I introduced a large circle of acquaintances, even in the second hour
of “Twice Round the Clock”—I mean the newspaper boys. In another page
I said, jestingly, that I was afraid of boys. I must except from the
category the newspaper boys. I have been sadly harassed and teazed by
them in their out-of-door or bagful state, when they go round to purchase
newspapers: for I once happened to be editor of a cheap journal, at whose
office there was no editor’s room. I was compelled, occasionally, to read
my proofs behind the counter, in the presence of the publisher and his
assistant, and I have endured much mental pain and suffering from the
somewhat too demonstrative _facetiæ_ of the young gentlemen engaged in
the “trade.” Verbal satire of the most acutely personal nature was their
ordinary mode of procedure; but, occasionally, when the publication (as
sometimes happened) was late in its appearance, their playfulness was
aggravated to the extent of casting an old shoe at me, and on one signal
occasion a bag of flour. Still the newspaper boy is the twin-brother of
the printer’s devil; and, much as I have seen of those patient, willing
little urchins, I should be a brute if I were hard to them, here.
The newspaper boys are, of course, in immense array at the six o’clock
fair on Friday evening. They are varied, as currants are by sultanas in a
dumpling, by newspaper men, who, where the boys struggle up to the window
and drop in their load, boldly fling bags full, sacks full, of journals
into the yawning casement. There is a legend that they once threw a boy
into the window, newspapers and all. But at six o’clock everything is
over—the window is closed—and newspaper fair is adjourned to the next
Friday.
SEVEN O’CLOCK P.M.—A THEATRICAL GREEN-ROOM, AND “BEHIND THE SCENES.”
Dear friends and readers, we are approaching the sere and yellow leaf
of our peregrinations “round the clock.” As the year wanes, as golden
August points to the culminating glories of the year, but with oft-times
a dark and impetuous storm presaging the evil days of winter that
are to come, so I feel, hour after hour, that our (to me) pleasant
intercommunications are destined to cease. You have been very forbearing
with me, have suppressed a justifiable petulance at my short-comings, my
digressions, my wayward fancies and prejudices, because you know (I hope
and trust) that I am always your faithful servant and willing scribe,
that (errors excepted, as the lawyers say) I have but one aim and end in
these papers—to tell you the truth about London, its life and manners; to
describe what I have seen, to tell you what I know; and to place before
you, very timidly and under all correction, certain things which, in my
opinion, it behoves you, and all who have a faith in the better part of
humanity, to think about. Indeed, it is a very great privilege for a
writer to be placed face to face with a hundred thousand critics every
week, in lieu of half a hundred every half-year or so. He is flouted, and
jeered, and scouted, and scolded, and remonstrated with, every time the
penny post comes in; but he makes friends every week. He knows that his
words are winged; he knows that he appeals to men who will understand
his views, and to women who will sympathise with him; and though he may
be as a pedlar, carrying about petty wares—ribbons, and tags, and small
jewellery, and soap, and sweetstuff—he is vain enough to imagine that
he can carry cheerfulness and content into many households; and that
in speaking our common language of hopes and fears, likes and dislikes,
he does not belie his cognomen of a “Welcome Guest.” If he—if I—thought
otherwise, I would tear this sheet, sell my reversion, buy an annuity
of £20 a year, and join the convent of La Trappe, to wear a cowl, sing
matins and complins, eat black radishes, and dig my own grave, to-morrow.
Seven o’clock post meridian has brought us at least the artificial
abnegation of daylight, and has subjected us to the _régime_ of gaslight.
You had a twinkle of that unwholesome vapour, under the head of public
dinners; but henceforth Sol will shine no longer on our labours. It is
seven o’clock in the evening, and we are going to the play.
