The only form of human love that atrophies the heart is the love
of self.
Marion Wright sat in the centre seat of the third row of the stalls,
shivering in spite of her sables. It was the dress rehearsal of her
first play, that play on which she had spent herself to the verge of
mental bankruptcy.
The nauseating presentiment of failure, the distaste and scorn of her
own work, were upon her, which the artist never escapes, which return as
acutely after twenty successes as in the hours of suspense before the
first essay. Marion's surroundings were not of a nature to reassure her.
To her unaccustomed eyes the empty, dimly lit theatre, swathed and
bandaged in dust-sheets, looked ominously dreary. Had any one ever
laughed in this shrouded desert? The long lines of stalls huddled under
their wrinkled coverings stretched before and behind her. The boxes were
shapeless holes of pallid grime. It was as if a London fog had trailed
its dingy veil over everything. There was a fog outside as well, and the
few electric lights which had been turned up peered blurred and yellow.
An immense ladder, three ladders tied together, reared itself from the
stalls to the roof. Something was being done to the lights on the
ceiling. Tired-looking men in overcoats were creeping into the
orchestra, thrusting white faces under screened lights, and rustling
papers on stands.
Marion had the theatre to herself except for a few whisperers in the
back row of the stalls--her maid, an attendant, one or two actors of
minor parts who did not appear in the first act, and a few costumiers.
It was fiercely cold, and she had not slept for several nights. She
wished she had never been born.
A magnificent-looking woman, wearing her chin tilted slightly upwards,
was squeezing herself and an immense fur coat towards her along the
stalls, and sat down beside her. This was Lenore, the leading lady.
She turned a colourless, beautifully shaped face and heavy eyes with
bistred lashes towards Marion.
"I suppose we shall have to wait about two hours for Mr. Montgomery,"
she said apathetically.
"Does he always keep people waiting?"
"Always, since he made his great hit in _The Deodars_."
There was a moment's silence.
"Mr. Montgomery does not like his part," said the leading lady
tentatively, hanging a hand in an interminable white glove over the back
of the stall in front of her.
Marion's face hardened.
"It's not a sympathetic part," she said, "but an artist ought not to
think of that."
"No, it's not sympathetic," acquiesced Lenore, turning up her fur
collar. "It seems as if the principal man's part never _is_ sympathetic
in a woman's play. If the central figure is a woman, the men grouped
round her are generally prize specimens of worms. I wonder why. In your
play, now, Maggie's everything! George does not count for much, as far
as I can see. Even Maggie had not much use for him."
"She loved him," said the author, with asperity.
"Did she? Sometimes when I'm playing Maggie to Montgomery's George I
wonder if she did. And I just wonder now and then if I would have thrown
him over as she did. I mean for good and all. It seems to me--if she'd
cared for him, cared _really_, you know----"
"She did," interposed Marion harshly.
"Wouldn't she have quarrelled and made it up again? Would she have been
quite so hard on him?"
"Yes, she would. Think, just think what she must have suffered in the
third act, the scene at the Savoy, when, loving him as she did, trusting
him as she did, she saw him come in with----"
"Well, I expect you know best," said Lenore, whose interest seemed to
flag suddenly; "anyhow, she suffered, poor thing. Women like her always
do, I think." She rose slowly. "I may as well go and dress. I suppose we
shall be here till midnight."
The orchestra struck up.
"Anyhow, she suffered."
The violins caught up the words and dinned them over and over again into
Marion's ears. Women like Maggie, women with deep hearts like
herself--for was not Maggie herself?--they always suffered, always
suffered, always!--said the violins.
The manager suddenly appeared in front of the curtain and walked swiftly
over the little bridge from the stage to the stalls. He was a small,
sturdy, thin-lipped, choleric man, who looked as if he were made up of
energy; energy distilled and bottled. Some one had said of him that his
hat was really a glass stopper, which might fly off at any moment.
It was off now. There had evidently been an explosion. He held a note in
his hand.
