The Old Adam: A Story of Adventure

"What things?" the provincial demanded.

But just then the curtain rose on the second act.

IV

"Won't you cam up to Miss April's dressing-room?" said Mr. Marrier, who in the midst of the fulminating applause after the second act seemed to be inexplicably standing over him, having appeared in an instant out of nowhere like a genie.

The fact was that Edward Henry had been gently and innocently dozing. It was in part the deep obscurity of the auditorium, in part his own physical fatigue, and in part the secret nature of poetry that had been responsible for this restful slumber. He had remained awake without difficulty during the first portion of the act, in which Elsie April-the orient pearl-had had a long scene of emotion and tears, played, as Edward Henry thought, magnificently in spite of its inherent ridiculousness; but later, when gentle Haidee had vanished away and the fateful troubadour messenger had begun to resume her announcements of "The woman appears," Edward Henry's soul had miserably yielded to his body and to the temptation of darkness. The upturned lights and the ringing hosannahs had roused him to a full sense of sin, but he had not quite recovered all his faculties when Marrier startled him.

"Yes, yes! Of course! I was coming," he answered a little petulantly. But no petulance could impair the beaming optimism on Mr. Marrier's features. To judge by those features, Mr. Marrier, in addition to having organised and managed the soirée, might also have written the piece and played every part in it, and founded the Azure Society and built its private theatre. The hour was Mr. Marrier's.

Elsie April's dressing-room was small and very thickly populated, and the threshold of it was barred by eager persons who were half in and half out of the room. Through these Mr. Marrier's authority forced a way. The first man Edward Henry recognised in the tumult of bodies was Mr. Rollo Wrissell, whom he had not seen since their meeting at Slosson's.

"Mr. Wrissell," said the glowing Marrier, "let me introduce Mr. Alderman Machin, of the Regent Theatah."

"Clumsy fool!" thought Edward Henry, and stood as if entranced.

But Mr. Wrissell held out a hand with the perfection of urbane insouciance.

"How d'you do, Mr. Machin?" said he. "I hope you'll forgive me for not having followed your advice."

This was a lesson to Edward Henry. He learnt that you should never show a wound, and if possible never feel one. He admitted that in such details of social conduct London might be in advance of the Five Towns, despite the Five Towns' admirable downrightness.

Lady Woldo was also in the dressing-room, glorious in black. Her beauty was positively disconcerting, and the more so on this occasion as she was bending over the faded Rose Euclid, who sat in a corner surrounded by a court. This court, comprising comparatively uncelebrated young women and men, listened with respect to the conversation of the peeress (who called Rose "my dear"), the great star-actress, and the now somewhat notorious Five Towns character, Edward Henry Machin.

"Miss April is splendid, isn't she?" said Edward Henry to Lady Woldo.

"Oh! My word, yes!" replied Lady Woldo nicely, warmly, yet with a certain perfunctoriness. Edward Henry was astonished that everybody was not passionately enthusiastic about the charm of Elsie's performance. Then Lady Woldo added: "But what a part for Miss Euclid! What a part for her!"

And there were murmurs of approbation.

Rose Euclid gazed at Edward Henry palely and weakly. He considered her much less effective here than in her box. But her febrile gaze was effective enough to produce in him the needle-stab again, the feeling of gloom, of pessimism, of being gradually overtaken by an unseen and mysterious avenger.

"Yes, indeed!" said he.

He thought to himself: "Now's the time for me to behave like Edward Henry Machin, and teach these people a thing or two!" But he could not.

A pretty young girl summoned all her forces to address the great proprietor of the Regent, to whom, however, she had not been introduced, and with a charming nervous earnest lisp said:

"But don't you think it's a great play, Mr. Machin?"

"Of course!" he replied, inwardly employing the most fearful and shocking anathemas.

"We were sure you would!"

The young people glanced at each other with the satisfaction of proved prophets.

"D'you know that not another manager has taken the trouble to come here!" said a second earnest young woman.

Edward Henry's self-consciousness was now acute. He would have paid a ransom to be alone on a desert island in the Indian seas. He looked downwards, and noticed that all these bright eager persons, women and men, were wearing blue stockings or socks.

"Miss April is free now," said Marrier in his ear.

