“How do you make that out?” asked Everton, interested.
“In this way. He owns two or three theaters, in fashionable quarters. He lets these to certain men who yearn to air themselves as ‘actor-managers,’ on easy terms, with the private understanding that whenever he chooses to put a woman on the boards as ‘leading lady,’ the actor-managers must take her, willy-nilly, and ‘boom’ her for all they are worth. She may not have an ounce of talent, — that doesn’t matter— ‘anything will go down with the public if it’s only boomed enough,’ thinks the Jew. But there he is often mistaken. The public are getting sick of having the discarded mistresses of wealthy Semites put forward for their delectation in ‘leading’ histrionic parts. They want trained, capable artistes, — not cast-off Delilahs. But it was in this way that Nordstein got his wife, — she was first his mistress.”
They were walking through a by-street, badly lit and tortuous; and Everton’s face was in shadow. He made no remark, and Howard went on: —
“She was a chorus girl in a musical comedy, and she had just one dance to herself in the piece, which she danced with unusual bravado. And her beauty attracted the ever-covetous Israel, and he took her off the stage. No one ever expected him to marry her; — but he did, much to the chagrin of several fortune-hunting young women. It was a great catch for her.”
“A great catch!” repeated Everton, his voice thrilling with contempt— “That old, feeble, miserable-looking creature! And she a mere girl!”
Howard gave him a quick glance.
“The ‘mere girl’ doesn’t exist any more,” — he said— “She wouldn’t have a chance if she did. Women are taught the coldest world-wisdom in their schoolrooms nowadays — and even the minx of fourteen is aware that a rich marriage is what she must aim at.” Here he stopped in his walk. “Just look down this alley!”
A narrow court faced them from which all manner of sounds and smells came rushing forth like able-bodied roughs bent on choking and deafening them where they stood. Cries of children, shrieking laughter of women, shouts and oaths of men, were all mingled with the melancholy grinding of a wheezy hurdy-gurdy which was being played somewhere round a further corner, and from the murky end of the alley a bright flare of light quivered through the darkness, intimating that the Drink-fiend had legitimate abode there, and was holding his usual revels.
“I happened to go down this place once in daytime,” — said Howard— “on a visit of curiosity and inspection, accompanied by a police officer in plain clothes. I went into one of the wretched tenement houses, where there was a little child just dead. The scene was one of indescribable misery and squalor; and a poor tottering old crone, who evidently had some shreds of natural feeling left in her starved soul, was putting linen round the little corpse, and while I was there she laid a couple of pennies on the eyelids to keep them closed. As she did this, another woman of middle age suddenly started up from a corner where she had been crouching like an animal in a lair, and with a savage cry she snatched the coins away and rushed out with them to the public-house. And — she was the dead child’s mother! Will any of the modern ‘poets,’ as they wrongfully style themselves, write me that tragedy truly? No! They will not, because it is too vastly beyond them! The twentieth-century rhymers write of their own petty desires and disillusions, but they have little or no sympathy with the continuous heartache of the wider world.”
They turned away and strolled in various other grimy and poverty-stricken quarters of the immediate neighborhood, always meeting with fresh scenes of distress and hopeless abandonment to the curse of drink. In the midst of the foulest slums they saw the large and handsome gin-palaces, many with brilliant dancing-saloons attached, where such wild orgies are nightly carried on as shame the ‘civilization’ of the age, and where money is lavishly laid out on specious attractions to allure the young and unwary into a vortex of destruction.
“To get the cash back that has been spent on these great buildings which exist for the distribution of poisoned beer and alcohol,” said Howard— “hundreds, ay, thousands of men and women must drink till they die! Otherwise there would be no ‘profits’; and the brewing and distilling companies would not be able to feed, like carrion crows, on the bodies slain!”
“And what do you think of small country places where the magistrates, as far as the granting of licenses goes, are mere slavish tools in the hands of one brewer?” asked Everton— “I could name you a town where there are public-houses in every street, and each one of those public-houses is ‘tied’ to the same brewery. Every penny is made by the one ‘Trust’ concern, — a ‘Trust’ in the working-man’s ruin! Should any publican seek to trade with a different company, the magistrates ‘cannot see their way’ to renew his license. There is a Freemasons’ Lodge in the town — but the chief business of its ‘freemasonry’ is to support the one rascally brewer on the gains made by the drunkenness of the people, and in allowing no outside competition.”
Howard nodded comprehensively.
“You needn’t tell me anything on that score,” — he said— “I know the devil’s whole box of tricks! Country places are the happy hunting-ground of the pettiest tyrants, and mayors and corporations, made up as they mostly are of local tradesmen, think only of their own pockets and seldom try to serve the wider interests of the ratepayers. But what’s to be done? All governing bodies become ‘parochial’ by degrees. Even the House of Commons itself grows less and less dignified as time goes on. It shows a tendency, on occasion, to sink to the vague vituperative condition common to old washerwomen at the tub’s edge. And, by the way, what an amount of casual drinking goes on among the members of that honorable assembly! In the midst of the nation’s business too! I remember being present once in the capacity of the intelligent stranger at an interesting debate one evening, and I certainly came away with the impression that whisky-soda was more anxiously sought after than the national welfare! After the debate, I stood in the lobby quarter of an hour, and during even that short space of time five men severally asked me to join them in swilling their favorite beverage. When you come to think of it, you know, it’s not quite what one expects from the makers of laws for the future of Great Britain!”
At that moment they had come to the end of a long narrow street which led to the wider thoroughfares, and the thunder of London’s restless motion and unceasing traffic sounded on their ears like the roar of an angry sea. A few yards more brought them into Leicester Square, where the flaring front of the Alhambra Music Hall made a garish fire against the overhead darkness of the night. By some instinctive mutual consent they both paused.
“It is not indeed what one expects,” — said Everton, slowly, answering his companion’s last remark— “It is the last thing one should look for or ever see in the Government house of our great Empire. And, — if we look yonder— “here he pointed to the center of the square, where an insignificant statue of Shakespeare challenges the contempt of every intelligent foreigner for its inadequate conception of honor to the world’s supremest Genius, “there is the ‘counterfeit presentment’ of our country’s Greatest Poet, who said of our country’s curse: “O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains!”
“Ah, that’s all very well!” and Howard began to laugh— “But have you ever thought that your very Shakespeare himself, so far as associations with his memory in his own native place are concerned, is literally soaked in Beer? Soaked! — why, yes, I should think he’s just pretty well drowned in it! His townsmen serve him up to you like a bit of toast in a gallon of ale!” Here he threw back his head and his laughter rang out heartily. “I don’t speak without knowledge, for, of course, like all good Americans, I’ve been to Stratford-on-Avon. The first thing I heard there from a small boy who was ‘touting’ as a guide to the different places of interest, was that ‘Shakespeare got droonk at Bidford.’ When I had recovered from this dizzying shock, I was hit in the eye by the spectacle of a bizarre theater on the banks of the c
lassic Avon, as inartistic a pile of bricks as ever I beheld, and I was told it had been built by a brewer as a ‘memorial’ to Shakespeare. Then I grasped the architectural design, of’ course, — which is that of a glorified brewery, round vat and all complete. I likewise learned that the said brewer had edited a version of the Immortal Plays, with all the bits he considered ‘naughty’ cut out! Can you realize this impertinence of Beer made paramount! But that’s not all. A brewer ‘manages’ the so-called ‘national’ Trust of the Bard’s own birthplace — never was there anything ‘national’ so purely petty and parochial! — and actually uses the design of the bust over the historic grave in the church as a ‘trade mark’ on the label of his beer-bottles! Poor ‘Gentle Willy’! A beery fate pursues his noble ghost, and I have sometimes thought the inscription on his tombstone ought to read thus: —
“‘Good Frende, for Jesus’ sake forbear
To mix mine ashes up with Beer, —
Blest be ye man who spares my fame,
And curst be traders in my name!’”
