_The Fall of the Curtain_
There are many tests of youthfulness, the mirror the least accurate.
“A man is as young as he feels,” we are told, but this is misleading. A
bad cold, a bill, an ill-cooked dinner, a few hours over-work, and the
youthful man of the morning may feel decrepit by night. Thoreau hits it
more nearly when he makes the thrill with which spring is hailed the
test of age; we are not old, he tells us, if the blood in our veins
runs swifter with the mounting sap; if we echo the joyousness of the
bluebird’s annunciatory warble.
Akin to this under urban conditions is the expectant thrill with which
we await the curtain’s rise upon the drama. Both are anticipatory; both
mean youth’s impatience for the play. Each summer is heralded by vague
anticipation of delight; each play which we wait to see for the first
time hints of unknown pleasures. No one is jaded, no one really old,
who is eager for a new joy.
By this test there was a youthful audience gathered in the Stratford
Theatre on a night of late November. Great things were said to be in
store for that audience. This was the first night of the first play by
Richard Latham, the poet.
Those who had ways of knowing something of the play said that it was
“great!” Those who had no clue to what they were to see said that
Richard Latham never allowed anything to go forth over his name that
was unworthy of his growing fame. Obviously, when it was not a matter
of a poem in a magazine, but a play on the boards, he would be no less
exacting with himself. Consequently, there was a literary and dramatic
treat awaiting these first nighters.
The orchestra was playing a Schumann overture to which it was
competent; the Stratford, under a renowned management, was deficient
in no department. In the stage box on the right sat ex-Governor
Abercrombie; with him his magnificently handsome daughter in a golden
gown and brilliant jewels; her husband-elect, his battered good looks
still striking, and a dark young woman in white who made an excellent
foil for the golden Helen, and who might have been George Lanbury’s
sister.
Miss Carrington was in the next box, decidedly the elegant old-type
gentlewoman in shining silvery silk, point lace, and a few fine
diamonds. With her was her nephew, Christopher Carrington, tall and
straight, his face youthfully clear, radiating happiness.
A girl as sweet as a flower in pale, rose-coloured crêpe, shrank
somewhat into the shadow of Miss Carrington’s shoulder. It was hard for
Anne to feel that Richard would not see her and lose something from
his hour of triumph. But though Richard knew precisely where Anne sat,
and had made Ted Wilberforce describe to him what she wore and how she
looked, it did not disturb him. He always wanted Anne, never forgot
that he was denied her; this was the established condition of his days;
to-night the play must be the thing.
In the box next to the author’s were Mr. and Mrs. Berkley, Joan and
Antony, with Peter back of them, ready to stand if his view were
impeded, striving to act as though he had spent years going to first
nights in theatre boxes, devoutly hoping that his unaccustomedness
to plays was not perceptible to the eyes of the audience, which he
imagined were upon him. Joan alone had a divided mind. She had been
persuaded to leave her baby with Bibiana. Bibiana had been a devoted
nurse to little Anne, but when it came to a baby like Barbara, provided
you ever could come to a baby like Barbara, the risk of leaving her was
too great to get it out of mind. Joan eagerly waited for the curtain to
go up, but at the same time she was wondering if the nursery window was
down.
The author’s box was the stage box on the left. The audience swayed
in an effort to see Latham better, but Richard sat in the shadow of
the drapery, additionally screened by a tall man whom those versed in
the affairs of the town recognized as Edwin Wilberforce, the painter,
Richard Latham’s devoted friend.
In the front of the author’s box, leaning absorbed over its edge,
utterly unconscious that people noticed her and speculated on whom she
was, why she was chosen to be with Latham on this first presentation of
his play, sat a little girl. She was dark, thin, not precisely pretty,
but there was a ceaseless play of expression upon her eager little
face that placed her beyond mere childish prettiness. She was dressed
in filmy white material that threatened to be destroyed by her rapid
motions. There were many in the audience who had seen the exhibition
of American painters in the last week of October and the first week of
November, who recognized this child as the original of “The Mystic,”
Wilberforce’s picture, the finest picture of the exhibition, the one
most discussed, oftenest printed in sepia-tinted Sunday supplements.
Little Anne turned at last from her absorbed yet horrified
contemplation of shoulder blades and spines in the parquette below,
the elevation of the box giving her ample opportunity for her study of
anatomy and ethics. She looked up at Ted Wilberforce with shocked eyes
and spoke to him with bated breath; Mr. Latham was lucky to be blind,
after all, she felt.
