Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 175
So here we are back in the old farm kitchen, and here, of course, are Rube and Phœbe again. And Rube tries to grab Phœbe round the waist, but she says, “Oh you Rube, you go along,” and lands a dish towel in his face. But this time Rube won’t go along. He manages to catch Phœbe and tell her that he wants her to be his wife and throw dishcloths at him all his life, and Phœbe calls him a “big thing,” and gives him a kiss like a smack (worse than a dish cloth or a pancake). So there they are, all set for marriage, as they might have been in the first act if Rube had had the nerve.
Well, they are no sooner straightened out than in come the farmer and his son Jack and Ned, Hope’s husband. The farmer seems very old and infirm, though suffused with the same air of peace and happiness as all the others. The two young men help him into an arm rocking chair. “Easy now.” Then Hiram sits down with that expression of difficulty “ay-ee-ee,” always used to symbolize stage rheumatism. There is no need for the farmer to become so suddenly old in the last act. But it was a favorite convention of 1880 to make all the old people very infirm and very happy at the end of the play.
So they begin to talk, just to pile on the happiness.
“I’m getting old, lads, I’m not the man I was.”
“Old, Father,” laughs Jack, “why you’re the youngest and spryest of all of us—”
“I’m getting past work, boys,” says the farmer, shaking his head, “past work—”
“Work,” says Jack, “why should you work?” and as the talk goes on you get to understand that Jack will never go to sea again but will stay and work the farm and they’ve just received the “papers” that appoint him keeper of the light in his father’s place, with a pension for the old man. And Ned, Hope’s husband, is going to stay right there too. His father has bought him the farm just adjoining with house and stock and everything and he and Hope are all ready to move into it just as soon as —
But wait a minute.
His father! Lawyer Ellwood! And the terribly enmity and feud!
Oh, pshaw, just watch that feud vanish! In the fifth act of an old time melodrama a feud could be blown to the four winds like thistledown.
Like this: —
There’s a knocking at the door and Ned goes to it and comes back all smiling and he says:
“There’s someone at the door to see you Mr. Haycroft. An old friend he says, shall he come in?”
“An old friend?” And in slips Ellwood — the farmer’s enemy, Hope’s father-in-law — looking pretty hale and hearty, but with the same touch of the old age of the fourth act visible.
He comes over and says:
“Well, Hiram, have you a shake of the hand for an old friend?”
And the farmer, rising, unsteadily:
“Why, Ephraim, it’s not your hand I should be taking; it’s your forgiveness, I ought to ask for my mad folly these two years past.”
“Forgiveness,” says the lawyer; how honest and cheery he looks now, not a bit like the scoundrel he seemed in the second act— “forgiveness!”
And off he goes with his explanation.
That’s the whole purpose of the fourth act, — explanation.
And what do you think! He’d been Hiram’s friend all along and was not in earnest about wanting the money back from Hiram, — didn’t want it at all! And he knew all about Hope’s love affair and Jack’s safe return with his son and was tickled to death over it — and that night two years ago when the farmer drove him out he had come over to tell the Haycrofts that the debt was cancelled, and he was going to buy a farm and start the young people, Ned and Hope, in life — and it was the cancelled mortgage that Jack was trying to sneak over and put in the drawer when his father shot him down! — and — why dear me, how simple it all is in the fifth act. Why didn’t he explain? Why didn’t he shout out, “Hiram I’m not a villain at all, I’m your old friend—” Oh pshaw, who ever did explain things in the second act of a melodrama? And where would the drama be if they did?
So they are still explaining and counter-explaining and getting happier and happier when the last climax is staged.
The audience hear Martha’s voice as she comes on to the stage, talking back into the wings, “Carry him carefully there, Phœbe, for the land’s sake, if you drop that precious child—”
And in they come.
Martha and Hope! Looking as sweet and fresh as when she started out years ago in the first act. And bringing up the rear Phœbe — carrying the Baby.
Yes, believe it or not, a baby! — or the very semblance of one all bundled up in white.
Hope’s baby!
No melodrama was ever brought to its righteous end without a baby.
How the women all cuddle round it and croon over it! They put it on the farmer’s lap — and say, isn’t he just clumsy when he tries to take it — and when Rube offers to help, and Phœbe slaps his face with a dish rag, the audience just go into paroxysms of laughter.
So there you are — and everybody saved. All happy, the baby installed on the farmer’s knees and explanations flowing like autumn cider.
All that is needed now is the farmer to get off the Final Religious Sentiment which is the end and benediction of the good old melodrama. So he utters it with all due solemnity: “Ay, lads, pin your hope in Providence and in the end you land safe in port.”
It sounds as convincing as a proposition in Euclid. Then the curtain slowly comes down and the matinée audience melts away, out into the murky November evening, with the flickering gas lamps in the street, and the clanging bells of the old horse-cars in their ears, but with their souls uplifted and illuminated with the moral glow of the melodrama.
The Soul Call. An Up-to-date Piffle Play. Period, 1923. (In Which a Man and Woman, Both Trying to Find Themselves, Find One Another)
AT THE OPPOSITE pole of thought from the good old melodrama, with its wind and sea-weed and danger, and its happy ending, is the ultra-modern, up-to-date Piffle Play.
