THE best that could be said about the Wheatsheaf Hotel at Staithley
Bridge was very good indeed; it was that when a certain eminent
actor-manager was appearing in Manchester, he put up at the Wheatsheaf
in Staithley and motored in and out. It is thirty miles each way, there
is a Midland Hotel in Manchester, and actor-managers know all there is
to know about personal comfort. That places the Wheatsheaf.
It was Staithley’s sporting hotel, and golf club-houses, not to mention
the habit of golfers of motoring to their sport, have dispelled the
illusion that sportsmen are a hardy race. The Wheatsheaf had its crowded
hour when the visiting teams of professional footballers who came to
oppose Staithley Rovers arrived in a charabanc, and attracted customers,
who paid reckless prices for drinks in a place where they could get near
views of authentic heroes: but for the most part, solid, quiet comfort
was the keynote of the Wheatsheaf and commercial travelers knew it.
Those of them who were not victims of the falling status of the
traveler, and the too closely scrutinized expense accounts, went to the
Wheatsheaf; the others envied them and went where they could afford to
go. The uninstructed Londoner would have passed it by without a second
glance; the Wheatsheaf did not advertise. It was innocent of gilt, and
its whisky was unwatered. It was a very good hotel.
Nevertheless, Mr. Alastair Montagu, who always stayed there when his
company was at the Theater Royal, was surprised to see Lexley Chown
in the smoking room of the Wheatsheaf. He remembered the eminent
actor-manager, and his surprise was not that Chown, being in Staith-ley,
should have the discrimination to stay at the Wheatsheaf, but that
Chown should be in Staithley. Chown was a figure in the profession, but
emphatically a London figure.
The business of Mr. Chown was that of an “artiste’s agent.” A middleman
trading in human flesh and blood? Perhaps; but Chown was a useful
clearing-house. He was an impressive person, floridly handsome,
beautifully dressed, and the routine work which kept him and the
expensively rented, exquisitely furnished suite of offices near
Leicester Square was something like this. A manager would ring up and
say that by to-morrow he must have a snub-nosed actor, six feet tall,
with red hair and a cockney accent to play a part worth seven pounds a
week. Mr. Chown, or Mr. Chown’s secretary, consulted the card index and,
by its means, collected half a dozen unemployed actors who answered,
roughly, to the manager’s specification, and sent them to see the
manager, who might choose one of them but more probably would not. He
would probably ring up and say, “I say, Chown, I’ve looked over this
bunch. Not one of them a bit like it.” Chown would reply, truthfully,
that each of his applicants had a snub nose, red hair, was six feet high
and a cockney who was prepared to act for seven pounds a week, and that
these were the qualifications the manager had demanded. The manager
would not deny it, but “I had a brain-wave last night. Billy Wren is the
man I want for that part. He was born to play it, only,” pathetically,
“I don’t know where he is.”
“I do,” Mr. Chown would say calmly. “He’s in ‘The Poppy Plant,’ which is
at Eastbourne this week and at Torquay next week.”
“Get him out of that for me, old man.”
“I’ll try, but Billy is five feet six, his hair is black and he’s got a
Roman nose.”
“I don’t care: I want him.”
“And his salary is sixteen.”
“Who cares?” Billy would be wired for, cajoled into giving up the
certainty of his tour for the uncertainty of a London run, his touring
manager would be placated with a substitute at half Billy’s salary,
and the London Manager would pay Mr. Chown precisely nothing for these
services. Did Mr. Chown, then, help lame dogs over stiles for nothing?
Not at all: he received ten per cent of the actor’s salary for the first
ten weeks of a run, from the actor. His brains and his system were at
the service of the manager, but it was the actor who paid all while
receiving certainly not more than the manager who paid nothing, not
even compliments to Mr. Chown on the astonishing efficiency of that
compilation of many years, his card index.
That was the bread and butter work of Mr. Lexley Chown, but his portly
form was not nourished on Lenten fare, nor was his wine bill paid out of
his card index. He was an industrious seeker after talent buried in the
English provinces; he had the flair--not the nose, for, remarkably, Mr.
