CHAPTER XIXBONNIE MAY LOOKS BACK
Baggot’splay, it seemed, was really a charming thing—a modernized fairy-story.
To the monotonous rumble of revolving car-wheels the plot was outlined, the characters sketched. Baron felt the dramatic force of it, the surprises. But as the enthusiastic playwright proceeded with his self-appointed task, Baron began to realize, also, that he and his companions and their affairs constituted a very queer sort of drama.
By his side sat Baggot, and in front of them were his mother and Bonnie May. Mrs. Baron, for special reasons of her own, was making a studied and persistent effort to be entertaining. She talked to the child almost continuously. But Baron could not help seeing that Bonnie May was determinedly playing a double rôle. She was politely pretending to listen to every word Mrs. Baron said, but she was also keeping one ear eagerly turned toward Baggot.
Baggot, for his part, saw only that Baron seemed to be giving a good deal of his attention to the little girl in the seat ahead. He couldn’t makeany excuse for such division of interest. He began leaning forward at frequent intervals to catch Baron’s eye—to see if the points he was making were going home.
Only Mrs. Baron remained in a single-minded mood. She continued to talk amiably, and no doubt a bit wearyingly. She was determined that Bonnie May should have no ground for complaint that she was not being properly entertained.
“You see,” Baggot was saying, “the central figure is an elf, or a sprite, who is supposed to be an embodiment of the good traits in human nature. And then there are witches, and gnomes, and dwarfs, and some big fellows—vikings and Titans and giants—and some figures put in for the sake of—well, variety: druids, and people like that. And Psyche—to make a swell picture. Looking at her reflection, you know. All but the central figure, the sprite, are supposed to embody faulty traits, like cruelty, or vanity, or superstition, or jealousy, or envy, or fear. And then certain other qualities—for comedy effects, like laziness, or stubbornness, or stupidity. See? And the sprite governs them all, little by little, until in the end they turn into fairies, or nice human beings. A great transformation scene....”
Baggot stopped suddenly and frowned. “It sounds childish, telling it. As if it were some silly sort of extravaganza. But there’s the dialogue. Smart and unexpected, you know. Modern drawing-roomstuff put up against the heart of the forest and the figures of the story-books. Bringing the sublime and the ridiculous together, you know—and the material and the ideal, and the every-day and the remote. Silly fallacies of our own day, set against the truth in words such as Æsop would have used.” He stopped suddenly and threw out his hands in a despairing gesture. “Oh, what’s the use?” he demanded. “I can’t get at it at all, just talking about it. You’ll have to see it in writing.”
“I’m sure I understand,” Baron reassured him. “You don’t put it so vaguely at all. And you know I saw the first act.”
“Yes.... But I’ve done that over—ever so much better.” He clasped his knee in his hands and fidgeted for a moment. And then he broke out with—“And the settings! The four seasons, in the forest, for the four acts. Big things to hit the eye—but nicely, you know, so that the drama doesn’t suffer—so that it’s not choked, you might say.”
“Yes,” said Baron, “I understand.”
Baggot began to go more into detail touching the plot. He put this part of it very incisively. Occasionally he laughed, or his eyes blazed with satisfaction. He had reached the end before it was time for them to leave the car.
Bonnie May had seemed to be listening attentively to Mrs. Baron; but once Baron heard hersay, with slight confusion: “I beg your pardon,” because she had not responded to a question that had been put to her.
Now, as they were getting ready to leave the car, she nodded her head decisively.
“Why are you nodding?” asked Mrs. Baron. She was frankly irritated.
And the child prevaricated. “Oh, I think it’s because I’m—well, satisfied.”
The entrance to Fairyland might have been described as a study in chaos. Hundreds of people were pouring into the gates, and they were all coming immediately under the spell of the bedlam of noises and the blaze of lights.
Baron had one moment of grave doubt as he marshalled his party before getting into the vortex of human forms. He thought his mother could not have looked less satisfied with things in general if she had been the Peri of the legend, just turned back from paradise because she hadn’t brought the thing that was expected of her.
But Mrs. Baron was playing a game. Rather, she was fighting a battle, and she remarked calmly, in response to Baron’s anxious look. “It won’t be so bad after we get inside.”
