Stage-Land Part 3

Besides, was not the heroine (now the hero's wife) the sweetest and the blithest girl in all the village of Deepdale? (They must have been a gloomy band, the others!) How can any one with a human heart beneath his bosom suggest that people like that should pay for their rest and was.h.i.+ng? The comic man is shocked at his wife for even thinking of such a thing, and the end of it is that Mr. and Mrs. Hero live there for the rest of the play rent free; coals, soap, candles, and hair-oil for the child being provided for them on the same terms.

The hero raises vague and feeble objections to this arrangement now and again. He says he will not hear of such a thing, that he will stay no longer to be a burden upon these honest folk, but will go forth unto the roadside and there starve. The comic man has awful work with him, but wins at last and persuades the n.o.ble fellow to stop on and give the place another trial.

When, a morning or so after witnessing one of these beautiful scenes, our own landlady knocks at our door and creates a disturbance over a paltry matter of three or four weeks' rent, and says she'll have her money or out we go that very day, and drifts slowly away down toward the kitchen, abusing us in a rising voice as she descends, then we think of these things and grow sad.

It is the example of the people round him that makes the comic man so generous. Everybody is generous on the stage. They are giving away their purses all day long; that is the regulation "tip" on the stage--one's purse. The moment you hear a tale of woe, you grab it out of your pocket, slap it in to the woe-er's palm, grip his hand, dash away a tear, and exit; you don't even leave yourself a 'bus fare home. You walk back quickly and get another purse.

Middle-cla.s.s people and others on the stage who are short of purses have to content themselves with throwing about rolls of bank-notes and tipping servants with five-pound checks. Very stingy people on the stage have been known to be so cussed mean as to give away mere sovereigns.

But they are generally only villains or lords that descend to this sort of thing. Respectable stage folk never offer anything less than a purse.

The recipient is very grateful on receiving the purse (he never looks inside) and thinks that Heaven ought to reward the donor. They get a lot of work out of Heaven on the stage. Heaven does all the odd jobs for them that they don't want to go to the trouble and expense of doing for themselves. Heaven's chief duty on the stage is to see to the repayment of all those sums of money that are given or lent to the good people. It is generally requested to do this to the tune of a "thousand-fold"--an exorbitant rate when you come to think of it.

Heaven is also expected to take care that the villain gets properly cursed, and to fill up its spare time by bringing misfortune upon the local landlord. It has to avenge everybody and to help all the good people whenever they are in trouble. And they keep it going in this direction.

And when the hero leaves for prison Heaven has to take care of his wife and child till he comes out; and if this isn't a handful for it, we don't know what would be!

Heaven on the stage is always on the side of the hero and heroine and against the police.

Occasionally, of late years, the comic man has been a bad man, but you can't hate him for it. What if he does ruin the hero and rob the heroine and help to murder the good old man? He does it all in such a genial, light-hearted spirit that it is not in one's heart to feel angry with him. It is the way in which a thing is done that makes all the difference.

Besides, he can always round on his pal, the serious villain, at the end, and that makes it all right.

The comic man is not a sportsman. If he goes out shooting, we know that when he returns we shall hear that he has shot the dog. If he takes his girl out on the river he upsets her (literally we mean). The comic man never goes out for a day's pleasure without coming home a wreck.

If he merely goes to tea with his girl at her mother's, he swallows a m.u.f.fin and chokes himself.

The comic man is not happy in his married life, nor does it seem to us that he goes the right way to be so. He calls his wife "his old Dutch clock," "the old geyser," and such like terms of endearment, and addresses her with such remarks as "Ah, you old cat," "You ugly old nutmeg grater," "You orangamatang, you!" etc., etc.

Well, you know that is not the way to make things pleasant about a house.

Still, with all his faults we like the comic man. He is not always in trouble and he does not make long speeches.

Let us bless him.

THE LAWYER.

He is very old, and very long, and very thin. He has white hair. He dresses in the costume of the last generation but seven. He has bushy eyebrows and is clean shaven. His chin itches considerably, so that he has to be always scratching it. His favorite remark is "Ah!"

In real life we have heard of young solicitors, of foppish solicitors, of short solicitors; but on the stage they are always very thin and very old. The youngest stage solicitor we ever remember to have seen looked about sixty--the oldest about a hundred and forty-five.

By the bye, it is never very safe to judge people's ages on the stage by their personal appearance. We have known old ladies who looked seventy, if they were a day, turn out to be the mothers of boys of fourteen, while the middle-aged husband of the young wife generally gives one the idea of ninety.

Again, what appears at first sight to be a comfortable-looking and eminently respectable elderly lady is often discovered to be, in reality, a giddy, girlish, and inexperienced young thing, the pride of the village or the darling of the regiment.

So, too, an exceptionally stout and short-winded old gentleman, who looks as if he had been living too well and taking too little exercise for the last forty-five years, is not the heavy father, as you might imagine if you judged from mere external evidence, but a wild, reckless boy.

