The Old Adam: A Story of Adventure

"I should like to," said Nellie generously.

"Well," said he, "I've got to go back to town to-morrow. Wilt come with me, lass?"

"Don't be silly, Edward Henry," said she. "How can I leave Mother in the middle of all this spring-cleaning?"

"You needn't leave Mother. We'll take her too," said Edward Henry lightly.

"You won't!" observed Mrs. Machin.

"I have to go to-morrow, Nell," said Edward Henry. "And I was thinking you might as well come with me. It will be a change for you."

(He said to himself: "And not only have I to go to-morrow, but you absolutely must come with me, my girl. That's the one thing to do.")

"It would be a change for me," Nellie agreed. She was beyond doubt flattered and calmly pleased. "But I can't possibly come to-morrow. You can see that for yourself, dear."

"No, I can't!" he cried impatiently. "What does it matter? Mother'll be here. The kids'll be all right. After all, spring cleaning isn't the day of judgment."

"Edward Henry," said his mother, cutting in between them like a thin blade, "I wish you wouldn't be blasphemous. London's London, and Bursley's Bursley." She had finished.

"It's quite out of the question for me to come to-morrow, dear. I must have notice. I really must."

And Edward Henry saw with alarm that Nellie had made up her mind, and that the flattered calm pleasure in his suggestion had faded from her face.

"Oh, dash these domesticated women!" he thought, and shortly afterwards departed, brooding, to the offices of the Thrift Club.

VIII

He timed his return with exactitude, and, going straight up-stairs to the chamber known indifferently as "Maisie's room" or "nurse's room," sure enough he found the three children there alone! They were fed, washed, night-gowned, and even dressing-gowned; and this was the hour when, while Nurse repaired the consequences of their revolutionary conduct in the bathroom and other places, they were left to themselves. Robert lay on the hearth-rug, the insteps of his soft, pink feet rubbing idly against the pile of the rug, his elbows digging into the pile, his chin on his fists, and a book perpendicularly beneath his eyes. Ralph, careless adventurer rather than student, had climbed to the glittering brass rail of Maisie's new bedstead, and was thereon imitating a recently seen circus performance. Maisie, in the bed according to regulation, and lying on the flat of her back, was singing nonchalantly to the ceiling. Carlo, unaware that at that moment he might have been a buried corpse but for the benignancy of Providence in his behalf, was feeling sympathetic towards himself because he was slightly bored.

"Hello, kids!" Edward Henry greeted them. As he had seen them before midday dinner, the more formal ceremonies of salutation after absence, so hateful to the Five Towns temperament, were happily over and done with.

Robert turned his head slightly, inspected his father with a judicial detachment that hardly escaped the inimical, and then resumed his book.

("No one would think," said Edward Henry to himself, "that the person who has just entered this room is the most enterprising and enlightened of West End theatrical managers.")

"'Ello, Father!" shrilled Ralph. "Come and help me to stand on this wire rope."

"It isn't a wire rope," said Robert from the hearth-rug, without stirring. "It's a brass rail."

"Yes, it is a wire rope, because I can make it bend," Ralph retorted, bumping down on the thing. "Anyhow, it's going to be a wire rope."

Maisie simply stuck several fingers into her mouth, shifted to one side, and smiled at her father in a style of heavenly and mischievous flirtatiousness.

"Well, Robert, what are you reading?" Edward Henry inquired in his best fatherly manner, half authoritative and half humorous, while he formed part of the staff of Ralph's circus.

"I'm not reading, I'm learning my spellings," replied Robert.

Edward Henry, knowing that the discipline of filial politeness must be maintained, said: "'Learning my spellings'-what?"

"Learning my spellings, Father," Robert consented to say, but with a savage air of giving way to the unreasonable demands of affected fools. Why indeed should it be necessary in conversation always to end one's sentence with the name or title of the person addressed?

"Well, would you like to go to London with me?"

"When?" the boy demanded cautiously. He still did not move, but his ears seemed to prick up.

"To-morrow?"

"No thanks … Father." His ears ceased their activity.

"No? Why not?"

"Because there's a spellings examination on Friday, and I'm going to be top boy."

