The Old Adam: A Story of Adventure

"And they want to see you about the linoleum for the gallery stairs," she added timidly. "The County Council man says it must be taken up."

The linoleum for the gallery stairs! Something snapped in him. He almost walked right through the young woman and the tea-tray.

"I'll linoleum them!" he bitterly exclaimed, and disappeared.

II

Having duly "linoleumed them," or rather having very annoyingly quite failed to "linoleum them," Edward Henry continued his way up the right-hand gallery staircase and reached the auditorium, where to his astonishment a good deal of electricity, at one penny three farthings a unit, was blazing. Every seat in the narrow and high-pitched gallery, where at the sides the knees of one spectator would be on a level with the picture-hat of the spectator in the row beneath, had a perfect and entire view of the proscenium opening. And Edward Henry now proved this unprecedented fact by climbing to the topmost corner seat and therefrom surveying the scene of which he was monarch. The boxes were swathed in their new white dust sheets; and likewise the higgledy-piggledy stalls, not as yet screwed down to the floor, save three or four stalls in the middle of the front row, from which the sheet had been removed. On one of these seats, far off though it was, he could descry a paper bag, – probably containing sandwiches, – and on another a pair of gloves and a walking-stick. Several alert ladies with sketchbooks walked uneasily about in the aisles. The orchestra was hidden in the well provided for it, and apparently murmuring in its sleep. The magnificent drop-curtain, designed by Saracen Givington, A.R.A., concealed the stage.

Suddenly Mr. Marrier and Carlo Trent appeared through the iron door that gave communication-to initiates-between the wings and the auditorium; they sat down in the stalls. And the curtain rose with a violent swish, and disclosed the first "set" of "The Orient Pearl."

"What about that amber, Cosmo?" Mr. Marrier cried thickly, after a pause, his mouth occupied with sandwich.

"There you are!" came the reply.

"Right!" said Mr. Marrier. "Strike!"

"Don't strike!" contradicted Carlo Trent.

"Strike, I tell you! We must get on with the second act." The voices resounded queerly in the empty theatre.

The stage was invaded by scene shifters before the curtain could descend again.

Edward Henry heard a tripping step behind him. It was the faithful typewriting girl.

"I say," he said. "Do you mind telling me what's going on here? It's true that in the rush of more important business I'd almost forgotten that a theatre is a place where they perform plays."

"It's the dress-rehearsal, Mr. Machin," said the woman, startled and apologetic.

"But the dress-rehearsal was fixed for three o'clock," said he. "It must have been finished three hours ago."

"I think they've only just done the first act," the woman breathed. "I know they didn't begin till seven. Oh! Mr. Machin, of course it's no affair of mine, but I've worked in a good many theatres, and I do think it's such a mistake to have the dress-rehearsal quite private. If you get a hundred or so people in the stalls, then it's an audience, and there's much less delay and everything goes much better. But when it's private a dress-rehearsal is just like any other rehearsal."

"Only more so, perhaps," said Edward Henry, smiling.

He saw that he had made her happy; but he saw also that he had given her empire over him.

"I've got your tea here," she said, rather like a hospital nurse now. "Won't you drink it?"

"I'll drink it if it's not stewed," he muttered.

"Oh!" she protested. "Of course it isn't! I poured it off the leaves into another teapot before I brought it up."

She went behind the barrier, and reappeared balancing a cup of tea with a slice of sultana cake edged on the saucer. And as she handed it to him-the sustenance of rehearsals-she gazed at him and he could almost hear her eyes saying: "You poor thing!"

There was nothing that he hated so much as to be pitied.

"You go home!" he commanded.

"Oh, but-"

"You go home! See?" He paused, threatening. "If you don't clear out on the tick, I'll chuck this cup and saucer down into the stalls."

Horrified, she vanished.

He sighed his relief.

After some time, the leader of the orchestra climbed into his chair, and the orchestra began to play, and the curtain went up again, on the second act of the masterpiece in hexameters. The new scenery, which Edward Henry had with extraordinary courage insisted on Saracen Givington substituting for the original incomprehensibilities displayed at the Azure Society's performance, rather pleased him. Its colouring was agreeable, and it did resemble something definite. You could, though perhaps not easily, tell what it was meant to represent. The play proceeded, and the general effect was surprisingly pleasant to Edward Henry. And then Rose Euclid as Haidee came on for the great scene of the act. From the distance of the gallery she looked quite passably youthful, and beyond question she had a dominating presence in her resplendent costume. She was incomparably and amazingly better than she had been at the few previous rehearsals which Edward Henry had been unfortunate enough to witness. She even reminded him of his earliest entrancing vision of her.

