Part 10
My efforts at the L.A.C. threw rather a cloud on my career at this season, for they continued to be crowned with failure; in fact, the bitter truth was slowly brought home to me that I was not a good runner. I won a heat in two handicaps, after repeated losses; but when it came to the semi-finals, in both cases my performance was quite beneath consideration. I was very unequal, and Nat Perry said that my running was rather “in and out,” and Dicky Travers said that it might be misunderstood and count against me, though, of course, he knew it was not intentional, but just according to the sort of spirits I was in. For instance, if Mr. Westonshaugh had praised me at the office, or Mr. Montgomery Merridew had said I was getting on at the Dramatic School, then, curiously enough, I ran better; but if Mr. Westonshaugh had frowned, or Mr. Merridew had exhibited impatience about my deportment or voice production, then my legs seemed to feel it, and sulk, and go slower, just when I most wanted them to go faster. Such, no doubt, is life.
But, to compensate for these reverses, most extraordinary success attended my cricket, and at the end of the season it was found on calculation that I headed the batting list with an average of forty, decimal something, for eight completed innings. We were the champion insurance office that season, thanks in a measure to me and another much better man called Finlay, who bowled at a great pace and was also a steady run-getter. Then came the striking news that there was a bat given annually for the best average. It was bestowed publicly, in the Board Room, and the Secretary presented it in the name of the directors.
For an instant I regretted my achievement; then I told myself that as a man destined to take his place on the public stage and be in the public eye, a trifling matter like a presentation-bat was all in the day’s work. So I took the matter in a light spirit, and, though doubtless many felt very envious of my amazing luck, for there were five “not outs” in my average, I none the less treated it with great apparent coolness.
“You’ll have to make a speech,” said Mr. Blades, and I merely answered:
“Of course. You always have to in these cases”—just as though receiving testimonials was as common a thing with me as registering policies.
Behind the scenes, however, the case was very different, and, as the time drew nearer for the presentation of the bat, I found, rather to my surprise, that my pulse quickened when the thought came into my mind.
To quiet this effect, which was entirely owing to the fact of being unprepared, I planned a speech. Of course, a written speech was out of the question, as only monarchs read their speeches, which they take from the hand of a courtier at the critical moment; but there is no objection to writing a speech first and then learning it by heart and delivering it in a slightly halting manner, as though it was an impromptu. This can be done, and with my histrionic attainments and increasing command of deportment and voice production, I felt hopeful that I should make a good impression. I felt my future official career might depend to some extent on this speech, and I spent several evenings at home, writing it and touching it up, so that it should be worthy of the Apollo Fire Office, and of the occasion, and of me.
I never polished anything so much in my life, and after it was completed to my satisfaction I tried it on Aunt Augusta, to see how it struck her, as an unprejudiced person, ignorant of cricket and so on.
“You are to imagine the Board Room of the Apollo full of a seething and serried flood of officials,” I said. “The Secretary, the famous Mr. Septimus Trott, rises in his chair and addresses the meeting. The affairs of the cricket club are discussed, and its great success during the past season; then he mentions me by name, and very likely a few of my best friends will raise a cheer. This cheer may possibly spread to men from the other departments, until the whole assemblage honours me with congratulations. I don’t say it will, of course, but it may. Then I step out and go up to the secretarial chair, and Mr. Septimus Trott, doubtless with a passing thought of how very different was the last time I came before him, smiles genially, picks up the presentation-bat, which I have already chosen, and hands it to me. He bows; I bow. Then I accept the bat in the true spirit of sportsmanship, and speak as follows.”
After that I read my aunt the speech, which was cast in these memorable words:
“Mr. Secretary and gentlemen, it would be no exaggeration to say that I was amazed at my performance as a wielder of the willow during our past season on the tented field. In my earlier days, Mr. Secretary and gentlemen, such little success as I may claim for my efforts was with the leather; but I never thought that, even helped with such phenomenal luck as has fallen to my share, I should top our averages and find myself standing before you in this honourable and invidious position.”
“Surely not ‘invidious,’” said Aunt Augusta; but I held up my hand for silence, in the style of Mr. Merridew when interrupted, and proceeded with the speech.
“The game of cricket, Mr. Secretary and gentlemen, is of surpassing antiquity; but it is subject to those famous laws of evolution discovered by Mr. Darwin, and it has vastly changed for the better during the last half-century. We can hardly imagine that first-class cricket is capable of further development; yet we are wrong. It is. And though I may not be here to see it, I have no hesitation in saying that some of you collected here to-day may live to observe vast changes in this historic, manly, and essentially English pastime.
“Much has already been done since the days of Captain Fellowes and Fuller Pilch to improve the national game; and though it is not possible to us of the Apollo Fire Office, owing to the many calls upon our time in this hive of industry, to acquire what you might consider perfection at what has been well called ‘the King of Games,’ still, we have already shown ourselves to be no mean foemen in the fifth or sixth-class cricket, which we practise so ably, as many a victory over our formidable antagonists in other insurance offices so clearly shows.
