The Prisoner Part 51

"And do a little preliminary advertising. How prison life had undermined your health and even touched your reason, so you weren't absolutely--you understand? _Then_ we'd publish it as an eccentric book by an eccentric fellow, a victim of prison regulations."

Jeff laid his papers down on the table beside him and set a gla.s.s on them to keep them from blowing away.

"No," said he. "I never was saner in my life. I'm about the only sane man in this town, because I've discovered we're all mad and the rest of 'em don't know it."

"That very remark!" said the young man, in unmixed approval. "Don't you see what that would do in an ad? My dear chap, they all think the other man's daffy."

Jeff carried the ma.n.u.script into the house, and asked the wise young judge to come out and see his late corn, and offered him a platter of it if he'd stay to supper. And he actually did, and proved to be a very good fellow indeed, born in the country, and knowing all its ways, only gifted with a diabolical talent for adapting himself to all sorts of places and getting on. He was quite shy in the face of Anne and Lydia.

All his c.o.c.kiness left him before their sober graces, and when Jeff took him to the station he had lost, for the moment, his rapier-like action of intellect for an almost maudlin grat.i.tude over the family he had been privileged to meet.

Anne and Lydia had paid him only an absent-minded courtesy. They were on the point of giving an evening of folk-dancing, under Miss Amabel's patronage, and young foreigners were dropping in all the time now to ask questions and make plans. And whoever they were, these soft-eyed aliens, they looked at Jeff with the look he knew. To them also he was The Prisoner.

XXVII

With these folk dances began what has been known ever since as the Dramatic Movement in Addington. On this first night the proudly despairing ticket-seller began to repeat by seven o'clock: "Every seat taken." Many stood and more were turned away. But the families of the sons and daughters who were dancing were clever enough to come early, and filled the body of the hall. Jeff was among them. He, too, had gone early, with Anne and Lydia, to carry properties and help them with the stage. And when he wasn't needed behind the scenes, he went out and sat among the gay contingent from Mill End, magnificent creatures by physical inheritance, the men still rough round the edges from the day's work, but the women gay in shawls and beads and shiny combs. Andrea was there and bent forward until Jeff should recognise him, and again Jeff realised that smiles lit up the place for him. Even the murmured name ran round among the rows. They were telling one another, here was The Prisoner. Whatever virtue there was in being a prisoner, it had earned him adoring friends.

He sat there wondering over it, and conventional Addington came in behind and took the vacant places. Jeff was glad not to be among them.

He didn't want their sophisticated views. This wasn't a pageant for critical comment. It was Miss Amabel's pathetic scheme for bringing the East and the West together and, in an exquisite hospitality, making the East at home.

But when the curtain went up, he opened his eyes to the scene and ceased thinking of philanthropy and Miss Amabel. Here was beauty, the beauty of grace and traditionary form. They were dancing the tarantella.

Jeff had seen it in Italy, more than one night after the gay little dinners Esther had loved to arrange when they were abroad. She had refused all the innocent bohemianisms of foreign travel; she had taken her own atmosphere of expensive conventionalities with her, and they had seen Europe through that medium. In all their travelling they had never touched racial intimacies. They were like a prince and princess convoyed along in a royal progress, seeing only what is fitting for royal eyes to see. The tarantella then was no more than an interlude in a play.

To-night it was no such spectacle. Jeff, who had a pretty imagination of his own, felt hot waves of homesickness for the beauties of foreign lands, and yet not those lands as he had seen them unrolled for the perusal of the traveller. He sat in a dream of the heaven of beauty that lies across the sea, and he felt toward the men who had left it to come here to better themselves a compa.s.sion in the measure of his compa.s.sion for himself. How bare his own life had been, even when the world opened before him her illuminated page! He had not really enjoyed these exquisite delights of hers; he had not even prepared himself for enjoying. He had kept his eyes fixed on the game that ensures mere luxury, and he had let Esther go out into the market and buy for them both the only sort of happiness her eyes could see. He loved this dancing rout. He envied these boys and girls their pa.s.sion and facility.

