Being acquainted with a newspaper reporter who had a couple of free passes, I got to see the performance a few nights ago at one of the popular vaudeville2 houses.
One of the numbers was a violin solo by a striking-looking man not much past forty, but with very gray thick hair. Not being afflicted3 with a taste for music, I let the system of noises drift past my ears while I regarded the man.
"There was a story about that chap a month or two ago," said the reporter. "They gave me the assignment. It was to run a column and was to be on the extremely light and joking order. The old man seems to like the funny touch I give to local happenings. Oh, yes, I'm working on a farce4 comedy now. Well, I went down to the house and got all the details; but I certainly fell down on that job. I went back and turned in a comic write-up of an east side funeral instead. Why? Oh, I couldn't seem to get hold of it with my funny hooks, somehow. Maybe you could make a one-act tragedy out of it for a curtain-raiser. I'll give you the details."
After the performance my friend, the reporter, recited to me the facts over Wurzburger.
"I see no reason," said I, when he had concluded, "why that shouldn't make a rattling5 good funny story. Those three people couldn't have acted in a more absurd and preposterous6 manner if they had been real actors in a real theatre. I'm really afraid that all the stage is a world, anyhow, and all the players men and women. 'The thing's the play,' is the way I quote Mr. Shakespeare."
"Try it," said the reporter.
"I will," said I; and I did, to show him how he could have made a humorous column of it for his paper.
There stands a house near Abingdon Square. On the ground floor there has been for twenty-five years a little store where toys and notions and stationery7 are sold.
One night twenty years ago there was a wedding in the rooms above the store. The Widow Mayo owned the house and store. Her daughter Helen was married to Frank Barry. John Delaney was best man. Helen was eighteen, and her picture had been printed in a morning paper next to the headlines of a "Wholesale8 Female Murderess" story from Butte, Mont. But after your eye and intelligence had rejected the connection, you seized your magnifying glass and read beneath the portrait her description as one of a series of Prominent Beauties and Belles9 of the lower west side.
Frank Barry and John Delaney were "prominent" young beaux of the same side, and bosom10 friends, whom you expected to turn upon each other every time the curtain went up. One who pays his money for orchestra seats and fiction expects this. That is the first funny idea that has turned up in the story yet. Both had made a great race for Helen's hand. When Frank won, John shook his hand and congratulated him - honestly, he did.
After the ceremony Helen ran upstairs to put on her hat. She was getting married in a traveling dress. She and Frank were going to Old Point Comfort for a week. Downstairs the usual horde11 of gibbering cave-dwellers were waiting with their hands full of old Congress gaiters and paper bags of hominy.
Then there was a rattle12 of the fire-escape, and into her room jumps the mad and infatuated John Delaney, with a damp curl drooping13 upon his forehead, and made violent and reprehensible14 love to his lost one, entreating15 her to flee or fly with him to the Riviera, or the Bronx, or any old place where there are Italian skies and dolce far niente.
It would have carried Blaney off his feet to see Helen repulse16 him. With blazing and scornful eyes she fairly withered17 him by demanding whatever he meant by speaking to respectable people that way.
In a few moments she had him going. The manliness18 that had possessed19 him departed. He bowed low, and said something about "irresistible20 impulse" and "forever carry in his heart the memory of" - and she suggested that he catch the first fire-escape going down.
"I will away," said John Delaney, "to the furthermost parts of the earth. I cannot remain near you and know that you are another's. I will to Africa, and there amid other scenes strive to for -"
"For goodness sake, get out," said Helen. "Somebody might come in."
He knelt upon one knee, and she extended him one white hand that he might give it a farewell kiss.
Girls, was this choice boon21 of the great little god Cupid ever vouchsafed22 you - to have the fellow you want hard and fast, and have the one you don't want come with a damp curl on his forehead and kneel to you and babble23 of Africa and love which, in spite of everything, shall forever bloom, an amaranth, in his heart? To know your power, and to feel the sweet security of your own happy state; to send the unlucky one, broken-hearted, to foreign climes, while you congratulate yourself as he presses his last kiss upon your knuckles24, that your nails are well manicured - say, girls, it's galluptious - don't ever let it get by you.
And then, of course - how did you guess it? - the door opened and in stalked the bridegroom, jealous of slow-tying bonnet25 strings26.
The farewell kiss was imprinted27 upon Helen's hand, and out of the window and down the fire-escape sprang John Delaney, Africa bound.
