"What do you mean, you villain!" roared Deleglise's caretaker at me one evening on entering the kitchen. "How dare you waste your time writing this sort of stuff?"
He had a copy of the paper containing my "Witch of Moel Sarbod" in his hand--then some months old. He screwed it up into a ball and flung it in my face. "I've only just read it. What did you get for it?"
"Nothing," I answered.
"Nothing!" he screamed. "You got off for nothing? You ought to have been whipped at the cart's tail!"
"Oh, come, it's not as bad as that," suggested old Deleglise.
"Not bad! There isn't a laugh in it from beginning to end."
"There wasn't intended to be," I interrupted.
"Why not, you swindler? What were you sent into the world to do? To make it laugh."
"I want to make it think," I told him.
"Make it think! Hasn't it got enough to think about? Aren't there ten thousand penny-a-liners, poets, tragedians, tub-thumpers, long-eared philosophers, boring it to death? Who are you to turn up your nose at your work and tell the Almighty His own business? You are here to make us laugh. Get on with your work, you confounded young idiot!"
Urban Vane was the only one among them who understood me, who agreed with me that I was fitted for higher things than merely to minister to the world's need of laughter. He alone it was who would listen with approval to my dreams of becoming a famous tragedian, a writer of soul-searching books, of passion-analysing plays. I never saw him laugh himself, certainly not at anything funny. "Humour!" he would explain in his languid drawl, "personally it doesn't amuse me." One felt its introduction into the scheme of life had been an error. He was a large, fleshy man, with a dreamy, caressing voice and strangely impassive face. Where he came from, who he was, nobody knew. Without ever passing a remark himself that was worth listening to, he, nevertheless, by some mysterious trick of manner I am unable to explain, soon established himself, even throughout that company, where as a rule men found their proper level, as a silent authority in all contests of wit or argument. Stories at which he listened, bored, fell flat. The _bon mot_ at which some faint suggestion of a smile quivered round his clean-shaven lips was felt to be the crown of the discussion. I can only conclude his secret to have been his magnificent assumption of superiority, added to a sphinx-like impenetrability behind which he could always retire from any danger of exposure. Subjects about which he knew nothing--and I have come to the conclusion they were more numerous than was suspected--became in his presence topics outside the radius of cultivated consideration: one felt ashamed of having introduced them. His own subjects--they were few but exclusive--he had the knack of elevating into intellectual tests: one felt ashamed, reflecting how little one knew about them. Whether he really did possess a charm of manner, or whether the sense of his superiority with which he had imbued me it was that made any condescension he paid me a thing to grasp at, I am unable to say. Certain it is that when he suggested I should throw up chorus singing and accompany him into the provinces as manager of a theatrical company he was then engaging to run a wonderful drama that was going to revolutionise the English stage and educate the English public, I allowed myself not a moment for consideration, but accepted his proposal with grateful delight.
"Who is he?" asked Dan. Somehow he had never impressed Dan; but then Dan was a fellow to impress whom was slow work. As he himself confessed, he had no instinct for character. "I judge," he would explain, "purely by observation."
"What does that matter?" was my reply.
"What does he know about the business?"
"That's why he wants me."
"What do you know about it?"
"There's not much to know. I can find out."
"Take care you don't find out that there's more to know than you think. What is this wonderful play of his?"
"I haven't seen it yet; I don't think it's finished. It's something from the Spanish or the Russian, I'm not sure. I'm to put it into shape when he's done the translation. He wants me to put my name to it as the adaptor."
"Wonder he hasn't asked you to wear his clothes. Has he got any money?"
"Of course he has money. How can you run a theatrical company without money?"
"Have you seen the money?"
"He doesn't carry it about with him in a bag."
"I should have thought your ambition to be to act, not to manage.
Managers are to be had cheap enough. Why should he want some one who knows nothing about it?"
"I'm going to act. I'm going to play a leading part."
"Great Scott!"
"He'll do the management really himself; I shall simply advise him.
But he doesn't want his own name to appear.
"Why not?"
"His people might object."
"Who are his people?"
"How do I know? What a suspicious chap you are."
Dan shrugged his shoulders. "You are not an actor, you never will be; you are not a business man. You've made a start at writing, that's your proper work. Why not go on with it?"
"I can't get on with it. That one thing was accepted, and never paid for; everything else comes back regularly, just as before. Besides, I can go on writing wherever I am."
"You've got friends here to help you."
"They don't believe I can do anything but write nonsense."
"Well, clever nonsense is worth writing. It's better than stodgy sense: literature is blocked up with that. Why not follow their advice?"
"Because I don't believe they are right. I'm not a clown; I don't mean to be. Because a man has a sense of humour it doesn't follow he has nothing else. That is only one of my gifts, and by no means the highest. I have knowledge of human nature, poetry, dramatic instinct.
I mean to prove it to you all. Vane's the only man that understands me."
Dan lit his pipe. "Have you made up your mind to go?"
"Of course I have. It's an opportunity that doesn't occur twice.
'There's a tide in the affairs?
"Thanks," interrupted Dan; "I've heard it before. Well, if you've made up your mind, there's an end of the matter. Good luck to you!