by David Lodge
‘What’s he going to do with himself?’
‘He said he’s going to see An Ideal Husband.’
‘Is he?’ Alexander was intrigued, for he had hopes of persuading Oscar Wilde to write another play for the St James’s, to follow up the success of Lady Windermere. He added: ‘I wish I could join him,’ and the two men laughed together, perhaps more heartily than the quip merited, to relieve their tension. Alexander had no such wish, of course. He looked forward to commanding the stage as Guy Domville. It was a meaty role, and required three changes of costume, all becoming, with a particularly fine pair of riding boots in the third act.]
At six thirty, in full evening dress, he sat down in the dining room to eat Mrs Smith’s Welsh rarebit and rasher, tucking a large napkin into the neck of his shirt to protect its starched front. The phrase, ‘the prisoner ate his last meal . . .’ crossed his mind. He asked Smith to pour him a glass of dry sherry to accompany the collation, which the man did with a flourish, sweeping the decanter round in a great arc before arresting it over the glass and taking out the stopper. Smith’s gestures tended to become more and more baroque as the day proceeded, no doubt in proportion to the amount of liquid refreshment he had imbibed himself. He caught a whiff of drink on the man’s breath and resolved, not for the first time, to speak to him about it – but not tonight, not tonight.
He glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece, calculating his immediate timetable. He would take a hansom to the Haymarket – he had walked enough that day, and an omnibus would not match the importance of the occasion. So if he left at 7.15, or just before, that should allow ample time to get to the Haymarket for eight. There was no curtain-raiser to An Ideal Husband, because it was a four-acter. Fortunate Wilde! He was not in favour of curtain-raisers – if they were very good they could make the main play seem disappointing, and if they were very bad they could put the audience into a disgruntled mood. Which category Field’s farce might fall into he couldn’t say, not having seen any rehearsals, but in any case its principal function was to give the quality customers their customary three entr’actes, during which to mill about and gossip and display their finery. In consequence his own play, the action of which divided naturally into three acts, had had to be cut to the bone to avoid an over-long evening. It was the intrusion of such purely institutional considerations that made the theatre such an infuriating medium for an artist to work in.
[In King Street the people waiting outside the theatre in two long lines for the cheap unreserved seats in the gallery and the pit were getting restless. Those at the front had been there for several hours, and all were feeling the cold. They stamped their feet and blew on their hands, and banged on the doors for admission, though they were well aware that these would not be opened until half an hour before the first curtain-up. Many of them knew each other by sight if not by name – they were regular attenders at first nights at the St James’s, dedicated admirers of George Alexander, who had first attracted their allegiance when he was a young leading actor in Irving’s company. They sometimes referred to themselves jocularly as ‘Alick’s Army’. There was much chaff and chat between them, and much speculation about the author of the night’s main entertainment. ‘’Enery Jimes – oo’s ’e, then?’ ‘Dunno, we never ’eard of ’im before.’ ‘Oo’s Guy Domville?’ ’E must be the ’ero, coz Alick’s playin’ ’im – it sez so on the poster.’ ‘Good old Alick!’
Two buskers in ragged overcoats, one playing a battered fiddle, the other singing and holding out his cap for coins, passed along the lines. The man with the cap sang in a loud hoarse voice a popular music hall song:
‘Where did you get that hat?
Where did you get that tile?
Oh, isn’t it a pretty one,
And just the proper style!’
A cheer went up as the doors to the gallery were opened and the crowd surged forward. Just inside the gallery entrance a young man sitting on a high stool behind a cramped counter took their shillings. Grumbling, joking, jostling, they climbed the four flights of uncarpeted stairs to the ‘gods’, hurrying to claim the best seats.]
He inspected himself in the glass on the wall of the hallway, tweaked his bow tie and smoothed his beard. The evening suit, freshly pressed, looked well. Smith held out his black overcoat. He plunged his arms into the sleeves and pulled in his stomach as he buttoned it up. It was getting to be a dangerously tight fit, and there was no way of ‘letting out’ an overcoat. He smoothed the black kid gloves over his fingers, and put on the silk top hat which Smith handed him, checking its angle in the mirror.
‘No need to wait up for me, Smith,’ he said. ‘I shall be very late.’
‘Very well, sir.’
‘Good evening, then.’
‘Good evening, sir,’ said the man, holding open the front door of the apartment. ‘I trust it will be a very enjoyable one.’
