My victorious career received a very serious check about this period. I
had, of course, bought Aristotle’s _Poetics_ and a cheap edition of
_Hamlet_, and on one or two occasions I much regret to say that Mr.
Westonshaugh, the best and kindest of men, had found me reading them
when I ought to have been registering policies of insurance.
He had rather a stealthy way of approaching the staff of the Country
Department from the rear, and, though a large man, revealed the
instincts of a hunter wonderfully developed; so that he was often upon
his game, which generally consisted of junior clerks, before the quarry
was roused and aware of its danger.
The first time he cautioned me; but the second time I grieve to relate
that he reported me. It was, of course, his duty to do so; and I believe
he regretted the necessity. But so it was; and it meant that I had to go
before the Secretary of the Apollo and meet him face to face, much to my
disadvantage.
The Secretary was, of course, the pivot round which the whole office
turned. The Directors themselves seldom dared to interfere with him; for
he was the hero of a thousand fights, so to say, and had climbed to the
giddy altitude of the secretarial chair after a lifetime spent in heroic
and successful efforts to advance the prosperity of the Apollo Fire
Office. His fame naturally extended far beyond the walls of the Apollo.
He was known throughout the whole insurance world as a light in the
darkness. He had written more than one book on the subject; and the
_Insurance Guide_, the journal of the insurance craft, seldom appeared
without some respectful allusion to his great fame. I believe he was a
sort of king over the secretaries of other Fire Offices; at any rate,
nobody ever pretended there was anybody to equal him. He was called
Septimus Trott, Esquire; and there came a gloomy morning when I stood
before him alone in the silence of the secretarial chamber. But, of
course, the interest was profound, for my fate might be said to hang in
the balance. I had seen Mr. Trott far off on several occasions, and had
once, in the Board Room, where I went with a message, witnessed the
solemn sight of him conversing on equal terms with six Directors
simultaneously, and easily making them think as he thought, thanks to
his enormous experience and easy flow of words; but this was the first
time I had approached him _in propria persona_, as we say.
He was of a sable silvered, with a florid complexion, and his eyes had a
piercing quality. He wore gold-rimmed glasses divided horizontally, so
that when he looked through the tops of them he could see men and things
about him, and when he looked through the bottom he could read documents
and data, or see to write himself if necessary.
He now looked through the upper story of his glasses and focused me with
an expression that I had never seen before on any human countenance. It
was not pity, by any means, and it was not scorn. You couldn’t say that
Mr. Trott was angry; but then you certainly couldn’t say that he was
pleased. He regarded me thoughtfully, yet without what you might call
much emotion. He was perfectly calm, yet under his easy self-control I
soon found that he concealed a good deal of quiet annoyance at what he
had heard about me. Having studied my features, which I had striven to
make as apologetic as possible, he dropped to the lower story of his
glasses, and I perceived that he had open before him some registers of
my writing. They evidently dismayed him, and for some time he said not a
word. At length he broke a silence which was becoming exceedingly
painful.
“Mr. Corkey,” he exclaimed, “I believe you are in your eighteenth year!”
“Yes, sir,” I answered. “It will be my eighteenth birthday in the
autumn.”
“And do you desire to celebrate that event with us, or elsewhere, Mr.
Corkey?” he inquired.
I told him that I greatly hoped to celebrate it with him—at least, with
the Country Department of the Apollo; and I breathed again in secret,
for this showed that I was not going to be dismissed.
Indeed, Mr. Blades had told me that a man was always cautioned once.
“They never fire you the first time,” was his forcible expression.
But the revulsion of feeling caused by knowing that I was saved made me
strike rather too joyful a note with Mr. Trott.
“I’m very sorry indeed that Mr. Westonshaugh had to report me, sir,” I
said, in a hearty sort of voice. “It was well deserved, and I promise
you it shan’t occur again.”
But the Secretary didn’t seem to want my views. In fact, he held up his
hand for silence.
