“I think change of air is good for everything,” Nancy would reply firmly.
So, up and down the length of England, in and out of Wales, across to Ireland and over the border to Scotland, for the next four years Bram and Nancy wandered. In every new company the first thing they pitched was Letizia’s canvas travelling-cot with its long poles and short poles and cross pieces and canopy which all fitted ingeniously together until the final business of lacing up the back like a pair of stays was finished and Letizia was tucked away inside. Always the same luggage—the tin bath packed so full of Nancy’s clothes that it was a great struggle to fasten it—Bram’s second-hand portmanteau with its flap like an elephant’s ear and bulging middle—the trim wicker luncheon-basket, and big wicker theatrical-basket smelling of grease paint and American cloth and old wigs. Endless journeys on Sundays in trains without corridors and on some lines still lighted with oil-lamps so that the baby Letizia, lying on the horsehair cushions of the railway-carriage, would drop asleep to the rhythmic movement of the oil swaying to and fro in the glass container. Long waits at stations like York and Crewe, where the only Sabbath traffic in those days seemed to be touring companies and all the compartments in all the trains were labelled engaged. Long waits while stout men with red noses and blue chins greeted old pals and ran up and down the length of the train, and cracked jokes over flasks of whisky or brandy. Long waits in big smoky junctions, sometimes catching sight of the Dorothy company with its pack of hounds—to the great excitement and joy of Letizia, who would be held up to admire the barking of the bow-wows. Late arrivals in smoky northern towns when the only fly at the station would be collared by the manager and the humbler members of the company would have to shoulder their light luggage and walk to their lodgings. Late arrivals in snowstorm and rainstorm, in fog and frost, when the letter ordering the meal had miscarried and the landlady was a gaunt stranger who thoroughly enjoyed telling the weary vagabonds that, not having heard from them, she had not lighted the fire in the sitting-room. Late arrivals when the landlady was an old friend and came down the steps to embrace both her lodgers and lead them into a toasting, glowing room with the table laid and a smell of soup being wafted along the little passage from the kitchen. Early morning starts when every lady in Nancy’s carriage wanted a different corner and signified her choice with an exaggerated and liverish politeness. Early morning starts when some familiar little thing was left behind and the next lodgings did not look like home until the missing article was forwarded on from the last town. Every week a new town, and sometimes two or three small towns in one week. Every Monday morning at eleven a music call, and after that a walk round the new town to discover the best and cheapest shops. Every day dinner at three o’clock and tea at six. Every evening Letizia left to the guardianship of the landlady while Bram and Nancy set out arm-in-arm to the theatre. Every night except Sunday the swing of a dingy door and the immemorial smell of the theatre within. Our modern young actors and actresses do not know that smell. It vanished in its perfection when electric light took the place of gas, and unretentive encaustic tiles lined the corridors instead of bare stone or whitewashed bricks. It requires something more than the warmth of hot-water pipes to ripen and conserve that smell. It may have lost some of its quintessential peculiarity when gas supplemented candles; but those gas-jets covered with wire guards, on which the ladies and gentlemen of visiting companies were requested by the management not to boil kettles, must have added a beautiful richness of their own.
Thou glorious ancient smell of the theatre, thou sublime pot-pourri of grease-paint, wig-paste, vaseline, powder, perspiration, old clothes, oranges, tobacco, gas, drains, hair, whitewash, hot metal, and dusty canvas, where mayest thou still be savoured instead of that dull odour of Condy’s fluid and fire extinguishers which faintly repels us as we pass through the stage-doors of our contemporary palaces of amusement?
Our particular vagabonds found it easier to obtain joint engagements in musical shows. Nancy’s contralto voice, untrained though it was, grew better and better each year, and Bram had developed into a capital comedian. In the third and fourth winters after they were married they played together in pantomime, and for the Christmas season of 1894 they were engaged at the Theatre Royal, Greenwich—Bram as Idle Jack in Dick Whittington and Clown in the Harlequinade, Nancy as Fairy Queen and Columbine. It was a pity that by now the Harlequinade was already a moribund form of entertainment, for Bram had a genuine talent for getting that fantastic street-life over the footlights. One may be allowed a fleeting suspicion that the English stage has lost more than it has gained by its banishment of the clown from its boards. The French, who are dramatically so much superior, have preserved their clowns.
