Twopence Coloured (17 page)

“I say, where
are
we going?” she said.

“God knows. He’ll take us round, I suppose.” He looked at his watch. “We’ll go in this to the theatre, and I’ll leave you there. It’ll be all right.” He was calmer now. “Well, Jackie, what have you been doing all this time?” He leant forward.

“Oh — nothing much.” She lay back, as though weary, and smiled. “Just the same.”

He looked out of the window.

“It’s all so sudden,” said Jackie. “I’d no idea ‘Little Girl’ was coming off. It’s wonderful of you to have got me this, though.”

“Oh, while we’re at it,” he said, and he gave her
instructions
as to what she was to do, and where she was to go to-morrow. And how she was to give notice to her
management
at the end of the week. There was then a very long silence. For quite three minutes they had nothing to say. He leant out of the window, shouted orders to the man, and sat down again. He left the window open.

Through the muddy London streets the taxi jolted on, and still they said nothing. It rained unceasingly and the streets
were practically deserted. They came to Baker Street station, and whirred down Baker Street.

“Are you up here just for the day, then?” asked Jackie.

“Yes. I came up to see my brother.”

She was looking at him, but he would not look at her.

“He was wonderful, wasn’t he? I was terribly
disappointed
when he did n’t get his century.”

“Yes. So was I.”

“He’s not like you, is he?” said Jackie.

“No.”

He was still peering out of the window, and now she raised herself to do the same. The draught was coming in full upon her, and she was trembling and cold.

“Is this Selfridge’s?” said Jackie.

“Yes. Selfridge’s.”

“Not far now.”

“No.”

“You’ll write to me, I suppose?”

“Be up to see you, I expect. Damn this weather.”

“Yes. Isn’t it awful?”

She was clenching her teeth to keep them from
chattering
. She was freezed to the bone, and she wished she was dead. It might have been raining since the beginning of the world.

He brought the window up with a bang.

“Oh, Jackie,” he said. “What
are
we going to do?”

She saw him looking at her, in an agonized way, and she looked away. She looked in front of her and could not speak. She could not trust herself to speak. She was like a little ashamed child, about to be ill.

“Well, Jackie?”

“I don’t know,” said Jackie….

But now he had his hand upon hers, and she watched this.

She observed its warmth and its brownness, and the way it was fondling hers. And this fondling was a curious,
timeless
, and inexplicable event — something which might be watched in a detached way — something which might never have begun, and which might never end….

“God,” he said. “Here we are.”

He withdrew his hand. The taxi stopped, and she looked up at him. He was opening the door, and stepping out into the rain. She followed him, and he took her hand.

“Well, good-bye, Jackie. If I don’t come up, I’ll write.”

“Right you are,” said Jackie, and went inside.

T
HE next day Jackie saw Mr. Walter Carters at the Old Strand Theatre in the Strand. She was kept waiting for two hours, in which she had two cups of coffee on two separate floors of a neighbouring A.B.C. establishment — the stage-doorkeeper having no notions concerning, nor any-apparent interest in, Mr. Carters’ whereabouts. At her fourth inquiry, however, she encountered Mr. Carters in the
doorway
, and he asked her if she was wanting him. She showed her letter of introduction from Mr. Gissing, and he
murmured
“Oh, yes,” and asked her to follow him. He took her up the stairs into a small dressing-room, where he switched on the light. The room was bare save for some red-bound and decayed scripts on the shelf, a disused whiskey-bottle, pen and ink, and Mr. Carters’ overcoat on a property basket. He read the letter through in a difficult silence.

