Пользователь - WORLDS END

Of course such a group would be interested in a handsome youth who had lived abroad, and spoke French fluently, and could talk about Cannes and Paris and London, Henley and Ascot and Long-champs. He played the piano, he danced well, and if he did not smoke or drink, that made him all the more an object of curiosity; the bored ladies imagined that he must be virginal, and they made themselves agreeable, and worried because he insisted upon staying in a dull office and couldn't be lured away for a tкte-а-tкte .

It was the practice of the club to give dramatic performances during the summer, in an open-air theater built in a woodland glade. There was a "dramatics committee," and hot arguments as to what sort of plays should be given. The smart crowd wanted modern things, full of talk about sex; the conservatives demanded and got something sentimental and sweet, suitable for the young people. In view of the conditions prevailing, they had given a war play called Lilac Time, which had been the success of the previous season in New York.

This summer everybody was supposed to be absorbed in war work. The businessmen went to their offices early and stayed late. The women spent their spare time rolling bandages, knitting socks and sweaters, or attending committee meetings where such activities were planned. But there were a few whom these efforts did not satisfy; perhaps their hearts were not in the killing of their fellow human beings, or in arousing the killing impulse in others. One could not say this, in the midst of all the patriotic fervors; what one said was that the cultural life of the community must not be allowed to lapse altogether, and that overworked executives who were forgoing their customary month of vacation ought to have some gracious form of entertainment.

So it was that the dramatics committee had summoned its courage and undertaken a production of A Midsummer-Night's Dream, which provides a variety of outdoor diversions and has charming music. The committee cast about for players suited to the various roles, and invited Lanny to become one of two lovelorn gentlemen who wander through a forest in the neighborhood of Athens. No one on the committee knew that Lanny himself had been a lovelorn gentleman for a couple of years. He still was - for only a few days ago he had received a letter from his erstwhile sweetheart, mentioning casually in the course of other news that she was about to be married to the grandson of the Earl of Sandhaven, who had been recalled from the "Mespot" front and was now attached to the War Office in London.

Lanny said he didn't think he'd have time to rehearse a play; but the committee assured him that the work would be done in the evening - of necessity, since the part of the Duke of Athens was to be played by a stately vice-president of the First National Bank, and the part of Bottom was entrusted to a member of the town's busiest law firm. Lanny's family gave their approval, and thereafter he dined at the club with other members of the cast, and on the stage of the open-air theater he alternately pursued and repulsed a beautiful damsel whose father managed the waterworks of the city of Newcastle. To his rival for her favor he recited:

"Lysander, keep thy Hermia; I will none: If e'er I loved her, all that love is gone."

Lanny could say this well, because he had only to imagine that Lysander was the heir to an English earldom, and that Hermia's last name was Codwilliger, pronounced Culliver.

III

America is the land of mass production and standardization; whatever it is that you want done, you will find somebody ready to do it according to the latest improved methods - if you have the price. If you want to raise funds for charity by means of amateur theatricals, you will discover that there are firms which specialize in showing you exactly how to do it. They will send you a director to take charge; they will rent you scenery and costumes, or provide experts to make them; they will advise you what play to give, and if you choose a modern one they will arrange about the copyright; they will have tickets and programs printed - in short they will do everything to smooth the development of whatever histrionic talent may be latent in Osawatomie, Kansas, or Deadwood Gulch, South Dakota.

The director of the Newcastle Country Club production of A Midsummer-Night's Dream came from New York; a tall young man of aesthetic appearance, wearing spectacles, and hair a bit longer than was usual in the town. He had an absentminded manner and a habit of making oddly humorous remarks. He took a liking to Lanny, and told him about a part of New York called Greenwich Village, where young people interested in the arts forgathered, writing plays on a little oatmeal and producing them on a shoestring. Walter Hayden was a discreet person, who valued his job, and never exercised his sense of humor upon anything in Newcastle; but he made general remarks to Lanny about the odd position of a stage director whose actors were all rich people accustomed to doing what they pleased, so that only by the exercise of patience and tact could things be got a little less than terrible.

After the first two or three rehearsals, there began to spread in the polite assemblage an uneasy sense that something was lacking in the Newcastle Country Club version of A Midsummer-Night's Dream. One of the "swank" young matrons found an opportunity to draw Lanny aside and ask whether he did not think it barely possible that Adelaide Hitchcock was less than completely adapted to the role of Puck? Adelaide was a lovely young girl with a wealth of wavy brown hair and large soulful brown eyes which turned quite often in the direction of Lanny Budd. She had a shapely figure, and everything that was needed to make a fairy, so long as she stood silent and motionless; but when she spoke her lines there was no life in them, and when she came onto the stage it was as a young lady entering a drawing room, and not in the least as a dancing sprite, the incarnation of mischief.