“You are here to listen, Mr. Corkey,” he replied. “Now, before me I have
some of your recent work. Will you kindly consider these pages in an
impartial spirit, and tell me what you think of them? I invite your
opinion.”
As bad luck would have it, before him were some registers of policies
that I had done under very unusual pressure. In fact, I had made a bet
with a chap called Mason that I would register twenty “short period”
policies quicker than he would register twenty of the same. My friend,
Dicky Travers, held the stakes, which amounted to a shilling a side, and
I won by one “short period” policy in record time.
These things, naturally, I did not tell my judge, for they would only
have hurt him and led to Mason. Therefore, I merely regarded my
handiwork with honest scorn and an expression of contempt, and said the
writing was not worthy of the Apollo Fire Office.
“I had come to the same conclusion,” said Mr. Septimus Trott. “We are of
one mind, Mr. Corkey. Now, I appeal to your honour as a gentleman, and
as one who is drawing a good salary here—I appeal to you, Mr. Corkey, to
do your work in future so that we may respect you and value your
services, and not deplore them. Remember henceforth, Mr. Corkey, that
from ten until four, or later, as the occasion demands, we have a right
to your whole time and energy and attention and intelligence. To deny us
that right, and to offer us less than your best, is quite unworthy of
you, and neither just nor honest to your masters. Good morning, Mr.
Corkey; I feel sure that I shall not have to speak again.”
I did not know what to answer, for this exceedingly fine man had made me
feel both uncomfortable and mean. I had, however, to say something, so
thanked him and promised that he should never be bothered by me any
more. But he had already dismissed the subject and was buried in a pile
of complicated documents, which were no doubt destined to melt under his
hands like the dew upon the fleece.
I returned calmly to my department and wrapped myself in silence as with
a garment. But I concealed a bruised heart, as the saying is, and
determined to rectify this unpleasant event as swiftly as possible. I
decided to stop after hours for six consecutive nights and write till
eight, or even nine o’clock, and so produce an amount of work during the
current account that should delight Mr. Westonshaugh and gratify Mr.
Trott, if he ever heard about it. I wanted, before everything, to show
them I bore no malice, but quite the contrary.
Mr. Blades thought my idea good, and that very night I stopped on and
on, long after the staff had gone. It was a weird and interesting thing
to be alone with my solitary gaslight in that huge and empty office. All
was profound silence, save where my industrious pen steadily registered
policy after policy. Here and there out of the darkness glimmered a knob
of brass or some such thing, like the watchful eye of a beast of prey,
and far below one heard the occasional, eerie rattle of a hansom, or cry
of a human voice in the empty City. In all that huge hive of industry
only I appeared to be humming! It was a great thought in its way. And
yet I felt the presence of my colleagues in a ghostly sort of fashion,
and knew where the warlike Bassett sat, and the musical Wardle, and the
sporting Tomlinson, and so on. But, of course, they were all far away in
the bosoms of their families, or elsewhere, as the case might be.
And then came a strange experience—the event of a lifetime, or, at any
rate, the event of mine so far, for suddenly and without anything much
in the way of premonitory symptoms, I got an urgent craving to write a
poem! It is impossible to say how it came, or why; but there it was. My
fatal experiences of that day, and being so sorry for myself, and one
thing and another, depressed me to a most unusual flatness; and then
nature, apparently rebelling against this flatness, urged me to write a
poem upon a dire and fearful subject.
