Chapter 60
"I said it as a French chambermaid would say it," Sylvia insisted.
"If I might venture--" the Dormouse began.
"One minute, please, Mr. Treherne," interrupted the Mad Hatter. "What Mr. Fortescue wants, Miss Scarlett, is exaggeration--a leetle exaggeration. I believe that is what you want, Mr. Fortescue?"
"I don't want a caricature," snapped the March Hare. "The play is farcical enough as it is. What I want to impart is realism. I want Miss Scarlett to say the line as a French girl would say it."
"Precisely," said the Hatter. "That's precisely what I was trying to explain to Miss Scarlett. You're a bit hasty, old chap, you know, and I think you frightened her a little. That's all right, Miss Scarlett, there's nothing to be frightened about. Mr. Fortescue intended nothing derogatory."
"I'm not in the least frightened," said Sylvia, indignantly.
"If I might make a suggestion, I think that--" the Dormouse began.
"One minute please, please, Mr. Burns, one minute--Ah, dear me, Mr.
Hearne, I was confusing you with the poet. Nothing derogatory in that, eh?" he laughed jovially.
"May I ask a question?" said Sylvia, and asked it before Mr.
Fitzherbert could interrupt again. "Why do all English authors draw all Frenchwomen as cocottes and all French authors draw all English women as governesses? The answer's obvious."
The Mad Hatter and the March Hare were so much taken aback by this attack from Alice that the Dormouse was able to emit an entire sentence.
"I should like to say that Miss Scarlett's rendering of the accent gives me great satisfaction. I have no fault to find. I shall be much obliged, Miss Scarlett, if you will correct my French whenever necessary. I am fully sensible of its deficiencies."
Mr. Marchmont Hearne blinked after this challenge and breathed rather heavily.
"I've had a good deal of experience," said Mr. Fortescue, grimly, "but I never yet found that it improved a play to allow the performers of minor roles, essentially minor roles, to write their parts in at rehearsal."
Mr. Fitzherbert was in a quandary for a moment whether he should smoothe the rufflings of the author or of the actress or of the producer, but deciding that the author could be more profitable to his career in the end, he took him up-stage and tried to whisper away Mr. Fortescue's bad temper. In the end Sylvia was allowed to roll her "r's" at her own pace.
"I'm glad you stood up to him, dear," said an elderly actress like a pink cabbage rose fading at the tips of the petals, who had been sitting throughout the rehearsal so nearly on the scene that she was continually being addressed in mistake by people who really were "on." The author, who had once or twice smiled at her pleasantly, was evidently under the delusion that she was interested in his play.
"Yes, I was delighted with the way you stood up to them," continued Miss Nancy Tremayne. "My part's wretched, dear. All feeding! Still, if I'm allowed to slam the door when I go off in the third act, I may get a hand. Have you ever been to New York before? I like it myself, and you can live quite cheaply if you know the ropes. Of course, I'm drawing a very good salary, because they wanted me. I said I couldn't come for a penny under one hundred dollars, and I really didn't want to come at all. However, he _would_ have me, and between you and me, I'm really rather glad to have the chance of saving a little money. The managers are getting very stingy in England. Don't tell anybody what I'm getting, will you, dear? One doesn't like to create jealousy at the commencement of a tour. It seems to be quite a nice crowd, though the girls look a little old, don't you think? Amy Melhuish, who's playing the ingenue, must be at least thirty. It's wonderful how some women have the nerve to go on. I gave up playing ingenues as soon as I was over twenty-eight, and that's four years ago now, or very nearly. Oh dear, how time flies!"
Sylvia thought that, if Miss Tremayne was only twenty-eight four years ago, time must have crawled.
"They're sending us out in the _Minneworra_. The usual economy, but really in a way it's nicer, because it's all one cla.s.s. Yes, I'm glad you stood up to them, dear. Fortescue's been impossible ever since he produced one of those filthy Strindberg plays last summer for the Unknown Plays Committee. I hate this continental muck. Degenerate, I say it is. In my opinion Ibsen has spoiled the drama in England. What do you think of Charlie Fitzherbert? He's such a nice man. Always ready to smooth over any little difficulties. When Mr. Vernon said to me that Charlie would be coming with us, I felt quite safe."
"Morally?" Sylvia asked.
"Oh, go on! You know what I mean. Comfortable, and not likely to be stranded. Well, I'm always a little doubtful about American productions.
