Peggy Rye, probably one of the happiest people in London, was
unquestionably one of the busiest, and, as is the habit of really busy
people, could always find time for everything. She pursued her myriad
schemes of philanthropy and kindness not only with a sense of duty, but
brought to them a lively and genuine interest that made unshrinkable
homespuns, innocuous wallpapers, unphosphorescent matches and leadless
glaze things in themselves attractive and absorbing. If she was not
opening a bazaar she was triumphantly closing some factory in which the
conditions of work were injurious to the _employés_; and there were but
few days when she was in town on which her great barrack of a house in
Pall-Mall was not open to something of an alleviating and charitable
nature. The house, in fact, as Hugh had once remarked, was a sort of
Clapham Junction of philanthropy, and relief trains ran screaming
through it in all directions and at the shortest possible intervals,
while she, like a general pointsman for all the lines, tugged at her
levers and sent the trains all on their various ways. Her levers, it may
be remarked, were of various kinds, and it was firstly her own energies,
her position, her time, her wealth that she cheerfully and eagerly
devoted to her charitable deeds; but secondly she used the time,
position, and money of her friends, plundering them with the utmost
avidity and mercilessness. She insisted on their putting up new
wallpapers--even though those they had were still recent--which, though
perhaps ugly, were not stained with the blood of work-people. She made
them buy homespun and tweeds which they did not want in order that Irish
peasants should not want either; and she compelled them to load their
dinner-tables with new services, which it was possible to eat off, she
explained, in comfort, without the feeling at the back of your mind that
every time you took a spoonful of soup you were really--so dreadful was
the mortality at some of these china factories--committing an act of
cannibalism. She even saw the bright side of the extreme friability of
these uncannibal plates, because it so soon became necessary to order
some more.
In the same way too she used her friends’ gifts; those who were musical
had to play the piano or the violin or sing at her concerts at Rye
House, while the less-gifted might confine themselves to taking guinea
tickets; those with histrionic gifts were expected to place them at her
service, and even go so far as to buy the dresses in which they would
appear, and pay their fares to distant parts of the country in order to
assist deserving objects in the manufacturing districts; poets, major
and minor alike, wrote odes which the less poetical had to buy at really
scandalous prices; those with gardens filled her bazaars with the finest
orchids and all that was best and rarest in their greenhouses; and
though Peggy was ruthless, persistent, and merciless in her demands
nobody ever resented or refused them, and only when goaded past all
bearing--as, for instant, when she wanted to give a bazaar during Ascot
week--told her that, though she appeared not to know it, there were
limits. For, as has been said, she had the most valuable of all social
gifts--namely, the habit of enjoying herself, which is quite
irresistible, and though she did not spare them, she was even more
merciless to herself.
It must be remarked too that without taking a cynical view of the
efforts and services of her friends, it was unquestionably a very
comfortable thing for those of otherwise worldly inclinations to be
friends of Peggy’s, for she did not confine herself, as might be
gathered, to making the lower classes more comfortable at the cost of
all comfort to the upper, but she ministered with the same eager
unwearying kindness to their tastes, and if those who were musical, for
instance, lent her their talents in aid of her schemes, she on her side
was always ready to lend them her opera-box, and entertained largely
both in town and country. She was also in this caravanserai of London
one of the very few people who really “mattered,” and though her wealth
and the way in which she spent it might be supposed to have something to
do with this, such a supposition would be entirely false where there
were so many more wealthy than she who would spend their uttermost
farthing to “matter,” yet never succeeded in doing so. What mattered was
her wisdom and her charm, and the cachet so seldom won, of a woman of
this kind who instead of spending a busy life in amusing herself, spent
it seriously in ameliorating the condition of the people, while at the
same time she gave and went to dances, entertained and was entertained
and was entertaining. Socially she enjoyed herself immensely, and with
her big house, her genius as hostess, her deep-rooted desire that other
people should enjoy themselves, especially at her expense, she was on a
pinnacle in her own world, while, like some skilful circus-rider of two
horses, she used all this to sell her guinea tickets and make people buy
the leadless glaze of her innocuous dinner-services. She would, in fact,
couple her invitation to a week-end party--not at the sequestered
cottage at Cookham, but at the big house at Kingston--with a request
for a couple of pianoforte solos from some renowned player at the
forthcoming concert in aid of some specialised sort of cripples in a
manner of which the significance could scarcely be missed.
