he had gone to Sunday school. But he had his orders and here was Lexley Chown remarkably sponsoring this incredible applicant. He took out a contract-form. “Name? Sign here. The company’s at Torquay. Report yourself at the theater to Mr. Darley to-morrow. You’ll travel midnight. Show this in the office and they’ll give you your fare.” He fired it all at her almost without interval, sincerely flattering the manner in which his chief addressed him, and, as a rule, he flustered the well-dressed, experienced ladies he addressed. Here was one who was not experienced, who was dressed so badly that he thought of her as a joke in bad taste and, confound her, she was not flustered. She took the contract and the payment-slip from him calmly, eyeing him with a steady gaze which reduced his self-importance to the vanishing point. “Good-by. Good luck,” he jerked at her with the involuntariness of an automaton.
She did not intend to seem disdainful; she was merely tired and the summary marching orders by a midnight train bewildered her. Mr. Chown, squiring her in her incongruous clothes from the Rossiter headquarters, thought he had reason to congratulate himself.
There was, first, the document, terrifyingly bespattered with red seals, which she had signed in his office. She might be a minor, but she had set hand and seal to the statement that she was legally of age and to the undertaking on the part of Mary Ellen Bradshaw, hereinafter known as the artiste and for professional purposes to be known as Mary Arden, to employ Lexley Chown as her sole agent at the continuing remuneration of ten per cent of her salary, paid weekly by the artiste to the agent. Formidable penalties were mentioned, two clerks witnessed their signatures with magisterial gravity and “Altogether,” thought Mr. Chown, refraining from handing her a copy of their agreement, “if she shuffles out of that, she’ll be spry.”
There was, second, the compliance of Mr. Rossiter and the coming noviciate under Darley. Deliberately he had left her in her country clothes, trusting them to disguise in the Rossiter offices a quality he did not wish to be clearly apparent yet: deliberately, he had rushed her affair thinking all the while of Darley—or if not of him, of a Darley, of some crude martinet who was to lick her into shape. He wanted her ill-dressed, he wanted her bewildered. He wanted Darley to know how raw she was; he wanted hot fire for her and he saw her Staithley clothes acting upon Darley like compressed air on a blast furnace. The girl was too cool, she showed no nervousness. “Darley will teach you to feel, my girl,” he thought: “I’m making your path short, but I don’t want it smooth. Soft places don’t make actresses. I’m cruel to be kind.” And being kind he advanced her two pounds on account of commission, told her the station for Torquay was Paddington and left her on Rossiter’s steps. He had exposed himself unavoidably to the lifted brows which could not help saluting the glossy Lexley Chown in the company of these obsolete clothes, but the necessity was past now and he lost no time in indicating to her that, for better or for worse, her future was in her own hands. He had other business to attend to.
Mary Ellen, who had surrendered herself confidingly to his large protectiveness, was braced by his departure. Their journey together, the wonder of lunching at a table in a train, the oppressiveness of offices—these were behind her now and she stood on Rossiter’s busy steps breathing hard like a swimmer who comes to surface after a long dive. She breathed the air of London and looked from that office down a street across Piccadilly Circus, nameless to her. The whirl of it assaulted her; the swimmer was in the breakers now.
Mr. Rossiter’s commissionaire, not unaccustomed to the sight of young women pausing distressfully on those steps where they had left their hopes behind them, addressed her with kindly intent. “Shall I get you a taxi, miss?”
“No, thanks,” said Mary Ellen, who had noted the immense sums Mr. Chown had paid to the drivers of those vehicles. “I’ll walk,” and “others walk” she thought. “I can do what they can,” and hardily set foot upon the London streets. Let that commissionaire perceive that Mary Ellen was afraid? Not she, and presently she was so little afraid that she asked the way to Euston of a policeman. Her suit-case—in strict fact, Mr. Pate’s suitcase—was at Euston.
