CHAPTER XII

THESPIS SENDS ME TWO REPRESENTATIVES ON THE SAME DAY AND MONOPOLISES OUR ATTENTION

I was sitting in my room at half-past ten wondering whether I should go to the Oval or to Lord's when a brisk rap sounded at the door, it was flung open, and in burst a dazzling, rustling creature.

"Oh, I beg your pardon!" she said. "I have come to the wrong room. I thought this was Miss Lestrange's room."

I saw who it was in a flash--it was Azure Verity. I told her that Miss Lestrange dwelt in some remote region of this wonderful expanding house to which I had never penetrated, and that if she would wait a moment I would ring for Mrs. Duckie.

"Mrs. who?" she asked, with an air of such perfect ingenuousness that I was caught at once.

"Duckie," I said, and then she laughed, and I no doubt blushed.

"Not really?" she inquired, laughing again.

"It is absurd, isn't it?" I said.

It his long been my theory that some of the best friendships are based upon a good initial _faux pas_ or ridiculous misunderstanding. The freemasonry of laughter gets to work at once and does in an instant what it otherwise might take days or weeks to achieve.

"May I tell you," I asked, "who you are, and then we can introduce each other?"

"Certainly," she said.

"You are Miss Azure Verity, now acting with unparalleled success at the Princess's Theatre in Mr. Operin's new play, and you have come to see your dresser, who calls herself Miss Lestrange but is really Miss Duckie."

"Wonderful!" she cried. "You are a Zanzig. But," she added, "so am I. You know there are always two of them. Let me now do my turn."

I had long since decided that I would not ring the bell before it was really necessary.

"You are the gentleman," she said, "from abroad who has the beautiful niece, and reads old books all night, and talks to mother in the mornings about what London used to be like thirty years ago--the gentleman who promises to go to the theatre to see Miss Verity but never gets nearer than a music hall. Am I right, sir?" she concluded, with an adorably mischievous smile.

"Quite right," I said. "We are very extraordinary people, it is clear, and we ought to succeed as duettists."

"Yes," she said, "Falconer and Verity--thought-readers and clairvoyants. That sounds all right."

"Verity is indeed an inspiration," I added. "It would make the fortune of a palmist."

"Oh," she said, "don't make any jokes about my name. I am so tired of them. Punch did it again only last week. Please ring for Mrs.--Mrs.--Duckie," she added, "but before I go I want you to promise me something. Promise me that if I send you a box you will not only come to the theatre but bring your niece too. Will you promise?"

I promised, and Mrs. Duckie appearing, the apparition disappeared.

Be-trice's illness brought me a second meeting with her illustrious brother Alf Pinto. He looked in to see if she was well enough to be driven to Epping, and by his mother's wish came into my room.

I told him that I had heard him at the Frivoli, and he seemed to be as gratified as any other kind of artist would be. "But I've got a better song than any of those," he assured me, and forthwith sang it. I suppose that to be as assured as that is half-way towards the conquest of the world; but for my part I could as easily undress in a crowded drawing-room as sing an unaccompanied song. He fixed me with his bold, roguish eye throughout three long coarse verses and three inane choruses. And without any shame, too; but indeed how could he have shame, for there was none over: I had it all. I had no notion where to look until he had done.

"That's a clinker, isn't it?" he said, and his words once more convinced me how needlessly we can suffer for others, for they proved him utterly oblivious to any confusion or want of appreciation on my part.

I temporised. "With proper costume and a full band it ought to go very well," I said; and I suppose it would, for the thing was as ugly and tawdry as the people want. Another exposure of marriage. The awakening after the raptures of courtship to the disenchantment of wedded life: the horror of crying twins and a bad-tempered wife and all the rest of it. The cruelty, the hateful ugliness, of this tireless delight in the ruin of the happiest of all human hopes!

"Why," I said, "do you always sing this kind of thing? Why is there no song about a happy marriage with some love and trust in it?"

"Where's the joke?" he asked.

"But surely," I said, "it could be made humorous or amusing enough. Surely there are families that have cheerfulness and gaiety as well as quarrels and poverty and drink. Look at your own father and mother."

"Not worth singing about," he said. "No fun in it."

I suppose this is so. People go to the music halls to laugh at, not smile with. They want a target, and apparently they are so constituted that they never relate the experiences in the songs to their own lives. The shilling at the pay-box absolves them from thought, releases them from fact; they, are in fairyland for the evening--or what stands for fairyland to them. Otherwise how could any member of the audience face marriage or paternity at all?

The odd thing is that, taking music-hall laughter as the test, the logical outcome is that if in England marriage were either abolished or became uniformly successful, and if we returned to a state of nature and called a spade a spade, there would be no humour left. Jokes came in with wives and clothes.

