Stage-Land Part 5

We were acquainted with a lodging-house slavey once--a real one, we mean. She was the handmaiden at a house in Bloomsbury where we once hung out. She was untidy in her dress, it is true, but she had not quite that castaway and gone-to-sleep-in-a-dust-bin appearance that we, an earnest student of the drama, felt she ought to present, and we questioned her one day on the subject.

"How is it, Sophronia," we said, "that you distantly resemble a human being instead of giving one the idea of an animated rag-shop? Don't you ever polish your nose with the blacking-brush, or rub coal into your head, or wash your face in treacle, or put skewers into your hair, or anything of that sort, like they do on the stage?"

She said: "Lord love you, what should I want to go and be a bally idiot like that for?"

And we have not liked to put the question elsewhere since then.

The other type of servant-girl on the stage--the villa servant-girl--is a very different personage. She is a fetching little thing, dresses bewitchingly, and is always clean. Her duties are to dust the legs of the chairs in the drawing-room. That is the only work she ever has to do, but it must be confessed she does that thoroughly. She never comes into the room without dusting the legs of these chairs, and she dusts them again before she goes out.

If anything ought to be free from dust in a stage house, it should be the legs of the drawing-room chairs.

She is going to marry the man-servant, is the stage servant-girl, as soon as they have saved up sufficient out of their wages to buy a hotel.

They think they will like to keep a hotel. They don't understand a bit about the business, which we believe is a complicated one, but this does not trouble them in the least.

They quarrel a good deal over their love-making, do the stage servant-girl and her young man, and they always come into the drawing-room to do it. They have got the kitchen, and there is the garden (with a fountain and mountains in the background--you can see it through the window), but no! no place in or about the house is good enough for them to quarrel in except the drawing-room. They quarrel there so vigorously that it even interferes with the dusting of the chair-legs.

She ought not to be long in saving up sufficient to marry on, for the generosity of people on the stage to the servants there makes one seriously consider the advisability of ignoring the unremunerative professions of ordinary life and starting a new and more promising career as a stage servant.

No one ever dreams of tipping the stage servant with less than a sovereign when they ask her if her mistress is at home or give her a letter to post, and there is quite a rush at the end of the piece to stuff five-pound notes into her hand. The good old man gives her ten.

The stage servant is very impudent to her mistress, and the master--he falls in love with her and it does upset the house so.

Sometimes the servant-girl is good and faithful, and then she is Irish.

All good servant-girls on the stage are Irish.

All the male visitors are expected to kiss the stage servant-girl when they come into the house, and to dig her in the ribs and to say: "Do you know, Jane, I think you're an uncommonly nice girl--click." They always say this, and she likes it.

Many years ago, when we were young, we thought we would see if things were the same off the stage, and the next time we called at a certain friend's house we tried this business on.

She wasn't quite so dazzlingly beautiful as they are on the stage, but we pa.s.sed that. She showed us up into the drawing-room, and then said she would go and tell her mistress we were there.

We felt this was the time to begin. We skipped between her and the door.

We held our hat in front of us, c.o.c.ked our head on one side, and said: "Don't go! don't go!"

The girl seemed alarmed. We began to get a little nervous ourselves, but we had begun it and we meant to go through with it.

We said, "Do you know, Jane" (her name wasn't Jane, but that wasn't our fault), "do you know, Jane, I think you're an uncommonly nice girl,"

and we said "click," and dug her in the ribs with our elbow, and then chucked her under the chin. The whole thing seemed to fall flat. There was n.o.body there to laugh or applaud. We wished we hadn't done it. It seemed stupid when you came to think of it. We began to feel frightened.

The business wasn't going as we expected; but we screwed up our courage and went on.

We put on the customary expression of comic imbecility and beckoned the girl to us. We have never seen this fail on the stage.

But this girl seemed made wrong. She got behind the sofa and screamed "Help!"

We have never known them to do this on the stage, and it threw us out in our plans. We did not know exactly what to do. We regretted that we had ever begun this job and heartily wished ourselves out of it. But it appeared foolish to pause then, when we were more than half-way through, and we made a rush to get it over.

We chivvied the girl round the sofa and caught her near the door and kissed her. She scratched our face, yelled police, murder, and fire, and fled from the room.

Our friend came in almost immediately. He said:

"I say, J., old man, are you drunk?"

We told him no, that we were only a student of the drama. His wife then entered in a towering pa.s.sion. She didn't ask us if we were drunk. She said:

"How dare you come here in this state!"

We endeavored unsuccessfully to induce her to believe that we were sober, and we explained that our course of conduct was what was always pursued on the stage.

She said she didn't care what was done on the stage, it wasn't going to be pursued in her house; and that if her husband's friends couldn't behave as gentlemen they had better stop away.

The following morning we received a letter from a firm of solicitors in Lincoln's Inn with reference, so they put it, to the brutal and unprovoked a.s.sault committed by us on the previous afternoon upon the person of their client, Miss Matilda Hemmings. The letter stated that we had punched Miss Hemmings in the side, struck her under the chin, and afterward, seizing her as she was leaving the room, proceeded to commit a gross a.s.sault, into the particulars of which it was needless for them to enter at greater length.

It added that if we were prepared to render an ample written apology and to pay 50 pounds compensation, they would advise their client, Miss Matilda Hemmings, to allow the matter to drop; otherwise criminal proceedings would at once be commenced against us.

We took the letter to our own solicitors and explained the circ.u.mstances to them. They said it seemed to be a very sad case, but advised us to pay the 50 pounds, and we borrowed the money and did so.

Since then we have lost faith, somehow, in the British drama as a guide to the conduct of life.

THE CHILD.

It is nice and quiet and it talks prettily.

We have come across real infants now and then in the course of visits to married friends; they have been brought to us from outlying parts of the house and introduced to us for our edification; and we have found them gritty and sticky. Their boots have usually been muddy, and they have wiped them up against our new trousers. And their hair has suggested the idea that they have been standing on their heads in the dust-bin.

And they have talked to us--but not prettily, not at all--rather rude we should call it.

But the stage child is very different. It is clean and tidy. You can touch it anywhere and nothing comes off. Its face glows with soap and water. From the appearance of its hands it is evident that mud-pies and tar are joys unknown to it. As for its hair, there is something uncanny about its smoothness and respectability. Even its boot-laces are done up.

We have never seen anything like the stage child outside a theater excepting one--that was on the pavement in front of a tailor's shop in Tottenham Court Road. He stood on a bit of round wood, and it was fifteen and nine, his style.

We thought in our ignorance prior to this that there could not be anything in the world like the stage child, but you see we were mistaken.

The stage child is affectionate to its parents and its nurse and is respectful in its demeanor toward those whom Providence has placed in authority over it; and so far it is certainly much to be preferred to the real article. It speaks of its male and female progenitors as "dear, dear papa" and "dear, dear mamma," and it refers to its nurse as "darling nursey." We are connected with a youthful child ourselves--a real one--a nephew. He alludes to his father (when his father is not present) as "the old man," and always calls the nurse "old nut-crackers." Why cannot they make real children who say "dear, dear mamma" and "dear, dear papa?"

The stage child is much superior to the live infant in every way. The stage child does not go rampaging about a house and screeching and yelling till n.o.body knows whether they are on their heads or their heels.

A stage child does not get up at five o'clock in the morning to practice playing on a penny whistle. A stage child never wants a bicycle and drives you mad about it. A stage child does not ask twenty complicated questions a minute about things that you don't understand, and then wind up by asking why you don't seem to know anything, and why wouldn't anybody teach you anything when you were a little boy.

The stage child does not wear a hole in the seat of its knickerbockers and have to have a patch let in. The stage child comes downstairs on its feet.

The stage child never brings home six other children to play at horses in the front garden, and then wants to know if they can all come in to tea. The stage child never has the wooping-cough, and the measles, and every other disease that it can lay its hands on, and be laid up with them one after the other and turn the house upside down.

The stage child's department in the scheme of life is to harrow up its mother's feelings by ill-timed and uncalled-for questions about its father. It always wants to know, before a roomful of people, where "dear papa" is, and why he has left dear mamma; when, as all the guests know, the poor man is doing his two years' hard or waiting to be hanged. It makes everybody so uncomfortable.

It is always harrowing up somebody--the stage child; it really ought not to be left about as it is. When it has done upsetting its mother it fishes out some broken-hearted maid, who has just been cruelly severed forever from her lover, and asks her in a high falsetto voice why she doesn't get married, and prattles to her about love, and domestic bliss, and young men, and any other subject it can think of particularly calculated to lacerate the poor girl's heart until her brain nearly gives way.