It was a fact that the infant (whose programmes were always somehow arranged in advance, and were in his mind absolutely unalterable) could spell the most obstreperous words. Quite conceivably he could spell better than his father, who still showed an occasional tendency to write "separate" with three e's and only one a.

"London's a fine place," said Edward Henry.

"I know," said Robert negligently.

"What's the population of London?"

"I don't know," said Robert with curtness, though he added after a pause: "But I can spell population-p-o-p-u-l-a-t-i-o-n."

"I'll come to London, Father, if you'll have me," said Ralph, grinning good-naturedly.

"Will you!" said his father.

"Fahver," asked Maisie, wriggling, "have you brought me a doll?"

"I'm afraid I haven't."

"Mother said p'r'aps you would."

It was true, there had been talk of a doll; he had forgotten it.

"I tell you what I'll do," said Edward Henry, "I'll take you to London, and you can choose a doll in London. You never saw such dolls as there are in London-talking dolls that shut and open their eyes and say Papa and Mamma, and all their clothes take off and on."

"Do they say 'Father?'" growled Robert.

"No, they don't," said Edward Henry.

"Why don't they?" growled Robert.

"When will you take me?" Maisie almost squealed.

"To-morrow."

"Certain sure, Father?"

"Yes."

"You promise, Father?"

"Of course I promise."

Robert at length stood up to judge for himself this strange and agitating caprice of his father's for taking Maisie to London. He saw that, despite spellings, it would never do to let Maisie alone go. He was about to put his father through a cross-examination, but Edward Henry dropped Ralph, who had been climbing up him as up a telegraph-pole, on to the bed and went over to the window, nervously, and tapped thereon.

Carlo followed him, wagging an untidy tail.

"Hello, Trent!" murmured Edward Henry, stooping and patting the dog.

Ralph exploded into loud laughter.

"Father's called Carlo 'Trent,'" he roared. "Father, have you forgotten his name's Carlo?" It was one of the greatest jokes that Ralph had heard for a long time.

Then Nellie hurried into the room, and Edward Henry, with a "Mustn't be late for tea," as hurriedly left it.

Three minutes later, while he was bent over the lavatory basin, someone burst into the bathroom. He lifted a soapy face.

It was Nellie, with disturbed features.

"What's this about your positively promising to take Maisie to London to-morrow to choose a doll?"

"I'll take 'em all," he replied with absurd levity. "And you too!"

"But really-" she pouted, indicating that he must not carry the ridiculous too far.

"Look here, d-n it," he said impulsively, "I want you to come. And I want you to come to-morrow. I knew it was the confounded infants you wouldn't leave. You don't mean to tell me you can't arrange it-a woman like you!"

She hesitated.

"And what am I to do with three children in a London hotel?"

"Take Nurse, naturally."

"Take Nurse?" she cried.

He imitated her with a grotesque exaggeration, yelling loudly, "Take Nurse?" Then he planted a soap-sud on her fresh cheek.

She wiped it off carefully and smacked his arm. The next moment she was gone, having left the door open.

"He wants me to go to London to-morrow," he could hear her saying to his mother on the landing.

"Confound it!" he thought. "Didn't she know that at dinner-time?"

"Bless us!" His mother's voice.

"And take the children-and Nurse!" his wife continued in a tone to convey the fact that she was just as much disturbed as her mother-in-law could possibly be by the eccentricities of the male.

"He's his father all over, that lad is!" said his mother strangely.

And Edward Henry was impressed by these words, for not once in seven years did his mother mention his father.

Tea was an exciting meal.

"You'd better come too, Mother," said Edward Henry audaciously. "We'll shut the house up."

"I come to no London," said she.

"Well, then, you can use the motor as much as you like while we're away."

"I go about gallivanting in no motor," said his mother. "It'll take me all my time to get this house straight against you come back."

"I haven't a thing to go in!" said Nellie with a martyr's sigh.

After all (he reflected), though domesticated, she was a woman.

He went to bed early. It seemed to him that his wife, his mother, and the nurse were active and whispering up and down the house till the very middle of the night. He arose not late, but they were all three afoot before him, active and whispering.

