“‘Hark! Tis-sa-ack the loved and lost one, is calling the brave Tu-toch-a-nu-lah.’”
A GREAT CITY’S SHAME
Over the entrance of what was once the Iroquois Theater, hangs a head, which the sculptor probably intended for the Goddess of Music. As I gaze upon the head its outlines become first blurred and then transformed. A Death’s head stands out in bold relief! The noble image of the Indian Chieftain that was once there, has been consigned to the Limbo of the Forgotten—to the Valley of Dead Lumber. The Death’s head grins and grins—grins sardonically. One can almost hear a chuckle, as the horrid thing looks down upon the heedless, hurrying crowd in the busy street. Seeing the thing above the door as I passed by in the midst of the throng to-day, I wondered why it grinned,—why it did not weep. Did it grin because it knew how soulless were the human things that inspired the hand which carved it; because it and the men who placed it there were of the same brotherhood of ghouls; because it felt that it was a grim satire upon humanity?
Have men whose hearts are adamant, whose souls are sordid, the right to stamp their own shamelessness upon a helpless block of stone; the right to hang it where it must perforce reflect their own cold, calculating, emotion defying inner consciousness upon the man in the street?
Beneath the grinning head, and flanking it below on either side, are impudently assertive, glaring legends that proclaim in lurid blatant type—“The Iroquois is no more.” The new temple of Thespis which, Phœnix like, has risen from the ashes of the old, is a “Music Hall.”
More harshly grating than all is the legend which announces that the new place of amusement will open to-night. Thus have insensate paint, paper and ink become accessories to a crime.
Yes, to-night the theater re-opens. “Refined Vaudeville” with a “Galaxy of Stars,” the bill boards say. And as the players caper about and sing, dance and perpetrate their quips and jokes, will they not see? They will gaze out upon the audience that applauds, and how can they fail to see the wraiths of that other audience? They will all be there, those ghostly ones. Sitting bolt upright where they died, piled row upon row in the aisles, massed in bewildering tangles at the doors—those delusive doors that would not open—they will all be there. And will they applaud, think you?
In this commercial age there is little room for sentiment. A people that will permit the fair face of Nature to be disfigured by the painter of patent medicine ads; that will gaze calmly upon a pictured ham or the announcement of the birth of a new “liver-pad” on the Palisades; that will tolerate on our boulevards flaming advertisements of the latest thing in corsets or “union suits,” is not likely to protest against a Death’s head that merely grins over the gate of a charnel house. And yet the people know. They have read of the awful things that lie behind that awful grin. Many of them have suffered, still more have seen. A few, a very few, go by on the other side of the street with suffused eyes averted, and great sobs of agony welling up in their throats.
“An’ I should live a thousand years,” I could not forget. Many horrible sights had I seen; much suffering had I witnessed; the faces of the dead had long since ceased to be a novelty to me and were no longer awesome;—I fancied I had grown callous. But that awful fire! Would that I could blunt the memory of it. Would that I might shelve it as but another experience in the land of Work-a-day.