“Indeed, Mr. Tupper,” I said, “you are doing far, far more than I should
ever have thought anybody would do for a perfect stranger. And unless I
could pay the money for the decayed Home, I should not dream of
accepting such a great kindness.”
He was quite touched. He blew his nose.
“We artists,” he said, “are emotional. There is a magic power in us to
find all that is trusting and good and of sweet savour in human nature.
And yet goodness and gratitude and proper feeling in the young always
move me, as you see me moved now. They are so rare.”
He brought out a brown leather purse and took from it half a sovereign.
He then called the waiter and paid the bill.
“We will go down into the smoking-room,” he said. “No doubt a liqueur
will not be amiss.”
I’d forgotten all about the time and, in fact, everything else in the
world during this fearfully exciting meeting with Mr. Martin Tupper; and
the end of it all was that I fished out my first five-pound note for the
introduction to Mr. Barrett and my first step on the stage.
“It should be guineas,” said Mr. Tupper, “but in your case, and because
I have taken a very great personal fancy to you, it shall be pounds. And
don’t grudge the money. Go on your way happy in the knowledge that it
will greatly gladden a life that has a distinctly seamy side. There is a
sad but courageous woman whose eyes will brighten when she sees this
piece of paper.”
But though he idly threw my note into his pocket as a thing of no
account, yet he was a man of the most honourable and sensitive nature.
“I cannot,” he said, “leave you without carrying out my part of the
contract. I gather that you are rather pressed for time, or I would
drive you to the Princess’s Theatre in my private brougham, which is
waiting for me near the Mansion House. No doubt the driver thinks I am
lunching with the Lord Mayor, as I often do. But to take you just now to
the Princess’s Theatre would interfere with your duties at the Apollo
Fire Office, which I should be the last to wish to do; so I will write
you a personal introduction to my dear friend, Mr. Barrett, and you can
deliver it, either to-night or on the next occasion that you go to see
him act.”
“It will be to-night,” I said.
He refused to go until his part was done.
“We must avoid even the appearance of evil,” he told me. “You might feel
uneasy and suspicious were I to leave you with nothing but a promise.
Martin Tupper’s word is as good as his oath, I believe; but it is a
hard, a cold, and a cruel world. At any rate, you shall have the
letter.”
He opened his bag, which contained writing materials, and he had soon
written a note to Mr. Barrett, warmly commending me to the attention of
that great man. He made me read it, and I was surprised how well he had
summed up my character. He next gave me his own address, which was No.
96 Grosvenor Square—one of the most fashionable residential
neighbourhoods in London—and then, hoping that I would dine with him and
Mrs. Tupper two nights later, at 8 o’clock, he shook me warmly by the
hand, wished me good luck, and left me.
I saw his dignified figure steal into the street, and though the general
public did not seem to recognise him in his modest attire, I fancy that
a policeman or two cast understanding glances at him. No doubt they had
seen him before—at royal or other functions.
I seemed to be walking on air when I went back to work, for this great
man, inspired by nothing but pure goodwill, had, as it were, opened the
door of success to me and given me a chance for which thousands and
thousands of young professional actors must have sighed in vain. He was
hardly the man I should have chosen to know; but now that I did know
him, I felt that it must have been a special Providence that had done
it. I wished that I could make it up to him and hoped that he would live
long enough for me to send him free tickets to see me act. Meantime, I
determined to buy all his books, which was the least I could do.
But I was brought down to earth rather rudely from these beautiful
thoughts, for when I got back to the office, Mr. Blades told me that Mr.
Westonshaugh wished to speak to me; and it then transpired that, instead
of taking half an hour for my luncheon, according to the rules and
regulations of the Apollo, I had been out for two hours and rather more!
I was terribly sorry, and felt the right and proper thing was to be
quite plain with Mr. Westonshaugh.
“I met Mr. Martin Tupper at a bookstall, and he introduced himself and
asked me to lunch, sir,” I said. But the Head of the Department did not
like this at all, and I was a good deal distressed to find the spirit in
which he took it. He seemed pained and startled by what I told him; he
even showed a great disinclination to accept my word.
