Mummers in Mufti/Chapter 19

OW, with the rise of the curtain on "Eleanor," which was Arnold Bellsmith's first great contact with life, there comes a peculiar temptation, one of those crises in the life of a story which must be met and fought down.

The temptation is to draw a black line across the page at this point and write in the impressive words:

Then the rest of the story could be called  "Renunciation" or "Harvest" or, as Bellsmith himself would say, "something jolly and stern." For this episode undoubtedly did mark a turning-point in the life of Arnold Bellsmith. Having purchased a musical comedy on the road, it would require no such shrewd observer as Israels, for example, to understand perfectly that Arnold Bellsmith's playtime was over.

On the other hand, if the rest of the story is to be called "Renunciation," the first part must be called "Youth," and, say what you like, Bellsmith was unmistakably thirty-five.

Also there is this difficulty: To merit division into "books" and "episodes" and "phases"—the little chevrons of earnest ideas—a story must really consider itself to be somber and searching. But Bellsmith was a trifler, and all actors are shadowy stuff at best. No vision which loves flippancy for its own sake can give any possible interpretation of "life."

So, "Pereat! Thumbs down," cries Bellsmith himself, remembering his Latin with greater and greater frequency as the toils of necessity tighten around him and awaken his slumbering soul. After all, the man himself is frankly Victorian, so, taking the cue from him, one puts aside the temptation to nose into modern letters and merely hurries on into—