IN LINCOLN THE BEST part of the theatrical season came late, when the good
companies stopped off there for one-night stands, after their long runs in
New York and Chicago. That spring Lena went with me to see Joseph
Jefferson in `Rip Van Winkle,' and to a war play called `Shenandoah.' She
was inflexible about paying for her own seat; said she was in business now,
and she wouldn't have a schoolboy spending his money on her. I liked to
watch a play with Lena; everything was wonderful to her, and everything was
true. It was like going to revival meetings with someone who was always
being converted. She handed her feelings over to the actors with a kind of
fatalistic resignation. Accessories of costume and scene meant much more
to her than to me. She sat entranced through `Robin Hood' and hung upon
the lips of the contralto who sang, `Oh, Promise Me!'
Toward the end of April, the billboards, which I watched anxiously in those
days, bloomed out one morning with gleaming white posters on which two
names were impressively printed in blue Gothic letters: the name of an
actress of whom I had often heard, and the name `Camille.'
I called at the Raleigh Block for Lena on Saturday evening, and we walked
down to the theatre. The weather was warm and sultry and put us both in a
holiday humour. We arrived early, because Lena liked to watch the people
come in. There was a note on the programme, saying that the `incidental
music' would be from the opera `Traviata,' which was made from the same
story as the play. We had neither of us read the play, and we did not know
what it was about--though I seemed to remember having heard it was a piece
in which great actresses shone. `The Count of Monte Cristo,' which I had
seen James O'Neill play that winter, was by the only Alexandre Dumas I
knew. This play, I saw, was by his son, and I expected a family
resemblance. A couple of jack-rabbits, run in off the prairie, could not
have been more innocent of what awaited them than were Lena and I.
Our excitement began with the rise of the curtain, when the moody Varville,
seated before the fire, interrogated Nanine. Decidedly, there was a new
tang about this dialogue. I had never heard in the theatre lines that were
alive, that presupposed and took for granted, like those which passed
between Varville and Marguerite in the brief encounter before her friends
entered. This introduced the most brilliant, worldly, the most
enchantingly gay scene I had ever looked upon. I had never seen champagne
bottles opened on the stage before-- indeed, I had never seen them opened
anywhere. The memory of that supper makes me hungry now; the sight of it
then, when I had only a students' boarding-house dinner behind me, was
delicate torment. I seem to remember gilded chairs and tables (arranged
hurriedly by footmen in white gloves and stockings), linen of dazzling
whiteness, glittering glass, silver dishes, a great bowl of fruit, and the
reddest of roses. The room was invaded by beautiful women and dashing
young men, laughing and talking together. The men were dressed more or
less after the period in which the play was written; the women were not. I
saw no inconsistency. Their talk seemed to open to one the brilliant world
in which they lived; every sentence made one older and wiser, every
pleasantry enlarged one's horizon. One could experience excess and satiety
without the inconvenience of learning what to do with one's hands in a
drawing-room! When the characters all spoke at once and I missed some of
the phrases they flashed at each other, I was in misery. I strained my
ears and eyes to catch every exclamation.
The actress who played Marguerite was even then old-fashioned, though
historic. She had been a member of Daly's famous New York company, and
afterward a `star' under his direction. She was a woman who could not be
taught, it is said, though she had a crude natural force which carried with
people whose feelings were accessible and whose taste was not squeamish.
She was already old, with a ravaged countenance and a physique curiously
hard and stiff. She moved with difficulty-- I think she was lame--I seem
to remember some story about a malady of the spine. Her Armand was
disproportionately young and slight, a handsome youth, perplexed in the
extreme. But what did it matter? I believed devoutly in her power to
fascinate him, in her dazzling loveliness. I believed her young, ardent,
reckless, disillusioned, under sentence, feverish, avid of pleasure. I
wanted to cross the footlights and help the slim-waisted Armand in the
frilled shirt to convince her that there was still loyalty and devotion in
the world. Her sudden illness, when the gaiety was at its height, her
pallor, the handkerchief she crushed against her lips, the cough she
smothered under the laughter while Gaston kept playing the piano
lightly--it all wrung my heart. But not so much as her cynicism in the
long dialogue with her lover which followed. How far was I from
questioning her unbelief! While the charmingly sincere young man pleaded
with her-- accompanied by the orchestra in the old `Traviata' duet,
'misterioso, misterios' altero!'--she maintained her bitter scepticism, and
the curtain fell on her dancing recklessly with the others, after Armand
had been sent away with his flower.
Between the acts we had no time to forget. The orchestra kept sawing away
at the `Traviata' music, so joyous and sad, so thin and far-away, so
clap-trap and yet so heart-breaking. After the second act I left Lena in
tearful contemplation of the ceiling, and went out into the lobby to smoke.
As I walked about there I congratulated myself that I had not brought some
Lincoln girl who would talk during the waits about the junior dances, or
whether the cadets would camp at Plattsmouth. Lena was at least a woman,
and I was a man.
Through the scene between Marguerite and the elder Duval, Lena wept
unceasingly, and I sat helpless to prevent the closing of that chapter of
idyllic love, dreading the return of the young man whose ineffable
happiness was only to be the measure of his fall.
I suppose no woman could have been further in person, voice, and
temperament from Dumas' appealing heroine than the veteran actress who
first acquainted me with her. Her conception of the character was as heavy
and uncompromising as her diction; she bore hard on the idea and on the
consonants. At all times she was highly tragic, devoured by remorse.
Lightness of stress or behaviour was far from her. Her voice was heavy and
deep: `Ar-r-r-mond!' she would begin, as if she were summoning him to the
bar of Judgment. But the lines were enough. She had only to utter them.
They created the character in spite of her.
The heartless world which Marguerite re-entered with Varville had never
been so glittering and reckless as on the night when it gathered in
Olympe's salon for the fourth act. There were chandeliers hung from the
ceiling, I remember, many servants in livery, gaming-tables where the men
played with piles of gold, and a staircase down which the guests made their
entrance. After all the others had gathered round the card-tables and
young Duval had been warned by Prudence, Marguerite descended the staircase
with Varville; such a cloak, such a fan, such jewels--and her face! One
knew at a glance how it was with her. When Armand, with the terrible
words, `Look, all of you, I owe this woman nothing!' flung the gold and
bank-notes at the half-swooning Marguerite, Lena cowered beside me and
covered her face with her hands.
The curtain rose on the bedroom scene. By this time there wasn't a nerve
in me that hadn't been twisted. Nanine alone could have made me cry. I
loved Nanine tenderly; and Gaston, how one clung to that good fellow! The
New Year's presents were not too much; nothing could be too much now. I
wept unrestrainedly. Even the handkerchief in my breast-pocket, worn for
elegance and not at all for use, was wet through by the time that moribund
woman sank for the last time into the arms of her lover.
When we reached the door of the theatre, the streets were shining with
rain. I had prudently brought along Mrs. Harling's useful Commencement
present, and I took Lena home under its shelter. After leaving her, I
walked slowly out into the country part of the town where I lived. The
lilacs were all blooming in the yards, and the smell of them after the
rain, of the new leaves and the blossoms together, blew into my face with a
sort of bitter sweetness. I tramped through the puddles and under the
showery trees, mourning for Marguerite Gauthier as if she had died only
yesterday, sighing with the spirit of 1840, which had sighed so much, and
which had reached me only that night, across long years and several
languages, through the person of an infirm old actress. The idea is one
that no circumstances can frustrate. Wherever and whenever that piece is
put on, it is April.
Read next: BOOK III - Lena Lingard#Chapter 4
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