Twopence Coloured, Page 2

  What Jackie found to be a trifle curious in all this, though, was that now she had fallen upon more evil days and was so placed that some sort of profession seemed a bare necessity for her, the idea and her own suggestion of adopting a profession, and most particularly a theatrical profession, was slurred over by her friends in a very strange and misty manner — by all her friends who had until that time incited her most whole-heartedly on those lines. But to Jackie, the more they slurred it over, the more her resistance, and even her slight resentment, arose. It was hence that she had come to be walking along the Brighton front intending to Go upon the Stage like that.

  Indeed the thing which her best friends had in view for Jackie at this period was, without any doubt whatever, a Match. “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about it all, Jackie, if I were you,” they would say. “You never know what’ll turn up.” They always called her “Jackie,” rather caressingly, on these occasions, and generally threw in an “if I were you” — thus betraying, Jackie imagined, a certain superiority and inward mockery of her projects. And although this serene faith in something turning up was assumed with a great show of indifference, Jackie was on more than one occasion led to suspect that some remote forestalling and assisting of the capricious gods was demonstrating itself in the form of various Brothers of persons, not to say Male Cousins, Old Friends, and similar eligibles, with whom she was casually thrown and left from time to time.

  Now in order to have any proper understanding of Jackie, and the step she was led to take at this time, it must be taken for granted that she was, on the whole, a complete fool, who was not even compensated with any of that impressionability and flaccidity which might have protected her from her own folly. There was, on the other hand, a certain stamina, interpreted by others (and in some measure justly) as self-will, which marked Jackie from the first. When Jackie said that she intended to do a thing, and underlined the word, it might have been as tremulous an emphasis as you liked, but she was going to do it for all that, you were surprised to discover. You were surprised because rather in the same way as you were mystically unable to credit that Jackie was really capable of carrying anything, of any weight, so you could not believe that she could ever maintain, by direct action, her own theories against those of her advisers. You were mistaken in either case. In this business of a Match, for instance, Jackie was a very depressing subject from the outset, and no amount of eligible reinforcement could bear her down. She had, in fact, quite different views.

  When it was made clear to her friends that Jackie’s object was to go up to London there was some disapproval, but much less disapproval than when it was understood that she was not going to stay there with the Langham family — a family with an artist father and two daughters who were Jackie’s closest friends — as had been taken for granted, but going on her own to live by herself in rooms which were to be let to her by her old nurse and housekeeper, Mrs. Lover.

  Mrs. Lover was a good-looking woman of about forty, who had married well and settled in West Kensington, three years ago, and who had known Jackie a great deal longer than anyone else in the world. And although it seemed to every one else the height of imprudence, it was to Jackie a perfect solution to all her problems. It was this Mrs. Lover who had in the first place Put Ideas into Miss Jackie’s head, and who had ever since been her closest and most sympathetic confidant on matters which Jackie had been able to share with no one else — her father included. Jackie’s admirers, indeed, who formed, in general, a section of the community divided against itself, had cause to be unanimous in the placating and propitiating of Mrs. Lover, in whom they sensed a power behind the throne, and rightly. It was Mrs. Lover who, with her brown sympathetic eyes and assumption of infinite experience, had sheltered and guided Jackie through all the intricacies of her twilight experiences. It was Mrs. Lover who could guess exactly why he had said that, who had told you he would begin that sort of thing, and who insisted that you should be firm now, or there was no telling what you would be getting into. It was Mrs. Lover who knew to a fine shade whether you should put Yours sincerely, Jackie, Yours affectionately, Jacqueline Mortimer, or just Yours gratefully, J., and write it again and cut out one of the “dears” in the middle so as to tone it down a bit. And the confidence was mutual. For when, in the course of time, the elder was in her turn confronted by the vexed problem of Lover himself, and was herself reduced to a baffling condition of indecision and lack of faith in her own precepts, it was Jackie who took on the sober wisdom of intelligent experience, and gave inflexible rulings and decisions on each turn of the affair. “But do you want to marry him?” Jackie would ask again and again, and “Do you Love him?” — thus getting a little of her own back….

  There was every sympathy to be expected from this quarter, then, and apart from that, it will be understood that in the mere imprudence and slight abandon of setting up on her own there were attractions for Jackie. Not only, after her father’s death, did she tell herself that she wanted to get away from Brighton and its memories for ever, but also her whole life had lost its old values since that event, and the gesture, the symbol, of complete transplantation was, she felt, necessary for her in starting again. It may be said, in fact, that Jackie by this time had an almost passionate impulse to burn her ships.

