Transcriber's note: Obvious printer's errors have been corrected, all other inconsistencies are as in the original. The author's spelling has been maintained.

ONE-ACT PLAYS
BY
MODERN AUTHORS

EDITED BY

HELEN LOUISE COHEN, Ph.D.

Chairman of the Department of English in the
Washington Irving High School in the
City of New York

Author of "The Ballade"

NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission in writing from the publisher.

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. BY
QUINN & BODEN COMPANY, INC.
RAHWAY, N. J.

To
M. S. S.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Had not both authors and publishers acted with the greatest generosity, this collection could not have been made. Though the editor cannot adequately express her sense of obligation, she wishes at least to record explicitly her indebtedness to Mr. Harold Brighouse, Lord Dunsany, Mr. John Galsworthy, Lady Gregory, Mr. Percy MacKaye, Miss Jeannette Marks, Miss Josephine Preston Peabody, Professor Robert Emmons Rogers, Mr. Booth Tarkington, and Professor Stark Young. The editor also desires to thank Chatto & Windus, Duffield & Company, Gowans & Gray, Ltd., Harper & Brothers, Little, Brown & Company, John W. Luce & Company, G. P. Putnam's Sons, Charles Scribner's Sons, and The Sunwise Turn, for permissions granted ungrudgingly.

Through the courtesy of Mr. T. M. Cleland, director of the Beechwood Players, the pictures of the Beechwood Theatre appear. Miss Mary W. Carter, chairman of the Department of English in the High School in Montclair, New Jersey, contributed the photographs of the Garden Theatre. Other illustrations appear through the kindness of Theatre Arts Magazine, and of The Neighborhood Playhouse.

The editor is grateful to Mrs. John W. Alexander, Mr. B. Iden Payne, and Mrs. T. Bernstein for the privilege of personal conferences on the subject of the book. To Mr. Robert Edmond Jones, who has allowed three of his designs to be reproduced and who has read and corrected that part of the Introduction that deals with The New Art of the Theatre, the editor takes this opportunity of expressing her warm appreciation. Finally, the editor wishes to thank her friend, Helen Hopkins Crandell for her indefatigable work on the proofs of this book.

PREFACE

Perhaps the student who is going to read the plays in this collection may have felt at some time or other a gap between the "classics" that he was working over in school and the contemporary literature that he heard commonly discussed, but he does not know that until recently few books were studied in the high school that were less than half a century old. Consciousness of the gap often drove him to trashy reading. He recognized Addison as respectable but remote, and yet he had no guide to the good literature which the writers of his own day were producing and which would be especially interesting to him, because its ideas and language would be more nearly contemporary with his own.

Even though the greatest literature has the quality of universality, it has been almost invariably my experience that, only as one grows older, is one quite ready to appreciate this quality. When one is young, it is easier to enjoy literature written from a point of view nearer to one's own life and times. Reading good contemporary literature is likely also to pave the way for a deeper appreciation of the great masterpieces of all time.

This is a collection of one-act plays, some of them less than five years old, chosen both because their appeal seems not to be limited to the adult audiences for which they were originally written, and because they may well serve the purpose of introducing the student to contemporary dramatists of standing. Some of them, it is true, make use of old stories and traditions, but the treatment is in all cases modern, if we except the literary fashion that we find in Josephine Preston Peabody's Fortune and Men's Eyes. This, though it is a one-act play, a modern development, is written more or less in the Shakespearian convention; but whether we are bookish or not, we can hardly help having a knowledge of Shakespeare's plays, because, popular with all kinds of people, they are continually being revived on the stage, and quoted in conversation.

The plays in this book, though intended for class-room study, may be acted as well as read. The general introduction will be found helpful to groups who produce plays, to those who live in cities and go to the theatre often, and to those who like to experiment with dramatic composition. For this book was planned to encourage an understanding attitude towards the theatre, to deepen the love that is latent in the majority of us for what is beautiful and uplifting in the drama, and to make playgoing a less expensive, more regular, and more intelligent diversion for the generation that is growing up.

H. L. C.

Washington Irving High School,
New York, 1 February, 1921.

CONTENTS

• Introduction Page
• The Workmanship of the One-Act Play [xiii]
• Theatres of To-day
• The Commercial Theatre and the Repertory Idea [xx]
• The Little Theatre [xxiii]
• The Irish National Theatre [xxvi]
• The New Art of the Theatre [xxix]
• Playmaking [xxxiv]
• The Theatre in the School [l]
• Robert Emmons Rogers
• The Boy Will [xxxviii]
• Booth Tarkington
• Introduction [3]
• Beauty and the Jacobin [5]
• Ernest Dowson
• Introduction [53]
• The Pierrot of the Minute [55]
• Oliphant Down
• Introduction [77]
• The Maker of Dreams [79]
• Percy MacKaye
• Introduction [97]
• Gettysburg [99]
• A. A. Milne
• Introduction [113]
• Wurzel-Flummery [115]
• Harold Brighouse
• Introduction [139]
• Maid of France [141]
• Lady Gregory
• Introduction [157]
• Spreading the News [159]
• Jeannette Marks
• Introduction [179]
• Welsh Honeymoon [181]
• John Millington Synge
• Introduction [195]
• Riders to the Sea [198]
• Lord Dunsany
• Introduction [211]
• A Night at an Inn [213]
• Stark Young
• Introduction [226]
• The Twilight Saint [227]
• Lady Alix Egerton
• Introduction [241]
• The Masque of the Two Strangers [244]
• Maurice Maeterlinck
• Introduction [265]
• The Intruder [268]
• Josephine Preston Peabody
• Introduction [287]
• Fortune and Men's Eyes [289]
• John Galsworthy
• Introduction [323]
• The Little Man [325]

ILLUSTRATIONS

• Page
• Twelfth Night on the stage of the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier in New York [xxiv]
• Design for The Merchant of Venice by Robert Edmond Jones [xxx]
• Design for Good Gracious Annabelle by Robert Edmond Jones [xxxii]
• Design for The Seven Princesses by Robert Edmond Jones [xxxiv]
• The Beechwood Theatre. Exterior and Interior [lviii]
• The Garden Theatre. The original site, and the theatre as it looks to-day [lx]
• Setting for The Maker of Dreams at The Neighborhood Playhouse designed by Aline Bernstein [79]
• Costumes for The Masque of the Two Strangers designed at the Washington Irving High School.
• Plate 1 [240]
• Plate 2 [253]
• Setting for The Intruder designed by Sam Hume [268]

INTRODUCTION
THE WORKMANSHIP OF THE ONE-ACT PLAY

The one-act play is a new form of the drama and more emphatically a new form of literature. Its possibilities began to attract the attention of European and American writers in the last decade of the nineteenth century, those years when so many dramatic traditions lapsed and so many precedents were established. It is significant that the oldest play in the present collection is Maeterlinck's The Intruder, published in 1890.

The history of this new form is of necessity brief. Before its vogue became general, one-act plays were being presented in vaudeville houses in this country and were being used as curtain raisers in London theatres for the purpose of marking time until the late-dining audiences should arrive. With the exception of the famous Grand Guignol Theatre in Paris, where the entertainment for an evening might consist of several one-act plays, all of the hair-raising, blood-curdling variety, programs composed entirely of one-act plays were rare. Sir James Matthew Barrie is usually credited with being the first in England to write one-act plays intended to be grouped in a single production. A program of this character has been uncommon in the commercial theatre in America, but three of Barrie's one-act plays, constituting a single program, have met with enthusiastic response from American audiences.

There are two new developments in the history of the theatre that have encouraged and promoted the writing of one-act plays: the one is the Repertory Theatre abroad and the other is the Little Theatre movement on both sides of the Atlantic. The repertory of the Irish Players, for example, is composed largely of one-act plays, and American Little Theatres are given over almost exclusively to the one-act play.

The one-act play is in reality so new a phenomenon, in spite of the use that has been made of the form by playwrights like Pinero, Hauptmann, Chekov, Shaw, and others of the first rank, that it is still generally ignored in books on dramatic workmanship.[1] None the less, the status of the one-act play is established and a study of the plays of this length, which are rapidly increasing in number, discloses certain tendencies and laws which are exemplified in the form itself. Clayton Hamilton sums up the matter well when he says: "The one-act play is admirable in itself, as a medium of art. It shows the same relation to the full-length play as the short-story shows to the novel. It makes a virtue of economy of means. It aims to produce a single dramatic effect with the greatest economy of means that is consistent with the utmost emphasis. The method of the one-act play at its best is similar to the method employed by Browning in his dramatic monologues. The author must suggest the entire history of a soul by seizing it at some crisis of its career and forcing the spectator to look upon it from an unexpected and suggestive point of view. A one-act play in exhibiting the present should imply the past and intimate the future. The author has no leisure for laborious exposition; but his mere projection of a single situation should sum up in itself the accumulated results of many antecedent causes.... The form is complete, concise and self-sustaining; it requires an extraordinary force of imagination."[2]

To follow for a moment a train of thought suggested by Mr. Hamilton's timely and appreciative comment on the technique of the one-act play: All writers on the short-story agree that, to use Poe's phrase, "the vastly important artistic element, totality, or unity of effect" is indispensable to the successful short-story. This singleness of effect is an equally important consideration in the structure of the one-act play. A short-story is not a condensed novel any more than a one-act play is a condensed full-length play. There is no fixed length for the one-act play any more than there is for the short-story. The one-act play must have its "dominant incident" and "dominant character" like the short-story. The effect of the one-act play, as of the short-story, is measured by the way it makes its readers and spectators feel. Neither the short-story nor the one-act play need necessarily "be founded on one of the passionate cruces of life, where duty and inclination come nobly to the grapple." One has but to consider the short-stories of Henry James or the one-act plays of Galsworthy or of Maeterlinck to be convinced that a violent struggle is not necessary to the art of either form.

This point is further illustrated in what Galsworthy himself says in general about drama in his famous essay, Some Platitudes Concerning the Drama, which should be read in connection with his satirical comedy, The Little Man. In that essay Galsworthy writes: "The plot! A good plot is that sure edifice which slowly rises out of the interplay of circumstance on temperament, and temperament on circumstance, within the enclosing atmosphere of an idea. A human being is the best plot there is.... Now true dramatic action is what characters do, at once contrary, as it were, to expectation, and yet because they have already done other things.... Good dialogue again is character, marshaled so as continually to stimulate interest or excitement." This commentary of Galsworthy's on dramatic technique offers to the student of The Little Man an unusual opportunity to verify a great critic's theory by a great playwright's practice. It is indeed the character of the Little Man that is the plot in this case; the plot may be said to begin when, according to stage direction, the hapless Baby wails, and to be well launched with the Little Man's deprecatory, "Herr Ober! Might I have a glass of beer?" These words distinguish him immediately from his bullying companions in the buffet. The highest point of interest, like the beginning of the plot, is to be found in the play of the Little Man's personality, at the point where he is left alone with the Baby, now a typhus suspect, and after an instant's wavering, bends all his puny energies to pacifying its uneasy cry. Again, the end of the plot comes with the tribute of the bewildered but adoring mother to the ineffably gentle Little Man.

But a one-act play that has any pretensions to literature must be looked upon as a law unto itself and should not be expected to conform to any set of arbitrary requirements. As a matter of fact, there are only a very few generalizations that can be made with regard to the structure or to the classification of the one-act play. Even this book contains plays that are not susceptible of any hard and fast classification. The Intruder and Riders to the Sea are indubitably tragedies, but Fortune and Men's Eyes, dealing, as it does, with the tragic theme of love's disillusionment, belongs not at all with the plays of Maeterlinck and Synge, shadowed, as they are, by death. And though the deaths are many and bloody in A Night at an Inn, the unreality of the romance is so strong that there is no such wrenching of the human sympathies as we associate with tragedy. The Pierrot of the Minute is superficially a Harlequinade, but Dowson's insistence on the theme of satiety brings it narrowly within the range of satire. Beauty and the Jacobin is rich in comedy; so is Lady Gregory's Spreading the News, and in both, the situations change imperceptibly from comedy to farce and from farce back to comedy.

The laws of the structure of the one-act play are in the nature of dramatic art no less flexible. It can be said that in order to secure that singleness of impression that is as essential to the one-act play as to the short-story, a single well sustained theme is necessary, a theme announced in some fashion early in the play. Indeed since the one-act play is a short dramatic form, it may be said in regard to the announcing of the theme that, "'Twere well it were done quickly." In Spreading the News, the curtain is barely up before Mrs. Tarpey is telling the magistrate: "Business, is it? What business would the people here have but to be minding one another's business?" And at approximately the same moment in the action of The Intruder, the uncle, foreshadowing the theme of the mysterious coming of death, says: "When once illness has come into a house, it is as though a stranger had forced himself into the family circle."

The single dominant theme for its dramatic expression calls also for a single situation developing to a single climax. In the case of Fortune and Men's Eyes, it is the ballad-monger, who in crying his wares,

"Plays, Play not Fair,
Or how a gentlewoman's heart was took
By a player, that was King in a stage-play,"

gives us in the first few minutes of the play his ironical clue to the theme. And this theme is worked out in Mary Fytton's shallow intrigue with William Herbert, which culminates in the shattering of the Player's dream on that autumn day in South London at "The Bear and the Angel."

The single situation exemplifying the theme of The Intruder is found in the repeatedly expressed premonitions of the blind Grandfather, stationary in his armchair, whose heightened senses detect the presence of the Mysterious Stranger. The unity of effect secured in this play is only rivaled, not surpassed, by the wonderful totality of impression experienced by the reader of The Fall of the House of Usher. The unity of effect in The Intruder is secured also by Maeterlinck's description of the setting, which reminds the playgoer or the reader inevitably of Stevenson's familiar words: "Certain dark gardens cry aloud for murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted."

In general, as has been said, the plot of the one-act play, because of the time limitations, admits of no distracting incidents. For the same reason the characterization must be swift and direct. By Bartley Fallon's first speech in Spreading the News, Lady Gregory characterizes him completely. He needs but say: "Indeed it's a poor country and a scarce country to be living in. But I'm thinking if I went to America it's long ago the day I'd be dead," and the fundamental part of his character is fixed in the minds of the audience. From that moment it is just a question of filling in the picture with pantomime and further dialogue.

The characterization of the Player in Fortune and Men's Eyes begins at the moment that he enters the tavern, when Wat, the bear-ward, calls out:

"I say, I've played.... There's not one man
Of all the gang—save one.... Ay, there be one
I grant you, now!... He used me in right sort;
A man worth better trades."

Wat's verdict on the fair-mindedness of Master William Shakespeare of the Lord Chamberlain's company is borne out by the Player's own,

"High fortune, man!
Commend me to thy bear."
[Drinks and passes him the cup.]

The entrance of the ballad-monger gives Master Will an opening for a punning jest and, the action continuing, shows him sympathetic to the strayed lady-in-waiting, tender to the tavern boy, magnanimous to the false friend and falser love.

One method of characterization which the author allows herself to use in this play, no doubt to heighten the Elizabethan illusion, is rare in the contemporary drama: when this "dark lady of the sonnets" flees "The Bear and the Angel," the Player breaks forth into the self-revealing soliloquy, found so frequently in his own plays, and continuing as a dramatic convention until the last quarter of the nineteenth century.[3]

Characterization rests in part on pantomime. In The Little Man, the Dutch Youth is dumb throughout the play, but he is sufficiently characterized by his foolish demeanor and his recurrent laugh. The part of the Little Man himself is one long gesture of humility and dedication. In those one-act plays in which the old characters of the Harlequinade reappear, like The Maker of Dreams and The Pierrot of the Minute, pantomime transcends dialogue as a method of characterization. In the plays of the Irish dramatists, Synge, Yeats, and Lady Gregory, pantomime and dialogue contribute equally to the characterization, which is of a very high order, since all these dramatists were close observers of the Irish peasant characters of their plays.

Synge, especially, illustrates the following critical theory of Galsworthy: "The art of writing true dramatic dialogue is an austere art, denying itself all license, grudging every sentence devoted to the mere machinery of the play, suppressing all jokes and epigrams severed from character, relying for fun and pathos on the fun and tears of life. From start to finish good dialogue is hand-made, like good lace; clear, of fine texture, furthering with each thread the harmony and strength of a design to which all must be subordinated." A study of the dialogue of Riders to the Sea reveals just this harmony between the dialogue and the inevitability of the plot, the dialogue and the simplicity of the characters.

The dialogue in The Little Man is the very idiom one would expect to issue from the mouth of the German colonel, the Englishman with the Oxford voice, or the intensely national American, as the case may be. The characters, though they have type names, are, as Mr. Galsworthy would probably be the first to explain, highly individualized. The author does not intend us to think that all Americans are like this loud-voiced traveler, or all Englishmen like the pharisaical gentleman who gives his wife the advertisements to read while he secures the news sheet for himself.

The function of dialogue is the same both in the long and in the short play. For, of course, both forms have many things in common. For instance, as in the full-length play it is necessary for the dramatist to carry forward the interest from act to act, to provide a "curtain" that will leave the audience in a state of suspense, so in the one-act play, the interest must be similarly relayed though the plot is confined to a single act. In The Intruder, every premonition expressed by the Grandfather grips the audience in such a way that they await from minute to minute the coming of the mysterious stranger. The tension is high in A Night at an Inn from the moment the curtain rises. In Riders to the Sea, the beginning of the suspense coincides with the opening of the play and lasts. "They're all gone now, and there isn't anything more the sea can do to me," says Maurya, and the audience experiences a rush of relief and a sense of release that the last words, "No man at all can be living for ever, and we must be satisfied," seem only to deepen.

A one-act play, then, has many structural features in common with the short-story; its plot must from beginning to end be dominated by a single theme; its crises may be crises of character as well as conflicts of will or physical conflicts; it must by a method of foreshadowing sustain the interest of the audience unflaggingly, but ultimately relieve their tension; it must achieve swift characterization by means of pantomime and dialogue; and its dialogue must achieve its effects by the same methods as the dialogue of longer plays, but by even greater economy of means. But when all is said and done, the success of a one-act play is judged not by its conformity to any set of hard and fast rules, but by its power to interest, enlighten, and hold an audience.

THEATRES OF TO-DAY
THE COMMERCIAL THEATRE AND THE REPERTORY IDEA

The term "Commercial Theatre" is rarely used without disparagement. The critic or the playwright who speaks of the Commercial Theatre usually does so either for the purpose of reflecting on the cheapness of the entertainment afforded, or in order to call attention to spectacular receipts.

In this country the Commercial Theatre stands for that form of big business in the theatrical world that produces dividends on the money invested comparable to those earned by the most prosperous of the large industries. This system has been, on the whole, a bad thing for the drama, because managers with their eye on attractions that should yield a return, let us say, of over ten per cent on the investment, have been unable to produce the superior play with an appeal to a definite, though perhaps limited audience, and have had to offer to the public the kind of play that would draw large audiences over a long period of time. The "longest run for the safest possible play" is thus conspicuously associated with the Commercial Theatre. As Clayton Hamilton says: "The trouble with the prevailing theatre system in America to-day is not that this system is commercial; for in any democratic country, it is not unreasonable to expect the public to defray the cost of the sort of drama that it wishes, and that, therefore, it deserves. The trouble is, rather, that our theatre system is devoted almost entirely to big business; and that in ignoring the small profits of small business it tends to exclude not only the uncommercial drama, but the non-commercial drama as well."[4] Here he makes a distinction between an "uncommercial" play, that is, a play that is a failure with all kinds of audiences, and the "noncommercial" play, which is capable of holding its own financially and yielding modest returns.

In the days before the pooling of theatrical interests in this country there were indeed long runs, but in many of the large American cities "stock companies," composed of groups of actors and actresses all of about the same reputation and ability, were maintained that kept a number of plays, a "repertory," before the public in the course of a season and gave scope for experiment with various kinds of plays. But the "star system," which has now become common, has tended to drive out the "stock company" idea, with the result that the average company rests on the reputation of the "star" and dispenses with distinction in the "support." With the decay of the stock company, the repertory system, in the form in which it did once exist here in the Commercial Theatre, has also declined.

Both in Great Britain and in America the repertory system, long established on the Continent, has been reintroduced in order to combat the practices of the Commercial Theatre. For the most part the new repertory theatres have been endowed either by the State or by private individuals. "Absolute endowment for absolute freedom,"[5] has seemed to at least one American the only means of delivering the drama from commercial bondage. This phrase of Percy MacKaye's expresses his cherished belief that endowed civic theatres, which should encourage the participation of whole communities in a community form of drama, are what is needed in a democracy. John Masefield, in the following lines from the prologue written for the opening of the Liverpool Repertory Theatre, has found a poetic theme in this idea of an endowed theatre:

"Men will not spend, it seems, on that one art
Which is life's inmost soul and passionate heart;
They count the theatre a place for fun,
Where man can laugh at nights when work is done.

If it were only that, 'twould be worth while
To subsidize a thing which makes men smile;
But it is more; it is that splendid thing,
A place where man's soul shakes triumphant wing;

A place of art made living, where men may see
What human life is and has seemed to be
To the world's greatest brains....

O you who hark
Fan to a flame through England this first spark,
Till in this land there's none so poor of purse
But he may see high deeds and hear high verse,
And feel his folly lashed, and think him great
In this world's tragedy of Life and Fate."[6]

In Great Britain repertory is associated with the interest and generosity of Miss A. E. F. Horniman, who will be mentioned in connection with the Irish National Theatre, and through whom, after some preliminary experiment, the Gaiety Theatre at Manchester was opened as the first repertory house in England, in the spring of 1908. Fifty-five different plays were produced in a little over two years—"twenty-eight new, seventeen revivals of modern English plays, five modern translations, and five classics."[7] In Miss Horniman's own words, her interest was in a Civilized Theatre. "A Civilized Theatre," she has written, "means that a city has something of cultivation in it, something to make literature grow; a real theatre, not a mere amusing toy. What we want is the opportunity for our men and women, our boys and girls to get a chance to see the works of the greatest dramatists of modern times, as well as the classics, for their pleasure as well as their cultivation.... Young dramatists should have a theatre where they can see the ripe works of the masters and see them well acted at a moderate price. There should be in every city a theatre where we can see the best drama worthily treated."[8] Owing to war conditions, the Manchester project has had to be abandoned, and so, for the most part, have other similar enterprises. They rarely became self-supporting, but depended on subsidy of one kind or another, which under new economic conditions is no longer forthcoming. The Birmingham Repertory Theatre continues, however, under the direction of John Drinkwater, and has become famous through its production of his Abraham Lincoln. "John Drinkwater, I see, has recently defined a Repertory Theatre," writes William Archer, in his latest article on the subject, "as one which 'puts plays into stock which are good enough to stay there.'" Enlarging this definition, I should call it a theatre which excluded the long unbroken run; which presents at least three different programs in each week (though a popular success may be performed three or even four times a week throughout a whole season); which can produce plays too good to be enormously popular; which makes a principle of keeping alive the great drama of the past, whether recent or remote; which has a company so large that it can, without overworking its actors, keep three or four plays ready for instant presentation; which possesses an ample stage equipped with the latest artistic and labor-saving appliances; and which offers such comfort in front of the house as to encourage an intelligent public to make it an habitual place of resort.

"That there exists in every great American city an intelligent public large enough to support one or more such playhouses is to my mind indisputable. But the theatre might have to be run at a loss for two or three opening seasons, until it had attracted and educated its habitual supporters. For even a public of high general intelligence needs a certain amount of special education in things of the theatre." This testimony is in a highly optimistic vein.

A talk with B. Iden Payne, once director of the Manchester Players, reveals the fact that in England at the present time the repertory idea is being taken over with more promise of success by the small groups that represent the Little Theatre movement in that country. The repertory theatre there did succeed in arousing in the locality in which, for the time being, it existed an interest in intelligent plays, but it was not equally successful in confirming a distaste for unintelligent plays. The study of these experiments will repay Americans who are interested in seeing the repertory idea fostered over here by endowment or otherwise.

