Paul Kelver Part 54

"Good boy," said old Deleglise, laying his hand on my shoulder. We were standing in the pa.s.sage. We had just shaken hands with the red-haired man, who, as usual, had been the last to leave. "None of the others will listen to him. He used to stop and confide it all to me after everybody else had gone. Sometimes I have dropped asleep, to wake an hour later and find him still talking. He gets it over early now. Good boy!"

Soon I learnt it was characteristic of the artist to be willing--nay, anxious, to confide his private affairs to any one and every one who would only listen. Another characteristic appeared to be determination not to listen to anybody else's. As attentive recipient of other people's troubles and emotions I was subjected to practically no compet.i.tion whatever. One gentleman, a leading actor of that day, I remember, immediately took me aside on my being introduced to him, and consulted me as to his best course of procedure under the extremely painful conditions that had lately arisen between himself and his wife.

We discussed the unfortunate position at some length, and I did my best to counsel fairly and impartially.

"I wish you would lunch with me at White's to-morrow," he said. "We can talk it over quietly. Say half-past one. By the bye, I didn't catch your name."

I spelt it to him: he wrote the appointment down on his shirt-cuff. I went to White's the next day and waited an hour, but he did not turn up. I met him three weeks later at a garden-party with his wife. But he appeared to have forgotten me.

Observing old Deleglise's guests, comparing them with their names, it surprised me the disconnection between the worker and the work. Writers of n.o.ble sentiment, of elevated ideality, I found contained in men of commonplace appearance, of gross appet.i.tes, of conventional ideas.

It seemed doubtful whether they fully comprehended their own work; certainly it had no effect upon their own lives. On the other hand, an innocent, boyish young man, who lived the most correct of lives with a girlish-looking wife in an ivy-covered cottage near Barnes Common, I discovered to be the writer of decadent stories at which the Empress Theodora might have blushed. The men whose names were widest known were not the men who shone the brightest in Deleglise's kitchen; more often they appeared the dull dogs, listening enviously, or failing pathetically when they tried to compete with others who to the public were comparatively unknown. After a time I ceased to confound the artist with the man, thought no more of judging the one by the other than of evolving a tenant from the house to which circ.u.mstances or carelessness might have directed him. Clearly they were two creations originally independent of each other, settling down into a working partnership for purposes merely of mutual accommodation; the spirit evidently indifferent as to the particular body into which he crept, anxious only for a place to work in, easily contented.

Varied were these guests that gathered round old Deleglise's oak.

Cabinet Ministers reported to be in Homburg; Russian Nihilists escaped from Siberia; Italian revolutionaries; high church dignitaries disguised in grey suitings; ex-errand boys, who had discovered that with six strokes of the pen they could set half London laughing at whom they would; raw laddies with the burr yet clinging to their tongues, but who we knew would one day have the people dancing to the music of their words. Neither wealth, nor birth, nor age, nor position counted. Was a man interesting, amusing; had he ideas and thoughts of his own? Then he was welcome. Men who had come, men who were coming, met there on equal footing. Among them, as years ago among my schoolmates, I found my place--somewhat to my dissatisfaction. I amused. Much rather would I have shocked them by the originality of my views, impressed them with the depth of my judgments. They declined to be startled, refused to be impressed; instead, they laughed. Nor from these men could I obtain sympathy in my disappointment.

"What do you mean, you villain!" roared Deleglise's caretaker at me one evening on entering the kitchen. "How dare you waste your time writing this sort of stuff?"

He had a copy of the paper containing my "Witch of Moel Sarbod" in his hand--then some months old. He screwed it up into a ball and flung it in my face. "I've only just read it. What did you get for it?"

"Nothing," I answered.

"Nothing!" he screamed. "You got off for nothing? You ought to have been whipped at the cart's tail!"

"Oh, come, it's not as bad as that," suggested old Deleglise.

"Not bad! There isn't a laugh in it from beginning to end."

"There wasn't intended to be," I interrupted.

"Why not, you swindler? What were you sent into the world to do? To make it laugh."

"I want to make it think," I told him.

"Make it think! Hasn't it got enough to think about? Aren't there ten thousand penny-a-liners, poets, tragedians, tub-thumpers, long-eared philosophers, boring it to death? Who are you to turn up your nose at your work and tell the Almighty His own business? You are here to make us laugh. Get on with your work, you confounded young idiot!"

