Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 319
But with a businesslike modesty Mr Everard hardly ever spoke of his exploits as a dramatist. It seemed to him as easy to concoct these plays as to do anything else, and he had, he said, quite his share of luck. Thus, chancing to assist an individual who selected the parterre of the St Helen’s Empire for a display of delirium tremens — having assisted the attendants to eject him and having good-naturedly taken him home in his car and let his wife treat him — Mr Everard discovered that the man in question was the proprietor of a ham and beef shop in Piccadilly, Manchester. The proprietor, however, appearing to be unlikely ever again to attend to his business, Mr Everard had acquired the property at a very low figure. And it was because he befriended a German clerk out of employment who asked him for aid in the square outside the Town Hall, Manchester, that Mr Everard got into his head the idea of turning the ham and beef shop into a place for the purveying of Strassburg Bratwurst, Italian Salami, Bismarck Herrings, Pumpernickel and Smoked Goose Breasts. He took in later the next door shop and supplied such light refreshments of a Teutonic kind that half business Manchester knocked over the other half in its efforts to get into the establishment at lunch time. He had ended by opening three more exactly similar establishments all within the shadow of the Town Hall, and the Watch Committee passed a vote of thanks to the services that he had rendered to the cause of sobriety. The idea for his patent collar-stud, of which, at that time he had sold thirteen millions — and it was his proud boast that every man in the North of England blessed him when he rose in the morning and when he dressed for dinner — this idea he had won from a New York character-actor, who had formerly been an electrical engineer, over a game of poker during his seventh voyage to the United States. The Illustrated Weekly he had acquired almost by accident, having good-naturedly lent its former proprietor at different times several hundred pounds that he never expected to see again. But having been begged at last to buy the paper, which was in a moribund condition, he set to work to have it rim so as exactly to please himself. Thus it was he who first had the idea of presenting the public with full-page photographs of the leading lights of Musical Comedy by the seaside in fancy bathing costumes. And Mr Everard’s taste, being exactly the tastes of the average healthy man, Mr Everard soon found himself in the possession of one more splendid “Property.” The costumier’s shop he had acquired in order to provide employment for one of his dancers who had had to have her leg amputated after a collision between her cab and a motor-bus when she was going home one night from the theatre. It paid him very well upon the whole, because he had to have his dresses made somewhere.
And then at last Mr Everard had ventured upon the conquest of London itself. Having acquired a lease of the old Frivolity Theatre and rechristened it the Talavera, he produced “The Maids of Madrid,” a light musical comedy with a corps of one hundred and twenty dancers, each of them being blonde with unimpeachable front teeth and over five feet ten in height. That, as Mr Everard told his wife, was how he liked them, and he guessed the public had got to like them too.
“The Maids of Madrid” ran for three hundred and seventy nights, and Mrs Everard died upon the two-hundred-and-twelfth. Mr Everard was not exaggerating when he said that Mrs Everard had been for him wife, sweetheart, mother, amanuensis, secretary, accountant, stage-manager, whenever it was wanted, and even cook when he had indigestion. He got along with her a great deal better than in the later days when he had four business managers, one of them a baronet for matters where presentability was a feature. He had also a singing director, three gymnasium instructors, and four gentlemen whose sole business it was to travel the country, and from the provincial theatres, shops, railway refreshment rooms and even from amongst the servants of hotels and private houses, to find for him his famous figurantes. But it did not all run so well as when Mrs Everard had been alive and it did not pay so well. That was no doubt because she had done more than half these jobs herself for nothing, and, as Mr Everard had said, she had jolly well seen that none of the others rooked him.
