The Regent by E. Arnold Bennett (page 5)

eyes witnessed the satisfaction spread by the voyaging telegram….

“Practically,” said the dame. “These things always go hand in hand,” she added in a deep tone.

“What things?” the provincial demanded.

But just then the curtain rose on the second act.

IV

“Won’t you cam up to Miss April’s dressing-room?” said Mr. Harrier, who in the midst of the fulminating applause after the second act seemed to be inexplicably standing over him, having appeared in an instant out of nowhere like a genie.

The fact was that Edward Henry had been gently and innocently dozing. It was in part the deep obscurity of the auditorium, in part his own physical fatigue, and in part the secret nature of poetry that had been responsible for this restful slumber. He had remained awake without difficulty during the first portion of the act, in which Elsie April–the orient pearl–had had a long scene of emotion and tears, played, as Edward Henry thought, magnificently in spite of its inherent ridiculousness; but later, when gentle Haidee had vanished away and the fateful troubadour-messenger had begun to resume her announcements of “The woman appears,” Edward Henry’s soul had miserably yielded to his body and to the temptation of darkness. The upturned lights and the ringing hosannahs had roused him to a full sense of sin, but he had not quite recovered all his faculties when Marrier startled him.

“Yes, yes! Of course! I was coming,” he answered a little petulantly. But no petulance could impair the beaming optimism on Mr. Harrier’s features. To judge by those features, Mr. Marrier, in addition to having organized and managed the soiree, might also have written the piece and played every part in it, and founded the Azure Society and built its private theatre. The hour was Mr. Marrier’s.

Elise April’s dressing-room was small and very thickly populated, and the threshold of it was barred by eager persons who were half in and half out of the room. Through these Mr. Marrier’s authority forced a way. The first man Edward Henry recognized in the tumult of bodies was Mr. Rollo Wrissell, whom he had not seen since their meeting at Slossons.

“Mr. Wrissell,” said the glowing Marrier, “let me introduce Mr. Alderman Machin, of the Regent Theatah.”

“Clumsy fool!” thought Edward Henry, and stood as if entranced.

But Mr. Wrissell held out a hand with the perfection of urbane insouciance.

“How d’you do, Mr. Machin?” said he. “I hope you’ll forgive me for not having followed your advice.”

This was a lesson to Edward Henry. He learnt that you should never show a wound, and if possible never feel one. He admitted that in such details of social conduct London might be in advance of the Five Towns, despite the Five Towns’ admirable downrightness.

Lady Woldo was also in the dressing-room, glorious in black. Her beauty was positively disconcerting, and the more so on this occasion as she was bending over the faded Rose Euclid, who sat in a corner surrounded by a court. This court, comprising comparatively uncelebrated young women and men, listened with respect to the conversation of the peeress who called Rose “my dear,” the great star-actress, and the now somewhat notorious Five Towns character, Edward Henry Machin.

“Miss April is splendid, isn’t she?” said Edward Henry to Lady Woldo.

“Oh! My word, yes!” replied Lady Woldo, nicely, warmly, yet with a certain perfunctoriness. Edward Henry was astonished that everybody was not passionately enthusiastic about the charm of Elsie’s performance. Then Lady Woldo added: “But what a part for Miss Euclid! What a part for her!”

And there were murmurs of approbation.

Rose Euclid gazed at Edward Henry palely and weakly. He considered her much less effective here than in her box. But her febrile gaze was effective enough to produce in him the needle-stab again, the feeling of gloom, of pessimism, of being gradually overtaken by an unseen and mysterious avenger.

“Yes, indeed!” said he.

He thought to himself: “Now’s the time for me to behave like Edward Henry Machin, and teach these people a thing or two!” But he could not.

A pretty young girl summoned all her forces to address the great proprietor of the Regent, to whom, however, she had not been introduced, and with a charming nervous earnest lisp said:

“But don’t you think it’s a great play, Mr. Machin?”

“Of course!” he replied, inwardly employing the most fearful and shocking anathemas.

“We were sure _you_ would!”

The young people glanced at each other with the satisfaction of proved prophets.

“D’you know that not another manager has taken the trouble to come here!” said a second earnest young woman.

Edward Henry’s self-consciousness was now acute. He would have paid a ransom to be alone on a desert island in the Indian seas. He looked downwards, and noticed that all these bright eager persons, women and men, were wearing blue stockings or socks.

“Miss April is free now,” said Marrier in his ear.

The next instant he was talking alone to Elsie in another corner while the rest of the room respectfully observed.

“So you deigned to come!” said Elsie April. “You did get my card.”

A little paint did her no harm, and the accentuation of her eyebrows and lips and the calculated disorder of her hair were not more than her powerful effulgent physique could stand. In a costume of green and silver she was magnificent, overwhelmingly magnificent. Her varying voice and her glance at once sincere, timid and bold, produced the most singular sensations behind Edward Henry’s soft frilled shirt-front. And he thought that he had never been through any experience so disturbing and so fine as just standing in front of her.

“I ought to be saying nice things to her,” he reflected. But, no doubt because he had been born in the Five Towns, he could not formulate in his mind a single nice thing.

“Well, what do you think of it?” she asked, looking full at him, and the glance too had a strange significance. It was as if she had said: “Are you a man, or aren’t you?”

“I think you’re splendid,” he exclaimed.

“Now please!” she protested. “Don’t begin in that strain. I know I’m very good for an amateur–“

“But really! I’m not joking.”

She shook her head.

“What do you think of my part for Rose? Wouldn’t she be tremendous in it? Wouldn’t she be tremendous?… What a chance!”

He was acutely uncomfortable, but even his discomfort was somehow a joy.

“Yes,” he admitted. “Yes.”

“Oh! Here’s Carlo Trent,” said she.

He heard Trent’s triumphant voice, carrying the end of a conversation into the room: “If he hadn’t been going away,” Carlo Trent was saying, “Pilgrim would have taken it. Pilgrim–“

The poet’s eyes met Edward Henry’s, and the sentence was never finished.

“How d’ye do, Machin?” murmured the poet.

Then a bell began to ring and would not stop.

“You’re staying for the reception afterwards?” said Elsie April as the room emptied.

“Is there one?”

“Of course.”

It seemed to Edward Henry that they exchanged silent messages.

V

Some time after the last hexameter had rolled forth, and the curtain had finally fallen on the immense and rapturous success of Carlo Trent’s play in three acts and in verse, Edward Henry, walking about the crowded stage, where the reception was being held, encountered Elsie April, who was still in her gorgeous dress of green and silver. She was chatting with Marrier, who instantly left her, thus displaying a discretion such as an employer would naturally expect from a factotum to whom he was paying three pounds a week.

Edward Henry’s heart began to beat in a manner which troubled him and made him wonder what could be happening at the back of the soft-frilled shirt front that he had obtained in imitation of Mr. Seven Sachs.

“Not much elbow-room here!” he said lightly. He was very anxious to be equal to the occasion.

She gazed at him under her emphasized eyebrows. He noticed that there were little touches of red on her delightful nostrils.

“No,” she answered with direct simplicity. “Suppose we try somewhere else?”

She turned her back on all the amiable and intellectual babble, descended three steps on the prompt side, and opened a door. The swish of her brocaded spreading skirt was loud and sensuous. He followed her into an obscure chamber in which several figures were moving to and fro and talking.

“What’s this place?” he asked. Involuntarily his voice was diminished to a whisper.

“It’s one of the discussion-rooms,” said she. “It used to be a classroom, I expect, before the Society took the buildings over. You see the theatre was the general schoolroom.”

They sat down unobtrusively in an embrasure. None among the mysterious moving figures seemed to remark them.

“But why are they talking in the dark?” Edward Henry asked behind his hand.

“To begin with, it isn’t quite dark,” she said. “There’s the light of the street-lamp through the window. But it has been found that serious discussions can be carried on much better without too much light…. I’m not joking.” (It was as if in the gloom her ears had caught his faint sardonic smile.)

Said the voice of one of the figures:

“Can you tell me what is the origin of the decay of realism? Can you tell me that?”

Suddenly, in the ensuing silence, there was a click, and a tiny electric lamp shot its beam. The hand which held the lamp was the hand of Carlo Trent. He flashed it and flashed the trembling ray in the inquirer’s face. Edward Henry recalled Carlo’s objection to excessive electricity in the private drawing-room at Wilkins’s.

“Why do you ask such a question?” Carlo Trent challenged the inquirer, brandishing the lamp. “I ask you why do you ask it?”

The other also drew forth a lamp and, as it were, cocked it and let it off at the features of Carlo Trent. And thus the two stood, statuesque and lit, surrounded by shadowy witnessers of the discussion.

The door creaked, and yet another figure, silhouetted for an instant against the illumination of the stage, descended into the discussion chamber.

Carlo Trent tripped towards the new-comer, bent with his lamp, lifted delicately the hem of the new-comer’s trousers, and gazed at the colour of his sock, which was blue.

“All right!” said he.

“The champagne and sandwiches are served,” said the new-comer.

“You’ve not answered me, sir,” Carlo Trent faced once more his opponent in the discussion. “You’ve not answered me.”

Whereupon, the lamps being extinguished, they all filed forth, the door swung to of its own accord, shutting out the sound of babble from the stage, and Edward Henry and Elsie April were left silent and solitary to the sole ray of the street-lamp.

