“Thank you for these few kind words, Harry,” said Ingestree. You save me the embarrassment of saying them myself. Don’t suppose I bear any malice. Indeed, if I may make a claim for my admittedly imperfect character, it is that I have never been a malicious man. I accept what Magnus says. He has described me as I no doubt appeared to him. And I haven’t scrupled to let you know that so far as I was concerned he was an obnoxious little squirt and climber. That’s how I would describe him if I were writing my autobiography, which I may do, one of these days. But what’s an autobiography? Surely it’s a romance of which one is oneself the hero. Otherwise why write the thing? Perhaps you give yourself a rather shopworn character, like Rousseau, or H. G. Wells, and it’s just another way of making yourself interesting. But Mungo Fetch and the Cantab belong to the drama of the past; it’s forty years since they trod the boards. We’re two different people now. Magnus is a great illusionist and, as I have said time after time, a great actor; I’m what you so generously described, Harry. So let’s not fuss about it.”
Magnus was not satisfied. “You don’t believe, then,” said he, “that a man is the sum and total of all his actions, from birth to death? That’s what Dunny believes, and he’s our Sorgenfrei expert on metaphysics. I think that’s what I believe, too. Squirt and climber; not a bad summing-up of whatever you were able to understand of me when first we met, Roly. I’m prepared to stand by it, and when your autobiography comes out I shall look for myself in the Index under S and C: ‘Squirts I have known, Mungo Fetch’, and ‘Climbers I have encountered. Fetch, M.’. We must all play as cast, as my contract with Sir John put it. As for truth, I suppose we have to be content with the constant revisions of history. Though there is the odd inescapable fact, and I still have one or two of those to impart, if you want me to go on.”
They wanted him to go on. The after-dinner cognac was on the table and I made it my job to see that everyone had enough. After all, I was paying my share of the costs, and I might as well cast myself as host, so far as lay in my power. God knows, that piece of casting would be undisputed when the bill was presented. “As we made the return journey across Canada, a change took place in the spirit of the company,” said Magnus; “going West it was all adventure and new experiences, and the country embraced us; as soon as we turned round at Vancouver it was going home, and much that was Canadian was unfavourably compared with the nests in the suburbs of London toward which many of the company were yearning. The Haileys talked even more about their son, and their grave worry that if they didn’t get him into a better school he would grow up handicapped by an undesirable accent. Charlton and Woulds were hankering for restaurants better than the places, most of them run by Chinese, we found in the West. Grover Paskin and Frank Moore talked learnedly of great pubs they knew, and of the foreign fizziness of Canadian beer. Audrey Sevenhowes, having squeezed the Cantab, threw him away and devoted herself seriously to subduing Eric Foss. During our journey West we had seen the dramatic shortening of the days which has such ominous beauty in northern countries, and which I loved; now we saw the daylight lengthen, and it seemed to be part of our homeward journey; we had gone into the darkness and now we were heading back toward the light, and every night, as we went into those queer little stage doors, the naked bulb that shone above them seemed less needful.
“The foreignness of Canada semed to abate a little at every sunset, but it was not wholly gone. When we played Regina for a week there was one memorable night when five Blackfoot Indian chiefs, asserting their right as tribal brothers of Sir John, sat as his guests in the left-hand stage box: it was rum, I can tell you, playing Scaramouche with those motionless figures, all of them in blankets, watching everything with unwinking, jetty black eyes. What did they make of it? God knows. Or perhaps Sir John had some inkling, because Morton W. Penfold arranged that he should meet them in an interval, when there was an exchange of gifts, and pictures were taken. But I doubt if the French Revolution figured largely in their scheme of things. Milady said they loved oratory, and perhaps they were proud of Soksi-Poyina as he harangued the aristocrats so eloquently.
“Sir John had rejoined us by that time, and it was a shock when he appeared in our midst, for his hair had turned almost entirely grey during his time in the hospital. Perhaps he had touched it up before then, and the dye had run its course; he never attempted to return it to its original dark brown, and although the grey became him, he looked much older, and in private life he was slower and wearier. Not so on the stage. There he was as graceful and light-footed as ever, but there was something macabre about his youthfulness, in my eyes, at least. With his return the feeling of the company changed; we had supported Gordon Barnard with all our hearts, but now we felt that the ruler had returned to his kingdom; the lamp of romance burned with a different flame — a return, perhaps, to gaslight, after some effective but comparatively charmless electricity.
“I had a feeling, too, that the critics changed their attitude toward us on the homeward journey, and it was particularly evident in Toronto. The important four were in their seats, as usual: the man who looked like Edward VII from Saturday Night; the stout little man, rumoured to be a Theosophist, from The Globe; the smiling little fellow in pince-nez from The Telegram; and the ravaged Norseman who wrote incomprehensible rhapsodies for The Star. They were friendly (except Edward VII, who was jocose about Milady), but they would persist in remembering Irving (whether they had ever actually seen him, or not), and that bothered the younger actors. Bothered Morton W. Penfold, too, who mumbled to Holroyd that perhaps the old man would be wise to think about retirement.
“The audiences came in sufficient numbers, and were warm in their applause, particularly when we played The Lyons Mail. It was another of the dual roles in which Sir John delighted, and so did I, because it gave me a new chance to double. If Roly had been looking for it, he would have found the seed of his Jekyll and Hyde play here, for it was a play in which, as the good Leserques, Sir John was all nobility and candour, and then, seconds later, lurched on the stage as the drunken murderer Dubosc, chewing a straw and playing with a knobbed cudgel. There was one moment in that play that never failed to chill me: it was when Dubosc had killed the driver of the mail coach, and leaned over the body, rifling the pockets; as he did it. Sir John whistled the ‘Marseillaise’ through his teeth, not loudly, but with such terrible high spirits that it summoned up, in a few seconds, a world of heartless, demonic criminality. But even I, enchanted as I was, could understand that this sort of thing, in this form, could not last long on the stage that Noel Coward had made his own. It was acting of a high order, but it was out of time. It still had magic here in Canada, not because the people were unsophisticated (on the whole they were as acute as English audiences in the provinces) but because, in a way I cannot explain, it was speaking to a core of loneliness and deprivation in these Canadians of which they were only faintly aware. I think it was loneliness, not just for England, because so many of these people on the prairies were not of English origin, but for some faraway and long-lost Europe. The Canadians knew themselves to be strangers in their own land, without being at home anywhere else.
“So, night by night, Canada relinquished its hold on us, and day by day we became weary, not perhaps of one another, but of our colleagues’ unvarying heavy overcoats and too familiar pieces of luggage; what had been the romance of long hops going West — striking the set, seeing the trucks loaded at the theatre and unloaded onto the train, climbing aboard dead tired at three o’clock in the morning, and finding berths in the dimmed, heavily curtained sleeping-car — grew to be tedious. Another kind of excitement, the excitement of going home, possessed us, and although we were much too professional a company to get out of hand, we played with a special gloss during our final two weeks in Montreal. Then aboard ship, a farewell telegram to Sir John and Milady from Mr. Mackenzie King (who semed to be a great friend of the theatre, though outwardly a most untheatrical man), and off to England by the first sailing after the ice was out of the harbour.