The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair Part 17

"I want to see the Board of Trade. Where is it?"

"Go outside and up the stairs into the galleries and you can see it all you want to, but not here."

Uncle did as he was bid, but found that he was quite widely separated from his family, because he had been sent up the opposite stairway from them.

"I came up to see the Board of Trade," he said, confidently, to a well-dressed stranger next to him.

"Well, there it is in all its glory," said the stranger.

"Oh, I see! The board is that table where them fellers is a tickin' them machines. You see I thought they would be a setting and a trading across a long, wide board like they used to do at the country stores for counters. But them fellers down there acts like a lot of lunatics. I don't see how they can ever come to a bargain, yelling and spewing around that way. And then I don't see the bulls and bears that change the market."

The stranger thought it a useless job to try to enlighten him.

When Uncle and his family came down, he went up to the doorkeeper and asked, "Say, do you belong here?" The keeper nodded. "Did you know Bill Simmons what lost five thousand dollars here last year?" The door keeper shook his head. "Well, say, I just want to ask one more question. Are them people down there the bulls and bears themselves, and are they the Board of Trade and are they the people that the farmers are so afraid of?" The keeper nodded.

"Well," continued Uncle, "I've got this to say; any set of farmers as is fools enough to be afraid of them yelling idiots, aint got no backbone at all."

Chicago was unsettling many of Uncle's ideas, and he began to decide that the only real, bonafide thing he could swear by was his own farm, and that the great outside world was only a great circus of art and extravagant genius.

_CHAPTER XIV_

SIGHT-SEEING GALORE

Under promises of gorgeous sights and full protection, f.a.n.n.y had concluded to visit the chief Midway Plaisance theaters with Johnny and Louis as escorts. The "Midway," as it is familiarly called, is undoubtedly the most unique and interesting pleasure-walk in the world.

It is a thoroughfare of ever-shifting scenes and ever-recurring incidents. f.a.n.n.y was not sure she ought to go, and Johnny could not comprehend why she did not go with him as readily wherever he proposed as she did on the wild free life of the big Jersey farm. But this was to her a supremely different existence, and she tried hard to recall all she had seen and heard and read of etiquette and the proprieties. Uncle and Aunt were not the only ones who were bewildered at every step by the amazing mixture of reality and art, of fact and fancy, of nature and imitation. They felt as if their souls were living apart, and that they were mere automatons in a panoramic world.

Johnny had seen the Soudanese and Nubian play actors just before his disastrous attempt to be informed concerning the Dahomey village. But some scoffers from the South had spoiled part of the novelty of it by alleging that the men of northern Africa were really natives of Mississippi or Louisiana, and were dancing only plantation hoe-downs in slow time and increased perpendicular action.

But without question the high histrionic art of the Chinese, Javanese, Turkish and Algerian actors ought to be seen. Maybe it was strangeness rather than excellence and novelty rather than entertainment that drew the people but strangeness and novelty are the greater excellence when people come to see wonders.

The Chinese theater is by far the most pretentious. It was pretty well advertised to the world at the advent of the actors in Vancouver and their encounter with the custom officers. They came to Chicago several hundred strong and are housed in the big blue-and-gilt structure with trim paG.o.das near the Cottage Grove end of the Midway. Entrance to the theater is through a big tea house, where decent-looking Chinamen who do not look like rats and whose fluent English proclaims their long sojourn in "Flisco," serve the cheering cup at from 10 to 60 cents, according to the pliability of the victim. They are doing a business worthy of a better cause. The tea house is but the ante-chamber to a joss house overhead, mendaciously advertised to be "the biggest outside of China,"

and to the theater proper. The latter is not so big as the Chinese theaters in San Francisco, but it smells sweeter, being over ground and not surrounded with the cooking-rooms and opium bunks of the actors.

This is a concession to occidental taste which all but oriental enthusiasts will appreciate. Nor are visitors allowed, as in San Francisco, to inspect the green-room or sit on the stage.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "She visited the play and sincerely regretted it."]