Bram and Nancy found exceptionally pleasant lodgings in Greenwich. Starboard Alley was a row of diminutive Georgian houses running down to the river and overlooking at the back the grounds of the Trinity Hospital. The bow windows which gave just such a peep of the wide Thames as one may get of the sea itself in little streets that lead down to ancient harbours, had no more than a genteel and unobtrusive curve; it was the very place in which an outward-bound mariner would have felt safe in leaving his wife to wait for his return. Starboard Alley was too narrow for vehicles, so that there was never any sound there but of the footsteps of people walking past on their way to stroll along the embankment above the river—a pleasant place, that embankment, even in this cold December weather, with the seagulls wheeling and screaming overhead and the great ships coming home on the tide, coming home for Christmas on the flowing tide. Not only was the house in Starboard Alley itself attractive, but Mrs. Pottage, the landlady, was as much a feature of it as the bow window, though, to say truth, she had a more obtrusive curve. She was a widow of forty years’ standing, her husband, a gunner in one of Her Majesty’s ships having been killed off Sebastopol; but she was still comely with her fresh complexion and twinkling eyes, and her heart was young.
“I was hardly eighteen at the time my poor husband vanished out of this world,” she told her lodgers, “and the offers of marriage I’ve had since—well, I assure you the men have always been round me like flies after sugar. But I’ve never melted like sugar does in the heat. I said ‘no’ to the first in 1855 within four months of my pore William’s death—well, it was death and burial all in one as you might say, because he’d been talking to his mate as cheerful as a goldfinch the moment before and the next moment there was nothing of him left. It was his mate I said ‘no’ to, four months later, when he was invalided home with a wooden leg. He was the first, and I said ‘no’ to the last only yesterday afternoon just before tea—a Mr. Hopkins he is, a ship’s chandler in a small style of business with a head like the dome of the Observatory, but no more in it than an empty eggshell. Oh, I ashore you I gave him a very firm ‘no,’ and he went back to his chandling as dumb as a doornail. Yes, you might really call it quite a hobby of mine refusing eligibles. I used to put the dates down in the butcher’s book or the baker’s book as the case might be, but I got charged for them one year as extra loaves and ever since then I’ve kept the dates in my head. Off to rehearsal now, are you? Well, fancy them having a rehearsal on Christmas Eve. I call that making a great demand on anybody’s good nature. In fact, if anybody didn’t mind being a bit vulgar, it’s what they might call blooming sauce. And you’ll leave your little girl with me? What’s her name, Letishyer? Said with a sneeze, I suppose? Never mind, I’ll enjoy having her hanging on to my skirts. I never had no children myself. Well, I was just getting over the first shyness and beginning to enjoy married life when all of a sudden that Crimeen war broke out and my poor William had to leave me. Well, it was a mean crime, and no mistake. Got to start off to the theatre now? Wrap yourselves up well, for it’s biting cold to-night. It’s my opinion we’re in for a real old-fashioned Christmas. Good job, too, I say, the size women are wearing their sleeves nowadays. Balloon sleeves they call them. Balloonatic sleeves I should say. Well, toora-loora!! I’ll pop your little girl into her cot and have the kettle on the boil for you when you come back. Ugh! What a perishing evening!”
The vagabonds arm-in-arm set out toward the theatre, the north wind blowing fiercely up Starboard Alley across the Thames from Barking Flats—a searching wind, fierce and bitter.
The Dick Whittington company had been rehearsing hard during the previous week, and now two days before the production on Boxing Day it was seeming incredible that the management would ever have the impudence to demand the public’s money to see such a hopelessly inadequate performance.
“We’ve been in some bad shows, my dear,” Bram said to Nancy on their way to the theatre, “but I think this is the worst.”