Читать книгу Time and the Hour - Howard Spring - Страница 26

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Anthony had never before been to a music-hall, and as he sat there in the orchestra stalls (free tickets for Aunt Jessie, though he didn’t know that), with the orchestra playing, and the lights shining through the blue fug of tobacco smoke left by the first-house patrons, he had no idea what Dick Hudson was to hand him. He had seen two Dick Hudsons: the elegant caped buck swaggering along Manningham Lane, and the rather dull chap who had brought Chris in a taxi-cab to Mrs. Wayland’s. But when the curtain went up on Dick’s act, neither of these appeared. Indeed, he could not believe that this was Dick Hudson at all. It was a shrunken little man standing outside an inn which a signboard declared to be the White Hart. He was polishing boots and singing a song about horses and hounds and foxes and tally-ho, meanwhile getting as much blacking on to his face as on to the boots and generally, Anthony thought, being a perfect example of the English rustic, who is notoriously inept, fumbling, and liable to get blacking in the wrong places. Then, taking up the boots, he disappeared round the side of the inn, and, almost at once, the front door was flung open by a corpulent and angry landlord, shouting: “Jorkins! Jorkins! Where is that fool? His lordship requires his boots.”

Anthony found it hard to believe that this, too, was Dick Hudson, but the programme had assured him that “The Great Hudson, without the help of confederates, will ring the changes on six characters.” This second character, despairing of finding the absent Jorkins, disappeared through the main door, and might almost be said to have jostled his lordship, so quickly did that personage appear, complete with all the swagger habiliments that had dazzled Anthony in the Sunday evening solitude of Manningham Lane. But now he was a more sinister lordship. It needed only a glance at his face to see that he was harbouring designs unbefitting an English gentleman. He looked up the road and down the road, like a hovering hawk inspecting a hedgerow for insuspicious mice. He took a pack of cards from his pocket and let them float with nonchalance from hand to hand. “So you are late, Mr. Middleton,” he ruminated devilishly. “But late or early, I’ll have the plucking of you yet, my pretty pigeon.” And then, as the coconut shells clattered backstage: “Ha! He arrives at the back! He would remain unseen!” And, eager for prey, he launched himself through the front door.

He missed Mr. Middleton, who had a perambulatory habit and came round the side of the house, he, also, to look up and down the road, but with a sad and pensive air. Anthony’s heart bled for him: a stripling who so clearly was about to be stripped. A nice lad, too, in a fawn overcoat with brown velvet lapels, and hair as fair as his lordship’s was dark. “Perhaps,” he pondered, “I look my last on these English fields,” and he drew an ugly-looking shooter from his pocket. “But now, ’tis all or nothing. ’Tis fortune, and the right, Alice, to state my case, or, losing, to lose you and life together.”

A cry of “Ho, there, Middleton!” caused the forlorn youth to run back the way he had come, while through the front door burst a jolly chap quaffing a tankard. “Gone!” he cried, on what seemed insufficient evidence. “Well, Frank, my boy, I’d have saved you from that beast of prey had it been in my power. My sister Alice is yours for the asking. She’ll fly to you like a bird to a bough, be it rich with fruit or bare with winter poverty. Well, I’ll to the pretty thing. She may need my comfort this night.” And, banging the tankard down on a rustic table, he strolled away and disappeared into the wings, whistling so merrily that one might wonder whether his affection for his sister was all he cracked it up to be.

Well, thought Anthony, counting on his fingers, there goes number five; and number six was not long in appearing. A shot rang out from the White Hart, suggesting close of play and ruin achieved in what must have been a record time even for so accomplished a pigeon-plucker as his lordship. But, to the pleasant surprise of the audience, his lordship had under-estimated his man. It was his valet who now came running through the front door, shouting: “My lord has met his match! Young Middleton has stripped him to the bone. He has sought the way out, but maybe he still breathes. Bring me his coach! His lordship’s coach there, I say!” And as the coconuts clattered again Anthony, highly pleased with all that he had seen, would not have been surprised had a four-in-hand trundled round the side of the White Hart with Dick disguised as the leader. But, instead, the curtain swung down, and the applause broke out, and Aunt Jessie was lugging him out of his seat, and presently he found himself in the prosaic off-stage purlieus of the theatre, cold passages and stone steps and wire-caged gaslights, and finally in a little room where Harry Pordage, Dick’s dresser, was hanging clothes on hooks, and wigs on stands, and Dick himself, sitting before a mirror, was wiping off his grease. With one side of his face wearing still the valet’s haggard and hang-dog look, and the other clean and pink from scrubbing, he turned to Jessie with a grin. “Well, lass, d’you think Ah’ve come on a bit?” he asked.

“Tha’ll do,” she assured him.

“Remember the night I wept on thi breast?”

“Tha’s nowt to weep about now.”

Anthony said: “I’ll bet Chris is proud of you, Mr. Hudson.”

“He’s never seen me, lad—not on the stage.”

“I’ll bet he’d like to, and to hear all those people cheering as they did.”

“Ah’m not sure of that, lad. You see, all this has nothing to do with Chris, except that it’s for Chris. Isn’t that so, Harry?” he appealed to Mr. Pordage.

Mr. Pordage, a sallow little whippet of a man, went on with his work. “As you say, Mr. Hudson,” he said without turning his head.