CHAPTER XI
THE END OF THE HARLEQUINADE
“I don’t think youwerea very good little girl,” said Nancy reproachfully to her daughter when she was brought round to the dressing-room by Mrs. Pottage after the matinée.
“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,” averred Letizia entirely impenitent. “My lamb what Santy Claus gave me saided I was a very good little girl. He saided ‘Oh, Tizia, youisa good little girl!’”
The landlady beamed.
“There’s one thing, she thoroughly enjoyed her little self, and so did I, I’m bound to say, even if wewasa bit noisy.”
“I’m afraid Letizia was very noisy indeed.”
“Yes, but nobody minded two penn’orth of gin except a dismal-faced widow-woman sitting just behind us, and she’d had more than two penn’orth before ever she come out which is my opinion.”
“My husband and I won’t have time to dress and come home between the shows,” said Nancy. “We’re having some dinner sent in to us here. The curtain goes up again at seven, and it’s nearly six now.”
There was a tap on the door, and Bram, still in his clown’s dress but without the tufted wig, peeped round the corner.
“Well, you’re a nice one,” he said to his daughter. “I nearly sent the policeman down to you.”
“Wasyou that white man with a funny face?” Letizia asked incredulously.
“There you are, I told you it was your dadda,” Mrs. Pottage put in.
“Yes,” said Letizia, and in the tone of the affirmation a desire to admit frankly that she had been wrong was mingled with a slight resentment that Mrs. Pottage should have been right.
When Letizia had departed with the landlady, Bram and Nancy joined several other members of the company at a picnic meal. The talk was mostly of the pantomime, of how this song had gone and how that joke had got across, of whether it would not be wiser to cut this scene out altogether and shorten that one.
“Of course it’ll play closer to-night,” said one of the company. “And they’ll be a little quicker with the changes. Or it’s to be hoped they will.”
“That limelight man is a bit of a jay,” said the Demon King gloomily. “Would he follow me with that spot? Not he. And when I was singing my song, the fool was jigging it all over the stage like a damned rocket. His mate was better with you, Miss O’Finn.”
“He was on me all right,” Nancy allowed. “But he ruined the last verse of my first song by letting it fizz till I could have knocked him off his perch with my wand.”
“I think our trap-act went great, old boy,” said the Policeman to the Clown. “I’ve never known a trap-act go so smooth the first time. The house was eating it.”
Bram nodded.
“Yes, it went all right,” he admitted without enthusiasm. “But that star didn’t seem to me to be working properly again. Which reminds me, I must get hold of Worsley and tell him to have a look at it.”
“Who wants Worsley?” inquired the stage-manager, coming into the dressing-room at that moment.
“It was about that star-trap, old man,” said Bram.
“Now, that’s all right, old chap. Don’t you worry. I’ve been down under the stage, and it’s working to rights now. Lovely.”
“I thought I wasn’t coming through this afternoon,” Bram grumbled.
“Why, you came up like a bird,” Worsley assured him. “What are you talking about?”
“Yes, I know Ididcome up,” Bram replied irritably, for he was feeling thoroughly tired. “But it did stick for a second or two, and you know what it would mean if I got caught.”
“Oh, Mr. Worsley,” Nancy exclaimed in a panic, “for God’s sake see it’s all right to-night.”
“Now, don’t you worry yourself, Miss O’Finn,” the stage-manager begged. “Good Lord, you don’t supposeIwant to have an accident?”
“I wish you’d speak to that blasted limelight man about getting his red spot on me,” said the Demon King. “He ruined every entrance I’ve got—and I haven’t got too many.”
The stage-manager decided that he should be happier elsewhere, and left the assembled diners.
“Have a drink, old man,” somebody called after him. But Mr. Worsley suspected aquid pro quoand shouted back:
“Haven’t time now, old man. I’ll join you after the evening show. I’ve got to see the property man.”
And they heard his voice go shouting along the corridors.
“Props! Props! Where the deuce is Props?”
