Regent — The First Night
I
It was upon an evening in June--and a fine evening, full of the exquisite melancholy of summer in a city--that Edward Henry stood before a window, drumming thereon as he had once, a less-experienced man with hair slightly less grey, drummed on the table of the mighty and arrogant Slosson.
The window was the window of the managerial room of the Regent Theatre.
And he could scarcely believe it--he could scarcely believe that he was not in a dream--for the room was papered, carpeted and otherwise furnished.
Only its electric light fittings were somewhat hasty and provisional, and the white ceiling showed a hole and a bunch of wires--like the nerves of a hollow tooth--whence one of Edward Henry's favourite chandeliers would ultimately depend.
The whole of the theatre was at least as far advanced towards completion as that room.
A great deal of it was more advanced; for instance, the auditorium, _foyer_, and bars, which were utterly finished, so far as anything ever is finished in a changing world.
Wonders, marvels and miracles had been accomplished.
Mr. Alloyd, in the stress of the job, had even ceased to bring the Russian Ballet into his conversations.
Mr. Alloyd, despite a growing tendency to prove to Edward Henry by authentic anecdote, about midnight, his general proposition that women as a sex treated him with shameful unfairness, had gained the high esteem of Edward Henry as an architect.
He had fulfilled his word about those properties of the auditorium which had to do with hearing and seeing--in so much that the auditorium was indeed unique in London.
And he had taken care that the Clerk of the Works took care that the builder did not give up heart in the race with time.
Moreover, he had maintained the peace with the terrible London County Council, all of whose inspecting departments seemed to have secretly decided that the Regent Theatre should be opened, not in June as Edward Henry had decided, but at some vague future date towards the middle of the century.
Months earlier Edward Henry had ordained and announced that the Regent Theatre should be inaugurated on a given date in June, at the full height and splendour of the London season, and he had astounded the theatrical world by adhering through thick and thin to that date, and had thereby intensified his reputation as an eccentric; for the oldest inhabitant of that world could not recall a case in which the opening of a new theatre had not been promised for at least three widely different dates.
Edward Henry had now arrived at the eve of the dread date, and if he had arrived there in comparative safety, with a reasonable prospect of avoiding complete shame and disaster, he felt and he admitted that the credit was due as much to Mr. Alloyd as to himself.
Which only confirmed an early impression of his that architects were queer people--rather like artists and poets in some ways, but with a basis of bricks and mortar to them.
His own share in the enterprise of the Regent had in theory been confined to engaging the right people for the right tasks and situations; and to signing cheques.
He had depended chiefly upon Mr. Marrier, who, growing more radiant every day, had gradually developed into a sort of chubby Napoleon, taking an immense delight in detail and in choosing minor hands at round-sum salaries on the spur of the moment.
Mr. Marrier refused no call upon his energy.
He was helping Carlo Trent in the production and stage-management of the play.
He dried the tears of girlish neophytes at rehearsals.
He helped to number the stalls.
He showed a passionate interest in the tessellated pavement of the entrance.
He taught the managerial typewriting girl how to make afternoon tea.
He went to Hitchin to find a mediaeval chair required for the third act, and found it.
In a word, he was fully equal to the post of acting manager.
He managed!
He managed everything and everybody except Edward Henry, and except the press-agent, a functionary whose conviction of his own indispensability and importance was so sincere that even Marrier shared it and left him alone in his Bismarckian operations.
The press-agent, who sang in musical comedy chorus at night, knew that if the Regent Theatre succeeded it would be his doing and his alone.
And yet Edward Henry, though he had delegated everything, had yet found a vast amount of work to do; and was thereby exhausted.
That was why he was drumming on the pane.
That was why he was conscious of a foolish desire to shove his fist through the pane.
During the afternoon he had had two scenes with two representatives of the Libraries (so called because they deal in theatre-tickets and not in books) who had declined to take up any of his tickets in advance.
He had commenced an action against a firm of bill-posters.
He had settled an incipient strike in the 'limes' departments, originated by Mr. Cosmo Clark's views about lighting.
He had dictated answers to seventy-nine letters of complaint from unknown people concerning the supply of free seats for the first night.
