The Making Of A Novelist Part 5

I hardly like to leave Constantinople without a memory of the Polish Legion. I took a journey by the Shooting Star Railway with a chance companion, to see him sworn in and receive his commission as an officer of that regiment The place of a.s.signation was a loft over an untenanted stable, for the time being the head-quarters of the corps. I never heard of their having any others; and I remember with unusual distinctness an interview one of the officers had with Said Pasha, who told him, with a perfect absence of reserve, that the Legion 'would be sent to the front and would be dissipated.' As a matter of fact, it never got really into form. I believe that there was never at any moment a solitary private in its ranks. So long as it lasted it consisted entirely of officers of various grades. Many of these, seeing how hopeless the whole enterprise had grown to be, abandoned it openly; others quietly slipped away without warning; and a good many willingly allowed themselves to be drafted into other regiments, where some of them did good service.

The English journalists in Turkey were divided by faction. We were mainly Philo-Turkish or Philo-Russian, according to the political colours of the journals we represented; and I know now very well that I was, for my own part, so impressed by the Bulgarian atrocities scare that I hardly knew how to look for mercy or right feeling in a Turk.

The plain truth was very hard to get at, but now, through the far perspective of the years that lie between, it is easier to see with a judicial eye. If there is to be found anywhere in the world a gentler, a more hospitable, a more sober, a more chaste, truthful, and loyal creature than the citizen Turk, I confess that I should like to meet him. If there is anywhere to be found a man more devoted to duty, braver, simpler, gentler than the common soldier of the Turkish army, I would walk a long way to find him.

While the war went on, half of the men who sent the news of it out to the civilised world found the Turk _anathema maranatha_, and the other half were persuaded that the Bulgarian was a beast altogether despicable and cowardly. Since the Bulgarians have had a chance to govern themselves they have amply disproved that unfavourable theory, and 'the unspeakable Turk,' of whom we heard so much in those days, was in the main as good a sort of fellow as might be found in Europe.

The atrocities which shocked the world were, without exception, the work of the auxiliaries--the Tchirca.s.se, the Bashi-Bazouk, the Zeibeck, the Smyrniote and Tripolite. I claim to know something of the doings of these gentry, for Mr. Francis Francis (then representing the _Times_) and myself were for six weeks the only Englishmen in what was known as the 'Roumelian atrocity district.' Day after day we lived among the Christian dead, night after night we saw the incendiary fires. From the heights of the lower Balkans--as at Sopot--we could see the horizon red.

The deserted villages stank with the unburied bodies of men and animals.

About them in the night-time hordes of vagabond dogs howled lugubriously in the dark.

It was wonderful and terrible to see how the old savage Eastern spirit could revive itself in these modern days--'Kill, slay! leave not one stone standing upon another.' In Kalofer, where there had been a busy and thriving population a fortnight before our arrival, there was not a creature left, and scarcely a wall on the summit of which one might not have laid one's hand. The town still sent up a melancholy smoke to heaven as we entered it late in the evening, and the last torch of war shone from a thatched roof at the uttermost limit of the place against the lowering darkness of the sky. The arabajee who drove the lumbering little vehicle in which our few belongings were stored fell upon his knees in the middle of the stony desert street, and delivered to mean impa.s.sioned address of which I could not make out one syllable. My dragoman translated for my benefit 'Man with the two sweet eyes,' said the kneeling orator, in possible tribute to my spectacles, 'why did we enter upon this disastrous journey? Allah has forgotten us. Let us return.' We were in two minds about it already, for the place was weird to look at and the air was a slow poison; but the horses were tired, and we ourselves had had almost enough of the day s march.

Suddenly I sighted a domestic rooster, walking with a certain air of pensive reflection down the street. I rested my revolver on my left arm, took careful aim and fired. The bird towered madly, executed a wild waltz, and went round the corner. The noise of the shot disturbed some members of his harem, and a hen fluttered into the branches of a tree close by. Francis potted her, and she fell at our feet. Here, at least, was supper; but at the first corner we turned, in search of a place in which to camp for the night, we found the rest of the feathered brood feeding on the carcase of a pig which literally heaved in waves of vermin life. We were very hungry; but there was a good two to one chance that our bird had enjoyed that uninviting diet, and we threw her over the nearest wall into the cinders of a smoking cottage.

