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188 MELODRAMA
shown by elegant debutantes who attended the opening in evening dress and drank champagne to the night-shift's health. It was well meant.
The public, no matter how vaguely aware of lost principles, made a moral code of whatever came to hand. Sport became sacred. Tennis no one dared play slackly; from Wimbledon's Centre Court to sixpenny courts in public parks all upheld its rules like ritual, while newspapers reported international contests with Homer's gravity. Each swimmer and golfer set his heart on efficiency. Character, said the preacher, will out. People found something they could believe however unlike it might be to anything the New Thought had expected them to believe. True, the intellectual drama came to blossom now ; it was amazing — particularly when, at the height of Shaw's apotheosis, the old idea of the clerical matinee was employed upon Saint Joan so that dog-collars swarmed to the theatre as they had not done since The Sign Of The Cross.
To fill imagination's vacuum there was the " semi-scientific " storytelling of Poe, available, though neglected, all these many years. Murder mysteries flooded the stage. Mary Roberts Rinehart, expert in detective stories, collaborated with Avery Hop wood, the playwright. The Bat, by them, nervewracked New York in 1920 and London in 1922 with its " Who done it? " murders. The Cat And The Canary, seen by New Yorkers and Londoners in 1922, was by an American actor, John Willard. Critical opinion hailed the now popular technique— the withholding of essential information from the audience until the last moment — as a brand-new twentieth-century novelty. None suspected that the novelty lay solely in the mood of the public, now willing at last to be stirred to no moral (or immoral) end.
There was immediately a new fashion in heroines. The young woman who lived in their atmosphere of horror was never born of author's fancy ; she simply grew out of the public's desire to be thrilled. In all performances where lights were switched off suddenly while crooked fingers clutched at curtains, she conformed to the same model. She suffered. Whether there were reason for it or not she went on suffering. Once the author omitted to provide a reason: though without any cause for complaint whatsoever she appeared in the usual dire distress until she fainted and was carried "off" to bed without a word of explanation for the state she was in. Sometimes, of course, she had justification enough. In one play she was roasted, in another she came very near to the electric chair, in another she was locked in a cabinet on the understanding that it would fill with acid fumes to corrode the skin off her face. Her virtue was not endangered or even mentioned. Such fears troubled her slightly compared with " the