Kitabı oku: «Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905», sayfa 19
“Dear me!” ejaculated Miss Herron. “I rather hope we’ll meet nobody I know.”
“The sheriff himself couldn’t stop us now.”
“But – ”
“Honk! honk!”
“Oh, Mr. Fraser!” They missed by a foot a carriage that was beginning slowly to turn around, and was nearly straight across the road when Archie twitched the automobile aside as if it was a polo pony.
“The stupid creatures!” cried Miss Herron, indignantly, when her heart commenced to beat again, “to block the way!”
“That was a close shave,” commented Archie.
“Not too recklessly, Mr. Fraser.”
“I must get you to the meeting, ma’am.”
“But the risk – ”
“If I can’t have Lucy,” the boy declared, sullenly, “I don’t care what happens.”
“Assure me,” demanded his passenger, after a brief moment, during which with no slackening of speed the great machine tore down Scarborough’s main street like a green tornado, “that you retain entire control of the thing.”
“Oh, yes.”
Another pause. “I suggested that you make no mention of Miss Lucy.”
“I can’t have her?”
“How fast can the automobile go?” asked Miss Herron, ignoring the boy’s question.
“Some faster than this. But Lucy can – ”
“Let us not discuss the matter, please.”
“I can’t have her?”
“I beg, Mr. Fraser, I beg you to center your attention on driving your machine.”
“Well, I will, then. I’ll drive her,” said the boy, grimly, “good and fast.” They came again to the open, but the road continued hard and broad, with only long curves around the base of a hill now and then. The wind blew the old lady’s hair into disarray, her dress was gray with dust, her eyes smarted terribly; she gave from time to time a little gasp – or was it a laugh? – and clutched at Archie’s arm, which held so rigid and strong to the tiller wheel. “This’ll be her finish, all right,” he thought. “Cross old cat. Scared?” he asked of her.
“I beg pardon?”
“You’re not scared, I suppose?” he said, mockingly.
“I have been accustomed to fast driving, Mr. Fraser, all my life.”
It was because she made that reply that Archie, quite desperate by now, dared what finally did occur. And this was occasioned by his spying in the distance another big car headed as he was, but moving less rapidly. In a minute he was alongside, and jammed on the brakes. The other driver, who was heavily mustached, red-faced and had three airy young damsels stowed in the tonneau, looked up in surprise.
“Hello, Isidore!”
“Hello! Hello, Mr. Fraser!”
“I’ll race you to the bridge.”
“Go on, now! Watcher think I got here?” But the girls chorused delightedly, and teased their driver – all but one, and she leaned forward to whisper confidingly, with her arms around his fat neck. Miss Herron surveyed the landscape.
“’Fraid cat!” giggled the girl. “You’re afraid, Mr. Mayer.”
“I ain’t, only – ”
“One!” cried Archie, releasing his steed again. “Two!”
“Leggo, May!” grunted the other.
“And – ”
“Three!” yelled Mayer. “To the bridge!”
By mere good luck the highway was empty, for to think that any cart or carriage could be passed was absurd. Side by side the huge machines, scarlet, green, alive with shining brass, tore along with the roar of express trains between the ditch and the bank. The slightest swerve at such speed meant death. The chatter of the careless girls dwindled, the faces of the rival drivers grew pale and tense.
“Oh, be careful!” murmured Miss Herron. “It’s very dangerous.”
“Very,” replied Archie. “Promise me Lucy and I’ll slow up.”
A sudden little shriek of joy and some handclapping from Mayer’s tonneau interrupted what the old lady might have answered. Glancing over, Miss Herron perceived that their rival had drawn ahead a yard or more, that the girls were crying taunts at her. Not far away now there showed a gleam of the river. And then Archie encountered the greatest surprise of his life.
“Saucy things!” remarked his passenger, and fell silent again.
“Come on!” called the prettiest of the three, through her hollowed hands. “Old freight car!”
“Archie!”
“Yes, Miss Herron?”
“Can’t you – Oh!”
“What, ma’am?” From the tail of his eye he was aware that Miss Agatha was wringing her hands.
“Archie, they mustn’t beat us!”
“I guess I’ll crowd him.”
“Oh!”
The time was ripe, he thought. “Give me Lucy,” he repeated, doggedly, “or I’ll foul him.”
He had expected to frighten her. He had told himself what fun it would be to hear her give her agitated assent, with the fear of death on her if she refused. It was to be a fine revenge. But Miss Herron only raised a warning forefinger.
