THOUGHT I was safe for the summer with this company, and congratulated myself upon having found such good quarters. The glorious uncertainty of the boards, however, almost rivals that of the turf. From one reason and another, we broke up without ever going on tour, so that, two months after leaving London, I found myself back there again on my way to the opposite side of the kingdom to join another company.
But, short as was my first country engagement, it gave me a pretty good insight into what provincial work was like. The following is from one of my letters, written after about a fortnight’s experience of this work, which did not begin until the pantomime was withdrawn:
“The panto, is over. I wasn’t by any means fond of it, but I’m sorry for one thing. While it was running, you see, there was no study or rehearsal, and we had the whole day free, and could—and did—enjoy ourselves. But no skating parties now! no long walks! no drives! no getting through a novel in one day! We play at least two fresh pieces every night and sometimes three. Most of them here already know their parts as well as they know their alphabet, but everything is new to me, and it is an awful grind. I can never tell until one night what I’m going to play the next. The cast is stuck up by the stage door every evening, and then, unless you happen to have the book yourself, you must borrow the stage manager’s copy, and write out your part. If somebody else wants it, too, and is before you, you don’t get hold of it till the next morning perhaps, and that gives you about eight hours in which to work up a part of say six or seven lengths (a ‘length’ is forty-two lines).
“Sometimes there’s a row over the cast. Second Low Comedy isn’t going to play old men. That’s not his line; he was not engaged to play old men. He’ll see everybody somethinged first.—First Old Man wants to know what they mean by expecting him to play Second Old Man’s part. He has never been so insulted in his life. He has played with Kean and Macready and Phelps and Matthews, and they would none of them have dreamt of asking him to do such a thing.—Juvenile Lead has seen some rum things, but he is blowed if ever he saw the light comedy part given to the Walking Gentleman before. Anyhow he shall decline to play the part given him, it’s mere utility.—Walking Gent, says, well it really isn’t his fault; he doesn’t care one way or the other. He was cast for the part, and took it.—Juvenile Lead knows it isn’t his fault—doesn’t blame him at all—it’s the stage manager he blames. Juvenile Lead’s opinion is that the stage manager is a fool. Everybody agrees with him here; it is our rallying point.
“The general result, when this sort of thing occurs, is that the part in dispute, no matter what it is, gets pitched on to me as ‘Responsibles.’ There’s a little too much responsibility about my line. I like the way they put it, too, when they want me to take a particularly heavy part. They call it ‘giving me an opportunity!’ If they mean an opportunity to stop up all night, I agree with them. That is the only opportunity I see about it. Do they suppose you are going to come out with an original and scholarly conception of the character, when you see the part for the first time the night before you play it? Why, you haven’t time to think of the meaning of the words you repeat. But even if you had the chance of studying a character, it would be no use. They won’t let you carry out your own ideas. There seems to be a regular set of rules for each part, and you are bound to follow them. Originality is at a discount in the provinces.
“I have lived to see our stage manager snubbed—sat upon—crushed. He has been carrying on down here, and swelling around to that extent you’d have thought him a station-master at the very least. Now he’s like a bladder with the air let out. His wife’s come.
“The company is really getting quite famili-fied. There are three married couples in it now. Our Low Comedian’s wife is the Singing Chambermaid—an awfully pretty little woman (why have ugly men always got pretty wives?). I played her lover the other night, and we had to kiss two or three times. I rather liked it, especially as she doesn’t make-up much. It isn’t at all pleasant getting a mouthful of powder or carmine.
“I gained my first ‘call’ on Saturday, before a very full house. Of course I was highly delighted, but I felt terribly nervous about stepping across when the curtain was pulled back. I kept thinking, ‘Suppose it’s a mistake, and they don’t want me.’ They applauded, though, the moment I appeared, and then I was all right. It was for a low comedy part—Jacques in The Honeymoon. I always do better in low comedy than in anything else, and everybody tells me I ought to stick to it. But that is just what I don’t want to do. It is high tragedy that I want to shine in. I don’t like low comedy at all. I would rather make the people cry than laugh.
“There is one little difficulty that I have to contend with at present in playing comedy, and that is a tendency to laugh myself when I hear the house laughing. I suppose I shall get over this in time, but now, if I succeed in being at all comical, it tickles me as much as it does the audience, and, although I could keep grave enough if they didn’t laugh, the moment they start I want to join in. But it is not only at my own doings that I am inclined to laugh. Anything funny on the stage amuses me, and being mixed up in it makes no difference. I played Frank to our Low Comedian’s Major de Boots the other night. He was in extra good form and very droll, and I could hardly go on with my part for laughing at him. Of course, when a piece is played often, one soon ceases to be amused; but here, where each production enjoys a run of one consecutive night only, the joke does not pall.
