I
What play do they play? Some confounded play or other.
Let's send for some cards. I ne'er saw a play had anything in't.
_A True Widow._
Roger Naldrett, the writer, sat in his box with a friend, watching the
second act of his tragedy. The first act had been received coldly; the
cast was nervous, and the house, critical as a first-night audience
always is, had begun to fidget. He watched his failure without much
emotion. He had lived through his excitement in the days before the
production; but the moment interested him, it was so unreal. The play
was not like the play which he had watched so often in rehearsal.
Unless some speech jarred upon him, as failing to help the action, he
found that he could not judge of it in detail. In the manuscript, and
in the rehearsals, he had tested it only in detail. Now he saw it as a
whole, as something new, as a rough and strong idea, of which he could
make nothing. Shut up there in the box, away from the emotions of the
house, he felt himself removed from time, the only person in the
theatre under no compulsion to attend. He sat far back in the box, so
that his friend, John O'Neill, might have a better view of the stage.
He was conscious of the blackness of John's head against the stage
lights, and of a gleam of gilt on the opposite boxes. Sometimes when,
at irregular intervals, he saw some of the cast, on the far left of the
stage, he felt disgust at the crudity of the grease paint smeared on
their faces.
Sometimes an actor hesitated for his lines, forgot a few words, or
improvised others. He drew in his breath sharply, whenever this
happened, it was like a false note in music; but he knew that he was
the only person there who felt the discord. He found himself admiring
the address of these actors; they had nerve; they carried on the play,
though their memories were a whirl of old tags all jumbled together.
It was when there was a pause in the action, through delay at an
entrance, that the harrow drove over his soul; for in the silence, at
the end of it, when those who wanted to cough had coughed, there
sometimes came a single half-hearted clap, more damning than a hiss.
At those times he longed to be on the stage crying out to the actors
how much he admired them. He was shut up in his box, under cover, but
they were facing the music. They were playing to a cold wall of
shirt-fronts, not yet hostile, but puzzled by the new mind, and vexed
by it. They might rouse pointed indifference in the shirt-fronts, they
might rouse fury, they would certainly win no praise. Roger felt pity
for them. He wished that the end would come swiftly, that he might be
decently damned and allowed to go.
Towards the middle of the act the leading lady made a pitiful brave
effort to save the play. She played with her whole strength, in a way
which made his spirit rise up to bless her. Her effort kept the house
for a moment. That dim array of heads and shirt-fronts became polite,
attentive; a little glimmer of a thrill began to pass from the stalls
over the house, as the communicable magic grew stronger. Then the
second lady, who, as Roger knew, had been feverish at the dress
rehearsal, struggled for a moment with a sore throat which made the
performance torture to her. Roger heard her voice break, knowing very
well what it meant. He longed to cry out to comfort her; though the
only words which came to his heart were: "You poor little devil." Then
a man in the gallery shouted to her to "Speak up, please." Half a
dozen others took up the cry. They wreaked on the poor woman's
misfortune all the venom which they felt against the play. Craning far
forward, the author saw the second lady bite her lip with chagrin; but
she spoke up like a heroine. After that the spell lost hold. The act
dragged on, people coughed and fidgeted; the play seemed to grow in
absurd unreality, till Roger wondered why there was no hissing. The
actors, who had been hitherto too slow, began to hurry. They rushed
through an instant of dramatic interest, which, with a good audience,
would have gone solemnly. The climax came with a rush, the act ended,
the last speech was spoken. Then, for five, ten, fifteen, twenty
fearful seconds the curtain hesitated. The absurd actors stood
absurdly waiting for the heavy red cloth to cloak them from the house.
Something had jammed, or the flyman had missed his cue. When the
curtain fell half the house was sniggering. The half-dozen derisive
claps which followed were intended for the flyman.
The author's box happened to be the royal box, with a sitting-room
beyond it, furnished principally with chairs and ash-trays. When the
lights brightened, Roger walked swiftly into the sitting-room and
lighted a cigarette. John O'Neill came stumbling after him.
"It's very good. It's very good," he said with vehemence. "It's all I
thought it when you read it. The audience don't know what to make of
it. They're puzzled by the new mind. It's the finest thing that's
been done here since poor Wentworth's thing." He paused for a second,
then looked at Roger with a hard, shrewd, medical look. "I don't quite
like the look of your leading lady. She's going to break down."