“That it has been my great good fortune, Mr. Secretary and gentlemen, to advance our prosperity to the flood-tide of success will ever be a source of proud gratification to me and my family in days to come; and I have no hesitation in saying that, among my possessions, be they great or small, in after life, I shall cherish this bat as a jewel in my crown, so to say, and never relinquish it as long as my powers enable me to participate in our national pastime.
“In conclusion, Mr. Secretary and—--”
Here my Aunt Augusta interposed again—definitely and sternly:
“Really—really—I do think it’s too long, my dear boy,” she said. “It’s awfully good and interesting, and flows beautifully, and if I was a clerk in your office I should love to hear you say it; but—but—--”
“You miss the elocution and the pauses and effects,” I explained. “I’m merely _reading_ it now; but when I _deliver_ it, everything will be quite different.”
“It may be so,” she said, “but I have a firm conviction that it is far too long for the occasion. You see, after the office hours are over, the men will all be wanting to hurry off to catch trains, and so on; and it would be a fearfully disappointing thing for you, in the midst of your speech, if people began going out. Suppose, as an extreme case, that the Secretary himself, who is a very important and busy man, _had_ to go before you had finished? Think what a cloud it would cast, and how you would feel.”
Of course the vision of the Secretary slipping away, and the clerks stealing out one by one, was a very painful vision; and my mind seemed to take hold of this gloomy idea of Aunt Augusta’s and elaborate it, until I pictured a scene where I and my bat were finally left in the midst of the Board Room in solitary state, addressing the empty air!
“I hadn’t looked at it in that manner,” I told Aunt Augusta, “and yet it seems a frightful shame that this thing should all go for nothing.”
“Couldn’t you shorten it by about three-quarters?” she suggested; but I felt, somehow, that this was out of the question.
“It is a case of all or none, as we say,” I replied, “and I am afraid it had better be a case of none. I should like to have delivered the speech, and I may tell you that what is called the ‘per-oration’ was the best part of it. I worked up to a sort of a pitch in it—a pitch of true feeling. In fact, it was poetry; and if I had done it properly, they’d have forgotten all about their trains and even felt it was worth missing them. But all is now over. I expect you are right, though, of course, it is impossible to be certain.”
With these words, I made a quick movement and dramatically cast the manuscript of the speech upon the fire. I thought that Aunt Augusta, womanlike, would have leapt forward, smitten with remorse before the spectacle, and dashed at the grate and very likely burned herself in unavailing efforts to rescue my words. But she made no such effort, and expressed no remorse whatever. I could not help showing a little irritation.
“Hang it all,” I said, “you might have asked to hear the peroration!”
She put her hand on my arm.
“I’m an artist too,” she said, in her quiet voice, “but I’m old, compared to you, and my sense of humour has been sharpened through a good many sorrows as well as joys. My dearest boy, it wasn’t any good—honestly—honestly. You can do a million times better than that. Just say what comes into your head, and you’ll cover yourself with glory.”
Of course the female sex is famous for a sort of intuition, and they often get clever and correct ideas without working for them like we men have to do. They have flashes of sense, as it were, and though sometimes the flashes are right bang off, to use a slang phrase, still, there is no doubt that often the things they utter on the spur of the moment will be found to hit the right nail on the head. Aunt Augusta had sense, though the worlds of the City and of sport were, naturally, sealed books to her. I allowed her hand to stay on my arm, which I did not always do, and granted that I honestly believed she was very likely right.
“And if you’ve had a good many sorrows in your time, Aunt Augusta, I’m very sorry, and don’t wish to add to them,” I said. “In fact, really, in cold blood, looking back at my idea of a speech, with stage deportment, and elocution, and so on—and pathos at the end, it may have been infernal cheek to think of such a thing from a junior clerk to a crowd of grown-up men. They might have given me ‘the bird,’ which is theatrical parlance for hissing; they might have got right-down annoyed, and thought I was making game of them; they might even have taken away the bat!”
“No,” she said, “they would never have done anything like that; but I’m sure they would have thought you were making too much of the whole affair; and that would have hurt your feelings.”
So we left it in that way, and I not merely forgave Aunt Augusta, but thanked her for saving me from what might have been a considerable peril and very likely damaged my future prospects in the Apollo.
When the great evening actually did come, only about a dozen sporting clerks, including Mr. Blades and Dicky Travers, dropped in to see the presentation, and Mr. Septimus Trott, in about six well-chosen words, handed me my bat and congratulated me on winning it. In return I merely said: “Thank you, sir. I’m very glad to have had such luck.”