It is named by such a name as The Soul Call, or The Heart Yearn, or The Stomach Trouble — always something terribly perplexed, and with sixty per cent of sex in it. It always deals in one way or another with the Problem of Marriage. Let it be noted that marriage, which used to be a sacrament, became presently a contract, and is now a problem. In art and literature it used to constitute the happy ending. Now it is just the bad beginning.
You always hear of The Soul Call long before you see it. It is being played in London before New York or in New York before London, or, at any rate, it is always played somewhere else first. It has to be. That’s part of the charm of it; so that, long before you see the play, you have heard people discussing it at dinner and debating whether Helga was right in wanting to poison her husband, and whether Lionel Derwent could live with such a woman as Mabel.
When at last it is played, it is put on in a little theatre, a small bijou place with seats for only two hundred and fifty. Even that is too many. The great mass of the theatre goers don’t go to The Soul Call; they are all round the corner in the huge picture-house (capacity three thousand) looking at “DEAD MEN’S GOLD — A FILM OF WESTERN LIFE, THROUGH WHICH BLOWS THE OZONE OF THE COW PASTURE.” That’s the stuff they want. But the really cultivated people want to know whether Helga should or should not have poisoned her husband and whether Mabel could or could not live with Lionel Derwent. So they are all there in evening clothes, with other people’s wives with white necks and plenty of jewels in their hair. So it is not a bit like the setting of the old melodrama with the huge theatre full of noise and clatter, the boys shouting “Peanuts, Program!”
In the little theatre all is quiet, with just dim red lights here and there and noiseless ushers selling the Book of the Play on embossed paper for fifty cents. This is the only kind of atmosphere in which people can properly analyze the Problem of Marriage.
When the Piffle Play begins, the curtain doesn’t go up; it is parted in the middle and silently drawn aside by a thing in black silk knee breeches. When it is drawn back the scene is a room. It is called A Room in The Derwent Residence and it is evidently just a “room.” The stage of the old melodrama had wings and flies and drops and open spaces up above and glimpses at the sides of actors not wanted and waiting till they were. But the stage of the Piffle Play is made into a room with a real ceiling and real doors and a real fire burning in a real grate.
By the time the audience have examined this, they see that there is an ineffective young man in a grey tweed suit seated at a little table on the left, playing patience with a pack of cards.
He flings down a card and he exclaims, “Oh, hang these cards!” then calls, “Meadows, I say, Meadows!” The audience by looking up on their programs “The characters in the order of their appearance,” know that the ineffective young man at the table is Lionel Derwent, husband of Mabel Derwent. The book of the play explains to them that “Lionel Derwent is the type of young man who would rather smoke a cigarette than work in a coal mine. In appearance he looks as if a proposition in solid geometry would bore him. He is quite visibly a man who might be fond of a Pekinese dog, but one sees at once that he would not care to attend a Hotel Men’s Annual Convention at Niagara-on-the-Lake.” Reading this, the audience knows exactly what sort of man he is.
When Derwent calls “Meadows, I say; Meadows!” in comes the butler. Derwent says, “Get me some more cards, will you, Meadows. These are perfectly rotten,” and Meadows says, “Yes, sir, at once, sir,” exactly as a butler would say it. The acting is so perfect that it isn’t acting at all. Meadows is, or at least was, a butler. That’s how he got the part. In the old melodrama days the actor made the part. Now the part makes the actor. The old time actor used to act anything and everything. One day he was a villain, the next a hero, one day old, the next young. One week he was six feet high, the next he had shrunk to five feet, four inches. He acted a bishop one night and an idiot the next. It was all the same to him. Bring him anything and he’d act it.
But in the Piffle Play on the New Stage the actor is cast for his part. When they want a man to act as a butler they don’t advertise for actors; they advertise for butlers.
Meadows has in his hand a little silver tray with a card on it and he says:
“Mr. Chown is downstairs, sir. May I show him up—”
Derwent says:
“Queen — four — Queen — yes, do, Meadows.”
Derwent goes on:
“King — six — eight—” till the door opens again and Meadows announces, “Mr. Chown.”
In comes another young man with a hat and stick in his hand. This is Charles Chown. He is just as well dressed as Derwent (only well-dressed people can get into a Piffle Play) but he looks somewhat rougher in texture. In fact the book says of him:
“Charles Chown is evidently the kind of man who would react to a share of Canadian Pacific stock rather than to a bunch of carnations. His air is that of a man who would fail to read a page of Bergson’s philosophy but would like a marginal option in an oil company. He would probably prefer a Cattle Show to a meeting of Secondary School teachers.” So we know exactly what Charles Chown is like.
Lionel says languidly:
“Ah, — Charles. Sit down, — ace — ten — queen—”
“I’ve just run in for a minute,” says Chown, “to give you your cigarette case. You left it at our house last night. Still nothing better to do than play patience, eh?”
“My dear fellow, what is there to do? Everything’s been done long ago.”