"They'll never stand the third act," said Roger. "There'll be a row in
the third act."
At this moment the door opened. Falempin, the manager of the theatre,
a gross and cheerful gentleman, with the relics of a boisterous vinous
beauty in his face, entered with a mock bow.
"Naldrett," he said, with a strong French accent, "you are all right.
Your play is very fine. Very interesting. I go to lose four thousan'
poun' over your play. Eh? Very good. What so? Som' day I go to make
forty thousan' poun' out of your play. Eh? It is all in a day's work.
The peegs" (he meant his patrons, the audience) "will not stan' your
third act. It is too--it is too--" He shook his head over the third
act. "Miss Hanlon, pretty little Miss Hanlon, she go into hysterics."
"Could I go round to speak to her?" Roger asked.
"No good," said Falempin. "She cannot see any one. She will not
interrupt her illusion."
"What happened to the curtain?" O'Neill asked.
"Ah, the curtain. It was absurd. I go to see about the curtain. We
meet at Philippi. Eh? There will be a row. But you are all right,
Naldrett. You know John O'Neill. Eh? Mr. O'Neill he tell you you are
all right." He bowed with a flourish of gloved hands, and vanished
through the stage door.
"John," said Roger, "the play's killed. I don't mind about the play;
but I want to know what it is that they hate."
"They hate the new mind," said Roger. "They've been accustomed to
folly, persiflage, that abortion the masculine hero, and justifications
of their vices. They like caricatures of themselves. They like
photographs. They like illuminated texts. They decorate their minds
just as they do their homes. You come to them out of the desert, all
locusts and wild honey, crying out about beauty. These people won't
stand it. They are the people in Frith's Derby Day. Worse. They
think they aren't."
"I'm sorry about Falempin," said Roger. "He's a good fellow. I shall
lose him a lot of money."
"Falempin's a Frenchman. He would rather produce a work of art than
pass his days, as he calls it, selling 'wash for the peegs.' What is
four thousand to a theatre manager? A quarter's rent. And what is a
quarter's rent to anybody?"
"Well," said Roger, "it's a good deal to me. Let's go round the house
and hear what they say."
They thrust their cigarettes into ash-trays, and passed through the
stalls to the foyer. The foyer of the King's was large. The
decorations of mirrors, gilt, marble, and red velvet, gave it that look
of the hotel which art's temples seldom lack in this country. It is a
concession to the taste of the patrons; you see it in theatres and in
picture galleries, wherever vulgarity has her looking-glasses. There
were many people gathered there. Half a dozen minor critics stood
together comparing notes, deciding, as outsiders think, what it would
be safe to say. Roger noticed among them a short, burly, shaggy-haired
man, who wore a turned-down collar. He did not know the man; but he
knew at once, from his appearance, that he was a critic, and a person
of no distinction. He was about to look elsewhere, when he saw, with a
flush of anger, that the little burly man had paused in his speech,
with his cigarette dropped from his mouth, to watch them narrowly, in
the covert manner of the ill-bred and malignant. Roger saw him give a
faint nudge with his elbow to the man nearest to him. The man turned
to look; three of the others turned to look; the little man's lips
moved in a muttered explanation. The group stared. Roger, who
resented their impertinence, stared back so pointedly that their eyes
fell. O'Neill's hands twitched. Roger became conscious that this was
one of O'Neill's feuds. They walked together past the group, with
indifferent faces. As they passed, the little man, still staring,
remarked, "One of that school." They heard his feet move round so that
he might stare after them. O'Neill turned to Roger.
"Do you know who that is?"
"No."
"That's O'Donnell, of _The Box Office_. He's the man who did for poor
Wentworth's thing. I called him out in Paris. He wouldn't come."
"Really, John?"
"Oh, you're too young; you don't remember. He wrote everywhere. He
wrote a vile tract called _Drama and Decency_. He nearly got Wentworth
prosecuted."
"I've heard of that! So O'Donnell wrote that?"
"He did."
"Who are the others?"
"Obscure dailies and illustrateds."