You might have thought that I should have taken refuge from the troubles
of the morning by writing something gladsome and joyous, or even a
regular, right-down hymn, with hopeful allusions to higher things; but
far from it, owing to the gloom of the silent office, or the gloom of my
mind, or perhaps both together, I produced stanza after stanza of the
most deathly and grim poetry you could find in the language. It was
called “The Witches’ Sabbath,” and I amazed myself by the ease with
which I handled corpse-candles, gouts of blood, the gallows tree,
ravens, owls, bats, lightning, the mutter of thunder, the stroke of
Doom, spectres, demons, hags, black cats, broomsticks, and, in fact,
every dreadful image you can possibly imagine from the classics at
large. These things simply rolled off my pen; I could hardly write fast
enough to catch up with the dance of horrors which seemed to get worse
and worse in every stanza; and I remember wondering, while my nib flew,
that if this ghastly thing was the result of a mild and temperate rebuke
from Mr. Septimus Trott, what sort of poem I should have made if he had
dealt bitterly and sarcastically and cruelly with me. I stopped to
examine the question, and finally decided that it was the great patience
and tenderness of Mr. Trott that had reduced me to this black depth of
despair; and I believed that if he had slated me with all the force of
barbed invective undoubtedly at his command, I should have gone to the
other extreme and not stopped overtime, and been reckless and ferocious
and mad, and very likely have produced a wild drinking-song, or some
profane limerick of a far lower quality than this stately poem with all
its horrors.
One verse especially pleased me, and I set it down here without
hesitation, because the time was actually coming when my poem would see
the glory of print—not, of course, that I should see the glory of
anything else in the way of reward. But merely to be in print glorifies
one for a long time.
“Through a dim gloaming with the hurtling crash
And thunder of their batlike wings they came.
Their tongues drip poison and their eyes they flash;
And twenty thousand others did the same.”
The effect of this horrible poem was entirely to restore my happiness;
and hope, long a stranger to my heart, as they say, returned, like the
dove to the ark. I simply rejoiced at the poem. I stopped registering
policies for that night and copied out the twelve verses of “The
Witches’ Sabbath” carefully. I said farewell to the messengers whose
duty it was to guard the Apollo by night; and I took home my poem,
filled with a great longing to read it to Aunt Augusta. She consented to
hear it and was much interested; and so surprised and pleased did she
appear to be that I had not the heart to tell her about the sorrowful
thing that led to it.
The next morning my poem was the first thought in my mind, and I read it
carefully through before getting up. The glow had rather gone out of it;
still, it was good. And I considered whether I should read it at the
office to Mr. Blades and others. But, strangely enough, though my
affection for Mr. Blades was deep and lasting, as well it might be,
considering all his goodness, something seemed to whisper to me that he
would not much like “The Witches’ Sabbath.” I had a wild idea of asking
Wardle to set it to music, but second thoughts proved best, as so often
happens, and I just kept the poem in my desk and waited till the next
lesson at the Dramatic School. For I felt that in the genial atmosphere
of tragic art my poem would be more at ease than in a hive of industry.
I improved it a great deal before the time came for the next meeting
with Mr. Merridew. Not, of course, that I was going to show it to him;
but I felt I should have courage to submit it to my fellow-pupil,
Brightwin, and ask him for his can-did opinion upon it. Of course,
measured according to Aristotle, it might have been found wanting;
because there was simply not a spark of pity about it. But the terror
was there all right.
To close this rather painful chapter, I may mention that I stuck to the
resolve to work overtime for a week, but was not rewarded by inventing
another poem. However, the result seemed highly favourable, for Mr.
Westonshaugh complimented me on my work in the account, and showed a
manly inclination to let the dead past bury its dead, as they say.
X
The rehearsal of the first scene of _Hamlet_, conducted by Mr.
Montgomery Merridew, went off with great verve. We were all very eager
to please him and there was naturally a good deal of excitement among us
to know how he would cast the parts.
He decided that Leonard Brightwin should be Horatio and George Dexter
Marcellus. I was Bernardo, and Harold Crowe took the rather minor part
of Francisco. Mr. Henry Smith had the honour of playing the ghost, and
it was very valuable to him for stage deportment and gesture; but not
much use in the way of his _h’s_, because the ghost does not make a
single remark in the first scene. Nevertheless, after Horatio, who was
easily the best, came Mr. Smith. In fact, he quite suggested “the
Majesty of buried Denmark,” in my opinion, though he didn’t manage his
hands well, and put rather too much expression into his face for a
ghost.
