Things near & far
well meant but futile after all; that I had not really touched the
mark, though I pretended that I had, and did my best to persuade
myself that it was so. But now; “I have really written something that
is good, that is, even, very good; that one of the best publishers in
London praises and praises highly.” I never thought of the money that
all this must mean, that never entered a moment into my mind; my only
meditation was that for fifteen years I had done all I could do, and
that now I was to enter into my reward. O golden Strand, that day,
golden Great Russell Street when I came home to tell my news, golden
happy world which rewards at last all humble faithful endeavour:
golden world inhabited by good men, by publishers of all men most
good.
It was a pure matter of form; the waiting for the agreement, a matter
of a week or so, as the kind gentlemen in the office informed me. And
in three weeks, somewhere about the middle of January, 1895, came
the MS. of “The Three Impostors” back to me, with a formal, printed
slip from the House of Heinemann, regretting that it was unable to
accept the enclosed manuscript. Well does A. E. Waite declare that
there is an element of waggery in the constitution of the universe.
Never did the proud policeman in the old pantomime, foiled by the
buttered slide of the clown, come down with a thump so boisterously
undignified. So, rolling in the mud, I lay sprawling, my legs in the
air. I was silly enough to write a somewhat exasperated letter to
my friend in the office. He answered me in a befitting manner, in a
tone of grave rebuke: he said that if I had realised the cares of the
publisher’s life I would not have written “so caustically.”
_Chapter VIII_
“The Three Impostors” came back then from Messrs. Heinemann, and
as soon as I got over the little bump I have just mentioned, I
thought that I would try to make the book a bit better. One of the
“novels” or introduced tales displeased me, so I am sure it must have
been very bad indeed. I am not certain, but I think it was about
a benevolent City man, of considerable means, who occupied an old
red brick house somewhere at the back of Acton and occasionally, I
suppose at the full moon, turned into a were-wolf. I can see nothing
against the plot; and I believe there is a considerable body of
unimpeachable evidence in favour of the hypothesis that the human
consciousness is occasionally displaced by the bestial consciousness:
the Malays, for instance, are apt at times to fancy themselves
wild cats and to behave accordingly. But, somehow, it wouldn’t do.
The transformation of the City man was highly unsatisfactory and
unconvincing: so I tore up the tale, and wrote instead of it the
surprising narrative of Professor Gregg and his disastrous search for
the fairies among the hills of my native country. In the machinery
of the story I introduced a hypothesis that was then new; I think I
read of it in some paper written by Sir Oliver Lodge. The theory was,
that when the lights are low, or turned out, at the spiritualist
séance, and objects are found, when the lights go up, to have been
brought from all quarters of the room and laid in the centre of the
table; or when the people sitting in the dark round the table hear
the piano near the door being played, the theory was that these
marvels are not necessarily due to the presence and intervention of
ghosts. I believe that it was the case of Eusapia Palladino that was
engaging Sir Oliver Lodge’s attention just then; and he advanced the
striking hypothesis that the piano was played and the objects fetched
from the sideboard by a kind of extension of the medium’s body. I
forget whether the distinguished Professor used the instance; but
I know that the impression conveyed to my mind was that something
happened similar to the protrusion and withdrawal of a snail’s horns:
Eusapia’s arm became twice or thrice its usual length, performed the
required feat whatever it was, and then shrank again to its normal
size. This hypothesis was novel in those days; now it is widely known
and credited amongst spiritualists. They have found a name for the
mysterious substance which projects itself from the medium’s body: it
is called ectoplasm. In all probability the whole theory is a pack of
nonsense, and the “phenomena” are the tricks of clever cheats: still,
what do we know? At all events, I worked it all into my fairy tale,
mixing up the old view that the fairy tales, the stories of Little
People, are in fact traditions of the aborigines of these islands,
small, dark men who took refuge under the hills from the invading
Celt with this view of the capacities of the human body, and my
view, still newer, that the fairies may still be found under the
hills, and that they are far from being pleasant little people. That
was the recipe for the tale, and I give it in spite of a friendly
rebuke I once received from poor H. B. Irving. He was talking to me
about the Introduction I had written to “The Great God Pan.”
“You shouldn’t have done it,” he said. “You destroy the illusion.
Never take people behind the scenes. I never do.”
But it really doesn’t matter. And, further, I have a suspicion that
it is often much more interesting “behind” than “in front.” I have
seen some very fine theatrical storms in my time; they did these
things very well in the days of the elder Irving at the Lyceum, but
I never enjoyed any of those tempests half so much as a storm I once
watched from the wings, while Sir Frank Benson was playing King Lear.