Chown was not a Jew--for discovering young people of merit whose market
value, under intelligent handling, would in a few years be in the
neighborhood of a hundred pounds a week. It is a profitable thing to be
sole agent of a number of people each earning a hundred pounds a week.
When business was good--and Staithley was a good “No. 2” town--Mr.
Alastair Montagu was capable of believing what his posters asked the
public to believe about the merits of his company, but in his most
optimistic, his most characteristically showman-like mood, he could not
persuade himself that Lexley Chown had come from London to Staithley
looking for stars of the future amongst the sprightly old women and
elderly young men of “The Woman Who Paid” company. There was old Tom
Hall, of course, a sound actor who ought to be in London, but Chown knew
all about Tom, and about Tom’s trouble, too. Whisky drinkers on Tom’s
scale weren’t Chown’s quarry, nor, indeed, he reflected, were sound
actors either. To be a “sound actor” is to be damned with faint
praise and a mediocre salary. No: Chown must be after something at the
music-hall, and Montagu had “popped in” the other evening without seeing
anything extraordinary. But that was just it, with Chown. There was
nothing extraordinary about the people he discovered until after he
discovered them; then every one saw how extraordinary they were.
Chown, shaking Montagu’s hand and bending over it with an inclination of
the body which seemed derived from Paris rather than London, was merely
Chown not differentiating between this unimportant touring manager
and the great ones of the earth who paid high salaries to established
reputations. But Mr. Montagu was flattered, he had a fine capacity for
flattery.
“My dear Montagu, I’m delighted,” said Mr. Chown. “You will honor me by
dining with me? They have a Chablis here that really is not unworthy of
your acceptance.”
It was flattering to be thought a connoisseur of wine, and Chown had
skillfully mentioned a wine that couldn’t go beyond Montagu’s _savoir
vivre_, instead of the more esoteric drinks of his own preferring. Yet
Mr. Chown, taking trouble to secure a guest, wanted nothing of Montagu
but his company. The theater is at once convivial and self-insulating.
Chown hated solitude, and though there were hail-fellow-well-met
commercial travelers in the hotel whose conversation would have been
a tonic, he preferred the limited Mr. Montagu. Erroneously, Mr. Chown
despised commercial travelers.
Mr. Montagu, in gratitude, decided to give Mr. Chown a hint. Mr. Chown
was in evening dress.
“I am glad to hear,” said Mr. Chown, who had heard nothing at all, “that
you are having excellent houses.”
The houses were no better than Montagu’s inexpensive company deserved.
“I am not,” he confessed, “doing musical comedy business. Still, they
have a feeling for the legitimate here. Staithley’s a good town, if,” he
added, trying to give his kindly hint, “it isn’t dressy.”
“No. I suppose one mustn’t judge these people by their clothes. They
don’t put their money on their backs in the North. They’ve more left to
spend on the theater, Montagu.”
“And the music-hall.”
“Ah! You feel the competition?”
“I wasn’t meaning that. Look here, Chown, are you coming in to see my
show to-night?”
“Well--” Mr. Chown’s whole anatomy, as seen above the table, was apology
incarnate.
“No. You’re not. I didn’t think it and that’s why I didn’t ask at once.
It’s some one at the Palace you’ve come to see, isn’t it?”
“What makes you think so?”
“Well, there’s nothing else in Staithley.” The theater _is_
self-insulating. “And you haven’t come here for your health. But, if
you’ll excuse my saying it, they don’t dress for the theater, let alone
the Palace, and if you go there as you are, they’ll throw things at you
from the gallery.”
“Montagu, I shan’t forget this kindness,” said Chown.
“You put me under obligation to you. But--did you never hear of an
Eisteddfod?”
“Is it a new act on the halls?” asked Mr. Montagu, who did not rapidly
clear his mind of an obsession.
Mr. Chown smiled. “Not yet,” he said, but “out of the mouths of
babes and sucklings,” he thought, mentally filing an idea for future
reference.
