But though of great interest to me, I cannot say any more about my doings at the London Athletic Club, because other more important matters have to be told. What with running and cricket matches against other Fire and Life Insurance Offices, I now got plenty of exercise and felt exceedingly well and keen to proceed with the most important business of my life—which was, of course, to become a tragic actor and play in the greatest dramatic achievements of the human mind.
VIII
At last there came the solemn evening when I arrived at the Dramatic School.
It was in a quiet sort of corner off the top of Regent Street, and I got there at six o’clock for my first lesson in the Thespian art. No less than four other youngish men had already assembled, and with them was an old or, at any rate, distinctly oldish man of rather corpulent appearance, with a clean-shaved face and grey hair. I thought at first he was the famous actor and elocutionist, Mr. Montgomery Merridew, of universal fame, who was to be my instructor in elocution and stage deportment; but judge of my surprise when I discovered that the distinctly oldish man was a pupil like myself! He gazed with rather an envious look at the other pupils, and no doubt wished that he had turned to the art earlier in life; and I felt he was a fatherly and a kindly sort of man, and certainly added weight and dignity to the class.
He was called Henry Smith, but proposed to change this name for something more attractive when he got his first engagement; and the other men were named respectively Leonard Brightwin, Wilford Gooding, Harold Crowe, and George Arthur Dexter.
Naturally, I scanned their faces eagerly to see if any were destined to the highest tragical walks of the drama; and I found that two were evidently going to be low comedians. These were Harold Crowe and Wilford Gooding. Crowe was a fair man with rather prominent eyes, and he concealed his nervousness under a cloak of humour of a trivial character; and Gooding was thin, with a very small head and a comic face, which he could move about in a most grotesque manner. He and Crowe already knew each other. George Arthur Dexter had a keen and knowing face, and was exceedingly stylishly dressed in a check suit, with an ivory skeleton’s head in his tie, a carnation in his buttonhole, and several rings, which appeared to have genuine precious stones in them, on his hands. He had an assertive presence and seemed inclined to take the lead among us. He might easily have been mistaken for an actor already, and indeed told us that he was an old hand on the amateur boards.
He explained to us that he had only come for polish, and wasn’t really sure if Mr. Merridew would be able to teach him anything that he didn’t know already.
This man, curiously enough, was the first man I didn’t like in London. Of course I didn’t like the shady customer who pretended to be Mr. Martin Tupper, but I only hated him afterwards; whereas, in the case of Dexter, I felt a feeling of dislike from the start. He was so fearfully contented with himself, and his clothes, and his skeleton’s head and his great histrionic gifts.
But Leonard Brightwin was a very different sort of man. Genius blazed out of his black eyes; he wore his raven locks long, and from time to time tossed them back from his forehead in a very artistic manner. In fact, I felt in the presence of a future leader of the stage. He was of medium height and of shy and retiring nature; but one could not help feeling that Brightwin was born to be a great tragedian. I longed to be his friend from the first.
We all fell into conversation of a very animated sort, and Dexter, who greatly fancied his powers of imitating well-known actors, was just doing Mr. Edward Terry in The Forty Thieves (as he thought, though it was utterly unlike), when the door opened and no less a person than the renowned Mr. Montgomery Merridew stood before us.