The Trial of Elizabeth Cree (30 page)

But what was this? The condemned woman was really falling through the trapdoor and Dan Leno, with his instinctive knowledge of stage techniques, knew that something had gone terribly wrong. He realized at once that the rope had not loosened, that the elevated platform had fallen without a brake being placed upon it, and that the neck of Aveline Mortimer must surely be broken as she dangled beneath the stage. Some of the audience had gasped, while others had screamed—not because they had any notion of the catastrophe played out before them, but because the whole scene had been mounted so impressively and so realistically. Dan Leno rushed beneath the stage, where the callboy and the prompter were already cutting down Aveline Mortimer’s body in an effort to revive her. Gertie Latimer, optimistic to the end, had brought a bottle of brandy to administer to her; but Dan Leno brushed her aside, and knelt over the dead woman. Nothing could be done for her now, however, and at this moment the stage chaplain clambered down the rope which hung from the scaffold; he was already gone with drink, but he attempted to give absolution to the dead actress while the others stood around in an attitude of simple worship.

Leno allowed them to remain in position for a minute, but then he took Gertie’s arm and held it very tightly. “Put the priest into a heavy swell costume,” he said, “and help me up onto the stage.” She was too dazed to do anything but comply, and within a few moments she had hoisted Dan Leno in the dress of Madame Gruyère back through the trapdoor and into the gaslight. He held on to the fatal rope as he clambered up and, in mock homage to that great melodrama
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
, he pulled on it three times when he was within sight of the audience. They understood the allusion at once, and
laughed in relief after the scene of terror before—here was the hanged woman revived, and ready to start the fun. Here was Elizabeth Cree in another guise, just as she had been before when she played the “Older Brother” or “Little Victor’s Daughter,” and it was a source of joy and exhilaration that the great Dan Leno should impersonate her.

The audience filed out into the dark night after the performance was over, the young and the old, the rich and the poor, the famous and the infamous, the charitable and the mean, all back into the cold mist and smoke of the teeming streets. They left the theater in Limehouse and went their separate ways, to Lambeth or to Brixton, to Bayswater or to Whitechapel, to Hoxton or to Clerkenwell, all of them returning to the uproar of the eternal city. And even as they traveled homeward, many of them remembered that wonderful moment when Dan Leno had risen from the trapdoor and appeared in front of them. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he had announced in his best mammoth comique manner, “here we are
again!
”