"Montgomery has given up the part," he said. "He was odd at rehearsal
yesterday. I felt there was something wrong. He said he had no show. Now
he says he's too ill to come--bronchitis."
The sense of disaster which had been hanging over Marion all day slipped
and engulfed her like an avalanche. She felt paralysed.
"Then the play can't go on?" she said.
"If it had to happen, better to-night than to-morrow night," said the
manager. "Montgomery is as slippery as an eel. I don't suppose he has
got bronchitis; but I have no doubt if I rushed over there at this
moment, I should find him in bed with a steam-kettle. He would play the
part."
"What will you do?" gasped Marion.
"Do?" he said. "Do? There's only one thing to do. Go through with the
play! It will start in two minutes, and we shall see what the understudy
can make of it. He's as clever as he can stick, and he's word perfect,
at any rate."
"Who is he?"
"A Mr. Delacour; at least, that's his stage name. He's been in America
for the last five years. Clever enough, but a rolling stone. He's not to
be depended on, poor devil; but it's Hobson's choice--we've got to
depend on him."
The manager sat down beside her and clapped his hands.
The lights suddenly burned up behind the curtain, the curtain rose and
the play began.
Some plays, some books, some men and women, possess a mysterious force
which, for lack of a better word, we call vitality. Those who possess it
not call it by all manner of ugly names. But, nevertheless, it is the
great gift, the power that overcomes, which makes life on a large scale
possible, which makes the soldier, the lover, the saint, possible. Most
of us are only half alive. Our work is half dead. We deal in creep-mouse
sentiment, and call it love. We write pathetically of our impotence to
live, and call it resignation. We who have never been young, compare
notes with each other on how to remain senile, and call it the art of
growing old.
But others go through life, and spend themselves on it, piece by piece,
with ardour as they go. These are the teachers--only they never teach.
They know. If we want to learn anything, we can watch them. And some of
us, again--and this is the hardest fate of all--come into life
inadequately equipped, not provisioned for a prolonged journey. What
little we have, and what little there is of us, we expend on the first
part of life, and having nothing left for middle age.
Such a woman was Marion. She had talent, and she had, besides--as the
manager beside her had divined--one live play in her. But he doubted
whether she had more than one. She looked insolvent, a dweller in the
past, crippled by an acute memory. No doubt it was this self-regarding
memory which had resulted in the play. It was obviously a personal
experience, and as she was rich enough to share the risk of producing
it, he was more than ready to put it on. It was full of faults; it was
melodramatic, it was amateurish, but it was passionately alive. The pit
and the gallery would love it; and if the stalls found it a little
cheap, what of that? He had considerable _flair_. He believed it would
succeed.
He glanced once or twice furtively at the handsome, unhappy-looking,
richly furred woman beside him--no longer young, "past youth, but not
past passion," with much of the charm of youth lingering in her graceful
erectness, her pretty hair, her delicate pallor.
She had told him feverishly that the only thing she cared for--had ever
cared for--was art, success, fame. He had heard something like it often
before.
He wished, with a half-sigh, that a little of that uneasy, egotistic
ambition might have been instilled into the heart of Lenore, for whom
he had a compassionate, bottled-up attachment of many years' standing.
Poor Lenore! What an actress, and what a hopelessly womanly woman, still
mourning the providential demise of an impossible brother who had lived
on her.
She was on the stage now, looking about seventeen, all youth and garden
hat and white muslin.
Marion's face twitched. She was living her own youth over again.
There was a pause. Lenore picked a rose to gain time, and looked into
the wings.
"Delacour!" roared the manager, bouncing up in his stall and then
sitting down again.
"We cut it here," said Lenore, advancing to the footlights, "and he
doesn't know. It is not his fault. He's waiting for his cue. See, Mr.
Delacour! Leave out that bit about the daisies, and come on at
'happiness.'"
The understudy came on, and Marion's heart thrust suddenly at her like a
rapier, and left her for dead, staring in front of her.
