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"That box is full and locked, and there's a long outside list waiting as well. Perhaps you mean with a K. You know money isn't everything, as some of you gentlemen seem to think, and if it were, you would have said fifty instead of fifteen." "K be damned!" replied Mr. Blake. "I'm not a mayor or an actor-manager.
"Oh, Marion!" he gasped, "suppose he should? He won't though," he added, but eying her eagerly and inviting contradiction. "He will," she answered, stoutly, "if he reads it." "The other managers read it," Carroll suggested, doubtfully. "Yes, but what do they know?" Marion returned, loftily. "He knows. Charles Wimpole is the only intelligent actor-manager in London."
And yet this, nothing more nor less, is done on the stage of the theatre whenever a Shakespeare play, or any serious work of dramatic art, is presented with any sort of public appeal. In the case of music, fortunately, something more than custom forbids: the nature of music forbids. But the play is at the mercy of the actor-manager, and the actor-manager has no mercy.
In vain the actor-manager swept the floor with the besom, beat time with the besom, beat his mother-in-law with the besom, leaned on the besom, swept bits of white paper with the besom. The hall, empty of its usual crowd, was fuller of derisive laughter. At last the spectators tired of laughter and the rafters re-echoed with hoots.
All night he wrote the play at railway speed, like a night express puffing out volumes of smoke as he panted along. "I dip my pen in their blood," he said from time to time, and threw back his head and laughed aloud in the silence of the small hours. Pinchas had a good deal to do to explain the next day to the actor-manager where the fun came in.
The fact that so many theatres are in the hands of actor-managers is one reason why these phrases are important, for the actor-manager is compelled very often to choose or refuse a player on the strength of hearsay testimony: ours is hearsay evidence in the most accessible form, and even the managers have some belief in the soundness of the judgment of several of us.
The result, in its usual manifestation, is the average bad actor a man with the cerebrum of a floor-walker and the vanity of a fashionable clergyman. The result, in its highest and holiest form is the actor-manager, with his retinue of press-agents, parasites and worshipping wenches perhaps the most preposterous and awe-inspiring donkey that civilization has yet produced.
A sort of lethargy had gripped the stalls. The dress-circle was coughing. Up in the gallery there was grim silence. Sir Chester Portwood was an actor-manager who had made his reputation in light comedy of the tea-cup school.
"Thou dost not grasp all the allusions, the back-handed slaps, the hidden poniards; perhaps not," the author acknowledged. "But the great heart of the people it will understand." The actor-manager was unconvinced, but he admitted there was a good deal of besom, and in consideration of the poet bating his terms to five per cent. of the receipts he agreed to give it a chance.
Fenwick was madly conscious all the time of his lessened consideration and dignity in the eyes of a band of people whom he despised. Two years before, his cooperation would have been an honour and his opinion law. Now, nothing of the kind; indeed, through the heated remarks of the actor-manager there ran the insolent implication that Mr.
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