‘Take a hold on yourself, Thackeray, for God’s sake,’ said Cribb. ‘You look as solemn as a blasted tombstone. She’s getting a damned good hearing. Wasn’t many years ago they covered the orchestra with netting to protect them from rotten fruit that fell short of duff performers.’
The sprinkle of applause at the end was more in relief than enthusiasm, but Miss Blake seemed satisfied, took her curtseys, blew kisses to someone still enthusiastic enough to whistle, and left the stage.
‘And now to chill your precious ’earts,’ announced the chairman from his seated position, ‘we ’ave a visitor from the wilds of North America. You’ve ’eard of ’Iawatha? Yes, my friends, a genuine Red Indian. What do you think ’e calls ’imself? Not Runnin’ Water—no-one cares for that ’ere. Not Bleedin’ Wolf—there’s enough of them about already. No, ladies, it’s your ’eart-throb, the man with the ’atchets—Gleamin’ Blade!’
Cymbals crashed, the front-cloth was lifted up into the flies, and the mediums, sets of coloured glass worked on the lever principle, filtered the footlight flames, to immerse the stage in Satanic crimson. A prancing Red Indian, with a tomahawk in each hand, dominated the centre, whooping and chanting. Upstage was a board the size of a door, surmounted with a totem-like carved head. The redskin momentarily interrupted his war-dance to hurl a tomahawk in that direction. It cut into the wood with a fearful thud. The audience’s unified gasp died in their throats as the second tomahawk was buried deep beside the first. With a shriek, the Indian retrieved both weapons and leapt round to face the audience. Thackeray tensed. Cribb’s restraining hand touched his arm. A drum-roll promised fresh horrors. ‘My God, Sarge! Look over there!’ Waiting out of sight of the rest of the audience in the wings opposite was a young woman in fleshings and a skimpy bodice and breech-clout. A single vertical feather was attached to her head. The hatchet-thrower now ran to the side of the stage, grabbed her wrist and pulled her, apparently struggling to escape, towards the board. There were screams from several parts of the hall.
‘Be ready, then,’ said Cribb, ‘but wait for the word from me!’
Thackeray leaned forward, poised for sudden movement, like the survivor in a game of musical chairs. On the stage below, the girl was being secured by rope to the totem. The Indian spoke a few words to her and then backed some twelve feet away. She waited, helplessly spreadeagled, as the drum-roll began again.
‘Not yet,’ muttered Cribb.
At the Indian’s feet were six tomahawks, glinting in the sinister illumination. He stooped for the first two. The drums reached their climax. His arm swung back behind his head and with a fiendish shriek he flung the first weapon. It hit the board, shuddering, six inches to the left of her waist.
‘One!’ shouted those of the audience able to speak.
The second tomahawk matched the first on the right.
‘Two!’
He picked up two more. The first came perilously close to her left knee.
‘Three!’
‘Four!’
The last two. They would have to be aimed at each side of her head. The Indian sighted his throw and, with awful menace, slowly drew back the weapon. A yell!
‘Five!’ Within two inches of the ear.
A final drum-roll.
The hurtling blade shimmered in flight.
‘Six!’ Shouted in huge relief, and topped with a storm of clapping and stamping.
‘Sometimes they try it again blindfold,’ suggested Cribb to Thackeray, who was paler than the Indian maiden.
Then—surprise—normal gaslight was restored and there were two unmistakably European performers removing their head-dresses to receive their salute from the enraptured audience.
‘Capital act!’ said Cribb, applauding energetically.
‘It’s left me feeling like a glass of beer gone flat.’
A large 3 was already in place on the frame to their right where the order of the acts was charted. Nobody appeared to have a programme, so the information was valuable only to the chairman. ‘If that last act ’orrified the ladies a little too much, I’ve got some news to set your minds at rest, girls. We ’ave with us tonight two outstandin’ guardians of the peace. Yes, the boys in blue are with us tonight . . .’
‘Blimey, Sarge. We’ve been spotted.’
‘Steady, Constable.’
‘. . . Those two favourite myrmidons of the Law, P.C.s Salt and Battree!’
