My Antonia

In Lincoln the best part of the theatrical season came late, when the good companies stopped off there for one-night stands, after their long runs in New York and Chicago.  That spring Lena went with me to see Joseph Jefferson in `Rip Van Winkle,’ and to a war play called `Shenandoah.’  She was inflexible about paying for her own seat; said she was in business now, and she wouldn’t have a schoolboy spending his money on her.  I liked to watch a play with Lena; everything was wonderful to her, and everything was true.  It was like going to revival meetings with someone who was always being converted.  She handed her feelings over to the actors with a kind of fatalistic resignation.  Accessories of costume and scene meant much more to her than to me.  She sat entranced through `Robin Hood’ and hung upon the lips of the contralto who sang, `Oh, Promise Me!’

Toward the end of April, the billboards, which I watched anxiously in those days, bloomed out one morning with gleaming white posters on which two names were impressively printed in blue Gothic letters:  the name of an actress of whom I had often heard, and the name `Camille.’

I called at the Raleigh Block for Lena on Saturday evening, and we walked down to the theatre.  The weather was warm and sultry and put us both in a holiday humour.  We arrived early, because Lena liked to watch the people come in.  There was a note on the programme, saying that the `incidental music’ would be from the opera `Traviata,’ which was made from the same story as the play.  We had neither of us read the play, and we did not know what it was about—­though I seemed to remember having heard it was a piece in which great actresses shone. `The Count of Monte Cristo,’ which I had seen James O’Neill play that winter, was by the only Alexandre Dumas I knew.  This play, I saw, was by his son, and I expected a family resemblance.  A couple of jack-rabbits, run in off the prairie, could not have been more innocent of what awaited them than were Lena and I.

Our excitement began with the rise of the curtain, when the moody Varville, seated before the fire, interrogated Nanine.  Decidedly, there was a new tang about this dialogue.  I had never heard in the theatre lines that were alive, that presupposed and took for granted, like those which passed between Varville and Marguerite in the brief encounter before her friends entered.  This introduced the most brilliant, worldly, the most enchantingly gay scene I had ever looked upon.  I had never seen champagne bottles opened on the stage before—­indeed, I had never seen them opened anywhere.  The memory of that supper makes me hungry now; the sight of it then, when I had only a students’ boarding-house dinner behind me, was delicate torment.  I seem to remember gilded chairs and tables (arranged hurriedly by footmen in white gloves and stockings), linen of dazzling whiteness, glittering glass, silver dishes, a great bowl of fruit, and the reddest of roses.  The room was invaded by beautiful women and dashing young men, laughing and talking together.  The men were dressed more or less after the period in which the play was written; the women were not.  I saw no inconsistency.  Their talk seemed to open to one the brilliant world in which they lived; every sentence made one older and wiser, every pleasantry enlarged one’s horizon.  One could experience excess and satiety without the inconvenience of learning what to do with one’s hands in a drawing-room!  When the characters all spoke at once and I missed some of the phrases they flashed at each other, I was in misery.  I strained my ears and eyes to catch every exclamation.

The actress who played Marguerite was even then old-fashioned, though historic.  She had been a member of Daly’s famous New York company, and afterward a `star’ under his direction.  She was a woman who could not be taught, it is said, though she had a crude natural force which carried with people whose feelings were accessible and whose taste was not squeamish.  She was already old, with a ravaged countenance and a physique curiously hard and stiff.  She moved with difficulty—­I think she was lame—­I seem to remember some story about a malady of the spine.  Her Armand was disproportionately young and slight, a handsome youth, perplexed in the extreme.  But what did it matter?  I believed devoutly in her power to fascinate him, in her dazzling loveliness.  I believed her young, ardent, reckless, disillusioned, under sentence, feverish, avid of pleasure.  I wanted to cross the footlights and help the slim-waisted Armand in the frilled shirt to convince her that there was still loyalty and devotion in the world.  Her sudden illness, when the gaiety was at its height, her pallor, the handkerchief she crushed against her lips, the cough she smothered under the laughter while Gaston kept playing the piano lightly—­it all wrung my heart.  But not so much as her cynicism in the long dialogue with her lover which followed.  How far was I from questioning her unbelief!  While the charmingly sincere young man pleaded with her—­accompanied by the orchestra in the old `Traviata’ duet, ‘misterioso, misterios’ altero!’—­she maintained her bitter scepticism, and the curtain fell on her dancing recklessly with the others, after Armand had been sent away with his flower.

Between the acts we had no time to forget.  The orchestra kept sawing away at the `Traviata’ music, so joyous and sad, so thin and far-away, so clap-trap and yet so heart-breaking.  After the second act I left Lena in tearful contemplation of the ceiling, and went out into the lobby to smoke.  As I walked about there I congratulated myself that I had not brought some Lincoln girl who would talk during the waits about the junior dances, or whether the cadets would camp at Plattsmouth.  Lena was at least a woman, and I was a man.

Through the scene between Marguerite and the elder Duval, Lena wept unceasingly, and I sat helpless to prevent the closing of that chapter of idyllic love, dreading the return of the young man whose ineffable happiness was only to be the measure of his fall.

I suppose no woman could have been further in person, voice, and temperament from Dumas’ appealing heroine than the veteran actress who first acquainted me with her.  Her conception of the character was as heavy and uncompromising as her diction; she bore hard on the idea and on the consonants.  At all times she was highly tragic, devoured by remorse.  Lightness of stress or behaviour was far from her.  Her voice was heavy and deep:  `Ar-r-r-mond!’ she would begin, as if she were summoning him to the bar of Judgment.  But the lines were enough.  She had only to utter them.  They created the character in spite of her.

The heartless world which Marguerite re-entered with Varville had never been so glittering and reckless as on the night when it gathered in Olympe’s salon for the fourth act.  There were chandeliers hung from the ceiling, I remember, many servants in livery, gaming-tables where the men played with piles of gold, and a staircase down which the guests made their entrance.  After all the others had gathered round the card-tables and young Duval had been warned by Prudence, Marguerite descended the staircase with Varville; such a cloak, such a fan, such jewels—­and her face!  One knew at a glance how it was with her.  When Armand, with the terrible words, `Look, all of you, I owe this woman nothing!’ flung the gold and bank-notes at the half-swooning Marguerite, Lena cowered beside me and covered her face with her hands.

The curtain rose on the bedroom scene.  By this time there wasn’t a nerve in me that hadn’t been twisted.  Nanine alone could have made me cry.  I loved Nanine tenderly; and Gaston, how one clung to that good fellow!  The New Year’s presents were not too much; nothing could be too much now.  I wept unrestrainedly.  Even the handkerchief in my breast-pocket, worn for elegance and not at all for use, was wet through by the time that moribund woman sank for the last time into the arms of her lover.

When we reached the door of the theatre, the streets were shining with rain.  I had prudently brought along Mrs. Harling’s useful Commencement present, and I took Lena home under its shelter.  After leaving her, I walked slowly out into the country part of the town where I lived.  The lilacs were all blooming in the yards, and the smell of them after the rain, of the new leaves and the blossoms together, blew into my face with a sort of bitter sweetness.  I tramped through the puddles and under the showery trees, mourning for Marguerite Gauthier as if she had died only yesterday, sighing with the spirit of 1840, which had sighed so much, and which had reached me only that night, across long years and several languages, through the person of an infirm old actress.  The idea is one that no circumstances can frustrate.  Wherever and whenever that piece is put on, it is April.