In a month’s time from this Paul’s soul sat chuckling all day long. He lived with the quaintest set he had ever conceived, and there was no page of ‘Nickleby’ which was fuller of comedy than a day of his own life. He met Crummies, and actually heard him wonder how those things got into the papers. He met the Infant Phenomenon. With his own hands he had helped to adjust the immortal real pump and tubs. He was still in the days when there was a farce in an evening’s performance to play the people in, and a solid five-act melodrama for the public’s solid fare, and a farce to play the people out.
Darco travelled with his own company, majestically Astrachan-furred and splendid, but rarely clean-shaven. Nine days in ten an aggressive stubble on cheek and chin seemed to sprout from an inward sense of his own glorious import.
‘I am Cheorge Dargo,’ he said unfailingly to every provincial stage-manager he met ‘I nefer sbeaks to beobles twice.’
His brutalities of demeanour earned for him the noisy hatred of scores of people. His hidden benefactions bought for him the silent blessings of some suffering unit in every town. He bullied by instinct in public. He blessed the suffering by instinct in private. He was cursed by ninety-nine in the hundred, and the odd man adored him. Paul’s heart fastened to the uncouth man, and he did him burningly eager service.
Paul was in clover, and had sense enough to know it.
‘I regognise the zymptoms,’ said Darco, when they had been on tour a week. ‘I am not going to haf my insbirations in the tay-dime any longer. All my crate iteas will gome to me now for some dime in the night. You haf got to be near me, young Armstrong. You must sday vith me in the zame lotchings.’
This meant that Darco paid his whole expenses, and that his salary came to him each week intact. He began to save money and to develop at the same time an inexpensive dandyism. He took to brown velveteen and to patent leather boots. He bought a secondhand watch at a pawnbroker’s, but disdained a chain. His father had inspired him with a horror of jewellery; for once, when he had spent the savings of a month upon a cheap scarf-pin, the elder Armstrong had wrathfully asked him what he meant by sticking that brass-headed nail in his chest, and had thrown the gewgaw into the fire. But the watch for the first week or two was a token of established manhood, and it was consulted a full hundred times a day, and was corrected by every public clock he passed.
His occupation was no sinecure, for Darco was running half-a-dozen companies, and kept up a fire of correspondence with each. He had dramas on the anvil, too, and dictated by the hour every day. Often he woke Paul in the dead of night, and routed him out of bed, and gave him notes of some prodigious idea which had just occurred to him.
Darco had an unfailing formula with his landladies: ‘Prek-fasd for three, lunge for three, tinner for three; petrooms and zidding-room for two,’ He worked for three and ate for two.
‘I am in many respegs,’ he told Paul, ‘a most remarkaple man. I am a boet, and a creat boet; but I haf no lankwage. My Vrench is Cherman, and my Cherman is Vrench, ant my Enklish is Alsatian. My normal demperadure is fever heat. I am a toctor; I am a zoldier. I haf peen a creat agdor in garagder bards—Alsatian garagder bards—in Vrance and in Chermany. I can write a blay, ant I can stage id, ant I can baint the scenery for id. I am Cheorge Dargo, ant vere I haf not been it is nod vorth vile to co; and vot I do not know apout a theatre it is not vorth vile to learn. Sdob vith me, and I will deach you your business.’
The company played a week within five miles of Castle Barfield, and Paul snatched an hour for home. There the brown velveteen and the patent leathers and the watch made a great impression, and the eight sovereigns Paul was able to jingle in his pockets and display to wondering eyes.
‘There’s danger in the life, lad,’ said Armstrong wistfully. ‘I know it, for I saw a heap of it in my youth. Keep a clean heart, Paul. High thinking goes with chaste and sober living. There’s nothing blurs faith like our own misdeeds.’
Paul was thankful for the dusk which hid his flaming cheeks at this moment. His mother had taken away the candle, and the old man had chosen the instant’s solitude for this one serious word.
‘I’m not denying,’ said Armstrong, ‘that it is a good worldly position for a lad of your years, but what’s it going to lead to, Paul, lad? What’s the direction, I’m asking?
‘I’m going to be a dramatist,’ said Paul.
‘A play-actor!’ cried the mother, who was back again.
‘A play-writer,’ Paul corrected. ‘I’ve got the best tutor in the world.’
‘Do you mean to tell me,’ his mother asked, ‘that you think o’ making that a trade for a lifetime?’
‘Why not? asked Pau.
‘Why not, indeed!’ she cried, with an angry click of her knitting-needle. ‘Writing a parcel o’ rubbidge for fools to speak, and other fools to laugh at.’
‘It was Shakespeare’s trade, Mary,’ said Armstrong.
‘It’s a pretty far cry from our Paul to Shakespeare, I reckon,’ said the mother with sudden dryness.
‘I suppose it is,’ said Paul, laughing; ‘but there are degrees in every calling. Wait a bit I don’t mean that you shall be ashamed of me.’
Paul had been away from home for half a year, and absence had altered many things. The High Street of the town had grown mean and sordid to the eye. Shops which had once been palatial had lost all the glamour which childhood had given them and custom had preserved. The dusty, untidy shop at home had shrunk to less than half its original dimensions. Armstrong seemed changed more than anything or anybody else. He looked suddenly small and old and gray. He was not much over five-and-sixty, but he had always seemed old to Paul, even from the earliest recollections of infancy. But his age had been the age of dignity and authority, and now it was age without disguise, white-haired and withered, and bowed in uncomplaining patience.
But Paul felt that there was no such change anywhere as in himself. A certain complacency had stolen across the horror which had shaken him at the first contemplation of his own fall. He had made a step towards manhood; he heard the talk of men—not the best, not the wisest, yet neither the worst nor the most stupid—and he knew now how lightly they valued that which he had once esteemed priceless. He had written in his note-book:
‘To forgive is godlike. Be as God unto thyself.’
