Part 11 (1/2)

”Except what I say,” Paul persisted. ”They'll tell me how one sets about being an actor.”

Rowlatt scribbled a couple of introductions on visiting cards, and Paul went away satisfied. He called on the two actors. The first, in atrabiliar mood, advised him to sweep crossings, black shoes, break stones by the roadside, cart manure, sell tripe or stocks and shares, blow out his brains rather than enter a profession over whose portals was inscribed the legend, Lasciate ogni speranza--he snapped his finger and thumb to summon memory as if it were a dog.

”Voi che intrate,” continued Paul, delighted at showing off the one Italian tag he had picked up from his reading. And filled with one of the purest joys of the young literary life and therefore untouched by pessimistic counsel, he left the despairing actor.

The second, a brighter and more successful man, talked with Paul for a long time about all manner of things. Having no notion of his antecedents, he a.s.sumed him to be a friend of Rowlatt and met him on terms of social equality. Paul expanded like a flower to the sun. It was the first time he had spoken with an educated man on common ground--a man to whom the great imaginative English writers were familiar friends, who ran from Chaucer to Lamb and from Dryden to Browning with amazing facility. The strong wine of allusive talk mounted to Paul's brain. Tingling with excitement, he brought out all his small artillery of scholars.h.i.+p and acquitted himself so well that his host sent him off with a cordial letter to a manager of his acquaintance.

The letter opened the difficult door of the theatre. His absurd beauty of face and figure, a far greater recommendation in the eyes of the manager who had begun rehearsals for an elaborate romantic production than a knowledge of The Faerie Queene, obtained for him an immediate engagement--to walk on as a gilded youth of Italy in two or three scenes at a salary of thirty s.h.i.+llings a week. Paul went home and spread himself like a young peac.o.c.k before Jane, and said: ”I am an actor.”

The girl's eyes glowed. ”You are wonderful.”

”No, not I,” replied Paul modestly. ”It is my star.”

”Have you got a big part?” asked Jane.

He laughed pityingly, sweeping back his black curls. ”No, you silly, I haven't any lines to speak”--he had at once caught up the phrase--”I must begin at the beginning. Every actor has to do it.”

”You'll get mother and me orders to come and see you, won't you?”

”You shall have a box,” declared Paul the magnificent.

Thus began a new phase in the career of Paul Kegworthy. After the first few days of bewilderment on the bare, bleak stage, where oddments of dilapidated furniture served to indicate thrones and staircases and palace doors and mossy banks; where men and women in ordinary costume behaved towards one another in the most ridiculous way and went through unintelligible actions with phantom properties; where the actor-manager would pause in the breath of an impa.s.sioned utterance and cry out, ”Oh, my G.o.d! stop that hammering!” where nothing looked the least bit in the world like the lovely ordered picture he had been accustomed to delight in from the s.h.i.+lling gallery--after the first few days he began to focus this strange world and to suffer its fascination. And he was proud of the silent part allotted to him, a lazy lute-player in attendance on the great lady, who lounged about on terrace steps in picturesque att.i.tudes. He was glad that he was not an unimportant member of the crowd of courtiers who came on in a bunch and bowed and nodded and pretended to talk to one another and went off again. He realized that he would be in sight of the audience all the time. It did not strike him that the manager was using him merely as a piece of decoration.

One day, however, at rehearsal the leading lady said: ”If my lute-player could play a few chords here--or the orchestra for him-it would help me tremendously. I've got all this long cross with nothing to say.”

Paul seized his opportunity. ”I can play the mandoline,” said he.

”Oh, can you?” said the manager, and Paul was handed over to the musical director, and the next day rehea.r.s.ed with a real instrument which he tw.a.n.ged in the manner prescribed. He did not fail to announce himself to Jane as a musician.

Gradually he found his feet among the heterogeneous band who walk on at London theatres. Some were frankly vulgar, some were pretentiously genteel, a good many were young men of gentle birth from the public schools and universities. Paul's infallible instinct drew him into timid companions.h.i.+p with the last. He knew little of the things they talked about, golf and cricket prospects, and the then brain-baffling Ibsen, but he listened modestly, hoping to learn. He reaped the advantage of having played ”the sedulous ape” to his patrons of the studios. His tricks were somewhat exaggerated; his sweep of the hat when ladies pa.s.sed him at the stage door entrance was lower than custom deems necessary; he was quicker in courteous gesture than the young men from the universities; he bowed more deferentially to an interlocutor than is customary outside Court circles; but they were all the tricks of good breeding. More than one girl asked if he were of foreign extraction. He remembered Rowlatt's question of years ago, and, as then, he felt curiously pleased. He confessed to an exotic strain: to Italian origin. Italy was romantic. When he obtained a line part and he appeared on the bill, he took the opportunity of changing a name linked with unpleasant a.s.sociations which he did not regard as his own.

Kegworthy was cast into the limbo of common things, and he became Paul Savelli. But this was later.

He made friends at the theatre. Some of the women, by petting and flattery, did their best to spoil him; but Paul was too ambitious, too much absorbed in his dream of greatness and his dilettante literary and musical pursuits, too much yet of a boy to be greatly affected. What he prized far more highly than feminine blandishments was the new comrades.h.i.+p with his own s.e.x. Instinctively he sought them, as a sick dog seeks gra.s.s, unconsciously feeling the need of them in his mental and moral development. Besides, the att.i.tude of the women reminded him of that of the women painters in his younger days. He had no intention of playing the pet monkey again. His masculinity revolted. The young barbarian clamoured. A hard day on the river he found much more to his taste than sporting in the shade of a Kensington flat over tea and sandwiches with no matter how sentimental an Amaryllis. Jane, who had seen the performance, though not from a box, a couple of upper-circle seats being all that Paul could obtain from the acting-manager, and had been vastly impressed by Paul's dominating position in the stage fairy-world, said to him, with a sniff that choked a sigh: ”Now that you've got all those pretty girls around you, I suppose you soon won't think of me any longer?”

Paul waved the dreaded houris away as though they were midges. ”I'm sick of girls,” he replied in a tone of such sincerity that Jane tossed her head.

”Oh? Then I suppose you lump me with the rest and are sick of me too?”

”Don't worry a fellow,” said Paul. ”You're not a girl-not in that sense, I mean. You're a pal.”

”Anyway, they're lots prettier than what I am,” she said defiantly.

He looked at her critically, after the brutal manner of obtuse boyhood, and beheld an object quite agreeable to the sight. Her Londoner's ordinarily colourless checks were flushed, her blue eyes shone bright, her little chin was in the air and her parted lips showed a flash of white teeth. She wore a neat simple blouse and skirt and held her slim, half-developed figure taut. Paul shook his head. ”Jolly few of them--without grease-paint on.”

”But you see them all painted up.”

He burst into laughter. ”Then they're beastly, near by! You silly kid, don't you know? We've got to make up, otherwise no one in front would be able to see our mouths and noses and eyes. From the front we look lovely; but close to we're horrors.”

”Well, how should I know that?” asked Jane.