Things near & far Chapter 17: Part 17

do!’” And I may say that the literary gentleman meant this as a very great compliment; indeed so it was. Well, we have been speaking a little of the stage. And in the earlier rehearsals of a play a good deal is taken for granted, or indicated by the gentleman in charge. I am speaking of the old days, be it understood, and of the Shakespearean Touring Company in the provinces. The company is assembling in the wings in small groups, one strolling in after another, some of them with the cheerful look of those who have partaken of refreshment. On the whole the men keep together, and the women talk to each other. The curtain is down, and by it is a deal table and a couple of Windsor chairs--or it may be a couple of golden thrones. At the table sit the stage-manager and his assistant, occupied with the prompt copies and various documents connected with the business of the morning. Above their heads burns the T-piece; piping in the shape of a capital T, with the top bar pierced and flaming with gas-jets. The stage-manager looks at his watch. “Five past eleven! All ready for the Procession! March off.” The stage-manager has risen from his Windsor chair--or throne, as the case may be--and is looking up stage with his back to the curtain. As he says, “March off,” he indicates the music that isn’t there: “Too-too, too-too--too-too, tootery-too, too-too,” in something like the time and tune of the music as it will be “on the night”; stamping with one foot on the stage to increase the realism of the performance. The old stage direction reads something like: “A sennet within. Culverins shot off,” and accordingly the stage-manager interrupts his “too-tooing” at intervals: “Too-too, tootery-too! Bang!” bringing his practicable foot down on the boards with a terrific crash. “Too-too-too, too-too: Bang!” Then: “March over. Flourish of Trumpets. Tara-tara-tara, ta-ta-ta. Curtain up! Tara-tara, ta-ta-ta-ta-tara. Procession on.” The Procession of Knights and Ladies which has been forming in the dusty obscurity of the wings begins to advance and cross an imaginary line which marks the place where the scenery will be on the night. They make more especially for a position up stage (L.U.E.) where there will be, at the proper time, a Gothic archway. The “taras” are still going on. They are violently interrupted. “Where’s the Rush-strewer?” howls the stage-manager. “Mr. Machen! (fff) Mr. Machen! Lobbit! (to the hovering call-boy) Call Mr. Machen! (To the Procession) Go back. I am going to have this done properly, if we have to stay all day for it.” The call-boy rushes violently into the darkness. His voice is heard vociferating “Mr. Machen!” in passages and on stairs. Finally, Mr. Machen appears, looking flurried or sulky, as the case may be. The stage-manager, who had been discussing beer with Mr. Machen a short quarter of an hour before, in a friendly and familiar manner, is now, very properly, distant and official. “Mr. Machen, I wish you would contrive to be more punctual. Better be an hour too soon on the stage than a second too late. You can’t learn to act, you know, by staying away from rehearsal!” Mr. Machen murmurs something about “ten minutes allowed for variation of clocks.” The stage-manager grunts impatiently. Mr. Machen places himself at the head of the procession with an imaginary bundle of rushes on his left arm. The too-tooing, the banging, the tara-ing are done all over again, and at last the stage-manager announces: “Flourish over”--and the play begins. In other words, after the little difficulties and delays that I have indicated, “The Three Impostors” was published in the Keynotes Series at the Bodley Head. It didn’t do so well as “The Great God Pan.” The title was a bad one. Then, as my French colleague, the late P. J. Toulet, said to me afterwards: “_Ce livre est trop fumiste, ou pas assez fumiste_”; the farce and the tragedy in it were not well mixed. And again, there had been some ugly scandals in the summer of ’95, which had made people impatient with reading matter that was not obviously and obtrusively “healthy”; and so, for one reason or another, “The Three Impostors” failed to set the Fleet Ditch on fire. Whereupon I began to think about my next book. I had done, as I have said, with Stevensonianism and White Powders; now we were to have something entirely new. “Tara, tara, tara!”