He had made a step towards manhood. He had thought it a hideous, irremediable plunge to ruin, and yet somehow he seemed to stand the higher for it. The episode was to be hateful for ever in memory. But it was to cloud life no longer—only to stand as a sign of warning, a danger-signal. Surely the net is spread in vain in the sight of any bird. The burned child dreads the fire. He did not as yet reckon that man is a moral Salamander, and accommodates himself to all temperatures of heat and asceticism. How should a raw lad of less than nineteen think in such a fashion? But he knew what he had not known; he had passed through the fire, and the smell of burning had left his raiment.
The Midland mother gave him a cold cheek to kiss when he went away, but the Scottish father embraced him with a trembling arm.
‘Ye’ll be remembering Sir Walter’s last words to Lockhart,’ he said. ‘Be a good man, my dear.’
Paul pressed his smooth cheek against the soft white whiskers of his father’s face, and held his right hand hard. There was a lump in his throat, and his good-bye had a husk in it. He went back to the society of men who had never thought manly chastity a virtue or the unchastity of men a crime. He went back armed in steel, and the armour lasted a full fortnight in its perfection. Then here and there a rivet came out, and by-and-by the whole suit fell to pieces.
‘Id is gurious,’ said Darco, ‘that all the vunniest sdories in the vorlt should be vhat they gall imbrober. Look at Arisdophanes; look at Jaucer; look at the “Gontes Troladigues”; look at the “Tegameron.”’
‘Look at Pickwick,’ said Paul.
‘Vell!’ cried Darco, ‘look at Bigvig. Bigvig woult haf peen a creat teal vunnier if Tickens had lived at the dime of Zmollet.’
‘I don’t mind drinking out of a jug,’ said Paul, ‘but I like a clean jug. I’ve read Aristophanes—in translation. It’s like drinking wine out of a gold cup that has been washed in a sewer.’
‘Who says that?’ asked Darco.
‘I do,’ said Paul.
‘It is a ferry coot ebicram,’ said Darco. ‘I vill rememper id. But, mindt you, to be squeamish is not to be glean-minded.
If a sdory is vunny, I laugh. Vy not? If a man tells me a sdory that is only dirdy, I co someveres else. I am a goot man. For dwendy-three hours and fifty-eight minutes in a tay I am as bure-minded as a child; then, in the ott dwo minutes somepoty tells me a dirdy sdory. I laugh, and I go avay, and I think of my blays and my boedry and my pusiness. It is water on a duck’s pack.’
‘Dirty water,’ said Paul.
‘There is enough glean water in the tay’s rainfall to wash it off,’ Darco answered. ‘Did you efer read “The Orichinal”?
‘No,’ said Paul.
‘The man who wrote it vos so healthy that he nefer hat need to wash himself. His skin was too bure to hold dirt.’
‘Filthy beggar!’ said Paul.
‘I make it a baraple,’ Darco declared. ‘Id is true of the immordal soul. I am as bure-minded as a child, and I haf heardt den thousand fillainous sdories. Vot does it madder?’
The rivets of Paul’s armour rotted, as the rivets of most men’s armour rot, and he grew to tolerate what had been abominable. And that is the way of life, which is a series of declensions from high ideals, and is meant to be so because things must be lost before their worth can be known. The society in which he lived and moved was as rich as any in the world in the kind of narrative he had discussed with Darco. Little by little he got to take Darco’s view. It is the view of ninety per cent, of men of the world. A naturally pure mind never learns to love nastiness, but it learns to tolerate it, for the sake of the wit which sometimes lives with it.
Darco was a man whom nobody ever saw for an instant under the influence of liquor, but then it was impossible to make him drunk. It seemed to Paul as if it were just as unlikely for him to become intoxicated by drinking as for a decanter to grow tipsy by having liquor poured into it. If he ate—as he did—twice as much as the average keen-set sportsman, he drank as much as the average hopeless drunkard, and no man could have guessed from his speech, or acts, or aspect that he was not a total abstainer. Paul, too, began to discover that he had a cast-iron pot of a head, and took an infantile pride in the fact; but this kind of vanity was not often indulged in, and he had no physical predisposition to it.
Darco made money by the handful, and spent it with a lavish ostentation. Paul continued his habit of riding about in cabs and dining in hotels. It was a bad commercial training, but he was not at the time of life to think of that. The days and nights were full. There were both labour and enjoyment in them. Every week showed him a new town or city: classic Edinburgh, dirty Glasgow—cleaner nowadays—roaring Liverpool, rainy Manchester, smoke-clouded Birmingham and Sheffield, granite-built Aberdeen, jolly Dublin, with an unaccustomed twang in the whisky, after the Scottish progress; Belfast, Cork, Waterford. Everywhere character studies in shoals; dialect studies every day and all day long. Paul could train his tongue, before the twelve months’ tour was over, to the speech of Exeter, or Norwich, or Brighton, or Newcastle, or Berwick, or Aberdeen, or Cork, or the black North. He set himself to the task conscientiously, and with a rich enjoyment. What a Gargantuan table was the world!
How lovable, laughable, hateful were the men who sat at it! What a feast of feeling was spread daily!
The tour came near to its end, and Darco was arranging a new series for half a dozen companies, so that work grew furious. A man might have commanded an army or ruled a great department of State with less expenditure of energy. There was no advertising or consulting of agencies, but everything was done by personal letter. There were reams and reams of letters; there were scores and scores of contracts with managers, and actors, and actresses, and upholsterers, and scene-painters, and printers, and bill-posters, and Darco one organized mass of effort at the centre of all the business hurly-burly, doing three men’s work, and tearing into fibre the nerves of all men who came near him. He could be princely with it all in his own way.