This was no understudy. This was the original George of the drama when
it was first acted. Marion saw the lover of her youth come on and kiss
Lenore's hand, with the same gesture with which he had once kissed
hers--in the sunshine, in a Kentish garden, beside a lavender bush, with
a bumble bee in it, ten endless years ago.
He was hardly changed--a little thinner, perhaps, but not a day older in
his paint; the same reckless, debonair creature whom Marion had loved,
who had wounded her and grieved her, whom she had discarded at last with
bitter anger, whom she had never forgotten, whom she remembered with
anguish.
The curtain was down before she recovered herself, and the conductor was
waving his baton.
The manager turned to her with some excitement.
"If only he can keep it up!" he said. "Delacour puts life into the
love-making. He makes love well, don't you think?"
"Admirably."
"If only he can keep it up!" repeated the manager.
Through the two acts which followed, the understudy kept it up. He did
more. He acted with an intensity that made the rest of the play somewhat
colourless. At the end of the scene at the Savoy, just before the
curtain fell, he added a sentence of his own.
In a second, before she knew what she had done, Marion had sprung to her
feet, and had said in a harsh, loud voice:
"That last sentence is not in the part."
The play stopped. The hurrying waiters with dishes stood stock still and
gaped, as astonished as if the interruption had been in real life. Some
of the supers at the little tables in the background got up to see what
was happening.
Delacour, wineglass in hand, came forward to the footlights, and their
eyes met.
"I beg your pardon," he said. "You say it is not in the part. I thought
it was. I will omit it in future."
"You will do no such thing!" bawled the manager, leaping to his feet and
shaking his fist at him. "Omit it! Why, Miss Wright, it's an
inspiration. Gets him the whole sympathy just at the critical moment.
And what a curtain! Good God! What a curtain!"
"Isn't it?" said Lenore. "Leave out my bit at the end altogether, and
make _that_ the curtain. Don't you agree, Miss Wright? And, look here,
Mr. Delacour, take the front centre here."
"Start again at 'falsehood,'" said the manager briskly to Lenore. "Now,
then, everybody. Sit down at the back there. Now----"
The play started again. Marion, astonished at her own violence, ashamed,
shattered by conflicting emotions, speechless, could only bow her
approval of the change, not that the manager cared a pin whether she
approved or not.
_Was Delacour acting?_ Marion knew that he was not. And as the play
proceeded it changed in character. The words were the words she had
written. Many of them were the words he had used himself, but his
passion transformed them. They took on a new meaning. It was Maggie who
was becoming a mean figure in spite of her grandiloquence--perhaps
because of it. Her rigid principles, her petty, egotistic pride, her
faultless demeanour jarred on the audience. Lenore, like a true artist,
caught the novel side of the situation and emphasised it. Her Maggie
dwindled, dwindled, until the man held the stage alone, dominated it.
Marion had never before seen his side of the miserable drama in which
her happiness had made shipwreck, had never before seen her own
character in this light. It was as if he were saying the truth at last,
defending himself at last--which he had never done in real life.
Finally repulsed, silent under her scornful invective, Delacour gathered
himself together and went off magnificent in defeat.
The curtain fell for the last time.
The tiny audience, strengthened by the rest of the cast who were not
needed in the final scene, broke into rapturous applause. The manager,
excited and radiant, clapped with the rest.
"He's immense. He's immense!" he kept on saying. "Delacour's the making
of it. He's immense! Hang Montgomery! He may have bronchitis till he's
blue. Delacour makes the play. I will fetch him!"
He disappeared behind the curtain, and in a few minutes reappeared,
dragging Delacour with him to introduce him to Marion.
"We have met before," she said faintly, putting out her hand.
"Did we ever really meet?" he said gently, taking it for a second in
his.
He seemed quite exhausted. Now that she saw him close at hand, he looked
much older. And his face was grievously lined, deteriorated.
She tried to thank him, to express her gratitude for the way he had
extricated them from a great difficulty; but her words were so
hesitating and frigid that the manager broke in, shaking him warmly by
the hand.
Delacour bowed his thanks, murmured something conventional, and was
gone.
