“You know,” Mr. Sands said, “I like to see a bit of good play-acting myself. If you go I’ll come with ye. You can send word to your missus—Jim Easby passes your door within a hundred yards almost. I’ll be seeing him in a few minutes.”
The elder Febery hovered exasperatingly over this simple solution, but at last gave way and consented.
“All right, George. If you do, see Jim and tell him to tell my missus, will you, as Cheery and me have gone to the performance and won’t be home till late. Now dry up!” he exhorted the boy.
“Oh, father!” In a passion of thankfulness the youngster threw his arms around his father’s hips.
“God bless my soul!” Mr. Febery was bewildered.
Father and son then went into the parlour and sat down to a tea served with ham and pickled cabbage, for the Tumble Down Dick was an ancient inn, lacy, leathery, and agreeably musty, famed for its good fare. If you halted there and for a moment doubted, you had but to open the precious album of beanfeast tributes that lay on the parlour table and you could doubt no longer. The very first page recorded the immense gratification of the Dredging Department of the London & So-&-So Railway, and not far off was the eulogy of the policemen from Plaistow: “To satisfy thirty-one policemen is no mean feat. We are confident there is no more comfortable hostel place to put up at than Tumble Down Dick’s. Signed Sergeant Trepelcock. X Div.”
The Feberys ate gustily until George Sands came back after instructing Jim Easby, and then George Sands sat down to eat too. And he told Cheery what a lot of fine things and comic things and terrible things they would be sure to see at the play; murders and daggers and pistols going off bang, and strangulation and poison, and bushels of blood flowing, enough to perish his little bones; but it would not do for him to be frittened, there was no call to be frittened, for it was all false as the devil’s heart. That was what everyone liked—the Lord knew why—it was a corker!
“But I do love a good drama, Albert. A good drama is what I do love.”
“Oh, ah!” said Mr. Febery.
“It’s education.”
“That’s it.”
“And I reckon it ’ull do him a smartish bit of good. There’s ghosts and what all, Cheery. Are you feared of ghosties?”
The boy shook his head, his mouth was full of onion.
“Nor me, neither,” said Mr. Sands. “I likes to see a good ghost or two; it brings the hereafter before you, don’t it?”
Mr. Febery averred that it certainly did that.
They went to the skittle alley at the back of the inn and the two men began to play a match, but Blandford soon tired of watching them heave the clumping cheeses at the fat ninepins and he stole away. When they had finished their game they found him standing in front of the theatre bill, moving his forefinger slowly along the words of the verse, spelling out those difficult lines about the curfew and the lowing herd. What was a curfew, or a knell? And those other words? His untutored mind was bothered, but none the less something had brushed his fancy with magic wings, had touched it indelibly. It set up some astonishing absurdities, and he could not ask his father to explain them.
“Let’s be off,” cried George, “there’s bound to be a crowd if we want a good place.”
Across the square they went to the Market Hall and stood for half a weary hour in a crowd clustered about the door, while everyone said jovial pleasant things until the doors were opened, but when the doors were opened all the men fought like tigers and swore and blasted and shoved and screamed. Somehow everybody got into the hall at last and although breathless and bruised they were jovial and pleasant once more. The hall had a bluewashed indigent interior, but there was a platform at one end hidden by curtains of real red velvet with golden tassels, and in front of that a smiling man with a melodeon, a man with a clarionet, and a boy with a triangle and a drum sat and played agreeable music. The boy was no bigger than Cheery, but he performed—as George Sands declared—remarkable well.
“Now you watch,” Mr. Febery enjoined his son when the music ceased. “You mustn’t say a word, and don’t be scared, ’cause it is not real at all. Watch!”
The curtain rolled up. There was nothing to be scared about. It was a short play, all about a clergyman being lathered for a shave by a black footman with a whitewash brush out of a bucketful of soapy suds. The audience rocked with laughter.
“What d’ye think o’ that?” panted Mr. Sands as the curtain descended.
The boy smiled a little wanly. “When will they do that bit about the curfew?”
“Curfew? Curfew? Oh, the curfew! Yes, that’s the last of all; presently.”