"Some people may like this!" he admitted, with a gleam of optimism. Hitherto, for weeks past, he had gone forward with his preparations in the most frigid and convinced pessimism. It seemed to him that he had become involved in a vast piece of machinery, and that nothing short of blowing the theatre up with dynamite would bring the cranks and pistons to a stop. And yet it seemed to him also that everything was unreal, that the contracts he signed were unreal, and the proofs he passed, and the posters he saw on the walls of London, and the advertisements in the newspapers. Only the checks he drew had the air of being real. And now, in a magic flash, after a few moments gazing at the stage, he saw all differently. He scented triumph from afar off, as one sniffs the tang of the sea. On the morrow he had to meet Nellie at Euston, and he had shrunk from meeting her, with her terrible remorseless, provincial, untheatrical common sense; but now, in another magic flash, he envisaged the meeting with a cock-a-doodle-doo of hope. Strange! He admitted it was strange.

And then he failed to hear several words spoken by Rose Euclid. And then a few more. As the emotion of the scene grew, the proportion of her words audible in the gallery diminished. Until she became, for him, totally inarticulate, raving away there and struggling in a cocoon of hexameters.

Despair seized him. His nervous system, every separate nerve of it, was on the rack once more.

He stood up in a sort of paroxysm and called loudly across the vast intervening space:

"Speak more distinctly, please."

A fearful silence fell upon the whole theatre. The rehearsal stopped. The building itself seemed to be staggered. Somebody had actually demanded that words should be uttered articulately!

Mr. Marrier turned toward the intruder, as one determined to put an end to such singularities.

"Who's up theyah?"

"I am," said Edward Henry. "And I want it to be clearly understood in my theatre that the first thing an actor has to do is to make himself heard. I daresay I'm devilish odd, but that's how I look at it."

"Whom do you mean, Mr. Machin?" asked Marrier in a different tone.

"I mean Miss Euclid of course. Here I've spent Heaven knows how much on the acoustics of this theatre, and I can't make out a word she says. I can hear all the others. And this is the dress-rehearsal!"

"You must remember you're in the gallery," said Mr. Marrier firmly.

"And what if I am! I'm not giving gallery seats away to-morrow night. It's true I'm giving half the stalls away, but the gallery will be paid for."

Another silence.

Said Rose Euclid sharply, and Edward Henry caught every word with the most perfect distinctness:

"I'm sick and tired of people saying they can't make out what I say! They actually write me letters about it! Why should people make out what I say?"

She quitted the stage.

Another silence…

"Ring down the curtain," said Mr. Marrier in a thrilled voice.

III

Shortly afterward Mr. Marrier came into the managerial office, lit up now, where Edward Henry was dictating to his typewriter and hospital nurse, who, having been caught in hat and jacket on the threshold, had been brought back and was tapping his words direct on to the machine. It was a remarkable fact that the sole proprietor of the Regent Theatre was now in high spirits and good-humour.

"Well, Marrier, my boy," he saluted the acting manager, "how are you getting on with that rehearsal?"

"Well, sir," said Mr. Marrier, "I'm not getting on with it. Miss Euclid refuses absolutely to proceed. She's in her dressing-room."

"But why?" enquired Edward Henry with bland surprise. "Doesn't she want to be heard by her gallery-boys?"

Mr. Marrier showed a feeble smile.

"She hasn't been spoken to like that for thirty years," said he.

"But don't you agree with me?" asked Edward Henry.

"Yes," said Marrier, "I agree with you-"

"And doesn't your friend Carlo want his precious hexameters to be heard?"

"We baoth agree with you," said Marrier. "The fact is, we've done all we could, but it's no use. She's splendid; only-" He paused.

"Only you can't make out ten per cent. of what she says," Edward Henry finished for him. "Well, I've got no use for that in my theatre." He found a singular pleasure in emphasising the phrase, "my theatre."

"That's all very well," said Marrier. "But what are you going to do about it? I've tried everything. You've come in and burst up the entire show, if you'll forgive my saying saoh!"