“Wait a moment,” said Mr. Montagu. “Why am I thinking of Lloyd George?”
“Because of a natural association of ideas. Staithley Eisteddfod,
however, is a Lancashire occasion with a Welsh label that hasn’t much to
do with it. You may recall the Hand Bell Ringers who were on the halls
some years ago. I picked them up at Staithley Eisteddfod. It’s a sort of
competitive festival of song, and if I were not dressed, I should not be
admitted to the stalls.”
Staithley was, so to speak, on Montagu’s beat, and it was not on,
obviously, Chown’s. Yet here was Chown telling Montagu something
about Staithley quite material to his business, which he did not know.
Staithley Eisteddfod did not advertise: the largest hall in the town was
too small to hold the friends of the competitors, let alone the hardly
more dispassionate public, and Chown had his ticket for the stalls
because he was a subscriber to the funds. Short of theft, it was the
only way by which one could become possessed of a ticket.
He did not add, though he knew, that Montagu’s second-rate company
with their third-rate play was at the Staithley Theater Royal that week
because more alert managers, with better attractions, steered clear
of the place in that week of musical ferment, and the resident theater
manager had to take what he could, by diplomatic silence, get. One lives
and learns and Mr. Montagu would learn that week without a living wage;
his moderate houses belonged with the early, pre-Eisteddfod nights of
the week and though only the favored few would crowd into the Eisteddfod
Hall, the rest of Staithley, hot partisans of the performers, watched
and waited.
Music is music in Lancashire.
“Ah.” said the innocent Mr. Montagu, “if it’s music, and dressed at
that, it’ll not affect me at the theater.”
“Let me fill your glass.” said Mr. Chown. “What’s your opinion of the
cinemas?”
Mr. Montagu was of the opinion, current, in 1912. that, the cinemas were
of no account. Revolutions in the making are apt to go unperceived by
their contemporaries. Chown was less insular, but “Imagine.” he said,
“the strangled emotions of the young man in the stalls who desires
a woman he sees on the cinema and then realizes she is a shadow on a
screen.” They finished dinner on a genially Rabelaisian note.
Chown chose this, the first evening of the Eisteddfod, because there
were to be no Hand Bell Ringers and no instrumentalists: there was
choral singing and there were soloists. He was going to hear Choral
Societies from all over Lancashire sing, one after the other, the same
chorus from “King Olaf,” and he was going to hear soloists, one after
the other, sing the same song. It was, on the face of it, the dullest
possible way of spending an evening, yet the packed audience in
Staithley Drill Hall considered themselves privileged to be there. The
official judges who were Walter Pate and two others (which meant, for
practical purposes. Walter Pate alone) sat screened oft from view of the
performers, lest prejudice should mar the fairness of their decisions.
They heard but did not see.
The audience heard and saw, and the singers were not numbers to them but
“our Annie”’ or “our Sam”’ or “our lot fra? Blackburn”’ and so on. Local
feeling ran high under an affectation of cool discrimination and broke
out in wild applause, intended to influence the judges’ verdict, coming,
curiously localized, from parts of the hall where adherents had gathered
together in the belief that union is strength. But they were, one
and all, susceptible to fine shades of singing; they didn’t withhold
applause from a fine rendering because the singers were of some other
district than their own. Local patriotism was disciplined to their
musical appreciations.
Mr. Chown, of London, had ceased, as an annual visitor, to be surprised
by this musical cockpit, where not money but taintless glory was the
prize. They competed for the honor of their birthplaces, and for the
privilege of holding a “challenge shield,” inscribed with the winners’
names, until the nest contest. He had ceased even to wonder at that
drastic rule of an autocratic committee imposing evening dress upon the
occupants of the front seats and at its phenomenal results. He was a
worker in research, he was scientifically unemotional about the motive
of his research, but he was on fertile ground here, and if he drew blank
at Staithley Eisteddfod, then Lancashire was not the county he took it
for.
