by Unknown
I was there again next afternoon. When I arrived a man was looking at volume 2. He was of a full habit of body, in a bluish-grey tweed suit, the sleeves of which were so short that I could see he either did not wear cuffs or from personal reasons had pushed them out of sight; the general impression was of marked intelligence. He was in the middle of the second volume, at the point where Lady Mary makes an excuse for leaving the two lovers together. Once I could swear he chuckled to himself; that was where Lord John bursts into the room and finds Henry on his knees. That he was interested in the story there is no doubt whatever in my mind; he perused it for a quarter of an hour at the lowest computation; and before he left he looked at the end of the last volume to see how it finished. I have always thought that he would have bought the book if he could have afforded it. However, the best judges of literature are not always in affluent circumstances, and I liked to see him turning in that way to the last page.
It was several days after this before I saw ‘Love Me Never or for Ever’ in any one’s hands. The next reader was a young woman, and when I saw her approach I had a presentiment that she would pick me up. She was young, of prepossessing appearance, and had blue eyes capable of melting softness; her dress was a becoming combination in which grey predominated; her hands were small, white and shapely, and her feet were encased in shoes. It was as clear a case of attraction at first sight as I ever saw, for she pushed several other three-volume novels aside with an imperious gesture, and pounced — there is no other word for it — on ‘Love Me Never or for Ever.’ Unhappily, she could scarcely have reached the meeting in the lane when she struck some other books with her elbow and knocked them over. I saw her glance apprehensively first at the books on the pavement and then at the shop door. Instinctively I knew she was meditating flight. ‘Don’t be alarmed,’ I said, stepping forward to rescue the book; but when I lifted my head it was to see her vanish into the Strand. Perhaps I had been foolish to interfere; but I had no time to weigh the possible consequences.
This was not by any means my only disappointment. I think it was the very next day that I thought the book had been sold. One of the shopmen came out, cast his eye over the three-volume novels, and took away ‘Love Me Never or for Ever,’ to the chagrin, as I was conscious, of the other novels. I had observed an elderly gentleman enter the shop a few minutes before, and it at once struck me that he must have asked if they had a novel with a certain attractive title. Perhaps he was the father of the lady who got the book at Mudie’s, and she had entreated him to buy her a copy. Or he might be her lover, for though no longer young he was well preserved, and had heard her lamenting the accident. I got close to the door to have another look at him. He was quietly dressed, and undoubtedly a man of culture. I was puzzled, however, when he came out. He carried no book in his hand. Had he left word where the volumes were to be sent? or was it possible that he might have them in his pockets? I was scanning his shape, when the shopman reappeared with three volumes in his hands. I recognized ‘Love Me Never’ at once. He put them back in their old place; but I saw even from a distance that there was a new label on them. I reached the shop the moment his back was turned. The slip of paper read, ‘Very exciting, 924 pp., is. Worth is. 6d.’ This gave me some pain, coming at a time when I was least expecting it. Yet I did not desert this shop. Once I heard two men, evidently persons of importance in the world of affairs, talking about it. In justice to myself I must say that I am not given to eavesdropping. Nevertheless there are exceptional moments when an author is hardly answerable for his actions. This was one of these; and when I saw those two men turning over the three-volume novels, and heard the words, ‘Love Me Never,’ I could not resist listening. It was very little they said, however. One of them offered to bet the other a ‘drink’ that a book with such a title must be by a woman. The other ‘took’ him. Then they turned to the title-page to decide the point; and as soon as they discovered that I was a man their interest in ‘Love Me Never’ ended; they went off to have their degrading drink.
Gradually I became very cunning, and I still believe that if I had been left in charge I could have got that copy sold. More than once I drew loiterers into looking through the book, and one all but bought it; he went back and forward between it and a second-hand trigo nometry, but at last he took the trigonometry. A lady who roused my hopes turned out to be the author of ‘John Mordaunt’s Christmas Box’ (in one vol.), in whose interest she was hanging about. It was soon after this that I could not help remarking to the attendant that ‘Love Me Never or for Ever’ seemed to be a capital novel. ‘Then why don’t you buy it?’ he snarled; ‘I see you here every day.’ This shocked me so much that I absented myself for a week. When I sauntered by again my novel had disappeared. Had it been sold? I was beginning to upbraid myself for having missed the purchase when I observed volumes I and 3 in the 2d.-a-volume box. This was more than I could endure, and I raged through the box for the other volume; but volume 2 had gone. I carried home volumes 1 and 3. Though disheartened, I had on reflection this to cheer me, that some one had bought volume 2.
