Darco’s work fell into routine for a time. The wheels of all his affairs went so smoothly that he and his assistant found many easy breathing-spaces. But Paul was of a mind just now to scorn delight and live laborious days. He confined himself for many hours of each day to his bedroom, and on the weekly railway journey with his chief he sat for the most part in a brown study, And made frequent entries in a big note-book.

‘Vat are you doing?’ Darco asked one day.

Paul blushed, and answered that he would rather wait a day or two before speaking.

‘I shall ask your opinion in a week at the outside,’ he added.

Darco went to sleep, a thing he seemed able to do whenever the fancy took him, and Paul made notes furiously all through the rest of the journey. His ideas affected him curiously, for at times his eyes would fill and he would blow his nose, and at other times he would chuckle richly to himself. He had got what he conceived to be a dramatic notion by the tip of the tail, and he was engaged in the manufacture of his first drama. In due time the result of his labours in his most clerk-like hand was passed over a breakfast-table to Darco, who winced, and looked like a shying horse at it.

‘Vot is id?’ he asked.

‘It is a play,’ said Paul, blushing and stammering. ‘I want to have your judgment on it.’

‘Dake it away!’ cried Darco; ‘dake it away. I am wriding blays myselluf, ant I will nod look at other beoble’s. No. Dake it away!’

Paul stared at him in confusion.

‘I do not vant to look at anypoty’s blays,’ said Darco. ‘I haf got alreaty all the tramatic iteas there ever haf been in the vorldt—all there efer will be. I do not vant notions that are olter than the hills brought to me, and then for beobles to say I haf zeen their pieces and gopied from them. I do not vant to gopy from anypoty. I am Cheorge Dargo.’

‘I’ll bet,’ said Paul rashly, ‘that you haven’t met this idea yet.’

‘My tear poy,’ Darco answered, ‘if you haf cot a new way of bantling an old itea you are ferry lucky. But there are no new iteas, and you may take my vort for it. If anypoty asks who told you that, say it was Cheorge Dargo.’

‘Let me read it to you,’ Paul urged. ‘It’s hardly likely that a youngster like myself is going to have the cheek to charge you with having stolen your ideas—now, is it?’ Darco smoothed a little. ‘You could tell me if there’s anything in it, or if I’m wasting time.’

‘Go on,’ said Darco, suddenly rising from the table and hurling himself into an arm-chair, so that the floor shuddered, and the windows of the room danced in their panes.

Paul sipped his tea, opened his manuscript and began to read. He read on until a loud snore reached his ears, and then looked up discouraged.

‘Vot’s the madder?’ Darco asked. ‘Go on; I am listening.’

Paul went on and Darco snored continuously, but whenever the reader looked up at him, he was wide awake and attentive. The landlady came in to clear the table and Darco drove her from the room as if she had come to steal her own properties. Then he flung himself anew into his arm-chair and snored until the reading came to a close. It had lasted two hours and a half, and Paul at times had been affected by his own humour and pathos. He waited with his eyes on the word ‘Curtain ‘at the bottom of the final page.

‘You think that is a blay?’ said Darco. ‘Vell, it is nod a blay. It is a chelly.’

‘I don’t quite think I know what you mean,’ Paul answered, horribly crestfallen.

‘I say vot I mean,’ Darco responded. ‘It is a chelly. It is a very goot chelly—in’ places. You might like it if you took it in a sboon out of a storypook, or a folume of boedry; but a blay is a very different greation.’

Then he fell to a mortally technical criticism of Paul’s work—a practical stage-manager’s criticism—and enlightened his hearer’s mind on many things. He said, ‘I am Cheorge Dargo, ant now you know,’ a little oftener than was necessary, but he laid bare all the weaknesses of plot and execution—all the improbabilities which Paul supposed himself cunningly to have effaced or bidden, and he showed him how fatally he had disguised his budding scoundrel in a robe of goodness throughout the whole of the first act.

‘But it’s life!’ cried Paul. ‘That’s what happens in life. You meet a man who seems made of honesty; you trust him, and he picks your pocket.’

‘Aha!’ said Darco; ‘but there is always somepoty who knows the druth apout him, ant efery memper of your autience must represend that somepoty. Now, I’ll dell you. I vill make a sgeleton for you. We will pild your chelly into a gomedy, ant we will preathe into id the preath of life, and it shall valk apout.’

‘You’ll—you’ll work with me?’ Paul cried. ‘Hurrah!’