I suppose I'm conservative. I like old-fas.h.i.+oned ways."
Which was not surprising, Sylvia thought.
"Miss Tremayne, I can't hear myself speak. Are you on in this scene?"
demanded the producer.
"I really don't know. My next cue is--"
"I don't think Miss Tremayne comes on till Act Three," said the author.
"We sha'n't get there for another two hours," the producer growled.
Miss Tremayne moved her chair back three feet, and turned to finish her conversation with Sylvia.
"What I was going to say when I was interrupted, dear, was that, if you're a bad sailor, you ought to make a point of making friends with the purser. Unfortunately I don't know the purser on the
"d.a.m.n it, Miss Tremayne, didn't I ask you not to go on talking?" the producer shouted.
"Nice gentlemanly way of asking anybody not to whisper a few words of advice, isn't it?" said Miss Tremayne, with a scathing glance at Mr.
Fortescue as she moved her chair quite six feet farther away from the scene.
"Now, of course, we're in a draught," she grumbled to Sylvia. "But I always say that producers never have any consideration for anybody but themselves."
By the time the S.S. _Minneworra_ reached New York Sylvia had come to the conclusion that the representatives of the legitimate drama differed only from the chorus of a musical comedy in taking their temperaments and exits more seriously. Sylvia's earlier experience had led her to suppose that the quant.i.ty of make-up and proximity to the footlights were the most important things in art.
Whatever hopes of individual ability to s.h.i.+ne the company might have cherished before it reached New York were quickly dispelled by the two American stars, up to whom and not with whom they were expected to twinkle. Mr. Diomed Olver and Miss Marcia Neville regarded the rest of the company as Jupiter and Venus might regard the Milky Way. Miss Tremayne's exit upon a slammed door was forbidden the first time she tried it, because it would distract the attention of the audience from Miss Neville, who at that moment would be sustaining a dimple, which she called holding a situation. This dimple, which was famous from Boston to San Francisco, from Buffalo to New Orleans, had, when Miss Neville first swam into the ken of a manager's telescope, been easy enough to sustain.
Of late years a slight tendency toward stoutness had made it necessary to a.s.sist the dimple with the forefinger and internal suction; the slamming of a door might disturb so nice an operation, and an appeal, which came oddly from Miss Neville, was made to Miss Tremayne's sense of natural acting.
Mr. Olver did not bother to conceal his intention of never moving from the center of the stage, where he maintained himself with the noisy skill of a gyroscope.
"See here," he explained to members of the company who tried to compete with his stellar supremacy. "The public pays to see Diomed Olver and Marcia Neville; they don't care a d.a.m.ned cent for anything else in creation. Got me? That's good. Now we'll go along together fine."
Mr. Charles Fitzherbert a.s.sisted no more at rehearsals, but occupied himself entirely with the box-office. Mr. Wade Fortescue was very fierce about 2 A.M. in the bar of his hotel, but very mild at rehearsals. Mr.
Marchmont Hearne hibernated during this period, and when he appeared very shyly at the opening performance in Brooklyn the company greeted him with the surprised cordiality that is displayed to some one who has broken his leg and emerges weeks later from hospital without a limp.
New York made a deep and instant impression on Sylvia. No city that she had seen was so uncompromising; so sure of its flamboyant personality; so completely an ingenious, spoiled, and precocious child; so lovable for its extravagance and mischief. To her the impression was of some Gargantuan boy in his nursery building up tall towers to knock them down, running his clockwork-engines for fun through the streets of his toy city, scattering in corners quant.i.ties of toy bricks in readiness for a new fit of destructive construction, scooping up his tin inhabitants at the end of a day's play to put them helter-skelter into their box, eking out the most novel electrical toys of that Christmas with the battered old trams of the Christmas before, cheris.h.i.+ng old houses with a child's queer conservatism, devoting a large stretch of bright carpet to a park, and robbing his grandmother's mantelpiece of her treasures to put inside his more permanent structures. After seeing New York she sympathized very much with the remark she had heard made by a young New-Yorker on board the _Minneworra_, which at the time she had thought a mere callow piece of rudeness.
A grave doctor from Toledo, Ohio, almost as grave as if he were from the original Toledo, had expressed a hope to Sylvia that she would not accept New York as representative of the United States. She must travel to the West. New York had no family life. If Miss Scarlett wished to see family life, he should be glad to show it to her in Toledo. For confirmation of his criticism he had appealed to a young man standing at his elbow.
