Nonna Lisa, the old Italian, slipped the white dress deftly over the mutinous head, so muffling the half-shriek. The manager laughed. "Hurry up then—on with you!" The child sprang away with a bound. "I've seen this too many times before," he added; "it's an attack of 'the last night's nerves.'—Hark!"
The tumult was drowning the last notes of the orchestral intermezzo, as the little girl, clad now wholly in white, ran in upon the stage and coming again down the centre raised her hand as if to command silence. With the gallery to see was to obey; the floor and balconies having subsided the applause from above died away.
The child, standing in the full glare of the footlights with the sunny skyey spaces and overlapping blue hills behind her, half-faced the brilliant house as, without accompaniment, she began to sing:
"There is a green hill far away
Without a city wall."
The childish voice sustained the simple melody perfectly, and it was evident when the little girl began the second verse that she was singing wholly to please herself and some one in a proscenium box. Before the close of the first stanza the gallery experienced a turn, the audience as a whole a sensation. Night after night the gallery gods had made it a point to be present at that hour of the continuous performance when the Little Patti—such was the name on the poster—sang either her famous Irish song "Oh, the praties they are small", or "The Holy City", and followed them by a coon dance the like of which was not to be seen elsewhere in New York; for into it the child threw such an abandonment of enthusiasm that she carried herself and her audience to the verge of extravagance—the one in action, the other in expression.
And now this!
A woman sobbed outright at the close of the second verse. The gallery heard—it hated hysterics—and considered whether it should look upon itself as cheated and protest, or submit quietly to being coerced into approval. The scales had not yet turned, when someone far aloft drew a long breath in order to force it out between closed teeth, and this in sign of disapproval. That one breath was, in truth, indrawn, but whether or no there was ever an outlet for the same remained a question with the audience. A woollen cap was deftly and unexpectedly thrust between the malevolent lips and several pair of hands held it there until the little singer left the stage.
What appeal, if any, that childish voice, dwelling melodiously on the simple words, made to the audience as a whole, cannot be stated because unknown; but that it appealed powerfully by force of suggestion, by the power of imagination, by the law of association, by the startling contrast between the sentiment expressed and the environment of that expression, to three, at least, among the many present is a certainty.
There is such a thing in our national life—a constant process, although often unrecognized—as social anastomosis: the intercommunication by branch of every vein and veinlet of the politico-social body, and thereby the coming into touch of lives apparently alien. As a result we have a revelation of new experiences; we find ourselves in subjection to new influences of before unknown personalities; we perceive the opening-up of new channels of communication between individual and individual as such. We comprehend that through it a great moral law is brought into operation both in the individual and the national life. And in recognition of this natural, though oft hidden process, the fact that to three men in that audience—men whose life-lines, to all appearance, were divergent, whose aims and purposes were antipodal—the simple song made powerful appeal, and by means of that appeal they came in after life to comprehend something of the workings of this great natural law, need cause no wonderment, no cavilling at the so-called prerogative of fiction. The laws of Art are the laws of Life, read smaller on the obverse.
The child was singing the last stanza in so profound a silence that the fine snapping of an over-charged electric wire was distinctly heard: