CHAPTER XXI IN THE STAGE BOX AT THE PARK LANE THEATRE
The curtain rose upon a drawing-room scene, perfectly conceived and carried out, an illusion of solid reality, immense and satisfying to eye and intelligence alike.
Here was a silver table, covered with those charming toys, modern and antique, which fashionable women collect and display.
There was a revolving book-shelf of ebony and lapis lazuli which held—so those members of the audience who were near could see—the actual novels and volumes of belles lettres of the moment; the things they had in their own drawing-rooms.
The whole scheme was wonderfully done. It was a room such as Waring and Liberty, assisted by the individual taste of its owner, carry out.
Up to a certain height the walls—and how real and solid they appeared!—were of pale grey, then came a black picture rail, and above it a frieze of deep orange colour. Black, orange, and grey, these were the colour notes of all the scene, and upon the expanses of grey were rows of old Japanese prints, or, rather, the skilful imitation of them, framed in gold.
The carpet was of orange, carrying a serpentine design of dead black, two heavy curtains of black velvet hung on either side of a door leading into a conservatory, softly lit by electric lights concealed amid the massed blossoms, for it was a night scene that opened the play.
There was a low murmur of applause and pleasure from the crowded theatre, for here was a picture as complete and beautiful as any hardened playgoers had seen for many years. Then the sound died away. The new actress was upon the stage, the unknown Mary Marriott; there was a great hush of curiosity and interest.
As the curtain rose the girl had been sitting upon a Chesterfield sofa of blue linen at the "O. P." side of the stage. For a moment or two she had remained quite motionless, a part of the picture, and, with a handkerchief held to her face, her shoulders shaking convulsively.
She was dressed in an evening gown of flame-colour and black.
In front of her, and in the centre of the stage, two odd and incongruous figures were standing.
One was a shabby, middle-aged woman, pale, shrinking, and a little furtive among all the splendours in which she found herself. She wore a rusty bonnet and a black cape scantily trimmed with jet.
By the woman's side stood a tall girl in a hat and a cheap, fawn-coloured jacket. The girl held a soiled boa of white imitation fur in one restless hand. She was beautiful, but sullen and hard of face.
Not a word was spoken.
It might have been a minute and a half before a word was said. The only sound was that of the sobbing from the richly-dressed woman upon the couch and the timid, shuffling feet of the two humble people—mother and daughter evidently—who stood before her.
Yet, curiously enough—and, indeed, it was unprecedented—not a sigh nor sound of impatience escaped the audience. One and all were as still as death. Some extraordinary influence was already flowing over the footlights to capture their imaginations and their nerves.
As yet they hadn't seen the face of the new actress, of whom they had heard so much in general talk and read so much in the newspapers.
A minute and a half had gone by and not a word had been spoken.
They all sat silent and motionless.
Suddenly Mary jumped up from the sofa and threw her handkerchief away.
They saw her for the first time; her marvellous beauty sent a flutter through the boxes and the stalls, her voice struck upon their ears almost like a blow.
Never was a play started thus before. Mary—upon the programme she was Lady Augusta Decies, a young widow—leapt up and faced the two motionless figures before her. Tears were splashing down her cheeks, her lovely mouth quivered with pain, her arms were outstretched, and her perfect hands were spread in sympathy and entreaty.
"Oh, but it shan't be, Mrs. Dobson! It can't be! I will stop it! I will alter it for you and Helen and all of you!"
These were the first words of the play. They poured out with a music that was terribly compelling.
There was a cry of agony, a hymn of sympathy, and a stern resolve. An audible sigh and shudder went round the theatre as that perfect voice swept round it.
"What was this play to be? Who was this girl? What did it all mean?"
Some such thought was in the mind of every one.
Such a voice had not been heard in a London theatre for long. Sarah Bernhardt had a voice like that, Duse had a voice like that—a voice like liquid silver, a voice like a fairy waterfall falling into a lake of dreamland. Most of the people there had heard the loveliest speaking voices of the modern world. But this was as lovely and compelling as any of them, and yet it had something more. It had one supreme quality—the quality of absolute conviction.
