market, and met there the people from the Hollow (who were somewhat
more bucolic than we), they passed about the open secret. Dana did not
speak to his wife. Again we knew he never would. The summer waned; the
cows were turned into the shack, and the most "forehanded" among us
began to cut boughs for banking up the house, and set afoot other
preparations for winter's cold. Still Dana had not spoken. But the
effect on Mary was inexplicable to us all. We knew she loved him
deeply, and that the habits of their relationship were very tender; we
expected her to sink and fail under the burden of this sudden exile of
the heart, just as Lyddy Ann had done, so many years ago. But Mary held
her head high, and kept her color. She even "went abroad" more than
usual; ostentatiously so, we thought, for she would come over to
Tiverton to pass the afternoon, after the good, old-fashioned style,
with women whom she knew but slightly. And, most incredible of all,
though Dana would not speak to her, she spoke to him! Once, in driving
past, I heard her clear voice (it seemed now a dauntless voice!)
calling,--
"Dana, dinner's ready!" Dana dropped the board he was carrying, and
went in, a fierce yet dogged look upon his face, as if it needed hourly
schooling to mirror his hard heart. Then the agent of the Sudleigh
"Star," who was canvassing for a new domestic paper, had also his story
to tell. He went to the Mardens', and Mary, who admitted him, put down
her name, and then called blithely into the kitchen,--
"Dana, I'm all out o' change. Will you hand me a dollar 'n' a quarter?"
Dana, flushed red and overwhelmed by a pitiable embarrassment, came to
the door and gave the money; and Mary, with that proud unconsciousness
which made us wonder anew every time we saw it in her, thanked him, and
dismissed the visitor, as if nothing were wrong. The couple went as
usual to church and sociable. Certain lines deepened in Dana's face,
but Mary grew every day more light-heartedly cheerful. Yet the
one-sided silence lived, with the terrible tenacity of evil.
So the days went on until midwinter snows began to blow, and then we
learned, with a thrill of pride, that the International Dramatic
Company proposed coming to our own little hall, for a two weeks'
engagement. Some said Sudleigh Opera House was too large for it, and
too expensive; but we, the wiser heads, were grandly aware that, with
unusual acumen, the drama had at last recognized the true emporium of
taste. We resolved that this discriminating company should not repent
its choice. A week before the great first night, magnificent posters in
red and blue set before us, in very choice English, the dramatic
performances, "Shakespearean and otherwise," destined to take place
among us. The leading parts were to be assumed by Mr. and Mrs. Van
Rensellaer Wilde, "two of the foremost artists in the stellar world,
supported by an adequate company."
The announcement ended with the insinuating alliteration, "Popular
prices prevail." The very first night, we were at the door, an excited
crowd, absolutely before it was open; but early as we went, the
hospitable pianist held the field before us; the hall resounded with
his jocund banging at the very moment when the pioneer among us set
foot within. I have never seen anywhere, either on benefit or farewell
night, a cordiality to be compared with that which presided over our
own theatre in Tiverton Hall. Mr. Van Rensellaer Wilde himself stood
within the doorway, to greet us as we came; a personable man, with the
smooth, individual face of his profession, a moist and beery eye, a
catholic smile, tolerant enough to include the just and the unjust, a
rusty, old-fashioned stock, and the very ancientest brown Prince Albert
coat still in reputable existence,--a strange historical epitome of
brushings and spongings, of camphor exile and patient patching. Quite
evidently he was not among the prosperous, even in his stellar world.
But not for that would he repine. This present planet was an admirable
plot of ground, and here he stood, cheerfully ready to induct us, the
Puritan-born, into the fictitious joys thereof. And popular prices
prevailed; the floor of the hall itself confirmed it. It was divided,
by chalk-lines, into three sections. Enter the first division, and a
legend at your feet indicated the ten-cent territory. Advance a little,
and "twenty-five cents" met the eye; and presently, approaching the
platform, you were in the seats of the scornful, thirty-five cents
each. The latter, by common consent, were eschewed by the very first
comers, not alone for reasons of thrift, but because we thought they
ought to be left for old folks, "a leetle mite hard o' hearin'," or the
unfortunates who were "not so fur-sighted" as we. So we seated
ourselves in delight already begun, for was not Mr. Gad Greenfield
performing one of the "orchestral pieces" which the programme had led
us to expect? The piano was an antique, accustomed to serve as victim
at Sudleigh's dancing-school and sociables. I have never heard its
condition described, on its return to Sudleigh; I only know that, from
some eccentric partiality, Gad Greenfield's music was all _fortissimo_.
