Once in a long while there came to Whitechurch the drama. In those
days stock companies in dilution, shadows of the shadows of
metropolitan companies, might be met with traveling, might at times
be regarded upon extemporized stages in the smaller towns and larger
villages of the country. Such a one came to Whitechurch and played
in the big room of Garth's Hotel. An ambitious shadow, it opened its
three nights' course with "Midsummer Night's Dream."
Doctor Young permitted us to go. He went himself with the four
teachers.
The advertisements promised "a classic performance." _The Clarion_,
the weekly paper published in a neighboring town, said that the
actors were of somewhat extraordinary goodness and that none should
miss the performance. And Shakespeare is always Shakespeare. The
best of Whitechurch prepared to go. Such was the bruit and rumor
that folk were coming in from the country. Fortunately the room at
Garth's was really big, as big as a barn, as big as an ordinary hall.
Of old it had been used for political gatherings and the like. There
was a platform with small rooms opening upon it, and floor space and
rows of benches.
John, appearing at Hilltop that morning, brought news that
grandfather and my mother were coming in. There had not been a play
in Whitechurch for a long time, certainly not Shakespeare. John
would stay in town, would indeed, at Doctor Young's invitation,
return to Hilltop after the play and spend the night with Gamaliel
and me.
All that day it was exciting to think of Garth's big room being
turned into a theater--exciting to envisage the company at Garth's.
Forth goes Imagination, questing his livelihood!
Evening came. Eight of the boys at Hilltop had tickets and were
going. Doctor Young would shepherd us down.
He did so; Gamaliel, John, and I at the tail of the string. The
night, I remember, was full of stars, magnificent, Decemberish. The
air seemed to rise on tiptoe, thrill, rise again, thrill....
Once in the High Street we meet with people, set in a stream, going
to Garth's. The old hotel seems to blaze, perhaps it does blaze,
perhaps it is only our spirits! We hear voices of men and voices of
women, talking, laughing, thrilling, expectant. We enter the big
room and see that Shakespeare will have an audience.
So full was the place that Doctor Young's flock could not be herded
together. Gamaliel and John and I found ourselves upon a bench
remote from the remainder of Hilltop. Ladies entered by the door
near us and could not find seats. We gave them ours and removed to
the broad window-sill. So much the better! We perceived that we
were going to be able to see splendidly.
We looked first at the curtain, that was of some dark stuff, and, to
the heightened fancy, wide and high. A row of lamps burned before
it, shaded on our side, bright toward the stage that would presently
be revealed. Ah! what mysteries behind it all, what delight, what
warm adventure--!
We were none too early. This side the lamps a piano and two violins
and a horn were getting ready. It was a stately company, that had
seen better days, that once would have smiled and passed by
Whitechurch.
The great room was warm and packed with men and women and not a few
children. Young men and young women predominated. But all the
leading citizens were here, all save those who would not go to the
theater--even if it was Shakespeare!
Colonel Forth and my mother came in. A man rose and beckoned and
they found a place beside the Beechwood Corbins and the Mt. Pleasant
Byrds. They were at a distance from our window, but almost
immediately my mother saw me, and then my grandfather. We touched in
the face of "space."
The piano, the violins, and the horn began. There seemed a start, a
thrill in the curtain's self. I thrilled, and John and Gamaliel.
One wave broke against the three of us, perched in the deep window.
Piano and violin; now the horn--Greek horns--hunting-horns of Theseus!
The curtain parted.
Undoubtedly this company stood above the kind that was wont to play
in villages. It was no worse off for scenery than was the sixteenth
century when the Mermaid Tavern went to plays. Greek costumes are
easily managed--fairy dress, no less.
Theseus speaks. It begins.... Theseus, Hermia, Demetrius, Bottom,
and the fairy king and queen are well played--the others more so-so.
But it is all good enough; it answers. It is delicate, fine drama.
The room and the stage grow one. We desire, will, and act in
England--Athens, ever old and ever new! It is delicate, upper-key
drama. We are not split into violent partizanships. We can like, we
can hold them all. We even find Bottom within, not without us.
Varying applications are made, similitudes seen. When Egeus
complains against his child, cries that she is his, that he may, can,
and will rule her destinies, I know that Gamaliel shoots a thought
across to Doctor Young. John likes the whole, but he shakes all over
when the Athenian "rude mechanicals" play. So with all others
present. There are individual linkings-up. But the whole comes
under our skin--fairies and all.
