Thoughts chirruping and cawing. Do not like the dawn. If dolls walk, now is the hour.
18th January, 1879
Half past midnight
Yesterday morning I was on the Strand with Harker and some of the apprentice players (who were in costume) handing out playbills for Hamlet, the run starts tomorrow night, God help us, when I noticed, in the window of Atkinson’s stationers, one of those new and portable machines about which so many have been rabbiting excitedly. After we had finished our efforts at advertisement, which were rather jolly and goodhearted bantering fellowship – I doubt we sold many tickets but the happiness bonded us – I went in to ask a closer look. Cupid’s arrow pierced me hard.
Mr Atkinson has let me take it with me here to the theatre on approbation and I am writing on it now. Bust me, it is capital fun. I find the chunking sounds it makes most pleasant, when one operates the keys. By the use of carbon paper inserted between the leaves on which one is type-writing, a perfect copy is produced. What larks.
Just a moment ago I type wrote a note for the company noticeboard saying
THANK YOU FOR YOUR DEDICATED WORK IN RECENT TIMES, GOD BLESS AND KEEP YOU ALL, THE CHIEF.
But it is time-consuming to make the letters and so I return to pen for the moment.
With this machine, one could be anyone.
— VIII —
In which further extracts of a journal are given, rings are exchanged and an eminent visitor comes backstage
19th January, 1879
An extraordinary day and night. I shall never forget it.
The feeling backstage was one of high excitation, the manly players in their finery and paints and armour, the lovely ingénue actresses all tripping about in their gorgeous silken robes and scarlet slippers, a delightful sight, like a summer-besotted garden, or a jeweller’s window conjured into life by a wizard, although I did have to stop our Ophelia spilling cigarette ash on herself and uttering words of a decidedly sailorly stamp. At one point as I passed, she was laughingly in conversation with the actress playing our Gertrude: ‘Oh it’s medicine, darling, going to bed with a fellow. The best way to get over a man is to get under another one.’ But when dealing with young people it is sometimes best to go a little deaf. It is only innocent sauciness.
Up until 19:00 the fleets of painters and varnishers were still toiling like Egyptians, finishing here, touching there, the devil knows what. The whole auditorium reeked of fresh paint and new carpet so that I had Harker burn incense on the stage.
At 29 minutes past seven precisely – I checked on my fob watch – I began calling out to the chief ushers, whom I had stationed carefully about the circles, boxes and stalls. Each man returned the call to me, ‘Ready, sir, thank you’. On the precise moment the bells rang for 19:30 in St Mary le Strand, I called out ‘Seven-thirty, gentlemen, curtain is thirty-two minutes precisely. Thank you. You may open the doors.’
Even as the audience began to stream in like a tide, I noticed a patch of damp on the wall of the box nearest the prompter’s desk, and, there being no one else at hand, hurriedly found a brush and patched it up myself.
First to arrive were the poor, many of whom were drunk and ragged in old cords and moleskins and peacoats and rather abusive to the boxkeepers but in a goodhearted way. One of them glowered at me as he passed and said ‘Oy, windy-wallets, what you lookin at then?’ I told him to be off with himself and we traded banterings for a while. He and some two hundred rabble were ushered into a separate area at the rear of the stalls, behind the new cast-iron fencing, which I must say looks exceeding handsome. We gave them beer (and, at Harker’s suggestion, empty bottles, for a certain purpose). Mob in place and contentedly spitting and fighting with itself, the respectable audience was admitted.
Seat by creaking seat, row upon row, the auditorium quickly filled, the boxes, the parterre, the rows up to the gods. The hubbub of the audience chattering, laughing, crying out seemed to suffuse the whole building – it was as though poor old Lady Lyceum’s lifeblood had been transfused back. Some of the actors and I peeped out through the curtain. It was like no excitement I ever felt in my life. Dizzy, giddy, I could have wept for joy but had to keep my formality and not be unmanned. ‘Oh, Auntie Bram’ – this is how some of them have taken to addressing me – ‘isn’t it wonderful?’ And they were teasing me, ‘Auntie, put on a costume, come into the scene with us, do, it shall be ever such larks.’