“There is a man in the town who has been to the theater regularly every night since we opened. The pantomime ran a month, and he came all through that. I know I was sick enough of the thing before it was over, but what I should have been sitting it out from beginning to end every evening, I do not like to think. Most of our patrons, though, are pretty regular customers. The theater-going population of the town is small but determined. Well, you see, ours is the only amusement going. There was a fat woman came last week, but she did not stay long. The people here are all so fat themselves they thought nothing of her.”
HAD a day in London before starting off on my next venture, and so looked in at my old theater. I knew none of the company, but the workmen and supers were mostly the same that I had left there. Dear old Jim was in his usual state and greeted me with a pleasant:
“Hulloa! you seem jolly fond of the place, you do. What the deuce brings here?”
I explained that it was a hankering to see him once again.
“Mad Mat” was there, too. The pantomime was still running, and Mat played a demon with a pasteboard head. He was suffering great injustice nightly, so it appeared from what he told me. He was recalled regularly at the end of the scene in which he and his brother demons were knocked about by the low comedian, but the management would not allow him to go on again and bow.
“They are jealous,” whispered Mat to me, as we strolled into The Rodney (it would be unprofessional for an actor to meet a human creature whose swallowing organization was intact, and not propose a drink)—“jealous, that’s what it is. I’m getting too popular, and they think I shall cut them out.”
The poor fellow was madder than ever, and I was just thinking so at the very moment that he turned to me and said:
“Do you think I’m mad? candidly now.”
It’s a little awkward when a maniac asks you point-blank if you think he’s mad. Before I could collect myself sufficiently to reply, he continued:
“People often say I’m mad—I’ve heard them. Even if I am, it isn’t the thing to throw in a gentleman’s teeth, but I’m not—I’m not. You don’t think I am, do you?”
I was that “took aback,” as Mrs. Brown would put it, that, if I had not had the presence of mind to gulp down a good mouthful of whisky and water, I don’t know what I should have done. I then managed to get out something about “a few slight eccentricities, perhaps, but——”
“That’s it,” he cried excitedly, “‘eccentricities ‘—and they call that being mad. But they won’t call me mad long—wait till I’ve made my name. They won’t call me mad then. Mad! It’s they’re the fools, to think a man’s mad when he isn’t. Ha, ha, my boy, I’ll surprise ‘em one day. I’ll show the fools—the dolts—the idiots, who’s been mad. ‘Great genius is to madness close allied.’ Who said that, eh? He was a genius, and they called him mad, perhaps. They’re fools—all fools, I tell you. They can’t tell the difference between madness and genius, but I’ll show them some day—some day.”
Fortunately there was nobody else in the bar where we were, or his ravings would have attracted an unpleasant amount of attention. He wanted to give me a taste of his quality then and there in his favorite rôle of Romeo, and I only kept him quiet by promising to call that night and hear him rehearse the part.
When we were ready to go out, I put my hand in my pocket to pay, but, to my horror, Mat was before me, and laid down the money on the counter. Nor would any argument induce him to take it up again. He was hurt at the suggestion even, and reminded me that I had stood treat on the last occasion—about three months ago. It was impossible to force the money on him. He was as proud on his six shillings a week as Croesus on sixty thousand a year, and I was compelled to let him have his way. So he paid the eightpence, and then we parted on the understanding that I was to see him later on at his “lodgings.”—“They are not what I could wish,” he explained, “but you will, I am sure, overlook a few bachelor inconveniences. The place suits me well enough—for the present.”
Hearing a lunatic go through Romeo is not the pleasantest way of passing the night, but I should not have had pluck enough to disappoint the poor fellow, even if I had not promised, and, accordingly, after having spent the evening enjoying the unusual luxury of sitting quiet, and seeing, other people excite themselves for my amusement, I made my way to the address Mat had given me.
The house was in a narrow court at the back of the New Cut. The front door stood wide open, though it was twelve o’clock, and a bitterly cold night. A child lay huddled up on the doorstep, and a woman was sleeping in the passage. I stumbled over the woman, groping my way along in the dark. She seemed used to being trodden upon though, for she only looked up unconcernedly, and went to sleep again at once. Mat had told me his place was at the very top, so I went on until there were no more stairs, and then I looked round me. Seeing a light coming from one of the rooms, I peered in through the halfopen door, and saw a fantastic object, decked in gaudy colors and with long, flowing hair, sitting on the edge of a broken-down bedstead. I didn’t know what to make of it at first, but it soon occurred to me that it must be Mat, fully made-up as Romeo, and I went in.
I thought, when I had seen him a few hours before, that he looked queer—even for him—but now, his haggard face daubed with paint, and his great eyes staring out of it more wildly than ever, he positively frightened me. He held out his hand, which was thin and white, but remained seated.
