by Grant Allen
The curtain had risen to applause, it fell to thunders. Meenie and half the company came forward for an ovation, and were almost smothered under two cartloads of bouquets. The dramatic critic of the Daily Irritator loudly declared that he had never till that night known what acting was. The poet with the daffodils asked to be permitted to present three golden blossoms with an unworthy holder of the same material to a lady who had at one sweep blotted out from his heart the memory of all European maidens. Five sculptors announced their intention of contributing busts of the Celestial Venus to the next Academy. And society generally observed that such an artistic and intellectual treat came like a delightful oasis amid the monotonous desert of English plays and English acting.
That night, as soon as the house was cleared, Jack caught Meenie in his arms, kissed her rapturously upon both cheeks, and vowed that they should be married that day fortnight. Meenie observed that she might if she liked at that moment take her pick of the unmarried peerage of England, but that on the whole she thought she preferred Jack. And so they went away well pleased with the success of their first night’s attempt at heartlessly and unjustifiably gulling the susceptible British public.
Next day, both Jack and Meenie looked anxiously in the papers to see the verdict of the able and impartial critics upon their Chinese drama. All the fraternity were unanimous to a man. “The play itself,” said the Irritator, “was perfect in its naïve yet touching moral sentiment, and in its profound knowledge of the throbbing human heart, always the same under all disguises, whether it be the frock-coat of Christendom or the graceful tunic of the Ming dynasty, in whose time the action is supposed to take place. As for the charming acting of Mee-Nee-Shang, the ‘Pearl of Dazzling Light’ — so an eminent Sinaist translates the lady’s name for us — we have seen nothing so truthful for many years on the Western stage. It was more than Siddons, it was grander than Rachel. And yet the graceful and amiable actress ‘holds up the looking-glass to nature,’ to borrow the well-known phrase of Confucius, and really acts so that her acting is but another name for life itself. When she died in the last scene, medical authorities present imagined for the moment that the breath had really departed from her body; and Sir John McPhysic himself was seen visibly to sigh with relief when the little lady tripped before the curtain from the sides as gaily and brightly as though nothing had occurred to break the even tenor of her happy thought. It was a pleasure which we shall not often experience upon British boards.”
As for the Hebdomadal Vaticinator, its language was so ecstatic as to defy transcription. “It was not a play,” said the concluding words of the notice, “it was not even a magnificent sermon: it was a grand and imperishable moral revelation, burnt into the very core of our nature by the searching fire of man’s eloquence and woman’s innocent beauty. To have heard it was better than to have read all the philosophers from Aristotle to Herbert Spencer: it was the underlying ethical principle of the universe working itself out under our eyes to the infallible detection of all shams and impostures whatsoever, with unerring truth and vividness.”
Jack and Meenie winced at that last sentence a little; but they managed to swallow it, and were happy enough in spite of the moral principle which, it seemed, was working out their ultimate confusion unperceived.
For ten nights “Hang Chow, the Apprentice of Fa Kiang,” continued to run with unexampled and unabated success. Mee-Nee-Shang was the talk of the clubs and the salons of London, and her portrait appeared in all the shop windows, as well as in the next number of the Mayfair Gazette. Professional beauties of Aryan type discovered themselves suddenly at a discount; while a snub-nosed, almond-eyed little countess, hitherto disregarded by devotees of the reigning belles, woke up one morning and found herself famous. On the eleventh night, Jack’s pride was at its zenith. Royalty had been graciously pleased to signify its intention of occupying its state box, and the whole house was ablaze, from the moment of opening the doors, with a perfect flood of diamonds and rubies. Meenie peeped with delight from behind the curtain, and saw even the stalls filled to overflowing ten minutes before the orchestra struck up its exquisite symphony for bells and triangle, entitled, “The Echoes of Nankin.”
