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Stage-Land-Part4_Jerome K.Jerome(1859-1927)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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and drink for the stage lawyer.

They all go about telling their own and their friends' secrets to



perfect strangers on the stage. Whenever two people have five minutes

to spare on the stage they tell each other the story of their lives.



"Sit down and I will tell you the story of my life" is the stage

equivalent for the "Come and have a drink" of the outside world.



The good stage lawyer has generally nursed the heroine on his knee

when a baby (when she was a baby, we mean)--when she was only so high.



It seems to have been a part of his professional duties. The good

stage lawyer also kisses all the pretty girls in the play and is



expected to chuck the housemaid under the chin. It is good to be a

good stage lawyer.



The good stage lawyer also wipes away a tear when sad things happen;

and he turns away to do this and blows his nose, and says he thinks he



has a fly in his eye. This touching trait in his character is always

held in great esteem by the audience and is much applauded.



The good stage lawyer is never by any chance a married man. (Few good

men are, so we gather from our married lady friends.) He loved in



early life the heroine's mother. That "sainted woman" (tear and nose

business) died and is now among the angels--the gentleman who did



marry her, by the bye, is not quite so sure about this latter point,

but the lawyer is fixed on the idea.



In stage literature of a frivolous nature the lawyer is a very

different individual. In comedy he is young, he possesses chambers,



and he is married (there is no doubt about this latter fact); and his

wife and his mother-in-law spend most of the day in his office and



make the dull old place quite lively for him.

He only has one client. She is a nice lady and affable, but her



antecedents are doubtful, and she seems to be no better than she ought

to be--possibly worse. But anyhow she is the sole business that the



poor fellow has--is, in fact, his only source of income, and might,

one would think, under such circumstances be accorded a welcome by his



family. But his wife and his mother-in-law, on the contrary, take a

violent dislike to her, and the lawyer has to put her in the



coal-scuttle or lock her up in the safe whenever he hears either of

these female relatives of his coming up the stairs.



We should not care to be the client of a farcical comedy stage lawyer.

Legal transactions are trying to the nerves under the most favorable



circumstances; conducted by a farcical stage lawyer, the business

would be too exciting for us.



THE ADVENTURESS.

She sits on a table and smokes a cigarette. A cigarette on the stage



is always the badge of infamy.

In real life the cigarette is usually the hall-mark of the



particularly mild and harmless individual. It is the dissipation of

the Y.M.C.A.; the innocent joy of the pure-hearted boy long ere the



demoralizing influence of our vaunted civilization has dragged him

down into the depths of the short clay.



But behind the cigarette on the stage lurks ever black-hearted

villainy and abandoned womanhood.



The adventuress is generally of foreign extraction. They do not make

bad women in England--the article is entirely of continental



manufacture and has to be imported. She speaks English with a

charming little French accent, and she makes up for this by speaking



French with a good sound English one.

She seems a smart business woman, and she would probably get on very



well if it were not for her friends and relations. Friends and

relations are a trying class of people even in real life, as we all



know, but the friends and relations of the stage adventuress are a

particularly irritating lot. They never leave her; never does she get



a day or an hour off from them. Wherever she goes, there the whole

tribe goes with her.



They all go with her in a body when she calls on her young man, and it

is as much as she can do to persuade them to go into the next room



even for five minutes, and give her a chance. When she is married

they come and live with her.



They know her dreadful secret and it keeps them in comfort for years.

Knowing somebody's secret seems, on the stage, to be one of the most



profitable and least exhausting professions going.

She is fond of married life, is the adventuress, and she goes in for



it pretty extensively. She has husbands all over the globe, most of

them in prison, but they escape and turn up in the last act and spoil



all the poor girl's plans. That is so like husbands--no

consideration, no thought for their poor wives. They are not a



prepossessing lot, either, those early husbands of hers. What she




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