“I don’t know,” I said despondently. “Perhaps you might see Miss Bendalind and persuade her to make an effort.”
“That would only make her worse,” she replied.
“Then what’s to be done?” I ejaculated, in despair.
“I’ll tell you—let me play the part for you,” she exclaimed, her blue eyes sparkling with excitement.
“You!” I said in amazement. “How could you? Why the soubrette part in The Unkissed Bride is almost as heavy as the heroine’s, and could not possibly be cut out.”
“I know that,” she replied; “but the soubrette is on in only two small scenes with the heroine. They can be cut out, and I’ll double the two parts, making up as a brunette for the soubrette, and a blonde for the heroine. Do let me play them! I am word perfect in both parts, and with the different make-ups the audience would never know.”
“I am afraid it would be too much for you,” I said, wavering.
“No it would’nt,” she responded quickly. “I should just revel in it, and I do so want to help you.”
So moved was I at the noble girl’s kindness in coming to the rescue at such a critical time that I could not forbear holding out my hand to her as I accepted her assistance. She took it just as impulsively, and as we stood thus Mr. Dan Baker turned into the lobby, softly whistling one of Moore’s melodies, as is his wont, when alone. The permanent droop in his left eyelid seemed unpleasantly pronounced as he looked at us, and both Miss Laurie and myself coloured involuntarily—though there was no reason why we should have done so.
Mr. Baker was the first to break the silence. “I was just coming to look for you,” he said to me, pausing in his execution of ‘There’s nothing half so sweet in life as Love’s Young Dream.’ “It’s time to go to the theatre.”
I informed him of Miss Bendalind’s sudden illness, and how Miss Laurie was going to help me out of a difficult position by playing the leading lady’s part as well as her own at a moment’s notice. Mr. Baker expressed his appreciation of Miss Laurie’s offer with so many arch glances from his one sound eye, as though to intimate that he perfectly understood why she had done so, that Miss Laurie retreated to her bedroom in a state of blushing confusion.
“A splendid girl, that,” remarked Mr. Baker to me as we walked away. “The man who wins her will get a treasure!”
Not exactly relishing the significant wink with which Mr. Baker accompanied his remark, I turned the conversation in another direction by remarking that I hoped Miss Bendalind’s illness would not be of long duration.
“You have taken the best means to ensure her complete and speedy recovery,” drily commented my companion.
“What do you mean?” I demanded.
“Simply that to put another actress in a leading lady’s part is the infallible remedy for the re-establishment of her health,” he said. “It is surer than a doctor’s prescription. I have never known it to fail yet. I have such faith in the remedy that I wouldn’t be surprised to see Miss Bendalind down at the theatre directly she hears of it.”
“I don’t think so,” I replied; “but if she does she shall not go on. Miss Laurie shall play the part now that I have promised her.”
“That’s the way to talk!” said Mr. Baker. “Never let your leading lady play fast and loose with you—that’s my motto. You’ll have a dog’s life as manager if you do.”
We arrived at the hall and went inside. My first feeling was one of dismay. The stage was an unusually large one for a country hall, and from the centre Little Billee (as Mr. Baker had named our only surviving piece of scenery) fluttered forlornly, looking in the vast emptiness of the stage not much larger than a pocket-handkerchief on a clothes line. To attempt to make that one piece of scenery do the work of a whole truck-load seemed as ridiculous as trying to perfume the desert of Sahara with one violet, and I told Barney that I thought it would be better to explain to the audience the mishap that had happened to us, and play without scenery at all. Barney’s theatrical instincts were so shocked at the mere idea of playing without some shred of scenery to hide something of the nakedness of the wooden walls that I hadn’t the heart to insist on the suggestion, so I left him to open the doors, and he returned to the stage to fix another tackling rope on Little Billee,
Just as the ticket rush had subsided and the time for the rising of the curtain drew near, Mr. Baker came to the ticket-box and informed me that Miss Bendalind had risen from her bed of sickness and had come down to play her part. “You’d better go behind and try if you can quieten her,” he added; “for nobody else can!”