The man in the left luggage office at Euston was good enough to tell her the way to Paddington, but “You can’t carry that,” he said. “Why not?” said Mary Ellen, and carried it. The case was heavy and grew heavier: but there were stretches of her route, the part, for instance, between Tottenham Court Road and Portland Road, which revived her spirit. That might have been a bit of Staithley. London was flat; she had seen no reason in the slight rise of Shaftesbury Avenue to justify Mr. Chown’s qualifying “Not absolutely”; but there were sights and smells along the road to Paddington which she accepted gratefully as evidence of some affinity with Staithley. Piccadilly Circus was not the whole of London; one could breathe here and there, Praed Street way, in cheering shabbiness. She saw a barefoot girl, and a ragged boy offered to carry her bag. There was still a confused echo of the surging West End in her ears and she hadn’t conquered London, but she had received comforting assurance that, in spots, London was habitable.
She fortified herself with tea at Paddington, remembered the night journey and bought buns at the counter, remembered the night journey again and slept in a waiting-room, cushioned on her bag, till it was nearly midnight. There was nothing in this precautionary garnering of sleep to prevent her from sleeping in the train, and her through carriage to Torquay was being shunted at Newton Abbot when she awoke and hungrily ate buns. Near Dawlish, she had the first sight in her life of the sea, and all the emotions proper to the child of an island race ought to have besieged her in the gray dawn. “It’s big,” she thought, grudging the sea the character of space, then turned her eyes inland to the cliffs. “They’re small, but they’re better than the sea.” Not Staithley Edge, but elevation of a sort.
Mr. Hugh Darley, arriving at the theater at eleven o’clock, was told by the doorkeeper that a young lady was waiting for him.
“Been here long?” he asked, looking through Mary Ellen who stood in the passage.
“I came on duty when the night-watchman went off at nine. She was here then.”
“More fool she,” he said. “Got my letters there?” The doorkeeper had his letters, including one from Mr. Drayton.
Darley was a small man, with a shock of red hair and intensely blue eyes which gleamed sometimes with the light of an almost maniacal fury. It was this uncontrolled temper which kept him out of London: at his job, the job of infusing energy and “go” into bored chorus girls and of supplying spontaneity and drollery to comedians who had neither spontaneity nor drollery of their own, he was masterly when he kept his temper. A stage manager needn’t suffer fools gladly, but he must suffer them suavely, he must hide his sufferings and must cajole when his every instinct is to curse, and Darley was a touring stage manager instead of a London “producer” because he simply could not roar them as ’twere any nightingale and London players were too well established not to be able effectually to resent his Eccles’ vein: the strollers were not.
He read Drayton’s letter through. “Where is she?” he asked.
“Why, here,” said the doorkeeper.
“But,” said Mr. Darley and then “Christ!” he cried, and bit through his pipe. That often happened: he carried sealing was in his pocket for plugging the hole. “Comes to a theater at eight in the morning and dresses like a scullery maid’s night out. What’ll they send me next? I suppose you are what they’ve sent me? What’s your name?”
“Mary Arden.”
He consulted the advice note of these extraordinary goods. “That’s right,” he admitted. “Arden! Whom did you see as Rosalind?”
Mary Ellen blushed: he seemed to her to read her secrets. “And me a man that respects Shakespeare,” he said. “There’s one line of the Banished Duke you may remember. ‘Sweet are the uses of adversity.’ If you don’t remember the line, you’re going to, Miss Mary Arden. You chose the name. I don’t know that I don’t choose to make you worthy of it.”
“Oh, will you?” she cried.
“You’ve got no sense of humor,” he said. “Come on the stage and we’ll see what you have got. It’ll be like going water-finding in the Sahara. Can you read music?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Then be looking at those songs. There’s a piano in the orchestra. I’m going down to it.”
She was staring in amazement at the sheeted auditorium into which the unexpected rake of the stage seemed threatening to precipitate her. Vague masses hung over her head in the half-light seeming about to fall and crush her in the grisly loneliness to which she was abandoned as Mr. Darley went round to the orchestra. The diminished echoes of his footfalls were a wan assurance that this place, shunned by daylight as if it were a tomb, had contacts with humanity. But he had said it was the stage and however disconcerting she might find its obscure menace, the stage was where she wished to be and she was not to be put down either by it or by a little man who was rude about her best clothes, while he had not shaved that morning and his knickerbockers showed a rent verging on the scandalous. She had to sing to him and she expelled her terrors of her strange, her so alarmingly dreary surroundings, and strained her eyes to read the music he had put into her hands.
