"Listen, love," Selma resumed, ecstactically hugging her pillow, "I want to tell you things. I wanted to yesterday, but I had to hurry off. You've got so much, that you must have the rest. Besides, it's in my mind this morning, because it was the beginning of last night——"
"Yes, tell me," Paula said faintly, bringing her a cup of coffee.
"I was first smitten with the passion to act—a gawky girl of ten at a child's party," Selma began. "I was speaking a piece when the impulse came to turn loose. It may have been because I was so homely and straight-haired, or it may have been that I did the verses so differently from the ordinary routine of speaking pieces—anyway, a boy in the room laughed. Another boy immediately bored in upon the scoffer, downed his enemy and was endeavoring hopefully to kill him with bare hands, when I interfered. My champion and I walked home together and left a wailing and disordered company. That's the first brush.
"My home was Danube, Kentucky. They had a dramatic society there. Eight years after the child's party, this dramatic society gave A Tribute to Art. Where the piece came from is forgotten. How it got its name never was known outside of the sorry brain that thrust it, deformed but palpitating, upon the world. Mrs. Fiske couldn't have made other than a stick of the heroine. The hero was larger timber, though too dead for vine leaves. But, I think I told you about the Big Sister—put there in blindness or by budding genius. There were possibilities in that character. Danube didn't know it, or it wouldn't have fallen to me. Indeed, I remember toward the end of the piece—a real moment of windy gloom and falling leaves, a black-windowed farmhouse on the left, the rest a desolate horizon—in such a moment the Big Sister plucks out her heart to show its running death.
"I had persisted in dramatic work, in and out of season, during those eight years, but it really was because the Big Sister didn't need to be beautiful that I got the part. I wove the lines tighter and sharpened the thing in rehearsals, until the rest of the cast became afraid, not that I would outshine them, but that I might disgrace the society on the night o' nights. You see, I was only just tolerated. Poor father, he wasn't accounted much in Danube, and there was a raft of us. Poor, dear man!
"Danube wasn't big enough to attract real shows, so the visiting drama gave expression to limited trains, trap-doors, blank cartridges and falling cliffs"—Selma Cross chuckled expansively at the memory—"and I plunged my fellow-townsmen into waters deeper and stormier than Nobody's Claim or Shadows of a Great City. Wasn't it monstrous?"
Paula inclined her head, but was not given time to answer.
"A spring night in Kentucky—hot, damp, starlit—shall I ever forget that terrible night of A Tribute to Art? All Danube somebodies were out to see the younger generation perpetuate the lofty culture of the place. Grandmothers were there, who played East Lynne on the same stage—before the raids of Wolfert and Morgan; and daddies who sat like deans, eyes dim, but artistic, you know—watched the young idea progress upon familiar paths.... The heroine did the best she could. I was a camel beside her—strode about her raging and caressing. You see how I could have spoiled The Thing last night—if I had let the passion flood through me like a torrent through a broken dam? That's what I did in Danube—and some full-throated baying as well. Oh, it is horrible to remember.
"The town felt itself brutalized, and justly. I had left a rampant thing upon every brain, and very naturally the impulse followed to squelch the perpetrator for all time. I don't blame Danube now. I had been bad; my lack of self-repression, scandalous. The part, as I had evolved it, was out of all proportion to the piece, to Danube, to amateur theatricals. I don't know if I struck a false note, but certainly I piled on the feeling.
"Can you imagine, Paula, that it was an instant of singular glory to me—that climax?... Poor Danube couldn't see that I was combustible fuel, freshly lit; that I was bound to burn with a steady flame when the pockets of gas were exploded.... My dazed people did not leave the hall at once. It was as if they had taken strong medicine and wanted to study the effect upon each other. I came out from behind at last, up the aisle, sensing disorder where I had expected praise, and was joined by my old champion, Calhoun Knox, who had whipped the scoffer at the child's party. He pressed my hand. We had always been friends. Passing around the edge of the crowd, I heard this sentence: