The Harlequinade: An Excursion Part 10

EGLANTINE. We've a few guineas in the house, I suppose?

HARLEQUIN. A few, my lord.

EGLANTINE. Enough for a coach hire to the country. A penniless fellow such as I am, Quin, would she welcome me to her home, I wonder?

HARLEQUIN. But I fear that this parchment fails of its effect unless your lords.h.i.+p is married to the owner.

EGLANTINE. But not a bad idea, Quin. [Then he sighs doubtfully.] Would she think so?

HARLEQUIN. Let us ask her when she has picked up the pieces.

[And here Alice and Uncle Edward draw the curtains, for the scene is over. But Alice still stands fingering their folds. Her eyes smile, but her mouth droops a little doubtfully. She is never over-happy about this scene. "Very pretty" she hears the front row people say; and then they rustle their programmes and read about whiskey very old in bottle, or cigarettes, a very special blend. "Very pretty" is so patronising.

Someone else remarks "How quaint"; and that is worse still. Miles away from us is the meaning of that eighteenth century with its polished perfections. So perfect, yet so partially perfect, that mankind could only break them all to pieces and start again. But Alice, tidy little soul, loves the fine order of it all. If they embroidered flowers so well, they must, she thinks, have loved the very flowers, too, and such good manners must have meant that somewhere underneath the silk and stays they had kind and worthy souls. But her mouth does droop a little, and she asks her uncle, almost whispering:

"Do you think they understood it?"

"Any child could understand it," Uncle Edward says, and back to his paper he goes.

Alice gives a shy glance round. She doesn't mind now if they do hear.

"But that's the trouble, as poor Auntie used to say: 'They're not children.' Don't we only wish they were."

Once more, then, Uncle Edward sizes up the house; a good house now, a contented house, a bread-and-b.u.t.ter house not to be quarrelled with.

"You take your public as you find 'em, my Missie," he says, or rather, this he only seems to say. His words are: "Alice, get on with your bit."

So Alice smiles again, and smooths her frock and puts her heels together and turns out her toes, and gets on.

ALICE. [As she faces them.] I beg your pardon. Well, that was in seventeen hundred and something. And we skip the eighteen hundreds because they were so busy: too busy to play, except just riotously, and we skip to-day, too, because ... well, really because what we showed you about to-day with bits of "you" put in it might seem rather rude. And we skip to-morrow, because to-morrow really is too serious to make our sort of jokes about. So we go right on to the day after. And you've noticed, haven't you, that we go westward all the time? So next the scene's in America, which you get to through New York. Things have been going from bad to worse with our four poor G.o.ds, but what has princ.i.p.ally knocked them endways is machinery. Now America is full of machinery. And they can't understand it. For whatever a machine is supposed to do in the end, there's one thing it always seems sure to do in the beginning, if you're not very, very careful. And that is to knock the spirit out of a man. Which is his magic. Clown and Pantaloon and Harlequin and Columbine are very simple folk, you know. They let themselves be just what it's most natural to be, and only try to give their friends in front ... kind friends in front, they call them ... just what will make them happiest quickest. So this is what they've come to be by this time, Clown and Columbine, Harlequin and Pantaloon. No names but those, no meaning, no real part at all in the rattle and clatter of machinery which is now called Life. They're out of it. They clung to the skirts of the theatre for a bit. But the theatre, aching to be "in it", flung them off. The intellectual drama had no use for them, no use at all.

And so they found themselves (out of it indeed) busking on the pavement, doing tricks and tumbling and singing silly songs to the unresponsive profiles of long lines of ladies (high-nosed or stumpy-nosed ladies), waiting admittance to the matinees of some highly intellectual play. And with gla.s.ses on those noses they'd be reading while they waited the book of that same play: so even then our poor G.o.ds busked in vain. But worse, far worse....

Along came the Man of the World again. He calls himself the Man of Business now. "Do the Public really want this sort of stuff?" he said. "Well, let 'em have it. But as a Business Proposition, if you please."

So he bought up all the theatres, and he said he'd make them pay. And his cousin, the Man in the Street, took shares. And they organised the Theatre.

And they made it efficient. And they conducted it on sound commercial lines. And the magic vanished and people wondered where and why. Now what we're going to show you, you won't believe could ever happen at all. It does seem like the cheapest of cheap jokes. But really if we will think magic's to be bought and sold, and if we leave our G.o.ds to starve because there isn't any money in their laughter or their tears ... well, it's more than the Theatre that may suffer. But the poor pampered Theatre is our business now, and here's our cheap, cheap joke about it. You aren't expected to laugh ... in fact, perhaps you shouldn't. It's one of those jokes you smile at, crookedly you know, this joke of the Theatre as it well may be the day after to-morrow if some of us don't look out.