"Do?" exclaimed Edward Henry. "It's perfectly simple. All you have to do is to act. God bless my soul, aren't you getting fifteen pounds a week, and aren't you my acting manager? Act, then! You've done enough hinting. You've proved that hints are no good. You'd have known that from your birth up, Marrier, if you'd been born in the Five Towns. Act, my boy."

"But haow? If she won't go on, she won't."

"Is her understudy in the theatre?"

"Yes. It's Miss Cunningham, you knaow."

"What salary does she get?"

"Ten pounds a week."

"What for?"

"Well-partly to understudy, I suppose."

"Let her earn it, then. Go on with the rehearsal. And let her play the part to-morrow night. She'll be delighted, you bet."

"But-"

"Miss Lindop," Edward Henry interrupted, "will you please read to Mr. Marrier what I've dictated?" He turned to Marrier. "It's an interview with myself for one of to-morrow's papers."

Miss Lindop, with tears in her voice if not in her eyes, obeyed the order and, drawing the paper from the machine, read its contents aloud.

Mr. Marrier started back-not in the figurative but in the literal sense-as he listened.

"But you'll never send that out!" he exclaimed.

"Why not?"

"No paper will print it!"

"My dear Marrier," said Edward Henry. "Don't be a simpleton. You know as well as I do that half-a-dozen papers will be delighted to print it. And all the rest will copy the one that does print it. It'll be the talk of London to-morrow, and Isabel Joy will be absolutely snuffed out."

"Well," said Mr. Marrier. "I never heard of such a thing!"

"Pity you didn't, then!"

Mr. Marrier moved away.

"I say," he murmured at the door. "Don't you think you ought to read that to Rose first?"

"I'll read it to Rose like a bird," said Edward Henry.

Within two minutes-it was impossible to get from his room to the dressing-rooms in less-he was knocking at Rose Euclid's door. "Who's there?" said a voice. He entered and then replied, "I am."

Rose Euclid was smoking a cigarette and scratching the arm of an easy-chair behind her. Her maid stood near by with a whisky-and-soda.

"Sorry you can't go on with the rehearsal, Miss Euclid," said Edward Henry very quickly. "However, we must do the best we can. But Mr. Marrier thought you'd like to hear this. It's part of an interview with me that's going to appear to-morrow in the press."

Without pausing, he went on to read: "'I found Mr. Alderman Machin, the hero of the Five Towns and the proprietor and initiator of London's newest and most up-to-date and most intellectual theatre, surrounded by a complicated apparatus of telephones and typewriters in his managerial room at the Regent. He received me very courteously. "Yes," he said in response to my question, "The rumour is quite true. The principal part in 'The Orient Pearl' will be played on the first night by Miss Euclid's understudy, Miss Olga Cunningham, a young woman of very remarkable talent. No; Miss Euclid is not ill or even indisposed. But she and I have had a grave difference of opinion. The point between us was whether Miss Euclid's speeches ought to be clearly audible in the auditorium. I considered they ought. I may be wrong. I may be provincial. But that was and is my view. At the dress-rehearsal, seated in the gallery, I could not hear her lines. I objected. She refused to consider the subject or to proceed with the rehearsal. Hinc illæ lachrymæ!" … "Not at all," said Mr. Machin in reply to a question, "I have the highest admiration for Miss Euclid's genius. I should not presume to dictate to her as to her art. She has had a very long experience of the stage, very long, and doubtless knows better than I do. Only, the Regent happens to be my theatre, and I'm responsible for it. Every member of the audience will have a complete uninterrupted view of the stage, and I intend that every member of the audience shall hear every word that is uttered on the stage. I'm odd, I know. But then I've a reputation for oddness to keep up. And by the way I'm sure that Miss Cunningham will make a great reputation for herself."'"

"Not while I'm here, she won't!" exclaimed Rose Euclid standing up, and enunciating her words with marvellous clearness.

Edward Henry glanced at her, and then continued to read: "Suggestions for headlines. 'Piquant quarrel between manager and star actress.' 'Unparalleled situation.' 'Trouble at the Regent Theatre.'"

"Mr. Machin," said Rose Euclid, "you are not a gentleman."

"You'd hardly think so, would you?" mused Edward Henry, as if mildly interested in this new discovery of Miss Euclid's.

