IT is not to be gainsaid that Tom Bradshaw heard of the flight of Mary Ellen with relief. “I don’t know if I’m a doubting Thomas: I’m sure I’m a doubting Quixote,” had been his thought lately when he remitted Walter his half share of her expenses. He was very certain now that he was the one good Bradshaw, and whatever backward glances Walter might cast Tom closed the account of Mary Ellen with finality. He would neither see nor hear that young woman again. “I blame myself,” he wrote to Walter. “She is a Bradshaw and I ought to have stopped your foolishness instead of going shares in it. I’ll stop it now, though, and when you write of going to the police I say I won’t have it. Forget her. (If it comes to police, owd lad, what price yon pair of white-slaving procurers, thee and me?). This man Chown that you say you suspect. I’ve made enquiries and there’s nothing the matter with Chown. And if he looted her from us, who looted first? It’s a blow to you, but honestly, Walter, better sooner than later and she would have cut and run when it suited her. She’s a Bradshaw. Bar me, Bradshaws are muck.”

Meanwhile, the organizer of victory was making first tactical moves in his Mary Ellen campaign. He made them in a spacious room whose admirable furniture suggested that this was the Holy of Holies of some eminent dealer in antiques until one noticed the large, floridly signed photographs on the walls and the parti-colored advertising sheet which announced all West End attractions and contradicted crudely the Persian rugs on the floor: the private office of Mr. Hubert Rossiter, that elderly miracle of youthful dapperness whose queer high-stepping walk suggested, especially when he rehearsed a crowd of chorus-girls, nothing so much as a bantam-cock. He had developed, to an extraordinary degree, the knack of knowing what the public wanted and of fitting together, like the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle, incongruous parts that merged under his touch into the ordered whole of a popular entertainment. He wasn’t, artistically, without scruple, but Hubert Rossiter with his two sweetstuff shops in town and his several touring companies in the country was a prophet of theatrical standardization: a safe man, with no highbrow pretensions about him, never short of other people’s money for the financing of his productions.

Chown had been called into the Presence about a matter which might have caused friction on any other day. Today, Chown wanted something of Rossiter and the threatening clouds dissolved in smiling sunshine. That affair settled, Chown took up his hat, then stopped.

“By the way, Hubert,” he said, “whom would you say is the toughest stage manager you’ve got on tour?”

“There’s Darley. Darley doesn’t wear kid gloves. He’s out with ‘The Little Viennese.’ I’m told they call that company ‘The Little Ease.’”

“Just what I’m looking for. That’s the South tour, isn’t it?” asked Chown who did not want Mary Ellen to visit Staithley.

“Yes.”

“Well, will you take a girl from me and put her in the chorus and ask Darley with my compliments to give her hell?”

“I conclude from this that you want to get back on some one who’s been pestering you to get a perfect lady on the stage.”

“If I were not an honest man, I’d let you go on thinking that. But when she’s had three months of Darley, I’m going to ask you to give her a part in another show and then a lead and—”

“My dear Lexley, you have only to command. I run my companies solely for your convenience.”

“Seriously, Hubert, you can have first option on this girl at a hundred a week in town two years hence, and she’ll be cheap at that. Would you like to see her now?”

“I hate looking at raw meat. What are her points?”

“She can sing.”

Mr. Rossiter shrugged his shoulders. “She’s nothing in my life for that,” he said.

“She’s got youth.”

“Flapper market’s depressed, Lexley. Give me experience all the time.”

“Darley’s seeing to the experience. I tell you, Hubert—”

“Oh, I know. The perfect Juliet. I’m always hearing of her. Never seen her yet.” Mr. Rossiter pressed a bell, and the immediacy of the response suggested that Mr. Claud Drayton, who entered, lived up to the part for which he was cast, of Field-Marshal to the Napoleon, Rossiter. “Got her with you, Chown?” asked Rossiter.

“I did venture to bring her.”

“You would. Drayton, Chown’s got a girl here. Chorus in ‘The Little Viennese’ for three months. Maisie in ‘The Girl from Honolulu’ after that. Get reports and let me see them. That’ll do. Good-by, Chown.” He pressed another bell and a shorthand typist appeared as if by magic: he was dictating letters to her before Chown and Drayton had left the room. It was efficiency raised to the histrionic degree.

