The Secrets of a Savoyard

by Henry A. Lytton

We were married late in 1883 at St. Mary's, Kensington. Louie and I certainly never realised the responsibilities of married life, and love's young dream was not spoiled by anxious reflections about the problem of ways and means, as may be gathered from the fact that our funds were exhausted on the very day of the marriage. I remember that, after the fees at church had been paid, the cash at our disposal amounted to eighteen-pence. The question then was how far this would take us in the matter of a honeymoon. Strolling into Kensington Gardens we decided that we would spend it on the thrills of a ride in a hansom-cab, and the driver was instructed to take us as far as he could for eighteen-pence. The journey was not at all long. I rather think that if the cabby had known the romantic and adventurous couple he had picked up as fares he would have been sport enough to give us a more generous trip.

Our plan of action after this honeymoon in a hansom had already been decided upon. My wife went to the theatre for the evening performance. I, on my part, had arranged to go back to school and put the best face on things that was possible. During my absence, of course, it had become known that my guardian's letter was a deception and that my three months care-free existence was truancy. Where I had been the headmaster did not know. What I had done he knew even less. But the delinquency was one which, in the interest of school discipline, had to be visited with extreme severity. The Dominie took me before the class and commenced to use the birch with well-applied vigour.

When at the mature age of seventeen one is made a public exhibition of one can have a very acute sense of injured dignity. The rod descended heavily.

"Stop it!" I shouted. "You can't thrash me like this. Do you know what you are doing? You're thrashing a married man!"

"You a married man! You lie!" The birching, bad as it had been, was redoubled in intensity. The master declared that he would teach me a lesson for lying.

"But I am a married man," I yelled. "I was married yesterday."

But even the dawn of truth meant no reprieve. The explanation put the offence in a still more lurid light. It was bad enough to tell a lie, but a good deal worse to get married, and the headmaster whacked me all the more severely as an awful example to the rest of the boys.

Following the thrashing, I enjoyed a fleeting notoriety in the eyes of my school mates, who crowded round to see the interesting matrimonial specimen. "Look who's married!" they shouted. "What's it like?" I'm afraid at the moment that, smarting under the rod, the joys of married life seemed to me to be, as Mark Twain would say, "greatly exaggerated." And worse was to come. Next day the master, considering my knowledge of life made me too black a reprobate to remain in his school any longer, terminated my career as a pupil. For a married man to be in one of the lower classes was too much of an absurdity.

Here was a pretty how-d'ye-do! A bridegroom in sad disgrace, and finding himself on the day after his marriage with no work, no prospects, no anything! Louie it was who came to the rescue. "Princess Ida" had just been produced at the Savoy, and she had been engaged for chorus work in the company which was being sent out on a provincial tour, commencing at Glasgow. My wife contrived to see Mr. Carte, and she faithfully followed the strategy that had been decided upon. Seeing that theatrical managers were understood to dislike married couples in companies on tour, she was to ask him whether he would engage her brother for the tour, pointing out that he had a good voice and was "fairly good looking." The upshot was that I was commanded to wait on Mr. Carte. Later in life I came to know him well and to receive many a kindness from him, but this first interview remains in my mind to this day, because it was destined to put my foot on the first rung of the theatrical ladder.

"Not much of a voice," was the conductor's comment—not a very flattering compliment, by the way, to one who had been for a long time solo boy in the choir of St. Philip's, Kensington. "Never mind," replied Mr. Carte; "he will do as understudy for David Fisher as King Gama." And as chorister and understudy I was engaged. Each of us was to have £2 a week, and in view of our circumstances the money was not merely welcome, but princely. Our troubles seemed to have vanished for ever.