The next instant he was talking alone to Elsie in another corner, while the rest of the room respectfully observed.

"So you deigned to come!" said Elsie April. "You did get my card!"

A little paint did her no harm, and the accentuation of her eyebrows and lips and the calculated disorder of her hair were not more than her powerful effulgent physique could stand. In a costume of green and silver she was magnificent, overwhelmingly magnificent.

Her varying voice and her glance, at once sincere, timid, and bold, produced the most singular sensations behind Edward Henry's soft-frilled shirt-front. And he thought that he had never been through any experience so disturbing and so fine as just standing in front of her.

"I ought to be saying nice things to her," he reflected; but, no doubt because he had been born in the Five Towns, he could not formulate in his mind a single nice thing.

"Well, what do you think of it?" she asked, looking full at him, and the glance too had a strange significance. It was as if she had said: "Are you a man, or aren't you?"

"I think you're splendid," he exclaimed.

"Now please!" she protested. "Don't begin in that strain. I know I'm very good for an amateur-"

"But really! I'm not joking!"

She shook her head.

"What do you think of my part for Rose? Wouldn't she be tremendous in it? Wouldn't she be tremendous? What a chance!"

He was acutely uncomfortable, but even his discomfort was somehow a joy.

"Yes," he admitted. "Yes."

"Oh! Here's Carlo Trent," said she.

He heard Trent's triumphant voice carrying the end of a conversation into the room: "If he hadn't been going away," Carlo Trent was saying, "Pilgrim would have taken it. Pilgrim-"

The poet's eyes met Edward Henry's, and the sentence was never finished.

"How d'ye do, Machin?" murmured the poet.

Then a bell began to ring and would not stop.

"You're staying for the reception afterwards?" said Elsie April as the room emptied.

"Is there one?"

"Of course."

It seemed to Edward Henry that they exchanged silent messages.

V

Some time after the last hexameter had rolled forth, and the curtain had finally fallen on the immense and rapturous success of Carlo Trent's play in three acts and in verse, Edward Henry, walking about the crowded stage where the reception was being held, encountered Elsie April, who was still in her gorgeous dress of green and silver. She was chatting with Marrier, who instantly left her, thus displaying a discretion such as an employer would naturally expect from a factotum to whom he was paying three pounds a week.

Edward Henry's heart began to beat in a manner which troubled him and made him wonder what could be happening at the back of the soft-frilled shirt-front that he had obtained in imitation of Mr. Seven Sachs.

"Not much elbow-room here!" he said lightly. He was very anxious to be equal to the occasion.

She gazed at him under her emphasized eyebrows. He noticed that there were little touches of red on her delightful nostrils.

"No," she answered with direct simplicity. "Suppose we try somewhere else."

She turned her back on all the amiable and intellectual babble, descended three steps on the prompt side, and opened a door. The swish of her brocaded spreading skirt was loud and sensuous. He followed her into an obscure chamber in which several figures were moving to and fro and talking.

"What's this place?" he asked. Involuntarily his voice was diminished to a whisper.

"It's one of the discussion-rooms," said she. "It used to be a classroom, I expect, before the society took the buildings over. You see the theatre was the general schoolroom."

They sat down inobtrusively in an embrasure. None among the mysterious moving figures seemed to remark them.

"But why are they talking in the dark?" Edward Henry asked behind his hand.

"To begin with, it isn't quite dark," she said. "There's the light of the street-lamp through the window. But it has been found that serious discussions can be carried on much better without too much light… I'm not joking." (It was as if in the gloom her ears had caught his faint sardonic smile.)

Said the voice of one of the figures:

"Can you tell me what is the origin of the decay of realism? Can you tell me that?"

Suddenly, in the ensuing silence, there was a click and a tiny electric lamp shot its beam. The hand which held the lamp was the hand of Carlo Trent. He raised it and flashed the trembling ray in the inquirer's face. Edward Henry recalled Carlo's objection to excessive electricity in the private drawing-room at Wilkins's.

"Why do you ask such a question?" Carlo Trent challenged the enquirer, brandishing the lamp. "I ask you why do you ask it?"

The other also drew forth a lamp and, as it were, cocked it and let it off at the features of Carlo Trent. And thus the two stood, statuesque and lit, surrounded by shadowy witnesses of the discussion.

