died and was buried in the potters' field. Cake managed to keep two
rooms of the wretched flat, and no word of his landlady's demise
reached the lodger's drink-dulled ears. Otherwise Cake feared he might
depart, taking with him her one big chance to reach the light. You
see, she did not know the lodger. Things might have been different if
she had. But he was never a human being to her, even after she knew
the truth; only a symbol, a means to the great end.
Her brothers went away--to the penitentiary and other places. One by
one the flood of life caught her sisters and swept them out, she did
not know to what. She never even wondered. She had not been taught to
care. She had never been taught anything. The knowledge that she must
be famous danced through her dreams like a will-o'-the-wisp; had grown
within her in the shape of a great pain that never ceased; only eased
a little as she strove mightily toward the goal.
So she still sold papers, a homely, gawky, long-legged girl in ragged
clothes much too small for her, and slaved at Maverick's for the
lodger's nightly dole that he might teach her and she be famous.
At first he was keen on the meat and drink--more especially the drink.
Later, gradually, a change came over him. Only Cake did not notice
this change. She was too set on being taught so she could become
famous. At first the lodger was all oaths and blows with shouts of
fierce, derisive laughter intermingled.
"My God!" he would cry. "If Noyes could only see this--if he only
could!"
This Noyes, it appeared, was a man he furiously despised. When he was
in the third stage of drunkenness he would never teach Cake, but would
only abuse his enemies, and this Noyes invariably came in for a
fearful shower of epithets. It was he as Cake heard it, sitting
huddled on the old dry-goods box, the candle casting strange shadows
into her gaunt, unchildlike face, who was the cause of the lodger's
downfall. But for Noyes--with a blasting array of curses before the
name--he would now have what Cake so ardently strove for: Fame. But
for Noyes he would be acting in his own theatre, riding in his own
limousine, wearing his own diamonds, entertaining his own friends upon
his own gold plate.
When he was still too sober to take a really vital interest in the
teaching, he was a misanthrope, bitter and brutal, with an astonishing
command of the most terrible words. At these times he made the gravest
charges against Noyes; charges for which the man should be made
accountable, even to such a one as the lodger. One evening Cake sat
watching him, waiting for this mood to pass so that the teaching might
begin.
"If I was youse," she said at last, "and hated a guy like youse do
this Noyes, I'd fetch 'im a insult that'd get under his skin right.
I'd make evens wit' 'im, I would, not jes' talk about it."
"Oh, you would!" remarked the lodger. He took a long pull at the
bottle. "You be _Queen Kathrine_, you alley-cat."
So the nightly teaching began with the usual accompaniment of curses,
blows, and shouts of brutal laughter. But when it was over and the
lodger was sinking to the third stage that came inevitably with the
bottom of the bottle, he kept looking at his pupil queerly.
"Oh, you would! Oh, you would, would you?" He said it over and over
again. "Oh, you would, would you?"
And after that he was changed by the leaven of hate her suggestion had
started working in him. For one thing, he took a far greater interest
in the teaching for its own sake. Of that much the girl herself was
thankfully aware. And she thought, Cake did, that the dull husk of
self was wearing away from that part of her destined to be famous,
wearing away at last. The lodger's curses changed in tone as the
nights filed past, the blows diminished, the laughter became far more
frequent.
Cake, as rapidly reaching the end of her girlhood as the lodger was
nearing the limits of his drink-sapped strength, redoubled her
efforts. It was very plain to her that he could not live much longer;
death in delirium tremens was inevitable. After that, she decided,
school would not keep, and she must try her fortune.
Then one night in the midst of the potion scene when she felt herself
_Juliet_, soft, passionate, and beautiful, far away in the land of
tragic romance, she heard the lodger crying:
"Stop--my God, stop! How do you get that way? Don't you know there's a
limit to human endurance, alley-cat?"
He was fairly toppling from the dry-goods box. His eyes were popping
from his head, and in the flickering candlelight his face looked
strained and queer. In after life she became very familiar with that
expression; she saw it on all types of faces. In fact, she came to
expect to see it there. But she did not know how to analyze it then.
She glimpsed it only as a tribute to her performance, so immense that
she had to be halted in the middle, and felt correspondingly elated.
She was exactly right in her deduction. But Cake and the lodger
advanced along very different lines of thought.
