I
The lamp had not been wiped, and the room smelt slightly of paraffin. The
old window-curtains, whose harsh green age had not softened, were drawn.
The mahogany sideboard, the threadbare carpet, the small horsehair sofa,
the gilt mirror, standing on a white marble chimney-piece, said clearly,
'Furnished apartments in a house built about a hundred years ago.' There
were piles of newspapers, there were books on the mahogany sideboard and on
the horsehair sofa, and on the table there were various manuscripts,--_The
Gipsy_, Act I.; _The Gipsy_, Act III., Scenes iii. and iv.
A sheet of foolscap paper, and upon it a long slender hand. The hand traced
a few lines of fine, beautiful caligraphy, then it paused, correcting with
extreme care what was already written, and in a hesitating, minute way,
telling of a brain that delighted in the correction rather than in the
creation of form.
The shirt-cuff was frayed and dirty. The coat was thin and shiny. A
half-length figure of a man drew out of the massed shadows between the
window and sideboard. The red beard caught the light, and the wavy brown
hair brightened. Then a look of weariness, of distress, passed over the
face, and the man laid down the pen, and, taking some tobacco from a paper,
rolled a cigarette. Rising, and leaning forward, he lighted it over the
lamp. He was a man of about thirty-six feet, broad-shouldered, well-built,
healthy, almost handsome.
The time he spent in dreaming his play amounted to six times, if not ten
times, as much as he devoted to trying to write it; and he now lit
cigarette after cigarette, abandoning himself to every meditation,--the
unpleasantness of life in lodgings, the charm of foreign travel, the beauty
of the south, what he would do if his play succeeded. He plunged into
calculation of the time it would take him to finish it if he were to sit at
home all day, working from seven to ten hours every day. If he could but
make up his mind concerning the beginning and the middle of the third act,
and about the end, too,--the solution,--he felt sure that, with steady
work, the play could be completed in a fortnight. In such reverie and such
consideration he lay immersed, oblivious of the present moment, and did not
stir from his chair until the postman shook the frail walls with a violent
double knock. He hoped for a letter, for a newspaper--either would prove a
welcome distraction. The servant's footsteps on the stairs told him the
post had brought him something. His heart sank at the thought that it was
probably only a bill, and he glanced at all the bills lying one above
another on the table.
It was not a bill, nor yet an advertisement, but a copy of a weekly review.
He tore it open. An article about himself!
After referring to the deplorable condition of the modern stage, the writer
pointed out how dramatic writing has of late years come to be practised
entirely by men who have failed in all other branches of literature. Then
he drew attention to the fact that signs of weariness and dissatisfaction
with the old stale stories, the familiar tricks in bringing about 'striking
situations,' were noticeable, not only in the newspaper criticisms of new
plays, but also among the better portion of the audience. He admitted,
however, that hitherto the attempts made by younger writers in the
direction of new subject-matter and new treatment had met with little
success. But this, he held, was not a reason for discouragement. Did those
who believed in the old formulas imagine that the new formula would be
discovered straight away, without failures preliminary? Besides, these
attempts were not utterly despicable; at least one play written on the new
lines had met with some measure of success, and that play was Mr. Hubert
Price's _Divorce_.
'Yes, the fellow is right. The public is ready for a good play: it wasn't
when _Divorce_ was given. I must finish _The Gipsy_. There are good things
in it; that I know. But I wish I could get that third act right. The public
will accept a masterpiece, but it will not accept an attempt to write a
masterpiece. But this time there'll be no falling off in the last acts. The
scene between the gipsy lover and the young lord will fetch 'em.' Taking up
the review, Hubert glanced over the article a second time. 'How anxious the
fellows are for me to achieve a success! How they believe in me! They
desire it more than I do. They believe in me more than I do in myself. They
want to applaud me. They are hungry for the masterpiece.'
At that moment his eye was caught by some letters written on blue paper.
His face resumed a wearied and hunted expression. 'There's no doubt about
it, money I must get somehow. I am running it altogether too fine. There
isn't twenty pounds between me and the deep sea.'
* * * * *
He was the son of the Rev. James Price, a Shropshire clergyman. The family
was of Welsh extraction, but in Hubert none of the physical characteristics
of the Celt appeared. He might have been selected as a typical Anglo-Saxon.