The next piece was all about a poor orphan boy named Frankie, and he was adopted by a rich lady and gentleman who had no children of their own. Frankie was not a bit bigger than Blandford Febery; this rich lady and gentleman treated him very, very kindly, and he was being educated for a higher station in life. One evening this rich lady and gentleman left him alone in the study doing his home lessons and went upstairs to their parlour to have a little music. And while he was studying his home lessons and counting on his fingers, a nasty burglar crept through a window behind Frankie and began crawling on his hands and knees towards the gentleman’s safe where he kept all his gold and silver. This ugly burglar had a horrible knife in his hand and went crawling very quiet like a snake to steal all the gold and silver, but Frankie happened to catch sight of him and said: “Hoi!” The burglar sprang up. “Silence!” he hissed. But Frankie was too brave for him: “I cannot allow you to pass,” he cried. “Silence!” the burglar hissed again, “or I shall cut your head off with my knife.” “No,” replied Frankie, “I shall not keep silent. You are on mischief bent. You are about to rob my benefactor, to whom I owe everything that is dear.” And he called out: “Help! Police!”
Then the burglar jumped on him and stabbed him in the chest. Frankie fell down on the hearthrug, and the burglar felt rather sorry because it was only a child. He bent down and said: “You’re not hurt, are you?” Just then the rich lady rushed in and flung herself on top of Frankie and screamed, and Frankie said he was dying and feeling very cold. So the lady said: “Help!” and her rich husband came hurrying in just as Frankie breathed his last. “Merciful Heaven!” moaned the rich man when he saw that all was over. He turned to the burglar, and pointing to the orphan’s body on the hearthrug, he asked him very haughtily: “Was yours the hand that struck this innocent youth that deadly blow?” The burglar shuffled and snivelled and then he tearfully said: “I couldn’t help it, guvnor; I couldn’t, on my honour.” But that was not good enough for the rich gentleman; he went to the window and shut it down with a bang. Then he latched it. Then, in a terrible voice, he said to the burglar: “You shall expiate your crime upon the scaffold.” And he would have done, too, only, after all, Frankie was not dead, he had only fainted away and was not hurt at all, not the least little bit.
“Damn my heart!” Mr. Sands huskily said. “But that boy acted very remarkable well.”
“Of course,” Mr. Febery intimated, “it wasn’t a boy at all, it was a gal dressed up in boy’s clothes.”
“I felt perhaps it was,” agreed Sands. “No boy could act so noble as that. It ain’t in ’em. Later on, a man if you like, but not a boy, no. Well, that was a marvellous good piece o’ drama, like life itself, very enjoyable. It moved you, Albert.”
“Oh, ah!” said Mr. Febery.
“It did me, anyhow.”
Cheery sat between them, smitten with dumb wonder as the grandeurs of Thespian art unfolded themselves before his eyes. Filled with immensity, with inexplicable emotions, he wanted at once to be the boy with the triangle, to roll his marvellous drum. He wanted to be Frankie, to be stabbed, to lie down, to die for ever, and then rise again to confound the wickedness of man. But the last piece was now preparing. The curtain rolled up, revealing an empty stage with a white sheet, and on the sheet a circle of light shone with dazzling splendour in the paramount darkness.
“Magic lanterns,” whispered Blandford’s father.
A pretty picture appeared on the sheet, of some fields and cattle with a thin moon rising; a bell boomed solemnly far off.
“Curfew,” Febery whispered.
And then Blandford became aware that the great Caesar Truman was on the stage. He emerged mysteriously from darkness, and now a light followed him wherever he moved. Melodiously his great vibrating voice began to thrill the soul of young Febery with the words of the poem he had read upon the bill. And how beautiful they sounded!
“The ploughman homeward plods his weary way.” With what infinite weariness that line was intoned!
“And leaves the world to darkness,” declaimed Caesar Truman. There was a long pause of surprise ere the great tragedian added in a soft whisper: “and to me.”
Then, after the actor had burst forth again into: “Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,” he spread his arms wide, hissing with bated breath: “And all the air a solemn stillness holds.”
