CHAPTER XIV.

IN THE GREEN-ROOM.

IT happened that the day on which Mr. Desmond paid his visit to Paul’s Terrace, Islington, was a day unmarked by any particular engagement. There had been a time when he was only too glad to snatch such a day for a quiet afternoon at the Hampton villa; but he no longer felt the same alacrity when the occasion offered itself. He was still fully alive to the fact that Mrs. Jerningham was one of the handsomest and most elegant women he had ever seen, and that to be preferred by her was an honour; but to be submitted to the slow torture of the domestic inquisition is none the less painful because the inquisitor-in-chief is a beautiful woman, from whose fair lips the victim had hoped to hear sweet words instead of captious questionings and ungenerous reproaches.

Thus did it come to pass that Mr. Desmond, having no imperative claim on his leisure, found himself at the doors of the Oxford Road Theatre, within two or three hours of his visit to Mr. Alford’s lodging. He had eaten a hurried dinner at his club, and had driven thence to the Oxford, which house of entertainment was to be found amidst a labyrinth of streets northward of Cumberland Gate.

It is not a fashionable theatre, but amongst the inhabitants of the immediate district it is at times a very popular resort; while there are other times in which this temple of the drama fades and languishes for lack of public patronage, in common with more brilliant temples of the same order. It is a theatre whose normal splendour is ever and anon brightened by the extra brilliancy of some wandering star, whose name, all renowned though it may be in the district, is comparatively unknown to the ears of fashionable playgoers, or known only as a bye-word and a reproach.

The great T. N. Buffboote, better known to his admirers as Brayvo Buffboote, is a favourite at the Oxford. Miss Marian Fitz-Kemble, the celebrated lady Lear, here performs her round of tragedy, from Macbeth to Julius Cæsar, with much satisfaction to herself and her friends. Here has the famous Transatlantic equestrian, best known to fame as the divine Miss Godiva Jones, pranced and galloped in her celebrated performances of Dick Turpin and Timour the Tartar. Here in the summer months, when the closing of West-end theatres affords a brief respite to manager and company, there come occasionally actors and actresses of higher repute, eager to gather new laurels in these untrodden regions, and not ill pleased to find themselves received with noisy rapture and outspoken admiration by the ruder gods and homelier goddesses of a threepenny gallery.

But while stars may come and stars may go at the Oxford Road Theatre, there is a regular company which goes on for ever, glad to be tragical with Miss Fitz-Kemble, melodramatic with the great Buffboote, or equestrian with the divine Godiva, as the case may be--a company which takes life as it comes, and asks no more from existence than that its swift-recurring Saturday shall witness the payment of every man’s salary.

Urged by the promptings of a fiery and ambitious soul, Mr. de Mortemar had been induced to take the Oxford Road Theatre at the very deadest and dullest time of the year--that dreary pause in the theatrical season which precedes the glory of Boxing-day--that fag-end of the year, during which the combined forces of a Macready and a Charles Mathews would scarcely suffice to illumine the profound darkness that foreshadows the rising of that brilliant luminary, the genuine face-distorting, policeman-overturning, baby-squashing, redhot-poker-brandishing, parcel-snatching, crinoline-flourishing Christmas clown--that wonder of wit and humour, who convulses his audience by asking them what they had for dinner the day after to-morrow, or by some sarcastic inquiry about a missing fourpenny-piece.

Mr. de Mortemar had a soul above such small considerations as good or bad seasons. He had that within him which whispered that wherever the English language was spoken there must be an audience able to comprehend and admire his rendering of Hamlet and Romeo, Master Walter and Claude Melnotte, Alfred Evelyn, Charles Surface, John Mildmay, Citizen Sangfroid, Miles na Coppaleen, Sir Charles Coldstream, and Paul Pry.

In _these_ few characters Mr. de Mortemar (_né_ Morris) felt himself unapproachable. Other provincial stars might pretend to a wider range of character; the modest De Mortemar only sought to surpass a Kean in Hamlet, a Gustavus Brooke in Master Walter, a Macready in Lear, a Charles Mathews in Coldstream, a Wigan in John Mildmay, a Boucicault in the faithful Miles, and a Wright in the inquisitive Paul. This much he felt that he could do, and he had no greedy desire to outstep the limit which liberal Nature had set upon his genius.

“I played a burlesque character of Robson’s for my benefit at Market Deeping last year,” Mr. de Mortemar remarked to a friend at the little tavern next door to the Oxford Road Theatre; “and the _Deeping Examiner_ said that if it were possible I could excel in anything where all was excellence, I did excel in burlesque. But I don’t care to make my mark in London as a burlesque actor. A man can’t help it if Nature made him versatile, you see, Tommy; but there’s some kind of principle in these things, and what Edmund Kean wouldn’t have done, I won’t do. That’s my principle, and I mean to stick to it.”

