Mary Burton was returning from a Sixth-avenue delicatessen shop with the
bottle of milk and box of crackers which constituted the marketing for
tomorrow morning's breakfast. She felt very faint and unspeakably sick
at heart. There was no longer even a trivial thing with which to
interest the pawnbroker. She had had little sleep for many nights and
her temples throbbed with pain. She had been trying to think out some
way to mend their misfortunes, and each day brought her nearer the point
where the grinding struggle must end in starvation.
"If it were only myself," she said bitterly as she turned the corner
under the superstructure of the Elevated, and shivered in the cutting
wind of the blizzard which was sweeping the city, "it would be simple."
She paused a moment later and halted against the wall of Jefferson
Market Court where a brick abutment broke the force of the bluster. Mary
was not so warmly clad as this rigorous weather warranted. The last
thing she had taken to the sign of the three balls was a heavy cloak.
"For me," she said to herself as she bent her head into the smother of
wind-driven snow, "life ended there in that office--when he died. If I
had just myself to consider I don't think God would blame me much for
ending it."
But it was not only herself she had to consider. The doctors told her
that her mother's tenuous life strand might snap at any time in sudden
death or might stretch indefinitely in helplessness and dethroned
reason. Even in the mean lodgings they occupied other tenants were
sometimes prone to the drawing of lines, and Mary knew that the landlord
did not regard it as helpful to his business to have "a crazy lady in
the house. Some guests objected." So when she began falling into arrears
she did not delude herself with false hopes of charitable indulgence.
Her father, too, though he had dropped down the scale of life to a
forlorn old man who loafed his hours away in saloons until he was turned
out, was still her father and while breath remained in his disreputable
body his stomach required food as well as drink.
The girl went in at the dark door of the house, which was not greatly
different from a tenement, and climbed the double flight of stairs. From
a place by the window her mother looked up from her chair where she sat
incessantly rocking. She held in her lap an old blank book and her
expression was vacant.
"I've just been reading Ham's diary," she querulously announced. Mary
shuddered. Of late her mother was always reading that old record of
boyhood ambitions, which to her was always new since no memory--save
those of other years--outlasted the hour.
"Ham thinks he's going to be a great man some day and I hope he's right.
He's a good boy and a dutiful son and--"
But the daughter was not listening. Her eyes had encountered an envelope
on the dresser mirror, and, as she tore the end of it, she felt a
premonition of its contents.
"How about some money on account?" questioned the writer. "Unless I get
some by tomorrow, I want my rooms vacated."
So the ultimatum had come. Mary Burton stood before the mirror for a
moment and out of her body all the strength seemed to flow. Her knees
shook, and her hands grew moist and chilly. Lest her sudden weakness be
apparent to her mother she turned and went wearily into the other room.
There she sat on the edge of her bed and tried to think.
"Tomorrow!" She dully repeated. "Tomorrow we are put out--then a public
asylum for my mother--and the street or the almshouse for my father."
Even now she was not thinking of herself. If it came to that she still
believed God would not resent her opening for herself the single door of
escape.
But these two old and helpless people! To Mary they were desperate
burdens, but perhaps that only made her love them the more, and fight
for them the more loyally.
For a long while she sat there in silence, then she rose with a red spot
burning on each cheek and put on her hat again. At the lower landing she
encountered the landlord. He was not a prepossessing man at best, and
his face just now did not indicate that he was at his best.
"You got my note?" he inquired bluntly, and the girl nodded.
"I think," she faltered, "probably I can do something about the rent
tomorrow."
"Thinking isn't going to satisfy me," he announced. "Tomorrow's the
limit of my patience."
Mary suddenly remembered that to telephone costs a nickel, and that she
had none with her. For a moment she stood on the sidewalk before
climbing the two flights again to raid the little supply of her purse.
The endless anxiety and the unbroken strain of these calamitous months
had weakened her to the point of realizing that the stairs were steep.
Then she remembered that the Italian woman at the delicatessen shop was
her friend, and would trust her for the five cents. She fought her way
along to the store through a wind which threatened to sweep her off her
feet and which cut her like whiplashes.
Her trembling fingers made a task of turning the pages of the directory
and finding the number of a newspaper on Park row, but at last she
succeeded.
"Is Mr. Smitherton there?" she asked, and the curt direction came back,
"Hold the wire."
Smitherton was sitting at a desk littered with newspaper clippings and
sheaves of copy-paper. His shirt-sleeves were rolled to the elbow and
the light of his desk bulb shone on his ruffled hair as the "copy-kid"
called out to him with that insouciant freshness which stamps his kind.
