HE SHORTENS HIS NAME
One day Geraldine needed a doctor. Henry was startled, frightened,
almost shocked. But when the doctor, having seen Geraldine, came into
the study to chat with Geraldine's husband, Henry put on a calm
demeanour, said he had been expecting the doctor's news, said also that
he saw no cause for anxiety or excitement, and generally gave the doctor
to understand that he was in no way disturbed by the work of Nature to
secure a continuance of the British Empire. The conversation shifted to
Henry's self, and soon Henry was engaged in a detailed description of
his symptoms.
'Purely nervous,' remarked the doctor--'purely nervous.'
'You think so?'
'I am sure of it.'
'Then, of course, there is no cure for it. I must put up with it.'
'Pardon me,' said the doctor, 'there is an absolutely certain cure for
nervous dyspepsia--at any rate, in such a case as yours.'
'What is it?'
'Go without breakfast'
'But I don't eat too much, doctor,' Henry said plaintively.
'Yes, you do,' said the doctor. 'We all do.'
'And I'm always hungry at meal-times. If a meal is late it makes me
quite ill.'
'You'll feel somewhat uncomfortable for a few days,' the doctor blandly
continued. 'But in a month you'll be cured.'
'You say that professionally?'
'I guarantee it.'
The doctor shook hands, departed, and then returned. 'And eat rather
less lunch than usual,' said he. 'Mind that.'
Within three days Henry was informing his friends: 'I never have any
breakfast. No, none. Two meals a day.' It was astonishing how frequently
the talk approached the great food topic. He never sought an opportunity
to discuss the various methods and processes of sustaining life, yet,
somehow, he seemed to be always discussing them. Some of his
acquaintances annoyed him excessively--for example, Doxey.
'That won't last long, old chap,' said Doxey, who had called about
finance. 'I've known other men try that. Give me the good old English
breakfast. Nothing like making a good start.'
'Ass!' thought Henry, and determined once again, and more decisively,
that Doxey should pass out of his life.
His preoccupation with this matter had the happy effect of preventing
him from worrying too much about the perils which lay before Geraldine.
Discovering the existence of an Anti-Breakfast League, he joined it, and
in less than a week every newspaper in the land announced that the ranks
of the Anti-Breakfasters had secured a notable recruit in the person of
Mr. Henry Shakspere Knight. It was widely felt that the Anti-Breakfast
Movement had come to stay.
Still, he was profoundly interested in Geraldine, too. And between his
solicitude for her and his scientific curiosity concerning the secret
recesses of himself the flat soon overflowed with medical literature.
The entire world of the theatre woke up suddenly and simultaneously to
the colossal fact of Henry's genius. One day they had never thought of
him; the next they could think of nothing else. Every West End manager,
except two, wrote to him to express pleasure at the prospect of
producing a play by him; the exceptional two telegraphed. Henry,
however, had decided upon his arrangements. He had grasped the important
truth that there was only one John Pilgrim in the world.
He threw the twenty-five chapters of _The Plague-Spot_ into a scheme of
four acts, and began to write a drama without the aid of Mr. Alfred
Doxey. It travelled fast, did the drama; and the author himself was
astonished at the ease with which he put it together out of little
pieces of the novel. The scene of the third act was laid in the
gaming-saloons of Monte Carlo; the scene of the fourth disclosed the
deck of a luxurious private yacht at sea under a full Mediterranean
moon. Such flights of imagination had hitherto been unknown in the
serious drama of London. When Henry, after three months' labour, showed
the play to John Pilgrim, John Pilgrim said:
'This is the play I have waited twenty years for!'
'You think it will do, then?' said Henry.
'It will enable me,' observed John Pilgrim, 'to show the British public
what acting is.'
Henry insisted on an agreement which gave him ten per cent. of the gross
receipts. Soon after the news of the signed contract had reached the
press, Mr. Louis Lewis, the English agent of Lionel Belmont, of the
United States Theatrical Trust, came unostentatiously round to Ashley
Gardens, and obtained the American rights on the same terms.
Then Pilgrim said that he must run through the manuscript with Henry,
and teach him those things about the theatre which he did not know.
Henry arrived at Prince's at eleven o'clock, by appointment; Mr. Pilgrim
came at a quarter to twelve.
'You have the sense _du theatre_, my friend,' said Pilgrim, turning over
the leaves of the manuscript. 'That precious and incommunicable
gift--you have it. But you are too fond of explanations. Now, the public
won't stand explanations. No long speeches. And so whenever I glance
through a play I can tell instantly whether it is an acting play. If I
see a lot of speeches over four lines long, I say, Dull! Useless! Won't
do! For instance, here. That speech of Veronica's while she's at the
piano. Dull! I see it. I feel it. It must go! The last two lines must
go!'
So saying, he obliterated the last two lines with a large and imperial
blue pencil.
'But it's impossible,' Henry protested. 'You've not read them.'
'I don't need to read them,' said John Pilgrim. 'I know they won't do. I
know the public won't have them. It must be give and take--give and take
between the characters. The ball must be kept in the air. Ah! The
theatre!' He paused, and gave Henry a piercing glance. 'Do you know how
I came to be _du theatre_--of the theatre, young man?' he demanded. 'No?
I will tell you. My father was an old fox-hunting squire in the Quorn
country. One of the best English families, the Pilgrims, related to the
Earls of Waverley. Poor, unfortunately. My eldest brother was brought up
to inherit the paternal mortgages. My second brother went into the army.
