The entertainment to which we must now draw the reader's unwilling attention was to consist of three parts. First, the Tableaux Vivants—thirty seconds of tableaux to about ten minutes of outer darkness and orchestral selection; then a comedietta; and finally, Mrs. Jarley's Waxworks.
The largest room behind the scenes had been reserved for the lady artistes; a draughty passage, furnished chiefly with flaring candles and soda-water syphons, being apportioned to the gentlemen. The loge des dames was a bare and cheerless apartment, but tables and mirrors had been placed round the walls; and here some fifteen or twenty maidens manœuvred with freezing politeness or unrestrained elbowings (according to their shade of social standing) for positions favourable to self-contemplation.
Joan and Sylvia Tarrant foregathered in the middle of the floor.
"I think we'd better dress here, dear," said Joan cheerfully, "and leave the nobility and gentry to fight for the dressing-tables. After all," she added complacently, "you and I need the least doing up of any of them."
The tableaux on the whole were a success, though it was some time before the audience were permitted to inspect them. The musical director, a nervous individual with a penchant for applied science, had spent the greatest part of two days in fixing up an electric bell of heroic proportions controlled from the conductor's desk, and ringing into the ear of the gentleman in charge of the lighting arrangements. A carefully type-written document (another by-product of the musician's versatility) apprised this overwrought official that one ring signified "stage-lights up," and two rings "stage-lights down."
Just before the curtain rose for the first tableau the conductor pressed his button once. After an interval of about two seconds, since the stage-lights showed no inclination to go up,—as a matter of fact the controller of illuminants was tenderly nursing a hopelessly perforated eardrum,—the agitated musician, convinced that the bell had not rung, rang it again. Consequently, just as the curtain rose, every single lamp on the stage, from the footlights to the overhead battens, was hastily extinguished. Confusion reigned supreme. The conductor pressed his button frantically and continuously; the electrician lost his head completely, and began to turn off switches which controlled the lights in the dressing-rooms and the hall itself; while the faithful orchestra, suddenly bereft of both light and leadership, endeavoured with heroic but misguided enthusiasm to keep the flag flying by strident improvisations of the most varied and individual character.
The audience, who had come prepared for anything, sat unmoved; but dolorous cries were heard from the dressing-rooms and vestibule. Above all rose the voice of the conductor, calling aloud for the blood of the electrician and refusing to be comforted. The first tableau vivant partook of the nature of an "extra turn," and was not foreshadowed in the programme. It took place in the middle of the stage, and depicted two overheated gentlemen (one carrying a bâton and the other en déshabille) explaining (fortissimo) the purport of a type-written document to a third (who caressed his right ear all the time) by the light of a single wax vesta.
After this gratuitous contribution to the gaiety of the proceedings the official programme came into force, and various attractive and romantic visions were unfolded to the audience. Certainly the tableaux were well mounted. The success of A Gambler's Wife and Two Strings to her Bow was beyond question. Haliburton, too, made a striking appearance in Orchardson's Hard Hit—the famous gambling picture with the countless packs of cards strewn upon the floor—wherein the broken gamester turns with his hand on the door-handle to take a last look at the three men who have mastered him.
There were minor blemishes, of course. The composure of the beauteous band who were discovered—when the conductor had been hounded back to his stool and the bemused electrician replaced by a man of more enduring fibre—contemplating their own charms in The Mirror of Venus was utterly wrecked—yea, transformed into helpless giggles—by a totally unexpected ejaculation of "Good old Gertie!" proceeding from a young man in the front row—evidently a brother—chiefly remarkable for a made-up tie and a red silk handkerchief, and directed apparently (if one may judge by consequences) at a massively-built young woman kneeling third from the end on the prompt side. During another tableau, as Prince Charles stood rigid in the embrace of Flora Macdonald, the audience sat spellbound for thirty breathless seconds, what time the unhappy prince's tartan stockings slipped inch by inch from the neighbourhood of his knees, past the boundary line where artificial brown left off and natural white began, right down to his ankles—a contretemps which, as Mr. D'Arcy remarked to Mrs. Leroy, added a touch of animation to what would otherwise have been a somewhat lifeless representation.
The comedietta was not an unqualified success. It was one of those characteristic products of what may be called the Back-Drawing-Room School, in which complications begin shortly after the rise of the curtain with the delivery and perusal of a certain letter, and are automatically adjusted at the end of about thirty-five minutes by the introduction of another, which explains everything, settles differences, precipitates engagements, and brings the curtain down upon all the characters standing in a row in carefully assorted couples.