THE PANTOMIME
“Now listen, Letizia, you’re to be a very good little girl and do
anything that Mrs. Pottage tells you without arguing,” Nancy admonished
her small daughter before she left Starboard Alley next morning to
dress for the matinée.
“Can I take my lamb what Santy Claus gave me to the pantomine?”
“Yes, I daresay Mrs. Pottage will let you.”
“And my dog? And my monkey? And my rub-a-dub-dub and my wheedle-wheedle
and my....”
“No, darling, you can take the lamb, but the others must stay at home.”
“I aspeck they’ll cry,” Letizia prophesied solemnly. “Because they
guessed they was going to the pantomine.”
“If she isn’t a regular masterpiece,” the landlady exclaimed. “Oh,
dear, oh, dear! She’s got an answer for every blessed thing. Listen, my
beauty, we’ll leave the rest of the menargerie to keep John company.”
John was the canary, and fortunately this solution commended itself to
Letizia, who seemed more hopeful for the happiness of the toys that
were going to be left behind.
There is no doubt that the presence of Mrs. Pottage and Letizia
contributed largely to the success of the Theatre Royal pantomime that
afternoon. No false shame deterred Letizia from making it quite clear
to the audience that it was her own mother who bearded the Demon King
Rat in his sulphurous abode.
“Stop, ere you any viler magic potions brew,
For I declare such wickedness you soon shall rue.”
“Muvver!” cried Letizia, clapping her hands in an ecstasy of welcome.
“Ush!” said a solemn and deeply interested woman sitting in the row
behind.
“It _is_ my muvver, I tell you,” said Letizia, standing up on the seat
of the stall and turning round indignantly to address the woman over
the back of it.
“Of course, it’s her mother,” Mrs. Pottage joined in even more
indignantly. “Nice thing if a child can’t call out ‘mother’ in a free
country without being hushed as if she was nobody’s child.”
The solemn woman took an orange out of a bag and sucked it in silent
disapproval.
“No use for you to raise the least objection,
Dick Whittington is under my protection,”
declared the Fairy Queen, waving her wand to the accompaniment of a
white spot-light.
“In vain you seek to make my plans miscarry,
For Dick his master’s daughter shall not marry,”
declared the Demon King Rat, waving his sceptre to the accompaniment of
a red spot-light.
“That man’s bad,” Letizia announced gravely.
If the traditional scene of alternate defiance of each other by the
powers of Good and Evil had lasted much longer, she might have made
an attempt to reach the stage and fight at her mother’s side; but the
Demon King Rat vanished down a trap and the Fairy Queen hurried off
Left to make way for Cheapside.
“Why has faver got a red nose?” Letizia inquired, when Bram entered
made up for Idle Jack. “I don’t like him to have a red nose. My lamb
what Santy Claus gave me doesn’t like him to have a red nose.”
Whereupon Letizia climbed up on the seat of the stall once more and
turned her back on the stage in disgust.
“Would you mind telling your little girl to kindly sit down,” the
solemn and deeply interested woman behind requested of Mrs. Pottage.
“This is my lamb what Santy Claus gave me,” Letizia informed the solemn
woman in her most engaging voice, at which the solemn woman turned
to her neighbour and declared angrily that children oughtn’t to be
allowed into pantomimes if they couldn’t behave theirselves a bit more
civilised.
“Get down, duckie, there’s a love,” said Mrs. Pottage, who in spite of
her contempt for the solemn woman could not but feel that she had some
reason to complain.
“Well, I don’t want to see faver with that red nose,” objected Letizia,
who thereupon sat down in her stall, but held her hands in front of
her eyes to shut out the unpleasant aspect of her father in his comic
disguise. However, Idle Jack did so many funny things that at last his
daughter’s heart was won, so that presently she and Mrs. Pottage were
leading the laughter of the house.
Finally when Idle Jack emptied a bag of flour on the Dame, Letizia was
seized by such a rapture of appreciation that she flung her lamb into
the orchestra and hit the first violin on the head.
“Faver,” she shouted. “I’ve frowed my lamb what Santy Claus gave me,
and the wheedle-wheedle in the band has tooked him somewhere.”
