The spirit of the play is always kept in the Village.  Let us take the opening night of the “Wigwam” as a case in point.

The Indian note is supreme.  It is not only the splendid line drawings of Indian chiefs, forming the panels of the room—­those mysterious and impressive shades created by the imagination of Lew Parrish—­it is the general mood.  Only candles are burning,—­big, fat candles, giving, in the aggregate, a magical radiance.

The victrola at the end of the room begins to play a curious Indian air with an uneven, fascinating, syncopated rhythm.  A graceful girl in Indian dress glides in and places a single candle on the floor, squatting before it in a circle of dim, yellow light.

She lifts her dark head with its heavy band about the brows and shades her eyes with her hand.  You see remote places, far, pale horizons, desert regions of sand.  There are empty skies overhead, instead of the “live-colour” ceiling.  With an agile movement, she rises and begins to dance about the candle, and you know that to her it is a little campfire; it is that to you, too, for the moment.  Something like the west wind blows her fringed dress; there is a dream as old as life in her eyes.

Faster and faster she dances about the candle, until at last she sinks beside it and with a strange sure gesture—­puts it out.

Silence and the dark.  The prairie fades....  The little dark-wood tables with their flowers and candles begin to glow again; the next musical number is a popular one step!...

CHAPTER VIII

Villagers

Although the serious affairs of life are met as conscientiously by the man or woman who has the real spirit of the Village, nevertheless each of them assuredly shows less of that sordidness and mad desire for money so prevalent throughout the land....

The real villager’s life is better balanced.  He produces written words of value, or material objects that offer utility and delight. He sings his songs.  He has a good time.—­From the Ink Pot (a Greenwich Village paper).

I quoted the above to a practical friend and he countered by quoting Dickens’ delightful fraud, “Harold Skimpole”: 

     “This is where the bird lives and sings!  They pluck his
     feathers now and then, and clip his wings, but he sings, he
     sings!...  Not an ambitious note, but still he sings!”

And my friend proceeded heartlessly:  “‘Skimpole’ would have made a perfect Villager!”

It is hard to answer cold prose when your arguments are those of warm poetry.  Not that prose has power to conquer poetry, but that the languages are so hopelessly dissimilar.  They need an interpreter and the post is not a sinecure.

I want to try to throw a few dim sidelights on these Villagers whom I love and whom I know to be as alien to the average metropolitan consciousness and perception as though they were aboriginal representatives of interior and unexplored China.  They are perhaps chiefly strange because of their ridiculous and lovely simplicity.