_ CHAPTER XVIII
SHE hurried to the first meeting of the play-reading committee.
Her jungle romance had faded, but she retained a religious
fervor, a surge of half-formed thought about the creation of
beauty by suggestion.
A Dunsany play would be too difficult for the Gopher Prairie
association. She would let them compromise on Shaw--on
"Androcles and the Lion," which had just been published.
The committee was composed of Carol, Vida Sherwin, Guy
Pollock, Raymie Wutherspoon, and Juanita Haydock. They
were exalted by the picture of themselves as being
simultaneously business-like and artistic. They were entertained
by Vida in the parlor of Mrs. Elisha Gurrey's boarding-house,
with its steel engraving of Grant at Appomattox, its basket of
stereoscopic views, and its mysterious stains on the gritty
carpet.
Vida was an advocate of culture-buying and efficiency-
systems. She hinted that they ought to have (as at the
committee-meetings of the Thanatopsis) a "regular order of
business," and "the reading of the minutes," but as there
were no minutes to read, and as no one knew exactly what was
the regular order of the business of being literary, they had
to give up efficiency.
Carol, as chairman, said politely, "Have you any ideas about
what play we'd better give first?" She waited for them to
look abashed and vacant, so that she might suggest
"Androcles."
Guy Pollock answered with disconcerting readiness, "I'll
tell you: since we're going to try to do something artistic,
and not simply fool around, I believe we ought to give something
classic. How about `The School for Scandal'?"
"Why---- Don't you think that has been done a good deal?"
"Yes, perhaps it has."
Carol was ready to say, "How about Bernard Shaw?" when
he treacherously went on, "How would it be then to give a
Greek drama--say `Oedipus Tyrannus'?"
"Why, I don't believe----"
Vida Sherwin intruded, "I'm sure that would be too hard
for us. Now I've brought something that I think would be
awfully jolly."
She held out, and Carol incredulously took, a thin gray
pamphlet entitled "McGinerty's Mother-in-law." It was the
sort of farce which is advertised in "school entertainment"
catalogues as:
Riproaring knock-out, 5 m. 3 f., time 2 hrs., interior set, popular
with churches and all high-class occasions.
Carol glanced from the scabrous object to Vida, and realized
that she was not joking.
"But this is--this is--why, it's just a---- Why, Vida, I
thought you appreciated--well--appreciated art."
Vida snorted, "Oh. Art. Oh yes. I do like art. It's
very nice. But after all, what does it matter what kind of
play we give as long as we get the association started? The
thing that matters is something that none of you have spoken
of, that is: what are we going to do with the money, if we
make any? I think it would be awfully nice if we presented
the high school with a full set of Stoddard's travel-lectures!"
Carol moaned, "Oh, but Vida dear, do forgive me but this
farce---- Now what I'd like us to give is something
distinguished. Say Shaw's `Androcles.' Have any of you read
it?"
"Yes. Good play," said Guy Pollock.
Then Raymie Wutherspoon astoundingly spoke up:
"So have I. I read through all the plays in the public
library, so's to be ready for this meeting. And---- But I
don't believe you grasp the irreligious ideas in this `Androcles,'
Mrs. Kennicott. I guess the feminine mind is too innocent to
understand all these immoral writers. I'm sure I don't want
to criticize Bernard Shaw; I understand he is very popular
with the highbrows in Minneapolis; but just the same---- As
far as I can make out, he's downright improper! The things
he SAYS---- Well, it would be a very risky thing for our
young folks to see. It seems to me that a play that doesn't
leave a nice taste in the mouth and that hasn't any message
is nothing but--nothing but---- Well, whatever it may be,
it isn't art. So---- Now I've found a play that is clean, and
there's some awfully funny scenes in it, too. I laughed out
loud, reading it. It's called `His Mother's Heart,' and it's
about a young man in college who gets in with a lot of free-
thinkers and boozers and everything, but in the end his mother's
influence----"
Juanita Haydock broke in with a derisive, "Oh rats, Raymie!
Can the mother's influence! I say let's give something with
some class to it. I bet we could get the rights to `The Girl
from Kankakee,' and that's a real show. It ran for eleven
months in New York!"
"That would be lots of fun, if it wouldn't cost too much,"
reflected Vida.
Carol's was the only vote cast against "The Girl from
Kankakee."
II
She disliked "The Girl from Kankakee" even more than
she had expected. It narrated the success of a farm-lassie in
clearing her brother of a charge of forgery. She became secretary
to a New York millionaire and social counselor to his
wife; and after a well-conceived speech on the discomfort of
having money, she married his son.
There was also a humorous office-boy.
Carol discerned that both Juanita Haydock and Ella
Stowbody wanted the lead. She let Juanita have it. Juanita kissed
her and in the exuberant manner of a new star presented to
the executive committee her theory, "What we want in a play
is humor and pep. There's where American playwrights put it
all over these darn old European glooms."
As selected by Carol and confirmed by the committee, the
persons of the play were:
John Grimm, a millionaire . . . . Guy Pollock
His wife. . . . . . . . . Miss Vida Sherwin
His son . . . . . . . . . Dr. Harvey Dillon
His business rival. . . . . Raymond T. Wutherspoon
Friend of Mrs. Grimm . . . . . . Miss Ella Stowbody
The girl from Kankakee . . . . . Mrs. Harold C. Haydock
Her brother. . . . . . . . . . Dr. Terence Gould
Her mother . . . . . . . . . . Mrs. David Dyer
Stenographer . . . . . . . Miss Rita Simons
Office-boy . . . . . . . . . . Miss Myrtle Cass
Maid in the Grimms' home . . Mrs. W. P. Kennicott
Direction of Mrs. Kennicott
Among the minor lamentations was Maud Dyer's "Well of
course I suppose I look old enough to be Juanita's mother,
even if Juanita is eight months older than I am, but I don't
know as I care to have everybody noticing it and----"
Carol pleaded, "Oh, my DEAR! You two look exactly the
same age. I chose you because you have such a darling
complexion, and you know with powder and a white wig, anybody
looks twice her age, and I want the mother to be sweet, no
matter who else is."
Ella Stowbody, the professional, perceiving that it was because
of a conspiracy of jealousy that she had been given a small part,
alternated between lofty amusement and Christian patience.
Carol hinted that the play would be improved by cutting,
but as every actor except Vida and Guy and herself wailed
at the loss of a single line, she was defeated. She told herself
that, after all, a great deal could be done with direction and
settings.
Sam Clark had boastfully written about the dramatic
association to his schoolmate, Percy Bresnahan, president of the
Velvet Motor Company of Boston. Bresnahan sent a check
for a hundred dollars; Sam added twenty-five and brought the
fund to Carol, fondly crying, "There! That'll give you a
start for putting the thing across swell!"
She rented the second floor of the city hall for two months.
All through the spring the association thrilled to its own talent
in that dismal room. They cleared out the bunting, ballot-
boxes, handbills, legless chairs. They attacked the stage.
It was a simple-minded stage. It was raised above the floor,
and it did have a movable curtain, painted with the
advertisement of a druggist dead these ten years, but otherwise it
might not have been recognized as a stage. There were two
dressing-rooms, one for men, one for women, on either side.
The dressing-room doors were also the stage-entrances, opening
from the house, and many a citizen of Gopher Prairie had for
his first glimpse of romance the bare shoulders of the leading
woman.
There were three sets of scenery: a woodland, a Poor
Interior, and a Rich Interior, the last also useful for railway
stations, offices, and as a background for the Swedish Quartette
from Chicago. There were three gradations of lighting: full
on, half on, and entirely off.
This was the only theater in Gopher Prairie. It was known
as the "op'ra house." Once, strolling companies had used
it for performances of "The Two Orphans," and "Nellie the
Beautiful Cloak Model," and "Othello" with specialties
between acts, but now the motion-pictures had ousted the gipsy
drama.
Carol intended to be furiously modern in constructing the
office-set, the drawing-room for Mr. Grimm, and the Humble
Home near Kankakee. It was the first time that any one in
Gopher Prairie had been so revolutionary as to use enclosed
scenes with continuous side-walls. The rooms in the op'ra house
sets had separate wing-pieces for sides, which simplified
dramaturgy, as the villain could always get out of the hero's way by
walking out through the wall.
The inhabitants of the Humble Home were supposed to be
amiable and intelligent. Carol planned for them a simple set
with warm color. She could see the beginning of the play:
all dark save the high settles and the solid wooden table
between them, which were to be illuminated by a ray from
offstage. The high light was a polished copper pot filled with
primroses. Less clearly she sketched the Grimm drawing-room
as a series of cool high white arches.
As to how she was to produce these effects she had no
notion.
She discovered that, despite the enthusiastic young writers,
the drama was not half so native and close to the soil as motor
cars and telephones. She discovered that simple arts require
sophisticated training. She discovered that to produce one
perfect stage-picture would be as difficult as to turn all of
Gopher Prairie into a Georgian garden.
She read all she could find regarding staging, she bought
paint and light wood; she borrowed furniture and drapes
unscrupulously; she made Kennicott turn carpenter. She
collided with the problem of lighting. Against the protest of
Kennicott and Vida she mortgaged the association by sending
to Minneapolis for a baby spotlight, a strip light, a dimming
device, and blue and amber bulbs; and with the gloating
rapture of a born painter first turned loose among colors, she
spent absorbed evenings in grouping, dimming-painting with
lights.
Only Kennicott, Guy, and Vida helped her. They speculated
as to how flats could be lashed together to form a wall; they
hung crocus-yellow curtains at the windows; they blacked the
sheet-iron stove; they put on aprons and swept. The rest
of the association dropped into the theater every evening, and
were literary and superior. They had borrowed Carol's
manuals of play-production and had become extremely stagey
in vocabulary.
Juanita Haydock, Rita Simons, and Raymie Wutherspoon
sat on a sawhorse, watching Carol try to get the right position
for a picture on the wall in the first scene.
"I don't want to hand myself anything but I believe I'll
give a swell performance in this first act," confided Juanita.
"I wish Carol wasn't so bossy though. She doesn't understand
clothes. I want to wear, oh, a dandy dress I have--
all scarlet--and I said to her, `When I enter wouldn't it
knock their eyes out if I just stood there at the door in this
straight scarlet thing?' But she wouldn't let me."
Young Rita agreed, "She's so much taken up with her old
details and carpentering and everything that she can't see the
picture as a whole. Now I thought it would be lovely if we
had an office-scene like the one in `Little, But Oh My!'
Because I SAW that, in Duluth. But she simply wouldn't listen
at all."
Juanita sighed, "I wanted to give one speech like Ethel
Barrymore would, if she was in a play like this. (Harry
and I heard her one time in Minneapolis--we had dandy seats,
in the orchestra--I just know I could imitate her.) Carol
didn't pay any attention to my suggestion. I don't want to
criticize but I guess Ethel knows more about acting than
Carol does!"
"Say, do you think Carol has the right dope about using a
strip light behind the fireplace in the second act? I told
her I thought we ought to use a bunch," offered Raymie.
"And I suggested it would be lovely if we used a cyclorama
outside the window in the first act, and what do you think
she said? `Yes, and it would be lovely to have Eleanora
Duse play the lead,' she said, `and aside from the fact that
it's evening in the first act, you're a great technician,' she
said. I must say I think she was pretty sarcastic. I've been
reading up, and I know I could build a cyclorama, if she didn't
want to run everything."
"Yes, and another thing, I think the entrance in the first
act ought to be L. U. E., not L. 3 E.," from Juanita.
"And why does she just use plain white tormenters?"
"What's a tormenter?" blurted Rita Simons.
The savants stared at her ignorance.
III
Carol did not resent their criticisms, she didn't very much
resent their sudden knowledge, so long as they let her make
pictures. It was at rehearsals that the quarrrels broke. No
one understood that rehearsals were as real engagements as
bridge-games or sociables at the Episcopal Church. They gaily
came in half an hour late, or they vociferously came in ten
minutes early, and they were so hurt that they whispered
about resigning when Carol protested. They telephoned, "I
don't think I'd better come out; afraid the dampness might
start my toothache," or "Guess can't make it tonight; Dave
wants me to sit in on a poker game."
When, after a month of labor, as many as nine-elevenths
of the cast were often present at a rehearsal; when most of
them had learned their parts and some of them spoke like
human beings, Carol had a new shock in the realization that
Guy Pollock and herself were very bad actors, and that
Raymie Wutherspoon was a surprisingly good one. For all her
visions she could not control her voice, and she was bored by
the fiftieth repetition of her few lines as maid. Guy pulled
his soft mustache, looked self-conscious, and turned Mr. Grimm
into a limp dummy. But Raymie, as the villain, had no
repressions. The tilt of his head was full of character; his drawl
was admirably vicious.