‘You haf learned your pusiness, young Armstrong,’ he said to Paul when the rush was over. ‘I gan deach anypoty his pusiness if he is not a vool. I am Cheorge Dargo. You haf done your work gabidally, and you are vorth fife dimes vot I am baying you. But I alvays like the shady site of a pargain, and I shall only gif you four dimes.’
So at four times the original sum Paul’s salary was fixed, and he began to feel himself a man of consequence.
‘I am Mr. Darco’s private secretary,’ he was told to say to people with whom he was empowered to deal. ‘I am entirely in Mr. Darco’s confidence, and you may deal with me exactly as if Mr. Darco were here.’
At the beginning of the second year the great provincial cities had begun to take advantage of the Public Libraries Act, and here was a new joy for Paul. The Free Library was the first place he asked for in any big town, and at every spare hour he stuck his nose into a book, and kept it there until duty called him away again. Something in ‘Gil Bias’ about poverty in observation struck his fancy, and he cast about in his own mind asking where he could observe, not knowing yet that he was observing all things. He hit upon the landlady. A man who has fifty-two landladies in a year has surely a fertile field. He sorted and classified in the light of experience: the honeyed, the acidulated, and bibulous-godly (mostly Scottish), the bibulous-ungodly (mostly English), the slut with a clean outside to things, the painstaking sloven, the peculative (here one majestic sample), the reduced in circumstances, the confidential, the reserved, the frisky, the motherly, the step-motherly—a most excellent assembly for mirth and pity.
Mrs. Brace came back again. How many years was it since the memory of Mrs. Brace had touched the Exile’s mind?
Darco did, in the main, his own marketing. He had sent home sausages for breakfast, seven in number. Six came to table.
‘Vere is my other zausage,’ cries Darco. ‘There vere zeven. Now there are six. Vere is my other zausage?’
‘Really you know, sir,’ says Mrs. Brace. ‘Sausages do shrink so in the cooking.’
Paul was under the table with a helpless yelp of pleasure, and Darco stormed like a beaten gong.
Come back again, in the brown sultry air, and the solitude, over that bridge of years departed, Mrs. Fuller. It was Mrs. Fuller’s plan to convey a portion of the guests’ clean linen from the chest of drawers into the hall, and to lay it on the table there pinned up in a neat newspaper parcel, and to say, ‘If you please, gentlemen, the rest of your linning have come home, and, if you please, it’s two and elevenpence halfpenny.’ Oh, the days—the days when a jest like this could shake the ribs with mirth!
And Mistress MacAlister, painfully intoxicated at the dinner hour of 2 p.m., and the uncooked leg of young pork in the larder.
‘D’ye thenk ah’m goin’ to cuik till ye on the Sabba’ Day? Ye’ll no be findin’ th’ irreligious sort o’ betches that’ll do that for ye in Dundee, ah’m thenkin’.’
And the little soft-spoken lady from New Orleans, whose husband had been a General—in Del Oro—and an old friend of Darco’s in his campaigning days. And the execution in the house. And Darco signing a cheque for twice the amount claimed, and blubbering like a great fat baby, and swearing to burn the cheque if she thanked him by another word. Old Darco, the nerve-tearer, the inordinate pyramid of vanity, the tender, the generous, the loyal. Sweetest fruit in sourest rind! Sleep on, old Darco. God makes none gentler in heart, though He makes many more beloved.
And how men do, on all hands, unconsciously lay themselves out to delight the budding genial satirist! Here is Darco, wealthy and prosperous as he has never been before, launching out fearlessly, and bearing with himthesplendour of the stage—the great Montgomery Bassett. Darco, in consultation with the glorious creature, the question being in which of his unrivalled and majestic assumptions he shall first appear:
‘It doesn’t matter, dear boy,’ says Mr. Montgomery Bassett, in that noble voice, a voice rich as the king of all the wines of Burgundy—‘it doesn’t matter the toss up of a blind beggar’s farthing. The people don’t come to see the play, my boy; they come to see me. They’d come to see me if I played in Punch and Judy.’
And the late leading man, now dethroned, and put to second business:
‘Bassett! Montgomery Bassett! I could act his head off, dear boy. He is the rottenest stick that ever stalked upon a stage. He can’t get in front of that infernal Roman nose, sir. “Now,” says Bassett, “I’m going to be pathetic;” and the Roman nose says, “I’ll see you damned first.” “And now,” says Bassett, “we’ll have a bit of comedy.” “Oh no, you won’t,” says the nose. You might as well try to act behind a barn-door as to act behind that nose. Just fill me out a little tot of Scotch, darling laddie. I want to lose the taste of Bassett.’
And the leading lady and theingénuewho hung together like twin cherries on one stalk, bathed in soft dews of tenderness, until Bassett praised the one and not the other, and the leading lady called the ingénue ‘Chit’ and the ingénue retorted ‘Wrinkles!’ And the reconciliation at the champagne supper which Darco gave when Bassett went away, when the tears they shed must have tasted of the wine.
Oh, the days—the days, long years before he set out on his Journey of Despair, when mirth had no malice, and tears were tributaries to pity!
‘I have vound oudt,’ said Darco, one day, ‘that our paggage man is a pantit He is ropping eferypoty, and I have kiven him a fortnight’s vages, and the bag to carry. That is my liddle chockular vay to say he has got the zack. I haf dele-graphed for a new man, and he will come from Lonton by the seven-thirty train. His name is Warr, and you will know him by his nose, which is pigger than your fist, and as hot to look at as the powels of the Phalarian Pull. It ought to be an acony to garry it, but he laughs pehint it in the distance. But I nodice it always zeems to make his eyes vater.’
