by Grant Allen
“As you wish, my Lord,” he answered submissively, and bowed the Bishop with profound respect into the outer room.
There John and the footman were waiting formally to recognize him, and the carriage stood ostentatiously at the door to carry him home again.
“Inspector,” the Bishop said quietly, “you need not apologize further. But I don’t want this most unfortunate affair to get publicly spoken about. You will easily perceive that it might be regarded by — ahem! — some irreverent persons in a ludicrous light. I shall be glad if you will request your constables to say nothing about it to one another or to anybody else.”
“My Lord,” the inspector said, with a feeling of the most profound relief, “you may rely upon it that not a single soul except the parties concerned shall ever hear a word of the matter.”
“And my companion in misfortune?” the Bishop asked, smiling.
The inspector, in his fluster of anxiety about the great prelate, had clean forgotten poor Harry Burbury. He went off at once to release the young man and make him a further nicely graduated apology.
“Captain Burbury,” the Bishop said, “can I drive you anywhere? Where are you stopping?”
Harry’s face reddened a little. “Nowhere, in fact,” he answered awkwardly. “The truth is, I have only just run up from Aldershot, and had meant to put up at the Charing Cross Hotel.”
Companionship in misfortune emollit mores. The Bishop relaxed his features and smiled graciously. “It’s too late to go there now,” he said with unwonted kindliness. “You had better come round to Eaton Place with me, and Mrs. Brandreth will try to find a comfortable bed for you.”
Harry, hardly knowing what he did, followed the Bishop timidly out to the carriage.
As soon as they had seated themselves on the well-padded cushions of the comfortable episcopal brougham, the Bishop suddenly turned round and asked his companion, “Captain Burbury, do you happen to know anybody anywhere who is called — excuse the nickname — the Growler?”
Captain Burbury started in surprise. “The Growler!” he cried. “Why, yes, certainly. He’s the adjutant’s orderly in my own regiment.”
The Bishop laid his hand kindly on the young man’s arm. “My dear Captain Burbury,” he said softly, “I believe I can do you a slight service. I have found a clue to the man who really embezzled the regimental money.”
The carriage swam around before Harry Burbury’s eyes, and he clutched the arm-rest by the window tightly with his hand. After all, then, the Bishop at any rate did not wholly suspect and mistrust him! Perhaps in the end he might marry Iris!
“My dear,” the Bishop said to his wife, on the morning when the adjutant’s orderly was first examined at Aldershot on the charge of embezzlement, “this strongly enforces the casual remark I happened to make to you the other day about the difference between moral and legal certainty.”
“And as soon as this wretched man is really convicted,” Mrs. Brandreth observed timidly, “there can be no reason why we shouldn’t announce that Iris is engaged to Captain Burbury.”
When you have once rendered a man a signal service, you always retain a friendly feeling for him. The Bishop looked up benevolently from his paper. “Well, Charlotte,” he said, “he seems a very proper, well-conducted young man, and though I should certainly myself have preferred Canon Robinson, I don’t see any good reason why he and Iris, if they like one another, shouldn’t be married as soon as convenient to you.”
THE CHINESE PLAY AT THE HAYMARKET.
“I don’t know how it is, Meenie,” said the manager gloomily, “but this theatre don’t seem to pay at all. It’s a complete failure, that’s what it is. We must strike out something new and original, with a total change of scenery, properties, and costume.”
It was the last night of the season at the Crown Prince’s Theatre, Mayfair. The manager was an amiable young man, just beginning his career as a licensed purveyor of dramatic condiments; and though he had peppered and spiced his performances with every known form of legitimate or illegitimate stimulant, the public somehow didn’t seem to see it. So here he was left at the end of the last night, surveying the darkened house from the footlights, and moodily summing up in his mind the grand total of the season’s losses. Meenie, better known to the critical world as Miss Amina Fitz-Adilbert, was his first young lady, a lively little Irish girl, with just the faintest soupçon of a brogue; and if the Crown Prince’s had turned out a success under his energetic management, Jack Roberts had fully made up his mind that she should share with him in future the honours of his name, at least in private life. She was an unaffected, simple little thing, with no actress’s manners when off the stage; and as she had but one relative in the world, a certain brother Pat, who had run away to foreign parts unknown after the last Fenian business, she exactly suited Jack, who often expressed his noble determination of marrying “a lone orphan.” But as things stood at present, he saw little chance of affording himself the luxury of matrimony, on a magnificent balance-sheet in which expenditure invariably managed to out-run revenue. So he stood disconsolate on the pasteboard wreck of the royal mail steamship which collided nightly in his fifth act; and looked like a sort of theatrical Marius about to immolate himself amid the ruins of a scene-painter’s Carthage.