The face was long and pale, and he wore a short reddish beard; the eyes
were light blue, verging on grey, and they seemed to speak a quiet,
steadfast soul. Hubert had always been his mother's favourite, and the
scorn of his elder brothers, two rough boys, addicted in early youth to
robbing orchards, and later on to gambling and drinking. The elder, after
having broken his father's heart with debts and disgraceful living, had
gone out to the Cape. News of his death came to the Rectory soon after; but
James's death did not turn Henry from his evil courses, and one day his
father and mother had to go to London on his account, and they brought him
back a hopeless invalid. Hubert was twelve years of age when he followed
his brother to the grave.
It was at his brother's funeral that Hubert met for the first time his
uncle, Mr. Burnett. Mr. Burnett had spent the greater part of his life in
New Zealand, where he had made a large fortune by sheep-farming and
investments in land. He had seemed to be greatly taken with his nephew, and
for many years it was understood that he would leave him the greater part,
if not the whole, of his fortune. But Mr. Burnett had come under the
influence of some poor relations, some distant cousins, the Watsons, and
had eventually decided to adopt their daughter Emily and leave her his
fortune. He did not dare intimate his change of mind to his sister; but the
news having reached Mrs. Price in various rumours, she wrote to her brother
asking him to confirm or deny these rumours; and when he admitted their
truth, Mrs. Price never spoke to him again. She was a determined woman, and
the remembrance of the wrong done to her son never left her.
While the other children had been a torment and disgrace, Hubert had been
to his parents a consolation and a blessing. They had feared that he too
might turn to betting and drink, but he had never shown sign of low tastes.
He played no games, nor did he care for terriers or horses; but for books
and drawing, and long country walks. Immediately on hearing of his
disinheritance he had spoken at once of entering a profession; and for many
months this was the subject of consideration in the Rectory. Hubert joined
in these discussions willingly, but he could not bring himself to accept
the army or the bar. It was indeed only necessary to look at him to see
that neither soldier's tunic nor lawyer's wig was intended for him; and it
was nearly as clear that those earnest eyes, so intelligent and yet so
undetermined in their gaze, were not those of a doctor.
But if his eyes failed to predict his future, his hands told the story of
his life distinctly enough--those long, white, languid hands, what could
they mean but art? And very soon Hubert began to draw, evincing some
natural aptitude. Then an artist came into the neighbourhood, the two
became friends, and went together on a long sketching tour. Life in the
open air, the shade of the hedge, the glare of the highway, the meditation
of the field, the languor of the river-side, the contemplation of wooded
horizons, was what Hubert's pastoral nature was most fitted to enjoy; and,
for the sake of the life it afforded him, he pursued the calling of a
landscape painter long after he had begun to feel his desire turning in
another direction. When the landscape on the canvas seemed hopelessly
inadequate, he laid aside the brush for the pencil, and strove to interpret
the summer fields in verse. From verse he drifted into the article and the
short story, and from the story into the play. And it was in this last form
that he felt himself strongest, and various were the dramas and comedies
that he dreamed from year's end to year's end.
While he was in the midst of his period of verse-writing his mother died,
and in the following year, just as he was working at his stories, he
received a telegram calling him to attend his father's death-bed. When the
old man was laid in the shadow of the weather-beaten village church, Hubert
gathered all his belongings and bade farewell for ever to the Shropshire
rectory.
In London Hubert made few friends. There were some two or three men with
whom he was frequently seen--quiet folk like himself, whose enjoyment
consisted in smoking a tranquil pipe in the evening, or going for long
walks in the country. He was one of those men whose indefiniteness provokes
curiosity, and his friends noticed and wondered why it was that he was so
frequently the theme of their conversation. His simple, unaffected manners
were full of suggestion, and in his writings there was always an
indefinable rainbow-like promise of ultimate achievement. So, long before
he had succeeded in writing a play, detached scenes and occasional verses
led his friends into gradual belief that he was one from whom big things
might be expected. And when the one-act play which they had all so heartily
approved of was produced, and every newspaper praised it for its literary
quality, the friends took pride in this public vindication of their
opinion. After the production of his play people came to see the new
author, and every Saturday evening some fifteen or twenty men used to
assemble in Hubert's lodgings to drink whisky, smoke cigars, and talk
drama. Encouraged by his success, Hubert wrote _Divorce_. He worked
unceasingly upon it for more than a year, and when he had written the final
scene, he was breaking into his last hundred pounds. The play was refused
twice, and then accepted by a theatrical speculator, to whom it seemed to
afford opportunity for the exhibition of the talents of a lady he was
interested in.
