“Poor old Mangel Worsley,” said the Demon King, with a gloomy shake of the head. “He never ought to have gone in for panto. He’s not up to it. He’d have done better to stick to Shakespeare. I saw his production of Macbeth for Wilson Forbes. Very pretty little show it was, too. Very pretty. But this sort of thing is too big for him altogether. He can’t grasp the detail. Result? My entrances go for nothing. For absolutely nothing! It stands to reason, if a red spot-light’s thrown Right Centre when I come on Down Stage Left it kills me dead. But that doesn’t trouble Worsley, because he doesn’t realise the importance of ensemble. He niggles, and it’s a pity, because within limits he’s quite a good stage-manager.”
How full the Theatre Royal was that Boxing Night! And Morton’s Theatre, the rival house, was just as full. People went to the pantomime even in days as near to us as the early nineties. They could not amuse themselves then by sporting with Amaryllis in the shade of a picture-palace while black-eyed heroes dreamed in profile during two hours of a monotonous reel or black-lipped heroines smeared their cheeks with vaseline and, intolerably magnified, blubbered silently at an unresponsive audience. The audience of the Theatre Royal that night was there to enjoy the performance, even though it lasted from seven o’clock till midnight. People went to the theatre in those days to see and to hear, to love and to hate. They were not sitting jam-packed in that reek of oranges and dust for the sake of cuddling one another. Nobody dressed up like a fireman came and squirted antiseptic perfumes over them. The odor of its own wedged-in humanity was grateful, an entity that breathed, cheered, laughed, and wept as one. The Grand, Islington, the Britannia, Hoxton, the Standard, Shoreditch, the transpontine Surrey, yes, and in those days Old Drury itself still defiant of change—all these theatres held people, not fidgety shadows gazing with lack-lustre eyes at a representation of fidgety shadows.
In spite of their fatigue the company played Dick Whittington that night at Greenwich with treble the vigour of the afternoon performance. Everything went better, in spite of the absence of Mrs. Pottage and Letizia. Even the limelight men managed to keep their beams steadily fixed on the object of their enhancement whencesoever he might enter, whithersoever he might move, wheresoever he might stand. The billows of the Demon King’s bass rolled along twice as majestically. Nancy’s song with the overwashed chorister in the circle earned a double encore. Principal boy, principal girl, dame, knockabout comedians, all gained the good-will of the house. But the success was Bram. After his first scene Idle Jack had only to appear on the stage to send the audience into a roar. The tritest line of dialogue was received as heavenly wit. The stalest piece of fooling was welcomed in a rapture.
“Darling, you are being so funny to-night,” Nancy told him, when for a moment they found themselves side by side in the wings.
“I don’t feel at all funny,” Bram said. “In fact, it’s because I’m feeling so tired and depressed off, I suppose, that I’m trying to cheer up by being extra funny on.”
He squeezed her hand, and a moment later she heard the deep-voiced laughter of the house greeting another of his entrances.
Bram’s success as Idle Jack that night was consolidated by his Joey. He was not just the traditional clown with wide red mouth, bending low in exaggerated laughter and treading always on hot bricks. There was something of the Pierrot in his performance. Not that he scorned tradition overmuch. The whole audience recognised him as the authentic Joey of their imagination; but he did contrive to be somehow the incarnate spirit of that London street much more essentially than the heavy-footed Harlequin, much more essentially than Columbine, whose short pink tarlatan skirt did not become Nancy’s height, though she pirouetted on and off the stage gracefully enough. Pantaloon, too, was good, and the actor did manage to represent that hoary-headed ancient Londoner in his absurd Venetian disguise. But Bram was the ghost of old London itself—a London that was fast dying, though here in Greenwich it might seem to be as full of vitality as ever. It was the London of sweet lavender and cherry ripe, the London of hot cockles, of Punch and Judy shows and four-wheelers and lumbering knife-board omnibuses, of gas-lamps and queer beggars. Bram’s incarnation of this vanishing city had that authentic whimsicality (the very term is nearly unintelligible now) of old cockney humour, an urban Puckishness as if for a while Robin Goodfellow had tried to keep pace with the times and live in great cities. He made his audience feel that sausages were only strung together because it was more amusing to steal a string than a single sausage. His red-hot poker itself glowed with such a geniality of warmth as made the audience feel that everybody to whose seat it was applied was being slapped on the back in the spirit of the purest good-fellowship.
Nancy had flitted for the last time across that most fantastic yet so utterly ordinary street; and she paused in the wings for a moment, before going up to her dressing-room, to listen to the tumultuous laughter of the house at the great trap-act which was the climax of the Harlequinade. She saw Bram’s white figure come diving through the shop window and safely caught by the scene-hands stationed on the other side. She saw the Policeman follow close upon his heels, and watched the pair of them chase each other round and round the revolving door. She heard the thunders of applause as the trick staircase shot the protagonists from top to bottom, and the still louder thunder when Bram appeared among the chimney-pots. Then she turned away and had just reached the door of her dressing-room when the corridors which had been echoing with the distant applause became suddenly still as death.
“I hope that husband of mine’s not doing some particularly breakneck feat to thrill the Bank Holiday crowd,” she said to the principal girl with whom she shared a room and who was by now nearly dressed. “What has happened?” Nancy repeated. This quiet was unnatural. A gust of overwhelming dread sent her hurrying back down the corridor, as she heard the agonised voice of Worsley crying:
“Ring down! Ring down! For the love of God, ring down!”