Dexter as Marcellus was bad. He made Marcellus a bounder, and when he
said, referring to the ghost, “Shall I strike at it with my partisan?”
you felt it was just the sort of utterly caddish idea that Dexter would
have had. My rendering of Bernardo was not well thought of, I regret to
say. Mr. Merridew explained that I must avoid the sin of overacting.
He said:
“You must correct your perspective, Mr. Corkey, and remember that the
dramatist designed Bernardo for an honest but simple soldier. He is, we
see, punctual and we have every reason to believe him an efficient
member of the corps to which he belonged. He is, moreover, an officer;
but more we do not know. You impart to him an air of mystery and
importance that are calculated to arrest the audience and make them
expect wonderful things of him, which he is not going to perform. In the
matter of deportment, Mr. Corkey, a man of your inches cannot be too
careful. Your legs—you understand I don’t speak offensively, but
practically—your legs are long and thin. They are, in fact, the sort of
legs that challenge the groundlings. It behoves you, therefore, to
manage them with perfect propriety; to tone them down, as it were, and
keep them as much out of the picture as possible.”
I very soon found, when it came to stage deportment in earnest, that I
had not time left to overact Bernardo. In fact, when I once began to
grasp the great difficulties of walking about on the stage with the art
that conceals art, I had no intelligence left for acting the part at
all, and my second rendering of Bernardo was colourless, though my legs
were better.
After a third rehearsal Wilford Gooding took my place, and he gave a
very different reading. In fact, when he and his friend Harold Crowe
found themselves together on the stage, they showed a decided
inclination to repeat their former imitation of the “Two Macs,” and Mr.
Merridew reproved them angrily.
“You are here to work, not to fool, gentlemen,” he said, “and if you
think the battlements of Elsinore by moonlight at the beginning of
_Hamlet_ is the proper place to be funny, then let me tell you you have
mistaken your vocation.”
A rehearsal, in fact, has to be conducted with deadly earnestness, and
for beginners to take it in a casual or lightsome spirit is a very great
mistake. There is nothing lightsome about it.
Mr. Merridew directed us to buy a further book, written by himself, on
the subject of voice production. It contained throat exercises for
strengthening the larynx and diaphragm and vocal chords, and so on; and
among other things, for a full hour every day we had to go into some
private place and shout the vowels with the full blast of our lungs.
“It will make a great deal of noise, and people won’t like you for doing
it,” prophesied Mr. Merridew, “but you must not mind a little
opposition. Your voices naturally want quality and tone, and these can
only be got with severe practice. Recollect that merely to speak is
useless; you must shout.”
He told us where to buy his book, which fortunately cost no more than
sixpence—in fact, only fourpence-halfpenny in reality.
During this lesson Mr. Merridew had to leave us for a short time, to
attend a meeting of the Directors of the Dramatic School; and while he
was away I ventured to show Leonard Brightwin my poem entitled “The
Witches’ Sabbath.” He read it with great interest and was much struck by
it.
“I’d no idea you were a writer,” he said; and I told him I hadn’t
either; but he believed it was in me. He, too, was a writer, and he
offered to introduce me to a friend of his who was an editor.
A glimpse of literary life was, of course, worth almost anything to me,
and I said that I should be exceedingly thankful to meet a professional
editor, if he didn’t think such a thing was above me. Then he explained
that his friend, Mr. Bulger, was an enthusiast of the drama and edited a
penny paper called _Thespis_.
“He owns it and does everything himself but print it,” explained
Brightwin. “It is not strictly self-supporting yet, but the amateurs
read it regularly, for he devotes a good deal of attention to their
performances. I often go and criticise them for him. He pays expenses
and hopes some day to do more than that. I write a good deal for him. My
belief is that he would publish that poem in his paper, though, of
course, I can’t promise.”