Peggy had the rather rare and wholly enviable faculty of being able to
sit down and think, and when sitting to arrange her thoughts, and having
arranged the particular strain of them which occupied her, to dismiss
them again. Thus when she left Cookham the following day in order to
open a bazaar at the Waynfleet Hall in the afternoon, she lunched in the
train, arranged her thoughts, which were concerned with the speech she
was going to make, and when she arrived at Paddington was at leisure
again, and able to give herself up to that most entrancing form of
entertainment--namely, the mere watching of the busy, jostling life of
the streets.
But how that spectacle enthralled her! To her keen and vivid mind there
was no such delectable pasture on which to browse, and not even the
liquid, dustless lawn and river were so entrancing. Much as she loved
the swift play of mind on mind, much as she loved the mere quietude of
Thames and green forest, or the idle, nonsensical, vivid intercourse
with friends, or with friends the grave note that was often struck,
there was nothing more attune to her than this sight of the eager
crowded streets, alive with strangers, each an enigma to her and not
less an enigma to himself. Hugh had once said to her that he always got
up early even in this London of late hours for fear of missing
something, and that sentiment appeared to her wholly admirable. What he
was afraid of “missing” neither he nor she knew; indeed, had it been a
definite “missing” it must have been an engagement or appointment of
some sort, which would have been devoid of romance. It was the very
vagueness of it that to her half-practical, half-Celtic mind was so
attractive. “Something might have happened,” he had said, “and how
dreadful to have been asleep like a pig!” That was so like him, and yet
it was like him too, though unsatisfactory, that he should do nothing
definite with this life, that he should refuse this wonderful offer to
sing at Covent Garden. Artist-like, he had for the last four years
absolutely devoted himself to the cultivation of his voice, spending the
five winter months in every year in the desolating town of Frankfort, so
as to allow no distraction to interfere with his lessons, and now when a
practical reward for his industry was offered him he refused it. To her,
as to Edith, it seemed almost a crime; a miracle of a voice had been
given him, and also part, though not all, of the artistic temperament
which, like genius, has unlimited capacities for taking pains. But what
had been left out was ambition; he had, strong as an instinct, the
internal need of learning all he could of the art of singing, but not
the wish to dazzle and hold the world. It was for singing’s sake that
for five months in every year he had cheerfully undergone the
incomparable tedium of Frankfort, not for the sake of knowing that on
the other side of the footlights the huge hushed house, packed from
stall to gallery, was holding its breath in expectation while he stood
before the masters in the meadow by the Pegnitz, or, as Tristan,
strained dying eyes over the untenanted blue of the Cornish sea for the
ship that came not, or voyaged miraculously on the swan to where by the
Scheldt the maiden Elsa called on her unknown and nameless champion.
That at present anyhow--the sting and goad of ambition, of impressing
himself on others--had not awoke in him; he did not in the least care
whether the world knew that he sang as long as Reuss knew it and he knew
it. To Edith his refusal seemed criminal, for never before, as far as
she knew, had a man’s voice arrived so early at maturity, and perhaps at
perfection. At last the ideal Wagner hero had come, one who was still
young, still with all the glow and thrill of youth on him; at last it
was possible to see a Tristan who was not middle-aged and obese, and a
Lohengrin who should indeed be the ideal of a girl’s dream; and these
possibilities were all ruled out because Hugh “didn’t want to.” It was
as if the key that unlocked some priceless treasure was put into the
hands of an idle, irresponsible child, who might throw open the jewelled
case, but simply did not care to turn the key.
Peggy made an effort to bring back her thoughts into their more usual
channels, for at this point she became aware again that she was driving
down Pall Mall and wasting her time terribly in thinking about Hugh
instead of devouring the crowded pavements, and she turned her attention
to them. There was an elderly man exactly like a rabbit, talking with a
curious nibbling movement of the mouth to a middle-aged woman whose face
was like a chest of drawers, square, obviously useful, with knobs on it.
