Author, Author Page 16

  ‘It’s not so intoxicating at a morning rehearsal in a dark unheated theatre in Sheffield or Portsmouth, I assure you,’ he said, putting his mouth close to her ear trumpet, for the noise in the enclosed space was tremendous. Even so, he was not sure she had heard him.

  ‘I have thought lately of trying my own hand at drama,’ she said. ‘Perhaps we might collaborate on a play together one day.’

  ‘That is an intriguing idea,’ he said politely, and changed the subject. ‘How are your new lodgings?’ Fenimore had recently moved to Oxford, which she claimed to find much more congenial than Cheltenham, but there was a difficulty in finding long-term accommodation in the city, and she had changed her address twice already.

  ‘Very comfortable, thank you. My landlady’s husband is the steward of Exeter College, so I get dishes from the college kitchens. Those dons look after themselves very well, I must say.’ Whether it was due to the ambience of Oxford or the quality of the food diverted to her from Exeter’s high table, Fenimore seemed in uncommonly good spirits.

  ‘Who was that lively little woman you were talking to, with the ear trumpet?’ William asked him afterwards, as they were driving in a four-wheeler to De Vere Gardens, and when Henry told him he said: ‘Really? The famous “she-novelist”? I would have liked to shake her hand.’ Henry felt a pang of regret that he hadn’t invited her to supper, but it was soon forgotten in the high spirits of the party. Mrs Smith excelled herself with a lobster salad, and Smith served the wine with majestic aplomb, in spite of having imbibed a good deal of it, Henry suspected, while waiting for him and his guests to arrive. William made a speech ending with a toast to ‘Henry, and his brilliant play’.

  The professional critics, alas, did not share William’s opinion. The reviews were not exactly bad, Compton said, but they were not good either. To Henry they seemed awful, terrible, cruel. He was particularly wounded by suggestions that his play was too melodramatic in its serious parts and too broad in its comic parts, for these were precisely the faults of which he himself accused most English drama. ‘Is it conceivable that the play satisfied the author of the novel?’ asked The Academy, and the question stung. William Archer’s notice, to Henry’s surprise, was one of the most favourable. He saw in the play ‘the touch of the born playwright’, but his comment on ‘neat and charming dialogue which is grateful to the ear even when it does not ring dramatically true’ was a double-edged compliment. Nearly all the critics remarked on Compton’s unfortunate coat, and at times they seemed to be reviewing the coat rather than the play. ‘Why the outer man of Christopher Newman should be clothed in a garment of chocolate faced with sky-blue remains a mystery known only to himself and his tailor,’ commented one, while another marvelled at the ‘mother-of-pearl buttons as large as cheese plates’. Compton’s performance was rated as no more than adequate, and Elizabeth Robins seemed at times, said one critic, to be acting in another play, perhaps one by Mr Ibsen.

  The reviews, clearly, were not going to make the play a success, and the hopes invested in it therefore depended on what Compton called ‘word of mouth’. For several weeks they watched the modest box office receipts, looking in vain for signs of an upturn. Henry quipped to Alice that he had two invalids on his hands, herself and his play, but the joke concealed a sombre presentiment of failure. There was a brief rally in the play’s fortunes when the Prince of Wales expressed a desire to see it in October, and Henry, all dignity thrown to the winds, scrabbled around to ‘dress’ the house with distinguished friends for the occasion. Young Master Compton was allowed to attend this performance as a special treat, and Henry found him with his father when he went backstage afterwards. Monty had grown considerably since Henry had last seen him, and was dressed smartly in a navy-blue Norfolk jacket and matching trousers. Henry asked him if he had enjoyed the play.

  ‘Oh yes, sir, very much,’ said the boy. ‘But I think it was a shame that the lady’s brother had to die. It made me sad.’

  ‘I told you so,’ Compton said to Henry with grim satisfaction. ‘Monty is a very good judge of a play.’

  ‘Well, we can’t change the ending now,’ said Henry with some asperity. He suspected Compton of having prejudiced his son against the last act in advance.

  ‘How did His Royal Highness seem to be enjoying it?’ Compton asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Henry confessed. ‘I didn’t think it would be polite to stare at the Royal Box.’

  The publicity generated by the Prince’s visit improved box office takings for a week or so, but they slumped again in November. When Compton told Henry that he had no alternative but to take the play off, he could not reasonably resist the decision. The run finished on December 3rd, after seventy performances. Henry had not earned out his advance, and if he had bothered to tot up the expenses he had incurred in connection with the play from the beginning – the telegrams, copyist’s fees, railway fares, hotel bills, hampers and supper parties – he would probably have found himself out of pocket, but he hadn’t the heart to do the calculation.

  Compton had lost considerably more money by the venture, and to add to his woes the play he hurried into production to plug the gap in his programme, an adaptation of Longfellow’s The Courtship of Miles Standish, was a complete ‘flop’, as they said on Broadway, and closed after only a week. Compton phlegmatically accepted his failure to establish himself in London, terminated his lease of the Opera Comique, and prepared to return to touring the provinces in the New Year. For what it was worth – not very much in terms of money – he proposed to continue performing The American in repertory. The verdict pronounced by William Archer in Southport had proved true: it was a play more likely to succeed in the provinces than in London. How vain and foolish the extravagant hopes and dreams of that first night now seemed!