There was an evening when Carol hoped she was going to
make a play; a rehearsal during which Guy stopped looking
abashed.
From that evening the play declined.
They were weary. "We know our parts well enough now;
what's the use of getting sick of them?" they complained.
They began to skylark; to play with the sacred lights; to
giggle when Carol was trying to make the sentimental Myrtle
Cass into a humorous office-boy; to act everything but "The
Girl from Kankakee." After loafing through his proper part
Dr. Terry Gould had great applause for his burlesque of
"Hamlet." Even Raymie lost his simple faith, and tried to
show that he could do a vaudeville shuffle.
Carol turned on the company. "See here, I want this
nonsense to stop. We've simply got to get down to work."
Juanita Haydock led the mutiny: "Look here, Carol, don't
be so bossy. After all, we're doing this play principally
for the fun of it, and if we have fun out of a lot of monkey-
shines, why then----"
"Ye-es," feebly.
"You said one time that folks in G. P. didn't get enough
fun out of life. And now we are having a circus, you want
us to stop!"
Carol answered slowly: "I wonder if I can explain what
I mean? It's the difference between looking at the comic
page and looking at Manet. I want fun out of this, of course.
Only---- I don't think it would be less fun, but more, to produce
as perfect a play as we can." She was curiously exalted;
her voice was strained; she stared not at the company but at the
grotesques scrawled on the backs of wing-pieces by forgotten
stage-hands. "I wonder if you can understand the `fun' of
making a beautiful thing, the pride and satisfaction of it, and
the holiness!"
The company glanced doubtfully at one another. In Gopher
Prairie it is not good form to be holy except at a church,
between ten-thirty and twelve on Sunday.
"But if we want to do it, we've got to work; we must
have self-discipline."
They were at once amused and embarrassed. They did not
want to affront this mad woman. They backed off and tried to
rehearse. Carol did not hear Juanita, in front, protesting to
Maud Dyer, "If she calls it fun and holiness to sweat over
her darned old play-well, I don't!"
IV
Carol attended the only professional play which came to
Gopher Prairie that spring. It was a "tent show, presenting
snappy new dramas under canvas." The hard-working actors
doubled in brass, and took tickets; and between acts sang
about the moon in June, and sold Dr. Wintergreen's Surefire
Tonic for Ills of the Heart, Lungs, Kidneys, and Bowels. They
presented "Sunbonnet Nell: A Dramatic Comedy of the
Ozarks," with J. Witherbee Boothby wringing the soul by
his resonant "Yuh ain't done right by mah little gal, Mr.
City Man, but yer a-goin' to find that back in these-yere hills
there's honest folks and good shots!"
The audience, on planks beneath the patched tent, admired
Mr. Boothby's beard and long rifle; stamped their feet in
the dust at the spectacle of his heroism; shouted when the
comedian aped the City Lady's use of a lorgnon by looking
through a doughnut stuck on a fork; wept visibly over Mr.
Boothby's Little Gal Nell, who was also Mr. Boothby's legal
wife Pearl, and when the curtain went down, listened respectfully
to Mr. Boothby's lecture on Dr. Wintergreen's Tonic as
a cure for tape-worms, which he illustrated by horrible pallid
objects curled in bottles of yellowing alcohol.
Carol shook her head. "Juanita is right. I'm a fool.
Holiness of the drama! Bernard Shaw! The only trouble
with `The Girl from Kankakee' is that it's too subtle for
Gopher Prairie!"
She sought faith in spacious banal phrases, taken from books:
"the instinctive nobility of simple souls," "need only the
opportunity, to appreciate fine things," and "sturdy exponents
of democracy." But these optimisms did not sound so loud
as the laughter of the audience at the funny-man's line, "Yes,
by heckelum, I'm a smart fella." She wanted to give up the
play, the dramatic association, the town. As she came out of
the tent and walked with Kennicott down the dusty spring
street, she peered at this straggling wooden village and felt
that she could not possibly stay here through all of tomorrow.
It was Miles Bjornstam who gave her strength--he and the
fact that every seat for "The Girl from Kankakee" had been
sold.