There is rhythm in the big room. Forth and return, forth and return,
with a soft, powerful, piston beat....
"Midsummer Night's Dream" goes on--"Midsummer Night's Dream" comes to
an end. At least, the woolen curtain draws to; the violins slip into
their cases. Whitechurch, after liberal applause, is on its feet, is
going out. It must be over--but I doubted it, even then.
I greet mother and grandfather. My ankle is as strong as ever. I am
going home before Christmas. There is in grandfather's and in my
mother's eyes the same look of distance and width that I feel in my
own. I note the tranquil measure in their voices, deep on deep,
perspective. They are in Whitechurch, but they are also in the wood
that neighbors Athens--and in other woods.
I have never questioned the literalness of being there. I was there,
as also, certainly, here. The there and here stood on a level. It
seemed that there was a largeness that held them both.
Gamaliel and John and I walked to Hilltop under the stars. Doctor
Young and the others came on some distance behind us. We had half a
mile to go. The night was high and starry, cold and still. We did
not talk. Our feet beat out rhymes, our hands were in our pockets,
we slanted a little forward, as though we met a wind, though there
was no wind materially perceptible.
Something was happening to me--or I was happening into something. It
seemed to be a bigger kind of memory.
The world as Drama opened. There was a cracking--a breaking through
a crust into a great sea, wide-shored. There came first a strong
feeling of Madam Black, and then this deepening. I went under the
surface.
There I met the course of true loves that did never run smooth, the
Warrior, and the Amazon Bride worth all labor of gaining; the child
and the parent, now together, now asunder; friends, and the
lightnings that rended them apart, and the rushings together again
when the lightnings explained themselves; honest, clownish attempt as
seen in its own mirror, and as seen from a balcony above, Asses'
Heads and Pucks, and frostwork, lacework, magic fabrics, night and
day, and quarrel and reconciliation, and a spectacle and a pageant, a
symphony playing itself, with many voices and fine contrapuntal work.
Everywhere and all the time....
My feet bore my body on under the stars, but an inner man stood with
parted lips. Like sprang to like even here. All arranged itself,
sprang where the composition demanded. Then what huge Art--and what
towering Artist? What Shakespeare built of Shakespeares--fused from
myriads of Shakespeares--fused and conscious?
I was half-way up a stair.
Doctor Young's voice caught us from behind. "Wait, Gamaliel!--I want
you to hear what I am saying."
Down I came--we came--to the surface of the surface.
But this night started with Gamaliel and me--and with John, too--new
voyages. All our old dreams, all our old make-believe, changed
somewhat in character. The sphere of fancy, iridescent, tenuous,
hollow, gave way to the great orb of imagination. End and Use came
in, though we were not conscious, then, of their entrance. None has
ever come to conclusions with Imagination, nor seen where its high
Verity begins or ends.
At Christmas I went home to Restwell. For the remainder of the
school year John and I walked to and fro. I missed Gamaliel. In the
springtime my mother persuaded Doctor Young to let him spend a week
at Restwell.... He and John and I swimming in the river!
Hilltop Academy closed doors behind pupils until mid-September should
come. What I had chiefly learned there was Gamaliel. That was not a
little to me.
Summer came on. It was the summer of 1876, the Centennial summer.
My grandfather, sitting between the pillars upon the porch, after
supper, twilight about him, the fireflies beginning to sparkle, the
frogs singing down by the little pond, the evening star bright in the
west, was wont, this summer, to cast back and talk of early statesmen
and of events that broke into light at this step and at that of the
road called American. He could remember Jefferson. He had had some
acquaintance with Mr. Madison and to a lesser degree with Mr. Monroe.
He remembered when railroads and steamboats came into general use.
He was a boy of nine when he heard of the cession of Florida to us by
Spain. He had made up his mind that now Florida was ours he would go
afoot and find Ponce de Leon's fountain of youth. He had thought:
"What a present it will be for them all! I'll let 'most everybody
drink!" He had started and had gotten beyond Whitechurch when Daddy
Guinea, who was then a young man, overtook him....
A night or two after this I went to see Daddy Guinea. He was much
older than my grandfather; he could not have been far from ninety.
Daddy Guinea remembered General George Washington. He remembered the
building of Restwell.
I sat on the cabin door-step and he sat beside me, his great veined
hands hanging over his knees. "What is dishyer Centennial I heah
erbout?"
"It's a hundred years since the Declaration of Independence."
"Sho-ly! En what was er hundred years befo' that?"
