CHAPTER IV.
The curtain fell. Franz had reappeared to receive the enthusiastic homage of the audience, and was now in his room undressing, when the door opened, and his father stood before him.
Instead of rushing into his arms, Franz stood confused, blushing, trembling. The haggard sternness of his father’s face told but too plainly with what feelings he was regarded.
It was a moment of cruel silence.
The position was humiliating. With his clothes scattered about the room; with the paint still unwashed from his face; with his room in disorder;—swords, playbills, theatrical dresses, a wig, a rouge-pot, and washing-stand, lying about; himself in the undignified attitude of drawing on his stockings;—all combined to present the miserable and prosaic side of his profession to the angry glance of an incensed parent.
“So!” said the old man, “these are your theological studies! This is the end of all my care! you have disobeyed me. You have destroyed all my hopes, and gone upon the stage, for which you well know my detestation. I find you thus!”
Franz could make no answer.
“While I fondly believed you still at the university, pursuing an honourable career—a career useful to mankind and honourable to yourself—you were like a runaway apprentice taking to this odious life.”
“But, sir,—I have succeeded!”
“So much the worse!”
“Is not that my excuse?”
“No; it is your condemnation.”
“Surely, father, it proves that I have chosen right. It proves I have a vocation for the stage?”
“It only proves your disobedience. Vocation, indeed! Any man has a vocation for the stage: any man who has brains, and is not physically too weak to utter the thoughts of an author. Vocation! You might as well tell me you had a vocation for the highway—and if you had robbed a man, by placing a pistol to his head, and bidding him stand and deliver, that your success was your excuse!
“Is it not enough,” pursued Schoenlein, after a pause, “that there should be one actor in the family: one whose necessities have driven him on the stage, and who, once there, is forced to remain there?”
“But I, for my part, see nothing reprehensible in the life of an actor.”
“I do.”
Franz saw there was no appeal from such a decision, so he dressed himself in silence.
He was hurt, angry. He expected that his father would have been delighted with his performance, would have rejoiced in his success. To be treated like a schoolboy, to hear such tones and see such looks, irritated him.
“Come with me to my hotel,” said Schoenlein, as Franz completed his dressing.
They had not taken many steps before a stout middle-aged woman, enveloped in a fur cloak, said to Franz:
“Lieber Franz, the carriage is waiting.”
Schoenlein did not hear the whispered reply, but strode hastily onwards: his son followed.
“Who was that,” he inquired, as they came out into the street, “who called you Lieber Franz?”
“Oh! that—an actress—one of our company—Madame Kritisch.”
“Hm!” growled the old man; but he did not speak again till they reached the hotel. Arrived there, they went up into his room.
“Franz, my dear boy,” said Schoenlein, with great tenderness, “you must promise me to quit this life, and I will forget that you have ever disobeyed me. Let us look on it as a boyish freak, now over.”
Franz was silent.
“It is your father who speaks. Remember he is your best friend; and he earnestly implores you to quit a career which even success can only make a gilded disgrace. Will you promise me this?”
He felt very uncomfortable, and knew not what answer to make.
“You are young,” pursued his father; “young and hopeful. You look as yet only to the bright side of life, and see only the pleasures of the stage. You think it glorious to be applauded, to have your name in the mouths of men, your portrait in shop windows. In a little while all this applause will pall upon your ear; all these portraits will look like so many signs of your disgrace, and caricatures of yourself. The charm will pass away, and you will feel yourself to be a mountebank, painted to amuse a gaping crowd! Then the wear and tear of the profession, its thousand petty irritations and miserable anxieties, will be as stings of wretchedness, and you will curse the day you first trod upon a stage.
“Look at me!” he said, suddenly pausing in the angry walk which he was taking up and down the room. “Have I not been successful? have I not been flattered, envied? have I not known what it is to be a great tragedian, to dictate terms to managers, to sway audiences? Have I not known all this? And yet, since you can remember me, have you ever seen me happy? Is not my life an example? Does not my whole life cry out to you, Beware! Will you not profit by the bitter lessons of my experience?”
