The Foolish Lovers Part 62

He felt considerably relieved. A rehearsal, of course, must be very different from a performance. But on the night of the dress rehearsal ... it took place on Sunday, for the stage was occupied on week-nights by regular performances ... the players seemed to go to pieces. All of them had difficulty in remembering their lines, and when at the end of the last act, a piece of the scenery collapsed upon St. Patrick, John felt that he could have cheerfully seen the entire theatre collapse on everybody concerned with it. He went to the grubby Temperance hotel in which he had taken a room, and gave himself completely to gloom and despair. He felt that his play was not quite so brilliant as he had imagined it to be, but he was not sure that his dissatisfaction with it ought not really to be displayed against the actors. Any play, treated as his had been treated, must seem to be a poor piece. Gidney had appeared to be pleased with the dress rehearsal and had wrung John's hand with great heartiness when they separated. "Going splendidly!" he murmured. "Congratulate you. Excellent piece!..." On the way to his hotel, he had seen a play-bill in the window of a tobacconist's shop, and a thrill of pleasure had quickened him as he stood in front of the gla.s.s and read his name beneath the t.i.tle of the play. He must remember to ask Gidney for a copy of the play-bill to hang up in his flat! Now, in the dull and not very clean bedroom of the Temperance Hotel, he felt indifferent to play-bills and the thrill of seeing his name in print. He wished that Eleanor were with him. They had decided that she should not be present at the first night in Cottenham because of the expense of hotel bills and railway fares.

"I'll see it in London," she had said bravely, trying to conceal her disappointment. Now, however, he wished that she were with him. She had remarkable powers of comforting. If he were depressed, Eleanor would draw his head down to her shoulder and would soothe him into a good temper again. There had been times since their marriage when he had been dubious about her ... when it seemed to him that she had only a kindly affection for him and still had not got love for him ... and the thought filled him with resentment against her. Why could she not love him? He was lovable enough and he loved her. A woman ought to love a man who loved her!... Then some perception of the self-sufficiency and the smugness of these thoughts went through his mind and he would abase himself in spirit before her and reproach himself for unkindnesses that he imagined he had shown to her ... hasty words that hurt her. His temper was quick to rise, but equally quick to fall; and sometimes he failed to realise that in the sudden outburst of anger he had said cruel, hurting things which made no impression on him because they were said without any feeling, but left a hard impression on those to whom they were addressed. He had seen pain in Eleanor's eyes when he had spoken some swift and biting word to her, and then, all repentance, he had tried to kiss the pain from her....

To-night, in this grubby bedroom, smelling of teetotallers and grim, forbidding people in whom are to be found none of the genial foibles of ordinary, hearty men, he felt an excess of remorse for any unkind thing he had ever said to Eleanor. His pessimism about his play caused him to exaggerate the enormity of his offences. He pictured her, looking at him with that queer air of puzzled pathos that had so impressed him when he first saw her, and intense shame filled him when he thought that he had done or said anything to make her look at him in that way.

Well, he would compensate her for any pain that he had caused her. He would love her so dearly that her life would be pa.s.sed in continual suns.h.i.+ne and comfort. Even if she were never to return his love or to return only a slight share of it, he would devote himself to her just as completely as if she gave everything to him. His play might be miserably acted and be a failure, apart from the acting, but what mattered that! While he had Eleanor he had everything.

VII

He went down to the theatre on the evening of the first performance in a state of calm and quietness which greatly astonished him. He had expected to tremble and quake with nervousness and to be reluctant to go near the theatre. He remembered to have read somewhere an account of the way in which some melodramatist of repute behaved on a first night.

He walked up and down the Embankment while his play was being performed, mopping his fevered brow and groaning in agony. Someone had found the melodramatist on one occasion, sitting at the foot of Cleopatra's Needle, howling into his handkerchief.... John, however, had no terrors whatever when he entered the theatre, and he told himself that the melodramatist was either an extremely emotional man or a very considerable liar. There was a moderate number of people in the auditorium, enough to preserve the theatre from seeming spa.r.s.ely- occupied, but not enough to justify anyone in saying that the house was full. The atmosphere resembled that of a church. People spoke, when they spoke at all, in whispers, and John was so infected by the air of solemnity that when a small boy in the gallery began to call out "Acid drops or cigarettes!" he felt that a sidesman must appear from a pew and take the lad to the police-station for brawling in a sacred edifice. He waited for the orchestra to appear, but the play began without any preliminary music. The lights were lowered, and soon afterwards someone beat the floor of the stage with a wooden mallet ...

sending forth three sepulchral sounds that seemed to hammer out of the audience any tendency it might have had to enjoy itself. Then the curtain ascended, and the play began.

