by Unknown
A public that takes its Shakespeare four plays a night, with an ‘entire change of programme’ for next evening, must not be too particular about scenery. In the manipulation of old canvas, much ingenuity can be displayed, and doubtless our theatre lessee could ‘set’ the whole of ‘Hamlet’ out of Mr. Irving’s view of the Brocken. Our great scene began life, I think, as a ‘cottage interior’; but it has become so rubbed and creased that it is willing to oblige as its own exterior. I have seen it as ‘the wall of Conn the Shaughraun’s cottage,’ as ‘the exterior of Glamis Castle,’ as ‘scene in the Tower,’ as ‘on the road to Dixie Land,’ as a bit of sky, as ‘hut in the woods,’ as ‘a banquet hall,’ as ‘lounge in the castle,’ and as ‘the pirates’ lair.’ No wonder it winks to us when it appears as something else.
A travelling company is not here for many days (they are never longer than a week) before every one in the town has met the members in the street, or gathering flowers on country roads, or in a boat up the river. It tickles us to see them smelling the flowers just as your wife might do or handling the oars as you do yourself. Much interest is taken in their proceedings, and numbers of us can tell you not only where they are lodging, but what accommodation they have and how much they pay for their rooms and which one sleeps on the sofa. Captain S. is seen calling on the manager at his lodgings, and tongues are at once loosened on his object. The probability is that he is to give the patronage of the militia officers to a benefit on Friday night. We had a good deal of skating in the winter, and one day some of the members of a company then at the theatre came to look on. A townsman walked a few yards to get a chair for one of the ladies; and by evening it was common talk that the gallant Mr. Dash had run all the way from the pond to his home for a chair, and run back with it on his head through the streets, merely because the lovely Miss Vavasour had said she felt tired. On the other hand, the players soon know as much about us. Their landladies are as ready to gossip to them as of them; and I always feel when I go to see a new company that they are on the lookout for me and know I have a slight squint. They are not specially interested in us as brothers and sisters; but they like to know who are theatregoers, who need a programme sent as an intimation of their performance, and who are sure to come without it. Travelling pantomime companies are not long in finding out which of us have large families.
Even if the entertainment is of the dullest, the ‘front of the house’ is still interesting. You find that your butcher patronizes burlesque, while your baker likes long slow deaths. You see a face in the pit that you are sure to remember but cannot identify; and after a long time you satisfy yourself that those are the whiskers of your housemaid’s cousin, whom you have observed occasionally at the kitchen table. You note that Mr. Roberts generally comes in at half-time, and draw your own deductions about his means therefrom. You shake your head over the way in which Mrs. Jones goes to the theatre without an escort; and when the Jenkins girls come crushing in after the curtain has risen, you call to mind that they are late for everything, even for church. There is always something to interest you in the smallest theatre, even though it may not be the play.”
The theatre I rashly call the smallest in my old article was in Dumfries and was the first I ever entered; so it was the one I liked best. I entered many times in my schooldays, and always tried to get the end seat in the front row of the pit, which was also the front row of the house, as there were no stalls. I sat there to get rid of stage illusion and watch what the performers were doing in the wings. I am like that still, in the sense that though I suppose I don’t go to a play nowadays twice in the year I should still be happy and interested looking on at the rehearsal of anything. Thus I am at least better than James Payn, whom I tried in vain to coax to one of my own rehearsals and who admitted to me such a distaste for the theatre that he said if he wanted friends to oblige him in some way he promised to go to a theatre with them as their reward. Even then he would scoot away if you forgot for a moment to keep a grip on his sleeve.
I loved that little theatre in Dumfries, for which Robert Burns once wrote prologues. I had the good fortune to frequent it in what was one of its great years (probably 1877). Usually it was only visited, as the article says, by wandering companies who were thankful to be gone in a few days, but on it that year descended a famous actor and manager who kept it open triumphantly for a whole winter. His name was J. H. Clynes, and I don’t know if he was really the great actor the boy at the end of the first row thought him. Anon in after years saw the name of Clynes on London theatre bills, but never went to a performance lest sadness should come of it. Mr. Clynes was my first Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and many others, and though he did sometimes play two and more of them in a night the versions were not of the kind the article refers to, and the scenery winked not. I never spoke to him. Heavens, how could any one have dared! but I saw Hamlet lift a mug to his lips. I never spoke to any of them, but I walked behind most of them as they strolled abroad and I told other boys that I had done so. More than one afterwards played in early pieces of mine. Occasionally Clynes brought ‘star’ companies to glorify his reign for a few nights, and one of them was J. L. Toole, among whose supporters was George Shelton, who afterwards ‘created’ the part of Smee in ‘Peter Pan,’ and since then has hardly been out of the bill.