The door creaked and yet another figure, silhouetted for an instant against the illumination of the stage, descended into the discussion-chamber.

Carlo Trent tripped towards the newcomer, bent with his lamp, lifted delicately the hem of the newcomer's trousers, and gazed at the colour of his sock, which was blue.

"All right!" said he.

"The champagne and sandwiches are served," said the newcomer.

"You've not answered me, sir," Carlo Trent faced once more his opponent in the discussion. "You've not answered me."

Whereupon, the lamps being extinguished, they all filed forth, the door swung to of its own accord, shutting out the sound of babble from the stage, and Edward Henry and Elsie April were left silent and solitary to the sole ray of the street-lamp.

All the Five Towns shrewdness in Edward Henry's character, all the husband in him, all the father in him, all the son in him, leapt to his lips and tried to say to Elsie, "Shall we go and inspect the champagne and sandwiches too?" and failed to say these incantatory words of salvation!

And the romantic adventurous fool in him rejoiced at their failure. For he was adventurously happy in his propinquity to that simple and sincere creature. He was so happy, and his heart was so active, that he even made no caustic characteristic comment on the singular behaviour of the beings who had just abandoned them to their loneliness. He was also proud because he was sitting alone nearly in the dark with a piquant and wealthy, albeit amateur, actress who had just participated in a triumph at which the spiritual aristocracy of London had assisted.

VI

Two thoughts ran through his head, shooting in and out and to and fro among his complex sensations of pleasure. The first was that he had never been in such a fix before, despite his enterprising habits. And the second was that neither Elsie April nor anybody else connected with his affairs in London had ever asked him whether he was married, nor assumed by any detail of behaviour towards him that there existed the possibility of his being married. Of course he might, had he chosen, have informed a few of them that a wife and children possessed him, but then, really, would not that have been equivalent to attaching a label to himself "Married"? – a procedure which had to him the stamp of provinciality.

Elsie April said nothing. And as she said nothing he was obliged to say something, if only to prove to both of them that he was not a mere tongue-tied provincial. He said:

"You know I feel awfully out of it here in this society of yours!"

"Out of it?" she exclaimed, and her voice thrilled as she resented his self-depreciation.

"It's over my head-right over it!"

"Now, Mr. Machin," she said, dropping somewhat that rich, low voice, "I quite understand that there are some things about the society you don't like, trifles that you're inclined to laugh at. Iknow that. Many of us know it. But it can't be helped in an organisation like ours. It's even essential. Don't be too hard on us. Don't be sarcastic."

"But I'm not sarcastic!" he protested.

"Honest?" She turned to him quickly. He could descry her face in the gloom, and the forward bend of her shoulders, and the backward sweep of her arms resting on the seat, and the straight droop of her Egyptian shawl from her inclined body.

"Honest!" he solemnly insisted.

The exchange of this single word was so intimate that it shifted their conversation to a different level-a level at which each seemed to be assuring the other that intercourse between them could never be aught but utterly sincere thenceforward, and that indeed in future they would constitute a little society of their own, ideal in its organisation.

"Then you're too modest," she said decidedly. "There was no one here to-night who's more respected than you are. No one! Immediately I first spoke to you-I daresay you don't remember that afternoon at the Grand Babylon Hotel-I knew you weren't like the rest. And don't I know them? Don't I know them?"

"But how did you know I'm not like the rest?" asked Edward Henry. The line which she was taking had very much surprised him, and charmed him. The compliment, so serious and urgent in tone, was intensely agreeable, and it made an entirely new experience in his career. He thought: "Oh! There's no mistake about it. These London women are marvellous! They're just as straight and in earnest as the best of our little lot down there. But they've got something else. There's no comparison!" The unique word to describe the indescribable floated into his head: "Scrumptuous!" What could not life be with such semi-divine creatures? He dreamt of art drawing-rooms softly shaded at midnight. And his attitude towards even poetry was modified.

"I knew you weren't like the rest," said she, "by your look; by the way you say everything you do say. We all know it. And I'm sure you're far more than clever enough to be perfectly aware that we all know it. Just see how everyone looked at you to-night!"