“We’ve tried everything, Meenie,” he went on disconsolately, “but it doesn’t seem to pay for all that. First of all we went in for sensational dramas. We put “Wicked London” on the stage: we drove a real hansom cab with a live horse in it across Waterloo Bridge; we had three murders and a desperate suicide: you nearly broke your neck leaping out of the fourth-floor window from the fire, when Jenkins forgot to put enough tow in the sheet to break your fall; and I singed my face dreadfully as the heroic fireman going to the rescue. We had more railway accidents, powdered coachmen, live supernumeraries, and real water in that piece than in any piece that was ever put on the London boards; and what did the Daily Irritator say about it, Meenie, I ask you that? Eh?”
“They said,” Meenie answered regretfully, “that the play lacked incident, and that the dulness of its general mediocrity was scarcely relieved by a few occasional episodes which hardly deserved the epithet of sensational.”
“Well, then we went in for æsthetics and high art, and brought out Theophrastus Massinger Villon Snook’s ‘Ninon de l’Enclos.’ We draped the auditorium in sage-green hangings, decorated the proscenium with peacock patterns by Whistler, got Alma-Tadema to design the costumes for the classical masque, and Millais to supply us with hints on Renaissance properties, and finally half ruined ourselves over the architecture of that château with the unpronounceable name that everybody laughed at. You got yourself up so that your own mother wouldn’t have known you from Ellen Terry, and I made my legs look as thin as spindles, so that I exactly resembled an eminent tragedian in the character of Hamlet: and what came of it all? What did the Evening Stinger remark about that play, I should like to know?”
“They observed,” said Meenie, in a lone of settled gloom, “that the decorations were washy and tasteless; that the piece itself was insipid and weakly rendered; and that no amount of compression or silk leggings would ever reduce your calves to a truly tragic diameter.”
“Exactly so,” said the despondent manager. “And then we went in for scenic spectacle. We produced ‘The Wide World: a Panorama in Five Tableaux.’ We laid our first act in Europe, our second in Asia, our third in Africa, our fourth in America, and our fifth in the islands of the Pacific Ocean. We hired five full-grown elephants from Wombwell’s menagerie, and procured living coconut palms at an enormous expense from the Royal Gardens, Kew. We got three real Indian princes to appear on the stage in their ancestral paste diamonds; and we hired Farini’s Zulus to perform their complete toilette before the eyes of the spectators, as an elevating moral illustration of the manners and customs of the South Sea Islanders. We had views, taken on the spot, of England’s latest acquisition, the Rock of Raratonga. Finally, we wrecked thi
s steamer here in a collision with a Russian ironclad, supposed to be symbolical of the frightful results of Mr. Gladstone’s or Lord Beaconsfield’s foreign policy — I’m sure I forget which: and what was the consequence? Why, the gods wanted to sing the National Anthem, and the stalls put on their squash hats and left the theatre in a fit of the sulks.”
“The fact is,” said Meenie, “English plays and English actors are at a discount. People are tired of them. They don’t care for sensation any longer, nor for æsthetics, nor for spectacle: upon my word, their taste has become so debased and degraded that I don’t believe they even care for legs. The whole world’s gone mad on foreign actors and actresses. They’ve got Sarah Bernhardt and the Comédie Française, and they go wild with ecstasies over her; as if I couldn’t make myself just as thin by a judicious course of Dr. Tanner.”
“No, you couldn’t,” said Jack, looking at her plump little face with a momentary relaxation of his brow. “Your fresh little Irish cheeks could never fall away to Sarah’s pattern.” And to say the truth, Meenie was a comely little body enough, with just as much tendency to adipose deposit as at one-and-twenty makes a face look temptingly like a peach. She blushed visibly through her powder, which shows that she had no more of it than the custom of the stage imperatively demands, and went on with her parable unrestrained.
“Then there are the Yankees, with the Danites and Colonel Sellers, talking tragedy through their noses, and applauded to the echo by people who would turn up their own at them in a transpontine melodrama. But that’s the way of English people now, just because they’re imported direct. That comes of free-trade, you know. For my part, I’m a decided protectionist. I’d put a prohibitory tariff upon the importation of foreign livestock, or compel them to be slaughtered at the port of entry. That’s what I’d do.”
Jack merely sighed.
“Well, then there are the Dutch, again, going through their performances like wooden dolls. ‘Exquisite self-restraint,’ the newspapers say. Exquisite fiddlesticks! Do you suppose we couldn’t restrain ourselves if we chose to walk through Hamlet like mutes at a funeral? Do you suppose we couldn’t show ‘suppressed feeling’ if we acted Macbeth in a couple of easy-chairs? Stuff and nonsense, all of it. People go because they want other people to think they understand Dutch, which they don’t, and understand acting, which they can’t see there. If we want to get on, we must go in for being Norwegians, or Russians, or Sandwich Islanders, or something of that sort; we really must.”
Jack looked up slowly and meditatively. “Look here, Meenie,” he said seriously; “suppose we get up a Chinese play?”
“Why, Jack, we’re not Chinamen and Chinawomen. We don’t look in the least like it.”
“I don’t know about that,” said Jack, quietly; “your eyes are not quite the thing perhaps, but your nose is fairly well up to pattern.”
“Now, sir,” said Meenie, pouting, and turning up the somewhat retroussé feature in question, “you’re getting rude. My nose is a very excellent nose, as noses go. But you could never make yours into a Chinaman’s. It’s at least three inches too long.”
“Well, you know, Meenie, there’s a man who advertises a nose-machine for pushing the cartilage, or whatever you call it, into a proper shape. Suppose we get this fellow to make us nose-machines for distorting it into a Chinese pattern. You’ll do well enough as you stand, with a little walnut-juice, all except the eyes; but your warmest admirer couldn’t pretend that your eyes are oblique. We must find out some dodge to manage that, and then we shall be all right. We can easily hire a few real Chinamen as supernumeraries — engage Tom Fat, or get ’em over from New York, or San Francisco, or somewhere; and as for the leading characters, nobody’ll ever expect them to be very Chinese-looking. Upon my word, the idea has points about it. I’ll turn it over in my mind and see what we can make of it, We may start afresh next season, after all.”
The next six or eight weeks were a period of prodigious exertion on the part of Jack Roberts. At first, the notion was a mere joke; but the more he looked at it, the better he liked it. An eminent distorter of the human countenance not only showed him how to twist his nose into Mongoloid breadth and flatness, but also invented an invisible eyelid for producing the genuine Turanian almond effect, and rose with success to the further flight of gumming on a pair of undiscoverable high cheek-bones. In a few days, the whole company were so transformed that their own prompter wouldn’t have known them, some allowance in the matter of noses and cheek-bones being naturally made in the case of the leading ladies, though all alike underwent a judicious course of copious walnut-juice. Jack telegraphed wildly to all parts of the globe for stray Chinamen; and when at last he picked up half a dozen from vessels in the Thames, it was unanimously decided that they looked far less genuinely celestial than the European members of the company. As for the play, Jack settled that very easily. “We shall give them George Barnwell,” he said, with wicked audacity; “only we shall leave out all the consonants except n and g, and call it ‘Hang Chow, the Apprentice of Fa Kiang.’ It’ll be easy enough to study our parts, as all we’ve got to do is to know our cues, and talk hocus-pocus in between as long as necessary.” Very wicked and unprincipled, no doubt, but very natural under the circumstances.
In a few weeks Jack was able to announce that the celebrated Celestial Troupe of the Mirror of Truth, specially decorated by his Majesty the Emperor of China and Brother of the Sun with the order of the Vermilion Pencil-case, would appear in London during the coming season in an original Chinese melodrama, for a limited number of nights only. Enthusiasm knew no bounds. The advent of the Chinese actors was the talk of society, of the clubs, of private life, and of the boys at the street corners. The Daily Irritator had a learned article next morning on the origin, progress, and present condition of the Chinese stage, obviously produced upon the same principle as the famous essays on the metaphysics of the Celestial Empire which attracted so much attention in the columns of the Eatanswill Gazette. The Hebdomadal Vaticinator ventured to predict for its readers an intellectual treat such as they had not enjoyed since the appearance of Mr. Jefferson in “Rip van Winkle” — evidently the only play at the performance of which the editor of that thoughtful and prophetic journal had ever assisted. Eminent Oriental travellers wrote to the society weeklies that they had seen the leading actress, Mee-Nee-Shang, in various well-known Chinese dramas at Pekin, Nagasaki, Bangkok, and even Candahar. All of them spoke with rapture of her personal beauty, her exquisite singing, and her charmingly natural histrionic powers; and though there were some slight discrepancies as to the question of her height, her age, the colour of her hair, and the soprano or contralto quality of her voice, yet these were minor matters which faded into insignificance beside their general agreement as to the admirable faculties of the coming prima donna.