But just at the last moment, as the curtain was on the point of rising, Jack rushed excitedly to her dressing-room, and pushing open the door without even a knock, exclaimed, in a tone of tragic distress, “Meenie, we are lost.”
“Goodness gracious! Jack! what on earth do you mean?”
“Why, who do you suppose is in the next box to the Prince? — the Chinese Ambassador with all his suite! We shall be exposed and ruined before the eyes of all London, and His Royal Highness as well.”
Meenie burst away to the stage, with one half of her face as yet unpowdered, and took another peep from behind the curtain at the auditorium. True enough, it was just as Jack had said. There, in a private box, with smiling face and neat pigtail, sat His Excellency the Marquis Tseng in person, surrounded by half a dozen unquestionable Mongolians. Her first impulse was to shriek aloud, go into violent hysterics, and conclude with a fainting fit. But on second thoughts she decided to brazen it out. “Leave it to me, Jack,” she said, with as much assurance as she could command. “We’ll go through the first act as well as we can, and then see what the Ambassador thinks of it.”
It was anxious work for Meenie, that evening’s performance; but she pulled through with it somehow. She had no eyes for the audience, nor even for His Royal Highness; she played simply and solely to the Ambassador’s box. Everybody in the theatre noticed the touching patriotism which made the popular actress pay far more attention to the mere diplomatic representative of her own beloved sovereign than to the heir-apparent of the British throne. “You know, these Chinese,” said the Marchioness of Monopoly, “are so tenderly and sentimentally attached to the paternal rule of their amiable Emperors. They still retain that pleasing feudal devotion which has unfortunately died out in Europe through the foolish influence of misguided agrarian agitators.” At any rate, Meenie hardly took her eyes off the Ambassador’s face. But that impassive oriental sat through the five acts without a sign or a movement. Once he ate an ice à la Napolitaine, and once he addressed a few remarks to an attaché; but from beginning to end he watched the performance with a uniformly smiling face, unmoved to tears by the great bastinado scene, and utterly impervious even to the touching incidents of the love-making in the third act.
When the curtain fell at last, Meenie was fevered, excited, trembling from head to foot, but not hopeless. Calls of “Mee-Nee-Shang” resounded loudly from the whole house, and even dukes stood up enthusiastically to join in the clamour. When she went forward she noticed an ominous fact. The Ambassador was still in his place, beaming as before, but the interpreter had quitted his seat and was moving in the direction of the manager’s room.
Meenie curtseyed and kow-towed in a sort of haze or swoon, and managed to reel off the stage somehow with her burden of bouquets. She rushed eagerly to Jack’s room, and as she reached the door she saw that her worst fears were realized. A celestial in pig-tail and tunic was standing at the door, engaged in low conversation with the manager.
Meenie entered with a swimming brain and sank into a chair. The interpreter shut the door softly, poured out a glass of sherry from Jack’s decanter on the table, and held it gently to her lips. “Whisht,” he said, beneath his breath, in the purest and most idiomatic Hibernian, “make yourself perfectly aisy, me dear, but don’t spake too loud, if you plase, for fear ye should ruin us botht.”
There was something very familiar to Meenie in the voice, which made her start suddenly. She looked up in amazement. “What!” she cried, regardless of his warning, “it isn’t you, Pat!”
“Indade an’ it is, me darlin’,” Pat answered in a low tone; “but kape it dark, if ye don’t want us all to be found out togither.”
“Not your long-lost brother?” said Jack, in hesitation. “You’re not going to perform Box and Cox in private life be
fore my very eyes, are you?”
“The precise thing, me boy,” Pat replied, unabashed. “Her brother that was in trouble for the last Faynian business, and run away to Calcutta. There I got a passage to China, and took up at first with the Jesuit missionaries. But marrying a nate little Chinese girl, I thought I might as well turn Mandarin, so I passed their examinations, and was appointed interpreter to the embassy. An’ now I’m in London I’m in deadly fear that Mike Flaherty, who’s one of the chief detectives at Scotland Yard, will find me out and recognize me, the same as they recognized that poor cricketer fellow at Leicester.”
