The Prisoners of Mainz

by Alec Waugh

And the same tribute must be accorded to the leading ladies. Nature had provided them with pleasing features. Under Hayes’s tuition they learnt the art of the glad eye and the droop of the lower lip. To see those beauties was to be back again in the gay world of colour and revue. A breath of femininity quivered about the rough-cast masculinity of Mainz. So much so, indeed, that on the night of the first performance a distinguished field officer, who had drunk deeply not only of romance, was observed chasing round the corridor behind the flying feet of an inclement Venus, and murmuring between his gasps, “Don’t call me Major, call me Jim”; and even the most hardened misogynists were not unconscious of a thrill when “Leola,” the daughter of the Hesperides, tripped down the joyboard, and sang with outspread, enticing arms, that beckoned to the audience—

“Come to Sonalia with me.”

The plot of the play was extravagantly simple. The curtain went up, revealing a harassed author searching among his papers for a hidden plot. The show was billed to start at two o’clock, but the play was lost, what should he do? And then the machinery of Romance began. An Arabic inscription gave the key. “Why should they not wish for the plot?” Faith would remove mountains, and Faith caused to emerge from the back of the stage a green-faced being, who called himself “The King of Wishland.”

From then onwards it was plain sailing: the barrier between the phenomenal and the real was torn aside, and we were in the world of fancy. And it was no surprise when this obliging monarch produced a strange device which he called a “thoughtoscope,” through which could be observed the hurried arrival from New York of the Financier who was to find a plot. Through this mendacious lens we saw him cross from Halifax to London. He was in an aeroplane, he was over Holland, he was coming down the Rhine, he had landed in Mainz, and look, amid gigantic enthusiasm the gates of the theatre were flung open and Milton Hayes, disguised as Silas P. Hawkshaw, was observed charging across the square, waving a stick and a suitcase.

What followed was sheer joy. The company rose to the occasion. With perfect equanimity we received the news that, in order to find the plot, we should have to be transported to Wishland. In Silas P. Hawkshaw we placed a blind unquestioning trust, and before we knew where we were, the curtain was down, and the chorus was regaling the audience, while the scene-shifters did their noble work.

When next the curtain rose it revealed a tropical island splashed in sunshine. Through a vista of palms gleamed the azure stretches of some ultimate shoreless sea. But no one would have willingly set sail. The island was too full of charm. There were singing girls and dancing girls, a sultan’s harem, and an American bar, and the story lost itself in a riot of intrigue. The plot abandoned all coherence. It was a fairy dream, in which a magic ring changed hands innumerable times, involving disastrous loves and deserted widows.

And through all this medley of incidents Hayes wandered, first in one garb, then in another. As a Scotsman he swallowed whisky, as a Welshman took two wives, as a padre wandered into a harem, and as “Leda was the mother of Helen of Troy, and all this was to him but as the sound of lyres and flutes.” It was for him a great triumph, and perhaps the most supreme moment was, when he proffered marriage to a much-married widow, and suggested that they should spend their holiday in a bungalow, in a duet of which the first verse is too good to be forgotten—

“He.	How’d you like a Bungalow for two, dear?
She.	How’d you like to furnish it complete?
He.	It would be a cosy nest, dear.
	Like the grey home in the west, dear.
She.	And on Sunday I should let you cook the meat,
He.	We’d have a little bedroom made for two, dear,
She.	A little bed, a little chair or so;
He.	And in a month or two, it maybe,
	We should have a little baby
Both.	Grand piano in our Bungalow.”