The next night he was shaky, came all too quickly to the teaching
period, and left it as speedily. Then he retired to the flock mattress
in the corner of the room and called Cake to bring the candle.
"I've an idea I'm going to leave you, gutter-snipe," he said, "and I
doubt if I ever see you again. The end of life cancels all bands. And
the one that bound you to me, alley-cat, was very material, very
material indeed. The kind that runs easily in and out of a black
bottle." He laughed.
"You Shakespearian actress!" He laughed again, longer this time. "But
I have not forgotten you," he resumed. "In addition to all that I have
taught you, I am going to leave you something. Here," he fumbled out a
square envelope and Cake took it between her hands. "Take that to the
address written on it," said the lodger, "and see what the gentleman
does." He began to laugh again.
"Noyes----" he cried and broke off to curse feebly but volubly. Cake
did not even glance in his direction. She went away out of the room,
too utterly stunned with fatigue to look at the letter in her dingy
hand.
The next morning the lodger was dead. He was buried in the potters'
field quite near his old landlady.
This second funeral, such as it was, closed the shelter that Cake, for
want of a more fitting name, had called home. She decided to put all
her years of bitterly acquired learning to the test. And as she best
knew what she had bought and paid for it she felt she could not fail.
She unfolded from a scrap of newspaper the envelope presented her by
the lodger and carefully studied the address.
Cake could both read and write, having acquired these arts from a
waiter at Maverick's, who also helped her steal the broken meats with
which she secured her artistic education. And, watching the steady
disappearance of the food, this waiter marvelled that she got no
fatter as she grew upward, hovering about in hope of becoming her
lover if she ever did. But even if that miracle had ever been
accomplished the helpful waiter would still have waited. Cake's
conception of a real lady was _Queen Katherine_; _Cleopatra_ her dream
of a dangerous, fascinating one. And what chance in the world for
either with a waiter?
Cake read the name and address upon the envelope freely as the hopeful
bread-caster had taught her: Arthur Payson Noyes, National Theatre.
With the simplicity and dispatch that characterized her, she went to
that place. To the man reposing somnolently in the broken old chair
beside the door she said she had a letter for Mr. Noyes. The
doorkeeper saw it was a large, swanking envelope with very polite
writing. He straightened up in the chair long enough to pass her in,
and then slumped down again.
Cake found herself in a queer, barnlike place, half room and half
hallway, feebly illumined by a single electric bulb suspended above
the door. Very composedly she looked about her. If Mr. Arthur Noyes
lived in this place, he was one of her own kind and there was no need
for any palpitation on her part. Anyway, she was looking solely for
her chance to become famous, and she brought to this second stage of
her search the same indifference to externals, the same calm,
unfaltering courage as she had to the first.
"Now, then," said a voice briskly. "Say what you want. We have not
advertised for any extra people. At least--not this year."
A short, stout man emerged from the shadows. He was very blond, with
his hair cut snapper, and his pale eyes popped perpetual astonishment.
She returned his look steadily and well. She knew she was born to be
famous, and fame has a certain beauty of dignity utterly lacking in
mere success.
"I am not an extra person," she replied. "I have come to see Mr.
Noyes," and she displayed once more the large square envelope, her
legacy from the lodger, the knife with which she proposed to shuck
from its rough shell that oyster, the world.
The man looked even more astonished, if the thing could have been
accomplished, and regarded her keenly--stared.
"Come this way," he said.
Cake followed him along a narrow passage that turned off to the right,
down five steps, across a narrow entry, up three more steps--although
it seems quite silly, she never in her life forgot the odd number of
those worn steps--and halted before a closed door. On this the fat man
knocked once and opened immediately without waiting.
"Someone I think you'll see," he said, standing between Cake and the
interior. There came to her a murmur over his chunky shoulder.
"She has a letter from----" The fat man dropped his voice and mumbled.
"Positive," he said, aloud, after a pause broken only by the vague
murmur within the room. "I'd know his fist anywhere. Yes." Then he
pushed the door open wide, stood aside, and looked at Cake. "Walk in,"
he said.
She did so. Beautifully. Poems have been written about her walk. Two
kinds.
The room she entered was square, with concrete floor and rough walls.
But Cake did not notice the room for three reasons: The rug on the
floor, four pictures on the walls, and the man who looked at her as
she entered.
