On the morning between the second and third performance of "The Spy,"
for McWhirter never let the people off with less than three if he could
help it, as I was sitting in the dining room of the Hotel Metropole at
Kincade, enjoying the sense of leisure a late breakfast afforded, I saw
the captain making his way toward me through an archipelago of whitish
island upon which the remains of innumerable breakfasts appeared to be
cast away without hope of rescue from the languid waiters, steering as
straight a course as was compatible with a conversation kept up over his
shoulder with a man, who for a certain close-cropped, clean-shaven,
ever-ready look, might have been bred for the priesthood and given it up
for the newspaper business. It was a type and manner I was to know very
well as the actor-manager, but as the first I had seen of that species,
I failed to identify it. What I did remark was the odd mixture of
condescension and importance which the captain managed to put into the
fact of being caught in his company. He introduced him to me as Mr.
O'Farrell, Mr. Shamus O'Farrell, as though there could be but one of him
and that one fully accredited and explained. He defined him
further--after some remarks on the performance of the evening before in
a key which seemed to sustain the evidence of Mr. O'Farrell's name in
favour of his nationality--as manager of the Shamrock Players Company,
billed for the first of the week in Kincade.
It turned out in the course of these remarks, which the captain
delivered with a kind of proprietary air in us, that Mr. O'Farrell--he
called himself The O'Farrell in his posters--had a proposition to make
to me. He put it with an admirable mixture of compliment and
depreciation, as though either was a sort of stopcock to meet a too
reluctant modesty on my part or a too exorbitant demand for payment. I
was afterward to know many variations of this singular blend, and to
acquaint myself definitely how far it is safe to trust it in either
direction before the stop was turned, but for the moment I was under the
impression, as no doubt O'Farrell meant I should be, that a thing so
perfectly asked for should not be refused.
What he asked was that I should come over to the opera house where the
rest of the company awaited us, to assist at a rehearsal in the part
left open by the illness of the star. I do not now recall if the manager
actually made me an offer in this first encounter, but it was in the air
that if I suited the part and the part suited me, I was to regard myself
as temporarily engaged in Miss Dean's place.
So naturally had the occasion come about, that I cannot remember that I
found any particular difficulty in reconciling myself to a possible
connection with the professional stage. There had been no church of my
denomination at Higgleston, and I had affiliated with one made up of the
remnants of two or three other houseless sects, under the caption of the
United Congregations, and there was nothing in its somewhat loosened
discipline that positively forbade the theatre. In my work with
McWhirter, the play had come to mean so much the intimate expression of
life, so wove itself with all that had been profound and heroic in the
experience of the people, that it seemed to come quite as a matter of
course for me to be walking out between the captain and the manager
toward the opera house. O'Farrell, too, must have beguiled me with that
extraordinary Celtic faculty for the sympathetic note, for I am sure I
received the impression as we went, that his play, "The Shamrock," meant
quite as much to the Irish temperament, as "The Spy" could mean to
Ohianna. The manager and McWhirter had crossed one another's trails on
more than one occasion, which seemed to give the whole affair the colour
of neighbourliness.
It transpired in the course of our walk that Laurine Dean, America's
greatest emotional actress--it was O'Farrell called her that--had been
taken down at Waterbury with bronchitis, and the cast having been
already disarranged by an earlier defection, he had been obliged to
cancel several one-night stands and put in at Kincade to wait until a
substitute could be procured from St. Louis or Chicago, which difficulty
was happily obviated by the discovery of Mrs. Olivia Bettersworth.
All this, as I was to learn later, was not so near the truth as it might
be, but it served. I could never make out, so insistent was each to
claim the credit of it, whether it was O'Farrell or McWhirter first
thought of offering the part to me, but there it was for me to take it
or leave it as I was so inclined. Our own performance was in Armory Hall
and this was my first entrance of the back premises of a proper stage. I
recall as we came in through the stage door having no feeling about it
all but an odd one of being entirely habituated to such entrances.
