Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

front with brass, woodwind, percussion, a bit of Brussels carpet on the stage, a drop scene of Edinburgh Castle or a Tudor village.
    In a Gainsborough hat or a Cossack hat, she’d do the cancan—the Carmagnole of the French Revolution—a handkerchief skirt dance, a barefoot Persian dance or a clog dance; in a Robin Hood jacket, knee breeches, silk stockings, in Pierrot costume, in bell-bottom trousers and coatee she’d sing songs like ‘They Call Me the Belle of Dollis Hill’ or ‘Street Arab Song’:
Out at
Dawn, nothing got to do.

    Then a man in a bat cloak and viridian tights might come on and recite a bit of Shakespeare.
Now for our Irish wars.
We must supplant those rough rug-headed kerns,
Which live like venom . . .

    One Shakespearean actor who followed her died on stage, in biretta and medieval-cardinal red, reciting Cardinal Wolsey’s farewell speech from Henry VIII .
    Occasionally the Belle teamed up with her sister who was another Belle—who otherwise wore woodland hats—for the purpose of doing leg shows, both of them in winged Mercury hats, tight bodices and gossamer tulle basket skirts with foamy petticoats.
    They did matinées at the Gaiety Theatre on the Strand where Ireland’s leader Charles Stewart Parnell and the hoydenish Kitty O’Shea, who wore dresses fastened to the neck with acorn buttons, fell in love in a box during a performance in 1880.
    The duettists were known to conclude performances with the singing of ‘Shepherd of Souls’ from The Sign of the Cross .
    Bracebridge was one of the few men who were allowed backstage.
    Others were Lord MacDuff, the Marquess of Anglesey, Sir George Wombwell and the notorious Posno brothers, both of whom were fond of turning up in deerstalkers.
    In a Chinese-red waistcoat from Poole’s Gentleman’s Outfitters, Limerick gloves in hand, cornucopia of golden cockerel hair, eyes the blue of the woodland bugle flower, he came into her dressing room one night and escorted her to Jimmies—the St James Restaurant in Piccadilly.
    Afterwards they’d go to the Adelaide Galleries—the Gatti’s Restaurant in the Strand or Evan’s Song and Supper Rooms where there was a madrigal choir.
    She married him in a dragonfly-blue art-nouveau dress with a music-hall corsage of myrtle blossoms in St James’s in Piccadilly.
    At the end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth there was a craze for music-hall girls to marry into the peerage.
    In 1884 Kate Vaughan, star of Flowers and Words by Gilbert Hastings McDermott, married Colonel Arthur Frederick Wellesley, son of the Earl of Cowley and nephew of the Duke of Wellington.
    Three years after the Belle married Bracebridge, Connie Gilchrist married the Earl of Orkney.
    Maud Hobson married a captain of the 11th Hussars and went to Samoa with him where she befriended Robert Louis Stevenson and sang ‘Pop Me on the Pier at Brighton’ to him while he was dying.
    In the mid-nineties, Rosie Boote, the County Tipperary music-hall girl, who was fond of posing in doges’ hats, married the Marquess of Headfort and became the Marchioness of Headfort.
    At the beginning of the twentieth century Sylvia Lillian Storey became the Countess Poulett; Denise Orme, Baroness Churston; Olive ‘Meatyard’ May, Countess of Drogheda; Irene Richards married Lord Drumlanrig.
    One music-hall girl was courted by an Italian count who bought her a silvered leopard-skin coat worth three thousand pounds; she ran away with him, he divested her of her coat and she came back to the stage door, begging for work, was sent to music halls in the north, where Jenny Hill used to polish pewter in pubs during the day and sang in the song halls at night before being acclaimed on the London stage.
    As late as 1925, Beatrice Lillie married Robert Peel, great-grandson of the prime minister.
    Before she left for Ireland, Bracebridge brought the Belle to a production of The Colleen Bawn at Her Majesty’s in Haymarket, which was about a young lord in the west of Ireland who married a peasant girl, got tired of her and drowned her, the horses refused to cross the bridge to his place of execution and he got out and walked to his own execution.
    In the foul-smelling Broadstone Station where they got the train to the west she wore a black riding hat with foxtail feathers and a bear muff, he a Hussar-blue covert coat with brandenbourgs—silk barrel-shaped buttons.
    On the terrace of the manor he showed her how the pear and cherry