Drayton had eliminated surprise from his official life, but he couldn’t restrain an instinctive gasp at the sight of Mary Ellen when Chown urbanely ushered her into his room. He gasped because she did not comply with, she violated, the first principle of an applicant for an engagement in the chorus. The first principle was that to apply with any chance of success for a job worth thirty-five shillings a week, you must wear visible clothing worth thirty-five pounds; and Mary Ellen was in the Sunday clothes of Staithley. Her costume was three seasons behind the fashions when it was new, her shoes were made for durability, and her hair-dressing made Mr. Drayton think of his boyhood, when he had gone to Sunday school. But he had his orders and here was Lexley Chown remarkably sponsoring this incredible applicant. He took out a contract-form. “Name? Sign here. The company’s at Torquay. Report yourself at the theater to Mr. Darley to-morrow. You’ll travel midnight. Show this in the office and they’ll give you your fare.” He fired it all at her almost without interval, sincerely flattering the manner in which his chief addressed him, and, as a rule, he flustered the well-dressed, experienced ladies he addressed. Here was one who was not experienced, who was dressed so badly that he thought of her as a joke in bad taste and, confound her, she was not flustered. She took the contract and the payment-slip from him calmly, eyeing him with a steady gaze which reduced his self-importance to the vanishing point. “Good-by. Good luck,” he jerked at her with the involuntariness of an automaton.

She did not intend to seem disdainful; she was merely tired and the summary marching orders by a midnight train bewildered her. Mr. Chown, squiring her in her incongruous clothes from the Rossiter headquarters, thought he had reason to congratulate himself.

There was, first, the document, terrifyingly bespattered with red seals, which she had signed in his office. She might be a minor, but she had set hand and seal to the statement that she was legally of age and to the undertaking on the part of Mary Ellen Bradshaw, hereinafter known as the artiste and for professional purposes to be known as Mary Arden, to employ Lexley Chown as her sole agent at the continuing remuneration of ten per cent of her salary, paid weekly by the artiste to the agent. Formidable penalties were mentioned, two clerks witnessed their signatures with magisterial gravity and “Altogether,” thought Mr. Chown, refraining from handing her a copy of their agreement, “if she shuffles out of that, she’ll be spry.”

There was, second, the compliance of Mr. Rossiter and the coming noviciate under Darley. Deliberately he had left her in her country clothes, trusting them to disguise in the Rossiter offices a quality he did not wish to be clearly apparent yet: deliberately, he had rushed her affair thinking all the while of Darley—or if not of him, of a Darley, of some crude martinet who was to lick her into shape. He wanted her ill-dressed, he wanted her bewildered. He wanted Darley to know how raw she was; he wanted hot fire for her and he saw her Staithley clothes acting upon Darley like compressed air on a blast furnace. The girl was too cool, she showed no nervousness. “Darley will teach you to feel, my girl,” he thought: “I’m making your path short, but I don’t want it smooth. Soft places don’t make actresses. I’m cruel to be kind.” And being kind he advanced her two pounds on account of commission, told her the station for Torquay was Paddington and left her on Rossiter’s steps. He had exposed himself unavoidably to the lifted brows which could not help saluting the glossy Lexley Chown in the company of these obsolete clothes, but the necessity was past now and he lost no time in indicating to her that, for better or for worse, her future was in her own hands. He had other business to attend to.

Mary Ellen, who had surrendered herself confidingly to his large protectiveness, was braced by his departure. Their journey together, the wonder of lunching at a table in a train, the oppressiveness of offices—these were behind her now and she stood on Rossiter’s busy steps breathing hard like a swimmer who comes to surface after a long dive. She breathed the air of London and looked from that office down a street across Piccadilly Circus, nameless to her. The whirl of it assaulted her; the swimmer was in the breakers now.

Mr. Rossiter’s commissionaire, not unaccustomed to the sight of young women pausing distressfully on those steps where they had left their hopes behind them, addressed her with kindly intent. “Shall I get you a taxi, miss?”

“No, thanks,” said Mary Ellen, who had noted the immense sums Mr. Chown had paid to the drivers of those vehicles. “I’ll walk,” and “others walk” she thought. “I can do what they can,” and hardily set foot upon the London streets. Let that commissionaire perceive that Mary Ellen was afraid? Not she, and presently she was so little afraid that she asked the way to Euston of a policeman. Her suit-case—in strict fact, Mr. Pate’s suitcase—was at Euston.

