The Always Ready Club

by GRETCHEN FINLETTER

1

SOME thirty years ago at Miss Spence’s School, a teacher announced a plan which she said must last us our lifetime and through all the trials and ordeals that would come to us. The teacher was Miss Bovée, who taught a subject known as Elocution. Her demand was that even if her pupils were faced by a major operation, a war, or a proposal of marriage, — much gigglings from the little girls, — they must be able, as members of Miss Bovée’s Always Ready Club, should the surgeon, general, or lover cry “Recite!” to give immediately three poems without a single mistake, and with expression.

Miss Bovee was completely successful. I do not believe that I or any of the other girls in her classes have ever forgot ten our three recitations, and under strange circumstances they rise to our lips, with expression.

The school of some three hundred girls had Elocution once a week, in classes of eight, for forty-five minutes. We were required to learn a minimum of sixteen lines a week and our range of selection was extremely limited. The Schooner Hesperus was sunk some eighty times a term, a hundred more reciters brought the good news from Ghent to Aix, a furl her group made Abou Ben Adhem’s tribe increase, or went Up the airy mountain, Down the rushy glen, with “The Fairies.”

There must have been more interest ing or modern verse but we did not know of it. We were bound by a purple book called The Silver Treasury, with five illustrations. After putting mustaches on the ladies’ faces and scratching the name of our favorite college along the sides of the book, we settled down to a long career of recitations.

Miss Bovee sat at the end of a table with her classbook open in front of her, where all could see what marks were given. The pupil’s name was called and, standing at the end of the room and facing Miss Bovee and her leering classmates, she recited. Miss Bovee closed her eyes, her lips moved silently, her facial expression changed constantly while she emphasized moods with a toss of her head.

At the conclusion, the trouble began. Miss Bovee would pick out the two most important lines and ask to have them repeated. Then she would stand up and give them herself the right Avay and shot with dramatics.

To the new pupil it was horrifying. She realized that to get a good mark she would have to be a damn fool; and even if she were willing to take that painful step, she did not understand the technique.

So Miss Bovee explained the “one, two, three.” This meant that before the great line of the poem the pupil was to pause and to count “one, two, three,” and then give it everything. In “Abou Ben Adhem,” the angel writes Abou’s request.

The “one, two, three” was at first given audibly and it wras always a great struggle to say it silently, and quite impossible not to move the lips.

Miss Bovee broke down self-consciousness. She insisted on varied voices and much expression, but we were never allowed to invent our own. It must be as complete an imitation of her style as possible. “The Wreck of the Hesperus” was her great favorite. It gave rare opportunity for a deep and a high voice in the unhappy dialogue between the father and his little daughter, and it was full of “one, two, three’s.”

2

A RECITATION which we all learned and for which Miss Bovee had a profound admiration was a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson about the mountain and the squirrel. It was nineteen lines long and became a basic “must” of the Always Ready members. It contained many problems.

The first was the pronunciation of the word “squirrel.” As a little animal that skips up and down trees, it remained a normal squirrel, but when it had its famous and victorious argument with the mountain, it became a “squ-i-rrr-il” — and woe to the girl who did not roll it out and add an extra dot or twro to the i”s.

The next demand was deeply embarrassing. When the squirrel spoke, we must resemble a squirrel. This was to be accomplished with merry eyes and an extremely roguish manner. We balked. Could we suggest it in another way — say, by simulating nuts in our cheeks? No, we must twinkle. This was an unhappy period and the nearest I remember to mutiny. But teachers are powerful. With sulky expressions we figuratively waved our tails. Says the squ-i-rrr-il: —

There was a deep rivalry between Miss Spence, the principal of die school, and Miss Bovee over Shakespeare. Miss Spence owned Shakespeare. She had an enormous class once a week, where she read us the plays and we learned the more famous speeches.

The classes were held in the Assembly Room, We sat on camp chairs in long rows, each of us having a clothbound copy of the play. Miss Spence stood high above us on a platform, reading and acting and having, I always felt, the time of her life. With her there were no closed eyes, no silently moving lips. She flung herself into the parts, she loved the drunken scenes full of bad puns, but like Miss Bovee she insisted that what we learned must be given in an exact copy of her style. At a certain moment we would be made to recite some passage in unison with identical inflection.

Miss Spence was particularly fond of The Merchant of Venice. For some reason which was never made clear to us, she insisted that in the opening line of Portia’s great speech in the courtroom scene, the voice should rise at least an octave on the word “strained.”

It was not just a slight lifting of the voice: it was an enormous vocal jump. The effect of ninety girls together making this very unnatural sound never disturbed her and she would lead us like an orchestra with a swoop of her arm.

In Shylock’s speech we let ourselves go and fairly shrieked, “You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog!” but quickly Miss Spence raised her hand. The dog, like the squirrel, had become a different animal. lie was no longer a friendly Dawg: he was forever a Dahk.

Miss Spence wore voluminous, bright-colored silk dresses which had a peculiar and penetrating rustle. I have never heard a dress since that could give quite the same crackle and hiss. For us the sound was a signal.

Miss Spence often showed the parents of prospective pupils through the school. Once she brought a visiting father and a mother into the elocution class. Miss Bovee had unfortunately been poaching on Miss Spence’s territory and had been bootlegging us some Shakespeare. The decision had to be made quickly whether to bury Caesar Miss Spence’s way or Miss Bovee’s. We were flustered by our audience but we were loyal to Miss Bovee.