For all his complicated business Mr Everard himself never employed a note. It was all done with his head though, of course, he had his secretaries to check him. And this characteristic, with its inevitable tendency to slips of the memory combined with a determination not in the very smallest particular ever to be “done,” this led to a very enviable crop of lawsuits of which some were very big and many quite small. For all this work Mr Everard employed the firm of Smith, Peckover & Jupp. When he had had his first engagement as a clog-dancer Mr Everard had omitted, being illiterate himself, to have any contract for his engagement, which was in a small Midland town. At the end of his week the managers refused to pay him anything at all, alleging that the arrangement was that he was to pay them for the privilege of appearing. He had gone back by train to his native town in such a state of rage and perturbation that his condition had attracted the attention of a gentleman in the railway carriage. This was Mr Smith, the father of Evangeline Luscombe and of Polly, and Mr Smith had been so good-naturedly moved by the state of the poor boy — Everard was at that time only seventeen — that he L had good-naturedly taken the matter up and had succeeded in extracting the boy’s salary. The whole sum, moreover, being only a matter of a few shillings, Mr Smith, himself quite a young man, had refused any payment except an occasional ticket at halls where Everard might be performing. In return Everard had never had any legal business that he had not taken to Mr Smith. And in course of time, the fees now amounting to a very considerable sum annually, Sir Smith had got into the habit of inviting Everard to dinner at Bayswater when he happened to be in London.
Except when he was actually engaged in business — and then he found it convenient occasionally to adopt a gasconnading but truculent or a brutally fierce manner — Mr Everard had a quiet and quite modest appearance. During his day he went through work persistently but without excitement. He seemed to have got to know all the different sorts of ropes he had to pull and the way to pull them, without having gone anywhere where the knowledge could be acquired. Thus, before signing the agreement for the engagement of any young lady he always, quite seriously, did kiss her. It was not that he particularly desired to, but it established the sort of position that he wanted to get at. He had got to be obeyed and he knew he would not be obeyed as sharply as he needed by people who kept him at any kind of distance at all. In a similar spirit he insisted that all his actors, except the principals, should not wear flowers in their buttonholes and should carry handkerchiefs with blue borders. There was not any sense in it, but they’d got to do it. On the other hand, at Mr Smith’s table, Mr Everard established a principle of never speaking until he was spoken to. And as he never slavishly deferred to anyone’s opinion or contradicted anybody in matters that they claimed to understand and as, moreover, he had a great fund of anecdotes about places and people and a shrewd common sense, no one ever seriously objected to meeting Mr Smith’s chief client.
Everard had remained a widower for seven years. Towards the end of the seventh, however, he had proposed to Polly Smith. He would have liked, indeed, to marry Evangeline, but she had been married to Mr Luscombe before Mrs Everard had been dead a twelvemonth. At this date, however, Mr Everard had found himself wanting to get married. He needed some domesticity for when he felt fagged and he had a desire to do a little modest entertaining. He knew, of course, how to give half-a-dozen different sorts of banquets in half-a-dozen different restaurants, but he wanted to have something quieter within his power. It was, indeed, one of his ambitions to sit upon the Borough Council of Marylebone and become a churchwarden. And Miss Smith was the most lady-like person that he knew, for he certainly did not intend to marry into the profession.
Miss Smith, on the other hand, was nothing loth to marry Mr Everard. He was fabulously wealthy, he was exceedingly generous, and he appeared to have no vices at all. The engagement, however, which had lasted six months, had been accompanied by almost as many outbreaks of temper on Miss Smith’s part as there had been days in that space of time. She made scenes at him because he used occasionally North-country idioms, because it rained, or if the hooks of her blouses came undone. If she had told him overnight to take tickets for the day to Folkestone, she would upbraid him violently next morning because he had not made it the 10.50 Pulman to Brighton. And when he bought her a diamond tiara she refused to speak to him for twenty-four hours because it had not been a Buhl cabinet that he did not know she had always wanted in her dressing-room. Mr Everard did not pay very much attention to these sallies. He thought they were the common property of womankind. Mrs Everard, he knew, had been an exception, and he had always heard that women were contrary. Nevertheless, he was not even as mediocrely happy as he had expected to be, for Miss Smith would pass whole afternoons in a sulky silence and violently resented having her hair disarranged if he attempted a modest embrace.
