As the play came to seem more distant from him, and more real, as he watched the first rehearsals on stage, then the first dress rehearsals, he became sure that he had found his metier, that he had not begun too late to write for the theatre. He was ready now to change his life. He foresaw an end to long, solitary days; the grim satisfaction that fiction gave him would be replaced by a life in which he wrote for voices and movement and an immediacy that through all his life up to now he had believed he would never experience. This new world was now within his grasp. But suddenly, especially in the morning, he would become certain that the opposite was the case, that he would fail, and he would have to return, willingly and unwillingly, to his true medium: the printed page. He had never known such days of strange shifts and excitements.
He felt only affection for the actors. There were times when he would have done anything he could for them. He arranged for hampers of food to be delivered backstage during the long days of rehearsal: cold chicken and beef, fresh salads, potatoes in mayonnaise, fresh bread and butter. He loved watching the actors eat, relishing those moments when they returned from their appointed roles to civilian life. He looked forward to years ahead when he would write new parts and observe them create the parts and play them every night until the run was over and they would fade back into the pale world outside.
He also felt that as a novelist he had fallen upon evil times, any indication of his being hugely wanted by any editor or publisher was declining. A new generation, writers he did not know and did not prize, had taken universal possession. The sense of being almost finished weighed him down; he had been producing little, and publication in periodicals, once so lucrative and useful, was becoming closed to him.
He wondered if the theatre could be not only a source of pleasure and amusement, but a lifeline, a way of beginning again now that the fruitful writing of fiction seemed to be fading. Guy Domville, his drama about the conflict between the material life and the life of pure contemplation, the vicissitudes of human love and a life dedicated to a higher happiness, was written to succeed, to match the public mood, and he awaited the opening night with a mixture of pure optimism – an absolute certainty that the play would hit home – and a deep anxiety, a sense that worldly glamour and universal praise would never be offered to him.
Everything depended on the opening night. He had imagined every detail, except what he himself would do. If he stood backstage, he would be in the way; in the auditorium he would be too agitated, too ready to allow every groan or sigh or fall of silence to disturb him or elate him unduly. He thought that he could hide himself in the Cap and Bells, the public house closest to the theatre, and Edmund Gosse, whom he trusted, could slip out at the end of the second act and let him know how it was going. But two days before the opening he decided the plan was absurd.
He would have to do something. There was no one he could have supper with because he had invited everyone he knew to the opening, and most of them had accepted. He could travel to a nearby city, he thought, view the sights and then return on an evening train in time for the applause. But nothing, he knew, could take his mind off his prospects. He wished that he was halfway through a book, with no need to finish until the spring when serialization would begin. He wished he could work quietly in his study with the haunting grey morning light of the London winter filtered through the windows. He wished for solitude and for the comfort of knowing that his life depended not on the multitude but on remaining himself.
He determined, after much indecision and discussion with Gosse and Alexander, that he would go to the Haymarket to see the new play by Oscar Wilde. It was the only way, he felt, in which he would be coerced into quietness between eight thirty and ten forty-five. He could then make his way to St James’s Theatre. Gosse and Alexander agreed with him that it was the best plan, the only plan. His mind would be elsewhere at least some of the time, and he could arrive at St James’s Theatre at the enraptured moment when his play had ended or was close to ending.
This, he thought, as he prepared himself for the evening, is how the real world conducts itself, the world he had withdrawn from, the world he guessed at. This is how money is made, how reputations are established. It is done with risk and excitement, the stomach hollow, the heart beating too fast, the imagination fired with possibilities. How many days in his life would be like this? If this, the first play of his which he believed could make his fortune, should end triumphantly, the opening nights of the future should be softer and less inflamed. And yet he did not stop wishing, even as he waited for the cab, that he had embarked just now on a new story, that the blank pages were ripe and waiting for him, that the evening was empty and he had nothing to do but write. The will to withdraw was strong in him as he set out for the Haymarket. He would have given anything now to be three and a half hours into the future, to know the result, to bathe in the praise and the adulation, or to know the worst.
As the cab made its way to the theatre he felt a sudden, strange, new, fierce desolation. It was too much, he thought, he was asking too much. He forced himself to think about the scenery, the golden lighting, the costumes, and the drama itself, and those who had accepted the invitations, and he felt only hope and excitement. He had chosen this and now he had it, he must not complain. He had shown Gosse the list of those who would fill the stalls and dress circle and Gosse had said that such a galaxy of aristocratic, literary and scientific celebrity would gather in St James’s Theatre as had never before been seen in a London playhouse.
Above them would be – he hesitated and smiled, knowing that if he were writing now he would stop and see if he could find the right tone – above them would be – how should he say it? – the people who had paid money, the real audience whose support and applause would mean more than the support and applause of his friends. They were, he almost said it aloud, the people who do not read my books, that is how we will know them. The world, he smiled as the next phrase went through his mind, is full of them. They are never at a loss for kindred company. Tonight, he hoped, these people would be on his side.
Instantly, as soon as he set foot on the pavement outside the Haymarket, he became jealous of Oscar Wilde. There was a levity about those who were entering the theatre, they looked like people ready to enjoy themselves thoroughly. He had never in his life, he felt, looked like that himself, and he did not know how he was going to manage these hours among people who seemed so jolly, so giddy, so jaunty, so generally cheerful. No one he saw, not one single face, no couple nor group, looked to him like people who would enjoy Guy Domville. These people were out for a happy conclusion. He winced now at the arguments with Alexander over the less than happy ending of Guy Domville.
He wished he had demanded a seat at the end of a row. In his allotted place he was enclosed, and, as the curtain rose, and the audience began to laugh at lines which he thought crude and clumsy, he felt under siege. He did not laugh once; he thought not a moment was funny, but more importantly, he thought not a moment was true. Every line, every scene was acted out as though silliness were a higher manifestation of truth. No opportunity was missed in portraying witlessness as wit; the obvious and shallow and glib provoked the audience into hearty and hilarious laughter.
If An Ideal Husband were feeble and vulgar, then he was clearly the only one who thought so, and when the first interval came, his longing to leave was profound. But the truth was that he had nowhere to go. His sole consolation was that this was not an opening night, there was no fashionable crowd, no one whom he recognized and no one who recognized him. Most consoling of all, there was no sign of Wilde himself, loud and large and Irish as he was, or of his entourage.