And since Mr Drury, leaping nightly from his Rolls saloon with that nervous and youthful alacrity that had been his most engaging asset for the past twenty years, always had time to bestow at least a smile and a friendly word on old Florrie, he affected her head and heart as much as anybody else’s. Nobody was more delighted than Florrie to know that he had again found a winner in Bitter Laurel, now sweeping on to its 100th performance. Night by night she saluted with a satisfied chuckle each board as it appeared: ‘Pit Full’, ‘Gallery Full’, ‘Dress Circle Full’, ‘Upper Circle Full’, ‘Stalls Full’, ‘Standing Room Only’, ‘House Full’. Set to run for ever, it was, and the faces that went in by the stage door looked merry and prosperous, as Florrie liked to see them.
As for the young man who had provided the raw material out of which Mr Drury had built up this glittering monument of success; if he wasn’t pleased, thought Florrie, he ought to be. Not that, in the ordinary way, one thought much about the author of a play – unless, of course, it was Shakespeare, who was different; compared with the cast, he was of small importance and rarely seen. But Mr Drury had one day arrived arm-in-arm with a sulky-looking and ill-dressed youth whom he had introduced to Florrie, saying in his fine, generous way: ‘Here, John, you must know Florrie. She’s our mascot – we couldn’t get on without her. Florrie, this is Mr Scales, whose new play’s going to make all our fortunes.’ Mr Drury was never mistaken about plays; he had the golden touch. Certainly, in the last three months, Mr Scales, though still sulky-looking, had become much better dressed.
On this particular night – Saturday, 15th April, when Bitter Laurel was giving its 96th performance to a full house after a packed matinée – Mr Scales and Mr Drury arrived together, in evening dress and, Florrie noted with concern, rather late. Mr Drury would have to hurry, and it was tiresome of Mr Scales to detain him, as he did, by arguing and expostulating upon the threshold. Not that Mr Drury seemed put out. He was smiling (his smile, one-sided and slightly elfin in quality, was famous), and at last he said, with his hand (Mr Drury’s expressive hands were renowned) affectionately upon Mr Scales’s shoulder, ‘Sorry, old boy, can’t stop now. Curtain must go up, you know. Come round and see me after the show – I’ll have those fellows there.’ Then he vanished, still smiling the elfin smile and waving the expressive hand; and Mr Scales, after hesitating a moment, had turned away and came down past Florrie’s corner. He seemed to be still sulky and rather preoccupied, but, looking up, caught sight of Florrie and grinned at her. There was nothing elfin about Mr Scales’s smile, but it improved his face very much.
‘Well, Florrie,’ said Mr Scales, ‘we seem to be doing pretty well, financially speaking, don’t we?’
Florrie eagerly agreed. ‘But there,’ she observed, ‘we’re getting used to that. Mr Drury’s a wonderful man. It doesn’t matter what he’s in, they all come to see him. Of course,’ she added, remembering that this might not sound very kind, ‘he’s very clever at picking the right play.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Mr Scales. ‘The play. I suppose the play has something to do with it. Not much, but something. Have you seen the play, Florrie?’
Yes, indeed, Florrie had. Mr Drury was so kind, he always remembered to give Florrie a pass early on in the run, even if the house was ever so full.
‘What did you think of it?’ enquired Mr Scales.
‘I thought it was lovely,’ said Florrie; ‘I cried ever so. When he came back with only one arm and found his fiancée gone to the bad at a cocktail party –’
‘Just so,’ said Mr Scales.
‘And the scene on the Embankment – lovely, I thought that was, when he rolls up his old army coat and says to the bobby, “I will rest on my laurels” – that was a beautiful curtain line you gave him there, Mr Scales. And the way he put it over –’
‘Yes, rather,’ said Mr Scales. ‘There’s nobody like Drury for putting over that kind of a line.’
‘And when she came back to him and he wouldn’t have her any more and then Lady Sylvia took him up and fell in love with him –’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Mr Scales. ‘You found that part moving?”