Sally Flint, brought thither by the much-enduring overseer, for the
sake of domestic peace, seemed to be the only one who did not regard
Gad's performance with unquestioning awe. She was heard to say aloud,
in a penetrating voice,--
"My soul an' body! what a racket!"
Whereupon she deliberately pulled some wool from the tassel of her
chinchilla cloud, and stuffed a little wad into each ear. We were sorry
for the overseer, thus put to shame by his untutored charge, and
delicately looked away, after making sure Sally had "r'ared as high" as
she proposed doing. She was the overseer's cross; no one could help him
bear it.
And now the curtain went up,--though not on the play, let me tell you!
On slighter joys, a fillip to the taste. A juggler, "all complete" in
black small-clothes and white kid gloves, stood there ready to burn up
our handkerchiefs, change our watches into rabbits, and make omelets in
our best go-to-meeting hats. I cannot remember all the wonderful things
he did (everything, I believe, judging from the roseate glow left in my
mind, everything that juggler ever achieved short of the Hindoo marvel
of cutting up maidens and splicing them together again, or planting the
magic tree); I only know we were too crafty to help him, and though he
again and again implored a volunteer from the audience to come and play
the willing victim, we clung to our settees the more, so that Gad of
the piano was obliged to fill the gap. And when the curtain came down,
and went up again on a drawing-room, with a red plush chair in it, and
a lady dressed in a long-tailed white satin gown, where were we? In
Tiverton? Nay, in the great world of fashion and of crime. I remember
very little now about the order of the plays; very little of their
names and drift. I only know we were swept triumphantly through the
widest range ever imagined since the "pastoral-comical,
historical-pastoral," of old Polonius. And in all, fat, middle-aged Wilde
was the dashing hero, the deep-dyed villain; and his wife, middle-aged
as he, and far, oh, far more corpulent! played the lovely heroine, the
blooming victim, the queen of hearts. And she was truly beautiful to
us, that blowsy dame, through the beguiling witchery of her art. The
smarting tears came into our eyes when, in "Caste," she staggered back,
despairing, lost in grief, unable to arm her soldier for the march.
Melodrama was her joy, and as we watched her lumbering about the stage
in a white muslin dress, with the artificial springiness of a youth
that would never return, we could have risen as one man, to snatch her
from the toils of villany. She was a cool piece, that swiftly
descending star! She had a way of deliberately stepping outside the
scenes and letting down her thin black hair, before the tragic moment;
then would she bound back again, and tear every passion to tatters, in
good old-fashioned style. In "The Octoroon" especially she tore our
hearts with it, so that it almost began to seem as if political issues
were imminent. For between the acts, men bent forward to their
neighbors, and put their heads together, recalling abolition times; and
one poor, harmless old farmer from Sudleigh way was glared at in a
fashion to which he had once been painfully accustomed, while murmurs
of "Copperhead! Yes, Copperhead all through the war!" must have
penetrated where he sat. But he was securely locked up in his fortress
of deaf old age, and met the hostile glances benignly, quite
unconscious of their meaning. In one particular, we felt, for a time,
that we had been deceived. The Shakespearean drama had not been touched
on as we had been led to expect; but at last, in the middle of the
second week, we were rejoiced by the announcement that "Othello" would
that night be appropriately set forth. The Moor of Venice! He would
never have recognized himself--his great creator would never have
guessed his identity--as presented by Mr. Van Rensellaer Wilde. I give
you my word for that! From beginning to end of the performance,
Tiverton groped about, in a haze of perplexity, rendered ever the more
dense by the fact that none of the actors knew their parts. I am
inclined to think they had enriched their announcement by this allusion
to the Shakespearean drama in a moment of wild ambition, as we gladly
commit ourselves to issues far-off and vague; and then, with a
chivalrous determination to vindicate their written word; they had
embarked on a troublous sea for which they had "neither mast nor sail,
nor chart nor rudder." So they went bobbing about in a tub, and we,
with a like paucity of equipment, essayed to follow them.
Othello himself was a veiled mystery in our eyes.
"Ain't he colored?" whispered Mrs. Wilson to me; and while I hesitated,
seeking to frame an answer both terse and true, she continued, although
he was at that moment impressing the Senate with his great apology, "Is
he free?"