At seven minutes to eight I spoke to the flymen before they ascended their ladders, reminding them that there are seventy-nine speech cues in our version of Hamlet, so they must listen hard and do their work, and that I loved and trusted them. They cried ‘three cheers for Auntie!’ Then the flower girls and apprentice stagehands, most of whom are very young and from the poorer parts of this neighbourhood (it being the Chief’s wish, as well as my own, that these people be taken on here and offered a path to self-betterment). I often think that these youngsters, who have been given almost nothing by way of education or chances, are my favourite people in the theatre if not indeed the whole world.
I said we were embarked on noble work together, that each and every one of us was a representative of the Lyceum Theatre. They must go about with decorum and hold their heads high, as good hard-working girls and boys, for their parents should be proud of them, as I was. Then I shook them by the hand and gave a hansel of two shillings each and a copy of the thank-you letter I had made on my type writing machine. I am moved by these young people and their simple matter-of-fact friendliness with each other.
It pleases me deeply, the Chief’s order that all proceeds of our first night be given to a fund for the needy of the parish. He in person has given a hundred guineas.
Lightning flashed outside, through our tall high windows, throwing shadows about the auditorium and over the splendid dark drapes, and the audience gasped in a laughing way, cheering each flash. It was as though Mother Nature wished to help us set the Gothic. At five minutes to eight I gave the signal for the musicians to come into the pit, which they did to a tremendous and sustained ovation from the whole house. They commenced with a couple of light-hearted arrangements, which had the cheap seats caterwauling along, then ‘God Save the Queen’, for which a (mostly) reverent silence (mostly) was observed, then ‘Lilliburlero’ and ‘The Harp That Once Through Tara’s Halls’. I was about to give the order for the house lights to be extinguished when the Prop Captain hurried in and said there was an urgent difficulty.
Torpedoed, I was not able to move while I listened. Then I uttered many obscene words, in truth the same fricative monosyllable over and over, which somehow helped me to think. I commanded the Prop Captain to keep his voice to himself, we must not spread unease among the company, for once that particular genie is out of the bottle it will not be coaxed back in again. I sent a note into the pit that the orchestra was to repeat its overture programme until further orders, no matter the audience, no matter the appearance of Jesus Christ himself in the stalls should that happen, then I followed the Prop Captain and his apprentice to Dressing Room Number One, ordering them to wait outside.
There he stood, by the window, naked but for a robe, a long-handled dagger in his hand. Rain pelted the glass like a weird simulacrum of applause and the lightning flickered strange chiaroscuro. Hearing me enter, he turned, face haggard and lifeless, as a tree whose every leaf has been stripped in a gale.
‘I have been vomiting,’ he murmured. ‘Cancel the performance.’
I told him it was a minute to curtain, that what he asked was impossible.
‘We are not ready,’ he said. ‘I tell you. Call it off.’
He looked frightened, shocked, as a child shuddering from a nightmare or a sleepwalker awakening in a moonlit park. And I could see that this was no prima-donna pose, no seeking of attention, but that some darker animus had attacked him.
‘The house is full to the gunnels,’ I ventured. ‘They love you. Can you not hear them call out?’
For by now, the
audience were chanting his name.
‘Poor fools. Give them back their money. You can say I am indisposed.’
‘How?’
‘Unwell. Asthmatic. Whatever you wish. Only please don’t mention my pigeon-livered cowardice to the company. Couldn’t bear them knowing their Chief is a bottler.’
‘I do not understand. What is there to fear?’
He said nothing, only crumpled before me, wordlessly thumbing away tears. I had never seen this before in him nor could have imagined it in my wildest fantasies. In plain truth, I did not know what to say.
‘You may trust me as a friend,’ was the best I could do.
‘You shan’t mock me?’
‘Speak to me with trust, we are both men.’
‘You know my eyesight is bad.’
‘What of that?’
‘It is worse than I thought. It has worsened of late. Tonight, as I sat to do my paint, I could scarcely see my face in the glass.’