"Well," the young man had replied, "I've never been fifty miles west of New York in my life, and I hope I never shall. When I want to travel I cross over to Europe for a month."
The Toledo doctor had afterward spoken severely to Sylvia on the subject of this young New-Yorker, citing him as a dangerous element in the national welfare. Now, after seeing the Gargantuan boy's nursery, she understood the spirit that wanted to enjoy his nursery and not be bothered to go for polite walks with maiden aunts in the country; equally, no doubt, in Toledo she should appreciate the point of view of the doctor and recognize the need for the bone that would support the vast bulk of the growing child.
Sylvia had noticed that as she grew older impressions became less vivid; her later and wider experience of London was already dim beside those first years with her father and Monkley. It had been the same during her travels. Already even the Alhambra was no longer quite clearly imprinted upon her mind, and each year it had been growing less and less easy to be astonished. But this arrival in New York had been like an arrival in childhood, as surprising, as exciting, as terrifying, as stimulating.
New York was like a rejuvenating potion in the magic influence of which the memories of past years dissolved. Partly, no doubt, this effect might be ascribed to the invigorating air, and partly, Sylvia thought, to the anxiously receptive condition of herself now within sight of thirty; but neither of these explanations was wide enough to include all that New York gave of regenerative emotion, of willingness to be alive and unwillingness to go to bed, and of zest in being amused. Sylvia had supposed that she had long ago outgrown the pleasure of wandering about streets for no other reason than to be wandering about streets, of staring into shops, of staring after people, of staring at advertis.e.m.e.nts, of staring in company with a crowd of starers as well entertained as herself at a bat that was flying about in daylight outside the Plaza Hotel; but here in New York all that old youthful att.i.tude of a.s.suming that the world existed for one's diversion, mixed with a sharp, though always essentially contemptuous, curiosity about the method it was taking to amuse one, was hers again. Sylvia had always regarded England as the frivolous nation that thought of nothing but amus.e.m.e.nt, England that took its pleasure so earnestly and its business so lightly. In New York there was no question of qualifying adverbs; everything was a game. It was a game, and apparently, by the enthusiasm with which it was played, a novel game, to control the traffic in Fifth Avenue--a rather dangerous game like American football, in which at first the casualties to the policemen who played it were considerable.
Street-mending was another game, rather an elementary game that contained a large admixture of practical joking. Getting a carriage after the theater was a game played with counters. Eating, even, could be made into a game either mechanical like the automatic dime lunch, or intellectual like the free lunch, or imaginative like the quick lunch.
Sylvia had already made acquaintance with the crude material of America in Carlos Morera. New York was Carlos Morera much more refined and more matured, sweetened by its own civilization, which, having severed itself from other civilizations like the Anglo-Saxon or Latin, was already most convincingly a civilization of its own, bearing the veritable stamp of greatness. Sometimes Sylvia would be faced even in New York by a childishness that scarcely differed from the childishness of Carlos Morera. One evening, for instance, two of the men in the company who knew her tastes invited her to come with them to Murden's all-night saloon off Sixth Avenue. They had been told it was a sight worth seeing.
Sylvia, with visions of something like the dancing-saloon in Buenos Aires, was anxious to make the experiment. It sounded exciting when she heard that the place was kept going by "graft." After the performance she and her companions went to Jack's for supper; thence they walked along Sixth Avenue to Murden's. It was only about two o'clock when they entered by a side door into a room exactly like the bar parlor of an English public house, where they sat rather drearily drinking some inferior beer, until one of Sylvia's companions suggested that they had arrived too near the hours of legal closing. They left Murden's and visited a Chinese restaurant in Broadway with a cabaret attached. The prices, the entertainment, the food, and the company were in a descending scale; the prices were much the highest. Two hours later they went back to Murden's; the parlor was not less dreary; the beer was still abominable. However, just as they had decided that this could not be the right place, an enormous man slightly drunk entered under the escort of two ladies of the town. Perceiving that Sylvia and her companions had risen, the new-comer waved them back into their chairs and called for drinks all round.
"British?" he asked.
They nodded.
"Yes, I thought you were Britishers. I'm Under-Sheriff McMorris." With this he seated himself, hugging the two nymphs on either side of him like a Dionysius in his chariot.
"Actor folk?" he asked.