“Excuse my rising,” he said slowly, in a weak voice, “I feel so strange. I don’t think I can go through the part to-night. So sorry to have brought you here for nothing, but you must come and see me some other time.”
I got him to lie down on the bed just as he was, and covered him with the old rags that were on it. He lay still for a few minutes, then he looked up and said:
“I won’t forget you, L———, when I’m well off. You’ve been friendly to me when I was poor: I shan’t forget it, my boy. My opportunity will soon come now—very soon, and then———”
He didn’t finish the sentence, but began to murmur bits of the part to himself, and in a little while he dropped asleep. I stole softly out, and went in search of a doctor. I got hold of one at last, and returned with him to Mat’s attic. He was still asleep, and after arranging matters as well as I could with the doctor, I left, for I had to-be on my way early in the morning.
I never expected to see Mat again, and I never did. People who have lived for any length of time on six shillings a week don’t take long to die when they set about it, and two days after I had seen him, Mad Mat’s opportunity came, and he took it.
HEY charged me extra for the basket on the Great Eastern Line, and I have hated that company ever since. Of course it was over weight, but actors are good customers to the railways, and a little excess luggage is not, as a rule, too closely inquired into. The myrmidons at Bishopsgate, however, were inexorable. It was in vain I tried to persuade them that the thing was “as light as a feather.” They insisted on sticking it up edgeways on a shaky iron plate, and wobbling something up and down a bar; afterward giving me an absurd bit of paper with “4s. 4d.” on it, which, I explained, I didn’t want, but which they charged me for just as though I had specially ordered it.
My destination was a small market-town in the eastern counties, where I arrived about mid-day. It was the most dead and alive place I have ever been to. All eastern county towns are more or less dead and alive—particularly the former—but this one was dreariness personified. Not a soul was to be seen outside the station. In the yard stood a solitary cab to which was attached a limp horse that, with head hanging down and knees bent out, looked the picture of resigned misery; but the driver had disappeared—washed away by the rain, perhaps, which was pouring steadily down. I left my belongings in the cloak room, and walked straight to the theater. I passed two or three green posters on my way, headed:
“Theater Royal,” and setting forth that “——— ————, the World-Renowned Tragedian from Drury Lane,” would give his magnificent impersonations of Richard III. and The Idiot Witness that night, and begging the inhabitants, for their own sakes, to “come early.” I found the whole company assembled on the stage, and looking as dismal as the town itself. They all had colds in the head, including the manager, “the World-Renowned Tragedian from Drury Lane,” who had the face-ache into the bargain.
After a rough and ready rehearsal of the tragedy, melodrama, and burlesque to be played that evening (I had had all my parts sent me by post before joining), I started off by myself to look for lodgings, as I had come to the conclusion that my own society would, on the whole, be less depressing than that of any gentleman in the company.
Lodging hunting is by no means the most pleasant business connected with touring. It always means an hour or two’s wandering up and down back streets, squinting up at windows, knocking at doors, and waiting about on doorsteps. You are under the impression, all the while that the entire street is watching you, and that it has put you down as either a begging letter impostor, or else as the water-rate man, and despises you accordingly. You never find the place that suits you until you have been everywhere else. If you could only begin at the end and work backwards, the search would be over at once. But, somehow or other, you can never manage to do this, and you have always to go through the same routine. First of all, there are the places that ask about twice as much as you are prepared to give, and at which you promise to call again when you have seen your friend. Then there are the places that are just taken, or just going to be taken, or just not to be taken. There are the places where you can have half a bed with another gentleman, the other gentleman generally being the billiard-marker at the hotel opposite, or some journeyman photographer. There are the people who won’t take you because you are not a married couple, and the people who won’t take you because you are a play-actor, and the people who want you to be out all day, and the people who want you to be in by ten. Added to these, there is the slatternly woman, who comes to the door, followed by a mob of dirty children, that cling to her skirts and regard you with silent horror, evidently thinking that the “big ugly man,” so often threatened, has really come this time. Or the fool of a husband, who scratches his head and says you had better call again, when his “missus” is in. Or, most aggravating of all, the woman who stands on the step, after you have gone, and watches you down the street, so that you don’t like to knock anywhere else.
All this I was prepared for when I started, but no such ordeal was in store for me. The difficulty of selecting lodgings was got rid of altogether in the present case by there simply being no lodgings of any kind to be let. It had evidently never occurred to the inhabitants of this delightful spot that any human being could possibly desire to lodge there, and I don’t wonder at it. There were a couple of inns in the High Street, but country actors cannot afford inns, however moderate, and of “Furnished Apartments” or “Bed Rooms for Single Gentlemen” there were none. I explored every street in the town without coming across a single bill, and then, as a last resource, I went into a baker’s shop to inquire. I don’t know why bakers should be better acquainted than any other tradesmen with the private affairs of their neighbors, but that they are has always been my impression, or, at least, had been up till then, when it received a rude blow. I asked two bakers, and both of them shook their heads, and knew of no one who let lodgings. I was in despair, and the High Street, when I glanced up and saw a very pleasant face smiling at me from the door of a milliner’s shop. Somehow, the sight of it inspired me with hope. I smiled back, and—
“Could the owner of the pleasant face recommend me to any lodgings?”