Yes, he had in fact been aware of the glances.

"I think I ought to tell you," she went on, "that I was rather unfair to you that day in talking about my cousin-in the taxi. You were quite right to refuse to go into partnership with her. She thinks so too. We've talked it over, and we're quite agreed. Of course it did seem hard-at the time, and her bad luck in America seemed to make it worse. But you were quite right. You can work much better alone. You must have felt that instinctively-far quicker than we felt it."

"Well," he murmured, confused, "I don't know-"

Could this be she who had too openly smiled at his skirmish with an artichoke?

"Oh, Mr. Machin," she burst out, "you've got an unprecedented opportunity, and, thank Heaven, you're the man to use it! We're all expecting so much from you, and we know we sha'n't be disappointed."

"D'ye mean the theatre?" he asked, alarmed as it were amid rising waters.

"The theatre," said she gravely. "You're the one man that can save London. No one in London can do it! … You have the happiness of knowing what your mission is, and of knowing too that you are equal to it. What good fortune! I wish I could say as much for myself. I want to do something! I try! But what can I do? Nothing-really! You've no idea of the awful loneliness that comes from a feeling of inability."

"Loneliness!" he repeated. "But surely-" He stopped.

"Loneliness," she insisted. Her little chin was now in her little hand, and her dim face upturned.

And suddenly a sensation of absolute and marvellous terror seized Edward Henry. He was more afraid than he had ever been-and yet once or twice in his life he had felt fear. His sense of true perspective-one of his most precious qualities-returned. He thought: "I've got to get out of this." Well, the door was not locked. It was only necessary to turn the handle, and security lay on the other side of the door! He had but to rise and walk. And he could not. He might just as well have been manacled in a prison-cell. He was under an enchantment.

"A man," murmured Elsie, "a man can never realise the loneliness-" She ceased.

He stirred uneasily.

"About this play," he found himself saying.

And yet why should he mention the play in his fright? He pretended to himself not to know why. But he knew why. His instinct had seen in the topic of the play the sole avenue of salvation.

"A wonderful thing, isn't it?"

"Oh, yes," he said; and then, most astonishingly to himself, added: "I've decided to do it."

"We knew you would," she said calmly. "At any rate I did… You'll open with it of course."

"Yes," he answered desperately, and proceeded, with the most extraordinary bravery: "If you'll act in it."

Immediately on hearing these last words issue from his mouth he knew that a fool had uttered them, and that the bravery was mere rashness; for Elsie's responding gesture reinspired him afresh with the exquisite terror which he had already begun to conjure away.

"You think Miss Euclid ought to have the part," he added quickly, before she could speak.

"Oh, I do!" cried Elsie positively and eagerly. "Rose will do simply wonders with that part. You see she can speak verse. I can't. I'm nobody. I only took it because-"

"Aren't you anybody?" he contradicted. "Aren't you anybody? I can just tell you-"

There he was again, bringing back the delicious terror! An astounding situation!

But the door creaked. The babble from the stage invaded the room. And in a second the enchantment was lifted from him. Several people entered. He sighed, saying within himself to the disturbers:

"I'd have given you a hundred-pound piece if you'd been five minutes sooner."

And yet simultaneously he regretted their arrival. And, more curious still, though he well remembered the warning words of Mr. Seven Sachs concerning Elsie April, he did not consider that they were justified. She had not been a bit persuasive … only…

VII

He sat down to the pianisto with a strange and agreeable sense of security. It is true that, owing to the time of year, the drawing-room had been, in the figurative phrase, turned upside down by the process of spring-cleaning, which his unexpected arrival had surprised in fullest activity. But he did not mind that. He abode content among rolled carpets, a swathed chandelier, piled chairs, and walls full of pale rectangular spaces where pictures had been. Early that morning, after a brief night spent partly in bed and partly in erect contemplation of his immediate past and his immediate future, he had hurried back to his pianisto and his home-to the beings and things that he knew and that knew him.