Paul went to meet this phenomenon, and from the train Mr. Warr of the Nonconformist printing-office stepped out, carrying the work of art before him like an oriflamme.
‘Mr. Warr, I believe?’ said Paul.
‘The same, sir,’ said Mr. Warr, with a spinal inclination.
Paul’s face was framed in a virginal fringe of brown beard, and he was dressed by a London theatrical tailor. Mr. Wan-had no memory of him.
‘I am Mr. Darco’s private secretary,’ said Paul. ‘That is the address of your lodgings, and when you have taken your traps there Mr. Darco will meet you at the theatre.’
‘I am at your disposal, sir,’ said Mr. Warr.
He gathered up two newspaper parcels, each of which leaked ragged hosiery and soiled linen at either end, and pottered along the platform at Paul’s side, subservient and timid. Paul spurted laughter and affected a cough to hide it.
‘Here is the refreshment-room, Mr. Warr,’ he said. ‘May I ask if you care at this moment to administer a coating of varnish to the work of art?’
‘Have I had the pleasure to encounter you before, sir?’ asked Mr. Warr, peering at him sideways across that astonishing nose, with a brown eye bright with moisture. It was like an old cat looking out from the side of a fireplace.
‘Come in and see,’ said Paul.
Mr. Warr went in, and being offered a choice in varnishes, selected cold gin.
‘My highly superior respects, sir. You either know me, or my fame has reached you.’ He smiled a propitiatory smile. ‘I do not recall you, sir.’
‘I have varnished the work of art before to-day,’ said Paul. ‘Do you remember Bucklersbury?’
‘I should do so,’ Mr. Warr returned. ‘I drudged there for eight long years, and had it not been for Mr. Darco’s kindly memories of an old associate, I might have drudged there still. But two and fifty shillings per week, sir, with freedom and travel thrown in, are highly superior to thirty-six, with slavery superadded. But I do not recall your face and figure, sir.’
‘My name is Armstrong,’ said Paul. ‘I worked beside you for a week or two.’
‘The friend of my youth,’ said Mr. Warr. ‘Permit me to shake hands. Rely upon me, Mr. Armstrong, not to be presumptuous. Rely upon me, sir. I shall respect bygones. Mr. Darco will tell you who I was and what I was when he first knew me. I was first low com., sir, at the Vic, upon my soul and honour, Mr. Armstrong. But the work of art, sir, so grew and prospered that at last the very gallery guyed me. I went for the varnish, Mr. Armstrong, in sheer despair. As God is my highly superior judge, sir, I never drank until I had a drunkard’s nose. Then I made a jest of a deformity, and the joke carried me too far. This infernal feature is an unnatural legacy. It is from my maternal grandfather, who once owned the town of Guildford. I have heard my mother say that his cellars covered a quarter of an acre, and held nothing but port and brandy—packed, sir, seven feet deep. To-morrow, in Mr. Darco’s presence, I sign the pledge till the end of the tour, as per our highly superior arrangement. I do not know, sir, whether behind that aspect of prosperity there lurks the probability of another fourpennyworth.’
‘You mustn’t get tipsy to meet Mr. Darco,’ said Paul.
‘There is no fear of that, sir,’ Mr. Warr answered. ‘That,’ pointing to the empty glass, ‘is my first to-day, and I as thirsty as I am hungry.’
‘Eat, man, eat,’ said Paul.
‘May I, sir?’ asked Mr. Warr.
‘Your fill,’ said Paul.
There were hard-boiled eggs and cold sausages on the marble-topped counter, and Mr. Warr fell to work among them, and mumbled gratitude with his mouth full. When he had half cleared the counter, Paul paid for the depredations, and Mr. Warr, who knew the town of old, picked up his leaking parcels and made off for the address given him.
‘Veil,’ said Darco when Paul got back to him, ‘you haf seen him? Had he any package and luckage?’ Paul described Mr. Warr’s kit. ‘You must puy for him a jeap, useful bordmandeau, and jarge id to me. I shall sdop it out of his wages,’ which of course he never did.
Mr. Warr presented himself at Darco’s lodging next morning wrapped in a perfume of gin and cloves. He laid upon the table a wordy document in foolscap with a receipt stamp in one corner, and read it aloud in his own breathless chuckle. It set forth that whereas he, the undersigned William Treherne Macfarvel Warr, of the one part, late of, et cetera, had entered into an engagement with George Darco, Esq., et cetera, et cetera, of the other part, to such and such an effect of polysyllabic rigmarole, he, the aforesaid and undersigned, did seriously and truly covenant with the aforesaid George Darco, Esq., of et cetera, et cetera, all over again, not to drink or imbibe or partake of any form of alcoholic liquor, whether distilled or fermented, until such time as the agreement or engagement between the aforesaid and undersigned on the one part, and the aforesaid George Darco, Esq., of the other part, should end, cease, and determine. He signed this document with a great sprawling flourish, and Darco and Paul having appended their names to it also, Mr. Warr wrote the date of the transaction across the receipt stamp, and handed the paper to his employer with a solemn bow.
‘You haf peen zaying goot-bye to the dear greature,’ said Darco; ‘I can see that.’
‘In the words of Othello, sir,’ said Mr. Warr: ‘“I kissed her ere I killed her.”’ He smiled self-consciously, but instantly grew grave again. ‘You know me, Mr. Darco. You have my highly superior word. I never go back on it, sir.’
Mr. Warr kept his word, but he grew insufferably self-righteous, and preached total abstinence to everybody, from Darco to the call-boy. He atoned for this unconsciously by the longing calculations he made.
‘I have consulted the almanac,’ he confided to Paul; ‘it is two hundred and seventy-one days to my next drink.’
