Held to Answer/Chapter 8
That night, according to programme, John went back to Los Angeles; and a few weeks later, also according to programme, he was again in San Francisco, no longer a railroad man, but—in his thought—an actor.
Now calling oneself an actor and being one are quite different; but it took an experience to prove this to John. Even the opportunity for this experience was itself hard to get. It was days before he even saw a theatrical manager, weeks before he met one personally, and a month before he got his first engagement.
When he talked of the drama to actors the way he had talked of it to the Reverend Charles Thompson Campbell, they did not comprehend him; when he talked to them as he had to Scofield, they smiled cynically; when he admitted to one manager that he was without professional experience, the admission drew a sneer which froze the stream of hope in his breast.
John thereafter told no other manager this, but learned instead the value of a "front", and inserted in the professional columns of the San Francisco Dramatic Review a card which read:
John Hampstead
heavy
at liberty
"Heavy" in theatrical parlance means the villain. Modestly confessing himself not quite equal to "leads", though in his heart John scorned to believe his own confession, he had announced himself as a "heavy."
This card appeared for three succeeding weeks, but on the fourth week there was a significant change. It read:
John Hampstead
heavy
With the People's Stock Company
The People's Stock Company was new, a "ten-twenty-thirty" organization, got together in a day for a season of doubtful length, in a huge barn of a house that once had been the home of bucket-of-blood melodramas, but for a long time had been given over to cobwebs and prize fights. The promoters had little money. They spent most of it on new paint and gorgeous, twelve-sheet posters. Everything was cheap and gaudy, but the cheapest thing was the company—and the least gaudy.
The opening play was a blood-spiller with thrills guaranteed; the scene was laid in Cuba at a period just preceding the Spanish-American War. Hampstead's part was a Spanish colonel, Delaro by name. Delaro was no ordinary double-dyed villain. He was triple-dyed at the least, and would kick up all the deviltry in the piece from the beginning to the end; he would steal the fair Yankee maiden who had strayed ashore from her father's yacht; he would imprison her in an out-of-the-way fortress; court her, taunt her, threaten her—and then when the audience was wrought to the highest pitch of excitement and the last throb of pity for her impending fate at the hands of this fiend in yellow uniform and brass buttons, the galloping of horses would herald the appearance of Lieutenant Bangster, U. S. N., lover of the maiden and hero of the play. (The Navy on horseback!) A pitched battle would result, pistols, rifles, cannon would be fired, the fortifications would be blown away, and Old Glory go fluttering up the staff to the thundering applause of the gods of the gallery.
Delaro was an enormous opportunity; but it was also an enormous responsibility. John went into rehearsal haunted by fear that the carefully guarded secret of his inexperience would be discovered, knowing that instant humiliation and discharge would follow. He had trudged, hoped, brazened, starved, prayed to get this part. He must not lose it, and he must make good. The sweat of desperation oozed daily from his pores.
Halson, the stage manager, was a tall, tubercular person, with a husk in his throat and a cloudy eye. This eye seemed always to John to be cloudier still when turned on him. On the fourth day of rehearsal, these clouded looks broke out in lightning.
"Stop that preaching!" Halson commanded impatiently. "You are intoning those speeches like a parrot in a pulpit. Colonel Delaro is not a bishop. He is a villain—a damned, detestable, outrageous villain! Play it faster; read those speeches more naturally. My God, you must have been playing— By the way, Hampstead, what were you playing last?"
The shot was a bull's-eye. John felt himself suddenly a monstrous fraud and had a sickening sense of predestined failure. In his soul he suddenly saw the truth. Acting was not bluffing. Acting was an art! The poorest, dullest of these people, bad as they appeared to be, knew how to read their lines more naturally than he. He was not an actor. He never had been an actor. He was only a recitationist.
"What were you playing last, I say?" bullied Halson, as if suddenly suspicious.
But John had rallied. "If I don't get the experience, how will I ever become an actor," was what he said to himself.
"My last season was in Shakespeare," was what he observed to Halson, with deliberate dignity.
"Oh," exclaimed the stage manager, much relieved. "That explains it. I was beginning to think somebody had sawed off a blooming amateur on me."
John had not deemed it prudential to add that this season in Shakespeare lasted one whole evening and consisted of some slices from the Merchant of Venice presented in the parlor of the Hotel Green in Pasadena; and the scorn with which Halson had immediately pronounced the word "amateur" sent a shiver to Hampstead's marrow, while he congratulated himself on his discretion. Nevertheless, he suffered this day many interruptions and much kindergarten coaching from Halson and felt himself humiliated by certain overt glances from the cast.
