I was--you shall hear immediately why I am not now--Egbert Craddock
Cummins. The name remains. I am still (Heaven help me!) Dramatic Critic
to the _Fiery Cross_. What I shall be in a little while I do not know.
I write in great trouble and confusion of mind. I will do what I can
to make myself clear in the face of terrible difficulties. You must
bear with me a little. When a man is rapidly losing his own identity,
he naturally finds a difficulty in expressing himself. I will make it
perfectly plain in a minute, when once I get my grip upon the story.
Let me see--where _am_ I? I wish I knew. Ah, I have it! Dead self!
Egbert Craddock Cummins!
In the past I should have disliked writing anything quite so full of
"I" as this story must be. It is full of "I's" before and behind, like
the beast in Revelation--the one with a head like a calf, I am afraid.
But my tastes have changed since I became a Dramatic Critic and studied
the masters--G.R.S., G.B.S., G.A.S., and the others. Everything has
changed since then. At least the story is about myself--so that there
is some excuse for me. And it is really not egotism, because, as I
say, since those days my identity has undergone an entire alteration.
That past!... I was--in those days--rather a nice fellow, rather
shy--taste for grey in my clothes, weedy little moustache, face
"interesting," slight stutter which I had caught in early life from
a schoolfellow. Engaged to a very nice girl, named Delia. Fairly
new, she was--cigarettes--liked me because I was human and original.
Considered I was like Lamb--on the strength of the stutter, I believe.
Father, an eminent authority on postage stamps. She read a great
deal in the British Museum. (A perfect pairing ground for literary
people, that British Museum--you should read George Egerton and Justin
Huntly M'Carthy and Gissing and the rest of them.) We loved in our
intellectual way, and shared the brightest hopes. (All gone now.) And
her father liked me because I seemed honestly eager to hear about
stamps. She had no mother. Indeed, I had the happiest prospects a
young man could have. I never went to theatres in those days. My Aunt
Charlotte before she died had told me not to.
Then Barnaby, the editor of the _Fiery Cross_, made me--in spite
of my spasmodic efforts to escape--Dramatic Critic. He is a fine,
healthy man, Barnaby, with an enormous head of frizzy black hair and
a convincing manner, and he caught me on the staircase going to see
Wembly. He had been dining, and was more than usually buoyant. "Hullo,
Cummins!" he said. "The very man I want!" He caught me by the shoulder
or the collar or something, ran me up the little passage, and flung me
over the waste-paper basket into the arm-chair in his office. "Pray be
seated," he said, as he did so. Then he ran across the room and came
back with some pink and yellow tickets and pushed them into my hand.
"Opera Comique," he said, "Thursday; Friday, the Surrey; Saturday, the
Frivolity. That's all, I think."
"But"--I began.
"Glad you're free," he said, snatching some proofs off the desk and
beginning to read.
"I don't quite understand," I said.
"_Eigh?_" he said, at the top of his voice, as though he thought I had
gone, and was startled at my remark.
"Do you want me to criticise these plays?"
"Do something with 'em.... Did you think it was a treat?"
"But I can't."
"Did you call me a fool?"
"Well, I've never been to a theatre in my life."
"Virgin soil."
"But I don't know anything about it, you know."
"That's just it. New view. No habits. No _clichés_ in stock. Ours is a
live paper, not a bag of tricks. None of your clockwork professional
journalism in this office. And I can rely on your integrity"--
"But I've conscientious scruples"--
He caught me up suddenly and put me outside his door. "Go and talk to
Wembly about that," he said. "He'll explain."
As I stood perplexed, he opened the door again, said, "I forgot this,"
thrust a fourth ticket into my hand (it was for that night--in twenty
minutes' time), and slammed the door upon me. His expression was quite
calm, but I caught his eye.
