MELODRAMA AND THE CIGARETTE.

Evening Star, Issue 11656, 17 September 1901, Page 8

MELODRAMA AND THE CIGARETTE.

The stage was occupied by a young wqtnan with a sad face, dressed in a simple frock of grey und white, who was telling a dashing young in«n, with a black moustache, that she could novcr lovo him. I thought she was being unnecessarily severe with hinf. until the journalist explainod, in a whisper that the man was a viUian. "How do yon know?" Tasked increduously. " Moustache,"' explained the journalist, briefly ; " also cigarettes. The hero, yon will find, is always clean shaven." Just then, a clean-shaven and middle-aged sort of young man, who contrived to look rather Mcc a. respectable butler, rushed on and disturbed the picturesque tete-a-tete in a most tactless and uncalled-for manner. "Cease your persecutions!" be said angrily to the villain, who. after all. had only been making the heroine an offer of marriage, which seemed a harmless sort of offence to me, compared with what generally happens in a West End play. "Impulsive boy!" retorted the villain, with a snap of his fingers; whereupon the heroine clnng to the middle-aged butler, and implored him to curb his impetuous spirit. "I cannot trust Bon Alfonso!" she cried. " Something tells mo he is an evil man. Besides," she added, quite as an after-thought, " he murdered my father, I'm quite sure he did!" After this surprising remark, which did not seem to disconcert the villain in the '?ast, the hero rather ineptly told him to go away at once or ho would send for the police. Don Alfonso lighted another cigarette, tossed the match with a superb gesture towards tho hero, and jauntily retired. " Why don't they send for the police, if he has really murdered sottfebody?" I asked the journalist. " They've got to make him lost through four more acts," he explained. The next scene was laid in a lonely cave on the sea shore, and disclosed Don Alfonso talking to a kind of piratical person in a blue jersey. "Murder the young squire?" cried the latter in hearty tones. "Shiver my timbers, that I will. Say the word, cap'en, and I'll weigh anchor and nail my flag _to the mizzenmast. Boat ahoy!" Having fired off all these nautical expressions with amazing rapidity, the piratical person then executed a hornpipe, while Don Alfonso had a scene with his other accomplice, an adventuress who wore Parisian clothes, and was altogether a most attractive person. She was, however, suitably wicked; and she promised to engage the heroine in conversation while Ben Salt, the piratical person, was murdering the hero. " Ay, ay!" said the piratical person to noIkxlj- in particular; and he rolled off into the wings with the accepted nautical gait. •" That's the kind of villian who has noble moments." said the journalist. " I wouldn't be a villian for anything!" 1 remarked to the journalist. " Oh, well " lie pointed out, "there must be a certain a rustic satisfaction in having a monopoly of the moustache and the cigarettes." "But i: doesn't matter how well he acts," I object' .il. "Just because he tries to prevent ii ivuliy nice girl from marrying a nincompoop nf a man who can't smoke, he has got to lie hissed for live acts. I think it's a -hume,!" "Ah !" said tlje journalist, " that'» because you have not yet acquired the melo'lntmatic frame of mind" During the next two acts I had to own that he was right. It seemed so absurd for a villian to poison two people, stab three more, and then strangle his accomplices, just because ho wanted to marry somebody who didn't want- to marry him. In a West End play he would probably have fought one duel with an injured husband because he had run away with the wife whom the injured husband did not love. Then, too, on the West End stage, Parisian gowns are not always symbolic of vice; but in the East nothing but the rather dowdy clothes of the local dressmaker would be considered appropriate to the innocence and purity of the heroine. Still, when I had once" readjusted my vitiated notions of stage morality, the melodramatic point of view was easy enough to grasp. " Of course," I heard the journalist murmur cynically. " handwriting counts for nothing, though she has known the writer for a year." He referred to the heroine, who had just fallen a. victim to the simple device of a forged letter,, purporting to have come from the hero, but written in realitv by Don Alfonso. By this time, however, all my sympathies wero with the heroine, in spite of her hopeless lack of style; and I had ceased to worry about anything so unnecessary as probability. Naturally, she had walked into the trap laid for her, because she was innocent and unsuspicious of evil. And when my companion even regretted the awful fate of the adventuress, who was burned, Parisian clothes and all, in the house she had ignited with tho intention of destroying the heroine, I could not understand his attitude at all. What ?lse could she expect? If she had been content to stay at home, and make her own dresses, and marry a middle-aged young man who habitually wore a frock coat and a. top hat in the garden, she would not have been burned at all. But anyone who dresses really well, and goes about stabbing people, uifl makes friends with a magnificent young man and a. cigarette case, really cannot expect to live happily ever after—the fifth By this time the only surviving wrongdoer was the wicked and splendid' Don Alfonso; and to him the heroine gave one List chance of salvation. " Whv won't vou ;:o away?" she said, in a feeble, complain>n- sort of way. "Yon killed my father, you know yon did!" The villian retorted «;ifli a careless laugh, and—the inevitable cigarette. But it was the last he ever drew trom his case. Pulling oub a revolver, which no one m a. melodrama should ever he without, the virtuous heroine shot him dead then and there. Whv she had not done so long before I was unable to discover ; but I heartily agreed with her lover who came upon the scene in his usual inept manner as soon as the deed was done, that she had heroically put an end to a. life ol crime ajid villaiuy. "Manslaughter!"" commented the journalist, as we went out. " She'd have been run in if the curtain hadn't come down." " Bow can you?" I exclaimed indignantly. ' She was perfectly justified in killing that wicked and deceitful Well, what's the .joke please?" The journalist was smiling m the most, aggravating way. " Melodrama t- such an absurd thing." ho observed calmly; "you can't possibly take it seriously for a moment, can you?" I jg. yored this remark altogether. "I have at last found the kind of play I like," 1 declared. "Why did no one ever tell me before that the only endurable kind of realism was to be- found in melodrama?" T began to wish, however, as we regained the outer world, that the only endurable kind of realism did not include'quite so many murders. It was impossible to pass three hours in the company of Don Alfonso and his gang without feeling suspicious of everybody we met in the sti-eet afterwards; and I felt quite convinced that the policeman who was watching us so intently, as we waited in the sunshine for our tram, was in reality a villain in disguise, who was looking out for someone to stab! I turned to mention this to the journalist! and foimd him, to my alarm, in the act of lighting a cigarette. "If you're going to smoke," I said nervously, "I think I'll go home alone, please. I don't want to be stabbed or poisoned, or " The journalist threw awav his match and hailed a tram. "It's all right," he said; ' I haven't got a moustache."—'Pall Mall (razette.'