A little grey man, with nervous eyes, came up to Roger, claiming
acquaintance on the strength of one previous meeting. He began to talk
to Roger with the easy patronage of one who, though impotent in art
himself, and without a divine idea in him, has the taste of his
society, its gossip, its critical cant, and an acquaintance with some
of its minor bards.
"You mustn't be discouraged," he said, with implied intellectual
superiority; "I hear you have quite a little following. How do you
like the acting? I don't like Miss Hanlon's acting myself. Did you
choose her?" As he spoke his eyes wandered over O'Neill, who stood
apart, with his back half turned to them. It was evident that he knew
O'Neill by sight, and wished to be introduced to him. Roger remembered
how this man had called O'Neill a charlatan. An insult rose to his
lips. Who was this fumbling little City man, with his Surrey villa and
collection of Meryon etchings, to patronise, and condemn, and to bid
him not to be discouraged?
"Yes," he said coldly. "I wrote the play for her. She's the only
tragic actress you've had here since Miss Cushman."
The little City man smiled, apparently by elongating his eyes. He laid
up, for a future dinner table, a condemnation of this young dramatist,
as too "opinionated," too "crude."
"Yes?" he answered. "By the way--my daughter is here; she wants so
much to talk to you about the play. Will you come?"
Roger had met this daughter once before. He saw her now, an anæmic
girl, in a Liberty dress, standing with her nose in the air, amid a mob
of first-nighters. She, too, wished to patronise him and to criticise
the oracle. The superiority of a girl of nineteen was more than he
could stand.
"Thanks," he said. "Afterwards, perhaps. I must be off now with my
friend."
He gave a hurried nod, caught O'Neill's arm, and fled. Two men
collided in his path and exchanged criticism with each other.
"Hullo, old man," said one; "what do you think of it?"
"I call it a German farce."
"Yes; rather colourless. It opened well."
Further on, a tall, pale, fat woman, with a flagging jowl, talked
loudly to two lesser women.
"I call it simply disgusting. I wonder such a piece should be allowed."
"I wouldn't mind its being disgusting so much," said one of her
friends; "but what I can't stand is that it is so uninteresting.
There's no meaning. It doesn't mean anything. It has no criticism of
life."
"They say he's killing himself with chloral," said the third woman.
At the entrance to the smoke-room, they were stopped by the crowd. A
lady with fine eyes fanned herself vigorously on the arm of her escort.
"It's very interestin'," she said; "but, of course, it isn't a play."
"No. It's not a play," said her friend. After a pause, he defined his
critical position. "Y'know, I don't believe in all this talk about
Ibsen and that. I like a play to be a play."
The smoke-room was full of men with cigarettes. Nearly all had a look
of the theatre about them, something clean-shaven, something in the
eye, in the fatness of the lower jaw, and in the general exaggeration
of the bearing. Something loud and unreal. The pretty girls at the
bar were busy, expending the same smile, and the same charm of manner,
on each customer, and dismissing him, when served, with an indifference
which was like erasure. The friends lighted fresh cigarettes and
shared a bottle of Perrier water. The pretty, weary-faced waitress
looked at Roger intently, with interested sympathy. She had seen the
dress-rehearsal, she was one of his admirers.
Matches scratched and spluttered; soda-water bubbled into spirits; the
cork extractors squeaked and thumped, with a noise of fizzing. A pale,
white-haired man, with an amber cigarette-holder nine inches long,
evidently his only claim to distinction, held a glass at an angle,
dispensing criticism.
"It's all damned tommy-rot," he said. "All this tosh these young
fellers write. It's what I call German measles. Now we've got a
drama. You may say what you like about these Scandinavian people, and
Hauptmann, and what's the name of the French feller, who wrote the book
about wasps? They're all. You know what I mean. Every one of them.
Like the pre-Raphaelites were; but put them beside our English
dramatists; where are they?"
Some one with an Irish voice maintained in a lull, rather brilliantly,
that Shakespeare had no intellect, but that Coriolanus showed a genuine
feeling for the stage.
A friend without definite contradiction offered, in amendment, that:
"None of the Elizabethans were any good at all; Coriolanus was a Latin
exercise. English drama dated from 1893."