I hate arguments. I decided that I would take his hint and become (to
my own destruction) a Dramatic Critic. I walked slowly down the passage
to Wembly. That Barnaby has a remarkably persuasive way. He has made
few suggestions during our very pleasant intercourse of four years
that he has not ultimately won me round to adopting. It may be, of
course, that I am of a yielding disposition; certainly I am too apt to
take my colour from my circumstances. It is, indeed, to my unfortunate
susceptibility to vivid impressions that all my misfortunes are due.
I have already alluded to the slight stammer I had acquired from a
schoolfellow in my youth. However, this is a digression.... I went home
in a cab to dress.
I will not trouble the reader with my thoughts about the first-night
audience, strange assembly as it is,--those I reserve for my
Memoirs,--nor the humiliating story of how I got lost during the
_entr'acte_ in a lot of red plush passages, and saw the third act from
the gallery. The only point upon which I wish to lay stress was the
remarkable effect of the acting upon me. You must remember I had lived
a quiet and retired life, and had never been to the theatre before,
and that I am extremely sensitive to vivid impressions. At the risk of
repetition I must insist upon these points.
The first effect was a profound amazement, not untinctured by alarm.
The phenomenal unnaturalness of acting is a thing discounted in the
minds of most people by early visits to the theatre. They get used to
the fantastic gestures, the flamboyant emotions, the weird mouthings,
melodious snortings, agonising yelps, lip-gnawings, glaring horrors,
and other emotional symbolism of the stage. It becomes at last a mere
deaf-and-dumb language to them, which they read intelligently _pari
passu_ with the hearing of the dialogue. But all this was new to me.
The thing was called a modern comedy, the people were supposed to be
English and were dressed like fashionable Americans of the current
epoch, and I fell into the natural error of supposing that the actors
were trying to represent human beings. I looked round on my first-night
audience with a kind of wonder, discovered--as all new Dramatic Critics
do--that it rested with me to reform the Drama, and, after a supper
choked with emotion, went off to the office to write a column, piebald
with "new paragraphs" (as all my stuff is--it fills out so) and purple
with indignation. Barnaby was delighted.
But I could not sleep that night. I dreamt of actors--actors glaring,
actors smiting their chests, actors flinging out a handful of extended
fingers, actors smiling bitterly, laughing despairingly, falling
hopelessly, dying idiotically. I got up at eleven with a slight
headache, read my notice in the _Fiery Cross_, breakfasted, and went
back to my room to shave. (It's my habit to do so.) Then an odd thing
happened. I could not find my razor. Suddenly it occurred to me that I
had not unpacked it the day before.
"Ah!" said I, in front of the looking-glass. Then "Hullo!"
Quite involuntarily, when I had thought of my portmanteau, I had flung
up the left arm (fingers fully extended) and clutched at my diaphragm
with my right hand. I am an acutely self-conscious man at all times.
The gesture struck me as absolutely novel for me. I repeated it, for
my own satisfaction. "Odd!" Then (rather puzzled) I turned to my
portmanteau.
After shaving, my mind reverted to the acting I had seen, and I
entertained myself before the cheval glass with some imitations of
Jafferay's more exaggerated gestures. "Really, one might think it a
disease," I said--"Stage-Walkitis!" (There's many a truth spoken in
jest.) Then, if I remember rightly, I went off to see Wembly, and
afterwards lunched at the British Museum with Delia. We actually spoke
about our prospects, in the light of my new appointment.
But that appointment was the beginning of my downfall. From that day
I necessarily became a persistent theatre-goer, and almost insensibly
I began to change. The next thing I noticed after the gesture about
the razor, was to catch myself bowing ineffably when I met Delia, and
stooping in an old-fashioned, courtly way over her hand. Directly I
caught myself, I straightened myself up and became very uncomfortable.
I remember she looked at me curiously. Then, in the office, I found
myself doing "nervous business," fingers on teeth, when Barnaby asked
me a question I could not very well answer. Then, in some trifling
difference with Delia, I clasped my hand to my brow. And I pranced
through my social transactions at times singularly like an actor! I
tried not to--no one could be more keenly alive to the arrant absurdity
of the histrionic bearing. And I did!