“You know,” Gerald Luscombe continued, “that Ophelia Bransdon is a married woman.”
“Oh, the devil!” Mr Everard ejaculated. “Married what? Married whom? Where’s her husband? I’ve never heard of him.”
“It’s rather secret,” Gerald Luscombe said. “I only know of it by accident.”
Mr Everard said, “Hum!” and then, “What’s the story? They ought not to let death traps like that run around.”
“I thought it would be just as well to tell you,” Gerald said.
“Well, but she didn’t at all seem to object to being kissed,” Everard expostulated.
“She wouldn’t,” Luscombe said. “I daresay she wouldn’t. But you never know where you might be landed. Theoretically, I suppose her husband wouldn’t object, but then again, you never know how much travelling mayn’t have changed him.”
“Well, but hang it all, what’s the story?” Everard asked. “One ought to be told.”
“I don’t see exactly why you ought to be told,” Luscombe said. “It’s no more your affair than it is mine.
And nobody’s told me anything except that Ophelia Bransdon has a husband who is the son of Gubb.”
“Oh, that man,” Mr Everard said lightly. “He’s a smart business man but he makes me feel sick just the same. What does Ophelia’s husband do, anyhow?”
“They were separated at the church door,” Gerald Luscombe said. “At least, they were separated in the next room. Since then young Gubb’s travelled. I believe he’s studying Bacteriology in Heidelberg — somewhere in Germany at any rate. He was adopted by an old maid on the wedding-day.”
“But, hang it all,” Mr Everard exclaimed, “old maids can’t go adopting other people’s husbands on their wedding-day.”
“He doesn’t like it,” Gerald Luscombe said.
“Shouldn’t think he would,” Mr Everard ejaculated. “I mean he doesn’t like studying Bacteriology,” Luscombe answered. “He doesn’t like anything in the world. He wants to be back here with the Simple Life.”
“I should think he would, too,” Mr Everard said, “A man’s proper place is with his wife.”
“Well, I don’t know.” Gerald Luscombe tried to let the subject drop. “There seemed to be some motive for separating them — in the mind of Gubb.”
“Oh, Gubb,” Mr Everard exclaimed. He continued after a pause, “Bransdon’s rather a jolly old boy. I’m going to take him for a run in my motor to-morrow.”
“A jolly old boy,” Gerald Luscombe exclaimed. “That’s the last thing I should have thought of calling Bransdon.”
“Oh, he’s quite convivial,” Everard said. “Says he’ll write me a play about South Africa. I don’t know that I particularly want it, but he’s set on having a shy.”
“Bransdon?” Luscombe asked with a slight incredulity.
“Are you quite sure you haven’t got hold of any of the others?”
“The others,” Mr Everard sniffed. “You couldn’t call any of them convivial. They’re more like chewed string, all of them.”
Luscombe’s eyebrows went up high into his forehead. “You can’t be talking of Bransdon!” he said.
“But I tell you I am,” Mr Everard answered with even a little irritation. “Simon Bransdon, author of ‘Clotted Vapours,’ a chap weighing about sixteen stone, with a beard like a dirty waterfall. Got a thing in his cottage like a monkey cage that he calls a loom, and he’s been in Africa.”
“Oh, you’ve been in the cottage,” Luscombe said.
“Bight there, sir,” Everard answered. “Ophelia Bransdon took me in after the Countess had driven away, and there was the old chap. Seemed mighty contented with himself, prattling away like a parakeet. Well, I’ve met some celebrities in my time — Lord Tennyson and Mark Twain and the President of the United States and Mr George R. Sims. I don’t want to say that Mr Bransdon was the most larky of them all, but I’ve known some of them that had a great deal more side and, as far as I know, a great deal less in them.”
“Did he recite to you?” Gerald Luscombe asked.