The owner of the pleasant face looked surprised. “Was Monsieur going to stop in the town?” On Monsieur explaining that he was an actor, Madame was delighted, and smiled more pleasantly than ever. “Madame did so love the theater. Had not been to one for, Oh! so long time; not since she did leave Regent Street—the Regent Street that was in our London. Did Monsieur know London? Had been to heaps and heaps of theaters then. And at Paris! Ah! Paris! Ah, the theaters at Paris! Ah! But there was nothing to go to here. It was so quiet, so stupid, this town. We English, we did seem so dull. Monsieur, son mari, he did not mind it. He had been born here. He did love the sleepiness—the what we did call the monotony. But Madame, she did love the gayety. This place was, oh, so sad.”
Here Madame clasped her hands—pretty little hands they were, too—and looked so piteous, that Monsieur felt, strongly inclined to take her in his arms and comfort her. He, however, on second thoughts, restrained his generous impulse.
Madame then stated her intention to go to the theater that very evening, and requested to know what was to be played.
On Monsieur informing her that “————, the World-Renowned Tragedian from Drury Lane, would give his magnificent impersonations of Richard III. and The Idiot Witness,” she seemed greatly impressed, and hoped it was a comedy. Madame loved comedies. “To laugh at all the fun—to be made merry—that was so good.” Monsieur thought that Madame would have plenty to laugh at in the magnificent impersonations of Richard III. and The Idiot Witness, even if she found the burlesque a little heavy, but he didn’t say so.
Then Madame remembered Monsieur was looking for lodgings. Madame put the tip of her forefinger in her mouth, puckered her brows, and looked serious. “Yes, there was Miss Kemp, she had sometimes taken a lodger. But Miss Kemp was so strict, so particular. She did want every one to be so good. Was Monsieur good?” This with a doubting smile.
Monsieur hazarded the opinion that having gazed into Madame’s eyes for five minutes was enough to make a saint of any man. Monsieur’s opinion was laughed at, but, nevertheless notwithstanding, Miss Kemp’s address was given him, and thither he repaired, armed with the recommendation of his charming little French friend.
Miss Kemp was an old maid, and lived by herself in a small three-cornered house that stood in a grass-grown courtyard behind the church. She was a prim old lady, with quick eyes and a sharp chin. She looked me up and down with two jerks of her head, and then supposed that I had come to the town to work.
“No,” I replied, “I had come to play. I was an actor.”
“Oh,” said Miss Kemp. Then added severely, “You’re married.”
I repudiated the insinuation with scorn.
After that, the old lady asked me inside, and we soon became friends. I can always get on with old ladies. Next to young ones, I like them better than any other class of the community. And Miss Kemp was a very nice old lady. She was as motherly as a barnyard hen, though she was an old maid. I suggested going out again to buy a chop for my tea, and to fetch my basket, but she would not hear of it.
“Bless the child,” said she, “do run and take off those wet boots. I’ll send some one for your luggage.”
So I was made to take off my coat and boots, and to sit by the fire, with my feet wrapped up in a shawl, while Miss Kemp bustled about with toast and steaks, and rattled the tea things and chatted.
I only stopped a week with Miss Kemp, that being the length of time the company remained in the town, but it will be a long while before I forget the odd little old maid with her fussy ways and kindly heart. I can still see, in memory, the neat kitchen with its cheerful fire in polished grate, before which sleek purring Tom lies stretched. The old-fashioned lamp burns brightly on the table, and, between it and the fire, sits the little old lady herself in her high-backed chair, her knitting in her hands and her open Bible on her knee. As I recall the picture, so may it still be now, and so may it still remain for many a year to come.
I must have been singularly fortunate in regard to landladies, or else they are a very much maligned class. I have had a good deal to do with them, and, on the whole, I have found them kind, obliging, and the very reverse of extortionate. With country landladies, especially, I have ever been most comfortable, and even among London ones, who, as a class, are not so pleasant as their provincial sisters, I have never, as yet, come across a single specimen of that terrible she-dragon about which I have heard so much. To champion the cause of landladies is rather an extraordinary proceeding, but, as so much is said against them, I think it only fair to state my own experience. They have their faults. They bully the slavey (but then the slavey sauces them, so perhaps it is only tit for tat), they will fry chops, and they talk enough for an Irish M. P. They persist in telling you all their troubles, and they keep you waiting for your breakfast while they do it. They never tire of recounting to you all they have done for some ungrateful relative, and they bring down a drawerful of letters on the subject, which they would like you to cast your eye through. They bore you to death every day, too, with a complete record of the sayings and doings of some immaculate young man lodger they once had. This young man appears to have been quite overweighted with a crushing sense of the goodness of the landlady in question. Many and many a time has he said to her, with tears in his eyes: “Ah, Mrs. So-and-so, you have been more than a mother to me”; and then he has pressed her hand, and felt he could never repay her kindness. Which seems to have been the fact, for he has generally gone off, in the end, owing a pretty considerable sum.
