Part 12 (1/2)

VII

SUPPER

Idealists must certainly be added to the drunkards and children over whom a specially benign deity watches: a flood of disaster by sea and land gave a plentiful crop of news and made it impossible for the papers to publish Charles Mann's scheme. His committee's dread of being made publicly ridiculous evaporated, and, as Lord Verschoyle did not resign, no other member did, and Griffenberg simply sent in a letter of protest and announced that he was too busy to take any more active part in the proceedings. He went away and denounced the theatre as a vulgar inst.i.tution, which no artist could enter without losing his soul. He said this publicly in a newspaper and produced one of those delightful controversies which in the once happy days of unlimited advertis.e.m.e.nt provided an opportunity for mutual recrimination upon an impersonal basis.

Verschoyle promised Charles thirty thousand pounds if he could raise another similar amount, and Charles regarded himself as worth thirty thousand already, raised Mr Clott's salary, and condescended with so much security to begin really to work at _The Tempest_.

Clara, who was still playing small parts at the Imperium, found to her dismay that Sir Henry had rather cooled towards the Mann production and was talking of other plays, a huge American success called _The Great Beyond_, and a French drama of which he had acquired the rights some few years previously. This was really alarming, for she knew that if she could not engage Charles speedily he would simply fling away from the theatre and devote himself, unsupported except by Verschoyle, who was by no means a certain quant.i.ty, to his airy schemes. Already he was beginning to be swayed by letters from well-meaning persons in the provinces, who urged him to found another Bayreuth in the Welsh Hills or the Forest of Arden.... Give Charles a hint and he would construct an imaginary universe! If she could only stop him advertising, he would not be exposed to the distracting bombardment of hints and suggestions which was opened upon him with every post, especially after he announced with his usual bland indiscretion his a.s.sociation with the owner of a fas.h.i.+onable part of the Metropolis.

Verschoyle did not object. It horrified his trustees and after a time, growing bolder, he was much in Charles's company, and found him extremely useful as a bogey to frighten away the mammas who had made his life hideous ever since his Eton days, when one of his aunts had horrified him by referring to one of his cousins, a child of fifteen, as his 'dear little wifie.' ... Further, by seeing much of Charles, he could see more of Clara without compromising her or himself.

Now in the world of the theatre there never is but always may be money.

It is always going to be made, so that everybody a.s.sociated with it has credit sustained by occasional payment. Clara realised this very early in her career. She understood finance, because her grandfather had discussed his affairs with her exactly as if she were his partner, and she had had to keep a tight hand on his extravagance; and she quickly understood that in the theatre money must be spent always a little faster than it can be made to keep the current of credit flowing. She also realised that Sir Henry Butcher spent it a great deal faster, and was cool and warm towards the various projects laid before him according as they made payment possible.... He had watched Charles Mann's increase of fame with a jealous interest, but with a shrewdly expert eye waited for the moment of capitalisation to come before he committed himself to the new-fangled ways of dressing the stage, these d.a.m.ned Greek tragedies, plays in curtains, German toy sets, and Russian flummery in which painted blobs stood for trees and clouds. To Sir Henry a tree was a tree, a cloud a cloud, and he liked nothing better than to have real rabbits on the stage, if possible to out-Nature Nature.... At the same time he knew that the public was changing. It was becoming increasingly difficult to produce an instantaneous success. The theatre did not stand where it had done in popular esteem, and its personalities had no longer the vivid authority they had once enjoyed. When the Prime Minister visited the Imperium, it was rather Sir Henry than the Prime Minister who was honoured: a sad declension, for Prime Ministers come and go, but a great actor rules for ever as sole lessee and manager of an inst.i.tution as familiar to the general mind as the House of Commons. Prime Ministers had come and gone, they had in turn accepted Sir Henry's kind offer of a box for the first night, but latterly Prime Ministers had gathered popularity and actor-managers had lost it, so great had been the deterioration of the public mind since the introduction of cheap newspapers, imposing upon every public character the necessity of a considerable waste of energy in advertising.... In the old days, a great man's advertising was done for him in acknowledgment of his greatness. Sir Henry was uneasy, could not shake off the gathering gloom, and a deep-seated conviction that Lady Butcher had made the fatal mistake of his career by devoting herself so exclusively to the front of the house and social drapery, bringing him into intimate contact with such persons as Prime Ministers, Dukes, and Attorney-Generals.... The public had been admitted behind the scenes. The mystery was gone. The theatre, even the Imperium had lost its spell. Nothing in it was sacred; not even rehearsals, which were continually interrupted by journalists, male and female, elegant young men and women who were friends and acquaintances of his family, dressmakers. 'Ah! Teresa! Teresa!' sighed Sir Henry, gazing at the portrait of that lady. 'It needs your touch, your charm, the quick insight into the health of the theatre which only comes to those who have been born in it.'