Bjornstam was "keeping company" with Bea. Every night
he was sitting on the back steps. Once when Carol appeared
he grumbled, "Hope you're going to give this burg one good
show. If you don't, reckon nobody ever will."
V
It was the great night; it was the night of the play. The
two dressing-rooms were swirling with actors, panting, twitchy
pale. Del Snafflin the barber, who was as much a professional
as Ella, having once gone on in a mob scene at a stock-
company performance in Minneapolis, was making them up,
and showing his scorn for amateurs with, "Stand still! For
the love o' Mike, how do you expect me to get your eyelids
dark if you keep a-wigglin'?" The actors were beseeching,
"Hey, Del, put some red in my nostrils--you put some in
Rita's--gee, you didn't hardly do anything to my face."
They were enormously theatric. They examined Del's makeup
box, they sniffed the scent of grease-paint, every minute
they ran out to peep through the hole in the curtain, they
came back to inspect their wigs and costumes, they read on
the whitewashed walls of the dressing-rooms the pencil
inscriptions: "The Flora Flanders Comedy Company," and
"This is a bum theater," and felt that they were companions
of these vanished troupers.
Carol, smart in maid's uniform, coaxed the temporary stage-
hands to finish setting the first act, wailed at Kennicott, the
electrician, "Now for heaven's sake remember the change in
cue for the ambers in Act Two," slipped out to ask Dave Dyer,
the ticket-taker, if he could get some more chairs, warned the
frightened Myrtle Cass to be sure to upset the waste-basket
when John Grimm called, "Here you, Reddy."
Del Snafflin's orchestra of piano, violin, and cornet began to
tune up and every one behind the magic line of the proscenic
arch was frightened into paralysis. Carol wavered to the
hole in the curtain. There were so many people out there,
staring so hard----
In the second row she saw Miles Bjornstam, not with Bea
but alone. He really wanted to see the play! It was a good
omen. Who could tell? Perhaps this evening would convert
Gopher Prairie to conscious beauty.
She darted into the women's dressing-room, roused Maud
Dyer from her fainting panic, pushed her to the wings, and
ordered the curtain up.
It rose doubtfully, it staggered and trembled, but it did get
up without catching--this time. Then she realized that
Kennicott had forgotten to turn off the houselights. Some
one out front was giggling.
She galloped round to the left wing, herself pulled the
switch, looked so ferociously at Kennicott that he quaked,
and fled back.
Mrs. Dyer was creeping out on the half-darkened stage.
The play was begun.
And with that instant Carol realized that it was a bad play
abominably acted.
Encouraging them with lying smiles, she watched her work
go to pieces. The settings seemed flimsy, the lighting
commonplace. She watched Guy Pollock stammer and twist his
mustache when he should have been a bullying magnate; Vida
Sherwin, as Grimm's timid wife, chatter at the audience as
though they were her class in high-school English; Juanita,
in the leading role, defy Mr. Grimm as though she were
repeating a list of things she had to buy at the grocery this
morning; Ella Stowbody remark "I'd like a cup of tea" as
though she were reciting "Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight";
and Dr. Gould, making love to Rita Simons, squeak, "My--
my--you--are--a--won'erful--girl ."
Myrtle Cass, as the office-boy, was so much pleased by the
applause of her relatives, then so much agitated by the
remarks of Cy Bogart, in the back row, in reference to her
wearing trousers, that she could hardly be got off the stage.
Only Raymie was so unsociable as to devote himself entirely
to acting.
That she was right in her opinion of the play Carol was
certain when Miles Bjornstam went out after the first act,
and did not come back.
VI
Between the second and third acts she called the company
together, and supplicated, "I want to know something, before
we have a chance to separate. Whether we're doing well or
badly tonight, it is a beginning. But will we take it as merely
a beginning? How many of you will pledge yourselves to
start in with me, right away, tomorrow, and plan for another
play, to be given in September?"
They stared at her; they nodded at Juanita's protest: "I
think one's enough for a while. It's going elegant tonight, but
another play---- Seems to me it'll be time enough to talk
about that next fall. Carol! I hope you don't mean to hint
and suggest we're not doing fine tonight? I'm sure the
applause shows the audience think it's just dandy!"
Then Carol knew how completely she had failed.
