The Socialist. Thorne Guy
and impressed by the mimic representations of life which they see upon the stage.
"You are a provincial actress. You have toured in ordinary melodrama. When, after some important act or scene, the characters are called before the curtain, what do you find? You find that some stick of a girl who has walked through the part of the heroine in a simper and a yellow wig is rapturously applauded – not for herself, the public thinks nothing of her acting one way or the other, but for the virtues of which she is the silly and inartistic symbol. The bad woman of the piece, always and invariably the finer player and more experienced artist, is hissed with genuine virulence.
"What is this but the very strongest proof – and there are dozens of other proofs if such were wanting – of the influence, the real and deep influence of the theatre upon the ordinary man and woman?
"It is to inaugurate the new use to which the theatre is going to be put by us that I have invited you to join us. But do not mistake me. We have taken the Park Lane Theatre by design. We are going to begin by showing the idle classes themselves the truth about themselves and their poorer brethren. They will come out of curiosity in the first instance, and afterwards because what we are going to give them is so unique, so extraordinary, and so artistically fine that they will be absolutely unable to neglect it. Then the movement will spread. We shall rouse the workers by this play, and others like it, in theatres which they can afford to attend. We shall have companies on tour – I may tell you that already a vast and detailed scheme is prepared, though I need not go into any of the details of that on this first night.
"And now, finally, let me tell you, quite briefly and without going into the scope of the plot, something about the first play of all at the Park Lane Theatre – your play, the play in which you are to create Helena Hardy. It is called, at present, The Socialist, and it is destined to be the first of a series. Its primary effort, in the carefully-thought-out scheme of theatre propaganda, is to draw a lurid picture of the extreme and awful contrast between the lives of the poor and the rich.
"We are going to do what has never been really done before – we are going to be extraordinarily and mercilessly realistic. It will be called brutal. And our studies are going to be made at first hand. In attacking one class, we are also going to allow it to be known that all our actual scenes have been taken from life. The slums to the north of Oxford Street, all round Paddington, are hideous and dreadful. They all belong to one man, the young Duke of Paddington, a boy at Oxford; incredibly rich. The theatre itself is on his land. Well, we are going to go for this young man tooth and nail, hammer and tongs, because he is typical of the class we wish to destroy. We are going to let it be generally known that this is our object. It will be published abroad that the slum scenes in the play are literal reproductions of actual scenes on the duke's property. Our scene painters are even now at work taking notes. One by one all the members of the cast are going to be taken to see these actual slums, to converse with their inhabitants, to imbibe the frightful atmosphere of these modern infernos. We want every one to play with absolute conviction. I have arranged that a party shall leave this house in two days' time, a county council inspector and a couple of police inspectors are coming with us, in order to do this. You, I beg, Miss Marriott, will come, too."
He had been speaking for a considerable time with enormous earnestness and vivacity. Now he stopped suddenly and sank into a chair. His face became pale again, he was manifestly tired.
Some one passed him a box of cigarettes. He lit one, inhaled the smoke in a few deep breaths, and then turned to Mary.
"Well?" he said.
She answered him as simply, and many words would not have made her answer more satisfying or sincere.
"Yes," she said.
"Very well, then, that's settled," Rose replied in his ordinary voice. "Salary and that sort of thing we will arrange to-morrow through Mr. Seaton. I will merely assure you that we regard the labourer as worthy of his hire, and that we shall not disagree upon that sort of thing."
As he spoke a maid entered the room. "Mr. Goodrick is being rung up from the offices of the Daily Wire," she said.
"Then there is something important," said the journalist, as he hurried to the telephone in an adjacent room. "When I left at five I said that I should not return to-night unless it was anything big. I left Bennett in sole charge."
He was away some minutes, and the conversation in the drawing-room became general, the high note being dropped by mutual consent.
"By the way," Mr. Conrad said suddenly, "what an odd thing it is that part of Paddington House was blown down this morning!"
"The poor boy will have to take arms against a sea of troubles," said Mrs. Rose sympathetically. "At any rate, we are law-abiding conspirators. It seems dreadful to think that there are people who will go these lengths. I'm sorry for the poor young duke. It isn't his fault that he's who and what he is."
"Of course," Rose replied. "I hate and deprecate this violence. It is, of course, a menace from the unemployed. But my heart bleeds for them. Think of them crouching in doorways, with no shirts below their ragged coats, with no food in their stomachs, on a night like this!"
He shuddered, and Mary saw, with surprise, another and almost neurotic facet of this extraordinary character.
Charles Goodrick hurried into the room. "I must say good-night," he said, in a voice which trembled with excitement. "A very big piece of news has come in. One of our men has all the details. It will be our particular scoop. No other paper to-morrow morning will have all that we shall."
"But what is it?" Rose asked.
"A big railway accident, but with an extraordinary complication, and – by Jove, what a coincidence! – it concerns the young Duke of Paddington!"
"Is he killed?"
"No. He was stunned for a time. The accident happened in the fog just outside Paddington Station. He was stunned, but soon recovered.
"Then what?" said the journalist.
"Why, the extraordinary thing is that he has totally disappeared!"
CHAPTER VII
KIDNAPPING UPON SCIENTIFIC PRINCIPLES
The Duke of Paddington lay stunned and unconscious beneath the wreck of the first-class carriage.
There had been the period of waiting outside Paddington Station – his own great-grandfather had sold the ground on which it stood to the company – in the black fog of the winter's night.
Then there had come the lengthening roar of the approaching train, the shouts, the horrid crash of impact, the long tearing, ripping, grinding noise – and oblivion.
How long he had been unconscious the duke did not in the least know. He came back to life with that curious growing, widening sensation that a diver has when he is once more springing up through the water towards the surface, air, and light.
Then quite suddenly full consciousness returned – rather, he arrived at full consciousness. Everything was dark, pitch dark. His ears were full of a horrid clamour. A heavy, suffocating weight was pressing upon him.
He lay perfectly still for some moments endeavouring to recollect where he was and what had happened. Finally he remembered and realised that he was actually – he himself – a victim of one of those terrible railway accidents of which he had read so often in the newspapers with a careless word of pity, or perhaps, no emotion at all.
Another train had crashed into the Oxford express in the fog.
The duke moved his right arm, and found he could do so freely, except above his body, where the heavy something which was lying upon him prevented its passage. He strove to dislodge the weight, but was utterly unable to do so. He was, in fact, pinned beneath a mass of woodwork, which, while not pressing on him with more than a little of its weight, nevertheless kept him rigid upon his back without possibility of movement. His left arm he could not move at all. Curiously enough, the sensation of fear was entirely absent.
"I am in a deuce of a tight place," he thought of himself, and thought about himself in a strangely detached fashion as if he was thinking of another person.
"I