She fortified herself with tea at Paddington, remembered the night journey and bought buns at the counter, remembered the night journey again and slept in a waiting-room, cushioned on her bag, till it was nearly midnight. There was nothing in this precautionary garnering of sleep to prevent her from sleeping in the train, and her through carriage to Torquay was being shunted at Newton Abbot when she awoke and hungrily ate buns. Near Dawlish, she had the first sight in her life of the sea, and all the emotions proper to the child of an island race ought to have besieged her in the gray dawn. “It’s big,” she thought, grudging the sea the character of space, then turned her eyes inland to the cliffs. “They’re small, but they’re better than the sea.” Not Staithley Edge, but elevation of a sort.
Mr. Hugh Darley, arriving at the theater at eleven o’clock, was told by the doorkeeper that a young lady was waiting for him.
“Been here long?” he asked, looking through Mary Ellen who stood in the passage.
“I came on duty when the night-watchman went off at nine. She was here then.”
“More fool she,” he said. “Got my letters there?” The doorkeeper had his letters, including one from Mr. Drayton.
Darley was a small man, with a shock of red hair and intensely blue eyes which gleamed sometimes with the light of an almost maniacal fury. It was this uncontrolled temper which kept him out of London: at his job, the job of infusing energy and “go” into bored chorus girls and of supplying spontaneity and drollery to comedians who had neither spontaneity nor drollery of their own, he was masterly when he kept his temper. A stage manager needn’t suffer fools gladly, but he must suffer them suavely, he must hide his sufferings and must cajole when his every instinct is to curse, and Darley was a touring stage manager instead of a London “producer” because he simply could not roar them as ’twere any nightingale and London players were too well established not to be able effectually to resent his Eccles’ vein: the strollers were not.
He read Drayton’s letter through. “Where is she?” he asked.
“Why, here,” said the doorkeeper.
“But,” said Mr. Darley and then “Christ!” he cried, and bit through his pipe. That often happened: he carried sealing was in his pocket for plugging the hole. “Comes to a theater at eight in the morning and dresses like a scullery maid’s night out. What’ll they send me next? I suppose you are what they’ve sent me? What’s your name?”
“Mary Arden.”