Successful Recitations | Page 8

Well, there came a night when we expected Jack to supper and he
appeared not. Only, in his place, a few lines to say that he was going to
start at once for his holiday. A friend had just invited him to join him
on his yacht. He added in a postscript: "I will write later." He did not
write. Hours, days, weeks passed, and not a word did we hear. "It is a
break-off," said my mother consolingly. "He had got tired of us all, and
he thought this the easiest way of letting us know. I told you there was
an understanding between him and Isabel Chisholm--any one could see
that with half an eye."
I turned away shuddering.
"Terrible gales," said my father, rustling the newspaper comfortably in
his easy chair. "Great disasters among the shipping. I shouldn't wonder
if the yacht young what's-his-name went out in were come to grief."
I grew pale, and thin, and dispirited. I knew the ladies of our company
made nasty remarks about me. One day I overheard two of them
talking.

"She never was much of an actress, and now she merely walks through
her part. They never had any feeling for art, not one of those Gascoigne
girls."
No feeling for art! What a low, mean, spiteful, wicked thing to say.
And the worst of it was that it was so true.
I resolved at once that I would do something desperate. The last piece
brought out at our theatre had been a "frost." It had dragged along until
the advertisements were able to announce "Fifteenth Night of the Great
Realistic Drama." And various scathing paragraphs from the papers
were pruned down and weeded till they seemed unstinted praise. Thus:
"It was not the fault of the management that the new play was so far
from being a triumphant success," was cut down to one modest
sentence, "A triumphant success." "A few enthusiastic cheers from
personal friends alone broke the ominous silence when the curtain fell,"
became briefly "Enthusiastic cheers."
But nobody was deceived. One week the public were informed that
they could book their seats a month in advance; the next that the
successful drama had to be withdrawn at the height of its popularity,
owing to other arrangements. What the other arrangements were to be
our manager was at his wit's end to decide. There only wanted three
weeks to the close of the season. Fired with a wild ambition born of
suspense and disappointment, I suggested that Shakespeare should fill
the breach. "Romeo and Juliet," with me, Sybil Gascoigne, as the
heroine.
"Pshaw!" said our good-humoured manager, "you do not know what
you are talking about. Juliet! You have not the depth, the temperament,
the experience for a Juliet. She had more knowledge of life at thirteen
than most of our English maids have at thirty. To represent Juliet
correctly an actress must have the face and figure of a young girl, with
the heart and mind of a woman, and of a woman who has suffered."
"And have I not suffered? Do you think because you see me tripping
through some foolish, insipid _rôle_ that I am capable of nothing better?
Give me a chance and see what I can do."

"Oh! bid me leap, rather than marry Paris,"
I began, and declaimed the speech with such despairing vigour that our
manager was impressed.
Well, the end of it was that he yielded to my suggestion.
It seemed a prosperous time to float a new Juliet. At a neighbouring
theatre a lovely foreign actress was playing the part nightly to crowded
houses. We might get some of the overflow, or the public would come
for the sake of comparing native with imported talent. Oh! the faces of
my traducers, who had said, "Those Gascoigne girls have no feeling for
art," when it was known that they were out of the bill, and that Sybil
Gascoigne was to play Shakespeare. I absolutely forgot Jack for one
moment. But the next, my grief, my desolation, were present with me
with more acuteness than ever. And I was glad that it was so. Such
agony as I was enduring would surely make me play Juliet as it had
never been played before.
At rehearsals I could see I created a sensation. I felt that I was grand in
my hapless love, my desperate grief. I should make myself a name. If
Jack were dead or had forsaken me, my art should be all in all.
The morning before the all important evening dawned, I had lain awake
nearly an hour, as my custom was of nights how, thinking of Jack,
wondering if ever woman had so much cause to grieve as I. Then I rose,
practised taking the friar's potion,