VIII

The actors were much better than they had promised to be at the dress rehearsal, but they were still far from being good. It was very plain that they had been insufficiently rehea.r.s.ed and there were some bad cases of mis-casting. Nevertheless, the performance was better than he had antic.i.p.ated, and his spirits rose almost as rapidly as they had fallen on the previous night; and when at the end of the performance there were calls for the author, he pa.s.sed through the door that gave access from the auditorium to the stage with a great deal of elation.

He was thrust on to the stage by Gidney, and found himself standing between two of the actresses. There was a great black cavern in front of him which, he realised, was the auditorium, and he could hear applause rising out of it. The curtain rose and fell again, and the buzz of voices calling praise to him grew louder. Then the curtain fell again, and this time it remained down. He realised that he had gripped the actresses by the hand and that he was holding them very tightly....

"I beg your pardon!" he said, releasing them.

"Awf'lly good!" said one of the actresses, smiling at him as she moved across the stage. How horrible actors and actresses in their make-up looked close to! He could not conceive of himself kissing that woman while she had so much paint on her face.... He turned to walk off the stage, and found that walking was very difficult. He was trembling so that his knees were almost knocking together and when he moved, he reeled slightly.

"I say," he said to one of the actors, "my nerve's gone to pieces.

Funny thing ... I ... felt nothing at all ... nothing ... until just now!"

The actor took hold of his arm and steadied him. "Queer how nerves affect people," he said, as John and he left the stage. "I knew a man who got stage fright two days before the first night of a play in which he had a big part. Nearly collapsed in the street. All right afterwards ... never turned a hair on the stage. Must congratulate you on your play ... jolly good, I call it. Tragedy, of course!..."

He had expected some sort of festivity after the performance, but there was none. The players were eager to get home, and Gidney had a headache, so John thanked each of them and went back to his hotel.

"Thank goodness," he said, "I shall be at home tomorrow."

He got into bed and lay quietly in the darkness, but he could not sleep, and so he turned on the light again and tried to read; but his head was thumping, thumping and the words had no meaning for him. He put the book down. How extraordinary is the common delusion, he thought, that actors and actresses lead gay lives! Could anything be more dull than the life of an actor in a repertory theatre? Daily rehearsals in a dingy and draughty theatre and nightly performances in half-rehea.r.s.ed plays!... "Give me the life of a bank clerk for real gaiety," he murmured. "An actor's just a drudge ... and a dull drudge, too! Very uninteresting people, actors!... Why the devil did I leave Eleanor behind?"

IX

He returned to London on the following morning, carrying copies of the _Cottenham Daily Post_ and the _Cottenham Mercury_ with him.

The notices of his play were mildly appreciative ... that of the _Post_ being so mild as to be almost denunciatory. The critic a.s.serted that John's play, while interesting, showed that its author had no real understanding of the meaning of tragedy. He found no evidence in _Milchu and St. Patrick_ that John appreciated the importance of the pressure of the Significant Event. The Significant Event decided the development of a tragedy, but in Mr. MacDermott's play there was no Significant Event. The play just happened, so to speak, and it ought not to "just happen." It was an excellent discursus on the drama from the time of the morality plays to the time of the Irish Players, and it included references to Euripides, Ibsen, the Noh plays of j.a.pan, Mr. Bernard Shaw (in a patronising manner), Synge and Mr. Masefield; but John felt, when he had read it, that most of it had been written before its author had seen his play. The other notice was less learned, but it left no doubt in the mind of the readers that although _Milchu and St. Patrick_ was an interesting piece ... the word "interesting," after he had read these notices, seemed to John to be equivalent to the word "poor" ... it was not likely to mark any epochs.

"I don't think much of Cottenham anyhow!" said John, putting, the papers in his pocket.

Eleanor met him at Euston. The fatigue which settles on a traveller in the last hour of a long railway journey had raised the devil of depression in John. He had reread the notices in the Cottenham papers, and as he considered their very restrained praises of his play, he remembered that Hinde had said _The Enchanted Lover_ was an ordinary novel.

"I wonder am I any good," he said to himself as the train hauled itself into Euston.

He looked out of the window and saw Eleanor standing on the platform, scanning the carriage as she sought for him.

