"We have two great needs, however. Able as our writers are, they are nearly all essayists or journalists. As yet no great popular novelist has joined us—one of those supreme preachers who wield the magic wand of fiction and reach where no others can reach.
"And lastly, we have never had as yet a socialistic stage! That tremendous weapon, the theatre, has laid ready to our hand, but we have not availed ourselves of it. We are about to do so now. You know, I know, we are both experts, and it is our business to know, that there are hundreds of thousands of people who never read a book or pamphlet, and who are yet profoundly influenced and impressed by the mimic representations of life which they see upon the stage.
"You are a provincial actress. You have toured in ordinary melodrama. When, after some important act or scene, the characters are called before the curtain, what do you find? You find that some stick of a girl who has walked through the part of the heroine in a simper and a yellow wig is rapturously applauded—not for herself, the public thinks nothing of her acting one way or the other, but for the virtues of which she is the silly and inartistic symbol. The bad woman of the piece, always and invariably the finer player and more experienced artist, is hissed with genuine virulence.
"What is this but the very strongest proof—and there are dozens of other proofs if such were wanting—of the influence, the real and deep influence of the theatre upon the ordinary man and woman?
"It is to inaugurate the new use to which the theatre is going to be put by us that I have invited you to join us. But do not mistake me. We have taken the Park Lane Theatre by design. We are going to begin by showing the idle classes themselves the truth about themselves and their poorer brethren. They will come out of curiosity in the first instance, and afterwards because what we are going to give them is so unique, so extraordinary, and so artistically fine that they will be absolutely unable to neglect it. Then the movement will spread. We shall rouse the workers by this play, and others like it, in theatres which they can afford to attend. We shall have companies on tour—I may tell you that already a vast and detailed scheme is prepared, though I need not go into any of the details of that on this first night.
"And now, finally, let me tell you, quite briefly and without going into the scope of the plot, something about the first play of all at the Park Lane Theatre—your play, the play in which you are to create Helena Hardy. It is called, at present, The Socialist, and it is destined to be the first of a series. Its primary effort, in the carefully-thought-out scheme of theatre propaganda, is to draw a lurid picture of the extreme and awful contrast between the lives of the poor and the rich.
"We are going to do what has never been really done before—we are going to be extraordinarily and mercilessly realistic. It will be called brutal. And our studies are going to be made at first hand. In attacking one class, we are also going to allow it to be known that all our actual scenes have been taken from life. The slums to the north of Oxford Street, all round Paddington, are hideous and dreadful. They all belong to one man, the young Duke of Paddington, a boy at Oxford; incredibly rich. The theatre itself is on his land. Well, we are going to go for this young man tooth and nail, hammer and tongs, because he is typical of the class we wish to destroy. We are going to let it be generally known that this is our object. It will be published abroad that the slum scenes in the play are literal reproductions of actual scenes on the duke's property. Our scene painters are even now at work taking notes. One by one all the members of the cast are going to be taken to see these actual slums, to converse with their inhabitants, to imbibe the frightful atmosphere of these modern infernos. We want every one to play with absolute conviction. I have arranged that a party shall leave this house in two days' time, a county council inspector and a couple of police inspectors are coming with us, in order to do this. You, I beg, Miss Marriott, will come, too."
He had been speaking for a considerable time with enormous earnestness and vivacity. Now he stopped suddenly and sank into a chair. His face became pale again, he was manifestly tired.
Some one passed him a box of cigarettes. He lit one, inhaled the smoke in a few deep breaths, and then turned to Mary.
"Well?" he said.