Darco rang a peal at the bell, and the landlady, probably thinking the house on fire, scurried madly to answer the call.

‘Half-bast elefen o’glock,’ growled Darco accusingly, ‘ant look at the preakfast-dable.’

‘But you told me, sir——’ began the gasping woman.

‘Now don’t sdant jattering there,’ said Darco, ‘I am koing to be busy. Glear avay!’

‘I came to clear away at nine, sir.’

‘Glear avay now,’ said Darco; ‘don’t vaste my dime.’

‘I’m sure I don’t want to waste your time, Mr. Darco,’ said the landlady, ‘but you’ve given me such a turn, sir, I don’t know where I am.’

Darco shook the room again by a new plunge into the armchair, and the trembling landlady cleared away.

‘Now, dake nodes!’ he roared, as she left the room.

‘I shall be very glad to take notice, sir,’ said the landlady.

‘Nodes!’ shouted Darco. ‘Nodes. I am not dalking to you. I am dalking to my brivade zegredary.’

Paul seized a pencil, set a pile of paper before him on the table, and waited. Darco began to prowl about the room, setting chairs in place with great precision, arranging ornaments on the chimney-shelf, and settling pictures on the wall with methodical exactness, muttering meanwhile, ‘Nodes. Dake nodes. I am dalking to my brivade zegredary. Nodes. Dake nodes.’ Paul was familiar with his ways, and waited seriously.

‘But this down,’ said Darco, pacing and turning suddenly. ‘No. Don’t but that down. I don’t vant that’ He roamed off again, murmuring: ‘No. Don’t but it down. I don’t vant it. I don’t vant it. Nodes. Dake nodes.’ Then with sudden loudness and decision: ‘But this down.’

He began to talk. Paul tried to follow him on paper, but the task was hopeless. Darco talked with a choking incoherence and at a dreadful pace. It was as if a big-bellied bottle were turned upside down, and as if the bottle were sentient and strove to empty the whole of its contents at once through a narrow neck. At last a meaning began to declare itself—the merest intelligible germ of a meaning—but it grew and grew until Paul clapped his hands with a cry of triumph at it.

‘That is what was wanted.’

‘That is a bart of vat is vanted,’ said Darco. ‘Haf you cot it town?’ Before Paul could answer he was off again in a new tangle, and fighting and tearing his way through it as madly as before. ‘Now I am dired,’ he said. ‘I shall haf some lunge, and co to sleep.’

He caught at the bell-pull in passing, gave it a tug, and waddled off to his bedroom. The landlady came in with the tray and began to arrange the table.

‘I don’t know what you gentlemen have been doing sir,’ she said to Paul, ‘but I’m sure I was afraid there was going to be murder in the house. I never heard anybody go on so in my life. I don’t know how any young gentleman puts up with it.’

‘There is very little danger, I assure you,’ said Paul. ‘Mr. Darco and I have been talking business.’

‘Well,’ returned the landlady, ‘I suppose you know how to manage him. But I wouldn’t be his keeper not for love or money.’

‘I am Mr. Darco’s private secretary, ma’am,’ Paul answered gravely.

‘All I can say is,’ said the landlady, sighing, ‘I’m glad it’s Saturday.’

It happened that the company took a late train that night for a distant town, and Darco paid his bill before leaving for the theatre. He told the landlady that he had been extremely comfortable, and that he should have great pleasure in recommending her to his friends. When he had gone, the landlady told Paul that she was glad the gendeman had his lucy intervals.

But the comedy having been once rebegun on Darco’s lines, was written to an accompaniment of fears and tremblings. It terrified the servants and the women-folk at large of every house the collaborateurs lodged in. Slaveys, with clasped hands and faces pale beneath smudges of blacklead, shook in the hall or on the stairs and landing whilst Darco roared, and Paul at the end of a day’s work used sometimes to feel as if he had been badly beaten about the head. None the less, the work was finished, and put into rehearsal.

‘Ve vill dry it on the tog,’ said Darco, and Paul, who never dared to question him as to his meaning, went puzzled for a while.

But Darco rarely said a thing once without repeating it many times, and at length Paul understood that the play was to be played ‘on the dog,’ which is theatrical English for the production of a new piece at an obscure house in the country. It was tried, but the dog never took to it with any great kindness. Darco swore it was the first comedy which had been produced since the days of Sheridan. He put it into the repertoire, and played it once a week, and whenever it was played it brought a guinea to Paul’s pocket. It is not every first effort in any work of art which does as much as this, however, and Paul had the good sense to see that he was fortunate, and looked hopefully to the future. He crept into the gallery when the piece was played in any town, and watched his neighbours, and listened to their comments on the action and to their talk between the acts. This taught him a great deal, for he saw how little the popular instinct varies in matters of emotion, and the verdict to which he listened was everywhere substantially the same.