THE LITTLE THEATRE

The year 1911 saw the beginning in the United States of the Little Theatre movement, which has grown with phenomenal rapidity and has spread in all directions. The first Little Theatres in this country were located in large cities; but in the course of time the idea has penetrated to small towns and rural communities all over the United States. Barns, wharves, saloons, and school assembly halls have been transformed into intimate little playhouses. There were European precedents for this idea. The Théâtre Libre, opened in Paris in 1887 by André Antoine as a protest against the kind of play then in favor, is generally called the first of this type. In the years from 1887 to 1911 Little Theatres were opened in Russia, in Belgium, in Germany, in Sweden, in Hungary, in England, in Ireland, and in France. In Europe these theatres came into being, generally speaking, in order to give freer play to the new arts of the theatre or for the purpose of encouraging a more intellectual type of drama than was being produced in the larger houses.

There are two conceptions of the Little Theatre current in the United States. According to one, it is a theatrical organization housed in a simple building, that makes its productions in the most economical way, does not pay its actors, does not charge admission, and uses scenery and properties that are cheaply manufactured at home.

Twelfth Night on the stage of the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier, New York.

The Little Theatre is, however, more commonly conceived of as a repertory theatre supported by the subscription system, producing its plays on a small stage in a small hall, selecting for production the kind of play not likely to be used by the Commercial Theatre, most frequently the one-act play, and committed to experiments in stage decoration, lighting, and the other stage arts. The Little Theatre and the one-act play have developed each other reciprocally, for the Little Theatre has encouraged the writing of one-act plays in Europe and in this country. The one-act play is the natural unit of production in the Little Theatre, both because it requires a less sustained performance from the actors, who have frequently been amateurs, and because it has offered in the same evening several opportunities to the various groups of artists collaborating in the productions of the Little Theatre. Though the movement has had the effect of stimulating community spirit and has been the means of solving grave community problems, the Little Theatre is not, in the technical sense, a community theatre; in the sense, that is, in which Percy MacKaye uses the word. It is not, in fact, so portentous an enterprise, because it does not enlist the participation of every member of a community. The community theatre is an example of civic co-operation on a large scale; the Little Theatre, of the same kind of co-operation on a small scale.

Notably artistic results have been achieved by such Little Theatres as The Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, built in 1914 by the Misses Irene and Alice Lewisohn, in connection with the social settlement idea, to provide expression for the talents of a community that had been previously trained in dramatic classes for some years; by the Chicago Little Theatre, founded in 1911, now no longer in existence, but for a few years under the direction of Maurice Browne, a disciple of Gordon Craig's; by the Detroit Theatre of Arts and Crafts, once under the direction of Mr. Sam Hume, also a follower of Gordon Craig's; by the Washington Square Players, who during several seasons in New York gave a remarkable impetus to the writing of one-act plays in America; by the Provincetown Players, whose first productions were made on Cape Cod, who later opened a small playhouse in New York, and who gave the public an opportunity to know the plays of Eugene O'Neill; by the Portmanteau Theatre of Stuart Walker, that uses but one setting in its productions, but varies the effect with different colored lights, and as its name implies, is portable, one of the few of its kind in the world; by the 47 Workshop Theatre that has arisen as the result of the course in playwriting given at Harvard University by Professor George Pierce Baker, and the productions of which have served to introduce many new writers; and by the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier, that came to New York from Paris in 1917, and remained for two seasons to illustrate the best French practice. These theatres also enjoy the distinction of having experimented with repertory.

The Théâtre du Vieux Colombier was organized and is directed by Jacques Copeau. It is no casual amateur experiment. Its actors are professionals and its director is a scholar and an artist. In preparation for the original opening the company went into the country and established a little colony. "During five hours of each day they studied repertoire but they did far more. They performed exercises in physical culture and the dance: they read aloud and acted improvised dramatic scenes. They worked thus upon their bodies, their voices and their actions: made them subtle instruments in their command." They learned that in an artistic production every gesture, every word, every line, and every color counted. Naturally no group of amateurs or semi-professionals can approach the results of a company trained as M. Copeau's is. When he was over here, he was much interested in our Little Theatres. He said in one of his addresses: "All the little theatres which now swarm in America, ought to come to an understanding among themselves and unite, instead of trying to keep themselves apart and distinctive. The ideas which they possess in common have not even begun to be put into execution. They must be incorporated into life."[9]

The native Little Theatres, much simpler affairs than the Vieux Colombier, persist. They have made a place for themselves in American life, among the farms, in the suburbs, in the small towns, and in the cities. Sometimes, no doubt, they are like the one in Sinclair Lewis's Gopher Prairie; or they hardly outlast a season. But new ones spring up to replace those that have gone out of existence, and meanwhile the ends of wholesome community recreation are being served.

THE IRISH NATIONAL THEATRE

About 1890 began the movement which has since been known as the Celtic Renaissance, a movement that had for its object the lifting into literature of the songs, myths, romances, and legends treasured for countless generations in the hearts of the Irish peasantry. In the same decade in Great Britain and on the Continent, tendencies were at work looking to the reform of the drama and its rescue from commercial formulas. The genesis of the Irish National Theatre, a pioneer in the field of repertory in Great Britain, and one of the first of the Little Theatres, is due to both of these influences.

Its first form was the Irish Literary Theatre, founded in 1899 by Edward Martyn, the author of The Heather Field and Maeve, George Moore, and William Butler Yeats. The first play produced by this organization was Yeats's Countess Cathleen. This enterprise employed only English actors, and did not assume to be purely national in scope. It came to an end in October, 1901. It was in October, 1902, that in Samhain, the organ of the Irish National Theatre, William Butler Yeats made the following announcement: "The Irish Literary Theatre has given place to a company of Irish actors." The nucleus of this new Irish National Theatre was certain companies of amateurs that W. G. Fay had assembled. These companies were composed of people who were unable to give full time to their interest in the drama, but who came from the office or the shop to rehearse at odd moments during the day and in the evening. The Irish National Theatre really developed from these amateur companies. It was strictly national in scope. The advisers, who were to include Synge, Lady Gregory, Padraic Colum, William Butler Yeats, and others, looked to the Irish National Theatre to bring the drama back to the people, to whom plays dealing with society life meant nothing. They intended also that their plays "should give them [the people] a quite natural pleasure, should either tell them of their own life, or of that life of poetry where every man can see his own magic, because there alone does human nature escape from arbitrary conditions." This program has been carried out with remarkable success.

October, 1902, is the date for the beginning of the Irish National Theatre. At first W. G. Fay, and his brother, Frank Fay, were in charge of the productions, the former as stage manager. Frank Fay had charge of training a company, in which the star system was unknown. He had studied French methods of stage diction and gesture, and the Irish Players are generally said to show the results of his familiarity with great French models. In 1913 a school of acting was organized in order to perpetuate the tradition created by the Fays.

Among the most famous playwrights who have written for the Irish National Theatre are Padraic Colum, John Millington Synge, William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, St. John G. Ervine, Æ (George W. Russell), and Lord Dunsany. At one time the theatre sent out, in a circular addressed to aspiring authors who showed promise, the following counsel: "A play to be suitable for performance at the Abbey should contain some criticism of life, founded on the experience or personal observation of the writer, or some vision of life, of Irish life by preference, important from its beauty or from some excellence of style, and this intellectual quality is not more necessary to tragedy than to the gayest comedy."[10]

In 1904 the Irish National Theatre was housed for the first time in its own playhouse, the Abbey Theatre. This change was made possible by the generosity of Miss A. E. F. Horniman, who saw the Irish Players when they first went to London in 1903. It was she who obtained the lease of the Mechanics' Institute in Dublin, increased its capacity, and rebuilt it, giving it rent free to the Players from 1904 to 1909, in addition to an annual subsidy which she allowed them. In 1910 the Abbey Theatre was bought from her by public subscription. The next year, the Irish Players paid their famous visit to the United States.

The Irish National Dramatic Company was organized as a protest against current theatrical practices. Its founders purposed to reform the various arts of the theatre. By encouraging native playwrights they hoped to do for the drama of Ireland what Ibsen and other writers had done for the drama in Scandinavian countries, where people go to the theatre to think as well as to feel. It was not intended in any sense that these new Irish players were to serve the purpose of propaganda; truth was not to be compromised in the service of a cause. Acting, too, was to be improved: redundant gesture was to be suppressed; repose was to be given its full value; speech was to be made more important than gesture. Yeats in particular had theories as to the way in which verse should be spoken on the stage; he advocated a cadenced chant, monotonous but not sing-song, for the delivery of poetry. The simplification of costume and setting was also included in their scheme, for both were to be strictly accessory to the speech and movement of the characters.

They have been faithful to their ideals. The performances at the Abbey Theatre continue, although from time to time certain of the most eminent actors of the company have withdrawn, some to migrate to America. Among the plays produced in 1919 and 1920 by the National Theatre Society at the Abbey Theatre are W. B. Yeats's The Land of Heart's Desire, G. B. Shaw's Androcles and the Lion, Lady Gregory's The Dragon, and Lord Dunsany's The Glittering Gate.

THE NEW ART OF THE THEATRE

There are certain facts about the artistic transformation that the theatre is undergoing in the twentieth century with which students of the drama need to be familiar in order to picture for themselves how plays can be interpreted by means of design, color, and light. The transformation is definitely connected with a few famous names. In Europe two men, Edward Gordon Craig and Max Reinhardt, stand out as reformers in matters connected with the construction, the lighting, and the design of stage settings. In this country the artists of the theatre are, generally speaking, disciples of one or both of these great Europeans and their colleagues. The new stage artist studies the characterization and the situations in the play, the production of which he is directing, and tries to make his setting suggestive of the physical and emotional atmosphere in which the action of the drama moves.

Gordon Craig has written several books and many articles embodying his ideas on play production. In all his writings he emphasizes the importance of having one individual with complete authority and complete knowledge in charge of coordinating and subordinating the various arts that go to make the production of a play a symmetrical whole, his theory being that there is no one art that can be called to the exclusion of all others the Art of the Theatre: not the acting, not the play, not the setting, not the dance; but that all these properly harmonized through the personality of the director become the Art of the Theatre.

The kind of setting that has become identified in the popular mind with Gordon Craig is the simple monochrome background composed either of draperies or of screens. It is unfortunate that this popular idea should be so limited because, of course, the name of Gordon Craig should carry with it the suggestion of an infinite variety of ways of interpreting the play through design. His screens, built to stand alone, vary in number from one to four and sometimes have as many as ten leaves. They are either made of solid wood or are wooden frames covered with canvas. The screens with narrow leaves may be used to produce curved forms, and screens with broad leaves to enclose large rectangular spaces. The screens are one form of the setting composed of adjustable units, which can be adapted in an infinite variety of ways to the needs of the play.

The new ideas in European stagecraft began to be popularized in America in the year 1914-15, when under the auspices of the Stage Society, Sam Hume, now teaching the arts of the theatre at the University of California, and Kenneth Macgowan, the dramatic critic, arranged an exhibition that was shown in New York, Chicago, and other great centres, of new stage sets designed by Robert Edmond Jones, Sam Hume, and others who have since become famous. The models displayed on this occasion brought before the public for the first time the new method of lighting which, as much as anything else, differentiates the new theatre art from the old. It introduced the device of a concave back wall made of plaster, sometimes called by its German name "horizont," and a lighting equipment that would dye this plaster horizon with colors that melted into one another like the colors in the sky; a stage with "dimmers" for every circuit of lights, and sockets for high-power lamps at any spot from the stage.

In the same year that the Stage Society showed Robert Edmond Jones's models, he was given an opportunity to design the settings and costumes for Granville Barker's production of Anatole France's The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife, which may be said to have advertised the new practices in America more than any other single production.

The Merchant of Venice. A room in Belmont. Design by Robert Edmond Jones. A great round window framed in the heavy molding of Mantegna and the pale clear sky of Northern Italy.

Writing of his own work shortly after, Mr. Jones says: "While the scenery of a play is truly important, it should be so important that the audience should forget that it is present. There should be fusion between the play and the scenery. Scenery isn't there to be looked at, it's really there to be forgotten. The drama is a fire, the scenery is the air that lifts the fire and makes it bright.... The audience that is always conscious of the back drop is paying a doubtful compliment to the painter.... Even costumes should be the handiwork of the scenic artist. Yes, and if possible, he should build the very furniture."[11] Robert Edmond Jones has not only designed settings and costumes for poetic and fantastic forms of drama, but he has also been called upon to plan the productions of realistic modern plays.

Three of his designs introducing three different aspects of his work have been here reproduced. The model for Maeterlinck's The Seven Princesses is an example of an attempt to present the essential significant structure of a setting in the simplest way conceivable and by so doing to stimulate the imagination of the spectator to create for itself the imaginative environment of the play. His design for a room in Belmont for The Merchant of Venice shows a great round window framed in the heavy molding of Mantegna and the pale, clear sky of Northern Italy. The scene for Good Gracious Annabelle is a corridor in an hotel. This scene is a typical example of a more or less abstract rendering of a literal scene. It was designed primarily with the idea of giving as many different exits and entrances as possible, in order that the action of the drama might be swift and varied.[12]

When Sam Hume was connected with the Detroit Theatre of Arts and Crafts, he used a symbolic and suggestive method for the setting of poetic plays the scene of which was laid in no definite locality. In this theatre he installed a permanent setting, including the following units: "Four pylons [square pillars], constructed of canvas on wooden frames, each of the three covered faces measuring two and one-half by eighteen feet; two canvas flats each three by eighteen feet; two sections of stairs three feet long, and one section eight feet long, of uniform eighteen-inch height; three platforms of the same height, respectively six, eight, and twelve feet long; dark green hangings as long as the pylons; two folding screens for masking, covered with the same cloth as that used in the hangings, and as high as the pylons; and two irregular tree forms in silhouette.

"The pylons, flats, and stairs, and such added pieces as the arch and window, were painted in broken color ...[13] so that the surfaces would take on any desired color under the proper lighting."[14] The economy of this method is illustrated by the fact that in one season nineteen plays were given in the Arts and Crafts Theatre at Detroit, and the settings for eleven of these were merely rearrangements of the permanent setting. This kind of setting is sometimes called "plastic"—a term which refers to the fact that the separate units are in the round, and not flat. The effect secured in settings representing outdoor scenes was made possible only by the use of a plaster horizon of the general type described in connection with the exhibition of the Stage Society.

Good Gracious Annabelle. A corridor in a hotel. Design by Robert Edmond Jones. A typical example of a more or less abstract rendering of a literal scene. It was designed primarily with the idea of giving as many different exits and entrances as possible in order that the action of the drama might be swift and varied.

Robert Edmond Jones and Sam Hume are two of an increasingly large number of artists in America, among whom should be mentioned Norman-bel Geddes, Maurice Browne, and Lee Simonson, who are experimenting with design, color, and light. Underlying the work of all of these is the belief that the whole production, the play, the acting, the lighting, and the setting, should be unified by some one dominating mood. In the work of these new artists, there is no place for the old-fashioned painted back drop, the use of which emphasizes the disparity between the painted and the actual perspective, though their backgrounds are by no means necessarily either screens or draperies. Another new style of background is the skeleton setting, a permanent structural foundation erected on the stage, which through the addition of draperies and movable properties, or the variation of lights, or the manipulation of screens, may serve for all the scenes of a play. A permanent structure of this sort, representing the Tower of London, was used by Robert Edmond Jones in a recent production of Richard III in New York, at the Plymouth Theatre. When Jacques Copeau conducted the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier in New York he had a permanent structure built on the stage of the Garrick Theatre, that he used for all the plays he produced; at times the upper half of the stage was masked, at times the recess back of the two central columns was used. The aspect of the stage was often completely changed by the addition of tapestries, stairs, panels, screens, and furniture.

In the description of the equipment of the Detroit Theatre of Arts and Crafts, reference has been made to a method of painting the plastic units in broken color. This is so important a principle that it should be more generally understood by those who are interested in the theatre. The principle was put into operation by the Viennese designer, Joseph Urban. In practice it means that a canvas painted with red and with green spots upon which a red light is played, throws up only the red spots blended so as to produce a red surface, and that the same canvas under a green light shows a green surface; and, if both kinds of lights are used, then both the green and red spots are brought out, according to the proportion of the mixture of green and red in the light.

Color is being used now not only for decorative purposes, but also symbolically. The decorative use of color on the stage is, obviously, like the decorative use of color in the design of textiles, or stained glass, or posters. The symbolic use of color is less easy to interpret, but it is plain that in most people's minds red is connected with excitement and frenzy, and blues and grays, with an atmosphere of mystery. This is a very bald suggestion of some of the very subtle things that have been done with color on the modern stage.

The new methods of stage lighting make possible all kinds of color combinations and effects. The use of the plaster horizon (or of the cyclorama, a cheaper substitute, usually a straight semi-circular curtain enclosing the stage, made of either white or light blue cloth), combined with high-powered lights set at various angles on the stage, makes outdoor effects possible, the beauty of which is new to the theatre.[15] Nowadays footlights are not invariably discarded, but where they are used they are wired so that groups of them can be lighted when other sections are dimmed or darkened. When the setting shows an interior scene with a window, though the scene may be lighted from all sides, the window seems to be the source of all light. A good deal of the lighting on the stage is what is known in the interior decoration of houses as indirect lighting; colored lights are produced most simply by the interposition between the source of light and the stage of transparent colored slides, gelatine or glass.

In any production that is made under the influence of the new stagecraft, the costumes, like the setting of the play, are considered in connection with the resources of lighting. The costumes, whether historically correct or historically suggestive, whether of a period or conventionalized, are conceived in their three-fold relation to the characters of the play, the background, and the scheme of lights, by the designer or the director under whose general supervision the play is staged.

In general, American audiences are hardly conscious of the existence of these reforms. Here and there, it is true, the manager of a commercial theatre or an opera house has called in an artist to supervise his productions and has thus given publicity to the new way of making the arts of the theatre work together. Certain Little Theatres, also, have educated their followers in the significance of the new use of light and design to represent the mood of a play. The demands that the new method makes on craftsmanship have also commended it to students in schools and colleges interested in play production. Both the Little Theatres and the school theatres are doing a real service when they educate their communities in these new arts, for not only will this education increase the capacity of these particular audiences to enjoy the good things of the theatre, but the influence of these groups is bound in the long run to popularize the new stagecraft.

PLAYMAKING

Shortly before the death of William Dean Howells, he related the experience that he had had of being circularized by a correspondence school that offered to teach him the art of writing fiction in a phenomenally short time at a ridiculously low rate. In this instance, there was something wrong with the mailing list, but the fact remains that in universities successful courses in writing short-stories and plays are given and the best of these courses actually have turned out writers who achieve various degrees of success financially and artistically It is plain that a brief treatise like the present one makes no such pretensions; it means merely to suggest some of the most obvious points of departure for students in the drama who wish to exercise themselves in the composition of the one-act play, much as a student of poetry will try his hand at a ballade or a sonnet without taking himself or his metrical exercises too seriously.

Courtesy of Theatre Arts Magazine

The Seven Princesses. Design by Robert Edmond Jones. An example of the attempt to present the essential significant structure of a setting in the simplest way conceivable and by so doing to stimulate the imagination of the spectator to create for itself the imaginative environment of the play.

In the famous Perse School in Cambridge, England, the boys begin at the age of twelve to practise playmaking as an aid to the fuller understanding of Shakespeare's dramatic workmanship, and this work is developed throughout the rest of the course. The boys, having learned that Shakespeare himself used stories that he found ready to hand, discover in their own reading a story that will lend itself to dramatization. The story is told and retold from every angle. The class is then divided up into committees to every one of which is entrusted some part of the dramatization. One little committee busies itself with the setting, another with the structure, another with the comic characters, another with the songs that are interspersed and so on. These committees prepare rough notes to be presented in class. These notes may propose an outline of successive scenes, present the part of some principal character, or the "business" (illustrative action) of some minor part. Lessons of this sort are followed by composition rehearsals, where the dramatic and literary value of the proposed plot, characterization, pantomime, and dialogue are tested, and subjected to the criticism of teacher and boys. In the next lessons, the teacher brings to bear on the special problems on which the boys are working all the criticism that his wider range of reading and experience can suggest. In the light of his suggestions the various points are debated and the boys then proceed to careful fashioning, shaping, and writing. A rehearsal of the nearly finished product is held, followed by a final revision of the text. The work then goes forward to a public performance given with all due ceremony. In the higher classes playmaking is taught more especially in connection with writing and the boys are trained to imitate the style of various dramatists. Synge was used as a model at one time for, as one of the masters of the school explained: "The style of Synge is easy to copy because it is so largely composed of a certain phraseology. The same words, phrases, and turns of sentence occur again and again. Here are a few taken at random; the reader will find them in a context on almost any page of the plays: It's myself—Is it me fight him?—I'm thinking—It's a poor (fine, great, hard, etc.) thing—A little path I have—Let you come—God help us all—Till Tuesday was a week—The end of time—The dawn of day—Let on—Kindly—Now, as in Walk out now—Surely—Maybe—Itself—At all—Afeard—Destroyed—It curse. Synge is also mighty fond of the words ditch and ewe. And there are certain forms of rhythm about Synge's prose which are used with equal frequency, and are quick and easy to catch. So far from this imitation of style being an artificial method, the fact is that once a boy of sixteen or over has read a play or two of Synge's, if he has any power of style in him, it will be all but impossible to stop him writing like Synge for a few weeks." Learning playwriting from models recalls the method of Benjamin Franklin and Robert Louis Stevenson who in their youth wrote slavish imitations of the great masters in order to form their own prose style. Of course, it is not claimed that this work at the Perse School makes playwrights, only that it gives the boys a deeper appreciation of dramatic workmanship and furnishes a new kind of intellectual game to add to the joy of school life.

The one-act plays contained in this collection are, as has been suggested in what has been said about their construction, illustrative of various kinds of workmanship. Certain of them are excellent models for those who are experimenting with playwriting. The one-act play, not nearly so difficult a form as the full-length play, offers undergraduates in school and college and inexperienced writers generally unlimited scope for experiment.

The testimony of Lord Dunsany is to the effect that his play is made when he has discovered a motive. Asked whether he always began with a motive, "'Not always,' he said; 'I begin with anything or next to nothing. Then suddenly, I get started, and go through in a hurry. The main point is not to interrupt a mood. Writing is an easy thing when one is going strong and going fast; it becomes a hard thing only when the onward rush is impeded. Most of my short plays have been written in a sitting or two.'"[16] This passage is quoted because insight into the practice of professional writers is always helpful to amateurs. Dunsany uses "motive," it seems, as a convenient term for denoting the idea, the character, the incident or the mood that impels the dramatist to start writing a play. Such material is to be found everywhere. Many professional writers accumulate vast stores of such themes against the day when they may have the necessary leisure, energy, and insight to develop them.

It has been pointed out that there are only thirty-six possible dramatic situations in any case, and that no matter how the plot shapes itself, it is bound to classify itself somehow or other as one of the inescapable thirty-six. There is comfort also in the suggestion that Shakespeare drew practically all the dramatic material that he used so transcendently direct from the familiar and accessible narrative stores of his day. The young or inexperienced playwright need have no hesitation, then, in turning to such sources as the Greek myths for inspiration. Quite recently a highly successful one-act play of Phillip Moeller's proved that Helen of Troy is as eternally interesting as she is perennially beautiful. Maurice Baring draws on the old Greek stories, too, for several of his Diminutive Dramas. The Bible has proved dramatically suggestive to Lord Dunsany and to Stephen Phillips. The old ballads of Fair Annie and The Wife of Usher's Well have been found dramatically available. The myths of the old Norse Gods, used by Richard Wagner for his music dramas, contain much unmined dramatic gold. John Masefield and Sigurjónsson have converted Saga material to the uses of the drama. In old English literature, in Widsith, in the Battle of Brunanburh, the seeking dramatist may find. The romances of the Middle Ages, the fairy lore of all peoples, and the old Hindu animal fables are fertile in suggestion to the intending dramatist. What a wonderful one-act play, steeped in the mellow atmosphere of the Renaissance in Italy, might be made out of Browning's My Last Duchess! At least one new literary precedent has recently been created by the author who wrote a sequel to Dombey and Son. Certainly many famous novels and plays may be conceived as calling out for similar treatment at the hands of the experimental playwright. Famous literary and historic characters offer themselves as promising dramatic material. When Robert Emmons Rogers, author of the well-known play, Behind a Watteau Picture, was a sophomore at Harvard, he wrote the following charming little play on Shakespeare which is reprinted here, with the author's permission, as a pleasing example of a promising piece of apprentice work:[17]

THE BOY WILL

Within the White Luces Inn on a late afternoon in spring, 1582. The room is of heavy-beamed dark oak, stained by age and smoke, with a great, hooded fireplace on the left. At the back is a door with the upper half thrown back, and two wide windows through whose open lattices, overgrown with columbine, one can see the fresh country side in the setting sun. Under them are broad window seats. At the right, a door and a tall dresser filled with pewter plates and tankards. A couple of chairs, a stool and a low table stand about. Anne, a slim girl of sixteen, is mending the fire. Master George Peele, a bold and comely young man, in worn riding dress and spattered boots, sprawls against the disordered table. Giles, a plump and peevish old rogue in tapster's cap and apron, stands by the door looking out.

