Twopence Coloured

  TWOPENCE COLOURED

  PATRICK HAMILTON

  TO

  MICHAEL SADLEIR

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Book One: The Aspirant

  Chapter I: Travel

  Chapter II: Glimpses

  Chapter III: A Day in the Theatre

  Chapter IV: Rehearsal

  Chapter V: The Other Girls

  Chapter VI: Highmindedness

  Chapter VII: The Gift

  Chapter VIII: Desolation

  Chapter IX: Lunches

  Chapter X: The Three Weeks

  Chapter XI: Cricket

  Chapter XII: The Underworld

  Chapter XIII: Dates

  Chapter XIV: Liverpool

  Chapter XV: The Return

  Chapter XVI: Charles

  Chapter XVII: “For God, King, and Country”

  Chapter XVIII: The Rain

  Book Two: The Actress

  Chapter I: Decisions

  Chapter II: The Actress

  Chapter III: The Evening

  Chapter IV: The Touring Company

  Chapter V: London

  Chapter VI: Arrival

  Chapter VII: Jackie and Richard

  Chapter VIII: Tennis

  Chapter IX: Temperament

  Chapter X: The Night

  Chapter XI: Richard

  Book Three: The Failure

  Chapter I: Moments

  Chapter II: The Aspirant

  Chapter III: Lunches

  Chapter IV: Manuscripts

  Chapter V: Eavesdropping

  Chapter VI: Observations

  Chapter VII: A Pleasant Surprise

  Chapter VIII: The Chance

  Chapter IX: Correspondence

  Chapter X: A Day in the Theatre

  Chapter XI: Doubtless Buying a New Hat

  Chapter XII: The Taxi

  Copyright

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  All the characters and play-titles in this book are entirely imaginary.

  PROLOGUE

  I

  SHORTLY before midnight, several years ago, a pretty but unusually foolish girl, for her age (which was nineteen), was walking by herself along the Brighton front. It was raining slightly, and the movement of her even strides made little thunders with her mackintosh, and the rain spat with a kind of sullen suddenness upon her glistening white face and mouth, and she was very full of her quiet self and her quiet decisions.

  She had just been to the Theatre Royal in this town. That is to say, she had been one of a large crowd of people who earlier in the evening had fled in a state of unnatural excitement and seriousness from their dinners, spent two hours and a half shut up in a stewed atmosphere of ardent illuminations and rippling facial darknesses, poured out into a distressed vestibule amid the uneasy superciliousness of the frustrated taxi-seeker, and the maddened importunities of the professional umbrella-holder, and at last dispersed to their respective homes again, in good order, but with their taste for such ebullitions temporarily damped, if in no way permanently satisfied.

  But this girl was in no way damped. She was braced and wrought up by it, on the other hand (why, else, should she have gone home and changed her clothes to walk by the rainy sea at midnight?): and the thick sights and sounds of the echoing evening behind her — the restless resplendence of the audience in the plush of the stalls, the hot whisperings, the lemon glare from the stage, the ring of actors’ voices and the hard roar of applause — were still in her eyes and ears, were still an intoxication to her, and were the very stuff from which she was making her decisions. And her decisions were very clearly defined, and most charmingly and alarmingly simplified, and yet a little defiant and tremulous withal (for she was by no means quite sure of herself as yet), and they amounted to this — that she intended — or rather that she intended — she was underlining tremendously to-night, which shows how insecure she was down below — that she intended — to Go upon the Stage.

  II

  For in the calculations of the youthful, light-hearted, and in every respect untheatrical circles in which she had hitherto moved, you had no difficulty in Going upon the Stage like that. The Stage (whatever that was) had no say in the matter. It was, presumably, just waiting somewhere, like a bus, or a tram, or the Giant Racer at Wembley, to be Gone Upon…. That the cold testimony of Science might one day succeed in cumbering the situation with whispers of an Agent (or some such coarse reality), she was, of course, vaguely aware; but such a thing never entered her head as a serious barrier. If there were any deterrent at all, it came from the character of the Stage itself, which was conceived by this girl as being unalterably, lamentably, and yet also a little enthrallingly inseparable from a nebulous kind of Wickedness. This Wickedness was obscurely collective, of course, rather than actively individual — otherwise you would naturally have little desire to Go amongst it — but that did not alter the fact of this Wickedness. Wickedness, indeed, confronted you at the very opening of your negotiations in this quarter, inasmuch as it was another unalterable and lamentable axiom (much impressed upon this girl by her various girlish and sympathetic discouragers) that you were not likely to Succeed upon the Stage unless you Carried On with the Manager.

  With respect to this Manager, it seems that the poor man had no more say in the matter than the stage had in the first place; and that just as there was some placidly receptive Stage, to be Gone Upon at will, so there was some kind of ideal and all-embracing Manager, pleasantly and professionally intemperate, simply waiting in an iniquitous flat somewhere to be Carried On with.