Mr. Reginald Carters was an untidy, thickly built,
sunburn
t, listless little man of forty-five, with a small moustache and very blue and innocent eyes. He had been actively
concerned
in this business for forty years, and was indeed
something
of a landmark and rock in his profession. His theatre, the Old Strand, which he had inherited from his father and now shared with his sister, had reached a legendary status — and from this legend he had made no attempt to break away. The titles of the plays and revivals with which he had, for the last twenty years, had almost exclusive connection, were revealing of this tendency. Such titles as “Alone in the City”—“Just a Girl”—“Married for Money”—“A Girl’s Best Friend”—“A Soul for Sale”—“Three Lasses from Blackpool”—“Tried and True”—“Masters of the Turf” —“Merely the Drudge”—“White All Through”—“Only
a Working Girl”—“Waifs from the Workhouse”—“For God, King and Country”—or “Sweet Seventeen” were
representative
and immediately identifiable titles. The plots of these melodramas accorded with these titles, and were similarly identifiable — dealing, as they did, exclusively and traditionally with infamously monocled scoundrels,
pathetically
credulous young women, oily-mannered (but
blackhearted
) solicitors, young men vaguely on His Majesty’s Service (but with plenty of time for white flannels,
father-defying
, and yachting caps), Generals (given to plumes, adamance, and remorse), aged but benign priests (with a benediction habit), youthful and moth-like clergymen,
temptresses
for same, hirelings of the monocle (abiding in
taverns
), a sprinkling of female Spies, and a red-nosed postman, or a red-nosed publican, or a red-nosed bookmaker, who, in imbecile partnership with his wife (who would behave in a captious and querulous manner), afforded light refreshment in an otherwise unrelieved emotional essay in high piety and moral integrity. The action took place in England and abroad, and amounted, in the long run, to little. Abroad there was a War, which people came back from (after many years) and found things lamentably altered: at home there was free and incessant criticism of motives, under the nervous wear-and-tear of which somebody at last got up and Struck some one, and there was a great to-do. The whole was
presented
in from sixteen to twenty scenes, with ample use of front-cloths, which were, in their two-dimensional placidity, unconvincing, and, in their frequently exercised ability to deal facetious but savage blows upon the comedian’s back, supernatural. There were introduced on the stage as many trains, battles, live race-horses, shipwrecks and the like, as could be afforded or negotiated.

With these plays revived, or with new attempts in the same model, Mr. Walter Carters was now almost exclusively associated — the “Old Strand‚” having one of the largest stages in London, being admirably suited to this type of thing. He was able to work with a minimum of cost, having a vast theatrical store (another family legacy) down at
Wimbledon, whence came not only a great part of the
costumes
and scenery of his productions, but also much of his printing. Hence, and in the nineteen-twenties, large posters depicting corseted young women with a multiple of
petticoats
standing challengingly and temptingly on tables, or
red-coated
soldiers strutting forth with their padded and
chess-queen
-shaped “gals,” or a straw-hatted nobility going floridly down on its knees before skirt-sweeping and hair-crowned susceptibles, or black-moustached landlords ejecting ancients (and their daughters) from honey-suckled but mortgaged property —directly defined a modern period, and added to the general historical flavour of the whole. Mr. Carters was, in fact, more of an artistic excavator of the past than a modern producer; and those vast dusty stores at Wimbledon, at which he spent so much of his time, could furnish an instructive tale of bygone melodramatic decades and rantings long ago.

At this time Mr. Carters had two shows in the provinces — one of which, “The Loves of an Empress,” had left the Old Strand some months ago and was paying him extremely well —the other of which, “The Girl from Somewhere,” was losing him from fifty to two hundred pounds weekly. He was withdrawing this and replacing it with a play called “A Man of Steel”— a revival from nineteen-eight, which he was giving an experimental run on the London Halls. He was also the owner of the King’s Theatre, Brighton, where he proposed finally to take “A Man of Steel,” and afterwards commence a repertory of the old dramas.

Mr. Carters’ professional manner was innocence, slight confusion, kindliness, slow speech, slightly wounded simplicity, and a general air of being on the verge of bankruptcy, but carrying on for others’ benefit alone. He was, indeed, a genius at evasion, as he was also a genius in his own line, and he had a wide reputation for being grasping. He knew, however, how to handle actors and actresses.

“Yes,” said Mr. Carters, naïvely. “I think I might have a Part for you.”

“Oh, do you think you might?” said Jackie.

“You have n’t had very much Experience, have you?”

“No,” said Jackie. “I’m in ‘Little Girl’ now….”

“Very good show, that….”

“Yes,” said Jackie, “it is….”

There was a pause.

“Well,” said Mr. Carters, taking up his manuscripts and making a sudden move to the door. “I can’t say anything definite just Now. But I think I’ll have something for you, and I’ll let you know. Of course we can’t Pay you very much here….”

“No,” said Jackie, following him out….

“But you’ve got the right voice and looks, haven’t you? And I think I could find something for you…. Well, I’ll let you know in a few days’ time, shall I?”

“Will you?” said Jackie. “Thanks very much.”

The next morning she received a thin, tattered part, bound in brown paper, and a letter agreeing to employ her at two pounds ten shillings a week. She was therefore able to get her blow in first with the management of “Little Girl”— which was a very trifling and barely observable revenge — but one giving her enormous satisfaction for all that.

And so it was that three weeks later, at eleven o’clock on a grey morning in July, Jackie found herself in the Strand, walking to the theatre for her first rehearsal. In her bag she had a printed rehearsal-call card, as well as her part (which she had intended, but for some reason unknown still neglected to have learnt by heart), and she was very nervous indeed.

