Already in a previous scene there had been the same old difficulty. While the man lay dead on his bed his spirit had been summoned by a Higher Power (indicated in a peep-show), and his corpse sat up, displacing the prostrate form of the widow, who had to take up a new position, without however appearing to notice anything. It was still sitting up when the curtain fell, and incidentally was caught in the act of resuming its recumbent position when the curtain rose again for the purpose of allowing the actors to receive our respectful plaudits.
Behind me I heard an American lady suggest that if they could somehow distinguish the spirit from the body it would be better for our illusions. To which her neighbour expressed the opinion that they would eventually manage to do that feat. I await, less hopefully, this development in stage mechanism. Meanwhile Mary Rose has much to answer for.
"The Daisy" (Mr. Caine). "What made you take a fancy to me?"
Julia (Miss Merrall). "I dunno."
(Sympathetic appreciation of her ignorance on part of audience.)
The play began promisingly enough with a scene full of colour and humanity, of humour and pathos. We were among the roundabouts, whose florid and buxom manageress, Mrs. Muscat (admirably played by Miss Suzanne Sheldon), was having a quarrel of jealousy with her assistant and late lover, "The Daisy," who had been seen taking notice of Another. The dumb devotion of this child, Julia (Miss Mary Merrall), who could never find words for her love—she said little beyond "Yuss" and "I dunno"—was a very moving thing; and the patient stillness with which she bore his subsequent brutality held us always under a strange fascination.
For the rest it was an ugly and sordid business, relieved only by the coy confidences of the amorous Maria (played by Miss Gladys Gordon with a nice sense of fun). Mr. Henry Caine, as "The Daisy," presented very effectively the rough-and-ready humour and the frank brutality of his type; but he perhaps failed to convey the devastating attractions which he was alleged to have for the frail sex; and his sudden spasms of tragic emotion seemed a little out of the picture.
Apart from the painful crudity of the scene that was loosely described as "The Other Side," the play abounded in amateurisms. For one thing there was too much sermonising. It began with an obtrusive homily on the part of an inspector of police, who went out of his way to admonish Julia about the danger of associating with "The Daisy." Another instance was that of the bank-messenger, a person of such self-possession and detachment that he contrived to deliver a moral address while holding one foiled villain at the point of his revolver and gripping the other's wrist as in a vice.
Nothing again could have been more naïve than the innocent home-coming of the domestic carving-knive, freshly sharpened, from the grinder's just in time to be diverted to the objects of a murderous enterprise.