“Writing a play! Rumour was busily at work. It was to be a grand new piece for Sir John’s company, and great opportunities might be secured by buttering up the playwright. Reginald Chariton and Leonard Woulds, who hadn’t much to do in Scaromouche and rather less in The Master, began standing the university genius drinks; Audrey Sevenhowes didn’t speak to him, but was frequently quite near him, laughing a silvery laugh and making herself fascinating. Old Emilia Pauncefort passed him frequently, and gave him a stately nod every time. Grover Paskin told him jokes. The genius liked it all, and in a few days was on good terms with everybody of any importance, and the secret was out. Sir John wanted a stage version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and the genius was to write it. But as he had never written a play before, and had never had stage experience except with the Cambridge Marlowe Society, he was attending rehearsals, as he said to ‘get the feel of the thing’.
“The genius was free with his opinions. He thought little of The Master of Ballantrae. ‘Fustian’ was the word he used to describe it, and he made it clear that the era of fustian was over. Audiences simply wouldn’t stand it any more. A new day had dawned in the theatre, and he was a particularly bright beam from the rising sun.
“He was modest, however. There were brighter beams than he, and the brightest, most blinding beam in the literature of the time was somebody called Aldous Huxley. No, Huxley didn’t write plays. It was his outlook—wry, brilliantly witty, rooted in tremendous scholarship, and drenched in the Ironic Spirit—that the genius admired, and was about to transfer to the stage. In no time he had a tiny court, in which Charlton and Woulds and Audrey Sevenhowes were the leaders, and after rehearsals they were always to be seen in the nearest pub, laughing a great deal. With my very long ears it wasn’t long before I knew they were laughing at Milady and Frank Moore and Emilia Pauncefort, who were the very warp and woof of fustian, and who couldn’t possibly be worked into the kind of play the genius had in mind. No, he hadn’t begun writing yet, but he had a Concept, and though he hated the word ‘metaphysical’ he didn’t mind using it to give a rough idea of how the Concept would take shape.
“Sir John didn’t know about the Concept as yet, but when it was explained to him he would get a surprise. The genius was hanging around The Master of Ballantrae because it was from a novel by the same chap that had written Jekyll and Hyde. But this chap—Roly says his name was Stevenson, and I’m sure he knows—had never fully shouldered the burden of his own creative gift. This was something the genius would have to do for him. Stevenson, when he had thought of Jekyll and Hyde, had seized upon a theme that was Dostoyevskian, but he had worked it out in terms of what some people might call Romance, but the genius regretfully had to use the word fustian. The only thing the genius could do, in order to be true to his Concept, was to rework the Stevenson material in such a way that its full implications—the ones Stevenson had approached, and run away from in fright—were revealed.
“He thought it could be done with masks. The genius confessed, with a laugh at his own determination, that he would not attempt the thing at all unless he was given a completely free hand to use masks in every possible way. Not only would Jekyll and Hyde wear masks, but the whole company would wear them, and sometimes there would be eight or ten Jekylls on the stage, all wearing masks showing different aspects of that character, and we would see them exchange the masks of Jekyll—because there was to be no nonsense about realism, or pretending to the audience that what they saw had any relationship to what they foolishly thought of as real life—for masks of Hyde. There would be dialogue, of course, but mostly in the form of soliloquies, and a lot of the action would be carried out in mime—a word which the genius liked to pronounce “meem”, to give it the flavour he thought it needed.
“Charlton and Woulds and Audrey Sevenhowes thought this sounded wonderful, though they had some reservations, politely expressed, about the masks. They thought stylized make-up might do just as well. But the genius was rock-like in his insistence that it would be masks or he would throw up the whole project.
