When I had gone through the asylum's wards and the doctor had called my attention to this or that exceptional case and had tried to make clear cause and effect; when I had noted ophidian's stealth in one and tigerish ferocity in another, I suddenly realized that to single one of these unfortunates out, then to go before an indifferent crowd of people and present to them a close copy of the helpless afflicted one, would be an act of atrocious cruelty. I could not do it! I would instead seize upon some of the general symptoms, common to all mad people, and build up a mad-scene with their aid, thus avoiding a cruel imitation of one of God's afflicted.
So in this scar I was not going exactly to copy that riven throat, but, with slender rolls of cotton, covered and held by gold-beaters' skin, I was going to create dull white welts with angry red spaces painted between—with strong sticking-plaster attached to my eyelid, I was going to draw it from its natural position. Oh, I should have a rare scar! yet that poor woman might herself see it without suspecting she had given me the idea.
Oh, what a time of misery it was, the preparation of that play! Poor Mr. Daly—and poor, poor Miss Morris!
You see everything hung upon the mad-scene. Yet, when we came to that, I simply stood still and spoke the broken, disjointed words.
"But what are you going to do at night?" Mr. Daly cried. "Act your scene, Miss Morris."
Act it, in cold blood, there, in the gray, lifeless daylight? with a circle of grinning, sardonic faces, ready to be vastly amused over my efforts? He might better have asked me to deliver a polished address in beautiful, pellucid Greek, to compose at command a charming little rondeau in sparkling French, or a prayer in sonorous Latin—they would have been easier for me to do, than to gibber, to laugh, to screech, to whisper, whimper, rave, to crouch, crawl, stride, fall to order in street-clothes, and always with those fiendish "guyers" ready to assist in my undoing. Yet, poor Mr. Daly, too! I was sorry for him, he had so much at stake. It was asking a good deal of him to trust his fate entirely, blindly to me.
"Oh!" I said, "I would if I could—do please believe me! I want to do as you wish me to, but, dear Mr. Daly, I can't, my blood is cold in daylight, I am ashamed, constrained! I cannot act then!"
"Well, give me some faint idea of what you are going to do," he cried, impatiently.
"Dear goodness!" I groaned, "I am going to try to do all sorts of things—loud and quiet, fast and slow, close-eyed cunning, wide-eyed terror! There, that's all I can tell about it!" and I burst into harassed tears.
He said never another word, but I used to feel dreadfully when, at rehearsals, he would rise and leave the stage as soon as we reached the mad-scene.