A little slow music, if you please - faint violin, just a breath in the clarinet and a touch of the 'cello28. Imagine the scene. Frank, white-hot, with the cry of a man wounded to death bursting from him. Helen, rushing and clinging to him, trying to explain. He catches her wrists and tears them from his shoulders - once, twice, thrice he sways her this way and that - the stage manager will show you how - and throws her from him to the floor a huddled29, crushed, moaning thing. Never, he cries, will he look upon her face again, and rushes from the house through the staring groups of astonished guests.
And, now because it is the Thing instead of the Play, the audience must stroll out into the real lobby of the world and marry, die, grow gray, rich, poor, happy or sad during the intermission of twenty years which must precede the rising of the curtain again.
Mrs. Barry inherited the shop and the house. At thirty-eight she could have bested many an eighteen-year-old at a beauty show on points and general results. Only a few people remembered her wedding comedy, but she made of it no secret. She did not pack it in lavender or moth30 balls, nor did she sell it to a magazine.
One day a middle-aged31 money-making lawyer, who bought his legal cap and ink of her, asked her across the counter to marry him.
"I'm really much obliged to you," said Helen, cheerfully, "but I married another man twenty years ago. He was more a goose than a man, but I think I love him yet. I have never seen him since about half an hour after the ceremony. Was it copying ink that you wanted or just writing fluid?"
The lawyer bowed over the counter with old-time grace and left a respectful kiss on the back of her hand. Helen sighed. Parting salutes32, however romantic, may be overdone33. Here she was at thirty-eight, beautiful and admired; and all that she seemed to have got from her lovers were approaches and adieus. Worse still, in the last one she had lost a customer, too.
Business languished34, and she hung out a Room to Let card. Two large rooms on the third floor were prepared for desirable tenants35. Roomers came, and went regretfully, for the house of Mrs. Barry was the abode37 of neatness, comfort and taste.
One day came Ramonti, the violinist, and engaged the front room above. The discord38 and clatter39 uptown offended his nice ear; so a friend had sent him to this oasis40 in the desert of noise.
Ramonti, with his still youthful face, his dark eyebrows41, his short, pointed42, foreign, brown beard, his distinguished43 head of gray hair, and his artist's temperament44 - revealed in his light, gay and sympathetic manner - was a welcome tenant36 in the old house near Abingdon Square.
Helen lived on the floor above the store. The architecture of it was singular and quaint1. The hall was large and almost square. Up one side of it, and then across the end of it ascended45 an open stairway to the floor above. This hall space she had furnished as a sitting room and office combined. There she kept her desk and wrote her business letters; and there she sat of evenings by a warm fire and a bright red light and sewed or read. Ramonti found the atmosphere so agreeable that he spent much time there, describing to Mrs. Barry the wonders of Paris, where he had studied with a particularly notorious and noisy fiddler.
Next comes lodger46 No. 2, a handsome, melancholy47 man in the early 40's, with a brown, mysterious beard, and strangely pleading, haunting eyes. He, too, found the society of Helen a desirable thing. With the eyes of Romeo and Othello's tongue, he charmed her with tales of distant climes and wooed her by respectful innuendo48.
From the first Helen felt a marvelous and compelling thrill in the presence of this man. His voice somehow took her swiftly back to the days of her youth's romance. This feeling grew, and she gave way to it, and it led her to an instinctive49 belief that he had been a factor in that romance. And then with a woman's reasoning (oh, yes, they do, sometimes) she leaped over common syllogism50 and theory, and logic51, and was sure that her husband had come back to her. For she saw in his eyes love, which no woman can mistake, and a thousand tons of regret and remorse52, which aroused pity, which is perilously53 near to love requited54, which is the sine qua non in the house that Jack55 built.
But she made no sign. A husband who steps around the corner for twenty years and then drops in again should not expect to find his slippers56 laid out too conveniently near nor a match ready lighted for his cigar. There must be expiation57, explanation, and possibly execration58. A little purgatory59, and then, maybe, if he were properly humble60, he might be trusted with a harp61 and crown. And so she made no sign that she knew or suspected.
And my friend, the reporter, could see nothing funny in this! Sent out on an assignment to write up a roaring, hilarious62, brilliant joshing story of - but I will not knock a brother - let us go on with the story.
One evening Ramonti stopped in Helen's hall-office-reception-room and told his love with the tenderness and ardor63 of the enraptured64 artist. His words were a bright flame of the divine fire that glows in the heart of a man who is a dreamer and doer combined.
"But before you give me an answer," he went on, before she could accuse him of suddenness, "I must tell you that 'Ramonti' is the only name I have to offer you. My manager gave me that. I do not know who I am or where I came from. My first recollection is of opening my eyes in a hospital. I was a young man, and I had been there for weeks. My life before that is a blank to me. They told me that I was found lying in the street with a wound on my head and was brought there in an ambulance. They thought I must have fallen and struck my head upon the stones. There was nothing to show who I was. I have never been able to remember. After I was discharged from the hospital, I took up the violin. I have had success. Mrs. Barry - I do not know your name except that - I love you; the first time I saw you I realized that you were the one woman in the world for me - and" - oh, a lot of stuff like that.