It was in those schoolboy days that I had an experience not always vouchsafed to greater mortals — I went ‘behind the scenes.’ This was so tremendous that to write it even now in ordinary ink and as part of a sentence seems an outrage. I lay down my pen and walk my room for a time before I can resume in comparative composure. The play was Mr. Clynes’s pantomime of I now know not what, but it was the merriest and wittiest that boy ever saw, and I am sorry that the only line I remember was a play on the manager’s name; some one had to say ‘I declines the task,’ which was always received by the boy in the corner seat with rhapsody, though I daresay he heard as good in London pantomimes afterwards. The occasion of his being allowed to cross into the realms of bliss was the benefit (they were all for benefits in those days) of one of the players, I think the principal boy, who was such a favourite that on the eventful night the house proper could not contain all her admirers. That boy must have had the luck to arrive late, not only his corner seat was gone, but every seat and even standing room, and a score or more would-be patrons left out in the cold. In the astonishing circumstances we were asked if we wouldn’t mind coming behind the scenes and making ourselves as small as possible. ‘If we wouldn’t mind!’ I hugged to myself the extraordinary graciousness of the phrase, as well as other events of that Arabian evening, with their culmination, which was when the beautiful lady said to me in passing that her shoe, confound it, was loose as usual. She may have mistaken me for some one else, but it was to me she said it. We never met again. I was speechless and so could not thank her, but I do so now. Is it possible that she meant I could tie those shoelaces?
Such doings led inevitably to the forming of a dramatic club at school for which I wrote my first play, ‘Bandelero the Bandit.’ No page of it remains, but though it played for less than half an hour it contained all the most striking scenes that boy had lapped up from his corner seat, and had one character (played by same boy) who was a combination of his favourite characters in fiction, the only two now remembered being Smike from ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ and Wamba from ‘Ivanhoe.’ I also appeared in another piece as a young wife, not so much to show my versatility as because they would not let me have a more leading part, and in this I wore a pigtail cunningly pinned to my hat to blow away all doubts about my sex. In the delirium of being cheered when the curtain revealed us, my husband knocked over the breakfast-table, and instead of being stage-struck dumb the wife grandly saved the situation by putting her arms round his neck and saying ‘You clumsy darling.’ This must have been one of the finest instances of presence of mind ever shown on any stage; but pride in my histrionic achievements having left me, I am willing to present it to any other actor who may n
ow be writing his life and is hard up for reminiscences. Long afterwards I saw Miss Irene Vanbrugh playing my part and told her that though she was good she missed some of my womanly touches.
CHAPTER VII
“OLD HYPHEN” — GREENWOOD’S WEAKNESS — GUNPOWDER — ENGLISH SCHOOLS AS CONCEIVED IN SCOTTISH HOMES
“The boys (henceforward to be called ‘persons’) in the great school of which he is master of a house naturally call him Old Hyphen because he has a double-barrelled name. A very good friend of mine is Old Hyphen; and I am also partial to my boy who is a member of his establishment. I read Old Hyphen’s reports on him with avidity and sometimes with a chuckle. The latest report included a confiscated Diary of Retrousy’s, which is my boy’s nickname because, says Retrousy (completely baffling me), of hereditary appearance. I fear however that in fixing on the term Retrousy the persons imply a certain cockiness in my boy, which is perhaps divulged unintentionally in the following gleanings from the Diary. Hyphen’s report, by the way, makes no comment on this work, except the laconic one, ‘The italics in brackets are mine.’ This refers, you will understand, to certain brackets at the end of Retrousy’s entries in the Diary, which were added after the shameless work fell into Old Hyphen’s hands.
May 26.
I have been reading (Retrousy begins his journal) an awfully topping Diary called ‘Defects of Schoolmasters,’ and the author is a schoolmaster himself, but it isn’t like the diaries some persons keep about ‘Get up at 6.30,’ a thing they have to do every day. It is communing with yourself so as to be a better man and pointing out the faults of your friends, and this is the kind of diary I am going to keep. Some persons know about it and they are egging me on to make it mostly about Old Hyphen’s defects, and they have offered to listen to readings from it in my room at a penny each if I pitch it strong enough. So I have bought an exercise book and this is the Preface, and I have wrote on the outside for title ‘Quadrilateral Triangles’ to choke Old Hyphen off opening it if he comes prowling into my desk. If he does he will very likely bag it and send me up to the Lower Beak.
(Retrousy obviously knows my little ways.)
May 27.