Applications for stalls, boxes, and seats in the dress circle poured in by the thousand. Very soon Jack became convinced that the Crown Prince’s would never hold the crowds which threatened to besiege his doors, and he made a hasty arrangement for taking over the Haymarket. “Hang Chow, the Apprentice of Fa Kiang,” was duly announced, and the play was put in rehearsal with vigour and effect.
At the beginning of the season, Jack opened the theatre with a tremendous success. Such a first night was never known in London. Duchesses intrigued for boxes, and peers called personally upon Jack to beg the favour of a chair behind the dress circle, as all the stalls were secured beforehand for a month ahead. The free list was really suspended, and the pit and gallery were all transformed into reserved places at five shillings a head. Jack even thought it desirable to ensure proper ventilation by turning on a stream of pure oxygen from a patent generator in the cellars below. It was the grandest sensation of modern times. Sarah Bernhardt was nowhere, Mr. Raymond took a through ticket for California, and the Dutch players went and hanged themselves in an agony of disgrace.
The curtain lifted upon a beautiful piece of willow-plate pattern scenery in bl
ue china. Azure trees floated airily above a cerulean cottage, while a blue pagoda stood out in the background against the sky, with all the charming disregard of perspective and the law of gravitation which so strikingly distinguishes Chinese art. The front of the stage was occupied by a blue shop, in which a youth, likewise dressed in the prevailing colour with a dash of white, was serving out blue tea in blue packages to blue supernumeraries, the genuine Chinamen of the Thames vessels. A blue lime-light played gracefully over the whole scene, and diffused a general sense of celestiality over the picture in its completeness. Applause was unbounded. Æsthetic ladies in sage-green hats tore them from their heads, lest the distressful contrast of hue should mar the pleasure of their refined fellow-spectators; and a well-known Pre-Raphaelite poet, holding three daffodils in his hand, fainted outright, as he afterwards expressed it, with a spasmodic excess of intensity, due to the rapturous but too swift satisfaction of a subtle life-hunger.
The youth in blue, by name Hang Chow, appeared, from the expressive acting of the celestial troupe, to be the apprentice of his aged and respectable uncle, Wang Seh, proprietor of a suburban grocery in a genteel neighbourhood of Pekin. At first impressively and obviously guided by the highest moral feelings, as might be observed from the elevated nature of his gestures, and the extreme accuracy with which he weighed his tea or counted out change to his customers, his whole character underwent a visible deterioration from the moment of his becoming acquainted with Mee-Nee-Shang, the beautiful but wicked heroine of the piece. Not only did he become less careful as to the plaiting of his pigtail, but he also paid less attention to the correct counting out of his change, which led to frequent and expressive recriminations on the part of the flat-faced supernumeraries. At length, acting upon the suggestions of his evil angel, with whom he appeared about to contract a clandestine marriage, George Barn — I mean, Hang Chow — actually robbed the till of seventeen strings of cash, represented by real Chinese coins of the realm, specially imported (from Birmingham) among the properties designed for the illustration of this great moral drama. Of course he was hunted down through the instrumentality of the Chinese police, admirably dressed in their national costume; and after an interesting trial before a Mandarin with four buttons and the Exalted Order of the Peacock’s Feather, he was found guilty of larceny to the value of twenty shillings, and sentenced to death by the bastinado, the sentence being carried out, contrary to all Western precedent, coram populo. Meenie, whose admirable acting had drawn down floods of tears from the most callous spectators, including even the directors of a fraudulent bank, finally repented in the last scene, flung herself upon the body of her lover, and died with him, from the effect of the blows administered by one of the supernumeraries with a genuine piece of Oriental bamboo.
