Sir Henry Butcher sat in his sanctum, pulling his aggressive, bulbous
nose, and ruefully turning over the account presented by his manager of
the last week's business with his new production, a spectacular version
of _Ivanhoe_, in which he appeared as Isaac of York.
'No pull,' he muttered. 'No pull.' And to console himself he took up
a little pink packet of Press cuttings, and perused them....
'Wonderful notices! Wonderful notices! It's these confounded
music-halls and cinemas, lowering the people's taste. Yet the public's
loyal, wonderfully loyal. Must be the play. Wish I'd read the book
before I let old Kinslake have his three hundred. Told me everybody
had read it....'
Sir Henry was a man of sixty, well-preserved, with the soft, infantine
quality which grease paint imparts to the skin. He had an enormous
head, large dark eyes, sly and humorous, in which, as his shallow
whimsical thoughts flitted through his brain, mischief glinted. He was
surrounded with portraits of himself in his various successes, and
above his head was a bust of himself in the character of Napoleon.
Every now and then, when he remembered it, he compressed his lips, and
tucked his chin into his breast, but he could not deceive even himself,
much less anybody else, and his habitual expression was that of a bland
baby miraculously endowed with a knowledge of the world's mischief.
His room was luxurious but dark, being lit only by a skylight. The
walls were lined with a dull gold lincrusta, and on them were hung
portraits of the proprietor of the Imperium and a series of drawings
for the famous Imperium posters, which had through many years
brightened the gloomy streets of London and its ever expanding
outskirts. Sir Henry's mischievous eyes flitted from drawing to
drawing, and his tongue passed over his thick lips as he tasted again
the savour of his success--more than twenty unbroken years of it. He
thought of the crowded houses, the brilliant audiences he had gathered
together, the happy speeches he had made, the banquets he had held
after so many first performances--and then he thought of _Ivanhoe_, a
mistake. Worse than a mistake, a strategical blunder, for now had come
the time when his crowning ambition should be fulfilled, to have the
Imperium unofficially acknowledged as the national theatre, so that
when he retired it should be purchased for the nation and make his
achievement immortal.... Macready, Irving, all of the great line had
perished and were but names, while Henry Butcher would be remembered as
the creator of the theatre, the people's theatre, the nation's
theatre.... Then he remembered a particularly delicious wine he had
drunk in this very room at supper, after rehearsal with the brilliant
woman who had steered him through his early career and had saved him
again and again from disaster--Teresa Chesney. Ah! there was no one
like her now, no one. Actresses were ladies now, they were not of the
theatre.... There was no one now with whom a bottle of old claret had
so divine a flavour.... She would never have let him produce
_Ivanhoe_. She would have read the book for him. She always used to
stand between him and those idiots at the club.
He went to the tantalus on his sideboard and poured himself out a
brandy and soda, and drank to Teresa's memory, and then to the portrait
of his wife, who had been so wonderfully skilful in decorating the
front of the house with Dukes, Duchesses, and celebrities, but it
needed Teresa's power behind the scenes.
It was very distressing that all qualities could not be found in one
woman, and a mocking litany floated through Sir Henry's brain, 'One for
the front of the house, one for the back, one for paragraphs, one for
posters, but a man for business.'
He lay back in his chair and cudgelled his brains for some means of
turning _Ivanhoe_ from a disastrous failure into an apparent success,
but no idea came, and throwing out his long legs and caressing his
round belly he said,--
'If I paint my nose red, and give myself two large eyebrows they'll
laugh, and it might go. I must have a play in which I enter down the
chimney....'
The telephone by his side rang.
'Yes. I'm terribly busy, terribly.... Very well. I'll ring as soon
as I can see him.'
He put down the receiver, flung out his legs once more, and resumed his
thoughts.
'I might pay a visit to America. They keep sending people over here.'
But his memory twinged as he thought of the insulting criticisms he had
encountered on his last visit to Broadway.
'Teresa would tell me what to do. Some one told me Scott was the next
best thing to Shakespeare. Oh, well!'
