What did I think, as I carefully wiped my newly scrubbed dentures on one of the Savoy’s plentiful linen hand-towels, before slipping them back over my gums? I thought I wanted all I could get of this vicarious life. I wanted to be off to Canada with Sir John Tresize. I knew what Canada meant to me: what had it meant to him?
6
When I returned to our drawing-room Roly was already aboard ship.
“One of my embarrassments — how susceptible the young are to embarrassment — was that my dear Mum had outfitted me with a vast woolly steamer-rug in a gaudy design. The company kept pestering Macgregor to know what tartan it was, and he thought it looked like Hunting Cohen, so The Hunting Cohen it was from that time forth. I didn’t need it, God knows, because the C.P.R. ship was fiercely hot inside, and it was too late in the season for anyone to sit on deck in any sort of comfort.
“My Mum was so solicitous in seeing me off that the company pretended to think I needed a lot of looking after, and made a great game of it. Not unkind (except for Charlton and Woulds, who were bullies) but very jokey and hard to bear, especially when I wanted to be glorious in the eyes of Audrey Sevenhowes. But my Mum had also provided me with a Baedeker’s Canada, the edition of 1922, which had somehow found its way into the shop, and although it was certainly out of date a surprising number of people asked for a loan of it, and informed themselves that the Government of Canada issued a four-dollar bill, and that the coloured porters on the sleeping-cars expected a minimum tip of twenty-five cents a day, and that a guard’s van was called a caboose on Canadian railways, and similar useful facts.
“The Co. may have thought me funny, but they were a quaint sight themselves when they assembled on deck for a publicity picture before we left Liverpool. There were plenty of these company pictures taken through the whole length of the tour, and in every one of them Emilia Pauncefort’s extraordinary travelling coat (called behind her back the Coat of Many Colours) and the fearful man’s cap that Gwenda Lewis fastened to her head with a hatpin, so that she would be ready for all New World hardships, and the fur cap C. Pengelly Spickernell wore, assuring everybody that a skin cap with earflaps was absolutely de rigueur in the Canadian winter, Grover Paskin’s huge pipe, with a bowl about the size of a brandy-glass, and Eugene Fitzwarren’s saucy Homburg and coat with velvet collar, in the Edwardian manner — all these strange habiliments figured prominently. Even though the gaudy days of the Victorian mummers had long gone, these actors somehow got themselves up so that they couldn’t have been taken for anything else on God’s earth but actors.
“It was invariable, too, that when Holroyd had mustered us for one of these obligatory pictures. Sir John and Milady always appeared last, smiling in surprise, as if a picture were the one thing in the world they hadn’t expected, and as if they were joining in simply to humour the rest of us. Sir John was an old hand at travelling in Canada, and he wore an overcoat of Raglan cut and reasonable weight, but of an amplitude that spoke of the stage — and, as our friend has told us, the sleeves were always a bit short so that his hands showed to advantage. Milady wore fur, as befitted the consort of an actor-knight; what fur it was nobody knew, but it was very furry indeed, and soft, and smelled like money. She topped herself with one of those cloche hats that were fashionable then, in a hairy purple felt; not the happiest choice, because it almost obscured her eyes, and threw her long duck’s-bill nose into prominence.
“But never — never, I assure you — in any of these pictures would you find Mungo Fetch. Who can have warned him off? Whose decision was it that a youthful Sir John, in clothes that were always too tight and sharply cut, wouldn’t have done in one of these pictures which always appeared in Canadian papers with a caption that read: ‘Sir John Tresize and his London company, including Miss Annette de la Borderie (Lady Tresize), who are touring Canada after a triumphant season in the West End.’ ”
“It was a decision of common sense,” said Magnus. “It never worried me. I knew my place, which is more than you did, Roly.”
“Quite right. I fully admit it. I didn’t know my place. I was under the impression that a university man was acceptable everywhere, and inferior to no one. I hadn’t twigged that in a theatrical company — or any artistic organization, for that matter — the hierarchy is decided by talent, and that art is the most rigorously aristocratic thing in our democratic world. So I always pushed in as close to Audrey Sevenhowes as I could, and I even picked up the trick from Charlton of standing a bit sideways, to show my profile, which I realize now would have been better kept a mystery. I was an ass. Oh, indeed I was a very fine and ostentatious ass, and don’t think I haven’t blushed for it since.”
“Stop telling us what an ass you were,” said Kinghovn. “Even I recognize that as an English trick to pull the teeth of our contempt. ‘Oh, I say, what a jolly good chap: says he’s an ass, don’t yer know; he couldn’t possibly say that if he was really an ass.’ But I’m a tough-minded European; I think you really were an ass. If I had a time-machine, I’d whisk myself back into 1932 and give you a good boot in the arse for it. But as I can’t, tell me why you were included on the tour. Apparently you were a bad actor and an arguing nuisance as a chair-lifter. Why would anybody pay you money, and take you on a jaunt to Canada?”
“You need a drink, Harry. You are speaking from the deep surliness of the deprived boozer. Don’t fuss; it’ll be the canonical, appointed cocktail hour quite soon, and then you’ll regain your temper. I was taken as Sir John’s secretary. The idea was that I’d write letters to fans that he could sign, and do general dog’s-body work, and also get on with Jekyll-and-Hyde.
“That was where the canker gnawed, to use an appropriately melodramatic expression. I had thought, you see, that I was to write a dramatization of Stevenson’s story, and as Magnus has told you I was full of great ideas about Dostoyevsky and masks. I used to quote Stevenson at Sir John: ‘I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous, and independent denizens,’ I would say, and entreat him to let me put the incongruous denizens on the stage, in masks. He merely shook his head and said, ‘No good, m’boy; my public wouldn’t like it.’ Then I would have at him with another quotation, in which Jekyll tells of ‘those appetites I had long secretly indulged, and had of late begun to pamper’. Once he asked me what I had in mind. I had lots of Freudian capers in mind: masochism, and sadism, and rough-stuff with girls. That rubbed his Victorianism the wrong way. ‘Unwholesome rubbish,’ was all he would say.
“In the very early days of our association I was even so daring as to ask him to scrap Jekyll-and-Hyde and let me do a version of Dorian Gray for him. That really tore it! ‘Don’t ever mention that man to me again,’ he said; ‘Oscar Wilde dragged his God-given genius in unspeakable mire, and the greatest kindness we can do is to forget his name. Besides, my public wouldn’t hear of it.’ So I was stuck with Jekyll-and-Hyde.
“Stuck even worse than I had at first supposed. Ages and ages before, at the beginning of their career together, Sir John and Milady had concocted The Master of Ballantrae themselves, with their own innocent pencils. They made the scenario, down to the last detail, then found some hack to supply dialogue. This, I discovered to my horror, was what they had done again. They had made a scheme for Jekyll-and-Hyde, and they expected me to write some words for it, and he had the gall to say they would polish. Those two mountebanks polish my stuff! I was no hack; hadn’t I got a meritorious second in Eng. Lit at Cambridge? And it would have been a first, if I had been content to crawl and stick to the party line about everything on the syllabus from Beowulf on down! Don’t laugh, you people. I was young and I had pride.”
“But no stage experience,” said Lind.