  Jackie did not come of course to this resolution all at once. It began as a dim supposition and possible ultimate refuge: it grew in suggestiveness as the days went by and the realities of her position were brought home to her: and at last it flooded in upon her as an inspiration. And by the time she had made her intentions known, there was no moving her at all. And although there was at first much dissent, it is possible that people were not a little relieved at getting Jackie once and for all off their shoulders and away in London. The first gush of hospitality and commiseration had died down into little more than a trickle of friendly sympathy, and apart from Lady Perrin, who was becoming a rather vague, aged and bewildered old person, there was not the same interest and rash generosity at Jackie’s command. Accordingly, when the thing was accepted, all her friends found it easy enough to work themselves up into another climax over Jackie, and to send her off amid the acclamations of a roseate popularity. It was in some way regarded as a purely temporary parting, and she was to write, and to be written to, come down again, and to visit, and heaven knew what, when she got up there. One of her friends might come and share rooms with her, indeed, if things shaped themselves as was hoped; and there was, altogether, quite a St. Martin’s Summer of fame and adulation for Jackie. It is true that still very little mention was made of the Stage — nothing but continued slurrings in fact, save in one instance — but Jackie had her own ideas on the subject and rather enjoyed keeping them to herself.

  That one instance was provided by the younger Langham girl, Iris, whom Jackie had promised to visit Wimbledon when she came to London and who claimed to have at her command a Friend, of the name of Gladys Weston, who was closely concerned with the theatre and could be relied upon to give any introductions necessary. It is eloquent of Jackie’s general attitude at this time that a Friend of the name of Gladys Weston figured not in her imagination as an individual of any value to her at all. Indeed she was rather offended and chilled by the idea of a Friend of the name of Gladys Weston. It is impossible to say how Jackie conceived that she was going to enter this business without some at least figurative Friend of the name of Gladys Weston, but she did do so. As she walked along the Brighton front, the night before she left for London, she was Going upon the Stage, and the matter ended there.

  It may be mentioned in passing that Jackie was very willing to begin with small parts.

  IV

  As Jackie walked along the Brighton front, it became more and more her own Brighton front, and at last it seemed that there was no one there at all to share her striding and buoyant possession of it. At the same time the wind grew higher, bawling violently into Jackie’s ears, and the rain came with it, spitting itself into millions of little ardent sh
arp triangles on the slimy, streaming paving under the lamps. And the sea, which a little while before had been crashing measuredly away (as though it had really rather forgotten what it was aiming at, after all the nonsensical centuries it had been at the business), suddenly seemed to awake, and as good as said it had had enough of this tomfoolery, and now the coast should listen, come what might! And that was what Jackie was wanting really, some sort of challenge like that, to nerve her and brace her and give her a sense of immediate and impending battle. And in the sound and rush of the storm about her, in the unquenched but fearful sputtering of the yellow-green lamps, in the wash and thunder of the war-like and long-prepared coast (which had taken the sea at its word and also wanted a row), Jackie planned for herself a very gallant and hand-to-hand and triumphing battle with life indeed. But wherever her dreamings and schemings took her, and whatever heights she scaled, all was concentrated upon, and at last reduced to the clear fact that Jackie intended, stage-struck or no, talented or untalented, mocked or applauded, to Go upon the Stage.

  And this is the last that will be seen of Jackie in quite this striding and ineffable frame of mind. She did not so much touch a summit to-night, as she walked along with the little thunders of her mackintosh and her eyes distantly agleam with the blaze of her ships already in flames: rather did she symbolize the whole ingenuous expectancy and glad preparedness for fate which had marked her auspicious youth. She will never again, after to-night so trustingly, so anxiously even, seek to impale herself upon life. This was a farewell to something more than the places of her youth.

  It would, therefore, be well to capture Jackie, as she strode along, vanishing and appearing in the light of lamp after lamp, which stood like gaunt sentinels to do honour to her meditations. For when, on reaching the confines of Portslade, where the wind and rain alike seemed suddenly to cease, as though they had done their duty by her and she should now go back to bed, Jackie, rather chilled, and deserted, and damp, turned homewards — and when, after reaching First Avenue again, she let herself in with her key, and crept up the stairs to her room and lit her candle, and hurriedly and with midnight clandestinity undressed, and climbed into bed, and sat up for a few peaceful and pencil-scrawling moments with a Brobdingnagian Boots’ Diary, in which she put on placid record for all time the romantic fact that she was “writing this at half-past one a. m.,” together with the accurate asseveration that this was her “last day in this house,” and that “nothing much happened excepting a theatre and a long walk all along the front at night,” and that she “wondered what to-morrow” would “bring forth” — when all this had been in due order accomplished, and Jackie had snuffed out the candle, and turned over and wriggled herself, with a single wriggle, into the cool arms of Morpheus — she had left behind her, if she but knew it, the whole kindly phase of her early existence.