--in the stage-manager’s manner. This time there was to be no doubt of it. “Everybody ready for the Great Romance!” I started fair. There was to be something different from the former books: I knew that. But I hadn’t the remotest notion of what this new book was to be about. I used to go out in the morning and pace the more deserted Bloomsbury squares and wonder very much what it would be like. I got the hint I wanted at last from a most interesting essay by Mr. Charles Whibley, written by way of Introduction to “Tristram Shandy.” Mr. Whibley was discussing the picaresque in literature. He pointed out that while “Gil Blas” and its early Spanish originals represented the picaresque of the body, and “Don Quixote” was picaresque both of mind and body, “Tristram Shandy” was picaresque of the mind alone. The wandering in that extraordinary book is, in other words, noumenal, not phenomenal. I caught hold of that notion: the thought that a literary idea may be presented from the mental as well as the physical side of things, and said to myself: “I will write a ‘Robinson Crusoe’ of the mind.” That was the beginning of “The Hill of Dreams.” It was to represent loneliness not of body on a desert island, but loneliness of soul and mind and spirit in the midst of myriads and myriads of men. I had some practical experience of this state to help me; not altogether in vain had I been constrained to dwell in Clarendon Road and to have my habitation in the tents of Notting Hill Gate. I immediately marked down all these old experiences as a valuable asset in the undertaking of my task: I knew what it was to live on a little in a little room, what it meant to wander day after day, week after week, month after month through the _inextricabilis error_ of the London streets, to tread a grey labyrinth whose paths had no issue, no escape, no end. I had known as a mere lad how terrible it was on a gloomy winter’s evening to go out because the little room had become intolerable, to go out walking through those multitudinous streets stretching to beyond and beyond, to see the light of kindly fires leaping on the walls, to see friendly faces welcoming father or husband or brother, to hear laughter or a song sounding from within, perhaps to catch a half glimpse of the faces of the lovers as they looked out, happy, into the dark night. All this had been my daily practice and use for a long while; I was qualified then, in a measure, to describe the fate of a Robinson Crusoe cast on the desert island of the tremendous and terrible London. Thus was accomplished what Garrick called, much to the Doctor’s amusement, the “first concoction” of the book. I am sorry that I cannot trace the further steps in its elaboration with a like minuteness. All this time I was getting my green-mounted review cuttings of “The Three Impostors.” I have kept them, I know, for I keep all my reviews, but I cannot lay my hands on them. I believe, though, that their general import was that I was something of a pretentious ass and that my horrors were all humbug; and for some obscure reason, which I cannot undertake to explain, these notices cheered me on immensely in my new work. “I cannot undertake to explain”; that is the very truth. Why should a man whose only life consists in writing books feel highly elated at being told on good authority that he is utterly and entirely incapable of doing anything of the kind; that he is clever, perhaps, in a thin sort of way, but that his most prized effects at which he has evidently toiled--as the reviewer declares--with most laborious pains miss fire completely; that his endeavours to be this, that and the other are really pathetic in their utter failure; that his lightnings and thunderings are effects of the property man? I do not know why this should be so, and perhaps if I knew I should not tell; but I think I know that there are deep things in psychology, in the real psychology, not in the muck-heap of the psycho-analytical chemists. At all events, I know that when I read a review which ended, say, with: “We can only wish Mr. Machen better luck with his next bag of thaumaturgic tricks,” I would be much uplifted, and go out and pace Mecklenburgh Square and the old graveyard by Heathcote Street in a happy mood of invention, feeling that the new book lay all simple and plain before me. So, thus cheered and highly comforted, I went on my daily tours about the Bloomsbury squares, about waste places abutting on the King’s Cross Road, about the wonderlands of Barnsbury, taking with me the problem of this great book that was to be made; this book that was to be the better part of me. Why, it was only the other day that a friend, who is curious like myself, in the remaining oddities of London, took me for a short stroll near the Gray’s Inn Road. “I think,” said he, “that I can show you something that you will like.” In his voice was the pride of the collector, who takes his keys, opens his safe, and draws out the rich case, containing “Pickwick” in the original numbers, with the cancelled plates, unopened leaves, all the advertisements preserved, perfect condition, autograph letter signed “Charles Dickens,” giving the source of the character of Sam Weller in separate portfolio: all the pride of one who possesses such a treasure was in the voice of my friend. He led me round corner after corner, by turns and ways that became more and more obscure. Then, elated, he said: “There!” In the by-street I saw a queer house, standing in a sunken yard away from the pavement. It was painted in cream colour, and grotesque heads, intended to be mediæval, were peppered over its frontage. I knew it well. “I never expected to see that again,” I said. “I thought it would have been pulled down long ago; like the ‘Rows’ that once led from Great