“The work was unrelenting. We opened The Master of Ballantrae, and although the other critics were not warm about it, Agate gave it a push and we played a successful six weeks in London. God, what audiences! People came out of the woodwork to see it, and it seemed they had all seen it before and couldn’t get enough of it. ‘It’s like peeping into the dark backward and abysm of time,’ the genius said, and even I felt that in some way the theatre had been put back thirty years when we appeared in that powerful, thrilling, but strangely antique piece.
“Every day we were called for rehearsal, in order to get the plays ready for the tour. And what plays they were! The Lyons Mail and The Corsican Brothers, in both of which I doubled for Sir John, and Rosemary, a small play with a minimum of scenery, which was needed to round out a repertoire in which all the other plays were big ones, with cartloads of scenery and dozens of costumes. I liked Rosemary especially, because I didn’t double in it but I had a showy appearance as a stilt walker. How we sweated! It was rough on the younger people, who had to learn several new parts during days when they were working a full eight hours, but Moore and Spickernell and Paskin and Miss Pauncefort seemed to have been playing these melodramas for years, and the lines rolled off their tongues like grave old music. As for Sir John and Milady, they couldn’t have been happier, and there is nothing so indestructibly demanding and tireless as a happy actor.
“Did I say we worked eight hours? Holroyd and Macgregor, with me as their slave, worked much longer than that, because the three plays we were adding to Scaramouche and The Master had to be retrieved from storage and brushed up and made smart for the tour. But it was all done at last, and we closed in London one Saturday night, with everything finished that would make it possible for us to sail for Canada the following Tuesday.
“A small matter must be mentioned. The genius’s mother turned up for one of the last performances of The Master, and it fell to me to show her to Sir John’s dressing-room. She was a nice little woman, but not what one expects of the mother of such a splendid creature, and when I showed her through the great man’s door she looked as if she might faint from the marvel of it all. I felt sorry for her; it must be frightening when one mothers such a prodigy, and she had the humble look of somebody who can’t believe her luck.”
It was here that Roland Ingestree, who had been decidedly out of sorts for the past half-hour, intervened.
“Magnus, I don’t much mind you taking the mickey out of me, if that’s how you get your fun, but I think you might leave poor old Mum out of it.”
Magnus pretended astonishment. “But my dear fellow, I don’t see how I can. I’ve done my best to afford you the decency of obscurity. I’d hoped to finish my narrative without letting the others in on our secret. I could have gone on calling you ‘the genius’, though you had other names in the company. There were some who called you ‘the Cantab’ because of your degree from Cambridge, and there were others who called you ‘One’ because you had that mock-modest trick of referring to yourself as One when in your heart you were crying, ‘Me, me, glorious ME!’ But I can’t leave you out, and I don’t see how I can leave your Mum out because she threw so much light on you, and therefore lent a special flavour to the whole story of Sir John’s touring company.”
“All right Magnus; I was a silly young ass, and I freely admit it. But isn’t one permitted to be an ass for a year or two, when one is young, and the whole world appears to be open to one, and waiting for one? Because you had a rotten childhood, don’t suppose that everybody else who had better luck was utterly a fool. Have you any idea what you looked like in those days?”
“No, I haven’t, really, but I see you are dying to tell me. Do please go ahead.”
“I shall. You were disliked and distrusted because everybody thought you were a sneak, as you’ve said yourself. But you haven’t told us that you were a sneak, and blabbed to Macgregor about every trivial breach of company discipline — who came into the theatre after the half-hour call, and who might happen to have a friend in the dressing-room during the show, and who watched Sir John from the wings when he had said they weren’t to, and anything else you could find out by pussyfooting and snooping. Even that might have passed as your job, if you hadn’t had such a nasty personality — always smiling like a pantomime demon — always stinking of some sort of cheap hair oil — always running like a rabbit to open doors for Milady — and vain as a peacock about your tuppenny-ha’penny juggling and wire-walking. You were a thoroughly nasty little piece of work, let me tell you.”
“I suppose I was. But you make the mistake of thinking I was pleased with myself. Not a bit of it. I was trying to learn the ropes of another mode of life –”
“Indeed you were. You were trying to be Sir John off the stage as well as on. And what a caricature you made of it! Walking like Spring-Heeled Jack because Frank Moore had tried to show you something about deportment, and parting your greasy long hair in the middle because Sir John was the last actor on God’s earth to do so, and wearing clothes that would make a cat laugh because Sir John wore eccentric duds that looked as if he’d had ’em since Mafeking Night.”
“Do you think I’d have been better off to model myself on you?”
“I was no prize as an actor. Don’t think I don’t know it. But at least I was living in 1932, and you were aping a man who was still living in 1902, and if there hadn’t been a very strong uncanny whiff about you you’d have been a total freak.”
“Ah, but there was an uncanny whiff about me. I was Mungo Fetch, don’t forget. We fetches can’t help being uncanny.”
Lind intervened. “Dear friends,” he said, being very much the courtly Swede, “let us not have a quarrel about these grievances which are so long dead. You are both different men now. Think, Roly, of your achievements as a novelist and broadcaster; One, and the Genius and the Cantab are surely buried under that? And you, my dear Eisengrim, what reason have you to be bitter toward anyone? What have you desired that life has not given you? Including what I now see is a very great achievement; you modelled yourself on a fine actor of the old school, and you have put all you learned at the service of your own art, where it has flourished wonderfully. Roly, you sought to be a literary man, and you are one; Magnus, you wanted to be Sir John, and it looks very much as if you had succeeded, in so far as anyone can succeed –”
“Just a little more than most people succeed,” said Ingestree, who was still hot; “you ate poor old Sir John. You ate him down to the core. We could see it happening, right from the beginning of that tour.”
“Did I really?” said Magnus, apparently pleased. “I didn’t know it showed so plainly. But now you are being melodramatic, Roly. I simply wanted to be like him. I told you, I apprenticed myself to an egoism, because I saw how invaluable that egoism was. Nobody can steal another man’s ego, but he can learn from it, and I learned. You didn’t have the wits to learn.”
“I’d have been ashamed to toady as you did, whatever it brought me.”
“Toady? Now that’s an unpleasant word. You didn’t learn what there was to be learned in that company, Ingestree. You were at every rehearsal and every performance of The Master of Ballantrae that I was. Don’t you remember the splendid moment when Sir John, as Mr. Henry, said to his father: ‘There are double words for everything; the word that swells and the word that belittles; my brother cannot fight me with a word.’ Your word for my relationship to Sir John is toadying, but mine is emulation, and I think mine is the better word.”
“Yours is the dishonest word. Your emulation, as you call it, sucked the pith out of that poor old ham, and gobbled it up and made it part of yourself. It was a very nasty process.”