And a few in the audience realized that the pretty little Mabel, with her long, dark curls and her clear soprano voice, was an old offender, serving her third term at Sherborn. A few remembered, not without a shiver, that the pirate at the end of the row, splendid in a blue and white striped cape slung from his—her—shoulder, a dagger stuck in her belt, had assisted at having her husband cut up in pieces, and, missing the electric chair by a minute and a half, was here in Sherborn for life.
It was hard to realize that one was within prison walls. These girls, most of them girls of the streets, supposedly the “dregs” of society, looked and acted like anything but dregs. Accustomed to the cheapest sort of music, the cheapest sort of amusement before they came here, they had nevertheless entered into the Gilbert and Sullivan spirit. They managed the difficult choruses superbly; they attacked their recitatives with understanding.
They had been branded, most of them, as unmanageables, incorrigibles. Yet they had been trained to a point of almost complete co-operation. The mentally defective were not only managing difficult alto, but getting around the preposterous vocabulary of the “Pirates,” such as the square on the hypotenuse and the crimes of Heliogabalus. And more than one in that audience leaned over to say to his neighbor: “If they can be trained to do this, they can certainly be trained to do something else.”
It was this realization that brought the audience, made up for the most part of prominent social workers and city officials from Boston, to its feet at the closing ensemble with all fifty-five on the stage. Policemen and pirates took off their hats and waved to the applauding audience that crowded around the stage, and the audience clapped and waved back. It was a recognition of a fact that both sides too often forget, the fact that criminals are not, after all, so different from non-criminals. It is largely because the criminal does not realize his relation to the rest of society that he breaks with it, and as for society, it forgot the human bond when it began clapping its offenders into dungeons and treating them as complete aberrations.
Mrs. Perle Wilkinson is the reason why Gilbert and Sullivan have invaded Sherborn. Mrs. Wilkinson’s official title is “chaplain.” But no chaplain ever took to himself such an amazing set of duties, and Mrs. Wilkinson admits the name must be changed.
Probably the girls themselves, as they rehearsed for the past eight or nine months under the “chaplain’s” direction, have not realized that they were enjoying an advantage which no other amateur performers in the country could command. For Saturday’s production of “The Pirates of Penzance” contained the original “business”—the “business” witnessed by those of us who saw the first presentation of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas in this country.
Mrs. Wilkinson was one-time chorus mistress for the D’Oyly Carte troupe, her husband singing the principal baritone roles. She has for many years had experience in chorus and choir training, and in addition had charge of the House of Refuge at Randall’s Island at the time when both boys and girls were admitted to that institution. It is a curious combination, and one which has brought results of the most amazing nature.
The girls have been working since September on the “Pirates.” It should not by rights have taken so long, explained Mrs. Wilkinson, but the voices were in bad shape. Most of them were hard and inflexible, patterned on the nasal attainments of the cheap vaudeville performer. An understanding of the music had slowly to be created. Then, just as everything was within a few weeks of completion, the parole board would descend and release the chief soloist and five or six of the best voices in the chorus, and work would have to be begun all over again.
This might have happened a week or so ago, for the prima donna’s time had expired and she was free to go. Which would have meant that “Pirates” would again have been postponed, probably for a much longer time, for Mabel’s part is difficult and requires a real voice. Mabel sent word to her family and stayed another week.
It was not only the fifty-five who actually took part in the opera who presented the “Pirates.” The whole prison, two hundred women, gave it. Long ago khaki skirts and blue prison dresses were piled up on one side of the machine room, and the most amazing materials took their place. Turkey reds and purples, tinsel of silver and gold, gauzy pinks and yellows surprised those machine needles, which for thirty-six years have been bobbing up and down through sombre colors. A visitor, looking in to see those who had been sentenced to “hard labor,” would have been amazed to see them putting gold braid on three-cornered hats, sewing buttons on policemen’s uniforms.