New Faces.

by Myra Kelly.

"THE PLAY'S THE THING"

A business meeting of the Lady Hyacinths Shirt-Waist Club was in progress. The roll had been called. The twenty members were all present and the Secretary had read the minutes of the last meeting. These formalities had consumed only a few moments and the club was ready to fall upon its shirt waists. The sewing-machines were oiled and uncovered, the cutting-table was cleared, every Hyacinth had her box of sewing paraphernalia in her lap; and Miss Masters who had been half cajoled and half forced into the management of this branch of the St.

Martha's Settlement Mission was congratulating herself upon the ease and expedition with which her charges were learning to transact their affairs, when the President drew a pencil from her pompadour and rapped professionally on the table. In her daytime capacity of saleslady in a Grand Street shoe store she would have called "cash," but as President of the Lady Hyacinths her speech was:

"If none of you goils ain't got no more business to lay before the meetin' a movement to adjoin is in order."

"I move we adjoin an git to woik," said Mamie Kidansky promptly. Only three b.u.t.tonholes and the whalebones which would keep the collar well up behind the ears lay between her and the triumphant rearing of her shirt waist. Hence her zeal.

Susie Meyer was preparing to second the motion. As secretary she disapproved of much discussion. She was always threatening to resign her portfolio vowing, with some show of reason, "I never would 'a' joined your old Hyacinths Shirt-Waists if I'd a' known I was goin' to have to write down all the foolish talk you goils felt like givin' up."

It seemed therefore that the business meeting was closed, when a voice from the opposite side of the table broke in with:

"Say, Rosie, why can't us goils give a play?"

"Ah Jennie, you make me tired," protested the Secretary.

"An' you're out of order anyway," was the President's dictum.

"Where?" cried Jennie wildly, clutching her pompadour with one hand and the back of her belt with the other, "where, what's the matter with me?"

"Go 'way back an' sit down," was the Secretary's advice, "Rosie meant you're out of parliamentry order. We got a motion on the table an' it's too late for you to b.u.t.t in on it. This meetin' is goin' to adjoin."

But Jennie was the spokesman of a newly-born party and her supporters were not going to allow her to be silenced. Even those Lady Hyacinths who had not been admitted to earlier consultations took kindly to the suggestion when they heard it.

"I don't care whether she's out of order or not," one ambitious Hyacinth declared, "I think it would be just too lovely for anything to have a play. They have 'em all the time over to Rivington Street an' down to the Educational Alliance."

"Rebecca Einstein," said the Secretary darkly, "if you're goin' to fire off your face about plays an' the Educational Alliances you can keep your own minnits, that's all! Do ye think I'm goin' to write down your foolishness? Well, I ain't."

Again the President plied her gavel. "Goils," she remonstrated, "this ain't no way to act. Say, Miss Masters," she went on, "I guess the whole lot of us is out of order now. What would you do about it if you was me?"

"I should suggest," Miss Masters answered, "that the motion to adjourn be carried and that the whole club go into committee on the question raised by Miss Meyer."

"I move that we take our woik into committee with us," cried Miss Kidansky, not to be deflected from her b.u.t.tonholes. And from such humble beginnings the production of Hamlet by the Lady Hyacinths sprang.

Hamlet was not their first choice. It was not even their tenth and to the end it was not the unanimous choice. During the preliminary stages of the dramatic fever Miss Masters preserved that strict neutrality which marks the successful Settlement worker. She would help--oh, surely she would help--the Hyacinths, but she would not lead them. She had never questioned their taste in the shape and color of their shirt waists. Some horrid garments had resulted but to her they represented "self expression," and as such gave her more pleasure than any servile following of her advice could have done. She soon discovered that the lat.i.tude in the shirt waist field is far exceeded by that in the dramatic and she discovered too, that the Lady Hyacinths, though they seldom visited the theatre had strong digestions where plays were concerned.

"East Lynne" was warmly advocated until some one discovered a grandmother who had seen it in her youth. Then:

"Ah gee!" remarked the Lady Hyacinths, "we ain't no grave s.n.a.t.c.hers. We ain't goin' to dig up no dead ones. Say Miss Masters, ain't there no new plays we could give?"

Miss Masters referred them to the public library, but not many plays are obtainable in book form, and the next two meetings were devoted to the plays of Ibsen, Bernard Shaw, Vaughan Moody. When Miss Masters descried this literature in the hands of the now openly mutinous Secretary she felt the time had come to interfere with the "self activity" of her charges. She promptly confiscated the second volume of "G.B.S." "For,"

she explained "we don't want to do anything unpleasant and the writer of these plays himself describes them as that."