“But, my dear father, you forget one thing: you have always looked upon the profession with disgust. I do not.”
“You will learn to do so.”
“I cannot believe it. You are the only actor in Germany who thinks so. Besides, I have, as it seems to me, a real vocation.—You may sneer, but a vocation is necessary in this as in all other professions. It is quite clear that I have none for theology. I must get my bread somehow.”
“Your bread? Franz, listen to me. So fixed is my opinion, that if you will obey me, from this time forward you shall have the whole of my earnings. I have already saved enough to satisfy my own humble wants. I will devote every shilling to furthering and maintaining you in any profession you choose to select. You shall not say that necessity made you—as it has made me—an actor.”
“I cannot accept such a sacrifice.”
“It is none. I would sacrifice every thing rather than see you on the stage! Besides, in another year or two you may make a rich marriage. I have already agreed with our old friend Schmidt, that you should be united to his daughter Bertha, and her dowry will be very large.”
A deep, deep blush overspread Franz’s face, which was succeeded by a deathlike paleness, as his father mentioned marriage.
“How can I ever break my marriage to him!” was his mental exclamation.
“Will you promise me?”
“I cannot. Believe me, it distresses me thus to disobey you, but I cannot quit the stage.”
“I have failed to convince you then? You misapprehend my motives. You think, perhaps”—and here an affected laugh of irony gave tenfold force to the words—“that I am jealous of you?”
“Oh, father!” exclaimed Franz.
But his father’s words and tone had, as in a flash of light, suddenly revealed the real feeling in his heart: he was jealous, and his son perceived it.
Do not, however, suppose that the old man was aware of this feeling; he would have shuddered at the accusation. Blinding himself with all sorts of sophistications, he attributed his horror at Franz’s adoption of the stage to his very sincere disgust to that profession; and because he really did in his own person feel an actor’s life was disgraceful, even sinful, he fancied his objection to Franz’s being an actor was wholly derived from that feeling. But in the depths of his heart he was horribly jealous. He had learned to hate Franz as a rival, before he knew him to be his son. Critics had maddened him by their comparisons. Franz had been pointed out as the actor who was to eclipse him. And now that he found Franz was his son, instead of rejoicing in his success, instead of feeling proud that at any rate his rival was his son, and that the genius which dethroned him was derived from himself—instead of the consolation which another father would have received, he was assailed by the bitterest thoughts at the idea of his son being an actor! He was incensed at such disobedience, at such violation of all his wishes; and attributed to his anger all he really felt of jealousy.
There is something so painful in the idea of a father being jealous of his son, that many will be tempted to pronounce it impossible. Rare it fortunately is, but not impossible. Who has not known women jealous of their daughters: women preserving their beauty, and followed by homage, till their girls are old enough to dispute and bear away the palm from them? If this is not uncommon—and more than one instance must occur within every reader’s experience—what is to prevent the same principle applying in a man’s case? You have only to imagine the vanity pampered by flattery into an unhealthy condition, and then bring in a rival—no matter whom—and the thing is done. Either the father’s vanity will be caressed by the reflection of the child’s success, (and this, happily, is the commoner case,) or it will be irritated at the child’s interference with its claims.
In Schoenlein’s case must be added the strange but intense dislike with which he regarded the profession of an actor. Had there been no rivalry in the case, had Franz been only a tolerable actor, he would still have been excessively irritated. But for his son to be an actor, and for the public to prefer him as an actor to his father—this was agonising!
He grew eloquent in his exhortations. Finding it was in vain to make Franz share his religious opinions, he endeavoured to dissuade him by painting all the dangers of the profession—its pangs, its weariness, its disappointments—painted the disagreeable ordeal he himself had been forced to undergo; and speaking, as he thought, to accomplish his son’s welfare, he was eloquent.