And they wanted me to go into the Church. I refused. "Well," said my
old father, "damn it, Jack! if you won't go to heaven, you may as well
ride straight to hell. Go on the stage." And I did, sir. I did. Idea for
a book there, isn't there?'
The blue-pencilling of the play proceeded. But whenever John Pilgrim
came to a long speech by Hubert, the part which he destined for himself,
he hesitated to shorten it. 'It's too long! It's too long!' he
whispered. 'I feel it's too long. But, somehow, that seems to me
essential to the action. I must try to carry it off as best I can.'
At the end of the second act Henry suggested an interval for lunch, but
John Pilgrim, opening Act III. accidentally, and pouncing on a line with
his blue pencil, exclaimed with profound interest:
'Ah! I remember noting this when I read it. You've got Hubert saying
here: "I know I'm a silly fool." Now, I don't think that's quite in the
part. You must understand that when I study a character I become that
character. Perhaps it would not be too much to say that I know more
about that character than the author does. I merge myself into the
character with an intense effort. Now, I can't see Hubert saying "I
know I'm a silly fool." Of course I've no objection whatever to the
words, but it seemed to me--you understand what I mean? Shall we strike
that out?'
A little farther on Henry had given Veronica a little epigram: 'When a
man has to stand on his dignity, you may be sure his moral stature is
very small.'
'That's more like the sort of thing that Hubert would say,' John Pilgrim
whispered. 'Women never say those things. It's not true to nature. But
it seems to fit in exactly with the character of Hubert. Shall
we--transfer----?' His pencil waved in the air....
'Heavenly powers!' Mr. Pilgrim hoarsely murmured, as they attained the
curtain of Act III., 'it's four o'clock. And I had an appointment for
lunch at two. But I never think of food when I am working. Never!'
Henry, however, had not broken his fast since the previous evening.
The third and the greatest crisis in the unparalleled popularity of
Henry Shakspere Knight began to prepare itself. The rumour of its
coming was heard afar off, and every literary genius in England and
America who was earning less than ten thousand pounds a year ground his
teeth and clenched his hands in impotent wrath. The boom and resounding
of _The Plague-Spot_ would have been deafening and immense in any case;
but Henry had an idea, and executed it, which multiplied the
advertisement tenfold. It was one of those ideas, at once quite simple
and utterly original, which only occur to the favourites of the gods.
The serial publication of _The Plague-Spot_ finished in June, and it had
been settled that the book should be issued simultaneously in England
and America in August. Now, that summer John Pilgrim was illuminating
the provinces, and he had fixed a definite date, namely, the tenth of
October, for the reopening of Prince's Theatre with the dramatic version
of _The Plague-Spot_. Henry's idea was merely to postpone publication of
the book until the production of the play. Mark Snyder admitted himself
struck by the beauty of this scheme, and he made a special journey to
America in connection with it, a journey which cost over a hundred
pounds. The result was an arrangement under which the book was to be
issued in London and New York, and the play to be produced by John
Pilgrim at Prince's Theatre, London, and by Lionel Belmont at the
Madison Square Theatre, New York, simultaneously on one golden date.
The splendour of the conception appealed to all that was fundamental in
the Anglo-Saxon race.
John Pilgrim was a finished master of advertisement, but if any man in
the wide world could give him lessons in the craft, that man was Lionel
Belmont. Macalistairs, too, in their stately, royal way, knew how to
impress facts upon, the public.
Add to these things that Geraldine bore twins, boys.
No earthly power could have kept those twins out of the papers, and
accordingly they had their share in the prodigious, unsurpassed and
unforgettable publicity which their father enjoyed without any apparent
direct effort of his own.
He had declined to be interviewed; but one day, late in September, his
good-nature forced him to yield to the pressure of a journalist. That
journalist was Alfred Doxey, who had married on the success of _Love in
Babylon_, and was already in financial difficulties. He said he could
get twenty-five pounds for an interview with Henry, and Henry gave him
the interview. The interview accomplished, he asked Henry whether he
cared to acquire for cash his, Doxey's, share of the amateur rights of
_Love in Babylon_. Doxey demanded fifty pounds, and Henry amiably wrote
out the cheque on the spot and received Doxey's lavish gratitude. _Love
in Babylon_ is played on the average a hundred and fifty times a year by
the amateur dramatic societies of Great Britain and Ireland, and for
each performance Henry touches a guinea. The piece had run for two
hundred nights at Prince's, so that the authors got a hundred pounds
each from John Pilgrim.
On the morning of the tenth of October Henry strolled incognito round
London. Every bookseller's shop displayed piles upon piles of _The
Plague-Spot_. Every newspaper had a long review of it. The _Whitehall
Gazette_ was satirical as usual, but most people felt that it was the
_Whitehall Gazette_, and not Henry, that thereby looked ridiculous.
Nearly every other omnibus carried the legend of _The Plague-Spot_;
every hoarding had it. At noon Henry passed by Prince's Theatre. Two
small crowds had already taken up positions in front of the entrances to
the pit and the gallery; and several women, seated on campstools, were
diligently reading the book in order the better to appreciate the play.
Twelve hours later John Pilgrim was thanking his kind patrons for a
success unique even in his rich and gorgeous annals. He stated that he
should cable the verdict of London to the Madison Square Theatre, New
York, where the representation of the noble work of art which he had had
the honour of interpreting to them was about to begin.
'It was a lucky day for you when you met me, young man,' he whispered
grandiosely and mysteriously, yet genially, to Henry.
On the facade of Prince's there still blazed the fiery sign, which an
excited electrician had forgotten to extinguish:
THE PLAGUE-SPOT.
SHAKSPERE KNIGHT.