Later, over years, he would hear hints and snatches of what had occurred. He never discovered everything, but he knew this much: that the clash between the invited audience and those above them who had paid was as unbridgeable as the gap between himself and the audience at the Oscar Wilde play. The paying public, it seemed, had begun to shift and shuffle, cough and whisper, even before the first act was over. In the second act they laughed when Mrs Edward Saker appeared in her large and expansive period costume. And once they began to laugh, they began to enjoy being offensive. It was not long before the laughter turned to jeers.
He learned later, much later also, what happened when Alexander uttered his last lines: ‘I’m the last, my lord, of the Domvilles.’ Someone from the gallery had shouted, ‘It’s a damned good thing you are!’ They hooted and roared and when the curtain came down they catcalled and yelled abuse as those in the stalls and dress circle applauded enthusiastically.
That night he entered the theatre by the stage door, meeting on arrival the stage manager, who assured him that all had gone well, his play was a success. Something about the way it was said made Henry want to enquire further, find out the scale and quality of the success, but just then the first applause came, and he listened, mistaking the catcalls for roars of approval. He glimpsed Alexander, noted how stiff and serious he was as he came off the stage and waited for a moment before returning to take his bow. He moved closer to the side of the stage, certain that Alexander and the other actors were triumphant. The whistles and roars, he still believed, indicated special approval of one or two of the performers, Alexander surely among them.
He stood and listened, close enough to the wings for Alexander to see him as he walked off from taking his bow. Later, he was told that there were wild shouts of ‘Author! Author!’ from his friends in the audience, but they were not wild enough for him to hear. Alexander heard them, however, or so he later said, because on catching the author’s eye he approached him, his face solemn, his expression fixed, and led him slowly and firmly by the hand onto the stage.
This was the crowd he had imagined over those long days of rehearsal. He had imagined them attentive and ready to be moved, he had imagined them still and sombre. He had not prepared himself for the chaos of noise and busy fluttering. He took it in for a moment, confused, and then he bowed. And when he lifted his head he realized what he was facing. In the stalls and in the gallery the members of the paying public were hissing and booing. He looked around and saw mockery and contempt. The invited audience remained seated, still applauding, but the applause was drowned out by the crescendo of loud, rude disapproval which came from the people who had never read his books.
The worst part was now – when he did not know what to do, when he could not control the expression on his own face, the look of panic he could not prevent. And now he could make out the faces of friends – Sargent, Gosse, Philip Burne-Jones – still gallantly applauding, futile against the yells of the mob. Nothing had prepared him for this. Slowly, he moved off the stage. He did not attend to Alexander’s speech to calm the audience. He blamed Alexander for leading him onto the stage, he blamed the crowd for booing, but more than anyone he blamed himself for being here. There was no alternative now, he would have to leave by the stage door. He had dreamed so much of moments of triumph, mingling with the invited guests, pleased that so many old friends had come to witness his theatrical success. Now he would walk home and keep his head down like a man who has committed a crime and is in imminent danger of apprehension.
He waited in the shadows backstage so that he would not have to see the actors. Nor did he wish to leave just yet as he did not know whom he might see in the streets around the theatre. Neither he nor they would know what to say, so great and so public was his defeat. For his friends, this night would be entered into the annals of the unmentionable, pages in which he had so studiously avoided having his name appear. As time passed, however, he realized that he could not betray the performers now. He could not give into his own horrible urge to be alone in the darkness, to escape into the night and walk as though he had written nothing and was nobody. He would have to go to them and thank them; he would have to insist that the repast planned after the triumph of his play should go ahead. In the half light he stood preparing himself, steeling himself, ready to suppress whatever his own urges and needs might be. He made his hands into fists as he set out to smile and bow and imagine that the evening in all its glory had been due entirely to the talents of the actors in the great tradition of the London stage.
CHAPTER TWO
AFTER THE FAILURE OF Guy Domville, his determination to work did battle with the feeling that he had been defeated and exposed. He had failed, he realized, to take the measure of the great flat foot of the public, and he now had to face the melancholy fact that nothing he did would ever be popular or generally appreciated. Most of the time he could, if he tried, control his thoughts. What he could not control was the terrible ache of the morning, an ache that stretched now towards noon and often did not lift. There was a line in Oscar Wilde’s play that he had liked in which the question was put – did the sadness of Londoners cause the fog or did the fog cause the sadness? His sadness, he thought, as the spare light of the winter morning peered in his window, was like the London fog. Except that it did not seem to lift, and it was accompanied by a weariness that was new to him, and a lethargy that shocked and depressed him.
He wondered if at some point in the future he would go out of fashion even more than now, and if the dividends from his father’s estate were to dry up, whether his reduced circumstances would represent a public humiliation. It came down to money, the sweetness it added to the soul. Money was a kind of grace. Everywhere he had been, the having of it and the holding of it had set people apart. It gave men a beautiful distant control over the world, and it gave women a poised sense of themselves, an inner light which even old age could not obliterate.
It was easy to feel that he was destined to write for the few, perhaps for the future, yet never to reap the rewards that he would relish now, such as his own house and a beautiful garden and no anxiety about what was to come. He retained his pride in decisions taken, the fact that he had never compromised, that his back ached and his eyes hurt solely because he continued to labour all day at an art that was pure and unconstrained by mere mercenary ambitions.
For his father and his brother, and for many in London too, a failure in the market was a kind of success, and a success in the market a matter not to be discussed. He did not ever in his life actively seek the hard doom of general popularity. Nonetheless, he wanted his books to sell, he wanted to shine in the marketplace and pocket the proceeds without compromising his sacred art in any way.
It mattered to him how he was seen; and being seen not to lift a finger to make his works popular pleased him; being seen to devote himself in solitude and selfless application to a noble art gave him satisfaction. He recognized, however, that lack of success was one thing, but abject failure was another. Thus his failure in the theatre, so public, so notorious and so transparent, managed to make him uneasy in company and unwilling to venture much into the wider world of London society. He felt like a general who had come back from a battlefield complete with a scent of defeat, and whose presence in the warm bright rooms of London would seem incongruous and unhappy.