  It is believed that those actually concerned in this connection would not defer to this outlook. That is all very well, they might say, but the thing’s not so easy as all that. The enigma hitherto has been to find your Manager. We shouldn’t mind Carrying On with him a bit if you could only tell us where to look him up. And they would surely be justified in thus casting disparagement upon questionable data. For experience has exhibited, with respect to Managers, that although there may yet be a certain quantity extant who (as this girl imagined the greater part of them to do) relieve their daily energies in a nefarious round of cigar-eating, champagne-drinking, being bloated, buying souls, and turning beautiful (and trusting) creatures into Things and so forth — that although there can never be any natural guarantee against the acquirement of any of the above-mentioned characteristics by Managers — they are a great deal more likely to appear in everyday affairs as middle-aged and heavily married bodies, in the habit of returning to their wives punctually for supper, with a severe talking-to if they forget the greens, and not without the threat of a strong mustard bath and a pot of gruel if there’s any sneezing and the weather’s on the chilly side…. For the domesticity of the average Manager, experience would affirm, is as pious as it is proverbial.

  But once get on to experience, and what experience would have had to say on the subject of the profession this girl was choosing at midnight with such tremulous audacity, and instances of her general bemusement might be multiplied indefinitely. Her misinterpretation of managerial intention was but a preliminary misinterpretation,

  III

  Jackie Mortimer, for that was this girl’s name, was the product of a late Edwardian and early Georgian Brighton, which was not really Edwardian, and not really Georgian; and she belonged to an indeterminate society which was dominated from no particular quarter, but conspicuously active in Cutting itself. This was a golden era for the Cut, in fact, and that naïve bludgeon of social consciousness and rectitude was wielded judiciously but lavishly on all sides. But then, from the standpoint of the present time, it was a naïve and simple-hearte
d Brighton altogether. It is impossible to say why it should have been so; but it was so, in its very artless Edward-Georgian self. It was a naïve Brighton merely because Horse Cabs are naïve things, and the spectacle of people whistling like blazes in the night for them is a spectacle of naïveté, and because people who can still make conversation on Ankles, and get into a great state about Glad Eyes and speak derisively of Knuts, and wear straw hats, and play Coon Can, and try to get thin on Antipon, and consider themselves on the road to becoming fast, and talk with strong conceit about Motoring, are fundamentally and necessarily a naïve people.

  In this Brighton, or rather in the Hove lying ponderously and residentially to the west of this Brighton, the whole of Jackie’s life had been spent. In the last days on earth of King Edward the Peacemaker, when that lovable yet imposing monarch was allowed to come out, laboriously and without molestation from the populace, into the King’s Gardens, and there take the sun with surly receptivity and asthmatic silence, Jackie Mortimer was a little girl of about five or six, herself playing with a ball in those gardens. And in the early part of the reign of King George the Fifth, just before the war, when all Brighton and Hove was going out on excited steamers to the fleet of battleships that lay peacefully on the coast, and the front was festive with pink and green and blue electric bulbs, hung all the way along, Jackie was a very composed and full-grown girl of about sixteen, who walked in twilights on the lawns of those same King’s Gardens, and was loved — walked up and down on the twilit grass, harangued, beseeched, peacefully worshipped, kissed, and withal very calm and friendly under the importunities of her straining young adorers.

  Where and when Jackie was first taken with the idea of adopting a theatrical line of business, it is difficult to say; though there can be no doubt that it was her nurse who, in the very first instance, Put Ideas into the child’s head. For Jackie was an exceptionally alluring little girl, and had just that kind of thoughtful-eyed and champagne-haired head into which it is a great pleasure for nurses to Put Ideas. But inasmuch as, among other ideas, Put, at this time, into Jackie’s head, there was always a positive and unequivocal understanding that she was one day (and if Good) to be the Queen, it is doubtful whether anything of so professional a nature could ever have entered into her mind as a serious project.

  But she must have acquired it somewhere, and that very young, for it had always been a tradition at Jackie’s day-school, from the earliest and satchel-carrying times, that that, somehow, was Jackie’s line, and that one day Jackie was coming back, in her glory, to play at the Theatre Royal. “You won’t know us then,” the other girls used to say. (That was the way in which people spoke to Jackie. She had just that quality of inspiring enthusiasm without resentment, and popularity without jealousy. She was always rather fêted and made much, was Jackie — in these days anyway.) Also, whenever there were any private theatricals in progress, she was always the leading figure, and naturally given the principal part, and played, it has been said, superbly. Indeed in a certain play, given by the school in her last term there, and called, you will not be surprised to hear, “The Dream Man,” Jackie came on in a sweet boy’s dress and with a large bag (purported to contain dreams), and took by storm the dark little hall that was specially hired for the entertainment. There was hardly one who did not join in the general applause of Jackie, then: and when she came up to take her prizes afterwards — for Jackie was as clever as Macaulay, as well as being so talented and beautiful (The Headmistress said that Their Youthful Siddons seemed to possess historic as well as histrionic talent [Laughter]) — such a roar of clapping and cheering and footstamping arose, that signs of tears became apparent not only in Jackie’s eyes, and not only in the eyes of her closest friends, but even in those of her few detractors, so carried away were they all by the occasion. Indeed one impassionable person of twelve years of age, celebrated for having nourished a Crush on the figure in the limelight, was positively observed to be no longer in command of herself and compelled to withdraw to the back of the hall, with an accommodating companion of the same years, until such time as she could again face the world with a dry and sober countenance.

