AT THE PLAY.
"The Land of Promise."
"I'm about fed up with God's Own Country," says the waster in the play, a youth who, after exchanging a safe thousand a year at Bridge for the dangerous delights of "Chemin-de-fer," had been invited by a stern sire to migrate to Canada. And even so he had not been present during the Third Act to see the things that we saw, or he would have learnt some more discouraging facts which are never mentioned in the philosophy of the emigration-agents; for example, that the solitude and wide spaces of the Golden West seem to induce, even in the honest native worker, a reversion to the state of a dragon of the prime. But he had already seen, in the case of Norah Marsh, whom poverty had driven to seek the shelter of her brother's roof on a Manitoba farm, how the drudgery and petty jealousies of a narrow Colonial ménage, the familiar society of hired hands, and the lack of life's common amenities, had developed a gently-bred Englishwoman into a sour-tongued shrew.
Extract from "The Prentice (Manitoba) Post":—"The wedding was quite an impromptu affair, the happy pair going straight to Mr. Taylor's shack, where they are spending the honeymoon quietly."
Norah Miss Irene Vanbrugh.
Frank Taylor Mr. Godfrey Tearle.
Worse was to follow when, as a sole escape from the bitter spite of her plebeian hostess, she consented to marry a barbarian who was looking for a woman-of-all-work to manage his primitive shack. Here, having already mislaid her feminine charm, she loses all sense of honesty. First, when ordered to do her household duties—which were of the essence of the contract—she declines to obey till he uses brute force; and then, when he demands of her the attitude of a wife (a very embarrassing scene), she protests that this was no part of the bargain.
I can't imagine what she supposed the bargain was about, if it didn't require her to be either wife or servant.
Terrorism was the man's simple solution; but those who looked, in the last Act, for a tamed and adoring shrew were to be disappointed. Brute force had only produced a patient obedience; and it was not till a damaged crop had brought them to the edge of ruin that she consented to become his ministering angel. But by that time we knew too well her distaste for Manitoban methods to believe in the sincerity of this sudden conversion.