"The boobs!" thought John. "The pin-heads! They don't know half as much as I do. They never taught a Y. M. C. A. class in public speaking; they never gave a lesson in elocution in all their lives, and here they are staring at me, because I have a little trouble mastering the mere mechanics of stage delivery. It's simple. I'll have it by to-morrow."
But at the end of the rehearsal, John felt weak. Instead of leaving the theater, he slipped behind a curtain into one of the boxes and sank down in the gloom to be alone and think. But he was not so much alone as he thought. A voice came up out of the shadows in the orchestra circle. It was the voice of Neumeyer, the "angel" of the enterprise, who was even more inexperienced in things dramatic than his "heavy" man.
"How do you think it'll go?" Neumeyer had asked anxiously.
"Oh, it'll go all right," barked the whiskey-throat of Halson. "It'll go. All that's worrying me is this blamed fool Hampstead. How in time I sawed him off on myself is more than I can tell. However, I've engaged a new heavy for next week."
John groped dumbly out into the day. But in the sunshine his spirits rallied. "They can't take this part away from me," he exulted and then croaked resolutely: "I'll show 'em; I'll show 'em yet. They're bound to like me when they see my finished work."
And that was what he kept saying to himself up to the very night of the first performance. But that significant occasion brought him face to face with another problem,—his make-up.
The matter of costume was simple. It had been rented for a week from Goldstein's. It was fearsomely contrived. The trousers were red. Varnished oilcloth leggings, made to slip on over his shoes, were relied upon to give the effect of top boots. The coat was of yellow, with spiked tails, with huge, leaf-like chevrons, with rows of large, superfluous buttons, and coils on coils of cord of gold.
But make-up could not be hired from a costumer and put on like a mask. It was a matter of experience, of individuality, and of skill upon the part of the actor. All John knew of make-up he had read in the books and learned from those experimental daubs in which his features had been presented in his own barn-storming productions. The make-up of Ursus had been almost entirely a matter of excess of hair, acquired by a beard and a wig rented for the occasion. This, therefore, was really to be his first professional make-up, and Hampstead was blissfully determined that it should be a stunning achievement.
In order that he might have plenty of time for experiment, the heavy man entered the dressing rooms at six o'clock, almost an hour and a half before any other actor felt it necessary to appear, and went gravely about his important task.
First treating the pores of his face to a filling of cold cream,—all the books agreed in this,—John chose a dark flesh color from among his grease paints and proceeded to give himself a swarthy Spanish complexion. Judging that this swarthiness was too somber, he proceeded next to mollify it by the over-laying of a lighter flesh tint; but later, in an effort to redden the cheeks, he got on too much color and was under the necessity of darkening it again. Thus alternately lightening and darkening, experimenting and re-experimenting, seven o'clock found him with a layer of grease paint, somewhere about an eighth of an inch thick masking his features into almost complete immobility.
Next he turned attention to the eyes, blackening the lashes and edging the lids themselves with heavy mourning. At the outer corners of the eyes he put on a smear of white to drive the eye in toward the nose; between the corner of the eye and the nose, he was careful to deepen the shadow. This was to make his eyes appear close together. Down the bridge of the nose he drew a straight white stripe to make that organ high and thin and narrow; while in the corner between the cheek and nostril went another smear of white, to drive the nose up still higher and sharper.
In the midst of this artistry, Jarvis Parks, the character man, who had been assigned to dress with Hampstead, entered.
"Hello," said John, with an attempt at unconcern.
"Hard at it," commented Parks, and began with the ease of long practice to arrange his make-up materials about him, after which deftly, and almost without looking at what he was doing, he transformed himself into a youthful, rosy-cheeked, navy chaplain.
"Half hour!" sang the voice of the call boy from below stairs.
John was busy now adjusting a pirate moustache to his upper lip by means of liberal swabbings of spirit gum. As he worked, he hummed a little tune just to show Parks how much at ease and with what satisfied indifference he performed the feat of transposing his fair Saxon features into the cruel scowls of a villainous Spanish colonel.
But catching the eye of Parks upon him for a moment, Hampstead was puzzled by the expression, although he reflected that it was probably admiration, since he certainly had got on ever so much better than he expected. It surely was a fine make-up—a brilliant make-up.
"Fifteen minutes," sang the voice of the call boy.
Hampstead could really contain his self-complacency no longer.
"Well," he exclaimed, turning squarely on Parks, "what do you think of it?"
Now if John had only known, he disclosed his whole amateurish soul to wise old Parks in that single question, for a professional actor never asks another professional what he thinks of his make-up.
"Great!" responded Parks drily, but again there was that look upon his face which Hampstead could not quite interpret.