They gazed at each other, Cake and this man, with sudden, intense
concentration. He was a genius in his line, she as surely one in hers.
And, instinctively, to that strange, bright flame each rendered
instant homage. What he saw he described long afterward when a million
voices were vociferously raised in a million different descriptions.
What she saw she likened in her mind to a dark sheath from which a
sword flashed gloriously. That sword was his soul.
"He says your name is Plain Cake--is that true?" He referred to the
lodger's letter held open in his hand, and by that she knew he was
Arthur Noyes. And great. That last she had not needed any telling.
"Yes," she replied.
"He says you are the right Shakespearian actress for me," Noyes
referred to the letter again. "Do you know Shakespeare?"
"All the way," said Cake. It was not quite the answer _Queen
Katherine_ might have made, perhaps, but her manner was perfect.
"Come here"--he pointed to the centre of the rapturous rug--"and do
the potion scene for me." Cake stepped forward.
Perhaps you have been so fortunate as to see her. If so you know that
to step forward is her only preparation. She was poised, she was gone.
Then suddenly she heard the lodger's voice crying:
"Stop--my God, stop! How do you get that way? Don't you know there's a
limit to human endurance, alley-cat?"
She broke off, staring confusedly into space just the height of his
debauched old figure crouching on the dry-goods box. Then with swift
realization of her surroundings, her vision cleared. It was the fat
man in the checked suit she saw leaning helplessly against the closed
door. His jaw sagged, his eyes were frightfully popped, his face wore
the same strained, queer look she had come to see so often on the
lodger's, and he made weak little flapping gestures with his hands.
Cake looked then at Arthur Noyes. His face was white as the letter in
his hand, his dark eyes were dilated with a look of dreadful
suffering, the numb, unconscious reaction of one who has received a
mortal blow.
"Come here, Crum," he cried as if there was no one else in the room.
And Crum fairly tottered forward.
"What do you make of this?" asked Noyes, while Cake stood and
listened.
"I--I--" stammered Crum exhaustedly. "My God," he groaned, "it's too
much for me. And training!"
"Oh, trained," Cake heard Noyes say. "Such training as only he could
give. Years of it, that's plain. And then to send her to me. A
Shakespearean actress for me! To insult me like that--"
"It's too much for me, Boss," said Crum again. "Still--Oh--oh, my!"
His back was turned, but Cake saw his whole body shake.
"Telephone Meier," exclaimed Noyes suddenly.
"Meier?" Crum became immediately composed, and Cake saw that he was
tremendously surprised. "You don't mean that you're going to--After
this? Why, she's in the know. Look at her. It's perfect!"
And they both turned and looked at Cake standing unconscious and
serene on the other side of the room. You who have seen her know just
how perfect the pose was.
"It _is_ perfect," Noyes said. "I'd be a pretty poor sport if I did
not acknowledge that." Then his voice dropped and Cake only caught
snatches here and there. "... such genius ... once in a century ...
get even with him in a way he least expects ... wipe off the slate
entirely ... no comeback to my play ... let him see that for himself.
Call Meier." Then he turned to Cake.
"Sit down, please," he said courteously. "I have sent for a man who
may give you an engagement."
She returned his gaze so quietly that he was puzzled. About her was
neither nervous anticipation nor flighty vivacity. The actions of her
audience of two left her in-curious and calm. You see, she was used to
the lodger. Also she had worked to be famous so long that all the
flowery borders of self were worn down to the keen edge of doing. Of
Plain Cake she thought not at all. But then, she never had. Only of
the light at the end of the passage that now loomed so bright to her
watching eyes.
It seemed only a minute before Noyes spoke again: "This is Mr. Meier."
He regarded her shrewdly all the time.
Cake bowed to Mr. Meier, a fat, gaudy gentleman with thick, hairy
hands. And Mr. Meier looked at Noyes and shook his head. She realized
they had already been talking together.
"Never before," Mr. Meier said.
"If you will repeat the potion scene," Arthur Noyes suggested. "This
time, I trust, you will not be interrupted," he added politely.
And Cake stepped once more into that rich orgy of emotion. This time,
though dimly aware of noise and a confusion of shouting, she carried
the scene through to the end. "Romeo, I come! This do I drink to
thee." She lay for a moment where she had fallen close to the heavenly
colours of the rug.
"Goo-hood Gaw-hud!" gasped Mr. Meier, and Cake sat up.