After this he offered a figure almost daily: ‘Two seventy. A dry journey, Mr. Armstrong.‘’Two fifty, sir, two fifty. The longest lane must turn, sir.’ Then, after a long spell of yearning: ‘Only two hundred now, sir. I should like to obliterate two hundred. But a Warr’s word is sacred.’
‘Now,’ said Paul one day, ‘why don’t you take advantage of this sober spell to cure yourself of the craving, in place of looking forward to the next outburst and counting the days between? Why don’t you make up your mind to have done with it altogether?
‘Sir,’ said Mr. Warr with intense solemnity, ‘if I thought I had tasted my last liquor, I’d cut my throat.’
‘If ever I find myself disposed to feel like that,’ Paul answered, ‘I will cut my own.’
‘Oh dear no, you won’t, sir,’ said Mr. Warr. ‘If ever you go that way at all, you’ll slide into it. You will always believe that you could drop it at any moment until you find you can’t. Then you’ll be reconciled, like the rest of us.’
Paul had little fear. His temptation, he told himself, did not lie in that direction.
Darco’s work fell into routine for a time. The wheels of all his affairs went so smoothly that he and his assistant found many easy breathing-spaces. But Paul was of a mind just now to scorn delight and live laborious days. He confined himself for many hours of each day to his bedroom, and on the weekly railway journey with his chief he sat for the most part in a brown study, And made frequent entries in a big note-book.
‘Vat are you doing?’ Darco asked one day.
Paul blushed, and answered that he would rather wait a day or two before speaking.
‘I shall ask your opinion in a week at the outside,’ he added.
Darco went to sleep, a thing he seemed able to do whenever the fancy took him, and Paul made notes furiously all through the rest of the journey. His ideas affected him curiously, for at times his eyes would fill and he would blow his nose, and at other times he would chuckle richly to himself. He had got what he conceived to be a dramatic notion by the tip of the tail, and he was engaged in the manufacture of his first drama. In due time the result of his labours in his most clerk-like hand was passed over a breakfast-table to Darco, who winced, and looked like a shying horse at it.
‘Vot is id?’ he asked.
‘It is a play,’ said Paul, blushing and stammering. ‘I want to have your judgment on it.’
‘Dake it away!’ cried Darco; ‘dake it away. I am wriding blays myselluf, ant I will nod look at other beoble’s. No. Dake it away!’
Paul stared at him in confusion.
‘I do not vant to look at anypoty’s blays,’ said Darco. ‘I haf got alreaty all the tramatic iteas there ever haf been in the vorldt—all there efer will be. I do not vant notions that are olter than the hills brought to me, and then for beobles to say I haf zeen their pieces and gopied from them. I do not vant to gopy from anypoty. I am Cheorge Dargo.’
‘I’ll bet,’ said Paul rashly, ‘that you haven’t met this idea yet.’
‘My tear poy,’ Darco answered, ‘if you haf cot a new way of bantling an old itea you are ferry lucky. But there are no new iteas, and you may take my vort for it. If anypoty asks who told you that, say it was Cheorge Dargo.’
‘Let me read it to you,’ Paul urged. ‘It’s hardly likely that a youngster like myself is going to have the cheek to chargeyouwith having stolen your ideas—now, is it?’ Darco smoothed a little. ‘You could tell me if there’s anything in it, or if I’m wasting time.’
‘Go on,’ said Darco, suddenly rising from the table and hurling himself into an arm-chair, so that the floor shuddered, and the windows of the room danced in their panes.
Paul sipped his tea, opened his manuscript and began to read. He read on until a loud snore reached his ears, and then looked up discouraged.
‘Vot’s the madder?’ Darco asked. ‘Go on; I am listening.’
Paul went on and Darco snored continuously, but whenever the reader looked up at him, he was wide awake and attentive. The landlady came in to clear the table and Darco drove her from the room as if she had come to steal her own properties. Then he flung himself anew into his arm-chair and snored until the reading came to a close. It had lasted two hours and a half, and Paul at times had been affected by his own humour and pathos. He waited with his eyes on the word ‘Curtain ‘at the bottom of the final page.
‘You think that is a blay?’ said Darco. ‘Vell, it is nod a blay. It is a chelly.’
‘I don’t quite think I know what you mean,’ Paul answered, horribly crestfallen.
‘I say vot I mean,’ Darco responded. ‘It is a chelly. It is a very goot chelly—in’ places. You might like it if you took it in a sboon out of a storypook, or a folume of boedry; but a blay is a very different greation.’
Then he fell to a mortally technical criticism of Paul’s work—a practical stage-manager’s criticism—and enlightened his hearer’s mind on many things. He said, ‘I am Cheorge Dargo, ant now you know,’ a little oftener than was necessary, but he laid bare all the weaknesses of plot and execution—all the improbabilities which Paul supposed himself cunningly to have effaced or bidden, and he showed him how fatally he had disguised his budding scoundrel in a robe of goodness throughout the whole of the first act.
‘But it’s life!’ cried Paul. ‘That’s what happens in life. You meet a man who seems made of honesty; you trust him, and he picks your pocket.’
‘Aha!’ said Darco; ‘but there is always somepoty who knows the druth apout him, ant efery memper of your autience must represend that somepoty. Now, I’ll dell you. I vill make a sgeleton for you. We will pild your chelly into a gomedy, ant we will preathe into id the preath of life, and it shall valk apout.’
‘You’ll—you’ll work with me?’ Paul cried. ‘Hurrah!’
Darco rang a peal at the bell, and the landlady, probably thinking the house on fire, scurried madly to answer the call.
‘Half-bast elefen o’glock,’ growled Darco accusingly, ‘ant look at the preakfast-dable.’
‘But you told me, sir——’ began the gasping woman.
‘Now don’t sdant jattering there,’ said Darco, ‘I am koing to be busy. Glear avay!’
‘I came to clear away at nine, sir.’
