Part 12
You may have seen Sylvia Cunningham? If so, you know how lovely she is. Not pretty but with the simple charm that beauty can't----
Well, that's trite! She'll never be a great actress, but in the rôle of Sylvia Cunningham she's perfect. I hate to call her slender--it's such an overworked word, but what other is there? Dark hair and clear, amberlucent brown eyes, and a slow, searching way of talking, as if she were really trying to put thought into speech. She, too, poor child, had had a bad summer, I guessed: there was a neat little mend in her glove. She was very friendly--I think Edwards must have told her about that _Observer_ notice. I saw that they were both much humiliated at their mishap, and I judged that genial frankness would carry off the situation best.
“Life among the artists!” I said. “What are our assets?”
“I've got seventeen cents,” said Edwards. It was a mark of fine breeding, I thought, that he did not insist upon saying how much it was that he had lost.
Miss Cunningham began to open her purse. “I have----”
“Nonsense!” I said. “What you have doesn't enter into the audit. In the vulgar phrase, your money's no good. I've got five dollars and a quarter. Now I suggest we go to Jamaica and get supper there, and then go back to town by trolley. It'll be an adventure.”
Well, that was what we did, and very jolly it was. You know how it is: artists and actors and manicure girls and newspapermen are accustomed to ups and downs of pocket; and when they have a misery in the right-hand trouser they make up for it in a spirit of genial comradeship. Jamaica is an entertaining place. In a little lunchroom, which I remembered from a time when I covered a story out that way, we had excellent ham and eggs, and a good talk.
As we sat in that little white-tiled restaurant, I couldn't help watching Edwards. I don't know how to make this plain to you, but our talk, which was cheerful enough, was the least important part of the occasion. Talk tells so little, anyway: most of it's a mere stumbling in an almost foreign tongue when it comes to expressing the inward pangs and certainties that make up life. I had a feeling, as I saw those two, that I was coming closer than ever before to something urgent and fundamental in the human riddle. I thought that I had never seen a man so completely in love. When he looked at her there was a sort of--well, a sort of possession upon him, an enthusiasm, in the true sense of that strange word. I thought to myself that Keats must have looked at Fanny Brawne in just that way. And--you know what writers are--I must confess that my observation of these two began to turn into “copy” in my mind. I was wondering whether they might not give me a hint for my stalled novel.
There are some engaged couples that make it a point of honour to be a bit off-hand and jocose when any one else is with them. Just to show, I suppose, how sure they are of each other. And somehow I had expected actors, to whom the outward gestures of passion are a mere professional accomplishment, to be a little blasé or polished in such matters. But there was a perfect candour and simplicity about them that touched me keenly. Their relation seemed a lovely thing. Too lovely, and too intense perhaps, to be entirely happy, I thought, for I could see in Edwards's face that his whole life and mind were wrapped up in it. I may have been fanciful, but at that time I was seeing the human panorama not for itself but as a reflection of my own amateurish scribblings. In my novel I had been working on the theory--not an original one, of course--that the essence of tragedy is fixing one's passion too deeply on anything in life. In other words, that happiness only comes to those who do not take life too seriously. Destiny, determined not to give up its secrets, always maims or destroys those who press it too closely. As we laughed and enjoyed ourselves over our meal, I was wondering whether Edwards, with his strange air of honourable sorrow, was a proof of my doctrine.
Of course we talked about the new play. Edwards had persuaded Upton to give Miss Cunningham a place in the cast, and she was radiant about it. Her eyes were like pansies as she spoke of it. I remember one thing she said:
“Isn't it wonderful? Morgan and I are together again. You know how much it means to us, for if the show has a run we can get married this winter.”
“This fall,” Edwards amended.
“Morgan's part is fine,” she went on, after a look at him that made even a hardened reporter feel that he had no right to be there. “It's really the big thing in the play for any one who can understand. It's just made for him.”
She was thoughtful a moment, and then added: “It's _too much_ made for him, that's the only trouble. You're living with him, Mr. Roberts. Don't let him take it too hard. He thinks of nothing else.”