Behind him on the screen the pictures were withdrawn and changed. There was an owl, a churchyard, a farm, men ploughing or reaping or chopping down trees, and then the churchyard again. But few were mindful of these, for the great Caesar Truman had cast them all under his spell. Not least the boy, in whom the voice of the old tragedian was arousing strange incommunicable recognitions. To declare that the uncomely Blandford Febery was never the same again would be no more than saying “Heaven is high” or “The sea is wide.” He had not lived till then; the creature we are to know was born in that hour.
The show being over, the two men went across to Tumble Down Dick’s to share a quart of ale. George Sands then mounted his saddle cob and rode away. Febery lit his two gig lamps, led out his harnessed mare, and backed her into the gig, while Cheery brought the little pony and tied its halter to a ring on the tailboard. Silently they drove out of town, but Febery, half-way across the dark heath, bent to his son. “That was a rum come-up, Cheery, eh!”
“We didn’t see any ghosts,” the boy sullenly responded.
“Naw, we didn’t neither! Better luck next time, eh!”
At that moment they saw a green light ahead of them, strangely swaying.
“What’s that, in the name of God!” Mr. Febery sat bolt upright and pulled guardedly at the reins. An old bearded man carrying a lantern and leading a white mule came stalking out of the bracken.
“It’s only old Barnaby; my God, I thought—”
The man with the mule waved his lantern as they drove past him.
“Good night, Ginger!” Mr. Febery yelled, and turned to see if the pony was still securely hitched to the cart tail.
“I’m going to be an actor,” said the boy suddenly.
“Are you?” gurgled his father. “You’ll make a fine actor, upon my soul you will. Oh, ah!”
II
The boy was robust enough, no illness molested him, but he had never displayed any relish for the work of the farm and after his momentous visit to the theatre he manifested a deep dislike. Although he did not care much for school he now became studious, made himself a proficient reader, and was generally found with his head stuck in some book or other, any sort of book, borrowed from anybody. It annoyed his father.
“All that truck will make a fool of him! It’s nonsense. He’ll never be able to turn his hand to any darn thing!”
“Leave him alone,” said Mrs. Febery, “he’s got a headpiece, and that’s what he wants.”
But the father was unconvinced. “Susan, it’s folly, you know that well. Your headpiece is good and all for the sense that may be in it, but your feet must be set firm afield and your hands guiding the plough. What all can he get from this here Pilgrim’s Progress and that Shakespeare?”
“Give him a chance, Albert!” protested Susan. “He’s young yet.”
“At fourteen years of age! Young! Why, my grandfather was married then!”
“Don’t lie so, Albert!”
“Well, he was—very nearly! And I started work myself when I was ten. But him! Oh no, I can’t make anything out of him.”
But at last he made him a corn chandler, and for four or five years Blandford Febery worked in the office of some millers in the market town, lodging during the week with some relations who also dwelt there.
On market days Albert would pop into the office and greet his son, but Blandford derived little pleasure from the visits; he disliked being kissed so childishly in front of his fellow clerks, and was restless until his chattering father said: “Well, so long, Cheery; see you Sunday.” And on Sundays Cheery would trudge over the heath to the farm for the day, to kiss his mother and eat mighty meals and be driven back in the gig by his father at night.
After a year, however, he did not visit the farm so often; he was still madly reading, spending all his leisure on book after book. And what for?—what for? some people would privately ask, and answer themselves with a “God knows!”
By the time he was twenty the morose youth had begun to emerge from his uncouthness into the style of a carefully dressed and not unconfident young man. There were rather sullen eyes in his palish face, his lips were unpleasantly thick, and despite his contact with a variety of people he seemed unable to cotton on to any acquaintance, male or female, of more than passing note. But on a sudden—it was during the Boer War—he resigned his post at the millers’ office, wrote to his mother saying that he was off to seek his fortune—and disappeared! His mother took the news with fortitude, his brother and sister grew up, his father went on ploughing and sowing and reaping.