[All the seats in the gallery and pit at the St James’s were occupied by now, and the stalls were beginning to fill up. In row J the young critic of the Pall Mall Gazette looked around with interest and attention, for it was still a novel experience to him to be seated in a theatre, in the stalls, wearing evening clothes, at a first night. Herbert Wells had been the Pall Mall’s drama critic only since Wednesday. The editor, Harry Cust, had promised him some time ago that he should have the first staff appointment on the paper that became vacant, and it happened to be drama. He had told Cust candidly that, apart from pantomimes and the occasional Gilbert and Sullivan, he had only been to the theatre twice in his life, but Cust seemed to think this was an advantage. ‘Just what I want,’ he had said. ‘A fresh view. Here are your tickets for this week – Oscar Wilde tomorrow, and Henry James on Saturday. Something for you to cut your teeth on.’ Having already acquired considerable facility as a freelance journalist, Herbert had no doubts about his ability to rise to this challenge, but he was conscious of the limitations of his wardrobe. ‘Should I wear evening dress?’ he asked. Cust, who was son and heir to the Earl of Brownlow, was clearly surprised by the question, and answered, after a pause, ‘Yes, of course.’ So he had hurried round to a tailor in Charles Street who he knew would give him credit and the man had run him up a suit of evening clothes in twenty-four hours, just in time for An Ideal Husband at the Haymarket. Pretty smart work, and Jane had said that it made him look very handsome as she tweaked his white tie and saw him off from their lodgings with a kiss. But not every man in the stalls tonight was wearing evening dress – he caught sight of someone in a brown Norfolk jacket suit taking his seat. It was George Bernard Shaw, who had just started reviewing plays for Frank Harris in The Saturday Review. He recognised the head of fiery red hair, and the matching beard like a tongue of flame, having heard him speak at Fabian meetings years ago when he was a student. It was typical of his fearless radicalism to ignore the theatre dress code. Herbert felt a little less smug about his new evening clothes.]
He hailed a hansom on Kensington Gore and asked to be taken to the Haymarket, but, finding he was a little early, alighted in Piccadilly opposite Hatchard’s and walked from there. He soon regretted the decision. The pavements around Piccadilly Circus were thronged with the usual promiscuous Saturday night crowd – silk-hatted mashers and Cockney couples, flower-sellers and newspaper vendors, bold young women walking arm in arm and calling out saucy invitations to the shy young men who stepped aside to let them pass. These were what might be called amateur whores, as much in search of a good time as money. But when he turned down the Haymarket the prostitutes trying to catch his eye or deliberately bumping into him to solicit his custom became a serious nuisance. Three of them practically ambushed him, barring his way as he approached the pillars of the Theatre Royal. ‘Feeling lonely, handsome?’ ‘Which of us d’you fancy then?’ ‘Only half a sovereign for a short time,’ they pestered.
‘Kindly let me pass,’ he said with dignity.
‘Oooh, don’t be like that, sir!’
They clustered round him, pawing his clo
thes. He smelled the stink of their cheap perfume and bad breath and recoiled.
‘Oi, let the gent alone, you gals! Get lorst!’ A young man in a cloth cap and a long threadbare overcoat with a moulting fur collar interposed himself and shooed the women away. Henry was about to express his gratitude when his rescuer added: ‘He’s not interested in your sort – are you ducky?’ and winked suggestively. There was a little gang of youths behind him, dressed in similar motley garments, looking on and grinning. The women moved away jeering and laughing. ‘Ain’t you a friend of Oscar’s?’ said the young man.
‘No, I certainly am not,’ he said. ‘Excuse me’ – and he pushed past.
‘Well, if you see him, give him my love!’ the young man called after him. ‘Charlie’s the name.’
It was a relief to pass under the classical portico and into the foyer with its glittering chandelier and civilised throng. His heart was beating fast from this unpleasant encounter and not until he had deposited his hat and coat in the cloakroom and taken his seat in the auditorium did he feel tolerably calm again. Field’s farce would be well under way by now, and the last cabs and carriages would be pulling up outside the St James’s with those members of the audience, the most affluent and sophisticated, who had chosen to omit the curtain-raiser.
[‘Botheration!’ George Du Maurier exclaimed, taking out his watch in the cab, and inspecting it by the light from the gaslamps in the street. ‘We’ve missed the curtain-raiser.’ The journey from Hampstead in the local hackney carriage had taken longer than usual, and now they were stuck in a long line of vehicles in Regent Street.