All the Five Towns’ shrewdness in Edward Henry’s character, all the husband in him, all the father in him, all the son in him, leapt to his lips, and tried to say to Elsie:

“Shall _we_ go and inspect the champagne and sandwiches, too?”

And failed to say these incantatory words of salvation!

And the romantic, adventurous fool in him rejoiced at their failure. For he was adventurously happy in his propinquity to that simple and sincere creature. He was so happy, and his heart was so active, that he even made no caustic characteristic comment on the singular behaviour of the beings who had just abandoned them to their loneliness. He was also proud because he was sitting alone nearly in the dark with a piquant and wealthy, albeit amateur actress, who had just participated in a triumph at which the spiritual aristocracy of London had assisted.

VI

Two thoughts ran through his head, shooting in and out and to and fro among his complex sensations of pleasure. The first was that he had never been in such a fix before, despite his enterprising habits. And the second was that neither Elsie April nor anybody else connected with his affairs in London had ever asked him whether he was married, or assumed by any detail of behaviour towards him that there existed the possibility of his being married. Of course he might, had he chosen, have informed a few of them that a wife and children possessed him, but then really would not that have been equivalent to attaching a label to himself: “Married”? a procedure which had to him the stamp of provinciality.

Elsie April said nothing. And as she said nothing he was obliged to say something, if only to prove to both of them that he was not a mere tongue-tied provincial. He said:

“You know I feel awfully out of it here in this Society of yours!”

“Out of it?” she exclaimed, and her voice thrilled as she resented his self-depreciation.

“It’s over my head–right over it!”

“Now, Mr. Machin,” she said, dropping somewhat that rich low voice, “I quite understand that there are some things about the Society you don’t like, trifles that you’re inclined to laugh at. _I_ know that. Many of us know it. But it can’t be helped in an organization like ours. It’s even essential. Don’t be too hard on us. Don’t be sarcastic.”

“But I’m not sarcastic!” he protested.

“Honest?” She turned to him quickly. He could descry her face in the gloom, and the forward bend of her shoulders, and the backward sweep of her arms resting on the seat, and the straight droop of her Egyptian shawl from her inclined body.

“Honest!” he solemnly insisted.

The exchange of this single word was so intimate that it shifted their conversation to a different level–level at which each seemed to be assuring the other that intercourse between them could never be aught but utterly sincere thenceforward, and that indeed in future they would constitute a little society of their own, ideal in its organization.

“Then you’re too modest,” she said decidedly. “There was no one here to-night who’s more respected than you are. No one! Immediately I first spoke to you–I daresay you don’t remember that afternoon at the Grand Babylon Hotel!–I knew you weren’t like the rest. And don’t I know them? Don’t I know them?”

“But how did you know I’m not like the rest?” asked Edward Henry. The line which she was taking had very much surprised him–and charmed him. The compliment, so serious and urgent in tone, was intensely agreeable, and it made an entirely new experience in his career. He thought: “Oh! there’s no mistake about it. These London women are marvellous! They’re just as straight and in earnest as the best of our little lot down there. But they’ve got something else. There’s no comparison!” The unique word to describe the indescribable floated into his head: “Scrumptious!” What could not life be with such semi-divine creatures? He dreamt of art drawing-rooms softly shaded at midnight. And his attitude towards even poetry was modified.

“I knew you weren’t like the rest,” said she, “by your look. By the way you say everything you _do_ say. We all know it. And I’m sure you’re far more than clever enough to be perfectly aware that we all know it. Just see how everyone looked at you to-night!”

Yes, he had in fact been aware of the glances.

“I think I ought to tell you,” she went on, “that I was rather unfair to you that day in talking about my cousin–in the taxi. You were quite right to refuse to go into partnership with her. She thinks so too. We’ve talked it over, and we’re quite agreed. Of course it did seem hard–at the time, and her bad luck in America seemed to make it worse. But you were quite right. You can work much better alone. You must have felt that instinctively–far quicker than we felt it.”

“Well,” he murmured, confused, “I don’t know–“

Could this be she who had too openly smiled at his skirmish with an artichoke?

“Oh, Mr. Machin!” she burst out. “You’ve got an unprecedented opportunity, and thank Heaven you’re the man to use it! We’re all expecting so much from you, and we know we shan’t be disappointed.”

“D’ye mean the theatre?” he asked, alarmed as it were amid rising waters.

“The theatre,” said she, gravely. “You’re the one man that can save London. No one _in_ London can do it!… _You_ have the happiness of knowing what your mission is, and of knowing, too, that you are equal to it. What good fortune! I wish I could say as much for myself. I want to do something! I try! But what can I do? Nothing–really! You’ve no idea of the awful loneliness that comes from a feeling of inability.”

“Loneliness,” he repeated. “But surely–” he stopped.

“Loneliness,” she insisted. Her little chin was now in her little hand, and her dim face upturned.

And suddenly a sensation of absolute and marvellous terror seized Edward Henry. He was more afraid than he had ever been–and yet once or twice in his life he had felt fear. His sense of true perspective–one of his most precious qualities–returned. He thought: “I’ve got to get out of this.” Well, the door was not locked. It was only necessary to turn the handle, and security lay on the other side of the door! He had but to rise and walk. And he could not. He might just as well have been manacled in a prison-cell. He was under an enchantment.

“A man,” murmured Elsie, “a man can never realize the loneliness–” She ceased.

He stirred uneasily.

“About this play,” he found himself saying. And yet why should he mention the play in his fright? He pretended to himself not to know why. But he knew why. His instinct had seen in the topic of the play the sole avenue of salvation.

“A wonderful thing, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. And then–most astonishingly to himself–added: “I’ve decided to do it.”

“We knew you would,” she said calmly. “At any rate I did…. You’ll open with it, of course.”

“Yes,” he answered desperately. And proceeded, with the most extraordinary bravery, “If you’ll act in it.”

Immediately on hearing these last words issue from his mouth he knew that a fool had uttered them, and that the bravery was mere rashness. For Elsie’s responding gesture reinspired him afresh with the exquisite terror which he had already begun to conjure away.

“You think Miss Euclid ought to have the part,” he added quickly, before she could speak.

“Oh! I do!” cried Elsie, positively and eagerly. “Rose will do simply wonders with that part. You see she can speak verse. I can’t. I’m nobody. I only took it because–“

“Aren’t you anybody?” he contradicted. “Aren’t you anybody? I can just tell you–“

There he was again, bringing back the delicious terror! An astounding situation!

But the door creaked. The babble from the stage invaded the room. And in a second the enchantment was lifted from him. Several people entered. He sighed, saying within himself to the disturbers:

“I’d have given you a hundred pounds apiece if you’d been five minutes sooner.”

And yet simultaneously he regretted their arrival. And, more curious still, though he well remembered the warning words of Mr. Seven Sachs concerning Elsie April, he did not consider that they were justified…. She had not been a bit persuasive … only….

VII

He sat down to the pianisto with a strange and agreeable sense of security. It is true that, owing to the time of year, the drawing-room had been, in the figurative phrase, turned upside down by the process of spring-cleaning, which his unexpected arrival had surprised in fullest activity. But he did not mind that. He abode content among rolled carpets, a swathed chandelier, piled chairs, and walls full of pale rectangular spaces where pictures had been. Early that morning, after a brief night spent partly in bed and partly in erect contemplation of his immediate past and his immediate future, he had hurried back to his pianisto and his home–to the beings and things that he knew and that knew him.

In the train he had had the pleasure of reading in sundry newspapers that “The Orient Pearl,” by Carlo Trent (who was mentioned in terms of startling respect and admiration), had been performed on the previous evening at the dramatic soiree of the Azure Society, with all the usual accompaniments of secrecy and exclusiveness, in its private theatre in Kensington, and had been accepted on the spot by Mr. E.H. Machin (“that most enterprising and enlightened recruit to the ranks of theatrical managers”) for production at the new Regent Theatre. And further that Mr. Machin intended to open with it. And still further that his selection of such a play, which combined in the highest degree the poetry of Mr. W.B. Yeats with the critical intellectuality of Mr. Bernard Shaw, was an excellent augury for London’s dramatic future, and that the “upward movement” must on no account be thought to have failed because of the failure of certain recent ill-judged attempts, by persons who did not understand their business, to force it in particular directions. And still further that he, Edward Henry, had engaged for the principal part Miss Rose Euclid, perhaps the greatest emotional actress the English-speaking peoples had ever had, but who unfortunately had not been sufficiently seen of late on the London stage, and that this would be her first appearance after her recent artistic successes in the United States. And lastly that Mr. Marrier (whose name would be remembered in connection with … etc., etc.) was Mr. E.H. Machin’s acting manager and technical adviser. Edward Henry could trace the hand of Marrier in all the paragraphs. Marrier had lost no time.

Mrs. Machin, senior, came into the drawing-room just as he was adjusting the “Tannhaeuser” overture to the mechanician. The piece was one of his major favourites.

“This is no place for you, my lad,” said Mrs. Machin, grimly, glancing round the room. “But I came to tell ye as th’ mutton’s been cooling at least five minutes. You gave out as you were hungry.”

“Keep your hair on, mother,” said he, springing up.

Barely twelve hours earlier he had been mincing among the elect and the select and the intellectual and the poetic and the aristocratic; among the lah-di-dah and Kensingtonian accents; among rouged lips and blue hose and fixed simperings; in the centre of the universe. And he had conducted himself with considerable skill accordingly. Nobody, on the previous night, could have guessed from the cut of his fancy waistcoat or the judiciousness of his responses to remarks about verse, that his wife often wore a white apron, or that his mother was–the woman she was! He had not unskilfully caught many of the tricks of that metropolitan environment. But now they all fell away from him, and he was just Edward Henry–nay, he was almost the old Denry again.