"Well," I said, "I'm sorry if cheerfulness is so impracticable. It would be new, at any rate, and novelty is said to be a great thing."

"Not in songs," replied Alf. "They don't want anything new in songs except the tune. They've all got to be about the same things for ever and ever."

But for all his ready-made cynicism and London brass, young Duckie is a decent fellow who seems to have character enough to be able to withstand the allurements of the bar. It is an odd way of making a living, but he works at it honestly and hard.

He receives sometimes, he tells me, as many as a dozen songs a day, none of them any good at all. "Do you mean all of them worse than the one you have just sung?" I said, rather unkindly.

But he saw no sting. "Yes," he said simply. "It is not so easy as it looks," he went on, "to sing even a good song; and to make a bad song, and they're mostly bad, go, wants hours of practice not only alone but with the band. The difficult thing to get is movement all the time." (He meant what a more accomplished artist would call the rhythm.) "It's not only that you've got to have a voice, but you've got to drive every word home too, and also keep it going."

This, I gather, is where the value of being unashamed comes in. The music-hall singer must be ashamed of nothing.

Our evening at the Frivoli to hear Alf had been, I suppose, a success, for we were all in good enough spirits; but with exceptions so rare and far between as to constitute oases which only made the desert the more arid, the performance was dull and stupid. But we had one half-hour of the real thing, when a little Scotchman swung on to the stage and sang three Scotch songs, with every line and every syllable telling. Curious songs, too, to come from that dour northern country, songs with an almost Oriental warmth in them and an infectious and irresistible glee. I sounded Alf about this little rival. He had no jealousy; he recognised supremacy and honoured it. "Oh yes," he said, "Lauder--he's a genius. He can do what he likes. There's no need for him to sing the old stuff. But he's almost the only one. All the rest of us have got to give it to them. But," he added, "why do you bother about it, Mr. Falconer? Music-hall songs aren't written for you. Music-hall songs are written for the gallery and the pit, every one of them, and always will be."

"Well," I said, "that may be so, but I am interested none the less in improving them."

"Better leave it alone," he answered. "They're as good songs as the people deserve."

And perhaps he is right; but one's fingers get in the way of itching to alter so many things.

None the less I think that the music halls have improved since my young days. There are grimy-minded men still, but the _double entendre_ is rarer than it was, and a measure of drollery has become important. Merely to roar out ugliness is not as sufficient as it used to be. The acrobatics, juggling, conjuring, and other exhibitions of skill are infinitely superior: so much so, indeed, that to see certain human gifts in perfection a visit to the music hall has become a necessity; while that curious modern extension of the illustrated newspaper--the cinematoscope--has also a real interest of its own, and takes the place of rubbish very satisfactorily.

Until this spring I had not been in an English music hall since January 1875. We made a final round of them just before I sailed for the Argentine. Thirty-three years ago! There were not so many then, nor were those that we had under such intensely business-like control. The singer when he had finished in those days would take his glass in the hall: no tearing off in a motor car to perform again elsewhere. It was now and then even possible to get an encore; there is no such thing to-day. Everything is now cut and dried, and each performer contrives to do as little as possible, and is supported by his Union in that praiseworthy ideal.

Alf was interested in hearing of the old easier system. "I'd often like to give encores," he said, "but there's no chance. It would throw out the whole time-table. But it's a loss the singer can feel quite as much as the audience--only they don't know it." I liked him for saying that.

My last music hall was, I remember, on a Monday night,--I sailed on the Wednesday and spent the Tuesday night at home,--and it was a very special occasion--the benefit of Sam Adams, the manager of the Royal, in Holborn. I have since been in the Royal as it is to-day--it is called the Holborn Empire--and how changed! Two performances nightly, and not a single thing the same except its site. Sam had a red, impetuous face and curly hair, and a shirt front that, one felt, would cover the Oval.

I asked Alf Pinto about him, and found that his name was not even known; but Trist tells me he is dead, and his own hall--the Trocadero, or Troc, as it was called by the bloods--has disappeared too, and is now a restaurant. Poor Sam! It is odd what flashes of insight one has. I remember thinking that night, in the midst of his triumph and all the jolly good-fellowship that sweltered round him, that he did not look as if marked out for happiness or longevity.

I cannot remember much of the evening, but George Leybourne was there with two or three slap-up songs, and Lieutenant Cole the ventriloquist, and Sam Redfern, a burnt-cork cynic, and Henri Clark, a comic singer, and an extraordinary couple named Ryley and Marie Barnum, who called themselves (to the total exclusion of George Fox) "the Original Quakers," the adjective made necessary, I imagine, by too successful imitation of their discreet yet mischievous caperings. Trist tells me that of these entertainers Leybourne is dead (to think that death should come also to Champagne Charley!), Henri Clark owns a music-hall in the Edgware Road, and Sam Redfern was recently in the bankruptcy court through inability to make a chicken farm pay. Well, well!

