LOBSTER-POTS
Getting up and out of the apartment before my husband was awake, I
bought all the morning papers at the nearest kiosk and carried them
back to my breakfast-table. At least I would know first, for my
wakefulness, what the edict of the critics was. I hated to read what
I knew in my heart to be their immature and sometimes even silly
opinions, but such is the power of the press over the theaters that
I could not wait for my coffee to boil before I unfolded the first
sheet. These sophisticated young writers, many of whom I knew and whose
opinions I respected less on that account, wielded the power of life
or death over their subjects, the playwrights, who struggled in the
arena of life for their approval and were never safe from their august
“thumbs down.” Sometimes I thought the older men, who should have known
better, were the most irresponsible. Bored out of all possibility of
forming any constructive opinion of a first night, they waited only to
see that every actor came on as advertised, and then scuttled back to
their typewriters to pound off something, anything that would leave
them free for half an hour’s game in the back of the newspaper office
before going home. What had they done to us and to our play, to the
cross-section of life which we had labored over all summer?
They were better than I had expected--probably because it was in
September and the dramatic critics were not yet jaded. Possibly,
fresh from the mountains, with the sunburn not yet worn off, they had
actually been to see the play and had had a good time meeting one
another in the lobby and comparing mileage. At any rate, their remarks
were universally good-natured, if not profound, and their intentions
beyond cavil. They had one criticism in common--they did not like our
ingénue, and I could not blame them any for that.
Will Turnball, on the “Gazette,” said that Myrtle Manners had done
all she could to ruin it, but fortunately the play did not depend
upon her for its success. He was not aware that it was the playwright
who was himself dependent upon her, who put her interests above any
one else’s in the cast. I remembered that Turnball knew the girl, and
wondered if he had said that deliberately and perhaps on my account.
One never knows where an obscure sense of chivalry is going to crop out
in a modern knight. We were old friends. He had read “The Shoals of
Yesterday” beforehand, one happy day in the middle of last summer, when
we were all down at ’Sconset together over a Sunday. And, at the time,
he had objected to Myrtle Manners taking that part. He had said she was
a trouble-maker, but Jasper, having only recently secured his contract
with Burton, who was going to produce the play, did not feel like
stepping in and dictating the cast. I had stupidly sustained him. And
now Turnball, knowing that what he said could not fail to make Myrtle
angry, had nevertheless gone out of his way to say it. I smiled at the
reaction I knew would follow, and picked up the next paper.
I was surprised to find that the man on the “Tribune” agreed with him.
I did not know this critic at all. And the “Globe” said:
“‘The Shoals of Yesterday,’ the new play by Jasper Curdy, well-known
short-story writer, opened last night at the Lyric with great
success.... When so many girls are out of work this fall, why hire
Myrtle Manners?”
I finished my breakfast with the feeling that I had been revenged.
Jasper had not chosen her, I came to his defense. The manager picked
her out, Burton himself, for no better reason than that her father
played baseball with him on the high-school team back in Plainfield,
New Jersey, and she had come to him with a letter and a sob-story and
a pair of blue eyes. She was ambitious, she had told him, and she
wanted to work hard. Well, she understood herself; she was all of
ambitious, but who was to do the hard work was more doubtful. She was
never up at the hour of the day when most of the hard work is done. To
do Jasper justice, he had not seen the girl until the first rehearsal,
although she had hardly been out of his sight since. Discontented with
the part as it was originally written, Myrtle had insisted on changes
in it until the whole fabric of the play was endangered. The part of
ingénue was not originally important, but her insistence, and Jasper’s
willingness to please her, had altered it until it threatened the lead.
Therefore it had come about that Gaya Jones, who was creating the
difficult part of a society crook, was herself becoming restless. There
was no need of antagonizing Gaya. She had started out at the beginning
of the rehearsals with all the good-will in the world, and worked up
her character with her usual dependable artistry. If she had her lines
cut and Myrtle Manners had hers made increasingly important, there was
going to be grave trouble. I had looked for Gaya in vain in the crowd
who were going out for supper last night. Probably, like myself, she
had gone home alone. I wished her better luck in her ice-box than I had
found in mine.
Now that the play had been launched I wondered if these two women, upon
whose acting it depended, would become reconciled to each other.
The telephone interrupted my foreboding with a new fear.
“O Mrs. Curdy? Myrtle talking. Have you seen the papers? Is Jasper
up? _Isn’t_ he? Why, he went home awfully early. He always does,
doesn’t he? Broke up the party; _so_ sorry you couldn’t go along! I
suppose you’ve read what the papers say about me? I got up to find
out; might as well go back to bed again! Some of them were grand, but
the ‘Tribune’--Wait till Jasper reads what that awful man said in the
‘Tribune.’ And the ‘Gazette’! I don’t believe they sent any one over
at all! That must have been written at the desk by the office-boy!
The ‘Globe’ was grouchy, too, but I know why that was; that Jones who
writes their stuff is married, you know, and he’s sore at me. Last
night, when we were all having supper, it was this way--”
I put my hand over the receiver so that I would not have to listen to
her story about the supper. I knew perfectly well that dramatic critics
were not loitering around restaurants after plays; they had to get
their reviews written before twelve o’clock.
