The Black Cat (magazine)/Volume 2/Number 10/The Casket of Pandora

by Margaret Dodge

The Casket of Pandora.

by Margaret Dodge.

T stood in a cobwebbed corner, in the garret of a suburban villa,—a huge zinc and wood trunk, scarred, and dented, and covered with vari-colored labels. Across its top was painted in bold, white, straggling letters the word THEATER—with the effect of a child's printing on a slate. It gave forth, when opened, an odor indescribable, half sickening,—the odor of stale "make-up," the odor theatrical of grease paint and powder that hangs around oft-used stage gowns and properties. It was, in short, a wardrobe trunk, and one that had seen hard service.

To the woman who knelt there in the mellow light of the October afternoon the old trunk was more than mere zinc and wood. It was the conjurer's box, out of which memory, the magician, evoked scenes and figures many colored, ever shifting, in credible,—the scenes of that life of the theater that to-day seemed as far from her own as though it had been seven centuries instead of seven years since her first season on the stage. Ah, that first season! The lips of the kneeling woman curved into a tender scorn at the memory of it,—at the memory of that year when her other self had played milkmaids, marchionesses, what not?—in a Western repertoire company, and when the glamour of youth and boundless ambition had gilded even the dingy dressing rooms of county scat "opera houses." It was in one of the dingiest of these, she remembered,—a room where she was nightly jostled by the four other women of the company, and put off with the awkwardest corner, the poorest light, and the roughest board shelf that ever did duty for a dressing table,—it was here that her trunk had first reached her —new and shiny, and stamped with the hall mark of a well-known theatrical trunk maker. And because that special night she had, in her zeal of the novice, arrived at least an hour ahead of the earliest of her companions, she had beguiled the property man into painting on its lid that significant legend;—a task which the big unkempt fellow had performed to the tune of such glowing prophecies of days when her trunk should "go to the star dressing rooms in the toniest theaters," as had sent her into a seventh heaven of theatrical beatitude. In that hour she had forgotten the sordid details of her surroundings,—the whitewashed walls covered with scrawling penciled initials, burnt match marks, and torn red and yellow playbills,—had forgotten the flat, drab little towns of their route, the insistent drolleries of the Heavy Man, the depressing menus of flyspecked hostelries; forgotten even the long "jumps" that sent the company once a week stumbling down unlighted, unpaved streets to untimely train takings; forgotten everything, in fact, except the ardors and ambitions of this incongruous, topsy-turvy, yet passionately loved world behind the scenes.

"Ah—"

The sound came from lips that no longer curved scornfully. She shivered a little, that woman who knelt there in the afternoon sunlight, and brushed one hand across her forehead like one not sure of her own identity. It was all such worlds away from her life of to-day. And yet, once all those feelings had been hers,—and more:—the hard-worked-for promotion of the two years following, the dizzy delight of that night when a Chicago manager, visiting an Indiana river-port, had seen her play and had called her up higher to a position as leading lady in his new drama; the exultations and depressions of his months of tutelage; and then that Chicago first night, flowers, ovations, thunderous applause, the never-to-be-forgotten look of a thousand faces upturned to hers.

The woman's blue eyes were fixed now in a somnambulic stare; her lips parted, smiling, as little by little the search-light of memory illumined every detail of that performance, even to the opera cloak—a wonderful affair of sapphire-blue velvet lined with ermine—that she had worn in her great scene. The pivot of the play, her manager had called the garment, and indeed, what with being put on and off, laid across a chair-back in the firelight as a background for her dark head and proud shoulders, and finally folded around her as she strayed out into a stage snow-storm, it had played an almost human part. But she knew and he knew the exultation his words covered.

"This is only the beginning," he had said, the next afternoon, as he called at her hotel sitting room, noted the bouquets that banked her mantelpiece, and reread the flattering notices in the newspapers.

Only the beginning!

