The Branding Iron - Page 133/142

Pierre's experience of theater-going was exceedingly small. He had

never been in so large a play-house as this one of Morena's; he had

never seen so large and well-dressed an audience; never heard a full

and well-trained orchestra. In spite of himself, he began to be

distracted, excited, stirred. When the curtain rose on the beautiful

tropical scene, the lush island, the turquoise sea, the realistic

strip of golden sand, Pierre gave an audible oath of admiration and

surprise. The people about him began to be amused by the excitement of

this handsome, haggard young man, so graceful and intense, so

different with his hardness and leanness, the brilliance of his eyes,

the brownness of his skin. His clothes were good enough, but they

fitted him with an odd air of disguise. An experienced eye would

inevitably have seen the appropriateness of flannel shirt, gay silk

neck-handkerchief, boots, spurs, and chaparreras. Pierre was

entirely unaware of being interesting or different. At that moment,

caught up in the action of the play, he was as outside of himself as a

child.

The palms of stage-land stirred, the ferns swayed; between then: tall,

vivid greenness came Joan with her tread and grace and watchful eyes

of a leopardess, her loose, wild hair decked with flowers: these and

her make-up and her thinness disguised her completely from Pierre, but

again his heart came to his throat and, when she put her hands up to

her mouth and called, his pulses gave a leap. He shut his eyes. He

remembered a voice calling him in to supper. "Pi-erre! Pi-erre!" He

could sniff the smoke of his cabin fire. He opened his eyes. Of

course, she wasn't Joan, this strange, gaunt creature. Besides, his

wife could never have done what this woman was doing. Why, Joan

couldn't talk like this, she couldn't act to save her soul! She was as

simple as a child, and shy, with the unself-conscious shyness of wild

things. To be sure, this "actress-lady" was making-believe she was a

wild thing, and she was doing it almighty well, but Joan had been the

reality, and grave and still, part of his own big, grave, mountain

country, not a fierce, man-devouring animal of the tropics. Pierre

lived in the play with all but one fragment of his brain, and that

remembered Joan. It hurt like a hot coal, but he deliberately ignored

the pain of it. He followed the action breathlessly, applauded with

contagious fervor, surreptitiously rid himself of tears, and when, in

the last scene, the angry, jealous woman sprang upon her tamer, he

muttered, "Serve you right, you coyote!" with an oath of the cow-camp

that made one of his neighbors jump and throttle a startled laugh.