Ignited by the tossed butt of a still-smouldering cigar that lodged in the cracks of the uneven floorboards, the theatre at Rid where Mrs Poe had made her last appearance buro the ground three weeks after her death. Ashes. Although Mr Allan told Edgar how all of his mother that was mortal had been buried in her coffin, Edgar khe somebody elses she so frequently became lived in her dressing-table mirror and were not strained by the physical laws that made her body rot. But now the mirror, too, was gone; and all the lovely and untouchable, volatile, unreal mothers went up together in a puff of smoke on a pyre of props and painted sery.
The sparks from this flagration rose high in the air, where they lodged in the sky to bee a stellation of stars whily Edgar saw and then only oain still nights of summer, those hot, rich, blue, mellow nights the slaves brought with them from Africa, weather that ferments the music of exile, weather of heartbreak and fever. (Oh, those voluptuous nights, like something forbidden!) High in the sky these invisible stars marked the points of a face folded in sorrow.
NATURE OF THE THEATRICAL ILLUSION; everything you see is false.
sider the theatrical illusion with special refereo this impressionable child, who was exposed to it at an age when there is no reason for anything to be real.
He must often have toddled on to the stage wheheatre was empty and the curtains down so all was like a parlour prepared for a séance, waiting for the moment when the eyes of the observers make the mystery.
Here he will find a painted backdrop of, say, an antique castle -- a castle! such as they dont build here; a Gothic castle all plete with owls and ivy. The flies are painted with segments of trees, massy oaks or something like that, all in two dimensions. Artificial shadows fall in all the wrong places. Nothing is what it seems. You knock against a gilded throne or horrid rack that looks perfectly solid, thick, immovable, and you kick it sideways, it turns out to be made of papier maché, it is as light as air -- a child, you yourself, could pick it up and carry it off with you and sit in it and be a king or lie in it and be in pain.
A creaking, an ominous rattling scares the little wits out of you; when you jump round to see what is going on behind your back, why, the very castle is in mid-air! Heave-ho and up she rises, amid the inarticulate cries and muttered oaths of the stagehands, and down es Juliets tomb or Ophelias sepulchre, and a super scuttles in, clutg Yorricks skull.
The foul-mouthed whores who dandle you on their pillos and tip mugs of sour painst your lips now gregate in the wings, where they have turned into nuns or something. On the invisible side of the plush curtain that cuts you off from the beery, importuobacco-stained multitude that has paid its pennies on the nail to watch these transdent rituals now e the thumps, bangs and clatter that make the presence of their expectatio. A stagehand swoops down to scoop you up and carry you off, protesting, to where Henry, like a good boy, is already deep in his picture book and there is a poke of dy for you and the er of a handkerchief dipped in moonshine and Mama in and train presses her rouged lips softly on your forehead before she goes down before the mob.
On his brow her rouged lips left the mark of .
Having, at an impressionable age, seen with his owhe nature of the mystery of the castle -- that all its ho