"Well, she thinks I am," he thought, as he alighted from the train.

"Eleanor!" he called to her, and she turned and when she saw him, her eyes lit and she hurried to him.

THE SECOND CHAPTER

I

Hinde's enthusiastic review of _The Enchanted Lover_ had not been followed by other reviews equally enthusiastic or nearly so. Many papers failed to do more than include it in the List of Books Received.

_The Times Literary Supplement_ gave six lines of small type to a cold account of it. The reviewer declared that "this first novel is not without merit" but either had not been able to discover the merit or had not enough s.p.a.ce in which to describe it, for he omitted to say what it was. John had paid a visit to the local lending library every morning for a week in order that he might see all the London newspapers and such of the provincial papers as were exhibited, and had searched their columns eagerly for references to his book; but the references were few and slight. Mr. Claude Jannissary, when John visited him, wagged his head dolefully and uttered some mournful remarks on the sad state of idealism in England. He regretted to say that the book was not selling so well as he had hoped it would sell. The appalling conditions of the publis.h.i.+ng trade were accentuated by the extraordinary reluctance of the booksellers to take risks or to show any enthusiasm for new things. Between Mr. Jannissary and John, he might say that booksellers were a very unsatisfactory lot. Most of them were quite uncultured men. Hardly any of them read books. Mr. Jannissary longed for the day when booksellers would look upon their shops as places of adventure and romance!...

A curious sensation of distaste for these words pa.s.sed through John when he heard them spoken by Mr. Jannissary. The booksellers, said the publishers, should be ambitious to earn the t.i.tle of the new Elizabethans ... hungering and thirsting after dangerous experiences.

He would like to see a bookseller turning disdainfully from "best sellers" and eagerly purchasing large quant.i.ties of books by unknown authors. "Think of the thrill of it," said Mr. Jannissary; and John, perturbed in his mind, tried hard to think of the thrill of it. His mental perturbation was due to the lean look of his bank balance. Money was going out of his house more rapidly than it was coming in, and Eleanor had been full of anxiety that morning. He had not yet received a cheque from the Cottenham Repertory Theatre for the royalties due on the week's performance of _Milchu and St. Patrick_, but he had soothed Eleanor's fears by a.s.suring her that there would be the better part of a hundred pounds to come to them from Cottenham in a few days.

In the meantime, he told her, he would call on Jannissary and see whether he could not obtain some money from him. "He must have sold much more than five hundred copies by this time," he said. "If all the bookshops in the country only took one copy each, he'd have sold more than five hundred, and I'm sure they'd all take two or three each.

Perhaps more!"

The suggestion that he might make a small advance to John on account of accrued royalties had a very chilling effect upon Mr. Jannissary.

"My dear fellow," he said, putting up his hands in a benedictory manner and then dropping them as if to say that even he found difficulty in believing in the n.o.bility of man, "impossible! Absolutely impossible!

I've sunk ... Money ... much Money ... in your book ... I don't regret it ... not for a moment ... I believe in you, MacDermott ... strongly ... but it will be a long time before I recover any of that ... Money ... if I ever recover it. I'm sorry!..."

John had come away from the publisher in a cheerless state of mind, and as he turned into the Strand, he collided with Hinde.

"How's the book getting on?" Hinde demanded when they had greeted each other.

John told him of what Jannissary had said.

"I tell you what I'll do." said Hinde. "I'll work up a boom for it in the _Evening Herald_. I'll turn one of my chaps on to writing half a dozen letters to the Editor about it!..."

"But you don't like the book," John expostulated. "You told me it wasn't much good!"

"Och, I know that," Hinde replied, "but that doesn't matter. I'd like to do you a good turn. There's a smart chap working for me now ... he can put more superlatives into a paragraph than any other man in Fleet Street, and he isn't afraid of committing himself to anything. Most useful fellow to have on your staff. He does our Literary article, and he's discovered a fresh genius every week since he came to me. He'll get on, that chap! I'll turn him on to your book!"

"I don't want praise that I don't deserve," John said, thrusting out his lower lip.

"Oh, you'll deserve it all right. Everybody deserves some praise. How's Eleanor?"

"All right!"

Then Hinde hurried away, and John went home. There was a letter from the Cottenham Repertory Theatre awaiting him, and he eagerly opened the envelope.

"You needn't worry any longer," he said to Eleanor as he took out the contents of the envelope....

He gaped at the cheque and the Returns Sheet.

"How much is it?" Eleanor asked.