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I saw the last act of "Tannhauser." I sat in the gloom and the deep stillness, waiting one minute, two minutes, I do not know exactly how long then the soft music of the hidden orchestra began to breathe its rich, long sighs out from under the distant stage, and by and by the drop-curtain parted in the middle and was drawn softly aside, disclosing the twilighted wood and a wayside shrine, with a white-robed girl praying and a man standing near.
The footlights were turned down, but the blue mountains and brown palm-trees of the drop-curtain, painted by one of the nuns, loomed through the red obscurity of the room. Benches had been set along the walls. Between them a strip of carpet, worked with roses and lilies, down which the girls advanced when called to receive their prizes, stretched its blue and slender length.
People always used to say of Mavick, when he was young and a clerk in a Washington bureau, that he looked omniscient. At least the imagination of spectators invested him with a golden hue, and regarded him through the roseate atmosphere that surrounds a many-millioned man. The girl had her eyes always on the orchestra, and was waiting for the opening of the world that lay behind the drop-curtain.
At Christmas-time Cable and Clemens took a fortnight's holiday, and Clemens went home to Hartford. There a grand surprise awaited him. Mrs. Clemens had made an adaptation of "The Prince and the Pauper" for the stage, and his children, with those of the neighborhood, had learned the parts. A good stage had been set up in George Warner's home, with a pretty drop-curtain and very good scenery indeed.
Oh, surely La Sylphine was the loveliest thing, that hot June night, the gas-light shone on! The fairy spectacle was over the green drop-curtain fell.
In the hands of a scene-painter they would yield a really unrivalled drop-curtain. I stick to the notion of this because when the beautiful goes too far, as it certainly does at Madeira, it leaves you not only sated but vindictive; you wish to mock it.
In other words, the privacy of my bedroom is assured by nothing more substantial than a canvas drop-curtain, shutting off my boudoir, where I could never very successfully bouder, from the larger living-room. This living-room is also the kitchen, the laundry, the sewing-room, the reception-room and the library.
This miniature theater was not much bigger than a man's coffin stood on end; the upper part was open and displayed a tinseled parlor a good-sized handkerchief would have answered for a drop-curtain; the footlights consisted of a couple of candle-ends an inch long; various manikins the size of dolls appeared on the stage and made long speeches at each other, gesticulating a good deal, and they generally had a fight before they got through.
The wardrobe became a side-scene in our theatre, and Eleanor and Clement laboured day and night with papers of powdered paint, and kettles of hot size, in converting canvas into scenery. "Theatricals" promised to be a lasting fancy; but the next holidays were in fine weather, and we made the drop-curtain into a tent. When the boys were at school, Eleanor and I were fully occupied.
By constant slight movements, to comply with the movements of the rampart of shoulders, he could discern fragments of various advertisements of soap, motor-cars, whisky, shirts, perfume, pills, bricks and tea for the drop-curtain was down.
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