She saw he was rather collapsed upon a chair near which he had been
standing up when she began. His fat face was purple, and tears stood
in his eyes. But Arthur Noyes had not changed. White, with that look
of mortal hurt, he still stood straight and slim against the table.
"You cannot offer her less than two hundred a week to begin," he said
with the same air of being alone with Mr. Meier.
"No, oh, no, no, no, no!" sighed Mr. Meier, wiping his eyes.
He rose and bowed to Cake with the queerest respect, still wiping his
eyes with the back of his thick, hairy hands. It was a striking
commentary upon her years of training that both of these men,
successful from long and hard experience, paid her the compliment of
thinking her an old hand at the game.
"Mine is the Imperial Theatre, Miss," said Meier. "You should be there
to-night by seven o'clock. It ain't necessary we should rehearse. No,
oh, no, no, no, no! And now, perhaps"--he looked her up and down,
oddly--"perhaps I can take you to your--hotel?"
Cake looked him back, serene in her belief in what the lodger had
taught her.
"I'll be there at seven," she said. "No, thank you." She walked out
and across into a small park where she sat until the appointed time.
Then she went to the stage entrance of the Imperial Theatre, presented
the card Mr. Meier had given her, and entered. Once inside she was
taken to a dressing room by a fat, comfortable, middle-aged woman who
seemed to be waiting for her. After a very short and, to Cake,
tranquil period, Mr. Meier bustled in.
"Of course, Miss, you know this is a Revue," he explained, rubbing his
hands with a deference that Cake shed utterly, because she did not
know it was there.
She nodded, accepting his statement. "We make 'em laugh here," said
Mr. Meier. Again Cake nodded; she knew exactly as much about the show
as she did before. "You close the second act; it's the best place for
you. Leafy, here, will help you dress."
Cake sat still while Leafy dressed her, very hushed and still. The
light blazed so near after all these hard, lean years of pursuit,
years in which the little affairs of life, like the business of
growing from a child to a woman, had simply passed her by. Of that
Urge to be famous she was even more burningly aware; herself she did
not know at all.
Mr. Meier came and took her by the hand. His fat face was pale and
sweating, he seemed almost awestruck by Cake's calm. He drew her out
of the dressing room and through a crowd of people, men and women with
painted faces, some beautifully, some extravagantly and strangely
dressed. They all stared. One woman shook her head. A man said:
"Search me! I never saw _her_ before."
Then Mr. Meier thrust her out in the face of a bright light. "Begin,"
he said hoarsely. "Walk over there and begin."
Quietly Cake obeyed. She had walked right into the bright light that
had drawn her so hard and so long. Of course it was time for her to
begin. And with this bright light in her face, which soon became to
her the candle in that dark room left so far behind, she fared away to
the magic land of beautiful make-believe.
And only when _Juliet_, that precocious child, sank down poisoned did
she become aware of the uproar about her. The shouts of the lodger,
"Stop--my God, stop! How do you get that way?" augmented a million
times. It was this she heard.
Slowly Cake lifted herself on her hands, dazedly she peered through
the heart of the great light that had caused her such suffering and
that she had followed faithfully so bitterly long. On the other side
she saw faces, rows and rows of them mounting up to the very roof.
Faces laughing; faces convulsed, streaming with tears; faces with eyes
fixed and wearing that same queer, strained look she had noticed
before; hundreds of faces topping each other in semicircular rows, all
different but all alike in that they were all laughing.
She rose to her knees and rested there on all fours--staring.
Laughter! A great clapping of hands rolled about her like thunder,
dying down and rising again to even greater volume. Cries of "Go on,"
assailed her ears, mingled with, "Stop, stop! I can't bear it!"
The curtain fell before her, blotting out the vision of those faces,
making the uproar slightly dimmer. Mr. Meier advanced and lifted her
to her feet. He moved weakly, exhausted with mirth.
"Even Noyes," he gasped. "He--he can't help it. Oh, my goo-hood
Gaw-hud!"
Cake looked away from him to the men and women that thronged about
her. The same faces that had turned to her such a short while ago; but
now, how different!
"Oh, don't criticise," one woman cried. "Hand it to her! She can't be
beat. She's the one that comes once in a century to show the rest of
us what really can be done."
"Meier," shouted a man. "Meier--she'll have to go back, Meier; she's
stopped the show."