In other respects the theater is pure San Francisco Chinese. There is the orchestra, led by the man with the yard-wide cymbals, playing the leading part. There is the property man, always in evidence, who places a chair and says "This is a horse," or turns the chair around and calls it a mountain. And there is the female impersonator with deeply roughed cheeks, who is the pride and flower of histrionic art. Women are not allowed to walk the boards of the Chinese theater, but the male actor who best can mimic woman's tones and mincing airs is the Henry Irving.

There is a whole chorus of these men-women in the Jackson Park theater--an all-star combination. As for the piece itself, they first play a little curtain-raiser of about two-months' duration and then the real play occupies the rest of the year. It will be all one to the American visitors, however, who enjoy the novelty, so that they are allowed to quit when they like. And there is no objection to that from the polite Chinamen in charge of the Jackson Park theater.

The Turkish theater is across the way and farther east than the Chinese.

It is back from the beaten path and you might miss it--if you were deaf.

Having ears to hear you will be apprised of its whereabouts at forty rods distance by the orchestra, which sits on the front steps and discourses horrors on a sort of flageolet and a ba.s.s drum. The orchestra plays only one tune and it plays that hard. When a respectable house has been gathered by these out-of-door allurements the curtain rises on a Turkish play. It is a sweet pastoral of a youth who is lovesick and cannot be cured by the doctor, by the soothsayer--by any one except his love, who comes in time, and there is a wedding.

When this play was ended, f.a.n.n.y decided that she had seen enough of foreign theaters and declined to go further.

A Boston girl in spectacles sat near her through the Turkish play. She told f.a.n.n.y that she and her mother had been venturesome enough to visit the other plays, and they sincerely regretted it. She found a mongrel horde of Turks, Arabs, Europeans, blacks, Greeks--everything applauding an interminable song, whose filthy motif it needs no knowledge of Arabic to discover. The singer was an Algerian woman, good enough looking, after the pasty style of oriental beauties, young, agile and mistress of the curious, droning guttural melody which const.i.tutes oriental music.

She plays her part with complete abandon, probably because she knows no better, and her audience applauds her wildly for the same reasons. The Boston girl said she had seen these same girls, or their professional sisters, in the Algerian theater. But their performance had been modified to suit the western taste. They sing and dance, but their songs and dances are nothing more dangerous than a languorous drone. But there are also some funny parts, according to the Algerian idea. They are played by a jet black Somauli woman who joins in the dance and a jet black Somauli boy in the orchestra who has a face of India rubber and a gift for "facial contortion" that would make the fortune of an American minstrel.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "FACIAL CONTORTION THAT WOULD MAKE THE FORTUNE OF AN AMERICAN MINSTREL."]

A look at the outside of the Soudanese theater is enough for the ordinary curiosity-seeker. It is a little round hut of bark in a dark corner of the Egyptian enclosure. Mahomet Ali sits at the receipt of custom exchanging pleasantries with dusky flower girls whose home is by the orange market beyond the Kase el Nil, who know more French than English, and more deviltry than either; who sing "Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay,"

and know how to solicit backsheesh to perfection. The theatricals here are simplicity brought to perfection. It is said their language consists of only a hundred words. If you were to paint your face black, look wild-eyed, stiffen your hair in many strands, array yourself in a cotton garment that revealed more than it concealed, and then were to jump straight up and down to the music of a dolorous chant you would not be far astray. Add to this a whining and interminable appeal for backsheesh and you might be very near the mark indeed. But there is one Soudanese performance you could scarcely hope to equal, unless you were to learn some sort of devil's chant, gird your loins with a loose belt of sh.e.l.ls and by rapid contortions of your body make these primitive cymbals accompany your chant. This is the star of the troupe.

Romantic people, who like to think of dancing as the poetry of motion, can get a liberal education in muscular poesy by making the rounds of the Midway Plaisance. They may see sonnets in double-shuffle metre, doggerels in hop-skip iambics, and ordinary newspaper "ponies" with the rhythm of the St. Vitus dance. Slices of pandemonium will be thrown in by the orchestras for the one price of admission, and if the visitor objects to taking his pandemonium on the installment plan, he may get it in job lots down at the Dahomeyan village.

In their "dance," as it is termed, they take a step forward with the right foot, and drag the left after it. This is repeated until they stub their toes on the orchestra, when they swarm back and go through the difficult feat of advancing by a series of hops on one foot. All of this is to the discordant pounding of drums and sc.r.a.p-iron, where tune could not be discovered with a search warrant.