I like awfully keeping a diary and there are tons of things to say. There is something about me that riles Old Hyphen more than anything. Most of the persons say it is because of my argumentative disposition, being considered the most argumentative junior in the House. When he has some of us to tea in his drawingroom, which is the most ghastly misery but there are hot tea-cakes, the others kick me beneath the table meaning that they want me to start an argument with him, and though I know I should be wise not to do it I cannot refrain. It is sublime to hear the two of us jawing away, and me doing best, and him trying to be polite because it is the drawingroom. If it was in Puppy Hole he would be at me in one bang. Persons say that such is my effect upon him that as soon as he sees me his hands itch to be at me. Some think it is because when I stand up to argue with him I keep my legs so wide apart and others think it is because I am rather stout. In the Diary about the Defects of Schoolmasters the author says they should ‘keep their tempers, avoiding alike noisy outbursts of rage, a constantly militant attitude, sarcasm and querulousness.’ If Old Hyphen would do this he would be a tip topper, his house being the best in the school, but his querulousness when you don’t obey him like a shot is hopeless, and he becomes militant as soon as I try to get a word in. The author also says ‘With common sense and a desire for self-improvement any one can overcome the difficulties of the scholastic profession,’ but it would be no good trying to get Old Hyphen to say that he needed self-improvement. I have sometimes wished to shove ‘Defects of Schoolmasters’ anonymously under his study door but it would be too risky, me being the one he generally picks out first. I offered Crackly Mi threepence to do it, but he was abashed though stoney. (O wise Crackly. It gives me, however, the creeps to note that Retrousy is aware of my struggles to be polite to him in the drawingroom.’)
May 28.
There was an awfully good go in form to-day. Old Hyphen is a bit of a nut at Scripture, but in a priceless fit of forgetfulness he spoke about ‘Joseph sleeping on the pillow of stones.’ For half a jiffy I was sorry for him but before I could be any sorrier I piped out ‘Don’t you think it was Jacob, sir?’ I then stood on the defensive, namely ready to get it hot, especially as Cotton giggled, but the old one just looked at me a long time during which I was the centre of admiration, and then he said ‘Thank you, Retrousy,’ and stung the others for not having noticed his mistake as quickly as I did, and said again, ‘Thank you, Retrousy,’ in an obliged threatening voice, which gave me the exulting uneasy feeling that he would get me later, but it was worth it.
(Not at all. I was only thinking what a queer fish he is. I admit he maddens me, but let me put on record before I have another ‘go’ at him, that, despite his artful ways, he is one of the most truthful boys I have ever had in my house.)
June I.
It is absolutely priceless to keep a Diary and I wish I had begun sooner. I now come to the real secret of how to manage boys. It is not in ‘Defects of Schoolmasters,’ which I have sold for a bob to Silly Billy, but I got it long ago from watching a mother anxious about her progeny, they are Dinkson Ma and Mi and I resided with them three days at Christmas and one night their mother did not come down to dinner and so I said had she a rash, and so they told me all and so my politeness changed to admiration. She was going without her dinner because Ma had killed two chickens with his catapult, and so it came out that she always punished her progenies through herself so as to strike their conscience dumb. Another day Ma kicked Mi for bursting a cane-handled bat while digging for worms with it and she let them both go fishing all the same and locked herself in the still-room. A third time when the fruit had disappeared from the sideboard she copied out 100 lines of Virgil Book 2. Her spelling was priceless but I admire her no end and on my return to Old Hyphen’s I told him about it in the drawingroom which was the only safe place, and all he said was that he would avenge the poor woman by taking it out of her sons.
(I did, I had them swished for something else.)
June 7.
This was the week of the sports when Pivot prayed for victory in the house fives juniors, and won and nobody thought much about it till he prayed to win the 100 yards and won again, though Anstruther Mi is heaps better. Then all sorts of persons began to wonder whether it was a good thing to be pi, and two more tried it and won like anything. By afternoon mi’tutor’s was the most religious house in the school among the juniors and we carried the quarter and the hammer, both of which Hurlbart’s House thought would be a walk-over for them, but they are unreligious persons. The queerest thing was when Anstruther challenged Pivot to run the hundred yards again for glory, and they both prayed, and the result was a dead heat. Then some of the big swells in another house got waxy about it and complained to our swells and they had a meeting, being a quorum, and passed a law that the fairest way was for no one to pray for victory, and the next one who did it to be tanned. I didn’t pray for victory, being sure of the mile without it for I am never ceasing in my efforts though a slow starter owing to my portly frame, but by a mistake of Old Hyphen’s I was swished with the others, and I don’t complain, for though nobody knows, I once prayed to be gently sick so as to shirk early chapel.