There came an especially memorable afternoon when Mr. Warr in a four-wheeled fly drove to Darco’s lodgings, and announced the sudden sickness of the juvenile lead. Darco pounced on Paul as the sick man’s successor.

‘My dear sir,’ said Paul, ‘I never spoke a word in public in my life. I can’t do it.’

‘That’s all right, my poy,’ said Darco. ‘You’ve got to do it.’

There was no arguing the matter.

Mr. Warr was despatched in the fly to gather the members of the company. Darco thrust into Paul’s hands the part he had to study, and went off tranquilly to his own room to sleep. Paul slaved for an hour, and seemed to have mastered nothing. Darco, having timed himself to sleep for one hour precisely, awoke to the minute, and bundled off his victim to the theatre. There such members of the company as Mr. Warr had succeeded in finding were already collected, and the scenes in which Paul was concerned were run through again and again until he began to have some idea of what was expected of him, and even some distant knowledge of the words. But the whole thing was like a nightmare, and whenever the thought of the coming night crossed his mind, it afflicted him with a half paralysis. Darco worried him incessantly, bubbling with unhelpful enthusiasm, roaring at him, pushing and hauling him hither and thither, so that at last he resigned himself to a stupor of despair. The leading lady intervened, and she and Darco talked together for a minute.

‘Tam it!’ he shouted. ‘Do you think I want anypoty to deach me? I am Cheorge Dargo. I know my drade!’

But the leading lady stuck to him, and at last he went away.

‘Now, my dear,’ said Miss Belmont to Paul. ‘I’ll shepherd you. You’re mostly with me, and so long as we’re together you’re safe. Darco’s a darling when you know him, but he’s enough to break a beginner’s heart. Now, dears ‘—she appealed here to her whole public—‘put your hearts into it, and help the young gentleman through.’

The rehearsal went on again, and the nightmare feeling wore away a little.

‘You’ve got to give me a little bit of a chance here,’ said Miss Belmont, with her pretty little gloved hand on Paul’s shoulder. ‘You see, it’s your forgiveness melts me, and if you forgive me like chucking a pennyworth of coppers at a beggar, I shan’t be melted. Now, then: “Georgy”—say it like that, just a bit throaty and quivery—“I loved you so that I’d have laid down my life for you!” Try it like that. That’s better. Now, give me your eyes, large and mournful, for just five ticks. Now turn, three steps up stage, hand to forehead. That’s it, but not quite so woodeny. Turn. Eyes again. “Georgy!” Now one step down, both hands out Pause. That’s it “You have broken a truer heart than you will easily find again. But I will say no more. Good-bye, Georgy. And for the sake of those old dreams which were once so sweet, and now are flown for ever, God bless you ‘Oh, God bless you and forgive you!” No. Try and get it just a little bit more. Poor dear Bannister always cried when he came to that. I’ve seen the tears run down his face many a time. Just go back to “Georgy, I loved you sa” Yes, yes, yes, that’s it; that’s capital. Now, that lets me in. “Oh, Richard! Richard! Is it possible that you forgive me?” That’s your cue for the chair, face in both hands. Now my long speech: “Richard,” and so on, and so on. “Good-bye, then, dearest, truest, tenderest.” Just a little shake of the shoulders here and there, as if you were sobbing to yourself, don’t you see? “Good-bye, good-bye.” No, don’t get up yet. Count six very slowly after “Good-bye” the second time. Now rise, turn, arms out “Georgy! Can’t you see?” Then down I rush, and—curtain. Now, just once more from “Georgy, I loved you so.”’

The company clapped hands. Berry, the first comedian, poked Earlsford, the leading man, in the waistcoat.

‘You’ll have to look to your laurels in a year or two.’