‘Romantic,’ said Florrie. ‘And the scene between the two girls – that was splendid. All worked-up, it made you feel. And then in the end, when he took the one he really loved after all –’
‘Sure-fire, isn’t it?’ said Mr Scales. ‘Goes straight to the heart I’m glad you think so, Florrie. Because, of course, quite apart from anything else, it’s very good box-office.’
‘I believe you,’ said Florrie. ‘Your first play, isn’t it? You’re lucky to have it taken by Mr Drury.’
‘Yes,’ said Mr Scales, ‘I owe him a lot. Everybody says so, and it must be true. There are two fat gentlemen in astrakhan coats coming along tonight to settle about the film-rights. I’m a made man, Florrie, and that’s always pleasant, particularly after five or six years of living hand-to-mouth. No fun in not having enough to eat, is there?’
‘That there isn’t,’ said Florrie, who knew all about it. ‘I’m ever so glad your luck’s turned at last, dearie.’
‘Thank you,’ said Mr Scales. ‘Have something to drink the health of the play.’ He fumbled in his breast-pocket. ‘Here you are. A green one and a brown one. Thirty bob. Thirty pieces of silver. Spend it on something you fancy, Florrie. It’s the price of blood.’
‘What a thing to say!’ exclaimed Florrie. ‘But you writing gentlemen will have a bit of a joke. And I know poor Mr Milling, who wrote the book for Pussycat, Pussycat and The Lipstick Girl always used to say he sweated blood over every one of ’em.’
A nice young gentleman, thought Florrie, as Mr Scales passed on, but queer and, perhaps, a little bit difficult in his temper, for them that had to live with him. He had spoken very nicely about Mr Drury, but there had been a moment when she had fancied that he was (as they said) registering sarcasm. And she didn’t quite like that joke about the thirty pieces of silver that was New Testament, and New Testament (unlike Old) was blasphemous. It was like the difference between saying, ‘Oh, God!’ (which nobody minded) and ‘Oh, Christ!’ (which Florrie had never held with). Still, people said all kinds of things nowadays, and thirty bob was thirty bob; it was very kind of Mr Scales.
Mr John Scales, slouching along Shaftesbury Avenue and wondering how he was going to put in the next three hours or so, encountered a friend just turning out of Wardour Street. The friend was a tall, thin young man, with a shabby overcoat and a face, under a dilapidated soft hat, like a hungry hawk’s. There was a girl with him.
‘Hullo, Mollie!’ said Scales. ‘Hullo, Sheridan!’
‘Hullo!’ said Sheridan. ‘Look who’s here! The great man himself. London’s rising dramatist. Sweet Scales of Old Drury.’
‘Cut it out,’ said Scales.
‘Your show seems to be booming,’ went on Sheridan. ‘Congratulations. On the boom, I mean.’
‘God!’ said Scales, ‘have you seen it? I did send you tickets.’
‘You did – it was kind of you to think of us amid your busy life. We saw the show. In these bargain-basement days, you’ve managed to sell your soul in a pretty good market.’
‘See here, Sheridan – it wasn’t my fault. I’m just as sick as you are. Sicker. But like a fool I signed the contract without a controlling clause, and by the time Drury and his producer had finished mucking the script about –’
‘He didn’t sell himself,’ said the girl, ‘he was took advantage of, your worship.’
‘Pity,’ said Sheridan. ‘It was a good play – but he done her wrong. But,’ he added, glancing at Scales, ‘I take it you drink the champagne that she sends you. You’re looking prosperous.’
‘Well,’ said Scales, ‘what do you expect me to do? Return the cheque with thanks?’
‘Good lord, no,’ said Sheridan. ‘It’s all right. Nobody’s grudging you your luck.’
‘It’s something, after all,’ said Scales defensively, ‘to get one’s foot in at all. One can’t
always look a gift horse in the mouth.’
‘No,’ said Sheridan. ‘Good lord, I know that. Only I’m afraid you’ll find this thing hang round your neck a bit if you want to go back to your own line. You know what the public is – it likes to get what it expects. Once you’ve made a name for sob-stuff, you’re labelled for good – or bad.’
