The Thing's the Play
Being acquainted with a newspaper reporter who had a couple of freepasses, I got to see the performance a few nights ago at one of thepopular vaudeville houses.One of the numbers was a violin solo by a striking-looking man not muchpast forty, but with very gray thick hair. Not being afflicted with ataste for music, I let the system of noises drift past my ears while Iregarded the man."There was a story about that chap a month or two ago," said thereporter. "They gave me the assignment. It was to run a column and wasto be on the extremely light and joking order. The old man seems to likethe funny touch I give to local happenings. Oh, yes, I'm working ona farce comedy now. Well, I went down to the house and got all thedetails; but I certainly fell down on that job. I went back and turnedin a comic write-up of an east side funeral instead. Why? Oh, I couldn'tseem to get hold of it with my funny hooks, somehow. Maybe you couldmake a one-act tragedy out of it for a curtain-raiser. I'll give you thedetails."After the performance my friend, the reporter, recited to me the factsover the Wrzburger."I see no reason," said I, when he had concluded, "why that shouldn'tmake a rattling good funny story. Those three people couldn't have actedin a more absurd and preposterous manner if they had been real actors ina real theatre. I'm really afraid that all the stage is a world, anyhow,and all the players men and women. 'The thing's the play,' is the way Iquote Mr. Shakespeare.""Try it," said the reporter."I will," said I; and I did, to show him how he could have made ahumorous column of it for his paper.There stands a house near Abingdon Square. On the ground floor there hasbeen for twenty-five years a little store where toys and notions andstationery are sold.One night twenty years ago there was a wedding in the rooms above thestore. The Widow Mayo owned the house and store. Her daughter Helen wasmarried to Frank Barry. John Delaney was best man. Helen was eighteen,and her picture had been printed in a morning paper next to theheadlines of a "Wholesale Female Murderess" story from Butte, Mont. Butafter your eye and intelligence had rejected the connection, you seizedyour magnifying glass and read beneath the portrait her description asone of a series of Prominent Beauties and Belles of the lower west side.Frank Barry and John Delaney were "prominent" young beaux of the sameside, and bosom friends, whom you expected to turn upon each other everytime the curtain went up. One who pays his money for orchestra seats andfiction expects this. That is the first funny idea that has turned up inthe story yet. Both had made a great race for Helen's hand. When Frankwon, John shook his hand and congratulated him--honestly, he did.After the ceremony Helen ran upstairs to put on her hat. She wasgetting married in a traveling dress. She and Frank were going to OldPoint Comfort for a week. Downstairs the usual horde of gibberingcave-dwellers were waiting with their hands full of old Congress gaitersand paper bags of hominy.Then there was a rattle of the fire-escape, and into her room jumps themad and infatuated John Delaney, with a damp curl drooping upon hisforehead, and made violent and reprehensible love to his lost one,entreating her to flee or fly with him to the Riviera, or the Bronx, orany old place where there are Italian skies and _dolce far niente_.It would have carried Blaney off his feet to see Helen repulse him. Withblazing and scornful eyes she fairly withered him by demanding whateverhe meant by speaking to respectable people that way.In a few moments she had him going. The manliness that had possessed himdeparted. He bowed low, and said something about "irresistible impulse"and "forever carry in his heart the memory of"--and she suggested thathe catch the first fire-escape going down."I will away," said John Delaney, "to the furthermost parts of theearth. I cannot remain near you and know that you are another's. I willto Africa, and there amid other scenes strive to for--""For goodness sake, get out," said Helen. "Somebody might come in."He knelt upon one knee, and she extended him one white hand that hemight give it a farewell kiss.Girls, was this choice boon of the great little god Cupid evervouchsafed you--to have the fellow you want hard and fast, and have theone you don't want come with a damp curl on his forehead and kneel toyou and babble of Africa and love which, in spite of everything, shallforever bloom, an amaranth, in his heart? To know your power, and tofeel the sweet security of your own happy state; to send the unluckyone, broken-hearted, to foreign climes, while you congratulate yourselfas he presses his last kiss upon your knuckles, that your nails are wellmanicured--say, girls, it's galluptious--don't ever let it get by you.And then, of course--how did you guess it?