In her sympathy she had assumed the pose of the bewildered child, and her face and hands were "puckered up," as she had described his brain.
This was Miss Cushman's last visit to Richmond, when she came as a reader, having left the dramatic stage. When I first knew her she was at the height of her wonderful career as an actress. I met her at the house of a friend, and she often visited me when in Richmond. She became very fond of our children and they were fascinated by her. My little Corbell asked her:
"What is the use of acting? Why don't you be it--just be it?"
"Ah," she replied, "there is the trouble. I do 'be it,' my child. There is where strength and vitality go--in just being it."
Corbell was anxious to see her play, but she would not let him see her as Meg Merrilies.
"No Meg Merrilies must ever come into the life of a child like that," she said. "Of all the people I have ever known, he would be the most deeply impressed by Meg Merrilies."
A friend had sent in some birds for Corbell, and he said to Miss Cushman:
"I wasn't brought up thinking it any wrong to shoot birds or any wrong to eat birds, and all the good people I know shoot them and eat them. But things that have such pretty feathers and such pretty talk in their throats must have souls, and so I don't know for sure about shooting them and eating them, not for really, truly sure, you know."
"I think you are right, my child, about the birds having souls, and I believe horses and dogs have souls, too. You know, dear, I believe in reincarnation. We eat the body of the bird, the feathers we put in our cap, and the soul is the voice that must sing in another bird."
After that Corbell did not feel so bad about the shooting of the birds. "The soul goes out and another bird catches it and sings."
Charlotte Cushman told me how her idea of Meg Merrilies had come to her. On the evening of the day that she had been unexpectedly called upon to play the character she was standing in the wing awaiting her cue, book in hand, when she heard one of the gypsies say, "Meg--why, she is no longer what she was; she doats." In a flash there came to her the conception of the character in which she was to make her greatest success.
I never saw her Lady Macbeth on the stage, but retain a vivid impression of the awesome personation when she showed me in my own room how she had played the sleep-walking scene upon her first appearance in drama when she was nineteen. I still see her tragic face with the dawning horror creeping over it as she looked at the stain on her hand. With the sudden impulse of a frightened woman, she hurriedly took up a fold of her dress to rub it off. The futility of the effort flashing upon her, she removed her clutch from her dress and a deeper terror gloomed into her face. She caught up her long hanging hair and tried to rub away the stain. With her great awe-compelling eyes fixed upon her hand she uttered the words, "Out, damned spot!" in a tone of anguished despair that thrilled me with terror. She did not act Lady Macbeth; she _was_ Lady Macbeth in all her pride, all her ambition, all her determination, all her despair. She said that she did not like to play the character because it exhausted her. It is easy to understand that a woman of cold and unscrupulous ambition would drain the life of one so gentle and sweet-natured as Charlotte Cushman.