‘I can imagine that that would be disconcerting but we can find an oculist in the morning. The important thing, for the moment—’
‘Sometimes on the stage I look out and see the darkness. Not their faces. Been with me since childhood. Afraid of the monsters.’
It was then I noticed that, on his dressing table, among the bouquets and telegrams, was a bottle of Scotch whisky, in which a nice hole had been made. I think of that spirit as disappointment-in-a-glass and could see he was in a somewhat Caledonian condition, indeed the full Hebrides were looming into view through the mists. On the basis that probably we were lost already, I poured a measure for him and a larger one for me.
‘As a boy, I used to stammer,’ he said. ‘The masters beat me viciously. Sometimes – irrational thing – I think they’re waiting in the darkness. Willing me to fail. So that everyone will forget me. Jumped-up little son of a travelling salesman. Never amount to anything. So my demons say.’
‘Every sensitive person has demons.’
‘You don’t seem to have any.’
‘I have plenty.’
‘I see none.’
‘My father and mother left me. They emigrated some years ago. I had been very sick as a child, I never attended school. I missed them.’
‘I lack your courage.’
‘I’ve no courage at all. I’m a dull clerk from Dublin, nothing more.’
‘You have a core in your heart. Anyone meeting you for two minutes feels its presence. Do you know what I have in mine? Nothing.’
‘Don’t talk rot.’
‘Nights I have sailed, old thing. Into myself. Through storms you couldn’t imagine. Evil apparitions. If you could see the thoughts in my head you would murder me out of pity.’
By now the lightning was flickering away like a bastard’s ingratitude and he looked appropriately skeletal and ghoulish, an effect to which he added by periodically stabbing the point of the dagger into the cork-lined wall. And I did not doubt the truth of what he was saying. At the same time, I have been around enough actors to know that they are capable of uttering gibberish of this sort, especially on a bellyful of malt.
‘Go out to the stage,’ I said. ‘Fight back at the demons.’
‘I can’t.’
‘I shall stand in the wings for the entire performance. Look over in my direction from time to time. And say out the words.’
‘No.’
‘Screw your courage to the sticking-place. It is your destiny. It is waiting. The men and women working yonder have given you everything they have. Will you tell them that their everything isn’t enough?’
‘You can tell them I am unwell.’
‘I’m damned if I will. Bloody tell them yourself.’
He nodded. And now, he did a curious thing. On the third finger of his left hand, he has long worn an opal signet said once to have belonged to Edmund Kean, presented to him some years ago by an admirer. He wrung it off, with some effort, and insisted on placing it in my hand.
‘That’s for luck,’ he said. ‘A first night token.’
I said I could not accept anything of such value from him.
‘It is an old belief among my sort that a gift from one of us to another may not be refused on a first night. But you may offer me something in return. I must take it.’
‘What have I that you want?’
‘Oh, Auntie.’ He chuckled and his face brightened a little. ‘You tearing old flirt.’
On my own hand, I had a little tin Claddagh ring that had been worn by my father. These are not expensive, are sold in the seaside villages of Galway for a couple of shillings to ‘trippers’ and the like. I took it off and gave it. Eyes filling, he slid it onto his finger.
‘Death or glory,’ he whispered. ‘Help me into my dress.’
By now, my anxious fob watch was telling twenty past eight and ticking a hole through my waistcoat. The house was rowdy and restless, there was jeering from beyond. I got him clad, as best I could, while he muttered away in some weird language I had never heard in my life but which turned out, so he said, to be Cornish, although it might as well have been Watusi for all one knew or cared.
He scribbled a note and commanded me to have it delivered to the box in which his wife and her party were seated, then he tugged the dagger out of the wall and kissed it three times. Collinson and the Prop Captain came in to lead him down to the wings. Off he swayed, tottering drunk, like a tart towards the magistrate. Nerve-exhausted, utterly strained, I stopped behind for a long while. I heard the roar as he took the stage, the blaring of trumpets.
