第61章
"Scene, a railway-platform.Lights down.Enter Prince (in disguise, of course) and faithful Attendant.This is the Prince--"(taking Bruno's hand) "and here stands his humble Servant!"What is your Royal Highness next command.?"
And he made a most courtier-like low bow to his puzzled little friend.
"Oo're not a Servant!" Bruno scornfully exclaimed."Oo're a Gemplun!""Servant, I assure your Royal Highness!" Eric respectfully insisted.
"Allow me to mention to your Royal Highness my various situations--past, present, and future.""What did oo begin wiz?" Bruno asked, beginning to enter into the jest.
"Was oo a shoe-black?"
"Lower than that, your Royal Highness! Years ago, I offered myself as a Slave--as a 'Confidential Slave,' I think it's called?" he asked, turning to Lady Muriel.
But Lady Muriel heard him not: something had gone wrong with her glove, which entirely engrossed her attention.
"Did oo get the place?" said Bruno.
"Sad to say, Your Royal Highness, I did not! So I had to take a situation as--as Waiter, which I have now held for some years haven't I?" He again glanced at Lady Muriel.
"Sylvie dear, do help me to button this glove!" Lady Muriel whispered, hastily stooping down, and failing to hear the question.
"And what will oo be next?" said Bruno.
"My next place will, I hope, be that of Groom.And after that--""Don't puzzle the child so!" Lady Muriel interrupted.
"What nonsense you talk!"
"--after that," Eric persisted, "I hope to obtain the situation of Housekeeper, which--Fourth Act!" he proclaimed, with a sudden change of tone."Lights turned up.Red lights.Green lights.Distant rumble heard.Enter a passenger-train!"And in another minute the train drew up alongside of the platform, and a stream of passengers began to flow out from the booking office and waiting-rooms.
"Did you ever make real life into a drama?" said the Earl.
"Now just try.I've often amused myself that way.
Consider this platform as our stage.Good entrances and exits on both sides, you see.Capital background scene: real engine moving up and down.
All this bustle, and people passing to and fro, must have been most carefully rehearsed! How naturally they do it! With never a glance at the audience! And every grouping is quite fresh, you see.
No repetition!"
It really was admirable, as soon as I began to enter into it from this point of view.Even a porter passing, with a barrow piled with luggage, seemed so realistic that one was tempted to applaud.
He was followed by an angry mother, with hot red face, dragging along two screaming children, and calling, to some one behind, "John! Come on!"Enter John, very meek, very silent, and loaded with parcels.
And he was followed, in his turn, by a frightened little nursemaid, carrying a fat baby, also screaming.All the children screamed.
"Capital byplay!" said the old man aside."Did you notice the nursemaid's look of terror? It was simply perfect!""You have struck quite a new vein," I said."To most of us Life and its pleasures seem like a mine that is nearly worked out.""Worked out!" exclaimed the Earl."For any one with true dramatic instincts, it is only the Overture that is ended! The real treat has yet to begin.You go to a theatre, and pay your ten shillings for a stall, and what do you get for your money? Perhaps it's a dialogue between a couple of farmers--unnatural in their overdone caricature of farmers' dress---more unnatural in their constrained attitudes and gestures--most unnatural in their attempts at ease and geniality in their talk.Go instead and take a seat in a third-class railway-carriage, and you'll get the same dialogue done to the life!
Front-seats--no orchestra to block the view--and nothing to pay!""Which reminds me," said Eric."There is nothing to pay on receiving a telegram! Shall we enquire for one?" And he and Lady Muriel strolled off in the direction of the Telegraph-Office.
"I wonder if Shakespeare had that thought in his mind," I said, "when he wrote 'All the world's a stage'?"The old man sighed."And so it is, "he said, "look at it as you will.
Life is indeed a drama; a drama with but few encores--and no bouquets!"he added dreamily."We spend one half of it in regretting the things we did in the other half!""And the secret of enjoying it," he continued, resuming his cheerful tone, "is intensity!""But not in the modern aesthetic sense, I presume? Like the young lady, in Punch, who begins a conversation with 'Are you intense?'""By no means!" replied the Earl.
"What I mean is intensity of thought--a concentrated attention.
We lose half the pleasure we might have in Life, by not really attending.
Take any instance you like: it doesn't matter how trivial the pleasure may be--the principle is the same.Suppose A and B are reading the same second-rate circulating-library novel.A never troubles himself to master the relationships of the characters, on which perhaps all the interest of the story depends: he 'skips' over all the descriptions of scenery, and every passage that looks rather dull: he doesn't half attend to the passages he does read: he goes on reading merely from want of resolution to find another occupation--for hours after he ought to have put the book aside: and reaches the 'FINIS' in a state of utter weariness and depression! B puts his whole soul into the thing--on the principle that 'whatever is worth doing is worth doing well':
he masters the genealogies: he calls up pictures before his 'mind's eye'
as he reads about the scenery: best of all, he resolutely shuts the book at the end of some chapter, while his interest is yet at its keenest, and turns to other subjects; so that, when next he allows himself an hour at it, it is like a hungry man sitting down to dinner: