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Syme's laughter at all this had about it a wild weakness of relief. He laughed at the idea of the paralytic Professor being really a young actor dressed up as if for the foot-lights. But he felt that he would have laughed as loudly if a pepperpot had fallen over. The false Professor drank and wiped his false beard. "Did you know," he asked, "that that man Gogol was one of us?"
But everything for that matter takes on such dramatic life as our lame colloquies never know so that almost any uttered communications here become an acted play, improvised, mimicked, proportioned and rounded, carried bravely to its <i>denoument</i>. The speaker seems actually to establish his stage and face his foot-lights, to create by a gesture a little scenic circumscription about him; he rushes to and fro and shouts and stamps and postures, he ranges through every phase of his inspiration.
Here I shone conspicuously; in the morning I was employed painting scenery and arranging the properties; as it grew later, I regulated the lamps, and looked after the foot-lights, mediating occasionally between angry litigants, whose jealousies abound to the full as much, in private theatricals, as in the regular corps dramatique.
The ceilings and walls were ivory white and much gilt. Heavy chandeliers, with the usual glass prisms and globes, revolved slowly or swayed from side to side. Huge oil paintings with shaded top and foot-lights occupied all vacant spaces in the walls. They were "valued" at from ten to thirty thousand dollars apiece, and that fact was advertised.
A glance at the foot-lights and at the orchestra recalled the recollection of where she was, and by a strong effort she controlled herself; though there was still an agitation in her voice, which the audience and the singers thought to be the perfection of acting.
Foremost among all the fairies and nymphs, noted for the shortness of her filmy skirts, the supple beauty of her shapely limbs, her incomparable dancing, and her dark, bright beauty, flashed La Sylphine before the foot-lights.
Resourceful, energetic and fertile men in the rural ministry can accomplish vastly more than conventional, orderly and proper men. The church in which I began my ministry used to have a play every Christmas. We built out the pulpit platform with boards, we hung it around with curtains, giving dressing-room space, and we placed lanterns in front for foot-lights.
Defeated by Malibran's viciousness in rehearsing her death-scene, she resigned herself to the impromptu imposed upon her, and prepared to follow her Romeo, wherever she might choose to die; but when the evening came, Malibran contrived to die close to the foot-lights and in front of the curtain; Sontag of necessity followed, and fell beside her there; the drop came down, and there lay the two fair corpses in full view of the audience, of course unable to rise or move, till a couple of stage footmen, in red plush breeches, ran in to the rescue, took the dead Capulet and Montague each by the shoulders, and dragged them off at the side scenes; the Spanish woman in the heroism of her maliciousness submitting to this ignominy for the pleasure of subjecting her gentle German rival to it.
At all events, the mob resolved on the latter course, and streaming up the Bowery in one wild, excited mass, gathered with loud shouts in front of the theatre. The doors were closed in their faces, but pressing against them with their immense weight, they gave way, and like a dark, stormy wave, they surged up the aisles toward the foot-lights.
In the quiet, darkened room, where the foot-lights of the great stage no longer glare upon us, where our ears are no longer strained to catch the clapping or the hissing of the town, we are, for a brief space, ourselves.
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