Chown grunts and sits down.
“After all, what is there in life? One simply lives.”
Chown grunts.
“Take the thing anyway you will, I’m hanged if I can see anything more in existence than simply existing. One breathes, but why?”
Chown grunts. He evidently doesn’t see why.
“I mean, here one is. Did one ask to be? Hardly. It is a matter in which one had no say. One wasn’t consulted.”
At this point Lionel Derwent gets up and walks over to the mantelpiece where he takes a cigarette and lights it.
This thrilling piece of action quite palpably lifts the whole play up.
Charles Chown goes and puts his hat and stick down on a table and pulls a chair near the fire and lights a cigar. This again is a regular thriller. In fact the action of the play is getting too wild altogether. So Lionel and Charles go back to their analysis of life. Some of the audience, who don’t understand that they are “analyzing life” wonder what in Hades they’re talking about. But these are uncultivated people who have no business in the Little Theatre and ought to be at Dead Men’s Gold next door. The bulk of the audience are fascinated.
Chown speaks.
“That’s all right, Derwent, but it’s all rot — puff — You ought to come down to the Exchange — puff — some morning, then you’d know that there’s something doing in life — puff.”
“My dear fellow!”
“This morning, for instance. Steel fell fifteen points.”
Lionel, very languidly, “Fell down or fell up?”
“Why, down, of course. You never heard such a racket as the fellows made.”
“How can they care about it?”
“Why, hang it, think of the money it meant!”
“Money! Oh, I say, Chown, money! Come, come!”
Lionel who has been standing, stretches his elbows with a yawn and walks over and stands looking at a picture and muttering, “Money! I say, Chown that’s rather thick! Money!”
Lionel’s acting when he yawns is simply admirable. In fact it was principally his yawn that got him where he is. In the old melodrama a good actor was one who could handle a broadsword in a Highland duelling scene, or leap off a lighthouse into the sea. In the Piffle Play it means one who can yawn.
“Well, I must skip along,” says Chown. “I must get down to the Exchange. So long.”
When Chown goes out Lionel shrugs his shoulders as he lights another cigarette.
“What a clod!” he murmurs; then he pushes a bell button and calls out, “Meadows!”
The butler reappears.
“Will you kindly dust off that chair where Mr. Chown was sitting.”
“Yes, sir,—”
Lionel watches Meadows dusting the chair for a minute. Then he says:
“I say, Meadows.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Has it ever occurred to you, Meadows, that some men have souls about the size of a share of preferred stock?”
“No, sir, I can’t say it has — ah, excuse me, sir, there’s the bell.”
In another half minute Meadows reopens the door with the words:
“Mrs. Chown!”
Helga Chown comes sliding into the room. She is dark, very beautiful and as slender as a liqueur glass. Her clothes are pure art and droop on her like a butterfly’s wings.
As to her character, the audience know all about it already from reading about The Soul Call before they see it; and, anyway, they have the book of the play which says:
“Helga, the wife of Charles Chown, is a woman whose soul has overgrown her body. Life presses on her on all sides and she cannot escape. She beats her wings against the bars in vain . . .” On the old fashioned stage this beating her wings against the bars might have been misunderstood. But not so now.
Derwent rises and they come together, saying “Helga!” and “Lionel!” with an infinite depth of meaning.
Helga draws off her gloves and drops into a chair.
“Charles here?” she says.
“Just left. Did you want to see him?”
“No, to not see him. Give me a cigarette.”
Lionel comes over near her and gives her a cigarette and lights it.
“Where’s Mabel?” she asks.
“Gone out to the Dog Show!”
They both shudder.
“And Charles?”
“Went to the Stock Exchange.”
They both shiver.
The audience are following the play with great expectancy and growing excitement. They don’t expect a passionate love scene. They know better than that. But Lionel and Helga are going to “analyze themselves!” and the audience wait for it with breathless interest.
Lionel starts first.
“How easy people like Charles and Mabel seem to find life!”
Helga nods. “Yes, don’t they?”
“They never seem to stop to analyze themselves.”
“Perhaps,” murmurs Helga, “they can’t.” This terrible thought holds them both silent for a minute. Then Helga, as if beating her wings against the bars, speaks.
“Lionel,” she says, “lately, I’ve been trying to think it all out, what it all means. I want to see it all clearly — you and me and everything—”
Lionel has taken her hand very gently.
“Yes, dear?” he murmurs.
“No, don’t. I mean don’t take my hand, not now.” She turns to him with a perplexed, beautiful face, “I want to think!”
It is evidently so difficult for her to think that if he takes her hand he’ll queer it.
“I want to think it all out and when I think about it, I want to be all me, can’t you understand, just me and not a bit you. Do you know how I mean?”
“I think I do, dear.”
He doesn’t really, but this is the kind of lie that must be told.
Helga goes on with rising animation breaking into passionate analysis of herself.
“Sometimes I sit by myself and think, and try to analyze myself and everything seems so small and myself so small too, as if nothing mattered, just like an infinitely small bit of something bigger, something lost in itself and looking for itself in itself. You know what I mean.”
“I think I do.”