He put his hand to a bell-button in the arm of his chair, and in a few
moments his secretary ushered in Mr Charles Mann. Sir Henry rose, drew
himself up to his full height, but even then had to look up at his
visitor.
'How d'you do? I remember you as a boy, and I remember your father. I
even remember his father at Drury Lane.... Pity you've broken the
tradition. The public is proud of the old theatrical families.... I'm
sorry you wouldn't take that part I offered you. I saw your photograph
in the papers and your face was the very thing, and, besides, your
return to the stage would have been interesting.'
Charles bristled, and flung his portfolio and large black hat down on
the table.
'I have brought you my designs for _Volpone_.'
'For what?'
'_Volpone_--a comedy by Ben Jonson.'
'Oh, Ben Jonson!'
Sir Henry was depressed. He had met people before who had talked to
him about the Old Dramatists.
Charles opened his portfolio.
'These are designs I have just completed. You see, classical, like
Ben's mind.'
'It looks immensely high,' said Sir Henry, his eyes twinkling.
'That,' replied Charles, 'is what I want, so that the figures are
dwarfed.'
'I should have to alter my proscenium,' chuckled Sir Henry, and
Charles, who missed the chuckle, continued eagerly,--
'I should like it played by dolls.'
Sir Henry turned over the drawings and played with the money in his
pocket.
'You never saw my _King Lear_, did you?'
'I have seen pictures of it. Too realistic. A visit to Stonehenge
would have answered the same purpose. You would have then to make such
a storm as would drown the storm in _Lear_.'
Sir Henry remembered his part and fetched up an enormous voice from his
stomach and roared,--
'Rage, blow and drown the steeples.' Then he kept his voice rumbling
in his belly and tapped with his foot like the bass-trumpet man in a
street band.
'Superb,' cried Charles.
'My voice?' asked Sir Henry, now very pleased with himself.
'My drawings,' replied Charles, rubbing his thumb along a line that
especially delighted him.
'O Heavens!' Sir Henry paid no further attention to the drawings and
drawled, 'Wonderful thing the theatre.' There's life in it--life! I
hate leaving it. You haven't been to my room before?'
'I once waited for two hours downstairs to ask you to give me a part.
You didn't see me and I gave up acting.
'Oh! and now when I offer you a part you refuse it----'
'Things are very different now.... I have had a great welcome back to
London.'
'What do you think of a national theatre?'
'Every nation, every city, ought to have its theatre.'
'Mine is the best theatre in London.'
'You won't do _Volpone_? It is one of the finest comedies ever
written.'
'I never heard of its being done.'
Charles flung his drawings back into his portfolio, seized his hat,
crammed it on to his head, and had reached the door when Sir Henry
called him back.
'What do you say to _The Tempest_?'
'It doesn't need scenery.'
'Oh, come! The ship, the yellow sands. Prospero's cave--pictures all
the way--and the masque.... I want to do _The Tempest_ shortly and I
should be glad of your assistance.'
'I should expect you to buy my drawings and to pay me ten thousand
pounds.'
Sir Henry ignored that. He knew his man by reputation. Ten thousand
pounds meant no more to him than one and sixpence. He merely mentioned
the first figures that came into his head. Sir Henry resumed,--
'I want _The Tempest_ to be my first Autumn production. I place my
theatre at your disposal.... To be quite frank with you, that was why
I offered you that part. The theatre wants something new. The Russian
ballet has upset people. They are expecting something startling....
Poor old Smithson who has painted my scenery for twenty years is
horrified when I suggest anything of the kind.'
'If I do _The Tempest_ for you will you join my committee?'
'Er--I--er--You must give me time to think it over. You know we
managers have to think of each other.'