A third put in a word for Romeo and Juliet. "Of course, in all his
serious work, Shakespeare is a most irritating writer. But in Romeo
and Juliet he is less irritating than usual. I like the Tomb scene."
The Irish voice replied that the English had the ballad instinct, and
liked those stories which would be tolerable in a ballad; but that
intellectual eminence was shown by form, not by an emotional condition.
This led to the obvious English retort that form was nothing, as long
as the thought was all right; and that anyway our construction was
better than the French. The talk closed in on the discussion, shutting
it out with babble; nothing more was heard.
The two friends, sipping Perrier water, were sensible of hostility in
the house, without hearing definite charges. An electric bell whirred
overhead. Glasses were hurriedly put down; cigarettes were dropped
into the pots of evergreens. The tide set back towards the stalls. As
they paused to let a lady precede them down a gangway, they heard her
pass judgment to a friend.
"Of course, it may be very clever; but what I mean is that it's not
amusing. It's not like a play."
A clear feminine voice dropped a final shot in a hush. "Oh, I think
it's tremendously second-rate; like all his books. I think he must be
a most intolerable young man. I know some friends of his."
Wondering which friends they were, Roger Naldrett took his seat in his
box an instant before the curtain rose.
Four minutes later, when the house found that the cap fitted, a line
was hissed loudly. It passed, the actors rallied, Miss Hanlon's acting
gathered intensity. As the emotional crisis of the act approached, she
seemed to be taking hold of the audience. The beauty of the play even
moved the author a little. Then, at her finest moment, in a pause, the
prelude to her great appeal, a coarse female voice, without natural
beauty, and impeded rather than helped, artificially, by a segment of
apple newly-bitten, called ironically, "Ow, chyce me," from somewhere
far above. The temper of the house as a whole was probably against the
voice; but collective attention is fickle. There was a second of
hesitation, during which, though the play went on, the audience
wondered whether they should laugh, following the titterers, or say
"Sh" vigorously in opposition to them. A big man in the stalls decided
them, by letting his mirth, decently checked during the instant,
explode, much as an expanded bladder will explode when smitten with a
blunt instrument.
"Ow, Charlie!" cried the voice again. Everybody laughed. The big man,
confirmed in what had at first alarmed him, roared like a bull. When
the laughter ended, the play was lost. No acting in the world could
have saved it.
For a moment it went on; but the wits had been encouraged by their
success. A few mild young men, greatly daring, bashfully addressed
questions to the stage in self-conscious voices. Whistles sounded
suddenly in shrill bursts. Somebody hissed in the stalls. A line
reflecting on England's foreign policy, or seeming to do so, for there
is nothing topical in good literature, raised shouts of "Yah," and
"Pro-Boer," phrases still shouted at advanced thinkers in moments of
popular pride. At the most poignant moment of the tragedy the gallery
shouted "Boo" in sheer anger. The stalls, excited by the noise, looked
round, and up, smiling. Songsters began one of the vile songs of the
music-halls, debased in its words, its rhythms, and its tune. Their
feet beat time to it. The booing made a monotony as of tom-toms;
whistles and cat-calls sounded, like wild-birds flying across the
darkness. People got up blunderingly to leave the theatre, treading on
other people's toes, stumbling over their knees, with oaths in their
hearts, and apologies on their lips. The play had come to an end. The
cast waited for the noise to cease. Miss Hanlon, the sword at her
throat, stood self-possessed, ready with her line and gesture, only
waiting for quiet. Two of the actors talked to each other, looking
straight across the stage at the dim mob before them. Roger could see
their lips move. He imagined the cynical slangy talk passing between
them. He recognised Miss Hanlon's sister standing in one of the boxes
on the other side.
The noise grew louder. John O'Neill, leaving his seat, came over to
him and shouted in his ear. "You're having a fine row," he shouted.
Roger nodded back to John in the darkness. "Yes, yes," he said. He
was wondering why he didn't care more deeply at this wreck of his work.
He did not care. The yelling mob disgusted him; but not more than any
other yelling mob. He wished that it had but one face, so that he
might spit in it, and smite it, to avenge brave Miss Hanlon, the genius
cried down by the rabble, who still waited, with the sobs choking her.
Otherwise, he did not care two straws. He believed in his work.
