Young Lives

by Richard Le Gallienne

A cordial answer came by return, enclosing two stalls for the following evening, when, said the great actor, he would be glad to see Mr. Laflin during or after the performance. The two young men were in their places as the curtain rose, and it goes without saying that their enthusiasm was unequalled in the audience. Between the third and fourth acts there was a considerable interval, and early in the performance it had been notified to Mike that the great actor would see him then. So when the time came, with a whispered "good luck" from Henry, he left his place and was led through a little mysterious iron door at the back of the boxes, on to the stage and into the great man's dressing-room. Opening suddenly out of the darkness at one side of the stage, it was more like a brilliantly lighted cave hung with mirrors than a room. Mirrors and lights and laurel wreaths with cards attached, and many photographs with huge signatures scrawled across them, and a magnificent being reading a book, while his dresser laced up some high boots he was to wear in the following act,--made Mike's first impression. Then the magnificent being looked up with a charming smile.

"Good-evening, Mr. Laflin. I am delighted to see you. I hope you will excuse my rising."

He said "Mr. Laflin" with a captivating familiarity of intonation, as though Mike was something between an old friend and a distinguished stranger.

"So you are thinking of joining our profession. I hope you liked the performance. I saw you in front, or at least I thought it was you. And your friend? I hope he will come and see me some other time. I have been delighted with his poems."

There is something dazzling and disconcerting to an average layman about an actor's dressing-room, even though the dressing-room be that of an intimate friend. He feels like a being on the confines of two worlds and belonging to neither, awkwardly suspended 'twixt fact and fancy. The actor for a while has laid aside his part and forgotten his wig and his make-up. As he talks to you, he is thinking of himself merely as a private individual; whereas his visitor cannot forget that in appearance he is a king, or an eighteenth-century dandy, or--though you know him well enough as a clean-shaven young man of thirty--a bowed and wrinkled greybeard. The visitor's voice rings thin and hestitating. It cannot strike the right pitch, and generally he does himself no sort of justice.

Perhaps, however, it was because Mike had been born for this world in which now for the first time he found himself, that he suffered from none of this embarrassment; perhaps, too, it was some half-conscious instinct of his own gifts that made him quite self-contained in the presence of acknowledged distinction, so self-contained that you might have thought he had no reverence. As he had passed across the stage, he had eyed that mysterious behind-the-scenes rather with the eye of a future stage-manager, than of a youth all whose dreams converged at this point, and at this moment.

One touch of the poetry of contrast caught his eye, of which custom would probably have made him unobservant. In an alcove of the stage, a "scene-dock," as Mike knew already to call it, a beautiful spirit in gauze and tights was silently rehearsing to herself a dance which she had to perform in the next act. Softly and silently she danced, absorbed in the evolutions of her lithe young body, paying as little heed to the rough stage-hands who hurried scenery about her on every side, as those hardened stage-hands paid to her dancing. Henry or Ned would probably have fallen madly in love with her on the spot. To Mike, she was but a part of the economy of the stage; and had she been Cleopatra herself, eyes filled to overflowing with the beauty of Esther would have taken no more intimate note of her. So, it is said, painters and sculptors regard their models with cold, artistic eyes.

This self-possession enabled Mike to show to the best advantage; and while they talked, the great actor, with an eye accustomed to read faces, soon made up his mind about him.

"I believe you and your friend are right, Mr. Laflin," he said. "I am much mistaken if you are not a born actor. But if you are that, you will not need to be told that the way is long and difficult, nor will you mind that it is so. Every true artist rather loves than fears the drudgery of his art. It is one of the tests of his being an artist. Art is undoubtedly the pleasantest of all work; but it is work for all that, and none of the easiest. Perhaps it is the pleasantest because it is the hardest. So if you really want to be an artist, you won't object to beginning your journey to the top right away at the bottom."

"Anywhere at all, sir," said Mike, his heart beating at this hint of what was coming.