He had responded in the negative to a request from a newspaper critic who, on the score that he was deaf, wanted a copy of the play.
He had replied finally to an official of the County Council about the smoke-trap over the stage.
He had replied finally to another official of the County Council about the electric sign.
He had attended to a new curiosity on the part of another official of the County Council about the iron curtain.
But he had been almost rude to still another official of the County Council about the wiring of the electric light in the dressing-rooms.
He had been unmistakably and pleasurably rude in writing to Slossons about their criticisms of the lock on the door of Lord Woldo's private entrance to the theatre.
Also he had arranged with the representative of the Chief Commissioner of Police concerning the carriage regulations for "setting-down and taking-up."
And he had indeed had more than enough.
His nerves, though he did not know it, and would have scorned the imputation, were slowly giving way.
Hence, really, the danger to the pane!
Through the pane, in the dying light, he could see a cross-section of Shaftesbury Avenue, and an aged newspaper-lad leaning against a lamp-post and displaying a poster which spoke of Isabel Joy.
Isabel Joy yet again!
That little fact of itself contributed to his exasperation.
He thought, considering the importance of the Regent Theatre and the salary he was paying to his press-agent, that the newspapers ought to occupy their pages solely with the metropolitan affairs of Edward Henry Machin.
But the wretched Isabel had, as it were, got London by the throat.
She had reached Chicago from the West, on her triumphant way home, and had there contrived to be arrested, according to boast, but she was experiencing much more difficulty in emerging from the Chicago prison than in entering it.
And the question was now becoming acute whether the emissary of the Militant Suffragettes would arrive back in London within the specified period of a hundred days.
Naturally, London was holding its breath.
London will keep calm during moderate crises--such as a national strike or the agony of the House of Lords--but when the supreme excitation is achieved London knows how to let itself go.
"If you please, Mr. Machin--" He turned.
It was his typewriter, Miss Lindop, a young girl of some thirty-five years, holding a tea-tray.
"But I've had my tea once!"
he snapped.
"But you've not had your dinner, sir, and it's half-past eight!"
she pleaded.
He had known this girl for less than a month, and he paid her fewer shillings a week than the years of her age--and yet somehow she had assumed a worshipping charge of him, based on the idea that he was incapable of taking care of himself.
To look at her appealing eyes one might have thought that she would have died to ensure his welfare.
"And they want to see you about the linoleum for the gallery stairs," she added timidly.
"The County Council man says it must be taken up."
The linoleum for the gallery stairs!
Something snapped in him.
He almost walked right through the young woman and the tea-tray.
"I'll linoleum them!"
he bitterly exclaimed, and disappeared.
II
Having duly "linoleumed them," or rather having very annoyingly quite failed to "linoleum them," Edward Henry continued his way up the right-hand gallery staircase, and reached the auditorium, where to his astonishment a good deal of electricity, at one penny three farthings a unit, was blazing.
Every seat in the narrow and high-pitched gallery, where at the sides the knees of one spectator would be on a level with the picture-hat of the spectator in the row beneath, had a perfect and entire view of the proscenium opening.
And Edward Henry now proved this unprecedented fact by climbing to the topmost corner seat and therefrom surveying the scene of which he was monarch.
The boxes were swathed in their new white dust-sheets; and likewise the higgledy-piggledy stalls, not as yet screwed down to the floor, save three or four stalls in the middle of the front row, from which the sheet had been removed.
On one of these seats, far off though it was, he could descry a paper bag--probably containing sandwiches--and on another a pair of gloves and a walking-stick.
Several alert ladies with sketch-books walked uneasily about in the aisles.
The orchestra was hidden in the well provided for it, and apparently murmuring in its sleep.
The magnificent drop-curtain, designed by Saracen Givington, A. R.
A.
, concealed the stage.
Suddenly Mr. Marrier and Carlo Trent appeared through the iron door that gave communication--to initiates--between the wings and the auditorium; they sat down in the stalls.
And the curtain rose with a violent swish, and disclosed the first "set" of "The Orient Pearl."