I made some jocular remark, I forget what. Edwards was silent for a minute. Then he said: “If you knew how I've longed for a part like that--a part that I could really lose myself in.”
“I shouldn't care,” I said, “to lose myself in a part. Suppose I couldn't find myself again when the time came?”
He turned to me earnestly.
“You're not an actor, Roberts, so perhaps you hardly understand what it means to find a play that's _real_--more real than everyday life. What I mean is this: everyday life is so damned haphazard, troubled by a thousand distractions and subject to every sort of cruel chance. We just fumble along and never know what's coming next. But in a play, a good play, it's all worked out beforehand, you can see the action progressing under clear guidance. What a relief it is to be able to sink yourself in your part, to live it and breathe it and get away for awhile from this pitiless self-consciousness that tags around with us. You remember what they used to say about Booth: that it wasn't Booth playing Hamlet, but Hamlet playing Booth.”
*****
The next day, I remember, I tied up my manuscript neatly in a brown paper parcel, marked it _Literary Remains of Leonard Roberts_ (I was childish enough to think that the alliteration would please my literary executor, if there should be such a person), put it away in my trunk, and went down to Park Row to see if there were any jobs to be had. Of course it was the usual story. I had been out of the game for six months, and Park Row seemed to have survived the blow with great courage. At the _Observer_ office they charitably gave me some books to review. As I came uptown on the subway I was reflecting on the change a few hours had made in my condition. That morning I had been an author, a novelist if you please; and now I was not even a reporter, but that most deplorable of all Grub Street figures, a hack reviewer. It was mid-afternoon, and I hadn't had any lunch yet. In a fit of sulks I went into Browne's, sat down in a corner, and ordered a chop and some shandygaff. As I ate, I looked over the books with a peevish eye. Never mind, I said to myself, I will write such brilliant, withering, and scorching reviews that in six months the Authors' League will be offering me hush money. I was framing the opening paragraph of my first article when Johnson, whom I had known on the _Observer_, stopped at my table. He was one of the newspaper men who had left Park Row to go into professional publicity work. There had been a time when I sneered at such a declension.
“Hullo, Leonard,” he said. “What are you doing nowadays?”
I told him, irritably, that I was writing a serial for one of the women's magazines. There is no statement that puts envious awe into a newspaper man so surely as that. But I also admitted that if he knew of a good job I might be persuaded to listen to details.
“As it happens,” he said, “I do. Upton, the theatrical producer, is looking for a press agent. He tells me he's got something unusual under way, and he wants a highbrow blurb-artist. He says his regular roughneck is no good for this kind of show. Something by a new writer, rather out of Upton's ordinary line, I guess.”
“Is it 'Obedience'?”
“That's it. I couldn't remember the name.” As soon as I had finished my lunch I went round to Upton's office. It was high up in a building overlooking Longacre Square, where the elevators were crowded with the people of that quaint and spurious world. The men I found particularly fascinating--you know the type, so very young in figure, often so old and hard and dry in face, with their lively tweeds, starched blue or green collars, silver-gray ties, and straight-brushed, purply-black hair. It was my first introduction to the realms of theatrical producing, and I must confess that I found Mr. Upton's office very entertaining with its air of elaborate and transparent bunkum. I sat underneath a coloured enlarged photo of the Garden of Eden ballet in “The Figleaf Lady” and surveyed the small anteroom. It was all intensely unreal. Those framed photographs, on which were scrawled _To Harry Upton, the Best of His Kind_, or some such inscriptions, and signed by dramatists I had never heard of; the typist pounding out contracts; the architect's drawing of the projected Upton Theatre at Broadway and Fiftieth Street, showing a line of people at the box office--all this, I knew by instinct, meant nothing. The dramatists whose photographs I saw would never write a real play; the Upton Theatre, even if it should be built, would not house anything but “burlettas,” and the typed contracts were not worth so much carbon paper. As for Mr. Upton himself, one couldn't help loving him: he was such a disarming, enthusiastic, shrewd, unreliable bandit. To abbreviate, he took me on as a member of his “publicity staff” (consisting of myself and a typewriter, as far as I could see) at one hundred dollars a week. His private office had three ingenious exits; going out by one of them, I found myself in a little alcove with the typewriter and plenty of stationery. Rehearsals of “Obedience” had started that morning, Upton had told me; so before I went home that afternoon I had typed and sent off the following pregnant paragraph for the next day's papers:
Henry Upton's first dramatic production of the season, “Obedience,” by Arthur Sampson, began making elbow room for itself at rehearsals yesterday. Keith Brooks will play the leading rôle, supported by Lillian Llewellyn, Sylvia Cunningham, Morgan Edwards, and other distinguished players.
