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The rehearsal of the first scene of Hamlet, conducted by Mr. Montgomery Merridew, went off with great verve. We were all very eager to please him and there was naturally a good deal of excitement among us to know how he would cast the parts.

He decided that Leonard Brightwin should be Horatio and George Dexter Marcellus. I was Bernardo, and Harold Crowe took the rather minor part of Francisco. Mr. Henry Smith had the honour of playing the ghost, and it was very valuable to him for stage deportment and gesture; but not much use in the way of his h’s, because the ghost does not make a single remark in the first scene. Nevertheless, after Horatio, who was easily the best, came Mr. Smith. In fact, he quite suggested “the Majesty of buried Denmark,” in my opinion, though he didn’t manage his hands well, and put rather too much expression into his face for a ghost.

Dexter as Marcellus was bad. He made Marcellus a bounder, and when he said, referring to the ghost, “Shall I strike at it with my partisan?” you felt it was just the sort of utterly caddish idea that Dexter would have had. My rendering of Bernardo was not well thought of, I regret to say. Mr. Merridew explained that I must avoid the sin of overacting.

He said:

“You must correct your perspective, Mr. Corkey, and remember that the dramatist designed Bernardo for an honest but simple soldier. He is, we see, punctual and we have every reason to believe him an efficient member of the corps to which he belonged. He is, moreover, an officer; but more we do not know. You impart to him an air of mystery and importance that are calculated to arrest the audience and make them expect wonderful things of him, which he is not going to perform. In the matter of deportment, Mr. Corkey, a man of your inches cannot be too careful. Your legs—you understand I don’t speak offensively, but practically—your legs are long and thin. They are, in fact, the sort of legs that challenge the groundlings. It behoves you, therefore, to manage them with perfect propriety; to tone them down, as it were, and keep them as much out of the picture as possible.”

I very soon found, when it came to stage deportment in earnest, that I had not time left to overact Bernardo. In fact, when I once began to grasp the great difficulties of walking about on the stage with the art that conceals art, I had no intelligence left for acting the part at all, and my second rendering of Bernardo was colourless, though my legs were better.

After a third rehearsal Wilford Gooding took my place, and he gave a very different reading. In fact, when he and his friend Harold Crowe found themselves together on the stage, they showed a decided inclination to repeat their former imitation of the “Two Macs,” and Mr. Merridew reproved them angrily.

“You are here to work, not to fool, gentlemen,” he said, “and if you think the battlements of Elsinore by moonlight at the beginning of Hamlet is the proper place to be funny, then let me tell you you have mistaken your vocation.”

A rehearsal, in fact, has to be conducted with deadly earnestness, and for beginners to take it in a casual or lightsome spirit is a very great mistake. There is nothing lightsome about it.

Mr. Merridew directed us to buy a further book, written by himself, on the subject of voice production. It contained throat exercises for strengthening the larynx and diaphragm and vocal chords, and so on; and among other things, for a full hour every day we had to go into some private place and shout the vowels with the full blast of our lungs.

“It will make a great deal of noise, and people won’t like you for doing it,” prophesied Mr. Merridew, “but you must not mind a little opposition. Your voices naturally want quality and tone, and these can only be got with severe practice. Recollect that merely to speak is useless; you must shout.”

He told us where to buy his book, which fortunately cost no more than sixpence—in fact, only fourpence-halfpenny in reality.

During this lesson Mr. Merridew had to leave us for a short time, to attend a meeting of the Directors of the Dramatic School; and while he was away I ventured to show Leonard Brightwin my poem entitled “The Witches’ Sabbath.” He read it with great interest and was much struck by it.

“I’d no idea you were a writer,” he said; and I told him I hadn’t either; but he believed it was in me. He, too, was a writer, and he offered to introduce me to a friend of his who was an editor.

A glimpse of literary life was, of course, worth almost anything to me, and I said that I should be exceedingly thankful to meet a professional editor, if he didn’t think such a thing was above me. Then he explained that his friend, Mr. Bulger, was an enthusiast of the drama and edited a penny paper called Thespis.