Beauty was worth following whatever the dull ass thought. He sat on
the edge of the box, and stared down at his enemies, "the peegs." A
rowdy in the stalls, drawing a bow at a venture, shouted "Author." At
that instant the curtain came down, and the lights went up. "Author,"
the house shouted. "Yah. Author. Boo." Women paused in the putting
on of their opera-cloaks to level glasses at him. He saw a dozen such.
He saw the men staring. He heard one man, one solitary friend, who
strove to clap, abruptly told to "chuck it." "Author," came the shout.
"Yah. Boo. Author. Gow 'owm."
He stood up to look at his enemies. One man, a critic, was clapping
him, an act of courage in such a house. The rest were enjoying the
row, or helping it, or hurriedly leaving with timid women. Those who
jeered, jeered mostly at John O'Neill, who looked liker an author than
his friend (i.e. his hair was longer).
"This is nearly martyrdom," said John. "Your work must be better than
I thought."
Roger laughed. The people, seeing the laughter, yelled in frenzy.
Falempin came from behind the curtain. He looked at the house
indifferently, stroking his white beard, as though debating over a
supper menu. He glanced absently at his watch, and tapped in a bored
manner with his foot. He was trying to decide whether he should insult
the "peegs," and gloriously end his career as a theatre manager. Fear
lest they should misunderstand his insult, and perhaps take it as a
compliment, restrained him in the end, even more than the thought of
what his wife would say. He waited for a lull in the uproar to remark
coolly that the play would not go on. After a pause, he told the
orchestra to play "God save the King" with excessive fervour, for a
long time; which they did, grinning. A few policemen in the pit and
gallery directed the religious spirit, thus roused, into peaceful
works. The hooters began to pass out of the theatre, laughing and
yelling; three or four young men, linking arms, stood across an exit,
barring the passage to women. One of them, being struck in the face,
showed fight, and was violently flung forth. The others, aiding their
leader, fought all down the stairs from the gallery, hindered by the
escaping crowd. They suffered in the passage. One of them, with his
collar torn off, scuffled on the sidewalk, crying out that he wanted
his "'at." He wasn't going without his "'at."
Meanwhile, in the pit, a dozen stalwarts stood by the stalls barrier,
waiting to boo the author as he left his box. The stalls were fast
emptying. Two attendants, still carrying programmes, halted under
Roger's box to say that it was a "shyme." Roger, at the moment, was
writing hurriedly on a programme a rough draft of a note of thanks,
praise, and sympathy to Miss Hanlon. It was only when he came to use
his faculties that he found them scattered by the agitations of the
night. The words which rose up in his mind were like words used in
dreams; they seemed to be meaningless. He botched together a crudity
after a long beating of his brains; but the result, when written out on
a sheet of notepaper, found in the ante-room, was feeble enough.
He twisted the paper swiftly into a tricorne. "Come along, John," he
said. "We'll go through the stage; I must leave this for Miss Hanlon."
They passed through the ante-room into a chamber heaped with
properties, and thence, by a swift turn, on to the stage, where a few
hands were shifting the scenery and talking of the row. On the
draughty, zig-zag, concrete stairs, leading to the dressing-rooms, the
stage-manager stood talking to a minor actor under a wavering gas-jet
enclosed by a wire mesh.
"Quite a little trouble, sir," he said to Naldrett. "Too bad."
"They didn't seem to like it, did they? Which is Miss Hanlon's room?"
"In number three, sir; but there's her dresser, if you've a note for
her, sir. There's some ladies with her."
Outside the stage door, in the alley leading to the street, several
idlers waited idly for an opportunity for outrage. In the street
itself a crowd had gathered at the theatre entrance. A mob of vacant
faces stood under the light, staring at the doors. They stared without
noise and without intelligence, under the spell of that mesmerism which
binds common intellects so easily. Policemen moved through the mob,
moving little parts of it, more by example than by precept. The
starers moved because others moved. In the road was a glare of cab
lights. Light gleamed on harness, on the satin of cloaks, on the hats
of footmen.
"When did the age of polish begin?" said Roger.
"When the age of gilt ended," said John. "It's a base age; you can't
even be a decent corpse without polish on your coffin. Here we are at
the Masquers; shall we sup here, or at the Petits Soupers?"