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quite screamed, and sat down suddenly.
"Oh!" she cried, "they are not alive!"
Eliza, with a much louder scream, had found out the same thing and announced it differently. "They
ain't got no insides," said she. The seven members of the audience seated among the wilderness of chairs
had, indeed, no insides to speak of. Their bodies were bolsters and rolled-up blankets, their spines were
broom-handles, and their arm and leg bones were hockey sticks and umbrellas. Their shoulders were the
wooden crosspieces that Mademoiselle used for keeping her jackets in shape; their hands were gloves
stuffed out with handkerchiefs; and their faces were the paper masks painted in the afternoon by the
untutored brush of Gerald, tied on to the round heads made of the ends of stuffed bolster-cases. The
faces were really rather dreadful. Gerald had done his best, but even after his best had been done you
would hardly have known they were faces, some of them, if they hadn't been in the positions which faces
usually occupy, between the collar and the hat. Their eyebrows were furious with lamp-black frowns
their eyes the size, and almost the shape, of five-shilling pieces, and on their lips and cheeks had been
spent much crimson lake and nearly the whole of a half-pan of vermilion.
"You have made yourself an auditors, yes? Bravo!" cried Mademoiselle, recovering herself and
beginning to clap. And to the sound of that clapping the curtain went up or, rather, apart. A voice said, in
a breathless, choked way, "Beauty and the Beast," and the stage was revealed.
It was a real stage too the dining-tables pushed close together and covered with pink-and-white
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counterpanes. It was a little unsteady and creaky to walk on, but very imposing to look at. The scene
was simple, but convincing. A big sheet of cardboard, bent square, with slits cut in it and a candle behind,
represented, quite transparently, the domestic hearth; a round hat-tin of Eliza s, supported on a stool with
a night-light under it, could not have been mistaken, save by wilful malice, for anything but a copper. A
waste-paper basket with two or three school dusters and an overcoat in it, and a pair of blue pyjamas
over the back of a chair, put the finishing touch to the scene. It did not need the announcement from the
wings, "The laundry at Beauty's home." It was so plainly a laundry and nothing else.
In the wings: "They look just like a real audience, don't they?" whispered Mabel. "Go on, Jimmy
don't forget the Merchant has to be pompous and use long words."
Jimmy, enlarged by pillows under Gerald's best overcoat which had been intentionally bought with a
view to his probable growth during the two years which it was intended to last him, a Turkish towel
turban on his head and an open umbrella over it, opened the first act in a simple and swift soliloquy:
"I am the most unlucky merchant that ever was. I was once the richest merchant in Bagdad, but I lost
all my ships, and now I live in a poor house that is all to bits; you can see how the rain comes through the
roof, and my daughters take in washing. And ,"
The pause might have seemed long, but Gerald rustled in, elegant in Mademoiselle's pink
dressing-gown and the character of the eldest daughter.
"A nice drying day," he minced. "Pa dear, put the umbrella the other way up. It'll save us going out in
the rain to fetch water. Come on, sisters, dear father's got us a new wash-tub. Here's luxury!"
Round the umbrella, now held the wrong way up, the three sisters knelt and washed imaginary linen.
Kathleen wore a violet skirt of Eliza s, a blue blouse of her own, and a cap of knotted handkerchiefs. A
white nightdress girt with a white apron and two red carnations in Mabel's black hair left no doubt as to
which of the three was Beauty.
The scene went very well. The final dance with waving towels was all that there is of charming,
Mademoiselle said; and Eliza was so much amused that, as she said, she got quite a nasty stitch along of
laughing so hearty.
You know pretty well what Beauty and the Beast would be like acted by four children who had
spent the afternoon in arranging their costumes and so had left no time for rehearsing what they had to
say. Yet it delighted them, and it charmed their audience. And what more can any play do, even
Shakespeare's? Mabel, in her Princess clothes, was a resplendent Beauty; and Gerald a Beast who wore [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]