"Dame wants you on the wire. Got a voice like a million-dollars worth of
peaches an' cream." Mary with the receiver to her ear heard the subtle
compliment of those mixed metaphors.
Smitherton finished pasting a clipping into the blank place in a
type-written page and rose slowly.
"Well?" he inquired shortly. "What is it? This is Smitherton."
At once he recognized the voice which replied, and recognized that it
came faintly and full of indecision.
"This is Mary Burton, Mr. Smitherton. Do you--do you think you could
still find me work in vaudeville?"
"Oh!" The reporter's office brusqueness fell away, and his tone
changed. He knew that this was the girl's last stand, and that she had
not admitted its necessity until every other effort had failed, every
path of escape closed. "I don't think, Miss Burton," he assured her, "I
am certain."
"Do you think--" the voice was even fainter--"it would be possible to
get just a little money--some sort of advance--soon--tomorrow?"
"Leave that to me," he confidently commanded. "Just give me your
address--and I'll be at your place in the morning."
Mary slept little that night. Against her windows screamed and whined
the wind, driving a swish of fine, hard snow in its breath. From two
rivers came the dull groaning of the fog horns. But the storm which kept
her eyes hot and sleepless was one within her own breast.
Over and over again she told herself that the work for which she was
volunteering was in no wise disgraceful. Probably many women who were
her superiors were doing it with willingness, even with warrantable
pride. It would mean for her mother, as the reporter had reminded her,
comfort and competent nursing. Perhaps, in surroundings of greater ease,
her father might even yet rehabilitate himself into a manlier old age.
Save to serve them her own life was already lived out.
But the shudder of disgust would return despite her efforts at its
banishment and shake her like a chill. In her case it was not
vaudeville--and it was only lying to herself to call it so. No manager
was considering the payment of a salary to her for anything she could
legitimately do. It was what Smitherton had described it, capitalizing
the publicity of a misfortune so sweeping as to possess a morbid public
interest. In whatever generosity of terms her contract was drawn its
essential meaning would be that in ten-and a hundred-fold it would come
back to the management for that one reason. It would so come because
people would flock in vulgar curiosity to see the woman who had reigned
in exclusive sets of society from which they were themselves barred;
whose brother had reigned as a magnificent dictator of dollars. They
would come because they had heard of this beauty, and had glutted
themselves with column upon column of yellow and sensational news
recording untold opulence, and afterward of tragedy building on tragedy
to this climax; herself standing there on exhibition in the pillory of
their gaze.
Seats would be filled and applicants turned away from the box-office,
because a large part of the American public differs in no wise from that
of Rome when it gathered in the circus to see a captive princess thrown
to the beasts--or claimed as a captor's slave. Her value could be based
only on pandering to the mob spirit of gloating over the fall of the
great.
They would warm over and republish all the sensational details which
time had cooled. The story she had refused to write, others would not
refuse to write--neither would they refuse to "color" certain scenes
into "drama."
The girl, lying in her bed, pressed her fore-arms against her eyes and
struggled to shut out the pictures that rose as horrors in her mind--but
they passed and repassed with fiendish pertinacity. Nightmare shapes
leered at her from gargoyle features.
To any human being a situation is what it seems to be.
Had she actually, like the Lady Godiva, been called upon to ride the
length of Broadway, clad only in her beautiful hair, and placarded
"Burton's Sister and Edwardes' Fiancée," it could have meant to her
delicacy of feeling no greater trial, no more truly the denuding of
herself to the public gaze.
Had all this realization not been so keen and so poignant Mary Burton
would not have fought so long against the idea which seemed to open the
only way.
Were there just herself she would, before considering such desecration
of every sacred memory, have preferred to stuff with paper the crannies
of that wind-rattled window and to turn on the gas. In comparison this
would have been easy.
Easy! Suddenly the idea became a soul-clutching temptation. It offered
escape from the horror of decision and action; escape, too, from the
haunting of memory. The woman sat up in bed and her eyes gazed
feverishly ahead through the dark. She trembled violently and the plan
invitingly unfolded. Some unseen devil's advocate was urging her, for
the instant half-persuading her, insinuating and luring. Often as a very
little girl she had slept in a room as bare as this and listened
contentedly to the rattle of storm-shaken shutters. She had cuddled, a
warm, soft shape, under the blankets, and sunk sweetly, dreamily into
unconsciousness and happy dreams. It was so easy! There, in a drawer
where she had thrust it, with abhorrence for the emblem of a
contemptible weakness, was Paul's hypodermic needle. This very night she
could again drift, unresisting, into sleep, and while she slept the
gas-jet could flow free.