There were signs of professional life outside the Old Strand Stage Door (which opened on a spacious side-street) but no signs of participation in theatrical transactions. That is to say, there were several little groups of two or three, standing chatting out on the pavement, or lurking in the doorway; but all appeared perfectly content to remain
chatting
there, with a complacency which surprised and puzzled
Jackie, whose call was for eleven and who was accustomed to the strictest discipline. There was an air of something portentous occurring inside, which did not at present affect those out here.

She therefore walked up and down, or stayed
self-consciously
still, surveying her new associates, who all
appeared
to have some acquaintance with each other, and who in turn surveyed her with cold and peering interest (on the part of the women) or grave detachment (on the part of the men).

The women were all much older than herself, and
extremely
dowdy. This caused Jackie some vexation with respect to her own coat and skirt, which she had arranged to wear for the first time to-day, and which she knew became her well. Nor did their glances spare her. The men also were all much older than herself, and their glances did not spare her either. In two of the groups there were children; and there was, in fact, a heavy, marital and almost boastfully domestic atmosphere over the greater part of those assembled here, which Jackie found displeasing. She was unable to explain this displeasure. Apart, that is, from a vague feeling that individuals with responsibilities in this world had no business with this kind of tomfoolery, and should not be hanging idly about stage doors at eleven o’clock in the morning. But then she had not as yet consciously and
deliberately
identified it as tomfoolery….

There were one or two very old men, who talked
ponderously
and gazed miserably ahead; and there was one old man in an old hat whose hair was white and whose eyebrows were painted thick black. Very crudely and foolishly and naïvely painted black. There was one short young woman of about thirty, who was fairly good-looking, and better dressed, and more aggressive. And there were four or five curious males, who wore rough suits and cow-boy hats, and had an air of familiarity with starvation and lassoes. (“A Man of Steel” was a Western drama.) At one o’clock these would be observed hanging outside Jones’ Restaurant in Leicester Square, conferring either with their own kind or
with stout yet waisted gentlemen with abnormally peach-like complexions…. Not all these were to appear in the present show — many having come solely on the chance of seeing Mr. Carters with a view to the future. The rumour, flying like fire down Garrick Street and St. Martin’s Lane, that Reggie, or (as he was sometimes even more colloquially and intimately termed) “Rej,” was taking out a new show, invariably inspired assemblies of this sort. Jackie felt that she was nearing abysses in the theatrical profession.

Mr. Carters came bustling at last, however, with scripts under his arm, and after various waylayings and swift
conversations
outside, vanished within. And then the rest slowly filtered in after him — Jackie amongst them — down the stone steps and on to the vast, bare, historic stage of the Old Strand, where the curtain was down, and the groups reassembled, and a low running murmur of brooding talk floated echoingly up to the grid. But it was dark, and cosier in here.

Jackie once caught the roving eye of Mr. Carters (who looked diplomatically away), but otherwise no notice was taken of her.

There was an old wooden table up against the curtain, and at this there were two chairs upon which Mr. Carters and a pale, hook-nosed young man were seated. There were also one or two chairs placed, with apparent plan, about the stage. The rehearsal began, amidst the mumbling, almost before anyone was aware of it.

The plot of “A Man of Steel” involved eight or nine
leading
characters in one Saloon scene, and one Ranch scene in Kansas, and it was a simple plot. The characters, also, were simply conceived.

The only character of importance, however, was
Jack
Lawson
(sometimes termed Honest Jack Lawson, which was deserved), who was first the owner of the Lazy Z Ranch, and later a peer of the British Realm, where he had suffered singularly in youth from a false charge of embezzlement.
He was a disillusioned man, and his relationships with
Sadie
Hicks
(a saloon dancer of low repute) — with
Big
Jim
Granger
(a foreman with a taciturn but honest nature) — with
Lady
Gwendolyn
Power
(an English Rose) — with
Two-Gun
MacFerran
(an outlaw from Western society, upon which he revenged himself with curses, Indian-flogging and revolvers) — with the
Hon.
John
Power
(a gentleman who had the monocle, moustache, and a gait of an embezzler, and was one) — with
Mr.
Hardbite
(a lawyer and inheritance-announcer) — and with
The
Boys
(a crowd which hardly ever opened its mouth except to cheer its Boss) — need not be described. It is enough to say that these relationships would have broken any other man of steel, but could not break this one.

Jackie’s part, which was that of
Lady
Joan
Hope
(the English Rose’s dearest woman friend), ran to three pages: