World of Wonders

by Robertson Davies

  “I couldn’t be quiet. ‘Mr. Macgregor, I didn’t mean to do it,’ I said; ‘I swear it on the soul of my mother.’ ‘All right, all right, I believe you without your Papist oaths,’ said Macgregor, ‘and I’m just telling you not to presume on the resemblance any further, or you’ll be getting a word from me.’ ‘What resemblance?’ I said. ‘Don’t talk to us as if we’re fools, m’boy,’ said old Frank. ‘You know damned well you’re the living image of the Guvnor in that outfit. Or the living image of him when I first knew him, I’d better say. Don’t you hear what’s said to you? Didn’t I tell you a fortnight ago? You’re as like the Guvnor as if you were spit out of his mouth. You’re his fetch, right enough.’ ‘Dinna say that,’ shouted Macgregor, becoming very broad in his Scots; ‘haven’t I told you it’s uncanny?’ But I began to understand, and I was as horrified as Macgregor. The impudence of it! Me, looking like the Guvnor! ‘What’d I better do?’ I said, and Holroyd and old Frank laughed like a couple of loonies. ‘Just be tactful, that’s all,’ said Holroyd. ‘It’s very useful. You’re the best double the Guvnor’s ever had, and it’ll be a livelihood to you for quite a while, I dare say. But be tactful.’

  “Easy to tell me to be tactful. When your soul is blasted by a sudden uprush of pride, it’s cruel hard work to be tactful. Within an hour my sense of terrible impertinence in daring to look like the Guvnor had given way to a bloating vanity. Sir John was handsome, right enough, but thousands of men are handsome. He was something far beyond that. He had a glowing splendour that made him unike anybody else—except me, it appeared, when the circumstances were right. I won’t say he had distinction, because the word has been chewed to death to describe all kinds of people who simply look frozen. Take almost any politician and put a special cravat on him and stick a monocle in his eye and he becomes the distinguished Sir Nincome Poop, M.P. Sir John wasn’t frozen and his air of splendour had nothing to do with oddity. I suppose living and breathing Romance through a long career had a great deal to do with it, but it can’t have been the whole thing. And I was his fetch! I hadn’t really understood it when Moore and Holroyd had told me in the Crown and Two Chairmen that I looked like him. I knew I was of the same height, and we were built much the same—shorter than anybody wants to be, but with a length of leg that made the difference between being small and being stumpy. In my terrible clothes and with my flash, carnie’s ways—outward evidence of the life I had led and the kind of thinking it begot in me—I never thought the resemblance went beyond a reasonable facsimile. But when Sir John and I were on equal terms—dressed and wigged alike, against the same scenery and under the same lights, and lifted into the high sweet air of Romance—his friends had been deceived by the likeness. That was a stupefying drink for Paul Dempster, alias Cass Fletcher, alias Jules LeGrand—cheap people, every one of them. Ask me to be tactful in the face of that! Ask the Prince of Wales to call you a taxi!

  “With the first night at hand my new vanity would not have been noticed, even if I had been free to display it. Our opening was exciting, but orderly. Macgregor, splendid in a dinner jacket, was a perfect field officer and everything happened smartly on cue. Sir John’s first entrance brought the expected welcome from the audience, and in my new role as a great gentleman of the theatre I watched carefully while he accepted it. He did it in the old style, though I didn’t know that at the time: as he walked swiftly down the steps from the inn, calling for the ostler, he paused as though surprised at the burst of clapping; ‘My dear friends, is this generosity truly for me?’ he seemed to be saying, and then, as the applause reached its peak, he gave the least perceptible bow, not looking toward the house, but keeping within the character of André-Louis Moreau, and began calling once more, which brought silence. Easy to describe, but no small thing to do, as I learned when my time came to do it myself. Only the most accomplished actors know how to manage applause, and I was lucky to learn it from a great master.

  “Milady was welcomed in the same way, but her entrance was showy, as his was not—except, of course, for that little vanity of the lighting, which was a great help. She came on with the troupe of strolling players, and it couldn’t have failed. There was C. Pengelly Spickernell on the trumpet, to begin with, and a lot of excited shouting from the inn-servants, and then further shouting from the Italian Comedians, as they strutted onstage with their travelling-wagon; Grover Paskin led on the horse that pulled the cart, and it was heaped high with drums and gaudy trunks, baskets and rolls of flags, and on the top of the heap sat Milady, making more racket than anybody as she waved a banner in the air. It would have brought a round from a Presbyterian General Assembly. The horse alone was a sure card, because an animal on the stage gives an air of opulence to a play no audience can resist, and this stage horse was famous Old Betsy, who did not perhaps remember Garrick but who had been in so many shows that she was an admired veteran. My heart grew big inside me at the wonder of it, as I watched from the wings, and my eyes moistened with love.

  “They were not too moist to notice one or two things that followed. The other women in the troupe of players walked on foot. How slim they looked, and I saw that Milady, with every aid of costume, was not slim. How fresh and pretty they looked, and Milady, though extraordinary, was not fresh nor pretty. When Eugene Fitzwarren gave her his arm to descend from the cart I could not help seeing that she came down on the stage heavily, with an audible plop that she tried to cover with laughter, and the ankles she showed were undeniably thick. All right, I thought, in my fierce loyalty, what of it? She could act rings around any of them, and did it. But she was not young, and if I had been driven to the last extreme of honesty I should have had to admit that she was like nothing in the heavens above, nor in the earth beneath, nor in the waters under the earth. I only loved her the more, and yearned for her to show how marvellous she was, though—it had to be faced—too old for Climene. She was supposed to be the daughter of old Frank Moore as Polichinelle, but I fear she looked more like his frivolous sister.

  “It was not until I read the book, years later, that I found out what sort of woman Sabatini meant Climene to be. She was a child just on the verge of love whose ambition was to find a rich protector and make the best bargain for her beauty. That wasn’t in Milady’s range, physically or temperamentally, for there was nothing calculating or cheap about her. So, by patient re-writing of the lines during rehearsals, she became a witty, large-hearted actress, as young as the audience would believe her to be, but certainly no child, and no beauty. Or should I say that? She had a beauty all her own, of that rare kind that only great comic actresses have; she had beauty of voice, boundless charm of manner, and she made you feel that merely pretty women were lesser creatures. She had also I cannot tell how many decades of technique behind her, because she had begun her career when she really was a child, in Irving’s Lyceum, and she could make even an ordinary line sound like wit.

  “I saw all of that, and felt it through and through me like the conviction of religion, but still, alas, I saw that she was old, and eccentric, and there was a courageous pathos about what she was doing.

  “I was bursting with loyalty—a new and disturbing emotion for me—and Two, two went just as Sir John wanted it. My reward was that when I appeared on the tightrope there was an audible gasp from the house, and the curtain came down to great applause and even a few cries of Bravo. They were for Sir John; of course I knew that and wished it to be so. But I was aware that without me that climax would have been a lesser achievement.

  “The play went on, it seemed to me, from triumph to triumph, and the last act, in Madame de Plougastel’s salon, shook me as it had never done in rehearsal. When André-Louis Moreau, now a leader in the Revolution, was told by the tearful Madame de Plougastel that she was his mother and that his evil genius, the Marquis de la Tour d’Azyr, was his father—this revelation drawn from her only when Moreau had his enemy at the sword’s point—it seemed to me drama could go no higher. The look that came over Sir John’s face of d
isillusion and defeat, before he burst into Scaramouche’s mocking laugh, I thought the perfection of acting. And so it was. It wouldn’t do now—quite out of fashion—but if you’re going to act that kind of thing, that’s the way to do it.

  “Lots of curtain calls. Flowers for Milady and some for Adele Chesterton, who had not been very good but who was so pretty you wanted to eat her with a silver spoon. Sir John’s speech, which I came to know very well, in which he declared himself and Milady to be the audience’s ‘most obedient, most devoted, and most humble servants’. Then the realities of covering the furniture with dust-sheets, covering the tables of properties, checking the time-sheet with Macgregor, and watching him hobble off to put the prompt-copy to bed in the safe. Then taking off my own paint, with a feeling of exaltation and desolation combined, as if I had never been so happy before, and would certainly never be so happy again.

  “It was never the custom in that company to sit up and wait to see what the newspapers said; I think that was always more New York’s style than London’s. But when I went to the theatre the following afternoon to attend to some duties, all the reports were in but those of the great Sunday thunderers, which were very important indeed. Most of the papers said kind things, but even I sensed something about these criticisms that I could have wished otherwise expressed, or not said at all. ‘Unabashed romanticism … proof positive that the Old School is still vital … dear, familiar situations, resolved in the manner hallowed by romance … Sir John’s perfect command shows no sign of diminution with the years … Lady Tresize brings a wealth of experience to a role which, in younger hands, might have seemed contrived … Sabatini is a gift to players who require the full-flavoured melodrama of an earlier day … where do we look today for acting of this scope and authority?’

  “Among the notices there had been one, in the News-Chronicle, where a clever new young man was on the job, which was downright bad. PITCHER GOES TOO OFTEN TO WELL, it was headed, and it said flatly that the Tresizes were old-fashioned and hammy, and should give way to the newer theatre.

  “When the Sunday papers came, the Observer took the same line as the dailies, as though they had been looking at something very fine, but through the wrong end of the binoculars; it made Scaramouche seem small and very far away. James Agate, in the Sunday Times, condemned the play, which he likened to clockwork, and used Sir John and Milady as sticks to beat modern actors who did not know how to speak or move, and were ill bred and brittle.

  “ ‘Nothing there to pull ’em in,’ I heard Holroyd saying to Macgregor.

  “Nevertheless, we did pull ’em in for nearly ten weeks. Business was slack at the beginning of each week, and grew from Wednesday onward; matinees were usually sold out, chiefly to women from the suburbs, in town for a look at the shops and a play. But I knew from the gossip that business like that, in a London theatre, was covering running costs at best, and the expenses of production were still on the Guvnor’s overdraft. He seemed cheerful, and I soon found out why. He was going to do the old actor-manager’s trick and play Scaramouche as long as it would last and then replace it ‘by popular request’ with a few weeks of his old war-horse, The Master of Ballantrae.”

  “Oh my God!” said Ingestree, and it seemed to me that he turned a little white.

  “You remember this play?” said Lind.

  “Vividly,” said Roly.

  “A very bad play?”

  “I don’t want to hurt the feelings of our friend here, who feels so strong about the Tresizes,” said Ingestree. “It’s just that The Master of Ballantrae coincided with rather a low point in my own career. I was finding my feet in the theatre, and it wasn’t really the kind of thing I was looking for.”

  “Perhaps you would like me to pass over it,” said Magnus, and although he was pretending to be solicitous I knew he was enjoying himself.

  “Is it vital to your subtext?” said Ingestree, and he too was half joking.

  “It is, really. But I don’t want to give pain, my dear fellow.”

  “Don’t mind me. Worse things have happened since.”

  “Perhaps I can be discreet,” said Magnus. “You may rely on me to be as tactful as possible.”

  “For God’s sake don’t do that,” said Ingestree. “In my experience tact is usually worse than the brutalities of truth. Anyhow, my recollections of that play can’t be the same as yours. My troubles were mostly private.”

  “Then I shall go ahead. But please feel free to intervene whenever you feel like it. Put me right on matters of fact. Even on shades of opinion. I make no pretence of being an exact historian.”

  “Shoot the works,” said Ingestree. “I’ll be as still as a mouse. I promise.”

  “As you wish. Well—The Master of Ballantrae was another of the Guvnor’s romantic specials. It too was from a novel, by somebody-or-other—”

  “By Robert Louis Stevenson,” said Ingestree, in an undertone, “though you wouldn’t have guessed it from what appeared on the stage. These adaptations! Butcheries would be a better word—”

  “Shut up, Roly,” said Kinghovn. “You said you’d be quiet.”

