After the overture, a pause.Susan, peeping through a hole in the drop, saw the curtain go up, drew a long breath of terror as the audience was revealed beyond the row of footlights, beyond the big, befrizzled blond head of Violet and the drink-seared face of Pat.From the rear of the auditorium came Burlingham's smooth-flowing, faintly amused voice, announcing the beginning of the performance "a delightful feast throughout, ladies and gentlemen, amusing yet elevating, ever moral yet with none of the depressing sadness of puritanism.For, ladies and gentlemen, while we are pious, we are not puritan.The first number is a monologue, `The Mad Prince,' by that eminent artist, Gregory Tempest.He has delivered it before vast audiences amid thunders of applause."Susan thrilled as Tempest strode forth--Tempest transformed by the footlights and by her young imagination into a true king most wonderfully and romantically bereft of reason by the woes that had assailed him in horrid phalanxes.If anyone had pointed out to her that Tempest's awful voice was simply cheap ranting, or that her own woes had been as terrible as any that had ever visited a king, or that when people go mad it is never from grief but from insides unromantically addled by foolish eating and drinking--if anyone had attempted then and there to educate the girl, how angry it would have made her, how she would have hated that well-meaning person for spoiling her illusion!
The spell of the stage seized her with Tempest's first line, first elegant despairing gesture.It held her through Burlingham and Anstruther's "sketch" of a matrimonial quarrel, through Connemora and Eshwell's "delicious symphonic romanticism" of a lovers' quarrel and making up, through Tempest's recitation of "Lasca," dying to shield her cowboy lover from the hoofs of the stampeded herd.How the tears did stream from Susan's eyes, as Tempest wailed out those last lines:
But I wonder why I do not care for the things that are like the things that were?
Can it be that half my heart lies buried there, in Texas down by the Rio Grande?
She saw the little grave in the desert and the vast blue sky and the buzzard sailing lazily to and fro, and it seemed to her that Tempest himself had inspired such a love, had lost a sweetheart in just that way.No wonder he looked gaunt and hollow-eyed and sallow.The last part of the performance was Holy Land and comic pictures thrown from the rear on a sheet substituted for the drop.As Burlingham had to work the magic lantern from the dressing-room (while Tempest, in a kind of monk's robe, used his voice and elocutionary powers in describing the pictures, now lugubriously and now in "lighter vein"), Susan was forced to retreat to the forward deck and missed that part of the show.
But she watched Burlingham shifting the slides and altering the forms of the lenses, and was in another way as much thrilled and spellbound as by the acting.
Nor did the spell vanish when, with the audience gone, they all sat down to a late supper, and made coarse jests and mocked at their own doings and at the people who had applauded.Susan did not hear.She felt proud that she was permitted in so distinguished a company.Every disagreeable impression vanished.
How could she have thought these geniuses common and cheap! How had she dared apply to them the standards of the people, the dull, commonplace people, among whom she had been brought up! If she could only qualify for membership in this galaxy! The thought made her feel like a worm aspiring to be a star.
Tempest, whom she had liked least, now filled her with admiration.She saw the tragedy of his life plain and sad upon his features.She could not look at him without her heart's contracting in an ache.
It was not long before Mr.Tempest, who believed himself a lady-killer, noted the ingenuous look in the young girl's face, and began to pose.And it was hardly three bites of a ham sandwich thereafter when Mabel Connemora noted Tempest's shootings of his cuffs and rumplings of his oily ringlets and rollings of his hollow eyes.And at the sight Miss Mabel's bright eyes became bad and her tongue shot satire at him.But Susan did not observe this.
After supper they went straightway to bed.Burlingham drew the curtains round the berth let down for Susan.The others indulged in no such prudery on so hot a night.They put out the lamps and got ready for bed and into it by the dim light trickling in through the big rear doorway and the two small side doorways forward.To help on the circulation of air Pat raised the stage curtain and drop, and opened the little door forward.Each sleeper had a small netting suspended over him from the ceiling;without that netting the dense swarms of savage mosquitoes would have made sleep impossible.As it was, the loud singing of these baffled thousands kept Susan awake.
