"Where did these come from?" the exasperated wife shrieked, flaunting them before the husband's eyes.
"Where did you get them?" He asked, trembling, and unable to think of any good excuse to make.
"I got them in your coat pocket," his spouse shouted, piling up the evidence and agony in a way that was excruciating.
"By jingo! is that so?" exclaimed the husband, coming suddenly to a sitting posture in bed, and bringing his hands together vehemently. "Now, I'll bet $4 Charley——," giving the name of his merchant friend, "put them there. He told me he had a pair that he was going to make a present of to one of the "Olivette" girls at the——."
Brilliant as this thought was, it did not satisfy the little lady. She kept up the argument all day, and that night paid a visit to the merchant's wife, where the affair got into such a tangle that the two husbands brought in a bachelor friend to shoulder the blame, and who made the excuse that the whole thing was a trick put up by a few gentlemen (among them the bachelor was not) on the dramatic man and merchant to get them into domestic trouble, as they had succeeded in doing, beyond their most sanguine desires.
And now that we have been long enough at the back door of the theatre, let us go home and come around to-morrow night to have a view of the plagues and annoyances to be found before the foot-lights.
CHAPTER V.
BEFORE THE FOOT-LIGHTS.
There are people who patronize the theatre who do not go there simply to see the play or to be pleased by the players, and whose interest in the stage is more than double discounted by the interest they manifest in and towards the audience. The "masher" makes it a market in which to display his fascinations and call upon the susceptible fraction of femininity to inspect and avail themselves of his heart-breaking and soul-wasting wares. Whether he modestly takes his stand in the rear of the auditorium, overcoat on arm and stove-pipe hat gracefully poised upon the thumb of his left hand, while, with polished opera-glass, he sweeps the sea of variegated millinery and obtrusive-hued cosmetics, or bravely hangs up his charms to view on the front row of the dress circle, or prominently displays them in a proscenium box, he is ever the same offensive and shameless barber-and-tailor-shop decoration, moved by a wild ambition to attract and hold feminine attention, and always attaining to a degree of notoriety among the masculine theatre-goers that keeps him overwhelmed with contempt, and causes him to be as readily recognized as if he had a tag tied to his back or spread across his vest front, declaring him to be a fisher after femininity. When the "masher" takes the shape of the young blood, whose short and tightly-fighting coat is matched by the shallowness of the crown of his straight-brimmed hat, and whose eye-glasses straddle his nose as gracefully as his twenty-five-cent cane is carried in his hand, and this irresistible combination of attractions is thrust upon the audience from a box opening, the acme of the lady-killing art is reached and if all the world does not admire the effective tableau it must be because all the world is unappreciative and the "masher" stands on an æsthetic plane to which the rest of mankind cannot hope to aspire.
THE "MASHER."
But the "masher" is only a fraction of the class of amusement patrons to which attention has been called in the opening sentence of this chapter. Apart from the people who deem it their duty to come tramping into the theatre while the performance is going on, and whose coming is followed by a triumphal flourish of banging seats, and the heaving footbeats of hurrying ushers, to the intense disgust of all who care to hear the first act of the play, there are others who have a hundred ways of annoying an audience, and who make a very effectual use of their gifts in this direction. There is the member of the "profesh,"—the gaseous advance agent, or the bloviate business manager, the actor "up a stump," or the "super" who has played the part of a silent but spectacular lictor with John McCullough or Tom Keene, and who sits in the rear of the house, but sufficiently forward to be distinctly heard by people in the dress circle, criticising the mannerisms of the ladies or gentlemen on the stage and "guying" everybody in the cast from the star down to the frightened and stiff-kneed little ballet girl whom an inscrutable Providence has allowed to wander in upon the scene occasionally, to say, "Yes, mum," or "No, mum." The leisurely but loud professional who thus disports himself must necessarily enjoy a large share of the audience's attention, and the more of this he attracts the more he is encouraged to be extravagant in his criticisms and unreserved in his elocution. He sometimes must dispute the title to obstreperous obtrusiveness with some liquor-laden auditor who has succeeded in passing the door-keeper only to find that the heat of the house has accelerated his inebriation and given freedom and license to his tongue until the "bouncer" lifts him out of his seat by the collar and deposits him in a reflective and emetic mood on the curbstone in front of the theatre. Then, too, a crowd of friends sometimes get together in the parquette, who begin a conversation before the first curtain rises and keep it going on in careless and annoying tones until the final flourish of the orchestra arrives with the dimming of the lights as the audience files out. But if the loud members of the "profesh," the interjective inebriate, and the crowd of communicative friends are not on hand to furnish diversion for the folks who are trying to follow what is going forward on the stage, there is one other never-failing source of distraction and annoyance—the giddy and gushing usher. It is safe to bet that just when the most pathetic passage of a play is reached, or the tragedian is singing smallest, a few ushers will throw themselves hastily together in the lobby and hold a mass meeting long and loud enough to be taken for a November night political meeting, if there were only a stake wagon and a few Chinese lanterns strewn around. Indeed, the usher seems to assume that he is a sort of safety-valve through which a disturbance must break out now and then to offset the quiet of the audience. If the usher isn't plying his fiendish proclivity, some bald-headed man in the parquette is sure to throw his skating rink over the back of the seat, and, with shining brow turned up towards the sun-burner in the dome, mouth rounded out like the base of a cupola and nostrils working like a suction pump, his beautiful snore will rise above the wildest roar of the orchestra and drown the mellifluous racket of the big bass drum, until some friendly hand disturbs the dreamer, and the "or-g-g-g-g-g-g-g!" that rushes up his nostrils, down his throat and out through his ears, is thus gently and perhaps only temporarily interrupted. The enthusiast—the man who is carried away by the spirit of the scene—is also a source of annoyance, and when he signifies from the balcony his willingness to take a hand in what is being enacted on the stage, damning the villain heartily, and, like the sailor of old, openly sympathizing with femininity in distress, he first becomes a target for the gallery boys' gutter-wit