We were resigned to remain supperless, when, with a prodigious clatter on the stony street, and a wild calling of voices, came down three Turkish Cossacks, detached, to call us back, from a party of regular troops which we had pa.s.sed that morning. The news they brought was, that the country was alive with every species of unconscionable blackguard known to the time and region; and at their urgent advice we mounted our tired beasts once more, and rode until a journey of some half-dozen miles brought us to the camp. There we fed royally, and slept in safety.

X

There is a theory to the effect that every man or woman in the world could write at least one readable and instructive novel out of his or her own actual experience. There is a very apparent disposition to put this idea to the test of practice, though, happily, not more than half the world's population has been so far animated by it. An equally sage idea is that anybody, and everybody, can take a part upon the stage.

To write a novel or to turn actor--to astonish the world with a new Waverley, Esmond, or Copperfield, or to dazzle the mimic scene with a novel Hamlet, Falstaff, Richelieu, or Oth.e.l.lo--would seem the simplest thing in the world to the apprehension of a good many excellent people.

Charles d.i.c.kens observed a great many years ago that to 'come out' in a great part is one of the easiest things in the world; while to avoid going in again is one of the most difficult. In my time I have both come out and gone in again; and though I am not disposed to tax my modesty for defences, or to offer prophecies for the future, it is not improbable that I may repeat the experience in its completeness. I suppose that the pursuit of the successful actor is the most fascinating in the world. Here and there one learns that it has been distasteful in an individual instance; but these cases are only the exceptions which prove themselves and nothing else.

A great many people have been good enough to tell the story of my first appearance on the stage; and they have told it in ways so diverse, and yet so circ.u.mstantially, that I have been sometimes tempted to doubt the genuineness of my own recollections. Here, however, for what it is worth, is my belief about the matter.

I was in New Zealand some three years ago, when a travelling manager whom I ran across in the course of my wanderings asked me if I happened to have such a thing as a new and original drama about me. I confessed that I had a scheme for a drama in my mind (the manager confessed himself to be singularly anxious to produce it), and I undertook to finish it and to see it through rehearsal. It will be observed that none of the usual difficulties which lie in the way of the ordinary pretender to dramatic fame obstructed my progress. There was no question of suitability--no thought of excellence or the reverse. The travelling manager had anything to gain and nothing to lose by the production of a piece from my hand. It meant no more than the trouble of rehearsing; and if the thing failed, it failed and there an end; and if it succeeded, the manager stipulated for half profits wherever the piece might be produced. He has not, so far, retired from business. In the innocence of my heart I promised that the piece should be ready for rehearsal in three weeks' time, and I set to work with the greatest vigour, burying myself for the first week at Gisborne, a weird and lonely seaside town where there has as yet been no whisper of a railway, and where the steamers which ply along the coast may or may not call for the traveller, according to the weather.

If I may say so of myself without immodesty, I am a rapid and a.s.sured workman.

All my best work has been done at a tremendous pace. I turned out 'Joseph's Coat' in thirty-six sittings, a chapter at a sitting. 'Val Strange,' a work of equal length or nearly, was written in as many consecutive days. 'Aunt Rachel,' the one work of mine which may outlive me by a score of years, was written at such a pace that a copying clerk would have some ado to transcribe it in the time. Its three last chapters were written between sunset and sunrise in the midst of as tragic interruptions as ever befell the writing of comedy anywhere.

With this lifelong habit of swift workmanship upon me, I thought that all I needed was to see my theme before me, and to go at it with my whole heart as I would have done at a new novel. In writing a novel you want a live place and live people; and these being provided, your book is as good as finished when you are half-way through with it. But I shall never forget in what a quagmire I landed myself when I began to write 'Chums' upon this principle. I have always, since I can remember, been a student of the acted drama. I acted for some years as dramatic critic in the provinces and in London. I knew as much about the exigencies of stage construction as the average man, and found that that meant a little less than nothing. The very method of work looked curiously bare and bald. My study for years has been to me a theatre in which I have acted many scores of different parts, often enough before a mirror to a.s.sure myself of nature. Yet I no sooner began to write consciously for the stage than this useful faculty abandoned me entirely. I no longer saw my living people; but in their stead the members of the travelling company obtruded themselves upon me.

