Part 9

Now, even to a tyro in repartee, it was of course apparent that I had got the worst of this. There ought to have been something further to add on my side; but my admiration at such a brilliant flash of badinage was such that I could only laugh with the greatest heartiness. I was, however, merely laughing at the humour, not at the beast of a tailor; and when I had recovered from my amusement, I told him so.

I said: “That’s jolly good; but, at the same time, you oughtn’t to talk to new customers in this withering way. You don’t know who I am. I may be the son of a duke, and worth very likely ten or fifteen pounds a year to you for the rest of your life.”

It then transpired that he had seen me in the office, when he went to pay his own fire insurance a few days before.

“You have a yarn with Mr. Bright and Mr. Walter,” he said. “They’ll tell you a thing or two well worth your knowing.”

I fell in with this suggestion and submitted the case to Mr. Bright, who spoke in the following manner:

“To put on side, because you think you are more important than that tailor, is absolute footle, my dear Corkey,” he declared. “That tailor, if you’ll excuse me for saying so, is worth forty thousand of you. He’s richer; he’s wiser; he’s smarter; he’s worked harder; he knows more; he’s traveled farther; he’s better-looking; in fact, he can give you yards and a beating in every possible direction; so why the deuce do you think yourself, in some mysterious way, the better man? Where do you reckon you’re better?”

“Well,” I said, “my father was a soldier and died for his country.”

“That’s all right,” said Mr. Bright. “Your father was a hero, no doubt, and any properly minded person would have treated him as such. But you’re not. You haven’t died for your country, by the look of you, and haven’t the smallest intention of doing so. My grandfather was a bishop; but I don’t expect people to ask for my blessing on the strength of it. There’s only one exception to the rule that one man’s as good as another, my dear Corkey—_only one exception_.”

“And what is that?” I asked.

“The only exception is—when he’s a jolly sight better!” answered Mr. Bright. “You must judge of a man by himself, not by the accidents of birth or cash. The tailor next door has won his place in the world by hard work and sense and brains; therefore he has a perfect right to reserve his judgment, so far as you are concerned, until he sees what you are good for. And, seeing that he’s got probably a thousand pounds to every one of your shillings, the spectacle of you advancing a quid on your clothes—to keep him going—naturally amused him.”

This was my first introduction to political economy and the rights of man, so naturally I found it exceedingly interesting. In fact, so much did the force of Mr. Bright’s arguments impress me that, in a week, I was an advanced Socialist, and going too far altogether in the opposite direction.

But now an exciting event claims my attention; for at the West-End Branch a fresh duty devolved upon me, and I had to attend upon the Directors of the Company, when they dropped in from time to time to put their signatures to the new policies. Every policy had the signature of two Directors upon it, otherwise it was not a complete legal document; so the great men came occasionally, and I had to stand beside them, blotting-paper in hand, and blot their names as they wrote them, and draw away each policy in turn as it was signed.

Judge of my great pleasure when who should arrive one morning to put his signature to policies but my old friend, Mr. Pepys! I carried in a hundred policies for his attention, and beamed upon him with the utmost heartiness; but only to be met by a look of polite, but complete, unrecognition! It was, as it were, a further illustration of the great gulf between capital and labour—Mr. Pepys, of course, standing for the former commodity. But, though he did not associate me with his past, Mr. Pepys was exceedingly polite. He adopted the genial manner of a man who falls in with a strange but friendly dog, and encourages it.

After signing twenty policies, he tired and sighed and had to rest. Then, being the kindliest of men, he addressed a few words to me on an official subject.

“Had any fires lately?” he asked.

But I didn’t know in the least, as fires, of course, belonged to one of the highest branches of the subject. I chanced it, however, and said:

“Nothing of much consequence, sir.”

“Good!” he answered. Then he was seized with a sudden fit of caution.

“But you keep an account of them, don’t you?” he asked, almost anxiously.

This afforded me the extraordinary experience of finding a man who knew less about fire insurance than I did; and I remembered how, in the far past, months ago, Mr. Pepys had spoken slightingly of his knowledge of the business. I felt quite an old, trusty official after this—one of the faithful, dogged sort of men who are actuated solely by enthusiasm for their masters’ interests. I slightly patronised Mr. Pepys, but not intentionally. I said:

“Oh yes, sir; we don’t allow them to pass.”

“That’s right!” he replied, and showed a satisfaction which may or may not have been genuine.

“They are all embalmed in the archives of the Society, sir,” I added.

He looked at me doubtfully after this, and didn’t seem to be sure of his ground. At any rate, it silenced him; to my disappointment he made no further remarks about fire insurance or anything else, but took up his pen again, sighed, and signed a few more policies. At this moment another director entered, and Mr. Pepys wished him good morning, and he said, “Morning!”

