Under promises of gorgeous sights and full protection, Fanny had
concluded to visit the chief Midway Plaisance theaters with Johnny and
Louis as escorts. The "Midway," as it is familiarly called, is
undoubtedly the most unique and interesting pleasure-walk in the world.
It is a thoroughfare of ever-shifting scenes and ever-recurring
incidents. Fanny was not sure she ought to go, and Johnny could not
comprehend why she did not go with him as readily wherever he proposed
as she did on the wild free life of the big Jersey farm. But this was to
her a supremely different existence, and she tried hard to recall all
she had seen and heard and read of etiquette and the proprieties. Uncle
and Aunt were not the only ones who were bewildered at every step by the
amazing mixture of reality and art, of fact and fancy, of nature and
imitation. They felt as if their souls were living apart, and that they
were mere automatons in a panoramic world.
Johnny had seen the Soudanese and Nubian play actors just before his
disastrous attempt to be informed concerning the Dahomey village. But
some scoffers from the South had spoiled part of the novelty of it by
alleging that the men of northern Africa were really natives of
Mississippi or Louisiana, and were dancing only plantation hoe-downs in
slow time and increased perpendicular action.
But without question the high histrionic art of the Chinese, Javanese,
Turkish and Algerian actors ought to be seen. Maybe it was strangeness
rather than excellence and novelty rather than entertainment that drew
the people but strangeness and novelty are the greater excellence when
people come to see wonders.
The Chinese theater is by far the most pretentious. It was pretty well
advertised to the world at the advent of the actors in Vancouver and
their encounter with the custom officers. They came to Chicago several
hundred strong and are housed in the big blue-and-gilt structure with
trim pagodas near the Cottage Grove end of the Midway. Entrance to the
theater is through a big tea house, where decent-looking Chinamen who do
not look like rats and whose fluent English proclaims their long sojourn
in "Flisco," serve the cheering cup at from 10 to 60 cents, according to
the pliability of the victim. They are doing a business worthy of a
better cause. The tea house is but the ante-chamber to a joss house
overhead, mendaciously advertised to be "the biggest outside of China,"
and to the theater proper. The latter is not so big as the Chinese
theaters in San Francisco, but it smells sweeter, being over ground and
not surrounded with the cooking-rooms and opium bunks of the actors.
This is a concession to occidental taste which all but oriental
enthusiasts will appreciate. Nor are visitors allowed, as in San
Francisco, to inspect the green-room or sit on the stage.
[Illustration: "She visited the play and sincerely regretted it."]
In other respects the theater is pure San Francisco Chinese. There is
the orchestra, led by the man with the yard-wide cymbals, playing the
leading part. There is the property man, always in evidence, who places
a chair and says "This is a horse," or turns the chair around and calls
it a mountain. And there is the female impersonator with deeply roughed
cheeks, who is the pride and flower of histrionic art. Women are not
allowed to walk the boards of the Chinese theater, but the male actor
who best can mimic woman's tones and mincing airs is the Henry Irving.
There is a whole chorus of these men-women in the Jackson Park
theater--an all-star combination. As for the piece itself, they first
play a little curtain-raiser of about two-months' duration and then the
real play occupies the rest of the year. It will be all one to the
American visitors, however, who enjoy the novelty, so that they are
allowed to quit when they like. And there is no objection to that from
the polite Chinamen in charge of the Jackson Park theater.
The Turkish theater is across the way and farther east than the Chinese.
It is back from the beaten path and you might miss it--if you were deaf.
Having ears to hear you will be apprised of its whereabouts at forty
rods distance by the orchestra, which sits on the front steps and
discourses horrors on a sort of flageolet and a bass drum. The orchestra
plays only one tune and it plays that hard. When a respectable house has
been gathered by these out-of-door allurements the curtain rises on a
Turkish play. It is a sweet pastoral of a youth who is lovesick and
cannot be cured by the doctor, by the soothsayer--by any one except his
love, who comes in time, and there is a wedding.