It began to dawn on me what it all meant. The acting, I saw, was too
much for my delicately-strung nervous system. I have always, I know,
been too amenable to the suggestions of my circumstances. Night after
night of concentrated attention to the conventional attitudes and
intonation of the English stage was gradually affecting my speech and
carriage. I was giving way to the infection of sympathetic imitation.
Night after night my plastic nervous system took the print of some new
amazing gesture, some new emotional exaggeration--and retained it. A
kind of theatrical veneer threatened to plate over and obliterate my
private individuality altogether. I saw myself in a kind of vision.
Sitting by myself one night, my new self seemed to me to glide,
posing and gesticulating, across the room. He clutched his throat, he
opened his fingers, he opened his legs in walking like a high-class
marionette. He went from attitude to attitude. He might have been
clockwork. Directly after this I made an ineffectual attempt to
resign my theatrical work. But Barnaby persisted in talking about the
Polywhiddle Divorce all the time I was with him, and I could get no
opportunity of saying what I wished.
And then Delia's manner began to change towards me. The ease of our
intercourse vanished. I felt she was learning to dislike me. I
grinned, and capered, and scowled, and posed at her in a thousand ways,
and knew--with what a voiceless agony!--that I did it all the time. I
tried to resign again, and Barnaby talked about "X" and "Z" and "Y" in
the _New Review_, and gave me a strong cigar to smoke, and so routed
me. And then I walked up the Assyrian Gallery in the manner of Irving
to meet Delia, and so precipitated the crisis.
"Ah!--_Dear!_" I said, with more sprightliness and emotion in my voice
than had ever been in all my life before I became (to my own undoing) a
Dramatic Critic.
She held out her hand rather coldly, scrutinising my face as she did
so. I prepared, with a new-won grace, to walk by her side.
"Egbert," she said, standing still, and thought. Then she looked at me.
I said nothing. I felt what was coming. I tried to be the old Egbert
Craddock Cummins of shambling gait and stammering sincerity, whom she
loved, but I felt even as I did so that I was a new thing, a thing
of surging emotions and mysterious fixity--like no human being that
ever lived, except upon the stage. "Egbert," she said, "you are not
yourself."
"Ah!" Involuntarily I clutched my diaphragm and averted my head (as is
the way with them).
"There!" she said.
"_What do you mean?_" I said, whispering in vocal italics--you know
how they do it--turning on her, perplexity on face, right hand down,
left on brow. I knew quite well what she meant. I knew quite well the
dramatic unreality of my behaviour. But I struggled against it in vain.
"What do you mean?" I said, and, in a kind of hoarse whisper, "I don't
understand!"
She really looked as though she disliked me. "What do you keep on
posing for?" she said. "I don't like it. You didn't use to."
"Didn't use to!" I said slowly, repeating this twice. I glared up and
down the gallery, with short, sharp glances. "We are alone," I said
swiftly. "_Listen!_" I poked my forefinger towards her, and glared at
her. "I am under a curse."
I saw her hand tighten upon her sunshade. "You are under some bad
influence or other," said Delia. "You should give it up. I never knew
anyone change as you have done."
"Delia!" I said, lapsing into the pathetic. "Pity me. Augh! Delia!
_Pit_--y me!"
She eyed me critically. "_Why_ you keep playing the fool like this I
don't know," she said. "Anyhow, I really cannot go about with a man who
behaves as you do. You made us both ridiculous on Wednesday. Frankly,
I dislike you, as you are now. I met you here to tell you so--as it's
about the only place where we can be sure of being alone together"--
"Delia!" said I, with intensity, knuckles of clenched hands white. "You
don't mean"--
"I do," said Delia. "A woman's lot is sad enough at the best of times.
But with you"--