"What about that amber, Cosmo?"
Mr. Marrier cried thickly, after a pause, his mouth occupied with sandwich.
"There you are!"
came the reply.
"Right!"
said Mr. Marrier.
"Strike!"
"Don't strike!"
contradicted Carlo Trent.
"Strike, I tell you!
We must get on with the second act."
The voices resounded queerly in the empty theatre.
The stage was invaded by scene-shifters before the curtain could descend again.
Edward Henry heard a tripping step behind him.
It was the faithful typewriting girl.
"I say," he said.
"Do you mind telling me what's going on here?
It's true that in the rush of more important business I'd almost forgotten that a theatre is a place where they perform plays."
"It's the dress-rehearsal, Mr. Machin," said the woman, startled and apologetic.
"But the dress-rehearsal was fixed for three o'clock," said he.
"It must have been finished three hours ago."
"I think they've only just done the first act," the woman breathed.
"I know they didn't begin till seven.
Oh!
Mr. Machin, of course it's no affair of mine, but I've worked in a good many theatres, and I do think it's such a mistake to have the dress-rehearsal quite private.
If you get a hundred or so people in the stalls then it's an audience, and there's much less delay and everything goes much better.
But when it's private a dress-rehearsal is just like any other rehearsal."
"Only more so--perhaps," said Edward Henry, smiling.
He saw that he had made her happy; but he saw also that he had given her empire over him.
"I've got your tea here," she said, rather like a hospital-nurse now.
"Won't you drink it?"
"I'll drink it if it's not stewed," he muttered.
"Oh!"
she protested, "of course it isn't!
I poured it off the leaves into another teapot before I brought it up."
She went behind the barrier, and reappeared balancing a cup of tea with a slice of sultana cake edged on to the saucer.
And as she handed it to him--the sustenance of rehearsals--she gazed at him and he could almost hear her eyes saying: "You poor thing!"
There was nothing that he hated so much as to be pitied.
"You go home!"
he commanded.
"Oh, but--" "You go home!
See?"
He paused, threatening.
"If you don't clear out on the tick I'll chuck this cup and saucer down into the stalls."
Horrified, she vanished.
He sighed his relief.
After some time the leader of the orchestra climbed into his chair, and the orchestra began to play, and the curtain went up again, on the second act of the masterpiece in hexameters.
The new scenery, which Edward Henry had with extraordinary courage insisted on Saracen Givington substituting for the original incomprehensibilities displayed at the Azure Society's performance, rather pleased him.
Its colouring was agreeable, and it did resemble something definite.
You could, though perhaps not easily, tell what it was meant to represent.
The play proceeded, and the general effect was surprisingly pleasant to Edward Henry.
And then Rose Euclid as Haidee came on for the great scene of the act.
From the distance of the gallery she looked quite passably youthful, and beyond question she had a dominating presence in her resplendent costume.
She was incomparably and amazingly better than she had been at the few previous rehearsals which Edward Henry had been unfortunate enough to witness.
She even reminded him of his earliest entrancing vision of her.
"Some people may _like_ this!"
he admitted, with a gleam of optimism.
Hitherto, for weeks past, he had gone forward with his preparations in the most frigid and convinced pessimism.
It seemed to him that he had become involved in a vast piece of machinery, and that nothing short of blowing the theatre up with dynamite would bring the cranks and pistons to a stop.
And yet it seemed to him also that everything was unreal, that the contracts he signed were unreal, and the proofs he passed, and the posters he saw on the walls of London, and the advertisements in the newspapers.
Only the cheques he drew had the air of being real.
And now, in a magic flash, after a few moments gazing at the stage, he saw all differently.
He scented triumph from afar off, as one sniffs the tang of the sea.
On the morrow he had to meet Nellie at Euston, and he had shrunk from meeting her, with her terrible remorseless, provincial, untheatrical common sense; but now, in another magic flash, he envisaged the meeting with a cock-a-doodle-doo of hope.
Strange!
He admitted it was strange.
And then he failed to hear several words spoken by Rose Euclid.
And then a few more.
As the emotion of the scene grew, the proportion of her words audible in the gallery diminished.
