Aunty

You can't sit by yourself without ever seeing people. But where I live now, it seems as if I've moved way out into the country. If I want to see people, I have to go into the kitchen and climb up onto the sink. That's the only way I can see my neighbors. Now, in that old alley of mine I could look right into the linen dealer's, and then I was only three steps from the theater; now I am three thousand steps away - a guardsman's steps, at that!"

Aunty might sometimes be ill, but however badly she happened to feel, she never missed the theater. One evening her doctor ordered her to put her feet in sour-dough poultices; she did as he told her, but rode off to the theater and sat there with her feet in sour dough. If she had died there it would have pleased her. Thorvaldsen died in the theater; and she called that "a blessed death."

She could not imagine heaven if there were no theater there; indeed, it was never promised to us, but it surely was conceivable that the many great actors and actresses who had gone on before would want to continue their work.

Aunty had her own private wire from the theater to her room; and the "telegram" came every Sunday for coffee. Her private wire was Mr. Sivertsen, of the stage-setting department. It was he who gave the signal for the raising and lowering of the curtain, the setting or striking of the scenery.

From him she received a brief, expressive report of each of the plays. Shakespeare's Tempest he called "detestable stuff - there's so much to set up! Why, it begins with water down to the first side drop!" That is to say, the rolling billows extended far forward on the stage. On the other hand, if a play could go through five acts in one and the same set, he said it was sensible and well written; it was a play of rest that could play itself, without all that setting up to do.

In the earlier days, Aunty recalled, meaning some thirty-odd years back, when she and Mr. Sivertsen were indeed much younger, he was then already in the mechanical department, and, as she called him, her "benefactor.