“And so I would, Morty, if I was you. Whatever Teddy Kean could do, you can do,” replied the humble Pylades. “And I’ll take another glass of bitter, if you’ll stand Sam.”

“I _have_ played clown for my ben,” murmured the great De Mortemar; “but, though I drew an enormous house, I felt the injury to my self-respect was poorly paid for by a clear half.”

“There ain’t nothing you can’t do, Morty, from Shylock to a flipflap. That ale’s uncommon hard; I think a six of brandy-and-water warm would do you more good, and wouldn’t hurt _me_.”

And thus the simple De Mortemar discoursed of the greatness that was in him, while the scantily furnished benches of pit and gallery attested the badness of the season.

“They haven’t heard of me yet,” said the star, serene even in the hour of disappointment. “London is a large place, and a man can’t get a reputation in a week. The metropolitan papers are slow, sir--very slow--to a man who has been accustomed to see a column and a half of criticism written upon every new character performed by him; but they can’t afford to leave me unnoticed much longer; and when they do speak, they’ll speak out, depend upon it. I look upon the Oxford Road Theatre as a stepping-stone to Drury Lane, and it was with that view I took it.”

Mr. de Mortemar had engaged Miss St. Albans for the heroines of those dramas and comedies in which he intended to shine, not because he believed in her talent--for in plain truth this great man believed in the existence of no talent except his own--but because she was very young and inexperienced, and he could do as he liked with her; which means, in a dramatic sense, that he could keep her with her back to the audience, in an ignominious corner of the stage, through the greater part of a scene, while he shouted and ranted at her from the centre of the boards; and that he could take her up so sharply at the end of her most telling speeches as to deprive her of that just meed of applause an approving audience might naturally have bestowed upon her, and in bestowing which they would have divided that coronal of glory Mr. de Mortemar desired to obtain for himself alone.

Mr. Desmond found that portion of the boxes playfully entitled the dress-circle in occupation of two young women in scarlet Garibaldi jackets and black velvet head-dresses; one fat elderly lady, in a cap which offered to the eye of the observer a small museum of natural and artistic curiosities in the way of shells, feathers, beads, butterflies, and berries; three warm-looking young men, sprawling and lounging and giggling and whispering amongst themselves in a corner box; and a scanty sprinkling of that class of spectators who come with free admissions, and rarely come prepared for the removal of their bonnets, which removal being rigorously exacted, leaves them wild and haggard of aspect and soured in temper.

Amongst this audience the editor of the _Areopagus_ meekly took his place, and prepared to await the rising of the curtain, while a subdued crunching of apples and sucking of oranges, mingled with a chorus of sibilant whisperings, went on round and about him.

Why, in a poorly-filled house, there should always be dispiriting and aggravating delays between the falling and the rising of the act-drop, unknown to a well-attended theatre, is one of the enigmas of theatrical existence only to be solved by the masters of the craft; but it is indisputable that a scanty audience, naturally disposed to be captious and low-spirited, is always rendered more dismal and more captious by heart-sickening intervals of waiting, that would spoil the pleasure of an evening with Edmund Kean, or Charles Mathews, but which, when endured for the sake of a De Mortemar, are exasperating in the highest degree.

During such an interval, Laurence Desmond waited with tolerable patience, entertained by the most hackneyed of waltzes and polkas, performed by a feeble orchestra, before the curtain rose for the third act of the _Lady of Lyons_. The flabby act-drop, with its faded picture, did at last ascend, and, after a little preliminary skirmishing, Miss St. Albans appeared, conducted by the great De Mortemar, who wore a long black cloak, and looked unutterable things at the gallery with his solemn eyes, the darkness whereof was intensified by very palpable half-circles of Indian ink. Miss St. Albans had very little to do in this scene. She had only to appear bewildered, and a little alarmed by the grinning landlord and servants, and very much in love with her prince. If she had any difficulty in giving expression to such simple sentiments, Mr. De Mortemar saved her from the exhibition of her incompetency, for he contrived to keep her back to the audience throughout the scene, and so stifled and smothered her against his manly breast, that all Mr. Desmond could see of his tutor’s daughter was a slender girlish figure robed in white, and a fair head half concealed by the stiff curve of Mr. de Mortemar’s encircling arm.

The first scene was short and unimportant; and after it came the cottage-scene--the great scene for Pauline--in which the merchant’s haughty daughter finds that her Italian prince is only a self-educated gardener’s son, with a mother in a white apron.