How I yearned to be back in Dublin Castle, among the ledgers, the soothing dust, the lullabying breeze of Mr Meates’s disapproval, the nothing-to-be-doneness, the restful ever-sameness, the luxuriant irrelevance, the all-consoling dismalness, the peaceful postprandial burps of the clerks.
Man’s doom is that he can never sit easy where Fate has placed him.
There was no whisky remaining in that bottle when I left the room.
By the time Stoker entered the wings, the police had been summoned, constables stationed about the house, arms folded or truncheons drawn. In a single, brilliant light, Irving stalked the boards regally, gesturing at the immensity of his shadow on Harker’s backdrop. But his voice was still hoarse, too faint, uncertain, as it had been since the top of the show. His diffidence was confusing the other players. Seven cues had been skipped in three minutes.
‘Can’t hear you, mate,’ came a yell from the back of the stalls.
The laughter appeared to throw him. He wiped his brow. Stuttered. Gulped.
‘To d-d-die, to s-s-sleep … No more, p-perchance …’
Stoker turned to Harker.
‘Was that note delivered to Mrs Irving?’
‘Sir, I’ve brung it up to the box myself but Mrs Irving wasn’t there, sir. Her sister and some friends was.’
‘What did she say?’
‘Just told me to go along, sir.’
The hissing began. Irving stared at the boards. It was as though some vast serpent had slithered its way up from the sewers.
‘What do we do, sir?’
‘Be patient. Let him fight.’
‘But he’s losing.’
‘Steady nerves. He shall win.’
Now the Prompter’s Assistant hurried in from the backstage dock, accompanied by a little boy with a serious, wrinkle-eyed face.
‘This is he?’
‘Yes, Mr Stoker, sir.’
‘Stand beside me, lad,’ Stoker said. ‘There now. Don’t be afraid. It’s rather exciting when one thinks about it. Stand up big and strong, there’s a mighty broth of a boy. Be sure Daddy can see you out there. Harker, bring me a lemonade.’
Ten feet away, in the light, Irving turned and saw his son. The boy waved shyly. His father nodded back, swallowing hard, face dripping, walked downstage, hand on hip, stared up at the backdrop. A slow handclap had commenced and was growing around the auditorium, whistles, stamping of boots, howls, jeers.
A call ca
me from the gods: ‘Irving, you stuttering fool!’
He turned like a gunfighter challenged.
‘And by a sleep’ – he spat the words – ‘to say we END the heartache. And the thousand natural SHOCKS that flesh is heir to. ‘’Tis a c-consummation devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep, to sleep perchance to dream – ay, there’s the rub, for in that s-s-s-sleep – ’
‘Sir,’ Harker said. ‘Do we drop the curtain?’
Irving walked to the lip of the stage, into the gale of mockery. He stared at the audience. Ripped open his shirt. The demonic glare lit his eyes.
‘WHAT DREAMS MAY COME,’ he roared. They rose to their feet. ‘When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause,’ and now nobody could hear his voice, for the thunder of the crowd. He let it rain on him, shook his locks, held his hands above his head. And then, as they wailed and cackled and screamed, he did something no actor had done in the history of the world.
He stepped down into the auditorium before them.
Through the aisles of astonished watchers.
Down the stunned parterre, towards the cast-iron fence.
Pulled the dagger from his sleeve as he clambered up the railing.
Snarling into their faces, as the vanquished clawed out to touch him.
‘To GRUNT and SWEAT under a weary life. But that the DREAD of something after death … puzzles the will … Thus conscience does make COWARDS of us all’.
They bellowed. They howled his name. In the wings, Stoker wept. As the ovation shook the chandeliers, Harker nudged him. A young woman in shimmering ivory evening-robe had come into backstage and was silently greeting some of the crew, embracing, shaking hands. There was something tomboyish in how she held herself but also a strange grace. She seemed at ease in her body, was fluent in quiet laughter, and she moved through the shadows as one born in them. Ungloving, she kissed the upturned face of Irving’s child, ruffled his unruly curls.
She plucked a cigarette from the lips of the Prompter, took a puff, then popped it back in his mouth and with a smile refused the chair the actor playing Rosencrantz had brought for her.
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