“Here he is!” exclaimed the supposed sheriff; “the dogs ran him into the third hole left by the well-diggers, and we lured him out by making a noise like sour dough.” During this speech, I am told, the character snarled continuously and tried to bite his captors. At this the woman, who had so deplorably unsexed herself for the character of Mr. Belknap-Jackson as he had played Oswald, approached the prisoner and smartly drew forth a handful of his beard which she stuffed into a pipe and proceeded to smoke, after which they pretended that the play went on. But no more than a few speeches had been uttered when the supposed Cousin Egbert eluded his captors and, emitting a loud shriek of horror, leaped headlong through the window at the back of the stage, his disappearance being followed by the sounds of breaking glass as he was supposed to fall to the street below.
“How lovely!” exclaimed the mimic Oswald. “Perhaps he has broken both his legs so he can’t run off any more,” at which the fellow Hobbs remarked in his affected tones: “That sort of thing would never do with us.”
This I learned aroused much laughter, the idea being that the remark had been one which I am supposed to make in private life, though I dare say I have never uttered anything remotely like it.
“The fellow is quite impossible,” continued the spurious Oswald, with a doubtless rather clever imitation of Mr. Belknap-Jackson’s manner. “If he is killed, feed him to the goldfish and let one of the dogs read his part. We must get along with this play. Now, then. ‘Ah! why did I ever leave Boston where every one is nice and proper?’” To which his supposed mother replied with feigned emotion: “It was because of your father, my poor boy. Ah, what I had to endure through those years when he cursed and spoke disrespectfully of our city. ‘Scissors and white aprons,’ he would cry out, ‘Why is Boston?’ But I bore it all for your sake, and now you, too, are smoking—you will go the same way.”
“But promise me, mother,” returns Oswald, “promise me if I ever get dusty in the garret, that Lord Algy here will tell me one of his funny wheezes and put me out of pain. You could not bear to hear me knocking Boston as poor father did. And I feel it coming—already my mother-in-law has bluffed me into admitting that Red Gap has a right to be on the same map with Boston if it’s a big map.”
And this was the coarsely wretched buffoonery that refined people were expected to sit through! Yet worse followed, for at their climax, the mimic Oswald having gone quite off his head, the Hobbs person, still with the preposterous affectation of taking me off in speech and manner, was persuaded by the stricken mother to sing. “Sing that dear old plantation melody from London,” she cried, “so that my poor boy may know there are worse things than death.” And all this witless piffle because of a quite natural misunderstanding of mine.
I have before referred to what I supposed was an American plantation melody which I had heard a black sing at Brighton, meaning one of the English blacks who colour themselves for the purpose, but on reciting the lines at an evening affair, when the American folksongs were under discussion, I was told that it could hardly have been written by an American at all, but doubtless by one of our own composers who had taken too little trouble with his facts. I mean to say, the song as I had it, betrayed misapprehensions both of a geographical and faunal nature, but I am certain that no one thought the worse of me for having been deceived, and I had supposed the thing forgotten. Yet now what did I hear but that a garbled version of this song had been supposedly sung by myself, the Hobbs person meantime mincing across the stage and gesturing with a monocle which he had somehow procured, the words being quite simply:
“Away down south in Michigan,
Where I was a slave, so happy and so gay,
‘Twas there I mowed the cotton and the cane.
I used to hunt the elephants, the tigers, and giraffes,
And the alligators at the break of day.
But the blooming Injuns prowled about my cabin every night,
So I’d take me down my banjo and I’d play,
And I’d sing a little song and I’d make them dance with glee,
On the banks of the Ohio far away.”
I mean to say, there was nothing to make a dust about even if the song were not of a true American origin, yet I was told that the creature who sang it received hearty applause and even responded to an encore.