As the colder weather shut me more into the haunted rooms, Tommy thought it might be a good thing if I took an interest in the entertainment which the I. O. O. F., of which he was a Fellow, was undertaking for the benefit of their new hall. As the sort of service counted on from the wives of prominent members, it might also be beneficial to trade. On this understanding I did take an interest, with the result that the entertainment was an immense success. It led naturally to my being put in charge of the annual Public School Library theatricals and a little later to my being connected with what was the acute dramatic crisis of the Middle West.
There should be a great many people still who remember a large, loose melodrama called "The Union Spy," or "The Confederate Spy," accordingly as it was performed north or south of Mason and Dixon's line, participated in by the country at large; a sort of localized Passion play lifted by its tremendous personal interest free of all theatrical taint. There was a Captain McWhirter who went about with the scenery and accessories, casting the parts and conducting rehearsals, sharing the profits with the local G. A. R. The battle scenes were invariably executed by the veterans of the order, with horrid realism. Effie wrote me that there had been three performances in Taylorville and Cousin Judd had been to every one of them.
With the reputation I had acquired in Higgleston, it came naturally when the town, by its slighter hold on the event, achieved a single performance, for me to be cast for the principal part, unhindered by any convention on behalf of my recent mourning. Rather, so close did the subject lie to the community feeling, there was an instinctive sense of dramatic propriety in my sorrow in connection with the anguish of war-bereaved women. One can imagine such a sentiment operating in the choice of players at Oberammergau. In addition to my acting, I began very soon to take a large share of the responsibility of rehearsals.
I do not know where I got the things I put into that business. Where, in fact, does Gift come from, and what is the nature of it? I found myself falling back on my studies with Professor Winter, on slight amateurish incidents of Taylorville, on my brief Chicago contact even, to account to Higgleston for insights, certainties, that they would not have accepted without some such obvious backing. Nevertheless the thing was there, the aptitude to seize and carry to its touching, its fruitful expression, the awkward eagerness of the community to relive its most moving actualities. Never in America have we been so near the democratic drama.
In the final performance I surprised Tommy and myself with my success, most of all I surprised Captain McWhirter. He was arranging a production of "The Spy" at the twin towns of Newton and Canfield, about two hours south of us, and asked me to go down there for him and attend to alternate rehearsals. Tommy was immensely flattered, pleased to have me forget my melancholy, and the money was a consideration. I saw the captain through with two performances in each town, and three at Waterbury. All this time I had not thought of the stage professionally. I returned to Tommy and the wall paper after the final performance with a vague sense of flatness, to try to pull together out of Higgleston's unwilling materials the stuff of a satisfying existence.
Suddenly in April came a telegram and a letter from Captain McWhirter at Kincade, to say that on the eve of production, his leading lady had run away to be married, and could I, would I, come down and see him through. The letter contained an enclosure for travelling expenses, and a substantial offer for my time. No reasonable objection presenting itself, I went down to him by Monday's train.
CHAPTER IV
On the morning between the second and third performance of "The Spy," for McWhirter never let the people off with less than three if he could help it, as I was sitting in the dining room of the Hotel Metropole at Kincade, enjoying the sense of leisure a late breakfast afforded, I saw the captain making his way toward me through an archipelago of whitish island upon which the remains of innumerable breakfasts appeared to be cast away without hope of rescue from the languid waiters, steering as straight a course as was compatible with a conversation kept up over his shoulder with a man, who for a certain close-cropped, clean-shaven, ever-ready look, might have been bred for the priesthood and given it up for the newspaper business. It was a type and manner I was to know very well as the actor-manager, but as the first I had seen of that species, I failed to identify it. What I did remark was the odd mixture of condescension and importance which the captain managed to put into the fact of being caught in his company. He introduced him to me as Mr. O'Farrell, Mr. Shamus O'Farrell, as though there could be but one of him and that one fully accredited and explained. He defined him further—after some remarks on the performance of the evening before in a key which seemed to sustain the evidence of Mr. O'Farrell's name in favour of his nationality—as manager of the Shamrock Players Company, billed for the first of the week in Kincade.
It turned out in the course of these remarks, which the captain delivered with a kind of proprietary air in us, that Mr. O'Farrell—he called himself The O'Farrell in his posters—had a proposition to make to me. He put it with an admirable mixture of compliment and depreciation, as though either was a sort of stopcock to meet a too reluctant modesty on my part or a too exorbitant demand for payment. I was afterward to know many variations of this singular blend, and to acquaint myself definitely how far it is safe to trust it in either direction before the stop was turned, but for the moment I was under the impression, as no doubt O'Farrell meant I should be, that a thing so perfectly asked for should not be refused.