Eugene was now a member of Professor Hatcher’s celebrated course for dramatists, and although he had come into this work by chance, and would in the end discover that his heart and interest were not in it, it had now become for him the rock to which his life was anchored, the rudder of his destiny, the sole and all-sufficient reason for his being here. It now seemed to him that there was only one work in life which he could possibly do, and that this work was writing plays, and that if he could not succeed in this work he had better die, since any other life than the life of the playwright and the theatre was not to be endured.
Accordingly every interest and energy of his life was now fastened on this work with a madman’s passion; he thought, felt, breathed, ate, drank, slept, and lived completely in terms of plays. He learned all the jargon of the art-playwriting cult, read all the books, saw all the shows, talked all the talk, and even became a kind of gigantic eavesdropper upon life, prowling about the streets with his ears constantly straining to hear all the words and phrases of the passing crowd, as if he might hear something that would be rare and priceless in a play for Professor Hatcher’s celebrated course.
Professor James Graves Hatcher was a man whose professional career had been made difficult by two circumstances: all the professors thought he looked like an actor and all the actors thought he looked like a professor. In reality, he was wholly neither one, but in character and temper, as well as in appearance, he possessed some of the attributes of both.
His appearance was imposing: a well-set-up figure of a man of fifty-five, somewhat above the middle height, strongly built and verging toward stockiness, with an air of vital driving energy that was always filled with authority and a sense of sure purpose, and that never degenerated into the cheap exuberance of the professional hustler. His voice, like his manner, was quiet, distinguished, and controlled, but always touched with the suggestions of great latent power, with reserves of passion, eloquence, and resonant sonority.
His head was really splendid; he had a strong but kindly-looking face touched keenly, quietly by humour; his eyes, beneath his glasses, were also keen, observant, sharply humorous; his mouth was wide and humorous but somewhat too tight, thin and spinsterly for a man’s; his nose was large and strong; his forehead shapely and able-looking, and he had neat wings of hair cut short and sparse and lying flat against the skull.
He wore eye-glasses of the pince-nez variety, and they dangled in a fashionable manner from a black silk cord: it was better than going to a show to see him put them on, his manner was so urbane, casual, and distinguished when he did so. His humour, although suave, was also quick and rich and gave an engaging warmth and humanity to a personality that sometimes needed them. Even in his display of humour, however, he never lost his urbane distinguished manner — for example, when someone told him that one of his women students had referred to another woman in the course, an immensely tall angular creature who dressed in rusty brown right up to the ears, as “the queen of the angleworms,” Professor Hatcher shook all over with sudden laughter, removed his glasses with a distinguished movement, and then in a rich but controlled voice remarked:
“Ah, she has a very pretty wit. A very pretty wit indeed!”
Thus, even in his agreeable uses of the rich, subtle and immensely pleasant humour with which he had been gifted, Professor Hatcher was something of an actor. He was one of those rare people who really “chuckle,” and although there was no doubting the spontaneity and naturalness of his chuckle, it is also probably true that Professor Hatcher somewhat fancied himself as a chuckler.
The Hatcherian chuckle was just exactly what the word connotes: a movement of spontaneous mirth that shook his stocky shoulders and strong well-set torso with a sudden hearty tremor. And although he could utter rich and sonorous throat-sounds indicative of hearty mirth while this chuckling process was going on, an even more characteristic form was completely soundless, the tight lips firmly compressed, the edges turned up with the convulsive inclination to strong laughter, the fine distinguished head thrown back, while all the rest of him, throat, shoulders, torso, belly, arms — the whole man — shook in the silent tremors of the chuckle.
It could also be said with equal truth that Professor Hatcher was one of the few men whose eyes could really “twinkle,” and it is likewise true that he probably fancied himself as somewhat of a twinkler.
Perhaps one fact that made him suspect to professors was his air of a distinguished and mature, but also a very worldly, urbanity. His manner, even in the class-room, was never that of the scholar or the academician, but always that of the cultured man of the world, secure in his authority, touched by fine humour and fine understanding, able, knowing and assured. And one reason that he so impressed his students may have been that he made some of the most painful and difficult labours in the world seem delightfully easy.
For example, if there were to be a performance by a French club at the university of a French play, produced in the language of its birth, Professor Hatcher might speak to his class in his assured, yet casual and urbanely certain tones, as follows:
“I understand Le Cercle Fran?ais is putting on De Musset’s Il faut qu’une porte soit ouverte ou fermée on Thursday night. If you are doing nothing else, I think it might be very well worth your while to brush up on your French a bit and look in on it. It is, of course, a trifle and perhaps without great significance in the development of the modern theatre, but it is De Musset in rather good form and De Musset in good form is charming. So it might repay you to have a look at it.”
What was there in these simple words that could so impress and captivate these young people? The tone was quiet, pleasant and urbanely casual, the manner easy yet authoritative; what he said about the play was really true. But what was so seductive about it was the flattering unction which he laid so casually to their young souls — the easy off-hand suggestion that people “brush up on their French a bit” when most of them had no French at all to brush up on, that if they had “nothing else to do,” they might “look in” upon De Musset’s “charming trifle,” the easy familiarity with De Musset’s name and the casual assurance of the statement that it was “De Musset in rather good form.”
It was impossible for a group of young men, eager for sophistication and emulous of these airs of urbane worldliness, not to be impressed by them. As Professor Hatcher talked they too became easy, casual and urbane in their manners, they had a feeling of being delightfully at ease in the world and sure of themselves, the words “brush up on your French a bit” gave them a beautifully comfortable feeling that they would really be able to perform this remarkable accomplishment in an hour or two of elegant light labour. And when he spoke of the play as being “De Musset in rather good form” they nodded slightly with little understanding smiles as if De Musset and his various states of form were matters of the most familiar knowledge to them.
What was the effect, then, of this and other such-like talk upon these young men eager for fame and athirst for glory in the great art-world of the city and the theatre? It gave them, first of all, a delightful sense of being in the ............