Concurrently with its publication, _The Puppet Booth_ opened its doors--its door, rather--on Macdougal Street; an artistic venture quite as marked, you would say, for early oblivion as Susan's own. The cocoon of _The Puppet Booth_ was a small stable where a few Italian venders of fruit and vegetables had kept their scarecrow horses and shabby carts and handcarts. From this drab cocoon issued a mailed and militant dragon-fly; vivid, flashing, erratic; both ugly and beautiful--and wholly alive! For there were in Greenwich Village--as there are, it would seem, in all lesser villages, from Florida to Oregon--certain mourners over and enthusiasts for the art called Drama, which they believed to be virtually extinct. Shows, it is true, hundreds of them, were each season produced on Broadway, and some of these delighted hosts of the affluent, sentimental, and child-like American _bourgeoisie_. Fortunate managers, playsmiths and actors, endowed with sympathy for the crude tastes of this _bourgeoisie_, a sympathy partly instinctive and partly developed by commercial acumen, waxed fat with a prosperity for which the Village could not wearily enough express its contempt.
None of these creatures, said the Village--no, not one--was a genuine artist! The Theater, they affirmed, had been raped by the Philistines and prostituted to sophomoric merrymakers by cynical greed. The Theater! Why, it should be a temple, inviolably dedicated to its peculiar god. Since the death of religion, it was perhaps the one temple worthy of pious preservation. Only in a Theater, sincerely consecrated to the great god, Art, could the enlightened, the sophisticated, the free--unite to worship. There only, they implied, could something adumbrating a sacred ritual and a spiritual consolation be preserved.
Luckily for Susan, and indeed for us all--for we have all been gainers from the spontaneous generation of "little theaters" all over America, a phenomenon at its height just previous to the war--one village enthusiast, Isidore Stalinski--by vocation an accompanist, by avocation a vorticist, by race and nature a publicist--had succeeded in mildly infecting Mona Leslie--who took everything in the air, though nothing severely--with offhand zeal for his cause. The importance of her rather casual conversion lay in the fact that her purse strings were perpetually untied. Stalinski well knew that you cannot run even a tiny temple for a handful of worshippers without vain oblations on the side to the false gods of this world, and these imply--oh, Art's desire!--a donor. And of all possible varieties of donor, that most to be desired is the absentee donor--the donor who donates as God sends rain, unseen.