Some men think her charge was made solely against collar-buttons, whose conduct the world admits is detrimental to good morals; but they are wrong; she included many things in her charge. Consider the innocent-looking rocking-chair, for instance. When it strikes does not the rocker always find your ankle-joint? In darkness or in light did it ever miss that exact spot? Never! And then how gently it will sway, while you rear and stamp, and, with briny eyes, say—well, things you should not say, things you would not say but for the malice of an inanimate thing.
Perhaps the quickest way to win your sympathy is to tell you at once that those knee-breeches were made of yellow plush, bright yellow—I thought that would move you! There was a coat, too—yes, things can always be worse, you see; and when I was crowded into that awful livery I felt like hopping about in a search for hemp-seed, I looked so like an enormous canary that had outgrown its cage.
Had Gail Hamilton known those breeches she would have said: "Here is total depravity in yellow plush!"
You see, the way they got their grip on me originally was this. There had been two utility men engaged for the company, but one of them was taken sick and could not come to the city at all, and the other one made the manager sick, and was discharged for utter incompetency, and that very night there was required a male servant who could in the first act summon the star to the presence of his employer, with a name hard to pronounce; and in the last act, when the star had become the boss of the whole affair, could announce the coming of his carriage.
"Could I do those two lines?"
"Oh, yes!" I joyfully announced my ability and my willingness; "but I had no clothes."
And then, instead of turning the part into a girl attendant, in an evil moment the manager bethought himself of some wardrobe he had purchased from a broken up or down opera manager, and search discovered the yellow-plush breeches, coat, and white wig. I put them on—the canary was hatched!
I played the part of two announcements; I walked out clear from the hip, like a boy—and I became the utility man of the company, and the tormented victim of the yellow breeches.
I was a patient young person and willing to endure much for art's sake, but that wig was too much. Built of white horse-hair mounted upon linen, its heat and weight were fearful. It had evidently been constructed for a big, round, perfectly bumpless head. It came down to my very eyebrows on top, and at the sides, instead of terminating just at the hair-line above the ear, it swallowed up my ears, covered my temples, and extended clear to my eyes, giving me the appearance of being harnessed up in large white blinders—like a shying horse. In common humanity the manager released me from the wig and let me wear powder, but the clutch of the yellow breeches remained unbroken.
As in their opera days (I don't know what they sang, but they were probably in the chorus) they had wandered through the world, knowing all continental Europe and the South Americas, so now they wandered through dramatic literature. One night accompanying me on to deliver a note to Madame de Pompadour, the next night those same yellow breeches and I skipped back to Louis XIV., and admitted many lords and ladies, with tongue-tying names, to that monarch's presence, only to skip forward again, in a few days, to bring in mail-bags to snuffy rural gentry, under almost any of the Georges. Though the lace ruffles and jabots of the French period might give place to a plain red waistcoat for the Georgian English household, the canary breeches were always there, ready to burst into song at any moment, to basely fire off a button or break a buckle just at the moment of my entrance-cue, treacherously suggesting, by their easy wrinkling while I stood, that I might just as well sit down and rest my tired feet, and the moment I attempted to lower myself to a chair, beginning such a mad cracking and snapping in every seam as brought me upright with a bound and the settled conviction that weariness was preferable to public shame.