Then she passed a hansom in which was sitting Arthur Crowfoot, one of
those red-hot faddists who spend their whole time in pursuing
health-giving practices. He had spent all April in deep-breathing, and
one was liable to come across him even in the streets, or sitting on a
little green chair in the Park, looking rather apoplectic because he was
holding his breath for ten seconds previous to expelling it slowly
through his left nostril while his right was firmly closed by his
finger. Then he gave up deep-breathing, and devoted May to the open-air
cure, being quite well already, with the result that he caught a
dreadful cold. That, however, he had remedied by giving up eating flesh
and living on a curious gray paste made of nuts and drinking water in
sips for an hour or two every day. At this moment he was observing his
tongue rather anxiously in the looking-glass of his hansom, and so did
not see Peggy. She registered the premonition that nut-paste would
probably be soon abandoned. How heavenly people were!
Then--she was really in luck--she found all sorts of enchanting things.
A circus was going somewhere, and the elephant at this colossal moment
did not want to go. Instead he wanted buns, and with a view to getting
them had taken his stand, kindly but extremely firmly on the pavement
opposite the Guards’ Club and had inserted his trunk through the open
window of the smoking-room; he picked up a _Pall Mall_, waved it
hysterically in the air, and then ate it. A little further on two
intensely English-looking men, appearing to be rather annoyed with each
other, wanted to pass, the one going east, the other west. But, with
aggrieved and offended faces, they danced a sort of sideways minuet in
front of each other, choosing the same side simultaneously. Then a man
on a bicycle approached, with a tied-up look about his face. Peggy could
not imagine why he looked so tied-up, until a hideous convulsion seized
him and he sneezed. The pavement had been lately watered, his bicycle
skidded, and he fell off. And how she longed to go back and see whether
the elephant had any more beautiful plans!
Mrs. Allbutt was staying while in London with her sister and
brother-in-law, in the huge chocolate-coloured house in Piccadilly
which Hugh had called the Clapham Junction of good works. Half a dozen
families could easily have been accommodated there without coming into
the contact too close for perfect liberty of action; and, as a matter of
fact, friends and relations were encouraged to and did treat it rather
like a hotel without bills. “For what,” as Peggy said, “is the use of
dwelling in marble halls in this very central situation unless one’s
friends will come and dwell there too?” So they came and dwelt, since
Peggy with true hospitality besought everybody to make any arrangements
they chose, to ask anybody to dinner or to go out to dinner, or to have
high tea exactly as they wished without consultation or notice given to
her provided only that one motor-car should be considered--as indeed it
was--her private property, and not to be used without reference to her.
Similarly, on days of big dinner parties she asked that the intentions
of any of those staying with her should be notified as soon as
convenient, so that the servants should not go mad; but in the ordinary
routine, when one person was going to the opera, and another to the
theatre, and a third dining quietly at home at eight, people simply went
to the dining-room at the time they had appointed, and there, as by a
miracle, always found that something was ready for them.
Thursday evening, in fact, the night when Andrew Robb was going to make
his bow before the dramatic world, was a typical instance of an ordinary
night. Lord Rye was going to the opera with his sister, and had ordered
dinner for half-past seven. Peggy, Mrs. Allbutt, and Hugh were going to
dine at seven, in order to be in time for the first fatal and
excruciating rise of the curtain; while Frank Adams and his a week of
whirl had been down to Ascot all day, and preferred to dine at home,
and go to a ball afterward. Peggy herself had been delayed in a manner
which it had been impossible to foresee over some charitable visit to
the East End, and returned at exactly seven, meeting Edith as she came
downstairs dressed on the way to her room.
“Darling, I am late,” she said, “and it wasn’t my fault. You look
perfectly beautiful, and how you can be so calm! Go in with Hugh as soon
as he comes, won’t you, and don’t wait for me, because we must be there
in time.”
She whirled on to her room, and Edith, finding a letter or two for her
on the table by the hall door, stopped to read them, and witnessed
Hugh’s arrival, who, like Peggy, seemed somehow to be going faster than
usual, and on dismounting instantly became involved in a dispute with
the cabman.