With the kindness and enthusiasm of the true creator for an inferior
artist, Brightwin promised to show the poem to Mr. Bulger, and I was
still thanking him most gratefully when our preceptor returned.
His face was gloomy, but he did not divulge the reason, and he proceeded
with the rehearsal.
An event of considerable interest overtook me an hour later, when the
evening’s work was at an end. As I left the school I met an old
acquaintance of the opposite sex, and instantly recognised the grey-eyed
girl who was waiting at the pit door of the Lyceum on the memorable
occasion when I fainted. She remembered me, too, and was able to tell me
the details of the event after I had lost consciousness.
She was a pupil like myself, only she belonged to the girls’ class.
“They ain’t going to allow mixed acting for the first six months,” she
said. “Funny, ain’t it? You’d think it was as tricky as mixed bathing.
How are you getting on?”
I told her of Mr. Merridew and _Hamlet_; and she told me that there were
seven girls in her class, and that none of them could “act for nuts,” to
use her own forcible expression.
An oldish woman had come to see the grey-eyed girl home, and when I
offered to accompany them to their door, the oldish woman refused in
peremptory tones. In fact, you might almost have thought she regarded me
as a shady character. It transpired that she was the cook of the
grey-eyed girl’s mother, and had been told off to the service of seeing
the pupil to and from the classes at the Dramatic School. Before the
cook’s rebuff I had, of course, to explain that I was also a pupil at
the school, and a person of the most honourable behaviour where the fair
sex is concerned; but the cook was not prepared to argue, and hurried
away her charge without more words.
I met the grey-eyed girl again, however, the very next evening—at a
first-night—and we enjoyed an uninterrupted conversation of three hours
before the doors opened. Thus a friendship was established of the most
interesting character; for we found that we had much in common, and I
was able to tell her several things which she did not know.
She was not a happy girl, for her parents only allowed her to study for
the stage under protest, and her family was entirely against her and of
a very unsympathetic turn of mind; but she felt that, sooner or later,
she would triumph. She indicated by certain allusions to my necktie and
hands that I interested her. She considered that I had artist’s hands,
which in its turn interested me a great deal, because my aunt had
noticed it as well as this penetrating, grey-eyed girl; and in return I
ventured to tell her that her eyes were exceedingly remarkable. I hinted
that I wrote poetry as well as acted, and, getting rather above myself,
as we say, told her that a poem of mine would probably be appearing in a
well-known theatrical journal called _Thespis_ at no distant date. I’m
afraid in my excitement I even hinted I should be paid for it, which was
going too far.
She said:
“Lor! Fancy!” Then, after a pause, she remarked, looking at me sideways
under her eyelids, that perhaps I should be making poems to her eyes
next, since I seemed to think they were “a bit of all right.” The idea
had not occurred to me; but now, of course, my chivalric instincts,
hitherto somewhat dormant, came to my aid, and I assured her that the
poem was only a question of time. In fact, we may be said rather to have
gone it, and when the doors were open and we entered the theatre, I sat
beside her.
I may state here that I had no objection to girls as a class, or in a
general way—in fact, rather the contrary, if anything. But they were not
so interesting to me as men; and I also understood that there is not a
rose without a thorn, as the poet says.
There are nocturnal girls in London known, generally speaking, as
“light.” They are as common as blackberries in the Sacred Writings, and
Shakespeare and the classics generally; and I may say that they have
often linked their arms in mine, when I have been returning home after
nightfall through some of the main London thoroughfares.
The first time this happened, being new to their unconventional ways, I
explained to two girls, who approached me simultaneously, that I didn’t
know them. Whereupon, with the swift repartee for which this class is
famous, they told me that they were the Duchess of Edinburgh and the
Empress of Russia, and that they were stopping with Queen Victoria at
Buckingham Palace, and had just popped out for a breather before supper.