Peele [rousing himself]. Giles! Gi-les!

Giles [hurries to him]. What more, zur? Wilt ha' the pastry or—?

Peele. Another quart of sack.

Giles. Yus, zur! Anne, bist asleep? [The girl rises slowly.]

Anne [takes the tankard]. He hath had three a'ready.

Peele [cheerfully]. And shall have three more so I will. This player's life of mine is a weary one.

Anne [pertly]. And a thirsty one, too, methinks.

Giles [scandalized]. Come, wench! Ha' done gawking about, and haste! [Anne goes at right.] 'Er be a forrard gel, zur, though hendy. I be glad 'er's none o' mine, but my brother's in Shottery. He canna say I love 'is way o' making wenches so saucy.

Peele. A pox on you! The best-spirited maid I ha' seen in Warwickshire, I say. Forward? Man alive, wouldst have her like your blowsy wenches here, that lie i' the sun all day? I have seen no one so comely since I left London.

Giles [feebly]. But 'ere, zur, in Stratford—

Peele [hotly]. Stratford? I doubt if God made Stratford! Another day here and I should die in torment. Your grass lanes, your rubbly houses, fat burgesses, old women, your young clouter-heads who have no care for a bravely acted stage-play. [Bitingly.] "Can any good come out of Stratford?"

Giles. Noa, Maister Peele! Others ha' spoke more fairly—

Peele [impatiently]. My sack, man! Is the girl a-brewing it?

Giles. Anne! Anne! (I'll learn she to mess about.) Anne!

Anne [hurries in and serves Peele]. I heard you.

Giles. Then whoi cunst thee not bustle? Be I to lose my loongs over 'ee?

Anne [simply]. Mistress Shakespeare called me to the butt'ry door. Will hath not been home all day, and she is fair anxious. She bade me send him home once I saw him.

Peele [drinking noisily]. Who is it? [Anne is clearing the table.]

Giles [shortly]. Poor John Shakespeare's son Will.

Peele. A Stratford lad? A straw-headed beater of clods!

Giles. Nay, zur. A wild young un, as 'ull do noa honest work, but dreams the day long, or poaches the graät woods wi' young loons o' like stomach.

Anne [indignantly, dropping a dish]. It's not true! He is no poacher.

Peele [grinning]. What a touchy lass! No poacher, eh?

Anne. Nay, sir, but the brightest lad in Stratford. He hath learning beyond the rest of us—and if he likes to wander i' the woods, 'tis for no ill—he loves the open air—and you should hear the little songs he makes!

Peele. Do all the lads find in you such a defender, or only—? [She turns away.] Nay, no offense! I should like to see this Will.

Giles [grumpily]. 'E 'ave noa will to help 'is father in these sorry times, but ever gawks at stage-plays. 'E 'ull come to noa good end. [The player starts up.]

Peele. Stage-plays—no good end? Have a care, man!

Giles. Nay, zur—noa harm, zur! I—I—canna bide longer. [Backs out.]

Anne [at the window, wonderingly]. He should be here. He hath never lingered till sunset before. [Peele comes up behind her.]

Peele. Troubled, lass?

Anne. Nay, sir, but—but—[Suddenly] Listen!

Peele [blankly]. To what? [A faint singing without.]

Anne [eagerly]. Canst hear nothing—a lilt afar off?

Peele [nodding]. Like a May-day catch? I hear it.

Anne. 'Tis Will! Cousin, Will is coming. [Giles comes back.]

Giles [peevishly]. I canna help it. Byunt 'e later'n common?

A Voice. [The clear, boyish singing is coming very near.]

When springtime frights the winter cold, 5
(Hark to the children singing!)
The cowslip turns the fields to gold,
The bird from 's nest is winging—

Peele. Look you! There the boy comes.

Anne [leaning out the window]. Isn't he coming here? Will! Will! [He passes by the window singing the last words

Young hearts are gay, while yet 'tis May,
Hark to the children singing!

and leaps in over the lower part of the door, a sturdy, ruddy boy, with merry face and a mop of brown hair. Anne greets him with outstretched hands.]

Anne [reproachfully]. Will! Thy mother was so anxious!

Will. I did na' think. I ha' been in the woods all day and forgot everything till the sun set.

Anne. All the day long? Thou must be weary.

Will [frankly]. Nay, not very weary—but hungry.

Anne. Poor boy. He shall have his supper now.

Giles [protesting]. 'E be allus eating 'ere, and I canna a-bear it. Let him sup at his own whoam.

Will [shaking his head]. I dare na go home, for na doubt my father'll beat me rarely. I'll bide here till he be asleep. [He places himself easily in the armchair by the fire.]

Giles [going sulkily]. Thriftless young loon!

Anne [laying the table]. Hast had a splendid day?

Will [absently]. Aye. In the great park at Charlecote. There you can lie on your back in the grass under the high arches of the trees, where the sun rarely peeps in, and you can listen to the wind in the trees, and see it shake the blossoms about you, and watch the red deer and the rabbits and the birds—where everything is lovely and still. [His voice trails off into silence. Anne smiles knowingly.]

Anne. Thou'lt be making poetry before long, eh, Will?—Will? [To Peele] The boy hath not heard a word I spoke.

Peele [coming forward]. Would he hear me, I wonder! Boy!

Will [starting]. Sir? [Peele looks down on him sternly.]

Peele. Dost know thou'rt in my chair?

Will [coolly]. Thine? Indeed, 'tis very easy.

Peele. Hark 'ee! Dost know my name?

Will. I canna say I do.

Peele [distinctly]. Master George Peele.

Will. I thank thee, sir.

Peele. Player in my Lord Admiral's Company.

Will. [His whole manner changes and he jumps up eagerly.] A player? Oh—I did not know. Pray, take the seat.

Peele [amused]. Dost think players are as lords? Most men have other views. [Sits. Will watches him, fascinated.]

Will. Nay, but—oh, I love to see stage-plays! Didst not play in Coventry three days agone, "The History of the Wicked King Richard"?

Peele. Aye, aye. Behold in me the tyrant.

Will. Thou? Rarely done! I mind me yet how the hump-backed king frowned and stamped about—thus [imitating]. Ha! Ha! 'Twas a brave play!

Anne. Thy supper is ready, Will.

Peele [amused]. The true player-instinct, on my soul!

Will [flattered]. Dost truly think so? [Anne plucks his sleeve.]

Anne. Will, where are thy wits? Supper waits.

Will [apologetically]. Oh—I—I—did na hear thee. [He tries to eat, but his attention is ever distracted by the player's words.]

Peele. Is my reckoning ready, girl?

Anne. Reckoning now, sir? Wilt thou—?

Peele. Yes, yes, I go to-night. To-morrow Warwick, then the long road to Oxford, playing by the way—and London at last!

Anne. And then? [Will listens intently.]

Peele. Then back to the old Blackfriars, where all the city will flock to our tragedies and chronicles—a long, merry life of it.

Anne [interested]. And does the Queen ever come?

Peele. Nay, child, we go to her. Last Christmas I played before her at court, in the great room at Whitehall, before the nobles and ambassadors and ladies—oh, a gay time—and the Queen said—

Will [starting up]. What was the play?

Anne. Eat thy supper, Will.

Will [impatiently]. I want no more.

Peele. So my young cockerel is awake again. Will, a boy of thy stamp is lost here in Stratford. Thou shouldst be in London with us. By cock and pie, I have a mind to steal thee for the company! [Rises to pace the floor.]

Will [breathlessly]. To play in London?

Anne. Nay, Will, he but jests. Thou'rt happier here than traipsing about wi' the players. [Giles appears at back.]

Giles. Nags be ready, zur, at sunset as thee'st bid. Shall I put the gear on?

Peele [sharply]. Well fed and groomed? Nay, I will see them myself. [Giles vanishes. Peele turns at the door.] Hark'ee, lass. Thy lad could do far worse than become a player. Good meat and drink, gold in 's pouch, favor at court, and true friends. I like the lad's spirit. [He goes. Anne drops into his chair by the fire. Twilight is coming on rapidly. Will stands silent at the window looking after the player.]

Anne [troubled]. Will, what is it? Thou'rt very strange to-night.

Will [wistfully]. I—I—Oh, Anne, I want to go to London. I am a-weary of rusting in Stratford, where I can learn nothing new, save to grow old, following my father's trade.

Anne. But in London?

Will [kindling]. In London one can learn more marvels in a day than in a lifetime here; for there the streets are in a bustle all day long, and the whole world meets in them, soldiers and courtiers and men of war, from France and Spain and the new lands beyond the sea, all full of learning and pleasant tales of foreign wars and the wondrous things in the colonies. My schoolmaster told me of it. You can stand in St. Paul's and the whole world passes by, mad for knowledge and adventure. And then the stage-plays—!

Anne. Oh, Will, why long for them?

Will. Think how splendid they must be when the Queen herself loves to see 'em. If I were like this player-fellow, and acted with the Admiral's company! He laughed that he would take me with him—to be a player and perchance write plays, interludes, and noble tragedies! Think of it, Anne—to live in London and be one of all the rare company there, to write brave plays wi' sounding lines for all to wonder at, and have folk turn on the streets when I passed and whisper, "That be Will Shakespeare, the play-maker"—to act them even at court and gain the Queen's own thanks! Anne, London is so great and splendid! It beckons me wi' all its turmoil of affairs and its noble hearts ready to love a new comrade. [Disconsolately] And I must bide in Stratford?

Anne [gently]. Come now, Will. No need to be so feverish. Sit down by me. What canst thou know of play-making? What canst thou do in London?

Will [he sits down by the hearth at her feet, looking into the firelight]. I'll tell thee, Anne. Thy father and half the village call me a lazy oaf, that I stray i' the woods some days instead of helping my father. I canna help it. The fit comes on me, and I must be alone, out i' the great woods.

Anne [gladly]. Then thou dost not poach?

Will [hastily]. No, no—that is—sometimes I am with Hodge and Diccon and John a' Field, and 'tis hard not to chase the deer. Nay, look not so grave—I try to do no harm.

Anne [quietly]. And when thou'rt alone?

Will. Then I lie under the trees or wander through the fields, and make plays to myself, as though I writ them in my mind, and cry the lines forth to the birds—they sound nobly, too—or make little songs and sing them i' the sunshine. They are but dreams, I know, but splendid ones—and the player looked wi' favor on me, and said I might make a good player, and he would take me with him.

Anne. But he only jested.

Will. No jest to me! I'll take him at his word and go with him to London. [He starts up eagerly.]

Anne [troubled]. Will, Will! [Peele enters at the back.]

Peele. Hark 'ee, Giles, I go in half an hour!

Will. Master Peele! [Catches at his arm.]

Peele. Well, youngster?

Will [slowly]. Thou—thou saidst I had a good spirit and would do well in London—in a stage company. Thou wert in jest, but—I will go with thee, if I may.

Peele [taken all aback]. Go with me?

Will [earnestly]. With the player's company—to London.

Peele [laughing]. 'S wounds! Thou hast assurance! Dost think to become a great player at once?

Will [impatiently]. Oh, I care not for the playing. Let me but be in London, to see the people there and be near the theatre. I'll be the players' servant, I'll hold the nobles' horses in the street—I'll do anything!

Peele [seriously]. And go with us all over England on hard journeys to play to ignorant rustics?

Will. Anywhere—I'll follow on to the world's end—only take me with you to London! [As he speaks Giles and Mistress Shakespeare, a kindly faced woman of middle age, dressed in housewife's cap and gown, appear at the door.]

Giles. There 'e be, Mistress Shixpur.

Mistress S. [as she enters]. Oh, Will. [He turns sharply.]

Will [confusedly]. Mother! I—I—did not know thou wert here.

Mistress S. Why didst not come home—and what dost thou want with this stranger?

Anne. He would go to London with him.

Mistress S. [aghast]. To London. My Will?

Will [quietly]. Thou knowest, mother, what I ha' told thee, things I told to no other, and now the good time has come that I can see more of England.

Mistress S. But I canna let thee go. Oh, Anne, I knew the boy was restless, but I did not think for it so soon. He is only a boy.

Will [coloring]. In two years I shall be a man—I am a man now in spirit. I canna stay in Stratford. [Mistress Shakespeare sinks down in a chair.]

Mistress S. What o' me? And, Will, 'twill break thy father's heart! [Will looks ashamed.]

Will. I know, he would not understand. 'Tis hard. He must not know till I be gone.

Mistress S. [To Peele]. Oh, sir, how could you wish to lead the lad away? Hath not London enough a'ready?

Peele [who has been listening uncomfortably, faces her gravely]. I but played with the lad at first, till I saw how earnest he was; then I would take him, for I loved his boldness. But, boy, I'll tell thee fairly, thou'lt do better here. Thou'st seen the brave side of it, the gay dresses, the good horses, the cheering crowds and the court-favor. But 'tis dark sometimes, too. The pouches often hang empty when the people turn away—the lords are as the clouded sun, now smiling, now cold—and there come the bitter days, when a man has no friends but the pot-mates of the moment, when every man's hand is against him for a vagabond and a rascal, when the prison-gates lay ever wide before him, and the fickle folk, crying after a new favorite, leave the old to starve.

Anne. Will, canst not see? Thou'rt better here—

Will [bravely]. I know—all this may wait me—but I must go.

Mistress S. [alarmed]. Must go, Will? [He kneels by her side.]

Will. [tenderly]. Hush, mother, I'll tell thee. 'Tis not entirely my longing, for this morning the keeper of old Lucy—

Giles. Ha, poaching again, young scamp!

Will. Brought me before him—I was na poaching, I'll swear it, not so much as chasing the deer—but Sir Thomas had no patience, and bade me clear out, else he would seize me. I—I—dare na stay.

Mistress S. I feared it; thy father forbade thee in the great park. And now—Oh, Will, Will—I know well how thou'st longed to go from here—and now thou must—what shall I do, lacking thee?

Peele [frankly]. Will, if thou must go, thou must. London is greater than Stratford, and there is much evil there, but thou'rt true-hearted, and—by my player's honor—I will stand by thee, till the hangman get me. But we must go soon. 'Tis a dark road to Warwick—I'll see to the horses. Is it a compact? [Will gives him his hands.]

Will [huskily]. A compact, sir—to the end. [Peele hurries out.]

Giles. Look at 'e now, breaking 'is mother's heart, and mad wi' joy to revel in London. 'Tis little 'e recks of she.

Will [hotly]. Thou liest. [Bending over her] Mother, 'tis not true. I do love thee and father, I love Stratford. I'll never forget it. But 'tis so little here, and I must get away to gain learning and do things i' the world, that I may bring home all I get; fame, if God grant it, money, if I gain it, all to those at home.

Anne. Thou'rt over-confident.

Will. Aye, because I'm young. God knows there is enough pain in London, and I'll get my share—but I'm young! Mother, thou'rt not angry?

Mistress S. I knew 'twas coming, and 'tis not so hard. We will always wait for thee at home, when thou'rt weary.

Giles [at the door]. The horses are waiting. 'Tis dark, Will.

Will [breaking down]. Mother, mother!

Mistress S. The good God keep thee safe. Kiss me, Will. [He bends over her, then stumbles to the door, Anne following.]

Will [turning]. Anne—Anne—thou dost not despise me for deserting Stratford. I must go.

Anne. Oh, I know. Thou'lt go to London and forget us all.

Will. No, no, thou—I couldn't forget. I'll remember thee, Anne—I'll put thee in my plays; all my young maids and lovers shall be thee, as thou'rt now—and I'll bring thee rare gifts when I come home.

Anne. I do na want them. Will—I—I—did na mean to be unkind. We were good friends, and I trust in thee, for the future, that thou'lt be great. Good-by—and do na forget the little playmate.

Will. I will na forget [kissing her], and, Anne, be good to my mother. [She goes back to Mistress Shakespeare, and he stands watching them in the dusk.]

Peele [at the window]. Come, come, Will! We must go.

Will [turning slowly]. I—I'm coming, sir.

[THE CURTAIN.]

All the dramatic motives that have been enumerated so far have been more or less literary in origin, but "A play may start from almost anything: a detached thought that flashes through the mind; a theory of conduct or an act which one firmly believes or wishes only to examine; a bit of dialogue overheard or imagined; a setting, real or imagined, which creates emotion in the observer; a perfectly detached scene, the antecedents and consequences of which are as yet unknown; a figure glimpsed in a crowd which for some reason arrests the attention of the dramatist ... a mere incident—heard in idle talk or observed; a story told only in barest outline or with the utmost detail."[18]

The great dramatic critic, William Archer, has said that "the only valid definition of the dramatic is: Any representation of imaginary personages which is capable of interesting an average audience assembled in a theater." For the purposes of the definition the Boy Will of Robert Emmons Rogers's little piece and Drinkwater's Abraham Lincoln are equally imaginary personages. In the case of the one-act play the theatre in question is more often than not a Little Theatre or a school theatre, the representation is more frequently at the moment by amateur than by professional actors and the audience, being small and close to the stage, is likely to assume a co-operative attitude towards the playwright, the actor, and the other immediate factors in the production. Since the success of a play depends on its adaptability to the requirements of actor, theatre, and audience, it is well for inexperienced playwrights to study the conditions under which one-act plays are likely to be produced.

One very practical consideration to hold in mind is that the one-act play has a shorter time in which to focus attention than the full-length play and so the indispensable preliminary exposition must be quickly disposed of and an urgent appeal to the emotional interest of the audience must be made at the beginning. As has been said, every artistic consideration that calls for singleness of impression in the short-story is of equal importance in determining the unified structure of the one-act play. For the reason that a one-act play is almost never given by itself, if for no other, its effect will be dissipated if plot, characterization, or atmosphere fails in unity.

The writer exercising himself in the art of play-making had best begin with the procedure common to many professional playwrights. This first step is the drawing up of a scenario, which is an outline showing the course of the story, identifying the characters, indicating the setting and atmosphere and explaining the nature of the play; that is, whether, for example, it is to be a fantasy like The Pierrot of the Minute, or a comedy of manners like Wurzel-Flummery.

Here for instance is such a scenario as might have been drawn up for The Boy Will:

THE BOY WILL (Historical fantasy)
Scenario for a one-act play, by
Robert Emmons Rogers

Characters
(in order of their appearance)

• Master George Peele, player of the Admiral's Company.
• Giles, a plump and peevish old rogue, a tapster.
• Anne Hathaway, at sixteen a slim girl, niece to Giles.
• Will Shakespeare, a sturdy, ruddy boy, Anne's playmate.
• Mistress Shakespeare, a kindly faced woman of middle age, Will's mother.

Within the White Luces Inn on a late afternoon in spring, 1582. (Here a description of the interior would follow.)

• Peele is eating and drinking at the inn, waited on by Anne Hathaway.
• Anne, scolded by Giles for her slowness, is commended as comely and spirited by Peele.
• Peele abuses Stratford as a sleepy hole.
• Anne explains her delay in fetching ale by the fact that Mistress Shakespeare has been at the back door inquiring for Will who has been gone all day.
• Giles explains Will to Peele as a young poacher.
• Anne indignantly denies the charge and praises Will as the brightest boy in Stratford.
• Giles accuses him of gawking at plays and predicts a bad end for the boy.
• Peele resents the implication.
• Singing a May-day catch, Will enters. Afraid to go home because he has been wasting his day in Charlecote Park and fears father's scolding.
• Goes off into a golden dream of his day in the woods.
• Peele attracts his attention by announcing his profession.
• Will shows his interest.
• Is too distracted by Peele to eat.
• Peele announces itinerary of his players and kindles Will's imagination with a mention of the Queen.
• Threatens to carry Will off to London.
• Anne discourages the plan.
• Peele draws glowing pictures of actor's profession.
• Will is all on fire for London in spite of Anne.
• Tells Anne he's tired of being nagged.
• Makes Peele promise to take him to London.
• His mother comes for him and is aghast at the news, but finally consents to let Will go without his father's knowledge.
• Peele then draws a picture of the actor as vagabond to discourage Will.
• Anne holds out against his going.
• Will tells how, though he has not been poaching, he has been warned by Sir Thomas Lucy to clear out.
• His mother sees that he must go.
• Will makes a compact with Peele.
• Promises Anne rare gifts and kissing his mother goes.

The scenario drawn up, the next step is to develop the plot. The plot of a one-act play, to be effective, must be extraordinarily compact. The accepted laws of plot construction for all artistic narratives are the same. The climax must be carefully prepared for, as in Synge's Riders to the Sea, and the various devices used for heightening the suspense should be discovered and applied.

Characterization is more difficult for the tyro to manage than plot. Consistency of characterization is attained through discovering in the beginning a motive that will sufficiently account for the part taken by the character by means of speech and action, and through constantly testing the characterization by this motive. Such consistency of characterization is illustrated to perfection in Tarkington's Beauty and the Jacobin. The writer of the one-act play does not use many characters. "Examination of several hundred one-act plays has revealed that the average number of characters to a play is between three and four."[19]

Facility in writing dialogue is gained like facility in plot construction and in characterization only by the patient study of the work of experienced and successful playwrights. Dialogue that is witty, charming, ironical, or graceful is of dramatic value only as it is in character.

A little experience on the stage is a great help. Such experience teaches the value of skillfully planned exits and entrances for characters; helps the beginner to distinguish between action that should be related and action that should be seen; shows him how a scene must be devised to occupy the time it takes for a character to appear after he has telephoned that he is coming; and a variety of other practical considerations.

Stage directions are likely to be over-elaborated by the inexperienced. The best stage directions are those that deal only with matters of setting, lighting and essential pantomime or action. They should not, in general, be used for characterization.

But after all there can be no infallible recipes for dramatic writing. With the successful professional playwright, apprenticeship is often an unconscious stage. Plays succeed that break all the rules laid down by critics and professors of dramatic literature, but after all those rules were, to begin with, based on practices productive of success under other conditions. In any case some insight into the mechanics of dramatic art does make the reading of plays more interesting and does give an added zest to theatre going.

THE THEATRE IN THE SCHOOL

The giving of plays in schools is no new thing. One of the earliest English comedies, Ralph Roister Doister, was written in the middle of the sixteenth century by Nicholas Udall, a schoolmaster, probably to be performed at Westminister School at Christmas time. Many generations of boys in the English public schools have presented the plays of the Greek and Latin dramatists; and schools and colleges in this country have also at times given performances of the classic drama. But until recently Shakespeare and the comedies of Sheridan and Goldsmith have been the chief dramatic fare both in the classroom and on the stage in American schools.