I left Mr. Baker in charge of the ticket-box and hurried behind. There I found Miss Bendalind pacing about like an enraged tigress. She pounced on me as soon as she saw me.
“That girl,” she said angrily, indicating Miss Laurie, who was waiting on the wing for her cue to go on in the opening scene; “says you have entrusted her with my part, and she wont give it up unless you tell her to. Please do so at once.”
“Certainly not,” I replied, with a firmness that surprised myself. “You sent word that you wouldn’t play, and I had to make other arrangements. It is too late to alter them now, and I will not.”
“You won’t?”
“No.”
“Then accept my resignation this instant. I decline to be a member of the company another minute!”
“You’ll think better of your decision before the morning, so we’ll postpone it till then, Miss Bendalind,” I said, with a propitiatory smile. “Go home and get quite recovered for to-morrow night’s performance.”
The indignant lady paid no heed to my soothing words, but bounced off the stage leaving behind her a stream of Colonial colloquialisms about ‘jumped-up new-chums’ and ‘kidding managers with sheep’s-eyes,’ the purport of which I only partly understood. We saw her no more that night.
The audience was a very large one, and I shall never forget their look of astonishment when the curtain went up and revealed Little Billee set in solitary state at the back of the stage doing duty as ‘London Bridge—Early Morning.’ Their surprise was perhaps more intense when Little Billee appeared in the second scene as ‘Waterloo Station by night,’ but I am thankful to say that on Little Billee’s third appearance as ‘the Earl of Greymoor’s ancestral home in Scotland,’ the majority of the audience were by that time too much interested in the fierce struggle that was proceeding on the stage between the forces of virtue and vice to notice that the play was set in a monotone, so to speak. One or two vulgar louts in the cheap seats guffawed rudely, but that was all, and the triumphant climax of the first act, which was splendidly acted by Miss Laurie, brought the curtain down amid a storm of applause that did my anxious heart good.
Little Billee was called upon for heavy work in the second act, when it had to be set for five different scenes, but it did what it could, and which of us can do more? By this time the audience had got to know and like Little Billee, and they greeted every fresh setting with the generous applause that warm-hearted New Zealand theatre-goers reserve for an old and tried favourite. Indeed, when Little Billee made its fifth appearance in that act as ‘A Storm at Sea,’ I thought the applause of those sturdy farmers would inevitably destroy the floor and settle the whole audience on the land underneath. No such calamity happened, however, and the curtain fell safely on another artistic triumph.
Whether Little Billee became spoilt by success, or whether it was too much for it to pose as ‘The Wrecking of the Midnight Express,’ after the previous strain on its powers, or whether the utility man in the flies got tangled up with the multiplicity of ropes necessary for its quick shifts, I know not, but certain it is that Little Billee got flied,’ and could not be lowered into position for the third act. Jerking and pulling and coaxing were all vainly tried, but it sullenly refused to descend, and the curtain had to go up on a stage completely bare of scenery. There was a little clamorous enquiry for it at first, but the actors went on with their parts, and the audience soon settled down
again to await the denouement of the stirring drama.
Just before that moment was reached there was a loud creaking in the flies, which attracted every eye upward. Little Billee, doubtless actuated by belated regret at having missed so much ‘fat,’ and regardless of the fact that the midnight express had already been safely wrecked, began to drop slowly in position without assistance. It surely and evenly descended into its setting in the centre of the stage without a hitch, and as it did so a voice in the gallery bellowed out to a friend in the hall below:
“Lord love us, Tom, who said it was lost!”
However, the audience were delighted with the play, and so were the committee of the Agricultural Society, who pocketed over a tenner by the brilliant acting of the Merry Marauders. They paid us the £30 down on the nail, and our share of the surplus as well.
