“Got any ideas out of them?” asked Hodgson, when the time came for us to say good-night.
“I'm thinking, if you don't mind,” I answered, “of going down into the country and writing the piece quietly, away from everybody.”
“Perhaps you are right,” agreed Hodgson. “Too many cooks—Be sure and have it ready for the autumn.”
I wrote it with some pleasure to myself amid the Yorkshire Wolds, and was able to read it to the whole company assembled before the close of the season. My turning of the last page was followed by a dead silence. The leading lady was the first to speak. She asked if the clock upon the mantelpiece could be relied upon; because, if so, by leaving at once, she could just catch her train. Hodgson, consulting his watch, thought, if anything, it was a little fast. The leading lady said she hoped it was, and went. The only comforting words were spoken by the tenor. He recalled to our mind a successful comic opera produced some years before at the Philharmonic. He distinctly remembered that up to five minutes before the raising of the curtain everybody had regarded it as rubbish. He also had a train to catch. Marmaduke Trevor, with a covert shake of the hand, urged me not to despair. The low comedian, the last to go, told Hodgson he thought he might be able to do something with parts of it, if given a free hand. Hodgson and I left alone, looked at each other.
“It's no good,” said Hodgson, “from a box-office point of view. Very clever.”
“How do you know it is no good from a box-office point of view?” I ventured to enquire.
“I never made a mistake in my life,” replied Hodgson.
“You have produced one or two failures,” I reminded him.
“And shall again,” he laughed. “The right thing isn't easy to get.”
“Cheer up,” he added kindly, “this is only your first attempt. We must try and knock it into shape at rehearsal.”
Their notion of “knocking it into shape” was knocking it to pieces.
“I'll tell you what we'll do,” would say the low comedian; “we'll cut that scene out altogether.” Joyously he would draw his pencil through some four or five pages of my manuscript.
“But it is essential to the story,” I would argue.
“Not at all.”
“But it is. It is the scene in which Roderick escapes from prison and falls in love with the gipsy.”
“My dear boy, half-a-dozen words will do all that. I meet Roderick at the ball. 'Hallo, what are you doing here?' 'Oh, I have escaped from prison.' 'Good business. And how's Miriam?' 'Well and happy—she is going to be my wife!' What more do you want?”
“I have been speaking to Mr. Hodgson,” would observe the leading lady, “and he agrees with me, that if instead of falling in love with Peter, I fell in love with John—”
“But John is in love with Arabella.”
“Oh, we've cut out Arabella. I can sing all her songs.”
The tenor would lead me into a corner. “I want you to write in a little scene for myself and Miss Duncan at the beginning of the first act. I'll talk to her about it. I think it will be rather pretty. I want her—the second time I see her—to have come out of her room on to a balcony, and to be standing there bathed in moonlight.”
“But the first act takes place in the early morning.”
“I've thought of that. We must alter it to the evening.”
“But the opera opens with a hunting scene. People don't go hunting by moonlight.”
“It will be a novelty. That's what's wanted for comic opera. The ordinary hunting scene! My dear boy, it has been done to death.”
I stood this sort of thing for a week. “They are people of experience,” I argued to myself; “they must know more about it than I do.” By the end of the week I had arrived at the conclusion that anyhow they didn't. Added to which I lost my temper. It is a thing I should advise any lady or gentleman thinking of entering the ranks or dramatic authorship to lose as soon as possible. I took both manuscripts with me, and, entering Mr. Hodgson's private room, closed the door behind me. One parcel was the opera as I had originally written it, a neat, intelligible manuscript, whatever its other merits. The second, scored, interlined, altered, cut, interleaved, rewritten, reversed, turned inside out and topsy-turvy—one long, hopeless confusion from beginning to end—was the opera, as, everybody helping, we had “knocked it into shape.”
“That's your opera,” I said, pushing across to him the bulkier bundle. “If you can understand it, if you can make head or tail of it, if you care to produce it, it is yours, and you are welcome to it. This is mine!” I laid it on the table beside the other. “It may be good, it may be bad. If it is played at all it is played as it is written. Regard the contract as cancelled, and make up your mind.”
He argued with force, and he argued with eloquence. He appealed to my self-interest, he appealed to my better nature. It occupied him forty minutes by the clock. Then he called me an obstinate young fool, flung the opera as “knocked into shape” into the waste-paper basket—which was the only proper place for it, and, striding into the middle of the company, gave curt directions that the damned opera was to be played as it was written, and be damned to it!
The company shrugged its shoulders, and for the next month kept them shrugged. For awhile Hodgson remained away from the rehearsals, then returning, developed by degrees a melancholy interest in the somewhat gloomy proceedings.
So far I had won, but my difficulty was to maintain the position. The low comedian, reciting his lines with meaningless monotony, would pause occasionally to ask of me politely, whether this or that passage was intended to be serious or funny.
“You think,” the leading lady would enquire, more in sorrow than in anger, “that any girl would behave in this way—any real girl, I mean?”
“Perhaps the audience will understand it,” would console himself hopefully the tenor. “Myself, I confess I don't.”
With a sinking heart concealed beneath an aggressively disagreeable manner, I remained firm in my “pigheaded conceit,” as it was regarded, Hodgson generously supporting me against his own judgment.
“It's bound to be a failure,” he told me. “I am spending some twelve to fifteen hundred pounds to teach you a lesson. When you have learnt it we'll square accounts by your writing me an opera that will pay.”
“And if it does succeed?” I suggested.
“My dear boy,” replied Hodgson, “I never make mistakes.”
From all which a dramatic author of more experience would have gathered cheerfulness and hope, knowing that the time to be depressed is when the manager and company unanimously and unhesitatingly predict a six months' run. But new to the business, I regarded my literary career as already at an end. Belief in oneself is merely the match with which one lights oneself. The oil is supplied by the belief in one of others; if that be not forthcoming, one goes out. Later on I might try to light myself again, but for the present I felt myself dark and dismal. My desire was to get away from my own smoke and smell. The final dress rehearsal over, I took my leave of all concerned. The next morning I would pack a knapsack and start upon a walking tour through Holland. The English papers would not reach me. No human being should know my address. In a month or so I would return, the piece would have disappeared—would be forgotten. With courage, I might be able to forget it myself.
“I shall run it for three weeks,” said Hodgson, “then we'll withdraw it quietly, 'owing to previous arrangements'; or Duncan can suddenly fall ill—she's done it often enough to suit herself; she can do it this once to suit me. Don't be upset. There's nothing to be ashamed of in the piece; indeed, there is a good deal that will be praised. The idea is distinctly original. As a matter of fact, that's the fault with it,” added Hodgson, “it's too original.”