  And then, of course, quite apart from her demonstrable dramatic skill, Jackie’s adorers and Jackie’s beauty must in themselves have been incitements to some sort of theatrical aspiration. And as for the quantity of those adorers, and the high quality of that beauty — the latter was proved by the former, and proved beyond question. Very possibly no other young girl in the whole history of those King’s Gardens could lay claim to quite so much admiration and quite so much of soft intrigue as Jackie had drawn towards her in those days. But whether or no she could actually and objectively have been styled a beauty in these days, and what kind of beauty she would have been if she fell under that category, are different questions. It need only be said that to the world at large she was certainly recognizable in her looks as one belonging to a type aiming distantly at some racial ideal, and she could not go abroad without making this fact subtly manifest in whatever quarter. Old ladies in buses were to be discovered either gazing with lost and dim-smiling benignancy, or frowning with fierce absorption at her, as she sat opposite: ticket-collectors, carpenters, porters, and their ingenuous kind were either reduced to almost emotional direction-giving and professional exposition, or braced to misanthropic curtness, in her presence: factory hoydens, when they passed her in the street, at once began to nudge, and giggle, and cry “La-di-dah!” and tumble about with similar derisive and envious expressions until she was out of sight: and she was, in general, considered in the course of nature to be unequal to carrying anything, of any weight whatever, or to standing up on the two legs which God had given her for any decent length of time, or to transacting any daily business with ordinary care or efficiency. Whether it was defined or not, Jackie introduced a new and slightly strained and slightly elevated atmosphere wherever she went; and it was taken for granted that she was constructed on slightly different principles.

  You must figure Jackie in these days as being very modest, but very bright-eyed and serene, and full of the most high-minded intentions of Knowing her old friends when she came back to the Theatre Royal in her glory, and with all the unhurried air of one who knows that the world is at her feet, and that the world’s prizes are for her leisurely picking. She had, at the time, the most curious credibility towards life as an occurrence, and success as a thing that would happen to her from the outside. Success, and the admitted obstacles to success, were alike to fall upon her as the natural results and indications of her talents. She had no sense of having to seek or make anything, to thrust, and watch the results, and thrust again. She had certain gifts, and the world would show the fit and normal worldly reaction to such gifts.

  Indeed at this time everything hung so deliciously and yet so very much in the air, that the whole thing seemed likely to remain in the air for ever, and finally dissolve into its own element: but two events occurred which brought her projects down to earth, where they still remained phantasmal, and delicious, and vague, but were down to earth for all that. The first of these was the outbreak of the war, and the second of these was the death of her father. Her mother had died when she was very young.

  Possibly there was no decline in Jackie’s popularity at the outbreak of the war, but there was, of course, a war to think about, and she could not expect, had no notion of expecting, to be the talk and pet of her circle to the same extent. Her circle, in fact, towards the end, showed every sign of getting itself involved in war-work and war-marriage and dispersing altogether. At war-work proper Jackie herself was utterly incompetent. She fainted instantly on being confronted by a day’s work at a canteen; she was the wretched and scared origin of a deplorable scene (involving a Tram) in the Dyke Road while trying to learn how to drive a car; and apart from a little rather strained singing and cigarette-bestowing amongst well-disposed wounded soldiers, and apart from a little estimably patriotic villification of the Germans, whom she declared
, with conviction, to be Brutes (or even, after great outrages, Swine), she was hardly any true support to her country in its hour of need. Indeed Jackie was always rather out of it as far as the war was concerned.

  It was three months before the Armistice that Jackie’s father died. Jackie’s father is only of interest to this story in so far as he claimed to be immortal, but was not. At least that is the only interpretation that can be made of his incessant reiteration to Jackie that If Anything Should Happen to him, she would be well provided for. It was never supposed for a moment that anything could happen to him, but it did. Furthermore, she was not well provided for. Apart from that, Jackie’s father was a much-loved father, who was a Punch artist, and who wore a close grey beard, and who was large, and tolerant, and a little guttural, and a figure in the neighbourhood: and when he died there was a great deal of him in the local papers, and much private commiseration for Jackie, to whom, it was affirmed by those in the know, he had left nothing but the Clothes she Stood Up in.

  This was practically true; but however that may have been, she did appear to be standing up with very tolerable success in those clothes. Also, even if there had been any decline in the cult of Jackie in the early days of the war, there was a kind of Jackie Renaissance on her father’s death, and from all quarters there came the most astounding and unforseen remembrances and kindnesses and sweeping invitations to stay indefinitely and be second daughters and so forth. The world, in fact, seemed to open its protective arms to Jackie on her father’s death, and hardly a trace of misgiving as to worldly circumstance ever entered her head. From the very first evening of the disaster that had fallen upon her, when she went over to sleep under the roof of old Lady Perrin, the widow of an Indian judge, who lived two doors away in First Avenue, and with whom she had remained until the commencement of this story, she had never been able to feel any true perturbation in that direction.