"Maria," said the star to her maid, "go and tell Mr. Marrier I'm coming."

"And I'll go back to the gallery," said Edward Henry. "It's the place for people like me, isn't it? I daresay I'll tear up this paper later, Miss Euclid-we'll see."

IV

On the next night a male figure in evening dress and a pale overcoat might have been seen standing at the corner of Piccadilly Circus and Lower Regent Street, staring at an electric sign in the shape of a shield which said in its glittering, throbbing speech of incandescence:

THE REGENTROSE EUCLIDINTHE ORIENT PEARL

The figure crossed the Circus, and stared at the sign from a new point of view. Then it passed along Coventry Street, and stared at the sign from yet another point of view. Then it reached Shaftesbury Avenue, and stared again. Then it returned to its original station. It was the figure of Edward Henry Machin, savouring the glorious electric sign of which he had dreamed. He lit a cigarette, and thought of Seven Sachs gazing at the name of Seven Sachs in fire on the façade of a Broadway theatre in New York. Was not this London phenomenon at least as fine? He considered it was. The Regent Theatre existed-there it stood! (What a name for a theatre!) Its windows were all illuminated. Its entrance-lamps bathed the pavement in light, and in this radiance stood the commissionaires in their military pride and their new uniforms. A line of waiting automobiles began a couple of yards to the north of the main doors and continued round all sorts of dark corners and up all manner of back streets toward Golden Square itself. Marrier had had the automobiles counted and had told him the number-, but such was Edward Henry's condition that he had forgotten. A row of boards reared on the pavement against the walls of the façade said: "Stalls Full," "Private Boxes Full," "Dress Circle Full," "Upper Circle Full," "Pit Full," "Gallery Full." And attached to the ironwork of the glazed entrance canopy was a long board which gave the same information in terser form: "House Full." The Regent had indeed been obliged to refuse quite a lot of money on its opening night.

After all, the inauguration of a new theatre was something, even in London! Important personages had actually begged the privilege of buying seats at normal prices, and had been refused. Unimportant personages, such as those who boast in the universe that they had never missed a first night in the West End for twenty, thirty, or even fifty years, had tried to buy seats at abnormal prices, and had failed; which was in itself a tragedy. Edward Henry at the final moment had yielded his wife's stall to the instances of a Minister of the Crown, and at Lady Woldo's urgent request had put her into Lady Woldo's private landowner's box, where also was Miss Elsie April who "had already had the pleasure of meeting Mrs. Machin." Edward Henry's first night was an event of magnitude. And he alone was responsible for it. His volition alone had brought into being that grand edifice whose light yellow walls now gleamed in nocturnal mystery under the shimmer of countless electric bulbs.

"There goes pretty nigh forty thousand pounds of my money!" he reflected, excitedly.

And he reflected:

"After all, I'm somebody."

Then he glanced down Lower Regent Street and saw Sir John Pilgrim's much larger theatre, now sublet to a tenant who also was lavish with displays of radiance. And he reflected that on first nights Sir John Pilgrim, in addition to doing all that he himself had done, would hold the great rôle on the stage throughout the evening. And he admired the astounding, dazzling energy of such a being, and admitted ungrudgingly:

"He's somebody too! I wonder what part of the world he's illuminating just now!"

Edward Henry did not deny to his soul that he was extremely nervous. He would not and could not face even the bare possibility that the first play presented at the new theatre might be a failure. He had meant to witness the production incognito among the crowd in the pit or in the gallery. But, after visiting the pit a few moments before the curtain went up, he had been appalled by the hard-hearted levity of the pit's remarks on things in general. The pit did not seem to be in any way chastened or softened by the fact that a fortune, that reputations, that careers were at stake. He had fled from the packed pit. (As for the gallery, he decided that he had already had enough of the gallery.)

He had wandered about corridors and to and fro in his own room and in the wings, and even in the basement, as nervous as a lost cat or an author, and as self-conscious as a criminal who knows himself to be on the edge of discovery. It was a fact that he could not look people in the eyes. The reception of the first act had been fairly amiable, and he had suffered horribly as he listened for the applause. Catching sight of Carlo Trent in the distance of a passage, he had positively run away from Carlo Trent. The first entr'acte had seemed to last for about three months. Its nightmarish length had driven him almost to lunacy. The "feel" of the second act, so far as it mystically communicated itself to him in his place of concealment, had been better. At the end of the second fall of the curtain the applause had been enthusiastic. Yes, enthusiastic!