Charles began to wish he had not come. The suggestion of mysterious
influences behind Sir Henry alarmed him, and at home was the furious
energy in Clara forcing him into the embraces of this huge machine of a
theatre, which discarded his _Volpone_ and required him to do something
for which he had not the smallest inclination. Yet so implicit was his
faith in her, so wonderful had been his life since she came into it,
that he accepted the accuracy of her divination of the futility of his
procedure through artists and literary persons, who would feed upon his
fame and increase it to have more to devour.... He decided then to say
no more about his committee for the present, to accept Sir Henry's
offer, and to escape as quickly as possible from the stifling room,
with its horrible drawings, and its atmosphere in which were blended a
fashionable restaurant and a stockbroker's office. He had not felt so
uncomfortable since he had been a schoolboy in the presence of his head
master, and yet he enjoyed a European reputation, while outside the
Anglo-Saxon world Sir Henry was hardly known.
The great actor condescendingly escorted the great artist down the
heavily carpeted stairs to a private door which led to the dress
circle. The theatre was in darkness. The seats were covered up in
their white sheets, and Sir Henry looked round him and sighed,--
'Ah! cold, cold, a theatre soon grows cold. But it possesses you. Art
is very like a woman. She only yields up her treasure to the purest
passion.'
'Art has nothing to do with women,' Charles rapped out, and, as Sir
Henry had only been making a phrase, he was not offended. Charles
shook the large fat hand which was held out to him, and plunged into
the street.... Ah! It was good to be in the air again, to gaze up at
the sky, to see the passers-by moving about their business. There was
a stillness about the theatre which made him think of Sir Henry in his
room as rather like a large pale fish swimming about in a tank in a
dark aquarium.... After his years of freedom in delightful countries,
where people were in no hurry and were able most charmingly to do
nothing in particular for weeks on end, the captivity of so eminent and
powerful a person appalled and crushed him.... He had not encountered
anything like it in his previous sojourn in London, and he was again
possessed with the bewildered rage that had seized him when he saw the
rebuilt station on his arrival. He had been out of it all for so long,
yet he was of it, and he shuddered away from the increased captivity of
London, yet longed to have been part of it.... It was almost
bewilderingly a new city. During his absence, the immense change from
horse to petrol-driven vehicles had taken place and a new style of
architecture had been introduced. The air was cleaner: so were the
streets. Shop windows were larger. There was everywhere more display,
more colour, more and swifter movement, and yet in the theatre was that
deadly stillness.
He turned into a magnificent shop, where all the flowers looked rather
like little girls dressed up for a party, and ordered some roses to be
sent to Clara, for whom he had begun to feel a rudimentary
responsibility. It comforted him to do that. Somehow it broke the
stillness which had infected him, and most profoundly shocked him, so
different was it from the theatre in which he had been born and bred,
the rather fatuous, very sentimental theatre which was inhabited by
simple kind-hearted vagabonds, isolated from the world of morals and
religion, yet passionately proud of their calling, and setting it above
both morals and religion. But this theatre, magnificent in this new
magnificent London, was empty and still. So much of the theatre that
had been dear to him was gone, and he mourned for it, lamented, too,
over his own folly, for he was suddenly brought face to face with the
fact that the theatre he proposed so light-heartedly to overthrow, the
theatre of the actor, had disappeared. In attacking it he was beating
the air. He had to deal with a new enemy.
As he was emerging from St James's Park into Victoria Street a woman
accosted him. He looked at her, did not recognise her, and moved to
pass on, for he was fastidious and took no interest in chance women.
She was a little woman, very alert, and she was rather poorly dressed.
She was young, but already her lips had stiffened into the hardness of
baffled hope and passion and her eyes smouldered with that
extraordinary glow which rouses a pity as cold as ice.
'I saw you were back in the papers,' she said. 'It's a pity you can't
hide yourself.'
Charles stared at her, stared and stared, cast about for some excuse
for pretending not to know her but remained rooted.
'You're not so young as you were,' she went on. 'There's a lot of talk
about you in the papers, but I know you; it's all talk.'
'My good woman,' said he, 'is that all you have to say?'
