THE THEATRE
MAJOR MAITLAND was very fond of the theatre, and as he had grown fond of
Zachariah, and frequently called at his house, sometimes on business and
sometimes for pleasure, he often asked his friend to accompany him. But
for a long time he held out. The theatre and dancing in 1814 were an
abomination to the Independents. Since 1814 they have advanced, and
consequently they not only go to plays and dance like other Christians,
but the freer, less prejudiced, and more enlightened encourage the
ballet, spend their holidays in Paris, and study French character there.
Zachariah, however, had a side open to literature, and though he had
never seen a play acted, he read plays. He read Shakespeare, and had
often thought how wonderful one of his dramas must be on the stage. So
it fell out that at last he yielded, and it was arranged that Mrs. and
Mr. Coleman should go with the Major to Drury Lane to see the great
Edmund Kean in “Othello.” The day was fixed, and Mrs. Coleman was busy
for a long time beforehand in furbishing up and altering her
wedding-dress, so that she might make a decent figure. She was all
excitement, and as happy as she could well be. For months Zachariah had
not known her to be so communicative. She seemed to take an interest in
politics; she discussed with him the report that Bonaparte was mad, and
Zachariah, on his part, told her what had happened to him during the day,
and what he had read in the newspapers. The Prince Regent had been to
Oxford, and verses had been composed in his honour. Mr. Bosanquet had
recited to the Prince an ode, or something of the kind, and had ventured,
after dilating on the enormous services rendered by kings in general to
the community during the last twenty years, to warn them:
“But ye yourselves must bow: your praise be given
To Him, the Lord of lords, your King in heaven.”
And Mrs. Zachariah, with a smile and unwonted wit, wondered whether Mr.
Bosanquet would not be prosecuted for such treasonable sentiments.
Zachariah hardly knew what to make of his wife’s gaiety, but he was glad.
He thought that perhaps he was answerable for her silence and coldness,
and he determined at all costs to try and amend, and, however weary he
might be when he came home at night, that he would speak and get her to
speak too.
The eventful evening arrived. Zachariah was to get away as early as he
could; the Major was to call at about six. After Zachariah had washed
and dressed, they were to take a hackney coach together. At the
appointed hour the Major appeared, and found Mrs. Zachariah already in
her best clothes and tea ready. She was charming—finished from the
uttermost hair on her head to the sole of her slipper—and the
dove-coloured, somewhat Quakerish tint of her wedding-gown suited her
admirably. Quarter-past six came, but there was no Zachariah, and she
thought she would make the tea, as he was never long over his meals.
Half-past six, and he was not there. The two now sat down, and began to
listen to every sound. The coach was ordered at a quarter to seven.
“What shall we do?” said the Major. “I cannot send you on and wait for
him.”
“No. How vexing it is! It is just like—” and she stopped.
“We must stay where we are, I suppose; it is rather a pity to miss being
there when Kean first comes on.”
She was in a fretful agony of impatience. She rose and looked out of the
window, thought she heard somebody on the stairs, went outside on the
landing, returned, walked up and down, and mentally cursed her husband,
not profanely—she dared not do that—but with curses none the less
intense. Poor man! he had been kept by a job he had to finish. She
might have thought this possible, and, in fact, did think it possible;
but it made no difference in the hatred which she permitted to rise
against him. At last her animosity relaxed, and she began to regard him
with more composure, and even with pleasure.
“Had you not better go and leave me here, so that we may follow? I do
not know what has happened, and I am sure he would be so sorry if you
were to be disappointed.”
She turned her eyes anxiously towards the Major.
“That will never do. You know nothing about the theatre. No! no!”
She paused and stamped her little foot, and looked again out of the
window.
The coachman knocked at the door, and when she went down asked her how
long he had to wait.
She came back, and throwing herself on a chair, fairly gave way to her
mortification, and cried out, “It is too bad—too bad!—it is, really.”
“I’ll tell you what,” replied the Major. “Do you mind coming with me?
We will leave one of the tickets which I have bought, and we can add a
message that he is to follow, and that we will keep his place for him.
Put on your bonnet at once, and I will scribble a line to him.”