WAS most miserable with the company I had now joined. What it was like may be gathered from the following:
“Dear Jim: If I stop long with this company I shall go mad (not very far to go, perhaps you’ll say!). I must get out of it soon. It’s the most wretched affair you could possibly imagine. Crummies’s show was a Comédie Française in its arrangements compared with this. We have neither stage-manager nor acting-manager. If this were all, I shouldn’t grumble; but we have to do our own bill posting, help work the scenes, and take the money at the doors—not an arduous task this last. There are no ‘lines.’ We are all ‘responsibles,’ and the parts are distributed among us with the utmost impartiality. In the matter of salary, too, there is the same charming equality; we all get a guinea. In theory, that is: in reality, our salaries vary according to our powers of nagging; the maximum ever attained by any one having been fifteen shillings. I wonder we got any, though, considering the audiences we play to. The mere sight of the house gives one the horrors every night. It is so dimly lighted (for, to save expense, the gas is only turned a quarter on) that you can hardly see your way about, and so empty, that every sound echoes and re-echoes through the place, till it seems as though a dozen people are talking in a scene where there are only two. You walk on the stage, and there in front of you are, say, twenty people dotted about the pit, a few more are lolling listlessly over the gallery rails, and there are two or three little groups in the boxes, while, as a background to these patches of unhappy humanity, there stares out the bare boards and the dingy upholstery. It is impossible to act among such surroundings as these. All you can do#is to just drag through your part, and the audience, who one and all have evidently been regretting from the very first that they ever came—a fact they do not even attempt to disguise—are as glad when it is over as you are. We stop a week in each town and play the same pieces, so, of course, there is no study or rehearsal now. But I wish there were; anything would be better than this depressing monotony.
“I might have guessed what sort of a company it was by his sending me the parts he did. I play Duncan, Banquo, Seyton, and a murderer in Macbeth; Tybalt and the Apothecary in Romeo and Juliet; and Laertes, Osric, and the Second Player in Hamlet—and so on all through. None of us play less than two parts in the same piece. No sooner are we killed or otherwise disposed of as one person, than we are up again as somebody else, and that, almost before we have time to change our clothes. I sometimes have to come on as an entirely new party with no other change than the addition of a beard. It puts me in mind of the nigger who borrowed his master’s hat with the idea of passing himself off as ‘one of them white folks.’ I should think that if the audience—when there are any—attempt to understand the play, they must have a lively time of it; and if they are at all acquainted with our National Bard, they must be still more puzzled. We have improved so on the originals, that the old gentleman himself would never recognize them. They are one-third Shakespeare, and two-thirds the Renowned Tragedian from Drury Lane.
“Of course, I have not had my railway fare, which I was promised after joining, and I’ve given up asking for it now.
“I got a chance of changing my quarters after a few weeks, and I need scarcely say I jumped at it. We passed through a big town that was the headquarters of an established circuit company, and, hearing that one of their ‘responsibles’ had just left, I went straight to the manager, offered myself, and was accepted. Of course, in the usual way, I ought to have given a fortnight’s notice to the other manager, but, under the circumstances, this could hardly have been insisted upon. So I made the Renowned Tragedian from Drury Lane a present of all the arrears of salary he owed me—at which generosity on my part we both grinned—and left him at once. I don’t think he was very sorry. It saved him a few shillings weekly, for my place was filled by one of the orchestra, that body being thereby reduced to two.”
The company of which I was now a member was one of the very few stock companies then remaining in the provinces. The touring system had fairly set in by this time, and had, as a consequence, driven out the old theatrical troupes that used to act on from year to year within the same narrow circle, and were looked upon as one of the institutions of the half-dozen towns they visited.
I am not going to discuss here the rival merits or demerits of the two systems. There are advantages and disadvantages to be urged on both sides, not only from the “school” point of view, but also as regards the personal interests and comfort of the actor. I will merely say, with reference to the latter part of the question, that I myself preferred the bustle and change of touring. Indeed, in spite of all the attending anxieties and troubles, it was in this constant change—this continual shifting of the panorama of scenes and circumstances by which I was surrounded—that, for me, the chief charm of stage-life lay. Change of any kind is always delightful to youth; whether in big things or in little ones. We have not been sufficiently seasoned by disappointment in the past, then, to be skeptical as to all favors the Future may be holding for us in her hand. A young man looks upon every change as a fresh chance. Fancy points a more glowing fortune for each new departure, and at every turn in the road he hopes to burst upon his goal.
