Nourished on skimmed newspaper, hashed review articles, minced magazines in the form of summaries, and short stories of dubious morality, was it likely that their brains could be in a condition to receive good wholesome literary food?
Macneillie had long been aware that a wave of evil tendency was passing over literature and the drama, he had struggled on, never allowing it to influence his choice of plays, sure that in time the “evil on itself would back recoil,” and faithful to his own conviction of what was a manager’s duty. But he began now to think that, before the force of this wave of uncleanness had spent itself, it would altogether submerge his fortune and leave him a ruined man.
One of the things that tried him most severely was the timidity of those who should have been his best supporters. The clergy with a few noteworthy exceptions fulminated against the evil plays but failed to support the good. He knew that hundreds of them would troop to Washington’s theatre when they went to London, but they were generally conspicuous by their absence from the theatres in their own towns where their presence might really have done much good. Personally they respected him and spoke of him in warm terms, but very few of them at all understood how hard a fight this man was making in a time of exceptional difficulty, or how bitter it was to him when those, from whom he reasonably expected much, held aloof.
It was quite the end of September when the Macneillie Company found themselves once more at Liverpool. They were giving the plays they had performed at Stratford during the Memorial week, and this made Macneillie feel the loss of Ralph more acutely than ever. To turn straight from a pupil who had been extraordinarily receptive, always good-humoured, always ready to study, and grudging no pains in the effort to please his instructor and conquer his own faults, to a man of exactly the opposite type, was hard indeed. It was all the more annoying to Macneillie because Ralph’s successor had excellent abilities but was cursed with the conviction that he already knew everything a little better than the Manager; he had moreover been born with one of those touchy and wayward natures that are so hard to deal with. He lived in a perpetual state of taking offence, and though Macneillie apparently ignored this and went quietly on his way, it nevertheless chafed him a good deal.
Then, too, all the many vicissitudes of a travelling company—the illness of one, the quarrels of another—seemed to worry him more now that he was alone and had no one to discuss things with. The very rooms he occupied in Seymour Street were full of memories to him; he had stayed there more than once with Ralph and Evereld, it had been there that they had first come to him after their marriage, and the place looked horribly blank without them.
By the Thursday morning of their stay he was in the lowest spirits. For three nights they had played to wretchedly bad houses owing to counter attractions elsewhere; his old trouble of sleeplessness was returning and he felt ill and horribly depressed as he walked down through the wet dingy streets to the Shakspere Theatre. There was a rehearsal of Romeo and Juliet, and the insolent manner and insufferable conceit of the Juvenile Lead proved just the last straw. After going through some great agony in life, and going through it well and bravely we are sadly apt to break down under some quite trifling strain. A petty thing will irritate us absurdly in the reaction after great distress, and Macneillie lost his temper now and scolded the offending actor right royally. When an habitually quiet, self-restrained man does lose his temper he usually does it with great thoroughness. Romeo was impressed as he might have been by a sudden thunder storm on a winter’s day, but those who really knew the Manager were troubled at such an unwonted scene, and Ivy glanced at him with the conviction that his health was again breaking down.
It was an uncomfortable rehearsal and Macneillie went back to Seymour Street doubly depressed. His thoughts turned to that April afternoon at Stratford on the river. He had been strong then, but
“It is very good for strength
To know that someone needs you to be strong.”
Christine’s presence, though in one sense it had been his most severe trial, had been in another an incentive to endure. To-day, in his lonely room with food before him which he could not touch, with a brain exhausted by want of rest, and harassed by a hundred cares and annoyances, he came perilously near to yielding. For that was the worst of it. The struggle was not one to be gone through once and for all, it was constantly recurring. And always he had the consciousness that Christine’s reverence for law was weaker than his own, that she would quickly yield to his lightest word. It was moreover so fatally easy to go to her, so hard to be loyal to that shamefully unfair law of the land which should be reformed.