  Book One

  THE ASPIRANT

  CHAPTER I

  TRAVEL

  I

  THAT covertly unpropitious something hovering around Jackie’s departure next day, made its presence felt from the moment of her waking. To begin with, the malevolent assault made on her sleep-hazed mind by the crashing fusillade of her Venetian blind being drawn up by Ada, the maid, at half-past eight, left her with nothing to contemplate but a dank, dripping fog which had risen in the night from the sea. This moping wraith thinned itself out somewhat while she dressed, but in doing so only revealed a hushed, dull, gleaming earth which had every appearance of having been submerged all night, up to its slates and chimneypots, by a silent ocean which had amazingly receded to the beach again. Then, on going down to breakfast, she learnt that Lady Perrin was in bed with a severe attack of neuralgia, and intending to stay there: which threw out all Jackie’s unconsciously preconceived ideas of the place and circumstances of the farewell. Then, in the course of breakfast, for which was provided a lukewarm haddock and a boiled egg — foods which she found savourless — she, with no discernible occasion for it, discovered herself to be trembling, and could eat nothing more. Then, shortly after this, when she had settled down on a stool in front of the fire to look at the pictures and cartoon in The Daily Mirror, her contemplative frame of mind was disturbed first by Ada, who bounced in apologetically to ask whether she minded the Men setting in upon the Windows, as they had Come, and immediately afterwards by the sight of a red ladder trembling under energetic (but quite impenitent) legs, and the sound of tirelessly ferocious rubbings and squeakings, punctuated by intermittent pail-clankings, all of which eventually culminated in a window being thrown open, an inrush of sea air, an unseemly intrusion on privacy, and a large amount of self-consciousness on both sides. Jackie left the dining-room and went upstairs to put the final polish on her packing. But here, also, there was the same unsettled and unfriendly air about everything. Her room, with its window wide open and the clothes stripped from the bed and removed, seemed to know that she was going and to have given up all interest in her. Moreover, the two servants, as they brushed the stairs and landings outside, were giggling unintermittently over some obstruse drollery of their own; and the world, on the whole, and particularly as exemplified by these two and the brusque polisher beneath, was most depressingly looking after its own business and taking it for granted that she would look after hers. The world, in fact, had no sympathetic recognition for aspirants and adventurers whatever.

  She was sorry now that her train did not go until 3.15, and on finding that a coat which had been sent to the cleaners had not yet returned, she decided to go out and fetch it herself with some sense of relief. Her way took her along the Brighton front as far as West Street.

  Now Jackie had intended on this walk to have a last glimpse of her sea; but she had not intended to pay her final respects to it in the condition in which she now found it. She had not intended, that is, to find a grey, full, mist-lost inanity, purring with feeble and invalid regularity at the brim, as though, even if it could recall that affair last night, it was sick to death of the whole subject and would not allude to it again. She found that she was not prepared, as she walked hurriedly along, for this sluggish, obtuse, workaday forgetfulness of the suggestions of the night before. She felt indeed, though scarcely knowing it, that she was being let down by the sea, and the same slightly treacherous air of disenchantment was over everything to be met out of doors. As she passed the Bedford, Preston Street, and the West Pier there was no faint God-speed — nothing save surly interest or disinterest — on the damp faces of those that passed her. And by the time she had reached the Metropole, outside which the baggage of certain young, female, and very much more confident and matter-of-fact travellers than she would be that day was being hauled by obsequious porters on to a taxi, Jackie was aware that she was seriously out of tune with the day already….

  As expected, Lady Perrin was not down to lunch, her neuralgia having advanced with the hours, so that the old lady was now sitting up, with a rigidly immovable countenance, and in a dark, curtained atmosphere of eau-de-Cologne, whence her voice emerged like that of an oracle in the first solemn phases of prophecy. She would not hear of the doctor being called in, and she would not hear of Jackie postponing her departure, and Jackie was of course to come up and see her again before she went….

  Jackie took no pleasure in her lunch, being alone in a dining-room with inexpressibly clean windows, which, in their very immaculate pellucidity, added to the unfamiliar and slightly hostile attitude this house had developed against her: and after lunch she could hardly contain herself with impatience and ennui — the sound of a passing taxi scaring her out of her wits, as her time drew nigh. Also the problems of What you Gave Ada, and If you gave Godfrey the Same or a little less because after all he’d done nothing to speak of, and Should you Give Mrs. Bascomb Anything, caused her the acutest anguish, with the clock ticking away the last moments in which she could decide. And even when all this was fixed upon, and she had intrepidly seen through those soft and shamefaced passages with the objects of her largesse
, there were harassed surmises on exactly how Pleased she was, and firm self-assurances and dubious convictions on the subject of Enough (all considered).

  The taxi, however, came five minutes before its time, and all at once Jackie found herself flying down the stairs (after a flushed farewell with her benefactor), on the principle that, however much time there was at one’s disposal, a taxi, of all things in this universe, must not be kept waiting.

  The taxi man, although quite kindly, was not sympathetic, and sensing Jackie’s defencelessness at once, entered into a vague conspiracy of winks and genial condescension with Ada, so casting an air of light derision over the whole venture. Also, having beer inside of him, he took numerous exception to the amount and size of Jackie’s luggage, asking, as a satirist, whether This was a Trip to the Continent or What. He shouldered it, however, with some skill, and then curtly slammed the taxi door upon her. And before she knew what had happened, the thing was snarling up the Avenue with her inside, as it had been engaged to do indeed, but not quite as she could have wished, in view of the fact that these were her last moments in the places of her youth. Similarly, as she flew giddily through the crowded Western Road, which seemed itself to be, somehow, giddily engaged in its everyday occupations, she had a feeling that all this had come upon her before she was ready for it, that she had done something irretrievable which she had only half intended to do. She passed the thronged Clock Tower and shot up Queen Street at a furious pace.