“Who chose this mutton?” he asked as he bent over the juicy and rich joint and cut therefrom exquisite thick slices with a carving-knife like a razor.

“_I_ did, if ye want to know,” said his mother. “Anything amiss with it?” she challenged.

“No. It’s fine.”

“Yes,” said she. “I’m wondering whether you get aught as good as that in those grand hotels as you call ’em.”

“We don’t,” said Edward Henry. First, it was true; and secondly, he was anxious to be propitiatory, for he had a plan to further.

He looked at his wife. She was not talkative, but she had received him in the hall with every detail of affection, if a little absent-mindedly owing to the state of the house. She had not been caustic, like his mother, about this male incursion into spring-cleaning. She had not informed the surrounding air that she failed to understand why them as were in London couldn’t stop in London for a bit, as his mother had. Moreover, though the spring-cleaning fully entitled her to wear a white apron at meals, she was not wearing a white apron: which was a sign to him that she still loved him enough to want to please him. On the whole he was fairly optimistic about his plan of salvation. Nevertheless, it was not until nearly the end of the meal–when one of his mother’s apple-pies was being consumed–that he began to try to broach it.

“Nell,” he said, “I suppose you wouldn’t care to come to London with me?”

“Oh!” she answered smiling, a smile of a peculiar quality. It was astonishing how that simple woman could put just one tenth of one per cent of irony into a good-natured smile. “What’s the meaning of this?” Then she flushed. The flush touched Edward Henry in an extraordinary manner.

(“To think,” he reflected incredulously, “that only last night I was talking in the dark to Elsie April–and here I am now!” And he remembered the glory of Elsie’s frock, and her thrilling voice in the gloom, and that pose of hers as she leaned dimly forward.)

“Well,” he said aloud, as naturally as he could, “that theatre’s beginning to get up on its hind-legs now, and I should like you to see it.”

A difficult pass for him, as regards his mother! This was the first time he had ever overtly spoken of the theatre in his mother’s presence. In the best bedroom he had talked of it–but even there with a certain self-consciousness and false casualness. Now, his mother stared straight in front of her with an expression of which she alone among human beings had the monopoly.

“I should like to,” said Nellie, generously.

“Well,” said he, “I’ve got to go back to town to-morrow. Wilt come with me, lass?”

“Don’t be silly, Edward Henry,” said she. “How can I leave mother in the middle of all this spring-cleaning?”

“You needn’t leave mother. We’ll take her too,” said Edward Henry, lightly.

“You won’t!” observed Mrs. Machin.

“I _have to_ go to-morrow, Nell,” said Edward Henry. “And I was thinking you might as well come with me. It will be a change for you.”

(He said to himself, “And not only have I to go to-morrow, but you absolutely must come with me, my girl. That’s the one thing to do.”)

“It would be a change for me,” Nellie agreed–she was beyond doubt flattered and calmly pleased. “But I can’t possibly come to-morrow. You can see that for yourself, dear.”

“No, I can’t!” he cried impatiently. “What does it matter? Mother’ll be here. The kids’ll be all right. After all, spring-cleaning isn’t the Day of Judgment.”

“Edward Henry,” said his mother, cutting in between them like a thin blade, “I wish you wouldn’t be blasphemous. London’s London, and Bursley’s Bursley.” She had finished.

“It’s quite out of the question for me to come to-morrow, dear. I must have notice. I really must.”

And Edward Henry saw with alarm that Nellie had made up her mind, and that the flattered calm pleasure in his suggestion had faded from her face.

“Oh! Dash these domesticated women!” he thought, and shortly afterwards departed, brooding, to the offices of the Thrift Club.

VIII

He timed his return with exactitude, and, going straight upstairs to the chamber known indifferently as “Maisie’s room” or “nurse’s room,” sure enough he found the three children there alone! They were fed, washed, night-gowned and even dressing-gowned; and this was the hour when, while nurse repaired the consequences of their revolutionary conduct in the bathroom and other places, they were left to themselves. Robert lay on the hearthrug, the insteps of his soft pink feet rubbing idly against the pile of the rug, his elbows digging into the pile, his chin on his fists, and a book perpendicularly beneath his eyes. Ralph, careless adventurer rather than student, had climbed to the glittering brass rail of Maisie’s new bedstead and was thereon imitating a recently-seen circus performance. Maisie, in the bed according to regulation, and lying on the flat of her back, was singing nonchalantly to the ceiling. Carlo, unaware that at that moment he might have been a buried corpse but for the benignancy of Providence in his behalf, was feeling sympathetic towards himself because he was slightly bored.

“Hello, kids!” Edward Henry greeted them. As he had seen them before mid-day dinner, the more formal ceremonies of salutation after absence–so hateful to the Five Towns temperament–were happily over and done with.

Robert turned his head slightly, inspected his father with a judicial detachment that hardly escaped the inimical, and then resumed his book.

(“No one would think,” said Edward Henry to himself, “that the person who has just entered this room is the most enterprising and enlightened of West End theatrical managers.”)

“‘Ello, father!” shrilled Ralph. “Come and help me to stand on this wire-rope.”

“It isn’t a wire-rope,” said Robert from the hearthrug, without stirring, “it’s a brass-rail.”

“Yes, it is a wire-rope, because I can make it bend,” Ralph retorted, bumping down on the thing. “Anyhow, it’s going to be a wire-rope.”

Maisie simply stuck several fingers into her mouth, shifted to one side, and smiled at her father in a style of heavenly and mischievous flirtatiousness.

“Well, Robert, what are you reading?” Edward Henry inquired, in his best fatherly manner–half authoritative and half humorous–while he formed part of the staff of Ralph’s circus.

“I’m not reading–I’m learning my spellings,” replied Robert.

Edward Henry, knowing that the discipline of filial politeness must be maintained, said, “‘Learning my spellings’–what?”

“Learning my spellings, father,” Robert consented to say, but with a savage air of giving way to the unreasonable demands of affected fools. Why indeed should it be necessary in conversation always to end one’s sentence with the name or title of the person addressed?

“Well, would you like to go to London with me?”

“When?” the boy demanded cautiously. He still did not move, but his ears seemed to prick up.

“To-morrow?”

“No thanks … father.” His ears ceased their activity.

“No? Why not?”

“Because there’s a spellings examination on Friday, and I’m going to be top-boy.”

It was a fact that the infant (whose programmes were always somehow arranged in advance, and were in his mind absolutely unalterable) could spell the most obstreperous words. Quite conceivably he could spell better than his father, who still showed an occasional tendency to write “separate” with three “e’s” and only one “a.”

“London’s a fine place,” said Edward Henry.

“I know,” said Robert, negligently.

“What’s the population of London?”

“I don’t know,” said Robert, with curtness; though he added after a pause, “But I can spell population–p,o,p,u,l,a,t,i,o,n.”

“_I_’ll come to London, father, if you’ll have me,” said Ralph, grinning good-naturedly.

“Will you!” said his father.

“Fahver,” asked Maisie, wriggling, “have you brought me a doll?”

“I’m afraid I haven’t.”

“Mother said p’r’aps you would.”

It was true there had been talk of a doll; he had forgotten it.

“I tell you what I’ll do,” said Edward Henry. “I’ll take you to London, and you can choose a doll in London. You never saw such dolls as there are in London–talking dolls that shut and open their eyes and say papa and mamma, and all their clothes take off and on.”

“Do they say ‘father’?” growled Robert.

“No, they don’t,” said Edward Henry.

“Why don’t they?” growled Robert.

“When will you take me?” Maisie almost squealed.

“To-morrow.”

“Certain sure, fahver?”

“Yes.”

“You promise, fahver?”

“Of course I promise.”

Robert at length stood up, to judge for himself this strange and agitating caprice of his father’s for taking Maisie to London. He saw that, despite spellings, it would never do to let Maisie alone go. He was about to put his father through a cross-examination, but Henry Edward dropped Ralph (who had been climbing up him as up a telegraph pole) on to the bed and went over to the window, nervously, and tapped thereon.

Carlo followed him, wagging an untidy tail.

“Hello, Trent!” murmured Edward Henry, stooping and patting the dog.

Ralph exploded into loud laughter.

“Father’s called ‘Carlo’–‘Trent,'” he roared. “Father, have you forgotten his name’s ‘Carlo’?” It was one of the greatest jokes that Ralph had heard for a long time.

Then Nellie hurried into the room, and Edward Henry, with a “Mustn’t be late for tea,” as hurriedly left it.

Three minutes later, while he was bent over the lavatory basin, someone burst into the bathroom. He lifted a soapy face.

It was Nellie, with disturbed features.

“What’s this about your positively promising to take Maisie to London to-morrow to choose a doll?”

“I’ll take ’em all,” he replied with absurd levity. “And you too!”

“But really–” she pouted, indicating that he must not carry the ridiculous too far.

“Look here, d—-n it,” he said impulsively, “I _want_ you to come. And I want you to come to-morrow. I knew it was the confounded infants you wouldn’t leave. You don’t mean to tell me you can’t arrange it–a woman like you!”

She hesitated.

“And what am I to do with three children in a London hotel?”