The man in the left luggage office at Euston was good enough to tell her the way to Paddington, but “You can’t carry that,” he said. “Why not?” said Mary Ellen, and carried it. The case was heavy and grew heavier: but there were stretches of her route, the part, for instance, between Tottenham Court Road and Portland Road, which revived her spirit. That might have been a bit of Staithley. London was flat; she had seen no reason in the slight rise of Shaftesbury Avenue to justify Mr. Chown’s qualifying “Not absolutely”; but there were sights and smells along the road to Paddington which she accepted gratefully as evidence of some affinity with Staithley. Piccadilly Circus was not the whole of London; one could breathe here and there, Praed Street way, in cheering shabbiness. She saw a barefoot girl, and a ragged boy offered to carry her bag. There was still a confused echo of the surging West End in her ears and she hadn’t conquered London, but she had received comforting assurance that, in spots, London was habitable.

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.”

He consulted the advice note of these extraordinary goods. “That’s right,” he admitted. “Arden! Whom did you see as Rosalind?”

Mary Ellen blushed: he seemed to her to read her secrets. “And me a man that respects Shakespeare,” he said. “There’s one line of the Banished Duke you may remember. ‘Sweet are the uses of adversity.’ If you don’t remember the line, you’re going to, Miss Mary Arden. You chose the name. I don’t know that I don’t choose to make you worthy of it.”

“Oh, will you?” she cried.

“You’ve got no sense of humor,” he said. “Come on the stage and we’ll see what you have got. It’ll be like going water-finding in the Sahara. Can you read music?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Then be looking at those songs. There’s a piano in the orchestra. I’m going down to it.”

She was staring in amazement at the sheeted auditorium into which the unexpected rake of the stage seemed threatening to precipitate her. Vague masses hung over her head in the half-light seeming about to fall and crush her in the grisly loneliness to which she was abandoned as Mr. Darley went round to the orchestra. The diminished echoes of his footfalls were a wan assurance that this place, shunned by daylight as if it were a tomb, had contacts with humanity. But he had said it was the stage and however disconcerting she might find its obscure menace, the stage was where she wished to be and she was not to be put down either by it or by a little man who was rude about her best clothes, while he had not shaved that morning and his knickerbockers showed a rent verging on the scandalous. She had to sing to him and she expelled her terrors of her strange, her so alarmingly dreary surroundings, and strained her eyes to read the music he had put into her hands.

He seemed to bob up below her like a jack-in-the-box, and struck some chords on the piano. “Have you got that one?” he asked.

“Yes.” she said, fighting her impulse to scream at the phenomenon of his sudden reappearance.

“Then let her go.”

She sang the opening chorus of “The Little Viennese.”

“You’ve sung that before,” he said, accusingly.

“Oh, no.”

“Don’t try to kid me. It won’t pay. Read through the one you’ve got there marked 3.” No. 3 was a new interpolation; she might know the rest, but she couldn’t know No. 3. “Ready? Go on,” and, in a minute, surprised, satisfied but by no means inclined to show his satisfaction other than by cutting the trial short, “That’ll do, that’ll do,” he said resentfully. “This isn’t the Albert Hall. What about your dancing?”

“I’m afraid I haven’t danced yet,” said Mary.

“You will,” he said savagely, “and to my piping. I knew there was a catch in it somewhere,” he thought, “but it comes to me that I’ve found a hobby for the rest of this tour. They don’t often send me stuff that’s worth working on.—I suppose you took the name of Arden because you’ve got a wooden leg,” he jeered aloud.

Mary Ellen’s face clouded, then an accomplishment of her street days came back to her. They were not, after all, so long ago. She pitched her hat into the wings and, reckless of the rake of the stage, turned rapid cartwheels.

“It’s that sort of wood,” she said, breathless but defiant.

“Thanks for the assurance,” he said, “only this isn’t a circus and your legs are wooden. They’re wooden because you’ve no brains in them and till you have brains in your toes you’re no use to me. You’ve got an accent that’s as thick as pea-soup and till you’ve cleared it, it’ll stay hidden in the chorus. If you’ll work, I’ll teach you to act but, by the Lord, you’ve work ahead of you. If I take trouble and you don’t work, I’ll flay you alive. Is that understood? Very well. There’s a matinee to-day. You come in and see the show this afternoon and you see it again to-night. You’ll be sitting where I can see you and if I catch you laughing, I’ll eat you. Leave laughing to the audience; it’s their job. You’re there to learn. Watch what the other girls do and when they do it. They’ll love you because I’m calling a chorus rehearsal for you to-morrow. Make mistakes then if you dare. You’ll play to-morrow night. See the wardrobe mistress between the shows to-day about your clothes. I’m paid to make you a chorus girl; you’ll be in the chorus tomorrow night. Then I begin to have my fun with you. I begin to make your name something else than an impertinence. I get busy on you, my girl. You’re clay and I’m the potter. Meantime, we’ll go to the door and I’ll tell the first girl who comes for her letters to show you where you’re likely to find rooms and you can ask her why Hugh Darley proposes to spend four hours a day breaking in a chorus girl.”

