“It was not until I read the book, years later, that I found out what sort of woman Sabatini meant Climene to be. She was a child just on the verge of love whose ambition was to find a rich protector and make the best bargain for her beauty. That wasn’t in Milady’s range, physically or temperamentally, for there was nothing calculating or cheap about her. So, by patient re-writing of the lines during rehearsals, she became a witty, large-hearted actress, as young as the audience would believe her to be, but certainly no child, and no beauty. Or should I say that? She had a beauty all her own, of that rare kind that only great comic actresses have; she had beauty of voice, boundless charm of manner, and she made you feel that merely pretty women were lesser creatures. She had also I cannot tell how many decades of technique behind her, because she had begun her career when she really was a child, in Irving’s Lyceum, and she could make even an ordinary line sound like wit.
“I saw all of that, and felt it through and through me like the conviction of religion, but still, alas, I saw that she was old, and eccentric, and there was a courageous pathos about what she was doing.
“I was bursting with loyalty—a new and disturbing emotion for me—and Two, two went just as Sir John wanted it. My reward was that when I appeared on the tightrope there was an audible gasp from the house, and the curtain came down to great applause and even a few cries of Bravo. They were for Sir John; of course I knew that and wished it to be so. But I was aware that without me that climax would have been a lesser achievement.
“The play went on, it seemed to me, from triumph to triumph, and the last act, in Madame de Plougastel’s salon, shook me as it had never done in rehearsal. When André-Louis Moreau, now a leader in the Revolution, was told by the tearful Madame de Plougastel that she was his mother and that his evil genius, the Marquis de la Tour d’Azyr, was his father—this revelation drawn from her only when Moreau had his enemy at the sword’s point—it seemed to me drama could go no higher. The look that came over Sir John’s face of disillusion and defeat, before he burst into Scaramouche’s mocking laugh, I thought the perfection of acting. And so it was. It wouldn’t do now—quite out of fashion—but if you’re going to act that kind of thing, that’s the way to do it.
“Lots of curtain calls. Flowers for Milady and some for Adele Chesterton, who had not been very good but who was so pretty you wanted to eat her with a silver spoon. Sir John’s speech, which I came to know very well, in which he declared himself and Milady to be the audience’s ‘most obedient, most devoted, and most humble servants’. Then the realities of covering the furniture with dust-sheets, covering the tables of properties, checking the time-sheet with Macgregor, and watching him hobble off to put the prompt-copy to bed in the safe. Then taking off my own paint, with a feeling of exaltation and desolation combined, as if I had never been so happy before, and would certainly never be so happy again.
“It was never the custom in that company to sit up and wait to see what the newspapers said; I think that was always more New York’s style than London’s. But when I went to the theatre the following afternoon to attend to some duties, all the reports were in but those of the great Sunday thunderers, which were very important indeed. Most of the papers said kind things, but even I sensed something about these criticisms that I could have wished otherwise expressed, or not said at all. ‘Unabashed romanticism … proof positive that the Old School is still vital … dear, familiar situations, resolved in the manner hallowed by romance … Sir John’s perfect command shows no sign of diminution with the years … Lady Tresize brings a wealth of experience to a role which, in younger hands, might have seemed contrived … Sabatini is a gift to players who require the full-flavoured melodrama of an earlier day … where do we look today for acting of this scope and authority?’
“Among the notices there had been one, in the News-Chronicle, where a clever new young man was on the job, which was downright bad. PITCHER GOES TOO OFTEN TO WELL, it was headed, and it said flatly that the Tresizes were old-fashioned and hammy, and should give way to the newer theatre.
“When the Sunday papers came, the Observer took the same line as the dailies, as though they had been looking at something very fine, but through the wrong end of the binoculars; it made Scaramouche seem small and very far away. James Agate, in the Sunday Times, condemned the play, which he likened to clockwork, and used Sir John and Milady as sticks to beat modern actors who did not know how to speak or move, and were ill bred and brittle.
“ ‘Nothing there to pull ’em in,’ I heard Holroyd saying to Macgregor.
“Nevertheless, we did pull ’em in for nearly ten weeks. Business was slack at the beginning of each week, and grew from Wednesday onward; matinees were usually sold out, chiefly to women from the suburbs, in town for a look at the shops and a play. But I knew from the gossip that business like that, in a London theatre, was covering running costs at best, and the expenses of production were still on the Guvnor’s overdraft. He seemed cheerful, and I soon found out why. He was going to do the old actor-manager’s trick and play Scaramouche as long as it would last and then replace it ‘by popular request’ with a few weeks of his old war-horse, The Master of Ballantrae.”
“Oh my God!” said Ingestree, and it seemed to me that he turned a little white.
“You remember this play?” said Lind.
“Vividly,” said Roly.
“A very bad play?”
“I don’t want to hurt the feelings of our friend here, who feels so strong about the Tresizes,” said Ingestree. “It’s just that The Master of Ballantrae coincided with rather a low point in my own career. I was finding my feet in the theatre, and it wasn’t really the kind of thing I was looking for.”
“Perhaps you would like me to pass over it,” said Magnus, and although he was pretending to be solicitous I knew he was enjoying himself.
“Is it vital to your subtext?” said Ingestree, and he too was half joking.
“It is, really. But I don’t want to give pain, my dear fellow.”
“Don’t mind me. Worse things have happened since.”
“Perhaps I can be discreet,” said Magnus. “You may rely on me to be as tactful as possible.”
“For God’s sake don’t do that,” said Ingestree. “In my experience tact is usually worse than the brutalities of truth. Anyhow, my recollections of that play can’t be the same as yours. My troubles were mostly private.”
“Then I shall go ahead. But please feel free to intervene whenever you feel like it. Put me right on matters of fact. Even on shades of opinion. I make no pretence of being an exact historian.”
“Shoot the works,” said Ingestree. “I’ll be as still as a mouse. I promise.”
“As you wish. Well—The Master of Ballantrae was another of the Guvnor’s romantic specials. It too was from a novel, by somebody-or-other—”
“By Robert Louis Stevenson,” said Ingestree, in an undertone, “though you wouldn’t have guessed it from what appeared on the stage. These adaptations! Butcheries would be a better word—”
“Shut up, Roly,” said Kinghovn. “You said you’d be quiet.”
“I’m no judge of what kind of adaptation it was,” said Magnus, “because I haven’t read the book and I don’t suppose I ever will. But it was a good, tight, well-caulked melodrama, and people had been eating it up since the Guvnor first brought it out, which I gathered was something like thirty years before the time I’m talking about. I told you he was an experimenter and an innovator, in his day. Well, whenever he had lost a packet on Maeterlinck, or something new by Stephen Phillips, he would pull The Master out of the storehouse and fill up the bank-account again. He could go to Birmingham, and Manchester, and Newcastle, and Glasgow, and Edinburgh or any big provincial town—and those towns had big theatres, not like the little pill-boxes in London—and pack ’em in with the The Master. Especially Edinburgh, because they seemed to take the play for their own. Macgregor told me, ‘The Master’s been a mighty get-penny for Sir John.’ When you saw him in it you knew why it was so. It was made for him.”