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Part Two, Chapter 2 - AN IMPORTANT ENGAGEMENT
Historians, when they come to deal with the opening years of the
twentieth century, will probably call this the Music-Hall Age. At the
time of the great invasion the music-halls dominated England. Every
town and every suburb had its Hall, most of them more than one. The
public appetite for sight-seeing had to be satisfied somehow, and the
music-hall provided the easiest way of doing it. The Halls formed a
common place on which the celebrity and the ordinary man could meet. If
an impulsive gentleman slew his grandmother with a coal-hammer, only a
small portion of the public could gaze upon his pleasing features at
the Old Bailey. To enable the rest to enjoy the intellectual treat, it
was necessary to engage him, at enormous expense, to appear at a
music-hall. There, if he happened to be acquitted, he would come on the
stage, preceded by an asthmatic introducer, and beam affably at the
public for ten minutes, speaking at intervals in a totally inaudible
voice, and then retire; to be followed by some enterprising lady who
had endeavoured, unsuccessfully, to solve the problem of living at the
rate of ten thousand a year on an income of nothing, or who had
performed some other similarly brainy feat.
It was not till the middle of September that anyone conceived what one
would have thought the obvious idea of offering music-hall engagements
to the invading generals.
The first man to think of it was Solly Quhayne, the rising young agent.
Solly was the son of Abraham Cohen, an eminent agent of the Victorian
era. His brothers, Abe Kern, Benjamin Colquhoun, Jack Coyne, and Barney
Cowan had gravitated to the City; but Solly had carried on the old
business, and was making a big name for himself. It was Solly who had
met Blinky Bill Mullins, the prominent sand-bagger, as he emerged from
his twenty years' retirement at Dartmoor, and booked him solid for a
thirty-six months' lecturing tour on the McGinnis circuit. It was to
him, too, that Joe Brown, who could eat eight pounds of raw meat in
seven and a quarter minutes, owed his first chance of displaying his
gifts to the wider public of the vaudeville stage.
The idea of securing the services of the invading generals came to him
in a flash.
"S'elp me!" he cried. "I believe they'd go big; put 'em on where you
like."
Solly was a man of action. Within a minute he was talking to the
managing director of the Mammoth Syndicate Halls on the telephone. In
five minutes the managing director had agreed to pay Prince Otto of
Saxe-Pfennig five hundred pounds a week, if he could be prevailed upon
to appear. In ten minutes the Grand Duke Vodkakoff had been engaged,
subject to his approval, at a weekly four hundred and fifty by the
Stone-Rafferty circuit. And in a quarter of an hour Solly Quhayne,
having pushed his way through a mixed crowd of Tricky Serios and
Versatile Comedians and Patterers who had been waiting to see him for
the last hour and a half, was bowling off in a taximeter-cab to the
Russian lines at Hampstead.
General Vodkakoff received his visitor civilly, but at first without
enthusiasm. There were, it seemed, objections to his becoming an
artiste. Would he have to wear a properly bald head and sing songs
about wanting people to see his girl? He didn't think he could. He had
only sung once in his life, and that was twenty years ago at a
bump-supper at Moscow University. And even then, he confided to Mr.
Quhayne, it had taken a decanter and a-half of neat vodka to bring him
up to the scratch.
The agent ridiculed the idea.
"Why, your Grand Grace," he cried, "there won't be anything of that
sort. You ain't going to be starred as a _comic_. You're a Refined
Lecturer and Society Monologue Artist. 'How I Invaded England,' with
lights down and the cinematograph going. We can easily fake the
pictures."
The Grand Duke made another objection.
"I understand," he said, "it is etiquette for music-hall artists in
their spare time to eat--er--fried fish with their fingers. Must I do
that? I doubt if I could manage it."
Mr Quhayne once more became the human semaphore.
"S'elp me! Of course you needn't! All the leading pros, eat it with a
spoon. Bless you, you can be the refined gentleman on the Halls same as
anywhere else. Come now, your Grand Grace, is it a deal? Four hundred
and fifty chinking o'Goblins a week for one hall a night, and
press-agented at eight hundred and seventy-five. S'elp me! Lauder
doesn't get it, not in England."
The Grand Duke reflected. The invasion has proved more expensive than
he had foreseen. The English are proverbially a nation of shopkeepers,
and they had put up their prices in all the shops for his special
benefit. And he was expected to do such a lot of tipping. Four hundred
and fifty a week would come in uncommonly useful.
"Where do I sign?" he asked, extending his hand for the agreement.
* * * * *
Five minutes later Mr. Quhayne was urging his taxidriver to exceed the
speed-limit in the direction of Tottenham.
Content of Part Two Chapter 2 - AN IMPORTANT ENGAGEMENT [P G Wodehouse's novel: The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England]
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