The act-drop had been lowered during the announcement, and now two performers dressed as uniformed police officers marched in step to the centre of the stage, the second ludicrously close behind the first. Predictably, there was a collision when they stopped in mid-stage, emphasised with cymbals.
‘Lord save us!’ said Cribb. ‘Not one of these lunatic displays!’
‘Watch yerselves!’ shouted one of the performers. ‘I’m watching you!’
‘Guying the Force is just about the favourite occupation of your fair-minded British general public,’ grumbled Cribb. ‘There ain’t been a pantomime since Grimaldi without a flatfooted constable blundering about with a string of sausages. And there’s more bluebottles on the music halls than there is in the Metropolitan: Vance, Stead, Arthur Lloyd, Edward Marshall—even Gilbert and Sullivan are up to it now. Blasted scandal, it is. Home Secretary wants to look into it, in my opinon.’
‘I’m the man wot takes to pris’n
He who steals wot isn’t his’n
X yer know is my Division
Number ninety-two,’ sang P.C. Salt.
Both artistes now produced authentic police-rattles, which they sprang, to the delight of the audience.
‘We could take ’em in for having police property, Sarge,’ suggested Thackeray.
‘It ain’t the night for it,’ growled Cribb, hunched over the box-front, with his hands over his face, watching the performance between his fingers.
Another song got under way:
‘They gave us an ’elmet and a greatcoat
And armlets to wear upon our sleeve
An ’andsome tunic too
In regulation blue
But now we’ve rattled our rattles we want to leave—
All together now—But now we’ve rattled our rattles we want to leave.’
‘Damned disgrace!’ said Cribb.
‘Watch yerselves!’ shouted P.C. Battree, ‘I’m watching you!’
‘These buffoons earn more for five minutes of this rubbish than you and I would get for a week’s beat-bashing,’ continued the sergeant. ‘And here we are protecting ’em. If this pair suffer an attack, you and I are taking the long way down to the stage, Thackeray.’
Whistles from the audience greeted a pretty young woman who had joined the officers on the stage. Her dress had a certain theatricality about it, but it was her mode of walking—characterised by a singular mobility in the region of the hips—that left no-one in any doubt as to the class of person she represented. After several exaggerated backward glances, P.C.s Salt and Battree began their final chorus:
‘Poor old feet
Out on the beat
Pursuin’ the enforcement of the Law.
But you gets a saucy wink
And the offer of a drink
And that prevents yer feet from gettin’ sore—
Once more now—And that prevents yer feet from gettin’ sore!’
Then, with arch nods and pointing, to leave the audience in no doubt of their intention, they trotted off in pursuit of their assistant, shortly afterwards returning with her to take their bow.
‘At least we didn’t have to go to their aid,’ said Thackeray, conscious of the fury in Cribb’s silence.
‘If I ever meet ’em in the course of duty, they’ll need aid all right.’
The curtain descended and the limelight returned to the chairman’s table. ‘And now, my friends, after that rare entertainment, not being a temperance-observer, I shall enjoy a tipple of fizz generously subscribed by the table on my right. The show proceeds with a redoubtable display of manly vigour from that sovereign of strong men, the ’Ercules of Rotherhithe, the great Albert.’
Albert’s props were the most interesting so far. He stood like some eccentric costermonger behind a substantial platform on wheels, neatly stacked with an extraordinary array of articles: books, folded clothes, the plinth for a statue, a top-hat, flags, a picnic-hamper and three sets of bar-bells. With a nod to the conductor, a cue for the Anvil Chorus, Albert mounted his platform and stood with legs apart, chest inflated and head in profile to the auditorium, and then clasped his hands so that his biceps bobbed up like ferrets in a sack. He was wearing a one-piece costume of the type introduced by Leotard, the original Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze. Generous applause greeted this display of muscularity, so Albert climbed on to his plinth, leaned forward, positioned his legs carefully, and assumed the classic stance of the Discobolus.
‘Pose Plastique,’ explained Cribb authoritatively. ‘The man’s got a fine body. Pity about the moustache, though. Don’t look like ancient Greece to me.’