When this play was ended, Fanny decided that she had seen enough of
foreign theaters and declined to go further.
A Boston girl in spectacles sat near her through the Turkish play. She
told Fanny that she and her mother had been venturesome enough to visit
the other plays, and they sincerely regretted it. She found a mongrel
horde of Turks, Arabs, Europeans, blacks, Greeks--everything applauding
an interminable song, whose filthy motif it needs no knowledge of Arabic
to discover. The singer was an Algerian woman, good enough looking,
after the pasty style of oriental beauties, young, agile and mistress of
the curious, droning guttural melody which constitutes oriental music.
She plays her part with complete abandon, probably because she knows no
better, and her audience applauds her wildly for the same reasons. The
Boston girl said she had seen these same girls, or their professional
sisters, in the Algerian theater. But their performance had been
modified to suit the western taste. They sing and dance, but their songs
and dances are nothing more dangerous than a languorous drone. But there
are also some funny parts, according to the Algerian idea. They are
played by a jet black Somauli woman who joins in the dance and a jet
black Somauli boy in the orchestra who has a face of India rubber and a
gift for "facial contortion" that would make the fortune of an American
minstrel.
[Illustration: "FACIAL CONTORTION THAT WOULD MAKE THE FORTUNE OF AN
AMERICAN MINSTREL."]
A look at the outside of the Soudanese theater is enough for the
ordinary curiosity-seeker. It is a little round hut of bark in a dark
corner of the Egyptian enclosure. Mahomet Ali sits at the receipt of
custom exchanging pleasantries with dusky flower girls whose home is by
the orange market beyond the Kase el Nil, who know more French than
English, and more deviltry than either; who sing "Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay,"
and know how to solicit backsheesh to perfection. The theatricals here
are simplicity brought to perfection. It is said their language consists
of only a hundred words. If you were to paint your face black, look
wild-eyed, stiffen your hair in many strands, array yourself in a cotton
garment that revealed more than it concealed, and then were to jump
straight up and down to the music of a dolorous chant you would not be
far astray. Add to this a whining and interminable appeal for backsheesh
and you might be very near the mark indeed. But there is one Soudanese
performance you could scarcely hope to equal, unless you were to learn
some sort of devil's chant, gird your loins with a loose belt of shells
and by rapid contortions of your body make these primitive cymbals
accompany your chant. This is the star of the troupe.
Romantic people, who like to think of dancing as the poetry of motion,
can get a liberal education in muscular poesy by making the rounds of
the Midway Plaisance. They may see sonnets in double-shuffle metre,
doggerels in hop-skip iambics, and ordinary newspaper "ponies" with the
rhythm of the St. Vitus dance. Slices of pandemonium will be thrown in
by the orchestras for the one price of admission, and if the visitor
objects to taking his pandemonium on the installment plan, he may get it
in job lots down at the Dahomeyan village.
In their "dance," as it is termed, they take a step forward with the
right foot, and drag the left after it. This is repeated until they stub
their toes on the orchestra, when they swarm back and go through the
difficult feat of advancing by a series of hops on one foot. All of this
is to the discordant pounding of drums and scrap-iron, where tune could
not be discovered with a search warrant.
That evening Fanny visited the C. C. of C. C. and arranged for a family
picnic at Washington Park the next day. She was to be hostess, and they
were to have an outing with her in the city's artificial fields and
forests that would recall the merry life of the country, and yet they
would be surrounded by all the artistic embellishments that money and
genius could secure.
Johnny went post haste for Louis, and the two boys were made bearers of
the lunches, guides of the expedition, the vanguard of the march and the
responsible protection of the company. They were eight merry young folks
who took possession of the grip-car on the Cottage Grove Avenue cable
line that morning. They stopped at the park hot-house and spent two
delightful hours in the wilderness of flowers and of palm forests. On
the outside were rustic seats about a pond where, in waters made tepid
by steam heat through iron pipes, all kinds of tropical plants
flourished in a profusion perhaps not excelled anywhere on the equator
or along the banks of the Amazon. The great flower clock and the immense
flower globe showing the geography of the earth, the old English castle
gate and the carpeted lawns showed them the skill of the gardener's art.