They were, the most ignorant of them, of another stripe from arid New Englanders encased in their temperamental calm, the women, in a laughable self-satisfaction, leading the intellectual life and their men set on "making good". The poorest child of the East and South had an inheritance that made him responsive, fluent, even while it left him hot-headed and even froward. There was something, he saw, in this idea of the melting-pot, if only the mingling could be managed by G.o.ds that saw the future. You couldn't make a wonder of a bell if you poured your metal into an imperfect mould. The mould must be flawless and the metal cunningly mixed; and then how clear the tone, how resonant! It wasn't the tarantella only that led him this long wandering. It was the quality of the dancers; and through all the changing steps and measures Anne and Lydia, too, were moving, Lydia a joyous leader in the temperamental rush and swing.

Mrs. Choate, stately in dark silk and lace and quite unlike the revolutionary matron who had lain in bed and let her soul loose with the "Mysteries of Paris," sat between her son and daughter and was silent though she grew bright-eyed. Mary whispered to her:

"Anne looks very sweet, doesn't she? but not at all like a dancer."

"Sweet," said the mother.

"Anne doesn't belong there, does she?" said Alston.

"No," said the mother. "Lydia does."

"Yes."

Alston, too, was moved by the spectacle, but he thought dove-like Anne far finer in the rout than gipsy Lydia. His mother followed his thoughts exactly, but while she placidly agreed, it was Lydia she inwardly envied, Lydia who had youth and a hot heart and not too much scruple to keep her from giving each their way.

When it was over, Jeff waited for Anne and Lydia, to carry home their parcels. He stood for a moment beside Andrea, and Andrea regarded him with that absurd devotion he exuded for The Prisoner. Jeff smiled at him even affectionately, though quizzically. He wished he knew what picture of him was under Andrea's skull. A sudden impulse seized him to make the man his confidant.

"Andrea," said he, "I want you fellows to act plays with me."

Andrea looked enchanted.

"What play?" he asked.

"Shakespeare," said Jeff. "In English. That's your language, Andrea, if you're going to live here."

Andrea's face died into a dull denial. A sort of glaze even seemed to settle over the surface of his eyes. He gave a perfunctory grunt, and Jeff caught him up on it.

"Won't she allow it?" he hazarded. "Madame Beattie?"

Andrea was really caught and quite evidently relieved, too, if Jeff understood so well. He smiled again. His eyes took on their wonted shining. Jeff, relying on Anne's and Lydia's delay, stayed not an instant, but ran out of the side door and along to the front where Madame Beattie, he knew, was making a stately progress, accepting greetings in a magnificent calm. He got to the door as she did, and she gave him the same royal recognition. She was dressed in black, her head draped with lace, and she really did look a distinguished personage. But Jeff was not to be put off with a mere greeting. He called her name.

"You may take me home," she said.

"I can't," said Jeff ruthlessly, when he had got her out of earshot.

"I'm going to carry things for Anne."

"No, you're not." She put her hand through his arm and leaned heavily and luxuriously. "Good Lord, Jeff, why can't New Englanders dance like those shoemakers' daughters? What is it in this climate that dries up the blood?"

"Madame Beattie," said Jeff, "you've got to give away the game. You've got to tell me how you've hypnotised every man Jack of those people there to-night so they won't do a reasonable thing I ask 'em unless they've had your permission."

"What do you want to do?" But she was pleased. There was somebody under her foot.

"I want to rehea.r.s.e some plays in English. And I gather from the leader of the clan--"

"Andrea?"

"Yes, Andrea. They won't do it unless you tell them to."

"Of course they won't," said Madame Beattie.

"Then why won't they? What's your infernal spell?"

"It's the spell of the East. And you can't tempt them with anything that comes out of the West."

"Their food comes out of the West," said Jeff, smarting.

"Oh, that! Well, that's about all you can give them. That's what they come for."

"All of them? Good G.o.d!"

"Not good G.o.d at all. Don't you know what a man is led by? His belly.

But they don't all come for that. Some come for--" She laughed, a rather cackling laugh.

"What?" Jeff asked her sternly. He shook her arm involuntarily.

"Freedom. That's talked about still. And a lot of demagogues like your Weedon Moore get hold of 'em and debauch 'em and make 'em drunk."

"Drunk?"

"No, no. Not on liquor. Better if they did. But they tell 'em they're G.o.ds and all they've got to do is to climb up on a throne and crown themselves."