That evening f.a.n.n.y visited the C. C. of C. C. and arranged for a family picnic at Washington Park the next day. She was to be hostess, and they were to have an outing with her in the city's artificial fields and forests that would recall the merry life of the country, and yet they would be surrounded by all the artistic embellishments that money and genius could secure.

Johnny went post haste for Louis, and the two boys were made bearers of the lunches, guides of the expedition, the vanguard of the march and the responsible protection of the company. They were eight merry young folks who took possession of the grip-car on the Cottage Grove Avenue cable line that morning. They stopped at the park hot-house and spent two delightful hours in the wilderness of flowers and of palm forests. On the outside were rustic seats about a pond where, in waters made tepid by steam heat through iron pipes, all kinds of tropical plants flourished in a profusion perhaps not excelled anywhere on the equator or along the banks of the Amazon. The great flower clock and the immense flower globe showing the geography of the earth, the old English castle gate and the carpeted lawns showed them the skill of the gardener's art.

A quiet nook was found near the water's edge of one of the ponds. With a newspaper for a table-spread they enjoyed a lunch where hunger was a sauce better than Worcestershire, and the sod a better resting place than a throne.

After their lunch and a good rest they returned to the business part of the city and spent the remainder of the day in the Mystic Maze, the Labyrinth and the Panoptican. These were places where electricity and mirrors were arranged with the object of reversing every conception the eye had ever given to the mind. In one place the visitors entered a triangular room in one corner of which there was a large vase of flowers. The walls were solid mirrors and the six girls found themselves as if in a host of people and a wilderness of flowers. From this they pa.s.sed on into a room which the attendant said was forty feet square and contained thirty-eight mirrors six feet by eight set at different angles between posts evenly distributed about the room. As they stepped forward they found themselves among countless hordes of people, again they were alone, all at once they found themselves in a line of girls that stretched on either side apparently for miles. One time they would be brushing around among people about two feet high and two feet thick; again they would be surrounded by thousands of girls eight or ten feet high and correspondingly thin. It was exasperating to say the least.

When they became weary of this novelty they looked about them for the attendant but he had mysteriously disappeared. Leila said she knew the way out and she started with all the confidence that a usually level headed girl can have, but alas! she nearly broke her head by running into one of the big mirrors. Nannie happened to look in a certain direction when she saw the door and the curtains about it as plainly as she ever saw anything in her life.

"There I see the door," she cried, "come this way," and she started with her hands out before her like some one feeling his way in the dark, though it was as bright about them as the electric lights could make it.

All at once the door she had in view disappeared like magic and she stood before herself in a mirror ducking her head backwards and forwards like two young chickens with their beaks just touching in the preliminaries of a fight. The situation was becoming too serious to be amusing any longer.

"What shall we do?" said f.a.n.n.y, who had read of death in the mysterious labyrinths in ancient times. The roof was low, and even if the sky had been their roof they had no wings, like Daedalus, whereby they might escape.

The girls began to get nervous, and several million of them seemed to huddle together as they discussed the situation.

"I say, let's yell!" said Mary.

"But what is the use to yell," one said, "if they have determined that we are to die here?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "THEY HELD TO ONE ANOTHER, AS IF FOR LIFE OR DEATH."]

Now they were becoming really frightened. The picture of their lingering death in that frightful crowd of specters was most horrifying. Their voices were becoming tremulous and hollow, and the terra-cotta figures of wild Bedouins that sat in a niche of the far wall and was multiplied a thousand times, seemed to grin at them maliciously, as if in antic.i.p.ation of seeing their agonizing struggles against death by hunger. The suspense was becoming something terrible.

"I say somebody must yell."

"Let Kate yell, she's got a strong voice that might reach the street."

Kate tried to do her duty, and she said, "Oh, Say!" in a voice that would not have wakened a rabbit from its slumber.

She tried again, "Oh, say, we want to get out!" in a voice so hollow that none of the girls recognized it as hers.

"Is ze ladies seen eet all they want?" said the polite attendant, as he seemed to come before them at one step.

"Where were you?" they all cried.

"Why, I vas by ze gla.s.s about tree feet away."

"And you were listening to all we said?"