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. One would 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.”
“_Will_ you, Patty,” said Selina, now thoroughly roused, “be good enough
to tell me who he _is_?”
“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 all the 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’t _all_ historical, 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 glance at 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, called _revue_, which recognizes that demand and seldom, if
ever, fails to cater for it. In _revues_ I 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, our _revue_ artists, 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 with _revues_ as uncle pretends. Give me the real muse of
_revue_ who 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!