Лучшие произведения Джерома К. Джерома / The Best of Jerome K. Jerome
They never see him there, standing close beside them, while they are performing these fearful crimes.
It is marvelous how short-sighted people on the stage are. We always thought that the young lady in real life was moderately good at not seeing folks she did not want to when they were standing straight in front of her, but her affliction in this direction is as nothing compared with that of her brothers and sisters on the stage.
These unfortunate people come into rooms where there are crowds of people about – people that it is most important that they should see, and owing to not seeing whom they get themselves into fearful trouble, and they never notice any of them. They talk to somebody opposite, and they can’t see a third person that is standing bang between the two of them.
You might fancy they wore blinkers.
Then, again, their hearing is so terribly weak. It really ought to be seen to. People talk and chatter at the very top of their voices close behind them, and they never hear a word – don’t know anybody’s there, even. After it has been going on for half an hour, and the people “up stage” have made themselves hoarse with shouting, and somebody has been boisterously murdered and all the furniture upset, then the people “down stage” “think they hear a noise.”
The comic man always rows with his wife if he is married or with his sweetheart if he is not married. They quarrel all day long. It must be a trying life, you would think, but they appear to like it.
How the comic man lives and supports his wife (she looks as if it wanted something to support her, too) and family is always a mystery to us. As we have said, he is not a rich man and he never seems to earn any money. Sometimes he keeps a shop, and in the way he manages business it must be an expensive thing to keep, for he never charges anybody for anything, he is so generous. All his customers seem to be people more or less in trouble, and he can’t find it in his heart to ask them to pay for their goods under such distressing circumstances.
He stuffs their basket full with twice as much as they came to buy, pushes their money back into their hands, and wipes away a tear.
Why doesn’t a comic man come and set up a grocery store in our neighborhood?
When the shop does not prove sufficiently profitable (as under the above-explained method sometimes happens to be the case) the comic man’s wife seeks to add to the income by taking in lodgers. This is a bad move on her part, for it always ends in the lodgers taking her in. The hero and heroine, who seem to have been waiting for something of the sort, immediately come and take possession of the whole house.
Of course the comic man could not think of charging for mere board and lodging the man who knocked him down when they were boys together! Besides, was not the heroine (now the hero’s wife) the sweetest and the blithest girl in all the village of Deepdale? (They must have been a gloomy band, the others!) How can any one with a human heart beneath his bosom suggest that people like that should pay for their rest and washing? The comic man is shocked at his wife for even thinking of such a thing, and the end of it is that Mr. and Mrs. Hero live there for the rest of the play rent free; coals, soap, candles, and hair-oil for the child being provided for them on the same terms.
The hero raises vague and feeble objections to this arrangement now and again. He says he will not hear of such a thing, that he will stay no longer to be a burden upon these honest folk, but will go forth unto the roadside and there starve. The comic man has awful work with him, but wins at last and persuades the noble fellow to stop on and give the place another trial.
When, a morning or so after witnessing one of these beautiful scenes, our own landlady knocks at our door and creates a disturbance over a paltry matter of three or four weeks’ rent, and says she’ll have her money or out we go that very day, and drifts slowly away down toward the kitchen, abusing us in a rising voice as she descends, then we think of these things and grow sad.
It is the example of the people round him that makes the comic man so generous. Everybody is generous on the stage. They are giving away their purses all day long; that is the regulation “tip” on the stage – one’s purse. The moment you hear a tale of woe, you grab it out of your pocket, slap it in to the woe-er’s palm, grip his hand, dash away a tear, and exit; you don’t even leave yourself a ‘bus fare home. You walk back quickly and get another purse.
Middle-class people and others on the stage who are short of purses have to content themselves with throwing about rolls of bank-notes and tipping servants with five-pound checks. Very stingy people on the stage have been known to be so cussed mean as to give away mere sovereigns.
But they are generally only villains or lords that descend to this sort of thing. Respectable stage folk never offer anything less than a purse.
The recipient is very grateful on receiving the purse (he never looks inside) and thinks that Heaven ought to reward the donor. They get a lot of work out of Heaven on the stage. Heaven does all the odd jobs for them that they don’t want to go to the trouble and expense of doing for themselves. Heaven’s chief duty on the stage is to see to the repayment of all those sums of money that are given or lent to the good people. It is generally requested to do this to the tune of a “thousand-fold” – an exorbitant rate when you come to think of it.