“But as I haven’t got any money, I can’t pay you,” he said rather
shrilly. “I forgot, as I tell you, to bring any, though I’m frightfully
rich. But if you’ll call at Dover Street to-morrow----”
The cabman’s contribution to the dispute was to say “Cheating a pore
cabby!” at intervals. He said it now.
“But you are so unreasonable,” continued Hugh. “No, I won’t give you my
watch. Oh, there’s a footman! I dare say I can borrow some. Would you
give me eighteen pence, please? No, a shilling.”
Hugh handed him the shilling.
“And if you hadn’t been so rude,” he said, “you should have had
eighteenpence, so I hope it will be a lesson to you. Oh, there you are,
Mrs. Allbutt! Aren’t cabmen ridiculous? Am I late?”
“Peggy is later,” she said. “She has only just come in. We are to begin
without her.”
They went into the dining-room, in which were several small tables, and
took their seats at one laid for three.
“I am never quite sure if I enjoy first nights,” said Hugh; “which
sounds polite as I am going with you to one, but I am so agitated on
behalf of the actors. And how the author can bear it at all is a thing
that passes comprehension. I don’t see how he can bear to be present,
and of course it would be beyond human power for him to stop away.”
“Ah, but the name of Andrew Robb inspires me with confidence!” said she.
“The name doesn’t sound as if he was likely to be nervous.”
Hugh looked at her with deep interest.
“You don’t suppose there is an Andrew Robb, do you?” he asked. “I feel
certain there isn’t. Nobody ever really was called that, do you think?”
“I don’t see any inherent impossibility in it.”
“Oh, surely it can’t happen! Do you often go to first nights?”
“Hardly ever,” said she. “Until this last fortnight, I don’t suppose I
have slept in town half a dozen times in the last three years.”
“How wise.”
“Yet Peggy tells me that you are the most confirmed of Cockneys, and are
in town nine months out of the twelve.”
“Yes; but then I like it,” said Hugh, eating fish very fast. “So that is
wise also. How few people know what they like!”
“Yes, but does that surprise you? I think it is rather difficult to know
what one likes. Anyhow, most people only see the world through the eyes
of others. In consequence they only like, or think they like, what other
people like.”
“I know what I like,” remarked Hugh roundly.
“And what is that?”
“Oh, almost everything!” he said.
“I sincerely congratulate you,” said she. “There is no gift so enviable
as that of liking.”
Mrs. Allbutt, as Hugh noticed for the second time and more emphatically
than before, had a voice of singular charm, and to him, to whom the ear
was the main organ of communication between his soul and that of things
external to him, it seemed a voice of wonderful temperament. It was very
level in tone, and pitched on rather a low note for woman, but the
quality of it was fine, clear but a little veiled, as if it came from
really inside her brain, not from her throat merely. Her utterance, too,
had great distinction; there was nothing slurred or clipped about it,
the words stood up like flowers in a field, and her personality gave
them its significance; what she said was no echo of other voices; it was
genuine, personal, as much hers as her face or her cool long-fingered
hands. Even had she talked mere gibberish her voice would have been a
thing to listen to for the melody of it; as it was, its music was but
the accompaniment to her thought so delightfully made audible. At the
moment, however, while these very simple and sincere sounds still dwelt
on his ear like song, Peggy, gorgeously though so hastily attired, came
in with a rush, snapping a bracelet on to her wrist.
“Ah, but if only the Government would bring in an eight-hour day for the
upper classes,” she cried, “how I would work for them--Conservative,
Liberal, Socialist, whatever they were! I have been on the warpaths of
charity since nine this morning, which makes ten hours already, and if
you think I have done yet--why, you’re mistaken. I have been mistaken
too, because I find that my ladyship is at home at eleven, and I quite
forgot. So you’ll come back with us, Hugh, won’t you, after the theatre?
Can’t you? How tiresome of you! There’s going to be no dancing, but we
are going to talk to each other for an hour. And at twelve a glass
slipper of rather large size is coming for me, and I’m going to a ball.
I wish I was dead!”
“No, dear, you don’t,” said Edith.