I thought for a moment. "We were colonies. We lived along the
Atlantic Ocean, but everywhere back in the hills the Indians lived."
"En er hundred years befo' that?"
"The Indians lived on the ocean, too. We lived in England and
Scotland and Ireland and France and Germany and Spain and Italy and
Africa."
Daddy Guinea's great hands moved together. "Sho-ly! Sho-ly! In en
out. In en out. Look at hit one way en hit draws out long--longer
'n from heah to neber! Look at hit ernother way en hit ain't enny
bigger 'n er bag of gyarden seed! All those places en the N'United
States.... en above the N'United States Beulah Land, where old Guinea
gwine, gwine!"
He sat in silence. There shone above us soft, reflected light. The
creek was running to the river, the river was running to the sea, the
sea-- Up and down of continents, and mankind in waves! I knew that
earth and all were flying through space. For a moment I grasped
intellectual space, and the traveling and the travelers there. Then
there were just the homey cabin, and Daddy Guinea, and the
whippoorwills.
The next day, Ahasuerus and I hoeing corn in the field under Lone
Tree Hill, Ahasuerus, too, wanted to know about the Centennial. That
evening, after an early supper, my mother was looking over a pile of
magazines--new ones, and rather old ones--sent by Aunt Harriet from
Richmond. Most current literature came to us from the Warringers.
Grandfather sat smoking, resting, dreaming back or forward. Aunt
Sarah, seated where she could get the western light, was hemstitching
ruffles, and where her deep desire and will had gone I do not know.
Our old mastiff, Hercules, lay by me on the steps. My mother spoke:
"This is a little bit, father, that I think you'll like. It's from
'Topics of the Time,' in the January _Scribner's Monthly_." She
began to read.
"All good Americans are looking forward to the passage of the year
1876 with great interest; and it is not to be denied that they are
animated by a new hopefulness. The financial failures that occur do
not depress business circles as they once did. There is a belief
that we have seen the worst, that it is well that the rotten houses
should go down, and that we shall practically start, during our
Centennial, on a new and prosperous national life.
"Of a certain kind of business there will undoubtedly be more done
during the year than ever before. The passenger traffic on the
railroads will be immense. All the West is coming East. All the men
and women who have been desiring throughout their lives to visit the
Eastern coast, yet have never found the occasion for such an
expenditure of time and money, will come to the great Exhibition.
The thousands in Europe who have long intended to visit America will
naturally desire to take it at its best and they will come this year.
The Southern States will be similarly moved, and all the lines of
travel converging upon New York will be crowded. Railroads and
steamboats will do unprecedented passenger business and hotels will
be overwhelmed with guests. The whole Eastern coast of the country
north of Baltimore will feel this great influx of life. Newport and
Saratoga ... will be full. Every Englishman--every foreigner
indeed--will visit Niagara. There will be a tremendous shaking up of
the people, a great going to and fro in the land, a lively
circulation of money, and a stimulation of trade.... There is still
another reason for hopefulness. The nation is to be brought together
as it has never been brought together before during its history. In
one hundred years of intense industry and marvelous development we
have grown from a few feeble colonies to a powerful nation of more
than forty millions of people. We have been so busy that we have
never been able to look one another in the face, except during four
terrible years of civil war. In a friendly way, for brotherly
courtesies, we have never come together. Well, that which divided us
is past. We are now all members of a consolidated nationality, and
this year around the old family altar at Philadelphia we expect to
meet and embrace as brothers. We are profoundly hopeful that this
year is to do much to cast into forgetfulness the bitterness
engendered by the Civil War, and to make the nation as united and
sympathetic in feeling as it is in the political fact. Of one thing
we are certain, if the South comes to the Centennial, it will receive
such a welcome as will be accorded to no guests from any other part
of the world. The glories of the old Declaration are a part of their
inheritance, and without them our festivals would be but a mockery.
They are the guests without whom we cannot get along--without whom
there would be bitterness in our bread, sourness in our wine, and
insignificance in our rejoicings."
My mother laid down the magazine. "I don't think anything could be
handsomer than that!"
My grandfather knocked the ashes from his cigar. General Warringer
sent him good cigars. "You're right, Cary! All one country--all one
country. Like a family--sometimes we pull against one another, and
we have differences; but we come together again. More than
that--like an individual. We are an individual.... I'd like to talk
with that editor."
On the steps, beside Hercules, I became conscious of a great desire
to go to the Centennial.