Modern plays are coming, however, to be more generally introduced into the course of study. The following significant list, prepared by Miss Anna H. Spaulding, is in use in the senior classes in English in the Brookline High School, at Brookline, Massachusetts:

• Noah's Flood
• Sacrifice of Isaac
• Everyman
• Everywoman
• The Servant in the House
• Ralph Roister Doister
• Tales of the Mermaid Tavern
• Merchant of Venice
• Jew of Malta
• Tragedy of Shakespeare
• Comedy of Shakespeare
• The Rivals
• The Good Natured Man
• She Stoops to Conquer
• Caste
• The Lady of Lyons
• One Closet Drama
• The Second Mrs. Tanqueray
• One Comedy of Pinero
• The Silver King
• One Serious Play by Jones
• Arms and the Man
• Caesar and Cleopatra
• John Bull's Other Island
• The Doctor's Dilemma
• Strife
• Justice
• The Tragedy of Nan
• The Marrying of Ann Leete
• Seven Short Plays
• The Land of Heart's Desire, or
• The Countess Cathleen, or
• Cathleen Ni Houlihan
• The Shadow of the Glen
• Riders to the Sea
• The Birthright
• The Truth
• The Witching Hour, or
• As a Man Thinks
• The Scarecrow
• The Piper
• Milestones
• The Importance of Being Earnest

Thirty-five of these plays are distinctly modern. Another list, in use as part of a course in contemporary literature given in the last half of the third year at the Washington Irving High School and including only modern plays, is reprinted below:

• The Blue Bird
• The Melting Pot
• Milestones
• Justice, or
• The Silver Box
• Pygmalion
• The Piper
• Prunella
• Sherwood
• The Land of Heart's Desire
• Spreading the News

These plays are read and studied; that is to say, such topics as dramatic workmanship, theme, setting, characterization, dialogue, and diction are taken up in connection with each one and each one is made the starting point for a new interest in the drama of to-day.[20]

In another high school in New York, the Evander Childs, there is a four years' course of two periods a week in classroom study of the drama, old and new. All composition work is connected with this special interest.

Another kind of work based on contemporary drama was carried on by a group of first-year students in a certain high school who were much interested in a program of one-act plays to be presented in the school theatre. The teacher of English who had charge of this young class discussed the subject of the theatre audience with them both before and after the performance. The outcome of this analysis of the interests of the audience was an outline. These fourteen-year old girls said that the next time that they went to the theatre they would keep in mind the following considerations:

• I. In regard to the play:
• A. Its title
• B. Classification
• C. Plot
• D. Characterization
• E. Dialogue
• F. Theme
• II. In regard to the actors:
• A. Their intelligence
• B. Clearness of speech
• C. Ease of manner
• D. Facial expression (appropriateness of make-up)
• E. Pantomime or action
• 1. Posture
• 2. Gesture
• 3. Repose
• F. Costumes
• 1. Appropriateness as an index to character
• 2. Color and design
• 3. Harmony with the setting
• III. In regard to the setting:
• A. The lighting
• B. Color and design
• C. Appropriateness as regards mood of play
• D. Suggestiveness
• E. Workmanship

One cannot help feeling that these young people were being effectively trained to enjoy the best drama in the best way.

Not only is modern drama being read and studied in the English classes, but the schools are becoming centres of Little Theatre movements and leading their communities in pageants and dramatic festivals. An editorial in The New York Evening Post in 1918 put it in this way: "As Froude states that in Tudor England there was acting everywhere from palace to inn-yard and village green, so, the prediction is made, future historians will record that in our America there was acting everywhere—in neighborhood theatres, portable theatres, church clubs, high schools and universities, settlements, open amphitheatres, and hotel ballrooms."

One reason that amateur dramatics have taken on a new lease of life in the schools is because other teachers besides teachers of English have become interested in the project of giving a play. Students in physics classes have planned and executed lighting systems for the school theatre, students in carpentering and manual arts have built the scenery from designs made in drawing classes, curtains have been stenciled, costumes made and cloths dyed in domestic art classes, programs printed by the school printing squad, music furnished by the school orchestra and dances taught by the physical training department. In most cases the line coaching and the general direction of the play have been part of the work in English.

A concrete example will illustrate this kind of co-operation. Several years ago the department of English at the Washington Irving High School gave two plays, Three Pills in a Bottle, a product of the 47 Workshop, by Rachel Lyman Field, and The Goddess of the Woven Wind, by Alice Rostetter. The Goddess of the Woven Wind had grown out of class-room work. The girls in an industrial course were studying the origin of the silk industry. A pamphlet stated that the wife of Hoangti, Si-Ling-Chi, was the first to prepare and weave silk. This legend offered suggestive dramatic material peculiarly appropriate for a girls' high school.

The work of obtaining the setting and the properties was divided between two committees, each working under the direction of a chairman. Since fifty dollars had been fixed as the limit of expenditure for the two plays, the problem was rather a difficult one. Fortunately, Three Pills in a Bottle calls for a small cast. The cast of The Goddess of the Woven Wind, however, included thirty-four girls, most of whom had to be orientally clad and equipped. The teacher who contemplates putting on a rather elaborate costume play in his or her high school will be interested to learn that the amount was so exactly fixed and the department so resourceful that fifty-one dollars and nine cents was the total sum spent on the two plays. Then, lest anyone think that there had been a miscalculation, let it be added that this sum included the money spent for hot chocolate to serve to the casts of the plays, between the afternoon and evening performances.

The problem of staging Three Pills in a Bottle was greatly simplified by the fact that the frontispiece of the play gives a simple, effective setting not difficult to copy. With the aid of some amateur carpentering, the regular interior set was easily transformed to suit the purpose. The problem of color was solved when the chairman of the committee found a patchwork quilt in the attic, during a visit to her mother's home; a conference with the janitress of her city apartment developed the fact that she possessed a freshly scrubbed wash-tub, which she was willing not only to donate to the cause, but to have painted green.

The task of staging The Goddess of the Woven Wind was difficult and interesting, because it was decidedly a costume play, and because it was a first production. Some of the difficulties that confronted the chairman of the committee for that play were amusing.

For instance, after some perplexed thought on the subject, she tacked the following list of costumes and properties on the Bulletin Board of the English office:

• WANTED:
• Mulberry tree
• Gardener's spade
• Teakwood stool
• Chinese necklaces
• Large, colorful abacus
• Mandarin coats and hats
• Sky-blue Chinese bowl
• Chinese gong
• Bamboo rod
• Silk cocoons

She also advertised the need of these things and many others in all her classes. Within two weeks nearly everything had either appeared or been promised, except a Chinese gong with a proper "whang" to it, an unbreakable sky-blue bowl and the mulberry tree! A teacher in a neighboring school lent the company a splendid gong, sometimes used in their orchestra; a student transformed a wooden chopping bowl by means of clay and tempera into an exquisite piece of pottery, copied from a priceless bowl on exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The mulberry tree was still an unsolved problem, when Dugald Stuart Walker, the artist who has produced a number of plays at the Christadora House in New York, was consulted. He suggested that the tree be a conventionalized one of flat "drapes" of green and brown poplin, with cocoons sewn on in a simple border design.

The staging of the play then became a project for members of a third-year art class. During their English period they read the play, recited on the subject of the China of remote dynasties, constructed a miniature stage, and then, forming committees among themselves, worked out the practical details. One group purchased the necessary paint, another painted the vermilion sun. Her neighbor affixed it to a bamboo rod. To emphasize the Chinese setting, two girls made a frame with a dragon as head-piece and huge, colorful Chinese medallions to be sewn on the side drapery. The design for the medallions was obtained from a Chinese brass plate. Almost every girl in the class took part in the project. Interest was easily aroused, as a number of girls in this class took part in the play.

As for the costumes, for the thirty-four members of the cast, only eight dollars' worth was hired. The rest were either borrowed or made by the girls. The most successful one, perhaps, that worn by the empress, was copied from an Edmund Dulac illustration of the Princess Badoura. The astrologers' costumes were obtained from photographs of The Yellow Jacket, lent by Mrs. Coburn. To complete the project, the girls wrote a composition explaining how to organize the staging of a costume play.

Meanwhile, the selection and coaching of the two casts was going on. Competition for the parts was open to the girls of the entire school. A great many girls were tried out before the two committees made a choice. In fact, every girl who was recommended by her English teacher was given an opportunity to read a part. In a number of cases two girls were assigned for one part and it was not known until almost the last moment who was to have the rôle or who was to understudy. Rehearsals were held at least three times a week, for three weeks, and a full-dress rehearsal was held two days before the final performance. It was thought advisable to allow a day to elapse between the last rehearsal and the real performance, in order to give the girls an opportunity to rest.

In coaching the plays, an effort was made to have a girl read the line properly without having it read to her. The members of the coaching committee would explain the mood or frame of mind to the speaker; the girl would then interpret the mood in her reading.

In addition to the coaching committee, several teachers sat at the back of the auditorium during rehearsals, to warn the speakers when they could not be heard.

The advertising campaign began soon after a choice of plays had been made. In compliance with the request of the Publicity Committee, one of the teachers of an art class and a teacher in the English Department assigned to their pupils the problem of making posters to advertise the plays. To the painter of the best one a prize was awarded.

Announcements of the play were posted by pupils in various parts of the building. Tiny brochures decorated with Chinese motives were prepared by students during an English period, and later were circulated among the faculty, and placed upon office bulletin boards, and in diaries. In writing these brochures the girls applied the knowledge they had gained in studying the writing of advertisements. Two illustrated advertisements made in one class were displayed in other high schools; a number were sent in an envelope with tickets to patrons and distinguished friends of the schools. One class wrote letters to firms of wholesale silk merchants and importers, advertising The Goddess of the Woven Wind, the story of silk.

In order to increase the sale of tickets and to prepare an appreciative audience, various subjects were suggested to English teachers for projects in class work connected with the plays. In many classes every girl wrote and illustrated a paper on some topic pertaining to Chinese life, such as customs, costumes, religion, occupations, silk, China, umbrellas, fireworks, fans, position of women, objects of art. Oral compositions were devoted to phases of some of these subjects. In the oral work and in the written composition, accurate knowledge of authorities consulted was insisted upon. Chinese proverbs were studied. "A man knows, but a woman knows better," used by the author in her play, was one of the most popular ones. Translations, found in the Literary Digest, of Chinese poems of the sixteenth and of the eighteenth century were produced and read by the girls, many of whom brought to class all the Chinese articles they could find at home. Incense burners, fans, pitchers, embroideries, chop sticks, beads, shoes, vases, and even a Chinese newspaper, found their way to the class-room and were exhibited with pride. Interest in things Chinese was so great that clippings and prints continued coming in for almost two weeks after the play had been presented. Class visits were made to the Chinese exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and to importing houses in the neighborhood.

The kind of co-operation described has led in some schools to the establishment of workshops similar to those conducted in connection with certain university courses in playwriting and dramatics and with many of the Little Theatres. A paragraph that appeared recently in a calendar of the New York Drama League explains in a convincing way the necessity for a workshop in connection with all amateur producing. "One of the most vital problems that the amateur group has to solve," says the writer, "is that of securing a proper place for the preparing of a production. Not all organizations can hold rehearsals, paint scenery, experiment with lighting on costumes and scenery on the stage on which they are finally to play. Even where this is possible, it is costly. Much of the activity is now carried on in the homes of members so far as rehearsals go; in barns or garages as regards the painting of scenery and not at all so far as the lighting question is concerned. More often than not, a few hasty final rehearsals are relied upon to pull into shape some of the most important elements of a satisfactory performance.

"The remedy lies in the acquisition of a workshop. A large room with a very high ceiling will serve admirably. But you must be able to work recklessly in it, sawing wood, hammering nails, mussing things up generally with paint and riddling the walls and ceiling with hooks and screws to hang lighting apparatus and other properties. An old-fashioned barn can be converted into an ideal workshop, if provision is made for proper heating. All the activity should be concentrated in the workshop and there is no reason why all the experimentalists cannot be at work at once—the carpenters, the scene painters, the electricians, the property men, and even the actors with their director."

The use of miniature model stages is becoming more and more common in the schools, the preliminary model serving the workshop, until the background, lighting, properties, and costumes are completed. It is an excellent thing for schools to start a collection of models of famous theatres and notably successful stage-sets. The material for these exists in illustrated books and magazines and in the mass of descriptive material in regard to the stage that is now being published.[21]

Interior of the Beechwood Theatre.

Exterior of the Beechwood Theatre.

Two school theatres designed especially for the purpose of fostering in the schools to which they are attached an interest in the drama are the Garden Theatre of the high school at Montclair, New Jersey, and the Beechwood Theatre in the private school at Scarborough-on-Hudson, New York, built by Frank A. Vanderlip. At Montclair the present high school building was completed in 1914. To the northeast of the building at that time was a ravine which afforded a natural amphitheatre. The site was perfect, and a gift from a public-spirited citizen, Mrs. Henry Lang, made it possible to create on this spot a very artistic and beautiful place for outdoor performances, either plays or pageants.

On the slope nearest the building are semi-circular rows of concrete seats accommodating about fifteen hundred people. A brook spanned by two arched bridges separates the audience from the stage. Back of the turf stage is a graveled stage slightly raised and reached by two flights of steps. The pergola and trees make a beautiful background. The house in the rear is a part of the plant and is used for dressing and make-up.

The Beechwood Theatre within the school has a proscenium opening of twenty-seven feet and a stage depth, back to the plaster horizon, of the same dimensions. There are two complete sets of drapery, one of coarse écru linen and one of blue velvet; there is also a stock drawing-room set of thirty pieces. Back of the stage are ten dressing-rooms. The lighting arrangements are extraordinarily complete: the theatre has a standard electrical equipment of footlights and borders and a switchboard of the best type to which has recently been added the latest lighting devices, consisting of an X-ray border, the end section of which is on a separate dimmer, a thousand-watt centre floodlight, six five-hundred watt-spotlights, each on separate dimmers, in the false proscenium or tormentor,[22] and a line of one-thousand-watt floodlights for lighting the plaster sky. All of this recently added equipment is controlled from a separate portable switchboard.

Though this plant was built primarily for the school, it is used also by the Beechwood Players, a Little Theatre organization, and by other community clubs which comprise an orchestra, a chorus, a group interested in the fine arts, and a poetry circle. Mr. Vanderlip looks forward to the development of a school of the arts of the theatre from the nucleus of the Beechwood community clubs. With this idea in mind he has just built a workshop for the Beechwood Players in a separate building. It contains power woodworking machines, and rooms for painting scenery and for the costume department, the latter containing power sewing machines.

There is no doubt but that these two schools have unique facilities for developing an interest in the acted drama. But artistic results have often been secured in the school theatre with equipment falling far short of the ideal standards achieved at Montclair and at Scarborough. Other less fortunate schools are, moreover, at no particular disadvantage when it comes to the class-room study of the drama for which this book is primarily planned, this work being the first step in the direction of a more intelligent attitude toward modern plays and modern theatres. A class-room reading of modern plays without any accessories, as Shakespeare is often read from the seats and the aisles, is one of the most practical methods of speech and voice improvement. Louis Calvert, the eminent actor, speaking of this kind of training says: "After all it is one of the simplest things in the world to learn to speak correctly, to take thought and begin and end each word properly.... A little attention to one's everyday conversation will often work wonders. If one schools himself for a while to speak a little more slowly, and to give each syllable its due, it is surprising how naturally and rapidly his speech will clarify. If we take care of the consonants, the vowels will take care of themselves."

Ravine where the Garden Theatre was built.

The Garden Theatre.

At the present time, then, the theatre in the schools means a variety of things. It means first and foremost, as suggested by the latest college entrance requirements, the study of modern plays, side by side with the classics. It means also the improvement of English speech, through the interpretation and the reading aloud of the text. It means a study of the new art of the theatre such as the present book suggests. It means often the presentation of plays before outside audiences and the consequent strengthening of the ties that should exist between the school and the community. It may mean the co-operation of several departments of the school in the production; and, in this case, it usually results in the establishment of some kind of a workshop. And finally, in certain favored schools, it means the erection of model Little Theatres. It seems fair to suppose that this newly aroused interest in modern drama and in modern methods of production in the schools will have far-reaching results.

BEAUTY AND THE JACOBIN[23]
By
BOOTH TARKINGTON

Since the days of Edward Eggleston, Indiana has been accumulating literary traditions until at the present time it rivals New England in the variety of its literary associations. Newton Booth Tarkington, born in Indianapolis in 1869, and continuing to make his home there still in the old family house on North Pennsylvania Street, is one of the most distinguished of the Hoosier writers. As a lad of eleven he began his friendship with James Whitcomb Riley, then a neighbor. "He acknowledges (shaking his head in reflection at the depth of it) that the spirit of Riley has exercised over him a strong, if often unconsciously felt, influence all his life." The delicious stories of Penrod and of the William Sylvanus Baxter of Seventeen that Booth Tarkington has told for the unalloyed delight of old and young are said to reproduce quite accurately the author's recollection of his own boyhood pranks and associations in the Middle-Western city of his birth. Tarkington went first to Phillips Exeter Academy and later to Purdue University at Lafayette, Indiana, before he became a member of the class of '93 at Princeton. His popularity and his good fellowship are still cherished memories on the campus.

It seems that he was infallibly associated in the undergraduate mind with the singing of Danny Deever; so much so, that whenever he appeared on the steps at Nassau Hall there would be an immediate demand for his speciality, a demand that often caused him to retire as inconspicuously as possible from the crowd. These old days are commemorated in the following verses, a copy of which, framed, hangs on the walls of the Princeton Club in New York.

No biography of Booth Tarkington, no matter how brief, should omit to mention that he was elected to the Indiana State Legislature and sat for a time in that body, where he accumulated, no doubt, some data on the subject of Indiana politics that he may afterwards have put to literary use.

He has found the subject for most of his novels and plays[24] in contemporary American life, which he treats unsentimentally, spiritedly, and vigorously. Beauty and the Jacobin, like his famous and fascinating tale, Monsieur Beaucaire, is exceptional among his works in deserting the modern American scene for an Eighteenth Century situation. The story and the play are likely, for this reason, to be compared. The tone of Monsieur Beaucaire is more urbane, more whimsical, more romantic than the mood of Beauty and the Jacobin which "breaks with the pretty, pretty kind of thing. There is a new quality in the texture of the writing.... The plot here springs directly from character, and the action of the piece is inevitable. Beauty and the Jacobin gives evidence of being the first conscious and determined, as it is the first consistent, effort of the author to leave the surface and work from the inside of his characters out.... The whole of the little drama is scintillant with wit, delicate and at times brilliant and somewhat Shavian, which flashes out poignantly against the sombreness of its background."[25]

Beauty and the Jacobin was published in 1912 and has had at least one performance on the professional stage. On November 12, 1912, it was played by members of the company then acting in Fanny's First Play, at a matinée at the Comedy Theatre, in New York. It has always been a favorite with amateurs and quite recently was performed in St. Louis by one of the dramatic clubs of that city.

BEAUTY AND THE JACOBIN

Our scene is in a rusty lodging-house of the Lower Town, Boulogne-sur-Mer, and the time, the early twilight of dark November in northern France. This particular November is dark indeed, for it is November of the year 1793, Frimaire of the Terror. The garret room disclosed to us, like the evening lowering outside its one window, and like the times, is mysterious, obscure, smoked with perplexing shadows; these flying and staggering to echo the shiftings of a young man writing at a desk by the light of a candle.

We are just under the eaves here; the dim ceiling slants; and there are two doors: that in the rear wall is closed; the other, upon our right, and evidently leading to an inner chamber, we find ajar. The furniture of this mean apartment is chipped, faded, insecure, yet still possessed of a haggard elegance; shamed odds and ends, cheaply acquired by the proprietor of the lodging-house, no doubt at an auction of the confiscated leavings of some emigrant noble. The single window, square and mustily curtained, is so small that it cannot be imagined to admit much light on the brightest of days; however, it might afford a lodger a limited view of the houses opposite and the street below. In fact, as our eyes grow accustomed to the obscurity we discover it serving this very purpose at the present moment, for a tall woman stands close by in the shadow, peering between the curtains with the distrustfulness of a picket thrown far out into an enemy's country. Her coarse blouse and skirt, new and as ill-fitting as sacks, her shop-woman's bonnet and cheap veil, and her rough shoes are naïvely denied by her sensitive, pale hands and the high-bred and in-bred face, long profoundly marked by loss and fear, and now very white, very watchful. She is not more than forty, but her hair, glimpsed beneath the clumsy bonnet, shows much grayer than need be at that age. This is Anne de Laseyne.

The intent young man at the desk, easily recognizable as her brother, fair and of a singular physical delicacy, is a finely completed product of his race; one would pronounce him gentle in each sense of the word. His costume rivals his sister's in the innocence of its attempt at disguise: he wears a carefully soiled carter's frock, rough new gaiters, and a pair of dangerously aristocratic shoes, which are not too dusty to conceal the fact that they are of excellent make and lately sported buckles. A tousled cap of rabbit-skin, exhibiting a tricolor cockade, crowns these anomalies, though not at present his thin, blond curls, for it has been tossed upon a dressing-table which stands against the wall to the left. He is younger than Madame de Laseyne, probably by more than ten years; and, though his features so strikingly resemble hers, they are free from the permanent impress of pain which she bears like a mourning-badge upon her own.

He is expending a feverish attention upon his task, but with patently unsatisfactory results; for he whispers and mutters to himself, bites the feather of his pen, shakes his head forebodingly, and again and again crumples a written sheet and throws it upon the floor. Whenever this happens Anne de Laseyne casts a white glance at him over her shoulder—his desk is in the center of the room—her anxiety is visibly increased, and the temptation to speak less and less easily controlled, until at last she gives way to it. Her voice is low and hurried.

Anne. Louis, it is growing dark very fast.

Louis. I had not observed it, my sister. [He lights a second candle from the first; then, pen in mouth, scratches at his writing with a little knife.]

Anne. People are still crowding in front of the wine-shop across the street.

Louis [smiling with one side of his mouth]. Naturally. Reading the list of the proscribed that came at noon. Also waiting, amiable vultures, for the next bulletin from Paris. It will give the names of those guillotined day before yesterday. For a good bet: our own names [he nods toward the other room]—yes, hers, too—are all three in the former. As for the latter—well, they can't get us in that now.

Anne [eagerly]. Then you are certain that we are safe?

Louis. I am certain only that they cannot murder us day before yesterday. [As he bends his head to his writing a woman comes in languidly through the open door, bearing an armful of garments, among which one catches the gleam of fine silk, glimpses of lace and rich furs—a disordered burden which she dumps pell-mell into a large portmanteau lying open upon a chair near the desk. This new-comer is of a startling gold-and-ivory beauty; a beauty quite literally striking, for at the very first glance the whole force of it hits the beholder like a snowball in the eye; a beauty so obvious, so completed, so rounded, that it is painful; a beauty to rivet the unenvious stare of women, but from the full blast of which either king or man-peasant would stagger away to the confessional. The egregious luster of it is not breathed upon even by its overspreading of sullen revolt, as its possessor carelessly arranges the garments in the portmanteau. She wears a dress all gray, of a coarse texture, but exquisitely fitted to her; nothing could possibly be plainer, or of a more revealing simplicity. She might be twenty-two; at least it is certain that she is not thirty. At her coming, Louis looks up with a sigh of poignant wistfulness, evidently a habit; for as he leans back to watch her he sighs again. She does not so much as glance at him, but speaks absently to Madame de Laseyne. Her voice is superb, as it should be; deep and musical, with a faint, silvery huskiness.]

Eloise [the new-comer]. Is he still there?

Anne. I lost sight of him in the crowd. I think he has gone. If only he does not come back!

Louis [with grim conviction]. He will.

Anne. I am trying to hope not.

Eloise. I have told you from the first that you overestimate his importance. Haven't I said it often enough?

Anne [under her breath]. You have!

Eloise [coldly]. He will not harm you.

Anne [looking out of the window]. More people down there; they are running to the wine-shop.

Louis. Gentle idlers! [The sound of triumphant shouting comes up from the street below.] That means that the list of the guillotined has arrived from Paris.

Anne [shivering]. They are posting it in the wine-shop window. [The shouting increases suddenly to a roar of hilarity, in which the shrilling of women mingles.]

Louis. Ah! One remarks that the list is a long one. The good people are well satisfied with it. [To Eloise] My cousin, in this amiable populace which you champion, do you never scent something of—well, something of the graveyard scavenger? [She offers the response of an unmoved glance in his direction, and slowly goes out by the door at which she entered. Louis sighs again and returns to his scribbling.]

Anne [nervously]. Haven't you finished, Louis?

Louis [indicating the floor strewn with crumpled slips of paper]. A dozen.

Anne. Not good enough?