Bram came down to the footlights and shook his fist at his small
daughter, an intimate touch that drove the house frantic with delight
and caused the solemn woman to observe to her neighbour that she didn’t
know who did come to the theatre nowadays, such a common lot of people
as they always seemed to be.
One of the features of pantomimes about this period was the
introduction of a sentimental song, usually allotted to the Fairy Queen
as having some pretensions to a voice, in the course of which a boy of
about twelve, chosen no doubt from the local church or chapel choir,
rose from his seat in the front row of the circle and answered the
singer on the stage, to the extreme delectation of the audience.
The refrain of the song this year went:
Sweet Suzanne,
I’ll be your young man,
They’ve never made your equal
Since the world began.
Won’t you take my name?
For my heart’s aflame
For love of you,
My pretty Sue,
My sweet Suzanne.
and again:
Your lips are red as rubies,
Your eyes are diamonds rare,
So while I have you,
My lovely Sue,
I’m as rich as a millionaire.
Why the Fairy Queen should suddenly enter and break into this
drivelling song was an unanswerable enigma, and why a little boy in an
Eton suit with a very white collar and a very pink face should rise
from the front row of the circle and sing each verse over again, while
the Fairy Queen walked backward and forward with one hand held to her
apparently entranced ear, was an equally unanswerable enigma.
At any rate Letizia thoroughly disapproved of the anomaly. While all
the women in the pit and gallery and stalls and circle were exclaiming:
“Oh, isn’t he a little love? Well, I declare, if he isn’t reelly
lovely. Oh, do listen to the little angel,” Letizia was frowning.
Then with great deliberation, unobserved by Mrs. Pottage, who was
languishing upon the sibilant cockney of this detestable young treble,
she stood up on the seat and shouted:
“Muvver!”
The Fairy Queen, while still holding one hand to an entranced ear,
shook her wand at her little mortal daughter. But Letizia was not to be
deterred from the problem that was puzzling her sense of fitness.
“Muvver!” she shouted again. “_Why_ is that boy?”
Then Mrs. Pottage woke from the trance into which the duet had flung
her and pulled Letizia down again into a sitting posture.
“Duckie, you mustn’t call out and spoil the lovely singing.”
“I don’t like that boy,” said Letizia firmly.
“Yes, but listen.”
“And my lamb what Santy Claus gave me doesn’t like him.”
“Hush, duckie, hush!”
“And I won’t listen. And I won’t look, Mrs. Porridge.”
“Come, come, be a good girl.”
But Letizia struggled out of Mrs. Pottage’s arms and retreated under
the seat of the stall from which she did not emerge until this
enigmatic interlude in the life of the Fairy Queen came to an end amid
a tumult of applause from the profoundly moved audience.
Letizia failed to recognise her father when he came rushing on for
the Harlequinade at the end of the Transformation Scene with the
time-honoured greeting of “Here we are again!” And when Mrs. Pottage
told her who the clown was, she merely shook her head violently and
reiterated “No, no, no, no, no!”
However, the Harlequinade itself thoroughly amused her, although she
did not approve of the Harlequin’s dance with her mother the Columbine.
“Who is that spotted man?” she asked. “Why does he frow muvver up like
that? I don’t like him. I don’t like his black face. I won’t let him
frow up my lamb what Santy Claus gave me.”
“Well, you threw it up yourself just now and hit the poor fiddle.”
“Yes,” Letizia acknowledged in a tone of plump contentment.
The Harlequinade came to an end with a wonderful trap-act, in which the
Clown was pursued by the Policeman head first through one shop window,
head first out through another, up a long flight of stairs that turned
into planks just as they both reached the top, so that they both rolled
down to the bottom and disappeared into a cellar. Out again and diving
through more windows, whirling round doors without hinges, climbing
over roofs, sliding down chimneys, until at last the Policeman’s
pursuit was shaken off and the Clown, after bounding up ten feet into
the air through a star-trap, alighted safely on the stage whence, after
snatching a basket that was hanging up outside a shop window, he began
to pelt the audience with crackers while the orchestra stood up to
play _God Save the Queen_ and the curtain slowly descended on a great
success at the Theatre Royal, Greenwich.