Mary asked the other girl, who looked curiously at her. “I never knew Darley to make love before,” she said.

“Love!” said Mary, blinking startled eyes as if a flashlight had blazed at her out of darkness.

“Well,” said her cynical friend, “when you’ve been more than five minutes on the stage, you’ll know that the way to success lies through the manager’s bedroom. Don’t look at me like that. Down your nose. I’m not a success, I’m in the chorus running straight on thirty-five shillings a week, and there are more of us keep straight than don’t.”

Mary was not conscious that she had looked, fastidiously or otherwise, at her companion. She had a feeling of vertigo; she was thinking of herself, not of the other girl, and of this shameful threat before which she seemed to stand naked in her bones.

“We don’t look after other people’s morals,” Dolly Chandler assured her, “but you may care to know Darley’s married.”

“You think he meant—this?”

Dolly shrugged her shoulders. “He’s a man.”

“And he meant you to tell me what you are telling me?”

“You’re pretty green, you know. I expect he thought I’d put you wise. Though I tell you again it’s not like what I’ve seen of Darley to do the sultan stunt.”

And in ordinary clothes she had turned cartwheels before this man! Mary Ellen blushed scarlet consternation.

Mr. Chown’s thought, “Darley will teach you to feel,” was taking rapid substance, but she must drive it from her, she must go to the theater and sit through two performances and memorize, memorize.

“That will do,” said Darley after the rehearsal next day. “Miss Arden will stay behind. You can go on to-night,” he told her as the rest went up the stairs. “You’ve got the tunes if you haven’t got the words and they’re damn fool enough not to matter though you’ll know them by Saturday. You’ve got a clumsy notion of the movements, but you don’t know how to move. Your idea of walking is to put one foot in front of the other. You’re as God made you, but he’s sent you to a good contractor for the alterations. He’s sent you to me. Did you get Dolly Chandler to answer that question?”

She failed to meet his eye. Telling herself she was a coward, she tried and failed.

“I see,” he said. “She answered it the way they’ll all answer it. I’m going to put in four hours a day with you and Dolly’s told you what they’ll think of you. Thought’s free and it’s mostly dregs and I don’t mind. What about you, Rosalind?”

“You mean it won’t be true?” There was a hope and she clutched at it with words that came unbidden to her lips.

“True?” he roared. “You—papoose, you whippet! Don’t cry, you whelp. I asked you a question. I asked you if you mind their thoughts?”

“No,” she said.

“Then we start fair,” he said. “I’m having you on the stage and I’m coming to see you at your rooms, and if you’d like to know your name in this company, it’s Dar-ley’s Darling. Only you and I’ll know we meet for work, not play. I’m stage manager of a rotten musical comedy on a scrubby tour, but I’m a servant of the theater and I’ll prove it on you.”

He was, disinterestedly, the theater’s servant, and service purged of self-interest is rare though there is plenty of voluntary work done in the theater. An actor rehearses for weeks and performs without fee in a special production: he may have an enthusiasm for the play he is to act, he may feel that such a play must, at all costs, come to birth, but somewhere self-interest lurks. The play may succeed at its special performance; it may be taken for a run, and, if not, the actor still has the hope that his acting will focus on him the attention of critics and managers. And if the part he plays is so inconsiderable that he cannot hope to attract notice to himself, his hope is that the organizers of special productions will note him as a willing volunteer to be rewarded, next time, with a distinctive part.

For Darley, proposing to spend laborious hours in molding Mary Ellen, there was nothing concrete to be gained; no credit from the Rossiter headquarters and the positive loss of a reputation for asceticism which had been a shield against the advances of aspirants who believed that success in the theater was reached by the road Dolly had indicated to Mary. He did not flatter his company by supposing that his reputation for austerity would survive association with Mary. But, intimately, he would have his incomparable gain, the matchless joy of the creative artist working on apt material.

“You can take the rest of this week in getting used to jigging about in the chorus,” he said. “Then we’ll begin to work. Only you needn’t despise musical comedy. There are as many great actresses who came out of a musical comedy training as out of Shakespeare. Perhaps for the same reason that white sheep eat more than black ones.”

He drilled her on a dozen stages as the tour went on, in a dozen walks from the Parisian’s to the peasant’s (“You’ve never heard of pedestrian art,” he said, “but this is it”), and for dancing, “You’re too old, but we’ll get a colorable imitation,” and in her rooms they went through Rosalind and Juliet till she spoke the lines in English and made every intonation to his satisfaction. “Feel it, you parrot, feel it,” was his cry, and he stopped his mockery of calling her Rosalind. He called her “Iceberg.”

