So much Arthur Berkeley, his own eyes glistening too with a sympathetic moisture, saw and heard before he went away in a happier mood and left them to their own domestic congratulations. But he did not see or know the reaction that came in the dead of night, after all that day’s unwonted excitement, to poor, sickening, weary, over-burdened Ernest. Even Edie never knew it all, for Ernest was careful to hide it as much as possible from her knowledge. But he knew himself, though he would not even light the candle to see it, that he had got those three glorious guineas—the guineas they had so delighted in—with something more than a morning’s labour. He had had to pay for them, not figuratively but literally, with some of his very life-blood.
CHAPTER XXV. — HARD PRESSED.
A week or two later, while ‘The Primate of Fiji’ was still running vigorously at the Ambiguities Theatre, Arthur Berkeley’s second opera, ‘The Duke of Bermondsey; or, the Bold Buccaneers of the Isle of Dogs,’ was brought out with vast success and immense exultation at the Marlborough. There is always a strong tendency to criticise a little severely the second work of a successful beginner: people like to assume a knowing air, and to murmur self-complacently that they felt sure from the beginning he couldn’t keep up permanently to his first level. But in spite of that natural tendency of the unregenerate human mind, and in spite, too, of a marked political bias on the author’s part, ‘The Duke of Bermondsey’ took the town by storm almost as completely as ‘The Primate of Fiji’ had done before it. Everybody said that though the principles of the piece were really quite atrocious, when one came to think of them seriously, yet the music and the dialogue were crisp and brisk enough to float any amount of social or economical heresy that that clever young man, Mr. Arthur Berkeley, might choose to put into one of his amusing and original operas.
The social and economical heresies, of course, were partly due to Ernest Le Breton’s insidious influence. At the same time that Berkeley was engaged in partially converting Ernest, Ernest was engaged in the counter process of partially converting Berkeley. To say the truth, the conversion was not a very difficult matter to effect; the neophyte had in him implicitly already the chief saving doctrines of the socialistic faith, or, if one must put it conversely, the germs of the disease were constitutionally implanted in his system, and only needed a little external encouragement to bring the poison out fully in the most virulent form of the complaint. The great point of ‘The Duke of Bermondsey’ consisted in the ridiculous contrast it exhibited between the wealth, dignity, and self-importance of the duke himself, and the squalid, miserable, shrinking poverty of the East-end purlieus from which he drew his enormous revenues. Ernest knew a little about the East-end from practical experience; he had gone there often with Ronald, on his rounds of mercy, and had seen with his own eyes those dens of misery which most people have only heard or read about. It was Ernest who had suggested this light satirical treatment of the great social problem, whose more serious side he himself had learnt to look at in Max Schurz’s revolutionary salon; and it was to Ernest that Arthur Berkeley owed the first hint of that famous scene where the young Countess of Coalbrookdale converses familiarly on the natural beauties of healthful labour with the chorus of intelligent colliery hands, in the most realistic of grimy costumes, from her father’s estates in Staffordshire. The stalls hardly knew whether to laugh or frown when the intelligent colliers respectfully invited the countess, in her best Ascot flounces and furbelows, to enjoy the lauded delights of healthful mine labour in propriâ personâ: but they quite recovered their good humour when the band of theatrical buccaneers, got up by the duke in Spanish costumes, with intent to deceive his lawless tenants in the East-end, came unexpectedly face to face with the genuine buccaneers of the Isle of Dogs, clothed in real costermonger caps and second-hand pilot-jackets of the marine-storedealers’ fashionable pattern. It was all only the ridiculous incongruity of our actual society represented in the very faintest shades of caricature upon the stage; but it made the incongruities more incongruous still to see them crowded together so closely in a single concentrated tableau. Unthinking people laughed uproariously at the fun and nonsense of the piece; thinking people laughed too, but not without an uncomfortable side twinge of conscientious remorse at the pity of it all. Some wise heads even observed with a shrug that when this sort of thing was applauded upon the stage, the fine old institutions of England were getting into dangerous contact with these pernicious continental socialistic theories. And no doubt those good people were really wise in their generation. ‘When Figaro came,’ Arthur Berkeley said himself to Ernest, ‘the French revolution wasn’t many paces behind on the track of the ages.’
‘Better even than the Primate, Mr. Berkeley,’ said Hilda Tregellis, as she met him in a London drawing-room a few days later. ‘What a delightful scene, that of the Countess of Coalbrookdale! You’re doing real good, I do believe, by making people think about these things more seriously, you know. As poor dear Mr. Le Breton would have said, you’ve got an ethical purpose—isn’t that the word?—underlying even your comic operas. By the way, do you ever see the Le Bretons now? Poor souls, I hear they’re doing very badly. The elder brother, Herbert Le Breton—horrid wretch!—he’s here to-night; going to marry that pretty Miss Faucit, they say; daughter of old Mr. Faucit, the candle-maker—no, not candles, soap I think it is—but it doesn’t matter twopence nowadays, does it? Well, as I was saying, you’re doing a great deal of good with characters like this Countess of Coalbrookdale. We want more mixture of classes, don’t we? more free intercourse between them; more familiarity of every sort. For my part, now, I should really very much like to know more of the inner life of the working classes.’ ‘If only he’d ask me to go to lunch,’ she thought, ‘with his dear old father, the superannuated shoemaker! so very romantic, really!’
But Arthur only smiled a sphinx-like smile, and answered lightly, ‘You would probably object to their treatment of you as much as the countess objected to the uupleasant griminess of the too-realistic coal galleries. Suppose you were to fall into the hands of a logical old radical workman, for example, who tore you to pieces, mentally speaking, with a shake or two of his big teeth, and calmly informed you that in his opinion you were nothing more than a very empty-headed, pretentious, ignorant young woman—perhaps even, after the plain-spoken vocabulary of hie kind, a regular downright minx and hussey?’
‘Charming,’ Lady Hilda answered, with perfect candour; ‘so very different from the senseless adulation of all the Hughs, and Guys, and Berties! What I do love in talking to clever men, Mr. Berkeley, is their delicious frankness and transparency. If they think one a fool, they tell one so plainly, or at least they let one see it without any reserve. Now that, you know, is really such a very delightful trait in clever people’s characters!’
‘I don’t know how you can have had the opportunity of judging, Lady Hilda,’ Arthur answered, looking at her handsome open face with a momentary glance of passing admiration—Hilda Tregellis was improving visibly as she matured—‘for no one can possibly ever have thought anything of the sort with you, I’m certain: and that I can say quite candidly, without the slightest tinge of flattery or adulation.’