  As if to reinforce the point, fate had one more cruel blow to inflict. On December 11th Henry received the shocking news that Wolcott Balestier, who had been so closely associated with the fortunes of The American, had died suddenly of typhoid blood poisoning while visiting Dresden. He was only thirty years of age. Henry made the long journey to attend the funeral in Dresden a few days later. He wept, standing beside Balestier’s widowed mother and sisters, as the coffin was lowered into the muddy grave. It seemed incredible, and irreconcilable with any notion of a benign Providence, that such a promising young life should have been snuffed out by an action as trivial as drinking a cup of contaminated water – probably in London, before his departure for Germany. But the tears were for himself too. Balestier had been more than an efficient agent; in their brief association he had become a friend, almost like a son or young brother, a source of energy and encouragement and a staff to lean on in times of trouble. Henry could not imagine that he would find a substitute.

  As the mourners moved away from the graveside, Balestier’s sister Caroline, a petite, intense young woman, who had bravely controlled her grief throughout the obsequies, whispered that she wished him to share with her one of the ornate black-and-silver coaches that were to carry them back to a reception. In the deeply upholstered privacy of this conveyance, she astounded Henry by telling him that she was engaged to be married to another of Balestier’s clients, Rudyard Kipling, and even more by asking him if he would ‘give her away’ at the wedding in place of her brother. ‘Wolcott had such a high regard for you,’ she said earnestly. ‘He looked up to you as a kind of father. I can think of no one more appropriate.’ In the highly emotional circumstances Henry could find no way decently to decline the office, but he did not look forward to performing it, even though Caroline assured him the wedding would be a small private ceremony. He had read Kipling’s short stories and poems about India, army and empire, and admired their force and originality, as everyone had. Kipling’s ‘boom’, especially since he returned to England from India in 1889, had been phenomenal, but its literary foundations were real. He was not another Rider Haggard – he was in a different category altogether. Every new book confirmed it, and he was s
till under thirty! As Du Maurier had said of him in a letter, ‘the little beast is Titanic’. But there was something beastly about the man and his work, a coarse streak of masculine arrogance that Henry found alien. If Rudyard Kipling was the British reading public’s idea of a great writer, then clearly it was not one that HJ would ever be able to satisfy. He had no wish to become personally intimate with this young lion, and the prospect of acting as a kind of pseudo-father-in-law to him was full of potential embarrassment.

  During the past year Henry had spent fewer Sundays with Du Maurier than previously, partly because the long walk up to Hampstead seemed less inviting now that Jusserand, who had been promoted and posted to Copenhagen, was no longer able to bear him company, and partly because of the pressure of theatre business, which occupied so much of his time that he needed his Sabbaths to catch up with correspondence and other work. He and Kiki continued to meet regularly at social gatherings in London and exchanged letters in the intervals – they commiserated at length with each other over the death of Lowell, far away on the other side of the Atlantic, in August – but Henry was guiltily conscious of having neglected him a little in the second half of the year. The guilt derived from a secret relief at having the excuse of his involvement in The American to avoid a long private conversation about Peter Ibbetson, which was serialised in Harper’s between June and December with illustrations by Du Maurier himself, and published as a book about halfway through this period. The long first section about the hero’s childhood stood up well on reacquaintance, but the further Henry read into the part of the novel which was new to him, the more his earlier misgivings were confirmed. For a while the narrative simply rambled, as the author, ill-concealed behind the mask of the narrator, obviously wondered what to do next. ‘On reading and re-reading these past pages I find that I have been unpardonably egotistic, unconscionably prolix and diffuse,’ Peter admitted; and ‘Yes, yes, my dear fellow, I’m afraid you have,’ Henry murmured as he read these words. Then the story took a sudden swerve into the supernatural. Peter, incarcerated in a prison for the criminally insane (for having murdered his villainous stepfather), and his beloved, the Duchess of Towers, were able miraculously to communicate and share a kind of life together by a technique of ‘dreaming true’. This allowed them to travel back in time to their idyllic childhood and observe their young selves, and also to inhabit as adults a virtual world of their own choice, travelling effortlessly around Europe, and moving from, say, a gallery in the Louvre to a box at La Scala as the mood took them. After pages of this sort of whimsy, the Duchess was killed in the real world, nobly saving a child from a railway accident, but returned to the hero in dream to cheer him with a mystical-evolutionary vision of the future of humanity and life after death: ‘Ever thus may a little live spark of your own individual consciousness be handed down mildly incandescent to your remotest posterity.’ It was all excruciatingly embarrassing and for Henry painfully reminiscent of his father’s Swedenborgianism. Why was it that apparently sensible people who rejected orthodox religion on rational grounds invariably constructed something infinitely less plausible in its place? From a literary point of view Du Maurier’s fatal error was not to have made the element of the uncanny ambiguous, with some possibility of a natural, materialistic explanation of the ‘true dreaming’. One had either to take it seriously or to leave it, and any intelligent reader would do the latter. He wondered briefly if he could have prevented this mistake by taking a more sustained interest in the novel’s development, but recalled that Du Maurier had complained bitterly about the interference of Harper’s editors while the book was in production. Like many beginners in the art of fiction, he combined modest claims for his work with a certain obstinacy in defending his execution of it.