The room was cold. Sitting upright in her bed, she shivered. Then, as
she realized how seriously she had yielded for a panic-ridden moment to
the temptation of turning her back on life's need of courage, the
shiver grew from a shudder of the flesh to a shudder of the soul. She
lay down again and hid her face in the pillow.
From the next room she heard the heavy snore of her father and the
gentler sleeping breath of her mother. Personal preferences and
prejudices belonged to the past.
Very well--she still had the flaming Burton courage. She would do this
hateful thing, and when she gazed on the eyes that glutted their
curiosity with staring, she would meet them serenely and give them no
sign that she was being tortured.
And this thing Mary Burton did--did with that calm dignity which is
vouchsafed to those whose souls are of heroic quality.
It was only when the day's work of rehearsal ended and she was locked
again in her own room that she sat dry-eyed and wretched, remembering a
dozen things which made her shudder. But as she walked along the streets
she kept her eyes to the front, because she could not tell from what
wall one of those blazing "three sheets" might confront her. They were
advertising her as Mary Hamilton Burton--that the value of those two
names might doubly pique the curiosity of the morbid.
Also, she avoided as a pestilence the newspapers, and what they might
contain.
Abey Lewis did not at all understand her, though he had handled a
variety of people during his long career as a purveyor of "refined
vaudeville" to the public. He confessed as much to Mr. Smitherton, with
whom, as Miss Burton's business manager, he came into constant
association.
"I don't get her at all, Mr. Smitherton," he querulously complained.
"I've known most of the big-time artists that have come along in
vodeville, and she ain't like none of them I ever seen. I've made a lot
of head-liners, but this girl acts like it gives her a pain to talk to
me. She don't seem to take no interest in her act."
The business manager chewed irritably on his cigar. They were sitting in
the darkened theater while Mary Burton was being rehearsed in the short
and dramatic sketch which Smitherton had secured for her.
"Has it occurred to you, Lewis," he suggested, with a certain coolness
of manner, "that you wouldn't be paying Miss Burton the salary you are
if she was like anybody else you've known? Haven't you considered the
fact that this lady is going to pack your place to capacity because of
her difference?"
"Maybe so. Maybe she's a big novelty, and I ain't kicking," assented the
other. "But it does seem to me she ought to be more grateful--for the
chance she's getting. She's a knock-out all right! Them eyes ought to
get the folks going--I wish she'd use 'em more."
The two sat silent for a while with the empty chairs around them, then
Mr. Abey Lewis raised the megaphone with which he was directing and
spoke to the stage.
"Daughter," he instructed, "you ain't quite got the psychology of the
part yet." Mary Burton came down toward the front of the stage, with her
fore-arm raised across her face to shut off the glare of the "foots," as
she listened. Mr. Lewis rose and walked thoughtfully down the aisle
toward her. It was Mr. Lewis' intent to handle very delicately this new
headliner whom he failed to comprehend, and of whom he stood in secret
awe.
"Now you see, daughter," he went on, "this act gives you a great chance
for emotion, and I know, when you get the right angle on it, you'll eat
it up. You've just got wise there, where I broke in, to the fact that
your husband's a criminal. You ain't never suspected he was a crook
before. Now that calls for emotion.... Put more color into it.... Pound
it a little harder. When George ends his long speech and pauses, that
brings you across, see? It cues your reception of the news. It throws a
bomb under you. In times like them women get more hysterical. They ain't
quiet in grief, like men, so just cut loose a little more. Give us a
nice little scream."
For once Mary Burton almost smiled, as she hearkened to this wise
dissertation on emotion, but she only bowed her head in assent, as the
director added: "Take the scene up again at George's entrance."
When he sat down beside Smitherton, Abey Lewis shook his head. "I ain't
sure we didn't make a mistake in giving her a straight dramatic sketch,"
he said dubiously. "She ain't got no emotion. She needs more pep. Now if
she had an act with lots of changes of costume--something that would
show her off better, it might go bigger."
Smitherton growled.
"Yes, and then you wouldn't have her at all," he retorted. "Get it
through your head that this whole thing is distasteful to Miss Burton.
It's bad enough as it is, without asking her to do a diving Venus."
"She won't ever be an actor," commented Mr. Lewis, sagely, "but what the
hell's the difference? It's the name that's going to carry this act--and
it's going to be a knock-out."