Soon the Imperium would close for a short holiday, after a shockingly bad season, and its manager had to make up his mind as to his new production. Mr Gillies was all for safety and economy, and for postponing any adventure to the Spring, but Sir Henry said,--

'The fate of the whole year is decided in October. The few people who matter come back from Karlsbad and Scotland cleaned up and sc.r.a.ped, and it is then that you make your impression. The Spring is too late. We must have something new.'

'We've got nothing new.'

'This fellow Mann.'

'But! He's mad. If he walked into the Club half the men would walk out of it.'

'He has made himself felt.'

'Yes. But in the wrong way.'

'The wrong way is often the right way in the end.'

'You can't have him in the theatre, Chief, after the way he has talked about us, as though none of us knew our business.'

'He might say so if he saw our balance-sheet,' said Sir Henry, who loved nothing so much as teasing his loyal subordinates. 'We've nothing but this melodrama of Halford Bunn's in which I should have to play the Pope.'

'Well, you were a great success as a Cardinal, Chief.'

'Hm! Hm! Yes.' Sir Henry began to live again through the success of _The Cardinal's Niece_, but also he remembered the horrible time he had had at rehearsals with Mr Halford Bunn who would get so drunk with his own words that any acting which distracted attention from them drove him almost into hysterics.

Sir Henry laughed.

'Bunn or Mann.... Said Mr Mann to Mr Bunn, ”I hope you've got a record run.” Said Mr Bunn to Mr Mann, ”You, sir, are but an also ran.”'

'Ha! ha! ha!' laughed the manager.

'He! he! he!' laughed Sir Henry, and they parted without having solved their problem, though the impishness in Sir Henry made him long to infuriate both Bunn and Mann by a merger of his contracts with the two of them.... Oh! dear. Oh, dear, authors had always been trial enough, but if artists were going to begin to thrust their inflated egoism into the machinery of the theatre then the life of its manager would become unbearable.... Sir Henry liked to drift and to make sudden and surprising decisions.

In this case the decision was made for him--by Clara. It had become one of his chief pleasures to give her lunch in the Aquarium, as she called it, and to laugh with her over her vivid and comic impressions of London, and insensibly he had fallen in love with her, not as was his habit theatrically and superficially, but with an old man's pa.s.sion for youth. It hurt him, plagued him, tortured him, because she never gave him an opening for flirtation, but kept his wits at full stretch and made him feel thirty again: and as he felt thirty he wanted to be thirty.... She never discussed her private affairs with him, but he knew that she lived alone. She baffled him, bewildered him, until he was often hard put to it not to burst into tears. So quick she was and she understood so well, had so keen an insight into character and the intrigue that went on all around her, that he marvelled at her innocence and sometimes almost hated her for it, and for her refusal to accept the position a.s.signed to women in society. His blague, his bluff were useless with her. He had painfully to reveal to her his best, the kindly, tender-hearted, generous simpleton that at heart he was. Loving her, he could not help himself, and, loving her, he raged against her.

She would never allow him to visit her in her rooms. That was a privilege which she reserved for Verschoyle. Her rooms were her sanctuary, her refuge, the place where she could be simple and human, and be the untouched Clara Day who had lived in childish glee with her grandfather and most powerfully alone in her imagination with various characters, more real than any of the persons with whom she ever came in contact until she met Charles Mann.... He was never admitted to her rooms, nor was Sir Henry Butcher, in whom she had for the first time encountered the ordinary love of the ordinary sentimental male. This left her so unmoved that she detested it, with all its ridiculous parade of emotions, its stealthy overtures, its corrosive dishonesty, which made a frank interchange of thought and feeling impossible....