The Fortunate Youth Part 11

"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 scholarship 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 shillings 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 shilling 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 companionship 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 comradeship 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.

"You couldn't unless you saw us--or were told. But now you know."

"Do you look beastly too?"

"Vile," he laughed.

"I'm glad I didn't think of going on the stage,"' she said, childish yet very feminine unreason combining with atavistic puritanism. "I shouldn't like to paint my face."

"You get used to it," said Paul, the experienced.

"I think it horrid to paint your face."

He swung to the door--they were in the little parlour behind the shop--a flash of anger in his eyes. "If you think everything I do horrid, I can't talk to you."

He marched out. Jane suddenly realized that she had behaved badly. She whipped herself. She had behaved atrociously. Of course she had been jealous of the theatre girls; but had he not been proving to her all the time in what small account he held them? And now he had gone. At seventeen a beloved gone for an hour is a beloved gone for ever. She rushed to the foot of the stairs on which his ascending steps still creaked.

"Paul!"

"Yes."

"Come back! Do come back!"

Paul came back and followed her into the parlour.

"I'm sorry," she said.

He graciously forgave her, having already arrived at the mature conclusion that females were unaccountable folk whose excursions into unreason should be regarded by man with pitying indulgence. And, in spite of the seriousness with which he took himself, he was a sunny-tempered youth.

Barney Bill, putting into the Port of London, so to speak, in order to take in cargo, also visited the theatre towards the end of the run of the piece. He waited, by arrangement, for Paul outside the stage door, and Paul, coming out, linked arms and took him to a blazing bar in Piccadilly Circus and ministered to his thirst, with a princely air.

"It seems rum," said Bill, wiping his lips with the back of his hand, after a mighty pull at the pint tankard--"it seems rum that you should be standing me drinks at a swell place like this. It seems only yesterday that you was a two-penn'orth of nothing jogging along o' me in the old 'bus."

"I've moved a bit since then, haven't I?" said Paul.

"You have, sonny," said Barney Bill. "But"--he sighed and looked around the noisy glittering place, at the smart barmaids, the well-clad throng of loungers, some in evening dress, the half-dozen gorgeous ladies sitting with men at little tables by the window--"I thinks as how you gets more real happiness in a quiet village pub, and the beer is cheaper, and--gorblimey!"

He ran his finger between his stringy neck and the frayed stand-up collar that would have sawn his head off but for the toughness of his hide. To do Paul honour he had arrayed himself in his best--a wondrously cut and heavily-braided morning coat and lavender-coloured trousers of eccentric shape, and a funny little billyc.o.c.k hat too small for him, and a thunder-and-lightning necktie, all of which he had purchased nearly twenty years ago to grace a certain wedding at which he had been best man. Since then he had worn the Nessus shirt of a costume not more than half-a-dozen times. The twisted, bright-eyed little man, so obviously ill at ease in his amazing garb, and the beautiful youth, debonair in his well-fitting blue serge, formed a queer contrast.

"Don't you never long for the wind of G.o.d and the smell of the rain?"

asked Barney Bill.

"I haven't the time," said Paul. "I'm busy all day long."

"Well, well," said Barney Bill, "the fellow wasn't far wrong who said it takes all sorts to make a world. There are some as likes electric light and some as likes the stars. Gimme the stars." And in his countryman's way he set the beer in his tankard swirling round and round before he put it again to his lips.

Paul sipped his beer reflectively. "You may find happiness and peace of soul under the stars," said he, sagely, "and if I were a free agent I'd join you tomorrow. But you can't find fame. You can't rise to great things. I want to--well, I don't quite know what I want to do," he laughed, "but it's something big."

"Yuss, my boy," said Barney Bill. "I understand. You was always like that. You haven't come any nearer finding your 'igh-born parents?"--there was a twinkle in his eyes--"'ave yer?"