“Do you s’pose, do you really, truly s’pose, they _all_ thought
there wouldn’t be anybody here but just themselves?” little Anne asked.
“Poor little Anne!” exclaimed Ted Wilberforce.
He pitied the child’s pang at her first dash with the world in which at
least one of the inimical triumvirate runs at large. “It’s the custom
just now, dear; they don’t see it as we do--in a two-fold sense!”
“I’m going to say a prayer for ’em. It’s awful!” groaned little Anne
with a shudder.
Then she proved that everywhere she behaved as the same little Anne, by
closing her eyes, clasping her hands, and moving her lips fast, seated
in the front of the stage box.
Having thrown the responsibility of rescuing these unfortunates, who
were perfectly self-satisfied, upon their Maker, little Anne turned
with zest to the stage.
The curtain was slowly rising upon a peaceful river, flowing between
its banks under a marvellous effect of sunrise. The scene struck little
Anne as familiar.
“It looks just like Cleavedge river, only I’m never out at sunrise,”
she said.
“Mr. Wilberforce made the sketch; it is our river, Anne,” said Richard.
He forgot his misfortune and leaned forward as if he might see the
heroine’s entrance. She emerged from the rosy mists that enveloped her,
a beautiful, effective entrance for the character that was to embody
youth, purity, and self-forgetful love.
The audience applauded, but was quickly silent, for the girl was
speaking the lovely opening lines which embodied the aim of the play.
From this moment there was complete quiet over the house, the absence
of those fidgeting movements which reveal a lack of interest; the
silence was far higher praise than applause could be. Yet applause
followed on the first curtain fall, calling it up again and yet again,
and cries of “Author!” began to arise here and there, though the time
for them had not come.
Visiting set in when the plaudits ceased. People streamed out into the
lobby, men came and hung over the orchestra chairs in which sat the
ladies who had so afflicted little Anne.
Richard Latham’s box was besieged by acquaintances and newspaper men
in search of first-hand information as to how he had come to write
“The Guerdon,” what his idea was in producing a play so unlike the
usual thing, what he should write next, and all the other big-little
facts demanded by the public, which rightly sees biography as supremely
important.
Ted Wilberforce had carried little Anne out to walk in the lobby,
lifting her over the crowd.
“I’m afraid,” she said, seriously, as he set her down, “that people
will not know that I was eight last month. It makes you look even
less’n seven to be carried. But I thank you just the same, Mr.
Wilberforce, and it’s nice to walk the kinks out, and a box is quite
warm, though, of course, it sounds so.”
The curtain rose on the second act with everyone back in his seat. That
alone proved how the play was taking.
This act closed on a peculiarly silent house. There were handkerchiefs
fluttering against eyes which were not accustomed to moisten over
sentiment so simple, so denuded of all but a direct appeal to the
finest human ideals. “The Guerdon” voiced this appeal without much
supplementary stage craft. The acting was perfect. This time with calls
for the author came calls for the three principal actors.
“Oh, if I could see them! They speak the lines as if they were
inspired!” sighed Richard, permitting himself to bemoan his blindness.
But he did not respond to the calls for a speech from him.
“The third act is the test; I’ll try to say something after it, if it
pleases them,” Richard told the delighted manager who made his impeded
way into the poet’s box.
When the curtain fell on the third act, after a moment’s hush the
applause was tempestuous, and this time there was no resisting the
enthusiastic shouts of “Author! Speech! Author!”
Richard had not intended to resist his audience if it wanted him to
talk after this act. He arose and patted little Anne’s shoulder in
farewell.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“I’m going on the stage, little Anne, and it might be as well to pray
for me to say the right thing as to pray for the ladies of the shoulder
blades,” said Richard, smiling.
Little Anne at once closed her eyes, and obeyed him literally.
Richard came forth from the side of the curtain, the same calm, gentle
Richard that little Anne knew at home, and she heard Ted Wilberforce
draw in his breath sharply.
Richard stood bowing from left to right for a few minutes while the
audience frantically welcomed him. The pathos of his blindness had
never been more poignant.
Then silence fell, the impressive silence of a concourse of people.
“My friends,” Richard’s quiet, thrilling voice broke the silence, “it
is not custom that makes me call you my friends. It seems to me that in
your reception of my play there is a quality that means friendship for
the man that wrote it. Or is it that I like to think so? I am deeply
grateful to you. Having said that, I might stop talking, for what can
I add? Truly, indeed, I thank you! The first night of his first play
means a great deal to an author. It means pretty much what it must have
meant to Wendy, John, and little Michael to be taken by Peter Pan into
the Never Never Land. It means one’s dreams come true.