A few minutes sufficed to clear up the business. Pat’s features lent themselves as readily as Meenie’s to the Chinese disguise; and he had cleverly intimated to the Ambassador that an additional interpreter in the national costume would prove more ornamental and effective than a recognized European like Dr. Macartney. Accordingly, he had assumed the style and title of the Mandarin Hwen Thsang, and had successfully passed himself off in London as a genuine Chinaman. Moreover, being gifted with Meenie’s theatrical ability, he had learned to speak a certain broken English without the slightest Irish accent; and it was only in moments of emotion, like the present, that he burst out into his native dialect. He had recognized Meenie on the stage, partly by her voice and manner, but still more by some fragments of Irish nursery rhymes, which they had both learned as children, and which Meenie had boldly interpolated into the text of the Fantaisies de Canton. So he had devoted all his energies to keeping up the hoax and deluding the Ambassador.
“And how did you manage to do it?” asked Jack.
“Sure I tould him,” Pat answered quietly, “that though ye were all Chinamen, ye were acting the play in English to suit your audience. And the ould haythen was perfectly contint to belave it.”
“But suppose he says anything about it to anybody?”
“Divil a word can he spake to anybody, except through me. Make yourselves aisy about it; the Ambassador thinks it’s all as right as tinpence. The thing’s a magnificent success. Ye’ll jest coin money, and nobody’ll ever find ye out. Sure there’s nobody in London understands Chinese except us at the embassy, and I’ll make it all sthraight for ye there.”
Meenie rushed into his arms, and then into Jack’s. “Pat,” she said, with emotion, “allow me to present you my future husband.”
“It’s proud I am to make his acquaintance,” Pat answered promptly; “and if he could lend me a tinpound note for a day or two, it ‘ud be a convanience.”
Three days later, Meenie became Mrs. Jack Roberts; and it was privately whispered in well-informed circles that the manager of the Chinese play had married the popular actress Mee-Nee-Shang. At least, it was known that a member of the embassy had been present at a private meeting in a Roman Catholic Chapel in Finsbury, where a priest was seen to enter, and Jack and Meenie to emerge shortly afterwards.
Of course the hoax oozed out in time, and all London was in a state of rage and despair. But Jack coolly snapped his fingers at the metropolis, for he had made a small fortune over his season’s entertainment, and had accepted an offer to undertake the management of a theatre at Chicago, where he is now doing remarkably well. Of course, too, his hoax was a most wicked and unprincipled adventure, which it has given the present writer deep moral pain to be compelled to chronicle. But then, if people will make such fools of themselves, what is a well-meaning but weak-minded theatrical purveyor to do?
MY CIRCULAR TOUR.
Her name was Melissa Fitch, and I always call her the Siren of Niagara. I took that phrase from a stray remark of Epaminondas A. Coeyman’s. Not a very poetical name for a siren, you will say; but the interest of historical truth must prevail with the faithful annalist above every other consideration.
My own name is Douglas Preston. I am a landscape painter by trade; and in the summer of 1878, being then in my twenty-first year, I took a three-months’ circular ticket for an American tour. After knocking about a little among the White Mountains and along the St. Lawrence bank, I settled down quietly at last for steady work at Niagara. There I began my immortal view of the Horse-shoe Fall, which you must have noticed in this year’s Academy, beautifully stuck against the ceiling sky-line in the dark right-hand corner of the fifth room.
When I first got to the Falls I put up at that vast palace-caravanserai, the Cataract House. But I soon found four dollars a day and a regal fare a little too expensive for my humble purse; and old Judge Decatur, of the New York State Supreme Court, to whom I had a letter of introduction, promised to find me board and lodging with some respectable family in the neighbourhood. The Judge himself lived in a large white wooden frame-house, beset with painted Doric columns and capped with a bright tin cupola — a sort of compromise between a Grecian temple, an Italian cathedral, and a square pine-wood cottage; and, with true American hospitality, he would have taken me in as his guest himself, if I would have consented to such an arrangement. Failing that, he handed me over to the maternal care of Mrs. Fitch, widow of a late deceased local surgeon and mother of the siren in question.
