One evening in the early spring, during the interval between the films
in a motion-picture theatre on lower Broadway, a thrill of excitement
went through the audience, which was of the sort that desires to live
on thrills.
Perhaps to-night, however, there was reasonable excuse for genuine
anticipation. For the song-dance specialty that was about to take
place was of a different order from anything that had been known in
that theatre heretofore. There was real grace and beauty in the
dancing, genuine melody in the voice of the singer, and something sweet
and wholesome about the whole performance.
The act was entitled "And Do You Ken Elsie Marley, Honey?" And one
whispered to another that the best of it was, that that was her real
name--honestly it was--at least it had always been her stage name, so
that probably the song had been written especially for her--and she
that young--and it wasn't real ragtime either. And her dimples were
real too; possibly they were enlarged and deepened by the make-up, but
she had them off the stage.
Heavy applause greeted the entrance of the actress.
She was only a slip of a girl--a mere child she looked, partly, they
said, because of her hair--the "Castle bob," you know. She tripped
lightly before the footlights, smiled charmingly as she put the
question of the first line, and sang the song through with dancing
between the stanzas and dramatic rendering of the lines. She smiled
and sparkled and dimpled; but though she was so pretty and piquant and
coquettish, so graceful and vivacious, so completely the actress, there
was a look of youth and innocence about her that pleased the blasé
audience, and touched one alien member of it to tears.
Once and again was Elsie Marley recalled to repeat the act. The young
actress had other things prepared, but though they might be well
received, they were followed by clamor for "Elsie Marley, Honey," until
only the forcible resumption of the pictures availed to quiet it.
And on Saturday night at the end of the second week, even that did not
avail. The last appearance of that bill having been announced, the
audience could not let Elsie Marley go. Finally, the manager came out
and announced that Miss Marley had been engaged for another week. And
again, while there was intense satisfaction elsewhere, to one person
the statement was like a blow.
In truth, on the day when Elsie had announced the opportunity that had
been offered her of appearing in a "specialty" on the stage of a
second-class cinema theatre, Miss Pritchard had been aghast. The
chance had come through the school in the person of Mr. Coates, who had
first seen possibilities in the song the girl had known since
childhood, and who had developed it to its limit, and trained her in a
more artificial though still charming rendering, the music having been
adapted more nearly to music-hall ragtime. When he had announced to
her what he had known from the first--that she was to go upon the stage
with it--Elsie had been so elated that Miss Pritchard had been
powerless before her. She couldn't be a wet blanket; neither, however,
could she force herself to express any gratification.
And when first she had seen this last member of her family before the
footlights of the cheap little theatre, with the bad air, the mixed
audience, and the poor pictures, she felt she couldn't endure it. The
image of the stately, aristocratic Aunt Ellen Pritchard rose before her
vision, overwhelmingly severe and reproachful. It would actually have
killed her to witness once what Julia Pritchard had to witness every
night for two weeks--or so she thought at first.
On this Saturday night when the engagement was extended, they were
later than usual in getting to their carriage. Elsie was wrapped
snugly in the rose-colored opera-cloak. Her eyes were very bright, her
cheeks flushed. She had not really required any make-up, but they had
insisted upon deepening the color of her lips and darkening the lower
eye-lids. Miss Pritchard, too depressed to force any semblance of
cheerfulness, saw her dimples appear and disappear in happy reverie.
She sighed. Through it all, the child was absolutely enchanting to her.
Elsie, catching the sigh, snuggled up to her.
"Oh, Cousin Julia, I'm so happy, so happy I'm afraid I'll just burst
like a circus balloon. Oh, dear darling, you're so good to me. And I
suppose you're sick to death of the same old thing, and dread the
thought of another week of it."
As a matter of fact, Miss Pritchard was as captivated by the song
specialty as any of the audience. She confessed that it wore well.
"But, oh, Elsie," she couldn't forbear adding, "I do wish you weren't
going to have another week in that cheap place."
"Oh, but Cousin Julia, one can't begin at the top," remonstrated the
girl. "Why, I'm the luckiest guy ever was. How much do you suppose
I'm going to get for this next week?"
Miss Pritchard had no heart for guessing. The sum the girl mentioned
was indeed surprising, but it only seemed to remove her further from
her and from the family they both represented.
"I should be only too glad to do it for the experience alone," Elsie
rattled on, "and of course what I get is only what is over and above
what they pay the school. And I shall get other chances, Mr. Coates
says, and--oh, Cousin Julia, I don't dare tell you--you don't"--there
was a catch in her voice--"you don't sympathize. You were so
different! And now you're just like--well, almost as bad as the
others."