At each new town I went to, and with each new company I joined, new opportunities for the display of my talents would arise. The genius that one public had ignored, another would recognize and honor. In minor matters, too, there was always pleasant expectation. Agreeable companions and warm friends might be awaiting me in a new company, the lady members might be extraordinarily lovely, and money might be surer. The mere traveling, the seeing strange towns and country, the playing in different theaters, the staying in different lodgings, the occasional passing through London and looking in at home, all added to the undoubted delight I felt in this sort of life, and fully reconciled me to its many annoyances.
But being fixed in a dull country town for about six months at a stretch, with no other recreation than a game of cards, or a gossip in an inn parlor, I didn’t find at all pleasant. To the staid, or to the married members, I daresay it was satisfactory enough. They had, some of them, been born in the company, and had been married in the company, and they hoped to die in the company. They were known throughout the circuit. They took an interest in the towns, and the towns took an interest in them, and came to their benefits. They returned again and again to the same lodgings. There was no fear of their forgetting where they lived, as sometimes happened to a touring actor on his first day in a new town. They were not unknown vagabonds wandering houseless from place to place; they were citizens and townsmen, living among their friends and relations. Every stick of furniture-in their rooms was familiar to them. Their lodgings were not mere furnished apartments, but “home,” or as near to a home as a country player could ever expect to get No doubt they, as madame would have said, “did love the sleepiness”; but I, an energetic young bachelor, found it “oh! so sad.” Sad as I might have thought it, though, I stayed there five months, during which time I seem to have written an immense number of letters to the long-suffering Jim. All that is worth recording here, however, is contained in the following extracts:
“.....The work is not so hard now. It was very stiff at first, as we changed the bill about every other night, but I got hold of the répertoire and studied up all the parts I knew I should have to play. It still comes heavy when there is a benefit, especially when anything modern is put up, as, then, having a good wardrobe, I generally get cast for the ‘gentlemanly party,’ and that is always a lengthy part. But what makes it still more difficult, is the way everybody gags. Nobody speaks by the book here. They equivocate, and then I am undone. I never know where I am. The other day, I had a particularly long part given me to play the next evening. I stayed up nearly all night over it. At rehearsal in the morning, the light comedy, with whom I was principally concerned, asked me how I’d got on. ‘Well, I think I shall know something about it,’ I answered. ‘At all events, I’ve got the cues perfect.’ ‘Oh! don’t bother yourself about cues,’ replied he cheerfully. ‘You won’t get a blessed cue from me. I use my own words now. Just you look out for the sense.’
“I did look out for the sense, but I’ll be hanged if I could see any in what he said. There was no doubt as to the words being his own. How I got through with it I don’t know. He helped me with suggestions when I stuck, such as: ‘Go on, let off your bit about a father,’ or ‘Have you told me what Sarah said?’
“Get me a pair of second-hand tights at Stinchcombe’s, will you, and have them washed and sent down. Any old things will do. I only want them to wear underneath others. I have to appear in black tights next Monday. They make your legs look so awfully thin, and I’m not too stout in those parts as it is.
“I have got hold of an invaluable pair of boots (well, so they ought to be, I paid fifteen shillings for them). Pulled up to their full height, they reach nearly to the waist, and are a pair of American jack-boots; doubled in round the calf, and with a bit of gold lace and a tassel pinned on, they are hessians; with painted tops instead of the gold lace and tassel, they are hunting boots; and wrinkled down about the ankle, and stuck out round the top, they are either Charles or Cromwell, according to whether they are ornamented with lace and a bow, or left plain. You have to keep a sharp eye on them, though, for they have a habit of executing changes on their own account unbeknown to you, so that while one of your legs is swaggering about as a highwayman, the other is masquerading as a cavalier. We dress the pieces very well indeed here. There is an excellent wardrobe belonging to the theater.
“I do wish it were possible to get the programmes made out by intelligent men, instead of by acting-managers. If they do ever happen, by some strange accident, not to place your name opposite the wrong character, they put you down for a part that never existed; and if they get the other things right, they spell your name wrong.
“I say, here’s a jolly nice thing, you know; they’ve fined me half a crown for not attending rehearsal. Why, I was there all the while, only I was over the way, and when I came back they had finished. That’s our fool of a prompter, that is; he knew where I was. I’ll serve him out.”
ORE extracts:
“... I’m afraid I shall have to trouble you to get me another wig. I thought my own hair would do for modern juvenile parts, but it isn’t considered light enough. ‘Be virtuous and you will have hair the color of tow,’ seems to be the basis of the whole theatrical religion. I wish I could be as economical in wigs as our First Old Man is. He makes one do for everything. He wears it the right way when he is a serious old man, and hind part foremost when he wants to be funny.