“She’s a most refined woman, and keeps a piano,” said the Judge meditatively. “Besides, she has two real nice girls, specially one of them. Most elegant manners, I assure you. I take a deal of interest in that girl, sir. You’ll find her European quite.”
So I arranged to go to Mrs. Fitch’s, board and lodging found, for some ten pounds a month, and there to paint away to my heart’s content. I was to be treated strictly as one of the family, and I took the expression in its most literal sense.
The young ladies of elegant manners were two twins of nineteen, by name Lavinia and Melissa. Lavinia was a severe-looking and highly intellectual personage, in green spectacles, who had graduated Senior Classic and Moral Philosophy Prize-woman at the Poughkeepsie Female University and Woman’s Suffrage Association. Melissa was slighter and very pretty, but, as her sister said, poor girl, she had merely an everyday kind of intellect. “She could never manage her Herodotus,” Lavinia used to remark with pity; “and as for the differential calculus, she has no more notion of it than I have of making buckwheat pancakes. She can never rise, Mr. Preston, to the abstract appreciation of the Infinite, the Absolute, or the Unknowable.”
I confess I was rather vague myself as to the precise qualities of the Unknowable; but I thought it best to conceal my ignorance and condole sympathetically with Lavinia on her sister’s unexpansive soullessness.
I had comfortable quarters enough at Mrs. Fitch’s. A pleasant white little cottage, with bright green venetians, and a verandah overgrown with Virginia creeper, and looking out on the white foam of the American Fall, is not a bad sort of place for a young artist to spend a stray summer in. Every morning after breakfast I walked across the bridge which spans the Rapids to Goat Island, and there, at the corner near the rock once crowned by the Terrapin Tower, I planted the easel for my magnum opus. Before me stretched the vast ceaseless emerald-green tumbling sheet of the Horse-shoe Fall, spanned by a perpetual rainbow, and glistening day after day in the unbroken radiance of an American sun. Above me the pines and maples spread their canopy of green and let through the mellow August light to fleck my canvas — sometimes a little too provokingly from a painter’s practical point of view. It never rained (how Watts and McPalet, my old fellow-students, must have envied me at Bettws-y-Coed!); and Lavinia or Melissa, singly or together, generally volunteered to bring me out my luncheon, so as to save me the trouble of leaving my work at a critical moment — a distraction which no genuine artist can endure. The girls often brought their own lunch as well, and we picnicked together on the rocks by the water’s edge, mixing our claret-cup with a jugful of pure crystal caught upon the very brink of the great Fall. In England our antiquated petty proprieties would have interfered to impose upon us that most awful of human inflictions, a chaperon; but in the happier innocence of the State of New York, I am glad to say, they do not treat every marriageable young woman on the same princip
le as if she were a convicted felon under the strictest police surveillance.
Walking across, one morning, near the end of the bridge, with Melissa to help me in carrying my impedimenta — she was a good-natured, humorous little thing, was Melissa, with dancing black eyes as full of fun as a Chipmonk squirrel’s — we met a tall, lanky, and distinctly red-haired young gentleman, whom Melissa introduced to me with much mock consequence as Mr. Epaminondas A. Coeyman, of Big Squash Hollow.
“Well, Pam,” she said, after he had acknowledged the introduction with the usual highflown circumlocution of American courtesy, “how’s the farm?”
“Thank you, Liss, the farm’s salubrious, I reckon. Fall wheat shows up well for the time of year, and turnips are amazing forward, considering the weather. I suppose Mr. Preston’s the new lodger? An artist, sir, I understand?”
