As to the play itself—I wish I need say
nothing about it. My mind, my heart, my soul,
have all been wrenched and twisted with such emotion
as is not pleasant to feel nor expedient to speak
about. It was too real, too heart-rending, too
awful. I hate, I abhor myself for feeling things
so acutely. I wish I were a skeptic, a scoffer,
an atheist. I wish I could put my mind on the
mechanism of the play. I wish I could believe
that it all took place two thousand years ago.
I wish I didn’t know that this suffering on
the stage was all actual. I wish I thought these
people were really Tyrolese peasants, wood-carvers
and potters, and that all this agony was only a play.
I hate the women who are weeping all around me.
I hate the men who let the tears run down their cheeks,
and whose shoulders heave with their sobs. It
is so awful to see a man cry.
But no, it is all true. It is taking place now.
I am one of the women at the foot of the cross.
The anguish, the cries, the sobs are all actual.
They pierce my heart. The cross with its piteous
burden is outlined against the real sky. The
green hill beyond is Calvary. Doves flutter in
and out, and butterflies dart across the shafts of
sunlight. The expression of Christ’s face
is one of anguish, forgiveness, and pity unspeakable.
Then his head drops forward on his breast. It
grows dark. The weeping becomes lamentation,
and as they approach to thrust the spear into His
side, from which I have been told the blood and water
really may be seen to pour forth, I turn faint and
sick and close my eyes. It has gone too far.
I no longer am myself, but a disorganised heap of
racked nerves and hysterical weeping, and not even
the descent from the cross, the rising from the dead,
nor the triumphant ascension can console me nor restore
my balance.
The Passion Play but once in a lifetime!
CHAPTER VI
MUNICH TO THE ACHENSEE
If there were a country where the crowned heads of
Europe in ball costume sat in a magnificent hall,
drinking nothing less than champagne, while the court
band discoursed bewitching music, and the electric
lights flashed on myriads of jewels, Bee and Mrs. Jimmie
would declare that sort of Bohemia to be quite in
their line. And because that kind of refined
stupidity would bore Jimmie and me to the verge of
extinction, and because we really prefer an open-air
concert-garden with beer, where the people are likely
to be any sort of cattle whom nobody would want to
know, yet who are interesting to speculate about, I
really believe that Bee and Mrs. Jimmie think we are
a little low.
However, their impossible tastes being happily for
us unattainable, three hours after our arrival in
Munich found Jimmie proudly marching three sailor-hat
and shirt-waist women into the Lowenbraukeller.
It was about four o’clock in the afternoon when
we arrived, and we took our seats at a little table
in the terraced garden. A rosy-cheeked maid,
who evidently had violent objections to soap, brought
us our beer, and then we looked around. There
was music, not very good, only a few people smoking
china pipes and not even drinking beer, a few idly
reading the paper, and a general air over everybody
of Mr. Micawber waiting for something to turn up.