Until she became, for him, totally inarticulate, raving away there and struggling in a cocoon of hexameters.
Despair seized him.
His nervous system--every separate nerve of it--was on the rack once more.
He stood up in a sort of paroxysm, and called loudly across the vast intervening space: "Speak more distinctly, please."
A fearful silence fell upon the whole theatre.
The rehearsal stopped.
The building itself seemed to be staggered.
Somebody had actually demanded that words should be uttered articulately!
Mr. Marrier turned towards the intruder, as one determined to put an end to such singularities.
"Who's up theyah?"
"I am," said Edward Henry.
"And I want it to be clearly understood in my theatre that the first thing an actor has to do is to make himself heard.
I daresay I'm devilish odd, but that's how I look at it."
"Whom do you mean, Mr. Machin?"
asked Marrier in a different tone.
"I mean Miss Euclid of course.
Here I've spent heaven knows how much on the acoustics of this theatre, and I can't make out a word she says.
I can hear all the others.
And this is the dress-rehearsal!"
"You must remember you're in the gallery," said Mr. Marrier, firmly.
"And what if I am?
I'm not giving gallery seats away to-morrow night.
It's true I'm giving half the stalls away, but the gallery will be paid for."
Another silence.
Said Rose Euclid, sharply, and Edward Henry caught every word with the most perfect distinctness: "I'm sick and tired of people saying they can't make out what I say!
They actually write me letters about it!
Why _should_ people make out what I say?"
She quitted the stage.
Another silence....
"Ring down the curtain," said Mr. Marrier in a thrilled voice.
III
Shortly afterwards Mr. Marrier came into the managerial office, lit up now, where Edward Henry was dictating to his typewriter and hospital-nurse, who, having been caught in hat and jacket on the threshold, had been brought back and was tapping his words direct on to the machine.
It was a remarkable fact that the sole proprietor of the Regent Theatre was now in high spirits and good humour.
"Well, Marrier, my boy," he saluted the acting-manager, "how are you getting on with that rehearsal?"
"Well, sir," said Mr. Marrier, "I'm not getting on with it.
Miss Euclid refuses absolutely to proceed.
She's in her dressing-room."
"But why?"
inquired Edward Henry with bland surprise.
"Doesn't she _want_ to be heard--by her gallery-boys?"
Mr. Marrier showed an enfeebled smile.
"She hasn't been spoken to like that for thirty years," said he.
"But don't you agree with me?"
asked Edward Henry.
"Yes," said Marrier, "I _agree_ with you--" "And doesn't your friend Carlo want his precious hexameters to be heard?"
"We baoth agree with you," said Marrier.
"The fact is, we've done all we could, but it's no use.
She's splendid, only--" He paused.
"Only you can't make out ten per cent of what she says," Edward Henry finished for him.
"Well, I've got no use for that in my theatre."
He found a singular pleasure in emphasizing the phrase, "my theatre."
"That's all very well," said Marrier.
"But what are you going to _do_ about it?
I've tried everything.
_You've_ come in and burst up the entire show, if you'll forgive my saying saoh!"
"Do?"
exclaimed Edward Henry.
"It's perfectly simple.
All you have to do is to act.
God bless my soul, aren't you getting fifteen pounds a week, and aren't you my acting-manager?
Act, then!
You've done enough hinting.
You've proved that hints are no good.
You'd have known that from your birth up, Marrier, if you'd been born in the Five Towns.
Act, my boy."
"But haow?
If she won't go on, she won't." "Is her understudy in the theatre?"
"Yes.
It's Miss Cunningham, you know."
"What salary does she get?"
"Ten pounds a week."
"What for?"
"Well--partly to understudy, I suppose."
"Let her earn it, then.
Go on with the rehearsal.
And let her play the part to-morrow night.
She'll be delighted, you bet."
"But--" "Miss Lindop," Edward Henry interrupted, "will you please read to Mr. Marrier what I've dictated?"
He turned to Marrier.
"It's an interview with myself for one of to-morrow's papers."
Miss Lindop, with tears in her voice if not in her eyes, obeyed the order and, drawing the paper from the machine, read its contents aloud.
