I
"Talk. Talk. Talk. . . . Good lines and no action . . . said
all . . . not even promising first act . . . eighth failure and season
more than half over . . . rather be a playwright and fail than a critic
compelled to listen to has-beens and would-bes trying to put over bad
plays. . . . Oh, for just one more great first-night . . . if there's
a spirit world why don't the ghosts of dead artists get together and
inhibit bad playwrights from tormenting first-nighters? . . . Astral
board of Immortals sitting in Unconscious tweaking strings until
gobbets and sclerotics become gibbering idiots every time they put pen
to paper? . . . Fewer first-nights but more joy . . . also joy of
sending producers back to cigar stands. . . . Thank God, no longer a
critic . . . don't need to come to first-nights unless I want . . .
can't keep away . . . habit too strong . . . poor devil of a colyumist
must forage . . . why did I become a columnist? More money. Money!
And I once a rubescent socialist . . . best parlor type . . . Lord! I
wish some one would die and leave me a million!"
Clavering opened his weary eyes and glanced over the darkened
auditorium, visualizing a mass of bored resentful disks: a few hopeful,
perhaps, the greater number too educated in the theatre not to have
recognized the heavy note of incompetence that had boomed like a
muffled fog-horn since the rise of the curtain.
It was a typical first-night audience, assembled to welcome a favorite
actress in a new play. All the Sophisticates (as Clavering had named
them, abandoning "Intellectuals" and "Intelligentsia" to the Parlor
Socialists) were present: authors, playwrights, editors and young
editors, columnists, dramatic critics, young publishers, the
fashionable illustrators and cartoonists, a few actors, artists,
sculptors, hostesses of the eminent, and a sprinkling of Greenwich
Village to give a touch of old Bohemia to what was otherwise almost as
brilliant and standardized as a Monday night at the opera. Twelve
years ago, Clavering, impelled irresistibly from a dilapidated colonial
mansion in Louisiana to the cerebrum of the Western World, had arrived
in New York; and run the usual gamut of the high-powered man from
reporter to special writer, although youth rose to eminence less
rapidly then than now. Dramatic critic of his newspaper for three
years (two years at the war), an envied, quoted and omniscient
columnist since his return from France. Journalistically he could rise
no higher, and none of the frequent distinguished parties given by the
Sophisticates was complete without the long lounging body and saturnine
countenance of Mr. Lee Clavering. As soon as he had set foot upon the
ladder of prominence Mr. Clavering had realized the value of
dramatizing himself, and although he was as active of body as of mind
and of an amiable and genial disposition, as his friends sometimes
angrily protested, his world, that world of increasing importance in
New York, knew him as a cynical, morose, mysterious creature, who, at a
party, transferred himself from one woman's side to another's by sheer
effort of will spurred by boredom. The unmarried women had given him
up as a confirmed bachelor, but a few still followed his dark face with
longing eyes. (He sometimes wondered what rôle he would have adopted
if he had been a blond.) As a matter of fact, he was intensely
romantic, even after ten years of newspaper work in New York and two of
war; and when his steel-blue half-closed eyes roved over a gathering at
the moment of entrance it was with the evergreen hope of discovering
the consummate woman.
There was no affectation in his idealistic fastidiousness. Nor, of
late, in his general boredom. Not that he did not still like his work,
or possibly pontificating every morning over his famous name to an
admiring public, but he was tired of "the crowd," the same old faces,
tired of the steady grind, of bad plays--he, who had such a passionate
love of the drama--somewhat tired of himself. He would have liked to
tramp the world for a year. But although he had money enough saved he
dared not drop out of New York. One was forgotten overnight, and
fashions, especially since the war, changed so quickly and yet so
subtly that he might be another year readjusting himself on his return.
Or find himself supplanted by some man younger than himself whose
cursed audacity and dramatized youthfulness would have accustomed the
facile public to some new brand of pap flavored with red pepper. The
world was marching to the tune of youth, damn it (Mr. Clavering was
beginning to feel elderly at thirty-four), but it was hard to shake out
the entrenched. He had his public hypnotized. He could sell ten
copies of a book where a reviewer could sell one. His word on a play
was final--or almost. Personal mention of any of the Sophisticates
added a cubit to reputation. Three mentions made them household words.
Neglect caused agonies and visions of extinction. Disparagement was
preferable. By publicity shall ye know them. Even public men with
rhinocerene hides had been seen to shiver. Cause women courted him.
Prize fighters on the dour morn after a triumphant night had howled
between fury and tears as Mr. Lee Clavering (once crack reporter of the
gentle art) wrote sadly of greater warriors. Lenin had mentioned him
as an enemy of the new religion, who dealt not with the truth. Until
he grew dull--no grinning skeleton as yet--his public, after hasty or
solemn digestion of the news, would turn over to his column with a sigh
of relief. But he must hang on, no doubt of that. Fatal to give the
public even a hint that it might learn to do without him.
He sighed and closed his eyes again. It was not unpleasant to feel
himself a slave, a slave who had forged his own gilded chains. But he
sighed again for his lost simplicities, for his day-dreams under the
magnolias when he had believed that if women of his class were not
obliged to do their own housework they would all be young and beautiful
and talk only of romance; when he had thought upon the intellectual
woman and the woman who "did things" as an anomaly and a horror. Well,
the reality was more companionable, he would say that for them. . . .