Every one was in a hurry to go, too. Marion remained a moment longer
talking to the manager, and then they went together through the royal
box to the private entrance, where her brougham was waiting. Just as
they reached it, he was called away, and an attendant let her out.
Waiting beside her brougham, in the rain, holding the door for her, was
Delacour, in a shabby overcoat, his hat in his hand.
Again their eyes met in a long look. His, sombre, melancholy, humble,
had a great appeal in them.
She seemed encased in some steel armour, which made movement and speech
wellnigh impossible. She thanked him inaudibly.
He shut the door, said "Home" to the coachman, and turned away.
The carriage drove off.
Then something in Marion snapped. Her other self, the poor woman in her
whom she had denied and starved and brow-beaten, pounced upon her and
called out suddenly, desperately:
"Forgive him. What is life without him? Think of the last ten years. Has
there been one day in all those grinding years when you have not longed
to see him? Has there ever been one day when you would not have given up
your ease and luxury for a cottage with him? And now he has come back
into your life. He still loves you. Are you going to lose him again? You
were vindictive, and you know it. Go back now and kneel down in the wet
street and ask him to forgive you. Quick! quick!--before it is too
late."
The other woman in her, the woman who had discarded him, stopped her
ears.
"No, no; I had good reasons for breaking with him. They hold as good
to-day as ten years ago."
"Very well," said the other scornfully. "Then never dare to tell
yourself again that you ever loved him. Let that lie cease. Your love
was only pretty words and pride and self-seeking, and a miserable streak
of passion. What do you care what happens to him? Don't go back. You
don't care for him. You never cared. Never, never. And he knows it. He
is telling himself so now--at this moment."
She stopped the brougham. She trembled so much that she could hardly
tell the man to drive back to the theatre. He turned slowly, the horse
evidently reluctant, and in a few minutes she was once more at the
private entrance. The door was closed. No one was to be seen in the
little _cul de sac_. The lamp over the door was out. She got out and
rang--once, twice, and yet again. Then she realised that every one else
had hurried away as precipitately as she had done, for the dawn was
already in the sky. She dragged herself back into her carriage and drove
home, shaking in every limb.
After all, it did not matter. She would get his address from the manager
first thing to-morrow, and go straight on and see him, and sacrifice her
pride, and beseech him to take her back. She had been too proud. She
saw that at last. She would say so. She saw at last that resentment is
disloyalty. She would say so. She was so sick of her present life that
she would say anything. And he loved her still, thank God! And--thank
God, too--she was rich. And it was obvious that he was poor. She had
much to share with him. And she was still attractive. Other men still
wished to marry her. She was pretty, still. All that she had, all that
she still was, she would give him. And this long nightmare of the last
ten years would pass at last, as that other nightmare of her youth had
passed--her wretched home, with a drunken father and a heartbroken
mother. That had passed, though at the time it had seemed as if it would
endure for ever. Her parents had died, and her vulgar, kindly, rich aunt
had adopted her. And now this second nightmare was at an end, too. The
ache would go out of her life, the long daily hunger and thirst would
cease. There would be no more dreadful homecomings after evenings of
amusement; no more sick recoil and despair at waking and seeing the pale
finger of the dawn upon the blind. She would be happy at last.
Marion cried herself to sleep that night. Next morning, as early as she
dared, she was at the theatre. The manager was going through his usual
paroxysm of anxiety and ill-temper which preceded a first night. He
could hardly find time for a word with her. There was a hitch in the
scenery of the last act; the lighting was not yet repaired; one of the
actors of the minor parts was ill, for whom an understudy had not been
provided; and the head scene-shifter had sprained his wrist.
"I won't keep you," said Marion, as he hurried up, fuming; "I only want
Mr. Delacour's address. I should like to see him at once--to--to talk to
him about his part. There are a few points----"
"Delacour's address?" said the manager. "Don't know it. Oh, yes, of
course!" He tore a little notebook out of his pocket. Then he suddenly
looked up at her. "Don't go to him. Send for him, if you like, or see
him here. He'll be here in an hour--at least, he will be if Smith is
worth his salt. I've bribed him to keep a lynx eye on him day and night,
and bring him up to time. But don't go and see him. I suppose you know
he----"
"He's married?" gasped Marion.