IX

He found out on the morning after the highly complex transaction of getting his family from Bursley to London that London held more problems for him than ever. He was now not merely the proprietor of a theatre approaching completion, but really a theatrical manager with a play to produce, artistes to engage, and the public to attract. He had made two appointments for that morning at the Majestic (he was not at the Grand Babylon, because his wife had once stayed with him at the Majestic, and he did not want to add to his anxieties the business of accustoming her to a new and costlier luxury): one appointment at nine with Marrier, and the other at ten with Nellie, family, and Nurse. He had expected to get rid of Marrier before ten.

Among the exciting mail which Marrier had collected for him from the Grand Babylon and elsewhere was the following letter:

Buckingham Palace Hotel.

DEAR FRIEND: We are all so proud of you. I should like some time to finish our interrupted conversation. Will you come and have lunch with me one day here at 1.30? You needn't write. I know how busy you are. Just telephone you are coming. But don't telephone between 12 and 1, because at that time I alwaystake my constitutional in St. James's Park.

Yours sincerely,

"Well," he thought. "That's a bit thick, that is! She's stuck me up with a dramatist I don't believe in, and a play I don't believe in, and an actress I don't believe in, and now she-"

Nevertheless, to a certain extent he was bluffing himself; for, as he pretended to put Elsie April back into her place, he had disturbing and delightful visions of her. A clever creature! Uncannily clever! Wealthy! Under thirty! Broad-minded! No provincial prejudices! … Her voice, that always affected his spine! Her delicious flattery! … She was no mean actress either! And the multifariousness of her seductive charm! In fact, she was a regular woman of the world, such as you would read about-if you did read! … He was sitting with her again in the obscurity of the discussion-room at the Azure Society's establishment. His heart was beating again.

Pooh! …

A single wrench, and he ripped up the letter and cast it into one of the red-lined waste-paper baskets with which the immense and rather shabby writing-room of the Majestic was dotted.

Before he had finished dealing with Mr. Marrier's queries and suggestions-some ten thousand in all-the clock struck, and Nellie tripped into the room. She was in black silk, with hints here and there of gold chains. As she had explained, she had nothing to wear, and was therefore obliged to fall back on the final resource of every woman in her state. For in this connection "nothing to wear" signified "nothing except my black silk" – at any rate, in the Five Towns.

"Mr. Marrier-my wife. Nellie, this is Mr. Marrier."

Mr. Marrier was profuse: no other word would describe his demeanour. Nellie had the timidity of a young girl. Indeed, she looked quite youthful, despite the aging influences of black silk.

"So that's your Mr. Marrier! I understood from you he was a clerk!" said Nellie tartly, suddenly retransformed into the shrewd matron as soon as Mr. Marrier had profusely gone. She had conceived Marrier as a sort of Penkethman. Edward Henry had hoped to avoid this interview.

He shrugged his shoulders in answer to his wife's remark.

"Well," he said, "where are the kids?"

"Waiting in the lounge with Nurse, as you said to be." Her mien delicately informed him that while in London his caprices would be her law, which she would obey without seeking to comprehend.

"Well," he went on, "I expect they'd like the parks as well as anything. Suppose we take 'em and show 'em one of the parks? Shall we? Besides, they must have fresh air."

"All right," Nellie agreed. "But how far will it be?"

"Oh," said Edward Henry, "we'll crowd into a taxi!"

They crowded into a taxi, and the children found their father in high spirits. Maisie mentioned the doll. In a minute the taxi had stopped in front of a toy-shop surpassing dreams, and they invaded the toy-shop like an army. When they emerged, after a considerable interval, Nurse was carrying an enormous doll, and Nellie was carrying Maisie, and Ralph was lovingly stroking the doll's real shoes. Robert kept a profound silence-a silence which had begun in the train.

"You haven't got much to say, Robert," his father remarked when the taxi set off again.

"I know," said Robert gruffly. Among other things, he resented his best clothes on a week-day.

"What do you think of London?"

"I don't know," said Robert.

His eyes never left the window of the taxi.

Then they visited the theatre-a very fatiguing enterprise, and also, for Edward Henry, a very nervous one. He was as awkward in displaying that inchoate theatre as a newly-made father with his first-born. Pride and shame fought for dominion over him. Nellie was full of laudations. Ralph enjoyed the ladders.

"I say," said Nellie, apprehensive for Maisie, on the pavement, "this child's exhausted already. How big's this park of yours? Because neither Nurse nor I can carry her very far."

