lodging-house near the British Museum, a mean, uncomfortable place,
where I had to be indoors by midnight. During the day I read in the
Museum; the atmosphere weighed upon me, and gave me a headache every
day; the same atmosphere weighed upon me in the streets around the
Museum; I was dull, depressed, anxious to get through with the task for
which I had come to London, anxious to get back again to the country. I
went back with a little book-learning, of the kind that I wanted to
acquire; I began to have books sent down to me from a Library in London;
I worked, more and more diligently, at reading and studying books; and
I began to think of devoting myself entirely to some sort of literary
work. It was not that I had anything to say, or that I felt the need of
expressing myself. I wanted to write books for the sake of writing
books; it was food for my ambition, and it gave me something to do when
I was alone, apart from other people. It helped to raise another barrier
between me and other people.
I went up to London again for a longer visit, and I stayed in a
lodging-house in one of the streets leading from the Strand to the
Embankment, near the stage-door of one of the theatres. A little actress
and her mother were staying in the house, and I felt that I was getting
an intimate acquaintance with the stage, as I sat up with the little
actress, after her mother had gone to bed, and listened timidly to her
stories of parts and dresses and the other girls. She was quite young,
and still ingenuous enough to look forward to the day when she would
have her name on the placards in letters I forget how many inches high.
I had been to my first theatre, it was Irving in 'King Lear,' and now I
was hearing about the stage from one who lived on it. A little actress,
afterwards famous for her beauty, and then a child with masses of gold
hair about her ears, lived next door, at another lodging-house, which
her mother kept. I watched for her to pass the window, or for a chance
of meeting her in the street. When I went back again to the country, it
was with a fixed resolve to come and live in London, where, it seemed, I
could, if I liked, be something more than a spectator of the great,
amusing crowd. The intoxication of London had got hold of me; I felt at
home in it, and I felt that I had never yet found anywhere to be at home
in.
I lived in London for five years, and I do not think there was a day
during those five years in which I did not find a conscious delight in
the mere fact of being in London. When I found myself alone, and in the
midst of a crowd, I began to be astonishingly happy. I needed so little
at the beginning of that time. I have never been able to stay long under
a roof without restlessness, and I used to go out into the streets,
many times a day, for the pleasure of finding myself in the open air and
in the streets. I had never cared greatly for the open air in the
country, the real open air, because everything in the country, except
the sea, bored me; but here, in the 'motley' Strand, among these
hurrying people, under the smoky sky, I could walk and yet watch. If
there ever was a religion of the eyes, I have devoutly practised that
religion. I noted every face that passed me on the pavement; I looked
into the omnibuses, the cabs, always with the same eager hope of seeing
some beautiful or interesting person, some gracious movement, a delicate
expression, which would be gone if I did not catch it as it went. This
search without an aim grew to be almost a torture to me; my eyes ached
with the effort, but I could not control them. At every moment, I knew,
some spectacle awaited them; I grasped at all these sights with the same
futile energy as a dog that I once saw standing in an Irish stream, and
snapping at the bubbles that ran continually past him on the water.
Life ran past me continually, and I tried to make all its bubbles my
own.
ESTHER KAHN.
Esther Kahn was born in one of those dark, evil-smelling streets with
strange corners which lie about the Docks. It was a quiet street, which
seemed to lead nowhere, but to stand aside, for some not quite honest
purpose of its own. The blinds of some of these houses were always
drawn; shutters were nailed over some of the windows. Few people passed;
there were never many children playing in the road; the women did not
stand talking at their open doors. The doors opened and shut quietly;
dark faces looked out from behind the windows; the Jews who lived there
seemed always to be at work, bending over their tables, sewing and
cutting, or else hurrying in and out with bundles of clothes under their
arms, going and coming from the tailors for whom they worked. The Kahns
all worked at tailoring: Esther's father and mother and grandmother, her
elder brother and her two elder sisters. One did seaming, another
button-holing, another sewed on buttons; and, on the poor pay they got
for that, seven had to live.
As a child Esther had a strange terror of the street in which she lived.
