To-day my friend Annabel Lee and I went to the theater and we saw
a wonderful and fascinating woman with long dark-red hair upon the
stage.
She is attractive, that red-haired woman--adorably attractive. And
she reminds one of many things.
Annabel Lee was greatly interested in her acting, and was charmed
with herself--and so was I.
“Do you suppose she finds life very delightful?” I said to my friend.
“I don’t suppose,” my friend replied, “she is of the sort that
considers whether or not life is delightful. Probably her work is
hard enough to keep her out of mischief of any kind.”
Whereupon we both fell to thinking how fortunate are they whose
work is hard enough to keep them out of mischief of any kind.
“But there must be,” I said, “some months, perhaps in the summer,
when she doesn’t work. I have heard that some actors take houses
among the mountains and do their own housework for recreation.”
“I,” said Annabel Lee, “can not quite imagine this woman with the
red hair making bread and scouring pans and kettles for pleasure.
But very likely she sometimes goes into the country for vacations,
and I can fancy her doing the various small enjoyable things that
celebrities can afford to do--like wading barefooted in a narrow
brooklet, or swinging high and recklessly in a barrel-stave hammock.”
“And since she is so adorable on the stage,” I exclaimed, “how
altogether enchanting she would be wading in the brooklet or swinging
in the barrel-stave hammock--she with the long, red hair! Perhaps
it would even be braided down her back in two long tails.”
It is a picture that haunts me--Mrs. Fiske in the midst of her
vacation doing the small enjoyable things.
“Of course,” said my friend Annabel Lee, “we don’t _know_ that she
doesn’t spend her vacations in a fine, conventional, stupid yacht,
or at some magnificent, insipid American or English country house.
We can only give her the benefit of the doubt.”
“Yes, the benefit of the doubt,” I replied.
How fascinating she was, to be sure, with her personality merged
in that of Mary Magdalene!
The Magdalene is no longer a shadowy ideal with a somewhat buxom
body, scantily draped, with indefinite hair and with the lifeless
beauty that the old masters paint. Nor is she quite the woman of
the scriptures who is presented to one’s mind without that quality
which is called local coloring, and with too much of the quality
that is ever present with the women in the scriptures--a something
between uncleanness and final complete redemption.
No, Mary Magdalene is Mrs. Fiske, a slight woman still in the
last throes of youth, with two shoulders which move impatiently,
expressing indescribable emotions of aliveness and two lips which
perform their office--that of coloring, bewitching, torturing,
perfuming, anointing the words that come out of them. Apart from
these lips, Mary Magdalene’s face has a wonderfully round and
childish look, and her two round eyes at first sight give one an
idea of positive innocence. In the Magdalene’s face--and in that of
an actor of Mrs. Fiske’s range--these are a beautifully delicate
incongruity.
And my friend Annabel Lee has told me that the strongest things are
the delicate incongruities--the strongest in all this wide world.
Because they make you consider--and considering, you wait.
With such a pair of round, innocent eyes of some grayish color--who
can blame Mary Magdalene?
In the latter acts of the play these eyes go one step farther than
innocence: they do hunger and thirst after righteousness. And, ah,
dear heaven (you thought to yourself), how well they did it! To
hunger and thirst after righteousness--not herself, but her eyes.
That was this Mary Magdalene’s art.
This Mary Magdalene, though she is indeed in the last throes of
youth--without reference to the years she may know--has yet
beneath her chin a very charming roundness of flesh which one day
obviously will become a double chin. Just now it is enchanting.
There are feminine children of seven and eight with round faces,
who have just that fullness beneath the chin, and beneath the chin
of Mary Magdalene--and added to her eyes--it carries on the idea of
innocence and inexperience to a rare good degree. Any other woman
actor would have long since massaged this fullness away. Forsooth,
perhaps this is the one woman actor who could wear such a thing
with beauty.
Mary Magdalene’s hair in its deep redness is scornful and aggressive
in the first acts of the play. In the latter acts it assumes a
marvelous patheticness. And, if you like, there is a world of
patheticness in red hair.
If Mary Magdalene’s hair were of a different color--if the bronze
shadows were yellow, or gray, or black, or brown shadows--her lips
and her shoulders were in vain.
On the stage Mary Magdalene stands with her back to her audience--she
stands, calm and placid, for three or four minutes before the rising
and falling curtain, graciously permitting all to admire and feast
their eyes upon the red of her hair.
“She knows,” said my friend Annabel Lee, “that she can make her face
bewitching--and she knows also that her hair is bewitching without
being so made. And she chooses that the world at large shall know
it, too.”
She has will-power, has Mary Magdalene. It is her will, her strength,
her concentration of all her power to herself that makes her thus
bewitching--and that seduces the brains of those who sit watching
her as she moves upon the stage.
She controls all her mental and physical features with metallic
precision--except her hair, and that she leaves uncontrolled to do
its own work. It does its work well.
She has cultivated that mobileness of her lips, probably with hard
work and infinite patience--and she makes them damp and brilliant
with rouge. She rubs the soft, thick skin of her face with layers
of grease. She loads her two white arms with limitless powder. And
the two childish eyes are exceeding heavy-laden as to lid and lash
with black crayon. One experiences a revulsion as one contemplates
them through a glass. Her voice in the days of her youth had drilled
into it the power to thrill and vibrate, and to become exquisitely
tender upon occasion, and now it does the bidding of its owner with
docility and skill. Since its owner has forcefulness and a power of
selfish concentration, the voice is mostly magnetic and cold and
strong. It is magnetic and cold and strong and contemptuous when its
owner says, “My curse upon you!” When its owner’s eyes do hunger and
thirst after righteousness the voice brings a miserable, anguished
feeling to the throats of those who sit listening. Every emotion
that the voice betrays is transmitted to the seduced brains of those
who sit listening. The red-haired woman works her audience up to
some torturing pitches--the while herself blandly and cold-bloodedly
earning an honest livelihood by the sweat of her brow.
Forsooth, it’s always so.
If all the red-haired woman’s scorn and anguish were real, the
audience would sit unmoved. If the red-haired woman’s scorn and
anguish were real it would strike inward--instead of outward toward
the audience--and the audience would not know. If the red-haired
woman’s scorn and anguish were real, it would not seem real and would
be very uninteresting. And that very likely is the reason why the
scorn and anguish of other red-haired women--and of black-haired, and
brown-haired, and yellow-haired, and gray-haired, and pale-haired
women, who are not working on the stage--is so uninteresting and
ineffectual. It is real, and they can not act it out, and so it
doesn’t seem real--and you don’t have to pay money to see it done.
To make it seem real they must need go at it cold-bloodedly, and
work it up, and charge you a round price for it.
Mary Magdalene isn’t here to do this, but Mrs. Fiske takes her
place and does it for her.
She does it exquisitely well.
Could Mary Magdalene herself--she of the Bible--be among those who
sit watching, she would surely marvel and admire.
Meanwhile, for myself, I have two visions of this Mary Magdalene.
One--in one of the acts wherein her eyes do hunger and thirst after
righteousness--when she sits before a small table and lifts her
pathetic, sweet voice with the words, “When the dawn breaks, and
the darkness shall flee away”; and then she stands and the red hair
is equally pathetic and twofold bewitching, and she says again,
“When the dawn breaks, and the darkness shall flee away.” And the
other vision is of her in the country in the midst of a summer day,
under a summer sky, swinging high and recklessly in a barrel-stave
hammock.