The manager laughed scornfully.
"He _drinks_, my dear lady. He drinks. He's only just out of an
inebriates' home. But don't alarm yourself. If he's watched, I dare say
we shall manage all right. I hope to goodness we shall! Don't look so
scared. Smith has charge of him, and he is accustomed to the job. He was
quite sober last night. I hear he always is after an outbreak. You're
going home? Well, I think you're right. Yes, very cold here now. Quite
right not to stop. See you again later."
Marion drove home and shut herself up in her room. There was no need to
lock the door. She was alone in the world, alone in her handsome, empty
house, where she had always been alone, even before her aunt died and
left it to her.... She would always be alone now. Only yesterday she had
hoped--what had she not hoped! She had seen him there in imagination
changing this weary house into a home, brilliant and faulty as ever,
lovable as ever, beloved as ever, surrounded by her lavished adoration.
She had seen their children running along its wide passages, playing in
its empty hall.
And now.
_He drank._
She shuddered. She had seen drink once. She knew. Never while she lived
would she forget what her home had been like. The past crowded back upon
her with all its vileness and nausea, all its unspeakable degradation
and violence, wrapped up with maudlin sentiment and cheap tears. The
sweat stood on her forehead.
What an escape she had had! To think that if it had not been for that
chance word of the manager's she would by now have pledged herself
irrevocably to a drunkard, waded back into the slough from which she had
emerged. Oh, what a merciful fate it had been, after all, which had
parted them! How faithless she had been all these years! How little she
had realised how the divine love and wisdom had watched over her, had
shielded her!
"Oh! thank God! Thank God!" she groaned. The other self in her, the poor
dying woman in her, arose on her deathbed and screamed to her, screamed
insane things. If a certain voice is too long ignored, its dictates seem
at last insane.
"Take him back all the same!" gasped the dying voice. "Marry him.
Devote yourself to him, day and night. Cure him. Set him up. You love
him. Love can do it, if anything can."
"I can't do it," groaned Marion. "Mother tried, but it was no good."
"Then do as she did, try and fail."
"I can't. He would break my heart."
"Let him break it."
Marion strangled the terrible, urgent voice with fury, and then cried as
if her heart would indeed break. The silenced voice spoke no more.
* * * * *
The play was a great success. Delacour, who had recently returned from
America, was the making of it. Lenore was the first to acknowledge it,
though his success was at her expense. Her part seemed only as a foil to
the sombre splendour of his.
The play ran and ran.
Delacour made no further effort to speak to Marion. He avoided her
systematically. He, on his side, was watched, was spied on, was
protected from himself, was never given a chance of yielding to
temptation. His self-imposed gaoler loved him. He was very lovable. The
manager was enthusiastic. Ignorant people said he was reformed. It
almost seemed as if he might grasp the great position to which his
talent entitled him. But how often before he had fallen just when he was
doing well! No one could depend on him. His record in America gradually
became known. It was a record of hideous outbreaks and cancelled
engagements.
By dint of the strenuous will of others, to which he yielded himself, he
was kept on his feet through the whole run of the play.
And then, released from surveillance, exhausted in mind and body--he
fell again.
He blazed like a comet across the theatrical world, and then set as
suddenly as he had risen.
Marion heard of it and shuddered. She had had a narrow escape.
* * * * *
She never wrote another play--at least, she never wrote another that
pleased a manager. She said she had not time. In spite of her success,
she felt a distaste for things theatrical. And perhaps she found that
success is not as warm a garment for a shivering life as she had
expected. There is a little fleecy wrap called affection, within the
reach of all of us, which she might have donned. But, as she often said,
there was, unfortunately, no one for whom she had much affection. She
was alone in the world. Her interest in the theatre was gradually
replaced by religion. Once she heard with real regret that Lenore had
lost her memory, and chloral was hinted at as the cause. She thought of
trying to save her, of making an earnest appeal to that better self
which, according to Marion, exists in all of us. But when she made
further inquiries about her, with a view to rescuing her, she was
daunted by the discovery that Lenore had been privately married to
Delacour for some time past, and that her declension, which was really
due to drink, dated from the time of the marriage.