Mr. Desmond set himself to watch this scene with a critical eye, for he wished to discover what hope of dramatic success there might be for his old friend’s daughter. Well, she was a very pretty, winning girl, and she spoke her lines in a low soft voice, and with a gentle accent which stamped her as of different breeding from the people who acted with her, but--but she was not a genius; or if in her soul there was by chance some spark of the divine fire, it was choked and obscured by the smoke of her surroundings, and had yet to kindle into flame. She spoke her pretty poetical speeches, and wept, and trembled, and covered her face at the right moment; but she was only a timid young actress trying to act. She was not the Demoiselle Deschapelles--proud, loving, passionate, and maddened by the cheat that had been put upon her. The supreme exaltation of mind, the positive intoxication of the intellect, which constitutes great acting, had not yet come to her. She was timid, self-conscious, nervously anxious to please her audience, and secure the reward of a little hand-clapping and feet-stamping from pit and gallery, when she should have been stung almost to madness by the sense of outraged faith and love abused, as unconscious of spectators as Ariadne at Naxos, or Dido on her funeral pyre.

But if Miss St. Albans was not yet an actress, it is to be remembered that she was only nineteen years of age, and had had little more than a twelvemonth’s experience or practice of an art which is perhaps amongst the most difficult and exacting of all arts, and which has no formulæ whereby the student may arrive at some comprehension of its mysteries. It is an art that is rarely taught well, and very often taught badly; an art which demands from its professors a moral courage, and an expenditure of physical energy, intellectual power, and emotional feeling demanded by no other art; and when a man happens to be endowed with those many gifts necessary to perfection in this art, he is spoken of in a patronizing tone as “only an actor;” and it is somewhat a matter of wonder that he should be “received in society.”

“She is very young,” thought Mr. Desmond, when the act-drop had fallen on Pauline’s passion and Claude’s remorse, and when the star had been recalled by three particular friends in the pit, and one shrill boy in the gallery. “She is very young, and she is pretty and interesting, and might learn to be a good actress, if there were any school in which she could be taught. But to act with such a conventional ranter and tearer as this De Mortemar, would be destruction to an embryo Siddons. This girl seems eminently sympathetic, and is of the stuff that makes our Faucits and Herberts; but where is she to get the right training?--that is the question.”

Mr. Desmond kept his place patiently throughout the third and fourth acts of the drama, though the dreary blank between the two acts was a sharp test of man’s capacity for suffering. He saw Pauline come downstairs to breakfast, in her smart bridal-dress of lace and satin, to go through all those phases of pride and anger, tenderness and yielding love, which form the crucial test of the young tragédienne’s power and genius; and after the curtain had fallen upon Pauline, the subjugated and devoted, Laurence Desmond left the apple-munchers, and whisperers, and gigglers of the dress-boxes to their own devices, and departed, with the intention of penetrating to those mysterious regions which lie behind the boundary-line of the footlights.

To an ordinary individual the stage-door of the Oxford Road Theatre might have been an impassable barrier; but the name of the _Areopagus_ was an “open sesame,” against which no stage-door keeper could afford to shut his eyes. The stage-door keeper was not a reader of the popular literary journal, but he had a vague notion that the _Areopagus_ was a paper affected by swells, and that it sometimes came down heavily upon the great ones of the dramatic world, whose genius no meaner organ dared gainsay. To the editor of such a periodical, Mr. de Mortemar would, of course, desire to be civil; and the door-keeper admitted Mr. Desmond, after having submitted him to a sharp scrutiny, or, in his own phraseology, “taken stock of him, to make sure as he was none of them milingtary coves a-tryin’ it on to git behind, and hang about the place a-talking to Mamsell Pasdebasque, which she ought to know better.”

Mr. Desmond had never before been behind the scenes of the Oxford Road Theatre, but he had run the gauntlet of the West-end houses; and except that the passages and stairs in the Oxford Road Theatre were a shade or so darker, and dingier, and dirtier, and a little more eminently adapted for the spraining of ankles and the breaking of necks, the Oxford Road was as other theatres.

After some groping and stumbling in the wrong passages and on the wrong stairs, the Editor made his way to the green-room. He could scarcely have told himself why he took this trouble in order to say a few kind words to his old tutor’s daughter, or whether the saying of kind words was at all required from him. It may be that, having given up his evening to this visit to the Oxford Road Theatre, he came behind the scenes merely because he could no longer endure the dreary misery of the boxes; or it may be that he wanted to observe the manners and customs of actors of a different class from those he had been accustomed to meet. Mr. Desmond, however, did not trouble himself with any consideration of his motive. He came to the green-room to see Miss Alford, or Miss St. Albans, because it was the humour of the moment to come. He had given himself an evening’s holiday from the ever-alternating labours of literary and social life, and he was not sorry to lose the sense of his own cares and perplexities amongst strange surroundings.

