THE END OF THE HARLEQUINADE
“I don’t think you _were_ a 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, you _is_ a 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 we _was_ a 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.”
“_Was_ you 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 I _did_ come 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 suppose _I_ want 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 a _quid pro quo_ and 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 of
_Macbeth_ for 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 played _Dick Whittington_ that
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. But _the_ success 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 Robin Goodfellow 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, Miss O’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 realise that. 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.