I assured her on that point, and she settled down to a troubled study
of the part, only to run hopelessly aground when Desdemona, in her
stiff white satin gown, announced her intention of cleaving to the
robust blackamoor, in spite of fate and father. That seemed a
praiseworthy action, "taken by and large," but we could not altogether
applaud it. "Abolition," as we were, the deed wounded some race
prejudice in us, and Mrs. Hiram Cole voiced the general sentiment when
she remarked audibly,--
"One color's as good as another, come Judgment Day, but let 'em marry
among themselves, _I_ say!"
The poverty of the scenery had something to do with our dulness in
following the dramatic thread, for how should we know that our own
little stage, disguised by a slender tree-growth, was the island of
Cyprus, and that Desdemona, tripping through a doorway, in the same
satin gown, had just arrived from a long and perilous voyage? "The
riches of the ship" had "come on shore," but for all we knew, it had
been in the next room, taking a nap, all the while. In the crucial
scene between Cassio and Iago, we got the impression that one was as
drunk as the other, and that Cassio acted the better man of the two,
chiefly because of his grandiloquent apostrophe relative to the
thieving of brains. We approved of that, and looked meaningly round at
old Cap'n Fuller, who was at that time taking more hard cider than we
considered good for him. But when the final catastrophe came, we,
having missed the logical sequence, were totally unprepared. Mr. Wilde,
with a blackamoor fury irresistibly funny to one who has seen a city
coal-man cursing another for not moving on, smothered his shrieking
spouse in a pillow brought over for that purpose from the Blaisdells',
where most of the actors were boarding. We were not inclined to endure
this quietly. The more phlegmatic among us moved uneasily in our seats,
and one or two men, excitable beyond the ordinary, sprang up, with an
oath. Mrs. Wilson dragged her husband down again.
"For massy sake, do set still!" she urged. "He 'ain't killed her. Don't
you see them toes a-twitchin'?"
No, Mrs. Wilde was not dead, as her weary appearance in the afterpiece
attested; but she had been cruelly abused, and the murmurs, here and
there, as we left the hall, went far to show that Othello had done well
in voluntarily paying the debt of nature, and that Emilia thought none
too ill of him.
"Ought to ha' been strong up, by good rights," growled Tiverton, "you
can't find a jury't would acquit _him_!"
Night after night, we conscientiously sat out the aforesaid afterpiece,
innocently supposed to be our due because it had formed a part of the
initial performance. However long our weary strollers might delay it,
in the empty hope of our going home content, there we waited until the
curtain went up. It was a dreary piece of business, varied by
horse-play considered "kind o' rough" by even the more boisterous among
us. Sometimes it was given, minstrel-wise, in the time-honored panoply
of burnt cork; again, poor weary souls! they lacked even the spirit to
blacken themselves, and clinging to the same dialogue, played boldly in
Caucasian fairness, with the pathetically futile disguise of a Teuton
accent. And last of all, Mr. Wilde would appear before the curtain, and
"in behalf of Mrs. Wilde, self and company" thank us movingly for our
kind attention, and announce the next night's bill.
The last half hour was my chosen time for leaning back against the
wall, and allowing thought and glance to dwell lovingly on Tiverton
faces. O worn and rugged features of the elder generation to whose
kinship we are born! What solution, even of Time, the all-potent,
shall wash your meaning from the heart? An absolute lack of
self-consciousness had quite transformed the gaze they bent upon the
stage. A veil had been swept aside, and the true soul shone forth; that
soul which ever dwells apart, either from the dignity of its estate or,
being wrought of fibre more delicate than air, because it fears recoil
and hurt. There were Roxy and her husband, he too well content with
life as it is, to be greatly moved by its counterfeit; she sparkling
back some artless reply to the challenge of feeble romance and wingless
wit. There was Uncle Eli, a little dazed by these strange doings, the
hand on his knee shaking, from time to time, under the stimulus of
unshared thought. There was Miss Lucindy, with Ellen and all the
McNeils, a care-free, happy phalanx, smiling joyously at everything set
before them, with that spontaneous rapture so good to see. One night,
Nance Pete appeared, and established herself, with great importance, in
the first row of the ten-cent seats; but she fell asleep, and snored
with embarrassing volume and precision. She never came again, and
announced indifferently, to all who cared to hear, that when she
"wanted to see a passel o' monkeys, she'd go to the circus, an' done
with it." There, too, one night when Comedy burlesqued her own rapt
self, was Dana Marden; but he came alone. Mary had a cold, we heard,
and "thought she'd better stay in." Dana sat through the foolish play,
unmoved. His brow loomed heavy, like Tragedy's own mask, and it grew
ever blacker while the scene went on. Hiram Cole whispered me,--
"He'll kill himself afore he's done with it. He's gone in for the whole
hog, but he 'ain't growed to it, as Old Josh had. The Marden blood run
emptin's afore it got to him."