The green-room was a long narrow slip of a room underground, furnished with a few shabby chairs and benches, some flaring gas-lamps, and a cheval-glass, before which the actors and actresses contemplated themselves afresh after every change of costume, more or less pleased with the result of their scrutiny.

Mr. Desmond found his friend’s daughter standing before this glass, arranging the scanty festoons of a black tulle ball-dress, dotted about with little bunches of violets--a dress that Mademoiselle Deschapelles could by no possibility have worn at any period of her existence, but which poor Lucy Alford fondly believed was the exact thing for the last act.

“How do you do, once more, Miss--St. Albans?” said the editor, going up to the glass.

“How do you do, Mr. Desmond?” the girl said, startled, and blushing brightly beneath the artificial pallor which marked the mental agonies of Pauline. “I--I didn’t think you’d come behind; it’s not generally allowed, you know; but of course with you it’s different. I saw you in the dress-circle. How kind of you to come! But it made me so nervous.”

“Yes, I could see that you were nervous.”

“You could see it! I am sorry for that!” said Lucy, just a little mortified.

“My dear young lady, if you were not nervous, you would not be of the sensitive stuff that makes an artist.

“You--you were not displeased with me?”

What could he say when she asked this question?--in faltering, pleading tones, that seemed to say, “Oh! for pity’s sake, give me a word of praise, or I shall die at your feet.” What could he say, when the soft blue eyes looked up to him with such a beseeching expression? Could he be candid, and reply, “You are at present the kind of actress whom the coarse-minded critic calls ‘a stick;’ your idea of Pauline Deschapelles is a schoolgirl’s notion, without force, or depth, or passion; but when you are ten years older, and have thought, and suffered, and studied, and have lost all the youthful beauty which now enables you to look the part, you may possibly be able to act it?”

Instead of this, Mr. Desmond fenced the question with diplomatic art.

“It gave me great pleasure to see you act,” he said; “and you looked charming. I think fortune is a great deal too kind to Claude in giving him such a lovely and devoted wife after his shabby conduct.”

“Do you like Mr. de Mortemar?” asked Lucy, delighted by the small meed of praise conveyed in this artful speech.

“Well, not very much,” replied Laurence, smiling; “he is not exactly my style.”

“And yet he was such an enormous favourite at Market Deeping,” said Lucy, opening her eyes to their widest extent. “But, to tell you the real truth, I do not very much admire him myself; only I wouldn’t say so to any one except you for the world, as it was so very good of him to give me a London engagement.”

“It is not very good of him to keep you in a corner of the stage all through your best scenes.”

“Yes, that is a disagreeable way he has; but I don’t think he knows when he does it.”

“Oh yes, my dear Miss St. Albans, depend upon it he knows very well. Ah, here he is.”

Mr. de Mortemar entered the green-room with his grandest tragedy stalk. He had been informed of Mr. Desmond’s visit.

“They have heard of me already,” he said to himself. “Perhaps the _Areopagus_ will be the first to speak out. I knew they couldn’t afford to continue their vile attempt to crush me by silence. They have been paid--bribed by some London actors whose names I could mention--to keep my fame from the public. But there must come a time when they will find it dangerous for their own reputation to play that game any longer. They attempted to crush Kean, and they are attempting to crush me. But they will find it even harder work to destroy me than they found it to destroy poor little Ted.”

This is what Mr. De Mortemar told his friends, whom he rarely entertained with any other topic than his own triumphs, past, present, and future; and this is what he told himself. Impressed with this conviction, he approached Mr. Desmond, and introduced himself to that gentleman with the air of a man who confers a favour, and who is fully aware of the fact.

“I saw you in the boxes during the third and fourth acts,” he said, in his grand, high-tragedy manner. “You could scarcely have chosen your time better for forming a fair judgment of my Claude. I do not consider it one of my _great_ parts, though my friends are pleased to tell me that I have left William Charles Macready some distance behind in my rendering of that character. You were, no doubt, struck by some points which are not only new to the stage, but which go a step or two beyond the original meaning of the author. As, for instance, at the close of the third act, where, instead of the ordinary, ‘Ho, my mother!’--a mere commonplace summons to a parent who is desired to come downstairs--I have adopted the heavy sigh of despair: ‘Oh, my mother!’--expressive of Claude’s remorseful consciousness that he has disregarded the widow’s very sensible advice in the first act. This reading opens up--if I may be permitted to say so--long vistas of thought, and also gives an importance and an elevation to the character of the Widow Melnotte, for which the lady performing that part can scarcely be sufficiently grateful. ‘Oh, my mother! Oh, my second self, my guide, my counsellor, by whose sustaining wisdom I might have escaped my present degradation and despair!’ All that, I flatter myself, is implied in the sigh and the gesture which I introduce at this point. Subtle, is it not?”

