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Джером К. Джером
On The Stage-And Off

CHAPTER XIII. Lodgings and Landladies

IHEY charged me extra for the basket on the Great Eastern Line, and I have hated that company ever since. Of course it was over weight, but actors are good customers to the railways, and a little excess luggage is not, as a rule, too closely inquired into. The myrmidons at Bishopsgate, however, were inexorable. It was in vain I tried to persuade them that the thing was “as light as a feather.” They insisted on sticking it up edgeways on a shaky iron plate, and wobbling something up and down a bar; afterward giving me an absurd bit of paper with “4s. 4d.” on it, which, I explained, I didn’t want, but which they charged me for just as though I had specially ordered it.

My destination was a small market-town in the eastern counties, where I arrived about mid-day. It was the most dead and alive place I have ever been to. All eastern county towns are more or less dead and alive – particularly the former – but this one was dreariness personified. Not a soul was to be seen outside the station. In the yard stood a solitary cab to which was attached a limp horse that, with head hanging down and knees bent out, looked the picture of resigned misery; but the driver had disappeared – washed away by the rain, perhaps, which was pouring steadily down. I left my belongings in the cloak room, and walked straight to the theater. I passed two or three green posters on my way, headed:

“Theater Royal,” and setting forth that “ – , the World-Renowned Tragedian from Drury Lane,” would give his magnificent impersonations of Richard III. and The Idiot Witness that night, and begging the inhabitants, for their own sakes, to “come early.” I found the whole company assembled on the stage, and looking as dismal as the town itself. They all had colds in the head, including the manager, “the World-Renowned Tragedian from Drury Lane,” who had the face-ache into the bargain.

After a rough and ready rehearsal of the tragedy, melodrama, and burlesque to be played that evening (I had had all my parts sent me by post before joining), I started off by myself to look for lodgings, as I had come to the conclusion that my own society would, on the whole, be less depressing than that of any gentleman in the company.

Lodging hunting is by no means the most pleasant business connected with touring. It always means an hour or two’s wandering up and down back streets, squinting up at windows, knocking at doors, and waiting about on doorsteps. You are under the impression, all the while that the entire street is watching you, and that it has put you down as either a begging letter impostor, or else as the water-rate man, and despises you accordingly. You never find the place that suits you until you have been everywhere else. If you could only begin at the end and work backwards, the search would be over at once. But, somehow or other, you can never manage to do this, and you have always to go through the same routine. First of all, there are the places that ask about twice as much as you are prepared to give, and at which you promise to call again when you have seen your friend. Then there are the places that are just taken, or just going to be taken, or just not to be taken. There are the places where you can have half a bed with another gentleman, the other gentleman generally being the billiard-marker at the hotel opposite, or some journeyman photographer. There are the people who won’t take you because you are not a married couple, and the people who won’t take you because you are a play-actor, and the people who want you to be out all day, and the people who want you to be in by ten. Added to these, there is the slatternly woman, who comes to the door, followed by a mob of dirty children, that cling to her skirts and regard you with silent horror, evidently thinking that the “big ugly man,” so often threatened, has really come this time. Or the fool of a husband, who scratches his head and says you had better call again, when his “missus” is in. Or, most aggravating of all, the woman who stands on the step, after you have gone, and watches you down the street, so that you don’t like to knock anywhere else.

All this I was prepared for when I started, but no such ordeal was in store for me. The difficulty of selecting lodgings was got rid of altogether in the present case by there simply being no lodgings of any kind to be let. It had evidently never occurred to the inhabitants of this delightful spot that any human being could possibly desire to lodge there, and I don’t wonder at it. There were a couple of inns in the High Street, but country actors cannot afford inns, however moderate, and of “Furnished Apartments” or “Bed Rooms for Single Gentlemen” there were none. I explored every street in the town without coming across a single bill, and then, as a last resource, I went into a baker’s shop to inquire. I don’t know why bakers should be better acquainted than any other tradesmen with the private affairs of their neighbors, but that they are has always been my impression, or, at least, had been up till then, when it received a rude blow. I asked two bakers, and both of them shook their heads, and knew of no one who let lodgings. I was in despair, and the High Street, when I glanced up and saw a very pleasant face smiling at me from the door of a milliner’s shop. Somehow, the sight of it inspired me with hope. I smiled back, and —

“Could the owner of the pleasant face recommend me to any lodgings?”