Then he grinned as he recalled the days of his passionate socialism,
when he had taken pains, like every socialist he had ever met, to let
it be understood that he had been born in the best society. Well, so
he had, and he was glad of it, even if the best society of his small
southern town had little to live on but its vanished past. He never
alluded to his distinguished ancestry now that he was eminent and
comfortable, and he looked back with uneasy scorn upon his former
breaches of taste, but he never quite forgot it. No Southerner ever
does.
The play droned on to the end of the interminable first act. Talk.
Talk. Talk. He'd go to sleep, but would be sure to get a crick in his
neck. Then he remembered a woman who had come down the aisle just as
the lights were lowering and passed his seat. He had not seen her
face, but her graceful figure had attracted his attention, and the
peculiar shade of her hair: the color of warm ashes. There was no
woman of his acquaintance with that rare shade of blonde hair.
He opened his eyes. She was sitting two seats ahead of him and the
lights of the stage gave a faint halo to a small well-shaped head
defined by the low coil of hair. She had a long throat apparently, but
although she had dropped her wrap over the back of the seat he had no
more than a glimpse of a white neck and a suggestion of sloping
shoulders. Rather rare those, nowadays. They reminded him, together
with the haughty poise of the head, of the family portraits in the old
gallery at home. Being dark himself, he admired fair women, although
since they had taken to bobbing their hair they looked as much alike as
magazine covers. This woman wore her hair in no particular fashion.
It was soft and abundant, brushed back from her face, and drawn merely
over the tips of the ears. At least so he inferred. He had not seen
even her profile as she passed. Profiles were out of date, but in an
old-fashioned corner of his soul he admired them, and he was idly
convinced that a woman with so perfectly shaped a head, long and
narrow, but not too narrow, must have a profile. Probably her full
face would not be so attractive. Women with _cendré_ hair generally
had light brows and lashes, and her eyes might be a washed-out blue.
Or prominent. Or her mouth too small. He would bet on the profile,
however, and instead of rushing out when that blessed curtain went down
he would wait and look for it.
Then he closed his eyes again and forgot her until he was roused by the
clapping of many hands. First-nighters always applaud, no matter how
perfunctorily. Noblesse oblige. But the difference between the
applause of the bored but loyal and that of the enchanted and quickened
is as the difference between a rising breeze and a hurricane.
The actors bowed en masse, in threes, in twos, singly. The curtain
descended, the lights rose, the audience heaved. Men hurried up the
aisle and climbed over patient women. People began to visit. And then
the woman two seats ahead of Clavering did a singular thing.
She rose slowly to her feet, turned her back to the stage, raised her
opera glasses and leisurely surveyed the audience.
"I knew it!" Clavering's tongue clicked. "European. No American
woman ever did that--unless, to be sure, she has lived too long abroad
to remember our customs."
He gazed at her eagerly, and felt a slight sensation of annoyance that
the entire house was following his example. The opera glasses
concealed her eyes, but they rested upon the bridge of an indubitably
straight nose. Her forehead was perhaps too high, but it was full, and
the thick hair was brushed back from a sharp point. Her eyebrows,
thank Heaven, were many shades darker than her hair. They were also
narrow and glossy. Decidedly they received attention. Possibly they
were plucked and darkened--life had made him skeptical of "points."
However, Clavering was no lover of unamended nature, holding nature,
except in rare moments of inspiration, a bungler of the first water.
In spite of its smooth white skin and rounded contours above an
undamaged throat, it was, subtly, not a young face. The mouth, rather
large, although fresh and red (possibly they had lip sticks in Europe
that approximated nature) had none of the girl's soft flexibility. It
was full in the center and the red of the underlip was more than a
visible line, but it was straight at the corners, ending in an almost
abrupt sternness. Once she smiled, but it was little more than an
amused flicker; the mouth did not relax. The shape of the face bore
out the promise of the head, but deflected from its oval at the chin,
which was almost square, and indented. The figure was very slight, but
as subtly mature as the face, possibly because she held it
uncompromisingly erect; apparently she had made no concession to the
democratic absence of "carriage," the indifferent almost apologetic
mien that had succeeded the limp curves of a few years ago.
She wore a dress of white jet made with the long lines of the present
fashion--in dress she was evidently a stickler. The neck was cut in a
low square, showing the rise of the bust. Her own lines were long, the
arms and hands very slender in the long white gloves. Probably she was
the only woman in the house who wore gloves. Life was freer since the
war. She wore a triple string of pearls.
He waited eagerly until she should drop her glasses. . . . He heard
two girls gasping and muttering behind him. . . . There was a titter
across the house.
She lowered the opera glasses and glanced over the rows of upturned
faces immediately before her, scrutinizing them casually, as if they
were fish in an aquarium. She had dropped her lids slightly before her
eyes came to rest on Clavering. He was leaning forward, his eyes hard
and focal, doing his best to compel her notice. Her glance did linger
on his for a moment before it moved on indifferently, but in that brief
interval he experienced a curious ripple along his nerves . . . almost
a note of warning. . . . They were very dark gray eyes, Greek in the
curve of the lid, and inconceivably wise, cold, disillusioned. She did
not look a day over twenty-eight. There were no marks of dissipation
on her face. But for its cold regularity she would have looked
younger--with her eyes closed. The eyes seemed to gaze down out of an
infinitely remote past.
Suddenly she seemed to sense the concentrated attention of the
audience. She swept it with a hasty glance, evidently appreciated the
fact that she alone was standing and facing it, colored slightly and
sat down. But her repose was absolute. She made no little embarrassed
gestures as another woman would have done. She did not even affect to
read her program.