“Take nurse, naturally.”

“Take nurse?” she cried.

He imitated her, with a grotesque exaggeration, yelling loudly, “Take nurse?” Then he planted a soap-sud on her fresh cheek.

She wiped it off carefully, and smacked his arm. The next moment she was gone, having left the door open.

“He _wants_ me to go to London to-morrow,” he could hear her saying to his mother on the landing.

“Confound it!” he thought. “Didn’t she know that at dinner-time?”

“Bless us!” His mother’s voice.

“And take the children–and nurse!” His wife continued, in a tone to convey the fact that she was just as much disturbed as her mother-in-law could possibly be by the eccentricities of the male.

“He’s his father all over, that lad is!” said his mother, strangely.

And Edward Henry was impressed by these words, for not once in seven years did his mother mention his father.

Tea was an exciting meal.

“You’d better come too mother,” said Edward Henry, audaciously. “We’ll shut the house up.”

“I come to no London,” said she.

“Well, then, you can use the motor as much as you like while we’re away.”

“I go about gallivanting in no motor,” said his mother. “It’ll take me all my time to get this house straight against you come back.”

“I haven’t a _thing_ to go in!” said Nellie, with a martyr’s sigh.

After all (he reflected), though domesticated, she was a woman.

He went to bed early. It seemed to him that his wife, his mother and the nurse were active and whispering up and down the house till the very middle of the night. He arose not late; but they were all three afoot before him, active and whispering.

IX

He found out, on the morning after the highly complex transaction of getting his family from Bursley to London, that London held more problems for him than ever. He was now not merely the proprietor of a theatre approaching completion, but really a theatrical manager with a play to produce, artistes to engage, and the public to attract. He had made two appointments for that morning at the Majestic–(he was not at the Grand Babylon, because his wife had once stayed with him at the Majestic, and he did not want to add to his anxieties the business of accustoming her to a new and costlier luxury)–one appointment at nine with Marrier, and the other at ten with Nellie, family and nurse. He had expected to get rid of Marrier before ten.

Among the exciting mail which Marrier had collected for him from the Grand Babylon and elsewhere, was the following letter:

“BUCKINGHAM PALACE HOTEL.

“DEAR FRIEND,–We are all so proud of you. I should like some time to finish our interrupted conversation. Will you come and have lunch with me one day here at 1.30? You needn’t write. I know how busy you are. Just telephone you are coming. But don’t telephone between 12 and 1, because at that time I _always_ take my constitutional in St. James’s Park.–Yours sincerely, E.A.”

“Well,” he thought, “that’s a bit thick, that is! She’s stuck me up with a dramatist I don’t believe in, and a play I don’t believe in, and an actress I don’t believe in–and now she–“

Nevertheless, to a certain extent he was bluffing himself. For, as he pretended to put Elsie April back into her place, he had disturbing and delightful visions of her. A clever creature! Uncannily clever! Wealthy! Under thirty! Broad-minded! No provincial prejudices!… Her voice, that always affected his spine! Her delicious flattery!… She was no mean actress either! And the multifariousness of her seductive charm! In fact, she was a regular woman of the world, such as you would read about–if you did read!… He was sitting with her again in the obscurity of the discussion-room at the Azure Society’s establishment. His heart was beating again.

Pooh!…

A single wrench and he ripped up the letter, and cast it into one of the red-lined waste-paper baskets with which the immense and rather shabby writing-room of the Majestic was dotted.

Before he had finished dealing with Mr. Marrier’s queries and suggestions–some ten thousand in all–the clock struck, and Nellie tripped into the room. She was in black silk, with hints here and there of gold chains. As she had explained, she had nothing to wear, and was therefore obliged to fall back on the final resource of every woman in her state. For in this connection “nothing to wear” signified “nothing except my black silk”–at any rate in the Five Towns.

“Mr. Marrier–my wife. Nellie, this is Mr. Marrier.”

Mr. Marrier was profuse: no other word would describe his demeanour. Nellie had the timidity of a young girl. Indeed she looked quite youthful, despite the ageing influences of black silk.

“So that’s your Mr. Marrier! I understood from you he was a clerk!” said Nellie, tartly, suddenly retransformed into the shrewd matron, as soon as Mr. Marrier had profusely gone. She had conceived Marrier as a sort of Penkethman! Edward Henry had hoped to avoid this interview.

He shrugged his shoulders in answer to his wife’s remark.

“Well,” he said, “where are the kids?”

“Waiting in the lounge with nurse, as you said to be.” Her mien delicately informed him that while in London his caprices would be her law, which she would obey without seeking to comprehend.

“Well,” he went on, “I expect they’d like the parks as well as anything. Suppose we take ’em and show ’em one of the parks? Shall we? Besides, they must have fresh air.”

“All right,” Nellie agreed. “But how far will it be?”

“Oh!” said Edward Henry, “we’ll crowd into a taxi.”

They crowded into a taxi, and the children found their father in high spirits. Maisie mentioned the doll…. In a minute the taxi had stopped in front of a toy-shop surpassing dreams, and they invaded the toy-shop like an army. When they emerged, after a considerable interval, nurse was carrying an enormous doll, and Nellie was carrying Maisie, and Ralph was lovingly stroking the doll’s real shoes. Robert kept a profound silence–a silence which had begun in the train.

“You haven’t got much to say, Robert,” his father remarked, when the taxi set off again.

“I know,” said Robert, gruffly. Among other things, he resented his best clothes on a week-day.

“What do you think of London?”

“I don’t know,” said Robert.

His eyes never left the window of the taxi.

Then they visited the theatre–a very fatiguing enterprise, and also, for Edward Henry, a very nervous one. He was as awkward in displaying that inchoate theatre as a newly-made father with his first-born. Pride and shame fought for dominion over him. Nellie was full of laudations. Ralph enjoyed the ladders.

“I say,” said Nellie, apprehensive for Maisie, on the pavement, “this child’s exhausted already. How big’s this park of yours? Because neither nurse nor I can carry her very far.”

“We’ll buy a pram,” said Edward Henry. He was staring at a newspaper placard which said: “Isabel Joy on the war-path again. Will she win?”

“But–“

“Oh, yes. We’ll buy a pram! Driver–“

“A pram isn’t enough. You’ll want coverings for her–in this wind.”

“Well, we’ll buy the necessary number of eider-downs and blankets, then,” said Edward Henry. “Driver–“

A tremendous business! For in addition to making the purchases he had to feed his flock in an A.B.C. shop, where among the unoccupied waitresses Maisie and her talkative, winking doll enjoyed a triumph. Still there was plenty of time.

At a quarter past twelve he was displaying the varied landscape beauties of the park to his family. Ralph insisted on going to the bridge over the lake, and Robert silently backed him. And therefore the entire party went. But Maisie was afraid of the water and cried. Now the worst thing about Maisie was that when once she had begun to cry it was very difficult to stop her. Even the most remarkable dolls were powerless to appease her distress.

“Give me the confounded pram, nurse,” said Edward Henry. “I’ll cure her.”

But he did not cure her. However, he had to stick grimly to the perambulator. Nellie tripped primly in black silk on one side of it. Nurse had the wayward Ralph by the hand. And Robert, taciturn, stalked alone, adding up London and making a very small total of it.

Suddenly Edward Henry halted the perambulator, and, stepping away from it, raised his hat. An excessively elegant young woman leading a Pekinese by a silver chain stopped as if smitten by a magic dart and held spellbound.

“How do you do, Miss April?” said Edward Henry, loudly. “I was hoping to meet you. This is my wife. Nellie–this is Miss April.” Nellie bowed stiffly in her black silk. (Naught of the fresh maiden about her now!) And it has to be said that Elsie April in all her young and radiant splendour and woman-of-the-worldliness was equally stiff. “And there are my two boys. And this is my little girl–in the pram.”

Maisie screamed, and pushed an expensive doll out of the perambulator. Edward Henry saved it by its boot as it fell.

“And this is her doll. And this is nurse,” he finished. “Fine breezy morning, isn’t it?”

In due course the processions moved on.

“Well, that’s done!” Edward Henry muttered to himself. And sighed.

CHAPTER IX

THE FIRST NIGHT

I

It was upon an evening in June–and a fine evening, full of the exquisite melancholy of summer in a city–that Edward Henry stood before a window, drumming thereon as he had once, a less-experienced man with hair slightly less grey, drummed on the table of the mighty and arrogant Slosson. The window was the window of the managerial room of the Regent Theatre. And he could scarcely believe it–he could scarcely believe that he was not in a dream–for the room was papered, carpeted and otherwise furnished. Only its electric light fittings were somewhat hasty and provisional, and the white ceiling showed a hole and a bunch of wires–like the nerves of a hollow tooth–whence one of Edward Henry’s favourite chandeliers would ultimately depend.

The whole of the theatre was at least as far advanced towards completion as that room. A great deal of it was more advanced; for instance, the auditorium, _foyer_, and bars, which were utterly finished, so far as anything ever is finished in a changing world. Wonders, marvels and miracles had been accomplished. Mr. Alloyd, in the stress of the job, had even ceased to bring the Russian Ballet into his conversations. Mr. Alloyd, despite a growing tendency to prove to Edward Henry by authentic anecdote, about midnight, his general proposition that women as a sex treated him with shameful unfairness, had gained the high esteem of Edward Henry as an architect. He had fulfilled his word about those properties of the auditorium which had to do with hearing and seeing–in so much that the auditorium was indeed unique in London. And he had taken care that the Clerk of the Works took care that the builder did not give up heart in the race with time.