The owner of the pleasant face looked surprised. “Was Monsieur going to stop in the town?” On Monsieur explaining that he was an actor, Madame was delighted, and smiled more pleasantly than ever. “Madame did so love the theater. Had not been to one for, Oh! so long time; not since she did leave Regent Street – the Regent Street that was in our London. Did Monsieur know London? Had been to heaps and heaps of theaters then. And at Paris! Ah! Paris! Ah, the theaters at Paris! Ah! But there was nothing to go to here. It was so quiet, so stupid, this town. We English, we did seem so dull. Monsieur, son mari, he did not mind it. He had been born here. He did love the sleepiness – the what we did call the monotony. But Madame, she did love the gayety. This place was, oh, so sad.”

Here Madame clasped her hands – pretty little hands they were, too – and looked so piteous, that Monsieur felt, strongly inclined to take her in his arms and comfort her. He, however, on second thoughts, restrained his generous impulse.

Madame then stated her intention to go to the theater that very evening, and requested to know what was to be played.

On Monsieur informing her that “ – , the World-Renowned Tragedian from Drury Lane, would give his magnificent impersonations of Richard III. and The Idiot Witness,” she seemed greatly impressed, and hoped it was a comedy. Madame loved comedies. “To laugh at all the fun – to be made merry – that was so good.” Monsieur thought that Madame would have plenty to laugh at in the magnificent impersonations of Richard III. and The Idiot Witness, even if she found the burlesque a little heavy, but he didn’t say so.

Then Madame remembered Monsieur was looking for lodgings. Madame put the tip of her forefinger in her mouth, puckered her brows, and looked serious. “Yes, there was Miss Kemp, she had sometimes taken a lodger. But Miss Kemp was so strict, so particular. She did want every one to be so good. Was Monsieur good?” This with a doubting smile.

Monsieur hazarded the opinion that having gazed into Madame’s eyes for five minutes was enough to make a saint of any man. Monsieur’s opinion was laughed at, but, nevertheless notwithstanding, Miss Kemp’s address was given him, and thither he repaired, armed with the recommendation of his charming little French friend.

Miss Kemp was an old maid, and lived by herself in a small three-cornered house that stood in a grass-grown courtyard behind the church. She was a prim old lady, with quick eyes and a sharp chin. She looked me up and down with two jerks of her head, and then supposed that I had come to the town to work.

“No,” I replied, “I had come to play. I was an actor.”

“Oh,” said Miss Kemp. Then added severely, “You’re married.”

I repudiated the insinuation with scorn.

After that, the old lady asked me inside, and we soon became friends. I can always get on with old ladies. Next to young ones, I like them better than any other class of the community. And Miss Kemp was a very nice old lady. She was as motherly as a barnyard hen, though she was an old maid. I suggested going out again to buy a chop for my tea, and to fetch my basket, but she would not hear of it.

“Bless the child,” said she, “do run and take off those wet boots. I’ll send some one for your luggage.”

So I was made to take off my coat and boots, and to sit by the fire, with my feet wrapped up in a shawl, while Miss Kemp bustled about with toast and steaks, and rattled the tea things and chatted.

I only stopped a week with Miss Kemp, that being the length of time the company remained in the town, but it will be a long while before I forget the odd little old maid with her fussy ways and kindly heart. I can still see, in memory, the neat kitchen with its cheerful fire in polished grate, before which sleek purring Tom lies stretched. The old-fashioned lamp burns brightly on the table, and, between it and the fire, sits the little old lady herself in her high-backed chair, her knitting in her hands and her open Bible on her knee. As I recall the picture, so may it still be now, and so may it still remain for many a year to come.

I must have been singularly fortunate in regard to landladies, or else they are a very much maligned class. I have had a good deal to do with them, and, on the whole, I have found them kind, obliging, and the very reverse of extortionate. With country landladies, especially, I have ever been most comfortable, and even among London ones, who, as a class, are not so pleasant as their provincial sisters, I have never, as yet, come across a single specimen of that terrible she-dragon about which I have heard so much. To champion the cause of landladies is rather an extraordinary proceeding, but, as so much is said against them, I think it only fair to state my own experience. They have their faults. They bully the slavey (but then the slavey sauces them, so perhaps it is only tit for tat), they will fry chops, and they talk enough for an Irish M. P. They persist in telling you all their troubles, and they keep you waiting for your breakfast while they do it. They never tire of recounting to you all they have done for some ungrateful relative, and they bring down a drawerful of letters on the subject, which they would like you to cast your eye through. They bore you to death every day, too, with a complete record of the sayings and doings of some immaculate young man lodger they once had. This young man appears to have been quite overweighted with a crushing sense of the goodness of the landlady in question. Many and many a time has he said to her, with tears in his eyes: “Ah, Mrs. So-and-so, you have been more than a mother to me”; and then he has pressed her hand, and felt he could never repay her kindness. Which seems to have been the fact, for he has generally gone off, in the end, owing a pretty considerable sum.