“He owns it and does everything himself but print it,” explained Brightwin. “It is not strictly self-supporting yet, but the amateurs read it regularly, for he devotes a good deal of attention to their performances. I often go and criticise them for him. He pays expenses and hopes some day to do more than that. I write a good deal for him. My belief is that he would publish that poem in his paper, though, of course, I can’t promise.”

With the kindness and enthusiasm of the true creator for an inferior artist, Brightwin promised to show the poem to Mr. Bulger, and I was still thanking him most gratefully when our preceptor returned.

His face was gloomy, but he did not divulge the reason, and he proceeded with the rehearsal.

An event of considerable interest overtook me an hour later, when the evening’s work was at an end. As I left the school I met an old acquaintance of the opposite sex, and instantly recognised the grey-eyed girl who was waiting at the pit door of the Lyceum on the memorable occasion when I fainted. She remembered me, too, and was able to tell me the details of the event after I had lost consciousness.

She was a pupil like myself, only she belonged to the girls’ class.

“They ain’t going to allow mixed acting for the first six months,” she said. “Funny, ain’t it? You’d think it was as tricky as mixed bathing. How are you getting on?”

I told her of Mr. Merridew and Hamlet; and she told me that there were seven girls in her class, and that none of them could “act for nuts,” to use her own forcible expression.

An oldish woman had come to see the grey-eyed girl home, and when I offered to accompany them to their door, the oldish woman refused in peremptory tones. In fact, you might almost have thought she regarded me as a shady character. It transpired that she was the cook of the grey-eyed girl’s mother, and had been told off to the service of seeing the pupil to and from the classes at the Dramatic School. Before the cook’s rebuff I had, of course, to explain that I was also a pupil at the school, and a person of the most honourable behaviour where the fair sex is concerned; but the cook was not prepared to argue, and hurried away her charge without more words.

I met the grey-eyed girl again, however, the very next evening—at a first-night—and we enjoyed an uninterrupted conversation of three hours before the doors opened. Thus a friendship was established of the most interesting character; for we found that we had much in common, and I was able to tell her several things which she did not know.

She was not a happy girl, for her parents only allowed her to study for the stage under protest, and her family was entirely against her and of a very unsympathetic turn of mind; but she felt that, sooner or later, she would triumph. She indicated by certain allusions to my necktie and hands that I interested her. She considered that I had artist’s hands, which in its turn interested me a great deal, because my aunt had noticed it as well as this penetrating, grey-eyed girl; and in return I ventured to tell her that her eyes were exceedingly remarkable. I hinted that I wrote poetry as well as acted, and, getting rather above myself, as we say, told her that a poem of mine would probably be appearing in a well-known theatrical journal called Thespis at no distant date. I’m afraid in my excitement I even hinted I should be paid for it, which was going too far.

She said:

“Lor! Fancy!” Then, after a pause, she remarked, looking at me sideways under her eyelids, that perhaps I should be making poems to her eyes next, since I seemed to think they were “a bit of all right.” The idea had not occurred to me; but now, of course, my chivalric instincts, hitherto somewhat dormant, came to my aid, and I assured her that the poem was only a question of time. In fact, we may be said rather to have gone it, and when the doors were open and we entered the theatre, I sat beside her.

I may state here that I had no objection to girls as a class, or in a general way—in fact, rather the contrary, if anything. But they were not so interesting to me as men; and I also understood that there is not a rose without a thorn, as the poet says.

There are nocturnal girls in London known, generally speaking, as “light.” They are as common as blackberries in the Sacred Writings, and Shakespeare and the classics generally; and I may say that they have often linked their arms in mine, when I have been returning home after nightfall through some of the main London thoroughfares.

