There were bottles, and glasses, and jugs, and decanters. From these aids to debauchery, it was pleasant to turn to a cozy-looking tea service on a tray with a white table cloth: there was a soothing suggestion of muffins and domestic bliss about it. There was plenty of furniture, a couple of tables, a bedstead, a dresser, a sofa, chairs – half dozen of them, high-backed ones, for “hall in the old Grange,” etc.; they were made by fixing pasteboard backs on to ordinary cane chairs. The result was that they were top heavy, and went over at the slightest touch; so that picking them up, and trying to make them stand, formed the chief business of the scenes in which they were used.
I remember the first time our light comedy attempted to sit down on one of these chairs.
It was on the opening night. He had just said something funny, and, having said it, sat down, crossed his legs, and threw himself back, with all that easy, negligent grace so peculiarly his own. Legs were the only things that could be seen for the next few minutes.
Other “props” were, a throne, gorgeous in gilt paper and glazed calico; a fire-grate, stuffed with red tinfoil; a mirror, made with silver paper; a bunch of jailer’s keys; handcuffs; leg irons; flat irons; rifles; brooms; bayonets; picks and crowbars for the virtuously infuriated populace; clay pipes; daggers made of wood; stage broadswords – there is no need to describe these, everybody knows them, they are like nothing else on earth; battle axes; candlesticks; a pound or two of short dips; a crown, set with diamonds and rubies each as big as a duck’s egg; a cradle – empty, an affecting sight; carpets, kettles, and pots; a stretcher; a chariot; a bunch of carrots; a costermonger’s barrow; banners; a leg of mutton, and a baby. Everything, in short, that could possibly be wanted, either in a palace or a garret, a farmyard or a battle-field.
Still wandering about, I came across a hole in the floor at the side of the stage, and groped my way down a ladder to the region beneath, where the fairies come from, and the demons go to. It was perfectly dark, and I could see nothing. It smelt very moldy, and seemed to be full of cunning contrivances for barking your shins. After bumping myself about a good deal there, I was glad to find my way out again, deferring all further investigations to some future period, with a candle.
On emerging, I saw that the company had at last begun to arrive. A tall, solemn-looking man was pacing the stage, and him I greeted. He was the stage manager, and so of course rather surly. I don’t know why stage managers are always surly, but they are.
In the course of the next few minutes, there trotted in a demure-looking little man, who turned out to be our “first low comedy,” and very good low comedy he was, too, though, from his wooden expression, you might have thought him as destitute of humor as the librettist of a comic opera. Then followed the heavy man, talking in a very gruff voice to a good-looking young fellow with him, who played the juveniles when our manager didn’t take them himself. Then, after a short interval, a lady – an old queer-looking little lady, who walked with a stick, and complained of rheumatism, and who, as soon as she reached the stage, plumped herself down on the thick end of a mossy bank, from which nothing would induce her to rise until she got up to go home. She was our “old woman.” She did the doting mothers and the comic old maids. She had played everything in her time, and could play anything still. She would have taken Juliet, or Juliet’s nurse, whichever you liked, and have done both of them well. She would have been ten minutes making up for Juliet, and then, sitting in the middle of the pit, you would have put her down for twenty.
The next to appear was a gentleman (“walking”) in a fur-trimmed overcoat, patent-leather boots and white gaiters and lavender kid gloves. He carried a silver-headed cane in his hand, a glass in his left eye, a cigar in his mouth (put out as soon as he got to the stage, of course), and a small nosegay in his button-hole. His salary I subsequently discovered to be thirty shillings a week. After him came two ladies (not with any designs upon the young man: merely in the order of time). One of them was thin and pale, with a careworn look underneath the rouge, just as if she were some poor, hard-working woman, with a large family and small means, instead of an actress. The other was fat, fair, and – forty, if she was a day. She was gloriously “got up,” both as regards complexion and dress. I can’t describe the latter, because I never can tell what any woman has got on. I only know she conveyed an impression to my mind of being stuck out all round, and thrown out in front, and puffed out at the back, and towering up at the top, and trailing away behind, and all to such a degree, that she looked four times her natural size. As everybody was very glad indeed to see her and welcomed her with what seemed to be irrepressible joy, even the stage manager being civil, I naturally concluded that she was the embodiment of all the virtues known to human kind. The whispered remarks that I overheard, however, did not quite support this view, and I was at a loss to reconcile matters, until I learned that she was the manager’s wife. She was the leading lady, and the characters she particularly affected, and in which she was affected, were the girlish heroines, and the children who die young and go to heaven.
The rest of the company was made up of a couple of very old men, and a middle-aged stout one, two rather pretty girls, evidently possessed of an inexhaustible fund of humor, for they kept each other giggling all the morning; and the manager himself, who arrived last, and was less interested in the proceedings than any one else. No one took the slightest notice of me, though I purposely stood about in conspicuous positions, and I felt like the new boy at school.
When everybody had arrived, the rickety table was brought down to the front, and a bell rung; whereupon a small boy suddenly appeared for the first time, and was given the “parts” to distribute. It was a manuscript play, though well known to the company, nearly all of whom had played in it plenty of times before. All the parts were torn and greasy except one, which was prominently clean. When the boy came to that one he seemed puzzled, not knowing to whom it belonged; so he stood in the center of the stage and bawled out the name on it; and as it was my name, and I had to claim the part, I was at once lifted out of my obscurity, and placed in an opposite extreme hardly more comfortable.
CHAPTER V. A Rehearsal
I HURRIEDLY unfolded the paper, to see what kind of a part I had got. I was anxious to begin studying it immediately. I had to form my conception of the character, learn the words and business, and get up gesture and expression all in one week. No time was therefore to be lost. I give the part in extenso:
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