He seemed to bob up below her like a jack-in-the-box, and struck some chords on the piano. “Have you got that one?” he asked.
“Yes.” she said, fighting her impulse to scream at the phenomenon of his sudden reappearance.
“Then let her go.”
She sang the opening chorus of “The Little Viennese.”
“You’ve sung that before,” he said, accusingly.
“Oh, no.”
“Don’t try to kid me. It won’t pay. Read through the one you’ve got there marked 3.” No. 3 was a new interpolation; she might know the rest, but she couldn’t know No. 3. “Ready? Go on,” and, in a minute, surprised, satisfied but by no means inclined to show his satisfaction other than by cutting the trial short, “That’ll do, that’ll do,” he said resentfully. “This isn’t the Albert Hall. What about your dancing?”
“I’m afraid I haven’t danced yet,” said Mary.
“You will,” he said savagely, “and to my piping. I knew there was a catch in it somewhere,” he thought, “but it comes to me that I’ve found a hobby for the rest of this tour. They don’t often send me stuff that’s worth working on.—I suppose you took the name of Arden because you’ve got a wooden leg,” he jeered aloud.
Mary Ellen’s face clouded, then an accomplishment of her street days came back to her. They were not, after all, so long ago. She pitched her hat into the wings and, reckless of the rake of the stage, turned rapid cartwheels.
“It’s that sort of wood,” she said, breathless but defiant.
“Thanks for the assurance,” he said, “only this isn’t a circus and your legs are wooden. They’re wooden because you’ve no brains in them and till you have brains in your toes you’re no use to me. You’ve got an accent that’s as thick as pea-soup and till you’ve cleared it, it’ll stay hidden in the chorus. If you’ll work, I’ll teach you to act but, by the Lord, you’ve work ahead of you. If I take trouble and you don’t work, I’ll flay you alive. Is that understood? Very well. There’s a matinee to-day. You come in and see the show this afternoon and you see it again to-night. You’ll be sitting where I can see you and if I catch you laughing, I’ll eat you. Leave laughing to the audience; it’s their job. You’re there to learn. Watch what the other girls do and when they do it. They’ll love you because I’m calling a chorus rehearsal for you to-morrow. Make mistakes then if you dare. You’ll play to-morrow night. See the wardrobe mistress between the shows to-day about your clothes. I’m paid to make you a chorus girl; you’ll be in the chorus tomorrow night. Then I begin to have my fun with you. I begin to make your name something else than an impertinence. I get busy on you, my girl. You’re clay and I’m the potter. Meantime, we’ll go to the door and I’ll tell the first girl who comes for her letters to show you where you’re likely to find rooms and you can ask her why Hugh Darley proposes to spend four hours a day breaking in a chorus girl.”
Mary asked the other girl, who looked curiously at her. “I never knew Darley to make love before,” she said.
“Love!” said Mary, blinking startled eyes as if a flashlight had blazed at her out of darkness.
“Well,” said her cynical friend, “when you’ve been more than five minutes on the stage, you’ll know that the way to success lies through the manager’s bedroom. Don’t look at me like that. Down your nose. I’m not a success, I’m in the chorus running straight on thirty-five shillings a week, and there are more of us keep straight than don’t.”
Mary was not conscious that she had looked, fastidiously or otherwise, at her companion. She had a feeling of vertigo; she was thinking of herself, not of the other girl, and of this shameful threat before which she seemed to stand naked in her bones.
“We don’t look after other people’s morals,” Dolly Chandler assured her, “but you may care to know Darley’s married.”
“You think he meant—this?”
Dolly shrugged her shoulders. “He’s a man.”
“And he meant you to tell me what you are telling me?”