Cheery never saw any of them again, he never went back. They thought he had gone off to fight the Boers, but it was not so; he was journeying around the north country with a circus! Knowing something of horses and forage, he was given a job, but he developed an unsuspected talent for announcing the performances of the circus, and so his scope was enlarged. He was not the ring master, he was the gentleman in a tall silk hat who with whip in hand strutted on the platform outside the great tent and harangued the hesitating mob in a picturesque rodomontade that was impressive, and therefore convincing. His perorations commonly produced a rush to the pay-box. This phase did not last a year, for he found an opportunity to join a travelling theatre company and Blandford Febery became an actor, an actor in plays of the kind that the great Caesar Truman himself had once adorned. His rise was rapid indeed; in a year or two he became a line on the bills of the play; soon he became the top line. Then a whole bill was given up to him until you might have thought the play itself was Febery, and nothing but him. Good God, what impossible changes this world does contrive—as if a toad could turn into a giraffe! That taciturn exterior had been harbouring a muffled but burning magniloquence, whose liberation made Blandford Febery.
“A youth to fortune and to fame unknown,” the idol of provincial audiences. And the man himself changed with his fortunes. No longer merely a dumb observer and reader, eloquence flowed from his person in gestures as in speech; he was the eccentric, the admired, the envied comrade of his fellow players.
Though not exactly witty, he was stimulating, and often there was a gush of mystical inspiration from him that awed them. Pity it was that he could not retain their pleased regard, but envy accrued against him, and all too soon, conscious of their misjudgment, he grew overbearing, dictatorial, a passionate cantankerous fellow who could flay the rest of the company with contemptuous criticisms. And the company had to suffer him; they thought him a poseur—but a genius none the less; he was a spoiled ass, but a golden one at that. Yet in truth it was not merely success that had turned Blandford Febery’s head; not that alone. He was a creature freed who had once been caged, and he was intoxicated by this realization. Having found a talent long buried in a napkin, he imagined that all had talents that they kept secretly hidden, or were too stupid to seek for, still creeping in their cages, wilfully unfree. He wanted something of them, but they could not understand what he wanted, any more than he could understan
d their want of understanding.
Perhaps he wanted them to be better than they were, better as actors and better as men, for he swore that only by becoming good actors could they become good men. Hoots! Toots! they would answer; they were all as good as good could be! Once Febery felt a violent urge, a quite burning desire, to call them the miserable drunkards, cowards, gamblers, and fornicators he supposed them to be, but he modified the extreme indictment: they were merely liars and shameful toadies! Whereat the oldest member of the company, a man with harsh eyes and turbulent lips who oft-times played Polonius, rebuked him:
“That won’t do, Mr. Febery. All the world’s a stage, and we have to play the play. In my time,” said Polonius, “I have played many parts. I don’t mean as an actor but as a citizen of the world, Mr. Febery. Each part gave me an inkling about the truth, and I took my cue from it. My own father used to exhort me when I was a boy at school: ‘Never be ashamed to speak the truth.’ He told me, instructed me, and impressed it upon me, never to be ashamed of truth. But I soon found that it was the one thing that did profoundly shame me! I took my cue from that, I did. D’you understand? To tell lies shamed me to myself perhaps, but that was far, far better than shaming myself to other people, or shaming them. I soon gave it up. Yes, and whatever I said I stuck to as long as it was necessary—it was never very long. So I say what I say now, true or false, devil or no, simply because it suits me best, pleases them, and injures nobody.”
Febery sighed, helpless before such abasement.
Pride goes before a fall, it is said, but you must not blame pride for the disaster; Blandford Febery’s downfall was due to other causes. One night he got a little tipsy at a leave-taking party—someone was off to America—and Febery fell into a dock at Liverpool, damaging one of his feet so hideously that it could not be properly repaired. Febery was an extremely abstemious man, he had never been drunk before; if one believed in omens and signs it was indeed a warning. As it turned out, the leave-taking party might have served him for his own, for in hospital he was soon made to realize that he would never again be able to strut heroically before the footlights; never any more. Hamlet with a club-foot and a walking-stick was unthinkable. Never any more. Farewell to the stage. The company resigned him, with tears, with sincere lamentations, with good wishes, and the company passed on. Febery never encountered his old actor friends again, for his life seemed to divide itself into segments having no relation to anything that had gone before.
The Hurly Burly and Other Stories Page 16