'It'll keep,' said she, and she turned abruptly and left him, feeling
that all the strength had gone out of his legs, all the feeling from
his bowels, leaving only a nauseating pity which brought up memory upon
memory of horrible emotions, without any physical memory to fix them so
that he was at their mercy. At last physical memories began to emerge,
rather ridiculously, theatrical lodgings, provincial theatres, the
arcades at Birmingham. And a blue straw hat that he had bought for her
long ago; and at last her name. Kitty Messenger, and her mother, a
golden-haired actress with a tongue like a flail in one temper, like
the honey-seeking proboscis of a bee in another.
'I had forgotten,' said Charles to himself. 'I really had forgotten.
Well--money will settle it. I shall have to do _The Tempest_ for that
fish.'
Thinking of the money restored his sense of serenity. Wonderful money
that can swamp so many ills: money that means work done
somewhere--work, the sole solace of human misery. But Charles had no
notion of the relation between work and money, or that in using up
large quantities of it he was diverting to his own uses more than his
fair share of the comfort of humanity. He had so much to give if only
humanity would take--and pay for it. What he had to give was beyond
price, wherefore he had no qualms in setting his price high.... From
_The Tempest_ boundless wealth would flow. He quickly persuaded
himself of that, and by the time he reached his furnished house had
lulled his alarm to sleep and had allayed the disgust and loathing of
the past roused in him by the meeting with Kitty Messenger.... So rosy
had the vision become under the influence of his potential wealth that
he met Clara without a qualm, and forgot even that Sir Henry was like a
fish in an aquarium.
'We got on splendidly,' he said, 'and I am to have the whole theatre
for _The Tempest_ in the Autumn.'
'I told you I was right,' said she.
'Bless you, child,' he cried. 'You always are, always. And now we
will go out and drink champagne--Here's a health unto His Majesty, with
a fal-lal-la.'
He was like a rebellious boy, and Clara disliked that mood in him,
because he was rather rough and cumbrous in his humour, cracked gusty
and rather stupid jokes, ate voraciously, and drank like a carter.
They went to a most elegant restaurant, where their entry created a
stir, and it was whispered from end to end of the room who he was. And
the girl with him? People shrugged.... Clara's eyes were alight, and
she looked from table to table at the sleek, well-groomed men, and the
showy women with their gaudy hair ornaments, bare powdered shoulders,
and beautiful gowns. She looked from face to face searching eagerly
for--she knew not what; power, perhaps, some power which should justify
their costly elegance. This hurt as a lie hurt her, because, as she
gazed from person to person, she could not divine the individuality
beneath the uniform, and she was still young enough to wish to do
so.... Meanwhile, as she gazed, Charles ate and drank lustily, and, it
must be admitted, noisily. There was no suppression of individuality
about Charles. It brimmed over in him. He had gone to that restaurant
to enjoy himself; not because it was a place frequented by successful
persons.... Clara's eyes came back to him. Yes, she preferred her
Charles to every one else, if only--if only he would realise that she
thought of other things besides himself.
From a table near by a very good-looking man came and tapped Charles on
the shoulder.
'There's no mistaking you, old chap,' he said. 'I'm just back from
America. They think a lot of you over there since your conquest of
London.'
'You haven't met my wife,' said Charles, with his mouth full. 'What a
splendid place this is! Chicken, this is Freeland Moore. We were
together in the old days with the Old Man.'
'I was with him when he died,' said Freeland, 'died in harness.
There's no one like him now.'
'Who?' asked Clara, alive at once to even the memory of a great
personality.
'Henry Irving. He was a prince, and kept royalty alive in England. It
seems a long time ago now. Won't you come over and join us for coffee,
when you have finished? I am with Miss Julia Wainwright; she's with us
at the Imperium. Not for long, I'm afraid. It's a wash-out.'
'Ah!' said Charles, remembering Sir Henry's depressed glance round the
theatre, and he saw himself restoring splendour and success to the
Imperium.
After dinner they went over to Mr Moore's table, and Clara, shaking
hands with Miss Wainwright, warmed to the large, generous creature with
her expansive bosom, her drooping figure, her tinted face and hair and
ludicrously long soft eyes. There was room in Miss Wainwright for a
dozen Claras. She looked sentimentally and with amazement spreading in
ripples over her big face at the girl's wedding-ring and said,--
'So pleased to meet you, child. I made Freeland go over and fetch
you.... You're not on the stage, are you?'