"Five minutes!" was bellowed up the stairway.
Hampstead drew on his coat of brilliant yellow, buckled on his sword, and had opportunity to survey himself again in the glass and bestow a few more touches to the face before the word "overture", the call boy's final scream of exultation, echoed through the dressing rooms.
The corridor outside John's door was immediately filled with the sound of trampling feet, of voices male and female, some talking excitedly, some laughing nervously, every soul aquiver with that brooding sense of the ominous which sheds itself over the spirits of a theatrical company upon a first night.
Parks, with a final touch to his hair and a sidewise squint at himself, turned and went out. The footsteps and voices in the corridor grew fainter and then came trailing back from the stairway like a chatterbox recessional.
It was quiet in the dressing rooms, except for a droning from across the way, and John knew what that was; for the sweet little ingénue had told him in a moment of confidence: "On first nights I always go down on my knees before I leave my dressing room." There she was now, telling her beads.
"Shall I pray, too?" he asked, and then answered resolutely, "No! Let's wait and see what God'll do to me."
His throat was arid. His lips, from the drying spirit gum and the excess of grease paint, were stiff and unresponsive.
"Eternal Hammering is the Price of Success," he muttered thickly, trying to brace himself. "Now for a great big swing with the hammer." But his spirits sagged unaccountably, and he turned out into the corridor as if for a death march.
At this moment the area between the foot of the stairs and the wings of the stage was a weaving mass of idling scene-shifters, hurrying, nervous, property men, and a horde of supernumeraries made up as American sailors, Spanish soldiers, and Cuban natives. All was movement and confusion.
The principals had drifted to their entrances and taken position in the order in which they would appear; but they too were restless; nobody stood quite still; at every movement, at every loud word, everybody turned or looked or started. The hoarse voice of Halson and his assistant, Page, repeatedly resounded.
As Hampstead descended the stairs upon this strange, moving picture, it appeared to him to organize into a ferocious, misshapen monster that meant him harm; or a python coiling and uncoiling its gigantic, menacing folds. The thing was argus-eyed, too, and every eye stabbed him like a lance.
Emerging upon the floor, John paused uncertainly before this hostile wall of prying scrutiny. Somebody snickered. A woman's voice groaned "My Gawd!" and followed it with a hysterical giggle.
Could it be that they were laughing at him? John felt that this was possible; but he stoutly assured himself that it was not probable.
However, just as his features passed under the rays of a bunch light standing where it was to illumine with the rays of the afternoon sun the watery perspective of a jungle scene, he came face to face with the stage manager. Halson darted one quick glance, and then a look of horror congealed upon his face.
"In the name of God!" he hissed huskily. "Hampstead, what have you been doing to yourself?"
"Doing to myself?" exclaimed John, trying for one final minute to fend off fate. "Why? What do you mean?"
Halson's voice floated up in a half humorous wail of despair, as he rolled his eyes sickly toward the flies.
"What do I mean?" he whined. "The man comes down here with his face daubed up like an Esquimaux totem pole, and he asks me what do I mean?"
But Halson was interrupted by a sudden silence from the front. The orchestra had stopped. The curtain was about to rise.
"Page! Page!" groaned Halson in a frantic whisper, "Hold that curtain! Signal a repeat to the orchestra! Here, you!" to the call boy. "Run for my make-up box. Quick!"
John's knees were trembling, and he felt his cheeks scalding in a sweat of humiliation beneath their blanket of lurid grease, as Halson turned again upon him with:
"You poor, miserable, God-forsaken amateur!"
Amateur! There, the word was out at last, and it was terrible. No language can express the volume of opprobrium which Halson was able to convey in it. To Hampstead it could never henceforth be anything but the most profane of epithets. As a matter of fact, he was never after able to hate any man sufficiently to justify calling him an amateur.
While the orchestra dawdled, while the company of "supers" crowded close, and the principals looked sneeringly on from all distances, Halson made up the heavy's face for the part he was to play, thereby submitting John Hampstead to the bitterest humiliation of his dramatic career.
Yet once engaged upon this work of artistry, the stage manager's wrath appeared to soften. Half cajoling and half pleading, he whined over and over again, "If you had only told me, Mr. Hampstead! If you had only told me, I would have helped you."
"If I only had told him," reflected John, beginning all at once to like Halson, and never suspecting that the man in his heart was hating him like a fiend, and that his fear that the amateur would go absolutely to pieces under the strain of the night was the sole reason for soothing and encouraging and commiserating him by turns.
But now the orchestra grew still again.
"Aw-right," husked Halson, and Hampstead heard that ominous, sliding, rustling sound which to the actor is like no other in all the world.