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She had not been idle or careless during the time when the Grisis, the Persianis, and the Linds were delighting the world with the magic of their art. She had assiduously kept up the culture of her delicious voice, and stepped again before the foot-lights with all the ease, steadiness, and aplomb of one who had never suffered an interregnum in her lyric reign.
The marquis and Manette are the traditional nobleman and soubrette, and flourish before us all the adjuncts of the stage. We give a fragment from a soliloquy of Manette's which suggests the foot-lights and an enforced "wait" in a comedy during a change of dress for the principal actors: "I adore Countess Nathalie, and am thankful for my blessings. And yet I have my disappointments, my chagrins.
A bouquet of American beauty roses was handed up over the foot-lights to the Premier, who buried her face in them, with a sudden flood of loneliness. But the crowd was applauding, and gain and again she was called forward. The people came flocking in through the wings, pleading to be introduced to the "Premier," but she was gone.
She stood before me with a handkerchief tied over her head, and a broom in her hand, but she looked, to me, as beautiful as she had done behind the glare of the foot-lights. Her simplicity was here even more fascinating. She held the door partly open, while I, to recover myself, asked for Franz. She told me he was gone out, but would return soon, if I would wait for him.
"For God's sake, keep it up!" urged Dineen. "For Christ's sake, let me alone, all of you, I know what I'm doing," this, as the elocution teacher tried to press home some advice.... During the second act I was as electric as during the first, but now I allowed myself to see over the foot-lights and recognise people I knew.
For as the play went on and the easily pleased audience laughed and clapped its hands, and the tired players bowed and smiled from behind the flaring foot-lights, there was one spectator who was conscious of a great crisis in her own life, which the mimicry of that evening seemed to ridicule and counterfeit.
If the platform be taken as a stage, and the out-curving margin of the dump to represent the line of the foot-lights, then our house would be the first wing on the actor's left, and this blacksmith's forge, although no match for it in size, the foremost on the right. It was a low, brown cottage, planted close against the hill, and overhung by the foliage and peeling boughs of a madrona thicket.
There is nothing I like so much as knowing a play beforehand, because then one can always whisper to one's companion what is coming next. The stage, with all its adjustments, had been carefully arranged, the foot-lights were lighted, the piece began. All went well till nearly the end of the first act, when there was a cry behind the scenes of "Mr. Denis!" Mr. Denis should have rushed on, but Mr.
A row of lamps made very good foot-lights, and an invisible band performed a Wagner-like overture on combs, tin trumpets, drums, and pipes, with an accompaniment of suppressed laughter.
Without make-up they were white and featureless in the glare of the foot-lights; they were jaded and a little impatient, too, but Manders, who seemed to make his personality unyielding and metallic on entering a theatre, galvanized them into alertness.
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