“When this news leaked through to the other members of the company they were disgusted. They talked about other versions of Jekyll and Hyde they had seen, which did very well without any nonsense about masks. Old Frank Moore had played with Henry Irving’s son ‘H.B.’ in a Jekyll and Hyde play where H.B. had made the transformation from the humane doctor to the villainous Hyde before the eyes of the audience, simply by ruffing up his hair and distorting his body. Old Frank showed us how he did it: first he assumed the air of a man who is about to be wafted off the ground by his own moral grandeur, then he drank the dreadful potion out of his own pot of old-and-mild, and then, with an extraordinary display of snarling and gnawing the air, he crumpled up into a hideous gnome. He did this one day in the pub and some strangers, who weren’t used to actors, left hurriedly and the landlord asked Frank, as a personal favour, not to do it again. Frank had an extraordinarily gripping quality as an actor.
“Nevertheless, as I admired his snorting and chomping depiction of evil, I was conscious that I had seen even more convincing evil in the face of Willard the Wizard, and that there it had been as immovable and calm as stone.
“Suddenly, one day at rehearsal, the genius lost stature. Sir John called to him, ‘Come along, you may as well fit in here, mphm? Give you practical experience of the stage, quonk?’, and before we knew what was happening he had the genius acting the part of one of the menservants in Lord Dumsdeer’s household. He wasn’t bad at all, and I suppose he had learned a few things in his amateur days at Cambridge. But at a critical moment Sir John said, ‘Gear away your master’s chair, m’boy; when he comes downstage to Miss Alison you take the chair back to the upstage side of the fireplace.’ Which the genius did, but not to Sir John’s liking; he put one hand under the front of the seat, and the other on the back of the armchair, and hefted it to where he had been told. Sir John said, ‘Not like that, m’boy; lift it by the arms.’ But the genius smiled and said, ‘Oh no, Sir John, that’s not the way to handle a chair; you must always put one hand under its apron, so as not to put a strain on its back.’ Sir John went rather cool, as he did when he was displeased, and said, ‘That may have been all very well in your father’s shop, m’boy, but it won’t do on my stage. Lift it as I tell you.’ And the genius turned exceedingly red, and began to argue. At which Sir John said to the other extra, ‘You do it, and show him how.’ And he ignored the genius until the end of the scene.
“Seems a trivial thing, but it rocked the genius to his foundations; after that he never seemed to be able to do anything right. And the people who had been all over him before were much cooler after that slight incident. It was the mention of the word ‘shop’. I don’t think actors are particularly snobbish, but I suppose Audrey Sevenhowes and the others had seen him as a gilded undergraduate; all of a sudden he was just a clumsy actor who had come from some sort of shop, and he never quite regained his former lustre. When we dress-rehearsed The Master it was apparent that he knew nothing about make-up; he appeared with a horrible red face and a huge pair of false red eyebrows. ‘Good God, m’boy,’ Sir John called from the front of the house, when this Spock appeared, ‘what have you been doing to your face?’ The genius walked to the footlights—inexcusable, he should have spoken from his place on the stage—and began to explain that as he was playing a Scots servant he thought he should have a very fresh complexion to suggest a peasant ancestry, a childhood spent on the moors, and a good deal more along the same lines. Sir John shut him up, and told Darton Flesher, a good, useful actor, to show the boy how to put on a decent, unobtrusive face, suited to chair-lifting.
“The genius was huffy, backstage, and talked about throwing up the whole business of Jekyll and Hyde and leaving Sir John to stew in his own juice. But Audrey Sevenhowes said, ‘Oh, don’t be so silly; everybody has to learn,’ and that cooled him down. Audrey also threw him a kind word about how she couldn’t spare him because he was going to write a l
ovely part for her in the new play, and gave him a smile that would have melted—well, I mustn’t be extreme—that would have melted a lad down from Cambridge whose self-esteem had been wounded. It wouldn’t have melted me; I had taken Miss Sevenhowes’ number long before. But then, I was a hard case.
