Page:Bambi (1914).djvu/56

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44
BAMBI

manuscript and do it herself. Once, during the first act, the Professor cleared his throat.

“Don’t do that!” said Jarvis, without pausing for the Professor’s hasty apology.

The play told the story of a woman whose God was Success. She sacrificed everything to him. First her mother and father were offered up, that she might have a career. Then her lover. She married a man she did not love, that she might mount one step higher, and finally she sacrificed her child to her devouring ambition. When she reached the goal she had visioned from the first, she was no longer a human being, with powers of enjoyment or suffering. She was, instead, a monster, incapable of appreciating what she had won, and in despair she killed herself.

There were big scenes, some bold, telling strokes, in Jarvis’s handling of his theme. Again, it was utterly lacking in drama. The author stopped the action and took to the pulpit.

At the end of the first act he stopped and looked at the faces of his audience. The Professor was awake and deeply puzzled. This strange young man was holding up to his view a perfectly strange anomaly which he called a woman. The Professor