Читать книгу While Rome Burns - Alexander Woollcott - Страница 15
ОглавлениеA FOND report on the reap-
pearance of Maude Adams, re-
turning to the stage after a thir-
teen year absence as Portia in
“The Merchant of Venice.”
REUNION IN NEWARK
DECEMBER 1931.
It is a commonplace that nothing can so poignantly evoke the flavor of the receding past as some remembered tune, some melody that has caught up and woven into its own unconscious fabric the very color and fragrance of a day gone by. I am sure, for example, that this Juventino Rosas (I have just copied his unfamiliar name from a phonograph record) who once wrote a pleasant and rather hoppy waltz called “Over the Waves,” would be astounded if he could know what overtones I hear when that old tune of his comes to me across a lake at sundown, or floats up through the darkness from a distant orchestra. I myself could not detect all its associations but first among them is certainly the heart-breaking gayety in the third act of The Cherry Orchard. Then there are the peanut-strewn paths at Willow Grove with Sousa’s band playing of a Sunday afternoon long ago. And of course every prom of my salad days, with the girls in organdy and the stag-line miserable in white gloves and stiff shirts, and chaperones, with frozen smiles, ever on the prowl. Then I think a few jugglers’ acts are mixed in somewhere.
I know that the blend was too much for a certain aging and mellow traveler one day in the May just past when, along with some scores of others, he was bidden to a cocktail party at the British Legation in Peking. The drinks, of which he took perhaps too many, were served in the largest of a succession of scarlet pavilions set in the greensward. Beyond the furthest one, the sentries could be seen ceaselessly pacing. In the shelter of another, the band of the Queen’s Own, which had come up from Tientsin for the polo game, was staying over to play for the party. And just as the aforesaid traveler was taking his departure and stepping into his apprehensive rickshaw, the band struck up the familiar opening bars of “Over the Waves” and its melody followed him through the streets of the Legation Quarter. Whereupon the traveler began to weep in a quiet way. Perhaps it was just as well that the already sufficiently puzzled rickshaw-boy understood no word of English, for it would have been difficult to explain to him (or to anyone else, for that matter) what the old fool was crying about.
To anyone “sufficiently decayed,” such an evocation of a bygone day is tinged with a sadness inexplicable to the young fry. One might warn them, however, that they will live to learn that all music is full of such mischief. But, as it happens, I never realized until one Wednesday afternoon early in the present month when, to my considerable surprise, I found myself in Newark, that there are other sounds which can come across the years as sweetly freighted with associations numberless and indefinable. For, sitting as one unresisting spectator in the largest audience I have seen in any theater in many a season, I found myself yielding to the spell of a music familiar, dear, and ineffably touching. It was the music of a speaking voice I had not heard in years nor ever thought to hear once more. It was the voice—unchanged and changeless—of Maude Adams. And the sound of it filled me with an almost intolerable nostalgia for a day that is not now and never can be again. I was under the distinct impression that the play was The Merchant of Venice and that the admirable Shylock was Otis Skinner—the same Shylock (and wearing, by the way, the selfsame cloak) that I had seen with Ada Rehan eight-and-twenty years before from a hard-earned seat in the gallery of the Garrick in Philadelphia. Then I knew, too, that Miss Adams was supposed to be Portia, but I kept hearing the glee of Babbie laughing through the rowan berries at the little minister and once—I think through some lovely intonation in the “Quality of Mercy” speech—I suddenly saw not Portia at all, but Peter standing white, wraithlike, and consecrate, on guard outside the house they built for Wendy.
I have no quarrel with the young reviewers who went all the way out to Cleveland to discover that Maude Adams was not a young and lustrous Portia, and am only a little amused at their implication that she ever would have been. For even when she was a youngster, she was a timeless gnome, and there never was a day when she could have played Portia to a good press. After all she was never considered a great actress in the sense that Ada Rehan and Mrs. Fiske were great. Another adjective described her more happily and still does—described her unmistakably and more nearly than any other player of my time. That adjective was “dear.” Also am I a little amused at the recurrent observation that the selection of this particular play for her return was “ill-advised.” If there is one thing I am sure of, it is that it was not advised at all. For she was ever a person apart, and long ago she learned to shut herself, such as she was, away from the distracting sounds of the managers, the critics, and the public. I am glad of that for only such a one could, in 1905, have saved the newborn Peter Pan from being the dire failure which the managers, the critics, and the public at first so confidently regarded it.
The audience in Newark was made up of gaffers and school-children. For instance, I was not unaware of several comely minxes but recently arrived in their teens who were sitting just behind me. When we came to the moon-drenched loveliness of the final scene and heard from Lorenzo how the floor of heaven was thick inlaid with patines of bright gold, the young females behind me giggled. I realized that, to them, bred at the movies, this scene was just a coupla young people in funny clothes necking in a garden. And right they were, I suppose. But beyond them stretched an acre or so of gray heads, and at some familiar gesture of this Portia, or at some fondly remembered caress of the funny, throaty little voice, which ever defeated the mimics of its day, a ripple ran across that audience as a gust of wind traverses a field of grain—a ripple that was part sigh and part contented chuckle and, to my notion, most pleasant to hear.
Probably she hears it every night, and as she steps on to the stage at Ford’s in Baltimore next Friday, she must know how many of us all over the land are wishing her, with all our hearts, a Merry Christmas.