As the audience seeped out she heard B. J. Gougerling the
banker say to Howland the grocer, "Well, I think the folks
did splendid; just as good as professionals. But I don't care
much for these plays. What I like is a good movie, with
auto accidents and hold-ups, and some git to it, and not all
this talky-talk."
Then Carol knew how certain she was to fail again.
She wearily did not blame them, company nor audience.
Herself she blamed for trying to carve intaglios in good
wholesome jack-pine.
"It's the worst defeat of all. I'm beaten. By Main Street.
`I must go on.' But I can't!"
She was not vastly encouraged by the Gopher Prairie
Dauntless:
. . .would be impossible to distinguish among the actors when
all gave such fine account of themselves in difficult roles of this
well-known New York stage play. Guy Pollock as the old millionaire
could not have been bettered for his fine impersonation of
the gruff old millionaire; Mrs. Harry Haydock as the young lady
from the West who so easily showed the New York four-flushers
where they got off was a vision of loveliness and with fine stage
presence. Miss Vida Sherwin the ever popular teacher in our
high school pleased as Mrs. Grimm, Dr. Gould was well suited in
the role of young lover-girls you better look out, remember the
doc is a bachelor. The local Four Hundred also report that he
is a great hand at shaking the light fantastic tootsies in the
dance. As the stenographer Rita Simons was pretty as a picture,
and Miss Ella Stowbody's long and intensive study of the drama
and kindred arts in Eastern schools was seen in the fine finish
of her part.
. . .to no one is greater credit to be given than to Mrs. Will
Kennicott on whose capable shoulders fell the burden of directing.
"So kindly," Carol mused, "so well meant, so neighborly--
and so confoundedly untrue. Is it really my failure, or theirs?"
She sought to be sensible; she elaborately explained to
herself that it was hysterical to condemn Gopher Prairie because
it did not foam over the drama. Its justification was in its
service as a market-town for farmers. How bravely and generously
it did its work, forwarding the bread of the world, feeding
and healing the farmers!
Then, on the corner below her husband's office, she heard
a farmer holding forth:
"Sure. Course I was beaten. The shipper and the grocers
here wouldn't pay us a decent price for our potatoes, even
though folks in the cities were howling for 'em. So we says,
well, we'll get a truck and ship 'em right down to Minneapolis.
But the commission merchants there were in cahoots with the
local shipper here; they said they wouldn't pay us a cent
more than he would, not even if they was nearer to the
market. Well, we found we could get higher prices in Chicago,
but when we tried to get freight cars to ship there, the
railroads wouldn't let us have 'em--even though they had cars
standing empty right here in the yards. There you got it--
good market, and these towns keeping us from it. Gus, that's
the way these towns work all the time. They pay what they
want to for our wheat, but we pay what they want us to
for their clothes. Stowbody and Dawson foreclose every mortgage
they can, and put in tenant farmers. The Dauntless lies
to us about the Nonpartisan League, the lawyers sting us,
the machinery-dealers hate to carry us over bad years, and
then their daughters put on swell dresses and look at us as
if we were a bunch of hoboes. Man, I'd like to burn this
town!"
Kennicott observed, "There's that old crank Wes Brannigan
shooting off his mouth again. Gosh, but he loves to hear himself
talk! They ought to run that fellow out of town!"
VII
She felt old and detached through high-school commencement
week, which is the fete of youth in Gopher Prairie;
through baccalaureate sermon, senior Parade, junior
entertainment, commencement address by an Iowa clergyman who
asserted that he believed in the virtue of virtuousness, and
the procession of Decoration Day, when the few Civil War
veterans followed Champ Perry, in his rusty forage-cap, along
the spring-powdered road to the cemetery. She met Guy; she
found that she had nothing to say to him. Her head ached
in an aimless way. When Kennicott rejoiced, "We'll have a
great time this summer; move down to the lake early and
wear old clothes and act natural," she smiled, but her smile
creaked.
In the prairie heat she trudged along unchanging ways,
talked about nothing to tepid people, and reflected that she
might never escape from them.
She was startled to find that she was using the word
"escape."
Then, for three years which passed like one curt paragraph,
she ceased to find anything interesting save the Bjornstams
and her baby.
_______
CHAPTER XVIII - Novel: Main Street - Author: Sinclair Lewis _