She was never sure whether something dreadful had just happened there,
or whether it was just going to happen. But she was always in suspense.
She was tormented with the fear of knowing what went on behind those
nailed shutters. She made up stories about the houses, but the stories
never satisfied her. She imagined some great, vague gesture; not an
incident, but a gesture; and it hung in the air suspended like a shadow.
The gestures of people always meant more to her than their words; they
seemed to have a secret meaning of their own, which the words never
quite interpreted. She was always unconsciously on the watch for their
meaning.
At night, after supper, the others used to sit around the table, talking
eagerly. Esther would get up and draw her chair into the corner by the
door, and for a time she would watch them, as if she were looking on at
something, something with which she had no concern, but which interested
her for its outline and movement. She saw her father's keen profile, the
great, hooked nose, the black, prominent, shifty eye, the tangled black
hair straggling over the shirt-collar; her mother, large, placid, with
masses of black, straight hair coiled low over her sallow cheeks; the
two sisters, sharp and voluble, never at rest for a moment; the brother,
with his air of insolent assurance, an immense self-satisfaction hooded
under his beautifully curved eyelids; the grandmother, with her bent and
mountainous shoulders, the vivid malice of her eyes, her hundreds of
wrinkles. All these people, who had so many interests in common, who
thought of the same things, cared for the same things, seemed so fond of
one another in an instinctive way, with so much hostility for other
people who were not belonging to them, sat there night after night, in
the same attitudes, always as eager for the events of to-day as they had
been for the events of yesterday. Everything mattered to them
immensely, and especially their part in things; and no one thing seemed
to matter more than any other thing. Esther cared only to look on;
nothing mattered to her; she had no interest in their interests; she was
not sure that she cared for them more than she would care for other
people; they were what she supposed real life was, and that was a thing
in which she had only a disinterested curiosity.
Sometimes, when she had been watching them until they had all seemed to
fade away and form again in a kind of vision more precise than the
reality, she would lose sight of them altogether and sit gazing straight
before her, her eyes wide open, her lips parted. Her hand would make an
unconscious movement, as if she were accompanying some grave words with
an appropriate gesture; and Becky would generally see it, and burst into
a mocking laugh, and ask her whom she was mimicking.
'Don't notice her,' the mother said once; 'she's not a human child,
she's a monkey; she's clutching out after a soul, as they do. They look
like little men, but they know they're not men, and they try to be;
that's why they mimic us.'
Esther was very angry; she said to herself that she would be more
careful in future not to show anything that she was feeling.
At thirteen Esther looked a woman. She was large-boned, with very small
hands and feet, and her body seemed to be generally asleep, in a kind of
brooding lethargy. She had her mother's hair, masses of it, but softer,
with a faint, natural wave in it. Her face was oval, smooth in outline,
with a nose just Jewish enough for the beauty of suave curves and
unemphatic outlines. The lips were thick, red, strung like a bow. The
whole face seemed to await, with an infinite patience, some moulding and
awakening force, which might have its way with it. It wanted nothing,
anticipated nothing; it waited. Only the eyes put life into the mask,
and the eyes were the eyes of the tribe; they had no personal meaning in
what seemed to be their mystery; they were ready to fascinate
innocently, to be intolerably ambiguous without intention; they were
fathomless with mere sleep, the unconscious dream which is in the eyes
of animals.
Esther was neither clever nor stupid; she was inert. She did as little
in the house as she could, but when she had to take her share in the
stitching she stitched more neatly than any of the others, though very
slowly. She hated it, in her languid, smouldering way, partly because it
was work and partly because it made her prick her fingers, and the skin
grew hard and ragged where the point of the needle had scratched it. She
liked her skin to be quite smooth, but all the glycerine she rubbed into
it at night would not take out the mark of the needle. It seemed to her
like the badge of her slavery.
She would rather not have been a Jewess; that, too, was a kind of badge,
marking her out from other people; she wanted to be let alone, to have
her own way without other people's help or hindrance. She had no
definite consciousness of what her own way was to be; she was only
conscious, as yet, of the ways that would certainly not be hers.