‘Now,’ said Miss Belmont, ‘you can’t expect to shine tonight. That wouldn’t be reasonable, would it? But if you won’t prevent the rest from shining you’ll have done your duty nobly. Never you mind Darco: I’ll keep him out of the house to-night. I’m the only woman in the profession who has the length of his foot I’d rather say the breadth of his heart, for that’s where I always get at him. There’ll be an explanation and an apology. You’d better read your part. The house won’t mind it. Then put all you know into that last scene. Chuck the book a minute before the real business comes on, as if you’d made up your mind to go for the gloves. That’ll fetch ‘em. Well go over that bit again and again till you’ve got it They’ll be just jumping with pleasure in front if you surprise ‘em with a good touch at the finish, and they’ll go away thinking how splendidly you’d have done it if you’d had half a chance. It’s the trot up the avenue, don’t you see?

Mr. Warr, who at a gesture had followed Darco from the theatre, appeared with a basket in his hand, and was followed by a man who bore a larger basket on his shoulder.

‘The governor sends his highly superior compliments, ladies and gentlemen,’ said Mr. Warr, ‘and his polite request that you will be so very kind as to forget the dinner-hour. Sandwiches, ladies and gentlemen. Ham, beef, tongue, pÂtÉ de foie gras, potted shrimps, and cetera. Juice of the grape.’ He pointed to the basket, which his attendant had already laid upon the stage. ‘Fizzy, Pommery-GrÉno, and no less, upon my sacred word of honour!’ He groped in his pockets. ‘Champagne-opener, to be carefully returned to bearer. Ah, sir,’ he added feelingly to Paul, ‘when I forswore the varnish, I little thought it would rise to this quality. And, ladies and gentlemen,’ he continued aloud, ‘I was to request that you would unite in lending your highly superior aid to the neophyte.’

‘Our compliments to the governor,’ said the leading comedian, who had seized the nippers and was already hard at work. ‘We bestow on him unanimously the order of the golden brick.’

Darco’s health was toasted, and the company went to rehearsal again, each with a champagne-glass in one hand and a sandwich in the other, and worked banqueting. Paul drank a glass of wine, and the coming night looked less terrible.

‘We’ve two hours clear,’ said Miss Belmont ‘Now see if we don’t make something of you in that time.’

Paul began to take up his cue with spirit, as often as not without the book, and to take his proper places without prompting. They worked their way on again to the final scene.

‘Now, don’t be afraid to let go,’ said Miss Belmont ‘Let us have it as if the house was full.’

So Paul threw down his part as arranged, for by this time he knew the words of this one scene, and what with the wine and the growing sense of freedom, he did pretty well, and when he sat in the arm-chair with his face in his hands Miss Belmont no longer gabbled her lines, but spoke them with all the feeling and fervour of which she was mistress. And when she came to her ‘Good-bye, good-bye,’ Paul, who at all times was easily emotional, was crying softly. He rose with outspread arms and the tears on his face and his voice broke. The leading lady rushed at him and clipped him round the neck, and Paul clipped the leading lady in a perfectly innocent enthusiasm and strained her to his breast.

‘You—little—devil!’ she whispered, as she drew away from him and stabbed him with one wicked flash of her blue eyes. ‘I’ll forgive you this time,’ she added half a minute later; ‘but it isn’t professional.’

‘Time for one more run through, ladies and gentlemen,’ said the stage-manager, and once more the task began.

Miss Belmont’s eyes plagued Paul most of the time, now with a look of serious affront, now with a sort of mocking challenge. Now, he was inclined to try that grip again to see how she would take it, and the mocking eyes invited him. Then he dared not so much as think of it, for the eyes looked severe offence at him. When the time came he was like a wooden doll handling a wooden doll.

‘Pooh!’ said Miss Belmont, pettishly drawing back from him. ‘That won’t do. Try again.’

They harked back to the beginning of the scene. The others had stolen away to their various dressing-rooms. Only the stage-manager was left, and he was engaged in talking with the leader of the orchestra, who had just come in with a fiddle-case beneath his arm peeping out from his shabby paletot The farewell speech came, and it was only breathed. She had always dearly, dearly loved him. She had lost him by her pride, her coquetry—her silly, silly, heartless coquetry. Her fingers touched him on the cheek soft as a snowflake, and lingered there whilst the cooing voice went on. Then came the ‘Good-bye’ again and the answering call. She paused and looked, and darted to him, and they clung together, she leaning back her head and tangling his eyes in hers.

‘You hold me like that,’ she breathed, ‘until the curtain falls,’

She released herself gradually from his embrace, and drew away. Paul’s pulses beat to a strange tune, and he was afraid to look at her.

