Lucian the dreamer

by J. S. Fletcher

‘Yes,’ answered the critic. He puffed thoughtfully at his cigar. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I think we have heard some beautiful poetry, beautifully recited. But I confess to feeling a certain sense of incongruity in the attempt to mingle Greek art with modern stage accessories. I think Damerel’s tragedy will read delightfully—in the study. But I counted several speeches to-night which would run to two and three pages of print, and I saw many people yawn. I fear that others will yawn.’

‘What would you give it?’ said the actor. ‘The other ran for twelve months.’

‘This,’ said the critic, ‘may run for one. But I think Harcourt will have to withdraw it within three weeks. I am bearing the yawns in mind.’

CHAPTER XXII

Lucian’s tragedy ran for precisely seventeen nights. The ‘attempt to revive Tragedy on the lines of pure Greek Art’ was a failure. Everybody thought the poetry very beautiful, but there were too many long speeches and too few opportunities for action and movement to satisfy a modern audience, and Harcourt quickly discovered that not even magnificent scenery and crowds of supernumeraries arrayed in garments of white and gold and purple and green will carry a play through. He was in despair from the second night onwards, for it became evident that a great deal of cutting was necessary, and on that point he had much trouble with Lucian, who, having revised his work to the final degree, was not disposed to dock it in order to please the gods in the gallery. The three weeks during which the tragedy ran were indeed weeks of storm and stress. The critics praised the poetry of the play, the staging, the scenery, the beauty and charm of everything connected with it, but the public yawned. In Lucian’s previous play there had been a warm, somewhat primitive human interest—it took those who saw it into the market-place of life, and appealed to everyday passions; in the new tragedy people were requested to spend some considerable time with the gods in Olympus amidst non-human characteristics and qualities. No one, save a few armchair critics like Mr. Chilverstone, wished to breathe this diviner air; the earlier audiences left the theatre cold and untouched. ‘It makes you feel,’ said somebody, ‘as if you had been sitting amongst a lot of marble statues all night and could do with something warming to the blood.’ In this way the inevitable end came. All the people who really wanted to see the tragedy had seen it within a fortnight; during the next few nights the audiences thinned and the advance bookings represented small future business, and before the end of the third week Harcourt had withdrawn the attempt to revive tragedy on the lines of pure Greek Art, and announced a revival of an adaptation from a famous French novel which had more than once proved its money-earning powers.

Lucian said little of this reverse of fortune—he was to all appearance unmoved by it; but Sprats, who could read his face as easily as she could read an open book, saw new lines write themselves there which told of surprise, disappointment, and anxiety, and she knew from his subdued manner and the unwonted reticence which he observed at this stage that he was thinking deeply of more things than one. In this she was right. Lucian by sheer force of circumstances had been dragged to a certain point of vantage whereat he was compelled to stand and look closely at the prospect which confronted him. When it became evident that the tragedy was a failure as a money-making concern, he remembered, with a sudden shock that subdued his temperamental buoyancy in an unpleasant fashion, that he had not foreseen such a contingency, and that he had confidently expected a success as great as the failure was complete. He sat down in his study and put the whole matter to himself in commendably brief fashion: for several months he and Haidee had been living and spending money on anticipation; it was now clear that the anticipation was not to be realised. The new volume was selling very slowly; the tragedy was a financial failure; very little in the way of solid cash would go from either to the right side of Lucian’s account at Darlington’s. And on the wrong side there must be an array of figures which he felt afraid to think of. He hurriedly cast up in his mind a vague account of those figures which memory presented to him; when he added the total to an equally vague guess of what Haidee might have spent, he recognised that he must be in debt to the bank to a considerable amount. He had never had the least doubt that the tragedy would prove a gold-mine—everybody had predicted it. Darlington had predicted it a hundred times, and Darlington was a keen, hard-headed business man. Well, the tragedy was a failure—to use the expressive term of the man in the street, ‘there was no money in it.’ It was to have replenished Lucian’s coffers—it left them yawning.

Easy-going and thoughtless though he was, Lucian had a constitutional dislike of owing money to any one, and the thought that he was now in debt to his bankers irritated and annoyed him. Analysed to a fine degree, it was not that he was annoyed because he owed money, but because he was not in a position to cancel the debt with a few scratches of his pen, and so relieve himself of the disagreeable necessity of recognising his indebtedness to any one. He had a temperamental dislike of unpleasant things, and especially of things which did not interest him—his inherited view of life had caused him to regard it as a walk through a beautiful garden under perpetual sunshine, with full liberty to pluck whatever flower appealed to his eye, eat whatever fruit tempted his palate, and turn into whatever side-walk took his fancy. Now that he was beginning to realise that it is possible to wander out of such a garden into a brake full of thorns and tangles, and to find some difficulty in escaping therefrom, his dislike of the unpleasant was accentuated and his irritation increased. But there was a certain vein of method and of order in him, and when he really recognised that he had got somewhere where he never expected to be, he developed a sincere desire to find out at once just where he was. The present situation had some intellectual charm for him: he had never in all his life known what it was to want money; it had always come to his hand as manna came to the Israelites in the desert—he wondered, as these unwonted considerations for the present and the future filled him, what would develop from it.

‘It will be best to know just where one really is,’ he thought, and he went off to find his wife and consult with her. It was seldom that he ever conversed with her on any matter of a practical nature; he had long since discovered that Haidee was bored by any topic that did not interest her, or that she did not understand. She scarcely grasped the meaning of the words which Lucian now addressed to her, simple though they were, and she stared at him with puzzled eyes.

‘You see,’ he said, feeling that his explanation was inept and crude, ‘I’d fully expected to have an awful lot of money out of the book and the play, and now, it seems, there won’t be so much as I had anticipated. Of course there will be Robertson’s royalties, and so on, but I don’t think they will amount to very much for the half-year, and——’

Haidee interrupted him.