Yet his was not the point of view of Mr. Pate, and the capacity to
sing was the least of the qualities for which he looked. To a sufficing
extent, the capacity would be present in all of to-night’s competitors,
even in those who sang only in chorus, and what Mr. Chown was looking
for was best indicated by the algebraic symbol, X. He couldn’t, himself,
have defined the quality he sought. The reflection of Mr. Montagu about
the actor Tom Hall may be recalled. Tom Hall was a sound actor, lacking
X. If there is a word for X, it is personality. Good locks went for
something, and so did the evident possession of either sex but the whole
of X depended neither upon good looks nor upon sex, and was a mystery of
the stars whom Mr. Chown, with his trustworthy flair, discovered before
they were stars. Technique could be acquired, and Mr.
Chown did not condemn technique, but X _was_ and it was not possible
to acquire it. Add X to technique and the result was a hundred pounds
a week: technique without X was Tom Hall, “The Woman Who Paid” and the
whisky of conscious failure in life.
He sat down with a silent prayer that an X performer would appear on
the platform and that he might not repeat his poignant disappointment
of last year when he had found an unmistakable X only to learn that
its possessor was a Wesleyan who looked upon a theater door as the main
entrance to hell. “But you’re a great artist,” he had told her and “I’m
a Christian woman,” she had replied and left him frustrate.
His program informed him that the first part of the evening would be
occupied by choral singing, and he settled himself on a spartan chair to
await, with what patience he might, the turn of the soloists. There were
ten choirs on the program; at least two hours of it, he reckoned,
but Mr. Chown was no quitter and the zeal of the conductors and the
rusticity of the choirs’ clothing might be trusted to afford him some
amusement. And yet he flagged; the monotony was drugging him, and the
Wheatsheaf had done him very well....
Had he slept? That was the question he asked himself as he saw the girl.
Had he slept through the choral and perhaps half of the solo singing? He
sat up sharply, and, as he did so, realized that a full choir was on
the platform. But his first impression had been that the girl was alone,
and, even now, he found it difficult to see that there were thirty-nine
other people with her.
She eclipsed them. “She’s got it,” he prevented himself with difficulty
from shouting aloud--and Mr. Chown was no easy prey to enthusiasm.
Still, a girl who could wipe out thirty-nine other people, who could
glow uniquely in a crowd! “Put her on a stage,” he was thinking, “and
they’ll feel her to the back row of the gallery.” He noted as additional
facts, accidentals but fortifying, that she had youth and good looks. He
tried, honestly, to fix his attention on a large-headed man in the choir
who had a red handkerchief stuck into his shirt-front, and a made-up tie
that had wandered below his ear. The fellow was richly droll, but it was
no use: the girl drew him back to her. He tried again, with an earnest
spinsterish lady who looked strong-minded enough for anything: and the
girl had him in the fraction of a minute. “She’ll do,” he thought--“if
she hasn’t got religion,” he added ruefully. “Number seven--Staithley
Bridge Choral Society,” he read on his program. That was a
simplification, anyhow: the girl must live in Staithley.
They were the home choir, Staithley’s own, and the applause was
long, detaining them in embarrassed acknowledgment on a platform they
vehemently wished to quit, but Mr. Chown, making for the pass-door under
cover of the applause, observed that there was no embarrassment about
the girl. “Um,” he thought, “no nerves. They’re better with them. Well,
one can’t have everything.” At the pass-door, a steward stood sentinel.
“Press,” said Mr. Chown with aplomb, using an infallible talisman, and
the sentinel made way for him.
When the verdict was announced, the winning choir was to appear again
on the platform to sing a voluntary and to receive acclamations and the
challenge shield. Meanwhile, the whole four hundred contestants were
herded together in the Drill Hall cellarage and Mr. Chown added himself
inconspicuously to their number. Mistaken, as he hoped to be, for
a Staithlwite just come off the platform, he found beer pressed
fraternally upon him, and, heroically, he drank. Self-immolation and
research are traditional companions. He felt that the beer had made him
one of them, but could not withhold a backward glance at the vanity
of West End tailoring. When he had said “Press” to the steward at the
pass-door he had wondered if his costly cut were plausible and now that
same cut was blandly accepted amongst the nondescript swallowtails of
this unconforming mob. But he welcomed their inappreciation; he wanted
to make the girl’s acquaintance first as one of themselves.