He was a very different type of Capital. He was, in fact, a retired general officer of some repute in his time, which was, however, long past. He had recently been made a peer, and from being called Lamb had soared into a title and taken the name of some place that interested him in Scotland. I doubt, when selecting his title, whether he had remembered the policies of the Apollo; for while “Lamb” is a word you can dash off in a second, “Corrievairacktown” is not. He laboured frightfully at it and heaved like a ship at sea, and sometimes actually forgot how to spell it! He jerked his snow-white head abruptly, as though he had acquired the habit of dodging cannon-balls, and from time to time he gave off little sharp explosions of breath, like a cat when trodden upon. This man realised his own greatness in a way that perhaps nobody else did. He was a Conservative to his soldierly backbone, and I think sometimes, when he came to the Apollo for the tame occupation of signing policies, he was almost ashamed that a man, who had seen many a shot fired in anger and moved like an avenging spirit under the hurtling wings of the God of War, should have come down to signing policies for such homely things as—cooking utensils, and so on.

To illustrate the nerve and courage of Mr. Bright at a supreme crisis, I may tell you that in his younger days he had once been attending to General Sir Hastings Lamb, as he was then, and during an explosion on the part of the gallant warrior he hurled fifty or sixty policies in a heap to the ground. Doubtless, he expected Mr. Bright to bound forward and pick them up again; but far from it!

Mr. Bright, well versed in Capital and Labour and Political Economy and the Rights of Man, knew that he was not there to pick policies off the floor which an irritated representative of Capital had thrown upon it. He knew the machinery of the office provided that, in such a contingency, he must ring the Board Room bell and summon a messenger, for the subordinate task of putting the policies on the table again. Accordingly, he summoned a messenger and directed him how to proceed. Whereupon, the representative of Capital subsided instantly and signed the rest of the policies like the lamb he was in those days. Undoubtedly you might call this a triumph for the sacred rights of man; and it also showed that Mr. Bright’s moral courage was equal to his physical, which is saying a great deal.

XII

“With an auspicious and a dropping eye,” as Shakespeare says, I returned in due course to the Parent Office of the Apollo. I was glad to go back to Mr. Blades and Travers and other friends; but I was exceedingly sorry to leave Mr. Walter and Mr. Bright. In fact, I missed them a great deal, and wrote to them once or twice; and they answered without hesitation, and hoped to see me again at some future time.

And now I was faced with my first great critical task for Mr. Bulger, and secretly I viewed it with great nervousness, though openly to Brightwin I approached the test in a jaunty spirit. Needless to say I had taken preliminary steps, and the greatest of these was to hire a dress suit. At this stage in my career, unfortunately, to buy a dress suit presented insuperable difficulties; but I found from fellow-pupils at the Dramatic School that one might hire for a merely nominal sum. So I hired, and had a dress rehearsal of the part I was to play at Clapham Assembly Room, in which my Aunt Augusta and her servant, Jane, constituted the audience.

Then came the important night. I returned home direct from the office, partook of a slight repast, and reached the Clapham Assembly Room three-quarters of an hour before the doors opened. This was rather feeble in a way, and not worthy of Mr. Bulger, or _Thespis_, because we all know that professional critics dash up at the last moment in their private broughams and sink into a sumptuous stall just as the curtain rises on new productions. But I had come, as a matter of fact, in a tram and was far too early. A sense of propriety, however, told me that I ought not to be there—skulking about at least an hour before I need be; and so, with a fair amount of presence of mind, I started off to take a look at Clapham, which was a district quite unknown to me. I decided with myself that nothing would make me return to the Assembly Room until ten minutes before the curtain actually rose. I should then lounge in, present my ticket, and appear with a bored and weary air among my fellow-critics.

But as all roads were said by the ancients to lead to Rome, so all roads at Clapham appear to lead to the Assembly Room. I walked away again and again and kept going in directions that seemed to point exactly opposite from the Assembly Room, yet, sooner or later, I invariably found myself back in the same old spot. The exterior of this edifice was of an unattractive architecture, and not until two minutes before the doors opened did people begin to collect in front of it. After being, as it were, the hero of a hundred first nights in London, this audience at Clapham appeared piffling; but as the performance was for a charitable institution, many came actuated by philanthropic emotions and, of course, in a perfectly uncritical spirit. I, however, being there in the course of business, felt that I must not let any considerations of the charitable institution come between me and my duty.

The moment arrived, and I entered and presented my ticket with an air of patient and long-suffering indifference.

“Press!” said the man in the ticket-office, and marked a number on my ticket and handed it to another man. It was distinctly a moment to remember, and I forgot my hired clothes and everything, but just felt that I stood there as a representative of that glorious institution—the London Press!