I had a feeling of cheerfulness that evening. The cursed novel was no longer on my mind, there would be a hundred dollars due me the next week, and I was about to satisfy my long-standing curiosity to know something about the theatre from the inside. It was one of those typical evenings of New York loveliness: a rich, tawny, lingering light, a dry, clear air, warm enough to be pleasantly soft and yet with a sharp tingle in the breeze. I strolled about that bright jolly neighbourhood round the hideous Verdi statue, bought a volume of Pinero's plays at one of those combination book, cigar, and toy shops, and as I sat in my favourite Milwaukee Lunch I believe (if I must be frank) that some idea of writing a play was flitting through my mind. I got back to my room about ten o'clock. I had just sat down to read Pinero when Edwards tapped at the door. My mouth was open to tell him my surprising news when I saw that he was unpleasantly agitated. First he insisted on returning my loan, although I begged him to believe that there need be no hurry about it.
“Rehearsals began to-day,” he said. He sat down on the bed and looked very sombre. “The worst possible has happened,” he said. “Fagan's directing.”
I tried to console him. Perhaps I felt that if Upton had shown such good sense in his choice of a press representative his judgment in directors couldn't be altogether wrong.
“Oh, well,” I said, “if the play's as good as you say, he can't hurt it much. Upton believes in it, he won't let Fagan chop it about, will he? And he's got a good cast--they won't need much direction: they know how to handle that kind of thing.”
“It's plain you don't know the game,” he said. “If Upton had combed Broadway from Herald Square to Reisenweber's, he couldn't have found a man so superbly equipped to kill the piece. As for poor Sampson, God help him. Fagan is a typical Broadway hanger-on, with plenty of debased cunning of his own; not a fool at all; but the last man for this kind of show, which needs imagination, atmosphere, delicate tone and tempo. But that's not all of it. Fagan hates me personally. He'll get me out of the company if he possibly can. He can do it, of course: he has Upton's ear.”
He sat a moment, one eyebrow twitching nervously. Suddenly he cried out, in a quivering, passionate voice which horrified and frightened me: “I've _got_ to play Dunbar! It's my only chance. _Everything_ depends upon it.”
Such an outcry, in a man usually so trained a master of himself, was pitiful. I was truly shocked, and yet I was almost on the verge of nervous laughter, I remember, when the idiotic old spinster in the next room pounded lustily on the wall. I suppose she thought we were revelling. I could see that he needed to talk. I tried to soothe him with some commonplace words and a cigarette.
“No,” he said, “I know what I'm talking about. Fagan hates me. No need to go into details. He directed 'After Dinner,' you know--and massacred it. We had a row then... he tried to bully a girl in the company... I threatened to thrash him. He hasn't forgotten, of course. He passed the word round then that I ruined the show. If this were any other play I'd have walked out as soon as I saw him. But this piece is different. I--I've set my heart on it. My God, I'm just _meant_ for that part----”
In the hope of calming him, I asked what had happened at the first rehearsal.
