I felt it was the supreme event of my life. It was the moment. And surely I should have spoilt it all unless my old-time friends had been sitting near me.
Eva and Julian were with Mr. and Mrs. Gunton-Cresswell in the box opposite us. To the Barrel Club I had sent the first row of the dress circle. It was expensive, but worth it. Hatton and Sidney Price were in the stalls. Tom Blake had preferred a free pass to the gallery. Kit and Malim were at the back of the upper circle (this was, Malim told me, Kit’s own choice).
One by one the members of the orchestra took their places for the overture, and it was to the appropriate strains of “Land of Hope and Glory” that the curtain rose on the first act of my play.
The first act, I should mention (though it is no doubt superfluous to do so) is bright and suggestive, but ends on a clear, firm note of pathos. That is why, as soon as the lights went up, I levelled my glasses at the eyes of the critics. Certainly in two cases, and, I think, in a third, I caught the glint of tear-drops. One critic was blowing his nose, another sobbed like a child, and I had a hurried vision of a third staggering out to the foyer with his hand to his eyes. Margaret was removing her own tears with a handkerchief. Mrs. Goodwin’s unmoved face may have hidden a lacerated soul, but she did not betray herself. Hers may have been the thoughts that lie too deep for tears. At any rate, she did not weep. Instead, she drew from her reticule the fragmentary writings of an early Portuguese author. These she perused during the present and succeeding entr’actes.
Pressing Margaret’s hand, I walked round to the Gunton-Cresswells’s box to see what effect the act had had on them. One glance at their faces was enough. They were long and hard. “This is a real compliment,” I said to myself, for the whole party cut me dead. I withdrew, delighted. They had come, of course, to assist at my failure. I had often observed to Julian how curiously lacking I was in dramatic instinct, and Julian had predicted to Eva and her aunt and uncle a glorious fiasco. They were furious at their hopes being so egregiously disappointed. Had they dreamt of a success they would have declined to be present. Indeed, half-way through Act Two, I saw them creeping away into the night.
The Barrel Club I discovered in the bar. As I approached, I heard Michael declare that “there’d not been such an act produced since his show was put on at–-” He was interrupted by old Maundrell asserting that “the business arranged for valet reminded him of a story about Leopold Lewis.”
They, too, added their quota to my cup of pleasure by being distinctly frigid.
Ascending to the gallery I found another compliment awaiting me. Tom Blake was fast asleep. The quality of Blake’s intellect was in inverse ratio to that of Mrs. Goodwin. Neither of them appreciated the stuff that suited so well the tastes of the million; and it was consequently quite consistent that while Mrs. Goodwin dozed in spirit Tom Blake should snore in reality.
With Hatton and Price I did not come into contact. I noticed, however, that they wore an expression of relief at the enthusiastic reception my play had received.
But an encounter with Kit and Malim was altogether charming. They had had some slight quarrel on the way to the theatre, and had found a means of reconciliation in their mutual emotion at the pathos of the first act’s finale. They were now sitting hand in hand telling each other how sorry they were. They congratulated me warmly.
A couple of hours more, and the curtain had fallen.
The roar, the frenzied scene, the picture of a vast audience, half-mad with excitement—how it all comes back to me.
And now, as I sit in this quiet smoking-room of a St. Peter’s Port hotel, I hear again the shout of “Author!” I see myself again stepping forward from the wings. That short appearance of mine, that brief speech behind the footlights fixed my future….
“James Orlebar Cloyster, the plutocratic playwright, to Margaret, only daughter of the late Eugene Grandison Goodwin, LL.D.”
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