My leading lady was before me in the place of Lucy Draycott. She was and is a most excellent and charming actress; but she was only playing at being Lucy Draycott, and she stood in between me and my own conception in a way which filled me with a cold embarra.s.sment. Then, again, Square Jack Furlong, a rustic rascal, who, as I boldly hoped, was to make quite a new type of stage villain, was to be impersonated by a heavy man of quite the conventional sort--a man who (small blame to him) would have no idea of the accent my scoundrel was to speak in (a vital point to me) and not a conception of the inner workings of his mind. In this way all the real people who supposed they were to interpret my shadows into flesh and blood converted my flesh and blood into shadow. Understand that I am not apologizing for a bad play or a failure. It was not counted either one or the other, though I must do something different to touch the mark I am in quest of. I am only trying to show in what fashion I was embarra.s.sed by new conditions. My travelling manager nearly broke his heart because I would not at first consent to allow my villain to shoot little Harold, and at last in desperation I took his advice and killed an idyll with a single grain of melodrama.

The piece was somehow written in the time prescribed, and was produced 'under the direct supervision of the author,' by which fact it gained perhaps as much as might have been expected. It was produced at Auckland, and achieved a success which it was not destined to repeat in its fulness. It was admirably, and in one respect originally, staged.

The second act was laid in the New Zealand bush: and since at Auckland folks know what a New Zealand bush-scene is like, it was needful to be a little truer to nature than we found it easily possible to be when the play was produced for a single experimental night at the Globe, or when it ran its twelvemonth course in the English and Scotch provinces later on.

Sir George Grey was interested in the production; and in Auckland Sir George Grey does pretty much as he likes, as he has a right to do when one remembers what the city, and indeed the whole colony, owes to his patriotism, his statesmanship, and his personal generosity. Without his aid the stage-manager's proposal could not possibly have been carried out; but, armed with his authority, I presented myself to the curator of the park, and from him obtained leaf.a.ge enough to dress the whole scene without the help of the scene-painter's art. We had a backcloth, to be sure, and an artificial waterfall (which flooded the cellars, by-the-by), but for everything else we were indebted to Sir George Grey and pure nature. The live bush, the wounds of the woodman's axe concealed by heaps of vari-coloured mosses, bloomed and rustled under the limelight as I suppose it never bloomed and rustled elsewhere in the history of the theatre, and the stage was ankle-deep in withered leaves; the scent of the forest actually getting beyond the footlights for once in a way.

I have never in my life seen any theatrical spectacle one-half as lovely; and this one scene had a great deal to do with the success of the piece. It was frantically applauded, and the scene-painter walked in front and bowed as if he had been responsible for its beauties. I overheard from a sun-tanned gentleman in the dress circle near whom I sat one useful trifle in the way of criticism. When Mr. Stuart Willoughby entered with his swag on his shoulder my neighbour whispered to _his_ neighbour that _that_ fellow had never learned to hump his bluey in Otago. 'I'll bet my head,' he added, 'that chap's an Australian.' And so he was. The future Stuart Willoughbys were instructed in this particular, and the most critical New Zealander could have found no fault with the style in which Mr. David James, junior, carried his belongings in the Otago bushland of the Globe Theatre, London.

'Chums' hit the New Zealand fancy, and the little play was kindly received in many places. I had begun to write another drama of a much more serious sort, and was working pretty busily as well at a revised edition of my first effort, when a serious accident befell us. My manager and I were travelling together to Dunedin (for we had formed a definite scheme of partnership, and had arranged to spend a year or two in the preparation of a _repertoire_ of pieces which might be fit to face the lights of London by the time we got there), when a telegram found us at a railway station _en route_. It told us that an important member of the company had seceded. I know now the story of his secession; but I have some slight acquaintance with the law of libel, and the history is of no particular interest to anybody.

We were announced to open in Dunedin in 'Jim the Penman,' and our missing man was to have played the part of Baron Hardfeldt The town was billed, seats were booked; there was no going back from the engagement without disaster. Then I had a goodly number of friends in Dunedin who were coming to see my own play, and there was a financial loss to be encountered into the bargain. Personally I experienced a keen sense of disappointment; but the manager was in despair. There was no filling the place of the recalcitrant for love or money--there was very little capital behind the concern; and, in short, it looked as if we had found a finish for our enterprise. Then it was that I bethought me, 'Why the d.i.c.kens shouldn't I play Baron Hardfeldt?'

I communicated my idea to my companion, who grasped at it as a drowning man grips a straw. We consulted together. We found it possible to begin to study at midnight, and we arranged for a rehearsal on the morrow. I had seen the piece once, and recalled its general tenor, and began to construct a Hardfeldt. One of my dearest friends is a Zliricher, and I felt certain of his accent. That was a point gained, for the rascally Baron might as well have come from Zurich as from anywhere else in the world. I recalled, with no twinge of inward apology, every tone of my old friend's voice, every trick of facial expression, and every little touch of Swiss gesture which helps his breezy and warm-hearted talk. I determined to dower Sir Charles Young's admirable scoundrel with all my dear old J---- G----'s tricks and manners; and I was the less remorseful in copying his cheerful and childlike _bonhomie_ because our recalcitrant had been in the habit of giving the Baron away at his very entrance, and had stamped him from the first as a ruffian of the deepest dye, whereas I was disposed to think that a really successful adventurer would be likely to have an honest and engaging manner.