“Oh, the usual thing. We went through the first act, with the sides. I knew my lines perfectly, the only one who did (I ought to, I've been over them incessantly these few weeks--the thing haunts me). That seemed to annoy Fagan. Sampson was there--a quiet little man with a bright, thoughtful eye. For his benefit, evidently, Fagan got off his old tosh about Victor Hugo and the preface to 'Hernani'. It's a bit of patter he picked up somewhere, and uses to impress people with. In the middle of it, he suddenly realized that I had heard it all before. That made him mad. So he cut it short, and reasserted himself by saying that the first act would have to be cut a great deal. Sampson looked pretty groggy, but said nothing. Sampson, I can see, is my only hope. Fagan will try to force me out of the show by hounding me until I lose my temper and quit. He began by telling me how to cross the stage. A man who learned the business under Frank Benson doesn't need to be taught how to walk!”
I ventured some mild sedative opinion, because I saw it did him good to pour out his perplexity.
“You don't know,” he said, “how the actor is at the mercy of the director. The director is appointed by the manager and is responsible only to him. If the director takes a dislike to one of the cast, he can tell the manager he 'can't work with him', and get him fired that way; or he can make the man's position impossible by ridicule and perpetual criticism at rehearsals. He remarked to-day that I was miscast. The fool! I've never had such a part.”
Well, we talked until after midnight, and only stopped then because I was afraid that the spinster might begin to hammer again. In the end I got him fairly well pacified. He was delighted when I told him that I was going to be press agent, and I pleased him by making some memoranda of his previous career, which I thought I could work up into a Sunday story. To tell the truth, I did not, then, take all his distress at its face value. I knew he had had a difficult summer, and was in a nervous, high-strung state. I thought that his trouble was partly what we call “actors' disease,” or (to put it more humanely) oversensitized selfconsciousness. I promised to get round to the rehearsal the next day.
As a matter of fact, it was several days before I was able to attend a rehearsal. For the next morning Upton asked me to go to Atlantic City, where he had a musical show opening, to collect data for publicity. His regular press man was ill, and it was evident that he expected me to do plenty of work for my hundred a week. However, it was a new and amusing job, and I was keen to absorb as much local colour as possible. I went to Atlantic City on the train with the “Jazz You Like It” company, took notes of all their life histories, went in swimming with the Blandishing Blondes quartette that afternoon, had them photographed on the sand, took care to see that they were arrested in their one-piece suits, bailed them out, and by dinner-time had collected enough material to fill the trashiest Sunday paper. In the evening the show opened, and I saw what seemed to me the most appallingly vulgar and brutally silly spectacle that had ever disgraced a stage. I wondered how a company of quite intelligent and amusing people could ever have been drilled into such laborious and glittering stupidity. The gallery fell for the Blondes, but the rest of the house suffered for the most part in silence, and I expected to see Upton crushed to earth. When I met him in the lobby afterward I was wondering how to condole with him. To my surprise he was radiant. “Well, I guess we've got a knockout,” he said. “This'll sell to the roof on Broadway.” He was right, too. Well, this is out of the story. I simply wanted to explain that I was away from New York for several days.
When I got back to Upton's office I was busy most of the day sending out stuff to the papers. Then I asked the imperial young lady who was alternately typing letters and attending to the little telephone switchboard, where “Obedience” was rehearsing. At the Stratford, she replied. Wondering how many of Mr. Upton's amusing and discreditable problems were bestowed under her magnificent rippling coiffure (she was really a stunning creature), I went round to that theatre. The middle door was open and I slipped in. The house was dark, on the tall, naked stage the rehearsal was proceeding. It was my first experience of this sort of thing, and I found it extremely interesting. The stage was set out with chairs to indicate exits and essentials of furniture; at the back hung a huge canvas sea-scene, used in some revue that had opened at the Stratford the night before. The electricians were tinkering with their illuminating effects, great blazes and shafts of light criss-crossed about the place as the rehearsal went on, much to the annoyance of the actors. Little electric stars winked in the painted sky portion of the blue back-drop, and men in overalls walked about gazing at their tasks.
