"Hampstead is my name," he blurted, with clumsy directness, "John
Hampstead," and the interview with Destiny was on.
"The first trouble with you," declared the white-haired actor
critically, "is that your face doesn’t fit."
John wet a lip and hitched a nervous leg, but sat awkwardly silent, his
eyes boring hungrily, as if waiting for more. The actor, however, was
slow to add more. Faces were his enthusiasm, as well as the raw material
of his profession, but this face puzzled him, so that before committing
himself further he paused to survey it again: the strong nose with its
hump of energy, the well buttressed chin, and then the broad forehead
with its unusually thick, bony ridge encircling the base of the brows
like a bilge keel, proclaiming loudly that here was a man with racial
dynamite in his system, one who, whatever else he might become, was now
and always a first-class animal.
The eyebrows heightened this suggestion by being thick and yellow, and
sweeping off to the temples in a scroll-like flare. The forehead itself
was broad, but gathered a high look from that welter of tawny hair which
was roached straight up and back, giving the effect of one who plunges
headlong.
But the eyes completely modified the countenance. They did not plunge.
They halted and beamed softly. Gray and deep-seated, they made all that
face’s force the force of tenderness, by burning with a light that was
obviously inner and spiritual. The mouth, again, while as cleanly
chiseled as if cut from marble,—sensitive, impressionistic, fine, was,
alas! weak; or if not weak, advertising weakness by an habitual
expression of lax amiability; although along with this the actor noted
that the two lips, buttoning so loosely at the corners, could none the
less collaborate in a most engaging smile.
Kenton concluded his second appraisal with a little gesture of
impatience. The man’s features gave each other the lie direct, and that
was all there was to it. They said: This man is a beast, a great,
roaring lion of a man; and then they said: No, this lion is a lamb, a
mild, dreamy, sucking dove sort of person.
"That’s it," he iterated. "Your face doesn’t fit."
Hampstead did not wince.
"The question is," he proposed, in a voice husky with a mixture of
embarrassment and determination, "how am I to make it fit? Or, failing
that, how am I to get somewhere with a face that doesn’t fit?"
The actor’s reply was half sagacity, half "selling talk", mixed with
some judicious flattery and tinged with inevitable gallery play,
although there was no gallery.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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