Chapter VIII

It was on the next morning that Percy again ran across the mysterious Lady of the Train.

He was buying a halfpenny paper at the north end of the platform when the train came in. The boy hadn't got change ready, and the result was that Percy had once more to run. As he tore past the third-class carriages, he suddenly saw her looking out. He hesitated, felt himself flush, and then turned back and opened the door.

He lifted his hat.

"Good-morning," he said. (He quite understood that he must not say " Miss.")

Obviously she was pleased to see him. She smiled swiftly and warmly, and all the melancholy of her face vanished. " So here you are again," she said. " Good-morning."

Honestly, Percy was not a coxcomb. Of course, he wondered, as all young men of his kind wonder, what kind of effect he produced upon people; but he had not, as a matter of fact, the least suspicion of how easily they got to like him. The truth was that Percy was very true to type — a type that is not very common. The first thing people noticed about him was his curly hair, his dark eyes and his clear complexion; and the next thing they noticed was that his character seemed to correspond, in that he was a natural, clean, simple boy. Certainly there was no overpowering personality about him; he did not compel. Yet

Digitized by Google neither was he obviously weak: his chin was well formed, his lips were decided, and he had a very frank, straightforward look in his eyes. But he was not self-conscious about it. It was precisely the absence of self-consciousness that made him so pleasant. He had a good taste in dress, and his manners, on the whole, were excellent and even rather engaging.

" I saw you at the window," he said, with a pleasing candour.

" That's very nice of you," she said, smiling again. " I mean it was very nice of you not to hurry past. You go up every day, I suppose? "

" That's it. I'm in an office."

"Oh!... Don't you hate it?"

" Yes." (Then he remembered that he had resolved not to hate it, and grew confused.)

" I mean, I'd sooner do other things," he said.

Persons of Percy's temperament find it usually quite impossible to be secretive about things in which they are passionately interested; and he talked rather abstractedly as the train went on. Of course, he wanted to tell her all about Sunday; and he was trying to frame a reason for telling her, satisfactory to himself. Of course he got that reason pretty soon: he perceived that it was his duty to bear his witness. He did not notice that she was watching him; and presently he broke abruptly in.

" A big thing has happened to me since I saw you last," he said suddenly.

" Really?"

Commonsense for a moment restrained him. He saw vividly what a very odd thing it would be to talk about his soul, in a train, to a girl he had only met once before in his life. But his fervour was hot on him, and he

Digitized by Google resolutely trampled commonsense down. But he flashed with the effort.

" Yes/' he said, " I went to church on Sunday in... in a Roman Catholic church."

She looked an inquiry. If he had been sharp, he would have seen that the brightness rather went out of her face. But he was thinking about himself just then.

"And... and I was bowled over by the sermon. I... I never dreamt in all my life "

" Oh! you've found religion/' said the girl.

He looked at her quickly, and the flush died out of his face. The coldness was quite unmistakable; it was, to all intents, a sneer.

" Yes," he said bravely. " I have. Why do you say it like that?"

All conventionality was gone now. Up to the present they had played counters with one another; now it was honest coin.

" Because I haven't found it," said the girl sharply. " At least, I suppose that's it." « But "

" I simply don't know what it means. I thought I did once — at least I thought I'd found it in somebody else. I was married in church, you know "

She stopped suddenly. Obviously she had said more than she meant. Percy's heart leapt and stood still.

"You're married?" he said.

" I didn't mean to say that," she said hurriedly. " But it's true. I was married. I'm not now." " I suppose "

" No; he's not dead. I divorced him six months after my marriage. He was what's called a religious man." Her bitterness was like frost in the carriage. Her face

Digitized by Google had changed: her splendid eyes were veiled and hard: her red lips were like a trap.

The train was screaming through a junction; and Percy turned his face mechanically to look out. He watched the faces on the platform whirl past in white lines. Then he turned again; and his heart blazed suddenly with Quixotism. It seemed to him that he saw his task. Here was a sorrowful, tormented soul, embittered by treachery, a soul that had turned against God and man....

" I don't care in the least," he said earnestly. " I... I'm very sorry. It's exactly people like you who want religion.... I... I wish you'd let me help."

For the first moment he thought she was going to laugh.

" Do you know what I am? " said the girl, looking at him with an odd searching expression.

" How do you mean? "

" I mean my profession. Well, I'm an actress. There! That generally puts religious people off." "But "

"Oh! I'm in a perfectly respectable theatre: and I'm a perfectly respectable person. I'm rehearsing at His Highness' — a problem play, don't you know."

Percy did vaguely know; and asserted that he understood perfectly.

" But that doesn't shock you "

"Shock me! Why, good Lord "

Then her face relaxed again; and the smile came back. It seemed to Percy that she was quite the most beautiful person he had ever seen. And now that he knew her story — at least, the dramatic and sensational part of it — her appeal to him was enormous, as it would be to all young men such as he. It appeared to him wonderful that he should have encountered such a soul in his new-found strength.

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" I... I wish you'd let me talk to you," he said. " I... I believe I could help. I don't mean I myself; but... but I could get somebody 99

She shook her head — smiling faintly.