My seat was in the second row and comfortable enough, without being sumptuous. I had a good view of the stage and I leisurely divested myself of my overcoat, saw that my dress shirt and tie were all right, pulled down my cuffs, and cast my eyes round the house. An amateur band, consisting chiefly of ladies, was playing, and a certain amount of verve and vivacity, though not much, filled the auditorium. Clapham had by no means turned out in its thousands; in fact, it was quite easy to count the house, and I should be exaggerating if I suggested that there were more than two hundred and fifty persons in it. Subtract fifty for biased friends of the performers and take off another fifty for pure philanthropists, and that left not more than a hundred and fifty at the outside who could be supposed to have come in a critical or artistic spirit.

The critics did not reveal their personality or sun themselves in the front of the stalls, as I had seen them do in proper theatres on a first night. They may have been there by stealth and in disguise; but more likely they had sent substitutes.

An official in evening dress came to speak to me presently. He evidently knew that I wielded my pen for _Thespis_, and I could see that knowledge inspired his friendship. He hoped I was comfortable, and said that, after the second act, there would be whisky and soda and sandwiches going in the gentlemen’s cloak-room. He added that they had all been in fear that the leading lady would lose her mother and be unable to act. But by good chance her mother was spared and she was going to play.

“Of course we had an understudy,” explained the official, who proved to be the assistant acting manager; “but no doubt you know, better than I do, what a bore it is for everybody concerned to have to fall back upon the understudies.”

“For everybody but the understudies,” I answered in a knowing sort of way, and the assistant acting manager said it was deuced good, and left me.

Of course the whisky and soda and sandwiches were a bribe, and I decided not to touch them, because you couldn’t be unprejudiced about people who thrust whisky and soda upon you; besides, I didn’t drink whisky. Every critic worthy of the name snatches a glass of champagne between the acts of a new play, and then comes back to his seat licking the ends of his mustache; but the management doesn’t pay for the sparkling beverage—far from it: the critic pays himself and so preserves his right of judgment untarnished.

As a matter of fact, after the second act I did stroll round to see the other critics and hear if others agreed with my views of the performance. There were four obvious critics in the cloak-room, all eating and drinking with complete abandon and not saying a word about the play; and there were several other people of both sexes also eating and drinking, who might, or might not, have been critics.

Somehow I found a plate of sardine sandwiches under my hand, so just ate perhaps six or eight, without, however, surrendering my right of judgment. There was no sparkling wine going, but siphons of soda-water and two bottles of whisky. I drank about a pennyworth of pure soda-water, smoked half a cigarette, and then returned to the auditorium. No official spoke a word to me during this interlude. They may have felt it was better taste not to.

The play which was submitted to my attention was not in any literary sense a novelty, though there were several new readings in it, of which the least said the soonest mended, in my opinion. The drama in question was adapted from the French of that famous dramatist, M. Victorien Sardou, and it had taken two Englishmen to do it, both called Rowe, namely, Mr. Saville Rowe and Mr. Bolton Rowe. _Diplomacy_ was the English name of the famous play, and there were seven men in it and five women. I knew the play, having seen it performed to perfection by Mr. and Mrs. Bancroft and their company; and the come-down from them to the Clapham Macreadies was, of course, tragically abrupt. But, as a critic, I naturally made allowance for the gulf that was fixed between professional and amateur acting, combined with the differences between an Assembly Room and a proper theatre.

There was much to praise; and no doubt if you are beginning to be an actor yourself and just finding out the fearful difficulties of the stage, it makes you more merciful than if you are a critic who has never himself tried it, or knows in the least what it feels like. After the third act, the assistant acting manager came to me again, on his way to others, and said in a hopeful voice:

“Going strong—eh?”

“D’you mean me, or the play?” I asked, not in the least intending a joke; but he took it for such and evinced considerable amusement.

“You’ll be the death of me,” he said. “You’re a born humourist. I expect I should be surprised if I knew your name.”

“Very likely you would,” I replied guardedly. But of course I kept hidden under the critical veil and preferred to remain anonymous; because, to have told him that my name was merely Corkey, and that I was a clerk in a fire insurance office, would have made him under-value my criticism; whereas, in reality, some of the greatest critics of the drama the world has ever known, such as Charles Lamb, have pursued the avocation of clerk with great lustre and great honour to themselves and their employers.

The assistant acting manager asked me to come behind after it was over and be introduced to some of the actors and actresses. He evidently observed that I was still in my first youth and might be dazzled; but though I should very much have liked to fall in with this suggestion, I felt that my critical faculty might be nipped in the bud, so to speak, if I approached the amateur histrion in the flesh on terms of equality.

Therefore I declined, and he hoped I would “let them all down gently,” to use his own expression, and I saw no more of him.