“Archie Fraser,” she said, in trembling tones, “if – if you take the dust from those common young women and that vulgar man, I’ll never forgive you.”
“Great heavens, Miss Herron! I – I – ”
“Beat ’em!” she ordered truculently.
He stuck blindly to his point: “Lucy?”
“Beat ’em! Show me,” she declaimed, in trumpet tones, “that the man who wants to marry a Herron has some courage in him. Now!”
The road narrowed just ahead, where it led through a cut in the hill and then down to the bridge. On either side the banks rose eight or ten feet, and very steep, and beyond was a sharp curve. Archie made his horn speak angrily, as once more he came abreast of his rival, favored by the fact that Mayer had struck a strip of newly repaired and soft roadway some yards long. A second later he was leading.
“Pull up!” he bellowed hoarsely, crouching forward over his tiller still lower. He dropped his hand to the emergency brake. The cut was not six rods off. Once more the girls cried out, but this time in shrill fear. Miss Herron remained calm as the Sphinx.
“Honk!” from Mayer, and the click of levers. His machine slid along in a cloud of dust. “You win!”
It was ten minutes before the victors exchanged a single word. They rattled over the long bridge, steered up the streets of Oldport to the place where the Daughters were in session. Then Archie lay back with a sigh.
“You weren’t scared a bit!” he exclaimed, frankly doleful.
The old lady straightened her hat, lightly brushed off the top layer of dust from the front of her dress, then gave the briefest of queer little laughs. “It is one of the traits of my family,” she said, “never to be surprised at anything. And another,” she added, descending majestically from the automobile, “is to make the best of circumstances which appear to be inevitable.”
The boy blinked. “I don’t understand,” he stammered.
Miss Herron touched him on the arm. “I trust, then, that Lucy will express herself to you more clearly. In case – if you should venture to ask her a question.”
And with that the old lady minced her way up the steps of the house to disappear within doors.
“Good Lord!” exclaimed Archie, as the light began to break.
TWO SORROWS
Before Love came my eyes were dim with tears,
Because I had not known her gentle face;
Softly I said: “But when across the years
Her smile illumes the darkness of my place,
All grief from my poor heart she will efface.”
Now Love is mine – she walks with me for aye
Down paths of primrose and blue violet;
But on my heart at every close of day
A grief more keen than my old grief is set, —
I weep for those who have not found Love yet!
Charles Hanson Towne.
LOVE AND MUSHROOMS
By Frances Wilson
Van Mater, out on the coast for the melancholy purpose of witnessing what he conceived to be Corny Graham’s crowning indiscretion – that is to say, his marriage – found himself lingering for the purpose of basking in California’s smiles. The writing instinct, which in the little old town on Manhattan would keep his hand traveling back and forth across the paper for days at a stretch, here languished and drowsed like some heavy-eyed, faintly smiling lotus eater.
He had, to be sure – in a spurt of energy that subsided almost as quickly as it came – begun a song to that sybaritic state, in which it was represented as a lady around whose neck hung
A chain ablaze with diamond days
All on the seasons strung,
which he thought sounded rather well.
Then, unfortunately, the rains set in and the result was a mental washout that carried the last vestige of his poetical idea out into the vasty deep where individual ideas become world-thought, though there was a moment when he had an inspiration – something about keeping Lent, which should typify the rains. But this, too, drifted off like a chip on an ocean, and the song became mere literary junk.
Probably the law of compensation is responsible for the fact that, while the coast’s dazzling summer is flawed by trade winds, its rainy season is tempered by mushrooms. At least, so thought Van Mater. Connoisseur that he was in the joys of living, he confessed to a new sensation when, for the first time, he found himself plodding over the seared, round-shouldered hills, spongy with the supererogatory wetness of a three days’ downpour. The rain had ceased temporarily, but the sky wore a look of ineffable gloom, and the feathery mist trailed along the earth like an uneasy ghost.
Some swarthy, dark-eyed Portuguese children, met on the road the day before, had proffered him their pail of spoil, and as he examined its contents he understood, for the first time, what a mushroom really ought to be. Their dank odor – the odor of germinating things – seemed to come from down in the earth where the gnomes are supposed to foregather; and Van Mater’s thoughts reverted with withering scorn to certain woodeny, tan objects that had been foisted upon him from time to time as mushrooms – always, he now triumphantly recalled, to his own inward amazement.
