MELODRAMA AND THE CIGARETTE.

Lake County Press, Issue 981, 26 September 1901, Page 7

MELODRAMA AND THE CIGARETTE.

The stage was occupied by a young woman with a sad face, dressed in a simple frock of grey and white, who was telling a. dashing young man, with a black moustache, that she could never love him. I thought she was being unnecessarily severe with him, until the journalist explained, in a whisper that the man was a villian. 11 How do you know?" I asked inereduously.

“ Moustache.” explained the journalist, briefly; "also cigarettes. The hero, you will find, is always clean shaven.” ..hist then, a clean-shaven and middle-aged sort of young man, who contrived to look rather like a respectable butler, rushed on and disturbed the picturesque tete-a-tete in a most tactless and uncalled-for manner. “ Cease your persecutions!” he 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 lingers; whereupon the heroine clung to the middle-aged butler, and implored him to curb his impetuous spirit. “ I cannot trust Don Alfonso!” she cried. “Something tells me he is an evil man. Besides,” she added, quite as an after-thought, “he murdered my father. I’m quite sure he did 1” After this surprising remark, which did not seem to disconcert the villain in the least, the hero rather ineptly told him to go away at once or he would send for (lie police. Don Alfonso lighted another cigarette. tossed the match with a superb gesture towards the hero, and jauntily retired. “ Why don’t they send for the police, if he has really murdered somebody?” 1 asked the journalist. “ They’ve got to make him last through four more acts,” he. explained.

Thi 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 tho young squire?” cried the latter in hearty tones. “Shiver my timbers, that 1 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 nobody 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!” I remarked to the journalist. “ Oh, well,” he pointed out. “ there must be a certain artistic satisfaction in having a monopoly of the moustache and the cigarettes.” “ But it doesn’t matter how well he acts,” I objected. “ Just because he tries to prevent a really nice girl from marrying a. nincompoop of a man who can’t smoke, he has got to be hissed for five acts. I think it’s a shame !” “Ah !” said the journalist, “ that’s because you have not yet acquired the melodramatic frame of mind ” During the next two acts I had to own that ho was right. It seemed so absurd for a villian to poison two people, stab three more, and then strangle his accomplices, just because he wanted to marry somebody who didn’t want to marry him. fn a West End play he would probably have fought one duel with an injured husband because lie had run away with the wife whom tho 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 jjeroinc. Still, when 1 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 tiic 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 reality by Don Alfonso. By this time, however, all my sympathies Mere with the heroine, in spite of her hopeless lack of style ; and 1 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 the intention of destroying the heroine, I could not understand his attitude at all. What ;lsc 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 More 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, tud makes friends with a magnificent young man and a, cigarette case, really cannot expect to live happily ever after —the fifth act.

By this time the only surviving wrongdoer was the wicked and splendid Don Alfonso ; and to him the heroine gave one last chance of salvation “ Why won’t you go away?” she said, in a feeble, complaining sort of way. “You killed my father, you know you did!” The villian retorted with a careless laugh, and—the inevitable cigarette. But it was the last lie ever drew from bis case. Pulling out » revolver, which no one in a melodrama should ever bo without, the virtuous heroine shot him dead then and there. Why she had not done so long before 1 was unable to discover ; but 1 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 tin end to a life of crime and villainy.

“ Manslaughter 1“ commented the journalist, as we. went out. “ She'd have been run in if the curtain hadn’t come down.” “ How can you?” T exclaimed indignantly.

“ Silo was perfectly justified in killing that wicked and deceitful— —Well, what's the joke, please?” The journalist was smiling in the most aggravating way. “Melodrama is such an absurd thing,” ho observed calmly; " you can't possibly take it seriously for a moment, can you?” I ignored (his remark altogether. "1 have at last found the kind of play I like,” 1 declared. “ Why did no one ever tell mo before that the only endurable kind of realism was to be found iu melodrama?”

1 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 suspicions of everybody we met in the street afterwards ; and i felt quite convinced that tlie policeman who was watching ns so intently, as we wailed 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 found him, to my alarm, in the act of lighting a cigarette. “If you're going to smoke,” 1 said nervously, " 1 think I’ll go home alone,

please. I don't want to be stabbed or poisoned, or ” The journalist threw away his match and hailed a. tram. “It’s all right,” he said ; “I haven’t got a moustache. Pall Mall Gazette.’