'No,' replied Clara, 'but I'm going to be.'
'It is not what it was,' resumed Miss Wainwright, sipping her _creme de
menthe_.' The Wainwrights have always been in the profession, but I'm
sending my boy to a public-school.... You're not English, are you?'
'Oh, yes,' answered Clara, 'but I have always lived abroad in Italy and
Germany and France with my grandfather. My father and mother died in
India, but I was born in London.'
'If you want to get about,' said Miss Wainwright, 'there's nothing like
the profession. I've been in Australia, Ceylon, South Africa, America,
but never Canada.... I'm just back from America with Freeland, and we
took the first thing that came along--_Ivanhoe_. It's a lovely show
but the play's no good.... Why not come and see it? Freeland, go and
telephone Mr Gillies to keep a box for Mrs Mann.'
Freeland obeyed, treading the floor of the restaurant as though it were
a stage.
'I suppose you're not sorry you gave up acting, Charles,' said Miss
Wainwright, with her most expansive affability. She oozed charm, and
surrounded Charles and Clara with it, so that almost for the first time
Clara felt that she really was identified with her great man. Those
who worshipped at the shrine of his greatness always regarded her as an
adjunct and their politeness chilled her, but Miss Wainwright swept
greatness aside and was delightfully concerned only with what she
regarded as a striking and very happy couple.
Charles, who was absorbed in eating an orange, made no reply other than
a grimace.
'I don't know how you did it.... I couldn't. Once a player, always a
player--money or no money, and there's a great deal more money in it
than there used to be.'
Freeland Moore returned, announced that a box had been reserved, and,
telling Miss Wainwright that it was time to go, he helped her on with
her wrap of swan's down and velvet....
'I'll come and call if I may,' said Miss Wainwright, with a billowing
bow, and, with a magnificent setting of all her sails she moved away
from the table, and, taking the wind of approval from her audience, the
other diners, she preened her way out.
'Pouf! Pah! Pah!' said Charles, shaking back his mane. 'Pouf! The
stink of green-paint.'
'I'm sure she's the kindest woman in the world.'
'So are they all,' growled Charles, 'dripping with kindness or burning
with jealousy.... The theatrical woman!--It's a modern indecency.'
'And suppose I became one.'
'You couldn't.'
'But I'm going to.'
'You'd never stand it for a week, my dear. I'd ... I'd ...'
'What would you do?'
'I'd forbid it.'
'Then I should not stay with you.... You know that.'
Charles knew it. He had learned painfully that though she had some
respect for his opinion, she had none for his authority.
He had more coffee, liqueurs, fruit, a cigar, gave the waiter a tip
which sent him running to fetch the noble diner's overcoat, and,
hailing a taxi, they drove the few hundred yards to the Imperium, where
he growled, grunted, muttered, dashed his hands through his hair, and
she sat with her eyes glued on the stage, and her brows puckered as the
dull, illiterate version of Scott's novel, denuded of all dramatic
quality, was paraded before her.... In an interval, Charles asked her
what she thought of it.
'It is death,' she said. 'It is nothing but money.'
'Money,' repeated Charles. 'Money.... Whose money? ...' And he
suddenly felt again that splendid feeling of confidence. With his
_Tempest_ all the money in that place should sustain beauty, and every
ugly thing, every ugly thought should disappear. He touched Clara's
hair, and for the first time, somewhat to his alarm, realised that she
was something more than an amusing and delightful child, and that he
had married her.
He looked down from the box into the stalls, and wondered if behind the
white-shirt fronts and the bare bosoms there were also anxious thoughts
and uneasy emotions, and if everybody had troubles that lurked in the
past and might race ahead of them to meet them in the future.... Then
he laughed at himself. After all, whatever happened, his fame grew,
and he went on being Charles Mann.