It was like those rather dreadful accounts of hangings, when you read that from the moment of pinioning till the drop fell was a period of less than two minutes. Not one of the meagre handful of clerks who attended the ceremony need have feared to miss his train; and doubtless they were well aware of this before they came to the ceremonial.
On the whole, I wasted a good deal of valuable time and thought on this subject, and shall never regard it as one of the most satisfactory things that happened to me during my first year in London. In fact, it was rather sad in a way, though very satisfactory from a purely sporting point of view.
XIV
Just as my first year in London was drawing to a close I received the gratifying news from Mr. Westonshaugh that I might take a holiday of a week’s duration. Naturally, my first idea was to go out of town, and Aunt Augusta reminded me that Doctor Dunston had said he would like to entertain me as a guest at Merivale when the opportunity offered.
But, strangely enough, I did not feel drawn to Merivale, because it so happened that I had seen the Doctor during the previous spring, when he came to London to buy prizes and attend one or two of the May meetings, which were his solitary annual relaxation. In fact, he had asked me to dine with him at his hotel, “The Bishop’s Keys,” not far from Exeter Hall, and I had gone, and found the Doctor changed. I couldn’t tell how he had changed exactly, for he was still the same man, of course, and still took the same majestic view of life; but somehow he had shrunk, and seeing him at “The Bishop’s Keys” was quite different from seeing him in his study at Merivale, surrounded by all the implements of the scholastic profession. His voice was the same, and his rich vocabulary, and his way of examining a question in all its bearings; but still, he had shrunk, and, a good deal to my surprise and uneasiness, I found myself actually disagreeing with him! He did not thoroughly realise what I had become; but that was my own fault to some extent, because the old fascination under the Doctor’s spell had not entirely perished, and I found myself feeling before him just as I used to feel. Of course I ought to have talked freely to him and described the life I led and the various things of interest that had happened to me in London; but I did not. Instead, I listened to him wandering on about Merivale, and the new boys, and the leak in the swimming-bath, and the scholarship his daughter had got for Girton, and his wife’s neuralgia, and his detection of the gardener’s boy in a series of thefts from the boot-room, and so on. He didn’t like London, and had to take lozenges for his throat every half-hour. He was, in fact, not to put too fine a point upon it, a bore, and though my conscience stung me for ingratitude, I could not throw myself into the leak in the swimming-bath, or feel that the gardener’s boy or the scholarship at Girton really mattered an atom. It was base on my part, but I could not help it, and, curiously enough, my conversation had the same effect on the Doctor that his had on me. The only difference was that he very soon stopped me when I began saying things he didn’t like, whereas I could not, of course, stop him. Without saying it unkindly, I found that the Doctor had become rather piffling in his interests. He gave me a bottle of ginger beer with my dinner, while he drank a half-bottle of burgundy, and he showed in a good many little ways that he still regarded me merely as Corkey Major, and expected me to regard him as Dr. Dunston. But one must give and take in these matters, and when he began talking about what his old pupils had done in the world, and left me entirely out of the list of those who had made their mark, I began to feel fairly full up with the Doctor, as they say, and knew only too well that in future I should manage to struggle on without seeing any more of him. Because living in London readjusts your perspective, so to speak, and it was rather sad in a way to see such a grand old scholar and large-minded man filling up his fine brain with such gew-gaws and fribbles as the affairs of Merivale. He was, moreover, more Conservative than ever, and I felt really ashamed to find anybody with such wrong ideas on demand and supply and the rights of man. But to have corrected his opinions on these subjects would have been an impossible task; because, as Mr. Blades once neatly said on another subject, you can’t bring a back-number up to date, and the Doctor, while he might have appeared to the old advantage in the scholastic and venerable atmosphere of Merivale, was distinctly of the ancient and honourable order of back-numbers as he appeared at “The Bishop’s Keys” in London.
There was great unrest among the working classes at this time, and Dr. Dunston was very angry with the proletariat. “The sons of labour,” he said, “will soon be the sons of perdition, for, at the rate they are going, they will inevitably dislocate forever the relations between Capital and Labour—with disastrous results to themselves, Corkey; with disastrous results to themselves!”
Of course, to one saturated in the sayings of Mr. Bright and Mr. Walter, these views appeared erroneous; but it would not have done to tell the Doctor that I was now a Radical. He must have felt it as a personal slight in his scheme of education. Still, I had to assert myself to some extent and didn’t hesitate to smoke a cigarette with my coffee. It may be added that the Doctor didn’t hesitate to resent it.
“A stupid habit, even in the adult, Corkey,” he said; “and I regret that you have allowed yourself to acquire it at your tender age. To suck into the system a deadening smoke from the conflagration of a poisonous vegetable has always seemed to me unworthy of a gentleman and a Christian. No doubt your companions have seduced you, but I am sorry the armour of Merivale was not proof against their temptation.”