Mrs. Zachariah did not see any other course open; her wrath once more
disappeared, and in another moment she was busy before the looking-glass.
The note was written, and pinned to the ticket, both being stuck on the
mantelpiece in a conspicuous place, so that Zachariah might see them
directly he arrived. In exuberant spirits she added in her own hand,
“Make as much haste as you can, my dear,” and subscribed her initials.
It was a tremendously hot afternoon and, what with the fire and the
weather and the tea, the air was very oppressive. She threw the bottom
sash open a little wider therefore, and the two rolled off to Drury Lane.
As the door slammed behind them, the draught caught the ticket and note,
and in a moment they were in the flames and consumed.
Ten minutes afterwards in came Zachariah. He had run all the way, and
was dripping with perspiration. He rushed upstairs, but there was
nobody. He stared round him, looked at the plates, saw that two had been
there, rushed down again, and asked the woman in the shop:
“Has Mrs. Coleman left any message?”
“No. She went off with that gentleman that comes here now and then; but
she never said nothing to me,” and Zachariah thought he saw something
like a grin on her face.
It may be as well to say that he never dreamed of any real injury done to
him by his wife, and, in truth, the Major was incapable of doing him any.
He was gay, unorthodox, a man who went about in the world, romantic,
republican, but he never would have condescended to seduce a woman, and
least of all a woman belonging to a friend. He paid women whom he
admired all kinds of attentions, but they were nothing more than the
gallantry of the age. Although they were nothing, however, to him, they
were a good deal more than nothing to Mrs. Zachariah. The symbolism of
an act varies much, and what may be mere sport to one is sin in another.
The Major’s easy manners and very free courtesy were innocent so far as
he was concerned; but when his rigid, religious companion in the hackney
coach felt them sweet, and was better pleased with them than she had ever
been with her husband’s caresses, she sinned, and she knew that she
sinned.
What curiously composite creatures we are! Zachariah for a moment was
half pleased, for she had now clearly wronged him. The next moment,
however, he was wretched. He took up the teapot; it was empty; the
tea-caddy was locked up. It was a mere trifle, but, as he said to
himself, the merest trifles are important if they are significant. He
brooded, therefore, over the empty teapot and locked tea-caddy for fully
five minutes. She had not only gone without him, but had forgotten him.
At the end of the five minutes teapot and tea-caddy had swollen to
enormous dimensions and had become the basis of large generalisations.
“I would rather,” he exclaimed, “be condemned to be led out and hung if I
knew one human soul would love me for a week beforehand and honour me
afterwards, than live half a century and be nothing to any living
creature.” Presently, however, it occurred to him that, although in the
abstract this might be true yet at that particular moment he was a fool;
and he made the best of his way to Drury Lane. He managed to find his
way into the gallery just as Kean came on the stage in the second scene
of the first act. Far down below him, through the misty air, he thought
he could see his wife and the Major; but he was in an instant arrested by
the play. It was all new to him; the huge building, the thousands of
excited, eager faces, the lights, and the scenery. He had not listened,
moreover, to a dozen sentences from the great actor before he had
forgotten himself and was in Venice, absorbed in the fortunes of the
Moor. What a blessing is this for which we have to thank the playwright
and his interpreters, to be able to step out of the dingy, dreary London
streets, with all their wretched corrosive cares, and at least for three
hours to be swayed by nobler passions. For three hours the little petty
self, with all its mean surroundings, withdraws: we breathe a different
atmosphere, we are jealous, glad, weep, laugh with Shakespeare’s
jealousy, gladness, tears, and laughter! What priggishness, too, is that
which objects to Shakespeare on a stage because no acting can realise the
ideal formed by solitary reading! Are we really sure of it? Are we
really sure that Garrick or Kean or Siddons, with all their genius and
study, fall short of a lazy dream in an arm-chair! Kean had not only a
thousand things to tell Zachariah—meanings in innumerable passages which
had before been overlooked—but he gave the character of Othello such
vivid distinctness that it might almost be called a creation. He was
exactly the kind of actor, moreover, to impress him. He was great,
grand, passionate, overwhelming with a like emotion the apprentice and
the critic. Everybody after listening to a play or reading a book uses
it when he comes to himself again to fill his own pitcher, and the Cyprus
tragedy lent itself to Zachariah as an illustration of his own
Clerkenwell sorrows and as a gospel for them, although his were so
different from those of the Moor. Why did he so easily suspect
Desdemona? Is it not improbable that a man with any faith in woman, and
such a woman, should proceed to murder on such evidence? If Othello had
reflected for a moment, he would have seen that everything might have
been explained. Why did he not question, sift, examine, before taking
such tremendous revenge?—and for the moment the story seemed unnatural.