CHAPTER XIV. With a Stock Company,

I WAS most miserable with the company I had now joined. What it was like may be gathered from the following:

“Dear Jim: If I stop long with this company I shall go mad (not very far to go, perhaps you’ll say!). I must get out of it soon. It’s the most wretched affair you could possibly imagine. Crummies’s show was a Comédie Française in its arrangements compared with this. We have neither stage-manager nor acting-manager. If this were all, I shouldn’t grumble; but we have to do our own bill posting, help work the scenes, and take the money at the doors – not an arduous task this last. There are no ‘lines.’ We are all ‘responsibles,’ and the parts are distributed among us with the utmost impartiality. In the matter of salary, too, there is the same charming equality; we all get a guinea. In theory, that is: in reality, our salaries vary according to our powers of nagging; the maximum ever attained by any one having been fifteen shillings. I wonder we got any, though, considering the audiences we play to. The mere sight of the house gives one the horrors every night. It is so dimly lighted (for, to save expense, the gas is only turned a quarter on) that you can hardly see your way about, and so empty, that every sound echoes and re-echoes through the place, till it seems as though a dozen people are talking in a scene where there are only two. You walk on the stage, and there in front of you are, say, twenty people dotted about the pit, a few more are lolling listlessly over the gallery rails, and there are two or three little groups in the boxes, while, as a background to these patches of unhappy humanity, there stares out the bare boards and the dingy upholstery. It is impossible to act among such surroundings as these. All you can do#is to just drag through your part, and the audience, who one and all have evidently been regretting from the very first that they ever came – a fact they do not even attempt to disguise – are as glad when it is over as you are. We stop a week in each town and play the same pieces, so, of course, there is no study or rehearsal now. But I wish there were; anything would be better than this depressing monotony.

“I might have guessed what sort of a company it was by his sending me the parts he did. I play Duncan, Banquo, Seyton, and a murderer in Macbeth; Tybalt and the Apothecary in Romeo and Juliet; and Laertes, Osric, and the Second Player in Hamlet– and so on all through. None of us play less than two parts in the same piece. No sooner are we killed or otherwise disposed of as one person, than we are up again as somebody else, and that, almost before we have time to change our clothes. I sometimes have to come on as an entirely new party with no other change than the addition of a beard. It puts me in mind of the nigger who borrowed his master’s hat with the idea of passing himself off as ‘one of them white folks.’ I should think that if the audience – when there are any – attempt to understand the play, they must have a lively time of it; and if they are at all acquainted with our National Bard, they must be still more puzzled. We have improved so on the originals, that the old gentleman himself would never recognize them. They are one-third Shakespeare, and two-thirds the Renowned Tragedian from Drury Lane.

“Of course, I have not had my railway fare, which I was promised after joining, and I’ve given up asking for it now.

“I got a chance of changing my quarters after a few weeks, and I need scarcely say I jumped at it. We passed through a big town that was the headquarters of an established circuit company, and, hearing that one of their ‘responsibles’ had just left, I went straight to the manager, offered myself, and was accepted. Of course, in the usual way, I ought to have given a fortnight’s notice to the other manager, but, under the circumstances, this could hardly have been insisted upon. So I made the Renowned Tragedian from Drury Lane a present of all the arrears of salary he owed me – at which generosity on my part we both grinned – and left him at once. I don’t think he was very sorry. It saved him a few shillings weekly, for my place was filled by one of the orchestra, that body being thereby reduced to two.”

The company of which I was now a member was one of the very few stock companies then remaining in the provinces. The touring system had fairly set in by this time, and had, as a consequence, driven out the old theatrical troupes that used to act on from year to year within the same narrow circle, and were looked upon as one of the institutions of the half-dozen towns they visited.

I am not going to discuss here the rival merits or demerits of the two systems. There are advantages and disadvantages to be urged on both sides, not only from the “school” point of view, but also as regards the personal interests and comfort of the actor. I will merely say, with reference to the latter part of the question, that I myself preferred the bustle and change of touring. Indeed, in spite of all the attending anxieties and troubles, it was in this constant change – this continual shifting of the panorama of scenes and circumstances by which I was surrounded – that, for me, the chief charm of stage-life lay. Change of any kind is always delightful to youth; whether in big things or in little ones. We have not been sufficiently seasoned by disappointment in the past, then, to be skeptical as to all favors the Future may be holding for us in her hand. A young man looks upon every change as a fresh chance. Fancy points a more glowing fortune for each new departure, and at every turn in the road he hopes to burst upon his goal.

