Theatre

by William Somerset Maugham

  ‘I don’t think it’s very nice of you to speak of your father like that.’

  ‘Have I told you anything you don’t know?’ he asked coolly.

  Julia wanted to smile, but would not allow the look of somewhat pained dignity to leave her face.

  ‘It’s our weakness, not our strength, that endears us to those who love us,’ she replied.

  ‘In what play did you say that?’

  She repressed a gesture of annoyance. The words had come naturally to her lips, but as she said them she remembered that they were out of a play. Little brute! But they came in very appositely.

  ‘You’re hard,’ she said plaintively. She was beginning to feel more and more like Hamlet’s mother. ‘Don’t you love me?’

  ‘I might if I could find you. But where are you? If one stripped you of your exhibitionism, if one took your technique away from you, if one peeled you as one peels an onion of skin after skin of pretence and insincerity, of tags of old parts and shreds of faked emotions, would one come upon a soul at last?’ He looked at her with his grave sad eyes and then he smiled a little, ‘I like you all right.’

  ‘Do you believe I love you?’

  ‘In your way.’

  Julia’s face was suddenly discomposed.

  ‘If you only knew the agony I suffered when you were ill! I don’t know what I should have done if you’d died!’

  ‘You would have given a beautiful performance of a bereaved mother at the bier of her only child.’

  ‘Not nearly such a good performance as if I’d had the opportunity of rehearsing it a few times,’ Julia answered tartly. ‘You see, what you don’t understand is that acting isn’t nature; it’s art, and art is something you create. Real grief is ugly; the business of the actor is to represent it not only with truth but with beauty. If I were really dying as I’ve died in half a dozen plays, d’you think I’d care whether my gestures were graceful and my faltering words distinct enough to carry to the last row of the gallery? If it’s a sham it’s no more a sham than a sonata of Beethoven’s, and I’m no more of a sham than the pianist who plays it. It’s cruel to say that I’m not fond of you. I’m devoted to you. You’ve been the only thing in my life.’

  ‘No. You were fond of me when I was a kid and you could have me photographed with you. It made a lovely picture and it was fine publicity. But since then you haven’t bothered much about me. I’ve bored you rather than otherwise. You were always glad to see me, but you were thankful that I went my own way and didn’t want to take up your time. I don’t blame you; you hadn’t got time in your life for anyone but yourself.’

  Julia was beginning to grow a trifle impatient. He was getting too near the truth for her comfort.

  ‘You forget that young things are rather boring.’

  ‘Crashing, I should think,’ he smiled. ‘But then why do you pretend that you can’t bear to let me out of your sight? That’s just acting too.’

  ‘You make me very unhappy. You make me feel as if I hadn’t done my duty to you.’

  ‘But you have. You’ve been a very good mother. You’ve done something for which I shall always be grateful to you, you’ve left me alone.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you want.’

  ‘I told you. Reality.’

  ‘But where are you going to find it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps it doesn’t exist. I’m young still; I’m ignorant. I thought perhaps that at Cambridge, meeting people and reading books, I might discover where to look for it. If they say it only exists in God, I’m done.’

  Julia was disturbed. What he said had not really penetrated to her understanding, his words were lines and the important thing was not what they meant, but whether they ‘got over’, but she was sensitive to the emotion she felt in him. Of course he was only eighteen, and it would be silly to take him too seriously, she couldn’t help thinking he’d got all that from somebody else, and that there was a good deal of pose in it. Did anyone have ideas of his own and did anyone not pose just a wee, wee bit? But of course it might be that at the moment he felt everything he said, and it wouldn’t be very nice of her to make light of it.

  ‘Of course I see what you mean,’ she said. ‘My greatest wish in the world is that you should be happy. I’ll manage your father, and you can do as you like. You must seek your own salvation, I see that. But I think you ought to make sure that all these ideas of yours aren’t just morbid. Perhaps you were too much alone in Vienna and I dare say you read too much. Of course your father and I belong to a different generation and I don’t suppose we can help you. Why don’t you talk it over with someone more of your own age? Tom, for instance.’

