To represent soldiers on the stage, real soldiers should, without doubt, be employed, but it is no good attempting to use them for anything else.
They are soldier-like in everything they do. You may dress them up in what you choose, and call them what you will, but they will never be anything else but soldiers. On one occasion, our manager tried them as a rabble. They were carefully instructed how to behave. They were told how to rush wildly on with a fierce, tumultuous yell; how to crowd together at the back of the stage, and, standing there, surging backward and forward like an angry sea, brandish their weapons, and scowl menacingly upon the opposing myrmidons of the law, until, at length, their sullen murmurs deepening into a roar of savage hate, they would break upon the wall of steel before them, and sweep it from their path, as pent-up waters, bursting their bonds, bear down some puny barrier.
That was the theory of the thing. That is how a stage mob ought to behave itself. How it really does behave itself is pretty generally known. It comes in with a jog-trot, every member of it prodding the man in front of him in the small of his back. It spreads itself out in a line across the stage, and grins. When the signal is given for the rush, each man—still grinning—walks up to the soldier nearest to him, and lays hold of that warrior’s gun. The two men then proceed to heave the murderous weapon slowly up and down, as if it were a pump handle. This they continue to do with steady perseverance, until the soldier, apparently from a fit of apoplexy—for there is no outward and visible cause whatever to account for it—suddenly collapses, when the conquering rioter takes the gun away from him, and entangles himself in it.
This is funny enough, but our soldiers made it funnier still. One might just as well have tried to get a modern House of Commons to represent a disorderly rabble. They simply couldn’t do it. They went on in single file at the double quick, formed themselves into a hollow square in the center of the stage, and then gave three distinct cheers, taking time from the sergeant. That was their notion of a rabble.
The other set, the regular bob (sometimes eighteenpence) a night “sups,” were of a very different character. Professional supers, taken as a class, are the most utterly dismal specimens of humanity to be met with in this world. Compared with them, “sandwich-men” are dashing and rollicky. Ours were no exception to the rule. They hung about in a little group by themselves, and looked like a picture of dejected dinginess, that their mere presence had a depressing effect upon everybody else. Strange that men can’t be gay and light-hearted on an income of six shillings a week, but so it is.
One of them I must exclude from this description—a certain harmless idiot, who went by the title of “Mad Mat,” though he himself always gave his name as “Mr. Matthew Alexander St. George Clement.”
This poor fellow had been a super for a good many years, but there had evidently been a time when he had played a very different part in life. “Gentleman” was stamped very plainly upon his thin face, and where he was not crazy he showed thought and education. Rumor said that he had started life as a young actor, full of promise and talent, but what had set him mad nobody knew. The ladies naturally attributed it to love, it being a fixed tenet among the fair sex that everything that happens to mankind, from finding themselves in bed with their boots on to having the water cut off, is all owing to that tender passion. On the other hand, the uncharitable—generally a majority—suggested drink. But nobody did anything more than conjecture: nobody really knew. The link between the prologue and the play was lost. Mat himself was under the firm conviction that he was a great actor who was only kept from appearing in the leading rôles by professional jealousy. But a time would come, and then he would show us what he could do. Romeo was his great ambition. One of these days he meant to act that character. He had been studying it for years, he once whispered to me in confidence, and when he appeared in it, he knew he should make a sensation.
Strange to say, his madness did not interfere at all with his superial duties. While on the stage he was docile enough, and did just as he saw the other supers do. It was only off the stage that he put on his comically pathetic dignity; then, if the super-master attempted to tell him what to do he would make a ceremonious bow, and observe, with some hauteur, that Mr. St. George Clement was not accustomed to be instructed how to act his part. He never mixed with the other supers, but would stand apart, talking low to himself, and seeming to see something a long way off. He was the butt of the whole theater, and his half-timid, half-pompous ways afforded us a good deal of merriment; but sometimes there was such a sad look in Mat’s white face, that it made one’s heart ache more than one’s sides.
His strange figure and vague history haunted my thoughts in a most uncomfortable manner. I used to think of the time when those poor vacant eyes looked out upon the world, full of hope and ambition, and then I wondered if I should ever become a harmless idiot, who thought himself a great actor.