A press of women came down the stairs into the cellar and Mary Ellen
was with them but not of them. They chattered incessantly, excitedly,
letting taut nerves relax in a spate of shouted words; she was silent,
unmoved by the ordeal of the platform and the applause, nursing her
sulky, secret resentment of Walter Pate who had refused to let her
compete amongst the soloists. Mr. Pate was guarding his treasure against
premature publicity; he was guarding her, specifically, against Mr.
Chown, that annual raider who had so damnably ruined the Staithley Hand
Bell Ringers by taking them to the music-halls; he hid her in the Choral
Society and he underrated Mr. Chown’s perceptiveness.
She had taken many things from Walter Pate--the good food which had so
unrecognizably developed her, with the physical exercises he prescribed,
from a sexless child into a woman of gracious curves; the good
education, the good musical instruction; the good beginnings of every
kind; and in return she gave him work. He was almost certain of her
now: the tin was gone from her golden voice and when he let his hoarded
secret loose upon the world he knew that, under God, he would be making
a great gift to the concert-platform. He would give a glorious voice,
perfectly trained, and perhaps more than that. But the more was still
only “perhaps.”
“Art,” he had said, “is unguessable” and it remained unguessable. But,
“she’s not awakened yet,” he thought, and hoped for a time when her
voice would be more than well-produced.
It lacked color, warmth, feeling, but she was young and, meanwhile, he
was doing his possible. It was the hardest thing to keep her back
from public trial, both because of the girl herself and because of Tom
Bradshaw, who was paying half her costs and didn’t share Walter’s faith.
But they must wait, they must all wait, and if two years were not long
enough they must wait longer.
Mr. Pate, who looked upon her as the great servant he would give to
music, was screened away in the judges’ box: Mr. Chown, who looked upon
her as an income, watched Mary Ellen take her cloak from a long row
hanging on the wall and go towards the stairs she had just descended.
Evidently, she was for a breath of air and he thought it would be a
shrewd air on his bare head, but the opportunity of private conversation
was too good to be missed and he awaited her return at the foot of the
stair.
“Oh, you are going out?” he said. “So’m I. It’s hot in here.” He
modified the Gallicism of his bow.
“Yes,” she said, consenting to his escort. She knew, better than he did,
that the sort of boisterous crowd which awaits the declaration of
an election result was assembled round the Drill Hall; it would be
convenient to have this big man with her to shoulder a way through it.
Their clothes stamped them as competitors and the crowd gave passage.
Evening dress was licensed in Staithley that night, but his arm was
agreeably protective till they were through the crush; then he withdrew
it.
“I’m glad to be out of that,” he said.
“There’s too much crowd to-night,” said Mary Ellen.
“Ah, you feel that, do you?”
“Choral singing!” she said, with immense disgust.
“Yes, indeed. It does make one feel one of a crowd. I’ve often wondered,
in my own case, if I shouldn’t have done better to have gone on the
stage.”
She looked him over. “Well,” she said, “I suppose you weren’t always
fat. It’s too late now.”
Mr. Chown swallowed hard. “Yes, for me,” he said. “Not for you. Would
you care to go on the stage if the chance came?”
“Would a duck swim?”
Ducks, he thought, more often drowned than swam on the stage; that was
why there was always so much room at the top. “It’s very hard work,” he
said.
“I’m not afraid of work,” she said, and then remembered her grievance,
“if I can see it leading anywhere. Work that only leads to singing with
the crowd isn’t funny.”
“Oh, I can do better than that for you.”
“You can? You?”
“If you will work. If, for instance, you will get rid of your Lancashire
accent.”