The success of the play was brief. But before it was withdrawn, Hubert had
sold the American rights for a handsome sum, and within the next two years
he had completed a second play, which he called _An Ebbing Tide_. Some of
the critics argued that it contained scenes as fine as any in _Divorce_,
but it was admitted on all sides that the interest withered in the later
acts. But the failure of the play did not shake the established belief in
Hubert's genius; it merely concentrated the admiration of those interested
in the new art upon _Divorce_, the partial failure of which was now
attributed to the acting. If it had only been played at the Haymarket or
the Lyceum, it could not have failed.
The next three years Hubert wasted in various aestheticisms. He explained
the difference between the romantic and realistic methods in the reviews;
he played with a poetic drama to be called _The King of the Beggars_, and
it was not until the close of the third year that he settled down to
definite work. Then all his energies were concentrated on a new play--_The
Gipsy_. A young woman of Bohemian origin is suddenly taken with the
nostalgia of the tent, and leaves her husband and her home to wander with
those of her race. He had read portions of this play to his friends, who at
last succeeded in driving Montague Ford, the popular actor-manager, to
Hubert's door; and after hearing some few scenes he had offered a couple of
hundred pounds in advance of fees for the completed manuscript. 'But when
can I have the manuscript?' said Ford, as he was about to leave. 'As soon
as I can finish it,' Hubert replied, looking at him wistfully out of pale
blue-grey eyes. 'I could finish it in a month, if I could count on not
being worried by duns or disturbed by friends during that time.'
Ford looked at Hubert questioningly; then he said 'I have always noticed
that when a fellow wants to finish a play, the only way to do it is to go
away to the country and leave no address.'
But the country was always so full of pleasure for him, that he doubted his
power to remain indoors with the temptation of fields and rivers before his
eyes, and he thought that to escape from dunning creditors it would be
sufficient to change his address. So he left Norfolk Street for the more
remote quarter of Fitzroy Street, where he took a couple of rooms on the
second floor. One of his fellow-lodgers, he soon found, was Rose Massey, an
actress engaged for the performance of small parts at the Queen's Theatre.
The first time he spoke to her was on the doorstep. She had forgotten her
latch-key, and he said, 'Will you allow me to let you in?' She stepped
aside, but did not answer him. Hubert thought her rude, but her strange
eyes and absent-minded manner had piqued his curiosity, and, having nothing
to do that night, he went to the theatre to see her act. She was playing a
very small part, and one that was evidently unsuited to her--a part that
was in contradiction to her nature; but there was something behind the
outer envelope which led him to believe she had real talent, and would make
a name for herself when she was given a part that would allow her to reveal
what was in her.
In the meantime, Rose had been told that the gentleman she had snubbed in
the passage was Mr. Hubert Price, the author of _Divorce_.
'Oh, it was very silly of me,' she said to Annie. 'If I had only known!'
'Lor', he don't mind; he'll be glad enough to speak to you when you meets
him again.'
And when they met again on the stairs, Rose nodded familiarly, and Hubert
said--
'I went to the Queen's the other night.'
'Did you like the piece?'
'I did not care about the piece; but when you get a wild, passionate part
to play, you'll make a hit. The sentimental parts they give you don't suit
you.'
A sudden light came into the languid face. 'Yes, I shall do something if I
can get a part like that.'
Hubert told her that he was writing a play containing just such a part.
Her eyes brightened again. 'Will you read me the play?' she said, fixing
her dark, dreamy eyes on him.
'I shall be very glad.... Do you think it won't bore you?' And his wistful
grey eyes were full of interrogation.
'No, I'm sure it won't.'
And a few days after she sent Annie with a note, reminding him of his
promise to read her what he had written. As she had only a bedroom, the
reading had to take place in his sitting-room. He read her the first and
second acts. She was all enthusiasm, and begged hard to be allowed to study
the part--just to see what she could do with it--just to let him see that
he was not mistaken in her. Her interest in his work captivated him, and he
couldn't refuse to lend her the manuscript.