‘Never mind, dear,’ said Emma mildly. ‘We’ll be in time for Henry James’s play, won’t we?’
‘But I like a farce,’ Du Maurier grumbled. As both of them knew, the real reason for his discontent was that, having paid for two plays, it irked him to get less than full value for his money. The sudden surge of income recently generated by the success of Trilby had made little difference to his parsimonious habits. ‘Hoskins is a hopeless driver,’ he said. ‘He sticks to the main roads which are always clogged with traffic, whereas your London cabby knows all the best routes through the side streets . . .’
‘But he’s very safe and reliable,’ said Emma.
‘I’m sick of these endless journeys in and out of town in this draughty old rattletrap!’ Du Maurier burst out petulantly. ‘We should move into Town – I mean permanently, not just for a few months every year. We can afford it now, after all.’ It was typical of Du Maurier that he could more easily contemplate a large expenditure of money than a small one.
‘Well, I don’t know, Kiki,’ Emma murmured. ‘You would miss the Heath so.’
‘There are parks in town to walk in. Flat parks. The hills of Hampstead are getting too much for me. I’m gasping for breath by the time I get home.’
‘Well, I know, but—’
‘Now that Gerald is doing so well, we’ll want to go to the theatre more often. And it’s such a beastly bore having to fag back to Hampstead afterwards.’
‘I keep hoping that it’s just a phase he’s going through,’ Emma sighed. ‘That one day he’ll tire of it, and go back to a respectable job.’
‘Not a chance, Pem. As soon as I saw him as that waiter in The Old Jew I knew he’d found his métier. There was nothing to the part on paper, but he squeezed a laugh out of every line!’ He chuckled, his good humour returning at the memory. ‘Now I come to think of it, that was almost exactly a year ago to the day – January the sixth. Let’s hope James’s first night is equally successful!’]
‘Going on to the Hartlocks’ tonight, Margaret?’
‘I suppose so. Are you?’
‘Yes. Horribly tedious parties they give, don’t they?’
‘Horribly tedious! Never know why I go. Never know why I go anywhere.’
‘I come here to be educated.’
‘Ah! I hate being educated!’
‘So do I. It puts one almost on a level with the commercial classes, doesn’t it?’
From the very opening lines of An Ideal Husband he knew he had made a mistake in coming to see it. He couldn’t enter into the spirit of the piece, he couldn’t respond to the jokes, and he couldn’t follow the plot, because his thoughts were elsewhere, with another play – or at least half of his thoughts were, or all his thoughts for half the time. It was as if he were receiving information from two sources at once, only one of which really interested him. He heard the words spoken by the actors, he recognised them as English, and he heard the answering laughter of his neighbours, but they made no immediate sense to him – only by a laborious effort of recapitulation, putting aside the mental images of his own play (on which the curtain would be rising at any moment), could he recall a line of Wilde’s and understand why it might have been thought funny, by which time the dialogue had moved on and he was still more at sea. He sat rigid in his seat, with a fixed blank expression, not moving a muscle, as if turned to stone, while all around him people rocked in their seats and shook their shoulders and nudged each other delightedly.
[At the St James’s Too Happy By Half had finished to friendly applause, and latecomers, including the Du Mauriers, were taking their seats, smiling and waving to old friends and acquaintances, as the orchestra played the ‘Guy Domville Prelude’, a medley of pleasant old airs evocative of the last century put together by the theatre’s musical director and conductor, Walter Slaughter. In row G, Cécile, the drama critic of Woman, stroked his moustache and tapped his feet in time to the music – for Cécile was actually a young man called Arnold Bennett, the assistant editor of that weekly journal of moderately feminist tendencies (motto, ‘Forward, but not too fast’). As well as commissioning and editing articles and short snippets on subjects like ‘The Professional Girl at Home’, ‘Do Rich Women Quarrel More Frequently Than Poor?’ and ‘How to Keep Parsley Fresh’, he wrote a regular column about theatrical entertainments called ‘Music and Mummery’, under the name of ‘Cécile’, and a weekly book review under the name of ‘Barbara’. It was that kind of magazine – you had to be versatile to work for it.
Walter Slaughter brought the overture to an end with a flourish, and turned, bowing, smiling, to receive the audience’s polite applause. The house lights dimmed. Electrification made that effect easy to achieve, though Alexander was not tempted to imitate the growing fad of plunging the auditorium into near-darkness during the performance. He knew that the kind of fashionable West End audience for whom he catered liked to see each other and be seen throughout the evening, and not just in the entr’actes.