  “I’m no judge of what kind of adaptation it was,” said Magnus, “because I haven’t read the book and I don’t suppose I ever will. But it was a good, tight, well-caulked melodrama, and people had been eating it up since the Guvnor first brought it out, which I gathered was something like thirty years before the time I’m talking about. I told you he was an experimenter and an innovator, in his day. Well, whenever he had lost a packet on Maeterlinck, or something new by Stephen Phillips, he would pull The Master out of the storehouse and fill up the bank-account again. He could go to Birmingham, and Manchester, and Newcastle, and Glasgow, and Edinburgh or any big provincial town—and those towns had big theatres, not like the little pill-boxes in London—and pack ’em in with the The Master. Especially Edinburgh, because they seemed to take the play for their own. Macgregor told me, ‘The Master’s been a mighty get-penny for Sir John.’ When you saw him in it you knew why it was so. It was made for him.”

  “It certainly was,” said Ingestree. “Made for him out of the blood and bones of poor old Stevenson. I have no special affection for Stevenson, but he didn’t deserve that.”

  “As you can see, it was a play that called forth strong feeling,” said Magnus. “I never read it, myself, because Macgregor always held the prompt-copy and did the prompting himself, if anybody was so absurd as to need prompting. But of course I picked up the story as we rehearsed.

  “It had a nice meaty plot. Took place in Scotland around the middle of the eighteenth century. There had been some sort of trouble—I don’t know the details—and Scottish noblemen were divided in allegiance between Bonny Prince Charlie and the King of England. The play was about a family called Durie; the old Lord of Durrisdeer had two sons, the first-born being called the Master of Ballantrae and the younger being simply Mr Henry Durie. The old Lord decided on a sneaky compromise when the trouble came, and sent the Master off to fight for Bonny Charlie, while Mr Henry remained at home to be loyal to King George. On those terms, you see, the family couldn’t lose, whichever way the cat jumped.

  “The Master was a dashing, adventurous fellow, but essentially a crook, and he became a spy in Prince Charlie’s camp, leaking information to the English: Mr Henry was a scholarly, poetic sort of chap, and he stayed at home and mooned after Miss Alison Graeme; she was the old Lord’s ward, and of course she loved the dashing Master. When news came from the wars that the Master had been killed, she consented to marry Mr Henry as a matter of duty and to provide Durrisdeer with an heir. ‘But ye ken she never really likit the fella,’ as Macgregor explained it to me; her heart was always with the Master, alive or dead. But the Master wasn’t dead; he wasn’t the dying kind: he slipped away from the battle and became a pirate—not one of your low-living dirty-faced pirates, but a very classy privateer and spy. And so, when the troubles had died down and Bonny Charlie was out of the way, the Master came
back to claim Miss Alison, and found that she was Mrs Henry, and the mother of a fine young laird.

  “The Master tried to lure Miss Alison away from her husband: Mr Henry was noble about it, and he nobly kept mum about the Master having turned spy during the war. ‘A verra strong situation,’ as Macgregor said. Consequence, a lot of taunting talk from the Master, and an equal amount of noble endurance from Mr Henry, and at last a really good scene, of the kind Roly hates, but our audiences loved.

  “The Master had picked up in his travels an Indian servant, called Secundra Dass; he knew a lot of those Eastern secrets that Western people believe in so religiously. When Mr Henry could bear things no longer, he had a fight with the Master, and seemed to kill him; but as I told you, the Master wasn’t the dying kind. So he allowed himself to be buried, having swallowed his tongue (he’d learned that from Secundra Dass) and, as it said in the play, ‘so subdued his vital forces that the spark of life, though burning low, was not wholly extinguished.’ Mr Henry, tortured by guilt, confessed his crime to his wife and the old Lord, and led them to the grove of trees where the body was buried. When the servants dug up the corpse, it was no corpse at all, but the Master, in very bad shape; the tongue-trick hadn’t worked quite as he expected—something to do with the chill of the Scottish climate, I expect—and he came to life only to cry, ‘Murderer, Henry—false, false!’ and drop dead, but not before Mr Henry shot himself. Thereupon the curtain came down to universal satisfaction.

  “I haven’t described it very respectfully. I feel irreverent vibrations coming to me from Roly, the way mediums do when there is an unbeliever at a seance. But I assure you that as the Guvnor acted it, the play compelled belief and shook you up pretty bad. The beauty of the old piece, from the Guvnor’s point of view, was that it provided him with what actors used to call ‘a dual role’. He played both the Master and

  Mr Henry, to the huge delight of his audiences; his fine discrimination between the two characters gave extraordinary interest to the play.