“Go back to your work, sir,” he said, in a very stern voice, “and don’t
add buffoonery to your other irregularities. I am much disappointed in
you, Mr. Corkey.”
It was a fearful thing to hear this great and good man misunderstand me
so completely. In fact, the blood of shame sprang to my forehead—a thing
that had never happened before. And then he made another even more
terrible speech.
“You look to me very much as if you’d been drinking,” he said. “Have a
care, young man; for if there is one thing that will ruin your future
more quickly than another, it is that disgusting offense!”
I sneaked away then, in a state of bewildered grief, sorrowful
repentance, and mournful exasperation. This was by far the unhappiest
event in my life; and things got worse and worse as the day wore on.
Mr. Blades asked me what the deuce I’d been doing, and when I told him,
he said “Rats!” This was a word he used to mean scorn. Then he
continued, and even used French.
“‘Martin Tupper!’ Why don’t you say it was Martin Luther at once? I
believe it’s a case of ‘Sasshay la fam!’”
“Martin Luther died in 1546, so it couldn’t have been him, and I don’t
know what ‘Sasshay la fam’ means,” I said, and Mr. Blades replied in a
most startling manner:
“So’s Martin Tupper dead—sure to be! Ages ago, no doubt. Anyway, I
happen to know that Mr. Westonshaugh thinks the dickens of a lot of him,
so when you said he’d been standing you a lunch, you made the worst joke
you could have.”
“It wasn’t a joke, but quite the reverse,” I said; and then I told Mr.
Blades how I had an introduction to Mr. Wilson Barrett at that moment in
my pocket—to prove the truth of what I was saying.
Mr. Blades read it carefully and shook his head.
“You’re such a jug, Corkey,” he said. “This is neither more nor less
than a common or garden confidence trick. The beggar saw you had a
‘fiver’ at the bookstall and soon found you were a soft thing. Then he
pretended to be friendly and just hammered away till he found the weak
spot. If you’d go and have a sensible lunch, like everybody else,
instead of wandering about London in the helpless way you do, on a bun
and a glass of milk, this wouldn’t have happened.”
“The great point is whether Mr. Tupper is or is not dead,” I told Mr.
Blades. “If he is dead, really and truly, then no doubt I have been
swindled by a shady character; but if he is not, then there is still
hope that it was really him.”
Mr. Blades, with his accustomed great kindness, himself went in to Mr.
Westonshaugh with me and explained the painful situation in some
well-chosen words.
“I shouldn’t have thought of using the name of such a world-renowned
poet, sir,” I said to the Head of the Department; “but he told me so
himself, and he was exceedingly serious-looking and solemn and kind; and
far above clean clothes—which is a common thing with poets. But, of
course, if he’s dead, as Mr. Blades thinks—--”
“He’s not dead,” answered the Chief. “I am glad to say that he is not
dead. It is my privilege to correspond with Mr. Tupper occasionally. I
heard from him on the subject of a difficult passage in one of his poems
only a month ago.”
“Does he live in Grosvenor Square, sir?” I asked; “because this Mr.
Tupper said he did—at No. 96.”
“He does not,” answered Mr. Westonshaugh. “He doesn’t live in London at
all.”
Then Mr. Blades had a brilliant idea.
“Would you know Mr. Tupper’s handwriting, sir?” he asked, and Mr.
Westonshaugh said that he would know it instantly.
He examined the letter of introduction to Mr. Barrett, and pronounced it
to be an unquestionable forgery.
“A great crime has been committed,” he said. “A professional thief has
used the name and signature of Mr. Tupper in order to rob you of five
pounds, and he has succeeded only too well. Let this be a lesson to you,
Mr. Corkey, not again to fall into conversation with the first
well-dressed—or badly dressed—stranger who may accost you. To think that
the insolent scoundrel dared to use that sacred name!”
Mr. Westonshaugh evidently considered it a very much worse thing to
forge Martin Tupper’s name than to steal my five-pound note. And I dare
say it was. He forgave me, however, and withdrew his dreadful hint about
my having had too much to drink.