“You’re pretty green, you know. I expect he thought I’d put you wise. Though I tell you again it’s not like what I’ve seen of Darley to do the sultan stunt.”
And in ordinary clothes she had turned cartwheels before this man! Mary Ellen blushed scarlet consternation.
Mr. Chown’s thought, “Darley will teach you to feel,” was taking rapid substance, but she must drive it from her, she must go to the theater and sit through two performances and memorize, memorize.
“That will do,” said Darley after the rehearsal next day. “Miss Arden will stay behind. You can go on to-night,” he told her as the rest went up the stairs. “You’ve got the tunes if you haven’t got the words and they’re damn fool enough not to matter though you’ll know them by Saturday. You’ve got a clumsy notion of the movements, but you don’t know how to move. Your idea of walking is to put one foot in front of the other. You’re as God made you, but he’s sent you to a good contractor for the alterations. He’s sent you to me. Did you get Dolly Chandler to answer that question?”
She failed to meet his eye. Telling herself she was a coward, she tried and failed.
“I see,” he said. “She answered it the way they’ll all answer it. I’m going to put in four hours a day with you and Dolly’s told you what they’ll think of you. Thought’s free and it’s mostly dregs and I don’t mind. What about you, Rosalind?”
“You mean it won’t be true?” There was a hope and she clutched at it with words that came unbidden to her lips.
“True?” he roared. “You—papoose, you whippet! Don’t cry, you whelp. I asked you a question. I asked you if you mind their thoughts?”
“No,” she said.
“Then we start fair,” he said. “I’m having you on the stage and I’m coming to see you at your rooms, and if you’d like to know your name in this company, it’s Dar-ley’s Darling. Only you and I’ll know we meet for work, not play. I’m stage manager of a rotten musical comedy on a scrubby tour, but I’m a servant of the theater and I’ll prove it on you.”
He was, disinterestedly, the theater’s servant, and service purged of self-interest is rare though there is plenty of voluntary work done in the theater. An actor rehearses for weeks and performs without fee in a special production: he may have an enthusiasm for the play he is to act, he may feel that such a play must, at all costs, come to birth, but somewhere self-interest lurks. The play may succeed at its special performance; it may be taken for a run, and, if not, the actor still has the hope that his acting will focus on him the attention of critics and managers. And if the part he plays is so inconsiderable that he cannot hope to attract notice to himself, his hope is that the organizers of special productions will note him as a willing volunteer to be rewarded, next time, with a distinctive part.
For Darley, proposing to spend laborious hours in molding Mary Ellen, there was nothing concrete to be gained; no credit from the Rossiter headquarters and the positive loss of a reputation for asceticism which had been a shield against the advances of aspirants who believed that success in the theater was reached by the road Dolly had indicated to Mary. He did not flatter his company by supposing that his reputation for austerity would survive association with Mary. But, intimately, he would have his incomparable gain, the matchless joy of the creative artist working on apt material.
“You can take the rest of this week in getting used to jigging about in the chorus,” he said. “Then we’ll begin to work. Only you needn’t despise musical comedy. There are as many great actresses who came out of a musical comedy training as out of Shakespeare. Perhaps for the same reason that white sheep eat more than black ones.”
He drilled her on a dozen stages as the tour went on, in a dozen walks from the Parisian’s to the peasant’s (“You’ve never heard of pedestrian art,” he said, “but this is it”), and for dancing, “You’re too old, but we’ll get a colorable imitation,” and in her rooms they went through Rosalind and Juliet till she spoke the lines in English and made every intonation to his satisfaction. “Feel it, you parrot, feel it,” was his cry, and he stopped his mockery of calling her Rosalind. He called her “Iceberg.”
He had taken her far, very far, along the technical way, and he had come to a barrier. Where there was question of the grand emotions, her voice was stupid. She seemed intelligently enough to understand with her brain, but there was a lapse between understanding and expression. “I’ve done all I’m going to,” thought Harley. “She’s not an actress yet, she’s only ready to be one when somebody breaks the eggs to make the omelette. I’m not the somebody.”