Helen felt young again. First a wave of pride and a sweet little thrill of vanity went all over her; and then she looked Ramonti in the eyes, and a tremendous throb65 went through her heart. She hadn't expected that throb. It took her by surprise. The musician had become a big factor in her life, and she hadn't been aware of it.
"Mr. Ramonti," she said sorrowfully (this was not on the stage, remember; it was in the old home near Abingdon Square), "I'm awfully66 sorry, but I'm a married woman."
And then she told him the sad story of her life, as a heroine must do, sooner or later, either to a theatrical67 manager or to a reporter.
Ramonti took her hand, bowed low and kissed it, and went up to his room.
Helen sat down and looked mournfully at her hand. Well she might. Three suitors had kissed it, mounted their red roan steeds and ridden away.
In an hour entered the mysterious stranger with the haunting eyes. Helen was in the willow68 rocker, knitting a useless thing in cotton-wool. He ricocheted from the stairs and stopped for a chat. Sitting across the table from her, he also poured out his narrative69 of love. And then he said: "Helen, do you not remember me? I think I have seen it in your eyes. Can you forgive the past and remember the love that has lasted for twenty years? I wronged you deeply - I was afraid to come back to you - but my love overpowered my reason. Can you, will you, forgive me?"
Helen stood up. The mysterious stranger held one of her hands in a strong and trembling clasp.
There she stood, and I pity the stage that it has not acquired a scene like that and her emotions to portray70.
For she stood with a divided heart. The fresh, unforgettable, virginal love for her bridegroom was hers; the treasured, sacred, honored memory of her first choice filled half her soul. She leaned to that pure feeling. Honor and faith and sweet, abiding71 romance bound her to it. But the other half of her heart and soul was filled with something else - a later, fuller, nearer influence. And so the old fought against the new.
And while she hesitated, from the room above came the soft, racking, petitionary music of a violin. The hag, music, bewitches some of the noblest. The daws may peck upon one's sleeve without injury, but whoever wears his heart upon his tympanum gets it not far from the neck.
This music and the musician caller her, and at her side honor and the old love held her back.
"Forgive me," he pleaded.
"Twenty years is a long time to remain away from the one you say you love," she declared, with a purgatorial72 touch.
"How could I tell?" he begged. "I will conceal73 nothing from you. That night when he left I followed him. I was mad with jealousy74. On a dark street I struck him down. He did not rise. I examined him. His head had struck a stone. I did not intend to kill him. I was mad with love and jealousy. I hid near by and saw an ambulance take him away. Although you married him, Helen -"
"Who are you?" cried the woman, with wide-open eyes, snatching her hand away.
"Don't you remember me, Helen - the one who has always loved you best? I am John Delaney. If you can forgive -"
But she was gone, leaping, stumbling, hurrying, flying up the stairs toward the music and him who had forgotten, but who had known her for his in each of his two existences, and as she climbed up she sobbed75, cried and sang: "Frank! Frank! Frank!"
Three mortals thus juggling76 with years as though they were billiard balls, and my friend, the reporter, couldn't see anything funny in it!