“Anyhow, why?” asked Hugh.
“Because I shan’t want to go out again, and I must. But one knows quite
well that one enjoys everything when one is doing it. I even enjoyed my
dentist yesterday, because he is a Christian Scientist and told me I had
no nerves in my teeth, and even if I had they wouldn’t hurt, because
mortal mind, as far as I understood him, did not really exist.”
“Then there should have been no teeth either,” remarked Hugh.
“I thought of that too, but my mouth was full of syringes and syphons
and pads of cotton-wool so that I couldn’t talk. Oh, yes, doing things
is always pleasant, whatever they are! Now you, Hugh, won’t do things.”
Hugh nodded at her.
“No; that is the other point of view. The one you don’t see.”
“Have you written to Reuss?”
“Not actually, because he refused to take any answer for a fortnight.
But practically.”
“And what is the other point of view,” she demanded--“the one I don’t
see?”
Hugh looked from one to the other; it seemed as if Mrs. Allbutt also was
waiting to hear about the other point of view.
“Merely that to be effective, to do things, however excellently, isn’t
necessarily the only thing in the world worth living for. As you say,
you like doing things; you would be bored and discontented if you were
not flying about like--like----”
“Well?” said Peggy.
“Well, if you don’t mind, like a bee against a glass window,” said Hugh.
“You go banging about in all directions, and stopping really in pretty
much the same place.”
“You serpent!” said Peggy. “Pray go on!”
“I think I will, because I’ve been thinking about it, and I probably
shall forget unless I say it soon. Oh, I think I was wrong about the bee
and the glass window! At least, it only partly applies to you, for you
do get through things, although, like the bee, you only charge wildly at
them. But you like working sixteen hours a day and having no time for
lunch; it pleases you. Add to that that you have a nice nature, and it
follows that you work sixteen hours a day for the sake of other people.
But----”
Hugh pointed an almost threatening finger at her.
“But if you had to work sixteen hours a day for yourself you wouldn’t
have the slightest idea what to do. You can improve the condition of
other people to any extent, but you haven’t got any idea as to how to
improve your own. The time would hang very heavy for you if you had to
use it all in improving your mind. Consequently you tend to think that
people who do try to improve their minds are lazy. You haven’t got any
real sympathy with art or music or literature, and you mainly want me to
go and squall at the opera because you feel that I shall then be doing
something definite.”
Peggy put both her elbows on the table.
“Go on about me,” she said. “It’s deeply interesting. Coil and wriggle
and sting, you dear serpent!”
“Very well. You are hopelessly conventional.”
Peggy gasped.
“Conventional?” she asked.
“Yes. You have often urged me, for instance, to go into Parliament,
merely because it was the obvious thing to do. You yourself do all the
conventional things with almost fanatical enthusiasm--bazaars, and
Fridays in Lent, and garden parties to congenital idiots. It is all so
stereotyped; there is nothing original about it, except when you induce
your friends to buy dinner-services that melt and dissolve when the soup
touches them, and then expect them to buy more. You can’t----”
Hugh paused a moment.
“Ah, I have it!” he said. “You can’t think of anything. And you don’t
want to.”
Peggy looked at him in a sort of comic despair.
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” she said.
“Because you never thought of it before,” said he. “Oh, I know what I
mean quite well! Do say it for me, Mrs. Allbutt,” he said, turning to
her.
She smiled at him.
“Do you know the thing called the Æolian harp?” she said. “It is a
matter of a few strings, and you put it up in a tree, and whatever
happens, whether it blows a gale or whether the sun shines or whether it
is frosty, the Æolian harp, as I imagine it, always responds and makes
music of some kind.”
“Oh, but the Æolian harp--” began Peggy.
“Dear, this is a peculiar sort of Æolian harp. The ordinary one only
makes sound when the wind blows, but I imagine one which turns
everything into song. It is the romanticist, the dreamer. It is neither
moral nor immoral; it is only exquisitely sensitive, not only in matters
of the heart, in sympathy, in kindness, but in intellectual things.”
Hugh laughed.
“Oh, how nice it sounds!” he cried. “Do let us all go and be Æolian
harps!”