They were all there waiting for us, the Shamrocks, grouped around the
prompter's table in a dimly lit, dusty space, with a half conscious
staginess even in their informal groupings, men and women regarding me
with a queer mixture of coldness and ingratiation. I had time to take
that in, and an impression of shoppy smartness, before Manager O'Farrell
with a movement like the shuffling of cards drew us all together in a
kind of general introduction and commanded the rehearsal to begin. Well,
I went on with it as I suppose it was foregone I should as soon as I had
smelled the dust of action, which was the stale and musty cloud that
rolled up on our skirts from the floor and shook down upon our
shoulders from the wings, too unsophisticated even to guess at the
situation which the manager's air of genial hurry was so admirably
planned to cover. I read from the prompter's book--O'Farrell had
sketched the plot to me on the way over--and did my utmost to keep up
with his hasty interpolations of the business. I was feeling horribly
amateurish and awkward in the presence of these second-rate folk, whom I
took always far too seriously, and suddenly swamped in confusion at
hearing the manager call out to me from the orchestra what was meant for
instruction, in an utterly unintelligible professional jargon. McWhirter
through some notion, I suppose, of keeping his work innocuously
amateurish, had used no sort of staginess, and the phrase froze me into
mortification. With the strain of attention I was already under I could
not even make an intelligent guess at his meaning, as O'Farrell,
mistaking my hesitation, repeated it with growing peremptoriness. I
could see the rest of the cast who were on the stage with me, aware of
my embarrassment, and letting the situation fall with a kind of sulky
detachment, which struck me then, and still, as vulgar rather than
cruel. Suddenly from behind me a voice smooth and full, translated the
clipped jargon into ordinary speech. I had not time, as I moved to obey
it, for so much as a grateful glance over my shoulder, but I knew very
well that the voice had come from a young woman of about my own age,
who, as I entered at the beginning of the rehearsal, had been sitting in
the wings, taking in my introduction with the gaze of a tethered cow,
quiet, incurious, oblivious of the tether. As soon as I was free from
the first act, I got around to her.
"Thank you so much," I began. "You see I am not used----"
"Why do you care?" she wondered. "It is only a kind of slang. They all
had to learn it once."
I could see that she sprang from my own class. Taylorville, the high
school, the village dressmaker, might have turned her out that moment;
and by degrees I was aware that she was beautiful; pale, tanned
complexion, thick untaught masses of brown hair, and pale brown eyes of
a profound and unfathomed rurality. As she moved across the stage at the
prompter's call, with her skirts bunched up on her hip with a safety
pin, out of the dust, as if she had just come from scrubbing the dairy,
I fairly started with the shock of her bodily perfection and her
extraordinary manner of going about with it as though it were something
picked up in passing for the convenience of covering. It provoked me to
the same sort of involuntary exclamation as though one should see a
child playing with a rare porcelain. By contrast she seemed to bring out
in the others, streaks and flashes of cheapness, of the stain and wear
of unprofitable use.
She came to me again at the end of her scene. "Where do you live?" she
wished to know. "I can come around with you and coach you with your
part."
"I'm not sure," I hesitated: "I don't know if I shall go on with it."
She took me again with her slow, incurious gaze.
"Why, what else are you here for?"
That in fact appeared to be Mr. O'Farrell's view of it, and though I
went through the form of taking the day to think it over and telegraph
to Tommy, I did finally engage myself to the Shamrock Company for the
term of Miss Dean's illness. My husband made no objection except that he
preferred I should not use my own name, as indeed, O'Farrell had no
notion of my doing, as the posters and programmes stood in Miss Dean's
name already.
We had from Thursday to Monday to get up my part. With all my quickness
I could not have managed it, except for the alacrity with which, after
the first day, all the company played up to my business, prompted me in
my lines, and assisted in my make-up. There was, if I had but known it,
a reason for this extra helpfulness, which, remembering the way the
ladies of the United Congregations had pulled and hauled about the
Easter entertainment, went far with me toward raising the estimate of
professional acting among the blessed privileges. Several members of the
cast had felt themselves entitled to Miss Dean's place, for the manager
had refused to pay an understudy, and found it easier to concede it to
me, a brilliant society woman as I had been figured to them--I suspected
McWhirter there--a talented amateur who would return to privacy and
trouble the profession no more, rather than to one who might be expected
to develop tendencies to keep what she had got. Moreover, they had
played to small houses of late, most of the salaries were in arrears,
and from the first of my taking hold of it, it began to be certain that
the piece would go. For I not only played the part of the gay,
melodramatic Irish Eileen, but I played with it. There was all my youth
in it, the youth I hadn't had, there was wild Ellen McGee and the wet
pastures and the woods aflame. With Tommy and a home to fall back upon,
with no professional standing to keep, with no bitterness and rancours,
I adventured with the part, tossed it up and made sport of it, played it
as a stupendous lark. The rest of the company took it from me that it
was a lark, and were as solicitous to see it through for me as though I
had been an only child among a lot of maiden aunts. And I did not know
of course that this charm of good fellowship was based more directly on
the box-office returns than on the community of art.
Incidentally a great deal that went on in my behalf threw light on the
character and disposition of the star.
"I 'most wore my fingers off, hookin' 'er up," confided the dresser who
took in her gowns for me, "but she won't let out an inch, not she. Well,
this spell 'll pull 'er down a bit, that's one comfort."