Everything, of course, was pitchy dark, save where a farthing light
was glimmering in some odd corner. By this light crouched a squat
form, that of the assistant stage-manager. In one hand he held the
Prompt Copy of the Play, with all the cues duly indicated in it. He
held it up as close as he could to the miserable glimmer, and had
evidently as much as he could do to see the script with its various
interlineetions and noughts and crosses, and all sorts of queer
hieroglyphics which mean a great deal to a stage-manager’s eye. But
in the other hand he held a drumstick, and coming nearer I saw that
the big drum was beside him on the boards, and that near at hand dim
figures stood ready for some mysterious service. A voice is heard
from somewhere:
“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow
You cataracts and hurricanes, spout
Till you have drench’d your steeples, drown’d the cocks,
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head; and then, all-shaking thunder--”
And so on. And all the while the man with the big drum was commenting
on the text. At certain points, bang! would come the drumstick
on the drum, and that gave the cue to the man who stood by the
thunder-sheet, which he caused to waggle violently, and at the same
moment “Props” released his lightnings. It was far better behind than
in front, to my taste, at all events. And so a man of letters of very
great distinction once said to me:
“I’ve been reading your ‘Great God Pan.’ I didn’t make much of it.
Confused, it seemed to me. But when I read the Introduction, I said
to myself: ‘Good heavens! Here’s a man who writes as well as I do!’”
And I may say that the literary gentleman meant this as a very great
compliment; indeed so it was.
Well, we have been speaking a little of the stage. And in the
earlier rehearsals of a play a good deal is taken for granted, or
indicated by the gentleman in charge. I am speaking of the old days,
be it understood, and of the Shakespearean Touring Company in the
provinces. The company is assembling in the wings in small groups,
one strolling in after another, some of them with the cheerful look
of those who have partaken of refreshment. On the whole the men keep
together, and the women talk to each other. The curtain is down, and
by it is a deal table and a couple of Windsor chairs--or it may be
a couple of golden thrones. At the table sit the stage-manager and
his assistant, occupied with the prompt copies and various documents
connected with the business of the morning. Above their heads burns
the T-piece; piping in the shape of a capital T, with the top bar
pierced and flaming with gas-jets. The stage-manager looks at his
watch. “Five past eleven! All ready for the Procession! March off.”
The stage-manager has risen from his Windsor chair--or throne, as the
case may be--and is looking up stage with his back to the curtain. As
he says, “March off,” he indicates the music that isn’t there:
“Too-too, too-too--too-too, tootery-too, too-too,” in something
like the time and tune of the music as it will be “on the night”;
stamping with one foot on the stage to increase the realism of the
performance. The old stage direction reads something like: “A sennet
within. Culverins shot off,” and accordingly the stage-manager
interrupts his “too-tooing” at intervals:
“Too-too, tootery-too! Bang!” bringing his practicable foot down on
the boards with a terrific crash.
“Too-too-too, too-too: Bang!”
Then: “March over. Flourish of Trumpets. Tara-tara-tara, ta-ta-ta.
Curtain up! Tara-tara, ta-ta-ta-ta-tara. Procession on.”
The Procession of Knights and Ladies which has been forming in the
dusty obscurity of the wings begins to advance and cross an imaginary
line which marks the place where the scenery will be on the night.
They make more especially for a position up stage (L.U.E.) where
there will be, at the proper time, a Gothic archway. The “taras” are
still going on. They are violently interrupted.
“Where’s the Rush-strewer?” howls the stage-manager. “Mr. Machen!
(fff) Mr. Machen! Lobbit! (to the hovering call-boy) Call Mr. Machen!
(To the Procession) Go back. I am going to have this done properly,
if we have to stay all day for it.”
The call-boy rushes violently into the darkness. His voice is heard
vociferating “Mr. Machen!” in passages and on stairs. Finally, Mr.
Machen appears, looking flurried or sulky, as the case may be. The
stage-manager, who had been discussing beer with Mr. Machen a short
quarter of an hour before, in a friendly and familiar manner, is now,
very properly, distant and official.
“Mr. Machen, I wish you would contrive to be more punctual. Better be
an hour too soon on the stage than a second too late. You can’t learn
to act, you know, by staying away from rehearsal!”
Mr. Machen murmurs something about “ten minutes allowed for variation
of clocks.” The stage-manager grunts impatiently. Mr. Machen places
himself at the head of the procession with an imaginary bundle of
rushes on his left arm. The too-tooing, the banging, the tara-ing
are done all over again, and at last the stage-manager announces:
“Flourish over”--and the play begins.
In other words, after the little difficulties and delays that I have
indicated, “The Three Impostors” was published in the Keynotes Series
at the Bodley Head. It didn’t do so well as “The Great God Pan.”
The title was a bad one. Then, as my French colleague, the late P.
J. Toulet, said to me afterwards: “_Ce livre est trop fumiste, ou
pas assez fumiste_”; the farce and the tragedy in it were not well
mixed. And again, there had been some ugly scandals in the summer of
’95, which had made people impatient with reading matter that was
not obviously and obtrusively “healthy”; and so, for one reason or
another, “The Three Impostors” failed to set the Fleet Ditch on fire.
Whereupon I began to think about my next book. I had done, as I have
said, with Stevensonianism and White Powders; now we were to have
something entirely new. “Tara, tara, tara!”--in the stage-manager’s
manner. This time there was to be no doubt of it. “Everybody ready
for the Great Romance!”