Then I left him and worked in a very miserable frame of mind until six
o’clock—to make up for my wasted time.
It was my earliest great and complete crusher; and, coming just at this
critical moment, made it simply beastly sad. Because my very first
earnings were completely swallowed up in this nefarious manner by a
shady customer. I had hoped to return home and flourish my five-pound
note in the face of Aunt Augusta and tell her to help herself liberally
out of it; but, instead of that, I had to horrify her with the bad news
that my money was gone for ever. If it had happened later, I believe
that I should have made less and even felt less of it; but such fearful
luck falling on my very first “fiver” made it undoubtedly harder to bear
than it otherwise would have been. And then I got a sort of gloomy idea
that losing my first honest earnings meant a sort of curse on everything
I might make in after life! I felt that a bad start like that might dog
me for years, if not for ever. I had a curious and horrid dread that I
should never really make up this great loss, but always be five pounds
short through the rest of my career to my dying day!
Aunt Augusta tried hard to make light of it. In fact, it is undoubtedly
at times like this that a woman is far more comforting than a man. She
went to her private store and brought out another crisp and clean
five-pound note and made me take it. She insisted, and so reluctantly I
took it; but I didn’t spend it in the least with the joy and ease that I
should have spent the other. It was, in fact, merely a gift—good enough
in its way—but very different from the one I had earned, single-handed,
by hard work, in a humming hive of industry.
The whole thing had its funny side—to other people, and I heard a good
deal about it at the Apollo Fire Office. In fact, I must have done the
real Martin Tupper a good turn in a way, because it was the fashion for
everybody to quote from his improving works when I passed by.
It was a great lesson all round; but London is full of interesting
things of this sort.
V
I was too much hurt about the insult offered Mr. Wilson Barrett and
myself to go and see him act again for a long time; but other theatres
demanded my attention because I was now a regular student of the drama
and didn’t like to miss anything. Sometimes I went alone and sometimes I
got a clerk from the Apollo to go with me. But none of them much cared
about legitimate drama.
I was already deeply in love, in a far-distant and hopeless sort of way,
with Miss Ellen Terry, and when there came a first night at the Lyceum
Theatre, I resolved to be present in the pit. I told Aunt Augusta not to
expect me at dinner-time, but she was well used to this and said she
wouldn’t. So the moment that I was free from my appointed task I flew
off to the Lyceum pit door and took my place. I was, however, by no
means the first to arrive. A crowd had already collected and I found
myself among that hardy and famous race of men and women known as
“first-nighters.” There were even youngish girls in the crowd, for one
stood near me reading the _Merchant of Venice_, which was the play we
had all come to see. Luckily for the girl a gas-lamp hung over her head
and she was thus enabled to read the play and pass the time. Like a fool
I had brought nothing, yet it was enough amusement and instruction for
me to be among so many regular professional “first-nighters”; and I
listened with great interest to their deep knowledge of the subject.
Five or six men of all ages evidently knew one another, and they were
talking about a little book that had just been written on Mr. Henry
Irving by Mr. William Archer. It was a very startling book—the very one,
in fact, that I was going to buy at the bookstall when the shady
customer pretended he was Mr. Martin Tupper. It was a small book with
rather a grim picture of Mr. Henry Irving on the outside, and I found
that these old hands of the stage did not altogether approve of the book
and thought parts of it rather strong coming from Mr. Archer to Mr.
Irving.
“He says that Irving is half a woman,” said a grey man. “Now that’s
going too far, in my opinion.”
“I know what he’s driving at,” answered a young man with a very
intellectual face. “You see, every artist has got to be man, woman, and
child rolled into one. Every great artist has to have the imagination
and power of feeling and fellow-feeling to identify himself with every
other sort of possible person. If you can’t do that, you can’t be a
first-class actor. That’s where Irving beats Barrett into a cocked
hat—temperament and power of imagination. Irving could act anything—from
Richard the Third to an infant in arms; Barrett could not.”
