Free Twopence Coloured by Patrick Hamilton Page A

Gissing; and when this individual did, with his loose, swashbuckling carriage, his emancipating wit and genial causticity, his depth and control of voice, which could break where it willed, yearn without querulousness, and hit every inflexion with an inevitability and surety of aim which left the soul released and happy — when, from the first moment, her own rescuer was to be witnessed evoking roars of laughing applause, and giggles of suspended delight, like a great wind over the rustling dark wheat of his audience; or caressing them into uncanny silences, like the threat of rain, which was the threat of tears, Jackie really did not know where she was or what she was doing at all. And when, at the end of the first act of this play, Dick Dudgeon drove forth his enemies and took their crying child-victim Essie under his wing; and when Essie began to cry, and he took her to himself and told her softly that she might cry that way if she liked, poor Jackie, as the curtain came down on that consummate moment, was in a fearful state of not knowing whether to let one’s tears roll one after another down one’s face, or to betray oneself equally by trying to smear them away. For she had by that time given up all her ambition of Going upon the Stage, all ambition of anything indeed, and had no object or fancy inlife but as some eternal Essie to some eternal Dick Dudgeon in an eternal atmosphere of crying consolations.
    And the remainder of the play was merely an endorsement of this cardinal point. There were no more emotional heights to be scaled. Indeed, by the time the play was over, and she came out into the air, she had quite cooled down.
IV
    It was with a curious blending of pride and trepidation that Jackie went round to the Stage Door afterwards, and asked of its guardian for Mr. Gissing. Her inquiry was handled with deferential suspicion, and in the few silent moments that she was kept waiting she was granted her first authentic impression of Stage Doors and the stone and brick passages leading therefrom — which was an impression of something distantly underhand, of business being transacted in a quiet and slightly furtive way, as from a distant consciousness of sin — which furtiveness was tempered by a certain humming jollity and ebullience whenever a human being passed across its background…. But this was but a fleeting and transitory impression, washed away in a variety of other more emphatic ones, by the time she had been transported to the door of Mr. Gissing’s dressing-room, and her conductor was knocking upon it.
    “Hullo!” Mr. Gissing was heard shouting, and the door was opened by Mr. Gissing’s slightly hostile dresser, through the defensive arms of whom Jackie peered through at Mr. Gissing, and Mr. Gissing peered through at Jackie.
    “Come in, come in, come in!” cried Mr. Gissing, three times exactly, as dressing actors have done since the first dressing actor. “I shan’t be long now.”
    Jackie entered smilingly, and the dresser went out, apparently in a temper.
    Mr. Gissing’s face was glistening with grease; Mr. Gissing was without coat and waistcoat, and wore no collar, and he was rubbing maliciously away at his face with a towel. You could have imagined that the labours of the evening had onlyjust begun, to watch him rubbing. He rubbingly offered her a chair, and continued to rub, looking all the time into the mirror, as though in a wild endeavour to emulate the insane frictional antics of the individual therein reflected. His dressing-table, which was a long wooden shelf, was covered with a towel, which was stained luxuriously with carmine (Marat’s bath-towel might have looked rather like this one) and spread with stumps and assortments of grease-paints number five and nine, and blue pencil. An inconceivably vast powder-puff lay to one side, together with a pot of cream (which was the size of a gas reservoir), and Dick Dudgeon’s hair. In other parts of the blinding little room lay Dick