“I did venture to bring her.”
“You would. Drayton, Chown’s got a girl here. Chorus in ‘The Little Viennese’ for three months. Maisie in ‘The Girl from Honolulu’ after that. Get reports and let me see them. That’ll do. Good-by, Chown.” He pressed another bell and a shorthand typist appeared as if by magic: he was dictating letters to her before Chown and Drayton had left the room. It was efficiency raised to the histrionic degree.
Drayton had eliminated surprise from his official life, but he couldn’t restrain an instinctive gasp at the sight of Mary Ellen when Chown urbanely ushered her into his room. He gasped because she did not comply with, she violated, the first principle of an applicant for an engagement in the chorus. The first principle was that to apply with any chance of success for a job worth thirty-five shillings a week, you must wear visible clothing worth thirty-five pounds; and Mary Ellen was in the Sunday clothes of Staithley. Her costume was three seasons behind the fashions when it was new, her shoes were made for durability, and her hair-dressing made Mr. Drayton think of his boyhood, when he had gone to Sunday school. But he had his orders and here was Lexley Chown remarkably sponsoring this incredible applicant. He took out a contract-form. “Name? Sign here. The company’s at Torquay. Report yourself at the theater to Mr. Darley to-morrow. You’ll travel midnight. Show this in the office and they’ll give you your fare.” He fired it all at her almost without interval, sincerely flattering the manner in which his chief addressed him, and, as a rule, he flustered the well-dressed, experienced ladies he addressed. Here was one who was not experienced, who was dressed so badly that he thought of her as a joke in bad taste and, confound her, she was not flustered. She took the contract and the payment-slip from him calmly, eyeing him with a steady gaze which reduced his self-importance to the vanishing point. “Good-by. Good luck,” he jerked at her with the involuntariness of an automaton.
She did not intend to seem disdainful; she was merely tired and the summary marching orders by a midnight train bewildered her. Mr. Chown, squiring her in her incongruous clothes from the Rossiter headquarters, thought he had reason to congratulate himself.
There was, first, the document, terrifyingly bespattered with red seals, which she had signed in his office. She might be a minor, but she had set hand and seal to the statement that she was legally of age and to the undertaking on the part of Mary Ellen Bradshaw, hereinafter known as the artiste and for professional purposes to be known as Mary Arden, to employ Lexley Chown as her sole agent at the continuing remuneration of ten per cent of her salary, paid weekly by the artiste to the agent. Formidable penalties were mentioned, two clerks witnessed their signatures with magisterial gravity and “Altogether,” thought Mr. Chown, refraining from handing her a copy of their agreement, “if she shuffles out of that, she’ll be spry.”
There was, second, the compliance of Mr. Rossiter and the coming noviciate under Darley. Deliberately he had left her in her country clothes, trusting them to disguise in the Rossiter offices a quality he did not wish to be clearly apparent yet: deliberately, he had rushed her affair thinking all the while of Darley—or if not of him, of a Darley, of some crude martinet who was to lick her into shape. He wanted her ill-dressed, he wanted her bewildered. He wanted Darley to know how raw she was; he wanted hot fire for her and he saw her Staithley clothes acting upon Darley like compressed air on a blast furnace. The girl was too cool, she showed no nervousness. “Darley will teach you to feel, my girl,” he thought: “I’m making your path short, but I don’t want it smooth. Soft places don’t make actresses. I’m cruel to be kind.” And being kind he advanced her two pounds on account of commission, told her the station for Torquay was Paddington and left her on Rossiter’s steps. He had exposed himself unavoidably to the lifted brows which could not help saluting the glossy Lexley Chown in the company of these obsolete clothes, but the necessity was past now and he lost no time in indicating to her that, for better or for worse, her future was in her own hands. He had other business to attend to.
Mary Ellen, who had surrendered herself confidingly to his large protectiveness, was braced by his departure. Their journey together, the wonder of lunching at a table in a train, the oppressiveness of offices—these were behind her now and she stood on Rossiter’s busy steps breathing hard like a swimmer who comes to surface after a long dive. She breathed the air of London and looked from that office down a street across Piccadilly Circus, nameless to her. The whirl of it assaulted her; the swimmer was in the breakers now.
Mr. Rossiter’s commissionaire, not unaccustomed to the sight of young women pausing distressfully on those steps where they had left their hopes behind them, addressed her with kindly intent. “Shall I get you a taxi, miss?”
“No, thanks,” said Mary Ellen, who had noted the immense sums Mr. Chown had paid to the drivers of those vehicles. “I’ll walk,” and “others walk” she thought. “I can do what they can,” and hardily set foot upon the London streets. Let that commissionaire perceive that Mary Ellen was afraid? Not she, and presently she was so little afraid that she asked the way to Euston of a policeman. Her suit-case—in strict fact, Mr. Pate’s suitcase—was at Euston.
The man in the left luggage office at Euston was good enough to tell her the way to Paddington, but “You can’t carry that,” he said. “Why not?” said Mary Ellen, and carried it. The case was heavy and grew heavier: but there were stretches of her route, the part, for instance, between Tottenham Court Road and Portland Road, which revived her spirit. That might have been a bit of Staithley. London was flat; she had seen no reason in the slight rise of Shaftesbury Avenue to justify Mr. Chown’s qualifying “Not absolutely”; but there were sights and smells along the road to Paddington which she accepted gratefully as evidence of some affinity with Staithley. Piccadilly Circus was not the whole of London; one could breathe here and there, Praed Street way, in cheering shabbiness. She saw a barefoot girl, and a ragged boy offered to carry her bag. There was still a confused echo of the surging West End in her ears and she hadn’t conquered London, but she had received comforting assurance that, in spots, London was habitable.