WHEN the time came for departure from No. 10, Old Street, Poppy did not go from Westminster. The grip of the place was on her and she did not care to leave it. But she sought and found a part of more cheerful aspect—a quiet square with a triangle of green in its centre, and the spire of an old church showing above the branches of trees in one of its corners. The house where she engaged two rooms had an old-fashioned air, though upon the opening of the front door was disclosed the depressing interior common to most houses of its kind—the worn linoleum in the hall and stairway; the inevitable pretentious hall-chair and umbrella-stand; the eternal smell of fish and boiling linen. But the two rooms were an artistic find. They had been inhabited and furnished by an actress, who was married to an artist, and were original without being uncomfortable.

The walls were papered with ordinary brown paper to a ledge of painted wood, above which rose a smoke-grey paper with pale zigzags upon it, making a charming background for a number of water-colour sketches and black-and-white etchings of all the chief theatrical celebrities, from Sir Henry Irving downwards.

There was also a piano—old and wicked, but still a piano, and various odd and quaint bits of furniture. The owners of these things had gone to America for a two-years' tour, and being anxious to come back to their rooms when they returned, had given the landlady instructions to "let furnished," and make what she could out of them. Poppy seized them with joy, glad to have so pleasant a setting for the struggle and fight she knew must ensue.

From the first it was bound to be a handicapped fight, for the king's son behaved like one, and a tyrannical despot at that. It was plain that work would only be achieved by desperate and persistent effort at all sorts of odds and ends of time in the day and night.

Probably things would have been more difficult still, but for the offices of a kindly soul who lived in the lower regions of the house by day, and ascended to somewhere near the stars at night, accompanied by her husband and two children.

She had opened the door to Poppy on the first visit, and having been the medium through which the rooms and tenant were brought together, she thereafter looked upon the tenant as her special protÉgÉe. She was a real Cockney, born and bred in Horseferry Road—quite young still, but with the hopelessly middle-aged, slack-waisted, slip-shod look of the English working man's wife who, having achieved a husband and two children, is content to consider her fate fulfilled and herself no more a player, but merely a passÉe looker-on at the great game of life. However, Mrs. Print did her looking on very good-humouredly. Her teeth were decayed, her hair in strings, but she carried an air of perpetual cheer and a wide smile. Her husband, a spruce, fresh-cheeked young cabman, looked, on the contrary, as though all the cares of the universe lay across his shoulders.

"'E always puts on that look," smiled Mrs. Print to Poppy; "in case I might ask 'im for an hextra sixpence for the 'ousekeeping."

She "charred" for Poppy; did various things, such as lighting the sitting-room fire and keeping the hearth and fire-irons clean. During this last business, which she always managed to prolong to the best part of an hour, she would give Poppy a brief summary of the morning news; an account of what the rest of the people in the house had been doing; what her George had said to her before he went to work; little bits of information about her two children; and advice about the treatment of Poppy's baby—generally sound.

She nearly drove poor Poppy frantic, yet it was impossible to be really angry with her: she was so essentially well-meaning and so unconsciously humorous. Besides, she took the king's son into the garden of the Square for a couple of hours every fine afternoon, carrying him most carefully up and down whilst she conversed in loud, agreeable tones with a dozen and one people who passed by, exchanging chaff and banter, roaring with laughter, scolding her own children—Jimmy and Jack—who were left to amuse themselves by staring at the immaculate plots of arsenically-green grass and the bare branches of the trees. If they did anything else, their mother's tongue would wag and her finger threaten.

"Come off there, Jimmy! Jack, if you do that again, I'll pay you—I'll pay you somethink merciful!" Jack, a stolid, emotionless boy, looked as though he had been badly carved out of a log of wood; but Jimmy was of a more vivid appearance, being afflicted with what his mother called St. Viper's Dance.

In her window Poppy would sit at her table, her eyes occasionally glancing at the figures in the Square, her pen flying over the paper before her. She was writing for money. Thoughts of Fame had slipped away from her. She put her child before Fame now: and wrote no better for that.

Day by day she grew paler, and the high cheek-bones had shadows beneath them that might easily turn into hollows. She had not regained flesh much, and a little of her buoyancy was gone. What she needed was to sit in the air and sunshine all day playing with her baby's dimples. Dank Westminster, built on a swamp, low-lying and foggy, when all the rest of London was clear, was no place for her or for her baby; but she did not know it, and had no time to find out, so wrapt was she in the business of making money that would assure home and life for her child and herself.