  ‘Tom? A poor little snob. His only ambition in life is to be a gentleman, and he hasn’t the sense to see that the more he tries the more hopeless it is.’

  ‘I thought you liked him so much. Why, at Taplow last summer you just lived in his pocket.’

  ‘I didn’t dislike him. I made use of him. He could tell me a lot of things that I wanted to know. But I thought him an insignificant, silly little thing.’

  Julia remembered how insanely jealous she had been of their friendship. It made her angry to think of all the agony she had wasted.

  ‘You’ve dropped him, haven’t you?’ he asked suddenly.

  She was startled.

  ‘I suppose I have more or less.’

  ‘I think it’s very wise of you. He wasn’t up to your mark.’

  He looked at her with his calm, reflective eyes, and on a sudden Julia had a sickening fear that he knew that Tom had been her lover. It was impossible, she told herself, it was only her guilty conscience that made her think so; at Taplow there had been nothing; it was incredible that any of the horrid gossip had reached his ears; and yet there was something in his expression that made her certain that he knew. She was ashamed.

  ‘I only asked him to come down to Taplow because I thought it would be nice for you to have a boy of that age to play around with.’

  ‘It was.’

  There was in his eyes a faint twinkle of amusement. She felt desperate. She would have liked to ask him what he was grinning at, but dared not; for she knew; he was not angry with her, she could have borne that, he was merely diverted. She was bitterly hurt. She would have cried, but that he would only laugh. And what could she say to him? He believed nothing she said. Acting! For once she was at a loss how to cope with a situation. She was up against something that she did not know, something mysterious and rather frightening. Could that be reality? At that moment they heard a car drive up.

  ‘There’s your father,’ she exclaimed.

  What a relief! The scene was intolerable, and she was thankful that his arrival must end it. In a moment Michael, very hearty, with his chin thrust out and his belly pulled in, looking for all his fifty odd years incredibly handsome, burst into the room and, in his manly way, thrust out his hand to greet, after a six months’ absence, his only begotten son.

  28

  THREE days later Roger went up to Scotland. By the exercise of some ingenuity Julia had managed that they should not again spend any length of time alone together. When they happened to be by themselves for a few minutes they talked of indifferent things. Julia was not really sorry to see him go. She could not dismiss from her mind the curious conversation she had had with him. There was one point in particular that unaccountably worried her; this was his suggestion that if she went into an empty room and someone suddenly opened the door there would be nobody there. It made her feel very uncomfortable.

  ‘I never set out to be a raving beauty, but the one thing no one has ever denied me is personality. It’s absurd to pretend that because I can play a hundred different parts in a hundred different ways I haven’t got an individuality of my own. I can do that because I’m a bloody good actress.’

  She tried to think what happened to her when she went alone into an empty room.

  ‘But I never am alone, even in an empty room. There’s always Michael,
or Evie, or Charles, or the public; not in the flesh, of course, but in the spirit, as it were. I must speak to Charles about Roger.’

  Unfortunately he was away. But he was coming back for the dress-rehearsal and the first night; he had not missed these occasions for twenty years, and they had always had supper together after the dress-rehearsal. Michael would remain in the theatre, busy with the lights and so on, so that they would be alone. They would be able to have a good talk.

  She studied her part. Julia did not deliberately create the character she was going to act by observation; she had a knack of getting into the shoes of the woman she had to portray so that she thought with her mind and felt with her senses. Her intuition suggested to her a hundred small touches that afterwards amazed people by their verisimilitude; but when they asked her where she had got them she could not say. Now she wanted to show the courageous yet uneasy breeziness of the Mrs Marten who played golf and could talk to a man like one good chap to another and yet, essentially a respectable, middle-class woman, hankered for the security of the marriage state.