He had taken her far, very far, along the technical way, and he had come to a barrier. Where there was question of the grand emotions, her voice was stupid. She seemed intelligently enough to understand with her brain, but there was a lapse between understanding and expression. “I’ve done all I’m going to,” thought Harley. “She’s not an actress yet, she’s only ready to be one when somebody breaks the eggs to make the omelette. I’m not the somebody.”

Except that she did not shirk work, she gave no sign of gratitude. Harley was another Pate, another man who was, to please himself, experimenting on her with a system. She was not afraid of him now; men in her experience were usable stepping-stones and when their use to her was gone, she stepped from one to another. In the present case she saw clearly what he was aiming at and the necessity of this training in technique. It had visible results, it wasn’t, like Pate’s, a journey to a peak mistily beyond a far horizon and it would, in any case, last only for the three months she was to spend in the chorus of “The Little Viennese.” He could take pains with her and she would generously be there to be taken pains with; it was a sort of exercise which he preferred to playing golf with the men or the other girls of the company, and she permitted his enjoyment of the preference because it was of use to her.

“What did you want to go on the stage for, anyhow?” he asked her once.

“To hold them,” she said, “there!” And made a gesture, imperious, queenly, that almost wrung applause from him. “To have them in my grip like that. To know I’ve got them in my power.”

“I think you’ll do it, Mary, when you have learned to feel,” he told her soberly.

She looked at him with glittering eyes. “Gee, does it get you like that?” he said, amazed. Here, to be welcomed with both hands, was feeling at last.

“Yes,” said Mary, dashing him to earth, “there’s money in it.”

“You miserable slut!” he said, and flung out of her room.

Money! Yet hadn’t she excuse? She feared poverty, having known it. Poverty, for her, was not a question of what would happen to an income of a thousand a year if the income tax went up; it was Jackman’s Buildings and the Staithley streets. If she could help it, she was not going back to poverty. To Staithley perhaps she would go back: she was indeed fixed in her idea to go back, to buy, with her stage-made wealth, a house in Staithley like Walter Pate’s and to be rich in Staithley. So far, in her journeyings, she had seen no place like Staithley: either there was flatness which depressed her, or hills which were too urbane, or too low, too much like mounds in a park to be worthy of the name of hills. The stage was a means to an end, and the end was Staithley, a house of her own, an independence—and her present salary was thirty-five shillings a week, less ten per cent to Chown! She was, at any rate, thrifty with it, seeing no need, on tour, with her contract in her pocket, to revise her wardrobe in the direction of effectiveness and keeping her nose too closely to the grindstone Darley held to have time for money-spending in other ways. She watched with satisfaction her Post Office Savings Bank account increase by a weekly ten shillings.

Darley relented and came back next day with the Maisie part in “The Girl from Honolulu” in his pocket. “Damn her,” he thought, “she’s honest about it and there have been avaricious artists. Avarice and Art aren’t contradictory.” He expected no more at their parting than the cool “Good-by” she gave him.

“Full of possibilities,” he reported her to Drayton, and when Drayton asked him to be more definite, “I can’t,” he wrote, “be more definite than this. You know those Chinese toys consisting of a box within a box of beautiful wood, wonderfully made? You marvel at the workmanship and you open box after box. You get tired and you go on opening because each box is beautiful and because of a faint hope you have that there’ll be something in the last box. I don’t know what’s in hers. That’s her secret and her mystery, and, by the way, you can discount what Pettigrew is going to tell you of her Maisie. It isn’t her Maisie. It’s mine. I’ve rehearsed her in it.”

“Darley’s mad about her,” Drayton interpreted this to Rossiter.

Darley was, anyhow, sufficiently interested to travel across half England to see her play Maisie on her first Saturday night, in Liverpool. He stood at the side of the circle where he could watch both her and the house, and he waited, especially for a scene which was one of the weaknesses of the piece, when Maisie, by sheer blague, has to subdue a rascally beachcomber who intends robbery. He wasn’t afraid of her song, but this scene called for acting; it wasn’t plausible, even for musical comedy, unless Maisie carried it off con brio.

And he had, that night, his reward for the labor of these months. It was Saturday night, and the audience stopped eating chocolates. Darley wasn’t looking at the stage, he was looking at the audience and he knew triumph when he saw it. They stopped eating. Darley looked upon his work and knew that it was good.

“Ich dieu” he muttered. “By God, I do. Where’s the bar?”