“Extremely subtle,” said Laurence; “you must have studied the German critics, Mr. de Mortemar? There is a profundity in your ideas that reminds me of Schlegel.”

“No, sir; I have studied _this_,” replied the tragedian, thumping the breast of his green-cloth coat, whereon glittered the tin-foil crosses and spangled stars which the soldier of the Republic was supposed to have won for himself in Italy. “I have drawn my inspiration from my own heart, sir; and I am the less surprised when I find that the fire that burns _here_ is quick to kindle an electric spark in the breasts of other men. The people of Market Deeping will tell you who and what I am, sir, if you can take the trouble to interrogate them. There are some there, sir, who know what good acting is, and who know how to appreciate a great actor. In London, you seem not to want great actors. The age of your Garricks and your Kembles is past; and when new Garricks and Kembles arise, you shut the doors of your principal theatres in their faces, and do your best to ignore them, or to write them down in your newspapers. But this kind of thing cannot last for ever, sir. The voice of the mighty British public is clamorous for a great actor; and you, sir, garble and misrepresent the truth as you may, cannot long interpose yourself between that mighty public and that great actor. I am, of course, understood to speak in a broad and general sense, sir, and to mean no offence to you in person.”

“Of course not. I shall accept all you say in a strictly parliamentary sense, as the Pickwickians did upon a memorable occasion. And believe me, Mr. de Mortemar, when Garrick _redivivus_ appears, mine shall not be the pen to dispute his genius. In the meantime the public must be content with--ah, you are called, I see, Mr. de Mortemar.”

A grimy-faced boy summoned the hero of the night, and the great De Mortemar was compelled to depart before he had extorted from the editor of the _Areopagus_ the smallest modicum of that praise for which his soul hungered.

Mr. Desmond did not find himself alone with Miss St. Albans on the departure of Mr. De Mortemar. An elderly and bloated individual, in a very shabby gray suit of the Georgian era, hovered near, and surveyed the stranger ever and anon with an observant eye--an eye in which there was that watery lustre, by some physiologists supposed to betoken a partiality for strong drinks. Mr. Desmond remembered this gentleman as the parent of Pauline, and perceived in his shabby and faded appearance the decadence of the wealthy merchant of Lyons.

“That’s rather a strong case of coals, a’nt it?” inquired this individual, indicating by a turn of his head that the departing De Mortemar was the subject of his discourse.

“A case of coals?” repeated Laurence, doubtfully.

“Yes, coals--nuts--barcelonas. The gorger’s awful coally on his own slumming, eh?”

“I really am at a loss--” faltered the bewildered Laurence.

“Don’t understand our patter, I suppose,” said M. Deschapelles, with an affable smile. “I mean to say that our friend the manager is rather sweet upon his own acting.”

“Well, yes; Mr. De Mortemar appears to have considerable confidence in his own powers.”

“Rather! Bless your heart, they’re always coming up to London like that, thinking they’re going to set the town in a blaze. There was William Harford--Howling Billy, they used to call him on the Northern Circuit--he came to London thinking he was going to put Macready’s nose out of joint--and didn’t. He was a wicked actor, he was. Satan will have him some day. A man can’t go on murdering Shakespeare as Howling Billy did without coming to Satan at last.

“P’line! Deechappells!--Miss St. Albans! Mr. Jackson!--last scene!” roared the grimy-faced boy at this juncture, and Mr. Desmond was fain to bid his tutor’s daughter a brief good-night.

He did not return to the front of the house. He had seen enough of Miss Alford’s acting to enable him to judge very fairly what she could do in the present, and what she might achieve in the future.

“I will try my best to get her out of this wretched school,” he said to himself. “I will try to get her away from Mr. de Mortemar and that curious, good-tempered-looking old man, who talked about Satan and Howling Billy. I dare say I can get Hartstone to engage her for the Pall Mall. He wants pretty, lady-like girls for his farces, and gives very liberal salaries; and though she won’t get the experience that makes a Helen Faucit, she will at any rate get away from the De Mortemar school. I should like to put her in the right path, for poor old Alford’s sake.”

END OF VOL. I.

J. Ogden and Co., Printers, 172, St. John Street, E.C.

=TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES=

Simple typographical errors have been silently corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.