Why, when and where mushrooms had won their vogue with epicures, he had often dumbly wondered, though he had remained silent lest he expose a too abysmal ignorance. Now he chuckled hilariously. It was his acceptance of those frauds – those mere shells from which the souls had fled – that displayed ignorance! In future he would know better, and he tossed the children a quarter and went his way, in a pleasant anticipation of the manner in which he would carelessly throw off to certain admiring friends:
“But I never eat mushrooms, save they come straight to the table from the soil, picked within an hour of the time when the rain ceases. Those things? Why, my dear fellow, you might as well eat so much gristle. Talk about the bouquet of wine! Why, the bouquet of the mushroom is as delicate and elusive as – as – ” The simile failed to materialize, but he went on eloquently: “You can no more preserve it than you can the dew upon a plum.” All of which sounded so well that he speculated anxiously upon the probability of any of the said fellows divining how very little he knew about the matter, after all. They were so deuced knowing, some of them; but it seemed a pity to let an idea like that, what had actually leaped from his brain full-fledged, go to waste. Decidedly, it was worth the risk.
His mind again reverted to the subject with pleasant anticipation when, the next afternoon, clad in knickers and a Norfolk, with a cap pulled rakishly over his eyes, he trudged over the hills to which the children had directed him. Soon, however, everything was blotted from his consciousness save a section of brown hill, over which his eyes roved eagerly in search of the small, Japanese-looking fungi.
“Mushroom or toadstool?” was his stern inward query, as the pert little parasols became more and more numerous; and he did not realize that he had spoken aloud until a gush of laughter caused him to raise his eyes hastily.
She was not three steps away, and from the trim leather leggings, above which her kilted skirt swirled, to the thick sweater and Tam that she wore, she seemed to Van Mater the most dashingly correct damsel he had ever seen. The foggy air had brought a delicious color to her cheeks and brightness to her eye which made her seem a very creature of the out-of-doors, and Van Mater stared, charmed and arrested.
“Evidently you don’t recognize me,” she suggested. “I was the third bridesmaid – the one in pink – the homely one, you know.”
She eyed him with a wicked satisfaction while the color rose to his face. He had a disagreeable recollection, since she identified herself so minutely, that he had rather passed that particular bridesmaid over with scant attention, amazing as it now seemed. Then he recovered himself, and with that gallant movement of the arm which seems the perfect expression of deference, removed his soft cap and bowed low, as he said:
“Of course – I remember you perfectly now, Miss – ah.”
He tried, as he took her extended hand, to mumble something unintelligible enough to pass for her name, looking at her with an admiration purposely open in the hope of distracting her attention, but the ruse was of no avail. She only smiled into his face with impish delight.
“You people from the East are so dreadfully disingenuous,” she complained. “Why not confess frankly that, so far as you are concerned, I belong to the ‘no name’ series?”
Her eyes were dancing, and suddenly Van Mater felt as if he had known her always – eons before he had known himself in his present incarnation.
“To think that I shouldn’t have recognized you in the pink gown,” he murmured, with well-feigned surprise. “And to think that I’m no more surprised than I am to have you suddenly bob up here in the wet, after your wanderings of perhaps a hundred lifetimes! I can’t seem to recall the date and planet upon which we last met,” he continued, apologetically, “but I fancy that we picked mushrooms in those old times – that the earth and air were all sopping, just as they are now.”
“You write books – you know you do!”
“Well – it’s a decent enough occupation!”
“Yes,” uncertainly. “Still, writers aren’t usually very sincere; they don’t mean what they say. They spin copy as a spider does a web!”
“Writers not sincere – don’t mean what they say!” he echoed. “Why, my dear young lady, you’re all wrong. They usually mean so much that they can’t begin to say it – and as for sincerity, they’re the sincerest people in the world!”
“That is, while it lasts!” he added to himself, but his listener, who had stooped to the ground and was now holding up a particularly large and luscious mushroom, was all unconscious of his reservation.
“Look out! You’re stepping on them!” she cried, excitedly, and for the next ten minutes they wandered about with eyes bent on the earth in fascinated absorption. Van Mater at last straightened up with such a thrill of satisfaction as he had not experienced since boyhood.
“My pail’s full,” he called, seating himself on one of the projecting bowlders. “So come and show me where to pick the beefsteaks.”
She pointed upward. Where the hill humped itself against the sky the blurred figure of a cow was visible. Van Mater tried again.
“You might come and rest,” he coaxed, pointing to another bowlder that cropped out in friendly nearness to his own. With a last lingering scrutiny of the ground about, she came, seating herself beside him. Then, with her chin resting on her hands, she surveyed him with a sort of boyish sang-froid.