Louis [with a rueful smile]. I have lived to discover that among all the disadvantages of being a Peer of France the most dangerous is that one is so poor a forger. Truly, however, our parents are not to be blamed for neglecting to have me instructed in this art; evidently they perceived I had no talent for it. [Lifting a sheet from the desk.] Oh, vile! I am not even an amateur. [He leans back, tapping the paper thoughtfully with his pen.] Do you suppose the Fates took all the trouble to make the Revolution simply to teach me that I have no skill in forgery? Listen. [He reads what he has written.] "Committee of Public Safety. In the name of the Republic. To all Officers, Civil and Military: Permit the Citizen Balsage"—that's myself, remember—"and the Citizeness Virginie Balsage, his sister"—that's you, Anne—"and the Citizeness Marie Balsage, his second sister"—that is Eloise, you understand—"to embark in the vessel Jeune Pierrette from the port of Boulogne for Barcelona. Signed: Billaud Varennes. Carnot. Robespierre." Execrable! [He tears up the paper, scattering the fragments on the floor.] I am not even sure it is the proper form. Ah, that Dossonville!

Anne. But Dossonville helped us—

Louis. At a price. Dossonville! An individual of marked attainment, not only in penmanship, but in the art of plausibility. Before I paid him he swore that the passports he forged for us would take us not only out of Paris, but out of the country.

Anne. Are you sure we must have a separate permit to embark?

Louis. The captain of the Jeune Pierrette sent one of his sailors to tell me. There is a new Commissioner from the National Committee, he said, and a special order was issued this morning. They have an officer and a file of the National Guard on the quay to see that the order is obeyed.

Anne. But we bought passports in Paris. Why can't we here?

Louis. Send out a street-crier for an accomplished forger? My poor Anne! We can only hope that the lieutenant on the quay may be drunk when he examines my dreadful "permit." Pray a great thirst upon him, my sister! [He looks at a watch which he draws from beneath his frock.] Four o'clock. At five the tide in the river is poised at its highest; then it must run out, and the Jeune Pierrette with it. We have an hour. I return to my crime. [He takes a fresh sheet of paper and begins to write.]

Anne [urgently]. Hurry, Louis!

Louis. Watch for Master Spy.

Anne. I cannot see him. [There is silence for a time, broken only by the nervous scratching of Louis's pen.]

Louis [at work]. Still you don't see him?

Anne. No. The people are dispersing. They seem in a good humor.

Louis. Ah, if they knew—[He breaks off, examines his latest effort attentively, and finds it unsatisfactory, as is evinced by the noiseless whistle of disgust to which his lips form themselves. He discards the sheet and begins another, speaking rather absently as he does so.] I suppose I have the distinction to be one of the most hated men in our country, now that all the decent people have left it—so many by a road something of the shortest! Yes, these merry gentlemen below there would be still merrier if they knew they had within their reach a forfeited "Emigrant." I wonder how long it would take them to climb the breakneck flights to our door. Lord, there'd be a race for it! Prize-money, too, I fancy, for the first with his bludgeon.

Anne [lamentably]. Louis, Louis! Why didn't you lie safe in England?

Louis [smiling]. Anne, Anne! I had to come back for a good sister of mine.

Anne. But I could have escaped alone.

Louis. That is it—"alone"! [He lowers his voice as he glances toward the open door.] For she would not have moved at all if I hadn't come to bully her into it. A fanatic, a fanatic!

Anne [brusquely]. She is a fool. Therefore be patient with her.

Louis [warningly]. Hush.

Eloise [in a loud, careless tone from the other room]. Oh, I heard you! What does it matter? [She returns, carrying a handsome skirt and bodice of brocade and a woman's long mantle of light-green cloth, hooded and lined with fur. She drops them into the portmanteau and closes it.] There! I've finished your packing for you.

Louis [rising]. My cousin, I regret that we could not provide servants for this flight. [Bowing formally.] I regret that we have been compelled to ask you to do a share of what is necessary.

Eloise [turning to go out again]. That all?

Louis [lifting the portmanteau]. I fear—

Eloise [with assumed fatigue]. Yes, you usually do. What now?

Louis [flushing painfully]. The portmanteau is too heavy. [He returns to the desk, sits, and busies himself with his writing, keeping his grieved face from her view.]

Eloise. You mean you're too weak to carry it?

Louis. Suppose at the last moment it becomes necessary to hasten exceedingly—

Eloise. You mean, suppose you had to run, you'd throw away the portmanteau. [Contemptuously.] Oh, I don't doubt you'd do it!

Louis [forcing himself to look up at her cheerfully]. I dislike to leave my baggage upon the field, but in case of a rout it might be a temptation—if it were an impediment.

Anne [peremptorily]. Don't waste time. Lighten the portmanteau.

Louis. You may take out everything of mine.

Eloise. There's nothing of yours in it except your cloak. You don't suppose—

Anne. Take out that heavy brocade of mine.

Eloise. Thank you for not wishing to take out my fur-lined cloak and freezing me at sea!

Louis [gently]. Take out both the cloak and the dress.

Eloise [astounded]. What!

Louis. You shall have mine. It is as warm, but not so heavy.

Eloise [angrily]. Oh, I am sick of your eternal packing and unpacking! I am sick of it!

Anne. Watch at the window, then. [She goes swiftly to the portmanteau, opens it, tosses out the green mantle and the brocaded skirt and bodice, and tests the weight of the portmanteau.] I think it will be light enough now, Louis.

Louis. Do not leave those things in sight. If our landlord should come in—

Anne. I'll hide them in the bed in the next room. Eloise! [She points imperiously to the window. Eloise goes to it slowly and for a moment makes a scornful pretense of being on watch there; but as soon as Madame de Laseyne has left the room she turns, leaning against the wall and regarding Louis with languid amusement. He continues to struggle with his ill-omened "permit," but, by and by, becoming aware of her gaze, glances consciously over his shoulder and meets her half-veiled eyes. Coloring, he looks away, stares dreamily at nothing, sighs, and finally writes again, absently, like a man under a spell, which, indeed, he is. The pen drops from his hand with a faint click upon the floor. He makes the movement of a person suddenly awakened, and, holding his last writing near one of the candles, examines it critically. Then he breaks into low, bitter laughter.]

Eloise [unwillingly curious]. You find something amusing?

Louis. Myself. One of my mistakes, that is all.

Eloise [indifferently]. Your mirth must be indefatigable if you can still laugh at those.

Louis. I agree. I am a history of error.

Eloise. You should have made it a vocation; it is your one genius. And yet—truly because I am a fool I think, as Anne says—I let you hector me into a sillier mistake than any of yours.

Louis. When?

Eloise [flinging out her arms]. Oh, when I consented to this absurd journey, this tiresome journey—with you! An "escape"? From nothing. In "disguise." Which doesn't disguise.

Louis [his voice taut with the effort for self-command]. My sister asked me to be patient with you, Eloise—

Eloise. Because I am a fool, yes. Thanks. [Shrewishly.] And then, my worthy young man? [He rises abruptly, smarting almost beyond endurance.]

Louis [breathing deeply]. Have I not been patient with you?

Eloise [with a flash of energy]. If I have asked you to be anything whatever—with me!—pray recall the petition to my memory.

Louis [beginning to let himself go]. Patient! Have I ever been anything but patient with you? Was I not patient with you five years ago when you first harangued us on your "Rights of Man" and your monstrous republicanism? Where you got hold of it all I don't know—

Eloise [kindling]. Ideas, my friend. Naturally, incomprehensible to you. Books! Brains! Men!

Louis. "Books! Brains! Men!" Treason, poison, and mobs! Oh, I could laugh at you then: they were only beginning to kill us, and I was patient. Was I not patient with you when these Republicans of yours drove us from our homes, from our country, stole all we had, assassinated us in dozens, in hundreds, murdered our King? [He walks the floor, gesticulating nervously.] When I saw relative after relative of my own—aye, and of yours, too—dragged to the abattoir—even poor, harmless, kind André de Laseyne, whom they took simply because he was my brother-in-law—was I not patient? And when I came back to Paris for you and Anne, and had to lie hid in a stable, every hour in greater danger because you would not be persuaded to join us, was I not patient? And when you finally did consent, but protested every step of the way, pouting and—

Eloise [stung]. "Pouting!"

Louis. And when that stranger came posting after us so obvious a spy—

Eloise [scornfully]. Pooh! He is nothing.

Louis. Is there a league between here and Paris over which he has not dogged us? By diligence, on horseback, on foot, turning up at every posting-house, every roadside inn, the while you laughed at me because I read death in his face! These two days we have been here, is there an hour when you could look from that window except to see him grinning up from the wine-shop door down there?

Eloise [impatiently, but with a somewhat conscious expression]. I tell you not to fear him. There is nothing in it.

Louis [looking at her keenly]. Be sure I understand why you do not think him a spy! You believe he has followed us because you—

Eloise. I expected that! Oh, I knew it would come! [Furiously.] I never saw the man before in my life!

Louis [pacing the floor]. He is unmistakable; his trade is stamped on him; a hired trailer of your precious "Nation's."

Eloise [haughtily]. The Nation is the People. You malign because you fear. The People is sacred!

Louis [with increasing bitterness]. Aren't you tired yet of the Palais Royal platitudes? I have been patient with your Mericourtisms for so long. Yes, always I was patient. Always there was time; there was danger, but there was a little time. [He faces her, his voice becoming louder, his gestures more vehement.] But now the Jeune Pierrette sails this hour, and if we are not out of here and on her deck when she leaves the quay, my head rolls in Samson's basket within the week, with Anne's and your own to follow! Now, I tell you, there is no more time, and now—

Eloise [suavely]. Yes? Well? "Now?" [He checks himself; his lifted hand falls to his side.]

Louis [in a gentle voice]. I am still patient. [He looks into her eyes, makes her a low and formal obeisance, and drops dejectedly into the chair at the desk.]

Eloise [dangerously]. Is the oration concluded?

Louis. Quite.

Eloise [suddenly volcanic]. Then "now" you'll perhaps be "patient" enough to explain why I shouldn't leave you instantly. Understand fully that I have come thus far with you and Anne solely to protect you in case you were suspected. "Now," my little man, you are safe: you have only to go on board your vessel. Why should I go with you? Why do you insist on dragging me out of the country?

Louis [wearily]. Only to save your life; that is all.

Eloise. My life! Tut! My life is safe with the People—my People! [She draws herself up magnificently.] The Nation would protect me! I gave the people my whole fortune when they were starving. After that, who in France dare lay a finger upon the Citizeness Eloise d'Anville!

Louis. I have the idea sometimes, my cousin, that perhaps if you had not given them your property they would have taken it, anyway. [Dryly.] They did mine.

Eloise [agitated]. I do not expect you to comprehend what I felt—what I feel! [She lifts her arms longingly.] Oh, for a Man!—a Man who could understand me!

Louis [sadly]. That excludes me!

Eloise. Shall I spell it?

Louis. You are right. So far from understanding you, I understand nothing. The age is too modern for me. I do not understand why this rabble is permitted to rule France; I do not even understand why it is permitted to live.

Eloise [with superiority]. Because you belong to the class that thought itself made of porcelain and the rest of the world clay. It is simple: the mud-ball breaks the vase.

Louis. You belong to the same class, even to the same family.

Eloise. You are wrong. One circumstance proves me no aristocrat.

Louis. What circumstance?

Eloise. That I happened to be born with brains. I can account for it only by supposing some hushed-up ancestral scandal. [Brusquely.] Do you understand that?

Louis. I overlook it. [He writes again.]

Eloise. Quibbling was always a habit of yours. [Snapping at him irritably.] Oh, stop that writing! You can't do it, and you don't need it. You blame the people because they turn on you now, after you've whipped and beaten and ground them underfoot for centuries and centuries and—

Louis. Quite a career for a man of twenty-nine!

Eloise. I have said that quibbling was—

Louis [despondently]. Perhaps it is. To return to my other deficiencies, I do not understand why this spy who followed us from Paris has not arrested me long before now. I do not understand why you hate me. I do not understand the world in general. And in particular I do not understand the art of forgery. [He throws down his pen.]

Eloise. You talk of "patience"! How often have I explained that you would not need passports of any kind if you would let me throw off my incognito. If anyone questions you, it will be sufficient if I give my name. All France knows the Citizeness Eloise d'Anville. Do you suppose the officer on the quay would dare oppose—

Louis [with a gesture of resignation]. I know you think it.

Eloise [angrily]. You tempt me not to prove it. But for Anne's sake—

Louis. Not for mine. That, at least, I understand. [He rises.] My dear cousin, I am going to be very serious—

Eloise. O heaven! [She flings away from him.]

Louis [plaintively]. I shall not make another oration—

Eloise. Make anything you choose. [Drumming the floor with her foot.] What does it matter?

Louis. I have a presentiment—I ask you to listen—

Eloise [in her irritation almost screaming]. How can I help but listen? And Anne, too! [With a short laugh.] You know as well as I do that when that door is open everything you say in this room is heard in there. [She points to the open doorway, where Madame de Laseyne instantly makes her appearance, and after exchanging one fiery glance with Eloise as swiftly withdraws, closing the door behind her with outraged emphasis.]

Eloise [breaking into a laugh]. Forward, soldiers!

Louis [reprovingly]. Eloise!

Eloise. Well, open the door, then, if you want her to hear you make love to me! [Coolly.] That's what you're going to do, isn't it?

Louis [with imperfect self-control]. I wish to ask you for the last time—

Eloise [flouting]. There are so many last times!

Louis. To ask you if you are sure that you know your own heart. You cared for me once, and—

Eloise [as if this were news indeed]. I did? Who under heaven ever told you that?

Louis [flushing]. You allowed yourself to be betrothed to me, I believe.

Eloise. "Allowed" is the word, precisely. I seem to recall changing all that the very day I became an orphan—and my own master! [Satirically polite.] Pray correct me if my memory errs. How long ago was it? Six years? Seven?

Louis [with emotion]. Eloise, Eloise, you did love me then! We were happy, both of us, so very happy—

Eloise [sourly]. "Both!" My faith! But I must have been a brave little actress.

Louis. I do not believe it. You loved me. I—[He hesitates.]

Eloise. Do get on with what you have to say.

Louis [in a low voice]. I have many forebodings, Eloise, but the strongest—and for me the saddest—is that this is the last chance you will ever have to tell—to tell me—[He falters again.]

Eloise [irritated beyond measure, shouting]. To tell you what?

Louis [swallowing]. That your love for me still lingers.

Eloise [promptly]. Well, it doesn't. So that's over!

Louis. Not quite yet. I—

Eloise [dropping into a chair]. O Death!

Louis [still gently]. Listen. I have hope that you and Anne may be permitted to escape; but as for me, since the first moment I felt the eyes of that spy from Paris upon me I have had the premonition that I would be taken back—to the guillotine, Eloise. I am sure that he will arrest me when I attempt to leave this place to-night. [With sorrowful earnestness.] And it is with the certainty in my soul that this is our last hour together that I ask you if you cannot tell me that the old love has come back. Is there nothing in your heart for me?

Eloise. Was there anything in your heart for the beggar who stood at your door in the old days?

Louis. Is there nothing for him who stands at yours now, begging for a word?

Eloise [frowning]. I remember you had the name of a disciplinarian in your regiment. [She rises to face him.] Did you ever find anything in your heart for the soldiers you ordered tied up and flogged? Was there anything in your heart for the peasants who starved in your fields?

Louis [quietly]. No; it was too full of you.

Eloise. Words! Pretty little words!

Louis. Thoughts. Pretty, because they are of you. All, always of you—always, my dear. I never really think of anything but you. The picture of you is always before the eyes of my soul; the very name of you is forever in my heart. [With a rueful smile.] And it is on the tips of my fingers, sometimes when it shouldn't be. See. [He steps to the desk and shows her a scribbled sheet.] This is what I laughed at a while ago. I tried to write, with you near me, and unconsciously I let your name creep into my very forgery! I wrote it as I wrote it in the sand when we were children; as I have traced it a thousand times on coated mirrors—on frosted windows. [He reads the writing aloud.] "Permit the Citizen Balsage and his sister, the Citizeness Virginie Balsage, and his second sister, the Citizeness Marie Balsage, and Eloise d'Anville"—so I wrote!—"to embark upon the vessel Jeune Pierrette—" You see? [He lets the paper fall upon the desk.] Even in this danger, that I feel closer and closer with every passing second, your name came in of itself. I am like that English Mary: if they will open my heart when I am dead, they shall find, not "Calais," but "Eloise"!

Eloise [going to the dressing-table]. Louis, that doesn't interest me. [She adds a delicate touch or two to her hair, studying it thoughtfully in the dressing-table mirror.]

Louis [somberly]. I told you long ago—

Eloise [smiling at her reflection]. So you did—often!

Louis [breathing quickly]. I have nothing new to offer. I understand. I bore you.

Eloise. Louis, to be frank: I don't care what they find in your heart when they open it.

Louis [with a hint of sternness]. Have you never reflected that there might be something for me to forgive you?

Eloise [glancing at him over her shoulder in frowning surprise]. What!

Louis. I wonder sometimes if you have ever found a flaw in your own character.

Eloise [astounded]. So! [Turning sharply upon him.] You are assuming the right to criticize me, are you? Oho!

Louis [agitated]. I state merely—I have said—I think I forgive you a great deal—

Eloise [beginning to char]. You do! You bestow your gracious pardon upon me, do you? [Bursting into flame.] Keep your forgiveness to yourself! When I want it I'll kneel at your feet and beg it of you! You can kiss me then, for then you will know that "the old love has come back"!

Louis [miserably]. When you kneel—

Eloise. Can you picture it—Marquis? [She hurls his title at him, and draws herself up in icy splendor.] I am a woman of the Republic!

Louis. And the Republic has no need of love.

Eloise. Its daughter has no need of yours!

Louis. Until you kneel to me. You have spoken. It is ended. [Turning from her with a pathetic gesture of farewell and resignation, his attention is suddenly arrested by something invisible. He stands for a moment transfixed. When he speaks, it is in an altered tone, light and at the same time ominous.] My cousin, suffer the final petition of a bore. Forgive my seriousness; forgive my stupidity, for I believe that what one hears now means that a number of things are indeed ended. Myself among them.

Eloise [not comprehending]. "What one hears?"

Louis [slowly]. In the distance. [Both stand motionless to listen, and the room is silent. Gradually a muffled, multitudinous sound, at first very faint, becomes audible.]

Eloise. What is it?

Louis [with pale composure]. Only a song! [The distant sound becomes distinguishable as a singing from many unmusical throats and pitched in every key, a drum-beat booming underneath; a tumultuous rumble which grows slowly louder. The door of the inner room opens, and Madame de Laseyne enters.]

Anne [briskly, as she comes in]. I have hidden the cloak and the dress beneath the mattress. Have you—

Louis [lifting his hand]. Listen! [She halts, startled. The singing, the drums, and the tumult swell suddenly much louder, as if the noise-makers had turned a corner.]

Anne [crying out]. The "Marseillaise"!

Louis. The "Vultures' Chorus"!

Eloise [in a ringing voice]. The Hymn of Liberty!

Anne [trembling violently]. It grows louder.

Louis. Nearer!

Eloise [running to the window]. They are coming this way!

Anne [rushing ahead of her]. They have turned the corner of the street. Keep back, Louis!

Eloise [leaning out of the window, enthusiastically]. Vive la—[She finishes with an indignant gurgle as Anne de Laseyne, without comment, claps a prompt hand over her mouth and pushes her vigorously from the window.]

Anne. A mob—carrying torches and dancing. [Her voice shaking wildly.] They are following a troop of soldiers.

Louis. The National Guard.

Anne. Keep back from the window! A man in a tricolor scarf marching in front.

Louis. A political, then—an official of their government.

Anne. O Virgin, have mercy! [She turns a stricken face upon her brother.] It is that—

Louis [biting his nails]. Of course. Our spy. [He takes a hesitating step toward the desk; but swings about, goes to the door at the rear, shoots the bolt back and forth, apparently unable to decide upon a course of action; finally leaves the door bolted and examines the hinges. Anne, meanwhile, has hurried to the desk, and, seizing a candle there, begins to light others in a candelabrum on the dressing-table. The noise outside grows to an uproar; the "Marseillaise" changes to "Ça ira"; and a shaft of the glare from the torches below shoots through the window and becomes a staggering red patch on the ceiling.]

Anne [feverishly]. Lights! Light those candles in the sconce, Eloise! Light all the candles we have. [Eloise, resentful, does not move.]

Louis. No, no! Put them out!

Anne. Oh, fatal! [She stops him as he rushes to obey his own command.] If our window is lighted he will believe we have no thought of leaving, and pass by. [She hastily lights the candles in a sconce upon the wall as she speaks; the shabby place is now brightly illuminated.]

Louis. He will not pass by. [The external tumult culminates in riotous yelling, as, with a final roll, the drums cease to beat. Madame de Laseyne runs again to the window.]

Eloise [sullenly]. You are disturbing yourselves without reason. They will not stop here.

Anne [in a sickly whisper]. They have stopped.

Louis. At the door of this house? [Madame de Laseyne, leaning against the wall, is unable to reply, save by a gesture. The noise from the street dwindles to a confused, expectant murmur. Louis takes a pistol from beneath his blouse, strides to the door, and listens.]

Anne [faintly]. He is in the house. The soldiers followed him.

Louis. They are on the lower stairs. [He turns to the two women humbly.] My sister and my cousin, my poor plans have only made everything worse for you. I cannot ask you to forgive me. We are caught.

Anne [vitalized with the energy of desperation]. Not till the very last shred of hope is gone. [She springs to the desk and begins to tear the discarded sheets into minute fragments.] Is that door fastened?

Louis. They'll break it down, of course.

Anne. Where is our passport from Paris?

Louis. Here. [He gives it to her.]

Anne. Quick! Which of these "permits" is the best?

Louis. They're all hopeless—[He fumbles among the sheets on the desk.]

Anne. Any of them. We can't stop to select. [She thrusts the passport and a haphazard sheet from the desk into the bosom of her dress. An orderly tramping of heavy shoes and a clinking of metal become audible as the soldiers ascend the upper flight of stairs.]

Eloise. All this is childish. [Haughtily.] I shall merely announce—

Anne [uttering a half-choked scream of rage]. You'll announce nothing! Out of here, both of you!

Louis. No, no!

Anne [with breathless rapidity, as the noise on the stairs grows louder]. Let them break the door in if they will; only let them find me alone. [She seizes her brother's arm imploringly as he pauses, uncertain.] Give me the chance to make them think I am here alone.

Louis. I can't—

Anne [urging him to the inner door]. Is there any other possible hope for us? Is there any other possible way to gain even a little time? Louis, I want your word of honor not to leave that room unless I summon you. I must have it! [Overborne by her intensity, Louis nods despairingly, allowing her to force him toward the other room. The tramping of the soldiers, much louder and very close, comes to a sudden stop. There is a sharp word of command, and a dozen muskets ring on the floor just beyond the outer door.]

Eloise [folding her arms]. You needn't think I shall consent to hide myself. I shall tell them—

Anne [in a surcharged whisper]. You will not ruin us! [With furious determination, as a loud knock falls upon the door.] In there, I tell you! [Almost physically she sweeps both Eloise and Louis out of the room, closes the door upon them, and leans against it, panting. The knocking is repeated. She braces herself to speak.]

Anne [with a catch in her throat]. Who is—there?

A Sonorous Voice. French Republic!

Anne [faltering]. It is—it is difficult to hear. What do you—

The Voice. Open the door.

Anne [more firmly]. That is impossible.

The Voice. Open the door.

Anne. What is your name?

The Voice. Valsin, National Agent.

Anne. I do not know you.

The Voice. Open!

Anne. I am here alone. I am dressing. I can admit no one.

The Voice. For the last time: open!

Anne. No!

The Voice. Break it down. [A thunder of blows from the butts of muskets falls upon the door.]

Anne [rushing toward it in a passion of protest]. No, no, no! You shall not come in! I tell you I have not finished dressing. If you are men of honor—Ah! [She recoils, gasping, as a panel breaks in, the stock of a musket following it; and then, weakened at rusty bolt and crazy hinge, the whole door gives way and falls crashing into the room. The narrow passage thus revealed is crowded with shabbily uniformed soldiers of the National Guard, under an officer armed with a saber. As the door falls a man wearing a tricolor scarf strides by them, and, standing beneath the dismantled lintel, his hands behind him, sweeps the room with a smiling eye.