You would not think so to look at him, but his only faults are that he is so young and light-headed. There is good in him, however, and he will no doubt be steady enough when he grows up. All the young men of the neighborhood wors.h.i.+p him and the girls love him.

"Here he comes," they say; "dear, dear old Jack--Jack, the darling boy--the headstrong youth--Jack, the leader of our juvenile sports--Jack, whose childish innocence wins all hearts. Three cheers for dancing, bright-eyed Jack!"

On the other hand, ladies with the complexion of eighteen are, you learn as the story progresses, quite elderly women, the mothers of middle-aged heroes.

The experienced observer of stage-land never jumps to conclusions from what he sees. He waits till he is told things.

The stage lawyer never has any office of his own. He transacts all his business at his clients' houses. He will travel hundreds of miles to tell them the most trivial piece of legal information.

It never occurs to him how much simpler it would be to write a letter.

The item for "traveling expenses" in his bill of costs must be something enormous.

There are two moments in the course of his client's career that the stage lawyer particularly enjoys. The first is when the client comes unexpectedly into a fortune; the second when he unexpectedly loses it.

In the former case, upon learning the good news the stage lawyer at once leaves his business and hurries off to the other end of the kingdom to bear the glad tidings. He arrives at the humble domicile of the beneficiary in question, sends up his card, and is ushered into the front parlor. He enters mysteriously and sits left--client sits right.

An ordinary, common lawyer would come to the point at once, state the matter in a plain, business-like way, and trust that he might have the pleasure of representing, etc., etc.; but such simple methods are not those of the stage lawyer. He looks at the client and says:

"You had a father."

The client starts. How on earth did this calm, thin, keen-eyed old man in black know that he had a father? He shuffles and stammers, but the quiet, impenetrable lawyer fixes his cold, gla.s.sy eye on him, and he is helpless. Subterfuge, he feels, is useless, and amazed, bewildered at the knowledge of his most private affairs possessed by his strange visitant, he admits the fact: he had a father.

The lawyer smiles with a quiet smile of triumph and scratches his chin.

"You had a mother, too, if I am informed correctly," he continues.

It is idle attempting to escape this man's supernatural acuteness, and the client owns up to having had a mother also.

From this the lawyer goes on to communicate to the client, as a great secret, the whole of his (the client's) history from his cradle upward, and also the history of his nearer relatives, and in less than half an hour from the old man's entrance, or say forty minutes at the outside, the client almost knows what the business is about.

On the other occasion, when the client has lost his fortune, the stage lawyer is even still happier. He comes down himself to tell the misfortune (he would not miss the job for worlds), and he takes care to choose the most unpropitious moment possible for breaking the news. On the eldest daughter's birthday, when there is a big party on, is his favorite time. He comes in about midnight and tells them just as they are going down to supper.

He has no idea of business hours, has the stage lawyer--to make the thing as unpleasant as possible seems to be his only anxiety.

If he cannot work it for a birthday, then he waits till there's a wedding on, and gets up early in the morning on purpose to run down and spoil the show. To enter among a crowd of happy, joyous fellow-creatures and leave them utterly crushed and miserable is the stage lawyer's hobby.

The stage lawyer is a very talkative gentleman. He regards the telling of his client's most private affairs to every stranger that he meets as part of his professional duties. A good gossip with a few chance acquaintances about the family secrets of his employers is food and drink for the stage lawyer.

They all go about telling their own and their friends' secrets to perfect strangers on the stage. Whenever two people have five minutes to spare on the stage they tell each other the story of their lives. "Sit down and I will tell you the story of my life" is the stage equivalent for the "Come and have a drink" of the outside world.

The good stage lawyer has generally nursed the heroine on his knee when a baby (when she was a baby, we mean)--when she was only so high. It seems to have been a part of his professional duties. The good stage lawyer also kisses all the pretty girls in the play and is expected to chuck the housemaid under the chin. It is good to be a good stage lawyer.

The good stage lawyer also wipes away a tear when sad things happen; and he turns away to do this and blows his nose, and says he thinks he has a fly in his eye. This touching trait in his character is always held in great esteem by the audience and is much applauded.

The good stage lawyer is never by any chance a married man. (Few good men are, so we gather from our married lady friends.) He loved in early life the heroine's mother. That "sainted woman" (tear and nose business) died and is now among the angels--the gentleman who did marry her, by the bye, is not quite so sure about this latter point, but the lawyer is fixed on the idea.

In stage literature of a frivolous nature the lawyer is a very different individual. In comedy he is young, he possesses chambers, and he is married (there is no doubt about this latter fact); and his wife and his mother-in-law spend most of the day in his office and make the dull old place quite lively for him.

He only has one client. She is a nice lady and affable, but her antecedents are doubtful, and she seems to be no better than she ought to be--possibly worse. But anyhow she is the sole business that the poor fellow has--is, in fact, his only source of income, and might, one would think, under such circ.u.mstances be accorded a welcome by his family. But his wife and his mother-in-law, on the contrary, take a violent dislike to her, and the lawyer has to put her in the coal-scuttle or lock her up in the safe whenever he hears either of these female relatives of his coming up the stairs.