"The moon?"

"Yes; as a present for Henry."

"Wouldn't it be rather dear?"

"Not at all. Twenty thousand would buy it any time this last hundred years. But the worst of it is, no one wants it but the poets, and they cannot afford it. Yet if only a poet could get hold of it, why what a literary property it would be!"

"You silly old thing!"

"No! but you don't seem to realise that I'm quite serious. Think of the money there would be for any poet who had acquired the exclusive literary rights in the moon! Within a week I'd have it placarded all over, 'Literary trespa.s.sers will be prosecuted!' And then I've no doubt Henry would lend me the Man in the Moon for my Christmas pantomimes."

"After all, it's not a bad idea," said Esther.

"Of course it's not," said Mike; "but be careful not to mention it to Henry just yet. I shouldn't like to disappoint him--for, of course, before we took any final steps in the purchase, we'd have to make sure that it wasn't, as some people think, made of green cheese."

"But never mind about the moon. Tell us how you got on with The Sothern."

The Sothern was an amateur dramatic club in Tyre which took itself very seriously, and to which Mike was seeking admission, as a first step towards London management. He had that day pa.s.sed an examination before three of the official members, solemn and important as though they had been the Honourable Directors of Drury Lane, and had been admitted to membership in the club, with the promise of a small part in their forthcoming performance.

"Oh, that's good!" said Esther. "What were they like?"

"Oh, they were all right,--rather humorous. They gave me 'Eugene Aram'

to read--Me reading 'Eugene Aram'!--and a scene out of 'London a.s.surance,' which was, of course, better. Naturally, not one of the men was the remotest bit like himself. One was a queer kind of Irving, another a sad sort of Arthur Roberts, and the other was--shall we say, a Tyrian Wyndham."

Actors, like poets, have provincial parodists of their styles in even greater numbers, so adoringly imitative is humanity. Some day, Mike would have his imitators,--boys who pulled faces like his, and prided themselves on having the Laflin wrinkles; just as it was once the fashion for girls to look like Burne-Jones pictures, or young poets to imitate Mr. Swinburne.

"Yes, I've got my first part. I've got it in my pocket," said Mike.

"Oh, really! That's splendid!" exclaimed Esther, with delight.

"Wait till you see it," said Mike, bringing out a French's acting edition of some forgotten comedy. "Yes; guess how many words I've got to say! Just exactly eleven. And such words!"

"Well, never mind, dear. It's a beginning."

"Certainly, it's a beginning,--the very beginning of a beginning."

"Come, let me see it, Mike. What are you supposed to be?"

At last Mike was persuaded to confess the humble little _role_ for which the eminent actors who had consented to be his colleagues had cast him.

He was to be the comic boy of a pastry-cook's man, and his distinguished part in the action of the piece was to come in at a certain moment with the pie that had been ordered, and, as he delivered it, he was to remark, "That's a pie as is a pie, is that there pie!"

"Oh, Mike, what a shame!" exclaimed Esther. "How absurd! Why, you're a better actor with your little finger than any one of them with their whole body."

"Ah, but they don't know that yet, you see."

"Any one could see it if they looked at your face half-a-minute."

"I wanted to play the part of Snodgra.s.s; but they couldn't think of giving me that, of course. So, do you know what I pretended, to comfort myself? I pretended I was Edward Kean waiting in the pa.s.sages at Drury Lane, with all the other fine fellows looking down at the shabby little gloomy man from the provinces. That was conceit for you, wasn't it?"

The pathos of this was, of course, irresistible to Esther, and Mike was thereupon hugged and kissed as he expected.

"Never mind," he said, "you'll see if I don't make something of the poor little part after all."

And, thereupon, he described what he laughingly called his "conception,"

and how he proposed to dress and make up, so vividly that it was evident that the pastry-cook's boy was already to him a personality whose actions and interests were by no means limited to his brief appearance on the stage, but who, though accidentally he had but few words to speak before the audience, was a very voluble and vital little person in scenes where the audience did not follow him.

"Yes, you see I'll do something with it. The best of a small part,"

said Mike, speaking as one of experience, "is that it gives you plenty of opportunity for making the audience wish there was more of it."

"From that point of view, you certainly couldn't have a finer part,"

laughed Esther.

Then for a moment Mike skipped out of the room, and presently knocked, and, putting in a funny face, entered carrying a cushion with alacrity.

"That's a pie as is a pie, is that there pie!" he fooled, throwing the cushion into Esther's lap, where presently his little red head found its way too.

"How can you love such a silly little creature?" he said, looking up into Esther's blue eyes.

"I don't know, I'm sure," said Esther; "but I do," and, bending down, she kissed the wistful boy's face. Was it because Esther was in a way his mother, as well as his sweetheart, that she seemed to do all the kissing?

Thus was Mike's first part rehea.r.s.ed and rewarded.

CHAPTER XIX

ON CERTAIN ADVANTAGES OF A BACKWATER

Though from a maritime point of view, Tyre was perhaps the chief centre of conjunction for all the main streams of the world, from the point of view of literature and any other art, it was an admitted backwater. Take what art you pleased, Tyre was a dunce. Even to music, the most persuasive of the arts, it was deaf. Surely, of all cities, it had not been built to music. It possessed, indeed, one private-spirited town-councillor, who insisted on presenting it with nude sculptures and mysterious paintings which it furiously declined. If Tyre was to be artistically great, it must certainly be with a greatness reluctantly thrust upon it.