At midnight I began to study; and at three o'clock in the morning I went away to bed, carrying with me the words and business of the part and a pretty bad headache. We rehea.r.s.ed at eleven; and I was 'letter-perfect,'

as actors say, and was always to be found on the very nail of the stage on which I was wanted. I have always boasted a verbal memory like a steel rat-trap. It never lets anything go upon which it once seizes.

So far excellent. 'But Linden saw another sight' at night-time. I knew platform fright as well as anybody. I have thrice been physically sick before addressing a strange audience, though I have been hardened by nearly a quarter of a century of practice. John Bright once said in my hearing that he never arose to speak in public without a feeling of insecurity at the knees and 'the sense of a scientific vacuum behind the waistcoat.' But this first appearance on the boards took me beyond anything I had hitherto experienced. I recalled the phrase about the 'scientific vacuum' which had fallen from the lips of England's greatest orator, and tried to console myself with the hope that I might not play so very vilely in spite of the fact that I had forgotten every line and word. I was bathed in a coward sweat whilst I stood near the central doors of the stage-chamber into which I was shortly to walk like a sheep to the slaughter. The cue came, and I entered mechanically crushing an opera-hat against my shirt-front. I know that if the audience could have seen the face below the grease-paint and the powder, they would have seen something very like the face of a corpse.

Luckily I am very short-sighted, and the s.p.a.ce beyond the yellow glare of the footlights was no more than a black and empty gulf to me. The Penman, my miserable sin-steeped confederate, took me by the hand and introduced me cordially to Mrs. Ralston. Until he had ceased to speak I had no remotest idea of what I had to say; but the words came somehow, and I half fancied that my old friend J---- G---- had spoken them.

There was a scattered round of applause at the end of the simple words I had to speak; for some of my friends in front had recognised me, as they might easily do, since I wore my own hair and beard. I did not think of this, but wondered dimly that I should have begun to make an impression so very early in the evening. I could see my breath rising like steam against the darkness of the auditorium, for it was cold weather and there was a touch of frost thus early even in the theatre. I sat and talked in dumb-show with Lady Duns-combe, was fittingly snubbed by Lord Dre-lincourt, and at length found myself alone with my confederate. The scene before me I knew to be one of the strongest of its cla.s.s in the whole range of modern drama. I knew, impotent as I was, that I _could_ play it--I could feel the sense of power tingling through my own impuissance. But the first essential was to know the words, and never a word knew I. Luckily Jim the Penman was an old stager, had played the part some two or three hundred times, and so knew most of the Baron's lines.

Whilst we were having our dumb talk with Percival I had told him that my head was as empty as a blown egg-sh.e.l.l, and had fairly frightened him into taking care of me. He gave me my first words in a guarded whisper at the close of every speech of his own, and shepherded me with the utmost care through the whole scene. I shall never forget the well-meaning feeble villain, stricken down by remorse and impending terror, and the dominative Baron bullying him the while, with words supplied piecemeal by the sufferer.

'And vot haf you to do vith shame?' inquired the Baron, and there stuck.

'Wife you cherish,' whispered the denounced one; and, thus primed, the inexorable Baron resumed, and, having reached 'Wife you cherish,' stuck again. 'Children you adore,' whispered Jim the Penman, gazing upward at his tyrant with filmy eyes of suffering.

'And the children you adore,' echoed the Baron in a tone which spoke his unrelenting nature. At last came one intolerable, awful moment, when the hopeless Jim could prompt no longer. The prompter was at his post, but took no earthly notice of the scene. He had witnessed the rehearsal and was taking things easily. There was nothing else for it. I walked across to him and asked him for the line, received it, and spoke it with a biting scorn which nipped my confederate to the quick. I was congratulated on that unwilling walk across the stage afterwards by an old hand who was present at this first appearance of mine. He told me that the pause, the walk, the turn, and the indignant scorn with which the words were spoken had impressed him greatly, and had a.s.sured him that I was a born actor. But by that time I had found the courage of desperation, and all my fears had melted into thin air. The words of the subsequent acts came readily, and before the last curtain fell I was as much at home as I had ever found myself on the lecture platform.