Albert now descended and progressed to a series of lifts with the bar-bells, accompanied by intermittent chords from the brass section and exhortations from the gallery. Just as the interest was threatening to flag, a novelty was introduced, in the person of an extremely stout, florid-faced woman in long white robes and a hat with red, white and blue ostrich feathers.
‘Blimey!’ shouted someone from the gallery. ‘Keep away from Albert, missus. You’ll rupture ’im.’
The lady’s contribution to the performance was soon made clear, however. While Albert ducked behind his platform to change his costume, she curtseyed and made the following announcement: ‘Now, ladies and gentlemen, in a tribute to a most distinguished member of our race, my son Albert gives his unique portrayal of the bard, Shakespeare!’
There, leaning against his plinth in the pose of the monument in Westminster Abbey, was Albert, with legs crossed, one arm resting on a pile of volumes on the plinth, the other holding an unfurled scroll. He wore breeches, doublet and cloak and a false beard. When the impact of this tableau was fully appreciated, he placed both hands on the edge of the plinth and gracefully upended himself into a slow handstand, the cloak draping itself elegantly over the back of the plinth. Then to a drum-roll and a powerful gesture from his mother’s right arm, Albert removed one of his hands from the plinth and remained poised on the other. The audience broke into open cheering. Theatres like Drury Lane and the Lyceum might have their Shakespeare; only the Grampian had him upside down on one hand!
‘Had me worried for a moment,’ admitted Cribb, when the strong man had righted himself. ‘There was the makings of a nasty little accident there. What are they doing now?’
Albert had disappeared behind the platform again for a change of costume while his mother occupied the centre of the stage with a Union Jack. To the strains of a patriotic tune, she began singing in a strong contralto,
‘O’er all the mighty world by British sons unfurled
The red and white and blue!
But to drag it in the mire now seems the sole desire
Of Gladstone and his crew.’
Unshaken by the mixed reception this got, she proceeded to:
‘Oh England, who shall shield thee from the shame?
And thy sons and thy daughters who shall save?
But we cherish in our hearts that one undying name—
Lord Beaconsfield, now lying in his grave!
Ladies and gentlemen, my son Albert now portrays the Greatness of Britain and her Empire!’
From the dangerous area of political controversy, the limelight made a timely return to Albert, now standing on the platform, which had been cleared of everything but a huge bar-bell and the picnic-basket. He was dressed convincingly as John Bull. A portentous thrumming from the orchestra-pit promised something even more spectacular than Shakespeare upside down.
John Bull spat into each hand and crouched at the bar-bell as the drumming slowly increased in volume. He braced, strained and began to lift, his veins protruding with the effort. The bar itself bowed impressively as it took the weight of the massive iron balls. He hauled it to the level of his knees. His hips. The Union Jack on his chest. His chin. His top-hat. Finally the lift was complete, his arms fully extended above his head, his legs vibrating with the colossal strain.
The role of the picnic-basket was now explained. While Albert bravely held his stance, his mother began unstrap-ping the lid.
‘Fancy bothering to strap it up, Sarge,’ murmured Thackeray. ‘The poor cove has to stand holding that lot above his head while she—Good Lord!’
One second of action transformed the scene. From the basket struggled a large white bulldog with a Union Jack tied about its middle. Snarling ferociously, it sank its teeth into the nearest of Albert’s quivering calves. His howl of pain echoed through the theatre, even after the crash of the bar-bell descending straight through the platform. Man and dog, still attached, disappeared in a mass of splintered wood.
‘That’s it, Thackeray!’ shouted Cribb. ‘Get the dog!’
Whether Thackeray used the route he had planned he could not remember afterwards; his descent was a four-second fumbling confusion among gilt bosoms and bottoms and torn curtains. But his debut on the stage was impeccable. The great Irving could not have moved with more despatch to the battered structure at the centre of the stage, pulled the debris aside with more vigour or seized the collar of the bulldog with more resolve. So surprised was the animal that it relaxed its grip on Albert and found itself hoisted by collar and tail-stump and clapped into the basket before uttering another growl.