“Poor old Mangel Worsley,” said the Demon King, with a gloomy shake of the head. “He never ought to have gone in for panto. He’s not up to it. He’d have done better to stick to Shakespeare. I saw his production ofMacbethfor Wilson Forbes. Very pretty little show it was, too. Very pretty. But this sort of thing is too big for him altogether. He can’t grasp the detail. Result? My entrances go for nothing. For absolutely nothing! It stands to reason, if a red spot-light’s thrown Right Centre when I come on Down Stage Left it kills me dead. But that doesn’t trouble Worsley, because he doesn’t realise the importance of ensemble. He niggles,and it’s a pity, because within limits he’s quite a good stage-manager.”
How full the Theatre Royal was that Boxing Night! And Morton’s Theatre, the rival house, was just as full. People went to the pantomime even in days as near to us as the early nineties. They could not amuse themselves then by sporting with Amaryllis in the shade of a picture-palace while black-eyed heroes dreamed in profile during two hours of a monotonous reel or black-lipped heroines smeared their cheeks with vaseline and, intolerably magnified, blubbered silently at an unresponsive audience. The audience of the Theatre Royal that night was there to enjoy the performance, even though it lasted from seven o’clock till midnight. People went to the theatre in those days to see and to hear, to love and to hate. They were not sitting jam-packed in that reek of oranges and dust for the sake of cuddling one another. Nobody dressed up like a fireman came and squirted antiseptic perfumes over them. The odor of its own wedged-in humanity was grateful, an entity that breathed, cheered, laughed, and wept as one. The Grand, Islington, the Britannia, Hoxton, the Standard, Shoreditch, the transpontine Surrey, yes, and in those days Old Drury itself still defiant of change—all these theatres held people, not fidgety shadows gazing with lack-lustre eyes at a representation of fidgety shadows.
In spite of their fatigue the company playedDick Whittingtonthat night at Greenwich with treble the vigour of the afternoon performance. Everything went better, in spite of the absence of Mrs. Pottage and Letizia. Even the limelight men managed to keep their beams steadily fixed on the object of their enhancement whencesoever he might enter, whithersoever he might move, wheresoever he might stand. The billows of the Demon King’s bass rolled along twice as majestically. Nancy’s song with the overwashed chorister in the circle earned a double encore. Principal boy, principal girl, dame, knockabout comedians, all gained the good-will of the house. Butthesuccess was Bram. After his first scene Idle Jack had only to appear on the stage to send the audience into a roar. The tritest line of dialogue was received as heavenly wit. The stalest piece of fooling was welcomed in a rapture.
“Darling, you are being so funny to-night,” Nancy told him, when for a moment they found themselves side by side in the wings.
“I don’t feel at all funny,” Bram said. “In fact, it’s because I’m feeling so tired and depressed off, I suppose, that I’m trying to cheer up by being extra funny on.”
He squeezed her hand, and a moment later she heard the deep-voiced laughter of the house greeting another of his entrances.
Bram’s success as Idle Jack that night was consolidated by his Joey. He was not just the traditional clown with wide red mouth, bending low in exaggerated laughter and treading always on hot bricks. There was something of the Pierrot in his performance. Not that he scorned tradition overmuch. The whole audience recognised him as the authentic Joey of their imagination; but he did contrive to be somehow the incarnate spirit of that London street much more essentially than the heavy-footed Harlequin, much more essentially than Columbine, whose short pink tarlatan skirt did not become Nancy’s height, though she pirouetted on and off the stage gracefully enough. Pantaloon, too, was good, and the actor did manage to represent that hoary-headed ancient Londoner in his absurd Venetian disguise. But Bram was the ghost of old London itself—a London that was fast dying, though here in Greenwich it might seem to be as full of vitality as ever. It was the London of sweet lavender and cherry ripe, the London of hot cockles, of Punch and Judy shows and four-wheelers and lumbering knife-board omnibuses, of gas-lamps and queer beggars. Bram’s incarnation of this vanishing city had that authentic whimsicality (the very term is nearly unintelligible now) of old cockney humour, an urban Puckishness as if for a while RobinGoodfellow had tried to keep pace with the times and live in great cities. He made his audience feel that sausages were only strung together because it was more amusing to steal a string than a single sausage. His red-hot poker itself glowed with such a geniality of warmth as made the audience feel that everybody to whose seat it was applied was being slapped on the back in the spirit of the purest good-fellowship.
