CHAPTER XIV
SIGHT-SEEING GALORE
Under promises of gorgeous sights and full protection, Fanny had concluded to visit the chief Midway Plaisance theaters with Johnny and Louis as escorts. The "Midway," as it is familiarly called, is undoubtedly the most unique and interesting pleasure-walk in the world. It is a thoroughfare of ever-shifting scenes and ever-recurring incidents. Fanny was not sure she ought to go, and Johnny could not comprehend why she did not go with him as readily wherever he proposed as she did on the wild free life of the big Jersey farm. But this was to her a supremely different existence, and she tried hard to recall all she had seen and heard and read of etiquette and the proprieties. Uncle and Aunt were not the only ones who were bewildered at every step by the amazing mixture of reality and art, of fact and fancy, of nature and imitation. They felt as if their souls were living apart, and that they were mere automatons in a panoramic world.
Johnny had seen the Soudanese and Nubian play actors just before his disastrous attempt to be informed concerning the Dahomey village. But some scoffers from the South had spoiled part of the novelty of it by alleging that the men of northern Africa were really natives of Mississippi or Louisiana, and were dancing only plantation hoe-downs in slow time and increased perpendicular action.
But without question the high histrionic art of the Chinese, Javanese, Turkish and Algerian actors ought to be seen. Maybe it was strangeness rather than excellence and novelty rather than entertainment that drew the people but strangeness and novelty are the greater excellence when people come to see wonders.
The Chinese theater is by far the most pretentious. It was pretty well advertised to the world at the advent of the actors in Vancouver and their encounter with the custom officers. They came to Chicago several hundred strong and are housed in the big blue-and-gilt structure with trim pagodas near the Cottage Grove end of the Midway. Entrance to the theater is through a big tea house, where decent-looking Chinamen who do not look like rats and whose fluent English proclaims their long sojourn in "Flisco," serve the cheering cup at from 10 to 60 cents, according to the pliability of the victim. They are doing a business worthy of a better cause. The tea house is but the ante-chamber to a joss house overhead, mendaciously advertised to be "the biggest outside of China," and to the theater proper. The latter is not so big as the Chinese theaters in San Francisco, but it smells sweeter, being over ground and not surrounded with the cooking-rooms and opium bunks of the actors. This is a concession to occidental taste which all but oriental enthusiasts will appreciate. Nor are visitors allowed, as in San Francisco, to inspect the green-room or sit on the stage.