Then, with one of his quick eager movements, he turned to Peggy.
“That’s the other ideal,” he said. “To catch all there is and turn it
into song.”
But Peggy was grave.
“But there are so many things that can’t be turned into song,” she said,
“and since I very wisely recognise that, I try to turn them into
shillings. There is no romance about a wretched family dying of
lead-poisoning and there is no song about it except funeral hymns.
Besides, I gather that Hugh wants to be an Æolian harp. Well, that’s
just what I want him to be. The whole point of the argument has been
that he should turn things into song at Covent Garden.”
She got up.
“We must go,” she said, “because we have to be there at the rise of the
curtain. Will you follow us in a hansom, Æolian harp?”
The two sisters drove off together in the motor, which was the only
thing of her own that Peggy laid claim to.
“Me conventional!” she said, with a sudden spurt of indignation. “Or am
I?” she demanded, turning to Edith.
“I suppose everybody who is very young like that thinks other people
rather conventional,” she said. “But to be conventional in that sense is
unfortunately necessary, if one is to do anything with life. One has to
choose one’s line and stick to it, and not mind about other
lines--disregard them, in fact.”
“But he didn’t call you conventional,” said Peggy, still humorously
indignant. “Besides, I want people to work. It makes them happy.”
“Ah, it makes you happy, you mean; and, of course, many people would be
happier if they did work. But I am not sure that working may not be a
sort of substitute only for the great thing.”
“What’s the great thing?”
“Why, living. I never feel sure that working is not a sort of drug that
makes us dream we are living. To be really alive matters so much more
than anything.”
Peggy looked at her in some alarm.
“Pray say none of those dangerous things to Hugh,” she said, “or we
shall certainly never hear him in Tristan!”
“I am afraid he thinks of them for himself,” said she. “But the mistake
he makes is in thinking that working interferes with living. It doesn’t.
People who can’t live only get a substitute for it in work which will
make them happy, but people who are really alive are not less so by
working.”
“Ah, that is much sounder!” said Peggy. “Here we are in the _queue_
already. It appears to extend from the Circus to Hyde Park Corner.”
Edith gave a little groan; something, either the discussion at dinner,
or those with whom she had discussed, had completely taken her mind off
what was coming. The sight of the _queue_, however, recalled her.
“Aren’t you hugely excited?” continued Peggy. “How can you help being?
And yet you look as if you were going out for a drive in the country to
see the place where Izaak Walton was born.”
“I feel as if I were going to see the place where Edith Allbutt was
buried,” remarked that lady, “and it appears to me to be gruesomely
interesting. And the whole world seems to be coming to the funeral
service.”
“Ah, but not a soul guesses who Andrew Robb is!” said Peggy. “I feel
sure of that.”
“But Mr. Grainger, probably among many more, said that it was quite
obvious there couldn’t be an Andrew Robb. It did seem unlikely when he
mentioned it.”
“But if it’s a huge and howling success, as I know it will be,” said
Peggy, “won’t you unmask Andrew?”
Edith shook her head.
“Not till the play is established,” she said. “When it has run fifty
nights I will.”
Again she groaned slightly.
“It hasn’t run one yet,” she said tragically, “and perhaps it won’t. Oh,
Peggy, I know I have fallen between several large hard stools. ‘Gambits’
isn’t risky, so one section of the audience will yawn; it isn’t
melodramatic, so another section will cough; it doesn’t contain any
horse-play, so a third will fidget. I quite realise that now, and I
shall join in the booing myself. How do you boo? Never mind, I shall
soon know. And at the dress rehearsal this morning nobody appeared to
know one single line of his part, and the curtain stuck at the end of
the second act.
“Ah, but, as told you, a brilliant dress rehearsal means failure!” said
Peggy. “And isn’t it just possible that a section of the audience will
like a play because it is neither indecent nor farcical?”
“I don’t think so,” said Edith. “But in any case I shall be a Turveydrop
of deportment, and shall join in the booing.”
“That will be insincere,” said Peggy.
