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"Right!" said Mr. Marrier. "Strike!" "Don't strike!" contradicted Carlo Trent. "Strike, I tell you! We must get on with the second act." The voices resounded queerly in the empty theatre. The stage was invaded by scene-shifters before the curtain could descend again. Edward Henry heard a tripping step behind him. It was the faithful typewriting girl. "I say," he said.
Instead of representing an interior scene by a series of wings set one behind the other, the scene-shifters now built the side walls of a room solidly from front to rear; and the actors were made to enter, not by walking through the wings, but by opening real doors that turned upon their hinges.
But the opera experienced no interruption: such an event would be regarded as a public calamity in the capital. In fact, this expensive establishment affords employ to a vast number of persons. The singers, dancers, musicians, machinists, painters, tailors, dress-makers, scene-shifters, &c. attached to it, would constitute a little nation.
But it happened, not many years since, that Port Deposit was awakened to a sudden notion of the value of the granite of the cliff, and, as commerce is a most ruthless contemner of all romance, and never hesitates between a speculation of profit and a speculation of history, Talbot's Cave soon began to figure conspicuously in the Price Current, and in a very little while disappeared, like a witch from the stage, in blasts of sulphur fire and rumbling thunder, under the management of those effective scene-shifters, the quarrymen.
The orchestra tuned their instruments with unusual care, the scene-shifters set their stage with lavish elegance, the prompter heroically took his seat in the stifling nook provided for him, and the actors dressed with trembling hands that dropped the pins, and perspiring brows whereon the powder wouldn't stick.
And now, in pity to an afflicted parent, hear for a while his offspring's Roscian capabilities. I abhor scene-shifters; at least, their province lies more among pantomimes, farces, and comedies, than in the region of the solemn tragic muse; her incidents should rather partake of the sculpture-like dignity of tableaux.
She did not know where to stand. The scene-shifters had come to carry away the scenes that were piled up in her corner, and one of the huge slips had nearly fallen on her. A troop of girls in single coloured gowns and poke bonnets had stopped to stare at her.
It enabled me to walk composedly and not too hurriedly through the crowd behind the scenes supers, scene-shifters, principals, none of whom seemed to be aware as yet of the hoax practised on Mademoiselle Mars' maid; and I reckon that I was out of the stage door exactly five minutes after Theodore had called the damsel away.
All the appliances were of the roughest sort: a few flowers served to indicate a garden, crowds and armies were represented by a dozen scene-shifters with swords and bucklers, heroes rode in and out on hobby-horses, and a scroll on a post told whether the scene was at Athens or London.
About this time a famous star, opening a three days' engagement, got into difficulties with the scene-shifters' union over an unjust demand for extra payment, refused to be blackmailed, and canceled the second performance. One paper only gave the facts, and that was the "Clarion," generally regarded as the defender and mouthpiece of the laboring as against the capitalistic interests.
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