“Talking of wigs puts me in mind of an accident our manager had the other night. He is over fifty, but he fancies he is a sort of Charles Mathews, and will play young parts. So on Saturday evening he came on as the lover in an old English comedy, wearing one of those big three-cornered hats. ‘Who is that handsome young man with the fair hair?’ says the heroine to her confidante. ‘Oh, that, why that is Sir Harry Monfort, the gallant young gentleman who saved the Prince’s life. He is the youngest officer in the camp, but already the most famous.’ ‘Brave boy.’ murmurs the heroine; ‘I would speak a word with him. Call him hither, Lenora.’ So Lenora called him thither, and up he skipped. When the heroine spoke to him, he was quite overcome with boyish bashfulness. ‘Ah, madam,’ sighed he, taking off his hat and making a sweeping bow—‘What the devil’s the matter? What are they laughing at? Oh my———’
“He had taken his wig off with his hat, and there was the ‘brave boy’s’ poor old bald head exposed to the jeers of a ribald house.
“I’d half a mind to rush up to town last week. I was out of the bill for three nights running. But the mere railway fare would have cost me nearly half a week’s salary, so I contented myself with a trip over to R———— and a look in at the show there. I met W———. He’s married little Polly ————, who was walking lady at———. She is up at Aberdeen now, and he hasn’t seen her for over three months. Rather rough on a young couple who haven’t been married a year. The old ones bear up against this sort of thing very well indeed, but poor W———— is quite upset about it.
“They kept together as long as they could, but business got so bad that they had to separate, and each take the first thing that offered.
“You remember my telling you how our prompter got me fined for not attending a rehearsal some time ago. I said I would serve him out, and so I have. Or rather we have—I and one of the others who had a score against him—for he’s a bumptious, interfering sort of fellow, and makes himself disagreeable to everybody. He is awful spoons on a Miss Pinkeen, whose father keeps an ironmonger’s shop next door to the theater. The old man knows nothing about it, and they are up to all kinds of dodges to get a word with each other. Now, one of our dressing-room windows is exactly opposite their staircase window, and he and the girl often talk across; and, once or twice, he has placed a plank between the two windows, and crawled along it into the house when her father has been away. Well, we got hold of a bit of this girl’s writing the other day, and forged a letter to him, saying that her father had gone out, and that she wanted to see him very particularly, and that he was to come over through the window and wait on the landing till she came upstairs. Then, just before rehearsal, we went out and gave a stray boy twopence to take it in to him.
“Of course no sooner did we see that he was fairly inside the house, and out of sight, than we pulled the board in and shut our window. It got quite exciting on the stage as time went by. ‘Where’s————?’ fumed the stage manager. ‘Where the devil’s———? It’s too bad of him to keep us all waiting like this.’ And then the call-boy was sent round to four public houses, and then to his lodgings; for he had got the book in his pocket, and we couldn’t begin without him. ‘Oh, it’s too bad of him to go away and stop like this,’ cried the stage manager again at the end of half an hour. I’ll fine him five shillings for this. I won’t be played the fool with.’ In about an hour, he came in looking thunder and lightning. He wouldn’t give any explanation. All we could get out of him was, that if he could find out who’d done it, he’d jolly well wring his neck.
“From what the ironmonger’s boy told our call-boy, it seems that he waited about three-quarters of an hour on the stairs, not daring to move, and that then the old man came up and wanted to know what he was doing there. There was a regular scene in the house, and the girl has sworn that she’ll never speak to him again for getting her into a row, and about four of her biggest male relatives have each expressed a firm determination to break every bone in his body; and the boy adds, that from his knowledge of them they are to be relied upon. We have thought it our duty to let him know these things.”
I find nothing further of any theatrical interest, until I come to the following, written about four months after the date of my entering the company:
“I was far too busy to write last week. It’s been something awful. We’ve got ———— * down here for a fortnight. His list consists of eighteen pieces—eight ‘legitimate,’ five dramas, four comedies, and a farce; and we only had a week in which to prepare. There have been rehearsals at ten, and rehearsal at three, and rehearsals at eleven, after the performance was over. First I took all the parts given me, and studied them straight off one after the other. Then I found I’d got them all jumbled up together in my head, and the more I tried to remember what belonged to which, the more I forgot which belonged to what. At rehearsal I talked Shakespeare in the farce, and put most of the farce and a selection from all the five dramas into one of the comedies. And then the stage manager went to put me right, and then he got mixed up, and wanted to know if anybody could oblige him by informing him what really was being rehearsed; and the Leading Lady and the First Low Comedy said it was one of the dramas, but the Second Low Comedy, the Soubrette, and the Leader of the Orchestra would have it was a comedy, while the rest of us were too bewildered to be capable of forming any opinion on any subject.