This personage is handsomely, almost dandiacally dressed in black; his ruffle is of lace, his stockings are of silk; the lapels of his waistcoat, overlapping those of his long coat, exhibit a rich embroidery of white and crimson. These and other details of elegance, such as his wearing powder upon his dark hair, indicate either insane daring or an importance quite overwhelming. A certain easy power in his unusually brilliant eyes favors the probability that, like Robespierre, he can wear what he pleases. Undeniably he has distinction. Equally undeniable is something in his air that is dapper and impish and lurking. His first glance over the room apparently affording him acute satisfaction, he steps lightly across the prostrate door, Madame de Laseyne retreating before him but keeping herself between him and the inner door. He comes to an unexpected halt in a dancing-master's posture, removing his huge hat—which displays a tricolor plume of ostrich feathers—with a wide flourish, an intentional burlesque of the old-court manner.]

Valsin. Permit me. [He bows elaborately.] Be gracious to a recent fellow-traveler. I introduce myself. At your service: Valsin, Agent of the National Committee of Public Safety. [He faces about sharply.] Soldiers! [They stand at attention.] To the street door. I will conduct the examination alone. My assistant will wait on this floor, at the top of the stair. Send the people away down below there, officer. Look to the courtyard. Clear the streets. [The officer salutes, gives a word of command, and the soldiers shoulder their muskets, march off, and are heard clanking down the stairs. Valsin tosses his hat upon the desk, and turns smilingly to the trembling but determined Madame de Laseyne.]

Anne [summoning her indignation]. How dare you break down my door! How dare you force your—

Valsin [suavely]. My compliments on the celerity with which the citizeness has completed her toilet. Marvelous. An example to her sex.

Anne. You intend robbery, I suppose.

Valsin [with a curt laugh]. Not precisely.

Anne. What, then?

Valsin. I have come principally for the returned Emigrant, Louis Valny-Cherault, formerly called Marquis de Valny-Cherault, formerly of the former regiment of Valny; also formerly—

Anne [cutting him off sharply]. I do not know what you mean by all these names—and "formerlies"!

Valsin. No? [Persuasively.] Citizeness, pray assert that I did not encounter you last week on your journey from Paris—

Anne [hastily]. It is true I have been to Paris on business; you may have seen me—I do not know. Is it a crime to return from Paris?

Valsin [in a tone of mock encouragement]. It will amuse me to hear you declare that I did not see you traveling in company with Louis Valny-Cherault. Come! Say it.

Anne [stepping back defensively, closer to the inner door]. I am alone, I tell you! I do not know what you mean. If you saw me speaking with people in the diligence, or at some posting-house, they were only traveling acquaintances. I did not know them. I am a widow—

Valsin. My condolences. Poor, of course?

Anne. Yes.

Valsin. And lonely, of course? [Apologetically.] Loneliness is in the formula: I suggest it for fear you might forget.

Anne [doggedly]. I am alone.

Valsin. Quite right.

Anne [confusedly]. I am a widow, I tell you—a widow, living here quietly with—

Valsin [taking her up quickly]. Ah—"with"! Living here alone, and also "with"—whom? Not your late husband?

Anne [desperately]. With my niece.

Valsin [affecting great surprise]. Ah! A niece! And the niece, I take it, is in your other room yonder?

Anne [huskily]. Yes.

Valsin [taking a step forward]. Is she pretty? [Anne places her back against the closed door, facing him grimly. He assumes a tone of indulgence.] Ah, one must not look: the niece, likewise, has not completed her toilet.

Anne. She is—asleep.

Valsin [glancing toward the dismantled doorway]. A sound napper! Why did you not say instead that she was—shaving? [He advances, smiling.]

Anne [between her teeth]. You shall not go in! You cannot see her! She is—

Valsin [laughing]. Allow me to prompt you. She is not only asleep; she is ill. She is starving. Also, I cannot go in because she is an orphan. Surely, she is an orphan? A lonely widow and her lonely orphan niece. Ah, touching—and sweet!

Anne [hotly]. What authority have you to force your way into my apartment and insult—

Valsin [touching his scarf]. I had the honor to mention the French Republic.

Anne. So! Does the French Republic persecute widows and orphans?

Valsin [gravely]. No. It is the making of them!

Valsin. I regret that its just severity was the cause of your own bereavement, Citizeness. When your unfortunate husband, André, formerly known as the Prince de Laseyne—

Anne [defiantly, though tears have sprung to her eyes]. I tell you I do not know what you mean by these titles. My name is Balsage.

Valsin. Bravo! The Widow Balsage, living here in calm obscurity with her niece. Widow Balsage, answer quickly, without stopping to think. [Sharply.] How long have you lived here?

Anne. Two months. [Faltering.]—A year!

Valsin [laughing]. Good. Two months and a year! No visitors? No strangers?

Anne. No.

Valsin [wheeling quickly and picking up Louis's cap from the dressing-table]. This cap, then, belongs to your niece.

Anne [flustered, advancing toward him as if to take it]. It was—it was left here this afternoon by our landlord.

Valsin [musingly]. That is very, very puzzling. [He leans against the dressing-table in a careless attitude, his back to her.]

Anne [cavalierly]. Why "puzzling"?

Valsin. Because I sent him on an errand to Paris this morning. [She flinches, but he does not turn to look at her, continuing in a tone of idle curiosity.] I suppose your own excursion to Paris was quite an event for you, Widow Balsage. You do not take many journeys?

Anne. I am too poor.

Valsin. And you have not been contemplating another departure from Boulogne?

Anne. No.

Valsin [still in the same careless attitude, his back toward her and the closed door]. Good. It is as I thought: the portmanteau is for ornament.

Anne [choking]. It belongs to my niece. She came only an hour ago. She has not unpacked.

Valsin. Naturally. Too ill.

Anne. She had traveled all night; she was exhausted. She went to sleep at once.

Valsin. Is she a somnambulist?

Anne [taken aback]. Why?

Valsin [indifferently]. She has just opened the door of her room in order to overhear our conversation. [Waving his hand to the dressing-table mirror, in which he had been gazing.] Observe it, Citizeness Laseyne.

Anne [demoralized]. I do not—I—[Stamping her foot.] How often shall I tell you my name is Balsage!

Valsin [turning to her apologetically]. My wretched memory. Perhaps I might remember better if I saw it written: I beg a glance at your papers. Doubtless you have your certificate of citizenship—

Anne [trembling]. I have papers, certainly.

Valsin. The sight of them—

Anne. I have my passport; you shall see. [With wildly shaking hands she takes from her blouse the passport and the "permit," crumpled together.] It is in proper form—[She is nervously replacing the two papers in her bosom when with a sudden movement he takes them from her. She cries out incoherently, and attempts to recapture them.]

Valsin [extending his left arm to fend her off]. Yes, here you have your passport. And there you have others. [He points to the littered floor under the desk.] Many of them!

Anne. Old letters! [She clutches at the papers in his grasp.]

Valsin [easily fending her off]. Doubtless! [He shakes the "permit" open.] Oho! A permission to embark—and signed by three names of the highest celebrity. Alas, these unfortunate statesmen, Billaud Varennes, Carnot, and Robespierre! Each has lately suffered an injury to his right hand. What a misfortune for France! And what a coincidence! One has not heard the like since we closed the theatres.

Anne [furiously struggling to reach his hand]. Give me my papers! Give me—

Valsin [holding them away from her]. You see, these unlucky great men had their names signed for them by somebody else. And I should judge that this somebody else must have been writing quite recently—less than half an hour ago, from the freshness of the ink—and in considerable haste; perhaps suffering considerable anguish of mind, Widow Balsage! [Madame de Laseyne, overwhelmed, sinks into a chair. He comes close to her, his manner changing startlingly.]

Valsin [bending over with sudden menace, his voice loud and harsh]. Widow Balsage, if you intend no journey, why have you this forged permission to embark on the Jeune Pierrette? Widow Balsage, who is the Citizen Balsage?

Anne [faintly]. My brother.

Valsin [straightening up]. Your first truth. [Resuming his gaiety.] Of course he is not in that room yonder with your niece.

Anne [brokenly]. No, no, no; he is not! He is not here.

Valsin [commiseratingly]. Poor woman! You have not even the pleasure to perceive how droll you are.

Anne. I perceive that I am a fool! [She dashes the tears from her eyes and springs to her feet.] I also perceive that you have denounced us before the authorities here—

Valsin. Pardon. In Boulogne it happens that I am the authority. I introduce myself for the third time: Valsin, Commissioner of the National Committee of Public Safety. Tallien was sent to Bordeaux; Collot to Lyons; I to Boulogne. Citizeness, were all of the august names on your permit genuine, you could no more leave this port without my counter-signature than you could take wing and fly over the Channel!

Anne [with a shrill laugh of triumph]. You have overreached yourself! You're an ordinary spy: you followed us from Paris—

Valsin [gaily]. Oh, I intended you to notice that!

Anne [unheeding]. You have claimed to be Commissioner of the highest power in France. We can prove that you are a common spy. You may go to the guillotine for that. Take care, Citizen! So! You have denounced us; we denounce you. I'll have you arrested by your own soldiers. I'll call them— [She makes a feint of running to the window. He watches her coolly, in silence; and she halts, chagrined.]

Valsin [pleasantly]. I was sure you would not force me to be premature. Remark it, Citizeness Laseyne: I am enjoying all this. I have waited a long time for it.

Anne [becoming hysterical]. I am the Widow Balsage, I tell you! You do not know us—you followed us from Paris. [Half sobbing.] You're a spy—a hanger-on of the police. We will prove—

Valsin [stepping to the dismantled doorway]. I left my assistant within hearing—a species of animal of mine. I may claim that he belongs to me. A worthy patriot, but skillful, who has had the honor of a slight acquaintance with you, I believe. [Calling.] Dossonville! [Dossonville, a large man, flabby of flesh, loose-mouthed, grizzled, carelessly dressed, makes his appearance in the doorway. He has a harsh and reckless eye; and, obviously a flamboyant bully by temperament, his abject, doggish deference to Valsin is instantly impressive, more than confirming the latter's remark that Dossonville "belongs" to him. Dossonville, apparently, is a chattel indeed, body and soul. At sight of him Madame de Laseyne catches at the desk for support and stands speechless.]

Valsin [easily]. Dossonville, you may inform the Citizeness Laseyne what office I have the fortune to hold.

Dossonville [coming in]. Bright heaven! All the world knows that you are the representative of the Committee of Public Safety. Commissioner to Boulogne.

Valsin. With what authority?

Dossonville. Absolute—unlimited! Naturally. What else would be useful?

Valsin. You recall this woman, Dossonville?

Dossonville. She was present when I delivered the passport to the Emigrant Valny-Cherault, in Paris.

Valsin. Did you forge that passport?

Dossonville. No. I told the Emigrant I had. Under orders. [Grinning.] It was genuine.

Valsin. Where did you get it?

Dossonville. From you.

Valsin [suavely]. Sit down, Dossonville. [The latter, who is standing by a chair, obeys with a promptness more than military. Valsin turns smilingly to Madame de Laseyne.] Dossonville's instructions, however, did not include a "permit" to sail on the Jeune Pierrette. All of which, I confess, Citizeness, has very much the appearance of a trap! [He tosses the two papers upon the desk. Utterly dismayed, she makes no effort to secure them. He regards her with quizzical enjoyment.]

Anne. Ah—you—[She fails to speak coherently.]

Valsin. Dossonville has done very well. He procured your passport, brought your "disguises," planned your journey, even gave you directions how to find these lodgings in Boulogne. Indeed, I instructed him to omit nothing for your comfort. [He pauses for a moment.] If I am a spy, Citizeness Laseyne, at least I trust your gracious intelligence may not cling to the epithet "ordinary." My soul! but I appear to myself a most uncommon type of spy—a very intricate, complete, and unusual spy, in fact.

Anne [to herself, weeping]. Ah, poor Louis!

Valsin [cheerfully]. You are beginning to comprehend? That is well. Your niece's door is still ajar by the discreet width of a finger, so I assume that the Emigrant also begins to comprehend. Therefore I take my ease! [He seats himself in the most comfortable chair in the room, crossing his legs in a leisurely attitude, and lightly drumming the tips of his fingers together, the while his peaceful gaze is fixed upon the ceiling. His tone, as he continues, is casual.] You understand, my Dossonville, having long ago occupied this very apartment myself, I am serenely aware that the Emigrant can leave the other room only by the window; and as this is the fourth floor, and a proper number of bayonets in the courtyard below are arranged to receive any person active enough to descend by a rope of bed-clothes, one is confident that the said Emigrant will remain where he is. Let us make ourselves comfortable, for it is a delightful hour—an hour I have long promised myself. I am in a good humor. Let us all be happy. Citizeness Laseyne, enjoy yourself. Call me some bad names!

Anne [between her teeth]. If I could find one evil enough!

Valsin [slapping his knee delightedly]. There it is: the complete incompetence of your class. You poor aristocrats, you do not even know how to swear. Your ancestors knew how! They were fighters; they knew how to swear because they knew how to attack; you poor moderns have no profanity left in you, because, poisoned by idleness, you have forgotten even how to resist. And yet you thought yourselves on top, and so you were—but as foam is on top of the wave. You forgot that power, like genius, always comes from underneath, because it is produced only by turmoil. We have had to wring the neck of your feather-head court, because while the court was the nation the nation had its pockets picked. You were at the mercy of anybody with a pinch of brains: adventurers like Mazarin, like Fouquet, like Law, or that little commoner, the woman Fish, who called herself Pompadour and took France—France, merely!—from your King, and used it to her own pleasure. Then, at last, after the swindlers had well plucked you—at last, unfortunate creatures, the People got you! Citizeness, the People had starved: be assured they will eat you to the bone—and then eat the bone! You are helpless because you have learned nothing and forgotten everything. You have forgotten everything in this world except how to be fat!

Dossonville [applauding with unction]. Beautiful! It is beautiful, all that! A beautiful speech!

Valsin. Ass!

Dossonville [meekly]. Perfectly, perfectly.

Valsin [crossly]. That wasn't a speech; it was the truth. Citizeness Laseyne, so far as you are concerned, I am the People. [He extends his hand negligently, with open palm.] And I have got you. [He clenches his fingers, like a cook's on the neck of a fowl.] Like that! And I'm going to take you back to Paris, you and the Emigrant. [She stands in an attitude eloquent of despair. His glance roves from her to the door of the other room, which is still slightly ajar; and, smiling at some fugitive thought, he continues, deliberately.] I take you: you and your brother—and that rather pretty little person who traveled with you. [There is a breathless exclamation from the other side of the door, which is flung open violently, as Eloise—flushed, radiant with anger, and altogether magnificent—sweeps into the room to confront Valsin.]

Eloise [slamming the door behind her]. Leave this Jack-in-Office to me, Anne!

Dossonville [dazed by the vision]. Lord! What glory! [He rises, bowing profoundly, muttering hoarsely.] Oh, eyes! Oh, hair! Look at her shape! Her chin! The divine—

Valsin [getting up and patting him reassuringly on the back]. The lady perceives her effect, my Dossonville. It is no novelty. Sit down, my Dossonville. [The still murmurous Dossonville obeys Valsin turns to Eloise, a brilliant light in his eyes.] Let me greet one of the nieces of Widow Balsage—evidently not the sleepy one, and certainly not ill. Health so transcendent—

Eloise [placing her hand upon Madame de Laseyne's shoulder]. This is a clown, Anne. You need have no fear of him whatever. His petty authority does not extend to us.

Valsin [deferentially]. Will the niece of Widow Balsage explain why it does not?

Eloise [turning upon him fiercely]. Because the patriot Citizeness Eloise d'Anville is here!

Valsin [assuming an air of thoughtfulness]. Yes, she is here. That "permit" yonder even mentions her by name. It is curious. I shall have to go into that. Continue, niece.

Eloise [with supreme haughtiness]. This lady is under her protection.

Valsin [growing red]. Pardon. Under whose protection?

Eloise [sulphurously]. Under the protection of Eloise d'Anville! [This has a frightful effect upon Valsin; his face becomes contorted; he clutches at his throat, apparently half strangled, staggers, and falls choking into the easy-chair he has formerly occupied.]

Valsin [gasping, coughing, incoherent]. Under the pro—the protection—[He explodes into peal after peal of uproarious laughter.] The protection of—Aha, ha, ha, ho, ho, ho! [He rocks himself back and forth unappeasably.]

Eloise [with a slight lift of the eyebrows]. This man is an idiot.

Valsin [during an abatement of his attack]. Oh, pardon! It is—too—much—too much for me! You say—these people are—

Eloise [stamping her foot]. Under the protection of Eloise d'Anville, imbecile! You cannot touch them. She wills it! [At this, Valsin shouts as if pleading for mercy, and beats the air with his hands. He struggles to his feet and, pounding himself upon the chest, walks to and fro in the effort to control his convulsion.]

Eloise [to Anne, under cover of the noise he makes]. I was wrong: he is not an idiot.

Anne [despairingly]. He laughs at you.

Eloise [in a quick whisper]. Out of bluster; because he is afraid. He is badly frightened. I know just what to do. Go into the other room with Louis.

Anne [protesting weakly]. I can't hope—

Eloise [flashing from a cloud]. You failed, didn't you? [Madame de Laseyne, after a tearful perusal of the stern resourcefulness now written in the younger woman's eyes, succumbs with a piteous gesture of assent and goes out forlornly. Eloise closes the door and stands with her back to it.]

Valsin [paying no attention to them]. Eloise d'Anville! [Still pacing the room in the struggle to subdue his hilarity.] This young citizeness speaks of the protection of Eloise d'Anville! [Leaning feebly upon Dossonville's shoulder.] Do you hear, my Dossonville? It is an ecstasy. Ecstasize, then. Scream, Dossonville!

Dossonville [puzzled, but evidently accustomed to being so, cackles instantly]. Perfectly. Ha, ha! The citizeness is not only stirringly beautiful, she is also—

Valsin. She is also a wit. Susceptible henchman, concentrate your thoughts upon domesticity. In this presence remember your wife!

Eloise [peremptorily]. Dismiss that person. I have something to say to you.

Valsin [wiping his eyes]. Dossonville, you are not required. We are going to be sentimental, and heaven knows you are not the moon. In fact, you are a fat old man. Exit, obesity! Go somewhere and think about your children. Flit, whale!

Dossonville [rising]. Perfectly, my chieftain. [He goes to the broken door.]

Eloise [tapping the floor with her shoe]. Out of hearing!

Valsin. The floor below.

Dossonville. Well understood. Perfectly, perfectly! [He goes out through the hallway; disappears, chuckling grossly. There are some moments of silence within the room, while he is heard clumping down a flight of stairs; then Valsin turns to Eloise with burlesque ardor.]

Valsin. "Alone at last!"

Eloise [maintaining her composure]. Rabbit!

Valsin [dropping into the chair at the desk, with mock dejection]. Repulsed at the outset! Ah, Citizeness, there were moments on the journey from Paris when I thought I detected a certain kindness in your glances at the lonely stranger.

Eloise [folding her arms]. You are to withdraw your soldiers, countersign the "permit," and allow my friends to embark at once.

Valsin [with solemnity]. Do you give it as an order, Citizeness?

Eloise. I do. You will receive suitable political advancement.

Valsin [in a choked voice]. You mean as a—a reward?

Eloise [haughtily]. I guarantee that you shall receive it! [He looks at her strangely; then, with a low moan, presses his hand to his side, seeming upon the point of a dangerous seizure.]

Valsin [managing to speak]. I can only beg you to spare me. You have me at your mercy.

Eloise [swelling]. It is well for you that you understand that!

Valsin [shaking his hand ruefully]. Yes; you see I have a bad liver: it may become permanently enlarged. Laughter is my great danger.

Eloise [crying out with rage]. Oh!

Valsin [dolorously]. I have continually to remind myself that I am no longer in the first flush of youth.

Eloise. Idiot! Do you not know who I am!

Valsin. You? Oh yes—[He checks himself abruptly; looks at her with brief intensity; turns his eyes away, half closing them in quick meditation; smiles, as upon some secret pleasantry, and proceeds briskly.] Oh yes, yes, I know who you are.

Eloise [beginning haughtily]. Then you—

Valsin [at once cutting her off]. As to your name, I do not say. Names at best are details; and your own is a detail that could hardly be thought to matter. What you are is obvious: you joined Louis and his sister in Paris at the barriers, and traveled with them as "Marie Balsage," a sister. You might save us a little trouble by giving us your real name; you will probably refuse, and the police will have to look it up when I take you back to Paris. Frankly, you are of no importance to us, though of course we'll send you to the Tribunal. No doubt you are a poor relative of the Valny-Cheraults, or, perhaps, you may have been a governess in the Laseyne family, or—

Eloise [under her breath]. Idiot! Idiot!

Valsin [with subterranean enjoyment, watching her sidelong]. Or the good-looking wife of some faithful retainer of the Emigrant's, perhaps.

Eloise [with a shrill laugh]. Does the Committee of Public Safety betray the same intelligence in the appointment of all its agents? [Violently.] Imbecile, I—

Valsin [quickly raising his voice to check her]. You are of no importance, I tell you! [Changing his tone.] Of course I mean politically. [With broad gallantry.] Otherwise, I am the first to admit extreme susceptibility. I saw that you observed it on the way—at the taverns, in the diligence, at the posting-houses, at—

Eloise [with serenity]. Yes. I am accustomed to oglers.

Valsin. Alas, I believe you! My unfortunate sex is but too responsive.

Eloise [gasping]. "Responsive"—Oh!

Valsin [indulgently]. Let us return to the safer subject. Presently I shall arrest those people in the other room and, regretfully, you too. But first I pamper myself; I chat; I have an attractive woman to listen. In the matter of the arrest, I delay my fire; I do not flash in the pan, but I lengthen my fuse. Why? For the same reason that when I was a little boy and had something good to eat, I always first paid it the compliments of an epicure. I looked at it a long while. I played with it. Then—I devoured it! I am still like that. And Louis yonder is good to eat, because I happen not to love him. However, I should mention that I doubt if he could recall either myself or the circumstance which annoyed me; some episodes are sometimes so little to certain people and so significant to certain other people. [He smiles, stretching himself luxuriously in his chair.] Behold me, Citizeness! I am explained. I am indulging my humor: I play with my cake. Let us see into what curious little figures I can twist it.

Eloise. Idiot!

Valsin [pleasantly]. I have lost count, but I think that is the sixth idiot you have called me. Aha, it is only history, which one admires for repeating itself. Good! Let us march. I shall play—[He picks up the "permit" from the desk, studies it absently, and looks whimsically at her over his shoulder, continuing:] I shall play with—with all four of you.

Eloise [impulsively]. Four?

Valsin. I am not easy to deceive; there are four of you here.

Eloise [staring]. So?

Valsin. Louis brought you and his sister from Paris: a party of three. This "permit" which he forged is for four; the original three and the woman you mentioned a while ago, Eloise d'Anville. Hence she must have joined you here. The deduction is plain: there are three people in that room: the Emigrant, his sister, and this Eloise d'Anville. To the trained mind such reasoning is simple.

Eloise [elated]. Perfectly!

Valsin [with an air of cunning]. Nothing escapes me. You see that.

Eloise. At first glance! I make you my most profound compliments. Sir, you are an eagle!

Valsin [smugly]. Thanks. Now, then, pretty governess, you thought this d'Anville might be able to help you. What put that in your head?

Eloise [with severity]. Do you pretend not to know what she is?

Valsin. A heroine I have had the misfortune never to encounter. But I am informed of her character and history.

Eloise [sternly]. Then you understand that even the Agent of the National Committee risks his head if he dares touch people she chooses to protect.

Valsin [extending his hand in plaintive appeal]. Be generous to my opacity. How could she protect anybody?

Eloise [with condescension]. She has earned the gratitude—

Valsin. Of whom?

Eloise [superbly]. Of the Nation!

Valsin [breaking out again]. Ha, ha, ha! [Clutching at his side.] Pardon, oh, pardon, liver of mine. I must not die; my life is still useful.

Eloise [persisting stormily]. Of the People, stupidity! Of the whole People, dolt! Of France, blockhead!

Valsin [with a violent effort, conquering his hilarity]. There! I am saved. Let us be solemn, my child; it is better for my malady. You are still so young that one can instruct you that individuals are rarely grateful; "the People," never. What you call "the People" means folk who are not always sure of their next meal; therefore their great political and patriotic question is the cost of food. Their heroes are the champions who are going to make it cheaper; and when these champions fail them or cease to be useful to them, then they either forget these poor champions—or eat them. Let us hear what your Eloise d'Anville has done to earn the reward of being forgotten instead of eaten.