Now if Lanny had been more at home in Connecticut, he would have stopped to reflect that the Hitchcock family was prominent in his father's city, and that Adelaide's mother was first cousin to Lanny's stepmother. But he was thinking about art, and he said that in his opinion Adelaide with wings on her shoulders would make a great addition to the train of Queen Titania; but for the part of Puck they needed a boy or girl who could act; and if it was a girl, it ought to be one with a boyish figure, without hips.

They talked about various members of the younger set and couldn't think of anybody. Lanny asked if there wasn't some teacher of dancing in the town who could make a suggestion; then suddenly Mrs. Jessup recalled that she had seen a play given by the students at the high school, and in it was a girl who had "stolen the show" by the extraordinary verve of her acting. Lanny said: "Why don't you bring her here and let the members meet her?" Again he showed that he was not at home in Connecticut; for in this old-fashioned city the daughters of the aristocracy did not attend the free high schools, and girls who attended these schools were rarely invited to country clubs.

Mrs. Jessup went off to find this girl, whose name was Gracyn Phillipson and whose mother was an interior decorator, having a little shop and her living rooms above it. Before Mrs. Jessup went, she told her friends that Lanny had made the suggestion, thus giving him full credit for what happened. Later on it would be said that she was an "intriguer," and had manipulated matters to this end; but how could Lanny know about that?

IV

Gracyn Phillipson came to the club late the next afternoon, and Lanny was there as he had promised. One glance, and you could see that she was made for the role of Puck; a tiny, slender figure, with no hips that you would notice; a quick, eager manner, a voice full of laughter, and feet that danced of themselves. To be sure she was a brunette, and Lanny had somehow thought of fairies as blond; but when you came to consult the authorities, you couldn't find anything definite on the point.

Several of Mrs. Jessup's smart friends, having been told that Lanny Budd was interested in this young lady, had assembled to meet her. As the quickest way to bring out her "points," someone asked her to dance. A record was put on the phonograph, and of course it was up to a gallant youth to escort her onto the floor. If he had been discreet, he would have found some other partner for her and would have sat and studied her with a cold professional eye. But Lanny had a weakness for dancing, and it may be that the intriguers were taking advantage of that.

Anyhow, there were the two young persons on the floor, and an extraordinary thing happened. Lanny hadn't had a real dance since coming to the land of the pilgrims' pride, and he had missed it. The dancing that was done at the club was so subdued that it amounted to little more than taking a lady in your arms and walking about the room with her, backing her for a while and then reversing and letting her back you. People did this to the pounding of ragtime music which exercised a hypnotic effect, so that you might have been watching a roomful of automatons, electrically controlled so that they didn't bump into one another as they wove here and there.

But if you are young and full of fire you can dance fast and freely to any music. You can take three steps while others are taking one; you can bend and turn and leap - in short you can express the joy that is in you. And if you have in front of you a girl who is the very soul of motion, who watches you with excitement in her eyes, and reads in your face what you are going to do - that is something to wake you up and get you going. A few tentative steps, a few quick words, and the two bodies were swaying together, they were bringing grace and charm into being - they were creating a dance.

The watching ladies of course had seen dancing on the stage; there was a thing known as "society dancing," all the rage just then. But that dancing was carefully rehearsed; whereas these two young creatures had never seen each other before, and you could see that they were inventing something to express their pleasure in the meeting. It was stimulating, indeed it was almost improper - and that is what it became when the story started on its thousand-legged way through the city of Newcastle.

Was Gracyn Phillipson really what she seemed to Lanny that afternoon? Did joy really bubble up in her like water in a mountain spring? Lanny gave no thought to the question, and would have had no means of getting the answer. If Gracyn was acting - well, it meant that she was an actress. And surely nobody was expecting her to write A Midsummer-Night's Dream.

After the dancing there was tea, and this alert young creature revealed that it was the hope of her life to get on the stage. Mrs. Jessup had told her about the play that the club was producing, and she said that she would be tremendously honored by a chance to appear in it. Yes, she knew a little about the part of Puck; she had loved Shakespeare since childhood. Miss Phillipspn didn't exactly say that she carried an assortment of Shakespearean roles about in her head; and of course there was the possibility that she had sat up most of the night learning Puck.

Anyhow, when Mrs. Jessup said: "Could you give us an idea of how you would do it?" the answer came promptly: "I'd be glad to, if it wouldn't bore you." No shyness, no inhibition; she was an actress. Right there in the main room of the clubhouse, with other ladies sipping tea or playing bridge, and gentlemen passing through with their golf bags, Gracyn Phillipson enacted the scene in which Puck replies to the orders of King Oberon to torment the lovers: "My fairy lord, this must be done with haste."