When I state that the subjects of this article are a Theatrical
Green-Room, and “Behind the Scenes,” I anticipate some amount of
intellectual commotion among the younger, and especially the “fast”
portion, of my readers. Jaunty young clerks, and incipient men about
town, dwelling in decorous country boroughs, will be apt to fancy that I
am about to launch into a deliriously exciting account of those charmed
regions which lie beyond the stage-door; that my talk will be altogether
of spangles, muslin, skirts, and pink tights. Nay, even my young lady
readers may deceive themselves with the idea that I shall draw a glowing
picture of the dangerous, delightful creatures who flutter every night
before theatrical audiences, and of the dear, naughty, wicked, darling
marquises, earls, and baronets who lounge behind the scenes. _Helas! il
n’en est rien._ I know all about green-rooms, wings, and prompt-boxes. I
have been in the artistes’ _foyer_ of the Grand Opera, in the flies of
her Majesty’s, and in the mezzanine floor of the Princess’s. I am not
about to be cynical, but I must be prosaic, and mean to tell you, in a
matter-of-fact way, what the green-room and behind the scenes of a London
theatre are like at seven o’clock.
It is strange, though, what a fascination these forbidden regions
exercise over the uninitiated. I never knew any one yet who was actuated
by an inordinate desire to visit the vestry-room of a church, or to see
the cupboard where the rector and curate’s surplices are suspended on
pegs, or where the sacramental wine is kept. It is but seldom that I have
seen anybody who evinced a particular curiosity to see a pawnbroker’s
ware-room, at the top of the spout, or to become acquainted with the
arcana of a butcher’s slaughter-house (though I must confess, myself,
to having once, as a schoolboy, subscribed fourpence, in company with
about ten others, to see a bullock killed)—yet everybody wants to go
“behind the scenes.” Some twenty months since, I had business to settle
with a firm of solicitors, haughty, precise, distant, and sternly
business-like, who dwelt in Bedford Row. I think that some one who was
a client of the firm had a judgment against me, to which was witness
one Frederick Pollock, at Westminster; but let that pass. I settled the
matter, and thought myself well out of the firm and its clutches, when
the penultimate junior partner, a middle-aged, respectable man, with a
prematurely-bald head, asked me to dinner at Verrey’s. He was good enough
to allow me to order the repast, and politely deferred to my preference
for _Macon vieux_ over hot sherry; but, towards the cheese, he hinted
that a man of the world, such as I seemed to be, ought never to be in
difficulties (I have been hopelessly insolvent since the year ’27, in
which I was born), and that he would esteem it a very great favour if
I would take him “behind the scenes” some night. Yes; this man of tape
and quill, of green ferret and pounce, of sheepskins and abominable
processes, positively wanted to see the Eleusinian mysteries of the
interior of a London theatre. I showed them to him, and he is grateful
still. I meet him occasionally at places of public resort. He is next
to senior partner now, but he never hints at six-and-eightpence when I
ask a legal question; and his most valuable act of friendship is this,
that whenever the Sheriff of Middlesex is moved to run up and down in
his bailiwick, with a special reference to my disparagement, I receive
a mysterious message, generally conveyed by a battered individual, who
wipes his face on the sleeve of his coat, and is not averse to taking
“something short,” that there is “something out” against me, and that I
had better look sharp. Whereupon I look out as sharp as I can for the
most convenient tenth milestone out of Babylon.
Now, friend and fellow-traveller of mine, do you mind transforming
yourself for the nonce into the friendly solicitor, and coming with me
“behind the scenes?” I know that with these continual metamorphoses I
am making a very golden ass of Apuleius of you; but it is all, believe
me, for your benefit. I don’t want you to stand a dinner at Verrey’s. I
only want you to put on the slippers of patience and the spectacles of
observation, and to follow me.
There is, the moralist hath said, a time for all things, and that much
libelled institution, a theatre, has among its Bohemian faults of
recklessness and improvidence, the somewhat rare virtue of punctuality.
