V
They were in a long whitewashed hall with a clumsy
draw-curtain across the front. The folding chairs were filled with
people who looked washed and ironed: parents of the pupils,
girl students, dutiful teachers.
"Strikes me it's going to be punk. If the first play isn't
good, let's beat it," said Kennicott hopefully.
"All right," she yawned. With hazy eyes she tried to read
the lists of characters, which were hidden among lifeless
advertisements of pianos, music-dealers, restaurants, candy.
She regarded the Schnitzler play with no vast interest. The
actors moved and spoke stiffly. Just as its cynicism was
beginning to rouse her village-dulled frivolity, it was over.
"Don't think a whale of a lot of that. How about taking
a sneak?" petitioned Kennicott.
"Oh, let's try the next one, `How He Lied to Her
Husband.' "
The Shaw conceit amused her, and perplexed Kennicott:
"Strikes me it's darn fresh. Thought it would be racy.
Don't know as I think much of a play where a husband
actually claims he wants a fellow to make love to his wife.
No husband ever did that! Shall we shake a leg?"
"I want to see this Yeats thing, `Land of Heart's Desire.'
I used to love it in college." She was awake now, and urgent.
"I know you didn't care so much for Yeats when I read him
aloud to you, but you just see if you don't adore him on
the stage."
Most of the cast were as unwieldy as oak chairs marching,
and the setting was an arty arrangement of batik scarfs and
heavy tables, but Maire Bruin was slim as Carol, and
larger-eyed, and her voice was a morning bell. In her, Carol lived,
and on her lifting voice was transported from this sleepy
small-town husband and all the rows of polite parents to the stilly
loft of a thatched cottage where in a green dimness, beside a
window caressed by linden branches, she bent over a chronicle
of twilight women and the ancient gods.
"Well—gosh—nice kid played that girl—good-looker," said
Kennicott. "Want to stay for the last piece? Heh?"
She shivered. She did not answer.
The curtain was again drawn aside. On the stage they
saw nothing but long green curtains and a leather chair. Two
young men in brown robes like furniture-covers were gesturing
vacuously and droning cryptic sentences full of repetitions.
It was Carol's first hearing of Dunsany. She sympathized
with the restless Kennicott as he felt in his pocket for a cigar
and unhappily put it back.
Without understanding when or how, without a tangible
change in the stilted intoning of the stage-puppets, she was
conscious of another time and place.
Stately and aloof among vainglorious tiring-maids, a queen
in robes that murmured on the marble floor, she trod the
gallery of a crumbling palace. In the courtyard, elephants
trumpeted, and swart men with beards dyed crimson stood with
blood-stained hands folded upon their hilts, guarding the
caravan from El Sharnak, the camels with Tyrian stuffs of
topaz and cinnabar. Beyond the turrets of the outer wall the
jungle glared and shrieked, and the sun was furious above
drenched orchids. A youth came striding through the
steel-bossed doors, the sword-bitten doors that were higher than ten
tall men. He was in flexible mail, and under the rim of his
planished morion were amorous curls. His hand was out to
her; before she touched it she could feel its warmth—
"Gosh all hemlock! What the dickens is all this stuff about,
Carrie?"
She was no Syrian queen. She was Mrs. Dr. Kennicott.
She fell with a jolt into a whitewashed hall and sat looking
at two scared girls and a young man in wrinkled tights.
Kennicott fondly rambled as they left the hall:
"What the deuce did that last spiel mean? Couldn't make
head or tail of it. If that's highbrow drama, give me a
cow-puncher movie, every time! Thank God, that's over, and we
can get to bed. Wonder if we wouldn't make time by walking
over to Nicollet to take a car? One thing I will say for that
dump: they had it warm enough. Must have a big hot-air
furnace, I guess. Wonder how much coal it takes to run 'em
through the winter?"
In the car he affectionately patted her knee, and he was for
a second the striding youth in armor; then he was Doc
Kennicott of Gopher Prairie, and she was recaptured by Main
Street. Never, not all her life, would she behold jungles and
the tombs of kings. There were strange things in the world,
they really existed; but she would never see them.
She would recreate them in plays!
She would make the dramatic association understand her
aspiration. They would, surely they would—
She looked doubtfully at the impenetrable reality of yawning
trolley conductor and sleepy passengers and placards advertising
soap and underwear.