He recited this with mock-tragic emphasis, and continued: ——
“A positive fume of beer enshrouds every personal association with his memory — for a brewer is to put a window in the church where his remains are buried, immediately above the register of his birth and death, — and as if all this were not enough, a Brewery stands on the site of his famous ‘Globe’ theater in Southwark! The thing is almost more than ludicrous. It seems as if the Muses were mocking at England, and asking derisively:— ‘Which do you prefer?
Your Greatest Man, or Beer? If you can’t make up your heavy, boorish mind, — here! — take them both together!’ We ‘pushful ‘Americans, as we are sometimes called, often make errors of taste, owing to our nation’s youth and inexperience, but if Shakespeare had been born in our country, we should have honored his memory more sacredly in his own native place at least than to have turned him into a Beer-advertisement! We should have tried to separate the nation’s greatest Poet from all connection with the nation’s greatest shame — Drink. And what a statue is this in Leicester Square! Like a shop-walker meditating on an error in a bill!”
He gave a half-contemptuous, half-indignant gesture, and added:
“Let’s come out of this! Shakespeare and the Alhambra do not ‘couple’ well!”
“Almost as badly as Shakespeare and Beer!” said Everton, with a smile.
“Almost! But not quite. For the idea of attaching the native and intimate associations of the world’s highest brain to the world’s lowest vice seems to me to be one that should not be tolerated patiently by any self-respecting nation. But you British are a queer people! Shakespeare’s own criticism of you, through the mouth of his ‘grave-digger ‘in Hamlet, when alluding to the soul-sick prince’s having been sent into England because he was mad, fits you all up to the present day. ‘A’ shall recover his wits there, or if a’ do not ’tis no great matter there— ‘twill not be seen in him there, — there the men are as mad as he!’”
“There’s a good deal of truth in that,” — said Everton— “We are really an erratic people. We have the reputation of being stolid and phlegmatic, full of sound reason and common sense, — whereas the real truth is that we are very impulsive, credulous, sentimental, and easily led away like children by the rumor of anything strange, monstrous, foolish and fantastical. The blind and stupid ease with which we swallow the lies of the modern press, prove this up to the hilt. We do not greatly appreciate our great men, — and by this I mean that we would not go out of our way to help them or make them happier while they are yet living among us. When they are dead we make just as much ado as may enable us to hold on to the tag-end of their spiritual royal robes ere they are swept away from us into the larger life, —— but if they were, to come back suddenly, materialized again into human form, and ask us for the loan of ten pounds, we would not give it to them! Think of Robert Burns! Think of the oceans of whisky that have been drunk to his memory since he died! And when he was alive he had to humbly ask his cousin James Burness for money! There is something horribly pathetic in the appeal: ‘O James, did you know the pride of my heart you would feel doubly for me! Alas, I am not used to beg!’ And I’m sure that if the unhappy, gifted fellow were to return among us to-morrow his experience would be the same, — and that not one of all his whisky-drinking admirers would find so much as five pounds ready to give him. Why, even a kind word might be grudged to him, — for when you come to think of it, how many lonely writers there must be who would be grateful for a kind word from their contemporaries, and they never get it unless they belong to a ‘clique,’ sworn to ‘boom’ each other.”