Moreover, he had maintained the peace with the terrible London County Council, all of whose inspecting departments seemed to have secretly decided that the Regent Theatre should be opened, not in June as Edward Henry had decided, but at some vague future date towards the middle of the century. Months earlier Edward Henry had ordained and announced that the Regent Theatre should be inaugurated on a given date in June, at the full height and splendour of the London season, and he had astounded the theatrical world by adhering through thick and thin to that date, and had thereby intensified his reputation as an eccentric; for the oldest inhabitant of that world could not recall a case in which the opening of a new theatre had not been promised for at least three widely different dates.

Edward Henry had now arrived at the eve of the dread date, and if he had arrived there in comparative safety, with a reasonable prospect of avoiding complete shame and disaster, he felt and he admitted that the credit was due as much to Mr. Alloyd as to himself. Which only confirmed an early impression of his that architects were queer people–rather like artists and poets in some ways, but with a basis of bricks and mortar to them.

His own share in the enterprise of the Regent had in theory been confined to engaging the right people for the right tasks and situations; and to signing cheques. He had depended chiefly upon Mr. Marrier, who, growing more radiant every day, had gradually developed into a sort of chubby Napoleon, taking an immense delight in detail and in choosing minor hands at round-sum salaries on the spur of the moment. Mr. Marrier refused no call upon his energy. He was helping Carlo Trent in the production and stage-management of the play. He dried the tears of girlish neophytes at rehearsals. He helped to number the stalls. He showed a passionate interest in the tessellated pavement of the entrance. He taught the managerial typewriting girl how to make afternoon tea. He went to Hitchin to find a mediaeval chair required for the third act, and found it. In a word, he was fully equal to the post of acting manager. He managed! He managed everything and everybody except Edward Henry, and except the press-agent, a functionary whose conviction of his own indispensability and importance was so sincere that even Marrier shared it and left him alone in his Bismarckian operations. The press-agent, who sang in musical comedy chorus at night, knew that if the Regent Theatre succeeded it would be his doing and his alone.

And yet Edward Henry, though he had delegated everything, had yet found a vast amount of work to do; and was thereby exhausted. That was why he was drumming on the pane. That was why he was conscious of a foolish desire to shove his fist through the pane. During the afternoon he had had two scenes with two representatives of the Libraries (so called because they deal in theatre-tickets and not in books) who had declined to take up any of his tickets in advance. He had commenced an action against a firm of bill-posters. He had settled an incipient strike in the ‘limes’ departments, originated by Mr. Cosmo Clark’s views about lighting. He had dictated answers to seventy-nine letters of complaint from unknown people concerning the supply of free seats for the first night. He had responded in the negative to a request from a newspaper critic who, on the score that he was deaf, wanted a copy of the play. He had replied finally to an official of the County Council about the smoke-trap over the stage. He had replied finally to another official of the County Council about the electric sign. He had attended to a new curiosity on the part of another official of the County Council about the iron curtain. But he had been almost rude to still another official of the County Council about the wiring of the electric light in the dressing-rooms. He had been unmistakably and pleasurably rude in writing to Slossons about their criticisms of the lock on the door of Lord Woldo’s private entrance to the theatre. Also he had arranged with the representative of the Chief Commissioner of Police concerning the carriage regulations for “setting-down and taking-up.”

And he had indeed had more than enough. His nerves, though he did not know it, and would have scorned the imputation, were slowly giving way. Hence, really, the danger to the pane! Through the pane, in the dying light, he could see a cross-section of Shaftesbury Avenue, and an aged newspaper-lad leaning against a lamp-post and displaying a poster which spoke of Isabel Joy. Isabel Joy yet again! That little fact of itself contributed to his exasperation. He thought, considering the importance of the Regent Theatre and the salary he was paying to his press-agent, that the newspapers ought to occupy their pages solely with the metropolitan affairs of Edward Henry Machin. But the wretched Isabel had, as it were, got London by the throat. She had reached Chicago from the West, on her triumphant way home, and had there contrived to be arrested, according to boast, but she was experiencing much more difficulty in emerging from the Chicago prison than in entering it. And the question was now becoming acute whether the emissary of the Militant Suffragettes would arrive back in London within the specified period of a hundred days. Naturally, London was holding its breath. London will keep calm during moderate crises–such as a national strike or the agony of the House of Lords–but when the supreme excitation is achieved London knows how to let itself go.

“If you please, Mr. Machin–“

He turned. It was his typewriter, Miss Lindop, a young girl of some thirty-five years, holding a tea-tray.

“But I’ve had my tea once!” he snapped.

“But you’ve not had your dinner, sir, and it’s half-past eight!” she pleaded.

He had known this girl for less than a month, and he paid her fewer shillings a week than the years of her age–and yet somehow she had assumed a worshipping charge of him, based on the idea that he was incapable of taking care of himself. To look at her appealing eyes one might have thought that she would have died to ensure his welfare.

“And they want to see you about the linoleum for the gallery stairs,” she added timidly. “The County Council man says it must be taken up.”

The linoleum for the gallery stairs! Something snapped in him. He almost walked right through the young woman and the tea-tray.

“I’ll linoleum them!” he bitterly exclaimed, and disappeared.

II

Having duly “linoleumed them,” or rather having very annoyingly quite failed to “linoleum them,” Edward Henry continued his way up the right-hand gallery staircase, and reached the auditorium, where to his astonishment a good deal of electricity, at one penny three farthings a unit, was blazing. Every seat in the narrow and high-pitched gallery, where at the sides the knees of one spectator would be on a level with the picture-hat of the spectator in the row beneath, had a perfect and entire view of the proscenium opening. And Edward Henry now proved this unprecedented fact by climbing to the topmost corner seat and therefrom surveying the scene of which he was monarch. The boxes were swathed in their new white dust-sheets; and likewise the higgledy-piggledy stalls, not as yet screwed down to the floor, save three or four stalls in the middle of the front row, from which the sheet had been removed. On one of these seats, far off though it was, he could descry a paper bag–probably containing sandwiches–and on another a pair of gloves and a walking-stick. Several alert ladies with sketch-books walked uneasily about in the aisles. The orchestra was hidden in the well provided for it, and apparently murmuring in its sleep. The magnificent drop-curtain, designed by Saracen Givington, A.R.A., concealed the stage.

Suddenly Mr. Marrier and Carlo Trent appeared through the iron door that gave communication–to initiates–between the wings and the auditorium; they sat down in the stalls. And the curtain rose with a violent swish, and disclosed the first “set” of “The Orient Pearl.”

“What about that amber, Cosmo?” Mr. Marrier cried thickly, after a pause, his mouth occupied with sandwich.

“There you are!” came the reply.

“Right!” said Mr. Marrier. “Strike!”

“Don’t strike!” contradicted Carlo Trent.

“Strike, I tell you! We must get on with the second act.” The voices resounded queerly in the empty theatre.

The stage was invaded by scene-shifters before the curtain could descend again.

Edward Henry heard a tripping step behind him. It was the faithful typewriting girl.

“I say,” he said. “Do you mind telling me what’s going on here? It’s true that in the rush of more important business I’d almost forgotten that a theatre is a place where they perform plays.”

“It’s the dress-rehearsal, Mr. Machin,” said the woman, startled and apologetic.

“But the dress-rehearsal was fixed for three o’clock,” said he. “It must have been finished three hours ago.”

“I think they’ve only just done the first act,” the woman breathed. “I know they didn’t begin till seven. Oh! Mr. Machin, of course it’s no affair of mine, but I’ve worked in a good many theatres, and I do think it’s such a mistake to have the dress-rehearsal quite private. If you get a hundred or so people in the stalls then it’s an audience, and there’s much less delay and everything goes much better. But when it’s private a dress-rehearsal is just like any other rehearsal.”

“Only more so–perhaps,” said Edward Henry, smiling.

He saw that he had made her happy; but he saw also that he had given her empire over him.

“I’ve got your tea here,” she said, rather like a hospital-nurse now. “Won’t you drink it?”

“I’ll drink it if it’s not stewed,” he muttered.

“Oh!” she protested, “of course it isn’t! I poured it off the leaves into another teapot before I brought it up.”

She went behind the barrier, and reappeared balancing a cup of tea with a slice of sultana cake edged on to the saucer. And as she handed it to him–the sustenance of rehearsals–she gazed at him and he could almost hear her eyes saying: “You poor thing!”

There was nothing that he hated so much as to be pitied.

“You go home!” he commanded.

“Oh, but–“

“You go home! See?” He paused, threatening. “If you don’t clear out on the tick I’ll chuck this cup and saucer down into the stalls.”

Horrified, she vanished.

He sighed his relief.

After some time the leader of the orchestra climbed into his chair, and the orchestra began to play, and the curtain went up again, on the second act of the masterpiece in hexameters. The new scenery, which Edward Henry had with extraordinary courage insisted on Saracen Givington substituting for the original incomprehensibilities displayed at the Azure Society’s performance, rather pleased him. Its colouring was agreeable, and it did resemble something definite. You could, though perhaps not easily, tell what it was meant to represent. The play proceeded, and the general effect was surprisingly pleasant to Edward Henry. And then Rose Euclid as Haidee came on for the great scene of the act. From the distance of the gallery she looked quite passably youthful, and beyond question she had a dominating presence in her resplendent costume. She was incomparably and amazingly better than she had been at the few previous rehearsals which Edward Henry had been unfortunate enough to witness. She even reminded him of his earliest entrancing vision of her.