The orchestra struck up again, a quieter strain to introduce the first act, and the audience fell expectantly silent. Arnold Bennett took out his notepad and pencil. The curtain rose and a little murmur of approval ran around the auditorium. He wrote in shorthand in his notebook: ‘Excellent set, old garden, very pretty, flowers look real.’ Being able to write shorthand was a very useful accomplishment for a theatre critic. Sometimes he thought that acquiring this skill was the cleverest thing he had ever done. Without it he would never have got the job of solicitor’s clerk that had brought him to London – he might still be working in his father’s office in Hanley, yawning with boredom as the clock ticked slowly through the long day and the smoke from a hundred pot-banks drifted over the blank street outside the grimy window. Instead of which he was sitting in a London theatre being paid to watch a play by Henry James. He greatly admired, even if he did not always enjoy, Henry James’s novels and stories, and regarded him as a supreme technician in the art of fiction, an art in which he nourished ambitions of his own (there was a half-finished novel in a drawer at his Chelsea lodgings and he had already had a short story accepted for publication in The Yellow Book, to which James himself was a contributor). He looked around, wondering if he might spot the author in the audience – though even if he did he wouldn’t dare to speak to him, because he suffered from a stammer which was apt to make him tongue-tied when he most wished t
o be eloquent.]
He thought of walking out of the theatre – since he was seated at the end of a row it would be simple enough – but where could he go? Not back to De Vere Gardens, obviously – the Smiths would think he was out of his senses; not to the pub with the ticking clock, already eliminated as a possible bolt-hole; not to the Reform where some acquaintance was sure to buttonhole him and enquire why he wasn’t attending his own first night; and certainly not to wander round the streets, swarming with prostitutes and blackguards of every description. There was nothing for it but to grit his teeth and try to concentrate on the piece being played before him. The plot seemed to concern a smooth English politician, with a priggish wife, who had done something dishonest in the past, in spite of which one was invited to sympathise with his plight when threatened with exposure by some unscrupulous adventuress, and approve of the efforts of an effete aristocratic friend to rescue him. The effete aristocrat, evidently modelled on his creator, was unable to open his mouth without uttering a paradox or an epigram.
‘I love talking about nothing, father. It is the only thing I know anything about.’
‘You seem to be living entirely for pleasure.’
‘What else is there to live for, father?’
The audience chuckled. Meanwhile the first act of Guy Domville would have begun. Picturing the scene, the pretty garden set, the simultaneous entrances of Frank Humber by the wooden gate and of Fanny, the maid, from the house – ‘You’re wanted, sir! Excuse me, sir; I thought you were Mr Domville.’ ‘Isn’t Mr Domville in the house?’ ‘No indeed, sir, I came out to look for him,’ – he realised that the St James’s was the only place where now – now that it was too late – he wanted to be! What a fool he was!
[The first act went very well. As it unfolded, Elizabeth Robins, sitting with Mrs Hugh Bell in the absent Henry James’s box at his invitation, felt hugely relieved on the author’s behalf – not to mention her own, for she recalled how exhausting it had been, the process of repairing his wounded feelings after the disappointing reviews of The American and the cancellation of Mrs Jasper’s Way, and she would be glad to escape a repetition of that duty. She was a great admirer of Henry as a novelist and critic, and felt privileged to call herself his friend, but she had always laboured under a certain embarrassment in their relationship, which was inseparable from their mutual involvement in the theatre – namely, in the deepest recesses of her heart she doubted whether he really had the dramatic gift. The plays he read to her or showed to her in various stages of composition were always in principle performable – the plots were well-constructed, the dialogue easy on the ear – but they lacked something which she could best describe as a real passion for the theatre as a medium of artistic expression. He was fascinated by it, but at the same time he despised it, and brought to it only his second-best ideas (often they were second-hand too). Henry’s attitude to the theatre sometimes reminded her of an elderly uncle who had decided to play some children’s game with his little nephews and nieces, which he did with an elaborate show of seriousness and solemnity, squatting down to put himself on their level, diligently learning the rules of the game and doing his best to beat them at it, and then became seriously, disproportionately competitive, so that he ended up spending hours in this pursuit that would have been better dedicated to something more appropriate to his talents.