“For three years I carried ‛The Guerdon’ around with me in vague,
mist-encircled thoughts of it, a waking dream. Gradually the
characters in it emerged farther and farther out of the mist, taking
shape as the events of that period of their lives with which the play
deals evolved and developed them. I knew what happened to these people
because I knew the people, and, again, I knew the people because of
what happened to them.
“Perhaps we do not realize how much of us the events of our lives
reveal. There are certain things that cannot befall people of a certain
type, and the reverse is equally true: there are events almost sure to
befall a certain type of people. The law of attraction, it seems to me,
holds in all combinations, in all orders of creation. Circumstances
develop from within outward. Though we are acted upon extraneously it
is because we call forth and yield ourselves to the action.
“Thus I came to know the people in this play through what happened to
them, and I understood what they must be to receive the particular
guerdon that you are seeing come to them. Nor has it seemed to me
that I caused these events of the play, nor created the people. It
is an unending marvel to us who write how wilful our puppets become,
how we stand aside and watch them make or mar their lives in spite
of us, precisely as do our other friends who are clothed in flesh. I
have had help in writing this play for which I shall be grateful all
my life. It grew in a quiet room in Cleavedge, and its writing was a
never-to-be-forgotten joy; a present joy that abides is mine, though
the play is done. Whatever comes to me later, I can never write another
first play, nor lose the happiness this one brought to me, crowned
to-night by your great kindness to it.
“You have shown me that I have not quite failed to share the dream with
you. You approve ‛The Guerdon.’ With all my heart I thank you. That is
my guerdon. I am a happy man to-night. I am grateful to the men and
women who have embodied the people in the play as I knew them, but as
you could not know them but for this acting, since outside my brain
and that quiet room in Cleavedge these play-people had never ventured.
Out of a grateful heart I thank you all.”
Anne shrank farther back as she listened to Richard talking here as
simply, as quietly as he had talked to her in that quiet room. His
allusion to it brought it before her so vividly that the theatre, the
audience were blotted out. She was back in that room, the bees humming
in the beautiful garden, their hum and the scent of the flowers they
were rifling coming in through the windows, open to the light breeze.
She knew that Richard was speaking to _her_, telling _her_
not to grieve, to remember that he was sincerely glad to carry with
him the memory of the days that had left him only memory. Kit, seeing
Anne’s face, came forward to take her chair and give her his place, a
little back of his aunt.
“Don’t look like that, honey!” he whispered. “People will notice, and
hang and quarter me! There’s always someone about who knows too much!
I don’t care if Latham did write ‛The Guerdon!’ ‛But notta Carlotta! I
gotta Carlotta!’ However you pity him, you can’t marry us both, dear!
Latham is happy! That’s true. Look at him!”
Richard was acknowledging the applause of his modest speech; his smile
was bright, his face shining. Ted Wilberforce was clapping with all his
might over little Anne’s head, and little Anne was waving both arms
over the rail of the box, leaning out of it dangerously, and shouting
shrilly:
“You dear, you dear, you dear!” to the delight of everyone within range
of her clear, childish voice.
Miss Carrington fell back in her chair after her emphatic applause of
Richard. She looked at Kit proudly, amusement and satisfaction in her
eyes.
“Fancy being the power behind the throne, the victorious rival in a
scene like this, Master Kit! I’ve always thought you a nice lad,
Christopher, but I never expected to see you before the public, which
does not suspect your glory, the scorner of such a creature as yonder
splendid Helen; the victor over the winner of the laurels which muses
and men bestow! Is it possible that I ever bought you copper-toed
boots, and ordered mutton tallow on your properly scornful nose!” she
said.
The fourth act followed, a worthy climax to the play, and when the
final curtain was rung down on “The Guerdon” Richard’s triumph was
complete. His box was full of flowers, masses of roses and orchids
bearing bits of cardboard, each with a well-known name engraved on it.
“Too bad this isn’t a church!” observed little Anne, to whom flowers
and altars were synonymous.
“I’ll send them all to the nearest church in your name, little Anne!”
declared Richard. “Now you and Ted come with me to the manager’s room.
I’m going to bid you good-bye there. Kit and Miss Dallas are coming.