The days were all too short, and soon the midnight-oil began to burn. Thereafter, shadows really did change gradually into hollows—very soft hollows, however. Still, her eyes were always blue and brave. Mrs. Print used to observe her disapprovingly and tell her that she should take a leaf out of the book of the lydy upstairs, who lay on the sofa all day reading novels.

"Miss Never-Sweat—that's what I calls her!" she said, contemptuously dismissing thus an anÆmic blonde damsel on the first floor, who mysteriously did nothing except take a fat poodle for half an hour's walk every day. Mrs. Print's attitude towards this graceful dilettante was one of resentful suspicion—resentful because she did nothing: suspicious for the same reason!

"With everybody helse in this 'ouse, including you, Mrs. Chard, it is

"But all days looks the same to 'er," she remarked, as she diligently polished the fire-irons in Poppy's sitting-room. The latter, intensely bored, knew that it was no use trying to divert Mrs. Print from the subject until it was exhausted; then, mayhap, she would depart.

"When I went up to do 'er fire this morning, she says to me, she says" (here Mrs. Print pitched her voice high and fell into a drawl), "'Oh, Mrs. Print, dear, I do feel so hill this morning. I've got pains in my 'ead and chest, and I can't henjoy my food at all. And my nerves is quite rore.' I gives one look at her yeller skin, and I says: 'Why, you've got the boil, that's what you've got, for want of getting about on your two pins. Wot you want to do is to go to the chimist's round the corner, and arst him for a pennorth of ikery-pikery. When you've took that, come back 'ome and turn out these two rooms of yours and cook your dinner—' She give me a look like a mad hyhena, and slabbed the door."

"Now, Mrs. Print," said her listener wearily, "do make haste and finish that fender. I want to work while baby is asleep."

"Yes ma'am, I shan't be another minit. I must just give the 'earth a brush up, 'a dirty 'earth makes dinner late,' and that's what mine'll be to-day, same as breakfast was, and Old George gone off in a dandy because he was late."

She always spoke of her husband as Old George, her children as our Jack and my Jimmy.

As the days went by, writing became more and more impossible to Poppy. It had begun to be a weary grinding out of words, common-place, and uninspired. She came to hate the sight of her writing-table, because of the torment of disgust that seized her as she sat at it and read over such things as she had been able to write. And her longing to be out in the air became almost intolerable. She felt like a starved woman—starved for want of the wind and trees and flowers, anything that smelt of open free spaces such as she had known all her life until now.

And nothing happened to encourage her. She had no news of her Book of Poems, and when she called to see the publisher, he was never visible, and when she wrote she got no answer except that the reader for the firm had not been able to look through the book. Her story had not yet appeared in The Cornfield, and the one she had followed it up with came back, accompanied by a little printed paper, which read to the effect that the editor was at present "overstocked." Of course, this was a polite way of saying that the story wasn't up to the standard of the magazine. She burned with chagrin when she first read it. Afterwards, she became hardened to the daily sight of intimations of the kind, and to the sickening thud of returned manuscripts in the letter-box.

The day when she had no money in the world but the thirty shillings realised by the sale of her piece of Spanish lace, she left the baby with Mrs. Print and walked all the way to Hunter Street, on the forlorn hope that some editor might have addressed a letter to her there, enclosing a cheque. Miss Drake, the good-natured landlady, was alarmed to see her looking so ill.

"You are sitting to your desk too much, dear, and losing your beauty—and you know no girl can afford to do that until she has forty thousand in the bank," she said with a broad smile. "Why don't you chuck writing over and try the stage? A girl of your appearance could get into the Gaiety or Daly's any day, especially if you have any kind of a voice. The change of life and scene would do you a lot of good—and take it from me, dear, there's nothing so comforting in this world as a regular salary."

On top of the 'bus she was obliged from sheer weariness to take back to Westminster, Poppy turned the idea over in her mind. The stage had never had any attraction for her. Unlike most girls, she did not hold the belief that she had only to be seen and heard upon the boards to become famous. But she could not turn away from the thought of the change from sitting at her desk; and the regular salary had its potent charm, too—Miss Drake spoke like an oracle there!

However, she put the thought by for another day or two. She would give literature another chance, she said, with an ironical lip, and she essayed to finish her novel. For three days and the better part of three nights she hung over it in every moment she could spare from her child; at the end of that time she thrust the manuscript into the drawer of her table and locked it up.

"Lie there and wait for the inspired hour," she said. "I must look for other ways and means to boil the pot."

The wrench was to leave the "king's son" at home crooning in hired arms beneath the eye of Mrs. Print.

It did not take long to find out the whereabouts of theatrical agents and managers. She presented herself at the office of one of the best-known agents in London.