She would not think only of making money, like her mother, nor of being
thought clever, like Becky, nor of being admired because she had good
looks and dressed smartly, like Mina. All these things required an
effort, and Esther was lazy. She wanted to be admired, and to have
money, of course, and she did not want people to think her stupid; but
all this was to come to her, she knew, because of some fortunate quality
in herself, as yet undiscovered. Then she would shake off everything
that now clung to her, like a worn-out garment that one keeps only until
one can replace it. She saw herself rolling away in a carriage towards
the west; she would never come back. And it would be like a revenge on
whatever it was that kept her stifling in this mean street; she wanted
to be cruelly revenged.
As it was, her only very keen pleasure was in going to the theatre with
her brother or her sisters; she cared nothing for the music-halls, and
preferred staying at home to going with the others when they went to the
Pavilion or the Foresters. But when there was a melodrama at the
Standard, or at the Elephant and Castle, she would wait and struggle
outside the door and up the narrow, winding stairs, for a place as near
the front of the gallery as she could get. Once inside, she would never
speak, but she would sit staring at the people on the stage as if they
hypnotised her. She never criticised the play, as the others did; the
play did not seem to matter; she lived it without will or choice, merely
because it was there and her eyes were on it.
But after it was over and they were at home again, she would become
suddenly voluble as she discussed the merits of the acting. She had no
hesitations, was certain that she was always in the right, and became
furious if any one contradicted her. She saw each part as a whole, and
she blamed the actors for not being consistent with themselves. She
could not understand how they could make a mistake. It was so simple,
there were no two ways of doing anything. To go wrong was as if you said
no when you meant yes; it must be wilful.
'You ought to do it yourself, Esther,' said her sisters, when they were
tired of her criticisms. They meant to be satirical, but Esther said,
seriously enough: 'Yes, I could do it; but so could that woman if she
would let herself alone. Why did she try to be something else all the
time?'
Time went slowly with Esther; but when she was seventeen she was still
sewing at home and still waiting. Nothing had come to her of all that
she had expected. Two of her cousins, and a neighbour or two, had wanted
to marry her; but she had refused them contemptuously. To her sluggish
instinct men seemed only good for making money, or, perhaps, children;
they had not come to have any definite personal meaning for her. A
little man called Joel, who had talked to her passionately about love,
and had cried when she refused him, seemed to her an unintelligible and
ridiculous kind of animal. When she dreamed of the future, there was
never any one of that sort making fine speeches to her.
But, gradually, her own real purpose in life had become clear. She was
to be an actress. She said nothing about it at home, but she began to
go round to the managers of the small theatres in the neighbourhood,
asking for an engagement. After a long time the manager gave her a small
part. The piece was called 'The Wages of Sin,' and she was to be the
servant who opens the door in the first act to the man who is going to
be the murderer in the second act, and then identifies him in the fourth
act.
Esther went home quietly and said nothing until supper-time. Then she
said to her mother: 'I am going on the stage.'
'That's very likely,' said her mother, with a sarcastic smile; 'and when
do you go on, pray?'
'On Monday night,' said Esther.
'You don't mean it!' said her mother.
'Indeed I mean it,' said Esther, 'and I've got my part. I'm to be the
servant in "The Wages of Sin."'
Her brother laughed. 'I know,' he said, 'she speaks two words twice.'
'You are right,' said Esther; 'will you come on Monday, and hear how I
say them?'
When Esther had made up her mind to do anything, they all knew that she
always did it. Her father talked to her seriously. Her mother said: 'You
are much too lazy, Esther; you will never get on.' They told her that
she was taking the bread out of their mouths, and it was certain she
would never put it back again. 'If I get on,' said Esther, 'I will pay
you back exactly what I would have earned, as long as you keep me. Is
that a bargain? I know I shall get on, and you won't repent of it. You
had better let me do as I want. It will pay.'
They shook their heads, looked at Esther, who sat there with her lips
tight shut, and a queer, hard look in her eyes, which were trying not to
seem exultant; they looked at one another, shook their heads again, and
consented. The old grandmother mumbled something fiercely, but as it
sounded like bad words, and they never knew what Old Testament language
she would use, they did not ask her what she was meaning.
