Though they had all been certain that they longed
for the privilege of attending committee meetings
and rehearsals, the dramatic association as definitely
formed consisted only of Kennicott, Carol, Guy Pollock,
Vida Sherwin, Ella Stowbody, the Harry Haydocks, the
Dave Dyers, Raymie Wutherspoon, Dr. Terry Gould, and
four new candidates: flirtatious Rita Simons,
Dr. and Mrs. Harvey Dillon and Myrtle Cass, an uncomely
but intense girl of nineteen. Of these fifteen
only seven came to the first meeting. The rest
telephoned their unparalleled regrets and engagements
and illnesses, and announced that they would be present
at all other meetings through eternity.
Carol was made president and director.
She had added the Dillons. Despite Kennicott’s
apprehension the dentist and his wife had not been
taken up by the Westlakes but had remained as definitely
outside really smart society as Willis Woodford, who
was teller, bookkeeper, and janitor in Stowbody’s
bank. Carol had noted Mrs. Dillon dragging past
the house during a bridge of the Jolly Seventeen,
looking in with pathetic lips at the splendor of the
accepted. She impulsively invited the Dillons
to the dramatic association meeting, and when Kennicott
was brusque to them she was unusually cordial, and
felt virtuous.
That self-approval balanced her disappointment at
the smallness of the meeting, and her embarrassment
during Raymie Wutherspoon’s repetitions of “The
stage needs uplifting,” and “I believe
that there are great lessons in some plays.”
Ella Stowbody, who was a professional, having studied
elocution in Milwaukee, disapproved of Carol’s
enthusiasm for recent plays. Miss Stowbody expressed
the fundamental principle of the American drama:
the only way to be artistic is to present Shakespeare.
As no one listened to her she sat back and looked
like Lady Macbeth.
The Little Theaters, which were to give piquancy to
American drama three or four years later, were only
in embryo. But of this fast coming revolt Carol
had premonitions. She knew from some lost magazine
article that in Dublin were innovators called The
Irish Players. She knew confusedly that a man
named Gordon Craig had painted scenery—or
had he written plays? She felt that in the turbulence
of the drama she was discovering a history more important
than the commonplace chronicles which dealt with senators
and their pompous puerilities. She had a sensation
of familiarity; a dream of sitting in a Brussels cafe
and going afterward to a tiny gay theater under a
cathedral wall.
The advertisement in the Minneapolis paper leaped
from the page to her eyes:
The Cosmos School of Music, Oratory,
and Dramatic Art announces a program of four
one-act plays by Schnitzler, Shaw, Yeats, and
Lord Dunsany.
She had to be there! She begged Kennicott to
“run down to the Cities” with her.