Miss Pritchard drew the little rose-colored figure close.
"Yes, I do sympathize, dear little cousin," she said, "only----"
She could not go on. And they went the rest of the way in silence. It
was the first time that anything, recognized by both of them, had come
between them. As the excitement that had buoyed her up for the evening
began to die away, Elsie's heart was like a stone. Later it would
ache. She wondered rather drearily how it would be after she was in
bed. Even now she recognized something that would have been absurd if
it weren't so terribly serious. To think of her demanding sympathy
from Cousin Julia--of appearing almost aggrieved not to receive it--she
who should be cowering beneath her scorn! How was it that she should
so forget, should feel and act as if everything were true--and square?
It was being on the stage, she supposed, a real actress at last. At
last! Why, it was almost _at first_. Who had ever been so fortunate
as she! To be on the stage in New York well within a year of her first
entering the city! And only to think that this might have been the
last night of her engagement! How terrible that seemed now! How would
she ever live without the evening to look forward to? How blissful to
have another week before her--six more appearances before that vast,
applauding throng! How happily would she go to sleep tonight to the
music of the lullaby of the thought: "Another week at the Merry Nickel,
another week at the Merry Nickel! Bliss! Bliss! Bliss!"
And yet it wasn't at all a blissful face which Miss Pritchard bore in
memory to her own room that night after she had kissed Elsie, put out
the light, and opened the windows. Since the girl had been at the
theatre, Miss Pritchard had dropped into the habit of going in to her
the last thing every night and tucking her in as if she had been a
child. For somehow she had seemed, since striking out into
professional life, only the more a child, more innocent, more
appealingly youthful, more than ever to be sheltered and guarded. She
had tried her wings, it is true; she believed she had proved them (and
perchance she had!); but more than ever was she a precious and tender
nestling.
As she sat by her window in the darkness, Miss Pritchard shook her head
sadly. She said to herself this couldn't go on--this state of things
couldn't continue. Despite Elsie's elation over the fact that she was
booked for another week at the theatre, she looked more mournful and
wistful and worn than ever. Some strain was wearing the child out. It
wasn't the work, nor yet the excitement, for she lived on them, and not
altogether unhealthily. There was no other possible explanation: it
was nothing less than the strain of combating her own disapproval,
tacit or expressed. Elsie was too warm-hearted to enjoy her legitimate
happiness alone, too sensitive not to suffer from want of sympathy.
The change in the girl had begun to be apparent directly after
Christmas. Elsie hadn't been herself since that time, which proved
beyond peradventure that Miss Pritchard's suspicion was correct. The
joyous, sparkling little creature whom she had found in her room on the
day after Christmas, bubbling over with excitement, eager to share her
good news, had become thin and wan. Her charmingly brilliant little
face was not only peaked, but in repose was generally wistful or
plaintive. Many a time one could have looked on it without suspecting
the existence of dimples. Only in the evening did she resemble her
real self. From dinner until the moment she lay in her bed, she was
the Elsie Marley she had been (with negligible interruptions) since the
night when she had walked straight into Miss Pritchard's heart before
she had known who she was. At other times she was a pale shadow, the
little ghost of the girl she had been or should be.
Miss Pritchard sighed deeply. If it were for want of
sympathy--approving sympathy--the child drooped and pined, must she not
have it, willy-nilly? But again she sighed, and yet more deeply.
Whatever her effort, was such a thing possible?
As for Elsie herself, the lullaby didn't prove a lullaby at all, and,
as usual these days, the girl cried herself to sleep. Every night, of
late, the reaction came. Every morning she awoke with a sense of a
heavy burden weighing her down. All day her heart ached, though dully
and vaguely for the most part; for if the pain threatened to become
acute, she could still drug it with anticipation of the excitement of
the evening.
In the weeks that had passed, Elsie hadn't once faced her conscience.
She had never squarely confronted the situation which was now so much
further complicated. When the unexpected and thrilling opportunity had
come to her the day after Christmas--the very day that was to
consummate her renunciation--the girl had been completely carried away
by it. She hadn't repudiated the decision she had come to so
painfully, she had simply disregarded it--ignored it utterly as if
there had been no such thing. And she had gone on ignoring it. In the
very first of it, the excitement of working directly for the stage had
rendered her oblivious of everything else. Then when certain faint
murmurings of conscience began to be audible, came the actual prospect
of the Merry Nickel to stifle them, and then there was the stage itself
and the actual footlights. Nevertheless, avoid the issue as she would,
more and more had her daylight hours come to be haunted with
misgivings, and now her heart was never light except in the evenings.