Of an evening I would muse about what sort of person the purchaser might be, sex, occupation and such like fond trifles, but I had no hope of tracking volume 2. I fell into a gentle vein of melancholy, from which I was roused by tidings of a resident of Shepherd’s Bush who had sat on a bus and extolled ‘Love Me Never.’ My friend who told me this did not know the stranger’s name, having merely exchanged talk with him on the bus, but described him as a stoutish man in the late thirties, of ruddy complexion and wearing a worsted waistcoat, in the inside pocket of which (made probably for foreign travel) he carried a volume of ‘Love Me Never.’ My friend (who is no reader) could not tell me which volume it was, but from the first I had a feeling that it was volume 2. I now travelled occasionally on Shepherd’s Bush buses, but without success. The mystery, however, deepened; for calling at my publisher’s, rather pluckily, I think, to inquire about sales, I received the astounding information that one person had ordered six copies, not indeed of the whole work but of volume 2. In the circumstances, as they inaptly expressed it, they had let him have them at a small price. He was a middle-aged man of full figure, and his colouring was rubicund. I was in such a daze that without further questioning I hurried away, and when I came to I found myself in Oxford Street watching the tops of buses proceeding to and from Shepherd’s Bush. Next day I again dropped into that publisher’s office, really to inquire about the colour of the worsted waistcoat, and a chance remark led to their telling me (quite casually) that they had his name and address, to which they had forwarded the parcel. The name was Banks, and the street Niagara Terrace, No. 17.
It was a pleasant terrace with bow-windows on the first floor admirably adapted for reading purposes in the long evenings. As I wandered up and down the little street with a beating heart I had no intention of intruding on the privacy of Mr. Banks, I merely wanted to be near him. But when what was obviously a doctor’s brougham drew up and what was obviously a doctor stepped into it from No. 17, my blood went a-boil. What had that man been doing in that house? My admirer must be ill, he was perhaps very ill. I had waited for him too long to stand on scruples. I hauled at his bell. If my purpose could have been put into words they would have been, ‘You shall not pass away, Banks, until I have heard you praise my book.’
He was quite well, and when I explained that I was the author of ‘Love Me Never’ he grasped my hand in a way that on an ordinary occasion would have made me wince. ‘I am proud to see you at my house,’ he cried, and grasped my hand still tighter. Then I knew what I meant when I wrote that my Lady Rosaline loved Sir Harry better and better the more he hurt her. Few authors have been more admired than I am by Mr. Banks. But, ochone, ochone.
You see the reason he cherishes ‘Love Me Never’ is because one of the characters happens to be called William Banks. He too is William. My William Banks is a very secondary person in the book who makes his first appearance in volume 2, and is dispat
ched out of it (to Australia) before the beginning of the third. That is why Banks of Shepherd’s Bush has no use for volumes I and 3. The extra copies were got by him for friends as a piece of swank, and they probably think that volume 2 is the complete work. At No. 17 Niagara Terrace the accident of two people, one in a book, and one out of it, being called William Banks is regarded as the brightest and most bewildering of coincidences.
Friends seek to comfort me by saying I should be thankful that the living William takes the coincidence in this way instead of, as usually happens, bringing me up for libel; but I have not told them everything. For instance, Banks of Shepherd’s Bush is giving me cause for some uneasiness. The Banks of my creation is described in volume 2 as being a passionate gardener, as always wearing a white hat, as having an odd trick of shaking hands with himself behind his back, of walking on the kerb instead of on the pavement. The Banks of Shepherd’s Bush, in his desire to live up to the honour that has come to him so unworthily, is dropping all his own little personalities and assuming those of my Banks. He shakes hands with himself behind his back as if it were a birth-mark, he may be seen in the streets carefully walking on kerbs and on buses wearing a white hat, he has never hitherto put a spade in the ground, but his leisure hours are now spent in digging and planting.
Even more important changes are pending; for example, my Banks did not love his wife. As I have said, ‘Love Me Never or for Ever’ is my first and last work of fiction. I consider that such encouragement as I have received has not been sufficient to make me try again.”
‘Love Me Never’ was one of another kind of paper of which a number went to Greenwood, not always to be returned. Anon knew no authors in those days, but he was already evidently interested in the mysterious creatures, and sufficiently smeared with their characteristics to be able to gauge their feelings. As a rather odd result he had afterwards experiences not dissimilar to those he describes, so that such an article as this becomes autobiographical, if that can be said of what preceded the happenings. When he published ‘Better Dead’ in book form he went in a modified way through the adventures of the unfortunate creator of William Banks. He too was in the throes of his stillborn (for it was little more), he too asked for it at Mudie’s with a palpitating heart, and had the same interest in the few buyers; ‘Better Dead’ also reached the 2d.-a-volume box in Holywell Street, where we may conceive the two outcasts, it and ‘Love Me Never,’ exchanging a dreary time of day. Thus does time bring its revenges.