On Monday Esther made her first appearance on the stage. Her mother
said to her afterwards: 'I thought nothing of you, Esther; you were just
like any ordinary servant.' Becky asked her if she had felt nervous. She
shook her head; it had seemed quite natural to her, she said. She did
not tell them that a great wave of triumph had swept over her as she
felt the heat of the gas footlights come up into her eyes, and saw the
floating cluster of white faces rising out of a solid mass of
indistinguishable darkness. In that moment she drew into her nostrils
the breath of life.
Esther had a small part to understudy, and before long she had the
chance of playing it. The manager said nothing to her, but soon
afterwards he told her to understudy a more important part. She never
had the chance to play it, but, when the next piece was put on at the
theatre, she was given a part of her own. She began to make a little
money, and, as she had promised, she paid so much a week to her parents
for keeping her. They gained by the bargain, so they did not ask her to
come back to the stitching. Mrs. Kahn sometimes spoke of her daughter to
the neighbours with a certain languid pride; Esther was making her way.
Esther made her way rapidly. One day the manager of a West End theatre
came down to see her; he engaged her at once to play a small but
difficult part in an ambitious kind of melodrama that he was bringing
out. She did it well, satisfied the manager, was given a better part,
did that well, too, was engaged by another manager, and, in short, began
to be looked upon as a promising actress. The papers praised her with
moderation; some of the younger critics, who admired her type, praised
her more than she deserved. She was making money; she had come to live
in rooms of her own, off the Strand; at twenty-one she had done, in a
measure, what she wanted to do; but she was not satisfied with herself.
She had always known that she could act, but how well could she act?
Would she never be able to act any better than this? She had drifted
into the life of the stage as naturally as if she had never known
anything else; she was at home, comfortable, able to do what many others
could not do. But she wanted to be a great actress.
An old actor, a Jew, Nathan Quellen, who had taken a kind of paternal
interest in her, and who helped her with all the good advice that he had
never taken to himself, was fond of saying that the remedy was in her
own hands.
'My dear Esther,' he would tell her, smoothing his long grey hair down
over his forehead, 'you must take a lover; you must fall in love;
there's no other way. You think you can act, and you have never felt
anything worse than a cut finger. Why, it's an absurdity! Wait till you
know the only thing worth knowing; till then you're in short frocks and
a pinafore.'
He cited examples, he condensed the biographies of the great actresses
for her benefit. He found one lesson in them all, and he was sincere in
his reading of history as he saw it. He talked, argued, protested; the
matter seriously troubled him. He felt he was giving Esther good advice;
he wanted her to be the thing she wanted to be. Esther knew it and
thanked him, without smiling; she sat brooding over his words; she never
argued against them. She believed much of what he said; but was the
remedy, as he said, in her own hands? It did not seem so.
As yet no man had spoken to her blood. She had the sluggish blood of a
really profound animal nature. She saw men calmly, as calmly as when
little Joel had cried because she would not marry him. Joel still came
to see her sometimes, with the same entreaty in his eyes, not daring to
speak it. Other men, very different men, had made love to her in very
different ways. They had seemed to be trying to drive a hard bargain, to
get the better of her in a matter of business; and her native cunning
had kept her easily on the better side of the bargain. She was resolved
to be a business woman in the old trade of the affections; no one should
buy or sell of her except at her own price, and she set the price vastly
high.
Yet Quellen's words set her thinking. Was there, after all, but one way
to study for the stage? All the examples pointed to it, and, what was
worse, she felt it might be true. She saw exactly where her acting
stopped short.
She looked around her with practical eyes, not seeming to herself to be
doing anything unusual or unlikely to succeed in its purpose. She
thought deliberately over all the men she knew; but who was there whom
it would be possible to take seriously? She could think of only one man:
Philip Haygarth.