“Barrett very nearly made Hamlet an infant in arms, all the same,” said
the grey man, and at this excellent and subtle joke they all laughed. I
wanted to laugh in an admiring sort of way, but doubted whether it would
not be rather interfering. So I contented myself with smiling heartily;
because I didn’t want them to think so fine a joke had been lost upon
me.
They were very deeply read in everything to do with the theatre, and I
found that they knew most of the actresses by their married names,
which, of course, I did not. Thus, greatly to my surprise, I found out
that nearly all the most fascinating and famous actresses were married.
Many even had families.
Splendid stories were told by the grey man. He related a great jest
about Mr. William Terriss when he was acting with Mr. Irving. It was
irreverent in a way to such a famous actor as Mr. Terriss; but, of
course, for mere intellectual power Mr. Terriss was not in it with Mr.
Irving—any more than any other actor was, though he might, none the
less, be very great in himself. And once, when Mr. Terriss was
rehearsing with Mr. Irving, the latter, failing to make the former do
what he wanted, said before the actors, actresses, and supernumeraries
at that time assembled on the spacious boards of the Lyceum Theatre—he
said, “My dear Terriss, do try and use the little brains that God has
given you!”
The hours rolled by and one or two of the young men spoke kindly to me.
Then the girl, who had grey eyes and a mass of yellow hair under a
deer-stalker hat, and was dressed in cloth of the same kind, also spoke
to me and asked me to take my elbow out of her shoulder-blade. I
apologised instantly and altered my position. The crush was now
increasing and the air was exceedingly stuffy; but there still remained
an hour before the doors opened.
Having broken the ice, the girl, who I think was tired of keeping quiet
for such a long time, began to talk. We discussed the drama and “first
nights” in general. From one thing we went to another and I found, much
to my interest, that the girl intended to become an actress. She was an
independent and courageous sort of girl. Her parents had a shop in the
Edgware Road and were very much against her going on the stage; but she
was determined to defy them. There was to be a dramatic school opened
shortly, and she was going to join it. Then I naturally told her that I
was going to join that school too, and she was quite pleased.
“Perhaps we shall play parts in the same play some day,” she said; and I
said I hoped we might.
“Phew!” she exclaimed presently. “This is getting a bit thick, isn’t
it?”
Certainly it was. I had never been in such a tightly packed crowd and,
as bad luck would have it, I was beginning to feel very uncomfortable. I
was, in plain words, starving. Like a fool I had spared no time for tea,
but rushed off at the earliest possible moment, and now I began to feel
emptier than I had ever felt in my life before.
The girl, to whom I mentioned this, said that I had gone white as chalk,
but that I should be able to buy something to eat and drink inside. She
had some chocolate in her pocket, fortunately, and with great generosity
insisted upon sharing it with me; but it amounted really to nothing in
my ravenous state. It was like giving a hungry tiger a shrimp.
And then a most extraordinary thing happened—a thing that I should not
have believed possible. I began to feel funnier and funnier, and to gasp
in a very fishlike way, and to feel a cold and horrid sweat bursting out
upon my forehead. I had not felt like this for many, many years—in fact,
only once before: on the day that I and Jackson Minor found a cigar at
Merivale and tossed for it and I won and smoked the cigar secretly to
the stump. And I remembered now, with tragical horror, what happened
afterwards; and the hideous thought came to me that I was going to be
ill in that seething crowd of hardy old “first-nighters”! Think of the
disgrace and shame of it; and it wasn’t only that, because, of course,
the “first-nighters” would never forget a horrible adventure of that
kind, and no doubt the next time I presented myself among them, to wait
five or six hours before the doors opened upon some great triumph of
Thespian art, they would recognise me and band together against me and
order me away, as a man unfit to take his place among seasoned critics
of the drama.
All this and much more flashed through my head and then, just before the
climax, there came the comforting thought that I couldn’t be ill in that
way, having had nothing since my bun and glass of milk eight hours
before. I am sorry to keep on mentioning this bun and glass of milk
because it sounds greedy, but for once in a way I was glad that I was
empty—for the sake of all those artistic and courageous
“first-nighters,” not to mention the brave, grey-eyed girl.