They were in plenty of time for the rise of the curtain, and indeed the
orchestra had only just begun to play what was called an “arrangement”
from “La Tosca” when they took their places. Hugh, who with masculine
cunning had directed his cabman to have nothing to do with the _queue_,
but to drive boldly up the centre of Piccadilly and stop in the middle
of it opposite the theatre, had got there before them, and was already
in the box, watching the rapid filling-up of the theatre. Certainly the
production of this piece had roused considerable interest, and some
minutes before the curtain rose the house was packed in every corner,
while the shrill buzz of conversation, always so eager and expectant on
a first night, nearly drowned the arrangement from “La Tosca.” For
London, whatever its faults may be, is, like Athens, passionately fond
of anything new, and the production by one of the best-known
actor-managers in the middle of the season of a play about the author of
which nothing was known was an event that thoroughly aroused its
curiosity. The stalls and boxes were crammed, the pit was one huddle of
close-packed faces, and the gallery was as if a swarm of bees had
settled on it. Higher and more shrill rose the buzz of conversation from
all parts of the huge hothouse, glittering with lights. Then suddenly
the lights went out, the orchestra stopped, a rustle of settlement
sounded in the darkened theatre, and the curtain went up. Hugh, too,
settled down with a sigh of contented expectancy.
“I am so nervous!” he said. “Just think of Andrew Robb.”
The act was rather long and though there were no signs of impatience
audible in the house, yet the skilled observer of audiences would not
have been completely satisfied with the quality of the silence. They
were silent, it is true, and their silence probably betokened attention,
but it was not as yet the throbbing palpitating silence that shows
absorption. As in all first acts, a good deal of preliminary work had to
be got through; the lady in the blue dress had so to characterise
herself in half a dozen lines, that even if she appeared--as she
probably would--in the second act in a totally different colour, there
could be no mistaking that it was she; the lady in green had to _be_
Mrs. Ashworth and no other; all the coining of personality had to take
place, so that it came hot and ringing from the genuine human mint. Also
the lines of circumstance had to be laid down; and it should have been
clear to the mind of the skilled what the reasonable outcome must be.
Only it was not quite clear; there were still nebulous points, and on
the fall of the curtain Hugh instantly put his finger on what seemed to
be the weak point.
“Rather long, wasn’t it?” he said. “And weren’t there too many aimless
bits of talk? Oh, they were well written; I thought the dialogue
excellent, just like people, but one wants plot, and one wants point.”
Peggy glanced instantaneously at her sister.
“Ah, but what seems to be pointless in a first act may prove to have
very sharp points!” she said. “One can’t tell. There certainly were a
lot of excursions in the dialogue, and, of course, if they prove to lead
nowhere, the play is hopeless. But one has to see.”
Edith moved so that she sat in the shadow of the curtain.
“Yes, the criterion of the first act is the last,” she said. “You can’t
tell if it is a good first act till you have seen the end. Don’t you
think so, Mr. Grainger? I quite agree, though, that it seemed long. It
seemed frightfully long to me.”
Hugh shook his head.
“No, I think you ought to know or guess at the last act from the first,”
he said--“or anyhow guess two or three possible ends. Here you can’t.
Look at the hero! At least, I suppose Mr. Amherst is the hero. But he
never knows his mind from one minute to another. He is utterly
inconsistent.”
“But isn’t it possible that his weakness of purpose may be the point of
the play?”
“I never thought of that. Oh, but how interesting if it is so! But it
can’t be, because that would make him like a real person, and modern
plays never resemble real people in any way. No; I bet you it is a bad
play. Mr. Amherst is going to develop some totally new and overpowering
characteristic which will make the whole of the first act a waste of
time. Do bet!”
“On the possible ability of Andrew Robb?” asked Mrs. Allbutt. “I have
seen nothing to warrant it.”
The opinion of the house in general tended to coincide with Hugh’s; and
the critics, those Olympians of the intellect, who can leave a theatre
not before eleven in the evening and have a column about it in their
respective engines of the press next morning, yawned, gathered together
in the _foyer_, with a sense of coming futility. Those, too, who had
come in obedience to Peggy’s commands wondered whether Andrew Robb might
not be some discovery of hers whom she had found scribbling fragments of
dialogue in the dinner-hour at the leadless glaze factory. Certainly it
was very clever of him if this was so, and also very clever of dear
Peggy, even if it was pushing leadless glaze rather far. No doubt at her
little gathering to-night after the play one would glean something. And
the band, having chopped “Pagliacci” up into bits, like murderers trying
to conceal a body, was silent again, and the curtain rose for the
second time.