“Tha’ gornless fule,” she said, “if tha’ doan’t kna’ th’ differ
’atween Lankysheer an’ t’other A’ll show thee. Me got an accent? Me
that’s worked like a Fury these last two years to lose my accent? Let me
tell you I’ve had the best teachers in Staithley and--”
“Yes,” he interrupted. “The difference is amazing. I realize how you
must have worked. It is only a question now of, so to speak, a finishing
school. The best teachers in Staithley are, after all, Staithley
teachers. I am thinking of London and perhaps not so much of conscious
work as unconscious imitation of the speech of the people who are around
you.”
“London!” she said. “London! Who are you?”
“I’m a well-known theatrical agent, and I became well-known by making
the right people famous. You are one of the right people, but there is
work before you. You can’t act yet. You have it all to learn, acting,
dancing--”
“Not all,” she said. “I can sing.”
“In a Choral Society,” he said.
“You go and ask Walter Pate,” she said, professing a faith in Walter’s
judgment which might, in her circumstances, have been to her credit, but
that all Staithley shared that faith.
All Staithley and Mr. Chown who was at once impressed by her giving
Walter Pate so confidently as reference for her abilities. “Does Mr.
Pate believe in you?” he asked.
“Ask him yourself. Ask him why he keeps me and teaches me and when he’s
told you that, ask him a question for me. Ask why he wouldn’t let me go
in for the solo competition to-night when he says I’m to sing solo in
the ‘Messiah’ at Christmas, and if you get the answer to that, tell me,
for I don’t know.”
Chown thought he could tell her without asking, and marked, gladly, her
bitterness. If Pate was training this girl, it was because he believed
in her. Pate did not take all who came, and wasted no time on fools, but
he had not let her sing as a soloist to-night, though she was to sing
“The Messiah” in a few months. Why? Because tonight was Chown’s night
for being in Staithley and Pate was afraid of Chown. Pate (the dog) had
found something in this girl and was keeping it to himself. He imagined
he had hidden her safely in that choir, did he? But old Chown had the
flair, Chown had spotted the girl’s possession of something Pate did not
know her to possess. Pate only knew she had a voice: Chown knew she
had the stuff in her that stars were made of. Certainly her voice, a
Pate-approved, Pate-produced voice, put an even better complexion on the
matter than Chown had suspected; it meant that here was immediate, and
not merely future, exploitability. She was ripe at once for musical
comedy on tour and when she had shed her accent and picked up some
tricks of the trade, he would stun London with her--if he could filch
her from the wary Mr. Pate.
He did not think of it, precisely, as filching, because his conscience
was quite clear that he, being Chown, could do immensely more for her
than Pate. Pate would be thinking of the salary of a musical comedy
star. Pate would do her positive damage by over-training her up to some
impossible standard ridiculously above the big public’s head; and the
big public was the only public that counted. Mr. Chown saw himself, in
all sincerity, as the girl’s benefactor, if not as her savior.
A word of hers came back to him as a menace to his hopes. “Did I
understand you to say that Mr. Pate keeps you?”
Mary Ellen nodded, and he felt he had struck a snag.
“You are a relative of his?”
“I’m not then. If you want to know, he found me singing in the streets.”
“And was this long ago?”
“Getting on for two years.”
Mr. Chown had the grace to feel a twinge: she was, beyond a doubt,
Pate’s property. But he recovered balance, telling himself very firmly
that Pate would mismanage the property; that life was a battlefield and
that “Vae Victis” was its motto; that one must live and that if Pate had
taken reasonable precautions, he would not have exposed the girl to the
marauding Mr. Chown. And, anyhow, Pate was a provincial.
He asked her age, and “Twenty-one,” she said brazenly, aware of the
trammels of minority. He guessed her eighteen at most, but she wasn’t
impossibly twenty-one and he had his reasons for believing her.
“You couldn’t be a better age,” he said. “I have some doubt as to what
Mr. Pate will say to my proposal of the stage for you.”
“Are you going to tell him about it?” she asked in alarm.
“I will tell you,” he said, “now. If you come with me to-morrow to
London, you can begin at once in a musical comedy on tour.” She gave
a gasp. “Oh,” he said, “you wish to hear no more. You are anxious to
return to the Drill Hall. You are, perhaps, cold?” He was very cold, but
not too cold to play his fish.
