“If you wish it,” she said, exulting secretly. “I’m sure she needs a change.”
So, Shakespeare conveniently arriving at Staithley in the hands of a troupe of actors of heroic good intentions, Mary Ellen went to fairyland with Mrs. Butterworth who proved, however, when she had grown used to sitting on a plush chair in the circle instead of on a hard bench in the pit, an unromantic guide. Mary was lost with Rosalind in Arden and Mrs. Butterworth took advantage of the interval to parade her knowledge of the private concerns of the actors. It was, for the most part, a recital of the sycophantic slush handed by the advance agent to the office of the Staithley Evening Reporter, and printed each Friday unedited. She knew how Jacques and Phoebe, though they only met when this tour began, had been married last week at. Huddersfield, and what difficulties had been overcome to secure legal marriage for a pair of strolling players who only stayed in a town for a week. And she knew where Rosalind lodged in Staithley. Mary did not find this disenchanting: for her it linked fairyland with Staithley. Rosalind was not a dream, mysterious, impalpably detached from life, but a real woman lodging in a street which Mary Ellen knew: she walked the pavements in skirts when she wasn’t ruffling it in doublet and hose, bewitching young Orlando in a glamorous wood, and if Rosalind why not, some magical day, Mary Ellen? She gasped at her audacity, at the egregious fantasy of leaping thought. She was earth-bound by Staithley, and these were the fetterless imaginings of a freer world.
She couldn’t and she didn’t look beyond Staithley, and the stage seemed something so remotely beyond her reach that she bid her thought, even from herself. She had the trick, when chocolate came her way, of getting on a chair and of putting the packet on the top of her wardrobe, hoarding it not too long but long enough to make her feel nobly conscious of severe self-restraint. So with this thought of the stage: she put it, wrapped in silver paper, at the top of her mental wardrobe, not wholly inaccessible, but difficult of access, not forgotten but put where it was not easy to remember it. But it had all the same its reactions and the chief of these operated in a manner precisely contrary to Walter’s intentions when he allowed her to go to the play. “She shan’t sing yet,” (in public, that is) he had said decidedly to Mrs. Butter-worth, and Mary Ellen, if she admitted doublet and hose to be, for her, the fabric of a dream, was spurred by that impossible to demand her possible, to demand her right to wear an evening dress and in it to appear upon a platform and to sing in public.
“Not yet,” he said. “Not for a long while yet.”
“Oh, Daddy Pate, I can’t wait for ever.”
“Nobody’s asking you to. But you’ll wait till you’re ready.”
“How long?”
“Some time. Years.”
“Years? But you told Mr. Bradshaw I was to sing in the ‘Messiah.’ I’ve been learning it.”
“You heard that? That night you came? Well, it was a foolish boast of mine. You practiced it as you have practiced other things, for the groundwork on which you’ll build.”