"I'm going on the stage."
"How are you going to get there?"
"I don't know," said Paul, "but if I knew an actor, he would be able to tell me. I thought perhaps you might know an actor."
"I do—one or two," replied Rowlatt; "but they're just ordinary actors—not managers; and I shouldn't think they'd be able to do anything for you."
"Except what I say," Paul persisted. "They'll tell me how one sets about being an actor."
Rowlatt scribbled a couple of introductions on visiting cards, and Paul went away satisfied. He called on the two actors. The first, in atrabiliar mood, advised him to sweep crossings, black shoes, break stones by the roadside, cart manure, sell tripe or stocks and shares, blow out his brains rather than enter a profession over whose portals was inscribed the legend, Lasciate ogni speranza—he snapped his finger and thumb to summon memory as if it were a dog.
"Voi che intrate," continued Paul, delighted at showing off the one Italian tag he had picked up from his reading. And filled with one of the purest joys of the young literary life and therefore untouched by pessimistic counsel, he left the despairing actor.
The second, a brighter and more successful man, talked with Paul for a long time about all manner of things. Having no notion of his antecedents, he assumed him to be a friend of Rowlatt and met him on terms of social equality. Paul expanded like a flower to the sun. It was the first time he had spoken with an educated man on common ground—a man to whom the great imaginative English writers were familiar friends, who ran from Chaucer to Lamb and from Dryden to Browning with amazing facility. The strong wine of allusive talk mounted to Paul's brain. Tingling with excitement, he brought out all his small artillery of scholarship and acquitted himself so well that his host sent him off with a cordial letter to a manager of his acquaintance.
The letter opened the difficult door of the theatre. His absurd beauty of face and figure, a far greater recommendation in the eyes of the manager who had begun rehearsals for an elaborate romantic production than a knowledge of The Faerie Queene, obtained for him an immediate engagement—to walk on as a gilded youth of Italy in two or three scenes at a salary of thirty shillings a week. Paul went home and spread himself like a young peacock before Jane, and said: "I am an actor."
The girl's eyes glowed. "You are wonderful."