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 the 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 delicatelystrung 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
any one 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—”