Читать книгу Sackcloth into Silk - Warwick Deeping - Страница 13

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Karl was thirteen years old when he deserted the parade ground for the drama.

No one said to him “You’re getting too old to play with lead soldiers.” He just grew out of the one, and into the other.

His first toy theatre took birth in the packing-case that Brother George had kicked. Incidentally, George called it “The—ater,” and when Rebecca consecrated to Karl’s art the back attic, George looked at Augustus with the disgusted air of a man whose mistress has jilted him.—“Why doesn’t she give the kid the whole ruddy house?”—Mr. Vidler had a share in the creating of Karl’s model theatre. He was technical adviser, and clerk of the works, but he left the constructing of the model to Karl. On Sunday evenings he would come in and assist, bringing with him material that would be of use, pulley-wheels, wire, brass hinges, oddments of canvas and of glue. The one gas-jet in the attic flared from six till nine while Karl and Mr. Vidler sawed and planed and sandpapered. Rebecca had bought her beloved a chest of tools and a cheap fretsaw outfit, and she would climb the stairs and watch the work in progress.

Augustus made a habit of reading in his bedroom, and his mother charged him sixpence a week extra for the midnight oil. Karl was allowed free gas, another grievance for George. But Rebecca was dreaming dreams about her beloved, and she did not dream dreams for her other sons. It was she who realised that a theatre needed paint for its wings, and its back-drop, and Karl had his paint box. The first back-drop was a piece of discarded American cloth, painted on its reverse side and fastened to a broomstick with reels screwed to its ends.

Karl’s earliest attempt at scene painting was distinctly impressionist, a very blue sea, and a splodge of black rock, and a forest sprouting rather unconvincingly from the very waves. Mr. Vidler bristled his eyebrows at it.

“That doesn’t fool me, my dear.”

“Have I got to fool you, Mr. Vidler?”

“I’m the public, my dear, and I’m sitting in the stalls. You’ve got to think of the gallery, and you’ve got to think of the stalls.”

But the completed model, with an old picture frame with a couple of gilded chair legs attached to the proscenium arch was a remarkable product. It was correct in all its details so far as the stage and its mechanisms were concerned. It had a grid, flies, a back-drop, wings and slides, tin footlights, a drop-scene, and an orchestra below. Karl’s idea was to work a musical-box into the orchestra. The thing functioned. It had no roof, and by standing on a box behind the scenes and leaning over, Karl could manipulate his model, pull strings, shift slides, but heavy breathing tended to make the candle-ends in the footlights wave and flicker.

Enter the actors. At first they were figures cut out in cardboard and attached to wooden stands with wire handles that could be manipulated from the wings. Karl wrote his own first play, and the development of the architect into the dramatist was—perhaps both inevitable and significant. The less said about that first play—the better. Karl kept the manuscript, and smiled over it when he had come to maturity. It dwelt with love in a village, and the only unusual thing about it was that the hero was a gentleman and the villain the village blacksmith—which was not life according to Slopp.

But Karl found the manipulating of his figures and the declaiming of the dialogue bad art. Either his mother or Mr. Vidler became the voice, and in his mother he discovered unexpected histrionic abilities. Almost, Rebecca acted the parts herself. As for Mr. Vidler, he was a stern critic, experienced as to entries and exits, posings and groupings. Karl began to learn a great deal about his own particular theatre and its problems, and its limitations. He became, in fact, the child régisseur with ideas. He wanted to do all sorts of wonderful things with his theatre, improve its mechanism, its scenery, and its lighting. Those candle-ends at the foot of the stage were very crude, and scenery should not flap.

The boy had not heard of Gordon Craig, or Appia, or Max Reinhardt, and Mr. Vidler was equally innocent. Had he been told of Reinhardt’s revolving stage no doubt he would have scoffed at it as a new-fangled fad. With Karl it was otherwise. He might squat for an hour in front of his theatre, contemplating it, but the young mind was not static. He was Winged Mercury, demanding that things should move swiftly; and a mechanism was always so far behind your soaring fancy. At the Globe theatre there were those interminable waits, with the gallery peeling oranges and sucking sweets, and beginning to shuffle restless feet. “O, get on with it,” and Karl agreed with the gallery.—Couldn’t the play be made to flow more swiftly without those boring intervals when the illusion reverted to bathos and chatter?

The idea came to Karl quite suddenly. He had been setting up a rustic scene, using animals from an old Noah’s Ark, and to follow it he had to stage a railway station with toy engine and carriages. Why should one have to drag all one’s properties off the stage and replace them? Supposing the stage itself went round?

Karl should have jumped up with a cry of “Eureka.” He sat and smiled, and then ran down to his mother.

“Mum,—I’ve got an idea.—Why shouldn’t the stage go round?”

Her beloved’s eyes were bright.

“Why not, dear.”

The innovation was put to Mr. Vidler. In fact, Karl demonstrated his idea with a turn-table made out of the top of a barrel, revolving on marbles set in grooves. Mr. Vidler sat on a stool, sucking an empty pipe. A stage that went round?—This was red revolution.—But why not?

“Well,—I’m dashed!—Why didn’t I ever think of that before?”

Being Mr. Vidler, he had now objections to raise. If you cut up a stage into sections, the sections would be small, wouldn’t they? And how were you going to link up with the wings and the proscenium arch? Karl had his answers ready. Didn’t some scenes require more space than others, like Westminster Abbey and a shop. Your stage wouldn’t be just divided into four—like an apple. One bit of scenery might run right through, and form a backing for parts of the others.

Mr. Vidler grunted, and bit hard at the stem of his pipe.

“It might work,” said he, “and it might not.—It might chuck some of our chaps off the job. That’s a thing to be remembered, my lad.”

But Karl and his inspiration transcended labour problems.

“Wouldn’t the audience be pleased?—Besides, you could have more scenes, Mr. Vidler, not less.”

“And what about the money, my dear?”

As yet finance was below Karl’s young horizon.

But Mr. Vidler, passing through, had a few words with Karl’s mother.

“That boy of yours is givin’ me shocks.—He looks like being a bit of a genius.”

Rebecca smiled upon him. Such was her dream.