"We'll buy a pram," said Edward Henry. He was staring at a newspaper placard which said: "Isabel Joy on the war-path again. Will she win?"

"But-"

"Oh, yes, we'll buy a pram! Driver-"

"A pram isn't enough. You'll want coverings for her, in this wind."

"Well, we'll buy the necessary number of eiderdowns and blankets, then," said Edward Henry. "Driver-"

A tremendous business! For, in addition to making the purchases, he had to feed his flock in an A-B-C shop, where among the unoccupied waitresses Maisie and her talkative winking doll enjoyed a triumph. Still, there was plenty of time.

At a quarter-past twelve he was displaying the varied landscape beauties of the park to his family. Ralph insisted on going to the bridge over the lake, and Robert silently backed him. And therefore the entire party went. But Maisie was afraid of the water, and cried. Now, the worst thing about Maisie was that when once she had begun to cry it was very difficult to stop her. Even the most remarkable dolls were powerless to appease her distress.

"Give me the confounded pram, Nurse," said Edward Henry, "I'll cure her."

But he did not cure her. However, he had to stick grimly to the perambulator. Nellie tripped primly in black silk on one side of it. Nurse had the wayward Ralph by the hand. And Robert, taciturn, stalked alone, adding up London and making a very small total of it.

Suddenly Edward Henry halted the perambulator and, stepping away from it, raised his hat. An excessively elegant young woman leading a Pekinese by a silver chain stopped as if smitten by a magic dart and held spellbound.

"How do you do, Miss April?" said Edward Henry loudly. "I was hoping to meet you. This is my wife. Nellie, this is Miss April." Nellie bowed stiffly in her black silk. Naught of the fresh maiden about her now! And it has to be said that Elsie April, in all her young and radiant splendour and woman-of-the-worldliness, was equally stiff. "And there are my two boys. And this is my little girl in the pram."

Maisie screamed, and pushed an expensive doll out of the perambulator. Edward Henry saved it by its boot as it fell.

"And this is her doll. And this is Nurse," he finished. "Fine breezy morning, isn't it?"

In due course the processions moved on.

"Well, that's done!" Edward Henry muttered to himself, and sighed.

CHAPTER IX

THE FIRST NIGHT

I

It was upon an evening in June-and a fine evening, full of the exquisite melancholy of summer in a city-that Edward Henry stood before a window, drumming thereon as he had once, a less experienced man with hair slightly less gray, drummed on the table of the mighty and arrogant Slosson. The window was the window of the managerial room of the Regent Theatre. And he could scarcely believe it, he could scarcely believe that he was not in a dream, for the room was papered, carpeted and otherwise furnished. Only its electric light fittings were somewhat hasty and provisional, and the white ceiling showed a hole and a bunch of wires, like the nerves of a hollow tooth, whence one of Edward Henry's favourite chandeliers would ultimately depend.

The whole of the theatre was at least as far advanced toward completion as that room. A great deal of it was more advanced; for instance the auditorium, foyer, and bars, which were utterly finished, so far as anything ever is finished in a changing world. Wonders, marvels, and miracles had been accomplished. Mr. Alloyd, in the stress of the job, had even ceased to bring the Russian ballet into his conversations. Mr. Alloyd, despite a growing tendency to prove to Edward Henry by authentic anecdote about midnight his general proposition that women as a sex treated him with shameful unfairness, had gained the high esteem of Edward Henry as an architect. He had fulfilled his word about those properties of the auditorium which had to do with hearing and seeing-in-so-much that the auditorium was indeed unique in London. And he had taken care that the clerk of the Works took care that the builder did not give up heart in the race with time.

Moreover he had maintained the peace with the terrible London County Council, all of whose inspecting departments seemed to have secretly decided that the Regent Theatre should be opened, not in June as Edward Henry had decided but at some vague future date toward the middle of the century. Months earlier Edward Henry had ordained and announced that the Regent Theatre should be inaugurated on a given date in June, at the full height of splendour of the London season, and he had astounded the theatrical world by adhering through thick and thin to that date, and had thereby intensified his reputation as an eccentric; for the oldest inhabitant of that world could not recall a case in which the opening of a new theatre had not been promised for at least three widely different dates.