‘Glear avay now,’ said Darco; ‘don’t vaste my dime.’
‘I’m sure I don’t want to waste your time, Mr. Darco,’ said the landlady, ‘but you’ve given me such a turn, sir, I don’t know where I am.’
Darco shook the room again by a new plunge into the armchair, and the trembling landlady cleared away.
‘Now, dake nodes!’ he roared, as she left the room.
‘I shall be very glad to take notice, sir,’ said the landlady.
‘Nodes!’ shouted Darco. ‘Nodes. I am not dalking to you. I am dalking to my brivade zegredary.’
Paul seized a pencil, set a pile of paper before him on the table, and waited. Darco began to prowl about the room, setting chairs in place with great precision, arranging ornaments on the chimney-shelf, and settling pictures on the wall with methodical exactness, muttering meanwhile, ‘Nodes. Dake nodes. I am dalking to my brivade zegredary. Nodes. Dake nodes.’ Paul was familiar with his ways, and waited seriously.
‘But this down,’ said Darco, pacing and turning suddenly. ‘No. Don’t but that down. I don’t vant that’ He roamed off again, murmuring: ‘No. Don’t but it down. I don’t vant it. I don’t vant it. Nodes. Dake nodes.’ Then with sudden loudness and decision: ‘But this down.’
He began to talk. Paul tried to follow him on paper, but the task was hopeless. Darco talked with a choking incoherence and at a dreadful pace. It was as if a big-bellied bottle were turned upside down, and as if the bottle were sentient and strove to empty the whole of its contents at once through a narrow neck. At last a meaning began to declare itself—the merest intelligible germ of a meaning—but it grew and grew until Paul clapped his hands with a cry of triumph at it.
‘That is what was wanted.’
‘That is a bart of vat is vanted,’ said Darco. ‘Haf you cot it town?’ Before Paul could answer he was off again in a new tangle, and fighting and tearing his way through it as madly as before. ‘Now I am dired,’ he said. ‘I shall haf some lunge, and co to sleep.’
He caught at the bell-pull in passing, gave it a tug, and waddled off to his bedroom. The landlady came in with the tray and began to arrange the table.
‘I don’t know what you gentlemen have been doing sir,’ she said to Paul, ‘but I’m sure I was afraid there was going to be murder in the house. I never heard anybody go on so in my life. I don’t know how any young gentleman puts up with it.’
‘There is very little danger, I assure you,’ said Paul. ‘Mr. Darco and I have been talking business.’
‘Well,’ returned the landlady, ‘I suppose you know how to manage him. But I wouldn’t be his keeper not for loveormoney.’
‘I am Mr. Darco’s private secretary, ma’am,’ Paul answered gravely.
‘All I can say is,’ said the landlady, sighing, ‘I’m glad it’s Saturday.’
It happened that the company took a late train that night for a distant town, and Darco paid his bill before leaving for the theatre. He told the landlady that he had been extremely comfortable, and that he should have great pleasure in recommending her to his friends. When he had gone, the landlady told Paul that she was glad the gendeman had his lucy intervals.
But the comedy having been once rebegun on Darco’s lines, was written to an accompaniment of fears and tremblings. It terrified the servants and the women-folk at large of every house the collaborateurs lodged in. Slaveys, with clasped hands and faces pale beneath smudges of blacklead, shook in the hall or on the stairs and landing whilst Darco roared, and Paul at the end of a day’s work used sometimes to feel as if he had been badly beaten about the head. None the less, the work was finished, and put into rehearsal.
‘Ve vill dry it on the tog,’ said Darco, and Paul, who never dared to question him as to his meaning, went puzzled for a while.
But Darco rarely said a thing once without repeating it many times, and at length Paul understood that the play was to be played ‘on the dog,’ which is theatrical English for the production of a new piece at an obscure house in the country. It was tried, but the dog never took to it with any great kindness. Darco swore it was the first comedy which had been produced since the days of Sheridan. He put it into the repertoire, and played it once a week, and whenever it was played it brought a guinea to Paul’s pocket. It is not every first effort in any work of art which does as much as this, however, and Paul had the good sense to see that he was fortunate, and looked hopefully to the future. He crept into the gallery when the piece was played in any town, and watched his neighbours, and listened to their comments on the action and to their talk between the acts. This taught him a great deal, for he saw how little the popular instinct varies in matters of emotion, and the verdict to which he listened was everywhere substantially the same.
There came an especially memorable afternoon when Mr. Warr in a four-wheeled fly drove to Darco’s lodgings, and announced the sudden sickness of the juvenile lead. Darco pounced on Paul as the sick man’s successor.
‘My dear sir,’ said Paul, ‘I never spoke a word in public in my life. I can’t do it.’
‘That’s all right, my poy,’ said Darco. ‘You’ve got to do it.’
There was no arguing the matter.
Mr. Warr was despatched in the fly to gather the members of the company. Darco thrust into Paul’s hands the part he had to study, and went off tranquilly to his own room to sleep. Paul slaved for an hour, and seemed to have mastered nothing. Darco, having timed himself to sleep for one hour precisely, awoke to the minute, and bundled off his victim to the theatre. There such members of the company as Mr. Warr had succeeded in finding were already collected, and the scenes in which Paul was concerned were run through again and again until he began to have some idea of what was expected of him, and even some distant knowledge of the words. But the whole thing was like a nightmare, and whenever the thought of the coming night crossed his mind, it afflicted him with a half paralysis. Darco worried him incessantly, bubbling with unhelpful enthusiasm, roaring at him, pushing and hauling him hither and thither, so that at last he resigned himself to a stupor of despair. The leading lady intervened, and she and Darco talked together for a minute.
‘Tam it!’ he shouted. ‘Do you think I want anypoty to deach me? I am Cheorge Dargo. I know my drade!’