[And with that we hear music. It's a ragtime tune, and something about it hurts us. After ten bars we find out what and why. It is the theme of the G.o.ds cheapened and degraded. Music is of all the arts the directest epitome of life. Not a n.o.ble thing in it that cannot, it would seem, with just a turn or two, be turned to baseness.

Alice and Uncle Edward draw back the curtains, and there's another curtain to be seen. It is not beautiful to look at--but it's useful. It has six advertis.e.m.e.nts painted on it in "screaming" colour.

and "keep thin" says one. "Drink and keep sober" says the next, and Somebody's Patent Something is the way. "Indulge freely; we take the consequence", the motto runs beneath the two. "Patent pearls that will deceive an oyster" says the third. The fourth's a Face Cream, and the fifth's for Shattered Nerves. The sixth says, "Believe in our Patent G.o.d and you shall a.s.suredly be saved." From one side comes the Man of the World--Man of Business--Business Manager. Silk hat, dress coat, white waistcoat, s.h.i.+ny s.h.i.+rt, patent boots, and big cigar; he's very smart and prosperous indeed. From the other side come the four poor G.o.ds, out of work buskers of the streets, down at heel and weary. But still G.o.ds, and with a G.o.d-like snap of ill-temper to them for you to know them by.

CLOWN. Morning.

MAN OF THE WORLD. Afternoon.

CLOWN. Is it? Now [Says he to the others], you leave it to me, and let's all keep our tempers. See here, Mr. Man, is this the old 99th Street Theayter?

MAN OF THE WORLD. This, sir, and you know it as well as I do, is nothing so out of date. It is Number 2613 of the five thousand Attraction Houses controlled by the Hustle Trust Circuit of Automatic Drama: President, Mr.

Theodor B. Kedger. But it is located on 99th Street, New York City.

CLOWN. Are you the boss?

MAN OF THE WORLD. I am a deputy sub-inspector of the New York and New Jersey division of the circuit.

CLOWN. Can we have a job, me and my pals, here?

MAN OF THE WORLD. You cannot.

CLOWN. And why not?

MAN OF THE WORLD. Because you are superseded.

CLOWN. What's that?

PANTALOON. I'll super if there's nothing better.

CLOWN. Where is the durn President?

MAN OF THE WORLD. I learn from the fas.h.i.+onable intelligence that he is at present cruising the Mediterranean on his electric yacht.

CLOWN. Where's the author of the piece?

MAN OF THE WORLD. There ain't no author of the piece. This present item is turned out by our Number Two Factory of Automatic Dramaturgy; Plunkville, Tennessee.

CLOWN. Where are the other actors... G.o.d help 'em?

MAN OF THE WORLD. There ain't no actors; we froze all them out way back.

Where've you been that you've grown all these mossy ideas on you?

CLOWN. Never you mind. Tell us, what's come to the poor old 99th Street Theayter... and how.

MAN OF THE WORLD. Well, I guess I need only quote you from Volume One of the Life of Mr. Theodor B. Kedger, our esteemed President ...Nit! [And as he says "Nit," if it were not for all the anti-expectoration notices hung round he would certainly spit.] It is stacked ready to put on the market the day he pa.s.ses in his checks. Hold on now. About the year 1918 Mr.

Kedger, who had already financially made good over the manipulation of wood-pulp potatoes, synthetic bread, and real estate, turned his attention to the Anglo-American Theatre. For the Anglo-American Theatre did not pay.

Here was Mr. Kedger's opportunity. Forming a small trust, he bought up the theatres, both of the Variety and of the Monotonous kind, bought up the dramatists with their copyrights present and future, bought up the actors--

PANTALOON. Didn't buy me.

MAN OF THE WORLD. Didn't count you.

CLOWN. Cost much?

MAN OF THE WORLD. [He winks.] The payment was partly made in shares. He then paid the Dramatists considerable sums not to go on writing, which was, of course, a clear profit. He paid the actors to stop acting, which was in some cases a needless expenditure of money. He also brought in the Cinema and Gramophone interests, organising the whole affair upon a strictly business basis.

PANTALOON. He left us out. We've had cruel hard times, but I'm glad he left us out.