Edward Henry had now arrived at the eve of the date, and if he had arrived there in comparative safety, with a reasonable prospect of avoiding complete shame and disaster, he felt and he admitted that the credit was due as much to Mr. Alloyd as to himself. Which only confirmed an early impression of his that architects were queer people-rather like artists and poets in some ways, but with a basis of bricks and mortar to them.

His own share in the enterprise of the Regent had in theory been confined to engaging the right people for the right tasks and situations; and to signing checks. He had depended chiefly upon Mr. Marrier, who, growing more radiant every day, had gradually developed into a sort of chubby Napoleon, taking an immense delight in detail and in choosing minor hands at round-sum salaries on the spur of the moment. Mr. Marrier refused no call upon his energy. He was helping Carlo Trent in the production and stage-management of the play. He dried the tears of girlish neophytes at rehearsals. He helped to number the stalls. He showed a passionate interest in the tessellated pavement of the entrance. He taught the managerial typewriting girl how to make afternoon tea. He went to Hitchin to find a mediæval chair required for the third act, and found it. In a word he was fully equal to the post of acting manager. He managed! He managed everything and everybody except Edward Henry, and except the press-agent, a functionary whose conviction of his own indispensability and importance was so sincere that even Marrier shared it, and left him alone in his Bismarckian operations. The press-agent, who sang in musical comedy chorus at night, knew that if the Regent Theatre succeeded, it would be his doing and his alone.

And yet Edward Henry, though he had delegated everything, had yet found a vast amount of work to do; and was thereby exhausted. That was why he was drumming on the pane. That was why he was conscious of a foolish desire to shove his fist through the pane. During the afternoon he had had two scenes with two representatives of the Libraries (so called because they deal in theatre-tickets and not in books) who had declined to take up any of his tickets in advance. He had commenced an action against a firm of bill posters. He had settled an incipient strike in the "limes" department, originated by Mr. Cosmo Clark's views about lighting. He had dictated answers to seventy-nine letters of complaint from unknown people concerning the supply of free seats for the first night. He had responded in the negative to a request from a newspaper critic who, on the score that he was deaf, wanted a copy of the play. He had replied finally to an official of the County Council about the smoke trap over the stage. He had replied finally to another official of the County Council about the electric sign. He had attended to a new curiosity on the part of another official of the County Council about the iron curtain. And he had been almost rude to still another official of the County Council about the wiring of the electric light in the dressing-rooms. He had been unmistakably and pleasurably rude in writing to Slossons about their criticisms of the lock on the door of Lord Woldo's private entrance to the theatre. Also he had arranged with the representative of the Chief Commissioner of Police concerning the carriage regulations for "setting-down and taking-up."

And he had indeed had more than enough. His nerves, though he did not know it, and would have scorned the imputation, were slowly giving way. Hence, really, the danger to the pane! Through the pane, in the dying light he could see a cross-section of Shaftesbury Avenue, and an aged newspaper lad leaning against a lamp-post and displaying a poster which spoke of Isabel Joy. Isabel Joy yet again! That little fact of itself contributed to his exasperation. He thought, considering the importance of the Regent Theatre and the salary he was paying to his press-agent, that the newspapers ought to occupy their pages solely with the metropolitan affairs of Edward Henry Machin. But the wretched Isabel had, as it were, got London by the throat. She had reached Chicago from the West, on her triumphant way home, and had there contrived to be arrested, according to boast, but she was experiencing much more difficulty in emerging from the Chicago prison than in entering it. And the question was now becoming acute whether the emissary of the militant Suffragettes would arrive back in London within the specified period of a hundred days. Naturally, London was holding its breath. London will keep calm during moderate crises-such as a national strike or the agony of the House of Lords-but when the supreme excitation is achieved London knows how to let itself go.

"If you please, Mr. Machin-"

He turned. It was his typewriter, Miss Lindop, a young girl of some thirty-five years, holding a tea-tray.

"But I've had my tea once!" he snapped.

"But you've not had your dinner, sir, and it's half-past eight!" she pleaded.

He had known this girl for less than a month and he paid her fewer shillings a week than the years of her age, and yet somehow she had assumed a worshipping charge of him, based on the idea that he was incapable of taking care of himself. To look at her appealing eyes one might have thought that she would have died to insure his welfare.