Philip Haygarth was a man of five-and-thirty, who had been writing plays
and having them acted, with only a moderate success, for nearly ten
years. He was one of the accepted men, a man whose plays were treated
respectfully, and he had the reputation of being much cleverer than his
plays. He was short, dark, neat, very worldly-looking, with thin lips
and reflective, not quite honest eyes. His manner was cold, restrained,
with a mingling of insolence and diffidence. He was a hard worker and a
somewhat deliberately hard liver. He avoided society and preferred to
find his relaxation among people with whom one did not need to keep up
appearances, or talk sentiment, or pay afternoon calls. He admired
Esther Kahn as an actress, though with many reservations; and he admired
her as a woman, more than he had ever admired anybody else. She appealed
to all his tastes; she ended by absorbing almost the whole of those
interests and those hours which he set apart, in his carefully arranged
life, for such matters.
He made love to Esther much more skilfully than any of her other lovers,
and, though she saw through his plans as clearly as he wished her to see
through them, she was grateful to him for a certain finesse in his
manner of approach. He never mentioned the word 'love,' except to jest
at it; he concealed even the extent to which he was really disturbed by
her presence; his words spoke only of friendship and of general topics.
And yet there could never be any doubt as to his meaning; his whole
attitude was a patient waiting. He interested her; frankly, he
interested her: here, then, was the man for her purpose. With his
admirable tact, he spared her the least difficulty in making her
meaning clear. He congratulated himself on a prize; she congratulated
herself on the accomplishment of a duty.
Days and weeks passed, and Esther scrutinised herself with a distinct
sense of disappointment. She had no moral feeling in the matter; she was
her own property, it had always seemed to her, free to dispose of as she
pleased. The business element in her nature persisted. This bargain,
this infinitely important bargain, had been concluded, with open eyes,
with a full sense of responsibility, for a purpose, the purpose for
which she lived. What was the result?
She could see no result. The world had in no sense changed for her, as
she had been supposing it would change; a new excitement had come into
her life, and that was all. She wondered what it was that a woman was
expected to feel under the circumstances, and why she had not felt it.
How different had been her feeling when she walked across the stage for
the first time! That had really been a new life, or the very beginning
of life. But this was no more than a delightful episode, hardly to be
disentangled from the visit to Paris which had accompanied it. She had,
so to speak, fallen into a new habit, which was so agreeable, and seemed
so natural, that she could not understand why she had not fallen into it
before; it was a habit she would certainly persist in, for its own sake.
The world remained just the same.
And her art: she had learned nothing. No new thrill came into the words
she spoke; her eyes, as they looked across the footlights, remembered
nothing, had nothing new to tell.
And so she turned, with all the more interest, an interest almost
impersonal, to Philip Haygarth when he talked to her about acting and
the drama, when he elaborated his theories which, she was aware,
occupied him more than she occupied him. He was one of those creative
critics who can do every man's work but their own. When he sat down to
write his own plays, something dry and hard came into the words, the
life ebbed out of those imaginary people who had been so real to him,
whom he had made so real to others as he talked. He constructed
admirably and was an unerring judge of the construction of plays. And he
had a sense of acting which was like the sense that a fine actor might
have, if he could be himself and also some one looking on at himself. He
not only knew what should be done, but exactly why it should be done.
Little suspecting that he had been chosen for the purpose, though in so
different a manner, he set himself to teach her art to Esther.
He made her go through the great parts with him; she was Juliet, Lady
Macbeth, Cleopatra; he taught her how to speak verse and how to feel the
accent of speech in verse, another kind of speech than prose speech; he
trained her voice to take hold of the harmonies that lie in words
themselves; and she caught them, by ear, as one born to speak many
languages catches a foreign language. She went through Ibsen as she had
gone through Shakespeare; and Haygarth showed her how to take hold of
this very different subject-matter, so definite and so elusive. And
they studied good acting-plays together, worthless plays that gave the
actress opportunities to create something out of nothing. Together they
saw Duse and Sarah Bernhardt; and they had seen Rejane in Paris, in
crudely tragic parts; and they studied the English stage, to find out
why it maintained itself at so stiff a distance from nature. She went on
acting all the time, always acting with more certainty; and at last she
attempted more serious parts, which she learned with Haygarth at her
elbow.