And combat any such direct thought as she might, she felt dimly that in
giving over her purpose to square her conduct with the right, she had
doubled and trebled the original wrong. Unvowing a vow must be
equivalent to signing a covenant with the powers of darkness. Now and
again lines from the poem Cousin Julia had repeated to her so
impressively that she could never forget it, came to her suddenly in
uncanny fashion. At such times, if questioned, Elsie would have
acknowledged that her Palladium had indeed fallen, with all the awful
consequences.
Lines from another and more familiar poem came to the girl the next day
as she sat in the afternoon with Miss Pritchard in their sitting-room,
the snow falling outside as if it were December. As she gazed at the
steadily falling, restful, soothing curtain of flakes which deadened
all sound and veiled all save its own beauty, unconsciously she was
repeating verses of a poem she had learned as a child. But as she came
to the words, "I thought of a mound in sweet Auburn," she recollected
herself. And somehow her mind turned instinctively to Miss Pritchard's
lover. It was because he, too, was dead, she supposed, and this snow
was rounding above his grave. But before she made the natural
application or drew the familiar comparison between his failure and her
own, Elsie clapped the lid down on her thoughts with a thud. Turning
resolutely to Miss Pritchard, she asked her, with strange intonation,
if she thought the snow would continue all night.
"I rather hope so," Miss Pritchard returned in a quiet voice that was
like a part of the silent storm, "for it's so late that we can't expect
another snowfall, and it seems really a privilege to have it now--like
plucking violets at Thanksgiving."
For a little, her gaze, too, lost itself outside. Then she turned and
looked at Elsie with a kindness in which there was something wistful.
"I know what you have been thinking, dear," she said. "You're thinking
that I'm not consistent nor fair--and you're right. I am neither. I
agree with you absolutely. Having in the first place consented to your
studying for the stage, I should have looked ahead and faced just this.
As you say, one can't begin at the tip-top--nor yet at the top. One
must make use of humble stepping-stones."
But it seemed that the struggle she had been through to bring herself
to this attitude had been in vain. On a sudden she lost all that she
had gained. Her heart sank as Elsie's face brightened eagerly--became
transformed, indeed.
"The trouble is," she went on sadly, "that the stepping-stones--oh,
Elsie, I'm so afraid the stepping-stones will only lead on and on and
on--never higher. They'll be and remain on a dead level, and you will
step from one to another, one to another, year after year, over the
same dreary waste. I hate awfully to say all this, dear, but when
those people refuse to allow you to do anything but the Elsie-Honey
business over and over, it comes to me what a fate it would be to be
doomed forever to that one stunt."
"Oh, Cousin Julia!" Elsie cried deprecatingly.
"Yes, dear, that's what I am exactly, an old killjoy; but truly I
cannot help it, though I have tried. I have struggled hard against my
prejudice. Elsie, last night you stopped yourself as you were about to
tell me something, but I fear I can guess what it was like. Some one
suggested your going on the road, as they say, with that one thing as
your repertoire--making a tour of the cheap moving-picture houses of a
certain section?"
Elsie grew very pale; her lips trembled. One interested wholly in her
dramatic career, seeing her at that moment, might have concluded that
the girl had it in her to develop a capacity for tragedy as well as
comedy.
"Cousin Julia," she said with tremulous dignity, "I don't want you to
come with me this week. I can go back and forth in a carriage by
myself. I've got to go through it, for I promised and they will have
made arrangements, but--please don't come with me any more."
She gazed at Miss Pritchard through reproachful tears, but when she saw
tears streaming down Miss Pritchard's plain, staunch face, she ran to
her arms.
"My dear, it's only because I love you so, because you are the very
apple of my eye, that I talk so," the latter declared, and the warm
words went straight to the girl's sore heart. "I know I'm not just,
but dear, we won't let anything come between us--ever. I'll do my best
to see your side of it, and you must be patient with me. It's hard, I
know, for youth to bear with age, for inexperience to hear the ugly
words of experience; but now we'll just go through the week together
and await what comes."
What came demanded further patience on her part and increased Elsie's
infatuation. Before the end of the week the young actress had an offer
from a rival establishment which would take her to the edge of summer
at a salary that fairly made her gasp. The second theatre was perhaps
a shade better, but not sufficiently so to reconcile Miss Pritchard to
it. But she held her peace. Whereupon the first manager increased the
sum offered by his rival, and, Miss Pritchard still tolerant, Elsie
agreed to remain there until June.