"Dentist?" Joan laughed, or rather crowed, in her characteristically childlike way. "Hughie at the dentist's! It seems so funny," she explained apologetically.

"It will be the reverse of funny," said Hughie severely, "when he gets hold of me. Do you know how long it is since I sat in a dentist's chair?

Eight years, no less!"

"You'll catch it!" said Miss Gaymer confidently. "But you simply must not go on that day. I want you at the show. Can't you change the date?"

"The a.s.sa.s.sin gave me to understand," said Hughie, "that it was a most extraordinary piece of luck for me that he should be able to take me at all; and he rather suggested that if I broke the appointment I need not expect another on this side of the grave. Besides, next Wednesday is about our one off-day from shooting. I also--"

Miss Gaymer fixed a cold and accusing eye on him.

"Confess, miserable shuffler!" she said. "You arranged that date with the dentist on purpose, so as to escape the theatricals."

"Guilty, my lord!" replied the criminal resignedly.

"Well, you are let off with a caution," said Joan graciously, "but you'll have to come, all the same. You _will_, won't you, Hughie?"

"Will my presence make so much difference?" said Hughie, rather boldly for him. He was inviting a heavy snub, and he knew it.

Joan raised her eyes to his for a moment.

"Yes," she said, rather unexpectedly, "it will."

"Then I'll come," said Hughie, with vigour. "I go to the dentist at ten.

I'll get that over, ask Lance to lunch, and come down by the afternoon train. What time does the show begin?"

"Eight."

"The train gets in at seven-fifty. I'll come straight to the Parish Hall--"

"You'll get no dinner," said Joan in warning tones.

"Never mind!" said Hughie heroically. "There's to be a supper afterwards, isn't there?"

"Yes."

"I'll last out, then. By the way, does it matter if I'm not in evening kit?"

"Not a bit, if you don't mind yourself. Of course the front rows will be full of people with their glad rags on," said Joan. "But if you feel shy, come round behind the scenes. Then you'll be able to keep an eye on me--and Mr. Haliburton!" she added, with a provocative little glance.

Hughie duly departed to town, promising faithfully to come back for the theatricals, and wondering vaguely why Joan had insisted so strongly on his doing so. Joan felt rather inclined to wonder herself. She was a little perplexed by her own impulses at present. But her mind was occupied by some dim instinct of self-preservation, and she felt somehow distinctly happier when Hughie promised to come.

However, there was little time for introspection. Rehearsals--"with the accent on the hea.r.s.e," as Mr. Binks remarked during one protracted specimen--were dragging their slow length along to a conclusion; tickets were selling like hot cakes; and presently the great day came.

Amateur theatricals are a weariness to the flesh, but viewed in the right spirit they are by no means dest.i.tute of entertainment. The drama's laws, as interpreted by the amateur, differ materially from those observed by the professional branch--the members of which, it must be remembered, have to please to live--in several important particulars; and with these the intending playgoer should at once make himself conversant.

Here is a _precis_:--

(1) Remember that the performance has been got up entirely for the benefit of the performers, and that you and the rest of the audience have merely been brought in to make the thing worth while.

(2) Abandon all hope of punctuality at the start or reasonability in the length of the intervals. Amateur scene-shifters and musicians do not relish having their "turns" curtailed any more than the more conspicuous members of the cast.

(3) Bear in mind the fact that the play is _not_ the thing, but the players. The most thrilling Third Act is as dross compared with the excitement and suspense of watching to see whether Johnny Blank will _really_ kiss Connie Dash in the proposal scene, or whether the fact (known to at least two-thirds of the audience) that they have not been on speaking terms for the past six months will result in the usual amateur _ne plus ultra_--a sort of frustrated peck, falling short by about six inches. Again, the joy of hearing the hero falter in a stirring apostrophe to the gallery is enhanced by the knowledge that he is reading it from inside the crown of his hat, and has lost the place: while the realistic and convincing air of deference with which the butler addresses the d.u.c.h.ess is the more readily recognized and appreciated by an audience who are well aware that he happens in private life to be that lady's husband.

The entertainment to which we must now draw the reader's unwilling attention was to consist of three parts. First, the Tableaux Vivants--thirty seconds of tableaux to about ten minutes of outer darkness and orchestral selection; then a comedietta; and finally, Mrs.

Jarley's Waxworks.

The largest room behind the scenes had been reserved for the lady _artistes_; a draughty pa.s.sage, furnished chiefly with flaring candles and soda-water syphons, being apportioned to the gentlemen. The _loge des dames_ was a bare and cheerless apartment, but tables and mirrors had been placed round the walls; and here some fifteen or twenty maidens manoeuvred with freezing politeness or unrestrained elbowings (according to their shade of social standing) for positions favourable to self-contemplation.

Joan and Sylvia Tarrant foregathered in the middle of the floor.

"I think we'd better dress here, dear," said Joan cheerfully, "and leave the n.o.bility and gentry to fight for the dressing-tables. After all,"

she added complacently, "you and I need the least doing up of any of them."

The tableaux on the whole were a success, though it was some time before the audience were permitted to inspect them. The musical director, a nervous individual with a _penchant_ for applied science, had spent the greatest part of two days in fixing up an electric bell of heroic proportions controlled from the conductor's desk, and ringing into the ear of the gentleman in charge of the lighting arrangements. A carefully type-written doc.u.ment (another by-product of the musician's versatility) apprised this overwrought official that one ring signified "stage-lights up," and two rings "stage-lights down."

Just before the curtain rose for the first tableau the conductor pressed his b.u.t.ton once. After an interval of about two seconds, since the stage-lights showed no inclination to go up,--as a matter of fact the controller of illuminants was tenderly nursing a hopelessly perforated eardrum,--the agitated musician, convinced that the bell had not rung, rang it again. Consequently, just as the curtain rose, every single lamp on the stage, from the footlights to the overhead battens, was hastily extinguished. Confusion reigned supreme. The conductor pressed his b.u.t.ton frantically and continuously; the electrician lost his head completely, and began to turn off switches which controlled the lights in the dressing-rooms and the hall itself; while the faithful orchestra, suddenly bereft of both light and leadership, endeavoured with heroic but misguided enthusiasm to keep the flag flying by strident improvisations of the most varied and individual character.

The audience, who had come prepared for anything, sat unmoved; but dolorous cries were heard from the dressing-rooms and vestibule. Above all rose the voice of the conductor, calling aloud for the blood of the electrician and refusing to be comforted. The first _tableau vivant_ partook of the nature of an "extra turn," and was not foreshadowed in the programme. It took place in the middle of the stage, and depicted two overheated gentlemen (one carrying a _baton_ and the other _en deshabille_) explaining (_fortissimo_) the purport of a type-written doc.u.ment to a third (who caressed his right ear all the time) by the light of a single wax vesta.

After this gratuitous contribution to the gaiety of the proceedings the official programme came into force, and various attractive and romantic visions were unfolded to the audience. Certainly the tableaux were well mounted. The success of A Gambler's Wife and Two Strings to her Bow was beyond question. Haliburton, too, made a striking appearance in Orchardson's Hard Hit--the famous gambling picture with the countless packs of cards strewn upon the floor--wherein the broken gamester turns with his hand on the door-handle to take a last look at the three men who have mastered him.

There were minor blemishes, of course. The composure of the beauteous band who were discovered--when the conductor had been hounded back to his stool and the bemused electrician replaced by a man of more enduring fibre--contemplating their own charms in The Mirror of Venus was utterly wrecked--yea, transformed into helpless giggles--by a totally unexpected e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n of "Good old Gertie!" proceeding from a young man in the front row--evidently a brother--chiefly remarkable for a made-up tie and a red silk handkerchief, and directed apparently (if one may judge by consequences) at a ma.s.sively-built young woman kneeling third from the end on the prompt side. During another tableau, as Prince Charles stood rigid in the embrace of Flora Macdonald, the audience sat spellbound for thirty breathless seconds, what time the unhappy prince's tartan stockings slipped inch by inch from the neighbourhood of his knees, past the boundary line where artificial brown left off and natural white began, right down to his ankles--a _contretemps_ which, as Mr. D'Arcy remarked to Mrs. Leroy, added a touch of animation to what would otherwise have been a somewhat lifeless representation.

The comedietta was not an unqualified success. It was one of those characteristic products of what may be called the Back-Drawing-Room School, in which complications begin shortly after the rise of the curtain with the delivery and perusal of a certain letter, and are automatically adjusted at the end of about thirty-five minutes by the introduction of another, which explains everything, settles differences, precipitates engagements, and brings the curtain down upon all the characters standing in a row in carefully a.s.sorted couples.