*A “Star” from London,
“The strain has so upset me, that I don’t even now know whether I’m standing on my head or my heels; and, our First Old Man—but I’ll come to him later on. My work has been particularly heavy, for, in consequence of a serious accident that has happened to our Walking Gentleman, I’ve had to take his place. He was playing a part in which somebody—the Heavy Man—tries to stab him while he’s asleep. But just when the would-be murderer has finished soliloquizing, and the blow is about to fall, he starts up, and a grand struggle ensues. I think the other fellow must have been drunk on the last occasion..Anyhow, the business was most clumsily managed, and R————, our Walking Gent, got his eye cut out, and is disfigured for life. It is quite impossible for him now to play his old line, and he has to do heavies or low comedy, or anything where appearance is of no importance. The poor fellow is terribly cut up—don’t think I’m trying to make a ghastly joke—and he seems to be especially bitter against me for having slipped into his shoes. I’m sure he need not be; whatever good his ill wind has blown me has brought with it more work than it’s worth; and I think, on the whole, taking this star business into consideration, I would rather have stopped where I was. I knew a good many of the parts I should have had to play, but as it is, everything has been fresh study.
“Well, I was going to tell you about our old man. He had always boasted that he hadn’t studied for the last ten years. I don’t know what particular merit there was in this, that he should have so prided himself upon it, but that he considered it as highly clever on his part there could not be the slightest doubt; and he had even got to quite despise any one who did study. You can imagine his feelings, therefore, when sixteen long parts, eleven at least of which he had never seen before, were placed in his hand, with a request that he would be letter ‘perfect in all by the following Thursday. It was observed that he didn’t say much at the time. He was a garrulous old gentleman as a rule, but, after once glancing over the bundle, he grew thoughtful and abstracted and did not join in the chorus of curses loud and deep which was being sung with great vigor by the rest of the company. The only person to whom he made any remark was myself, who happened to be standing by the stage-door when he was going out. He took the bundle of parts out of his pocket, and showed them to me. ‘Nice little lot, that—ain’t it?’ he said. ‘I’ll just go home and study them all up—that’s what I’ll do.’ Then he smiled—a sad, wan smile—and went slowly out.
“That was on Saturday evening, and on Monday morning we met at ten for rehearsal. We went on without the old man until eleven; and then, as he hadn’t turned up, and was much wanted, the boy was despatched to his lodgings to see if he was there. We waited patiently for another quarter of an hour, and then the boy returned.
“The old man had not been seen since Sunday.
“His landlady had left him in the morning, looking over the ‘parts,’ and when she returned in the evening, he was gone. A letter, addressed to her, had been found in his room, and this she had given the boy to take back with him.
“The stage manager took it and hurriedly opened it. At the first glance, he started and uttered an exclamation of horror; and when he had finished it, it dropped from his hand, and he sank down in the nearest chair, dazed and bewildered, like a man who has heard, but cannot yet grasp, some terrible news.
“A cold, sickly feeling came over me. The strange, far-away look, and the quiet, sad smile that I had last seen on the old man’s face came back to me with startling vividness, and with a new and awful meaning. He was old and enfeebled. He had not the elastic vigor of youth that can bear up under worry and work. His mind, to all seeming, had never at any time been very powerful. Had the sudden and heavy call upon his energies actually unhinged it? and had the poor old fellow in some mad moment taken up arms against his sea of troubles, and by opposing ended them? Was he now lying in some shady copse, with a gaping wound from ear to ear, or sleeping his last sleep with the deep waters for a coverlet? Was what lay before me a message from the grave? These thoughts flashed like lightning through my brain as I darted forward and picked the letter up. It ran as follows:
“Dear Mrs. Hopsam,—I’m off to London by the 3.30, and shan’t come back. I’ll write and let you know where to send my things. I left a pair of boots at Jupp’s to have the toe-caps sewn—please get ‘em; and there was a night-shirt short last week—it’s got a D on it. If they send from the theater, tell them to go to the devil; and if they want sixteen parts studied in a week, they’d better get a cast-iron actor. Yours truly, D———.
“This was a great relief to me, but it didn’t seem to have soothed the stage manager much. When he recovered from his amazement, he said what he thought of the old man, which I will not repeat. There was a deuce of a row, I can tell you. Our Leading Man, who had consoled himself for being temporarily ousted from his proper position by the thought of having nothing to do all the time, and being able to go in front each night and sneer at the ‘star,’ had to take the First Old Man’s place, and a pretty temper he’s in about it. It’s as much as one’s life’s worth now, even, to sneak a bit of his color. Another old man joins us after next week, but of course that is just too late for the hard work. ——— will be gone then...”