Even those events of its daily life which depend for the extent of
their duration upon adventitious circumstances, are marked by a
remarkably well-kept average. Theatrical rehearsals generally commence
at ten o’clock in the morning; and though it will sometimes happen, in
the case of new pieces about to be produced—especially pantomimes and
_spectacles_, that the rehearsal is prolonged to within a few minutes of
the rising of the curtain for the evening performance, the usual turning
of an ordinary rehearsal’s, or series of rehearsals’ lane, is four
o’clock p.m. Then the _répétitêur_ in the orchestra shuts up his fiddle
in its case, and goes home to his tea. Then the young ladies of the
_corps de ballet_, who have been indulging in saltatory movements for the
last few hours, lay aside their “practising dresses”—generally frocks of
ordinary material, cut short in the manner immortalised by that notable
pedlar, Mr. Stout, in his felonious transaction with the little old woman
who fell asleep by the king’s highway—and subside into the long-flounced
garments of common life, which are to be again replaced so soon as
seven o’clock comes, by the abridged muslin skirts and flesh-coloured
continuations of ballet-girlhood. The principal actresses and actors
betake themselves to dinner, or to a walk in the park, or give themselves
a finishing touch of study in the parts they are not yet quite perfect
in, or, it may be, mount the steep theatrical stairs to the mountainous
regions where dwell the theatrical tailor and tailoress—I entreat them to
excuse me, the _costumier_ and the mistress of the robes—with whom they
confer on the weighty subject of the dresses which they are to wear that
evening. The carpenters abandon work; the scene-shifters, whose generic
name in technical theatrical parlance is “labourers,” moon about the back
part of the stage, seeing that the stock of scenery for the evening is
all provided, the grooves duly blackleaded and the traps greased, and all
the “sinks” and “flies,” ropes and pulleys, and other theatrical gear
and tackle, in due working order. For, you see, if these little matters
be not rigidly and minutely attended to, if a rope be out of its place
or a screw not rightly home, such trifling accidents as mutilation and
loss of life are not unlikely to happen. That the occurrence of such
casualties is of so extreme a rarity may be ascribed, I think, to the
microscopic care and attention which these maligned theatrical people
bestow on every inch of their domain behind the scenes. They have to
work in semi-darkness, and under many other circumstances of equal
disadvantage; but, next to a fire-engine station and the ’tween decks
of a man-o’-war, I do not think that I can call to mind a more orderly,
better-disciplined, better-tended place than that part of a theatre which
lies behind the foot-lights.
Now, mouse-like, from undiscovered holes, patter softly mysterious
females in tumbled mob-caps and battered bonnets, who, by the way, have
been pottering stealthily with brooms and brushes about the pit and boxes
in the morning, disappearing towards noon. They proceed to disencumber
the front of the house of the winding-sheets of brown holland in which it
has been swathed since last midnight. These are the “cleaners,” and when
they have made the house-clean and tidy for the audience of the evening,
dusted the fauteuils, and swept the lobbies, they hie them behind the
scenes, see that the proper provision of soap and towels exists in the
dressing-rooms, perhaps lend a hand to the scene-shifters, who are
completing _their_ afternoon’s labour by scientifically irrigating the
stage with watering-pots; or, if a tragedy is to be performed, spreading
the green baize extending to the foot-lights—that incomprehensible
green baize—that field _vert_ on which Paris dies combatant, and Hamlet
lies rampant, and without whose presence it is considered by many
dramatic sages no tragedy could possibly be enacted.[8] Meanwhile, the
property-man has brought to the verge of the wings, or laid out in trays
and hampers, ready to be conveyed below by his assistants, the necessary
paraphernalia and appurtenances for the pieces in that night’s bill.
Shylock’s knife and scales, Ophelia’s coffin, Claude Melnott’s easel
and maulstick, Long Tom Coffin’s mob-cap; the sham money, sham words,
sham eatables and drinkables of this unreal and fantastic world, are
all prepared. Presently the myrmidons of the wardrobe will take the
required costumes from their frowning presses, and convey them to the
dressing-rooms, ready for the histrionics who are to wear them. High
up above all, above ceiling, and flies, and chandelier, in his lofty
skylighted studio, the scene-painter throws down his “double-tie” brush,
bids his colour-grinder clean his boots, indulges in a mighty wash, and
dresses himself for the outward world. He improves marvellously by the
change. But ten minutes since he was an almost indescribable scarecrow,
in a tattered suit of canvas and list slippers, and bespattered from head
to foot with dabs of colour. And now he turns out a trim gentleman, with
a watch-chain, a moustache, an eye-glass, and kid gloves, and he walks
off as gingerly to the artistic or literary club to which he may belong,
as though he had never heard of size or whitewash in his life.