XI

Amongst actors one finds some of the queerest people in the world. The men of the modern school are very much like other people; but the old stagers can still find some of their number who are as richly comical as Mr. Vincent Crummies himself. They are like the dyer's hand, subdued to what they work in. I was thrown a great deal into the society of one elderly young gentleman whose speciality had for years been that sort of high-flying rattling comedy of which Charles Mathews was the chief exponent in my youth. He had the most suasive, genial, and gentlemanly comedy manner conceivable, and was never for a minute away from the footlights. At breakfast, at luncheon, at dinner, he played to the public of the hotel coffee-room. In the street he played to his fellow-promenaders. He played, and played hard, in the simplest private conversation. He had no more sense of moral responsibility than a b.u.t.terfly. He was as admirable a stage liar, or nearly, as Mr. Hawtrey is; and off the stage he was as free from the trammels of veracity as he was when on it He could promise, explain, evade, as dexterously in his own person as in the character of Lord Oldacre or Greythorne or Hummingtop. The world to him was literally a stage, and all the men and women merely players. Old age will teach him no sadness. He will play at being old. Death will have none of its common terrors for him. He will play at dying. When last I heard of him I was told that he was very, very poor; but I am sure he suffers little. He is playing at making a fortune or playing at having lost one: pluming himself on some visionary splendour, or commiserating some picturesquely broken n.o.bleman in his own person.

I enjoyed the most astonishing adventure of my lifetime with this gentleman's aid, and by his express invention. He had secured the right to perform a play of mine through the Australasian colonies and through India. Of course there were certain pecuniary obligations attached to the matter, and, these being disregarded, I ventured into the theatre with a request for a settlement My comedian was not in a position to effect a settlement, or perhaps he did not care to do it. He found a way out of the difficulty which I do not think would have occurred to one man in a million. He got rid of his creditor by giving him into custody for trespa.s.s; and I, being marched off by the police, had to find bail until the case was heard next morning. The magistrate advised me that I had a legal remedy; but my gentleman disbanded his company and betook him to a neighbouring colony. I was incensed at the time, though the business is laughable enough now, and I took out a writ against him, but never succeeded in serving it When I had found my bail (a local editor was kind enough to pledge his word to save me from durance), I had to put in an appearance at the police station. There was a big policeman on duty there, and he went through the essential technicalities with so grave a face that the farce for a moment seemed quite real.

'What's your name?' asked the big policeman.

I told him, and spelled it for him.

'Your age?'

I answered that question also.

'What trade are you?'

'I am a man of letters.'

'What's that?'

'Man of letters. Write it down. Man--of--letters,'

'Are y' educated? Can ye read and write?'

I was flippant enough to say that I could read and write a little, and the big policeman entered me as being imperfectly educated. That record stands against me unto this day.

We played all through the princ.i.p.al towns, and then we took to bush-whacking, setting up one or two night stands in places rarely visited by a theatrical company; and I believe that the business done in these small places was almost always highly satisfactory from a monetary point of view. Some of the villages we visited--for they were nothing more--yielded fuller houses and realised better profits than we found always in the capitals. I remember that we played once in a schoolroom built of corrugated iron and without a vestige of scenery. We put on 'Chums;' and the settler's parlour, the forest scene, and the outer view of the Otago homestead were each and all represented with the help of a green baize cloth, which hung at the rear and on either side of the stage, three upturned petroleum tins, three chairs, a tub, and a little oblong deal table with red legs. We had a stage s.p.a.ce of about four yards by three. I played Square Jack Furlong; and in the last act my revolver hung fire and exploded a second or two too late, when it was unfortunately and accidentally levelled at the back of the leading man's head. The waxen pellet which packed the powder hit him smartly on the philoprogenitive b.u.mp, and he swore audibly.

A revolver is always a nuisance on the stage and a terror to the actor who has to use it. You may buy the best weapon in the trade, you may have your cartridges made with the utmost care; but there will always be a chance of its missing fire. You may have a double in the wings, of course, but even that provides no surety. I have known my own revolver and the double refuse duty at the same instant, and have faced the moaned inquiry of the leading man, who ought to have been stretched out in apparent death throes, 'What the devil's going to happen now?' To make matters better, when I had thrown away the useless weapon with an improvised execration and was about to hurl myself upon the virtuous victim, the pistol in the wings obeyed the pressure of the prompter's finger, and the leading man dropped to a shot from nowhere, to the great mystification of the audience.