At each new town I went to, and with each new company I joined, new opportunities for the display of my talents would arise. The genius that one public had ignored, another would recognize and honor. In minor matters, too, there was always pleasant expectation. Agreeable companions and warm friends might be awaiting me in a new company, the lady members might be extraordinarily lovely, and money might be surer. The mere traveling, the seeing strange towns and country, the playing in different theaters, the staying in different lodgings, the occasional passing through London and looking in at home, all added to the undoubted delight I felt in this sort of life, and fully reconciled me to its many annoyances.

But being fixed in a dull country town for about six months at a stretch, with no other recreation than a game of cards, or a gossip in an inn parlor, I didn’t find at all pleasant. To the staid, or to the married members, I daresay it was satisfactory enough. They had, some of them, been born in the company, and had been married in the company, and they hoped to die in the company. They were known throughout the circuit. They took an interest in the towns, and the towns took an interest in them, and came to their benefits. They returned again and again to the same lodgings. There was no fear of their forgetting where they lived, as sometimes happened to a touring actor on his first day in a new town. They were not unknown vagabonds wandering houseless from place to place; they were citizens and townsmen, living among their friends and relations. Every stick of furniture-in their rooms was familiar to them. Their lodgings were not mere furnished apartments, but “home,” or as near to a home as a country player could ever expect to get No doubt they, as madame would have said, “did love the sleepiness”; but I, an energetic young bachelor, found it “oh! so sad.” Sad as I might have thought it, though, I stayed there five months, during which time I seem to have written an immense number of letters to the long-suffering Jim. All that is worth recording here, however, is contained in the following extracts:

“…The work is not so hard now. It was very stiff at first, as we changed the bill about every other night, but I got hold of the répertoire and studied up all the parts I knew I should have to play. It still comes heavy when there is a benefit, especially when anything modern is put up, as, then, having a good wardrobe, I generally get cast for the ‘gentlemanly party,’ and that is always a lengthy part. But what makes it still more difficult, is the way everybody gags. Nobody speaks by the book here. They equivocate, and then I am undone. I never know where I am. The other day, I had a particularly long part given me to play the next evening. I stayed up nearly all night over it. At rehearsal in the morning, the light comedy, with whom I was principally concerned, asked me how I’d got on. ‘Well, I think I shall know something about it,’ I answered. ‘At all events, I’ve got the cues perfect.’ ‘Oh! don’t bother yourself about cues,’ replied he cheerfully. ‘You won’t get a blessed cue from me. I use my own words now. Just you look out for the sense.’

“I did look out for the sense, but I’ll be hanged if I could see any in what he said. There was no doubt as to the words being his own. How I got through with it I don’t know. He helped me with suggestions when I stuck, such as: ‘Go on, let off your bit about a father,’ or ‘Have you told me what Sarah said?’

“Get me a pair of second-hand tights at Stinchcombe’s, will you, and have them washed and sent down. Any old things will do. I only want them to wear underneath others. I have to appear in black tights next Monday. They make your legs look so awfully thin, and I’m not too stout in those parts as it is.

“I have got hold of an invaluable pair of boots (well, so they ought to be, I paid fifteen shillings for them). Pulled up to their full height, they reach nearly to the waist, and are a pair of American jack-boots; doubled in round the calf, and with a bit of gold lace and a tassel pinned on, they are hessians; with painted tops instead of the gold lace and tassel, they are hunting boots; and wrinkled down about the ankle, and stuck out round the top, they are either Charles or Cromwell, according to whether they are ornamented with lace and a bow, or left plain. You have to keep a sharp eye on them, though, for they have a habit of executing changes on their own account unbeknown to you, so that while one of your legs is swaggering about as a highwayman, the other is masquerading as a cavalier. We dress the pieces very well indeed here. There is an excellent wardrobe belonging to the theater.

“I do wish it were possible to get the programmes made out by intelligent men, instead of by acting-managers. If they do ever happen, by some strange accident, not to place your name opposite the wrong character, they put you down for a part that never existed; and if they get the other things right, they spell your name wrong.

“I say, here’s a jolly nice thing, you know; they’ve fined me half a crown for not attending rehearsal. Why, I was there all the while, only I was over the way, and when I came back they had finished. That’s our fool of a prompter, that is; he knew where I was. I’ll serve him out.”