“We’re right cozy for acquaintances of a half hour’s standing,” she remarked, at last. “But, then, I’ve heard about you for so long. You see, Corny told Beth, and she has – well – mentioned you to me.”
“Pooh – that’s nothing! I tell you, I’ve known you for centuries. I remember that when I heard of one of those theosophist fellows marrying a girl he’d known for a thousand years or so, I roared. Now I understand it!” (Very solemnly.)
She did not speak, and he began again with increased seriousness:
“Really, I’m in earnest, you know. I’ve the most curious sense of – well, of companionship with you – as if we’d known each other indefinitely, as if – ”
She interrupted rather hastily.
“Honestly?”
Tersely – “Upon my soul.”
She rose somewhat hurriedly. “It’s going to rain!”
“Never mind. I have a conundrum. Why is love like a mushroom?”
She wrinkled her brow. “Because it’s easily crushed, I suppose, and you’re never quite sure of it.”
“Wrong. Because it springs up in a night – that is, in an hour,” he answered, impressively.
The drops began to fall softly, swiftly, easily, as if they would never more be stanched.
“Come,” she said, but her cheeks were more richly colored than before.
“Isn’t this heavenly?” he murmured, as they vanished down the road in a blur of rain. She did not answer, but her eyes were shining.
SOME FEMININE STARS
By Alan Dale
Advertised personalities. Enormous sums squandered on theatrical impossibilities. Amelia Bingham’s pluck and restlessness. “Nancy Stair” rather tiresome. Lesser lights in star-dom.
Three thin, anæmic, bedraggled plays, each with a heralded, exultant feminine “star” skewered to its bloodless pulp, dropped into this metropolis just ahead of the reluctant crocus. Three highly advertised “personalities” tried to weather out a veritable emaciation of drama, and the result was, of course, a foregone conclusion. Slowly but surely is knowledge being forced upon the deluded manager, and he is learning to appreciate the vital truth of the much battered Shakespearian quotation, “The play’s the thing.” No trumped-up interest in one particular puppet will take the place of the drama itself. This is a pity. It is easier to create a marionette than it is to construct a play.
The three highly advertised “personalities” that reached us at crocus time were owned and engineered by Miss Amelia Bingham, Miss Mary Mannering and Miss Virginia Harned. I mention them in the order in which they appeared, which is not necessarily that of superior merit. They came in at the fag end of a tired season, dragging a load of pitiful dramatic bones. Hope ran high, but fell in sheer despondency. In spite of the fact that the poet prefers to picture hope as springing, I think that in this case it may be better portrayed as running. There is a sensation of panic in the race.
Miss Bingham came to town with a very swollen “comedy-drama,” called “Mademoiselle Marni,” from the pen of a “monsoor,” programmed as Henri Dumay – said to be an American “monsoor” at that. This actress affects French plays for reasons that have never been explained, and that certainly do not appear. As a “star,” she is of course entitled to treat herself to any luxury that may seem to tempt her histrionic appetite, and the Gallic siren evidently appeals to her. It is not likely that there will be international complications, although the provocation must at times be keen.
“Mademoiselle Marni” was one of those impossible chromos that might have been designed for the mere purpose of giving one’s sense of humor a chance to ventilate itself. In the serious theater-goer – and one is bound to consider him – it awoke amazement. How is it that at rehearsal a dozen presumably sane people can “pass” such an effort, he must have asked himself? Why is it that in a theatrical venture that costs a great deal of money, there are no misgivings? The serious theater-goer is never able to answer these questions.
It is almost proverbial that the most hopeless sort of theatrical enterprise – if conventional – never languishes for lack of funds. Try and start a solid business scheme, in which you can calculate results in black and white, and the difficulties and discouragements will be almost insuperable. Endeavor to obtain money for an invention or innovation that has success written across it in luminous letters, and you will “strike a snag,” as the rude phrase goes, with marvelous celerity. But a bad play – one that to the unsophisticated theater-usher or to the manager’s scrubwoman must perforce appear as such – experiences no such fate. This is one of the marvels of theaterdom.
In the case of “Mademoiselle Marni” Miss Bingham herself must have spent an enormous sum that she would probably have hesitated to invest in some enterprise sane or possible. The play was a turgid coagulation of illogical episodes lacking in all plausibility. This particular actress is generally happy when she can select for herself a character that is beloved by all the masculine members of the cast. Apparently, she “sees” herself in this rôle. She likes to appear as the personification of all the virtues, self-sacrificing and otherwise, and this idiosyncrasy is, of course, frequently fatal to sustained interest. We do not care for these sensational paragons.