I sat down quietly in the gloom, about halfway down the middle aisle. Two or three other people, whose identity I could not conjecture, sat singly down toward the front. In the orchestra row, in shirtsleeves, with his feet on the brass rail and a cigar in his mouth, sat a person who, I saw, must be the renowned Fagan. Downstage were Brooks, Edwards, and a charming creature in summery costume who was obviously the original of the multitudinous photographs of Lillian Llewellyn. The rest of the company were sitting about at the back, off the scene. Edwards, who was very pale in the violent downpour of a huge bulb hanging from a wire just overhead, was speaking as I took my seat.
“Wait a minute, folks--_wait a minute!_” cried Fagan, sharply. “Now! You've got your situation planted, let's nail it to the cross. Mr. Edwards!”
The actors turned, wearily, and Miss Llewellyn sat down on a chair. Brooks stood waiting with a kind of dogged endurance. At the back of the stage a workman was hammering on a piece of metal. Fagan pulled his legs off the rail and climbed halfway up the little steps leading from the orchestra pit to the proscenium.
“Mr. Edwards!” he shouted, “you're letting it drop. It's dead. Give it to Mr. Brooks so he can pick it up and do something with it. You've got to lift it into the domain of comedy! My God!” he cried, throwing his cigar stub into the orchestra well, “that whole act is terrible. Take it again from Miss Llewellyn's entrance. Mr. Edwards, try to put a little more stuff into it. This isn't amateur theatricals.”
Edwards turned as though about to speak, but he clenched his fist and kept silent. Brooks, however, was less patient.
“Pardon me, Mr. Fagan,” he said, in a clear, ironical tone. “But I should like to ask a question, if you will allow me. You speak, very forcibly, of lifting it into the domain of comedy. That seems a curious phrase for this scene. Is it intended to be comic? If so, I must have misconstrued the author's directions in the script.”
Brooks was too well-known a performer for Fagan to bully. Brooks was “on the lights”--in other words, when the show's electric signboard went up, it would carry his name. Around his presence hung the mystic aura of five hundred dollars a week, quite enough in itself to make Fagan respectful. The director seemed a little startled by the star's caustic accent. As a matter of fact, I don't suppose he had ever read the script as a whole. I remembered that after the first rehearsal Edwards told me that Fagan had admitted not having read the play. He said he preferred to “pick up the dialogue as they went along”. This reference to the author must have seemed to him unaccountably eccentric. I daresay he had forgotten that there was such a person.
He threw up his hands in mock surrender. “All right, all right, if that's the way you take it, I've got nothing to say. Play it your own way, folks. Mr. Edwards, you're killing Mr. Brooks's scene there. Give him time to come down and get his effect.”
Again I saw Edwards lift his head as though about to retort, but Brooks whispered something to him. Fagan came back to his seat in the front row and lit a fresh cigar. “Take it from Miss Llewellyn's first entrance,” he shouted.
Miss Cunningham and a third man came forward and the five regrouped themselves. The rehearsal resumed. I watched with a curious tingle of excitement. The dialogue meant little to me, plunging in at the middle of the act, but I could not miss the passionate quality of Edwards's playing. Even Brooks, a polished but very cold actor, caught the warmth. Their speeches had the rich vibrance of anger. I was really startled at the power and velocity of the performance, considering that they had only rehearsed a week. As I watched, someone leaned over my shoulder from behind and whispered: “What do you think of Dunbar?”
My eyes had grown accustomed to the gloom. I turned and saw a little man with a thin face and lifted eyebrows which gave him a quaint expression of perpetual surprise. I was so absorbed in the scene that at first I hardly understood.
“Dunbar--? Oh, Edwards?” I whispered. “I think he's corking--fine.”
At that moment Edwards was in the middle of a speech. Miss Cunningham had just said something. Edwards, going toward her, had put his hand on her shoulder and was replying in a tone of peculiar tenderness. Fagan's loud voice broke in.
“Dunbar! Mr. Edwards! I can't let you do it like that. You make me hold up this scene every time. Now get it right. This is a bit of comedy, not sob stuff. Try to be a bit facetious, if you can. You're not making love to the girl--not yet!”