“No, sir,” Mr Everard answered. “We got talking about Teddy Montague’s grog-shop in Cape Town where I was just before the war broke out, with that company that I took to Jo’burg, and I got such a thirst on me that I commandeered a bottle of whisky and some split sodas from the little pub next door but one, and there we sat and smoked and clacked away about odd people we’d met till just before dinner when Ophelia wanted to show me her printing works.”
“But Bransdon doesn’t smoke,” Luscombe said.
“He cottoned on to my Flor de Coronas like winking, then,” Mr Everard answered. “I think I’ll put on his old play if he writes it. I’ll try it in Manchester. He wants to call it ‘The White Man’s Burden’ and have a cast with twenty-two niggers in it. It might do. You never can tell. Sometimes I think the public might swallow Serious Literary Drama. It will never pay like Musical Comedy, of course, but I don’t see why I shouldn’t have a shy.”
“He’ll never write a play,” Gerald Luscombe said. “He’s too sleepy. I don’t know what’s come to him if what you say is true. Perhaps it’s the air! But I wouldn’t mind betting a fiver he doesn’t ever keep awake long enough to write a play.”
Mr Everard leaned forward in his chair. “You’ll bet a fiver?” he said.
“Two, if you like,” Gerald Luscombe laughed.
Mr Everard rose genially from his chair. “Done with you!” he said. “Now I’ll bet ten to one, a hundred quid to your two five-pound-notes that I shake him into writing a play before two years are out. And I’ll back myself to put it on at Manchester and run it for a fortnight at the shortest. Come now.”
Luscombe sat looking up at him amiably. “I haven’t anything against taking it,” he said. “But you’ll lose a lot of money if you win the bet.”
“Well, I can afford to lose it, can’t I?” Mr Everard said. “‘The Girls of Girton’ is going to run five hundred nights if I’m any judge. So I don’t see why I shouldn’t drop a little on the poor old legitimate and Literature. Even if it’s only to put those National Theatre chaps’ noses out of joint.” He leaned back on his heels, looking at Luscombe and a glimmer came suddenly into his eyes.
“By God!” he said. “I’ll take a London Theatre and put the thing on for a month’s run. I’ll work it for all I’m worth. I don’t believe I shall lose money on it. I believe I can work it so as to make a profit.”
Luscombe contemplated him seriously. “Is that the way you do business?” he said. “Are you really in earnest?”
“Of course, that’s the way I do business,” Mr Everard said. “And of course I’m in earnest. You see, I’ve got a feeling about things. I feel I can do this. I’ve noticed this is my life, that my failures, such as they have been, have always come when I’ve sat down and thought a thing out. When I’ve made a success it’s always been by a sort of accident and I’ve always had this sort of feeling. I suppose, really, it lies in me. If I start something along what the newspapers call the cold lines of reason I work at it of course and work hard, too, but it’s not quite the same thing as when I’ve got a feeling that a thing would be a lark and worth shoving for the fun of it, and would make people gasp because they never believed I could carry it off. And by Jove! I’ll do this and carry it off, too. You see!”
Luscombe smiled at him rather friendlily.
“Well, I wish you luck,” he said. I’m sure I haven’t anything against it.”
“And mind you,” Mr Everard continued, “there’s the cold lines of reason joke about this, too. This is what stands to reason. Now you hear me. If that chap Gubb can run Bransdon so as to make him pay along the lines of any kind of crank and prig, I, yes, this gentleman,” — and Mr Everard tapped the front of his shirt with a large and spatula te finger—” I can make him pay about four hundred times as well. You mark my words. There isn’t a gold mine in the new, realistic, poetic-and-all-that-rot drama. The whole of London isn’t made up of prigs and cranks and snobs. But if this Mr Gubb can get together nineteen households of chewed string, there’s no reason in the world why I shouldn’t get thirty housefuls out of them. The great heart of the nation is sound, thank God! Nothing will ever touch Musical Comedy, or not in my life-time. But the other market hasn’t been worked yet.”