--the door opened and instalked the bridegroom, jealous of slow-tying bonnet strings.The farewell kiss was imprinted upon Helen's hand, and out of the windowand down the fire-escape sprang John Delaney, Africa bound.A little slow music, if you please--faint violin, just a breath in theclarinet and a touch of the 'cello. Imagine the scene. Frank, white-hot,with the cry of a man wounded to death bursting from him. Helen, rushingand clinging to him, trying to explain. He catches her wrists and tearsthem from his shoulders--once, twice, thrice he sways her this way andthat--the stage manager will show you how--and throws her from him tothe floor a huddled, crushed, moaning thing. Never, he cries, will helook upon her face again, and rushes from the house through the staringgroups of astonished guests.And, now because it is the Thing instead of the Play, the audience muststroll out into the real lobby of the world and marry, die, grow gray,rich, poor, happy or sad during the intermission of twenty years whichmust precede the rising of the curtain again.Mrs. Barry inherited the shop and the house. At thirty-eight she couldhave bested many an eighteen-year-old at a beauty show on points andgeneral results. Only a few people remembered her wedding comedy, butshe made of it no secret. She did not pack it in lavender or moth balls,nor did she sell it to a magazine.One day a middle-aged money-making lawyer, who bought his legal cap andink of her, asked her across the counter to marry him."I'm really much obliged to you," said Helen, cheerfully, "but I marriedanother man twenty years ago. He was more a goose than a man, but Ithink I love him yet. I have never seen him since about half an hourafter the ceremony. Was it copying ink that you wanted or just writingfluid?"The lawyer bowed over the counter with old-time grace and left arespectful kiss on the back of her hand. Helen sighed. Parting salutes,however romantic, may be overdone. Here she was at thirty-eight,beautiful and admired; and all that she seemed to have got from herlovers were approaches and adieus. Worse still, in the last one she hadlost a customer, too.Business languished, and she hung out a Room to Let card. Two largerooms on the third floor were prepared for desirable tenants. Roomerscame, and went regretfully, for the house of Mrs. Barry was the abodeof neatness, comfort and taste.One day came Ramonti, the violinist, and engaged the front room above.The discord and clatter uptown offended his nice ear; so a friend hadsent him to this oasis in the desert of noise.Ramonti, with his still youthful face, his dark eyebrows, his short,pointed, foreign, brown beard, his distinguished head of gray hair, andhis artist's temperament--revealed in his light, gay and sympatheticmanner--was a welcome tenant in the old house near Abingdon Square.Helen lived on the floor above the store. The architecture of it wassingular and quaint. The hall was large and almost square. Up one sideof it, and then across the end of it ascended an open stairway to thefloor above. This hall space she had furnished as a sitting room andoffice combined. There she kept her desk and wrote her business letters;and there she sat of evenings by a warm fire and a bright red light andsewed or read. Ramonti found the atmosphere so agreeable that he spentmuch time there, describing to Mrs. Barry the wonders of Paris, where hehad studied with a particularly notorious and noisy fiddler.Next comes lodger No. 2, a handsome, melancholy man in the early 40's,with a brown, mysterious beard, and strangely pleading, haunting eyes.He, too, found the society of Helen a desirable thing. With the eyes ofRomeo and Othello's tongue, he charmed her with tales of distant climesand wooed her by respectful innuendo.From the first Helen felt a marvelous and compelling thrill in thepresence of this man. His voice somehow took her swiftly back to thedays of her youth's romance. This feeling grew, and she gave way toit, and it led her to an instinctive belief that he had been a factorin that romance. And then with a woman's reasoning (oh, yes, they do,sometimes) she leaped over common syllogisms and theory, and logic, andwas sure that her husband had come back to her. For she saw in his eyeslove, which no woman can mistake, and a thousand tons of regret andremorse, which aroused pity, which is perilously near to love requited,which is the _sine qua non_ in the house that Jack built.But she made no sign. A husband who steps around the corner for twentyyears and then drops in again should not expect to find his slipperslaid out too conveniently near nor a match ready lighted for his cigar.There must be expiation, explanation, and possibly execration. A littlepurgatory, and then, maybe, if he were properly humble, he might betrusted with a harp and crown. And so she made no sign that