The new player—this unknown Mary Marriott—was hardly acting. It was a real cry of anguish straight from the heart itself.
Every one there felt it, though in different ways and according to the measure of their understanding.
To one man it came as a double revelation; it came with the force and power of a mighty avalanche that rushes down the sides of a high Alp, sweeping forests and villages away in its tremendous course.
The duke knew that here was one of the very greatest artists who had ever come upon the boards, and he knew also—oh, sweet misery and sudden shame!—that this was the woman he had loved from their first meeting—had loved, loved now, hopelessly, for ever and a day!
In that moment he lowered his head and prayed.
He sent up an inarticulate prayer to God, a wild, despairing ejaculation, that he might be given power to bear the burden, that he might be a man, a gentleman, and keep these things hid.
From where he sat in the shadow of the box he could see Lady Constance Camborne opposite. Both she and the bishop were leaning forward with polite attention stamped upon their faces. There was the girl who was to be his wife. He was bound to her for always, but she didn't know—she never should know! Above all, he must be a gentleman!
Never did play have such an extraordinary beginning, one only possible to an artist of consummate ability and knowledge, to a playwright of absolute unconventionality and daring in art.
In ten minutes the whole attention of the house was engrossed, after the first quarter of an hour the audience was perfectly still.
But this was curious. Throughout the whole of the first act there was hardly any applause—until the fall of the curtain. What little clapping of hands there was came from the huge upper circle, which combined in itself the functions of pit, upper circle, and gallery in the Park Lane Theatre.
But it was not a chilling silence; it was by no means the silence of indifference, of boredom. It was a silence of astonishment at the daring of the play. It was also a silence of wonder at, and appreciation of, the supreme talent of the writer, and the players who interpreted him.
There were many Socialists in the house, more especially in the upper tiers, but these were in a large minority.
Rose and Flood had allowed but few tickets to be sold to the libraries and theatre agents for the first three nights.
They had laid their plans well; they wanted Society to see the play before other classes of the community did so.
The "boom" which had been worked up in the general Press of London, more especially owing to the skilful direction of it by that astute editor, Mr. Goodrick, of the Daily Wire, had been quite sufficient to ensure an enormous demand for seats.
The manager of the box office had his instructions, and as a result the theatre was crammed with people to whom socialistic doctrines were anathema, and who sat angry at the doctrine which was being pumped into their brains from the other side of the footlights, but spellbound by the genius that was doing it.
Yet the plot of the play was quite simple. It seemed fresh and new because of the subtlety of its treatment, yet, nevertheless, it was but a peg on which to hang an object lesson.
Mary, the heroine, represented a woman of the wealthy class which controls the "high finance." Her late husband had left her millions. As a girl she was brought up in the usual life of her class, shielded from all true knowledge of human want, the younger daughter of an earl, married at twenty to a gentlemanly high priest of the god Mammon, who had died five years after the marriage, leaving her with one child, a boy, and mistress of his vast fortune. At the period when the play opened she was engaged to the young Marquis of Wigan, a peer, also immensely wealthy. She was deeply in love with him—real love had come to her for the first time in her life—and he adored her. They were soon to be married. They lived in a rosy dream. They knew nothing of the outside world.
It was at her first real contact with the outside world, at terrible, stinging, and bitter truths, which were told her by an ex-kitchenmaid whom she had employed in the past but never seen, which struck the keynote of the play.
It was a play of black and white, of yellow and violet—of incredible contrasts.
No such brutal and poignant thing had been seen upon the stage of a West End theatre before. In all its shifting scenes and changes there was a hideous alternation.
The perfection of cultured luxury, of environment and thought, was shown with the most lavish detail and fidelity. No scenes in the lives of wealthy and celebrated people had ever been presented with such entire disregard of cost before.
The pictures were perfect. They were recognized by every one there—they lived in just such a way themselves.
But the other scenes?—the hideously sombre pictures—these struck into the heart with chilling horror and dismay.