The tide of our prosperity did not turn with that. Next morning, while Barney and I were enjoying the sun outside our boarding house and discussing our future plans, we were accosted by an elderly clergyman, who desired to know whether we could tell him where to find the manager of the Merry Marauders Dramatic Company. He was pleased to learn that he had got his bird with his first barrel, and lost no time in unfolding his business. He had been much troubled in his mind by the wickedness of his flock, who, from what he told us, seemed to be building up in Ngati a record for wickedness second only to that established by the ancient Jewish cities referred to in the fifth chapter of the second book of Numbers. Our presence in Ngati had given him an idea, which he desired to put into execution, in order to startle his flock of black sheep out of their wicked ways. His plan was that we should stage some powerful drama conveying a terrible moral lesson, for the special benefit of these backsliders. He was prepared to give us the use of his schoolroom free for this good purpose, reserving the right of free admission for himself and family and whomsoever else he liked to ask. We were at liberty to charge reasonable prices of admission to the remainder of the audience.
Barney jumped at the proposal before I had a chance to speak, and assured the reverend gentleman that he had come to the right shop to get good weight and a bit over in moral dramas. He suggested East Lynne as a drama calculated to awaken the people of Ngati to the awful consequences of sin.
The clergyman had an objection to East Lynne because the moral was not sufficiently pointed. To allow such a shameless creature as Lady Isabel to die comfortably in her bed was, to his way of thinking, nothing less than giving a premium to vice. Something much more drastic was needed, he said, to act on the torpid consciences of his congregation.
Barney explained that the Merry Marauders’ version of East Lynne differed from others by causing Lady Isabel to die in great want and misery in a London garret, with rats and black despair as her death-bed companions. The drama in its amended form, he said, had been highly praised as a corrective of vice by many New Zealand clergymen.
The good man was entirely convinced, and said that in those altered conditions East Lynne would do admirably. After arranging for the performance to take place the evening after the conclusion of our three nights’ season at the hall, he left us with a cordial hand-shake.
Barney was highly delighted with the outcome of the interview, and gaily overruled my objections that we hadn’t a special version of East Lynne nor the necessary scenery if we had. He said he could write a third act in half an hour on the lines he had indicated to the clergyman, and as for scenery, Little Billee would be amply sufficient for a set of Sunday school duffers, whose idea of theatrical entertainment was confined to charades after the annual church tea-meeting.
“Little Billee may do for the scenery,” I said, “but what are you going to do about the part of Little Willie in the play? We haven’t got a child with us.”
“We’ll cut it out,” said Barney, calmly. “At least, all except the death scene, which is too good ‘a curtain’ to throw away. Somebody can crouch in Little Willie’s dying bed and do the kid’s dying conversation with Madame Vine. We’ll have to get out special posters for this production—something after this style: ‘The Stage and the Pulpit! Union at Last!! Special performance of East Lynne by the Merry Marauders Dramatic Company, at the request and under the partonage of—’ By Jove, that’s well thought of! We haven’t got our clerical friend’s name. I’ll run after him and find out.”
The performance of East Lynne came off as arranged, and was witnessed by an audience which, if not so profitable as it might have been, owing to our clergyman friend’s generous exercise of his privilege of passing his friends through, was sufficiently so to pay expenses, and a bit over. The acting of the Merry Marauders in this admirably moral, if sad drama, was excellent, and the play went off very well. It would have gone off still better if the utility man who played Little Willie in the dying scene had not partly forgotten his lines, and substituted the words “Madam Vine, am I going to croak?” for his distressed infant appeal to his disguised mother to tell him if he was going to die; and if one of the other utility men had not unfortunately, after getting almost intoxicated before the start, mistaken Lady Isabel’s anguished cry of “Thank heaven, here comes some succour” to mean a personal reflection on himself, and stopped the action of the play to inform the audience, amid a painful silence, that while the lady’s sex protected her, if any man in the audience liked to call him a ‘sucker’ he would immediately put such a head on him that he would be compelled to wear a turban for the rest of his natural life.
