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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.
As we paused, after some minutes, to select our course, one of the finest surprises of the trip awaited us: the fog in our front was swiftly whirled up by the breeze, like the drop-curtain at the theatre, only much more rapidly, and in a twinkling the vast gulf opened before us. It was so sudden as to be almost bewildering.
Kaya shrank back into the leaves that were painted, and they trembled slightly as if a breeze had passed; and the great drop-curtain blew out, bulging. "Keep the windows shut," called the voice of the stage manager, "Quick before the curtain goes up. A storm is coming, and the draughts oh Je!" He went hurrying past.
Those great actors who played in it have passed away, but the same drama still holds the stage. The drop-curtain falls between the acts; the scenery shifts; the music alters; but the crisis and its issues are unchanged, and the parts which you and I play are assigned to us by our own choice of "the ever favorite object of our hearts."
When in my tender years I was taken to the matinee, usually the most thrilling feature of the spectacle to me was the scene depicted on the drop-curtain.
A dozen pale jets of a miserable iron gas-fitting hanging out of the shadows of the roof struggled in the gloom, leaving the outlines of the Muses above the proscenium as undefinable as the silhouettes of the shopkeepers in the pit. Over against the shopkeepers was the drop-curtain, the centre of which contained a romantic picture intended to prepare the spectators for the play soon to begin.
Within its curving arms a hundred thousand people could be seated. Its foreground is the emerald river; its drop-curtain the radiant cañon wall. Cathedrals, too, are here, with spires twice as high as those which soar above the minster of Cologne. Fantastic gargoyles stretch out from the parapets. A hundred flying buttresses connect them with the mountain side.
Her attention was so concentrated on the big man by her side that she scarcely knew she was in a theatre, and had as yet perceived neither the star-light nor the drop-curtain.
Then the leader of the orchestra came to his place, and after a pause, the music began. "A fiddle's great value," John's neighbour whispered to him. "I'm a great hand at the Jew's harp myself!..." The music ceased, the lights were lowered in the theatre and the footlights were raised, throwing a great soft yellow glow on the picture of the Lakes of Killarney which decorated the drop-curtain.
When Mr. Tiffany came to me with an order for the drop-curtain of a theater, I did not trouble myself about a scheme for it, knowing that it had probably taken exact and interesting form in his own mind. It was a beautiful lesson to me, this largeness of purpose in needlework.
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