Page:Punch Vol 148.djvu/470

Those who imagined that the Liverpool Commonwealth Company were to reproduce for us the grim and dour actualities of a Lancashire interior in the manner of the late Mr. Stanley Houghton and the Manchester School, were doomed to be disappointed. Apart from the Irish butler and the Scotch cyclist, there is very little in The Kiss Cure that might not have been just as well conveyed to us by any London playwright and company who had studied the manners of our Tooting minxes and our Surbiton bloods. Still, since even these types may have in them a touch of novelty for certain sections of a London audience, we had something to learn. Thus we came to know that there are minxes by habit and experience and minxes of occasion; and the same with bloods. There are those who practise indiscriminate kissing as a test of the emotions, and employ the art of jealousy as part of the daily routine of what they call flirtation; while others, not among the mystics, allow themselves to be temporarily initiated into these rules for single and serious ends, and make a sad mess of it. All this may be very suburban, but when the actors' hearts, as here, are in it, you can, with a little goodwill, be sufficiently amused. And anyhow, after a course of stage problems and intrigues, the whole thing looks as innocent as the habit of ice-cream and claret-cup.

The company played well together. Miss Winwood was a practised minx, though her artfulness did not extend to her gestures, which suffered from angularity. Mr. Armstrong, as a Scotchman with a stutter, who knew the rules of the game, and Mr. Cooper, as a learner, made good fun. But the best sketch was by Mr. Shine as the Irish butler. He said little, but you could see him thinking a lot. And I am glad to believe that his opinion of the society in which he found himself was much the same as mine.

Pauline, a dialogue by the same author, Mr. Ronald Jeans, preceded The Kiss Cure. It is slightly, but only very slightly, less innocent. The lady tests her lover's devotion by alleging that she is not married to the man she lives with. Instead of feeling a passionate shock of joy at this news of her legal freedom, the gentleman takes the view that her virtue is damaged, and her value, for him, depreciated. An egoistic view, of course, but I don't blame him, though the lady did. Miss Madge McIntosh made her part seem almost probable.

M. le Marquis de Sevigné, aged 46, officer of cavalry and military attaché to the French Embassy at Constantinople, took no pains to disguise from us that he wanted to be a Quixote. He had no trouble with his nose (like Cyrano de Bergerac), or other physical impediment—indeed he looked very well in his French-grey tunic and vermilion breeches—but he had had no opportunity of distinguishing himself either in love or war, and he was frankly on the look-out for his chance. It was unfortunate that when it came it offered him no better scope for distinction than could be got out of the murder of a very disagreeable Englishman who was obviously better dead. It meant of course that Sevigné couldn't get a medal for his feat, nor even find any satisfaction in talking about it at large.

On the other hand, it was fortunate for him that the only person who had proof of his guilt (the head of the Turkish police) was under a personal obligation to him, and so arranged to hang somebody else who wanted hanging anyhow. Fortunate, too, that the present War broke out the very morning after the murder, thus affording him a lively distraction from the embarrassment of his position, though I daresay that an ordinary domestic murder might well escape adverse comment on the shores of the Bosphorus. My only regret was that he hadn't studied the papers and seen that a war was likely to occur; for then he might have reserved himself for an occasion in which "the right to kill" was certain to be more generally recognised. And if a scrap of paper was an essential feature of his quest, he might, by waiting a few days, have killed a number of the enemy for the sake of a document that was really worth while—namely, the Belgian Treaty. As it was, in his hurry to be a hero, he had to stab a prospective Ally for the relatively vulgar purpose of securing a scrap of paper with nothing on it but a confession of frailty signed by his victim's wife. One knows these scraps of paper. Stage husbands (as in Searchlights) have a passion for them. Here the wife is forced to sign under menace of an open scandal. But how the signing of it would serve to prevent this inconvenience when the husband was in any case determined on a divorce no one knew, and no one ever will know.

The play is something better than a sordid melodrama of intrigue and murder relieved by uniforms and a cosmopolitan setting. The scene in the Pavilion is clearly designed to afford a trial of character. From his concealment in Lady Falkland's detached appartement à coucher, the Marquis involuntarily overhears a conversation which proves her not only to be unfaithful to her husband (which mattered little) but unworthy of his own devotion (which mattered a good deal). Yet the revelation leaves him unshaken in his resolve to defend her at the risk of his life.

Apart from this situation and its issues, the interest lay for us in the continued strain that Lady Falkland was called upon to endure. Forced by the brutality and infidelity of her husband (flagrant) and by a sense of friendlessness (imaginary) to seek protection in the wrong arms, her heart was torn between passion for her lover and an overwhelming sense of the deepening shadow of tragedy. She seeks relief in confession to a woman friend; and in this scene the humanity of Miss Irene Vanbrugh made irresistible appeal. More than her words, the play of her lips as she tried to wear a brave face revealed the insufferable anguish of her heart. I have seen Miss Vanbrugh in many such ordeals, but cannot remember a finer delicacy in her revelation of womanhood.

Sir Herbert Tree was the hero, suffering a little from the distraction