“Not so hard that I hadn’t a little sympathy for Adele Chesterton, whose nose was out of joint. She was still playing in Scaramouche, but she had not been cast in The Master; an actress called Felicity Larcombe had been brought in for the second leading female role in that. She was one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen anywhere: very dark brown hair, splendid eyes, a superb slim figure, and that air of enduring a secret sorrow bravely which so many men find irresistible. What was more, she could act, which poor Adele Chesterton, who was the Persian-kitten type, could only do by fits and starts. But she was a decent kid, and I was sorry for her, because the company, without meaning it unkindly, neglected her. You know how theatre companies are: if you’re working with them, you’re real, and if you aren’t, you have only a half-life in their estimation. Adele was the waning, and Felicity the waxing, moon.
“As usual, Audrey Sevenhowes had a comment. ‘Nobody to blame but herself,’ said she; ‘Made a Horlicks—an utter Horlicks—of her part. I could have shown them, but—’ Her shrug showed what she thought of the management’s taste. ‘Horlicks’ was a word she used a lot; it suggested ‘ballocks’ but avoided a direct indecency. Charlton and Woulds loved to hear her say it; it seemed delightfully daring, and sexy, and knowing. It was my first encounter with this sort of allurement, and I disliked it.
“I mentioned to Macgregor that Miss Larcombe seemed a very good, and probably expensive, actress for her small part in The Master. ‘Ah, she’ll have a great deal to do on the tour,’ he replied, and I pricked up my ears. But there was nothing more to be got out of him about the tour.
“It was all clear before we opened The Master, however; Sir John was engaging a company to make a longish winter tour in Canada, with a repertoire of some of his most successful old pieces, and Scaramouche as a novelty. Holroyd was asking people to drop into his office and talk about contracts.
“Of course the company buzzed about it. For the established actors a decision had to be made: would they absent themselves from London for the best part of a winter season? All actors under a certain age are hoping for some wonderful chance that will carry them into the front rank of their profession, and a tour in Sir John’s repertoire wasn’t exactly it. On the other hand, a tour of Canada could be a lark, because Sir John was known to be a great favourite there and they would play to big audiences, and see a new country while they did it.
“For the middle-aged actors it was attractive. Jim Hailey and his wife Gwenda Lewis jumped at it, because they had a boy to educate and it was important to them to keep in work. Frank Moore was an enthusiastic sightseer and traveller, and had toured Australia and South Africa but had not been to Canada since 1924. Grover Paskin and C. Pengelly Spickernell were old standbys of Sir John’s, and would cheerfully have toured Hell with him. Emilia Pauncefort wasn’t likely to get other offers, because stately old women and picturesque hags were not frequent in West End shows that season, and the Old Vie, where she had staked out quite a little claim in cursing queens, had a new director who didn’t fancy her.
“But why Gordon Barnard, who was a very good leading man, or Felicity Larcombe, who was certain to go to the top of the profession? Macgregor explained to me that Barnard hadn’t the ambition that should have gone with his talent, and Miss Larcombe, wise girl, wanted to get as much varied experience as she could before descending on the West End and making it hers forever. There was no trouble at all in recruiting a good company, and I was glad to sign my own contract, to be assistant to Mac and play doubles without having my name on the programme. And to everybody’s astonishment, the genius was offered a job on the tour, and took it. So eighteen actors were recruited, not counting Sir John and Milady, and with Holroyd and some necessary technical staff, the final number of the company was to be twenty-eight.
“The work was unrelenting. We opened The Master of Ballantrae, and although the other critics were not warm about it, Agate gave it a push and we played a successful six weeks in London. God, what audiences! People came out of the woodwork to see it, and it seemed they had all seen it before and couldn’t get enough of it. ‘It’s like peeping into the dark backward and abysm of time,’ the genius said, and even I felt that in some way the theatre had been put back thirty years when we appeared in that powerful, thrilling, but strangely antique piece.