‘I know. Hell. Can’t do anything about it, though. Come and have a drink.’
But the others had an appointment to keep, and passed on their way. The encounter was typical. Damnation, thought Scales, savagely, turning in to the Criterion Bar, wasn’t it enough to have had your decent play cut about and turned into the sort of thing that made you retch to listen to it, without your friends supposing you had acquiesced in the mutilation for the sake of making money?
He had been a little worried when he knew that George Philpotts (kindly, officious George, who always knew everybody) had sent Bitter Laurel to Drury. The very last management he himself would have selected; but also the very last management that would be likely to take so cynical and disillusioned a play. Miraculously, however, Drury had expressed himself as ‘dead keen’ about it. There had been an interview with Drury, and Drury, damn his expressive eyes, had – yes, one had to admit it – Drury had ‘put himself across’ with great success. He had been flattering, he had been charming. Scales had succumbed, as night by night pit and stalls and dress circle succumbed to the gracious manner and the elfin smile. ‘A grand piece – grand situations,’ Garrick Drury had said. ‘Of course, here and there it will need a little tidying up in production.’ Scales said modestly that he expected that – he knew very hide about writing for the stage – he was a novelist – he was quite ready to agree to alterations, provided, naturally, nothing was done to upset the artistic unity of the thing. Mr Garrick Drury was pained by the suggestion. As an artist himself, he should, of course, allow nothing inartistic to be done. Scales, overcome by Drury’s manner, and by a flood of technicalities about sets and lighting and costing and casting poured out upon him by the producer, who was present at the interview, signed a contract giving the author a very handsome share of the royalties, and hardly noticed that he had left the management with full power to make any ‘reasonable’ alterations to fit the play for production.
It was only gradually in the course of rehearsal, that he discovered what was being done to his play. It was not merely that Mr Drury had succeeded in importing into the lines given to him, as the war-shattered hero, a succulent emotionalism which was very far from the dramatist’s idea of that embittered and damaged character. So much, one had expected. But the plot had slowly disintegrated and reshaped itself into something revoltingly different. Originally, for example, the girl Judith (the one who had ‘gone to the bad at a cocktail party’) had not spurned the one-armed soldier (Mr Drury). Far from it. She had welcomed him and several other heroes home with indiscriminate, not to say promiscuous enthusiasm. And the hero, instead of behaving (as Mr Drury saw to it that he did in the acted version) in a highly sacrificial manner, had gone deliberately and cynically to the bad in his turn. Nor had ‘Lady Sylvia’, who rescued him from the Embankment, been (as Mr Drury’s second leading lady now represented her to be) a handsome and passionate girl deeply in love with the hero, but a nauseous, rich, elderly woman with a fancy for a gigolo, whose attentions the hero (now thoroughly deteriorated as a result of war and post-war experience) accepted without shame or remorse in exchange for the luxuries of life. And finally, when Judith, thoroughly shocked and brought to her senses by these developments, had tried to recapture him, the hero (as originally depicted) had so far lost all sense of decency as to prefer – though with a bitter sense of failure and frustration – to stick to Lady Sylvia, as the line of least resistance, and had ended, on Armistice Day, by tearing away the public trophies of laurel and poppy from the Cenotaph and being ignominiously removed by the police after a drunken and furious harangue in denunciation of war. Not a pleasant play, as originally written, and certainly in shocking taste; but an honest piece of work so far as it went. But Mr Drury had pointed out that ‘his’ public would never stand the original Lady Sylvia or the final degradation of the hero. There must be slight alterations – nothing inartistic, of course, but alterations, to make the thing more moving, more uplifting, more, in fact, true to human nature.
Because, Mr Drury pointed out, if there was one thing you could rely on, it was the essential decency of human nature, and its immediate response to general sentiments. His experience, he said, had proved it to him.
