“I never thought of that. Oh, but how interesting if it is so! But it can’t be, because that would make him like a real person, and modern plays never resemble real people in any way. No; I bet you it is a bad play. Mr. Amherst is going to develop some totally new and overpowering characteristic which will make the whole of the first act a waste of time. Do bet!”
“On the possible ability of Andrew Robb?” asked Mrs. Allbutt. “I have seen nothing to warrant it.”
The opinion of the house in general tended to coincide with Hugh’s; and the critics, those Olympians of the intellect, who can leave a theatre not before eleven in the evening and have a column about it in their respective engines of the press next morning, yawned, gathered together in the foyer, with a sense of coming futility. Those, too, who had come in obedience to Peggy’s commands wondered whether Andrew Robb might not be some discovery of hers whom she had found scribbling fragments of dialogue in the dinner-hour at the leadless glaze factory. Certainly it was very clever of him if this was so, and also very clever of dear Peggy, even if it was pushing leadless glaze rather far. No doubt at her little gathering to-night after the play one would glean something. And the band, having chopped “Pagliacci” up into bits, like murderers trying to conceal a body, was silent again, and the curtain rose for the second time.
It had not long been up when silence of quite another quality began to spread like some waveless tide over the theatre. What had seemed idle talk in the first act took significance, and on what was dark and featureless a dawn, sad enough no doubt but intensely human, began to show the contours of landscape; the audience began to “see.” Little careless sentences, remembered because of a certain distinction and unusualness in them, flashed back again into the brain; here was their meaning; they were plot, they were character. And the inconsistent, vacillating hero became every moment more pathetically human. His inadequacy in dealing with little things developed into the helplessness of a weak man before things that are not little. Poignant domestic suffering, remediable probably by a strong man, seemed to paralyse him; he could not make his move, his gambit. Slowly too and inevitably the counteraction of her who was becoming his adversary was apparent.
It was a short act, and the curtain came down swift as the guillotine knife with supreme dramatic fitness the moment that the whole of the position that had through indecision become almost irremediable was revealed. Then for a moment there was dead silence and afterward, before any applause, a huge buzz of eager conversation, everyone talking to his neighbour, argumentative, each with his own idea of the solution, of the gambit that would be selected in the third and last act. To the audience the play had ceased to be a play; it had become a piece of life, and in an hour the actors had become old friends. Stalls argued right and left; boxes were knots of eager disputation; the pit was babel. And for some three minutes this went on.
Hugh was characteristic of the rest.
“Oh, I am glad I didn’t bet,” he said, “because, of course, that is the point! He might do several things all of which would be characteristic. What heavenly people, poor wretches! Why, they are like you and me—so I suppose we’re heavenly too. It isn’t a play at all. It’s It! What will be the way out? Why, we are in the theatre after all!”
He stood up and began applauding violently. The same fact—namely, that they were in a theatre—seemed to strike the rest of the house simultaneously, and from the buzz of conversation there rose the storm of clapping and shouting. And once again Peggy looked secretly across to her sister.
The usual barbaric ceremonies followed; the principal actor appeared, with a fearful grin on his face, bowed, and retired. He came on again and did it again. Then for the third time he appeared, hand-in-hand with the leading lady, and repeated this double appearance. Again and again he appeared each time leading on an additional character, in the manner of “The House that Jack Built,” till everybody who had been seen at all, down to the typewriter who was mute throughout the action, had joined his procession. Then the curtain went finally down, and stray bars of “Cavalleria” were occasionally heard, for nobody left the theatre, but continued arguing till it went up again.
Tense silence, but after some ten minutes somebody blew his nose. Pure, simple pathos, the striving of a weak man to do his best and finding his best failing was there. But with that a certain bravery, foreshadowed from the beginning, a quiet courage began to grow out of the wreck. And then came the simple solution, quite unexpected but absolutely sincere and inevitable, sad perhaps with the sadness of sunset, but bringing its own consolation in the fact of the hot weary day being over.