“That’s a fact,” — said Howard— “And in your literary sections over here you have a certain overpowering and offensive dilettantism which makes it a rule to sneer at everything which is ‘popular.’ And yet who in Heaven’s name is more ‘popular’ than Shakespeare? Did he not ‘play to the gallery’? Of course he did, — he depended on the gallery for support. He used old and ‘popular’ stories, favorites with the ‘common’ folk, as the groundwork of his plays, and upon them strung his jewels of poesy for the benefit of the ‘common’ public. He never thought himself a genius, and never anticipated that the ‘literary critic’ would follow humbly in the wake of ‘popular’ applause, and crouch at his footstool for all time! Nowadays we talk of him as we do of all our dead martyrs in the service of art and literature, as a kind of demigod whom it needs ‘high culture’ to appreciate, — but he himself never wrote specially for highly-cultured persons — only for the ‘vulgar’ British masses. Fortunately there was then no cheap press on which jejune youths were employed at five or ten shillings a column to sneer down their betters, — but nowadays the ‘great’ poet, so admitted by the literary cliques, is he who has buttered the fingers of a friend to ‘boom’ him; while the ‘great’ novelist on the same lines is the person who writes a sexual and sensual book unfit for decent-minded men and women to read, and is therefore the ‘literary’ star of the carnal-minded section of the ‘Upper Ten.’ By the wav who ‘boomed’ you?”
They were nearing their hotel by this time, and Everton stopped in sheer amaze.
“Boomed me!” he echoed— “Why, no one!”
Howard looked at him with a quizzical, half-laughing expression.
“Oh, come, come!” he said; “That won’t do! No clergyman can get his sermons reported in the extensive way yours have been, unless he’s friends, — and particular friends too! — with the press.”
The quick blood flushed to Everton’s brows with a sense of something like indignation.
“I assure you,” he declared warmly, “I do not know a soul connected with any newspaper whatever!”
Howard gave a slight shrug of his shoulders.
“Well! Then all I can say is that some one is working you on without your knowledge. There’s a hand behind the scenes somewhere. Everything you say is reported in several of the leading papers at more or less length — and do you suppose that could be done without money or private influence?”
This suggestion took Everton completely by surprise.
“Do you really think,” — he began ——
“Do I really think you have a friend at court?” said Howard, good-humoredly— “Why of course I do! No one, — neither author, preacher nor hero, gets a whole column of ‘boom’ unless he pays for it, or is a friend of newspaper proprietors. Mute inglorious Miltons remain mute and inglorious except when they chance to please the ‘vulgar ‘public. But you are not sufficiently known to this vulgar public yet, to create such a stir as has been made for you! I am sure you quite deserve it, — still there is evidently some one who knows your merits and has the power to bring them into recognition.”
Everton was silent because he could find nothing to say. He was vaguely annoyed and bewildered. He had thought that such notices as he had received in the press had been solely because something he had said in his sermon had appealed t
o his hearers, and from them to the wider world.
Now, — if such a thing were possible, or could be probable, that some unknown influence was at work to bring himself and his preaching into prominence, why then it was no more than a ‘worked-up’ fame, — a fictitious interest in him which would cease the moment the ‘boom’ dropped. All sorts of conflicting emotions stirred in him, and his face showed the troubled tenor of his thoughts. Howard glanced at him curiously once or twice, — then said, kindly: —
“Don’t take me too seriously, Mr. Everton! I may be quite wrong. I only form my judgment on the facts of modern newspaper management as presented to me by experience. I came over here five or six years ago on business connected with the purchase of a certain influential journal, — I am fairly wealthy, and I was asked to help re-float the thing. Well! — I learned a good deal, — much that I was both ashamed and sorry to know. Anyhow, I decided not to put my money into the dirty work of a newspaper ‘trust.’ For I found that in this kind of commercial news-mongering concerns, no real justice for the people is advocated, but only the interests of ‘party’ on the chance of personal emolument. Also, that no author, artist or actor is highly praised or recommended unless through some sort of ‘pay’ or private influence; — and I imagine the same rule must apply to preachers; — but as I say, I may be entirely wrong—”
“I think — nay, I am sure you are!” said Everton, earnestly, “At any rate I hope you are. Such praise as has been bestowed on me by the press, would be not only valueless but actually offensive to my mind if I thought it was not genuine, — and as for ‘pay’ or ‘influence,’ neither I nor any of the friends I have could use either.”
“Well, if there’s anything at the bottom of it all you’re sure to find it out,” — said Howard; “I suppose your sermon of to-morrow will be reported?”
Delphi Collected Works of Marie Corelli Page 738
