Twopence Coloured by Patrick Hamilton

“Jacqueline.”
    “Jacqueline Mortimer, in fact?”
    “Yes.” There was a silence.
    “Any more?”
    “Yes. A beastly one. Rose.”
    He seemed to think about that. “Yes. I don’t like that,” he said.
    This cross-examination was stimulating her beyond measure , and it was with the utmost misery that she drew nearer to the barrier, where he would for certain leave her, and where she would be cast alone again into the outer world.
    “Do you know where one can get some tea here?” she asked.
    “Yes. We’ll have it together, shall we?”
    “Oh yes. Let’s,” said Jackie, and if there were not tears of gratitude in her eyes as she looked up at him, there were in her voice.
VI
    It was after they had each received checks for their luggage at the cloak-room, and were walking back across the station again at a rapid pace (set by the elder), she holding his little case and he grasping her suitcase, that he altered her existence again, and set her heart throbbing with joyous, trembling potentialities. He had asked her where she was going in London, and she had replied, “West Kensington.”
    “Oh, West Kensington?” he said. “I’m coming over that way on Monday.”
    “Oh — are you?”
    “Yes. I’m playing at the King’s.”
    Jackie did not quite understand this allusion at first, but something of its awe-inspiring implications crept into her soul as she answered vaguely:
    “The King’s?”
    “Yes,” he said, and looked at her. “Hammersmith,” he added, as though to make himself clear.
    “Oh,” said Jackie, and then the truth filled her. The man was an actor, and all her troubles were at an end. That she would have not the slightest difficulty in using this man for her own ends, that she had found her protector, that all her problems had been solved by the calm will of Providence, andthat nothing remained to be done save the exquisite preliminaries and fixing of the details of her immediate attack, Jackie was brimmingly confident. And he was coming to West Kensington! This all was, in fact, too felicitous to bear thought, and with joy she decided to eke it out, as it were, and put it away from her until tea, when she would pick it up again and handle it slowly and luxuriously. She therefore changed the subject.
    He took her to a little tea-shop nestling high in a building overlooking the thronged thoroughfares outside the station. A crow’s nest of a tea-shop, in fact, above a roaring yellow ocean of traffic — climbed up to by endless wooden stairs, and enlivened by blue-curtained windows and blue neat waitresses, and as warm and grateful to the senses as the sparkling tea and oozing toast provided were to the taste. And here, after a little (and very noticeably thawed) conversation, Jackie lingered deftly, but at last led round to the subject nearest her heart.
    “Did you say you were coming to West Kensington next week?” she asked.
    “That’s right.”
    “Did you say you were Playing somewhere there, or something ?” asked Jackie, finding this not quite so easy as she had thought it would be.
    “Yes. ‘The Devil’s Disciple.’ The King’s. Why?”
    “Oh,” said Jackie, as though this had just struck her. “So you’re a ——” There was a pause.
    “Nactor?” he suggested.
    “Yes.”
    “Well, I suppose I am. Why, though? Are you?”
    “Oh no; I’m not. I just thought how interesting, that’s all.”
    “How, exactly,” said her friend, who appeared to take everything at its face value, “interesting?”
    “Oh, just interesting. That’s all.”
    He did not reply to this, but busied himself with pouring out the tea. And in the long silence that followed Jackie knew that she was up against it, and must speak now or never.
    “Tell me,” she said. “What would one do if one wanted to become one?”
    Her manner of saying this implied much more detachment than personal interest, but there was sufficient of the latter quality to cause her companion’s eyes to come up and