But if they played a moving scene well he cried like a child, and when they said an amusing line as he wanted it said he bellowed with laughter.
He would skip about the stage on one leg if he was pleased, and if he was angry would throw the script down and stamp on it while tears of rage ran down his cheeks.
The company laughed at him and abused him and did everything they could to please him.
He aroused a protective instinct in them, so that one and all they felt that they couldn’t let him down.
Though they said he drove them like slaves, and they never had a moment to themselves, flesh and blood couldn’t stand it, it gave them a sort of horrible satisfaction to comply with his outrageous demands.
When he wrung an old trooper’s hand, who was getting seven pounds a week, and said, by God, laddie, you’re stupendous, the old trooper felt like Charles Kean.
It happened that when Michael kept the appointment he had asked for, Jimmie Langton was in need of a leading juvenile.
He had guessed why Michael wanted to see him, and had gone the night before to see him play.
Michael was playing Mercutio and he had not thought him very good, but when he came into the office he was staggered by his beauty.
In a brown coat and grey flannel trousers, even without make-up, he was so handsome it took your breath away.
He had an easy manner and he talked like a gentleman.
While Michael explained the purpose of his visit Jimmie Langton observed him shrewdly.
If he could act at all, with those looks that young man ought to go far.
‘I saw your Mercutio last night,’ he said.
‘What d’you think of it yourself?’
‘Rotten.’
‘So do I.
How old are you?’
‘Twenty-five.’
‘I suppose you’ve been told you’re good-looking?’
‘That’s why I went on the stage. Otherwise I’d have gone into the army like my father.’
‘By gum, if I had your looks what an actor I’d have been.’
The result of the interview was that Michael got an engagement.
He stayed at Middlepool for two years.
He soon grew popular with the company.
He was good-humoured and kindly; he would take any amount of trouble to do anyone a service.
His beauty created a sensation in Middlepool and the girls used to hang about the stage door to see him go out.
They wrote him love letters and sent him flowers.
He took it as a natural homage, but did not allow it to turn his head.
He was eager to get on and seemed determined not to let any entanglement interfere with his career.
It was his beauty that saved him, for Jimmie Langton quickly came to the conclusion that, notwithstanding his perseverance and desire to excel, he would never be more than a competent actor.
His voice was a trifle thin and in moments of vehemence was apt to go shrill.
It gave then more the effect of hysteria than of passion.
But his gravest fault as a juvenile lead was that he could not make love.
He was easy enough in ordinary dialogue and could say his lines with point, but when it came to making protestations of passion something seemed to hold him back.
He felt embarrassed and looked it.
‘Damn you, don’t hold that girl as if she was a sack of potatoes,’ Jimmie Langton shouted at him.
‘You kiss her as if you were afraid you were standing in a draught.
You’re in love with that girl.
You must feel that you’re in love with her. Feel as if your bones were melting inside you and if an earthquake were going to swallow you up next minute, to hell with the earthquake.’
But it was no good.
Notwithstanding his beauty, his grace and his ease of manner, Michael remained a cold lover.
This did not prevent Julia from falling madly in love with him.
For it was when he joined Langton’s repertory company that they met.
Her own career had been singularly lacking in hardship.
She was born in Jersey, where her father, a native of that island, practised as a veterinary surgeon.
Her mother’s sister was married to a Frenchman, a coal merchant, who lived at St Malo, and Julia had been sent to live with her while she attended classes at the local lycee.
She learnt to speak French like a Frenchwoman.
She was a born actress and it was an understood thing for as long as she could remember that she was to go on the stage.
Her aunt, Madame Falloux, was ‘en relations’ with an old actress who had been a societaire of the Comedie Francaise and who had retired to St Malo to live on the small pension that one of her lovers had settled on her when after many years of faithful concubinage they had parted.