In “Mademoiselle Marni” Miss Bingham played the part of a very beautiful French actress, of whom everybody said: “Oh, what a woman!” (Perhaps the audience also echoed that phrase, but with quite a different significance.) She was exquisitely in love with Comte Raoul de Saverne, who was engaged to another, and was “ordered” away from her by the father of that other. This parent was a very wicked baron, and just as Mlle. Marni in an ecstasy of rage was about to strike him, somebody called out: “Do not hit him; he is your father.”
We discovered that Mlle. Marni was the wicked baron’s illegitimate child. As he had been saying extremely pretty things to her – for she was so bee-yoo-ti-ful! – you will readily perceive that fastidious people might find this “situation” what some critics love to call “unpleasant.” Wicked barons, viewed in the process of admiring their own daughters, are not exactly long-felt wants upon the New York stage. However, this episode was scarcely offensive, for it was so exuberantly silly that nobody could take it seriously.
Later on, Mlle. Marni gambled on the stock exchange, and made two million dollars in a few minutes, so that she could get even with the wicked baron, and force him to recall Raoul. In this act the actress wore black velvet, and looked every inch French – Bleecker Street French. It was the “big” scene, and was considered very strenuous by those acting in it. To those in the audience, it merely accentuated the cheap vulgarity of the play, that had no redeeming point, either literary or dramatic. It was, in fact, a forlorn hope.
Perhaps if Miss Amelia Bingham would not select her own plays, she would fare better. She is by no means lacking in histrionic ability. She has done many good things in her day. But the temptation of the self-made “star” to see nothing but her own part in the drama that she buys, is very acute. A satisfactory ensemble, a logical story, a set of plausible characters and a motive are all overlooked. Her own “personality” is her sole anxiety, and – well, it is not enough. Miss Bingham was assisted by Frederic de Belleville, Frazer Coulter and others less known to fortune and to fame, but “Mademoiselle Marni” was not accepted. It was staged “regardless,” but even that fact did not count in its favor. Miss Bingham’s pluck and recklessness were alone in evidence.
Scarcely more felicitous was Miss Mary Mannering with “Nancy Stair.” Miss Mannering is not as good an actress as Miss Bingham. She is one of the “be-stars-quickly.” A year or two more in some good company would have been of inestimable advantage to her, but the lower rungs of the ladder are not in great demand to-day. That ladder is top-heavy. The upper rungs are worn by the futile grasp of the too ambitious; the lower ones are neglected.
It was Paul M. Potter who tapped on the book cover of Elinor Macartney Lane’s novel, with his not very magic wand, and tried to coax forth a play. Exactly why he did this was not made clear, for the day of the book play is over, and there was nothing in “Nancy Stair” that overtopped the gently commonplace. Mr. Potter’s play was by no means lacking in interest, but we are exceedingly tired of the ubiquitous heroine of tawdry “romance” who does unsubtle things, in an unsubtle way, to help out certain unsubtle “complications.” If I mistake not, these very novels are beginning to pall, as such stupid, meaningless vaporings should do. One cannot resist the belief that one-half of them are written with an eye upon the gullible playwright, for a play means larger remuneration than any novel could ever hope to secure.
It is not necessary to rehearse the story of “Nancy Stair.” I can assume that you have read it, though if you are like me, you haven’t. I look upon Mr. Julius Cahn’s “Official Theatrical Guide” as rich and racy literature compared with these fatiguing attempts to invent impossible people, and drag them through a jungle of impossible happenings – simply because Mr. Anthony Hope, a few years ago, achieved success by similar means, which at that time had a semblance of novelty. I may be “prejudiced,” but then I have at least the courage of my own prejudices. In “Nancy Stair” Mr. Potter even seemed to belittle opportunities that might have raised his play from the dull level of conventionality.
One episode in which Nancy, afraid that her lover has murdered the Duke of Borthwicke, enters the presence of the corpse, and there forges a letter in the interests of Danvers, might have been made into something strongly emotional, creepy and Sarah Bernhardtian. This incident in itself was so striking, and it seemed to be so new – though I believe that Mr. Potter himself repudiates the notion that there can be anything new in the drama – that it was almost criminal to slight it. Nothing was made of it. It almost escaped attention. Instead, we got a crew of comic opera Scotchmen singing songs, and an absurd picture of Robert Burns, who was injected pell-mell into the “romance.” It was disheartening.