This much is to be said for fathers who object to their sons following their own careers: the struggles by which they have won their way, the sorrows which have been forced upon them, the dangers they have escaped—these are all so vividly present to their minds, that they believe them inseparable from the career. Who shall say that another will escape these perils? All the delight, all the rapture of hope and of success are forgotten, or else weigh but as a feather in the scale against these perils. A father says:—
“It is true I escaped; but I was fortunate. Besides, I had genius,—I had rectitude,—I had strength of will. My poor boy, (and fathers are apt to look with a sort of compassion on their children: is it because the children have, from infancy upwards, looked to them for pity and protection?)—my poor boy will not be able to buffet with the world as I did! He will be led away by temptations; he will succumb beneath adversity!”
In proportion to the precariousness of the profession is the reluctance of the parent. Poets never wish their sons to be poets; certainly not to trust to poetry for their livelihood. Nor do artists desire their sons to be artists. Actors almost universally shudder at the idea of their children becoming actors.
So that Schoenlein’s remonstrances would have been vehement, even had he not been tormented with jealousy. But, from the moment Franz perceived the real state of his father’s mind, all compunction vanished. No arguments could have made him quit the stage; but now he felt his father’s arguments to be insults.
“I hope you do not misunderstand me,” said the old man. “You must know me well enough to believe that no one would more rejoice in your success—that to no one should I be so proud to transmit my laurel crown, if it were not lined with iron, which brands the forehead with disgrace. I am growing old, and am soon about to leave the stage for ever: to whom could I so fitly leave the inheritance of my renown, did I not perceive that it would entail lasting misery upon him, as it has entailed it upon me? No, no, you must relinquish this boyish notion,—you shall marry Bertha Schmidt, and quit the stage for ever.”
“Oh, do not ask it!”
“I do more than ask it—I command!”
“Do not—dear father—do not force me to disobey you.”
“You—you will not leave the stage?”
“I—I cannot! It would be hypocrisy in me to pretend it. I have a passion for the stage; and whether that passion lead me to happiness or to ruin, I must gratify it.”
“And think you Bertha will marry an actor?”
“Perhaps not.”
“Are you indifferent to that?”
“Why—the truth is—I cannot marry her.”
“You cannot? You shall!”
“I love another!”
“You love another!” angrily exclaimed his father; and then adding, with a sneer—
“Some actress, I presume!”
Franz coloured.
“It is so,” said his father. “Old Clara Kritisch, I shouldn’t wonder!”
A deeper blush overspread Franz’s face, and a look of anger shot from his eyes, as his father contemptuously let fall those words.
Franz loved his wife; but he knew the disparity between them. She was not old to him, for he loved her,—was happy with her; but although to him she was as young as a bride, he knew what others said of her—what others thought of her. For himself he felt that
“Age could not wither, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety;”
yet he trembled at his father’s knowing she was his wife.
Schoenlein, who had observed the blush on Franz’s countenance, walked up to him and, placing one hand upon his shoulder, said—
“Franz, Franz, beware! You are on the edge of an abyss: the worst temptations of our miserable profession beset you. Beware of that artful old woman:—do not frown, she is artful,—I have heard of her! She has ruined more young men than any woman now upon the stage. She has ensnared you;—do not attempt to deny it,—I see it in your countenance. She has flattered and cajoled you. She has lured you with languishing looks and sweet low words. You are already her dupe;—beware lest you become her victim!”
“I cannot,” said Franz, rising wrathfully, “I must not, I will not, hear this language of her.”
“You must and shall hear it. Why should I hesitate to utter the contempt I feel for that refuse of a hundred libertines!”
Franz was purple with suppressed passion, and, with terrible calmness, said:—
“You are speaking, sir, of MY WIFE!”
Schoenlein’s lower jaw fell; his eyes became glazed, and, slowly sinking on the sofa, he waved his hand for his son to withdraw.