At the end of the play there was much applause and cheering, and the ladies received bouquets of choice flowers handed up by frenzied admirers; but all this was, of course, nothing to me. I left the Assembly Room and passed out among the audience, like one of themselves. Then I walked all the way home, in order that I might collect my thoughts and reach a judicial and impartial frame of mind. Of course one must sometimes be cruel to be kind, and so on; but I felt in this case that it was possible, allowing for the low artistic plane on which amateurs are accustomed to move, to say some friendly and encouraging thing, accompanied, of course, by the practical advice for which these Clapham Macreadies would naturally look in the pages of _Thespis_ when next they purchased it.

My review occupied an entire Sunday in writing, and I don’t think I overlooked anything or anybody. I began by touching lightly on the veteran French dramatist who was responsible for the play; I then alluded to the translation, and the Bancrofts, and their reading of the parts, and so on. Then, slowly but surely, I came to the Macreadies and their production.

I began with some hearty praise of the general performance and the courageous spirit that had inspired the company to attempt so ambitious an achievement. I censured some of the scenery, but indicated how it might have been made better with a little more forethought. The music between the acts I examined very thoroughly and considered it not well chosen.

I may quote a passage or two, in order to show the general nature of the critique:—

“To Mr. Frank Tottenham fell the part of Count Orloff, and we may say at once that his rendition left little to be desired. His conception was subtle and vigorous; he managed his limbs with a sound knowledge of stage deportment, and though his elocution was faulty, his voice appeared well in keeping with the character. His make-up, however, left much to be desired. There was a lack of permanence about it, and it changed perceptibly during the course of the play.”

Again I submit another passage:—

“Baron Stein requires an actor in every way out of the common for his adequate rendition, and if Mr. Rupert B. Somervail did not plumb the character to the core and betray the secret springs that inspire it, he none the less submitted a consistent and highly intelligent, if rather tame, reading. He has considerable promise, in our opinion; and we shall watch his future progress with acute attention.”

I took each character in turn in this way, and found that, to do real justice to the production, almost a whole number of _Thespis_ would be necessary. However, that, of course, was not my affair. I had undertaken to do a thing for Mr. Bulger, and I did it as well as I could. The rest I left to him.

Much to my regret, he took a very high-handed course with my review, and of all the twelve pages of carefully written foolscap (not to mention that I copied it three times) he only availed himself of twelve lines. The analytic part he remorselessly cut out, and the advice to the Clapham Macreadies, and most of the adverse criticism. In fact, all you would have gathered from the few commonplace paragraphs that finally appeared was this: that the Clapham Macreadies had produced _Diplomacy_, in the interests of a Cottage Hospital somewhere, and that they had given a painstaking and capable performance before a distinguished and enthusiastic audience. The usual finish and style inseparable from a Clapham Macready production was apparent, the ladies’ band excelled itself, and the Club was to be congratulated on adding another wreath to its laurels.

Of course, I had said all these things, but not in this bald and silly way. In fact, I was a good deal annoyed, and asked Brightwin rather bitterly what Mr. Bulger supposed I had hired a suit of dress clothes for, and gone down to Clap-ham, and racked my brain for twelve hours on Sunday, and so on; but he assured me that Mr. Bulger had been tremendously taken by my review and considered that I was a born critic and had really been far too conscientious in the matter.

It was my first glimpse behind the scenes of the press world, and I found that all that is written, even by critics, by no means gets into print.

I felt in the first pangs of disappointment that I would never put my pen to paper again, and so be lost to Mr. Bulger and _Thespis_ forever; but when a week or two later he actually published “The Witches’ Sabbath” on the last page, under the title of “Original Poetry,” I forgave him all. He had undoubtedly tampered with “The Witches’ Sabbath” and reduced the number of the stanzas; but all the best of it was still there; and in print it looked decidedly literary. A great many mistakes had unfortunately crept into it; and Mr. Bulger had rather tampered with the terror in one or two of the most fearful verses. Still, it was mine, and as I passed home through London that day, with a copy of _Thespis_ in my pocket, sent from the editor, I could not help wondering how little the hurrying thousands guessed that, as they carelessly elbowed me, they were touching a man who had written original poetry which had been accepted and printed in a public newspaper, and might be bought at any bookstall in London. It was rather a solemn thought in its way, and I stopped at a bookstall near Regent’s Circus to prove it, and threw down a penny and asked for _Thespis_. Much to my surprise, however, the man did not keep it in stock.

“We could get it for you, no doubt; but I thought it was dead,” he said.

“I can get it for myself, if it comes to that,” I answered, picking up the penny again. “You ought to stock it. All theatrical people buy it, and if you thought it was dead, you thought utterly wrong. It’s much more alive than you are.”

I then left him hastily, before he had time to think of a repartee.

XIII