"Guess we don't," the President agreed. "We got to live up to our name, ain't we? An' what could be pleasanter than a Hyacinth?"

"Nothing, of course," agreed Miss Masters unsteadily.

"There's one in this Ibsen book might do," Jennie suggested. "It's called 'A Dolls' House,' that's a real sweet name."

"I am afraid it wouldn't do," said Miss Masters hastily.

"What's the matter with it?" demanded Susie Meyer.

"Well, in the first place, there are children in it--"

"Cut it! 'Nough said," p.r.o.nounced the President. "Them plays wid kids in 'em is all out of style. We giv' 'East Lynne' the turn down an' there was only one kid in that. What else have you got in that Gibson book?

Have you got the play with the Gibson goils in it? We could do that all right, all right. Ain't most of us got Gibson pleats in our shirt waists?"

"I don't see nothin' about goils," the Secretary made answer, "but there's one here about ghosts. How would that do?"

"Not at all," said Miss Masters firmly.

"What's the matter with it?" asked one of the girls abandoning her sewing-machine and coming over to the table. "I seen posters of it last year. They are givin' it in Broadway. The costoomes would be real easy, just a sheet you know and your hair hanging down."

"It's not about that kind of ghost," Miss Masters explained, "and I don't think it would do for us as there are very few people in the cast and one of them is a minister."

"Cut it," said the President briefly, "we ain't goin' to have no hymn singin' in ours. We couldn't, you know," she explained to Miss Masters, "the most of us is Jewesses."

"Katie McGuire ain't no Jewess," a.s.serted the Secretary. "She could be the minister if that's all you've got against this Gibson play. I wish we _could_ give it. It's about the only up-to-date Broadway success we can find. The librarian says you can't never buy copies of Julia Marlowe's an' Ethel Barrymore's an' Maude Adams' plays. I guess they're just scared somebody like us will come along an' do 'em better than they do an' bust their market. Actresses," she went on, "is all jest et up with jealousy of one another. Is there anythin' except the minister the matter with 'Ghosts?'"

"Everything else is the matter with it," said Miss Masters. "To begin with, I might as well tell you, it never was a Broadway success. It's a play that is read oftener than it's acted and last year, Jennie, when you saw the posters, it only ran for a week."

"Cut it," said the President. "We ain't huntin' frosts."

The brows of the Hyacinths grew furrowed and their eyes haggard in the search. Everyone could tell them of plays but no one knew where they could be found in printed form and whenever the librarian found something which might be suitable Miss Masters was sure to know of something to its disadvantage.

And then the real stage, the legitimate Broadway stage intervened.

Albert Marsden produced Hamlet and the Lady Hyacinths determined to follow suit.

"It's kind of old," the President admitted, "but there must be some style left to it. They're playin' it on Broadway right now. An' we'll give it on East Broadway just as soon as we can git ready. Me and Mamie went round to the library last night an' got it out. It's got a dandy lot of parts in it: more than this club will ever need. An' it's got lots of murders an' sc.r.a.ps, an' court ladies an' soldiers an' kings.

It's our play all right!"

The sea of troubles into which the Lady Hyacinths plunged with so much enthusiasm swallowed them so completely that Miss Masters could only stand on its sh.o.r.e, looking across to Denmark and wringing her hands over the awful things that were happening in that unhappy land.

Fortunately she had a friend to whom she could appeal for succour for the lost but still valiant Hyacinths. He was the sort of person to whom appeals came as naturally as honors come to some men and, since he had nothing to do and ample time and money with which to do it, he was generally helpful and resourceful. That he had once loved Miss Masters has nothing to do with this story. She was now engaged to be married to a poorer and busier man, but it was to Jack Burgess that she appealed.

"Of course I know," said he when he had responded to her message and she had anch.o.r.ed him with a tea-cup and disarmed him with a smile, "of course I know what you want to say to me. Every girl who has refused me has said it sooner or later. You are saying it later--much later--than they generally do, but it always comes. 'You have found a wife for me.'"

"I have done much better than that," she answered, "I have found work for you." And she sketched the distress of the Hyacinths in Denmark and urged him to go to their a.s.sistance.

"But, my dear Margaret," he remonstrated, "What can I do? You have always known that 'something is rotten in the state of Denmark,' and yet you have let these poor innocents stir it up. I have often thought that poor Shakespeare added that line after the first performance. I intend to write that hint to Furniss one of these days."

"You will write it," said Margaret Masters, "with more conviction after you have seen _my_ Denmark."