But the leading lady stuck to him, and at last he went away.
‘Now, my dear,’ said Miss Belmont to Paul. ‘I’ll shepherd you. You’re mostly with me, and so long as we’re together you’re safe. Darco’s a darling when you know him, but he’s enough to break a beginner’s heart. Now, dears ‘—she appealed here to her whole public—‘put your hearts into it, and help the young gentleman through.’
The rehearsal went on again, and the nightmare feeling wore away a little.
‘You’ve got to give me a little bit of a chance here,’ said Miss Belmont, with her pretty little gloved hand on Paul’s shoulder. ‘You see, it’s your forgiveness melts me, and if you forgive me like chucking a pennyworth of coppers at a beggar, I shan’t be melted. Now, then: “Georgy”—say it like that, just a bit throaty and quivery—“I loved you so that I’d have laid down my life for you!” Try it like that. That’s better. Now, give me your eyes, large and mournful, for just five ticks. Now turn, three steps up stage, hand to forehead. That’s it, but not quite so woodeny. Turn. Eyes again. “Georgy!” Now one step down, both hands out Pause. That’s it “You have broken a truer heart than you will easily find again. But I will say no more. Good-bye, Georgy. And for the sake of those old dreams which were once so sweet, and now are flown for ever, God bless you ‘Oh, God bless you and forgive you!” No. Try and get it just a little bit more. Poor dear Bannister always cried when he came to that. I’ve seen the tears run down his face many a time. Just go back to “Georgy, I loved you sa” Yes, yes, yes, that’s it; that’s capital. Now, that lets me in. “Oh, Richard! Richard! Is it possible that you forgive me?” That’s your cue for the chair, face in both hands. Now my long speech: “Richard,” and so on, and so on. “Good-bye, then, dearest, truest, tenderest.” Just a little shake of the shoulders here and there, as if you were sobbing to yourself, don’t you see? “Good-bye, good-bye.” No, don’t get up yet. Count six very slowly after “Good-bye” the second time. Now rise, turn, arms out “Georgy! Can’t you see?” Then down I rush, and—curtain. Now, just once more from “Georgy, I loved you so.”’
The company clapped hands. Berry, the first comedian, poked Earlsford, the leading man, in the waistcoat.
‘You’llhave to look to your laurels in a year or two.’
‘Now,’ said Miss Belmont, ‘you can’t expect to shine tonight. That wouldn’t be reasonable, would it? But if you won’t prevent the rest from shining you’ll have done your duty nobly. Never you mind Darco: I’ll keep him out of the house to-night. I’m the only woman in the profession who has the length of his foot I’d rather say the breadth of his heart, for that’s where I always get at him. There’ll be an explanation and an apology. You’d better read your part. The house won’t mind it. Then put all you know into that last scene. Chuck the book a minute before the real business comes on, as if you’d made up your mind to go for the gloves. That’ll fetch ‘em. Well go over that bit again and again till you’ve got it They’ll be just jumping with pleasure in front if you surprise ‘em with a good touch at the finish, and they’ll go away thinking how splendidly you’d have done it if you’d had half a chance. It’s the trot up the avenue, don’t you see?
Mr. Warr, who at a gesture had followed Darco from the theatre, appeared with a basket in his hand, and was followed by a man who bore a larger basket on his shoulder.
‘The governor sends his highly superior compliments, ladies and gentlemen,’ said Mr. Warr, ‘and his polite request that you will be so very kind as to forget the dinner-hour. Sandwiches, ladies and gentlemen. Ham, beef, tongue, pâté de foie gras, potted shrimps, and cetera. Juice of the grape.’ He pointed to the basket, which his attendant had already laid upon the stage. ‘Fizzy, Pommery-Gréno, and no less, upon my sacred word of honour!’ He groped in his pockets. ‘Champagne-opener, to be carefully returned to bearer. Ah, sir,’ he added feelingly to Paul, ‘when I forswore the varnish, I little thought it would rise to this quality. And, ladies and gentlemen,’ he continued aloud, ‘I was to request that you would unite in lending your highly superior aid to the neophyte.’
‘Our compliments to the governor,’ said the leading comedian, who had seized the nippers and was already hard at work. ‘We bestow on him unanimously the order of the golden brick.’
Darco’s health was toasted, and the company went to rehearsal again, each with a champagne-glass in one hand and a sandwich in the other, and worked banqueting. Paul drank a glass of wine, and the coming night looked less terrible.
‘We’ve two hours clear,’ said Miss Belmont ‘Now see if we don’t make something of you in that time.’
Paul began to take up his cue with spirit, as often as not without the book, and to take his proper places without prompting. They worked their way on again to the final scene.
‘Now, don’t be afraid to let go,’ said Miss Belmont ‘Let us have it as if the house was full.’
So Paul threw down his part as arranged, for by this time he knew the words of this one scene, and what with the wine and the growing sense of freedom, he did pretty well, and when he sat in the arm-chair with his face in his hands Miss Belmont no longer gabbled her lines, but spoke them with all the feeling and fervour of which she was mistress. And when she came to her ‘Good-bye, good-bye,’ Paul, who at all times was easily emotional, was crying softly. He rose with outspread arms and the tears on his face and his voice broke. The leading lady rushed at him and clipped him round the neck, and Paul clipped the leading lady in a perfectly innocent enthusiasm and strained her to his breast.
‘You—little—devil!’ she whispered, as she drew away from him and stabbed him with one wicked flash of her blue eyes. ‘I’ll forgive you this time,’ she added half a minute later; ‘but it isn’t professional.’
‘Time for one more run through, ladies and gentlemen,’ said the stage-manager, and once more the task began.