A year passed. Delacour began to make fitful reappearances, then more
frequent ones. He took and kept regular engagements. But his wife
returned no more.
Presently Marion's own play was revived with success. It was one of
Delacour's greatest parts. And Marion went to see it, hidden behind the
curtains of her box.
The years since she had last sat in that box had not dealt kindly with
her. Her discontented face showed that she was one of the many victims
of arrested development, still hampered in middle age by the egotistic
longings of youth. In youth we all want to receive instead of to give,
to be loved, to be served, to be admired. Middle age is the time to
reverse engines, the time to love, to serve, to give rather than to
receive. Marion had not learned that elementary lesson of life. We all
recognise them at sight, the nervous, fretful faces of the middle-aged
men and women who want to be loved. And love knows them, too, and--flies
them.
The manager, somewhat pinched and grizzled, as from a long fast, came in
to see her between the acts, and growled out his disapproval of his
leading lady.
"She's nothing to Lenore," he said.
"Is she too"--Marion sought for a charitable word--"too ill to act?"
"She is too ill to act," said the manager. "She will never act any more.
She is dying."
There was a silence.
"She is dying of drink," he said; "and if there is such a place as
heaven, she is very near it. And if there is such a person as God, I
hope she will say a word for me when she gets there."
Marion did not speak. She was horrified.
"She would marry Delacour," said the manager. "I begged her to marry me.
Over and over again I asked her. But she said I could do without her,
and Delacour couldn't. They fell in love with each other at this very
play when it was first put on. I saw it coming, and it spelt disaster
for her. But it was the real thing; and when the real thing comes, we
all have to knock under to it. It doesn't come often. Most of us are
quite incapable of it. I have only seen it once or twice. I dare say I
have never felt it, though I should have liked to take care of Lenore,
and not let her work so hard, and make a garden for her. She loves
flowers and running water. I made the garden just on the chance, but she
has never seen it. Down in Sussex it is, with a little old-world cottage
in it. It is a pretty place. Pergola; small cascade with rustic bridge;
fishpond, with green-tiled floor to show up the gold-fish. And a rose
garden. I should have liked her to see it. But she and Delacour! It was
like a thing in a book. They fell in love, and he behaved well. He
wouldn't marry her. He said he knew he couldn't cure himself of
drink--that his will was too weak. But she was determined to marry him.
She said her will was strong enough for both of them. I don't know about
her will. I think it was her love which was strong enough. He gave in at
last and married her. I know I shouldn't have held out as long as he
did. And for a little while things went well. He was at her feet. He
told me it was the first time any woman had ever cared for him. For a
little while I almost hoped--and then, in spite of his love for her, in
spite of everything, he began to drink again. Then she told him that
what he drank she should drink, and she stuck to it. If he drank, she
drank the same. If he 'nipped,' she did the same. When he got drunk, she
got drunk. It was kill or cure. And he loved her. That was her hold over
him. It took time, but she broke him of it. He suffered too much seeing
her kill herself for his sake, and it steadied him. He _had_ to give it
up."
"Then, now--why doesn't she give it up, too?"
"She can't," said the manager, his face twitching. "She was too far gone
by the time he was cured. She had not his physique. She was absolutely
played out. She is dying, and they both know it. But she does not mind.
She has saved him. That was the point. She is perfectly happy. She does
not care about anything else. He is a great actor. She has lived to see
him recognised. Some women wouldn't have risked it. But I suppose a
woman will take any risk if she loves, at least, women like Lenore
will."
"And does he--in spite of this--does he love her still?" said Marion,
with dry lips.
The manager was silent.
"I did not think any one could care as much for Lenore as I did," he
said at last, "but Delacour does--he cares more."
_Printed by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury._