ETTA ROMNEY IS PRESENTED
The new play, "Haddon Hall," had been announced for half-past eight
precisely on the evening of Wednesday, the twentieth day of May. It
still wanted a few minutes to the hour of eight when that famous
American impressario, Mr. Charles Izard, permitted a waiter in the
Carlton Hotel to serve him with a coffee and liqueur; while he confided
to his invaluable confederate and stage-manager, Mr. Walter Lacombe,
the assuring intelligence that he had no doubt either about the play or
the company.
"They're ho-mo-gen-e-us," he said, lighting a cigar with comfortable
deliberation; "the first act's bully and any play with that Third Act I
produce. We must get something written for her to follow in. My side
will take "Haddon Hall" and it will take Etta Romney. If it doesn't, I
close up."
Mr. Lacombe, the stage-manager, had his own doubts, but he was far too
diplomatic to express them.
"When you close up, I sell bananas," said he; "that will be in the Ides
of March."
Mr. Charles Izard, who had not enjoyed the distinction of three years'
idleness at Cambridge (and so had made a vast fortune), produced those
strange concatenations of sounds which served him for laughter before
uttering a pious wish.
"It's the 'ides of the critics' I'd like to touch," he exclaimed with
real feeling; "you know what they're going to say about this as well as
I do----"
"Oh, of course," said Lacombe frankly, "they'll baste it, sure enough.
No historical play is likely to please Watley. He'll say that hot
blankets are the proper treatment."
"I'd like to wrap him up in 'em and smother him," interjected Mr.
Charles Izard, still piously.
"That's so--he's capable _de tout_. But I fancy he will take her none
the less."
"Etta Romney, why yes! I'd like to see the man who wouldn't take her.
It's a woman that makes a play nowadays. If you'd more of 'em this
side, you wouldn't have so many failures. In America we star the woman
first and the play afterwards. Here you star the man and when all the
schoolgirls have seen him, your theatre's empty."
"Exactly--this play is the exception. You've certainly cut the writing
on the wall. There's no room for whiskers on your ideas."
Mr. Izard drained his coffee cup and admitted loftily that there was
not.
"I'd have been a fool not to. Here's a girl comes to me out of the
_ewigkeit_. No name, no story, nothing. Won't tell me who she is or
where she has played before. Just says, 'I've read about Constant
Hayter's play--I know Derbyshire; I have loved the tradition of that
story all my life. Money is nothing to me. Let me play the part Miss
Fay Warner has given up. Let me play it at rehearsal, and then say
whether you wish me to go on.' You couldn't better it in a fairy book.
I see her act a scene, hear her speak twenty lines, and say, 'That's
bully.' She doesn't ask a salary--why, sir, the girl's a genius born
and bred--and what's more she's a lady from the top of her hat to the
soles of her boots. I couldn't wish my own daughter to behave better."
"Something odd about her all the same," Lacombe reflected; "dreadfully
afraid of being known. She goes in and out of the theatre like a
ghost."
Mr. Charles Izard laughed again.
"Well, don't she play the part of one?" he asked affably. "How would
you have her come in and out? Whistling like the overhead? The part's
herself--the Lady of Haddon. She was born to it. If that girl hasn't
walked as a ghost sometime or other, put me down for twenty pounds to
an hospital. And no salary, sir, not a single penny."
"Immense," said Lacombe, but immediately paused as a well-known critic
passed through the hall and went out to the theatre almost adjoining
the hotel.
"There's Clayaton," he went on quickly, "it's not often he sits out a
sword-and-cape drama."
"Then he'll sit out one to-night and be ashamed of himself in the
morning. Let's get, my boy, it's just on the half-hour. We must be
there."
What precisely would have happened had so great a man not been there,
the merely humble individual might hardly dare to say. As events went,
Mr. Charles Izard put on a light great-coat with a great deal of
splendid ceremony, and giving the many-colored lackey a shilling,
strolled pompously into the street with his cigar still alight.
Passing His Majesty's, before whose doors the boards "House Full" were
conspicuously displayed, the pair walked leisurely on to the front
entrance of the Carlton Theatre, and were there gratified by one of
those spectacles which London alone can display upon the first night of
a new production.
Cabs, carriages, electric broughams, even the motor-cars, arrived in
quick succession before the brightly lighted vestibule of one of the
prettiest theatres in London. From these emerged women in blazing
evening dress, men who had dined, and men capricious and irritable
because they had not dined--young girls to whom all plays were a dream
of delight, mere boys who already had voted the whole thing "rot." As
for the critics, they were chiefly patrons of hansoms; though a few
arrived on foot, two and two, each trying to learn what the other would
say about a performance which many had witnessed at a dress rehearsal.
Short men and tall men, bearded men and bald men, they cared nothing
for the success of the play, but everything for the glory of the
notices they must write. An historical drama could not fail to give
them a fine opening. They lolled back easily in their stalls as men
whose literary knives were for the moment sheathed, but would be busy
anon.
The theatre was packed to the very ceiling when the curtain rose, and
few of the amiable first-nighters were missing from the audience.
Famous lawyers, doctors of letters, and doctors of medicine, editors of
illustrated papers and editors of papers that were not illustrated,
literary ladies and ladies who were not literary, novelists, essayists,
poets, that curious quasi-Bohemian crowd which constitutes a London
first-night house, stood for most of the arts and many of the sciences
of our day; and yet in the main brought a child's heart to the play as
Bohemian crowds will. The cynics of eighteen, mostly representing
halfpenny evening papers, were among the few who denounced the drama
before they had seen it. "'Haddon Hall' on the stage again--why," said
they, "there have been twenty Di Vernons in our time and why should
this Di Vernon find mercy?" She was already in the coach of failure so
far as they were concerned. The curtain rose upon their mutterings and
did not still them.
It was a pretty scene, the park of famous Haddon Hall and the meeting
between pretty Dorothy Vernon and her young lover beneath the
sheltering yews. The unknown _debutante_, Etta Romney, received a
lukewarm welcome from the audience; but all admitted the grace of her
attitudes, the charm of her voice, and the earnestness she brought to
her assistance. A little amateurish in the earlier moments of the play
she warmed to her work anon; and a love scene which would have been
ridiculous had it been ill-played, she lifted by natural talent to a
pinnacle at least of toleration. So the curtain fell to some applause;
and the great impressario, Mr. Charles Izard, again ventured the
opinion that she was "bully," though his voice had not that confident
ring it possessed at the dinner-table. Could the girl make a failure
of it, after all? It was just possible. And undoubtedly the play was
not a masterpiece.
So the Second Act passed and found him not a little anxious, and he sat
far back in his box when the curtain rose upon the Third and
concentrated his whole attention upon the performance. The scene was
that of the Long Gallery at Haddon; the episode, a midnight meeting
between Dorothy and her lover. Dressed in spotless white with the
softest black hair tumbling about her almost to her knees, young and
supple limbs moving elegantly, a face that Reynolds might have loved to
paint, a voice that was music to hear--nevertheless all these physical
attributes were speedily forgotten in the sincerity of Etta Romney's
acting and the human feeling which animated it. Here was one who loved
every stone of this ancient house which the quivering canvas attempted
to portray; who had wandered abroad often in its stately park, who
spoke the tongue of three centuries ago more naturally than her own,
who had been so moved by this story of Di Vernon's life that she gave
her very soul to its re-telling. From amazement the audiences passed
quickly to a kind of entrancement which only genius can command. It
did not applaud; its silence was astounding--not a whisper, scarce the
rustle of a dress could be heard. The spell growing, it followed the
white figure from scene to scene; was unconscious, perhaps, that any
other than she trod the stage; devoured her with amazed eyes; heard,
for the first time, each a tale of mediaeval England as neither
historian nor romancer had ever told. When the curtain fell, the
people still sat in silence a little while; but the applause came at
length, upon a tempest of wild excitement rarely known in a modern
theatre.
Who was she? Whence had she come?
A hundred ready tongues asked the question which none appeared able to
answer.
There was but one man in the house who made sure of Etta Romney's
identity, and he was a Roumanian.
Count Odin had witnessed the girl's _debut_ from a box on the second
tier.
"She is a great actress," he said to his companion, Felix Horowitz, a
young attache from the Hungarian Embassy; "I am going to make love to
her."
The young man looked up quickly.
"I promise you failure," he said--"a woman who can speak of England
like that will marry none but an Englishman."