“Some people may _like_ this!” he admitted, with a gleam of optimism. Hitherto, for weeks past, he had gone forward with his preparations in the most frigid and convinced pessimism. It seemed to him that he had become involved in a vast piece of machinery, and that nothing short of blowing the theatre up with dynamite would bring the cranks and pistons to a stop. And yet it seemed to him also that everything was unreal, that the contracts he signed were unreal, and the proofs he passed, and the posters he saw on the walls of London, and the advertisements in the newspapers. Only the cheques he drew had the air of being real. And now, in a magic flash, after a few moments gazing at the stage, he saw all differently. He scented triumph from afar off, as one sniffs the tang of the sea. On the morrow he had to meet Nellie at Euston, and he had shrunk from meeting her, with her terrible remorseless, provincial, untheatrical common sense; but now, in another magic flash, he envisaged the meeting with a cock-a-doodle-doo of hope. Strange! He admitted it was strange.

And then he failed to hear several words spoken by Rose Euclid. And then a few more. As the emotion of the scene grew, the proportion of her words audible in the gallery diminished. Until she became, for him, totally inarticulate, raving away there and struggling in a cocoon of hexameters.

Despair seized him. His nervous system–every separate nerve of it–was on the rack once more.

He stood up in a sort of paroxysm, and called loudly across the vast intervening space:

“Speak more distinctly, please.”

A fearful silence fell upon the whole theatre. The rehearsal stopped. The building itself seemed to be staggered. Somebody had actually demanded that words should be uttered articulately!

Mr. Marrier turned towards the intruder, as one determined to put an end to such singularities.

“Who’s up theyah?”

“I am,” said Edward Henry. “And I want it to be clearly understood in my theatre that the first thing an actor has to do is to make himself heard. I daresay I’m devilish odd, but that’s how I look at it.”

“Whom do you mean, Mr. Machin?” asked Marrier in a different tone.

“I mean Miss Euclid of course. Here I’ve spent heaven knows how much on the acoustics of this theatre, and I can’t make out a word she says. I can hear all the others. And this is the dress-rehearsal!”

“You must remember you’re in the gallery,” said Mr. Marrier, firmly.

“And what if I am? I’m not giving gallery seats away to-morrow night. It’s true I’m giving half the stalls away, but the gallery will be paid for.”

Another silence.

Said Rose Euclid, sharply, and Edward Henry caught every word with the most perfect distinctness:

“I’m sick and tired of people saying they can’t make out what I say! They actually write me letters about it! Why _should_ people make out what I say?”

She quitted the stage.

Another silence….

“Ring down the curtain,” said Mr. Marrier in a thrilled voice.

III

Shortly afterwards Mr. Marrier came into the managerial office, lit up now, where Edward Henry was dictating to his typewriter and hospital-nurse, who, having been caught in hat and jacket on the threshold, had been brought back and was tapping his words direct on to the machine.

It was a remarkable fact that the sole proprietor of the Regent Theatre was now in high spirits and good humour.

“Well, Marrier, my boy,” he saluted the acting-manager, “how are you getting on with that rehearsal?”

“Well, sir,” said Mr. Marrier, “I’m not getting on with it. Miss Euclid refuses absolutely to proceed. She’s in her dressing-room.”

“But why?” inquired Edward Henry with bland surprise. “Doesn’t she _want_ to be heard–by her gallery-boys?”

Mr. Marrier showed an enfeebled smile.

“She hasn’t been spoken to like that for thirty years,” said he.

“But don’t you agree with me?” asked Edward Henry.

“Yes,” said Marrier, “I _agree_ with you–“

“And doesn’t your friend Carlo want his precious hexameters to be heard?”

“We baoth agree with you,” said Marrier. “The fact is, we’ve done all we could, but it’s no use. She’s splendid, only–” He paused.

“Only you can’t make out ten per cent of what she says,” Edward Henry finished for him. “Well, I’ve got no use for that in my theatre.” He found a singular pleasure in emphasizing the phrase, “my theatre.”

“That’s all very well,” said Marrier. “But what are you going to _do_ about it? I’ve tried everything. _You’ve_ come in and burst up the entire show, if you’ll forgive my saying saoh!”

“Do?” exclaimed Edward Henry. “It’s perfectly simple. All you have to do is to act. God bless my soul, aren’t you getting fifteen pounds a week, and aren’t you my acting-manager? Act, then! You’ve done enough hinting. You’ve proved that hints are no good. You’d have known that from your birth up, Marrier, if you’d been born in the Five Towns. Act, my boy.”

“But haow? If she won’t go on, she won’t.”

“Is her understudy in the theatre?”

“Yes. It’s Miss Cunningham, you know.”

“What salary does she get?”

“Ten pounds a week.”

“What for?”

“Well–partly to understudy, I suppose.”

“Let her earn it, then. Go on with the rehearsal. And let her play the part to-morrow night. She’ll be delighted, you bet.”

“But–“

“Miss Lindop,” Edward Henry interrupted, “will you please read to Mr. Marrier what I’ve dictated?” He turned to Marrier. “It’s an interview with myself for one of to-morrow’s papers.”

Miss Lindop, with tears in her voice if not in her eyes, obeyed the order and, drawing the paper from the machine, read its contents aloud.

Mr. Marrier started back–not in the figurative but in the literal sense–as he listened.

“But you’ll never send that out!” he exclaimed.

“Why not?”

“No paper will print it!”

“My dear Marrier,” said Edward Henry, “don’t be a simpleton. You know as well as I do that half-a-dozen papers will be delighted to print it. And all the rest will copy the one that does print it. It’ll be the talk of London to-morrow, and Isabel Joy will be absolutely snuffed out.”

“Well,” said Mr. Marrier, “I never heard of such a thing!”

“Pity you didn’t, then!”

Mr. Marrier moved away.

“I say,” he murmured at the door, “don’t you think you ought to read that to Rose first?”

“I’ll read it to Rose like a bird,” said Edward Henry.

Within two minutes–it was impossible to get from his room to the dressing-rooms in less–he was knocking at Rose Euclid’s door. “Who’s there?” said a voice. He entered and then replied: “I am.”

Rose Euclid was smoking a cigarette and scratching the arm of an easy-chair behind her. Her maid stood near by with a whisky-and-soda.

“Sorry you can’t go on with the rehearsal, Miss Euclid,” said Edward Henry very quickly. “However, we must do the best we can. But Mr. Marrier thought you’d like to hear this. It’s part of an interview with me that’s going to appear to-morrow in the press.”

Without pausing, he went on to read: “I found Mr. Alderman Machin, the hero of the Five Towns and the proprietor and initiator of London’s newest and most up-to-date and most intellectual theatre, surrounded by a complicated apparatus of telephones and typewriters in his managerial room at the Regent. He received me very courteously. “Yes,” he said in response to my question, “the rumour is quite true. The principal part in ‘The Orient Pearl’ will be played on the first night by Miss Euclid’s understudy, Miss Olga Cunningham, a young woman of very remarkable talent. No, Miss Euclid is not ill or even indisposed. But she and I have had a grave difference of opinion. The point between us was whether Miss Euclid’s speeches ought to be clearly audible in the auditorium. I considered they ought. I may be wrong. I may be provincial. But that was and is my view. At the dress-rehearsal, seated in the gallery, I could not hear her lines. I objected. She refused to consider the objection or to proceed with the rehearsal. _Hinc illae lachrymae_!” … “Not at all,” said Mr. Machin in reply to a question, “I have the highest admiration for Miss Euclid’s genius. I should not presume to dictate to her as to her art. She has had a very long experience of the stage, very long, and doubtless knows better than I do. Only, the Regent happens to be my theatre, and I’m responsible for it. Every member of the audience will have a complete uninterrupted view of the stage, and I intend that every member of the audience shall hear every word that is uttered on the stage. I’m odd, I know. But then I’ve a reputation for oddness to keep up. And by the way, I’m sure that Miss Cunningham will make a great reputation for herself.”

“Not while I’m here, she won’t!” exclaimed Rose Euclid, standing up, and enunciating her words with marvellous clearness.

Edward Henry glanced at her, and then continued to read: “Suggestions for headlines. ‘Piquant quarrel between manager and star-actress.’ ‘Unparalleled situation.’ ‘Trouble at the Regent Theatre.'”

“Mr. Machin,” said Rose Euclid, “you are not a gentleman.”

“You’d hardly think so, would you?” mused Edward Henry, as if mildly interested in this new discovery of Miss Euclid’s.

“Maria,” said the star to her maid, “go and tell Mr. Marrier I’m coming.”

“And I’ll go back to the gallery,” said Edward Henry. “It’s the place for people like me, isn’t it? I daresay I’ll tear up this paper later, Miss Euclid–we’ll see.”