The staircase that led to his waiting-room was crowded with lounging, clean-shaven men, and the waiting-room hummed with the voices of girls and women and more men, all gabbling at once. Phrases made themselves heard above the din.

"No: I won't go into panto—not if Frankie goes down on his knees to me."

"Oh, he's sure to do that, dear!"

"She says that her figure is her stock-in-trade—musical comedy, of course."

"H'm! more stock than trade, I should say."

A score or so of made-up eyes raked Poppy from under heavy complexion-veiling; she became aware of such strong scents as frangipani and chypre; many ropes of large pearls; heavy fur coats flung open to reveal sparkling art-chains slung round bare, well-powdered necks. A wry-lipped quotation of Abinger's flitted through her memory:

When, after weary waiting, her turn came to be admitted to the agent's inner sanctum, she found a clean-looking, brown young man, with grey hair and a shrewd eye. He shot an enveloping glance over her while she was closing the door.

"Well, dear, what do you want?" he asked briskly, but pleasantly—all theatrical people "dear" each other automatically, but Poppy, not knowing this, flushed at the term. She explained that she was seeking work on the stage.

"Any experience?"

"No."

"Can you sing?"

"No."

"Dance?"

"Yes." (Abinger had allowed her to take lessons in Florence.)

"Good legs?"

He regarded her puzzled eyes with impatience.

"Any photographs in tights? I like to know what I'm engaging, you know. A lot of you girls come here with your spindle-shanks hidden under flounced petticoats and flowing skirts; and your bones wrapped up in heavy coats and feather boas, and you cut a great dash, and when we get you on the stage in tights it's another story altogether—not that I'm saying it about you, dear, for I can see——"

"I don't think I am what you require in any case," she said as she reached the door. "Good-morning."

She fled through the waiting-room and down the stairs. Some of the loungers shared a smile.

"A greenhorn, evidently!" they said. "What has Frankie been saying?"

The next day she beat her way through wind and rain to another office. And the next day to yet another. Within a week she did the whole dreary round. All the waiting-rooms were crowded, for the spring provincial tours were coming on, and engagements were being booked briskly; also, there were many vacancies occurring in the pantomimes.

Several managers, taken with Poppy's appearance, offered her small parts (with a good understudy) in touring companies. But she knew that it would be impossible to think of travelling with her baby, and she did not for a moment contemplate leaving him.

By talking to all the people who talked to her, and "theatricals," generally, are a kindly, sociable people, she learned that it was of no great use to try the agencies for London engagements.

"Go to the theatres themselves," they said; adding cheerfully: "not that that's much good either. Every stage manager has a gang of pets waiting for an opening to occur, and they never let an outsider get in."

One agent, rather more kindly than the rest, suggested that she should try the Lyceum Theatre.

"Ravenhill is taking it for a Shakespearian season," he said. "And I should say that class of work would just suit you."

Poppy thought so too, and wasted no time about finding the Lyceum.

"Yes, Mr. Ravenhill is seeing small-part ladies and walkers-on to-day," the door-keeper informed her confidentially, and after a long waiting she was eventually shown into the Green-room, where she found the well-known Shakespearian actor sitting on a trunk, reading his letters, in the midst of piles of scenery and robes.

He was a thin, Hamlet-faced man, with a skin of golden pallor and romance-lit eyes, and he looked at Poppy with kindness and comradeship.

"Have you had any experience?" he asked.

"None at all," said Poppy sadly. She was getting tired of the question, and felt inclined to vary the answer, but the truthful, kind eyes abashed the thought.

"Is there anything you could recite to me?"

Poppy thought swiftly. She knew volumes of prose and poetry, but at the word everything fled from her brain except two things—Raleigh's "O Eloquent, Just and Mighty Death!" which she in somewhat morbid mood had been reading the night before, and a poem of Henley's that had been dear to her since she had loved Carson. In desperation, at last she opened her lips and gave forth the sweet, tender words, brokenly, and with tears lying on her pale cheeks, but with the voice of a bird in the garden:

When she had finished she stood, swaying and pale, tears falling down. Ravenhill looked at her sadly. He thought: "This girl has more than her share of the world's hard luck."

"I will take you as a walker-on," he said, "with an understudy and with the chance of a small part. You have a fine voice, and a temperament—but I need not tell you that. Of course, if you want to get on, you need to study and work hard. I can't offer you more than thirty shillings a week—with a difference if you play."

He did not mention that all other walkers-on with understudies were only getting a guinea; some of them nothing at all. He only looked at her with kindness and comradeship.

As for her: she could have fallen at his feet in thankfulness. The contract was signed and she went home happy.

Thirty shillings a week certain!