“Because you are a bad man.”
“Then die!” The struggle on the brink!! “Help!!” “There is none to help you here.”
“You lie, Harry Baddun; I am here.” A hand from the grave!! Harry Baddun meets his doom!!!
“That’s what I mean by a gag bill.
“Whatever money is made, however, he takes care to keep for himself. He can always put up at the best hotel in the place, while we have to pawn our things to pay for the meanest of lodgings.
“It isn’t only actors who get robbed by these managers: authors also suffer pretty considerably. We have two copyright pieces in our list, both of which draw very well, but not a penny is paid for performing them. To avoid any chance of unpleasantness, the titles of the pieces and the names of the chief characters are altered. So that even if the author or his friends (supposing it possible for any author to have any friends) were on the lookout, they would never know anything about it. And, if they did, it would be of no use. It would be throwing good money after bad to attempt to enforce payment from the men who do this sort of thing,—and I hear that it is done all over the provinces,—they have no money and none can be got out of them. Your penniless man can comfortably defy half the laws in the statute book.
“What a nuisance firearms are on the stage! I thought I was blinded the other night, and my eyes are painful even now. The fellow should have fired up in the air. It is the only safe rule on a small stage, though it does look highly ridiculous to see a man drop down dead because another man fires a pistol at the moon. But there is always some mishap with them. They either don’t go off at all, or else they go off in the wrong place, and, when they do go off, there is generally an accident. They can never be depended upon. You rush on to the stage, present a pistol at somebody’s head, and say, ‘Die!’ but the pistol only goes click, and the man doesn’t know whether to die or not. He waits while you have another try at him, and the thing clicks again; and then you find out that the property man hasn’t put a cap on it, and you turn round to get one. But the other man, thinking it is all over, makes up his mind to die at once from nothing else but fright, and, when you come back to kill him for the last time, you find he’s already dead.
“We have recourse to some rum makeshifts here, to eke out our wardrobes. My old frock coat, with a little cloth cape which one of the girls has cutout for me pinned on underneath the collar, and with a bit of lace round the cuffs, does for the gallant of half the old comedies; and, when I pin the front corners back and cover them with red calico, I’m a French soldier. A pair of white thingumies does admirably for buckskin riding breeches, and for the part of a Spanish conspirator, I generally borrow my landlady’s tablecloth....”
It was about the end of October when I found myself once more in London. The first thing I then did was to go to my old shop on the Surrey-side. Another company and another manager were there, but the latter knew me, and, as I owned a dress suit, engaged me at a salary of twelve shillings weekly to play the part of a swell. When I had been there just one week, he closed. Whether it was paying me that twelve shillings that broke him, I cannot say; but on Monday morning some men came and cut the gas off, and then he said he shouldn’t go on any longer, and that we must all do the best we could for ourselves.
I, with two or three others, thereupon started off for a theater at the East End, which was about to be opened for a limited number of nights by some great world-renowned actor. This was about the fortieth world-renowned party. I had heard of for the first time within the last twelvemonth. My education in the matter of world-renowned people had evidently been shamefully neglected.