We rode a taxi to the Broadway theater where Julian had reserved our seats, and we mingled in the lobby with a crowd of well-dressed Eupatridians of both sexes. It was clear even before we entered the auditorium that this would be a performance infinitely grander than the recruiting film I had seen in the Dominion Hall in Williams Ford. The movie to be shown here, which was called Eula’s Choice, was advertised with colorful Lobby Posters, which portrayed a female in antiquated dress, and a man with a pistol; also a horse and an American flag. Julian explained that Eula’s Choice was a patriotic story, its debut timed to coincide with the Independence season. He didn’t expect much in the way of refined drama, he said, but the movie had been produced by a local crew known for its extravagant camera-work and lavish stage effects. “It ought to be a fine spectacle,” he said, “if nothing else.”
Calyxa was ill-at-ease among the haughty Eupatridians, and she seemed relieved when a team of ushers appeared to shoo us into the auditorium, where we took our assigned seats. “All the money that changes hands here,” she said, “could feed a thousand orphans.”*
“That’s not the way to think of it,” Julian reproved her. “By that reasoning there would be no art at all, nor philosophy, nor books. This is an independent theater, not a Eupatridian institution. The profits pay the salaries of working actors and singers, who would otherwise go hungry.”
“Singers as well as actors? In that case I withdraw the remark.”
The entire theater was powered by an in-house dynamo which thrummed from the basement like a snoring Leviathan. The lights were electric, and they dimmed in unison as the orchestra—a full brass band, with strings—struck up the overture. The curtain rose, revealing a huge white Screen and the veiled booths in which the Voice-Actors and Sound Effects persons worked. As soon as the darkness was complete the beam of the projector threw an ornate title on the screen:
THE NEW YORK STAGE AND SCREEN ALLIANCE
presents
EULA’S CHOICE
A Musical Story of Antiquity
accompanied by the Dominion Stamp of Approval.
“This ought to be rich,” remarked Calyxa, who had seen movies under less elaborate circumstances in Montreal; but Julian shushed her, and the music swelled and subsided as the story began.
I won’t describe my astonishment—the reader can take it for granted. I will say that, for once, Julian’s pride in Eastern culture seemed justified and wholly excusable. This was Art, I thought; and on a grand scale!
The story took place at some unspecified time during the Fall of the Cities. The main characters were Boone, the beleaguered pastor of an urban Church; Eula, his fiancé; and Foster, a thrifty industrialist.
The show was divided into three Acts, itemized in a Program Book the ushers had distributed. Each Act featured three songs, or “Arias.”
There was no singing at first, however—only Spectacle, as the audience was treated to flickering scenes of a City of the Secular Ancients in the last stage of its decline. We saw many impossibly tall buildings, artfully constructed of paper and wood, but fully real to the eye; we saw streets crowded with Business Men, Atheists, Harlots, and Automobiles.* Boone and Eula appeared, working together in Boone’s small pious church, and bantering in a way that suggested their approaching nuptials; but they were interrupted by a troop of Secular Policemen who barged in and accused Boone of speaking such forbidden words as “faith” and “heaven.” These thugs led Boone away to prison, while Eula wept piteously. Boone, as he was dragged through the street in chains, sang the first song, which according to the program was:
Aria: The hand of God, not gentle.
The filmed actor was expressive, and he was voiced by a masculine tenor who lent fire and discipline to the lyrics. (The hand of God, not gentle but just / Descends upon the wicked by and by, and so forth).
If the Secular Policemen by this brutish behavior had earned themselves a place in Hell, their city was already halfway there. We witnessed a montage of strikes, rioting, and fires, the tall buildings beginning to burn as if they had been built of kindling. Now the audience was introduced to Foster, the industrialist, who labored mightily to subdue a fire in his iron mill, which had been set ablaze by unruly workers; but he was forced back by the heat and fallen timbers. Against this backdrop of destruction Foster wiped his sooty brow and sang in resignation the
Aria: Gone, all that I have built.
All this was sorrowful enough to melt the hardest cynic’s heart, but it wasn’t finished. Eula appeared once more. She had left the scene of Boone’s cruel arrest, only to find her family home engulfed in flame, and her mother and father crying out from a window from which they could not be rescued. The flames consumed them. Overwhelmed with grief, Eula stumbled on to the jail where she believed Boone had been taken; but that building, too, had burned to the ground.
Several of the Eupatridian ladies in the audience were moved by this tragic scene, and they dabbed their eyes and blew their noses in a manner that distracted from Eula’s excellently performed
Aria: Lost and alone among the ruins,
which was the conclusion of Act I.
The lights came up for an intermission. Many of the Eupatridians adjourned at once to the lobby; but Calyxa and Julian and I were young and staunch of bladder, and we kept our seats. Images from the film were still vivid in my mind’s eye, and I began to think about the lost wonders of the Secular Ancients. I said to Julian, “The Secular Ancients made movies, didn’t they?—you told me so, I think.”
“Movies too numerous to count, though none survive, unless they’ve been locked away in the Dominion Archives.” The Dominion’s Cultural Committee kept a large stone building in New York City, Julian explained, where it preserved antique texts and documents and other items too blasphemous to be seen by the public. No one outside the licensed clergy knew what treasures it contained.
“And their movies had recorded sound, and color photography?”
“They did.”
“Then why can’t we have such movies? Or at least a larger number of the ones we do make? I don’t understand it, Julian. The simpler technologies of the past are no mystery to us. We may not have bountiful supplies of oil, but we can burn coal to much the same effect.”
“We could make movies with recorded sound,” Julian said, “but the resources haven’t been allotted that way. The same is true of that typewriter by which Theodore Dornwood seduced your services. We could build a typewriter for every human being in Manhattan if we liked; but it would be a reckless expenditure of iron or rubber or whatever they make typewriters out of—materials the Senate assigns to Eupatridian manufacturers, who in turn supply the military with weapons and other necessities.”
I had not thought of it in those terms. I supposed every Trench Sweeper in Labrador could be considered a typewriter not manufactured or a movie not produced. A painful bargain, but what patriot could disagree with it?
“An artist,” Julian said, “or a small manufacturer or shopkeeper, has to make do with whatever resources trickle down as surplus from above, or with second-pickings from some local Tip. The justice of this is debatable, of course.” He turned to Calyxa. “What do you think of the film so far?”
“As drama?” She rolled her eyes scornfully. “And the songs—excuse me, the arias—are simple-minded. The female singer is good, though. A little flat in the upper registers, but bold and fluent overall.”