By five o’clock the little industries that have prevailed since the
rehearsal ended are mostly completed; and the theatre becomes quite
still. It is a complete, a solemn, almost an awful stillness. All the
busy life and cheerful murmur of this human ant-hill are hushed. The rows
of seats are as deserted as the degrees of some old ruined amphitheatre
in Rome. The stage is a desert. The “flies” and “borders” loom overhead
in cobweb indistinctness. Afar off the dusky, feeble chandelier, looks
like a moon on which no sun condescends to shine; and were it not for
one ray of golden afternoon sunlight, that from a topmost window shines
obliquely through the vast dimness, and rescues the kettle-drums in the
orchestra from tenebrose oblivion, you might fancy this place, which two
hours hence will be brilliantly lighted up, full of gorgeous decorations
and blithesome music, and a gay audience shouting applause to mimes and
jesters and painted bayadères, chasing the golden hours with frolic
feet—you might fancy the deserted theatre to be a Valley of Dry Bones.
Only two functionaries are ever watchful, and do not entertain the
slightest thought, either of suspending their vigilance, or of leaving
the theatre. At the entrance, in his crabbed little watch-box by the
stage-door, the grim man in the fur cap, who acts as Cerberus to
the establishment, sits among keys and letters for delivery. Of a
multifarious nature is the correspondence at a stage-door. There are
County Court summonses, seductive offers from rival managers to the
popular tragedian of the day, pressing entreaties for orders, pink
three-cornered notes scented and sealed with crests for the _première
danseuse_, frequently accompanied by pinned-up _cornets_ of tissue-paper
containing choice bouquets from Covent Garden. There are five-act
tragedies, and farces, written on official paper for the manager;
solicitations for engagements, cards, bills, and applications for benefit
tickets. But the grim man at the stage-door takes no heed of them, save
to deliver them to their proper addresses. He takes no heed either
(apparently) of the crowds of people, male and female, who pass and
repass him by night and by day, from Monday till Saturday. But he knows
them all well, be assured; knows them as well as Charon, knows them as
well as Cerberus, knows them as well as the turnkey of the “lock” in a
debtor’s prison. Scene-shifter or popular tragedian, it is all one to
him. He has but to obey his _consigne_ to let no one pass his keyed and
lettered den who is not connected with the theatre, or who has not the
_entrée_ behind the scenes by special managerial permission; and in
adhering to that, he is as inflexible as Death. And while he guards the
portal, Manager Doldrum sits in his easy-chair in his manuscript-littered
private room upstairs. The rehearsal may be over, but still he has work
to do. He has always work to do. Perhaps he anticipates a thin house
to-night, and is busy scribbling orders which his messenger will take
care shall permeate through channels which shall do the house no harm. Or
he may be glancing over a new farce which one of the accredited authors
of the theatre has just sent in, and with black-lead pencil suggesting
excisions, additions, or alterations. Or perhaps he tears his hair and
gnashes his teeth in dignified privacy, thinking with despair upon the
blank receipts of the foregone week, murmuring to himself, “Shall I
close! shall I close?” as a badgered and belated Minister of State might
ask himself, “Shall I resign?”