Then I felt my knees give and the gaslight overhead whirled about like a
comet with twenty tails; I saw the heads of the people round me fade off
their shoulders; the gaslight went out; I heard a tremendous humming and
roaring in my ears, like a train in a tunnel, and all was over. My last
thought was that this was death, and I wondered if Miss Ellen Terry
would read about it in the paper next day and be sorry. But, even at
that ghastly moment, I knew she wouldn’t, because of course she would
want to hear what the critics thought of her “Portia”; and that would
naturally be the principal thing in the newspaper for her.
Of course I wasn’t dying really; but I fainted and must have put a great
many people to fearful inconvenience. It shows, however, what jolly good
hearts “first-nighters” have got, in my opinion, that they didn’t merely
let me sink to the earth, and ignore me, and walk over me when the doors
opened. But far from that, despite the length of my legs, they lugged me
out somehow and forced open the side door of a public-house that was
close at hand, and thrust me in.
When I came to, my first instinct was one of pure self-preservation and
I asked for food. Outside, the people were crushing into the pit of the
theatre, and by the time I had eaten about a loaf and half a Dutch
cheese, and drunk some weak brandy-and-water, which the landlord of the
public-house very kindly and humanely insisted upon my doing, the pit
was full—not even standing room remained. It was rather sad in a way;
but I felt less for the frightful disappointment, after waiting all
those hours, than for the debt I owed the merciful men who had rescued
me. Of course I didn’t know who they might be and, in any case, it was
impossible to wait there till midnight, on the off-chance of seeing them
after the play was over and thanking them gratefully.
I could have kicked myself over it, because for a chap nearly six feet
high, about to join the London Athletic Club and going to be an actor
some day and so on—for such a chap, with his way to make in the world,
to go into a crowd and faint, like a footling schoolgirl who cuts her
finger—it was right bang off, as they say. I felt fearfully downcast
about it, because it looked to me as if my career might just as well be
closed there and then: but the kind landlord rather cheered me up. He
said:
“You needn’t take on like that. No doubt you’ve outgrown your strength.
It’s nothing at all. The air out there in these crushes would choke a
crow. It’s the commonest thing in the world for people to be dragged out
and shot in that door.”
“Women, I dare say—not men.”
“Women—and boys,” he answered. “And what d’you call yourself?”
“Well, I’m a man, I suppose,” I replied. “I’m earning my own living,
anyway.”
“So did I—afore I was ten years old, my bold hero!” said the landlord.
He talked to me, while I ate my bread and cheese, and presently advised
me to take a cab and drive home; but this I scorned to do, being
perfectly fit again. I said I hoped to see him once more some day and he
only took sixpence for all my refreshment. He was a good man and I felt
jolly obliged to him—especially when he told me that my faint was not a
disgrace in itself, but more in the nature of a misfortune.
I walked home and said nothing about this unfortunate event; but merely
told Aunt Augusta that I had not been able to get into the Lyceum, which
was the strict truth and no more. For if I had revealed to her about
fainting she would have fussed me to death and very likely made me go to
Harley Street in grim earnest and not merely as a spectator of that
famous spot.
Two nights later I went to the Lyceum again and waited three hours, and
being laden in every pocket with sausage rolls, mince pies, and fat,
sustaining pieces of chocolate, simply laughed at the waiting. However,
it was a lesson in its way; and the lesson was never to be hungry in
London. It is the worst place in the world to be hungry in—owing to the
great strain on the nerves, no doubt. And hunger weakens the strength in
a very marked way and makes you liable to be run over, or anything.
Besides that, to be hungry is not only very uncomfortable in itself; but
it makes you a great nuisance to other people; and the hungry person
ought not to go into crowds for fear of the consequences. A time was
coming when I was going to see hundreds of hungry persons all assembled
in one place together; but that remarkable and fearful sight did not
happen until many months later.
The immediate result of the fainting was a change of diet, and you will
be glad to know I shall never mention the bun and the glass of milk
again; because it went out of my career from that day forward.
