“He was a great one to talk,” said Ingestree. “He could drink any amount without showing it, and it was believed everywhere that he drank a bottle of brandy a day just to keep his voice mellow.”
“Believed, but simply not true. It’s always believed that star actors drink heavily, or beat their wives, or deflower a virgin starlet every day to slake their lust. But Sir John drank pretty moderately. He had to. Gout. He never spoke about it, but he suffered a lot with it. I remember one of those parties when the train lurched and Felicity Larcombe stumbled and stepped on his gouty foot, and he turned dead white, but all he said was, ‘Don’t speak of it, my dear,’ when she apologized.”
“Yes, of course you’d have seen that. You saw everything. Obviously, or you couldn’t tell us so much about it now. But we saw you seeing everything, you know. You weren’t very good at disguising it, even if you tried. Audrey Sevenhowes and Charlton and Woulds had a name for you—the Phantom of the Opera. You were always somewhere with your back against a wall, looking intently at everything and everybody. ‘There’s the Phantom, at it again,’ Audrey used to say. It wasn’t a very nice kind of observation. It had what I can only call a wolfish quality about it, as if you were devouring everything. Especially devouring Sir John. I don’t suppose he made a move without you following him with your eyes. No wonder you knew about the gout. None of the rest of us did.”
“None of the rest of you cared, if you mean the little clique you travelled with. But the older members of the company knew, and certainly Morton W. Penfold knew, because it was one of his jobs to see that the same kind of special bottled water was always available for Sir John on every train and in every hotel. Gout’s very serious for an actor. Any suggestion that a man who is playing the Master of Ballantrae is hobbling is bad for publicity. It was clear enough that Sir John wasn’t young, but it was of the uttermost importance that on the stage he should seem young. To do that he had to be able to walk slowly; it’s not too hard to seem youthful when you’re leaping about the stage in a duel, but it’s a very different thing to walk as slowly as he had to when he appeared as his own ghost at the end of The Corsican Brothers. Detail, my dear Roly; without detail there can be no illusion. And one of the odd things about Sir John’s kind of illusion (and my own, when later on I became a master illusionist) is that the showiest things are quite simply arranged, but anything that looks like simplicity is extremely difficult.
“The gout wasn’t precisely a secret, but it wasn’t shouted from the housetops, either. Everybody knew that Sir John and Milady travelled a few fine things with them—a bronze that he particularly liked, and she always had a valuable little picture of the Virgin that she used for her private devotions, and a handsome case containing miniatures of their children—and that these things were set up in every hotel room they occupied, to give it some appearance of personal taste. But not everybody knew about the foot-bath that had to be carried for Sir John’s twice-daily treatment of the gouty foot; a bathtub wouldn’t do, because it was necessary that all of his body be at the temperature of the room, while the foot was in a very hot mineral solution.
“I’ve seen him sitting in his dressing-gown with the foot in that thing at six o’clock, and at half-past eight he was ready to step on the stage with the ease of a young man. I never thought it was the mineral bath that did the trick; I think it was more an apparatus for concentrating his will, and determination that the gout shouldn’t get the better of him. If his will ever failed, he was a goner, and he knew it.
“I’ve often had reason to marvel at the heroism and spiritual valour that people put into causes that seem absurd to many observers. After all, would it have mattered if Sir John had thrown in the towel, admitted he was old, and retired to cherish his gout? Who would have been the loser? Who would have regretted The Master of Ballantrae? It’s easy to say, No one at all, but I don’t think that’s true. You never know who is gaining strength as a result of your own bitter struggle; you never know who sees The Master of Ballantrae, and quite improbably draws something from it that changes his life, or gives him a special bias for a lifetime.
“As I watched Sir John fighting against age—watched him wolfishly, I suppose Roly would say—I learned something without knowing it. Put simply it is this: no action is ever lost—nothing we do is without result. It’s obvious, of course, but how many people ever really believe it, or act as if it were so?”
“You sound woefully like my dear old Mum,” said Ingestree. “No good action is ever wholly lost, she would say.”
“Ah, but I extend your Mum’s wisdom,” said Magnus. “No evil action is ever wholly lost, either.”
“So you pick your way through life like a hog on ice, trying to do nothing but good actions? Oh, Magnus! What balls!”
“No, no, my dear Roly, I am not quite such a fool as that. We can’t know the quality or the results of our actions except in the most limited way. All we can do is to try to be as sure as we can of what we are doing so far as it relates to ourselves. In fact, not to flail about and be the deluded victims of our passions. If you’re going to do something that looks evil, don’t smear it with icing and pretend it’s good; just bloody well do it and keep your eyes peeled. That’s all.”
“You ought to publish that. Reflections While Watching an Elderly Actor Bathing His Gouty Foot. It might start a new vogue in morality.”
“I was watching a little more than Sir John’s gouty foot, I assure you. I watched him pumping up courage for Milady, who had special need of it. He wasn’t a humorous man; I mean, life didn’t appear to him as a succession of splendid jokes, big and small, as it did to Morton W. Penfold. Sir John’s mode of perception was romantic, and romance isn’t funny except in a gentle, incidental way. But on a tour like that, Sir John had to do things that had their funny side, and one of them was to make that succession of speeches, which Penfold arranged, at service clubs in the towns where we played. It was the heyday of service clubs, and they were hungrily looking for speakers, whose job it was to say something inspirational, in not more than fifteen minutes, at their weekly luncheon meetings. Sir John always cemented the bonds of the Commonwealth for them, and while he was waiting to do it they levied fines on one another for wearing loud neckties, and recited their extraordinary creeds, and sang songs they loved but which were as barbarous to him as the tribal chants of savages. So he would come back to Milady afterward, and teach her the songs, and there they would sit, in the drawing-room of some hotel suite, singing
—and at the appropriate moments they would clap their hands to substitute for the forbidden words ‘God-damn’, which good Rotarians knew, but wouldn’t utter.
“I tell you it was eerie to see those two, so English, so Victorian, so theatrical, singing those utterly uncharacteristic words in their high-bred English accents, until they were laughing like loonies. Then Sir John would say something like ‘Of course one shouldn’t laugh at them, Nan, because they’re really splendid fellows at heart, and do marvels for crippled children—or is it tuberculosis? I can never remember.’ But the important thing was that Milady had been cheered up. She never showed her failing spirits—at least she thought she didn’t—but he knew. And I knew.