“As Caesar loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honor him; but, as he was ambitious, I slew him.”

Miss Bovee felt Brutus had killed regretfully, and our voices became hushed for “slew.” Miss Spence listened to two girls, but it was like a red rag to her. She stood up herself and hurled out: “ But, as he was ambitious, I slew him! ” And there was no doubt that Brutus was delighted.

Miss Bovee thanked Miss Spence and Miss Spence swished out, followed by the startled parents, who apparently were not aware of how swords had crossed. But we left Brutus for the rest of the period, and Miss Bovee after a quick blow of her nose asked for volunteers of the Always Ready Club, and her closed eyelids were pink.

3

AT THIS time E. H. Sothern and Julia Marlowe were giving a cycle of Shakespeare at the Empire Theatre and we were all encouraged to go. We knew the plays so well that we had a sense of authorship. But when Sothern and Marlowe diverged from the interpretation of the school, we were unanimous that they were wrong. One mannerism of Sothern’s, however, impressed me deeply: he never said “my”; he said “meh.”

This seemed to me fascinating and daring, and I was determined, in spite of Miss Bovee, that I would never say “my” again.

The fact that Sothern and Marlowe were married was romantic to us, and we used to search through their grease paint for some glint of the deep love that we knew must be burning between them. Sothern was a very dirty old Shylock with matted heard and sunken eyes, and Julia Marlowe a particularly Yassar-like Port ia, and they met only once in the courtroom scene, but several girls would always claim that there had been a moment when Shyloek had looked at Portia in a “married” sort of way.

I was never convinced of this phenomenon, but when they took their rather stately curtain calls together, first to the right, then to the left, then to the top balcony, and then to each other, surely at that moment there was a mild, connubial glow. That was the moment when all Miss Spence’s pupils broke into their wildest applause.

At that time actors and actresses were mysterious and remote and no magazine ever divulged their weight, their love affairs, or how they did their manicures. But the interest in them was just as deep, and we assumed that as they were in their parts, so must they be in their private lives. Half t he school worshiped Maude Adams. It was known then as a crush, but the joys of this jelly-like state were much enhanced if they were shared by a dozen others.

I belonged to a smaller and more organized group who loved William Gillette. He was then playing Secret Service, Held by the Enemy, and his great role of Sherlock Holmes. The advantage of the Gillette circle, as opposed to the Maude Adams party, lay largely in the fact that William Gillette was a man. Little girls of nine and ten adored Maude Adams. It was silly. To shiver over Sherlock Holmes in his silk dressing gown when he cried, “Quick, Watson, the needle!” and then bared his arm and stuck the hypodermic into the upper wrist, and then gazed out over the audience with t hat, oh, so tired look - that was a moment of mature experience in one’s life. It made the Peter Pan goings on mere childish falderal.

We like him best in his dusty uniform of the Union officer in Secret Service; in his Smoking jacket; wearing his cap with the visor at each end; in his dressing gown; or as he looked when he lit his pipe. Many were the girls who at home of an evening wandered about the rooms in striped wrappers, holding imaginary pipes between their clenched teeth as they looked out wearily into the night solving little crimes.

But we were humble and we were timid. It would not have occurred to us to wait at the stage door to see William Gillette leave the theater. Instead we combined on a second-tier stage box where, if we hung far out, we could s e him standing in the wings before his entrance. There was revealed to each of us in turn, by changing seats rather noisily, not Holmes, the detective, but Gillette, the man. He was equally wonderful. He looked just as tired, just as misunderstood, and just as full of dope as when he was on the stage.

We were convinced he was a real drug fiend, and in the wonderful daydreams that we wove we forced him to give up the terrible morphine. And then came the great scene when he thanked one for having rescued him. Somehow he shed the dressing gown, was in a dusty uniform, and lo, it was a beautiful love scene.

“But I am too old for you.”

“No — no — ”

It ended in a vague mist and we began all over again. It was very, very silly and we were very, very happy.

Admiration for Gillette affected our elocution badly, for Gillette had a dry, almost monotonous voice admirably suited to the great Holmes but somehow lacking in the timbre necessary for Robert Browning. I would recite: —

in an ancient and weary voice and with no expression. My marks shot down but I would not give in. I felt I was at last an actress creating a role.

This summer the Office of Civilian Defense held one of its many air-raid rehearsals in which a shock feeding unit of which I was a member was asked to make a special test for speed, with all equipment. At the first wail of the siren, the group was to rush to a certain fire department and make coffee and revive the wounded firemen while doctors and first-aiders tended the other injured.

A Led Cross captain who had been sent to time us kept her eyes on her wrist watch and gave us all a real sense of panic. Four large firemen stretched themselves out on tables and cried out that they were in great agony and only a drink could save them. A little lady, a new member of the shock feeders, hidden by a too large helmet, feverishly started stirring the pot, which looked like an oversized garbage can. In it was suspended the coffee in a gauze bag surrounded by gallons of tepid water.

An elderly canteener of many courses and little experience proffered a great deal of advice. “You should have heated the water first in small quantities,” she insisted.

“You’ve been eighteen minutes already!” announced the Red Cross captain.

“Hurry up, girls, we’re bleeding to death!” yelled the firemen.

The lady, who had been murmuring some incantation at the great pot, now turned furiously.

The water suddenly boiled. An unknown alumna of the Always Ready Club had survived a crisis.