“No doubt you’re right,” replied Baron; and then they all pressed forward.
They got by the gatemen just as a car of the scenic-railway variety was cut loose from its moorings on a high platform to which it had beendragged, and began its incredibly swift descent along a far-off vista of trees and lights. Women shrieked as if they were being enveloped in flames, and tried to hold their hats in place.
“Mercy!” was Mrs. Baron’s comment; whereupon Baron dropped back a step, and hid his mouth with his hand.
The inrush of persons behind kept them going somewhat smartly past the first group of “attractions”: an “old mill-wheel,” with an entirely uniform supply of water tumbling down upon its buckets; a shooting-gallery; a negro with terrified, grinning face protruding from a hole in a curtain as a target for a group of men who were throwing baseballs.
A merry-go-round started just as Baron’s party passed, and a popular melody was ground out with quite superfluous vehemence. Mrs. Baron paused—startled into making a halt, seemingly—just long enough to catch a glimpse of an elderly couple, a man and a woman, mounted upon two highly colored lions. They were undoubtedly country people, and the woman’s expression indicated that she was determined not to betray unfamiliarity with the high life of the city.
Mrs. Baron hadn’t even an ejaculation which seemed at all adequate to her needs in this case.
“I think the theatre’s over this way,” said Baron, steering a course which promised escape from the main currents of the crowd.
Yes, there was the theatre, standing on a knoll with trees growing on its sides. A curved, flower-bordered road led up to its entrance.
Conditions rapidly improved. There weren’t nearly so many people, and what there were were of a quieter type.
Half-way up the knoll Baron turned about for a bird’s-eye view of the whole place. But beneath them a Midway blazed, and he caught sight of a lady on a platform before a tent, who was coiling a very large snake about her neck, while a little farther away a princess—she seemed to be—in red satin and spangles, sat wearily on a palanquin on top of a camel.
He thought it would be as well for his mother not to see these choicest fascinations of Fairyland. He directed attention to the theatre ahead, which was modelled after what is left of a famous Roman ruin. And so they completed their climb without looking back.
A grove surrounded the theatre, and under the trees there were chairs and tables.
“Chairs!” exclaimed Mrs. Baron. “They’re the first thing I’ve seen....” She turned one about and sat down.
“Fine idea, that,” said Baron. “Let’s all sit down.”
“It’s plenty of time to go in when you hear the overture begin,” observed Bonnie May; whereat Mrs. Baron regarded her with rather a blank expression; but she said nothing.
From the portals of the theatre strolled Thornburg, and instantly his glance took in Baron and his party.
It was Baggot who observed that the manager seemed about to join them.
The manager did. He came toward them across the grass and shook hands with Baron. He was smiling almost benignantly.
Baron introduced his party. Thornburg was rather casually cordial in his manner. Then he took in the fact that the child in the party was Bonnie May.
“So this is the little girl?” he inquired. He drew her to his side and flushed with pleasure. His entire appearance changed. “I had an idea she might be over to the house to-night,” he added, turning to Baron.
“No,” said Baron, “she preferred to come with us.”
Bonnie May shrank slightly from the stranger’s touch; but after she had regarded him critically she yielded to it. He seemed rather a good sort, she thought. He wasn’t loud, and he didn’t take things for granted too much.
But Mrs. Baron stiffened and seemed bent upon bringing upon the entire group that discomfort and embarrassment the creation of which is one of the finer social accomplishments. “Sit down, Bonnie May,” she said. She patted an unoccupied chair with her hand and smiled. There was somethingin her manner which caused Bonnie May to regard her with surprise.
Thornburg, too, observed her rather deliberately. For an instant he seemed to forget himself, to be absent-minded. Thornburg was of that type of man who seems to surrender unconditionally when a woman employs strategies, but who resolves to do what he pleases when her back is turned.
Baron resented his mother’s attitude, her decision not to be communicative and gracious. He stood by the manager’s side and spoke of the splendid picture the garden presented. For a moment they stood in silence, looking down upon the tangle of many-colored lights which marked the course of the Midway.
The steady stream of people who had been entering the theatre had begun to diminish, and now the notes of the overture arose—the “Poet and Peasant.”
Bonnie May sprang to her feet. “There it is,” she said, and both Baron and Thornburg smiled down on her. Then Thornburg escorted the party into the theatre.
