AGAIN AT THE MARTELLO TOWER
Now that regattas are over and oysters have come in again, our little port has returned to its normal or W. W. Jacobs demeanour. The bathers on the sand-spit have struck their tents. The Salvation Army band is practising its winter repertory. When our blue-eyed boatman rowed us over to the Martello tower again the other day, he almost looked as though he expected little more than his legal fare. Selina, who has the gift of management, suggested that Patty should try it on with him, on the ground, first, that women always do these things better than men, and, second, that Patty was blue-eyes’ favourite. I acquiesced, and Patty borrowed half-a-crown of me, so as to be prepared when the time came.
Meanwhile Selina began to read us extracts from Professor Henri Bergson on “Laughter.” Selina is a serious person without, so far as I have ever discovered, a grain of humour in her composition. These are just the people who read theories of laughter. It is a mystery to them, and they desire to have it explained. “A laughable expression of the face,” began Selina, “is one that will make us think of something rigid and, so to speak, coagulated, in the wonted mobility of the face. What we shall see will be an ingrained twitching or a fixed grimace. Onewould say that the person’s whole moral life has crystallized into this particular cast of features.”
“I wonder whether Mr. George Robey’s whole moral life has,” dropped Patty, innocently.
“And who, pray,” said Selina, with her heavy eyebrows making semi-circles of indignant surprise, “is Mr. George Robey?”
I sat silent. I had just brought my niece back from a short but variegated stay in town. I knew, but I would not tell.
“Why, Selina, dear,” answered Patty, “you are the very image of him with your eyebrows rounded like that. He is always glaring at the audience that way.”
“Willyou, Patty,” said Selina, now thoroughly roused, “be good enough to tell me who heis?”
“Well, he’s an actor, who makes the very faces your Bergson describes. Uncle took me to see him in a” (catching my warning eye)—“in a sort of historical play. He was Louis XV., at Versailles, you know.”
“H’m,” said Selina, “it’s rather a doubtful period; and the very best historical plays do make such a hash of history. Was it in blank verse? Blank verse will do much to mitigate the worst period.”
“N-no,” answered Patty, “I don’t think it was in blank verse. I didn’t notice; did you, Uncle?”
I tried to prevaricate. “Well, you never know about blank verse on the stage nowadays, nearly allthe actors turn it into prose. Mr. Robey may have been speaking blank verse, as though it were prose. The best artists cannot escape the fashion of the moment, you know.”
“But what did he do?” insisted Selina, “What was the action of the play?”
Patty considered. “I don’t remember his doing anything, Selina, dear, but chuck the ladies of the Court under the chin. Oh, yes, and he made eyes at them affectionately.”
“A pretty sort of historical play, on my word!” exclaimed Selina.
“Oh, it wasn’tallhistorical, Selina, dear,” said Patty, sweetly. “A lot of it was thoroughly modern, and Mr. Robey wore a frock coat, and such a funny little bowler hat, and another time he was a street musician in Venice with a stuffed monkey pinned to his coat-tails.”
Selina looked at me. There was a silent pause that would have made anybody else feel uncomfortable, but I was equal to the occasion. I snatched Selina’s book out of her hand, and said, cheerfully, “You see, Selina, it’s all explained here. Wonderful fellow, Bergson. ‘Something mechanical encrusted upon the living,’ that’s the secret of the comic. Depend upon it, he had seen George Robey and the stuffed monkey. And if Bergson, who’s a tremendous swell, member of the institute, and all that, why not Patty and I?”
“And where,” asked Selina, with a rueful glanceat the Bergson book, as though she began to distrust theories of the comic, “where was this precious performance?”
“At the Alhambra,” answered Patty, simply.
“The Alhambra! I remember Chateaubriand once visited it,” said Selina, who is nothing if not literary, “but I didn’t know it was the haunt of philosophers.”
I looked as though it was, but Patty tactlessly broke in, “Oh, I wish you two wouldn’t talk about philosophers. Can’t one laugh at Mr. Robey without having him explained by Bergson? Anyhow, I don’t believe he can explain Mr. Nelson Keys.”
“Another of your historical actors?” inquired Selina with some bitterness.
“Yes, Selina, dear, and much more historical than Mr. Robey. He played Beau Brummell and they were all there, Fox and Sheridan and the Prince of Wales, you know, all out of your favourite Creevey, and they said ‘egad’ and ‘la’ and ‘monstrous fine,’ and bowed and congee’d like anything—oh, it was awfully historical.”
Selina, a great reader of memoirs, was a little mollified. “Come,” she said, “this is better—though the Regency is another dangerous period. I’m glad, however, that Londoners seem to be looking to the theatre for a little historical instruction.”
“Yes, Selina,” I said, feeling that it would be dangerous to let Patty speak just at that moment, “and there is a certain type of contemporary play,calledrevue, which recognizes that demand and seldom, if ever, fails to cater for it. InrevuesI have renewed acquaintance with the heroes of classical antiquity, with prominent crusaders, with Queen Elizabeth, with the Grand Monarque—a whole course of history, in fact. Let Bergson explain that, if he can. And, what is more wonderful still, ourrevueartists, whose talent is usually devoted to provoking laughter, seem willingly to forgo it for the honour of appearing as an historical personage. Mr. Robey and Mr. Keys, I should tell you, are both professional laughter-provokers, indeed are the heads of their profession, yet one is content to posture as Louis Quinze and the other as Beau Brummell without any real chance of being funny. So the past ever exerts its prestige over us. So the muse of history still weaves her spell.”
“Which was the muse of history, Patty, dear?” said Selina, whose equanimity was now happily restored.
“Oh, bother, I forget,” said Patty, “and, anyhow, I don’t think she has as much to do withrevuesas uncle pretends. Give me the real muse ofrevuewho inspired Mr. Keys with his German waiter and his Spanish mandolinist and his Japanese juggler and——”
“This,” I said, to put an end to Patty’s indiscreet prattle, “must be the muse of geography.”
Patty gave me no change out of my half-crown. The boatman said he didn’t happen to have any. So much for Selina’s management!