The Metropolis

— there was one idea iipon which all the interest of it was based; and Montague strove to analyse this idea and formulate it to himself. There are certain life principles — one might call them moral axioms — which are the result of the experience of countless ages of the human race, and upon the adherence to which the continuance of the race depends. And here was an audience by whom all these principles were — '• not questioned, nor yet disputed, nor yet denied

— but to whom the denial was the axiom, something which it would be too banal to state jHatly, but which it was elegant and witty to take for granted. In this audience there were elderly people, and married men and women, and young men and maidens; and a perfect gale of laughter swept through it at a story of a married woman whose lover had left her when he got married: —'

" She must have been heartbroken," said the' leading lady.

" She was desperate," said the leading man, with a grin.

" What did she do," asked the lady. " Go and shoot herself ? "

" Worse than that," said the man. " She went back to her husband and had a baby !"

But to complete your understanding of the significance of this play, you must bring yourself

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to realise that it was not merely a play, but a hind of a play; it had a name — a "musical comedy" — the meaning of which everyone understood. Hundreds of such plays were written and produced, and "dramatic critics" went to see them and gravely discussed them, and many thousands of people made their livings by travelling over the country and playing them; stately theatres were built for them, and hxindreds of thousands of people paid their money every night to see them. And all this no joke and no nightmare — but a thing that really existed. Men and women were doing these things — actual flesh-and-blood human beings.

Montague wondered, in an awe-stricken sort of way, what kind of human being it could be who had flourished the cane and made the grimaces in that play. Later on, when he came to know the "Tenderloin," he met this same actor, and he found that he had begun life as a little Irish " mick " who lived in a tenement, and whose mother stood at the head of the stairway and defended him with a rolling-pin against a policeman who was chasing him. He had discovered that he could make a living by his comical antics; but when he came home and told his mother that he had been offered twenty dollars a week by a show manager, she gave him a licking for lying to her. Now he was making three thousand dollars a week — more than the President of the United States and his cabinet; but he was not happy, as he confided to Montague, because he did not know how to read, and this was a cause pf perpetual humiliation. The secret desire of

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this little actor's heart was to play Shakespeare; he had " Hamlet" read to him, and pondered how to act it — all the time that he was flourishing his little cane and making his grimaces! He had chanced to be on the stage when a fire had broken out, and five or six hundred victims of greed were roasted to death. The actor had pleaded with the people to keep their seats, but all in vain; and all nis life thereafter he went about with this vision of horror in his mind, and haunted by the passionate conviction that he had failed because of his lack of education —■ that if only he had been a man of culture, he would have been able to think of something to say to hold those terror-stricken people!

At three o'clock in the morning the performance came to an end, and then there were more refreshments; and Mrs. Vivie Patton came and sat by him, and they had a nice comfortable gossip. When Mrs. Vivie once got started at talking about people, her tongue ran on like a windmill.

There was Reggie Mann, meandering about and simpering at people. Reggie was in his glory at Mrs. de Graffenried's affairs. Reggie had arranged all this — he did the designing and the ordering, and contracted for the shows with the agents. You could bet that he had got his commission on them, too — though sometimes Mrs. de Graffenried got the shows to come for nothing, because of the advertising her name would bring. Commissions were Reggie's specialty — he had begun life as an auto agent.

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