Baron noted the immense audience, sitting in a blaze of light; a fairly quiet and pleasant-appearing audience. He noted, too, that where one might have expected to find walls at right and left there were vast open spaces, through which stars, beyond waving horizontal branches, were visible. Rolled canvas, which might be let down in case ofrain, rattled slightly in the breeze, and one or two disturbed sparrows darted into the place and rested, chirping, on a girder overhead.
Then Baron had eyes only for Bonnie May, who had undergone some strange sort of transformation the moment she had entered the theatre.
Her eyes were enough to thrill an ordinary world-weary person. Her color became brilliant. Then her body began to respond to some overmastering influence. One might have thought of her as a little palfrey about to enter a great parade with many bands in it. She was not merely proud and happy; she was quite entranced with delight.
When the usher, with the manner of his kind, darted down the aisle until he was some eight or ten steps in advance of the party, the child hurried forward a little, and then turned about, her face alight with eagerness; and suddenly she stood still until Mrs. Baron came up to her, and seized that amazed lady’s hand and laid her cheek against it and patted it rapidly.
“It’s all right, child,” whispered Mrs. Baron warningly, in dread of a scene; but her voice was like a caress, and her eyes were beaming with joy. She was thinking how little she had had to sacrifice, and how very well worth while the sacrifice had been. Truly, it would have been cruel to deprive the child of a pleasure which meant so much to her.
The man who stood with his big bass fiddle inthe orchestra pit was making a dreadful noise on one string—sawing it rapidly—when the usher flung down a row of seats. Mrs. Baron went in first, followed by Bonnie May. Baron took the next seat, leaving the aisle seat to Baggot.
The overture ended, and the orchestra leader laid down his baton, while he and his musicians began to adjust themselves in easy positions in their chairs.
Somewhere a man at a switchboard performed his duty, and one light after another went out until the theatre was in darkness.
Then the curtain lifted.
But to Baron it all meant less the story of Paula Tanqueray, up there on the stage, than it did the story of Bonnie May, close by his side. Tanqueray’s friends discussed his approaching marriage and his bride to be; the argument of the drama received its simple statement, and presently the ill-starred woman appeared. But through it all Baron knew that his thoughts were chiefly with the child by his side.
She was so completely lost in the rapture of every passing moment that he felt a strange uneasiness. Here was something more than a normal enjoyment. She had the extraordinary gift of being able to appraise the value of the make-believe—to gauge the truth of every look and word and movement, and at the same time to lose herself in the story. She clasped and unclasped her hands in silent,painful intensity; there were little, strange movements of her head as a result of her acute sympathy with the work of the playwright and players alike. And sometimes she hung upon a word that halted, and smiled with rapture when a difficulty was surmounted.
Baron thought, grotesquely enough, of a little fish fallen from a hook into the grass for a breathless moment, and then getting back into its proper element and rushing away with a mighty flicking of tail and fins.
Bonnie May had been of the theatre once, and Baron realized, as he watched her, that somehow, sometime, she would return to it again.
When, at the end, the report of a pistol was heard, and the stepdaughter of Mrs. Tanqueray came screaming upon the stage, Mrs. Baron set her lips in a hard line.
“Nobody to blame but herself!” was her comment. She, too, had been deeply impressed by the play.
But the larger faith of the little girl asserted itself. “Oh, don’t say that!” she begged. “She’d have been all right, if they’d really loved her in spite of all!”
It was the reality of it that held her, Baron perceived—or her ability to see it as something real.
The puppets, the make-believe—these were off the stage, for Bonnie May. The truth and beauty and reality were on it.
He smiled thoughtfully as they all filed up the aisle, amid a babble of voices. The child might be wrong; but was it strange that so glorious an ignis fatuus should have power to lead her on to the end?
As they left the theatre they passed Thornburg, standing near the entrance alone. For an instant there was a peculiar, inscrutable expression in his eyes; then he pulled himself together and smiled and lifted his hat. But after this perfunctory greeting was over, the manager steadily regarded Mrs. Baron, who did not look at him.
That quiet, masked glance made Baron uncomfortable, and instinctively he stooped and took Bonnie May firmly by the hand.
In another moment they were lost in the throng.