Curiously, it was the revulsion caused by this new birth of hope that, while the third act was being played, had driven him out of the theatre. His wild hope needed ozone. His breast had to expand in the boundless prairie of Piccadilly Circus. His legs had to walk. His arms had to swing.

Now he crossed the Circus again to his own pavement and gazed like a stranger at his own posters. On several of them, encircled in a scarlet ring, was the sole name of Rose Euclid-impressive! (And smaller, but above it, the legend "E. H. Machin. Sole proprietor.") He asked himself impartially, as his eyes uneasily left the poster and slipped round the Circus, deserted save by a few sinister and idle figures at that hour, "Should I have sent that interview to the papers, or shouldn't I? … I wonder. I expect some folks would say on the whole I've been rather hard on Rose since I first met her! … Anyhow, she's speaking up all right to-night!" He laughed shortly.

A newsboy floated up from the Circus bearing a poster with the name of Isabel Joy on it in large letters.

He thought:

"Be blowed to Isabel Joy!"

He did not care a fig for Isabel Joy's competition now.

And then a small door opened in the wall close by, and an elegant, cloaked woman came out on to the pavement. The door was the private door leading to the private box of Lord Woldo, owner of the ground upon which the Regent Theatre was built. The woman he recognised with confusion as Elsie April, whom he had not seen alone since the Azure Society's night.

"What are you doing out here, Mr. Machin?" she greeted him with pleasant composure.

"I'm thinking," said he.

"It's going splendidly," she remarked. "Really! I'm just running round to the stage door to meet dear Rose as she comes off. What a delightful woman your wife is! So pretty, and so sensible!"

She disappeared round the corner before he could compose a suitable husband's reply to this laudation of a wife.

Then the commissionaires at the entrance seemed to start into life. And then suddenly several preoccupied men strode rapidly out of the theatre, buttoning their coats, and vanished, phantom-like. Critics, on their way to destruction!

The performance must be finishing. Hastily he followed in the direction taken by Elsie April.

He was in the wings, on the prompt side. Close by stood the prompter, an untidy youth with imperfections of teeth, clutching hard at the red-scored manuscript of "The Orient Pearl." Sundry players, of varying stellar degrees, were posed around in the opulent costumes designed by Saracen Givington, A.R.A. Miss Lindop was in the background, ecstatically happy, her cheeks a race-course of tears. Afar off, in the centre of the stage, alone, stood Rose Euclid, gorgeous in green and silver, bowing and bowing and bowing-bowing before the storm of approval and acclamation that swept from the auditorium across the footlights.

With a sound like that of tearing silk, or of a gigantic contralto mosquito, the curtain swished down, and swished up, and swished down again. Bouquets flew on to the stage from the auditorium (a custom newly imported from the United States by Miss Euclid, and encouraged by her, though contrary to the lofty canons of London taste). The actress already held one huge trophy, shaped as a crown, to her breast. She hesitated, and then ran to the wings, and caught Edward Henry by the wrist impulsively, madly. They shook hands in an ecstasy. It was as though they recognised in one another a fundamental and glorious worth; it was as though no words could ever express the depth of appreciation, affection and admiration which each intensely felt for the other; it was as though this moment were the final consecration of twin lives whose long, loyal comradeship had never been clouded by the faintest breath of mutual suspicion. Rose Euclid was still the unparalleled star, the image of grace and beauty and dominance upon the stage. And yet quite clearly Edward Henry saw close to his the wrinkled, damaged, daubed face and thin neck of an old woman; and it made no difference.

"Rose!" cried a strained voice, and Rose Euclid wrenched herself from him and tumbled with half a sob into the clasping arms of Elsie April.

"You've saved the intellectual theatah for London, my boy! That's what you've done!" Marrier was now gripping his hand. And Edward Henry was convinced that he had.

The strident vigour of the applause showed no diminution. And through the thick heavy rain of it could be heard the monotonous insistent detonations of one syllable:

"'Thor! 'Thor! 'Thor! Thor! Thor!"

And then another syllable was added:

"Speech! Speech! Speech! Speech!"