The first time this happened, being new to their unconventional ways, I explained to two girls, who approached me simultaneously, that I didn’t know them. Whereupon, with the swift repartee for which this class is famous, they told me that they were the Duchess of Edinburgh and the Empress of Russia, and that they were stopping with Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace, and had just popped out for a breather before supper. Of course, the right thing to do is to take these dashing meteors in their own spirit; and when they invited me to return with them to the palace, I explained that some other night I should be delighted to do so, but that I was bound for Marlborough House myself on this occasion, and already half an hour late. They appreciated the bon mot and rather took to me. Though doubtless they might have been called bad girls, nobody would have called them bad company. They had an air of abandon and heartiness which put you entirely at your ease with them. In fact, when they asked me to stand them a drink, I very nearly did so; but not quite. Instead, I left them abruptly and vanished into the night, followed by epithets humorous in their way, but not intended for publication.

To return to Brightwin: in due course he took me to see Mr. Bulger, editor of Thespis, and I found myself confronted with a type of the poet mind. Mr. Bulger was evidently a dreamer. His great ambition centred upon a State theatre for England, similar to that in foreign countries. He had very exalted opinions and an intense hatred of bad Art. He wanted to gather round him a band of young enthusiasts who would work for love; because, as he explained to me, the pioneer is seldom rewarded, excepting with the laurels of fame.

“Even these,” said Mr. Bulger bitterly, “seldom encircle his own brow. You will generally find them on the bronze or marble forehead of his statue, long after he has vanished into the dust.”

In this high strain he talked, and I saw in a moment that I stood before genius. His soul looked out of his eyes and made them water. His physical frame was of no consequence, and one forgot it when he talked. I trembled to think that this aspiring man was going to read my poem; but he did so, and Brightwin and I sat silent and watched him. Once or twice he nodded in a slightly approving way; and once or twice he shook his head, and I felt the blush of shame upon my cheek.

When he had finished, he said:

“Quite excellent, Mr. Corkey; we must publish this in the paper. There are, however, some failures of technique and a few flashes of unconscious humour that will be better away. May I take it that you will not mind if I edit the poem for publication?”

Little knowing what this exactly meant, I replied that it would be a great privilege to me if he would do so.

“Good,” he said, and put my poem under a paper-weight upon his desk.

We then discussed the drama, and he told us exactly what the young actor should think and feel about his profession. It was clear that I had not thought and felt at all rightly on the subject of the stage, for I had rather intended to shine, and be somebody, and play the tragic lead, and so on. But Mr. Bulger was all for quite a different spirit. He worshipped at the shrine of Art, and explained that in the service of Art we must regard the world and ourselves as well lost.

He advised a spirit of self-sacrifice, and admitted it was not so much the ruling principle in the histrionic mind as it should be. He said some hard things about actor-managers, and declared that in some cases the charwomen who cleaned their theatres were doing more for Art than they were. His eyes blazed against actor-managers in general, and they must tremble when they hear his name.

Presently we rose to take our leave, and then, diving among a mass of tickets and documents, he produced a card of admittance to the Clapham Assembly Room on the occasion of an amateur theatrical entertainment a fortnight hence.

“You can try your hand at that, Mr. Corkey,” he said to me. “You may, in fact, criticise the show for our columns. Keep it short, and don’t indulge in pleasantries at the expense of the company. The Macready Dramatic Club of Clapham is a well-meaning body and their productions are most painstaking. Let me have an account of your expenses, as I shall defray them according to my rule.”

This was, naturally, a very great moment for me. I had but one fleeting twinge that perhaps it was rather rough on the Macready Dramatic Club of Clapham; but I thanked Mr. Bulger heartily for placing such confidence in me, and promised that I would devote the whole of my energies and experience to the performance.

Not until Brightwin and I had left the editorial presence did I begin seriously to doubt; but he assured me that it was quite unnecessary.

“My dear chap,” he said, “you spend all your spare time at the theatre; you are studying for the stage, and you have an immense natural aptitude for the art; therefore, if you are not good enough to review the efforts of a purely amateur crowd of this sort, you ought to be.”

So I imitated Brightwin’s slightly scornful view of the Macreadies of Clapham, and felt that, if I could keep up this haughty spirit through the actual performance, all might possibly be well.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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