It was not merely in literary matters that Anon anticipated his experiences. Many things happened to him in later life of which he had already written a fairly accurate account. Perhaps this is quite usual; I merely mention it in case it is not.
I am sure he was far oftener in Holywell Street than was the author of ‘Love Me Never.’ There is a delightful sketch by the late Stacy Aumonier (one of the best, as Mr. Galsworthy has pointed out, of all writers of short stories) about a group of Londoners who fell out disastrously in an endeavour to locate Wych Street, which had ceased to be. I wanted to pause in the reading of that story so that I might join the circle and give my version. Anon often passed through Wych Street on his way to and from Holywell Street, so that his verdict should have convinced even Mr. Aumonier himself, unless indeed that author had stumped everybody by asking, ‘But where precisely was Holywell Street.’ Any one can stump me about anything with the word ‘precisely,’ and I cannot say precisely where Holywell Street in the Strand was, though I could take the investigator within a few yards of it. I remember Mrs. Richmond Ritchie (Miss Thackeray) telling me that after she came from Wimbledon to live in Grosvenor Road she had always to go first to Waterloo Station to find her way about in London. If you wanted me to find Holywell Street ‘precisely’ for you, I think we should have to, as Anon so often did, set out from Grenville Street, Bloomsbury.
Anon frequented Holywell Street (which I venture to say was slightly west of the present Law Courts) because Denny’s corner shop was his public library. It was a shabby, narrow alley, perhaps fifty yards in length, vending many shabby things and smelling chiefly of old books, but that corner shop with its outside display drew him to it as if they smelt of things more succulent. In a true sense they did, for many a guinea Anon made by using those outside shelves for reference. He never, so far as I remember, penetrated inside, but once a month or so, even from the beginning, he would throw prudence to the winds and dine, as it were, at the expense of Denny’s. A sausage and mash was fourpence (the steam being thrown in for nothing), and for another twopence you could get what was fascinatingly called a ‘repeat.’ An affair in more epic form was a chop, which you selected yourself and took home to be cooked.
Though Anon respected this library for the reasons indicated, I feel sure that he had no love for it. Never did he trudge elatedly to Holywell Street because he could gather facts about some subject that entranced him. Facts were never pleasing to him. He acquired them with reluctance and got rid of them with relief. He was never on terms with them until he had stood them on their heads. It was nothing more persuasive than the state of his exchequer that dragged him to that corner shop, and he went through several stages of poverty before he sallied thither, game but gloomy. As long as he could turn out fanciful things, he was now at his happiest. ‘Love Me Never’ is a specimen, and so were all the papers about smoking; if he had smoked at that time he could not have written those papers with as much glee, one might almost say with as much knowledge. Next to these he liked to press his memory for reminiscences of his past, after which, in order of merit, came the reminiscences of his new friends; they did not provide him with these, he plucked imaginary pasts and presents out of them. If all these stages failed for a time he clenched his teeth and went into politics. He was never a reader of newspapers, and going into politics meant for him saying to a friend, ‘Tell me what is going on in politics, and I’ll stop you as soon as I think I have got my article.’ This sometimes worked well, though the article might be only a little squib, and he exercised to the full his right of ‘stopping’ them. When even this failed he decided that he must become ‘informative,’ and marched off to Holywell Street, for he had no works of reference in his lodgings; often he had only one book, Roget’s ‘Thesaurus.’ The corner shop offered no guide with whose help you could search for your abstruse subject, you had to roam for it in the general display. Sometimes Anon found it, and at other times he found some other subject, which might, or might not, do just as well. I hope to spare you any specimens of his informative papers, though re-reading some of them in putting this booklet together I have been astounded at the number of things Anon used to know.
A few years ago I was presented by a kindly firm of publishers with an encyclopaedia in many large volumes, and I dote on it but don’t know what to do with it. In the meantime I have hidden it behind a screen.
