She sits on a table and smokes a cigarette. A cigarette on the stage is
always the badge of infamy.
In real life the cigarette is usually the hall-mark of the particularly
mild and harmless individual. It is the dissipation of the Y.M.C.A.; the
innocent joy of the pure-hearted boy long ere the demoralizing influence
of our vaunted civilization has dragged him down into the depths of the
short clay.
But behind the cigarette on the stage lurks ever black-hearted villainy
and abandoned womanhood.
The adventuress is generally of foreign extraction. They do not make bad
women in England--the article is entirely of continental manufacture
and has to be imported. She speaks English with a charming little French
accent, and she makes up for this by speaking French with a good sound
English one.
She seems a smart business woman, and she would probably get on very
well if it were not for her friends and relations. Friends and relations
are a trying class of people even in real life, as we all know, but
the friends and relations of the stage adventuress are a particularly
irritating lot. They never leave her; never does she get a day or an
hour off from them. Wherever she goes, there the whole tribe goes with
her.
They all go with her in a body when she calls on her young man, and it
is as much as she can do to persuade them to go into the next room even
for five minutes, and give her a chance. When she is married they come
and live with her.
They know her dreadful secret and it keeps them in comfort for years.
Knowing somebody's secret seems, on the stage, to be one of the most
profitable and least exhausting professions going.
She is fond of married life, is the adventuress, and she goes in for it
pretty extensively. She has husbands all over the globe, most of them
in prison, but they escape and turn up in the last act and spoil all
the poor girl's plans. That is so like husbands--no consideration, no
thought for their poor wives. They are not a prepossessing lot, either,
those early husbands of hers. What she could have seen in them to induce
her to marry them is indeed a mystery.
The adventuress dresses magnificently. Where she gets the money from we
never could understand, for she and her companions are always more or
less complaining of being "stone broke." Dressmakers must be a trusting
people where she comes from.
The adventuress is like the proverbial cat as regards the number of
lives she is possessed of. You never know when she is really dead. Most
people like to die once and have done with it, but the adventuress,
after once or twice trying it, seems to get quite to like it, and goes
on giving way to it, and then it grows upon her until she can't help
herself, and it becomes a sort of craving with her.
This habit of hers is, however, a very trying one for her friends and
husbands--it makes things so uncertain. Something ought to be done to
break her of it. Her husbands, on hearing that she is dead, go into
raptures and rush off and marry other people, and then just as they
are starting off on their new honeymoon up she crops again, as fresh as
paint. It is really most annoying.
For ourselves, were we the husband of a stage adventuress we should
never, after what we have seen of the species, feel quite justified in
believing her to be dead unless we had killed and buried her ourselves;
and even then we should be more easy in our minds if we could arrange to
sit on her grave for a week or so afterward. These women are so artful!
But it is not only the adventuress who will persist in coming to life
again every time she is slaughtered. They all do it on the stage. They
are all so unreliable in this respect. It must be most disheartening to
the murderers.
And then, again, it is something extraordinary, when you come to think
of it, what a tremendous amount of killing some of them can stand and
still come up smiling in the next act, not a penny the worse for it.
They get stabbed, and shot, and thrown over precipices thousands of feet
high and, bless you, it does them good--it is like a tonic to them.
As for the young man that is coming home to see his girl, you simply
can't kill him. Achilles was a summer rose compared with him. Nature and
mankind have not sufficient materials in hand as yet to kill that
man. Science has but the strength of a puling babe against his
invulnerability. You can waste your time on earthquakes and shipwrecks,
volcanic eruptions, floods, explosions, railway accidents, and such like
sort of things, if you are foolish enough to do so; but it is no good
your imagining that anything of the kind can hurt him, because it can't.
There will be thousands of people killed, thousands in each instance,
but one human being will always escape, and that one human being will be
the stage young man who is coming home to see his girl.
He is forever being reported as dead, but it always turns out to be
another fellow who was like him or who had on his (the young man's) hat.
