"Uncle Charlie wants you to be able to say you have seen certain of the great actors," she had said, but Emmy Lou did not grasp that she was seeing the actor until it was explained to her afterward. She had no idea that a great actor would be a poor, tottering old man, white-haired and ragged, who brought tears to the onlooker as he lifted his hand to his peering eyes, standing there bewildered upon the stage.
Aunt Louise took her to another play called "The Two Orphans." She understood this less. "The name on the program is Henriette. Why do they call it 'Onriette'? Is it a cold in their heads?" She was cross and spoke fretfully because she was bothered.
But the pantomime! Christmas Eve, the theater brilliant with lights and garlands, evergreens wreathing the box wherein she sat in her new crimson dress with Alice, Rosalie, Amanthus, and Charlotte, and Mrs. Pulteney just behind—fair and lovely Mrs. Pulteney who, like the mother of Charlotte, did not live with her husband, though Emmy Lou is doing her best to forget it.
The lights go down, the curtain rises, the pantomime is beginning!
Can it be so? Palace and garden, an open market-place, the public fountain, the shops and dwellings of a town, and threading the space thus set about, a crowding, circling throng, jugglers, giants, dwarfs, fairies, a crutch-supported witch, a white-capped baker! It is the world of the green and gold book!
The goose-girl is here, about to put her teeth into an apple. The beggar-maid and her king are recognized. A princess and a prince, kissing their finger-tips to the boxes, are the center of the stage.
No, Harlequin in his parti-colored clothes with his dagger, whoever Harlequin may be, is that center, causing the baker at a touch to take off his head and carry it under his arm, striking the apple from the lips of the goose-girl, tipping the crown from the head of the prince, twitching the scepter from the fingers of the princess.
Clownery? Buffoonery? Grotesquerie? Emmy Lou never suspects it if it be. Rather it is life, which with the same perversity baffles the single-hearted, bewilders the seeker, and juggles with and decapitates the ideas even as Harlequin dismembers the well-meaning and unoffending baker. With this difference, that in the world Emmy Lou is gazing on all will be made right before the end.
The play moves on. Who are these who now are the center of the scene? Emmy Lou has not met them before? Sad and lovely Gabriella at her wheel in her woodland cottage, in reality a princess stolen when in the cradle, and Bertram her husband, forester of the ignoble deeds, whose hands have wrung the white doe's neck in wantonness.
And who are these as the play moves on? Florizel, once high-hearted prince, forced to dig in the nether world for gold to replace that forever slipping through the unmended pocket of Gonderiga his wife, standing by, princess of the slovenly heart, who is no princess in truth at all, but a goose-girl changed in the cradle.