The Master

The Master Read Online Free PDF Page A

Book: The Master Read Online Free PDF
Author: Colm Tóibín
Tags: Fiction, Literary, General, Historical
facing. In the stalls and in the gallery the
members of the paying public were hissing and booing. He looked around and saw mockery and contempt. The invited audience remained seated, still applauding, but the applause was drowned out by the
crescendo of loud, rude disapproval which came from the people who had never read his books.
    The worst part was now – when he did not know what to do, when he could not control the expression on his own face, the look of panic he could not prevent. And now he could make out the
faces of friends – Sargent, Gosse, Philip Burne-Jones – still gallantly applauding, futile against the yells of the mob. Nothing had prepared him for this. Slowly, he moved off the
stage. He did not attend to Alexander’s speech to calm the audience. He blamed Alexander for leading him onto the stage, he blamed the crowd for booing, but more than anyone he blamed himself
for being here. There was no alternative now, he would have to leave by the stage door. He had dreamed so much of moments of triumph, mingling with the invited guests, pleased that so many old
friends had come to witness his theatrical success. Now he would walk home and keep his head down like a man who has committed a crime and is in imminent danger of apprehension.
    He waited in the shadows backstage so that he would not have to see the actors. Nor did he wish to leave just yet as he did not know whom he might see in the streets around the theatre. Neither
he nor they would know what to say, so great and so public was his defeat. For his friends, this night would be entered into the annals of the unmentionable, pages in which he had so studiously
avoided having his name appear. As time passed, however, he realized that he could not betray the performers now. He could not give into his own horrible urge to be alone in the darkness, to escape
into the night and walk as though he had written nothing and was nobody. He would have to go to them and thank them; he would have to insist that the repast planned after the triumph of his play
should go ahead. In the half light he stood preparing himself, steeling himself, ready to suppress whatever his own urges and needs might be. He made his hands into fists as he set out to smile and
bow and imagine that the evening in all its glory had been due entirely to the talents of the actors in the great tradition of the London stage.

CHAPTER TWO
February 1895
    A FTER THE FAILURE OF Guy Domville , his determination to work did battle with the feeling that he had been defeated and exposed. He had failed, he
realized, to take the measure of the great flat foot of the public, and he now had to face the melancholy fact that nothing he did would ever be popular or generally appreciated. Most of the time
he could, if he tried, control his thoughts. What he could not control was the terrible ache of the morning, an ache that stretched now towards noon and often did not lift. There was a line in
Oscar Wilde’s play that he had liked in which the question was put – did the sadness of Londoners cause the fog or did the fog cause the sadness? His sadness, he thought, as the spare
light of the winter morning peered in his window, was like the London fog. Except that it did not seem to lift, and it was accompanied by a weariness that was new to him, and a lethargy that
shocked and depressed him.
    He wondered if at some point in the future he would go out of fashion even more than now, and if the dividends from his father’s estate were to dry up, whether his reduced circumstances
would represent a public humiliation. It came down to money, the sweetness it added to the soul. Money was a kind of grace. Everywhere he had been, the having of it and the holding of it had set
people apart. It gave men a beautiful distant control over the world, and it gave women a poised sense of themselves, an inner light which even old age could not obliterate.
    It was easy to feel that he was destined to write for
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