They will not come to my supper of celebration, and you’re too small to
sup with me. So we’ll part, to meet again in Cleavedge in the spring.”
“Oh, me!” sighed little Anne. “Nothing keeps right on. Heaven is best.
I don’t want you to go!”
Richard and Ted Wilberforce, with little Anne, went to the manager’s
room.
Anne and Kit were waiting there.
Richard took Kit’s outstretched hand in both of his and held it. They
talked earnestly for a few minutes, while Ted talked to his cousin.
Anne was nervously fighting back her tears and Ted was evidently
reassuring her.
Richard turned from Kit and crossed over to her.
“We are the only ones who know how much of ‛The Guerdon’ is yours,
patient little collaborator!” he said. “I shall not see you till
spring. Ted and I have decided upon Rome in February. Then Cleavedge
for us both! Will you make a room for me in the new home which you’re
to begin at Easter? Kit says ‛Yes!’ Will Kit’s wife also welcome me?”
“Oh, dear Richard, who so beloved or so welcome?” Anne cried.
“Good-bye, then, for a time. I am content. What a night! And how much
of it due to you! I’m a lucky poet! Good-bye, dearest of women.”
Richard took Anne’s hand, held it for a moment, then relinquished it,
laying it down amid the folds of her skirt with a tiny smile. But his
lips had grown white, and the movement was like laying down a dead, not
a living hand. The three adults watching him knew that he then bade
farewell forever to Anne Dallas, whom he should always love.
Then he turned to little Anne.
“And good-bye to you, little Anne, darling, but only for a half year!”
he said.
He stooped to kiss her, but little Anne threw her arms around him with
such a tempestuous embrace that he raised her, clinging to his neck, to
his breast.
“If only nothing ever changed!” she sobbed.
“What shall I bring you from Rome, dear child? I’ll be back when May
comes to Cleavedge.”
Little Anne traced a tiny cross on his forehead with her thumbnail.
“Only you. Take care of yourself and bring me you,” she said. “I shall
study hard’s I can to be ready to help you when you come home. I’m
going to learn to write on a typewriter and make squiggles so you can
tell me your works like Anne! But if you have time I’d just love to
have you pray for me in the catacombs!”
“How I wish I could take you with me! It would be worth anything to
show you St. Peter’s, little Anne!” said Richard.
“Oh, yes!” little Anne breathlessly agreed.
Then she added, with one of her exalted moods suddenly sweeping her
beyond the grief of parting and the desire for Rome:
“But every place is the same, if you’ve got God!”
“What a valedictory to a theatrical triumph!” exclaimed Richard.
Anne and Kit took little Anne’s cold hands and went away. Ted
Wilberforce followed them down the corridor to say good-bye to the
child and a last word to his cousin.
“Good-bye, little Anne! Remember to love me with Richard. And go to
sleep in a trice, for this is dissipation, you know!” said Ted.
Little Anne warmly returned his farewell kiss.
“I’ve had a wonderful time, and I don’t truly think I could go to
sleep,” she said. “I’d just as lief as not sit up hours and hours to
talk about it to Mother and Father and Joan and Peter and everyone!
It’s rather wasteful to go to bed when you feel wide awake, ’way
through, don’t you think so? But good-bye, dear Mr. Wilberforce. I do
love you, too!”
Ted returned to Richard to go with him to the supper that he was giving
to celebrate “The Guerdon.” Anne and Kit took little Anne with them
to the hotel where they all were to spend the night, and return to
Cleavedge in the morning.
“It’s all over!” said Anne.
“It’s all beginning, little wife!” Kit corrected her.
“Isn’t something always like that, all over and just beginning?” asked
wise little Anne.
THE END
[Illustration]
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS
GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
Transcriber’s Note:
Punctuation has been standardised. Spelling and hyphenation have been
retained as printed in the original publication except as follows:
Page 27
dropped back into his chiar _changed to_
dropped back into his chair
Page 67
lighty kissing Miss Carrington’s _changed to_
lightly kissing Miss Carrington’s
Page 76
Sister something-or-Other _changed to_
Sister Something-or-Other
Page 84
went so far as to to try _changed to_
went so far as to try
Page 149
the pity whth which _changed to_
the pity with which
Page 158
I’m sure I don’t knew _changed to_
I’m sure I don’t know
Page 173
interpretating Kit’s unconsidered _changed to_
interpreting Kit’s unconsidered
Page 240
tight little white yoke-top _changed to_
tight little white yoke top