“Who has insulted me, sir! Why you have!” cried she, with a look of astonishment.
“I, madam! How?” he exclaimed with a similar expression.
“Look at your gloves, sir!”
“Well, madam, they are clean, I washed them myself.”
“But, sir! Berlin gloves! It’s monstrous! I was never so treated before in all my life! Paltry cotton. You ought to be ashamed of yourself—a leading character too. I never played with a gentleman before in your part who did not wear new white kids!”
“I laughed,” said my friend. “It was rude, I know, but for the life of me I couldn’t help it. Here was my employer living in comparative luxury at first-class lodgings in a fashionable town, abusing a poor devil whom she had cheated and half-starved, because, in a back-street garret with scarcely a penny in his pocket, he did not wear nightly, as he otherwise would have done, a new pair of white kid gloves!”
The late Miss Oliver, who stood by at the time, called the fellow who dared to laugh at a manageress in such dire distress, “a brute.”
On another occasion Mr. Huntley May Macarthy, a once well-known and very eccentric provincial manager, abruptly closed the theatre at Bury St. Edmunds, after keeping it open a week or ten days, leaving the unfortunate company to escape from the dilemma of debt and difficulty into which so many of them were deeply plunged. Some had drawn a fortnight’s salary in advance, to pay their travelling expenses to Bury St. Edmunds, and they had all been gathered from far and near by the London agent. In that case my friend the editor found his ark of safety in falling back upon his old profession. He painted the portrait of a local celebrity, which, being exhibited in the town, soon brought him sitters enough to enable him to help himself and spare something for one or two of his less happily situated brothers and sisters in misfortune. I remember my friend remarked as curious on each of these occasions the quietude with which the histrionics submitted to be so unfairly treated. Neither in the case of Miss Glover nor that of Mr. Macarthy were there any attacks made upon them to the face, heartily as they were cursed and abused behind their backs.
In explanation of this I may recall what Mrs. Mathews said of her husband, the elder Mathews, when he suffered under the same infliction, which in the old days of “circuits” and “strolling companies” was a very common one and is still by no means unknown. She said,—
“I have heard Mr. Mathews say that he has gone to the theatre at night without having tasted anything since a meagre breakfast, determined to refuse to go on the stage unless some portion of his arrears was first paid. When, however, he entered the green-room his spirits were so cheered by the attention of his brethren, and the éclat of his reception that his fainting resolution was restored, all his discontent utterly banished for the time, and he was again reconciled to starvation: nay, he even felt afraid of offending the unfeeling manager, and returned home silent upon the subject of his claims.”