  Michael never liked to have a crowd at a dress-rehearsal, and this time, anxious to keep the secret of the play till the first night, he had admitted besides Charles only the people, photographers and dressmakers, whose presence was necessary. Julia spared herself. She had no intention of giving all she had to give till the first night. It was enough if her performance was adequate. Under Michael’s business-like direction everything went off without a hitch, and by ten o’clock Julia and Charles were sitting in the Grill Room of the Savoy. The first thing she asked him was what he thought of Avice Crichton.

  ‘Not at all bad and wonderfully pretty. She really looked lovely in that second-act dress.’

  ‘I’m not going to wear the dress I wore in the second act. Charley Deverill has made me another.’

  He did not see the slightly humorous glance she gave him, and if he had would not have guessed what it meant. Michael, having taken Julia’s advice, had gone to a good deal of trouble with Avice. He had rehearsed her by herself upstairs in his private room and had given her every intonation and every gesture. He had also, Julia had good reason to believe, lunched with her several times and taken her out to supper. The result of all this was that she was playing the part uncommonly well. Michael rubbed his hands.

  ‘I’m very pleased with her. I think she’ll make quite a hit. I’ve half a mind to give her a contract.’

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ said Julia. ‘Not till after the first night. You can never really tell how a performance is going to pan out till you’ve got an audience.’

  ‘She’s a nice girl and a perfect lady.’

  ‘A nice girl, I suppose, because she’s madly in love with you, and a perfect lady because she’s resisting your advances till she’s got a contract.’

  ‘Oh, my dear, don’t be so silly. Why, I’m old enough to be her father.’

  But he smiled complacently. She knew very well that his love-making went no farther than holding hands and a kiss or two in a taxi, but she knew also that it nattered him to imagine that she suspected him capable of infidelity.

  But now Julia, having satisfied her appetite with proper regard for her figure, attacked the subject which was on her mind.

  ‘Charles dear, I want to talk to you about Roger.’

  ‘Oh yes, he came back the other day, didn’t he? How is he?’

  ‘My dear, a most terrible thing has happened. He’s come back a fearful prig and I don’t know what to do about it.’

  She gave him her version of the conversation. She left out one or two things that it seemed inconvenient to mention, but what she told was on the whole accurate.

  ‘The tragic thing is that he has absolutely no sense of humour,’ she finished.

  ‘After all he’s only eighteen.’

  ‘You could have knocked me down with a feather when he said all those things to me. I felt just like Balaam when his ass broke into light conversation.’

  She gave him a gay look, but he did not even smile. He did not seem to think her remark as funny as she did.

  ‘I can’t imagine where he got his ideas. It’s absurd to think that he could have thought out all that nonsense for himself.’

  ‘Are you sure that boys of that age don’t think more than we older people imagine? It’s a sort of puberty of the spirit and its results are often strange.’

  ‘It seems so deceitful of Roger to have harboured thoughts like those all these years and never breathed a word about them. He might have been accusing me.’ She gave a chuckle. ‘To tell you the truth, when Roger was talking to me I felt just like Hamlet’s mother.’ Then with hardly a break: ‘I wonder if I’m too old to play Hamlet?’

  ‘Gertrude isn’t a very good part, is it?’

  Julia broke into a laugh of frank amusement.

  ‘Don’t be idiotic, Charles. I wouldn’t play the Queen. I’d play Hamlet.’

  ‘D’you think it’s suited to a woman?’

  ‘Mrs Siddons played it and so did Sarah Bernhardt. It would set a seal on my career, if you know what I mean. Of course there’s the difficulty of the blank verse.’

  ‘I have heard actors speak it so that it was indistinguishable from prose,’ he answered.

  ‘Yes, but that’s not quite the same, is it?’

  ‘Were you nice to Roger?’

  She was surprised at his going back to that subject so suddenly, but she returned to it with a smile.

  ‘Oh, charming.’

  ‘It’s hard not to be impatient with the absurdity of the young; they tell us that two and two make four as though it had never occurred to us, and they’re disappointed if we can’t share their surprise when they have just discovered that a hen lays an egg. There’s a lot of nonsense in their ranting and raving, but it’s not all nonsense. One ought to sympathize with them; one ought to do one’s best to understand. One has to remember how much has to be forgotten and how much has to be learnt when for the first time one faces life. It’s not very easy to give up one’s ideals, and the brute facts of every day are bitter pills to swallow. The spiritual conflicts of adolescence can be very severe and one can do so little to resolve them. It may be that in a year or two he’ll lose sight of the clouds of glory and accept the chain. It may be that he’ll find what he’s looking for, if not in God, then in art.’

  ‘I should hate him to be an actor if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘No, I don’t think he’ll fancy that.’

  ‘And of course he can’t be a playwright, he hasn’t a sense of humour.’

  ‘I dare say he’ll be quite content to go into the Foreign Office. It would be an asset to him there.’

  ‘What would you advise me to do?’

  ‘Nothing. Let him be. That’s probably the greatest kindness you can do him.’

  ‘But I can’t help being worried about him.’

  ‘You needn’t be. Be hopeful. You thought you’d only given birth to an ugly duckling; perhaps he’s going to turn into a white-winged swan.’

  Charles was not giving Julia what she wanted. She had expected him to be more sympathetic.

  ‘I suppose he’s getting old, poor dear,’ she reflected. ‘He’s losing his grip of things. He must have been impotent for years; I wonder it never struck me before.’

  She asked what the time was.

  ‘I think I ought to go. I must get a long night’s rest.’

  Julia slept well and when she awoke had at once a feeling of exultation. Tonight was the first night. It gave her a little thrill of pleasure to recollect that people had already been assembling at the pit and gallery doors when she left the theatre after the dress-rehearsal, and now at ten in the morning there was probably already a long queue.

  ‘Lucky it’s a fine day for them, poor brutes.’

  In bygone years she had been intolerably nervous before a first night. She had felt slightly sick all day and as the hours passed got into such a state that she almost thought she would have to lea
ve the stage. But by now, after having passed through the ordeal so many times, she had acquired a certain nonchalance. Throughout the early part of the day she felt only happy and mildly excited; it was not till late in the afternoon that she began to feel ill at ease. She grew silent and wanted to be left alone. She also grew irritable, and Michael, having learnt from experience, took care to keep out of her way. Her hands and feet got cold and by the time she reached the theatre they were like lumps of ice. But still the apprehension that filled her was not unpleasant.

  Julia had nothing to do that morning but go down to the Siddons for a word-rehearsal at noon, so she lay in bed till late. Michael did not come back to luncheon, having last things to do to the sets, and she ate alone. Then she went to bed and for an hour slept soundly. Her intention was to rest all the afternoon; Miss Phillips was coming at six to give her a light massage, and by seven she wanted to be at the theatre. But when she awoke she felt so much refreshed that it irked her to stay in bed, so she made up her mind to get up and go for a walk. It was a fine, sunny day. Liking the town better than the country and streets more than trees, she did not go into the Park, but sauntered round the neighbouring squares, deserted at that time of year, idly looking at the houses, and thought how much she preferred her own to any of them. She felt at ease and light-hearted. Then she thought it time to go home. She had just reached the corner of Stanhope Place when she heard her name called in a voice that she could not but recognize.

  ‘Julia.’

  She turned round and Tom, his face all smiles, caught her up. She had not seen him since her return from France. He was very smart in a neat grey suit and a brown hat. He was tanned by the sun.

  ‘I thought you were away.’

  ‘I came back on Monday. I didn’t ring up because I knew you were busy with the final rehearsals. I’m coming tonight; Michael gave me a stall.’

  ‘Oh, I’m glad.’

  It was plain that he was delighted to see her. His face was eager and his eyes shone. She was pleased to discover that the sight of him excited no emotion in her. She wondered as they went on talking what there was in him that had ever so deeply affected her.