Every one knew in a vague sort of way that such things went on. They had always known it, but they had put the facts away from themselves and refused to recognize them.
They were trapped now.
They had to sit and watch a supremely skilful imitation of real life in the malign slums of London. They had to sit and listen to dialogue which burnt and blistered, which seared even the most callous heart, truths from the hell of London forced into their ears, phrases which lashed their soft complacency like burning whips.
The act-drop came down in absolute silence after the last scene of the first act, a scene in an East-End sweater's den, so cruel and relentless in its realism that dainty women held handkerchiefs of filmy lace to their nostrils as if the very foul odour and miasma of the place might reach them.
There was a long sigh of relief as the horror was shut out. The dead, funereal silence was continued for a moment, and then everybody suddenly realized something.
The whole audience realized that they had been witnessing an artistic triumph that would always be historic in the annals of the stage.
Mary Marriott had done this thing. The fire of her incarnate pity and sorrow had played upon their heart-strings till all of them—wishful, greedy, worldly, sensual—were caught up into an extraordinary emotion of gratitude and sympathy.
A burst of cheering, a thunder of applause absolutely without precedent, rang and echoed in the theatre. The evening pedestrians upon the pavements of Oxford Street heard it and halted in wonder before the façade of the theatre.
High up in the "grid" the distant stage carpenters heard it and looked at each other in amazement. Up stone flights of stairs in far-away dressing-rooms members of the company heard it and gasped.
Mary Marriott and Aubrey Flood came before the curtain and bowed.
The full-handed thunder rose to a terrifying volume of sound, and the Duke of Paddington, forgetful of all else, leaned forward in his box and shouted with the rest.
The tears were falling down his cheeks, his voice was choked and hoarse. As she retired Mary Marriott looked at him and smiled a welcome!
* * * * * *
There were only three acts.
In the course of the plot, simply but ingeniously construed, the Marquis of Wigan and Lady Augusta Decies were taken into the most awful and hopeless places of London. There was a third principal character, a cynical cicerone with a ruthless and bitter tongue, who explained everything to them and was the chorus of their progression.
In Doctor Davidson, a prominent socialistic leader, every one recognized a caricature of James Fabian Rose by himself, put before them to ram the message home!
The struggle in the woman's mind and heart was manifested with supreme art. Piece by piece the audience saw the old barriers of caste and prejudice crumbling away, until the culminating moment arrived when the young marquis must choose between the loss of her and the abandonment of all his life theories and the prejudices of race.
The end came swiftly and inevitably.
There was a great culminating scene, in which the girl appealed to her lover to give up almost everything—as she herself was about to do—for the cause of the people, for the cause of brotherhood and humanity. He hesitates and wavers. He is kindly and good-hearted, he wants her more than anything else, but in him caste and long training triumphs.
There is a final moment in which he confesses that he cannot do this thing.
With pain and anguish he renounces his love for her in favour of his order, the order to which she also belongs.
Even for her he cannot do it. He must remain as he has always been; he must say good-bye.
The last scene is the same as the first—it is Lady Augusta's drawing-room. Everything is over; they say farewell at the parting of the ways.
But she holds the little son by her first husband up to him.
"Good-bye, dear Charles!" she says. "You and I go different ways for ever and a day. God bless you! But this little fellow, with the blood of our own class in his veins, shall do what you cannot do. Good-bye!"
As the last curtain fell a tall and portly figure came into the Duke of Paddington's box.
"John," said the Earl of Camborne and Bishop of Carlton, "I have known that you were here for the last hour. Constance has gone back to Grosvenor Street, but I want to speak to you very seriously indeed."
The duke looked up quickly, his voice was decisive.
"I didn't know that either you or Connie were in London," he said. "I understood from Gerald that you were both down at the palace. I'm very sorry, but I'm afraid we shall have to postpone our talk until to-morrow morning. I'll turn up at Grosvenor Street at whatever time you wish. To-night, however, now, as a matter of fact, I am very particularly engaged indeed."