He is bound to be out of it, whoever else may be in.
"If I had been at my post that day," he explains to his sobbing mother,
"I should have been blown up, but the Providence that watches over good
men had ordained that I should be laying blind drunk in Blogg's saloon
at the time the explosion took place, and so the other engineer, who had
been doing my work when it was his turn to be off, was killed along with
the whole of the crew."
"Ah, thank Heaven, thank Heaven for that!" ejaculates the pious old
lady, and the comic man is so overcome with devout joy that he has to
relieve his overstrained heart by drawing his young woman on one side
and grossly insulting her.
All attempts to kill this young man ought really to be given up now. The
job has been tried over and over again by villains and bad people of all
kinds, but no one has ever succeeded. There has been an amount of energy
and ingenuity expended in seeking to lay up that one man which, properly
utilized, might have finished off ten million ordinary mortals. It is
sad to think of so much wasted effort.
He, the young man coming home to see his girl, need never take an
insurance ticket or even buy a _Tit Bits_. It would be needless
expenditure in his case.
On the other hand, and to make matters equal, as it were, there are some
stage people so delicate that it is next door to impossible to keep them
alive.
The inconvenient husband is a most pathetic example of this. Medical
science is powerless to save that man when the last act comes round;
indeed, we doubt whether medical science, in its present state of
development, could even tell what is the matter with him or why he dies
at all. He looks healthy and robust enough and nobody touches him, yet
down he drops, without a word of warning, stone-dead, in the middle of
the floor--he always dies in the middle of the floor. Some folks like
to die in bed, but stage people don't. They like to die on the floor. We
all have our different tastes.
The adventuress herself is another person who dies with remarkable ease.
We suppose in her case it is being so used to it that makes her so quick
and clever at it. There is no lingering illness and doctors' bills and
upsetting of the whole household arrangements about her method. One walk
round the stage and the thing is done.
All bad characters die quickly on the stage. Good characters take a long
time over it, and have a sofa down in the drawing-room to do it on, and
have sobbing relatives and good old doctors fooling around them, and can
smile and forgive everybody. Bad stage characters have to do the whole
job, dying speech and all, in about ten seconds, and do it with
all their clothes on into the bargain, which must make it most
uncomfortable.
It is repentance that kills off the bad people in plays. They always
repent, and the moment they repent they die. Repentance on the stage
seems to be one of the most dangerous things a man can be taken with.
Our advice to stage wicked people would undoubtedly be, "Never repent.
If you value your life, don't repent. It always means sudden death!"
To return to our adventuress. She is by no means a bad woman. There is
much good in her. This is more than proved by the fact that she learns
to love the hero before she dies; for no one but a really good woman
capable of extraordinary patience and gentleness could ever, we are
convinced, grow to feel any other sentiment for that irritating ass,
than a desire to throw bricks at him.
The stage adventuress would be a much better woman, too, if it were not
for the heroine. The adventuress makes the most complete arrangements
for being noble and self-sacrificing--that is, for going away and never
coming back, and is just about to carry them out, when the heroine, who
has a perfect genius for being in the wrong place at the right time,
comes in and spoils it all. No stage adventuress can be good while the
heroine is about. The sight of the heroine rouses every bad feeling in
her breast.
We can sympathize with her in this respect. The heroine often affects
ourselves in precisely the same way.
There is a good deal to be said in favor of the adventuress. True, she
possesses rather too much sarcasm and repartee to make things quite
agreeable round the domestic hearth, and when she has got all her
clothes on there is not much room left in the place for anybody else;
but taken on the whole she is decidedly attractive. She has grit and
go in her. She is alive. She can do something to help herself besides
calling for "George."
She has not got a stage child--if she ever had one, she has left it on
somebody else's doorstep which, presuming there was no water handy to
drown it in, seems to be about the most sensible thing she could have
done with it. She is not oppressively good.