‘Ah!’ she said, in a voice so commonplace that he jumped to hear it, ‘the kind creatures have left us half a bottle. One glass, Mr. Armstrong, will do you good. You dress with Berry; hell help you with your make-up. Don’t be nervous. You’ve got the book to prop you till the very end, and there you’ll be as right as rain. Here’s luck to your first appearance.’

Paul took the glass she held out to him, but his hand trembled so that he spilled one half its contents on the stage.

‘How clumsy!’ purred the leading lady. ‘Here, take a full glass; there’s more in the bottle. There; chink glasses. Luck for to-night.’

He drank mechanically, and the stinging wine threw him into a fit of coughing. Miss Belmont patted him laughingly on the back, and ran away to her own room. Paul took his part from the stage, and tumbled up a spiral iron staircase to the loft in which the leading comedian dressed.

‘You’d better wear Bannister’s togs, if they’ll fit you,’ said the comedian; ‘if not, you’ll want a dress-suit for the second act.’

The clothes fitted excellently, and Berry saw to the neophyte’s make-up, painting and powdering him dexterously, and dressing the virginal beard and moustache with a dark cosmetic.

‘You’re funking it,’ the comedian said cheerfully. ‘That’s all right, my boy; there never was a man worth his salt who didn’t. Give me a new part, and I’m as nervous as a cat. But you’re in luck in a way, for we’ve all been together so long in this that we could play it in our sleep. There isn’t one of us that doesn’t know the thing inside-out and upside-down and backwards.’

Paul crept down the spiral staircase, part in hand, and listened whilst the local manager, who rather prided himself on his ability as an orator, deplored the serious and sudden indisposition of that established favourite, Mr. Bannister, and announced that Mr. Armstrong had ‘gallantly stepped into the breach,’ and would essay the part, literally at a moment’s notice. Paul would most certainly have ungallantly bolted out of the breach had that been possible; but the people cheered the local manager cordially, and he, stepping back into the gloom of the stage, found Paul shivering there, and tried to hearten him.

The night went by in a sort of fog, but Paul read his lines somehow, and made his crosses at the right places; and actors are eager to answer to any little courtesy from a manager, and Darco’s half-dozen of champagne was richly paid for by the Élan with which everybody played. As to the neophyte, they fed and nursed him, and were in at the close of every speech of his with a spring and a rattle which made the audience half forget the artificiality of the scenes he clouded. Mr. Berry took as much whisky-and-water as was good for him, and perhaps a little more, and Paul in his nervous anxiety lent a helpful hand towards the emptying of the bottle. There was no buzz in the cast-iron head and no cloud in the eyes, but he was strung to a strange tension, and he was looking forward to that last act and the embrace which crowned it.

‘I shan’t take the book for this last scene,’ he whispered to the prompter; ‘but watch me, will you?’

The prompter nodded, and Paul passed on to the spot from which he was to make his entrance. There was Miss Belmont waiting also. She was in evening dress, with shining white arms and shoulders.

‘Fit?’ she asked laconically, buttoning a glove.

‘Middling,’ said Paul hoarsely.

She slid away from him through the painted doorway, and he heard her voice on the stage. There was a pause, and someone near him whispered:

‘Mr. Armstrong, go on; they’re waiting.’

He obeyed. The practised woman, cool as a cucumber, gave him his cue a second time, and continued to make the pause look rational He plunged into the scene, awkward and constrained, but resolute, and in some degree master of himself. It was his stage business to be awkward and constrained, but he fared not over well, for on the stage it is easy to go too close to nature. But at the very last he lost his nervous tremors, and in the one scene in which he had been coached so often he acquitted himself with credit.

‘Can’t you see?’ he asked in the final line of his piece, and the leading lady was in his arms again.

‘I can see,’ she whispered. ‘Kiss me, you silly boy!’

And Paul bent his lips to hers, and kissed her in a way which looked theatrically emotional to the house. The roller came down with a thud.

‘Stay as you are,’ she said; ‘there is a call.’

The curtain rose again and fell again, and Paul held the leading lady in his arms. The embrace lasted little more than a minute, but it left Paul frantically in love—after a fashion.

This was bad in many ways, for the woman was eight years his senior and a most heartless coquette, and Paul’s infatuation kept him from his own thoughts, which were just beginning to be of value to him.

The Dreamer in the mountains grieved wistfully as the old times enacted themselves before him. ‘Love,’ says blackguard Iago, ‘is a lust of the blood and a permission of the will.’ Well, one-and-twenty made his dreams even out of such poor material. The westward train boomed past, invisible from first to last in the smoke-cloud.