This somewhat trite and conventional plot was agreeably varied by the vagaries of the talented gentleman who played the footman responsible for the delivery of the letters. He brought on the second letter first, with the result that the heroine found herself exclaiming: "How foolish I have been! Gerald had been true to me through all! I must go to him at once! We can be married to-morrow!" after the drama had been in progress some three minutes,--a catastrophe only tided over by some perfectly Napoleonic "gagging" by the comic man and an entirely unrehea.r.s.ed entrance (with obvious a.s.sistance from the rear) of the footman, with the right letter.

Fortunately these divergences from the drama's normal course were lost upon the majority of the audience; for the actors, whether from nervousness or frank boredom, were inaudible beyond the first three rows of seats. Even here the feat of following the drift of the dialogue was rendered almost impossible by the persistent and frantic applause of two obvious "deadheads" in the front row,--poor relations of the gentleman who played the footman,--who, since they occupied free seats, evidently considered it their bounden duty to applaud every entrance and exit of their munificent relative, even when he came on with the wrong letter or was elbowed off to fetch the right one. The only member of the company who performed his duties with anything like thoroughness was the prompter, a retired major with lungs of bra.s.s. He had evidently decided, with the true instinct of a strong man, that if you want a thing well done you must do it yourself. Consequently his voice re-echoed through the hall in an unceasing monologue which, while it lacked the variety inseparable from the deliverances of a whole company, did much to keep the occupants of the back benches _au fait_ with the intricacies of the plot. The best laugh of the evening, however, was aroused by the temerity of one of the actors, who suddenly interrupted the prompter to remark mildly but distinctly: "All right, old man, I know this bit!"

Then came Mrs. Jarley's Waxworks. The curtain rose upon the usual group of historical and topical characters, seated round the stage in a semicircle, most of them twitching with incipient hysteria, and all resolutely avoiding the eye of the audience. Presently Mrs. Jarley (Binks), accompanied by Master Jarley (Cherub, in a sailor suit and white socks), made her appearance, and plunged into a slightly laboured monologue, what time her offspring walked round the stage, and, by dint of dusting, oiling, and other operations, stimulated any of the figures which could possibly have been mistaken for waxworks into a fitting display of life and activity.

One "Mrs. Jarley" is very like another, and the audience, who were beginning to suffer from a slight attack of theatrical indigestion, were a little slow in responding to Binks's h.o.a.ry "wheezes" and unfathomable topical allusions. It was not until a bench at the back of the stage, occupied by Oliver Cromwell, General Booth, Dorando, and a Suffragette, suddenly toppled over backwards, and discharged its tenants, with four alarming thuds, into the chasm which yawned between the back of the staging and the wall, that the entertainment could be said to have received a proper fillip. After the first sensation of surprise and resentment at finding themselves reposing upon the backs of their necks in the dust, the four gentlemen affected (who, it is to be feared, had been priming themselves for this, their first appearance on any stage, in the customary manner) accepted the situation with heroic resignation.

Remembering that they were waxworks, and for that if for no other reason incapable of getting up, they continued in their present posture, invisible to the naked eye except for their legs, which stuck straight up into the air. The flagging audience, imagining that the entire disaster was part of the performance, applauded uproariously, and Mrs.

Jarley seized the opportunity to deliver a pithy _extempore_ lecture upon character as read from the soles of the feet.

The performance concluded with a song and chorus, specially composed for the occasion, and sung by Mrs. Jarley and her exhibits in spasmodic antistrophe. Mrs. Jarley began,--

"Some ladies have one figure--one, home grown!

But I have quite a lot, like Madam Tussaud.

And whatever sort of one you'd like to own, Just order me to make it, and I'll do so.

I can make you waxen figures that can walk, Or wave their arms, or turn and look behind 'em--"

Here, in attempting to suit the action to the word, the singer tripped heavily over her own train, and was only saved from complete _boulevers.e.m.e.nt_ by the miraculously animated and suddenly outstretched arm of Henry the Eighth, who was sitting close behind. Binks continued, quite undisturbed,--

"And some of them (the female ones!) can talk, And it's wonderful how useful people find them.