Scales had not given way without a struggle. He had fought hard over every line. But there was the contract. And in the end, he had actually written the new scenes and lines himself, not because he wanted to, but because at any rate his own lines would be less intolerable than the united efforts of cast and producer to write them for themselves. So that he could not even say that he had washed his hands of the whole beastly thing. Like his own (original) hero, he had taken the line of least resistance. Mr Drury had been exceedingly grateful to him and delighted to feel that author and management were working so well together in their common interest.
‘I know how you feel,’ he would say, ‘about altering your artistic work. Any artist feels the same. But I’ve had twenty years’ experience of the stage, and it counts, you know, it counts. You don’t think I’m right – my dear boy, I should feel just the same in your place. I’m terribly grateful for all this splendid work you’re putting in and I know you won’t regret it. Don’t worry. All young authors come up against the same difficulty. It’s just a question of experience.’
Hopeless. Scales, in desperation, had enlisted the services of an agent, who pointed out that it was now too late to get the contract altered. ‘But,’ said the agent, ‘it’s quite an honest contract, as these things go. Drury’s management has always had a very good name. We shall keep an eye on these subsidiary rights for you – you can leave that to us. I know it’s a nuisance having to alter things here and there, but it is your first play, and you’re lucky to have got in with Drury. He’s very shrewd about what will appeal to a West End audience. When once he’s established you, you’ll be in a much better position to dictate terms.’
Yes, of course, thought Scales – to dictate to Drury, or to anybody else who might want that type of play. But in a worse position than ever to get anybody to look at his serious work. And the worst of it was that the agent, as well as the actor-manager, seemed to think that his concern for his own spiritual integrity didn’t count, didn’t matter – that he would be quite genuinely consoled by his royalties.
At the end of the first week, Garrick Drury practically said as much. His own experience had been justified by the receipts. ‘When all’s said and done,’ he remarked, ‘the box-office is the real test. I don’t say that in a commercial spirit. I’d always be ready to put on a play I believed in – as an artist – even if I lost money by it. But when the box-office is happy, it means the public is happy. The box-office is the pulse of the public. Get that and you know you’ve got the heart of the audience.’
He couldn’t see. Nobody could see. John Scales’s own friends couldn’t see; they merely thought he had sold himself. And as the play settled down to run remorselessly on, like a stream of treacle, John Scales realised that there would be no end to it. It was useless to hope that the public would revolt at the insincerity of the play. They probably saw through it all right, just as the critics had done. What stood in the way of the play’s deserved collapse was the glorious figure of Garrick Drury. ‘This broken-backed play,’ said the Sunday Echo, ‘is only held together by the magnificent acting of Mr Garrick Drury.’ ‘Saccharine as it is,’ said the Looker-On, ‘Bitter Laurel provides a personal triumph for Mr Garrick Drury.’ ‘Nothing in the play is consistent,’ said the Dial, ‘except the assured skill of Mr Garrick Drury, who – ‘Mr John Scales,’ said the Daily Messenger, ‘has constructed his situations with great skill to display Mr Garrick Drury in all his att
itudes, and that is a sure recipe for success. We prophesy a long run for Bitter Laurel.’ A true prophecy, or so it seemed.
And there was no stopping it. If only Mr Drury would fall ill or die or lose his looks or his voice or his popularity, the beastly play might be buried and forgotten. There were circumstances under which the rights would revert to the author. But Mr Drury lived and flourished and charmed the public, and the run went on, and after that there were the touring rights (controlled by Mr Drury) and film rights (largely controlled by Mr Drury) and probably radio rights and God only knew what else. And all Mr Scales could do was to pocket the wages of sin and curse Mr Drury, who had (so pleasantly) ruined his work, destroyed his reputation, alienated his friends, exposed him to the contempt of the critics and forced him to betray his own soul.
If there was one living man in London whom John Scales would have liked to see removed from the face of the earth, it was Garrick Drury, to whom (as he was daily obliged to admit to all and sundry) he owed so much. Yet Drury was a really charming fellow. There were times when that inexhaustible charm got so much on the author’s nerves that he could readily have slain Mr Drury for his charm alone.