Still, as Barney says, trifles need not worry us while the treasury bag is full.
Yours, as of old,
VAL.
V
WAI-TE-AIRA,
NORTH ISLAND, N.Z.
14th February, 1913.
MY DEAR DICK:
As the gentleman remarked when his wife died on the eve of their diamond wedding, this is a world of change, and no man can tell what the morrow may bring forth. The Merry Marauders, who at the date of my last writing were basking in unusual prosperity that had its genesis in a providential engine spark, are now once more up against misfortune hard and fast. We played through the King Country with tolerable success, and then the start of a veritable chapter of troubles sprang from the foolishness of Mr. Dan Baker, who, on his journey across from the Loopline Junction to Ruatopiro (our first showing place on the road to Rotorua), whither he was speeding to prepare for our coming, acted with an indiscretion and impetuosity truly regrettable in one of his years. From what I can gather, Mr. Baker, who is a food faddist and calls himself a maltarian, prefaced his journey by taking a few glasses of beer instead of breakfast in order to convince some doubters that beer is—as he holds—man’s natural food. He was so much invigorated by his meal that shortly after he boarded the train he came to the conclusion that he could drive the train better than the engine-driver, and he insisted on getting out at every station to tell that official so. I can really find no excuse for our advance agent’s conduct, for I have been informed by reputable eye witnesses that the engine-driver put up with a great deal before he resorted to force. Mr. Baker’s profane demands to be told by what methods of fraud and misrepresentation the engineer had obtained his certificate he passed over in silence; even the taunt that he didn’t know enough about his business to engineer a barrow up a plank did not stir him to action; but what did break down his self-restraint was Mr. Baker’s arrogant assertion that the only engine-driving work he was fit for was to carry the warning red flag in front of a steam-roller. At that he lost his temper completely, and springing off the foot-plate, took such vigorous retaliatory measures that Mr. Baker had to make the rest of the journey in the guard’s van, from which he was transferred in a stretcher to the Ruatopiro hospital, where he is still an in-patient.
We did not hear of this unfortunate contretemps till the following day, when the news was brought in by Barney King, who had it from a commercial traveller who had gone up in the previous day’s train and returned the following day. Barney pointed out that if we did not
get another man up to Ruatopiro by that afternoon’s goods-train it would be no use billing the place at all, as we were due to perform there the following night. Barney wanted to send the pianist and do without music at our last performance at the Junction, but I refused to play such a shabby trick on a fairly generous public, particularly as our last experiment in that direction had resulted in a lamentable shrinkage in the takings owing to my absence from the front of the house. I suggested, as an alternative, sending a young man who had waited on me that morning seeking employment. His name was Gardiner, and his success as a reciter at local concerts had convinced him that the proper place for his abilities was the stage. When I sent him sorrowfully away he had given me his business address in order that I might let him know when the first vacancy in the company occurred.
Barney and I sought out this young man. He was so transported with delight at the idea of realising his life’s ambition, if only for a week, that he insisted in resigning on the spot his position as salesman of cow-boluses in the pharmacy department of the local general store, and said he would be completely at our disposal in five minutes—which was all the time he required, he earnestly assured us, to pack up his luggage, consisting of a celluloid collar, a pair of fancy socks, and a dramatic work he was studying, entitled ‘From Call-Boy to Hamlet,’ or ‘How to become a Henry Irving in Six Easy Lessons.’ He rejoined us before the expiration of the allotted time with these necessaries concealed in a paper parcel, and said he was ready to go to the end of the world to serve the Merry Marauders. He was so humbly anxious to please that it was quite a pleasure instructing him in his new duties. We found him rather slow of comprehension, though, and our instructions required so much repetition that the train was just about to move off before I suddenly remembered that I had forgotten the most important part of an advance agent’s equipment—the sinews of war.
The Merry Marauders Page 4
