Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/239

Rh must, he argues, be true to his blood and return to his own; the Indian mother must be bought off, and the child reared commensurately with his station in life. The invoking of the boy's future wins the father reluctantly to the lawyer's plea, and he breaks the decision to the squaw as kindly as possible.

A stolid savage, knowing only a dozen words of English, and her native speech unintelligible to the man, she cannot convey her grief, despair and ravished mother love by impassioned rhetoric or gestures. Whoever plays the part is restricted to little more than grunts. The squaw grasps the situation slowly, consents with a nod, almost as if it were a commonplace for a woman to surrender her child and mate to an abstraction of which she understands nothing, and leaves the stage. She is not seen again, but a moment later the single bark of a pistol tells her fate. As the play is written, the whole burden of this climactic scene is left to the skill of the actress, and more than one, when the play became a popular success, was found unequal to it. But long before the renunciation scene this night, all had forgotten that Abeles was not really an Indian mother, and I rarely have seen a more spontaneous or a more emotional