It had not long been up when silence of quite another quality began to
spread like some waveless tide over the theatre. What had seemed idle
talk in the first act took significance, and on what was dark and
featureless a dawn, sad enough no doubt but intensely human, began to
show the contours of landscape; the audience began to “see.” Little
careless sentences, remembered because of a certain distinction and
unusualness in them, flashed back again into the brain; here was their
meaning; they were plot, they were character. And the inconsistent,
vacillating hero became every moment more pathetically human. His
inadequacy in dealing with little things developed into the helplessness
of a weak man before things that are not little. Poignant domestic
suffering, remediable probably by a strong man, seemed to paralyse him;
he could not make his move, his gambit. Slowly too and inevitably the
counteraction of her who was becoming his adversary was apparent.
It was a short act, and the curtain came down swift as the guillotine
knife with supreme dramatic fitness the moment that the whole of the
position that had through indecision become almost irremediable was
revealed. Then for a moment there was dead silence and afterward, before
any applause, a huge buzz of eager conversation, everyone talking to his
neighbour, argumentative, each with his own idea of the solution, of the
gambit that would be selected in the third and last act. To the audience
the play had ceased to be a play; it had become a piece of life, and in
an hour the actors had become old friends. Stalls argued right and left;
boxes were knots of eager disputation; the pit was babel. And for some
three minutes this went on.
Hugh was characteristic of the rest.
“Oh, I am glad I didn’t bet,” he said, “because, of course, that is the
point! He might do several things all of which would be characteristic.
What heavenly people, poor wretches! Why, they are like you and me--so I
suppose we’re heavenly too. It isn’t a play at all. It’s It! What will
be the way out? Why, we are in the theatre after all!”
He stood up and began applauding violently. The same fact--namely, that
they were in a theatre--seemed to strike the rest of the house
simultaneously, and from the buzz of conversation there rose the storm
of clapping and shouting. And once again Peggy looked secretly across to
her sister.
The usual barbaric ceremonies followed; the principal actor appeared,
with a fearful grin on his face, bowed, and retired. He came on again
and did it again. Then for the third time he appeared, hand-in-hand with
the leading lady, and repeated this double appearance. Again and again
he appeared each time leading on an additional character, in the manner
of “The House that Jack Built,” till everybody who had been seen at all,
down to the typewriter who was mute throughout the action, had joined
his procession. Then the curtain went finally down, and stray bars of
“Cavalleria” were occasionally heard, for nobody left the theatre, but
continued arguing till it went up again.
Tense silence, but after some ten minutes somebody blew his nose. Pure,
simple pathos, the striving of a weak man to do his best and finding his
best failing was there. But with that a certain bravery, foreshadowed
from the beginning, a quiet courage began to grow out of the wreck. And
then came the simple solution, quite unexpected but absolutely sincere
and inevitable, sad perhaps with the sadness of sunset, but bringing
its own consolation in the fact of the hot weary day being over.
It was long before Hugh would leave the box, for he was one of those who
like to say “Thank you!” when they have enjoyed themselves, and the
procession had to pass again and again before he and the rest of the
house were in the least satisfied. Then Mr. Amherst had to explain that
Andrew Robb was not present, he had to thank his friends, he had to say
that their pleasure was his, and that he did not know when he had been
so deeply touched. Yes, and Mr. Robb really was not present.
Eventually, however, the three left the house. Hugh was going on to his
dance, and saw the two sisters into their motor. There was a block ahead
of them, and till it cleared he talked to them through the window.
“I shall come to ‘Gambits’ every night,” he announced, “and all day I
shall search for Andrew Robb.”
“And when you find him?” asked Peggy.
“I shall black his boots, if he will let me. I shall learn to fold
clothes and apply for a place as his valet. What a heavenly mind he must
have! I----”
And the block dissolved and the motor moved.