Of course, the right thing to do is to take these dashing meteors in
their own spirit; and when they invited me to return with them to the
palace, I explained that some other night I should be delighted to do
so, but that I was bound for Marlborough House myself on this occasion,
and already half an hour late. They appreciated the _bon mot_ and rather
took to me. Though doubtless they might have been called bad girls,
nobody would have called them bad company. They had an air of abandon
and heartiness which put you entirely at your ease with them. In fact,
when they asked me to stand them a drink, I very nearly did so; but not
quite. Instead, I left them abruptly and vanished into the night,
followed by epithets humorous in their way, but not intended for
publication.
To return to Brightwin: in due course he took me to see Mr. Bulger,
editor of _Thespis_, and I found myself confronted with a type of the
poet mind. Mr. Bulger was evidently a dreamer. His great ambition
centred upon a State theatre for England, similar to that in foreign
countries. He had very exalted opinions and an intense hatred of bad
Art. He wanted to gather round him a band of young enthusiasts who would
work for love; because, as he explained to me, the pioneer is seldom
rewarded, excepting with the laurels of fame.
“Even these,” said Mr. Bulger bitterly, “seldom encircle his own brow.
You will generally find them on the bronze or marble forehead of his
statue, long after he has vanished into the dust.”
In this high strain he talked, and I saw in a moment that I stood before
genius. His soul looked out of his eyes and made them water. His
physical frame was of no consequence, and one forgot it when he talked.
I trembled to think that this aspiring man was going to read my poem;
but he did so, and Brightwin and I sat silent and watched him. Once or
twice he nodded in a slightly approving way; and once or twice he shook
his head, and I felt the blush of shame upon my cheek.
When he had finished, he said:
“Quite excellent, Mr. Corkey; we must publish this in the paper. There
are, however, some failures of technique and a few flashes of
unconscious humour that will be better away. May I take it that you will
not mind if I edit the poem for publication?”
Little knowing what this exactly meant, I replied that it would be a
great privilege to me if he would do so.
“Good,” he said, and put my poem under a paper-weight upon his desk.
We then discussed the drama, and he told us exactly what the young actor
should think and feel about his profession. It was clear that I had not
thought and felt at all rightly on the subject of the stage, for I had
rather intended to shine, and be somebody, and play the tragic lead, and
so on. But Mr. Bulger was all for quite a different spirit. He
worshipped at the shrine of Art, and explained that in the service of
Art we must regard the world and ourselves as well lost.
He advised a spirit of self-sacrifice, and admitted it was not so much
the ruling principle in the histrionic mind as it should be. He said
some hard things about actor-managers, and declared that in some cases
the charwomen who cleaned their theatres were doing more for Art than
they were. His eyes blazed against actor-managers in general, and they
must tremble when they hear his name.
Presently we rose to take our leave, and then, diving among a mass of
tickets and documents, he produced a card of admittance to the Clapham
Assembly Room on the occasion of an amateur theatrical entertainment a
fortnight hence.
“You can try your hand at that, Mr. Corkey,” he said to me. “You may, in
fact, criticise the show for our columns. Keep it short, and don’t
indulge in pleasantries at the expense of the company. The Macready
Dramatic Club of Clapham is a well-meaning body and their productions
are most painstaking. Let me have an account of your expenses, as I
shall defray them according to my rule.”
This was, naturally, a very great moment for me. I had but one fleeting
twinge that perhaps it was rather rough on the Macready Dramatic Club of
Clapham; but I thanked Mr. Bulger heartily for placing such confidence
in me, and promised that I would devote the whole of my energies and
experience to the performance.
Not until Brightwin and I had left the editorial presence did I begin
seriously to doubt; but he assured me that it was quite unnecessary.
“My dear chap,” he said, “you spend all your spare time at the theatre;
you are studying for the stage, and you have an immense natural aptitude
for the art; therefore, if you are not good enough to review the efforts
of a purely amateur crowd of this sort, you ought to be.”
So I imitated Brightwin’s slightly scornful view of the Macreadies of
Clapham, and felt that, if I could keep up this haughty spirit through
the actual performance, all might possibly be well.