收听单词发音 |
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quaint
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| adj.古雅的，离奇有趣的，奇怪的 | |
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vaudeville
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| n.歌舞杂耍表演 | |
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afflicted
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| 使受痛苦，折磨( afflict的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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farce
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| n.闹剧，笑剧，滑稽戏；胡闹 | |
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rattling
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| adj. 格格作响的, 活泼的, 很好的 adv. 极其, 很, 非常 动词rattle的现在分词 | |
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preposterous
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| adj.荒谬的，可笑的 | |
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stationery
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| n.文具；(配套的)信笺信封 | |
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wholesale
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| n.批发；adv.以批发方式；vt.批发，成批出售 | |
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belles
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| n.美女( belle的名词复数 )；最美的美女 | |
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bosom
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| n.胸，胸部；胸怀；内心；adj.亲密的 | |
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horde
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| n.群众，一大群 | |
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rattle
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| v.飞奔，碰响；激怒；n.碰撞声；拨浪鼓 | |
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drooping
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| adj. 下垂的，无力的 动词droop的现在分词 | |
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reprehensible
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| adj.该受责备的 | |
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entreating
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| 恳求，乞求( entreat的现在分词 ) | |
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repulse
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| n.击退，拒绝；vt.逐退，击退，拒绝 | |
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withered
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| adj. 枯萎的，干瘪的，（人身体的部分器官）因病萎缩的或未发育良好的 动词wither的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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manliness
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| 刚毅 | |
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possessed
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| adj.疯狂的；拥有的，占有的 | |
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irresistible
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| adj.非常诱人的，无法拒绝的，无法抗拒的 | |
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boon
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| n.恩赐，恩物，恩惠 | |
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vouchsafed
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| v.给予，赐予( vouchsafe的过去式和过去分词 )；允诺 | |
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babble
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| v.含糊不清地说，胡言乱语地说，儿语 | |
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knuckles
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| n.（指人）指关节( knuckle的名词复数 )；（指动物）膝关节，踝v.（指人）指关节( knuckle的第三人称单数 )；（指动物）膝关节，踝 | |
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bonnet
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| n.无边女帽；童帽 | |
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strings
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imprinted
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| v.盖印（imprint的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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cello
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| n.大提琴 | |
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huddled
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| 挤在一起（huddle的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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moth
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| n.蛾，蛀虫 | |
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middle-aged
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| adj.中年的 | |
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salutes
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| n.致敬，欢迎，敬礼( salute的名词复数 )v.欢迎，致敬( salute的第三人称单数 )；赞扬，赞颂 | |
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overdone
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| v.做得过分( overdo的过去分词 )；太夸张；把…煮得太久；（工作等）过度 | |
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languished
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| 长期受苦( languish的过去式和过去分词 )； 受折磨； 变得（越来越）衰弱； 因渴望而变得憔悴或闷闷不乐 | |
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tenants
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| n.房客( tenant的名词复数 )；佃户；占用者；占有者 | |
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tenant
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| n.承租人；房客；佃户；v.租借，租用 | |
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abode
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| n.住处，住所 | |
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discord
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| n.不和，意见不合，争论，（音乐）不和谐 | |
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clatter
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| v./n.(使)发出连续而清脆的撞击声 | |
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oasis
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| n.（沙漠中的）绿洲，宜人的地方 | |
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eyebrows
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| 眉毛( eyebrow的名词复数 ) | |
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pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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distinguished
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| adj.卓越的，杰出的，著名的 | |
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temperament
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| n.气质，性格，性情 | |
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ascended
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| v.上升，攀登( ascend的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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lodger
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| n.寄宿人，房客 | |
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melancholy
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| n.忧郁，愁思；adj.令人感伤（沮丧）的，忧郁的 | |
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innuendo
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| n.暗指，讽刺 | |
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instinctive
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| adj.(出于)本能的；直觉的；(出于)天性的 | |
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syllogism
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| n.演绎法，三段论法 | |
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logic
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| n.逻辑(学)；逻辑性 | |
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remorse
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| n.痛恨，悔恨，自责 | |
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perilously
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| adv.充满危险地，危机四伏地 | |
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requited
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| v.报答( requite的过去式和过去分词 )；酬谢；回报；报复 | |
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jack
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| n.插座，千斤顶，男人；v.抬起，提醒，扛举；n.（Jake）杰克 | |
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slippers
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| n. 拖鞋 | |
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expiation
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| n.赎罪，补偿 | |
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execration
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| n.诅咒，念咒，憎恶 | |
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purgatory
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| n.炼狱；苦难；adj.净化的，清洗的 | |
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humble
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| adj.谦卑的，恭顺的；地位低下的；v.降低，贬低 | |
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harp
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| n.竖琴；天琴座 | |
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hilarious
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| adj.充满笑声的，欢闹的；[反]depressed | |
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ardor
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| n.热情，狂热 | |
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enraptured
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| v.使狂喜( enrapture的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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throb
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| v.震颤，颤动；(急速强烈地)跳动，搏动 | |
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awfully
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| adv.可怕地，非常地，极端地 | |
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theatrical
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| adj.剧场的，演戏的；做戏似的，做作的 | |
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willow
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| n.柳树 | |
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narrative
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| n.叙述，故事；adj.叙事的，故事体的 | |
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portray
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| v.描写，描述；画(人物、景象等) | |
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abiding
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| adj.永久的，持久的，不变的 | |
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purgatorial
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| adj.炼狱的，涤罪的 | |
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73
conceal
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| v.隐藏，隐瞒，隐蔽 | |
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74
jealousy
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| n.妒忌，嫉妒，猜忌 | |
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75
sobbed
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| 哭泣，啜泣( sob的过去式和过去分词 )； 哭诉，呜咽地说 | |
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76
juggling
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| n. 欺骗, 杂耍(=jugglery) adj. 欺骗的, 欺诈的 动词juggle的现在分词 | |
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