“Every day we were called for rehearsal, in order to get the plays ready for the tour. And what plays they were! The Lyons Mail and The Corsican Brothers, in both of which I doubled for Sir John, and Rosemary, a small play with a minimum of scenery, which was needed to round out a repertoire in which all the other plays were big ones, with cartloads of scenery and dozens of costumes. I liked Rosemary especially, because I didn’t double in it but I had a showy appearance as a stilt walker. How we sweated! It was rough on the younger people, who had to learn several new parts during days when they were working a full eight hours, but Moore and Spickernell and Paskin and Miss Pauncefort seemed to have been playing these melodramas for years, and the lines rolled off their tongues like grave old music. As for Sir John and Milady, they couldn’t have been happier, and there is nothing so indestructibly demanding and tireless as a happy actor.
“Did I say we worked eight hours? Holroyd and Macgregor, with me as their slave, worked much longer than that, because the three plays we were adding to Scaramouche and The Master had to be retrieved from storage and brushed up and made smart for the tour. But it was all done at last, and we closed in London one Saturday night, with everything finished that would make it possible for us to sail for Canada the following Tuesday.
“A small matter must be mentioned. The genius’s mother turned up for one of the last performances of The Master, and it fell to me to show her to Sir John’s dressing-room. She was a nice little woman, but not what one expects of the mother of such a splendid creature, and when I showed her through the great man’s door she looked as if she might faint from the marvel of it all. I felt sorry for her; it must be frightening when one mothers such a prodigy, and she had the humble look of somebody who can’t believe her luck.”
It was here that Roland Ingestree, who had been decidedly out of sorts for the past half-hour, intervened.
“Magnus, I don’t much mind you taking the mickey out of me, if that’s how you get your fun, but I think you might leave poor old Mum out of it.”
Magnus pretended astonishment. “But my dear fellow, I don’t see how I can. I’ve done my best to afford you the decency of obscurity. I’d hoped to finish my narrative without letting the others in on our secret. I could have gone on calling you ‘the genius’, though you had other names in the company. There were some who called you ‘the Cantab’ because of your degree from Cambridge, and there were others who called you ‘One’ because you had that mock-modest trick of referring to yourself as One when in your heart you were crying, ‘Me, me, glorious ME!’ But I can’t leave you out, and I don’t see how I can leave your Mum out because she threw so much light on you, and therefore lent a special flavour to the whole story of Sir John’s touring company.”
“All right Magnus; I was a silly young ass, and I freely admit it. But isn’t one permitted to be an ass for a year or two, when one is young, and the whole world appears to be open to one, and waiting for one? Because you had a rotten childhood, don’t suppose that everybody else who had better luck was utterly a fool. Have you any idea what you looked like in those days?”
“No, I haven’t, really, but I see you are dying to tell me. Do please go ahead.”
“I shall. You were disliked and distrusted because everybody thought you were a sneak, as you’ve said yourself. But you haven’t told us that you were a sneak, and blabbed to Macgregor about every trivial bre
ach of company discipline—who came into the theatre after the half-hour call, and who might happen to have a friend in the dressing-room during the show, and who watched Sir John from the wings when he had said they weren’t to, and anything else you could find out by pussyfooting and snooping. Even that might have passed as your job, if you hadn’t had such a nasty personality—always smiling like a pantomime demon—always stinking of some sort of cheap hair oil—always running like a rabbit to open doors for Milady—and vain as a peacock about your tuppenny-ha’penny juggling and wire-walking. You were a thoroughly nasty little piece of work, let me tell you.”
“I suppose I was. But you make the mistake of thinking I was pleased with myself. Not a bit of it. I was trying to learn the ropes of another mode of life—”
“Indeed you were. You were trying to be Sir John off the stage as well as on. And what a caricature you made of it! Walking like Spring-Heeled Jack because Frank Moore had tried to show you something about deportment, and parting your greasy long hair in the middle because Sir John was the last actor on God’s earth to do so, and wearing clothes that would make a cat laugh because Sir John wore eccentric duds that looked as if he’d had ‘em since Mafeking Night.”
World of Wonders tdt-3 Page 24
