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.; 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 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