A quiet nook was found near the water's edge of one of the ponds. With a
newspaper for a table-spread they enjoyed a lunch where hunger was a
sauce better than Worcestershire, and the sod a better resting place
than a throne.
After their lunch and a good rest they returned to the business part of
the city and spent the remainder of the day in the Mystic Maze, the
Labyrinth and the Panoptican. These were places where electricity and
mirrors were arranged with the object of reversing every conception the
eye had ever given to the mind. In one place the visitors entered a
triangular room in one corner of which there was a large vase of
flowers. The walls were solid mirrors and the six girls found themselves
as if in a host of people and a wilderness of flowers. From this they
passed on into a room which the attendant said was forty feet square and
contained thirty-eight mirrors six feet by eight set at different angles
between posts evenly distributed about the room. As they stepped forward
they found themselves among countless hordes of people, again they were
alone, all at once they found themselves in a line of girls that
stretched on either side apparently for miles. One time they would be
brushing around among people about two feet high and two feet thick;
again they would be surrounded by thousands of girls eight or ten feet
high and correspondingly thin. It was exasperating to say the least.
When they became weary of this novelty they looked about them for the
attendant but he had mysteriously disappeared. Leila said she knew the
way out and she started with all the confidence that a usually level
headed girl can have, but alas! she nearly broke her head by running
into one of the big mirrors. Nannie happened to look in a certain
direction when she saw the door and the curtains about it as plainly as
she ever saw anything in her life.
"There I see the door," she cried, "come this way," and she started with
her hands out before her like some one feeling his way in the dark,
though it was as bright about them as the electric lights could make it.
All at once the door she had in view disappeared like magic and she
stood before herself in a mirror ducking her head backwards and forwards
like two young chickens with their beaks just touching in the
preliminaries of a fight. The situation was becoming too serious to be
amusing any longer.
"What shall we do?" said Fanny, who had read of death in the mysterious
labyrinths in ancient times. The roof was low, and even if the sky had
been their roof they had no wings, like Daedalus, whereby they might
escape.
The girls began to get nervous, and several million of them seemed to
huddle together as they discussed the situation.
"I say, let's yell!" said Mary.
"But what is the use to yell," one said, "if they have determined that
we are to die here?"
[Illustration: "THEY HELD TO ONE ANOTHER, AS IF FOR LIFE OR DEATH."]
Now they were becoming really frightened. The picture of their lingering
death in that frightful crowd of specters was most horrifying. Their
voices were becoming tremulous and hollow, and the terra-cotta figures
of wild Bedouins that sat in a niche of the far wall and was multiplied
a thousand times, seemed to grin at them maliciously, as if in
anticipation of seeing their agonizing struggles against death by
hunger. The suspense was becoming something terrible.
"I say somebody must yell."
"Let Kate yell, she's got a strong voice that might reach the street."
Kate tried to do her duty, and she said, "Oh, Say!" in a voice that
would not have wakened a rabbit from its slumber.
She tried again, "Oh, say, we want to get out!" in a voice so hollow
that none of the girls recognized it as hers.
"Is ze ladies seen eet all they want?" said the polite attendant, as he
seemed to come before them at one step.
"Where were you?" they all cried.
"Why, I vas by ze glass about tree feet away."
"And you were listening to all we said?"
"Oh, I do not leesen. Eet ese my beesness to go out weeth you ven you
ask eet."
And then they followed him out.
"What a horrid place that was and we thought at first it was so nice,"
said one.
"In all our lives we can never have a dream half so frightful as that
was," said a third.
"One thing sure," said Mary, "this terrible experience has bound us
forever and forever together; and because of our common experience in
this awful adventure we must initiate Fanny into the mysteries of the
noble order of progressive girls, C. C. of C. C."
_CHAPTER XV_