Cecelia Brune made me up. She was the youngest member of the company and
that she was distractingly and unnecessarily pretty didn't obviate the
certainty that in Milwaukee where she was born she had been known as
Cissy Brown.
"You don't really need anything but a little colour and black around the
eyes," she insisted. "Dean is a sight when she's made up; got so much to
cover. I'll bet she is no sicker than me, she's just taken the slack
time to get her wrinkles massaged. Gee, if I had a face like hers I'd
take it off and have it ironed!"
Cecelia, I may remark, lived for her prettiness; she lived by it. She
had a speaking part of half a dozen lines and a dance in the Village
Green act, and her mere appearance on the street of any town where we
were billed, was good for two solid rows clear across the house. In
Cecelia's opinion this was the quintessence of art, to attract males and
keep them dangling, and to eke out her personal adornment by gifts which
she managed to extract from her admirers without having yet paid the
inestimable price for them. Married woman as I was, I was too
countrified to understand that inevitably she must finally pay it. She
had all the dewy, large-eyed softness of look that one reluctantly
disassociates from innocence, and a degree of cold, grubby calculation
which she mistook, flaunted about in fact, for chastity. It was she who
told me as much as I got to know for a great many years of Sarah
Croyden, who had already taken me with the fascination of her Gift, the
inordinate curiosity to know, to touch and to prove, which makes me
still the victim of its least elusive promise and the dupe of any poor
pretender to it. I wanted something to account for, except when she was
under the obsession of a part, her marked inadequacy to her perfect
exterior, for the rich full voice that, caught in the wind of her
genius, gripped and threatened, but ran through her ordinary
conversation as flaccid as a velvet ribbon.
She was, by Cecelia's account, the daughter of a Baptist elder in a
small New York town, strictly brought up--I could measure the weals of
the strictness upon my own heart--and had run away with an actor named
Lawrence, after one wild, brief encounter when O'Farrell had been
playing in the town. That was before Cecelia's time and she had no
report of the said Lawrence except that he was as handsome as they make
them and a regular rotter.
"She'd ought to have known," opined Cecelia--though where in her
nineteen years she could have acquired the groundwork of such knowledge
was more than I could guess--"She'd ought to have known what she was up
against by his bein' so willing to marry her. He wouldn't have put his
head in a noose like that without he had hold of the loose end of it
himself."
That he had so held it, transpired in less than a year, in the
reappearance of a former wife who turned up at his lodging one night to
wait his return from the theatre, where, no one knew by what diabolical
agency, Lawrence had word of her, and made what Cecelia called a "get
away." What passed between the two women on that occasion must have been
noteworthy, but it was sunk forever under Sarah's unfathomable rurality.
O'Farrell, who of his class was a very decent sort, had been so little
able to bear the sight of beauty in distress that he offered the poor
girl an unimportant part as an alternative to starvation, and Sarah had
very quickly settled what was to become of her by developing
extraordinary talent.
I think no one of us at that time quite realized how good she was;
Cecelia Brune, I know, did not even think her beautiful.
"No style," she said, settling her corset at the hips and fluffing up
her pompadour with my comb, "and no figgur." But myself, I seemed to see
her the mere embodiment of a gift which had snatched at this chance
encounter with an actor, to swing into opportunity, regardless of its
host. Whenever I watched her acting, some living impulse deep within me
reared its head.
I have set all this down here because with the exception of Manager
O'Farrell and Jimmy Vantine, the comedian, who was thirty-five,
objectionable, and in love with Cecelia, these two women were all I ever
saw again of the Shamrock players. Miss Dean I did not meet on this
occasion, for though at the end of three weeks, before I had time to
tire of travel and new towns and nightly triumphs, she wrote she would
return to her work, it fell out that she did not actually return until I
was well on my way home.
"I thought she would have a quick recovery when she found out what a
sweep you'd been makin'," remarked Cecelia. That was all the comment
that passed on the occasion. If Mr. O'Farrell made no motion toward
making me a permanent member of his company, there were reasons for it
that I understood better later. I had to own to a little disappointment
that nobody came to the station to see me off except Cecelia and Sarah
Croyden. It is true Jimmy Vantine was there, but he left us in no doubt
that he only came because Cecelia had promised to spend the interval
between their train and my own in his company. He fussed about with my
luggage in order to get me off as quickly as possible.
The very bread-and-buttery relation of the Shamrocks to what was for me
the community of Art, had never struck so sourly upon me as at the
casual quality of their good-byes. I remembered noticing that morning
how very little hair there was on the top of Jimmy Vantine's head, and
that he did not seem to me quite clean. I found myself so let down after
the three weeks' excitement that I thought it necessary at Springfield,
where I changed, to interpose two days' shopping between me and
Higgleston. Among other things I bought there was a spirit lamp and a
brass teakettle.