Quiet and very still, Cake drew away.
It seemed to her only a moment later that Leafy touched her arm.
"Mr. Meier has taken a suite for you here in this hotel," she said.
"Can't you eat a little, Miss?"
Eat? She had never had enough to eat in her life. Her life? She had
spent her life securing food for the lodger that he might teach her to
be famous. Leafy lifted the spoon of hot soup to her lips and
immediately she drank--she who had never had enough to eat in her
life. Morsel by morsel from the bountifully filled table the kindly
dresser fed her. Obediently she ate, and the hot, rich food stimulated
her to swifter, more agonizing thought.
Then, for the first time, she saw Arthur Noyes standing with his back
against a closed door. She read pity in his eyes, comprehension, great
wonder, and what she did not know then was the love that came to a
rare perfection between them and has never faded--and has no place in
this story.
"Will you tell me," he said, "what your name is, where your home is,
and who are those that love you there?"
Then he broke off and shrank a little against the door. "Oh, don't,"
he protested.
Yet she had only looked at him and smiled. But it came to her keenly
in her new awareness that his questions covered the whole of a woman's
life: Her name, her home, and the ones that loved her there. While
she--she had no name, she did not even know the lodger's name. She
looked down with strange astonishment at her grown-up figure, her
woman's hands. She saw herself a ragged, gaunt, bushy-headed child
moving on a tight rope above a dark abyss, intent only upon a luminous
globe floating just out of reach ahead of her, that she stretched out
for eagerly with both her hands. Suddenly the lovely bubble burst and
the child was a woman, falling and falling among rows of convulsed,
shining white faces to the sound of gargantuan laughter.
"You tell me," Arthur Noyes pleaded gently.
And she did so very simply and beautifully. She did know Shakespeare;
it was the only English that she had ever been taught. So Noyes heard
how she became an instrument in the hands of the man who hated him
mortally, and owed her debut and her terrible awakening to what he
considered the only sporting answer to that insult. While he listened
he pondered, awestruck, upon the fact that out of all this muck and
blackness, the degradation of hate by the lodger, the refinement of
hate by himself, had flowered that rarest of all human creatures--one
that could make the whole world laugh.
"He always hated me," he said. "I told him he had traded his genius
for drink, and he never forgave me. Where is he now?"
"Now?" Cake looked up at him in startled wonder. It came over her
suddenly that he counted upon the lodger's being in the Imperial
Theatre that night.
"Now?" she repeated. "Why, he is dead."
It took Noyes a minute to recover. "What will you do?" he asked her.
"Will you go on from this start, continue this--this sort of success?"
He felt it the basest cruelty, in the face of her story, to say it was
the only kind she was ever destined to make. He waited for her answer,
wondering, and a little awestruck. It seemed to him they had come to
the supreme test of her genius.
And she looked up at him with such sadness and such mirth--such
tragic, humorous appreciation of the darkness in which she had been
born, the toilsome way she had travelled to the Great Light and what
it actually revealed when she arrived.
"I will go on from this success," she said. Involuntarily she raised
her hand to her breast. "I must, since it is the only way for me. You
see," with a humour far more touching than the saddest tears, "I must
be famous."
And she smiled that smile that hurt him, the smile the world loves and
will give anything to see.
The most famous funmaker of her time looked away from the bright river
fleeting beyond the trees to her giggling, half-terrified visitors.
"Fame," she said, "is a secret that cannot be told. It must be
discovered by the seeker. Let me offer you tea as a substitute."
MUMMERY
By THOMAS BEER
From _Saturday Evening Post_
On Monday Mrs. Egg put her husband on the east-bound express with many
orders. He was not to annoy Adam by kissing him when they met, if they
met in public. He was to let Adam alone in the choice of civil dress,
if Adam wanted to change his naval costume in New York. He was not to
get lost in Brooklyn, as he had done before. He was to visit the
largest moving-picture theatres and report the best films on his
return. She made sure that Egg had her written list of lesser commands
safe in his wallet, then folded him to her bosom, sniffed, and patted
him up the steps of the coach.
A red-haired youth leaned through an open window and inquired, "Say,
lady, would you mind tellin' me just what you weigh?"
"I ain't been on the scales in years, bub," said Mrs. Egg equably;
"not since about when you was born. Does your mamma ever wash out your
mouth with soap?"