“Cold? I could listen all night to this.” Mr. Chown envied her the
undistinguished cloak she wore: _per ardua ad astra_.
“Well,” he said, “it is true that the work I have to offer you is very
different from the restrained, the almost caged existence you have been
enduring. But you will begin in the chorus. You have stage fright to
get over, and all the green sickness of a raw beginner. My friend Hubert
Rossiter”--even Mary Ellen had heard of Rossiter--“will take you and I
shall see that he passes you on from company to company. Soon you will
play small parts, and then leading parts. Possibly, for experience, a
pantomime at Christmas. And while you are learning your business in this
way you will be paid all the time.”
“How much?” she asked promptly.
“Exactly what you are worth,” he said. “You won’t starve and I call your
attention to this point. I act as your agent and I take a ten per cent
commission of your salary. That is all I take, and you will see that it
is to my interests that your salary shall be large. If I did not believe
that your salary in a very few years will be considerable, I should not
be standing bareheaded and without a coat in a Staithley by-street. The
train to London leaves at ten in the morning. Am I to take a ticket for
you?”
“Yes,” she said.
“It is a curious fact,” he remarked, “that I do not know your name. Mine
is Chown. Lexley Chown.”
“Mine’s Mary Ellen Bradshaw,” she said, jettisoning the name of Pate as
useless cargo now.
“Mary,” he mused. “I think we’ll keep the Mary. But we’ll improve the
rest. And now that you and I have settled this between ourselves, when
do I see Mr. Pate?”
“He’s very busy to-night,” said Mary Ellen, “and the train leaves early
to-morrow.”
Mr. Chown looked hard at her, and she met his eye unflinchingly. It was
perfectly understood between them that Walter Pate was a ladder by which
she had reached a secure place. Having reached it, she could kick the
ladder from her, and “Well,” thought Mr. Chown, “she can do it to Pate,
but I’m forewarned.” He turned to go back to the Drill Hall expecting
her to follow. She did not follow, she was gazing fixedly up the street
in which they stood and when he returned, a trifle ill-tempered at
being kept longer than need be in the chilling air, her remark was
disconcerting.
The street ran uphill from the valley of the town, by daylight bleak and
mean, each small house monotonously the repetition of its neighbor,
but seen as she saw it now, blurred in the misty night, it led like
an escape from man’s sordid handiwork to the everlasting hills beyond.
Dimly the rim of Staithley Edge showed as she raised her eyes, vague
blackness obscurely massed beneath a gloomy sky, and above it floated
the trail of smoke emitted from some factory-stack where the night
stokers fed a furnace. Chimneys, the minarets of Staithley; stokers,
the muezzins; smoke, the prayer. Somewhere wind stirred on the blemished
moors and a fresher air blew through the street. Mary Ellen breathed
deeply, greedily filling her lungs as if she feared that to go from
Staithley was to dive into some strange element which would suffocate
her unless she had a stored reserve of vital air. But she was not
thinking that.
Mr. Chown was watching her in some bewilderment. She brought her eyes
down from Staithley Edge to the level of his face. “London’s flat,”
asserted Mary Ellen.
“Not absolutely,” he assured her.
“It’s flat,” she insisted. “I’m going to miss the Staithley hills.”
It was right and proper for Mr. Chown, agent, to have his offices near
Leicester Square and his beautifully furnished rooms in the Albany; but
it was not right for Mary Ellen Bradshaw to adumbrate the instincts of
the homing pigeon. In Mr. Chown’s opinion, home was a superstition of
the middle-classes, and if an artist was not a nomad at heart, the worse
artist she.
He returned to his seat in the Drill Hall, with his bright certainty of
Mary Ellen a trifle dimmed by her unreadiness to forget the Staithley
hills, just as Walter Pate announced the judges’ decision of the choral
competition. Staithley Bridge were not the first; he faced an audience
which was three parts Staithley and gave the verdict to another choir.
It was wonderful proof of their opinion of Walter Pate that there was no
disposition to mob the referee.