Still Henry and Ned had sense enough to be glad that they had been born there. It was from no mere recognition of an inexpensively effective background; perhaps they hardly knew why they were glad till later on.

But, meanwhile, they instinctively laid hold of the advantages of their limitations. Had they been London-born and Oxford-bred, they would have been much more fashionable in their tastes; but their very isolation, happily, saved them from the pa.s.sing superst.i.tions of fashion; and they were thus able to enjoy the antiquities of beauty with the same freshness of appet.i.te as though they had been novelties. If Henry was to meet Ned some evening with the announcement that he had a wonderful new book to share with him, it was just as likely to be Sir Philip Sidney's "Astrophel and Stella," as any more recent publication--though, indeed, they contrived to keep in touch with the literary developments of the day with a remarkable instinct, and perhaps a juster estimate of their character and value than those who were taking part in them; for it is seldom that one can be in the movement and at the centre as well.

As a matter of fact, there was little that interested them, or which at all events didn't disappoint and somewhat bewilder. The novel was groaning under the thraldom of realism; poetry, with one or two exceptions, was given up to bric-a-brac and metrical ingenuity. To young men for whom French romanticism was still alive, who were still content to see the world through the spiritual eyes of Sh.e.l.ley and Keats, and who had not yet learned to belittle Carlyle, there seemed a strange lack of generosity and, indeed, vitality in the literary ideals of the hour. The novel particularly seemed barren and unprofitable to them, more and more an instrument of science than a branch of literature. Laughter had deserted it, as clearly as romance or pathos, and more and more it was becoming the vehicle of cynical biology on the one hand, and Unitarian theology on the other. Besides, strangest of all, men were praised for lacking those very qualities which to these boys had seemed essential to literature. The excellences praised were the excellences of science, not literature. In fact, there seemed to be but one excellence, namely, accuracy of observation; and to write a novel with any eye to beauty of language was to err, as the writer of a scientific treatise would err who endeavoured to add charm and grace to the sober record of his investigations. Dull sociological a.n.a.lysts reigned in the once laughing domain of Cervantes, of Fielding and Thackeray, of Dumas and d.i.c.kens, of Hugo and Gautier and George Sand.

Were they born too late? Were they anachronisms from the forgotten age of romanticism, or were they just born in time to a.s.sist at the birth of another romantic, idealistic age? Would dreams and love and beautiful writing ever come into fashion again? Would the poet be again a creature of pa.s.sion, and the novelist once more make you laugh and cry; and would there be essayists any more, whose pages you would mark and whose phrases you would roll over and over again on your tongue, with delight at some mysterious magic in the words?

History may be held to have answered these questions since then, much in favour of those young men, or at all events is engaged in answering them; but, meanwhile, what a miraculous refreshment in a dry and thirsty land was the new book Henry Mesurier had just discovered, and had eagerly brought to share with Ned in their tavern corner one summer evening in 1885.

Ned was late; but when Henry had sipped a little at his port, and turned to the new-born exquisite pages, he hardly noticed how the minutes were going by as he read. Presently he had come to the end of the first volume, the only one he had with him, and he raised his eyes from the closing page with that exquisite exaltation, that beatific satisfaction of mind and spirit,--even almost one might say of body,--which for the lover of literature nothing in the world like a fine pa.s.sage can bring.

He turned again to the closing sentences: "_Yes; what was wanting was the heart that would make it impossible to witness all this; and the future would be with the forces that would beget a heart like that. His favourite philosophy had said, Trust the eye. Strive to be right always, regarding the concrete experience. Never falsify your impressions. And its sanction had been at least effective here, in saying: It is what I may not see! Surely, evil was a real thing; and the wise man wanting in the sense of it, where not to have been, by instinctive election, on the right side was to have failed in life_."

The pa.s.sage referred to the Roman gladiatorial shows, and to the philosophic detachment by which Marcus Aurelius was able to see and yet not to see them; and the whole book was the spiritual story of a young Roman's soul, a priestlike artistic temperament, born in the haunted twilight between the setting sun of pagan religion and philosophy and the dawn of the Christian idea. The theme presented many fascinating a.n.a.logies to the present time; and in the hero's "sensations and ideas"

Henry found many correspondences with his own nature. In him, too, was united that same joy in the sensuous form, that same adoration of the spiritual mystery, the temperaments in one of artist and priest. He, too, in a dim fashion indeed, and under conditions of culture less favourable, had speculated and experimented in a similar manner upon the literary art over which as yet he had acquired--how crushingly this exquisite book taught him--such pathetically uncertain mastery. That impa.s.sioned comradeship in books beautiful, was it not to-day Ned's and his, as all those years before it had been that of Marius and Flavian?

And where in the world _was_ Ned? How he would kindle at a pa.s.sage like this: "_To keep the eye clear by a sort of exquisite personal alacrity and cleanliness, extending even to his dwelling-place; to discriminate, ever more and more exactly, select form and colour in things from what was less select; to meditate much on beautiful visible objects, on objects, more especially, connected with the period of youth,--on children at play in the morning, the trees in early spring, on young animals, on the fashions and amus.e.m.e.nts of young men; to keep ever by him, if it were but a single choice flower, a graceful animal or sea-sh.e.l.l, as a token and representation of the whole kingdom of such things; to avoid jealously, in his way through the world, everything repugnant to sight; and, should any circ.u.mstance tempt him to a general converse in the range of such objects, to disentangle himself from that circ.u.mstance at any cost of place, money, or opportunity: such were, in brief outline, the duties recognised, the rights demanded, in this new formula of life_."