IV

On the next night a male figure in evening dress and a pale overcoat might have been seen standing at the corner of Piccadilly Circus and Lower Regent Street, staring at an electric sign in the shape of a shield which said, in its glittering, throbbing speech of incandescence:

THE REGENT

ROSE EUCLID

IN

“THE ORIENT PEARL”

The figure crossed the Circus, and stared at the sign from a new point of view. Then it passed along Coventry Street, and stared at the sign from yet another point of view. Then it reached Shaftesbury Avenue and stared again. Then it returned to its original station. It was the figure of Edward Henry Machin, savouring the glorious electric sign of which he had dreamed. He lit a cigarette, and thought of Seven Sachs gazing at the name of Seven Sachs in fire on the facade of a Broadway Theatre in New York. Was not this London phenomenon at least as fine? He considered it was. The Regent Theatre existed–there it stood! (What a name for a theatre!) Its windows were all illuminated. Its entrance-lamps bathed the pavement in light, and in this radiance stood the commissionaires in their military pride and their new uniforms. A line of waiting automobiles began a couple of yards to the north of the main doors and continued round all sorts of dark corners and up all manner of back streets towards Golden Square itself. Marrier had had the automobiles counted and had told him the number, but such was Edward Henry’s condition that he had forgotten. A row of boards reared on the pavement against the walls of the facade said: “Stalls Full,” “Private Boxes Full,” “Dress Circle Full,” “Upper Circle Full,” “Pit Full,” “Gallery Full.” And attached to the ironwork of the glazed entrance canopy was a long board which gave the same information in terser form: “House Full.” The Regent had indeed been obliged to refuse quite a lot of money on its opening night. After all, the inauguration of a new theatre was something, even in London! Important personages had actually begged the privilege of buying seats at normal prices, and had been refused. Unimportant personages–such as those whose boast in the universe was that they had never missed a first night in the West End for twenty, thirty, or even fifty years–had tried to buy seats at abnormal prices, and had failed: which was in itself a tragedy. Edward Henry at the final moment had yielded his wife’s stall to the instances of a Minister of the Crown, and at Lady Woldo’s urgent request had put her into Lady Woldo’s private landowner’s-box, where also was Miss Elsie April, who “had already had the pleasure of meeting Mrs. Machin.” Edward Henry’s first night was an event of magnitude. And he alone was responsible for it. His volition alone had brought into being that grand edifice whose light yellow walls now gleamed in nocturnal mystery under the shimmer of countless electric bulbs.

“There goes pretty nigh forty thousand pounds of my money!” he reflected excitedly.

And he reflected:

“After all, I’m somebody.”

Then he glanced down Lower Regent Street and saw Sir John Pilgrim’s much larger theatre, now sub-let to a tenant who was also lavish with displays of radiance. And he reflected that on first nights Sir John Pilgrim, in addition to doing all that he himself had done, would hold the great _role_ on the stage throughout the evening. And he admired the astounding, dazzling energy of such a being, and admitted ungrudgingly:

“He’s somebody too! I wonder what part of the world he’s illuminating just now!”

Edward Henry did not deny to his soul that he was extremely nervous. He would not and could not face even the bare possibility that the first play presented at the new theatre might be a failure. He had meant to witness the production incognito among the crowd in the pit or in the gallery. But, after visiting the pit a few moments before the curtain went up, he had been appalled by the hard-hearted levity of the pit’s remarks on things in general. The pit did not seem to be in any way chastened or softened by the fact that a fortune, that reputations, that careers were at stake. He had fled from the packed pit. (As for the gallery, he decided that he had already had enough of the gallery.) He had wandered about corridors, and to and fro in his own room and in the wings, and even in the basement, as nervous as a lost cat or an author, and as self-conscious as a criminal who knows himself to be on the edge of discovery. It was a fact that he could not look people in the eyes. The reception of the first act had been fairly amiable, and he had suffered horribly as he listened for the applause. Catching sight of Carlo Trent in the distance of a passage, he had positively run away from Carlo Trent. The first _entr’acte_ had seemed to last for about three months. Its nightmarish length had driven him almost to lunacy. The “feel” of the second act–so far as it mystically communicated itself to him in his place of concealment–had been better. And at the second fall of the curtain the applause had been enthusiastic. Yes, enthusiastic! Curiously, it was the revulsion caused by this new birth of hope that, while the third act was being played, had driven him out of the theatre. His wild hope needed ozone. His breast had to expand in the boundless prairie of Piccadilly Circus. His legs had to walk. His arms had to swing.

Now he crossed the Circus again to his own pavement and gazed like a stranger at his own posters. On several of them, encircled in a scarlet ring, was the sole name of Rose Euclid–impressive! (And smaller, but above it, the legend, “E.H. Machin, Sole Proprietor.”) He asked himself impartially, as his eyes uneasily left the poster and slipped round the Circus–deserted save by a few sinister and idle figures at that hour–“Should I have sent that interview to the papers, or shouldn’t I?… I wonder. I expect some folks would say that on the whole I’ve been rather hard on Rose since I first met her!… Anyhow, she’s speaking up all right to-night!” He laughed shortly.

A newsboy floated up from the Circus bearing a poster with the name of Isabel Joy on it in large letters.

He thought:

“Be blowed to Isabel Joy!”

He did not care a fig for Isabel Joy’s competition now.

And then a small door opened in the wall close by, and an elegant cloaked woman came out on to the pavement. The door was the private door leading to the private box of Lord Woldo, owner of the ground upon which the Regent Theatre was built. The woman he recognized with confusion as Elsie April, whom he had not seen alone since the Azure Society’s night.

“What are you doing out here, Mr. Machin?” she greeted him with pleasant composure.

“I’m thinking,” said he.

“It’s going splendidly,” she remarked. “Really!… I’m just running round to the stage-door to meet dear Rose as she comes off. What a delightful woman your wife is! So pretty, and so sensible!”

She disappeared round the corner before he could compose a suitable husband’s reply to this laudation of a wife.

Then the commissionaires at the entrance seemed to start into life. And then suddenly several preoccupied men strode rapidly out of the theatre, buttoning their coats, and vanished phantom-like….

Critics, on their way to destruction!

The performance must be finishing. Hastily he followed in the direction taken by Elsie April.

V

He was in the wings, on the prompt side. Close by stood the prompter, an untidy youth with imperfections of teeth, clutching hard at the red-scored manuscript of “The Orient Pearl.” Sundry players, of varying stellar degrees, were posed around in the opulent costumes designed by Saracen Givington, A.R.A. Miss Lindop was in the background, ecstatically happy, her cheeks a race-course of tears. Afar off, in the centre of the stage, alone, stood Rose Euclid, gorgeous in green and silver, bowing and bowing and bowing–bowing before the storm of approval and acclamation that swept from the auditorium across the footlights. With a sound like that of tearing silk, or of a gigantic contralto mosquito, the curtain swished down, and swished up, and swished down again. Bouquets flew on to the stage from the auditorium (a custom newly imported from the United States by Miss Euclid, and encouraged by her, though contrary to the lofty canons of London taste). The actress already held one huge trophy, shaped as a crown, to her breast. She hesitated, and then ran to the wings, and caught Edward Henry by the wrist impulsively, madly. They shook hands in an ecstasy.

It was as though they recognized in one another a fundamental and glorious worth; it was as though no words could ever express the depth of appreciation, affection and admiration which each intensely felt for the other; it was as though this moment were the final consecration of twin-lives whose long, loyal comradeship had never been clouded by the faintest breath of mutual suspicion. Rose Euclid was still the unparalleled star, the image of grace and beauty and dominance upon the stage. And yet quite clearly Edward Henry saw close to his the wrinkled, damaged, daubed face and thin neck of an old woman; and it made no difference.

“Rose!” cried a strained voice, and Rose Euclid wrenched herself from him and tumbled with half a sob into the clasping arms of Elsie April.

“You’ve saved the intellectual theatah for London, my boy! That’s what you’ve done!” Marrier now was gripping his hand. And Edward Henry was convinced that he had.

The strident vigour of the applause showed no diminution. And through the thick, heavy rain of it could be heard the monotonous, insistent detonations of one syllable:

“‘Thor! ‘Thor! ‘Thor! ‘Thor! ‘Thor!”

And then another syllable was added:

“Speech! Speech! Speech! Speech!”

Mechanically Edward Henry lit a cigarette. He had no consciousness of doing so.

“Where is Trent?” people were asking.

Carlo Trent appeared up a staircase at the back of the stage.

“You’ve got to go on,” said Marrier. “Now, pull yourself together. The Great Beast is calling for you. Say a few wahds.”

Carlo Trent in his turn seized the hand of Edward Henry, and it was for all the world as though he were seizing the hand of an intellectual and poetic equal, and wrung it.

“Come now!” Mr. Marrier, beaming, admonished him, and then pushed.

“What must I say?” stammered Carlo.

“Whatever comes into your head.”

“All right! I’ll say something.”

A man in a dirty white apron drew back the heavy mass of the curtain about eighteen inches, and Carlo Trent stepping forward, the glare of the footlights suddenly lit his white face. The applause, now multiplied fivefold and become deafening, seemed to beat him back against the curtain. His lips worked. He did not bow.

“Cam back, you fool!” whispered Marrier.

And Carlo Trent stepped back into safe shelter.

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“I c-couldn’t,” murmured weakly the greatest dramatic poet in the world, and began to cry.

“Speech! Speech! Speech! Speech!”

“Here!” said Edward Henry, gruffly. “Get out of my way! I’ll settle ’em! Get out of my way!” And he riddled Carlo Trent with a fusillade of savagely scornful glances.