Mr. Marrier started back--not in the figurative but in the literal sense--as he listened.
"But you'll never send that out!"
he exclaimed.
"Why not?"
"No paper will print it!"
"My dear Marrier," said Edward Henry, "don't be a simpleton.
You know as well as I do that half-a-dozen papers will be delighted to print it.
And all the rest will copy the one that does print it.
It'll be the talk of London to-morrow, and Isabel Joy will be absolutely snuffed out."
"Well," said Mr. Marrier, "I never heard of such a thing!"
"Pity you didn't, then!"
Mr. Marrier moved away.
"I say," he murmured at the door, "don't you think you ought to read that to Rose first?"
"I'll read it to Rose like a bird," said Edward Henry.
Within two minutes--it was impossible to get from his room to the dressing-rooms in less--he was knocking at Rose Euclid's door.
"Who's there?"
said a voice.
He entered and then replied: "I am."
Rose Euclid was smoking a cigarette and scratching the arm of an easy-chair behind her.
Her maid stood near by with a whisky-and-soda.
"Sorry you can't go on with the rehearsal, Miss Euclid," said Edward Henry very quickly.
"However, we must do the best we can.
But Mr. Marrier thought you'd like to hear this.
It's part of an interview with me that's going to appear to-morrow in the press."
Without pausing, he went on to read: "I found Mr. Alderman Machin, the hero of the Five Towns and the proprietor and initiator of London's newest and most up-to-date and most intellectual theatre, surrounded by a complicated apparatus of telephones and typewriters in his managerial room at the Regent.
He received me very courteously.
"Yes," he said in response to my question, "the rumour is quite true.
The principal part in 'The Orient Pearl' will be played on the first night by Miss Euclid's understudy, Miss Olga Cunningham, a young woman of very remarkable talent.
No, Miss Euclid is not ill or even indisposed.
But she and I have had a grave difference of opinion.
The point between us was whether Miss Euclid's speeches ought to be clearly audible in the auditorium.
I considered they ought.
I may be wrong.
I may be provincial.
But that was and is my view.
At the dress-rehearsal, seated in the gallery, I could not hear her lines.
I
objected.
She refused to consider the objection or to proceed with the rehearsal.
_Hinc illae lachrymae_!"
...
"Not at all," said Mr. Machin in reply to a question, "I have the highest admiration for Miss Euclid's genius.
I should not presume to dictate to her as to her art.
She has had a very long experience of the stage, very long, and doubtless knows better than I do.
Only, the Regent happens to be my theatre, and I'm responsible for it.
Every member of the audience will have a complete uninterrupted view of the stage, and I intend that every member of the audience shall hear every word that is uttered on the stage.
I'm odd, I know.
But then I've a reputation for oddness to keep up.
And by the way, I'm sure that Miss Cunningham will make a great reputation for herself."
"Not while I'm here, she won't!"
exclaimed Rose Euclid, standing up, and enunciating her words with marvellous clearness.
Edward Henry glanced at her, and then continued to read: "Suggestions for headlines.
'Piquant quarrel between manager and star-actress.'
'Unparalleled situation.'
'Trouble at the Regent Theatre.'
" "Mr. Machin," said Rose Euclid, "you are not a gentleman."
"You'd hardly think so, would you?"
mused Edward Henry, as if mildly interested in this new discovery of Miss Euclid's. "Maria," said the star to her maid, "go and tell Mr. Marrier I'm coming."
"And I'll go back to the gallery," said Edward Henry.
"It's the place for people like me, isn't it?
I daresay I'll tear up this paper later, Miss Euclid--we'll see."
IV
On the next night a male figure in evening dress and a pale overcoat might have been seen standing at the corner of Piccadilly Circus and Lower Regent Street, staring at an electric sign in the shape of a shield which said, in its glittering, throbbing speech of incandescence: THE REGENT
ROSE EUCLID
IN
"THE ORIENT PEARL" The figure crossed the Circus, and stared at the sign from a new point of view.
Then it passed along Coventry Street, and stared at the sign from yet another point of view.