  Henry of course kept his opinion to himself, and sent Du Maurier vague but warm messages of congratulation by letter as the serialisation proceeded and the book began to circulate. It helped that reviewers were on the whole lenient in their comments on Du Maurier’s first attempt at fiction, and that most of his other friends were apparently genuinely impressed by it. They had never suspected the artist had it in him to write a full-length novel, and that he had illustrated it himself was an additional source of pleasure to its readers. Sales were modest, but respectable, though this was not a matter of crucial concern to Du Maurier, since he had taken a flat fee of £1,000 for the copyright, rather than a smaller sum as an advance against royalties. He preferred cash in the hand to the uncertain prospect of future gain, and it was not, Henry conceded, though he disapproved in principle, a bad bargain for a first novel.

  Du Maurier seemed more than ever anxious about money these days, and to supplement his income further he engaged to do a lecture tour in the winter and spring of 1891–2, which would take him to eighteen venues in England and Scotland. His subject – he gave the same lecture in each place – was ‘The Artists of Punch’, principally Leech and Keene, illustrated with sixteen lantern slides. Henry received an amusing account by letter of his first engagement, at the Wolverhampton Literary and Scientific Society on 12th November, whither he was accompanied by the faithful Emma. ‘When we saw the hall & were told that it would be quite full, we both turned pale and dissembled – When we were told that the audience would thoroughly appreciate every joke & hit of a famous Punch artist, we reflected that there wasn’t a single joke in the whole lecture, and dissembled again – when we traipsed up and down the street of the most unbeautiful town in an east wind and thought of what was before us, a deadly chill, a wave of terror swept over us . . .’ It reminded Henry of his own first night at Southport, and seemed to have ended similarly with a reassuring ovation. Indeed he saw a parallel between Du Maurier’s journeys to far-flung lecture halls, and the slow progress of The American around the provincial theatre circuit that was about to recommence.

  ‘We are both old troupers now, you and I, Kiki,’ he said, putting a fraternal hand on Du Maurier’s shoulder, ‘compelled to learn new tricks and perform them wherever an audience can be found.’ It was a fine but very cold Sunday just before Christmas, and Henry had made the effort to walk up to Hampstead and take Du Maurier out for his constitutional on the Heath, according to custom. They were alone, apart from the terrier Don, who nosed about on the frost-hardened ground looking frustrated at the scarcity of interesting smells. It was too cold to sit on their favourite bench – cold enough for people to be skating on the ponds. Watching them, Du Maurier recalled an occasion long ago when a dog fell through the ice on the Whitestone Pond and got into difficulties, and he had plunged into the icy water to rescue the creature. ‘The grateful owner tried to tip me half-a-crown, and when I shook my head he raised it to five shillings, upon which I’m afraid I was rather short with him. “I beg your pardon,” he said, “I didn’t realise you were a gentleman.”’ Henry laughed, though he had heard the story before – it was something of a family legend. It was hard to imagine Du Maurier acting so heroically now, he looked so frail, with his stick and dark glasses.

  ‘You must be careful not to overstrain yourself with all this lecturing, Kiki,’ Henry said. ‘It sounds like a terribly gruelling programme.’

  ‘Emma goes with me everywhere, and looks after me,’ said Du Maurier. ‘She makes sure the beds in the hotels are aired and warms my nightshirts at the fire, bless her. Anyway, I need the tin. My sight is getting worse. I’ve had to give up drawing altogether these past few weeks.’

  ‘My dear fellow,’ Henry murmured sympathetically.

  ‘Gerald will be leaving Harrow soon, and we’ve decided to make him a solicitor. That will cost money. He won’t be paying his way by winning bursaries and scholarships like his future brother-in-law, you can rely on that. And Sylvia’s wedding will be another expense next year.’

  ‘Is the law Gerald’s choice?’ Henry asked.

  Du Maurier gave a rueful laugh. ‘Not likely! He wants to be an actor, but his mother won’t hear of it. I’m not in favour myself, for that matter.’

>   ‘I understand your reservations,’ said Henry. ‘But I have to say that the Comptons are thoroughly respectable people, and so are most of the other English actors I have met – unlike the French ones. The French are cleverer and more amusing, but quite impossible to know socially. If Gerald has the gift – and I recall some family entertainments when he showed distinct promise – then perhaps . . .’ Henry shrugged to imply that Du Maurier should reconsider his opposition.

  ‘Oh, he has the gift all right,’ said Du Maurier. ‘I remember once, he couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen, he dressed up in some men’s clothes – you know I keep a hamper of clothes at home for my models – he put on a wig and false beard and spectacles, and pretended to be a stranger who called asking me for a loan. It was ten minutes before I twigged! Of course, with my poor eyesight, it wasn’t so difficult to fool me, but even so . . .’ Du Maurier laughed reminiscently. ‘The little devil. He was good at taking you off, too, Henry.’