Except that she did not shirk work, she gave no sign of gratitude. Harley was another Pate, another man who was, to please himself, experimenting on her with a system. She was not afraid of him now; men in her experience were usable stepping-stones and when their use to her was gone, she stepped from one to another. In the present case she saw clearly what he was aiming at and the necessity of this training in technique. It had visible results, it wasn’t, like Pate’s, a journey to a peak mistily beyond a far horizon and it would, in any case, last only for the three months she was to spend in the chorus of “The Little Viennese.” He could take pains with her and she would generously be there to be taken pains with; it was a sort of exercise which he preferred to playing golf with the men or the other girls of the company, and she permitted his enjoyment of the preference because it was of use to her.
“What did you want to go on the stage for, anyhow?” he asked her once.
“To hold them,” she said, “there!” And made a gesture, imperious, queenly, that almost wrung applause from him. “To have them in my grip like that. To know I’ve got them in my power.”
“I think you’ll do it, Mary, when you have learned to feel,” he told her soberly.
She looked at him with glittering eyes. “Gee, does it get you like that?” he said, amazed. Here, to be welcomed with both hands, was feeling at last.
“Yes,” said Mary, dashing him to earth, “there’s money in it.”
“You miserable slut!” he said, and flung out of her room.
Money! Yet hadn’t she excuse? She feared poverty, having known it. Poverty, for her, was not a question of what would happen to an income of a thousand a year if the income tax went up; it was Jackman’s Buildings and the Staithley streets. If she could help it, she was not going back to poverty. To Staithley perhaps she would go back: she was indeed fixed in her idea to go back, to buy, with her stage-made wealth, a house in Staithley like Walter Pate’s and to be rich in Staithley. So far, in her journeyings, she had seen no place like Staithley: either there was flatness which depressed her, or hills which were too urbane, or too low, too much like mounds in a park to be worthy of the name of hills. The stage was a means to an end, and the end was Staithley, a house of her own, an independence—and her present salary was thirty-five shillings a week, less ten per cent to Chown! She was, at any rate, thrifty with it, seeing no need, on tour, with her contract in her pocket, to revise her wardrobe in the direction of effectiveness and keeping her nose too closely to the grindstone Darley held to have time for money-spending in other ways. She watched with satisfaction her Post Office Savings Bank account increase by a weekly ten shillings.
Darley relented and came back next day with the Maisie part in “The Girl from Honolulu” in his pocket. “Damn her,” he thought, “she’s honest about it and there have been avaricious artists. Avarice and Art aren’t contradictory.” He expected no more at their parting than the cool “Good-by” she gave him.
“Full of possibilities,” he reported her to Drayton, and when Drayton asked him to be more definite, “I can’t,” he wrote, “be more definite than this. You know those Chinese toys consisting of a box within a box of beautiful wood, wonderfully made? You marvel at the workmanship and you open box after box. You get tired and you go on opening because each box is beautiful and because of a faint hope you have that there’ll be something in the last box. I don’t know what’s in hers. That’s her secret and her mystery, and, by the way, you can discount what Pettigrew is going to tell you of her Maisie. It isn’t her Maisie. It’s mine. I’ve rehearsed her in it.”
“Darley’s mad about her,” Drayton interpreted this to Rossiter.
Darley was, anyhow, sufficiently interested to travel across half England to see her play Maisie on her first Saturday night, in Liverpool. He stood at the side of the circle where he could watch both her and the house, and he waited, especially for a scene which was one of the weaknesses of the piece, when Maisie, by sheer blague, has to subdue a rascally beachcomber who intends robbery. He wasn’t afraid of her song, but this scene called for acting; it wasn’t plausible, even for musical comedy, unless Maisie carried it off con brio.
And he had, that night, his reward for the labor of these months. It was Saturday night, and the audience stopped eating chocolates. Darley wasn’t looking at the stage, he was looking at the audience and he knew triumph when he saw it. They stopped eating. Darley looked upon his work and knew that it was good.
“Ich dieu” he muttered. “By God, I do. Where’s the bar?”