Urban Vane was the only one among them who understood me, who agreed with me that I was fitted for higher things than merely to minister to the world's need of laughter. He alone it was who would listen with approval to my dreams of becoming a famous tragedian, a writer of soul-searching books, of pa.s.sion-a.n.a.lysing plays. I never saw him laugh himself, certainly not at anything funny. "Humour!" he would explain in his languid drawl, "personally it doesn't amuse me." One felt its introduction into the scheme of life had been an error. He was a large, fleshy man, with a dreamy, caressing voice and strangely impa.s.sive face.

Where he came from, who he was, n.o.body knew. Without ever pa.s.sing a remark himself that was worth listening to, he, nevertheless, by some mysterious trick of manner I am unable to explain, soon established himself, even throughout that company, where as a rule men found their proper level, as a silent authority in all contests of wit or argument.

Stories at which he listened, bored, fell flat. The _bon mot_ at which some faint suggestion of a smile quivered round his clean-shaven lips was felt to be the crown of the discussion. I can only conclude his secret to have been his magnificent a.s.sumption of superiority, added to a sphinx-like impenetrability behind which he could always retire from any danger of exposure. Subjects about which he knew nothing--and I have come to the conclusion they were more numerous than was suspected--became in his presence topics outside the radius of cultivated consideration: one felt ashamed of having introduced them.

His own subjects--they were few but exclusive--he had the knack of elevating into intellectual tests: one felt ashamed, reflecting how little one knew about them. Whether he really did possess a charm of manner, or whether the sense of his superiority with which he had imbued me it was that made any condescension he paid me a thing to grasp at, I am unable to say. Certain it is that when he suggested I should throw up chorus singing and accompany him into the provinces as manager of a theatrical company he was then engaging to run a wonderful drama that was going to revolutionise the English stage and educate the English public, I allowed myself not a moment for consideration, but accepted his proposal with grateful delight.

"Who is he?" asked Dan. Somehow he had never impressed Dan; but then Dan was a fellow to impress whom was slow work. As he himself confessed, he had no instinct for character. "I judge," he would explain, "purely by observation."

"What does that matter?" was my reply.

"What does he know about the business?"

"That's why he wants me."

"What do you know about it?"

"There's not much to know. I can find out."

"Take care you don't find out that there's more to know than you think.

What is this wonderful play of his?"

"I haven't seen it yet; I don't think it's finished. It's something from the Spanish or the Russian, I'm not sure. I'm to put it into shape when he's done the translation. He wants me to put my name to it as the adaptor."

"Wonder he hasn't asked you to wear his clothes. Has he got any money?"

"Of course he has money. How can you run a theatrical company without money?"

"Have you seen the money?"

"He doesn't carry it about with him in a bag."

"I should have thought your ambition to be to act, not to manage.

Managers are to be had cheap enough. Why should he want some one who knows nothing about it?"

"I'm going to act. I'm going to play a leading part."

"Great Scott!"

"He'll do the management really himself; I shall simply advise him. But he doesn't want his own name to appear.

"Why not?"

"His people might object."

"Who are his people?"

"How do I know? What a suspicious chap you are."

Dan shrugged his shoulders. "You are not an actor, you never will be; you are not a business man. You've made a start at writing, that's your proper work. Why not go on with it?"

"I can't get on with it. That one thing was accepted, and never paid for; everything else comes back regularly, just as before. Besides, I can go on writing wherever I am."

"You've got friends here to help you."

"They don't believe I can do anything but write nonsense."

"Well, clever nonsense is worth writing. It's better than stodgy sense: literature is blocked up with that. Why not follow their advice?"

"Because I don't believe they are right. I'm not a clown; I don't mean to be. Because a man has a sense of humour it doesn't follow he has nothing else. That is only one of my gifts, and by no means the highest.

I have knowledge of human nature, poetry, dramatic instinct. I mean to prove it to you all. Vane's the only man that understands me."

Dan lit his pipe. "Have you made up your mind to go?"

"Of course I have. It's an opportunity that doesn't occur twice.

'There's a tide in the affairs--"