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Updated: May 1, 2025
Tier after tier of lights had begun to prick out in the back-drop of skyscraping office-buildings. The little park, after the six-o'clock stampede, settled back into a sort of lamplit quiet, dark figures, the dregs of a city day, here and there on its benches.
The field of the telescope, like the circular picture shown by a magic lantern, presented this spectacle: the platform of a broken tower, the walls of which were higher in the more distant part and formed as it were a back-drop, over which surged waves of ivy. In front, amid a cluster of bushes, were two human beings, a man and a woman, leaning back against a heap of fallen stones.
In the dusk, as she flung back the heavy curtains, I could see the bulk of Brompton Oratory set behind the houses like the looming back-drop of a painted scene. Nearer, in front of a tall house across the way, stood the singer, a thin girl whose shadowy presence seemed animated by a curious bravery.
Fifteen minutes before the appointed time Louis Mitchell was fidgeting nervously outside the Filbert Street cold-water "walk-up" known as Geraldine Manor, wondering if Miss Dunlap would notice his clothes. Twelve dollars a week had starved his wardrobe until it resembled the back-drop for a "Pity the Blind" card; but promptly on the minute he punched the button at the fourth apartment.
And yet he asks in all humility is the play not enough? or must he lift the back-drop and bring into view the net-work of pulleys and lines, the tanks of moonlight gas and fake properties of papier-mache that produce the illusion?
Under the blazing heavens pony and rider showed upon that glowing surface as a tiny dot; a dot that moved slowly on and on until the yellow-brown carpet of the bunch-grass came to an end and was replaced by a gleaming sheet of alkali. Before that crawling dot the mirage wavered and undulated like a weirdly painted back-drop stirring in the wind.
Those were happy days for the drama, when a scoundrel was a scoundrel and wore a silk hat to prove it, and a hero was a two-fisted man, as anybody could tell by a glance at his marcelled hair and his open-at-the-throat shirt. Tum tum tum tum taaaa-tum. Pizzicato pianissimo, says the direction on the score. So we are all set for a melodrama. Here is the Great City back-drop.
At the back of the piazza, like the back-drop on a stage, rises a towering sugar-loaf mound, thrown up, so they say, by Attila, that from it he might conveniently watch the siege and burning of Aquileia.
The back-drop of office-lights began to blink out then, all except the tallest tower in the world, rising in the glory of its own spotlight into a rococo pinnacle of man's accomplishment. Strolling the edge of that park so close to the water that she could hear it seethe in the receding, a policeman finally took to following Mrs.
Carl was damp at the eyes, and swore with real fervor the oath to protect the girl, sure that in the ravine behind the back-drop his bearded foe-men were lurking. He held off a mob of shrieking gangsters, crouched behind an overturned table in a gambling-den.
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