In the train he had had the pleasure of reading in sundry newspapers that "The Orient Pearl," by Carlo Trent (who was mentioned in terms of startling respect and admiration), had been performed on the previous evening at the dramatic soirée of the Azure Society, with all the usual accompaniments of secrecy and exclusiveness, in its private theatre in Kensington, and had been accepted on the spot by Mr. E. H. Machin ("that most enterprising and enlightened recruit to the ranks of theatrical managers ") for production at the new Regent Theatre. And further, that Mr. Machin intended to open with it. And still further, that his selection of such a play, which combined in the highest degree the poetry of Mr. W. B. Yeats with the critical intellectuality of Mr. Bernard Shaw, was of excellent augury for London's dramatic future, and that the "upward movement" must on no account be thought to have failed because of the failure of certain recent ill-judged attempts, by persons who did not understand their business, to force it in particular directions. And still further, that he, Edward Henry, had engaged for the principal part Miss Rose Euclid, perhaps the greatest emotional actress the English-speaking peoples had ever had, but who unfortunately had not been sufficiently seen of late on the London stage, and that this would be her first appearance after her recent artistic successes in the United States. And lastly, that Mr. Marrier (whose name would be remembered in connection with … etc., etc.) was Mr. E. H. Machin's acting manager and technical adviser. Edward Henry could trace the hand of Marrier in all the paragraphs. Marrier had lost no time.

Mrs. Machin, senior, came into the drawing-room just as he was adjusting the "Tannhäuser" overture to the mechanician. The piece was one of his major favourites.

"This is no place for you, my lad," said Mrs. Machin grimly, glancing round the room. "But I came to tell ye as th' mutton's been cooling at least five minutes. You gave out as you were hungry."

"Keep your hair on, Mother," said he, springing up.

Barely twelve hours earlier he had been mincing among the elect and the select and the intellectual and the poetic and the aristocratic; among the lah-di-dah and Kensingtonian accents; among rouged lips and blue hose and fixed simperings; in the centre of the universe. And he had conducted himself with considerable skill accordingly. Nobody, on the previous night, could have guessed from the cut of his fancy waistcoat, or the judiciousness of his responses to remarks about verse, that his wife often wore a white apron, or that his mother was-the woman she was! He had not unskillfully caught many of the tricks of that metropolitan environment. But now they all fell away from him, and he was just Edward Henry-nay, he was almost the old Denry again.

"Who chose this mutton?" he asked as he bent over the juicy and rich joint and cut therefrom exquisite thick slices with a carving-knife like a razor.

"I did, if ye want to know," said his mother. "Anything amiss with it?" she challenged.

"No. It's fine."

"Yes," said she, "I'm wondering whether you get aught as good as that in these grand hotels, as you call 'em."

"We don't," said Edward Henry. First, it was true, and secondly he was anxious to be propitiatory, for he had a plan to further.

He looked at his wife. She was not talkative, but she had received him in the hall with every detail of affection, if a little absent-mindedly, owing to the state of the house. She had not been caustic, like his mother, about this male incursion into spring-cleaning. She had not informed the surrounding air that she failed to understand why them as were in London couldn't stop in London for a bit, as his mother had. Moreover, though the spring-cleaning fully entitled her to wear a white apron at meals, she was not wearing a white apron, which was a sign to him that she still loved him enough to want to please him. On the whole, he was fairly optimistic about his plan of salvation. Nevertheless, it was not until nearly the end of the meal, when one of his mother's ample pies was being consumed, that he began to try to broach it.

"Nell," he said, "I suppose you wouldn't care to come to London with me?"

"Oh!" she answered smiling, a smile of a peculiar quality. It was astonishing how that simple woman could put just one-tenth of one per cent. of irony into a good-natured smile. "What's the meaning of this?" Then she flushed. The flush touched Edward Henry in an extraordinary manner.

("To think," he reflected, incredulously, "that only last night I was talking in the dark to Elsie April-and here I am now!" And he remembered the glory of Elsie's frock, and her thrilling voice in the gloom, and that pose of hers as she leaned dimly forward.)

"Well," he said aloud, as naturally as he could. "That theatre's beginning to get up on its hind legs now, and I should like you to see it."

A difficult pass for him, as regards his mother! This was the first time he had ever overtly spoken of the theatre in his mother's presence. In the best bedroom he had talked of it, but even there with a certain self-consciousness and false casualness. Now his mother stared straight in front of her with an expression of which she alone among human beings had the monopoly.