But then he considered again that men and women, if they do not murder
one another, do actually, in everyday life, for no reason whatever, come
to wrong conclusions about each other; utterly and to the end of their
lines misconstrue and lose each other. Nay, it seems to be a kind of
luxury to them to believe that those who could and would love them are
false to them. We make haste to doubt the divinest fidelity; we drive
the dagger into each other, and we smother the Desdemona who would have
been the light of life to us, not because of any deadly difference or
grievous injury, but because we idly and wilfully reject.
The tale, evermore is:
“Of one whose hand,
Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe.”
So said Zachariah to himself as he came out into Drury Lane and walked
eastwards. His wife and the Major were back before him. The Major did
not wait but returned at once to Albany Street, leaving Mrs. Coleman to
sit up for her husband. He was not hurrying himself, and could not free
himself from the crowd so easily as those who left from below. The
consequence was that he was a full half-hour behind her, and she was not
particularly pleased at having been kept so long out of her bed. When
she let him in all that she said was, “Oh, here you are at last,” and
immediately retired. Strange to say, she forgot all about family
worship—never before omitted, however late it might be. If she had taken
the trouble to ask him whether he had seen her message and the ticket so
much might have been cleared up. Of course he, too, ought to have spoken
to her; it was the natural thing to do, and it was extraordinary that he
did not. But he let her go; she knelt down by her bed, prayed her prayer
to her God, and in five minutes was asleep. Zachariah ten minutes
afterwards prayed his prayer to _his_ God, and lay down, but not to
sleep. No sooner was his head on his pillow than the play was before his
eyes, and Othello, Desdemona, and Iago moved and spoke again for hours.
Then came the thoughts with which he had left the theatre and the
revulsion on reaching home. Burning with excitement at what was a
discovery to him, he had entered his house with even an enthusiasm for
his wife, and an impatient desire to try upon her the experiment which he
thought would reveal so much to him and make him wealthy for ever. But
when she met him he was struck dumb. He was shut up again in his old
prison, and what was so hopeful three hours before was all vanity. So he
struggled through the short night, and, as soon as he could, rose and
went out. This was a frequent practice, and his wife was not surprised
when she woke to find he had gone. She was in the best of spirits again,
and when he returned, after offering him the usual morning greeting, she
inquired at once in what part of the theatre he was, and why he had not
used the ticket.
“We waited for you till the last moment; we should have been too late if
we had stayed an instant longer, and I made sure you would come
directly.”
“Ticket—what ticket? I saw no ticket?”
“We left it on the mantelpiece, and there was a message with it.”
His face brightened, but he said nothing. A rush of blood rose to his
head; he moved towards her and kissed her.
“What a wretch you must have thought me!” she said half laughingly, as
she instantly smoothed her hair again, which he had ruffled. “But what
has become of the ticket?”
“Fell in the fire most likely; the window was open when I came in, and
the draught blew the picture over the mantelpiece nearly off its hook.”
The breakfast was the happiest meal they had had for months. Zachariah
did his best to overcome his natural indisposition to talk. Except when
he was very much excited, he always found conversation with his wife too
difficult on any save the most commonplace topics, although he was
eloquent enough in company which suited him. She listened to him,
recalling with great pleasure the events of the preceding evening. She
was even affectionate—affectionate for her—and playfully patted his
shoulder as he went out, warning him not to be so late again. What was
the cause of her gaiety? Was she thinking improperly of the Major? No.
If she had gone with Zachariah alone to the theatre would she have been
so cheerful? No. Did she really think she loved her husband better?
Yes. The human heart, even the heart of Mrs. Coleman, is beyond our
analysis.