she knew orsuspected.And my friend, the reporter, could see nothing funny in this! Sent outon an assignment to write up a roaring, hilarious, brilliant joshingstory of--but I will not knock a brother--let us go on with the story.One evening Ramonti stopped in Helen's hall-office-reception-room andtold his love with the tenderness and ardor of the enraptured artist.His words were a bright flame of the divine fire that glows in the heartof a man who is a dreamer and doer combined."But before you give me an answer," he went on, before she could accusehim of suddenness, "I must tell you that 'Ramonti' is the only name Ihave to offer you. My manager gave me that. I do not know who I am orwhere I came from. My first recollection is of opening my eyes in ahospital. I was a young man, and I had been there for weeks. My lifebefore that is a blank to me. They told me that I was found lying in thestreet with a wound on my head and was brought there in an ambulance.They thought I must have fallen and struck my head upon the stones.There was nothing to show who I was. I have never been able to remember.After I was discharged from the hospital, I took up the violin. I havehad success. Mrs. Barry--I do not know your name except that--I loveyou; the first time I saw you I realized that you were the one woman inthe world for me--and"--oh, a lot of stuff like that.Helen felt young again. First a wave of pride and a sweet little thrillof vanity went all over her; and then she looked Ramonti in the eyes,and a tremendous throb went through her heart. She hadn't expected thatthrob. It took her by surprise. The musician had become a big factor inher life, and she hadn't been aware of it."Mr. Ramonti," she said sorrowfully (this was not on the stage,remember; it was in the old home near Abingdon Square), "I'm awfullysorry, but I'm a married woman."And then she told him the sad story of her life, as a heroine must do,sooner or later, either to a theatrical manager or to a reporter.Ramonti took her hand, bowed low and kissed it, and went up to his room.Helen sat down and looked mournfully at her hand. Well she might. Threesuitors had kissed it, mounted their red roan steeds and ridden away.In an hour entered the mysterious stranger with the haunting eyes. Helenwas in the willow rocker, knitting a useless thing in cotton-wool. Hericocheted from the stairs and stopped for a chat. Sitting across thetable from her, he also poured out his narrative of love. And then hesaid: "Helen, do you not remember me? I think I have seen it in youreyes. Can you forgive the past and remember the love that has lastedfor twenty years? I wronged you deeply--I was afraid to come back toyou--but my love overpowered my reason. Can you, will you, forgive me?"Helen stood up. The mysterious stranger held one of her hands in astrong and trembling clasp.There she stood, and I pity the stage that it has not acquired a scenelike that and her emotions to portray.For she stood with a divided heart. The fresh, unforgettable, virginallove for her bridegroom was hers; the treasured, sacred, honored memoryof her first choice filled half her soul. She leaned to that purefeeling. Honor and faith and sweet, abiding romance bound her to it. Butthe other half of her heart and soul was filled with something else--alater, fuller, nearer influence. And so the old fought against the new.And while she hesitated, from the room above came the soft, racking,petitionary music of a violin. The hag, music, bewitches some of thenoblest. The daws may peck upon one's sleeve without injury, but whoeverwears his heart upon his tympanum gets it not far from the neck.This music and the musician caller her, and at her side honor and theold love held her back."Forgive me," he pleaded."Twenty years is a long time to remain away from the one you say youlove," she declared, with a purgatorial touch."How could I tell?" he begged. "I will conceal nothing from you. Thatnight when he left I followed him. I was mad with jealousy. On a darkstreet I struck him down. He did not rise. I examined him. His head hadstruck a stone. I did not intend to kill him. I was mad with love andjealousy. I hid near by and saw an ambulance take him away. Although youmarried him, Helen--""_Who Are You?_" cried the woman, with wide-open eyes, snatching herhand away."Don't you remember me, Helen--the one who has always loved you best? Iam John Delaney. If you can forgive--"But she was gone, leaping, stumbling, hurrying, flying up the stairstoward the music and him who had forgotten, but who had known her forhis in each of his two existences, and as she climbed up she sobbed,cried and sang: "Frank! Frank! Frank!"Three mortals thus juggling with years as though they were billiardballs, and my friend, the reporter, couldn't see anything funny in it!
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