Heaven is also expected to take care that the villain gets properly cursed, and to fill up its spare time by bringing misfortune upon the local landlord. It has to avenge everybody and to help all the good people whenever they are in trouble. And they keep it going in this direction.
And when the hero leaves for prison Heaven has to take care of his wife and child till he comes out; and if this isn’t a handful for it, we don’t know what would be!
Heaven on the stage is always on the side of the hero and heroine and against the police.
Occasionally, of late years, the comic man has been a bad man, but you can’t hate him for it. What if he does ruin the hero and rob the heroine and help to murder the good old man? He does it all in such a genial, light-hearted spirit that it is not in one’s heart to feel angry with him. It is the way in which a thing is done that makes all the difference.
Besides, he can always round on his pal, the serious villain, at the end, and that makes it all right.
The comic man is not a sportsman. If he goes out shooting, we know that when he returns we shall hear that he has shot the dog. If he takes his girl out on the river he upsets her (literally we mean). The comic man never goes out for a day’s pleasure without coming home a wreck.
If he merely goes to tea with his girl at her mother’s, he swallows a muffin and chokes himself.
The comic man is not happy in his married life, nor does it seem to us that he goes the right way to be so. He calls his wife “his old Dutch clock,” “the old geyser,” and such like terms of endearment, and addresses her with such remarks as “Ah, you old cat,” “You ugly old nutmeg grater,” “You orangamatang[194], you!” etc., etc.
Well, you know that is not the way to make things pleasant about a house.
Still, with all his faults we like the comic man. He is not always in trouble and he does not make long speeches.
Let us bless him.
The lawyer
he is very old, and very long, and very thin. He has white hair. He dresses in the costume of the last generation but seven. He has bushy eyebrows and is clean shaven. His chin itches considerably, so that he has to be always scratching it. His favorite remark is “Ah!”
In real life we have heard of young solicitors, of foppish solicitors, of short solicitors; but on the stage they are always very thin and very old. The youngest stage solicitor we ever remember to have seen looked about sixty – the oldest about a hundred and forty-five.
By the bye, it is never very safe to judge people’s ages on the stage by their personal appearance. We have known old ladies who looked seventy, if they were a day, turn out to be the mothers of boys of fourteen, while the middle-aged husband of the young wife generally gives one the idea of ninety.
Again, what appears at first sight to be a comfortable-looking and eminently respectable elderly lady is often discovered to be, in reality, a giddy, girlish, and inexperienced young thing, the pride of the village or the darling of the regiment.
So, too, an exceptionally stout and short-winded old gentleman, who looks as if he had been living too well and taking too little exercise for the last forty-five years, is not the heavy father, as you might imagine if you judged from mere external evidence, but a wild, reckless boy.
You would not think so to look at him, but his only faults are that he is so young and light-headed. There is good in him, however, and he will no doubt be steady enough when he grows up. All the young men of the neighborhood worship him and the girls love him.
“Here he comes,” they say; “dear, dear old Jack – Jack, the darling boy – the headstrong youth – Jack, the leader of our juvenile sports – Jack, whose childish innocence wins all hearts. Three cheers for dancing, bright-eyed Jack!”
On the other hand, ladies with the complexion of eighteen are, you learn as the story progresses, quite elderly women, the mothers of middle-aged heroes.
The experienced observer of stage-land never jumps to conclusions from what he sees. He waits till he is told things.
The stage lawyer never has any office of his own. He transacts all his business at his clients’ houses. He will travel hundreds of miles to tell them the most trivial piece of legal information.
It never occurs to him how much simpler it would be to write a letter. The item for “traveling expenses” in his bill of costs must be something enormous.
There are two moments in the course of his client’s career that the stage lawyer particularly enjoys. The first is when the client comes unexpectedly into a fortune; the second when he unexpectedly loses it.
In the former case, upon learning the good news the stage lawyer at once leaves his business and hurries off to the other end of the kingdom to bear the glad tidings. He arrives at the humble domicile of the beneficiary in question, sends up his card, and is ushered into the front parlor. He enters mysteriously and sits left – client sits right. An ordinary, common lawyer would come to the point at once, state the matter in a plain, business-like way, and trust that he might have the pleasure of representing, etc., etc.; but such simple methods are not those of the stage lawyer. He looks at the client and says:
“You had a father.”
