Miss Julia Wainwright might be sentimental, and she might be jealous,
but she was shrewd, and she understood intuitively the relationship
between Charles and Clara. At first she refused to believe that they
were married, as Charles was notoriously careless in these matters, but
when she was faced with the fact her warm heart warned her of tragedy
and she took it upon herself to inform Clara of the mysterious
difficulties of married life, especially for two sensitive people.
'Charles wants a stupid woman and you want a stupid man,' she said.
Clara, of course, refused to believe that, and said that with a stupid
woman Charles would just rot away in a studio and grow more and more
unintelligible.
'Never mind, then,' said Miss Wainwright. 'I'll show you round. If
you are meant for the theatre nothing can keep you away from it. The
only thing I can see against you is that you're a lady.'
'Is that against me?' asked Clara, a little astonished.
'Well,' replied Miss Wainwright, 'we're different.'
And indeed Clara discovered very soon that actors and actresses were
different from other people, because they concealed nothing. Their
personalities were entirely on view, and exposed for sale. They
reserved nothing. Such as they were, they were for the theatre and for
no other purpose, but to be moved at a moment's notice from theatre to
theatre, from town to town, from country to country. They were
refreshing in their frank simplicity, compared with which life with
Charles was oppressive in its complexity.
As she surveyed the two, Clara was torn asunder for a time and was
reluctant to take the plunge, and yet she knew that this was the world
to which Charles belonged, this world of violent contrasts, of vivid
light and shadowy darkness, of painted illusion and the throbbing
reality of the audience, of idle days and feverish nights. His mind
was soaked in it, and his soul, all except that obscure part of it that
delighted in flowers and in her own youth, hungered for it, and yet it
seemed she had to force him into it.... If only he had a little more
will, a little more intelligence.
Often she found herself thinking of him as 'poor Charles,' and then she
set her teeth, and shook back her hair, and vowed that no one should
ever think of her as 'poor Clara.' ... Life had been so easy when they
had drifted together from studio to studio, but it threatened to be
mighty difficult now that they had squared up to life and to this huge
London....
_Ivanhoe_ staggered on for six weeks and then collapsed, and an old
successful melodrama was revived to carry the Imperium over the early
summer months. In this production, as a protegee of Miss Wainwright's,
Clara played a small part in which she had ten words to say.... She
was quite inaudible though she seemed to herself to be using every atom
of voice in her slim young body, but always her voice seemed to fill
her own head until it must surely burst.
'Nerves,' said Miss Wainwright. 'You'll get your technique all right,
and then you won't hear yourself speak any more than you do when you
are talking in a room. It's just a question of losing yourself, and
that you learn to do unconsciously.... It'll come all right, dearie.
It'll come all right.'
Clara was determined that it should come all right, though she knew it
would not until she had overcome her loathing of painting her face, and
pencilling her eyes, and dabbing red paint into the corners of them.
So much did she detest this at first that her personality repudiated
this false projection of herself and left her helpless. Over and over
again she said to herself,--
'I shall never be an actress. I shall never be an actress....' But
then again she said, 'I will.'
There was a violence in appearing in the glaring light before so many
people which offended her deeply, and yet she knew that she was wrong
to be offended, because the people had come not to look at her, Clara
Day, but at the false projection of Clara Day which was needed for the
play.... Her objection was moral, and so strong that it made her
really ill, and it was with the greatest difficulty that she could keep
going at all, but not a word did she say to a soul. She fought through
it with clenched teeth, going through agony night after night, smiling
when it was over, going home exhausted, and dreading the coming of the
morrow when it would all have to be borne again....
She used to look at the others and wonder if they had been through the
same thing, but it was plain to her clear eyes that they had nearly all
accepted without a struggle, and had surrendered to the false
projection of themselves which the theatre needed. Stage-fright they
knew, but not this moral struggle in which, determined not to be
beaten, she fought on.
Rehearsals she enjoyed. Then the actors were at their indolent best,
and the half-lit stage was full of a dim, suggestive beauty, which
entirely disappeared by the time the scene-painter, the lime-light man,
and the stage-carpenter had done their work. Often at rehearsal, words
would give her the shock of truth that in performance would just puzzle
her by their banality; voices would seem to come from some remote
recess of life; movements would take on dignity; the players seemed
indeed to move and live in an enchanted world.... And so, off the
stage, they did.
Miss Wainwright and Mr Freeland Moore, who had played together for so
many years, were idyllic lovers, though he had a wife in America, and
she a husband who had gone his ways. To them there were no further
stages of love than those which are shown to the Anglo-American public.
For them there were but Romeo and Juliet at the ball with no contending
houses to plague them. They lived in furnished flats and paid their
way, impervious to every conspiracy of life to bring them down to
earth.... Both adored Clara, both soon accepted her and Charles as
lovers even more perfect than themselves, because younger, and both
were never tired of thinking what kindness they could next do to help
their friends.
And Clara struggled on. Sometimes she could have screamed with rage
against the theatre, and these people whose enchantment had been won by
the sacrifice of the fiery essence of themselves, so that they accepted
meekly insults from the manager, from the stage-manager, from the very
dressing-room staff of the theatre, who could make their lives
uncomfortable. She understood then what it was that had driven Charles
out, and made him so reluctant to return, and why his immense talent,
which should have been expressed in terms of the theatre, was reduced
to making what, after all, were only notes on paper. Convinced that
she could help to bring him back from exile, she struggled on, though
the strain increased as more and more fiercely she had to pit her will
against the powerful machinery of the theatre.
Everybody was kind to her, though many were alarmed by the intent force
with which she set about her work. Very often she had no energy left
for conversation, and would then take refuge in a book, a volume of
Meredith, or Bernard Shaw, Schopenhauer or Browning, who had been the
poet of her first discovery of the world of books. That frightened off
the young men, who were at first greatly taken with her charm. They
were subdued themselves as everybody was, from the business manager
down, but her silence chilled and alarmed them.... Except those she
bought herself, she never saw a book in the theatre.
At first, full of Charles's fierce denunciation of Sir Henry Butcher,
she detested the man, who seemed to her like some monster who absorbed
all the vitality of the rest and used it to inflate his egoism. He
never spoke to her for some weeks, and she avoided meeting him, did not
wish to speak to him, felt, indeed, that she was perhaps using him a
little unfairly in turning his theatre to her own ends, forcing herself
to accept it in order to make things easier for Charles, to whom she
used to go with a most vivid caricature of Sir Henry at rehearsals.
Until he appeared there was a complete languor upon the stage. The
actors and actresses still had upon them the mood of breakfast-in-bed;
some looked as though they were living in the day before yesterday and
had given up all hope of catching up with the rest of the world; some
of the men talked sport; all the women chattered scandal; some read
their letters, others the telegrams by which their correspondence was
conducted. In none was the slightest indication of preparedness for
work, for the thoughts of all were obviously miles away from the
theatre.... Stagehands moved noisily about. They, at least, were
conscious of earning their living. Messages were brought in from the
stage-door. Back cloths were let down: the fire-proof curtain
descended slowly, and remained shutting out the vast and gloomy spaces
of the auditorium, also a melancholy gray-haired lady who was the widow
of the author of the melodrama in rehearsal.
Sir Henry appeared with a bald-headed Frenchman, with a red ribbon in
his button-hole, his secretary, carrying a shorthand notebook, and a
stout, thick-set Jew, who waited obsequiously for the great actor to
take further notice of him. Sir Henry talked volubly and laughed
uproariously. He was very happy and he beamed round the stage at his
company. The ladies said,--
'Good-morning, Sir Henry.'