The Stage Hero who, for once, had Justice done to him.

I remember witnessing long ago, in a country barn, a highly moral play.  It was a Problem Play, now I come to think of it.  At least, that is, it would have been a Problem Play but that the party with the past happened in this case to be merely a male thing.  Stage life presents no problems to the man.  The hero of the Problem Play has not got to wonder what to do; he has got to wonder only what the heroine will do next.  The hero—he was not exactly the hero; he would have been the hero had he not been hanged in the last act.  But for that he was rather a nice young man, full of sentiment and not ashamed of it.  From the scaffold he pleaded for leave to embrace his mother just once more before he died.  It was a pretty idea.  The hangman himself was touched.  The necessary leave was granted him.  He descended the steps and flung his arms round the sobbing old lady, and—bit off her nose.  After that he told her why he had bitten off her nose.  It appeared that when he was a boy, he had returned home one evening with a rabbit in his pocket.  Instead of putting him across her knee, and working into him the eighth commandment, she had said nothing; but that it seemed to be a fairly useful sort of rabbit, and had sent him out into the garden to pick onions.  If she had done her duty by him then, he would not have been now in his present most unsatisfactory position, and she would still have had her nose.  The fathers and mothers in the audience applauded, but the children, scenting addition to precedent, looked glum.

Maybe it is something of this kind the heroine is hinting at.  Perhaps the Problem has nothing to do with the heroine herself, but with the heroine’s parents: what is the best way of bringing up a daughter who shows the slightest sign of developing a tendency towards a Past?  Can it be done by kindness?  And, if not, how much?

Occasionally the parents attempt to solve the Problem, so far as they are concerned, by dying young—shortly after the heroine’s birth.  No doubt they argue to themselves this is their only chance of avoiding future blame.  But they do not get out of it so easily.

“Ah, if I had only had a mother—or even a father!” cries the heroine: one feels how mean it was of them to slip away as they did.

The fact remains, however, that they are dead.  One despises them for dying, but beyond that it is difficult to hold them personally responsible for the heroine’s subsequent misdeeds.  The argument takes to itself new shape.  Is it Fate that is to blame?  The lady herself would seem to favour this suggestion.  It has always been her fate, she explains, to bring suffering and misery upon those she loves.  At first, according to her own account, she rebelled against this cruel Fate—possibly instigated thereto by the people unfortunate enough to be loved by her.  But of late she has come to accept this strange destiny of hers with touching resignation.  It grieves her, when she thinks of it, that she is unable to imbue those she loves with her own patient spirit.  They seem to be a fretful little band.

Considered as a scapegoat, Fate, as compared with the father, has this advantage: it is always about: it cannot slip away and die before the real trouble begins: it cannot even plead a scientific head; it is there all the time.  With care one can blame it for most everything.  The vexing thing about it is, that it does not mind being blamed.  One cannot make Fate feel small and mean.  It affords no relief to our harrowed feelings to cry out indignantly to Fate: “look here, what you have done.  Look at this sweet and well-proportioned lady, compelled to travel first-class, accompanied by an amount of luggage that must be a perpetual nightmare to her maid, from one fashionable European resort to another; forced to exist on a well-secured income of, apparently, five thousand a year, most of which has to go in clothes; beloved by only the best people in the play; talked about by everybody incessantly to the exclusion of everybody else—all the neighbours interested in her and in nobody else much; all the women envying her; all the men tumbling over one another after her—looks, in spite of all her worries, not a day older than twenty-three; and has discovered a dressmaker never yet known to have been an hour behind her promise!  And all your fault, yours, Fate.  Will nothing move you to shame?”