CHAPTER VI
“THE SMALLEST THEATRE” — THE BOY IN THE CORNER SEAT — BEHIND THE SCENES
“For some months I have been housed in a small provincial town, the smallest, I am told, in the kingdom that can boast of a theatre which is never used as a hall or a corn exchange or an auction room. It is a pretty little building, quite complete, but so tiny that you smile to it as to a child when you go in; and, though it is occasionally visited by good companies, it has rarely been known to ‘pay.’ Can London theatregoers picture a dress circle from which they could almost shake hands with a man in the pit or gallery, and with a leap pop on to the stage? It is not really of course quite so tiny as that, and no doubt the sensation of smallness arises partly from your knowing, more or less, every person in the house, his occupation, and the number of his family. You know still better those other old friends, the scenery, who may be said to receive you with a wink.
We get more for our money than London gives; and so much of it is the ‘legitimate’ that one hardly believes Shakespeare can spell bankruptcy in the little places. What think you of four Shakespearian plays in a night, wi
th a ‘song and dance’ between the pieces, ‘Leah, the Jewish Maiden’ flung in as an extra, and the whole concluding with the side-splitting farce of ‘Handy Andy’? We had such fare one evening, the performance being for the benefit of a company in distress, whose manager had stolen away leaving them ‘stoney.’ The Shakespearian pieces of the evening were ‘the sublime tragedy of Hamlet,’ the ‘pastoral comedy of As You Like It,’ the ‘great historical play of Macbeth,’ and ‘the poetic tragedy of Romeo and Juliet.’ The versions played were not those known to the London theatregoer nor to the student. In London, I notice, the players who are in the principal piece of the evening seldom appear in the opening farce. At our theatre there are no relays of actors; and the gentleman who was Prince of Denmark from seven p in till eight, was the melancholy Jaques and Macbeth a little later in the evening, was throwing kisses from the foot of a balcony to Juliet about half-past ten, and had an Irish brogue as Handy Andy at eleven. Mercutio was killed only to rush on to the next scene as some one else; and one man played five different characters, including two of the witches in ‘Macbeth.’ He also enveloped his person in a white sheet that did duty as a tablecloth in the banquet scene; and when this ghost gesticulated the sheet began to fall off. Then his arms flapped quickly to his sides, like a windmill when the breeze goes unexpectedly down, and he cautiously ‘gathered his cloak more closely around him.’ He was to be a soldier in a few minutes, and there was already the gleam of tinsel on his legs. This kind of thing, I presume, is what is meant by the ‘all-round training’ which actors got in the ‘palmy days’ of provincial stock companies.
The unrehearsed effects at our pocket-edition of a theatre are more amusing, if less exciting, than those known to the London public. To my simple mind ‘organized oppositions’ pale as a pleasure before a scene enacted here a short time ago. A travelling company had possession of the boards, and the chief scene in the great domestic drama played by them represented a marriage ceremony. Unfortunately, the manageress of the company and the lessee of the theatre differed as to the point on the stage where the altar should be erected. Decidedly at the back of the stage, argued the lessee, who was proud of his altar and wanted to exhibit it where it would be seen to the best advantage. But the lady was less interested in scenic effects than in the acting, and insisted that it should stand at the side, so as to leave room on the small stage for the players. When she came to the theatre in the evening she found the lessee with his mind made up not to give way. She ordered her stage-manager to see to it that the altar was erected according to her directions. The lessee dared him to place it anywhere but at the back. ‘Then,’ said the lady, ‘I refuse to play.’ He said she should never again darken the doors of that Theatre Royal. She replied dreadfully that there were a hundred Theatres Royal but only one Clara Montalbion. The audience began to wonder why the curtain did not rise. Presently the lessee advanced to the footlights, and, after a few remarks about the respect he had for his patrons, the pleasant relations that had always subsisted between them, and his admiration for Miss Montalbion, explained the situation behind the scenes. He had also a proposal to make: no other than that the scene about which the dispute had arisen should be set first in the way the lady wished, and then as he preferred it. The audience would say which they liked best, and the piece would be played according to their taste. This was done, and by a large majority the spectators favoured the lady’s choice. The lessee, who was greatly excited, then made another speech, bowed to the wishes of the house, and the play proceeded. It is by such a scene as this that we feel ourselves drawn closer to the players: we know all about their little troubles behind the scenes, and they know all about ours in front. There is a great deal of sympathy between them and us, though we have the reputation of being a cold audience. This is because in so small a theatre one feels a selfconscious delicacy in applauding. The eyes of the whole house are on you the moment you are seen bringing your hands together; you know that your friends are remarking to each other that Foster the linen-draper admires the girl who plays chambermaid, or that he was tickled at the pun about see-saws and sea-sauce. Then the chambermaid, in acknowledgment of the applause, bows to you in such a marked manner that you go red in your proud face and your neighbours whisper that you are unaccompanied by Mrs. Brown.