" You couldn't. Nobody can. You know — I was rather religious once, and that makes it all the worse."

" I... I'm certain I could. Look here, may I come and call upon you? "

The head-shaking continued. She looked out of the window a minute or two without speaking. Then she turned again.

" Give me your address," she said. " But I won't give you mine. You're... you're a dear boy."

She was very silent at the rehearsal that morning.

The play was of the usual modern kind known as a Problem play, which means a drama that plants its feet firmly along the very edge of the Ten Commandments, particularly of one of them that occurs towards the end. Such a play as this gives the keenest sensations of pleasure to people who are chiefly preoccupied in ordinary life with that kind of subject: and the best of it is that it can always be defended along highly philosophical and human lines. The principal persons of the play were in love with other persons than those whom they had promised to love — an old situation which brought about some very pretty and new scenes. There was one particular such scene in the passage of a country house towards the end of the second act that was very problematic indeed.

It was the third act, however, that was being rehearsed this morning; and the girl whom Percy proposed to " help," had not more than a sentence or two to speak.

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She had done her talking just before the previous curtain. So she sat apart just off the stage, and said nothing to anybody. Two or three friends came up to her, and rapidly went away again. She was obviously in something of a temper.

When her cue came she sat still, completely unaware that the entire party was waiting for her.

" Now then, please " called a voice impatiently.

Then she sprang up suddenly and went on.

"Not like that! not like that!" wailed a voice from the gloom of the stalls. " Please remember that you're supposed to be broken-hearted. Surely you haven't forgotten "

She flounced out indignantly. (She had very much of a "temperament"; it was her "temperament" in fact that had won her this fairly prominent part.) Then she came on again, the very picture of broken-heartedness.

On the whole she did very well; and the bald man, with no nose to speak of, who happened to have written the play, complimented her. But her temper was ferocious; she snapped like a chained dog at every living being except her theatrical superiors. She flatly refused to go and lunch with her dearest friend, and gave no reason at all except that she didn't want to.

As the last lines drew to an end, a rather shabby-looking man in trousers with a red line down the seam, came up and stood in the wings; and, as she moved off, he came up to her.

" A note please, miss. And Mr. Marridon's waiting for an answer."

She took the note without a word; opened it and read it. Then she tore it up and let the fragments flutter down from her fingers.

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Then she said, quite clearly and distinctly: "Tell him to go to hell!"

She knew quite well that there was an element of pose in all this attitudinizing; but she did not know how much. Such pose as there was consisted in representing these various personages — herself, Percy, her ex-husband, Mr. Marridon, in certain roles more clearly defined than the facts warranted. She herself was the disillusioned, embittered woman, who had drunk eagerly of the cup offered and found it poison and rottenness: Percy was the ardent boy whose simplicity attracted her, in whom, as by looking in a child's face, she might find forgetfulness: her ex-husband was the traitor through whom disillusionment had come; the Hon. James Marridon (who had, as a matter of fact, pestered her a good deal with little notes and whose invitations she had once or twice accepted) was the tempter who would disillusion her still further.

Her temperament was essentially dramatic: she was not interested in people or things, unless she could group them. Generally she grouped them sufficiently accurately; but in any case, if they were once grouped, she threw herself with zest into her own part. There was no harm in her: at least she meant none: there was no malice. But the danger lay (as always in such cases) in the temptation that her puppets experienced, to play up to her lead. Mr. Marridon, for one, went away in precisely the mood she would have wished. He received the message as it was originally given; and stamped off in a rage, pulling his moustache fiercely. He also remarked: "Curse the woman! " quite in the accepted manner.

And Percy, too, unconsciously, took up his role with equal promptness. His head, too, was full all day of the

Digitized by Google help that he proposed to give her, though he felt rather more manly and protective than she had contemplated.

And she herself, as she put on her hat and cloak in the dressing-room, preserved a rigid silence. Was it conceivable, she asked herself, that the way out really might lie along the road that Percy had represented? Since her own disillusionment she had preferred to label all religious persons as unchristian; to thank God that she was not as these Pharisees. Certainly she had suffered at the hands of a man who professed religion; and, of course, to one of a pigeon-holing temperament, the short cut to generalization lay in a contempt of all religious professions for the future. But the new pose appeared even more attractive: she knew nothing whatever about Catholicism except its gracefulness. Might it not be something of an idyll, if she could find her peace by its means?... She pictured herself at confession.

But she was not insincere in all this. She was, on the contrary, entirely true to a temperament that happened to be dramatic, and to a youthfulness that was certainly not at present her fault.

She went away in the same moody manner at the close of the afternoon rehearsal; and down again to the cheap little flat she inhabited near Ponder's End. She had settled on her about a hundred a year from her parents, now deceased; she lived alone and did her own cooking.

So she let herself into the flat; glanced at a couple of letters inscribed with her stage name that also was her maiden name — Miss Gladys Farham — made herself some tea, and settled down to an emotional evening. She was scarcely aware that in a private drama it is not only one's puppets but oneself too who occasionally grows into the part assigned by imagination.

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