After this I hid my secret flights toward literature and the boards. His view of the theatre appeared to be that the Greek drama was worthy of all praise, but that the English drama was not. I asked him if he was going to see _Hamlet_, as performed by Mr. Irving and Miss Ellen Terry, and he said, “No, Corkey. The modern theatre is no place for a preceptor of the young. Shakespeare, in fact, is far too sacred a subject for the modern stage. The spirit evaporates, the poet takes wing, and what is left is not worth going to see. I read my Shakespeare in the privacy of my own chamber, Corkey; and I do not expect that the modern generation of actors can teach me anything I do not already know of the Swan of Avon, either from a poetic or philosophical standpoint.”
To argue with this sort of thing was, of course, no work for me. I listened in silence, and concealed the pity combined with annoyance that was surging in my breast. I hated hiding from this religious-minded but parochial man that I was going on the stage, for it seemed mean to do so; but I also felt it was no good putting him to needless pain and very likely spoiling the effect of the May Meetings and doing him harm. So I changed the subject and asked him about the prizes. He had been to the Army and Navy Stores for these, and had bought _Longfellow’s Poems_, and _Robinson Crusoe_, and _St. Winifred’s_, and _Masterman Ready_, and _Hours with a Microscope_ and _Hours with a Telescope_, and _Eyes and no Eyes_, and many another fine, old, crusted work, familiar enough to me in the past. In fact, I realised with interest that the Doctor’s mind was standing still, and though there was something grand in a small way to see this steadfast attitude, like a light-house, to use a poetical simile, casting its unchanging beam over the tumultuous seas of Merivale, yet, somehow, in the atmosphere of the Strand, London (for “The Bishop’s Keys” were merely round a corner from the main thoroughfare), the beam of the Doctor was reduced to a mere night-light.
By good luck he was going to an evening May Meeting at nine o’clock, and he invited me to accompany him to hear an eminent Colonial Bishop on the Spread of Christianity in the Frigid Zone; but with unexpected courage I withstood him, pleaded an engagement, which was true, as it was a Dramatic School night, and left him at the threshold of Exeter Hall. Our parting was marked by a cordiality that both of us were far from feeling; for I knew that I had disappointed the Doctor; and though, of course, he little knew that he had disappointed me, he had; and I felt an overpowering wish not to see him again. I had, in fact, now broken definitely with my past, and when, therefore, Aunt Augusta suggested that my week’s holiday should be spent at Merivale, I negatived the idea without a division, as they say.
Aunt Augusta then rose to the occasion, with her usual kindness and generosity, and proposed a few days at a place familiar to her in Brittany.
“It is wild and lonely,” she said, “but it is very beautiful, and I can do some sketching if the weather permits, and you can practise elocution among the sand dunes and shout yourself hoarse.”
This offer of seeing a foreign country was far too good to refuse, and though financially such a thing was beyond my private resources, I had now made an arrangement with Aunt Augusta by which it was definitely understood that any advances which she might be good enough to make for the moment should be amply recognised at a later period in my career, when money ceased to be the vital object it was at present.
She had not much, but still, far more than I, having made a niche for herself on the pinnacle of fame, and often selling a work of creative art for eight or even ten pounds. She promised, therefore, that when the time came for me to earn money on the boards and draw a salary in keeping with the dignity of a London actor, she would let me take the financial lead, so to speak, and richly reward her for her generosity of the past. In fact, it was understood that if Aunt Augusta cast her bread upon the waters, in scriptural language, it would return to her after many days—not like the talent hidden in the napkin, but more like the widow’s cruse of oil, that increased a thousand-fold. I knew of course that this must happen, and I think she felt there was more than an off-chance of it. At any rate, she went on hopefully casting.
So we visited Brittany, and I enjoyed the interesting experience of a foreign land and a foreign language in my ears, together with foreign food and foreign money. A volume, of course, might be written about Brittany, and, as a matter of fact, many volumes have been; but it is not my intention to say anything on the subject here; because, upon my return to London, much happened of a very abnormal character, and my recollection of the peaceful days, when I practised elocution in the sand dunes and Aunt Augusta painted pictures of the rather tame scenery, was speedily swept away to limbo.
Moreover, I had now reached within a week of my eighteenth birthday and, by a rather curious coincidence, the dreadful events now convulsing the metropolis culminated on that anniversary. But I must not anticipate. Though the proletariat was getting a good deal out of hand when I came back from France, no actual collision had taken place with Law and Order; but, to use a well-known figure of speech, the lion was aroused and roaring, though he had not yet emerged from his den. To drop metaphor, I may say that Labour was up in arms against Capital, and Political Economy was at the last gasp.
At this grave crisis I found myself summoned once again to assist our West-End Branch, and then discovered, to my astonishment, that the proletariat had selected Trafalgar Square as a sort of rallying-ground for their forces. Indeed, scenes of great unrest were daily enacted in that famous centre of civilisation.