The client starts. How on earth did this calm, thin, keen-eyed old man in black know that he had a father? He shuffles and stammers, but the quiet, impenetrable lawyer fixes his cold, glassy eye on him, and he is helpless. Subterfuge, he feels, is useless, and amazed, bewildered at the knowledge of his most private affairs possessed by his strange visitant, he admits the fact: he had a father.
The lawyer smiles with a quiet smile of triumph and scratches his chin.
“You had a mother, too, if I am informed correctly,” he continues.
It is idle attempting to escape this man’s supernatural acuteness, and the client owns up to having had a mother also.
From this the lawyer goes on to communicate to the client, as a great secret, the whole of his (the client’s) history from his cradle upward, and also the history of his nearer relatives, and in less than half an hour from the old man’s entrance, or say forty minutes at the outside, the client almost knows what the business is about.
On the other occasion, when the client has lost his fortune, the stage lawyer is even still happier. He comes down himself to tell the misfortune (he would not miss the job for worlds), and he takes care to choose the most unpropitious moment possible for breaking the news. On the eldest daughter’s birthday, when there is a big party on, is his favorite time. He comes in about midnight and tells them just as they are going down to supper.
He has no idea of business hours, has the stage lawyer – to make the thing as unpleasant as possible seems to be his only anxiety.
If he cannot work it for a birthday, then he waits till there’s a wedding on, and gets up early in the morning on purpose to run down and spoil the show. To enter among a crowd of happy, joyous fellow-creatures and leave them utterly crushed and miserable is the stage lawyer’s hobby.
The stage lawyer is a very talkative gentleman. He regards the telling of his client’s most private affairs to every stranger that he meets as part of his professional duties. A good gossip with a few chance acquaintances about the family secrets of his employers is food and drink for the stage lawyer.
They all go about telling their own and their friends’ secrets to perfect strangers on the stage. Whenever two people have five minutes to spare on the stage they tell each other the story of their lives. “Sit down and I will tell you the story of my life” is the stage equivalent for the “Come and have a drink” of the outside world.
The good stage lawyer has generally nursed the heroine on his knee when a baby (when she was a baby, we mean) – when she was only so high. It seems to have been a part of his professional duties. The good stage lawyer also kisses all the pretty girls in the play and is expected to chuck the housemaid under the chin. It is good to be a good stage lawyer.
The good stage lawyer also wipes away a tear when sad things happen; and he turns away to do this and blows his nose, and says he thinks he has a fly in his eye. This touching trait in his character is always held in great esteem by the audience and is much applauded.
The good stage lawyer is never by any chance a married man. (Few good men are, so we gather from our married lady friends.) He loved in early life the heroine’s mother. That “sainted woman” (tear and nose business) died and is now among the angels – the gentleman who did marry her, by the bye, is not quite so sure about this latter point, but the lawyer is fixed on the idea.
In stage literature of a frivolous nature the lawyer is a very different individual. In comedy he is young, he possesses chambers, and he is married (there is no doubt about this latter fact); and his wife and his mother-in-law spend most of the day in his office and make the dull old place quite lively for him.
He only has one client. She is a nice lady and affable, but her antecedents are doubtful, and she seems to be no better than she ought to be – possibly worse. But anyhow she is the sole business that the poor fellow has – is, in fact, his only source of income, and might, one would think, under such circumstances be accorded a welcome by his family. But his wife and his mother-in-law, on the contrary, take a violent dislike to her, and the lawyer has to put her in the coal-scuttle or lock her up in the safe whenever he hears either of these female relatives of his coming up the stairs.
We should not care to be the client of a farcical comedy stage lawyer. Legal transactions are trying to the nerves under the most favorable circumstances; conducted by a farcical stage lawyer, the business would be too exciting for us.
The adventuress
she sits on a table and smokes a cigarette. A cigarette on the stage is always the badge of infamy.
