He was sitting very near me, leaning his arm on the velvet rail which
divided the boxes. He was looking at the stage. Two young girls and a
very beautiful woman, beautifully dressed, were with him. Save for his
formal dress, he looked exactly as he looked when I had said good-by to
him in Twiney's pasture.
I was terrified for fear he should turn and look at me. I longed, as I
had never longed for anything, to have him turn and look. I shrank back
lest I should find that I must speak to him. I was wild with the wish to
lean and speak his name. What if he had forgotten? Not until I caught
the lift of his brow as he turned, the line of his chin, the touch of
his hand, already familiar, to his forehead, did I know how well I had
remembered. And then, abruptly, I was shot through with a sweetness and
a pride: The time had come! I could meet him as I had dreamed of
meeting him, speak to him as I had hoped sometime to speak to him, as
some one a little within his world....
"The bally trouble with opera--" Gerald was beginning.
"Please, please!" I said. "You talked right through that act, Gerald.
Let me sit still now!"
Mr. Ember, his face turned somewhat toward the house, was talking to the
woman beside him.
" ... the new day," he said. "Such a place as this gives one hope. For
all the folly of it, some do care. Here is music--a good deal
segregated, in a place apart, for folk to come and participate. And they
come--by jove, you know, they come!"
The woman said something which I did not hear.
"Not as pure an example as a symphony concert," he said, "no. There they
demand nothing--no accessories, no deception, no laughter--even no
story! That is music, pure and undefiled, and, it seems to me, really
socialized. There participation is complete, with no interventions. I
tell you we're coming on! Any day now, the drama may do the same thing!"
He listened to the woman again, and nodded, without looking at her. That
made me think of a new wonder--of what it would be to have him
understand one like that.
"Ah, yes," he said, "there's the heartbreak. God knows how long it will
be before these things will be for more than the few. This whole
thing,"--his arm went out toward the house--"and us with it, are sitting
on the chests of the rest of them. And that isn't so bad, bad as it is.
The worst is that we don't even know it."
"But what is one to do?" she cried--her voice was so eager that I caught
some of what she said. "What can one do?"
"Find your corner and dig like a devil," he said. "I suppose I should
say go at it like a god. Only we don't seem to know how to do
that--yet."
He sat silent for a minute, looking over the house.
"We don't even half know that the other fellow is here," he said. "The
isolation in audiences is frightful. Look at us now--we don't even guess
we're all on the same job." He laughed. "We need to unionize!"
Some one else came to their box and joined them. He rose, moved away,
talked with them all. Then he came to his place again, very near me, and
sat silent while the others talked. I could see his head against the
velvet stage curtain, and his fine clear profile. But now it was as if I
were looking at him down a measureless distance.
I looked down at my yellow dress and my yellow slippers, at my hands
that were manicured under my long gloves. I thought of the things they
had taught me, about moving and speaking and eating. I thought how proud
I was that I had made myself different. And to-night, when I first saw
him in that box, it was as if I had come running to him, like a little
child with a few bangles--and I had thought I could meet him now, almost
like an equal.
And I saw now that the girl who had sat there outside the Katytown inn
and had eaten her peaches, and had tried to flirt with him, wasn't much
farther away from him--not much farther away--than I was, there in the
opera box in my yellow dress, with a year of school behind me. And my
only chance to help in all this that he understood and lived was to go
with Rose; and I had let that slip, so that I could come here and show
off how well I looked, with my words--and my hair--done different.
The place where he lived every day of his life was a place that I had
never gone in or guessed or dreamed could be. He was living for some
other reason than I had ever found out about. And I had thought that I
was almost ready to see him _now_!
As far as I could, I drew back toward the partition, out of his possible
sight. But I heard the last act as I had never heard music
before--because I heard it as he was hearing it, as we all over the
house might have been listening to it. I listened with him. And all the
anguish and striving in the world were in the music and the music's way
of trying to make this clear. It said it so plain that I wondered all of
us didn't stand up in our places and "go at it like gods."
Before the curtain, and in the high moment of the act, they came for us.
Mrs. Dudley liked to go down and give her carriage number early,
especially when a supper was on. So we went, and I left him there. I saw
him last against the crude setting of a prison, with the music
remembering back to what it had been saying long before.