Miss Belmont’s eyes plagued Paul most of the time, now with a look of serious affront, now with a sort of mocking challenge. Now, he was inclined to try that grip again to see how she would take it, and the mocking eyes invited him. Then he dared not so much as think of it, for the eyes looked severe offence at him. When the time came he was like a wooden doll handling a wooden doll.
‘Pooh!’ said Miss Belmont, pettishly drawing back from him. ‘That won’t do. Try again.’
They harked back to the beginning of the scene. The others had stolen away to their various dressing-rooms. Only the stage-manager was left, and he was engaged in talking with the leader of the orchestra, who had just come in with a fiddle-case beneath his arm peeping out from his shabby paletot The farewell speech came, and it was only breathed. She had always dearly, dearly loved him. She had lost him by her pride, her coquetry—her silly, silly, heartless coquetry. Her fingers touched him on the cheek soft as a snowflake, and lingered there whilst the cooing voice went on. Then came the ‘Good-bye’ again and the answering call. She paused and looked, and darted to him, and they clung together, she leaning back her head and tangling his eyes in hers.
‘You hold me like that,’ she breathed, ‘until the curtain falls,’
She released herself gradually from his embrace, and drew away. Paul’s pulses beat to a strange tune, and he was afraid to look at her.
‘Ah!’ she said, in a voice so commonplace that he jumped to hear it, ‘the kind creatures have left us half a bottle. One glass, Mr. Armstrong, will do you good. You dress with Berry; hell help you with your make-up. Don’t be nervous. You’ve got the book to prop you till the very end, and there you’ll be as right as rain. Here’s luck to your first appearance.’
Paul took the glass she held out to him, but his hand trembled so that he spilled one half its contents on the stage.
‘How clumsy!’ purred the leading lady. ‘Here, take a full glass; there’s more in the bottle. There; chink glasses. Luck for to-night.’
He drank mechanically, and the stinging wine threw him into a fit of coughing. Miss Belmont patted him laughingly on the back, and ran away to her own room. Paul took his part from the stage, and tumbled up a spiral iron staircase to the loft in which the leading comedian dressed.
‘You’d better wear Bannister’s togs, if they’ll fit you,’ said the comedian; ‘if not, you’ll want a dress-suit for the second act.’
The clothes fitted excellently, and Berry saw to the neophyte’s make-up, painting and powdering him dexterously, and dressing the virginal beard and moustache with a dark cosmetic.
‘You’re funking it,’ the comedian said cheerfully. ‘That’s all right, my boy; there never was a man worth his salt who didn’t. Give me a new part, and I’m as nervous as a cat. But you’re in luck in a way, for we’ve all been together so long in this that we could play it in our sleep. There isn’t one of us that doesn’t know the thing inside-out and upside-down and backwards.’
Paul crept down the spiral staircase, part in hand, and listened whilst the local manager, who rather prided himself on his ability as an orator, deplored the serious and sudden indisposition of that established favourite, Mr. Bannister, and announced that Mr. Armstrong had ‘gallantly stepped into the breach,’ and would essay the part, literally at a moment’s notice. Paul would most certainly have ungallantly bolted out of the breach had that been possible; but the people cheered the local manager cordially, and he, stepping back into the gloom of the stage, found Paul shivering there, and tried to hearten him.
The night went by in a sort of fog, but Paul read his lines somehow, and made his crosses at the right places; and actors are eager to answer to any little courtesy from a manager, and Darco’s half-dozen of champagne was richly paid for by theélanwith which everybody played. As to the neophyte, they fed and nursed him, and were in at the close of every speech of his with a spring and a rattle which made the audience half forget the artificiality of the scenes he clouded. Mr. Berry took as much whisky-and-water as was good for him, and perhaps a little more, and Paul in his nervous anxiety lent a helpful hand towards the emptying of the bottle. There was no buzz in the cast-iron head and no cloud in the eyes, but he was strung to a strange tension, and he was looking forward to that last act and the embrace which crowned it.
‘I shan’t take the book for this last scene,’ he whispered to the prompter; ‘but watch me, will you?’
The prompter nodded, and Paul passed on to the spot from which he was to make his entrance. There was Miss Belmont waiting also. She was in evening dress, with shining white arms and shoulders.
‘Fit?’ she asked laconically, buttoning a glove.
‘Middling,’ said Paul hoarsely.
She slid away from him through the painted doorway, and he heard her voice on the stage. There was a pause, and someone near him whispered:
‘Mr. Armstrong, go on; they’re waiting.’
He obeyed. The practised woman, cool as a cucumber, gave him his cue a second time, and continued to make the pause look rational He plunged into the scene, awkward and constrained, but resolute, and in some degree master of himself. It was his stage business to be awkward and constrained, but he fared not over well, for on the stage it is easy to go too close to nature. But at the very last he lost his nervous tremors, and in the one scene in which he had been coached so often he acquitted himself with credit.
‘Can’t you see?’ he asked in the final line of his piece, and the leading lady was in his arms again.
‘I can see,’ she whispered. ‘Kiss me, you silly boy!’
And Paul bent his lips to hers, and kissed her in a way which looked theatrically emotional to the house. The roller came down with a thud.
‘Stay as you are,’ she said; ‘there is a call.’
The curtain rose again and fell again, and Paul held the leading lady in his arms. The embrace lasted little more than a minute, but it left Paul frantically in love—after a fashion.
This was bad in many ways, for the woman was eight years his senior and a most heartless coquette, and Paul’s infatuation kept him from his own thoughts, which were just beginning to be of value to him.
The Dreamer in the mountains grieved wistfully as the old times enacted themselves before him. ‘Love,’ says blackguard Iago, ‘is a lust of the blood and a permission of the will.’ Well, one-and-twenty made his dreams even out of such poor material. The westward train boomed past, invisible from first to last in the smoke-cloud.