The last night came of all our blissful interlude, and on that night,
by some stroke of fate, the bill was "Oliver Twist." Of that
performance let naught be spoken, save in reverence. For, by divine
leading it might seem, and not their own good wit, those poor players
had been briefly touched by the one true fire. Shakespeare had beckoned
them, and they had passed him by; Comedy and Tragedy had been their
innocent sport. How funny their tragedy had been, how sad their comedy,
Momus only might tell. But to-night some gleaming wave from a greater
sea had lifted them, and borne them on. Still they played, jarringly,
for that was their untutored wont. Their speech roared, loud defiance
to grammar's idle saws, their costumes were absurd remnants of an
antique past; but a certain, rude, and homely dignity had transfigured
them, and enveloped, too, this poor drama which, after all, goes very
deep, down to the springs of life and love. There was a dirty and
wicked abomination of a Fagin. Wilde himself played Sykes, and we of
Tiverton, who know little about the formless monster dwelling under the
garnished pavement of every great city, and rising, once in a century
or so, to send red riot and ruin through the streets,--even we could
read the story of his word and glance. Unconsciously to ourselves, we
guessed at Whitechapel and the East End "tough," and shuddered under
the knowledge of evil. Mrs. Wilde, her heavy face many a shade sincerer
than when she walked in dirty white satin, was Nancy; and in her death,
culminated the grand moment of Tiverton's looking the drama in the
face, and seeing it for what it is,--the living sister of life itself.
Sykes really killed her alarmingly well. Round the stage he dragged
her, bruised and speechless, with such cruel realism that we women
crouched and shivered; and when she staggered to her knees, and told
her pitiful lie for the brute she loved, the general shudder of worship
and horror thrilled us into a mighty reverence for the tie stronger
than death and hell, binding the woman to the man, and lifting Love
triumphant on his cross of pain. With Nancy's final sigh, another swept
through the hall, like breath among the trees, and, drawn by what
thread I know not, I looked about me, and all unwittingly was present
at another great last act. Dana Marden and his wife were in front of
me, not three seats away. Mary was very pale, and sat quite motionless,
looking down into her lap; but Dana bent forward, gripping the seat in
front of him with white and straining hands. His face, drawn and
knotted, was a mirror of such anguish as few of us imagine; we only
learn its power when it steals upon us in the dark, and our souls
wrestle with it for awful mastery. He seemed to be suffering an
extremity of physical pain. After that, I gave little heed to the
stage. I was only conscious that the curtain had gone down, and that
Mr. Wilde was thanking us for our kind attention, and expressing a
flattering hope that another year would find him again in our midst. We
did not want the farce, that night, even as our rightful due. We got
up, and filed out in silence. I was just behind Dana and Mary; so near
that I could have touched him when, half-way, down the hall, he put out
a clumsy hand and drew her shawl closer about her shoulders. Then he
set his face straight forward again, but not before I had noticed how
the lips were twitching still, in that dumb protest against the fetters
of his birth. Again he turned to her, as suddenly as if a blow had
forced his face about. I heard his voice, abrupt, explosive, full of
the harshness so near at hand to wait on agony,--
"You got your rubbers on?"
Mary started a little, and a tremor like that of cold, went over her;
but she kept her head firmly erect.
"Yes, Dana," she said, clearly, just as she had spoken to him all those
months, "I've got 'em on."
Before eleven o'clock, the next morning, the news had spread all over
joyful Tiverton. Dana had spoken at last! But Mary! Within a week, she
took to her bed, quite overmastered by a lingering fever. She "came out
all right," as we say among ourselves, though after Dana had suffered
such agonies of tenderness over her as few save mothers can know, or
those who have injured their beloved. But she has never since been
quite so dauntless, quite so full of the joy of life. As Hiram Cole
again remarked, it is a serious thing to draw too heavily on the
nerve-juice.
THE END.
End of Project Gutenberg's Meadow Grass, by Alice Brown