The woman who knelt in the glow of the October sunset looked down at the sapphire-blue cloak where it lay, camphor-scented, wrinkled, its folds undisturbed these four years past. She looked around at the attic storeroom, with its cedar chests, its rows of red chintz piece bags, its atmosphere of housewifely care. She rose, and walking to the window, let her eyes wander over the neat lawn, the immaculate gravel path and trim nasturtium beds, and then to the little Queen Ame villa opposite, whose irregular porticoes, golden-brown gables, and crisp, white muslin curtains, reproduced the house she lived in like the image in a looking-glass. The image of a happy home, she told herself, as she, in her soft gray house gown with its spotless collar and cuffs, was the picture of a happy matron. And in truth, she had been very happy in that pretty home and its placid, sheltered life,—so happy that only the evening before, sitting silently with her husband in the twilight, she had laughed softly at the memory of her manager's bitter prophecy at parting four years ago,—his prediction of the vain regret she would one day feel for the career she had, as he put it, "thrown over for a passing fancy." To-day, too, she laughed at the memory—but with a difference; for now her accent was all that of the stage world; and suddenly the laughter broke into sobs, and the happy woman's dark head drooped upon her heaving breast.

As she raised both hands to brush away the tears, a bit of paper fell from her unconsciously clenched fingers into the open trunk tray before her. It was the letter that had brought her to this long-forgotten corner. Through the mist over her eyes she re-read the words as through the veil:—

My dear pupil:—Four years ago, you thought the world well lost for love, and flung away success—yours and mine—as a child might a half-eaten apple. At the time I was unnecessarily angered at what I termed your desertion. But my feeling for my favorito pupil has outlived anger.

Besides, I know you. I know that long before this your artist nature must have triumphed. It is always so. You may give up the stage; it never gives up you. You may fancy that you have forgotten it; but one day, like Pandora in the old Greek legend, you open the forbidden casket—and, presto! the spirits of your past existence are alive and possess you.

Why do I write this? Because I need you,—you, who alone can understand my ideas. Because I have a new play,—whose leading character you only can create.

In two weeks I begin rehearsals at Chicago. Will you come back to the world that is yours by right of conquest? Will you gain glory for yourself and for the teacher who gave his best energies to your success? If you will—listen. It is a melodramatic request, maybe—but you know we stage people are always romantic, sentimental, if you like; we never do things in the every day fashion. Well—this afternoon at five I shall pass your home. If you consent—be on your piazza wearing the sapphire-blue cloak in which you made our triumph. Then I shall understand, and the rest will be easy.

At five o'clock! The woman's eyes sought the clock in a neighboring steeple, and noted that it lacked twenty minutes of the hour. They sought once more the Queen Anne cottage opposite, then narrowed to include the cedar chests and rows of red chintz piece bags. Finally, they returned to the trunk, where the sapphire-blue cloak still lay undisturbed.

As she looked, a strange desire surged into her heart,—the desire to assume again that enchanted garment, again to walk in fancy the once beloved boards; and then to fold the garment and its memories away forever.

Steadily, though with eyes burning like those of a long abstainer who reaches for the forbidden cup, she rose, and slowly stretching out her hand, drew the soft velvet folds of the cloak about her. But at the touch of it and the scent of it, a feeling irresistible, unbelievable, tingled through her body. Once more she lived the life of the theater; once more she smelt the odor of raw gas mingled with that of powder and grease paint; once more she heard the scraping and creaking of scenery; she felt the hum of the audience, the thrill of the overture,—all that maddening under-rhythm of the world behind the scenes, whose call is to the player as the bugle note to the soldier.

Against that overmastering voice from the past what availed mere steeling of will and clenching of hands? Nothing to the woman, who, half blinded, half sickened, forgetful of all the ties that so lately had seemed inviolable, staggered down the stairs and out upon the little porch.

The stage had called; for the moment its voice seemed to fill the universe.

Only for that moment, though. With the next, another voice spoke to ber; it came with the rush of a tiny white figure, with the fluttering of yellow curls, with the pressure of soft little hands on the velvet folds of her garment. It said: "O mamma, are you going away in the pitty cloak and leave me?"

"My darling!"

Into those words, and through the convulsive embrace that strained the clinging figure to the mother's breast, there thrilled who knows what of shame, of remorse, of that all but divine impulse compared to which the transports of the artist are only as the shadow of a dream? It was the lightning-swift revulsion of a body freed from thralldom by some supreme recoil of spirit.

Five minutes later a man strolling leisurely along the opposite side of the street shot a casual glance at the empty piazza of the pretty Queen Anne cottage, halted for an instant, his eyes on a muslin-curtained window, then, turning, strode swiftly away into the gathering twilight. What he had seen was a common enough sight at this time, and on this street of homes,—simply a woman sitting quietly behind the sunset-gilded panes, her head bent against the shining head of a child.

But in that instant the man knew that he had received his answer, and that it was unchanging.