Eloise [her lips quivering]. She surrendered her property voluntarily. She gave up all she owned to the Nation.

Valsin [genially]. And immediately went to live with her relatives in great luxury.

Eloise [choking]. The Republic will protect her. She gave her whole estate—

Valsin. And the order for its confiscation was already written when she did it.

Eloise [passionately]. Ah—liar!

Valsin [smiling]. I have seen the order. [She leans against the wall, breathing heavily. He goes on, smoothly.] Yes, this martyr "gave" us her property; but one hears that she went to the opera just the same and wore more jewels than ever, and lived richly upon the Laseynes and Valny-Cheraults, until they were confiscated. Why, all the world knows about this woman; and let me tell you, to your credit, my governess, I think you have a charitable heart: you are the only person I ever heard speak kindly of her.

Eloise [setting her teeth]. Venom!

Valsin [observing her slyly]. It is with difficulty I am restraining my curiosity to see her—also to hear her!—when she learns of her proscription by a grateful Republic.

Eloise [with shrill mockery]. Proscribed? Eloise d'Anville proscribed? Your inventions should be more plausible, Goodman Spy! I knew you were lying—

Valsin [smiling]. You do not believe—

Eloise [proudly]. Eloise d'Anville is a known Girondist. The Gironde is the real power in France.

Valsin [mildly]. That party has fallen.

Eloise [with fire]. Not far! It will revive.

Valsin. Pardon, Citizeness, but you are behind the times, and they are very fast nowadays—the times. The Gironde is dead.

Eloise [ominously]. It may survive you, my friend. Take care!

Valsin [unimpressed]. The Gironde had a grand façade, and that was all. It was a party composed of amateurs and orators; and of course there were some noisy camp-followers and a few comic-opera vivandières, such as this d'Anville. In short, the Gironde looked enormous because it was hollow. It was like a pie that is all crust. We have tapped the crust—with a knife, Citizeness. There is nothing left.

Eloise [contemptuously]. You say so. Nevertheless, the Rolands—

Valsin [gravely]. Roland was found in a field yesterday; he had killed himself. His wife was guillotined the day after you left Paris. Every one of their political friends is proscribed.

Eloise [shaking as with bitter cold]. It is a lie! Not Eloise d'Anville!

Valsin [rising]. Would you like to see the warrant for her arrest? [He takes a packet of documents from his breast pocket, selects one, and spreads it open before her.] Let me read you her description: "Eloise d'Anville, aristocrat. Figure, comely. Complexion, blond. Eyes, dark blue. Nose, straight. Mouth, wide—"

Eloise [in a burst of passion, striking the warrant a violent blow with her clenched fist]. Let them dare! [Beside herself, she strikes again, tearing the paper from his grasp. She stamps upon it.] Let them dare, I say!

Valsin [picking up the warrant]. Dare to say her mouth is wide?

Eloise [cyclonic]. Dare to arrest her!

Valsin. It does seem a pity. [He folds the warrant slowly and replaces it in his pocket.] Yes, a great pity. She was the one amusing thing in all this somberness. She will be missed. The Revolution will lack its joke.

Eloise [recoiling, her passion exhausted]. Ah, infamy! [She turns from him, covering her face with her hands.]

Valsin [with a soothing gesture]. Being only her friend, you speak mildly. The d'Anville herself would call it blasphemy.

Eloise [with difficulty]. She is—so vain—then?

Valsin [lightly]. Oh, a type—an actress.

Eloise [her back to him]. How do you know? You said—

Valsin. That I had not encountered her. [Glibly.] One knows best the people one has never seen. Intimacy confuses judgment. I confess to that amount of hatred for the former Marquis de Valny-Cherault that I take as great an interest in all that concerns him as if I loved him. And the little d'Anville concerns him—yes, almost one would say, consumes him. The unfortunate man is said to be so blindly faithful that he can speak her name without laughing.

Eloise [stunned]. Oh!

Valsin [going on, cheerily]. No one else can do that, Citizeness. Jacobins, Cordeliers, Hébertists, even the shattered relics of the Gironde itself, all alike join in the colossal laughter at this Tricoteuse in Sèvres—this Jeanne d'Arc in rice-powder!

Eloise [tragically]. They laugh—and proclaim her an outlaw!

Valsin [waving his hand carelessly]. Oh, it is only that we are sweeping up the last remnants of aristocracy, and she goes with the rest—into the dust-heap. She should have remained a royalist; the final spectacle might have had dignity. As it is, she is not of her own class, not of ours: neither fish nor flesh nor—but yes, perhaps, after all, she is a fowl.

Eloise [brokenly]. Alas! Homing—with wounded wing! [She sinks into a chair with pathetic grace, her face in her hands.]

Valsin [surreptitiously grinning]. Not at all what I meant. [Brutally.] Peacocks don't fly.

Eloise [regaining her feet at a bound]. You imitation dandy! You—

Valsin [with benevolence]. My dear, your indignation for your friend is chivalrous. It is admirable; but she is not worth it. You do not understand her: you have probably seen her so much that you have never seen her as she is.

Eloise [witheringly]. But you, august Zeus, having never seen her, will reveal her to me!

Valsin [smoothly urbane]. If you have ears. You see, she is not altogether unique, but of a variety known to men who are wise enough to make a study of women.

Eloise [snapping out a short, loud laugh in his face]. Pouff!

Valsin [unruffled]. I profess myself an apprentice. The science itself is but in its infancy. Women themselves understand very well that they are to be classified, and they fear that we shall perceive it: they do not really wish to be known. Yet it is coming; some day our cyclopedists will have you sorted, classed, and defined with precision; but the d'Alembert of the future will not be a woman, because no woman so disloyal will ever be found. Men have to acquire loyalty to their sex: yours is an instinct. Citizen governess, I will give you a reading of the little d'Anville from this unwritten work. To begin—

Eloise [feverishly interested, but affecting languor]. Must you?

Valsin. To Eloise d'Anville the most interesting thing about a rose-bush has always been that Eloise d'Anville could smell it. Moonlight becomes important when it falls upon her face; sunset is worthy when she grows rosy in it. To her mind, the universe was set in motion to be the background for a decoration, and she is the decoration. She believes that the cathedral was built for the fresco. And when a dog interests her, it is because he would look well beside her in a painting. Such dogs have no minds. I refer you to all the dogs in the portraits of Beauties.

Eloise [not at all displeased; pretending carelessness]. Ah, you have heard that she is beautiful?

Valsin. Far worse: that she is a Beauty. Let nothing ever tempt you, my dear, into setting up in that line. For you are very well-appearing, I assure you; and if you had been surrounded with all the disadvantages of the d'Anville, who knows but that you might have become as famous a Beauty as she? What makes a Beauty is not the sumptuous sculpture alone, but a very peculiar arrogance—not in the least arrogance of mind, my little governess. In this, your d'Anville emerged from childhood full-panoplied indeed; and the feather-head court fell headlong at her feet. It was the fated creature's ruin.

Eloise [placidly]. And it is because of her beauty that you drag her to the guillotine?

Valsin. Bless you, I merely convey her!

Eloise. Tell me, logician, was it not her beauty that inspired her to give her property to the Nation?

Valsin. It was.

Eloise. What perception! I am faint with admiration. And no doubt it was her beauty that made her a Republican?

Valsin. What else?

Eloise. Hail, oracle! [She releases an arpeggio of satiric laughter.]

Valsin. That laugh is diaphanous. I see you through it, already convinced. [She stops laughing immediately.] Ha! we may proceed. Remark this, governess: a Beauty is the living evidence of man's immortality; the one plain proof that he has a soul.

Eloise. It is not so bad then, after all?

Valsin. It is utterly bad. But of all people a Beauty is most conscious of her duality. Her whole life is based upon her absolute knowledge that her Self and her body are two. She sacrifices all things to her beauty because her beauty feeds her Self with a dreadful food which it has made her unable to live without.

Eloise. My little gentleman, you talk like a sentimental waiter. Your metaphors are all hot from the kitchen.

Valsin [nettled]. It is natural; unlike your Eloise, I am really of "the People"—and starved much in my youth.

Eloise. But, like her, you are still hungry.

Valsin. A Beauty is a species of cannibal priestess, my dear. She will make burnt-offerings of her father and her mother, her sisters—her lovers—to her beauty, that it may in turn bring her the food she must have or perish.

Eloise. Boum! [She snaps her fingers.] And of course she bathes in the blood of little children?

Valsin [grimly]. Often.

Eloise [averting her gaze from his]. This mysterious food—

Valsin. Not at all mysterious. Sensation. There you have it. And that is why Eloise d'Anville is a renegade. You understand perfectly.

Eloise. You are too polite. No.

Valsin [gaily]. Behold, then! Many women who are not Beauties are beautiful, but in such women you do not always discover beauty at your first glance: it is disclosed with a subtle tardiness. It does not dazzle; it is reluctant; but it grows as you look again and again. You get a little here, a little there, like glimpses of children hiding in a garden. It is shy, and sometimes closed in from you altogether, and then, unexpectedly, this belated loveliness springs into bloom before your very eyes. It retains the capacity of surprise, the vital element of charm. But the Beauty lays all waste before her at a stroke: it is soon over. Thus your Eloise, brought to court, startled Versailles; the sensation was overwhelming. Then Versailles got used to her, just as it had to its other prodigies: the fountains were there, the King was there, the d'Anville was there; and naturally, one had seen them; saw them every day—one talked of matters less accepted. That was horrible to Eloise. She had tasted; the appetite, once stirred, was insatiable. At any cost she must henceforth have always the sensation of being a sensation. She must be the pivot of a reeling world. So she went into politics. Ah, Citizeness, there was one man who understood Beauties—not Homer, who wrote of Helen! Romance is gallant by profession, and Homer lied like a poet. For the truth about the Trojan War is that the wise Ulysses made it, not because Paris stole Helen, but because the Trojans were threatening to bring her back.

Eloise [unwarily]. Who was the man that understood Beauties?

Valsin. Bluebeard. [He crosses the room to the dressing-table, leans his back against it in an easy attitude, his elbows resting upon the top.]

Eloise [slowly, a little tremulously]. And so Eloise d'Anville should have her head cut off?

Valsin. Well, she thought she was in politics, didn't she? [Suavely.] You may be sure she thoroughly enjoyed her hallucination that she was a great figure in the Revolution—which was cutting off the heads of so many of her relatives and old friends! Don't waste your pity, my dear.

Eloise [looking at him fixedly]. Citizen, you must have thought a great deal about my unhappy friend. She might be flattered by so searching an interest.

Valsin [negligently]. Not interest in her, governess, but in the Emigrant who cools his heels on the other side of that door, greatly to my enjoyment, waiting my pleasure to arrest him. The poor wretch is the one remaining lover of this girl; faithful because he let his passion for her become a habit; and he will never get over it until he has had possession. She has made him suffer frightfully, but I shall never forgive her for not having dealt him the final stroke. It would have saved me all the bother I have been put to in avenging the injury he did me.

Eloise [frowning]. What "final stroke" could she have "dealt" him?

Valsin [with sudden vehement intensity]. She could have loved him! [He strikes the table with his fist.] I see it! I see it! Beauty's husband! [Pounding the table with each exclamation, his voice rising in excitement.] What a vision! This damned, proud, loving Louis, a pomade bearer! A buttoner! An errand-boy to the perfumer's, to the chemist's, to the milliner's! A groom of the powder-closet—

Eloise [snatching at the opportunity]. How noisy you are!

Valsin [discomfited, apologetically]. You see, it is only so lately that we of "the People" have dared even to whisper. Of course, now that we are free to shout, we overdo it. We let our voices out, we let our joys out, we let our hates out. We let everything out—except our prisoners! [He smiles winningly.]

Eloise [slowly]. Do you guess what all this bluster—this tirade upon the wickedness of beauty—makes me think?

Valsin. Certainly. Being a woman, you cannot imagine a bitterness which is not "personal."

Eloise [laughing]. "Being a woman," I think that the person who has caused you the greatest suffering in your life must be very good-looking!

Valsin [calmly]. Quite right. It was precisely this d'Anville. I will tell you. [He sits on the arm of a chair near her, and continues briskly.] I was not always a politician. Six years ago I was a soldier in the Valny regiment of cavalry. That was the old army, that droll army, that royal army; so ridiculous that it was truly majestic. In the Valny regiment we had some rouge-pots for officers—and for a colonel, who but our Emigrant yonder! Aha! we suffered in the ranks, let me tell you, when Eloise had been coy; and one morning it was my turn. You may have heard that she was betrothed first to Louis and later to several others? My martyrdom occurred the day after she had announced to the court her betrothal to the young Duc de Creil, whose father afterward interfered. Louis put us on drill in a hard rain: he had the habit of relieving his chagrin like that. My horse fell, and happened to shower our commander with mud. Louis let out all his rage upon me: it was an excuse, and, naturally, he disliked mud. But I was rolling in it, with my horse: I also disliked it—and I was indiscreet enough to attempt some small reply. That finished my soldiering, Citizeness. He had me tied to a post before the barracks for the rest of the day. I remember with remarkable distinctness that the valets of heaven had neglected to warm the rain for that bath; that it was February; and that Louis's orders had left me nothing to wear upon my back except an unfulsome descriptive placard and my modesty. Altogether it was a disadvantageous position, particularly for the exchange of repartee with such of my comrades as my youthful amiability had not endeared; I have seldom seen more cheerful indifference to bad weather. Inclement skies failed to injure the spectacle: it was truly the great performance of my career; some people would not even go home to eat, and peddlers did a good trade in cakes and wine. In the evening they whipped me conscientiously—my tailor has never since made me an entirely comfortable coat. Then they gave me the place of honor at the head of a procession by torchlight and drummed me out of camp with my placard upon my back. So I adopted another profession: I had a friend who was a doctor in the stables of d'Artois; and I knew horses. He made me his assistant.

Eloise [shuddering]. You are a veterinarian!

Valsin [smiling]. No; a horse-doctor. It was thus I "retired" from the army and became a politician. My friend was only a horse-doctor himself, but his name happened to be Marat.

Eloise. Ah, frightful! [For the first time she begins to feel genuine alarm.]

Valsin. The sequence is simple. If Eloise d'Anville hadn't coquetted with young Creil I shouldn't be Commissioner here to-day, settling my account with Louis. I am in his debt for more than the beating: I should tell you there was a woman in my case, a slender lace-maker with dark eyes—very pretty eyes. She had furnished me with a rival, a corporal; and he brought her for a stroll in the rain past our barracks that day when I was attracting so much unsought attention. They waited for the afterpiece, enjoyed a pasty and a bottle of Beaune, and went away laughing cozily together. I did not see my pretty lace-maker again, not for years—not until a month ago. Her corporal was still with her, and it was their turn to be undesirably conspicuous. They were part of a procession passing along the Rue St. Honoré on its way to the Place of the Revolution. They were standing up in the cart; the lace-maker had grown fat, and she was scolding her poor corporal bitterly. What a habit that must have been!—they were not five minutes from the guillotine. I own that a thrill of gratitude to Louis temporarily softened me toward him, though at the very moment I was following him through the crowd. At least he saved me from the lace-maker!

Eloise [shrinking from him]. You are horrible!

Valsin. To my regret you must find me more and more so.

Eloise [panting]. You are going to take us back to Paris, then? To the Tribunal—and to the—[She covers her eyes with her hands.]

Valsin [gravely]. I can give you no comfort, governess. You are involved with the Emigrant, and, to be frank, I am going to do as horrible things to Louis as I can invent—and I am an ingenious man. [His manner becomes sinister.] I am near the top. The cinders of Marat are in the Pantheon, but Robespierre still flames; and he claims me as his friend. I can do what I will. And I have much in store for Louis before he shall be so fortunate as to die!

Eloise [faintly]. And—and Eloise—d'Anville? [Her hands fall from her face: he sees large, beautiful tears upon her cheeks.]

Valsin [coldly]. Yes. [She is crushed for the moment; then, recovering herself with a violent effort, lifts her head defiantly and stands erect, facing him.]

Eloise. You take her head because your officer punished you, six years ago, for a breach of military discipline!

Valsin [in a lighter tone]. Oh no. I take it, just as she injured me—incidentally. In truth, Citizeness, it isn't I who take it: I only arrest her because the government has proscribed her.

Eloise. And you've just finished telling me you were preparing tortures for her! I thought you an intelligent man. Pah! You're only a gymnast. [She turns away from him haughtily and moves toward the door.]

Valsin [touching his scarf of office]. True. I climb. [She halts suddenly, as if startled by this; she stands as she is, her back to him, for several moments, and does not change her attitude when she speaks.]

Eloise [slowly]. You climb alone.

Valsin [with a suspicious glance at her]. Yes—alone.

Eloise [in a low voice]. Why didn't you take the lace-maker with you? You might have been happier. [Very slowly she turns and comes toward him, her eyes full upon his: she moves deliberately and with incomparable grace. He seems to be making an effort to look away, and failing: he cannot release his eyes from the glorious and starry glamour that holds them. She comes very close to him, so close that she almost touches him.]

Eloise [in a half-whisper]. You might have been happier with—a friend—to climb with you.

Valsin [demoralized]. Citizeness—I am—I—

Eloise [in a voice of velvet]. Yes, Say it. You are—

Valsin [desperately]. I have told you that I am the most susceptible of men.

Eloise [impulsively putting her hand on his shoulder]. Is it a crime? Come, my friend, you are a man who does climb: you will go over all. You believe in the Revolution because you have used it to lift you. But other things can help you, too. Don't you need them?

Valsin [understanding perfectly, gasping]. Need what? [She draws her hand from his shoulder, moves back from him slightly, and crosses her arms upon her bosom with a royal meekness.]

Eloise [grandly]. Do I seem so useless?

Valsin [in a distracted voice]. Heaven help me! What do you want?

Eloise. Let these people go. [Hurriedly, leaning near him.] I have promised to save them: give them their permit to embark, and I—[She pauses, flushing beautifully, but does not take her eyes from him.] I—I do not wish to leave France. My place is in Paris. You will go into the National Committee. You can be its ruler. You will rule it! I believe in you! [Glowing like a rose of fire.] I will go with you. I will help you! I will marry you!

Valsin [in a fascinated whisper]. Good Lord! [He stumbles back from her, a strange light in his eyes.]

Eloise. You are afraid—

Valsin [with sudden loudness]. I am! Upon my soul, I am afraid!

Eloise [smiling gloriously upon him]. Of what, my friend? Tell me of what?

Valsin [explosively]. Of myself! I am afraid of myself because I am a prophet. This is precisely what I foretold to myself you would do! I knew it, yet I am aghast when it happens—aghast at my own cleverness!

Eloise [bewildered to blankness]. What?

Valsin [half hysterical with outrageous vanity]. I swear I knew it, and it fits so exactly that I am afraid of myself! Aha, Valsin, you rogue! I should hate to have you on my track! Citizen governess, you are a wonderful person, but not so wonderful as this devil of a Valsin!

Eloise [vaguely, in a dead voice]. I cannot understand what you are talking about. Do you mean—

Valsin. And what a spell was upon me! I was near calling Dossonville to preserve me.

Eloise [speaking with a strange naturalness, like a child's]. You mean—you don't want me?

Valsin. Ah, Heaven help me, I am going to laugh again! Oh, ho, ho! I am spent! [He drops into a chair and gives way to another attack of uproarious hilarity.] Ah, ha, ha, ha! Oh, my liver, ha, ha! No, Citizeness, I do not want you! Oh, ha, ha, ha!

Eloise. Oh! [She utters a choked scream and rushes at him.] Swine!

Valsin [warding her off with outstretched hands]. Spare me! Ha, ha, ha! I am helpless! Ho, ho, ho! Citizeness, it would not be worth your while to strangle a man who is already dying!

Eloise [beside herself]. Do you dream that I meant it?

Valsin [feebly]. Meant to strangle me?

Eloise [frantic]. To give myself to you!

Valsin. In short, to—to marry me! [He splutters.]

Eloise [furiously]. It was a ruse—

Valsin [soothingly]. Yes, yes, a trick. I saw that all along.

Eloise [even more infuriated]. For their sake, beast! [She points to the other room.] To save them!

Valsin [wiping his eyes]. Of course, of course. [He rises, stepping quickly to the side of the chair away from her and watching her warily.] I knew it was to save them. We'll put it like that.

Eloise [in an anger of exasperation]. It was that!

Valsin. Yes, yes. [Keeping his distance.] I saw it from the first. [Suppressing symptoms of returning mirth.] It was perfectly plain. You mustn't excite yourself—nothing could have been clearer! [A giggle escapes him, and he steps hastily backward as she advances upon him.]

Eloise. Poodle! Valet! Scum of the alleys! Sheep of the prisons! Jailer! Hangman! Assassin! Brigand! Horse-doctor! [She hurls the final epithet at him in a climax of ferocity which wholly exhausts her; and she sinks into the chair by the desk, with her arms upon the desk and her burning face hidden in her arms. Valsin, morbidly chuckling, in spite of himself, at each of her insults, has retreated farther and farther, until he stands with his back against the door of the inner room, his right hand behind him, resting on the latch. As her furious eyes leave him he silently opens the door, letting it remain a few inches ajar and keeping his back to it. Then, satisfied that what he intends to say will be overheard by those within, he erases all expression from his face, and strides to the dismantled doorway in the passage.]

Valsin [calling loudly]. Dossonville! [He returns, coming down briskly to Eloise. His tone is crisp and soldier-like.] Citizeness, I have had my great hour. I proceed with the arrests. I have given you four plenty of time to prepare yourselves. Time? Why, the Emigrant could have changed clothes with one of the women in there a dozen times if he had hoped to escape in that fashion—as historical prisoners have won clear, it is related. Fortunately, that is impossible just now; and he will not dare to attempt it.

Dossonville [appearing in the hallway]. Present, my chieftain!

Valsin [sharply]. Attend, Dossonville. The returned Emigrant, Valny-Cherault, is forfeited; but because I cherish a special grievance against him, I have decided upon a special punishment for him. It does not please me that he should have the comfort and ministrations of loving women on his journey to the Tribunal. No, no; the presence of his old sweetheart would make even the scaffold sweet to him. Therefore I shall take him alone. I shall let these women go.

Dossonville. What refinement! Admirable! [Eloise slowly rises, staring incredulously at Valsin.]

Valsin [picking up the "permit" from the desk]. "Permit the Citizen Balsage and his sister, the Citizeness Virginie Balsage, and his second sister, Marie Balsage, and Eloise d'Anville—" Ha! You see, Dossonville, since one of these three women is here, there are two in the other room with the Emigrant. They are to come out, leaving him there. First, however, we shall disarm him. You and I have had sufficient experience in arresting aristocrats to know that they are not always so sensible as to give themselves up peaceably, and I happened to see the outline of a pistol under the Emigrant's frock the other day in the diligence. We may as well save one of us from a detestable hole through the body. [He steps toward the door, speaking sharply.] Emigrant, you have heard. For your greater chagrin, these three devoted women are to desert you. Being an aristocrat, you will pretend to prefer this arrangement. They are to leave at once. Throw your pistol into this room, and I will agree not to make the arrest until they are in safety. They can reach your vessel in five minutes. When they have gone, I give you my word not to open this door for ten. [A pistol is immediately thrown out of the door, and falls at Valsin's feet. He picks it up, his eyes alight with increasing excitement.]

Valsin [tossing the pistol to Dossonville]. Call the lieutenant. [Dossonville goes to the window, leans out, and beckons. Valsin writes hastily at the desk, not sitting down.] "Permit the three women Balsage to embark without delay upon the Jeune Pierrette. Signed: Valsin." There, Citizeness, is a "permit" which permits. [He thrusts the paper into the hand of Eloise, swings toward the door of the inner room, and raps loudly upon it.] Come, my feminines! Your sailors await you—brave, but no judges of millinery. There's a fair wind for you; and a grand toilet is wasted at sea. Come, charmers; come! [The door is half opened, and Madame de Laseyne, white and trembling violently, enters quickly, shielding as much as she can the inexpressibly awkward figure of her brother, behind whom she extends her hand, closing the door sharply. He wears the brocaded skirt which Madame de Laseyne has taken from the portmanteau, and Eloise's long mantle, the lifted hood and Madame de Laseyne's veil shrouding his head and face.]

Valsin [in a stifled voice]. At last! At last one beholds the regal d'Anville! No Amazon—

Dossonville [aghast]. It looks like—

Valsin [shouting]. It doesn't! [He bows gallantly to Louis.] A cruel veil, but, oh, what queenly grace! [Louis stumbles in the skirt. Valsin falls back, clutching at his side. But Eloise rushes to Louis and throws herself upon her knees at his feet. She pulls his head down to hers and kisses him through the veil.]

Valsin [madly]. Oh, touching devotion! Oh, sisters! Oh, love! Oh, honey! Oh, petticoats—

Dossonville [interrupting humbly]. The lieutenant, Citizen Commissioner. [He points to the hallway, where the officer appears, standing at attention.]

Valsin [wheeling]. Officer, conduct these three persons to the quay. Place them on board the Jeune Pierrette. The captain will weigh anchor instantly. [The officer salutes.]

Anne [hoarsely to Louis, who is lifting the weeping Eloise to her feet]. Quick! In the name of—

Valsin. Off with you! [Madame de Laseyne seizes the portmanteau and rushes to the broken doorway, half dragging the others with her. They go out in a tumultuous hurry, followed by the officer. Eloise sends one last glance over her shoulder at Valsin as she disappears, and one word of concentrated venom: "Buffoon!" In wild spirits he blows a kiss to her. The fugitives are heard clattering madly down the stairs.]

Dossonville [excitedly]. We can take the Emigrant now. [Going to the inner door.] Why wait—

Valsin. That room is empty.

Dossonville. What!

Valsin [shouting with laughter]. He's gone! Not bare-backed, but in petticoats: that's worse! He's gone, I tell you! The other was the d'Anville.

Dossonville. Then you recog—

Valsin. Imbecile, she's as well known as the Louvre! They're off on their honeymoon! She'll take him now! She will! She will, on the soul of a prophet! [He rushes to the window and leans far out, shouting at the top of his voice:] Quits with you, Louis! Quits! Quits! [He falls back from the window and relapses into a chair, cackling ecstatically.]

Dossonville [hoarse with astonishment]. You've let him go! You've let 'em all go!

Valsin [weak with laughter]. Well, you're not going to inform. [With a sudden reversion to extreme seriousness, he levels a sinister forefinger at his companion.] And, also, take care of your health, friend; remember constantly that you have a weak throat, and don't you ever mention this to my wife! These are bad times, my Dossonville, and neither you nor I will see the end of them. Good Lord! Can't we have a little fun as we go along? [A fresh convulsion seizes him, and he rocks himself pitiably in his chair.]

[THE CURTAIN.]

THE PIERROT OF THE MINUTE
A DRAMATIC FANTASY IN ONE ACT
By
ERNEST DOWSON
Performance Free

Ernest Christopher Dowson, now generally known simply as Ernest Dowson, was born at the Grove, Belmont Hill, Lee, Kent, August 2, 1867, and died in London thirty-three years later. His schooling, because of his delicate health, was irregular, and he spent too short a time at Queen's College, Oxford, to take a degree. He lived abroad much, but during his sojourns in London in the 'nineties belonged to the Rhymer's Club[26] that met in an upper room of Johnson's own "Cheshire Cheese." His death from consumption brought to a close a life marred by waste and sordid associations.

The Pierrot of the Minute, Ernest Dowson's only dramatic attempt, is touched like the preceding play with the glamour of the old régime. Its charming artificiality suggests the pastoral games to which the ladies and gentlemen of Louis XV's circle may have turned for relief after the formalities and extravagances of their life at court.

Dowson's play, written in 1892, is mentioned in one of his letters, dated October twenty-fourth of that year: "I have been frightfully busy," he wrote, "having rashly undertaken to make a little Pierrot play in verse ... which is to be played at Aldershot and afterwards at the Chelsea Town Hall: the article to be delivered in a fortnight. So until this period of mental agony is past, I can go nowhere." Anyone who has ever had to write something that had to be ready on a certain date will understand the quality of Dowson's emotion in this letter.

A recent critic who has studied the literary fashions of the group to which Dowson belonged and found that the members were addicted to the frequent use of the adjective, white, says: "Ernest Dowson was dominated by a sense of whiteness.... The Pierrot of the Minute is a veritable symphony in white. He calls for 'white music' and the Moon Maiden rides through the skies 'drawn by a team of milk-white butterflies,' and farther on in the same poem we have a palace of many rooms:

"'Within the fairest, clad in purity,
Our mother dwelt immemorially:
Moon-calm, moon-pale, with moon-stones on her gown,
The floor she treads with little pearls is sown....'"

When the play was given in this country at the McCallum Theatre at Northampton, Massachusetts, it was "staged in black and white, the garden set having black walls on which fantastic white forms were stenciled. The bench, the statue, and Pierrot and his lady love were in white. To have tried to depict a real garden would have crowded the small stage, so a garden was suggested, and by suggestion caught the spirit of the piece."[27]

Granville Bantock, the English musician, composed The Pierrot of the Minute. A Comedy Overture to a Dramatic Phantasy by Ernest Dowson, which he conducted at the Worcester Festival in 1908. This music in whole or part may be used in connection with a production of Dowson's play.

THE PIERROT OF THE MINUTE

• CHARACTERS

• A Moon Maiden.
• Pierrot.

SCENE.—A glade in the Parc du Petit Trianon. In the center a Doric temple with steps coming down the stage. On the left a little Cupid on a pedestal. Twilight.

Enter Pierrot with his hands full of lilies. He is burdened with a little basket. He stands gazing at the Temple and the Statue.

Pierrot.
My journey's end! This surely is the glade
Which I was promised: I have well obeyed!
A clue of lilies was I bid to find,
Where the green alleys most obscurely wind;
Where tall oaks darkliest canopy o'erhead,
And moss and violet make the softest bed;
Where the path ends, and leagues behind me lie
The gleaming courts and gardens of Versailles;
The lilies streamed before me, green and white;
I gathered, following: they led me right,
To the bright temple and the sacred grove:
This is, in truth, the very shrine of Love!
[He gathers together his flowers and lays them at the foot of Cupid's statue; then he goes timidly up the first steps of the temple and stops.]
It is so solitary, I grow afraid.
Is there no priest here, no devoted maid?
Is there no oracle, no voice to speak,
Interpreting to me the word I seek?
[A very gentle music of lutes floats out from the temple. Pierrot starts back; he shows extreme surprise; then he returns to the foreground, and crouches down in rapt attention until the music ceases. His face grows puzzled and petulant.]
Too soon! too soon! in that enchanting strain,
Days yet unlived, I almost lived again:
It almost taught me that I most would know—
Why am I here, and why am I Pierrot?
[Absently he picks up a lily which has fallen to the ground, and repeats.]
Why came I here, and why am I Pierrot?
That music and this silence both affright;
Pierrot can never be a friend of night.
I never felt my solitude before—
Once safe at home, I will return no more.
Yet the commandment of the scroll was plain;
While the light lingers let me read again.
[He takes a scroll from his bosom and reads.]
"He loves to-night who never loved before;
Who ever loved, to-night shall love once more."
I never loved! I know not what love is.
I am so ignorant—but what is this?
[Reads.]
"Who would adventure to encounter Love
Must rest one night within this hallowed grove.
Cast down thy lilies, which have led thee on,
Before the tender feet of Cupidon."
Thus much is done, the night remains to me.
Well, Cupidon, be my security!
Here is more writing, but too faint to read.
[He puzzles for a moment, then casts the scroll down.]
Hence, vain old parchment. I have learnt thy rede!
[He looks round uneasily, starts at his shadow; then discovers his basket with glee. He takes out a flask of wine, pours it into a glass, and drinks.]
Courage, mon Ami! I shall never miss
Society with such a friend as this.
How merrily the rosy bubbles pass,
Across the amber crystal of the glass.
I had forgotten you. Methinks this quest
Can wake no sweeter echo in my breast.
[Looks round at the statue, and starts.]
Nay, little god! forgive. I did but jest.
[He fills another glass, and pours it upon the statue.]
This libation, Cupid, take,
With the lilies at thy feet;
Cherish Pierrot for their sake,
Send him visions strange and sweet,
While he slumbers at thy feet.
Only love kiss him awake!
Only love kiss him awake!
[Slowly falls the darkness, soft music plays, while Pierrot gathers together fern and foliage into a rough couch at the foot of the steps which lead to the Temple d'Amour. Then he lies down upon it, having made his prayer. It is night. He speaks softly.]
Music, more music, far away and faint:
It is an echo of mine heart's complaint.
Why should I be so musical and sad?
I wonder why I used to be so glad?
In single glee I chased blue butterflies,
Half butterfly myself, but not so wise,
For they were twain, and I was only one.
Ah me! how pitiful to be alone.
My brown birds told me much, but in mine ear
They never whispered this—I learned it here:
The soft wood sounds, the rustlings in the breeze,
Are but the stealthy kisses of the trees.
Each flower and fern in this enchanted wood
Leans to her fellow, and is understood;
The eglantine, in loftier station set,
Stoops down to woo the maidly violet.
In gracile pairs the very lilies grow:
None is companionless except Pierrot.
Music, more music! how its echoes steal
Upon my senses with unlooked for weal.
Tired am I, tired, and far from this lone glade
Seems mine old joy in rout and masquerade.
Sleep cometh over me, now will I prove,
By Cupid's grace, what is this thing called love.
[Sleeps.]
[There is more music of lutes for an interval, during which a bright radiance, white and cold, streams from the temple upon the face of Pierrot. Presently a Moon Maiden steps out of the temple; she descends and stands over the sleeper.]

The Lady.
Who is this mortal
Who ventures to-night
To woo an immortal?
Cold, cold the moon's light,
For sleep at this portal,
Bold lover of night.
Fair is the mortal
In soft, silken white,
Who seeks an immortal.
Ah, lover of night,
Be warned at the portal,
And save thee in flight!
[She stoops over him: Pierrot stirs in his sleep.]

Pierrot [murmuring].
Forget not, Cupid. Teach me all thy lore:
"He loves to-night who never loved before."

The Lady.
Unwitting boy! when, be it soon or late,
What Pierrot ever has escaped his fate?
What if I warned him! He might yet evade,
Through the long windings of this verdant glade;
Seek his companions in the blither way,
Which, else, must be as lost as yesterday.
So might he still pass some unheeding hours
In the sweet company of birds and flowers.
How fair he is, with red lips formed for joy,
As softly curved as those of Venus' boy.
Methinks his eyes, beneath their silver sheaves,
Rest tranquilly like lilies under leaves.
Arrayed in innocence, what touch of grace
Reveals the scion of a courtly race?
Well, I will warn him, though, I fear, too late—
What Pierrot ever has escaped his fate?
But, see, he stirs, new knowledge fires his brain,
And Cupid's vision bids him wake again.
Dione's Daughter! but how fair he is,
Would it be wrong to rouse him with a kiss?
[She stoops down and kisses him, then withdraws into the shadow.]

Pierrot [rubbing his eyes].
Celestial messenger! remain, remain;
Or, if a vision, visit me again!
What is this light, and whither am I come
To sleep beneath the stars so far from home?
[Rises slowly to his feet.]
Stay, I remember this is Venus' Grove,
And I am hither come to encounter ——

The Lady [coming forward, but veiled].
Love!

Pierrot [in ecstasy, throwing himself at her feet].
Then have I ventured and encountered Love?

The Lady.
Not yet, rash boy! and, if thou wouldst be wise,
Return unknowing; he is safe who flies.

Pierrot.
Never, sweet lady, will I leave this place
Until I see the wonder of thy face.
Goddess or Naiad! lady of this Grove,
Made mortal for a night to teach me love,
Unveil thyself, although thy beauty be
Too luminous for my mortality.

The Lady [unveiling].
Then, foolish boy, receive at length thy will:
Now knowest thou the greatness of thine ill.

Pierrot.
Now have I lost my heart, and gained my goal.

The Lady.
Didst thou not read the warning on the scroll?
[Picks up the parchment.]

Pierrot.
I read it all, as on this quest I fared,
Save where it was illegible and hard.

The Lady.
Alack! poor scholar, wast thou never taught
A little knowledge serveth less than naught?
Hadst thou perused —— but, stay, I will explain
What was the writing which thou didst disdain.
[Reads.]
"Au Petit Trianon, at night's full noon,
Mortal, beware the kisses of the moon!
Whoso seeks her she gathers like a flower—
He gives a life, and only gains an hour."

Pierrot [laughing recklessly].
Bear me away to thine enchanted bower,
All of my life I venture for an hour.

The Lady.
Take up thy destiny of short delight;
I am thy lady for a summer's night.
Lift up your viols, maidens of my train,
And work such havoc on this mortal's brain
That for a moment he may touch and know
Immortal things, and be full Pierrot.
White music, Nymphs! Violet and Eglantine!
To stir his tired veins like magic wine.
What visitants across his spirit glance,
Lying on lilies, while he watch me dance?
Watch, and forget all weary things of earth,
All memories and cares, all joy and mirth,
While my dance woos him, light and rhythmical,
And weaves his heart into my coronal.
Music, more music for his soul's delight:
Love is his lady for a summer's night.
[Pierrot reclines, and gazes at her while she dances. The dance finished, she beckons to him: he rises dreamily, and stands at her side.]

Pierrot.
Whence came, dear Queen, such magic melody?

The Lady.
Pan made it long ago in Arcady.

Pierrot.
I heard it long ago, I know not where,
As I knew thee, or ever I came here.
But I forget all things—my name and race
All that I ever knew except thy face.
Who art thou, lady? Breathe a name to me,
That I may tell it like a rosary.
Thou, whom I sought, dear Dryad of the trees,
How art thou designate—art thou Heart's-Ease?

The Lady.
Waste not the night in idle questioning,
Since Love departs at dawn's awakening.

Pierrot.
Nay, thou art right; what recks thy name or state,
Since thou art lovely and compassionate.
Play out thy will on me: I am thy lyre.

The Lady.
I am to each the face of his desire.

Pierrot.
I am not Pierrot, but Venus' dove,
Who craves a refuge on the breast of love.

The Lady.
What wouldst thou of the maiden of the moon?
Until the cock crow I may grant thy boon.

Pierrot.
Then, sweet Moon Maiden, in some magic car,
Wrought wondrously of many a homeless star—
Such must attend thy journeys through the skies,—
Drawn by a team of milk-white butterflies,
Whom, with soft voice and music of thy maids,
Thou urgest gently through the heavenly glades;
Mount me beside thee, bear me far away
From the low regions of the solar day;
Over the rainbow, up into the moon,
Where is thy palace and thine opal throne;
There on thy bosom ——

The Lady.
Too ambitious boy!
I did but promise thee one hour of joy.
This tour thou plannest, with a heart so light,
Could hardly be completed in a night.
Hast thou no craving less remote than this?

Pierrot.
Would it be impudent to beg a kiss?

The Lady.
I say not that: yet prithee have a care!
Often audacity has proved a snare.
How wan and pale do moon-kissed roses grow—
Dost thou not fear my kisses, Pierrot?

Pierrot.
As one who faints upon the Libyan plain
Fears the oasis which brings life again!

The Lady.
Where far away green palm trees seem to stand
May be a mirage of the wreathing sand.

Pierrot.
Nay, dear enchantress, I consider naught,
Save mine own ignorance, which would be taught.

The Lady.
Dost thou persist?

Pierrot.
I do entreat this boon!
[She bends forward, their lips meet: she withdraws with a petulant shiver. She utters a peal of clear laughter.]

The Lady.
Why art thou pale, fond lover of the moon?

Pierrot.
Cold are thy lips, more cold than I can tell;
Yet would I hang on them, thine icicle!
Cold is thy kiss, more cold than I could dream
Arctus sits, watching the Boreal stream:
But with its frost such sweetness did conspire
That all my veins are filled with running fire;
Never I knew that life contained such bliss
As the divine completeness of a kiss.

The Lady.
Apt scholar! so love's lesson has been taught,
Warning, as usual, has gone for naught.

Pierrot.
Had all my schooling been of this soft kind,
To play the truant I were less inclined.
Teach me again! I am a sorry dunce—
I never knew a task by conning once.

The Lady.
Then come with me! below this pleasant shrine
Of Venus we will presently recline,
Until birds' twitter beckon me away
To my own home, beyond the milky-way.
I will instruct thee, for I deem as yet
Of Love thou knowest but the alphabet.

Pierrot.
In its sweet grammar I shall grow most wise,
If all its rules be written in thine eyes.
[The Lady sits upon a step of the temple, and Pierrot leans upon his elbow at her feet, regarding her.]
Sweet contemplation! how my senses yearn
To be thy scholar always, always learn.
Hold not so high from me thy radiant mouth,
Fragrant with all the spices of the South;
Nor turn, O sweet! thy golden face away,
For with it goes the light of all my day.
Let me peruse it, till I know by rote
Each line of it, like music, note by note;
Raise thy long lashes, Lady! smile again:
These studies profit me.
[Takes her hand.]

The Lady.
Refrain, refrain!

Pierrot [with passion].
I am but studious, so do not stir;
Thou art my star, I thine astronomer!
Geometry was founded on thy lip.
[Kisses her hand.]

The Lady.
This attitude becomes not scholarship!
Thy zeal I praise; but, prithee, not so fast,
Nor leave the rudiments until the last,
Science applied is good, but 'twere a schism
To study such before the catechism.
Bear thee more modestly, while I submit
Some easy problems to confirm thy wit.

Pierrot.
In all humility my mind I pit
Against her problems which would test my wit.

The Lady [questioning him from a little book bound deliciously in vellum].
What is Love?
Is it a folly,
Is it mirth, or melancholy?
Joys above,
Are there many, or not any?
What is love?

Pierrot [answering in a very humble attitude of scholarship].
If you please,
A most sweet folly!
Full of mirth and melancholy:
Both of these!
In its sadness worth all gladness,
If you please!

The Lady.
Prithee where,
Goes Love a-hiding?
Is he long in his abiding
Anywhere?
Can you bind him when you find him;
Prithee, where?

Pierrot.
With spring days
Love comes and dallies:
Upon the mountains, through the valleys
Lie Love's ways.
Then he leaves you and deceives you
In spring days.

The Lady.
Thine answers please me: 'tis thy turn to ask.
To meet thy questioning be now my task.

Pierrot.
Since I know thee, dear Immortal,
Is my heart become a blossom,
To be worn upon thy bosom.
When thou turn me from this portal,
Whither shall I, hapless mortal,
Seek love out and win again
Heart of me that thou retain?

The Lady.
In and out the woods and valleys,
Circling, soaring like a swallow,
Love shall flee and thou shalt follow:
Though he stops awhile and dallies,
Never shalt thou stay his malice!
Moon-kissed mortals seek in vain
To possess their hearts again!

Pierrot.
Tell me, Lady, shall I never
Rid me of this grievous burden?
Follow Love and find his guerdon
In no maiden whatsoever?
Wilt thou hold my heart for ever?
Rather would I thine forget,
In some earthly Pierrette!

The Lady.
Thus thy fate, what'er thy will is!
Moon-struck child, go seek my traces
Vainly in all mortal faces!
In and out among the lilies,
Court each rural Amaryllis:
Seek the signet of Love's hand
In each courtly Corisande!

Pierrot.
Now, verily, sweet maid, of school I tire:
These answers are not such as I desire.

The Lady.
Why art thou sad?

Pierrot.
I dare not tell.

The Lady [caressingly].
Come, say!

Pierrot.
Is love all schooling, with no time to play?

The Lady.
Though all love's lessons be a holiday,
Yet I will humor thee: what wouldst thou play?

Pierrot.
What are the games that small moon-maids enjoy,
Or is their time all spent in staid employ?

The Lady.
Sedate they are, yet games they much enjoy:
They skip with stars, the rainbow is their toy.

Pierrot.
That is too hard!

The Lady.
For mortal's play.

Pierrot.
What then?

The Lady.
Teach me some pastime from the world of men.

Pierrot.
I have it, maiden.

The Lady.
Can it soon be taught?

Pierrot.
A single game, I learnt it at the Court.
I sit by thee.

The Lady.
But, prithee, not so near.

Pierrot.
That is essential, as will soon appear.
Lay here thine hand, which cold night dews anoint,
Washing its white ——

The Lady.
Now is this to the point?

Pierrot.
Prithee, forebear! Such is the game's design.

The Lady.
Here is my hand.

Pierrot.
I cover it with mine.

The Lady.
What must I next?
[They play.]

Pierrot.
Withdraw.

The Lady.
It goes too fast.
[They continue playing, until Pierrot catches her hand.]

Pierrot [laughing].
'Tis done. I win my forfeit at the last.
[He tries to embrace her. She escapes; he chases her round the stage; she eludes him.]

The Lady.
Thou art not quick enough. Who hopes to catch
A moon-beam, must use twice as much despatch.

Pierrot [sitting down sulkily].
I grow aweary, and my heart is sore.
Thou dost not love me; I will play no more.
[He buries his face in his hands. The Lady stands over him.]

The Lady.
What is this petulance?

Pierrot.
'Tis quick to tell—
Thou hast but mocked me.

The Lady.
Nay! I love thee well!

Pierrot.
Repeat those words, for still within my breast
A whisper warns me they are said in jest.

The Lady.
I jested not: at daybreak I must go,
Yet loving thee far better than thou know.

Pierrot.
Then, by this altar, and this sacred shrine,
Take my sworn troth, and swear thee wholly mine!
The gods have wedded mortals long ere this.

The Lady.
There was enough betrothal in my kiss.
What need of further oaths?

Pierrot.
That bound not thee!

The Lady.
Peace! since I tell thee that it may not be.
But sit beside me whilst I soothe thy bale
With some moon fancy or celestial tale.

Pierrot.
Tell me of thee, and that dim, happy place
Where lies thine home, with maidens of thy race!

The Lady [seating herself].
Calm is it yonder, very calm; the air
For mortals' breath is too refined and rare;
Hard by a green lagoon our palace rears
Its dome of agate through a myriad years.
A hundred chambers its bright walls enthrone,
Each one carved strangely from a precious stone.
Within the fairest, clad in purity,
Our mother dwelleth immemorially:
Moon-calm, moon-pale, with moon stones on her gown,
The floor she treads with little pearls is sown;
She sits upon a throne of amethysts,
And orders mortal fortunes as she lists;
I, and my sisters, all around her stand,
And, when she speaks, accomplish her demand.

Pierrot.
Methought grim Clotho and her sisters twain
With shriveled fingers spun this web of bane!

The Lady.
Theirs and my mother's realm is far apart;
Hers is the lustrous kingdom of the heart,
And dreamers all, and all who sing and love,
Her power acknowledge, and her rule approve.

Pierrot.
Me, even me, she hath led into this grove.

The Lady.
Yea, thou art one of hers! But, ere this night,
Often I watched my sisters take their flight
Down heaven's stairway of the clustered stars
To gaze on mortals through their lattice bars;
And some in sleep they woo with dreams of bliss
Too shadowy to tell, and some they kiss.
But all to whom they come, my sisters say,
Forthwith forget all joyance of the day,
Forget their laughter and forget their tears,
And dream away with singing all their years—
Moon-lovers always!
[She sighs.]

Pierrot.
Why art sad, sweet Moon?
[Laughs.]

The Lady.
For this, my story, grant me now a boon.

Pierrot.
I am thy servitor.

The Lady.
Would, then, I knew
More of the earth, what men and women do.

Pierrot.
I will explain.

The Lady.
Let brevity attend
Thy wit, for night approaches to its end.

Pierrot.
Once was I a page at Court, so trust in me:
That's the first lesson of society.

The Lady.
Society?

Pierrot.
I mean the very best.
Pardy! thou wouldst not hear about the rest.
I know it not, but am a petit maître
At rout and festival and bal champêtre.
But since example be instruction's ease,
Let's play the thing.—Now, Madame, if you please!
[He helps her to rise, and leads her forward: then he kisses her hand, bowing over it with a very courtly air.]