The man in the apron obediently drew back the curtain again, and the next second Edward Henry was facing an auditorium crowded with his patrons. Everybody was standing up, chiefly in the aisles and crowded at the entrances, and quite half the people were waving, and quite a quarter of them were shouting. He bowed several times. An age elapsed. His ears were stunned. But it seemed to him that his brain was working with marvellous perfection. He perceived that he had been utterly wrong about “The Orient Pearl.” And that all his advisers had been splendidly right. He had failed to catch its charm and to feel its power. But this audience–this magnificent representative audience drawn from London in the brilliant height of the season–had not failed.

It occurred to him to raise his hand. And as he raised his hand it occurred to him that his hand held a lighted cigarette. A magic hush fell upon the magnificent audience, which owned all that endless line of automobiles outside. Edward Henry, in the hush, took a pull at his cigarette.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, pitching his voice well–for municipal politics had made him a practised public speaker, “I congratulate you. This evening you–have succeeded!”

There was a roar, confused, mirthful, humorously protesting. He distinctly heard a man in the front row of the stalls say: “Well, for sheer nerve–!” And then go off into a peal of laughter.

He smiled and retired.

Marrier took charge of him.

“You merit the entire confectioner’s shop!” exclaimed Marrier, aghast, admiring, triumphant.

Now Edward Henry had had no intention of meriting cake. He had merely followed in speech the secret train of his thought. But he saw that he had treated a West End audience as a West End audience had never before been treated, and that his audacity had conquered. Hence he determined not to refuse the cake.

“Didn’t I tell you I’d settle ’em?” said he.

The band played “God Save the King.”

VI

One hour later, in the double-bedded chamber at the Majestic, as his wife lay in bed and he was methodically folding up a creased white tie and inspecting his chin in the mirror, he felt that he was touching again, after an immeasurable interval, the rock-bottom of reality. Nellie, even when he could only see her face–and that in a mirror!–was the most real phenomenon in his existence, and she possessed the strange faculty of dispelling all unreality round about her.

“Well,” he said, “how did you get on in the box?”

“Oh!” she replied, “I got on very well with the Woldo woman. She’s one of our sort. But I’m not _so_ set up with your Elsie April.”

“Dash this collar!”

Nellie continued:

“And I can tell you another thing, I don’t envy Mr. Rollo Wrissell.”

“What’s Wrissell got to do with it?”

“She means to marry him.”

“Elsie April means to marry Wrissell?”

“He was in and out of the box all night. It was as plain as a pikestaff.”

“What’s amiss with my Elsie April?” Edward Henry demanded.

“She’s a thought too _pleasant_ for my taste,” answered Nellie.

Astonishing, how pleasantness is regarded with suspicion in the Five Towns, even by women who can at a pinch be angels!

VII

Often during the brief night he gazed sleepily at the vague next bed and mused upon the extraordinariness of women’s consciences. His wife slept like an innocent. She always did. It was as though she gently expired every evening and returned gloriously to life every morning. The sunshiny hours between three and seven were very long to him, but it was indisputable that he did not hear the clock strike six: which was at any rate proof of a little sleep to the good. At five minutes past seven he thought he heard a faint rustling noise in the corridor, and he arose and tiptoed to the door and opened it. Yes, the Majestic had its good qualities! He had ordered that all the London morning daily papers should be laid at his door as early as possible–and there the pile was, somewhat damp, and as fresh as fruit, with a slight odour of ink. He took it in.

His heart was beating as he climbed back into bed with it and arranged pillows so that he could sit up, and unfolded the first paper. Nellie had not stirred.

Once again he was disappointed in the prominence given by the powerful London press to his London enterprise. In the first newspaper, a very important one, he positively could not find any criticism of the Regent’s first night. There was nearly a page of the offensive Isabel Joy, who was now appealing, through the newspapers, to the President of the United States. Isabel had been christened the World-Circler, and the special correspondents of the entire earth were gathered about her carpeted cell. Hope still remained that she would reach London within the hundred days. An unknown adherent of the cause for which she suffered had promised to give ten thousand pounds to that cause if she did so. Further, she was receiving over sixty proposals of marriage a day. And so on and so on! Most of this he gathered in an instant from the headlines alone. Nauseating! Another annoying item in the paper was a column and a half given to the foundation-stone-laying of the First New Thought Church, in Dean Street, Soho–about a couple of hundred yards from its original site. He hated the First New Thought Church as one always hates that to which one has done an injury.

Then he found what he was searching for: “Regent Theatre. Production of poetical drama at London’s latest playhouse.” After all, it was well situated in the paper, on quite an important page, and there was over a column of it. But in his nervous excitation his eyes had missed it. His eyes now read it. Over half of it was given up to a discussion of the Don Juan legend and the significance of the Byronic character of Haidee–obviously written before the performance. A description of the plot occupied most of the rest, and a reference to the acting ended it. “Miss Rose Euclid, in the trying and occasionally beautiful part of Haidee, was all that her admirers could have wished.” … “Miss Cunningham distinguished herself by her diction and bearing in the small part of the Messenger.” The final words were, “The reception was quite favourable.”

“Quite favourable” indeed! Edward Henry had a chill. Good heavens, was not the reception ecstatically, madly, foolishly enthusiastic? “Why!” he exclaimed within, “I never saw such a reception!” It was true, but then he had never seen any other first night. He was shocked, as well as chilled. And for this reason: for weeks past all the newspapers, in their dramatic gossip, had contained highly sympathetic references to his enterprise. According to the paragraphs, he was a wondrous man, and the theatre was a wondrous house, the best of all possible theatres, and Carlo Trent was a great writer, and Rose Euclid exactly as marvellous as she had been a quarter of a century before, and the prospects of the intellectual-poetic drama in London so favourable as to amount to a certainty of success. In those columns of dramatic gossip there was no flaw in the theatrical world. In those columns of dramatic gossip no piece ever failed, though sometimes a piece was withdrawn, regretfully and against the wishes of the public, to make room for another piece. In those columns of dramatic gossip theatrical managers, actors, and especially actresses, and even authors, were benefactors of society, and therefore they were treated with the deference, the gentleness, the heartfelt sympathy which benefactors of society merit and ought to receive.

The tone of the criticism of the first night was different–it was subtly, not crudely, different. But different it was.

The next newspaper said the play was bad and the audience indulgent. It was very severe on Carlo Trent, and very kind to the players, whom it regarded as good men and women in adversity–with particular laudations for Miss Rose Euclid and the Messenger. The next newspaper said the play was a masterpiece–and would be so hailed in any country but England. England, however–! Unfortunately this was a newspaper whose political opinions Edward Henry despised. The next newspaper praised everything and everybody, and called the reception tumultuously enthusiastic. And Edward Henry felt as though somebody, mistaking his face for a slice of toast, had spread butter all over it. Even the paper’s parting assurance that the future of the higher drama in London was now safe beyond question did not remove this delusion of butter.

The two following newspapers were more sketchy or descriptive, and referred at some length to Edward Henry’s own speech, with a kind of sub-hint that Edward Henry had better mind what he was about. Three illustrated papers and photographs of scenes and figures, but nothing important in the matter of criticism. The rest were “neither one thing nor the other,” as they say in the Five Towns. On the whole, an inscrutable press, a disconcerting, a startling, an appetite-destroying, but not a hopeless press!

The general impression which he gathered from his perusals was that the author was a pretentious dullard, an absolute criminal, a genius; that the actors and actresses were all splendid and worked hard, though conceivably one or two of them had been set impossible tasks–to wit, tasks unsuited to their personalities; that he himself was a Napoleon, a temerarious individual, an incomprehensible fellow; and that the future of the intellectual-poetic drama in London was not a topic of burning actuality…. He remembered sadly the superlative-laden descriptions, in those same newspapers, of the theatre itself, a week or two back, the unique theatre in which the occupant of every seat had a complete and uninterrupted view of the whole of the proscenium opening. Surely that fact alone ought to have ensured proper treatment for him!

Then Nellie woke up and saw the scattered newspapers.

“Well,” she asked, “what do they say?”

“Oh!” he replied lightly, with a laugh. “Just about what you’d expect. Of course you know what a first-night audience always is. Too generous. And ours was, particularly. Miss April saw to that. She had the Azure Society behind her, and she was determined to help Rose Euclid. However, I should say it was all right–I should say it was quite all right. I told you it was a gamble, you know.”

When Nellie, dressing, said that she considered she ought to go back home that day, he offered no objection. Indeed he rather wanted her to go. Not that he had a desire to spend the whole of his time at the theatre, unhampered by provincial women in London. On the contrary, he was aware of a most definite desire not to go to the theatre. He lay in bed and watched with careless curiosity the rapid processes of Nellie’s toilette. He had his breakfast on the dressing-table (for he was not at Wilkins’s, neither at the Grand Babylon). Then he helped her to pack, and finally he accompanied her to Euston, where she kissed him with affectionate common sense and caught the twelve five. He was relieved that nobody from the Five Towns happened to be going down by that train.

As he turned away from the moving carriage the evening papers had just arrived at the bookstalls. He bought the four chief organs–one green, one yellowish, one white, one pink–and scanned them self-consciously on the platform. The white organ had a good heading: “Re-birth of the intellectual drama in London. What a provincial has done. Opinions of leading men.” Two columns altogether! There was, however, little in the two columns. The leading men had practised a sagacious caution. They, like the press as a whole, were obviously waiting to see which way the great elephantine public would jump. When the enormous animal had jumped they would all exclaim: “What did I tell you?” The other critiques were colourless. At the end of the green critique occurred the following sentence: “It is only fair to state, nevertheless,