He is forever being reported as dead, but it always turns out to be another fellow who was like him or who had on his (the young man's) hat. He is bound to be out of it, whoever else may be in.
"If I had been at my post that day," he explains to his sobbing mother, "I should have been blown up, but the Providence that watches over good men had ordained that I should be laying blind drunk in Blogg's saloon at the time the explosion took place, and so the other engineer, who had been doing my work when it was his turn to be off, was killed along with the whole of the crew."
"Ah, thank Heaven, thank Heaven for that!" ejaculates the pious old lady, and the comic man is so overcome with devout joy that he has to relieve his overstrained heart by drawing his young woman on one side and grossly insulting her.
All attempts to kill this young man ought really to be given up now. The job has been tried over and over again by villains and bad people of all kinds, but no one has ever succeeded. There has been an amount of energy and ingenuity expended in seeking to lay up that one man which, properly utilized, might have finished off ten million ordinary mortals. It is sad to think of so much wasted effort.
He, the young man coming home to see his girl, need never take an insurance ticket or even buy a Tit Bits. It would be needless expenditure in his case.
On the other hand, and to make matters equal, as it were, there are some stage people so delicate that it is next door to impossible to keep them alive.
The inconvenient husband is a most pathetic example of this. Medical science is powerless to save that man when the last act comes round; indeed, we doubt whether medical science, in its present state of development, could even tell what is the matter with him or why he dies at all. He looks healthy and robust enough and nobody touches him, yet down he drops, without a word of warning, stone-dead, in the middle of the floor—he always dies in the middle of the floor. Some folks like to die in bed, but stage people don't. They like to die on the floor. We all have our different tastes.
The adventuress herself is another person who dies with remarkable ease. We suppose in her case it is being so used to it that makes her so quick and clever at it. There is no lingering illness and doctors' bills and upsetting of the whole household arrangements about her method. One walk round the stage and the thing is done.
All bad characters die quickly on the stage. Good characters take a long time over it, and have a sofa down in the drawing-room to do it on, and have sobbing relatives and good old doctors fooling around them, and can smile and forgive everybody. Bad stage characters have to do the whole job, dying speech and all, in about ten seconds, and do it with all their clothes on into the bargain, which must make it most uncomfortable.
It is repentance that kills off the bad people in plays. They always repent, and the moment they repent they die. Repentance on the stage seems to be one of the most dangerous things a man can be taken with. Our advice to stage wicked people would undoubtedly be, "Never repent. If you value your life, don't repent. It always means sudden death!"