I wonder how many people there are who see the manager airing his white
waistcoat in his especial stage-box, or envy him as he drives away from
the theatre in his brougham, or joyfully takes his cheque on Ransom’s
for that last “stunning” and “screaming” new farce that forty pounds
were given for, and that ran four nights; I wonder how many of these
outsiders of the theatrical arcana know what a persecuted, hunted dog,
a genteel galley-slave, a well-dressed Russian serf, is the theatrical
manager. He may well be coarse and _brusque_ in his manners, captious and
pettish in conversation, remiss in answering letters, averse to parting
with ready money for manuscripts which are often never acted, and more
often never read. Do you know the life he leads? Mr. Pope’s existence
at Twickenham (or Twitnam), about the period when he instructed “good
John,” his man, to say that he was sick, or dead, was a combination of
halcyon days compared to the life of a theatrical manager. Are there sons
“destined their fathers’ souls to cross,” who “pen a stanza when they
should engross?” are there men with harum-scarum lunatic projects, with
tomfool notions that they are tragedians, with tragedies and farces, to
estimate whose real value one should make a handsome deduction for the
injury done to the paper on which they are written? are there madcap
young ladies, newly-whipped at boarding-school, who fancy that they have
the vocal powers of Grisi or Bosio, or the tragic acquirements of Ellen
Tree or Helen Faucit (excuse the Kean and Martin marital prefixes: the
old names are _so_ pleasant)? are there mad mothers who vehemently insist
that their skimping daughters can dance like Rosati or Pocchini? are
there “guardians,” in other words the proprietary slaveholders of dwarfs
and contorsionists, precocious pianists, and female violoncellists? are
there schemers, knaves, Yankee speculators, foreign farmers of singers
with cracked voices, bores or insipid idlers—they all besiege the
theatrical manager, supplicate, cajole, annoy, or threaten him. If he
doesn’t at once accede to their exorbitant terms, they forthwith abuse
him scurrilously out of doors. He is a robber, an impostor, a miser, a
Jew. He has been transported. He is insolvent. He came out ten years
since in the provinces, and in light comedy, and failed. He beats his
wife. He was the ruin of Miss Vanderplank, and sent men into the house
to hiss and cry out “pickles” when Toobey the tragedian was performing
his starring engagements, because, forsooth, Toobey did not draw. He owes
ten thousand pounds to Miss Larke, the _soprano_. He buys his wardrobe
in Petticoat Lane. He drinks fearfully. He will be hung. I have been an
editor, and know the amenities that are showered on _those_ slaves of the
lamp; the people who accuse you of having set the Thames on fire, and
murdered Eliza Grimwood, if you won’t accept their interminable romances,
and darkly insinuate that they will have your heart’s blood if you
decline to pay for poems copied from the annuals of eighteen hundred and
thirty-six; but to find the acme of persecution and badgering commend me
to a theatrical manager.
Return we to our muttons. The theatre sleeps a sound, tranquil sleep for
some hundred minutes; but about six it begins to wake again to fresh
life and activity. At half-past six it is wide awake and staring. The
“dressers,” male and female, have arrived, and are being objurgated by
incensed performers in their several _cabinets de toilette_, because they
are slow in finding Mr. Lamplugh’s bagwig, or Mademoiselle Follejambe’s
white satin shoes. The call-boy—that diminutive, weazened specimen of
humanity, who has never, so it seems, been a boy, and never will be
a man—has entered upon his functions, and already meditates a savage
onslaught on the dressing-room doors, accompanied by a shrill intimation
that the overture is “on.” Let us leave the ladies and gentlemen engaged
in the theatre to complete the bedizenment of their apparel, and, pending
their entrance into the green-room, see what that apartment itself is
made of.
Of course it is on a level with the stage, and within a convenient
distance of that prompt-box which forms the head-quarters of the
call-boy, and where he receives instructions from his adjutant-general,
the prompter. In country theatres, the green-room door is often within
a foot or so from the wing; and there is a facetious story told of
a whilom great tragedian, who, now retired and enjoying lettered
and dignified ease as a country gentleman, was, in his day, somewhat
remarkable for violent ebullitions of temper. He was playing Hamlet; and
in the closet scene with Gertrude, where he kills the old chamberlain,
who lies in ambuscade, and just at the moment he draws his rapier, it
occurred to his heated imagination that an inoffensive light comedian,
ready dressed for the part of Osric, who was standing at the green-room
door within reasonable sword range, was the veritable Polonius himself.
Whereupon the tragedian, shrieking out, “A rat! a rat! dead, for a
ducat—dead!” made a furious lunge at the unhappy Osric, who only escaped
instant death by a timely hop, skip, and jump, and fled with appalling
yells to a sofa, under which he buried himself. Tradition says that the
tragedian’s rapier went right through the wood-work of the half-opened
door; but I know that tradition is not always to be trusted, and I
decline to endorse this particular one now.