Nancy had flitted for the last time across that most fantastic yet so utterly ordinary street; and she paused in the wings for a moment, before going up to her dressing-room, to listen to the tumultuous laughter of the house at the great trap-act which was the climax of the Harlequinade. She saw Bram’s white figure come diving through the shop window and safely caught by the scene-hands stationed on the other side. She saw the Policeman follow close upon his heels, and watched the pair of them chase each other round and round the revolving door. She heard the thunders of applause as the trick staircase shot the protagonists from top to bottom, and the still louder thunder when Bram appeared among the chimney-pots. Then she turned away and had just reached the door of her dressing-room when the corridors which had been echoing with the distant applause became suddenly still as death.
“I hope that husband of mine’s not doing some particularly breakneck feat to thrill the Bank Holiday crowd,” she said to the principal girl with whom she shared a room and who was by now nearly dressed. “What has happened?” Nancy repeated. This quiet was unnatural. A gust of overwhelming dread sent her hurrying back down the corridor, as she heard the agonised voice of Worsley crying:
“Ring down! Ring down! For the love of God, ring down!”
At the head of the stairs she met the Pantaloon, beardless, with startled eyes, who waved her back.
“Don’t come down on the stage for a minute, MissO’Finn. There’s been an accident. He was caught in the star-trap. The spring must have broken.”
“Bram....”
He nodded, and burst into tears.
Nancy hurried past him toward the stage. Beyond the dropped curtain she could hear the murmur of the anxious and affrighted audience. Bram was lying beside the closed trap, the pointed sections of which were red.
“There isn’t a doctor in the whole audience,” Worsley was saying. “But several people have run to fetch one. How do you feel now, old man?”
Nancy pushed her way through the staring group, and knelt beside Bram, now unconscious, a bloody belt round his white dress, his head pillowed on the string of sausages.
“My precious one,” she cried. “Oh, my precious one!”
His eyelids flickered at her voice, and his limp body quivered very faintly.
“A doctor will be here in a minute, Miss O’Finn,” Worsley said.
“A doctor,” she cried. “Damn you, damn you! A doctor! He told you the trap wasn’t working properly. If he dies, it will be you that has killed him.”
By now, several of the ladies of the company had joined the group round the prostrate clown.
“Hush, dear,” said one of them, “don’t say anything you may regret afterwards.”
Nancy did not answer this pacific woman, but bent low over her husband.
“My precious one, my precious one.”
The doctor came at last. When he had finished his examination, he shook his head.
“He is injured mortally.”
“Dying?” Nancy whispered.
“He can hardly live many more minutes with these injuries. Has he any relations here?”
“I am his wife.”
“My poor girl,” said the doctor quickly. “I didn’t realisethat. But I couldn’t have hidden the truth. He must lie here. He’s unconscious. Even to move him to a dressing-room would probably kill him.”
The group round the dying man moved away and left him alone with his wife and the doctor, on that silent bright unnatural stage.
“And is there nothing we can do?” she asked.
“Nothing, my poor girl. It is kinder to leave him unconscious and not try to revive him. He will suffer less.”
But presently Bram’s lips moved, and Nancy bending low to his mouth heard the dim voice speaking with a fearful effort.
“I’m dying—Nancy darling—I wish—I wish....”
The dim voice died away.
“Oh, my only love, my darling, what do you wish? Do you want to see Letizia?”
“No—no—better not—not kind for baby girls to see death—better not—better not—Mrs. Pottage very kind—kind and good—I wish—I wish....”
Again the dim voice was lost.
“What, my precious one? What do you wish?”
“Nancy—if things are difficult—we haven’t saved much money—difficult—go to Caleb—too bitter about my people—too hard—faults on both sides—Nancy, kiss me once—quick—quick—I don’t think I shall know soon if you kiss me....”
She touched his cold lips with hers.
“Such a darling wife—always such a darling—very happy together—happy memories—your father’s speech—yes, Caleb will look after you if things very difficult—give my love to grandmamma—always kind to me—happy memories—Nancy! Nancy! I wish—oh, my own Nancy, I do wish....”
The dim voice was lost in the great abyss of eternity that stretched beyond this fantastic ordinary street, beyond this silent bright unnatural stage.
“Sweetheart, what do you wish? What do you wish?”
But the Clown was dead.