“It’s the peril of the actor,” said Ingestree. “Do you remember what Aldous Huxley said? ‘Acting inflames the ego in a way which few other professions do. For the sake of enjoying regular emotional self-abuse, our societies condemn a considerable class of men and women to a perpetual inability to achieve non-attachment. It seems a high price to pay for our amusements.’ A profound comment. I used to be deeply influenced by Huxley.”
“I gather you got over it,” said Eisengrim, “or you wouldn’t be talking about non-attachment over the ruins of a tremendous meal and a huge cigar you have been sucking like a child at its mother’s breast.”
“I thought you had forgiven me,” said Ingestree, being as winsome as his age and appearance allowed. “I don’t pretend to have set aside the delights of this world; I tried that and it was no good. But I have my intellectual fopperies, and they pop out now and then. Do go on about Sir John and his egoism.”
“So I shall,” said Magnus, “but at another time. The waiters are hovering and I perceive the delicate fluttering of paper in the hands of the chief bandit yonder.”
I watched with envy as Ingestree signed the bill without batting an eyelash. I suppose it was company money he was spending. We went out into the London rain and called for cabs.
4
In the days that followed, Magnus was busy filming the last scraps of Hommage in a studio near London; these were close-ups, chiefly of his hands, as he did intricate things with cards and coins, but he insisted on wearing full costume and make-up. There was also a time-taking quarrel with a fashionable photographer who was to provide publicity pictures, and who kept assuring Magnus that he wanted to catch “the real you”. But Magnus didn’t want candid pictures of himself, and he was rather personal in his insistence that the photographer, a bearded fanatic who wore sandals, was not likely to capture with his camera something he had taken pains to conceal for more than thirty years. So we went to a very famous photographer who was celebrated for his pictures of royalty, and he and Magnus plotted some portraits, taken in a splendid old theatre, that satisfied both of them. All of this took time, until there was no longer any reason for us to stay in London. But Lind and Ingestree, and to a lesser degree Kinghovn, were determined to hear the remainder of Magnus’s story, and after a good deal of teasing and protesting that there was really nothing to it, and that he was tired of talking about himself, it was agreed that they should spend our last day in London with us, and have their way.
“I’m doing it for Ingestree, really,” said Magnus, and I thought it an odd remark, as he and Roly had not been on the best of terms since they first met at Sorgenfrei. Inquisitive, as always, I found a time to mention this to Roly, who was puzzled and flattered. “Can’t imagine why he said that,” was his comment; “but there’s something about him that rouses more than ordinary curiosity in me. He’s terribly like someone I’ve known, but I can’t say who it is. And I’m fascinated by his crusty defence of old Tresize and his wife. I know a bit about Sir John that puts him in a very different light from the rosy glow Magnus spreads over his memories. These recollections of old actors, you know — awful old hams, most of them. Its the most perishable of the arts. Have you ever had the experience of seeing a film you saw thirty or even forty years ago and thought wonderful? Avoid it, I urge you. Appallingly disillusioning. One remembers something that never had any reality. No, old actors should be let die.”
“What about old conjurors?” I said; “Why Hommage? Why don’t you leave Robert-Houdin in his grave?”
“That’s precisely where he is. You don’t think this film we’re making is really anything like the old boy, do you? With every modern technique at our command, and Jurgen Lind sifting every shot through his own marvellously contemporary concept of magic — no, no, if you could be whisked back in time and see Robert-Houdin you’d see something terribly tacky in comparison with what we’re offering. He’s just a peg on which Jurgen is hanging a fine modern creation. We need all the research and reconstruction and whatnot to produce something inescapably contemporary; a paradox, but that’s how it is.”
“Then you believe that there is no time but the present moment, and that everything in the past is diminished by the simple fact that it is irrecoverable? I suppose there’s a name for that point of view, but at present I can’t put my tongue to it.”
“Yes, that’s pretty much what I believe. Eisengrim’s raptures about Sir John and Milady interest me as a phenomenon of the present; I’m fascinated that he should think as he does at this moment, and put so much feeling into expressing what he feels. I can’t be persuaded for an instant that those two old spooks were anything very special.”
“You realize, of course, that you condemn yourself to the same treatment? You’ve done some work that people have admired and admire still. Are you agreed that it should be judged as you judge Magnus’s idols?”
“Of course. Let it all go! I’ll have my whack and that’ll be the end of me. I don’t expect any yellow roses on my monument. Nor a monument, as a matter of fact. But I’m keenly interested in other monument-worshippers. Magnus loves the past simply because it feeds his present, and that’s all there is to it. It’s the piety and ancestor-worship of a chap who, as he’s told us, had a nasty family and a horrid childhood and has had to dig up a better one. Before he’s finished he’ll tell us the Tresizes were his real parents, or his parents in art, or something of that sort. Want to bet?”
I never bet, and I wouldn’t have risked money on that, because I thought that Ingestree was probably right.
5
Our last day was a Saturday, and the three film-makers appeared in time for lunch at the Savoy. Liesl had arranged that we should have one of the good tables looking out over the Embankment, and it was a splendid autumn day. The light, as it fell on our table, could not have been improved on by Kinghovn himself. Magnus never ate very much, and today he confined himself to some cold beef and a dish of rice pudding. It gave him a perverse pleasure to order these nursery dishes in restaurants where other people gorged on luxuries, and he insisted that the Savoy served the best rice pudding in London. The others ate heartily, Ingestree with naked and rather touching relish, Kinghovn like a man who has not seen food for a week, and Lind with a curious detachment, as though he were eating to oblige somebody else, and did not mean to disappoint them. Liesl was in one of her ogress moods and ordered steak tartare, which seemed to me no better than raw meat. I had the set lunch; excellent value.
“You spoke of Tresize’s egoism when last we dealt with the subtext,” said Lind, champing his great jaws on a lamb chop.
“I did, and I may have misled you. Shortly after I had my talk with Milady, we stopped rehearsing at the Crown and Two Chairmen, and moved into the theatre where Scaramouche was to appear. It was the Globe. We needed a theatre with plenty of backstage room because it was a pretty elaborate show. Sir John still held to the custom of opening in London with a new piece; no out-of-town tour to get things shaken down. It was an eye-opener to me to walk into a theatre that was better than the decrepit vaudeville houses where I had appeared with Willard; there was a discipline and a formality I had never met with. I was hired as an assistant stage manager (with a proviso that I should act ‘as cast’ if required) and I had everything to learn about the job. Luckily old Macgregor was a patient and thorough teacher. I had lots to do. That was before the time when the stagehands’ union was strict about people who were not members moving and arranging things, and some of my work was heavy. I was on good terms with the stage crew at once, and I quickly found out that this put a barrier between me and the actors, although I had to become a member of Actors’ Equity. But I was ‘crew’, and although everybody was friendly I was not quite on the level of ‘company’. What was I? I was necessary, and even important, to the play, but I found out that my name was to appear on the programme simply as Macgregor’s assistant. I had no place in the list of the cast.