In real life the cigarette is usually the hall-mark of the particularly mild and harmless individual. It is the dissipation of the Y.M.C.A.[195]; the innocent joy of the pure-hearted boy long ere the demoralizing influence of our vaunted civilization has dragged him down into the depths of the of the short clay.
But behind the cigarette on the stage lurks ever black-hearted villainy and abandoned womanhood.
The adventuress is generally of foreign extraction. They do not make bad women in England – the article is entirely of continental manufacture and has to be imported. She speaks English with a charming little French accent, and she makes up for this by speaking French with a good sound English one.
She seems a smart business woman, and she would probably get on very well if it were not for her friends and relations. Friends and relations are a trying class of people even in real life, as we all know, but the friends and relations of the stage adventuress are a particularly irritating lot. They never leave her; never does she get a day or an hour off from them. Wherever she goes, there the whole tribe goes with her.
They all go with her in a body when she calls on her young man, and it is as much as she can do to persuade them to go into the next room even for five minutes, and give her a chance. When she is married they come and live with her.
They know her dreadful secret and it keeps them in comfort for years. Knowing somebody’s secret seems, on the stage, to be one of the most profitable and least exhausting professions going.
She is fond of married life, is the adventuress, and she goes in for it pretty extensively. She has husbands all over the globe, most of them in prison, but they escape and turn up in the last act and spoil all the poor girl’s plans. That is so like husbands – no consideration, no thought for their poor wives. They are not a prepossessing lot, either, those early husbands of hers. What she could have seen in them to induce her to marry them is indeed a mystery.
The adventuress dresses magnificently. Where she gets the money from we never could understand, for she and her companions are always more or less complaining of being “stone broke.” Dressmakers must be a trusting people where she comes from.
The adventuress is like the proverbial cat as regards the number of lives she is possessed of. You never know when she is really dead. Most people like to die once and have done with it, but the adventuress, after once or twice trying it, seems to get quite to like it, and goes on giving way to it, and then it grows upon her until she can’t help herself, and it becomes a sort of craving with her.
This habit of hers is, however, a very trying one for her friends and husbands – it makes things so uncertain. Something ought to be done to break her of it. Her husbands, on hearing that she is dead, go into raptures and rush off and marry other people, and then just as they are starting off on their new honeymoon up she crops again, as fresh as paint. It is really most annoying.
For ourselves, were we the husband of a stage adventuress we should never, after what we have seen of the species, feel quite justified in believing her to be dead unless we had killed and buried her ourselves; and even then we should be more easy in our minds if we could arrange to sit on her grave for a week or so afterward. These women are so artful!
But it is not only the adventuress who will persist in coming to life again every time she is slaughtered. They all do it on the stage. They are all so unreliable in this respect. It must be most disheartening to the murderers.
And then, again, it is something extraordinary, when you come to think of it, what a tremendous amount of killing some of them can stand and still come up smiling in the next act, not a penny the worse for it. They get stabbed, and shot, and thrown over precipices thousands of feet high and, bless you, it does them good – it is like a tonic to them.
As for the young man that is coming home to see his girl, you simply can’t kill him. Achilles was a summer rose compared with him. Nature and mankind have not sufficient materials in hand as yet to kill that man. Science has but the strength of a puling babe against his invulnerability. You can waste your time on earthquakes and shipwrecks, volcanic eruptions, floods, explosions, railway accidents, and such like sort of things, if you are foolish enough to do so; but it is no good your imagining that anything of the kind can hurt him, because it can’t.
There will be thousands of people killed, thousands in each instance, but one human being will always escape, and that one human being will be the stage young man who is coming home to see his girl.
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 aTit Bits[196]. 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[197] 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!”
To return to our adventuress. She is by no means a bad woman. There is much good in her. This is more than proved by the fact that she learns to love the hero before she dies; for no one but a really good woman capable of extraordinary patience and gentleness could ever, we are convinced, grow to feel any other sentiment for that irritating ass, than a desire to throw bricks at him.
The stage adventuress would be a much better woman, too, if it were not for the heroine. The adventuress makes the most complete arrangements for being noble and self-sacrificing – that is, for going away and never coming back, and is just about to carry them out, when the heroine, who has a perfect genius for being in the wrong place at the right time, comes in and spoils it all.
No stage adventuress can be good while the heroine is about. The sight of the heroine rouses every bad feeling in her breast.