Those who had read the book complained bitterly of the “liberties” that Mr. Potter had taken with it. Those who had not read the book complained equally bitterly that Mr. Potter had not taken more of those “liberties” and made it better worth his while. To me, the book drama is a conundrum. It always has been, and now that it has nearly died out, I am still unable to solve it. When you read a book, you form mental pictures of its characters, and are generally discontented with those that confront you on the stage. And when you don’t read a book, the play made therefrom lacks lucidity, and you experience the need of a “key.” I should imagine that the dramatization of a novel killed its sale. Who, after viewing “Nancy Stair” as a play, would tackle it as a novel? Of course, when a book is dramatized after it has had a stupendous sale, the author cannot complain. He has no excuse for protesting. This is a somewhat interesting topic.
Miss Mannering coped with Nancy as she would cope with Camille or Juliet, or any character quite outside of her range of ability. In light comedy episodes, she is quite acceptable. She is a very pretty, graceful, distinguished young woman, but her “emotion” is absurd. Her dramatic fervor is such an exceedingly stereotyped affair that you can watch it in a detached mood. You can pursue your own thoughts while she is “fervoring,” and she will not interrupt them. Miss Mannering is emotional in a conventional stage way, and she knows a few tricks. But the subtlety that comes from experience, the quality that nothing but a long and arduous apprenticeship can produce, are leagues beyond her ken. It is a pity, but the “be-stars-quickly” all suffer in this identical way and there is no remedy.
Robert Loraine as the “hero” gave a far better performance. It was theatrical, but satisfactory. The late Robert Burns was played by T. D. Frawley in a deliciously Hibernian way. Poor Bobbie would have had a fit if he could have seen his nationality juggled with in this manner. If Mr. Frawley had warbled “The Wearing o’ the Green” the illusion would have been complete. Mr. Andrew Mack could have done nothing better – for Ireland.
“The Lady Shore” was the title of Miss Virginia Harned’s massive production at the Hudson Theater. Jane Shore was dragged, willy-nilly, from history almost as though she were the heroine of a so-called popular novel, and two ladies, Mrs. Vance Thompson and Lena R. Smith, propelled her toward 1905. While, on moral grounds, we may inveigh against the courtesan, when we meet her in everyday life, the fact remains that for the stage there is no character in greater demand by “star” actresses and “romantic” playwrights. They seem to find a peculiar interest in a woman who has “lived” – no matter how. If, in ransacking history, they are lucky enough to discover a courtesan who can be billed as a “king’s favorite,” they appear to smack their lips exultantly. One is almost inclined to believe that dead-and-gone kings must have chosen “favorites” merely for the sake of to-day’s stage.
As soon as the playwright has excavated a courtesan, he begins to think of the best way of whitewashing her. For she must be offered up as more sinned against than sinning. Of course. The playwright wastes his substance thinking up excuses for her. He is quite willing – nay, anxious – that she shall go wrong, but he prefers that she shall be driven to it by untoward circumstances. He is desirous that we shall sympathize with her, to the point of tears, in the last act. It is very kind of him to do such charitable deeds in history’s name, and we realize how exceedingly unselfish he is. Just the same, this mania for resurrecting defunct courtesans seems a trifle neurasthenic. It appears to indicate a hysterical sympathy, on the part of the playwright, with dead characters whom, in life, he would hesitate at asking to dinner en famille.
The two women who built up “The Lady Shore” smashed history into smithereens in their rabid and frenzied effort to make her an exquisite impersonation of nearly all the virtues. It was, in fact, grotesque and ludicrous. With any old history book staring them in the face, they treated Jane Shore precisely as though she were the heroine of a dime novel. They had no qualms. They lopped great wads from her past, and huge excrescences from her present, and by the time that she had reached the last act, the audience sat dazed at the delicate beauty of her character. No masculine playwright could have done as much. Possibly if the purifiers of Lady Jane Shore elected to dramatize the career of Messalina, they would make of her a combination of Joan of Arc and Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall.
The Jane Shore at the Hudson Theater was married to a brute of a husband, but she left him simply because she was driven to it, poor girl! She became the mistress of Edward IV., apparently because she yearned to be a mother to his children. She was always rescuing the little princes from the Duke of Gloucester. She sat beside Edward IV., in the council chamber of Westminster Palace, so that she could beseech him to pardon delinquents who were brought before him in a procession of fifteenth century “drunk and disorderly.”