I had no secrets from Mr. Blades, who was now my greatest and most
trusted friend in London. Therefore I told him about the catastrophe,
making him first swear silence; and he explained it all and let me go
out to lunch with him that very day, to show me what a good and
nourishing lunch ought to be.
“It is silly to say you can’t pay for it,” declared Mr. Blades, “because
you must. And it is far better to pay for a chop or steak or even a
sausage and mashed and half of bitter ale, than to find yourself in the
doctor’s hands.”
He was full of these wise and shrewd sayings; so I went to an
eating-house with him and never laughed so much before, owing to the
screamingly funny way in which a waiter shouted things down a tube. It
was not so much the things in themselves as the way he shortened the
names of them, to save his precious time. Men came in and gave their
orders, and then this ridiculous but exceedingly clever waiter shouted
his version of the orders down a pipe which led to the kitchen of the
restaurant, where the dishes were being prepared.
It was like this: the waiter cruised round among the customers and
collected orders for soup. Two men ordered ox-tail soup, three had
mock-turtle soup, Mr. Blades decided for vegetable soup and I had
pea-soup. Well, of course, that was far too much to shout down the tube,
so the genius of a waiter said, “Two ox, three mocks, a veg, and a pea!”
And there you were! In less than no time the various soups appeared, and
the funniest thing of all to me was, that nobody saw anything funny
about it. But I roared—I couldn’t help it, and much to my regret annoyed
Mr. Blades, who told me not to play the fool where he was known. After a
time I steadied down and made an ample meal; and afterwards it
transpired that it was generally the custom of Mr. Blades to play a
couple of games of dominoes with some of his friends, who lunched at the
same place. But, though he promised to teach me, it was impossible that
day owing to my being quite unsteadied and helpless and imbecile with
laughing just at the end of the lunch.
It was, I need hardly say, the amazing waiter. He saw that he had
frightfully amused me and perhaps thought he would get an extra tip for
being so wonderful. Which he did do, for I gave him sixpence and made
Mr. Blades angry again.
But the waiter deserved a pound, for when two men ordered Gorgonzola
cheese and another man ordered a currant dumpling and three others
wanted kidneys on toast, he excelled himself by screaming down to the
kitchen these memorable words:
“Two Gorgons, a dump, and three kids!” Then he winked at me and I simply
rolled about helplessly and wept with laughing. This must have been one
of that glorious waiter’s greatest efforts, I think, because several
other quite elderly men laughed too.
He was called “William,” and I knew him well in a week. He had a rich
fund of humour, but was very honest and hard-working and a Londoner to
the backbone. He hated foreign waiters and said that the glitter of his
shiny hair was produced by a little fat from the grill well rubbed in
every morning. No barber’s stuff could touch it, he said, and if it made
him smell like a mutton chop, who thought the worse of him for that? He
expected twopence after each luncheon, and if any stranger gave him
less, he made screamingly funny remarks. In his evenings he waited at
the banquets of the City Companies, which are the most stupendous feeds
the world has ever known since Nero’s times; and at these dinners he
often heard State and other secrets, which he said would have been worth
a Jew’s eye to him if he had not been an honest man. He didn’t, of
course, say these things as if they were meant to be true. Simple people
no doubt would have believed them, but I soon got to notice that he
accompanied many of his most remarkable statements with a wink, which
disarmed criticism, as the saying is. He was a good man at heart and had
a wife at home and also a lame daughter who would never walk; so, though
one would not have thought it, he had his trials. In fact nearly
everybody I met, when I got to know them, told me about distressing
things which they hid from the world. Even Mr. Blades, who seemed to
preserve the even tenor of his way with great skill, confessed to me
that he had a brother very different from himself and evidently very
inferior in every way. In fact it looked to me, though of course I never
hinted at such a thing, that the brother of Mr. Blades must have been
rapidly sinking into a shady customer of the deadliest sort.
Really for the moment, after I took to proper lunches, it seemed as if I
was the only man in the office with no private worries.