But if I can see no more of the performances of these variety stars, there are two or three actors still performing whom I saw that month during my farewell round of gaiety. Lionel Brough, who was then with Willie Edouin and Lydia Thompson in _Blue Beard_ at the Globe, is still playing, and Wyndham, who was in _Brighton_ at the Royal Court, is active almost as ever; but James Thorne, whom I laughed at in _Our Boys_ at the Vaudeville, Irving who was in _Hamlet_ at the Lyceum, Buckstone and Sothern in _Our American Cousin_ at the Haymarket--where are they?

We went to the Princess's--to the Royal Box, if you please--to see Miss Verity: Naomi and I, Lionel, and Dollie Heathcote with the very latest shirt and a dress suit watch no thicker than half a crown. Serious plays are as a rule not much in either Dollie's or Lionel's way: and Operin is now always serious, with his conscientious transcript of types from what is called real life (as if there were two kinds of life), who talk pedantic grammar and covet their neighbours' wives. Some day perhaps a playwright will arise observant enough to find other domestic difficulties as full of dramatic possibilities as this dreary formula of the _tertium quid_; but at present we are as much under its sway as the French nation are under that of their single joke. There are a thousand problems of daily life within the experience of every one that have as much drama in them as is needed. One would think that all England had nothing to do but break the seventh commandment; whereas those of us who do so are in a minute minority, and are not the especially interesting persons. Is there no material for drama in the lives of husbands who do not tire of their wives and wives who do not tire of their husbands--the most enviable people of all, when all is said?

Both Dollie and Lionel, as I say, would rather have been at a musical comedy, but they had a very real desire to meet the famous Azure, and the evening promised an opportunity. Naomi was very happy to be at the play and to wear a new dress, neither event being too common with her; and as for me, I did not much mind, for once, although had I been alone I should probably have faltered at the theatre portico. I have too many points in common with Wang Hiu-Chih, one of the illustrious persons in my Chinese book, and the occupier of a high place on the roll of honour of the diffident. "On one occasion," it is recorded, "he went in the snow to visit a friend, named Tai Ta-k'uei; but on reaching the door he turned round and went home again. Being asked the explanation of this behaviour, he replied, 'I started full of spirits; when they were exhausted, I came back.'" So is it very often with me; I start out full of spirits, and when they are exhausted I come back. Probably there are no persons in London at this moment who in the past few months have seen so many first acts, and first acts only, as I have. It needs a very engaging dramatist or very acceptable performers to make me forget the allurements of the word Exit.

But on the present occasion I was on duty and in perfect order. At the end of the second act a servant came summoning us to Miss Verity's dressing-room. Naomi would not go, try as I would to make her, but Dollie and Lionel hurried off with no attempts to conceal their pleasure. In a very few moments, however, they were back again, and Miss Verity with them--a rustle of femininity at high pressure. "If you don't come to see me, I must come to see you," she said very winningly to Naomi; and she sat down at the back of the box, well out of view, and talked away gaily and extremely well. Why she so wanted to make an impression on this quiet girl I did not understand; but I will venture the opinion that she had never worked harder to ingratiate herself with a man.

The _entr'acte_ was not long, but long enough for her to wring from Naomi her consent to come to tea.

"You are very rude," she said to me as a parting shot. "You have never said how you like me in the play."

How I wish I was a better liar; or, in other words, less of an intellectual snob. I did not like her in the play, and I did not like the play. The simple natural thing under such conditions was to say, "You are absolutely delightful," but having a paltry vanity as to preserving pure one's twopenny-halfpenny critical sense, I said nothing, and instead was just awkward and offensive.

"Never mind, Mr. Falconer," said Azure, who divines swiftly, "don't say anything. Keep that conscience intact whatever happens."

And so saying she was gone, with Lionel and Dollie in attendance. Such is the vitality of her personality that it seemed for the moment as if she had taken all the air with her and we languished in a vacuum. But only for a moment or so.

"She is very attractive," said Naomi, with a little sigh. "It must be nice to have such power and be so popular."

I took her hand and stroked it.

Dollie and Lionel here came back, crushed their hats against their bosoms, and sat dawn.

"She's a ripper," said Lionel. "She's coming to see me play against Somerset to-morrow."

"Jolly awkward if you make a blob," said Dollie. "I've got her autograph."

"Where? I should like to see it," said Naomi.

"Here," he said, "on my shirt front. That means fifteen and six, for of course I shan't wear the shirt again. I shall have it framed. Isn't it jolly handwriting?"