“No, Jasper isn’t up yet,” I replied, taking my hand away just in time
to hear her insistent question. “All right.”
But the sunshine had been taken out of the room for me, as if a blind
had been drawn. Was this what we had been working for--this? Failure
might have drawn us together, might have made us need each other
more--or did I not mean that it would have made my husband need me
just a little? But now he was forever a part of a production--as long
as “The Shoals of Yesterday” should live, its slave and its nurse. Nor
did I want it to die precisely, nor quarrel with my bread and butter,
but, like many another, wanted success without the price of success,
and fame without the penalty. If, after the production, Jasper had to
spend all of his time mollifying this girl, if he had to get right up
out of bed to answer her demands, what had he gained? I was so tired of
the whole circle of my life! Tired of plays and of writers, of actors
and of stages, of newspapers and of telephones. The list ran on in my
mind like a stanza of Walt Whitman. I could think of just as many nouns
as he could, and of all of them I was tired. The thought of leaving New
York altogether was to my mind like a fresh breeze on a sultry noon.
There was nothing more to detain Jasper. Why not go?
I looked about the room where I was sitting with eyes suddenly grown
cold to it. There was a hinge loose on the gate-legged table that had
once been our pride, so that a wing would go down if one kicked it.
The leather cushion on the big davenport in the windows was worn white.
The curtains were half-dirty and stuck to the screen. The silver needed
cleaning. The painted chairs, which furnished that intimate “arty”
touch, were like a woman who has slept in her rouge without washing her
face and needed touching up. The living-room was too near. I wanted
rooms where to leave one was not to look back into it continually,
rooms from which there was some escape, that did not merge into one
another. Particularly desirable to me at that moment was a separate
kitchen, incorrigibly isolated. I felt that I would not care if it were
in the basement or in another building, if only I did not have to see
the grapefruit rinds on the kitchen sink while I was eating my egg.
That house on the cape! Two thousand dollars! The price of a car, and
Jasper had said he was going to get a car--to take Myrtle out in,
probably. I decided right then that if he bought a car, instead of a
house, I would never ride in it. (But I knew that I lied, even as I did
so.) It seemed to me that our life here was ended. More real was the
House of the Five Pines, the sand-dunes and the sea, the little road
and the vessels in the harbor. They were enduring; they had been there
before us and would indifferently outlast our brief sojourn, if we
lived with them the rest of our lives. They were the sum of the hopes
of simple men and the fabric of their dreams. I could hear the voices
of the children who would run around in that great yard, if it were
ever mine, and smell the hollyhocks that again would bloom in orderly
rows against the freshly painted house.
I took the mail in from the janitor--a letter from Star Harbor.
Dear Madam:
Mattie “Charles T. Smith” was drowned yesterday while taking up her
lobster-pots. I know that you will feel sorry for her demise, but
Providence has now made clear the way for you to have the house you
wanted. Please advise, as I would like to close the deal.
Yours truly,
JOHN BELL.
I sat quite still, with the letter trembling in my hand.
Mattie had gone back to the sea, back to that ancient mother of hers
out of whose arms she had been taken.
I knew the place where the lobster-pots were put out. A long row
from Mattie’s wharf, over in one shallow pool of the bay behind the
stone breakwater, where children played on the flats at low tide and
the horseshoe-crabs held carnival. No cottages were near this spot,
no fishermen’s houses stood up on the bank, for deep-pooled marshes
stretched behind it and to one side and beyond the breakwater was
nothing but sand and mosquitoes. The breakwater itself was too lonely a
walk for any one but lovers, who have the nocturnal habits of the cat,
but who do not patrol distant beaches to see the sunrise. And no other
person would ever have been in shouting distance of the place where
Mattie must have been drowned. I could see it all as it must have been.
An early morning; fiery clouds veiling the rising sun, turning the
whole bay to heliotrope and silver; fishing-vessels at anchor, their
crews still asleep; sea-gulls flapping up lazily to roost again on pile
tops, each one a gargoyle in the morning mist; and a little old woman
rowing a heavy boat to her traps, standing to tug at the slippery line.
An extra pull that drew her over the edge; a stagger to recover her
balance as she floundered; a cry that no one heard on those desolate
flats; a boat left rocking, half-full of water; and an old withered
body, found when the tide went out, caught fast in the lobster-pots.
Mattie “Charles T. Smith”! Cast upon the mercy of these hard
fisher-folk and in the end snatched back by the sea, which always
claims its own! At least, and I was glad for it, she had been spared
the ignominy of being turned out of her home by me or any of my kind.
The manner of her going was like the way of her living--an accident of
fate, a silence, and a mystery.
Jasper startled me, coming into the room in his bath-robe, asking for
coffee. “Oh, let’s see the papers.”
I had forgotten the papers. I pushed them all toward him and went out
to make fresh toast.
The letter lay there. I did not know whether to show it to him or
not. For the first time in our married life I was afraid. I wanted so
passionately to have him go away with me, to have a place in which to
be together alone, a home, and yet at the same time I knew that he
would have to choose it for himself or the project would be futile. I
hated to be refused, and I would not force a decision. Had he risen on
this morning of his great success thinking only of that little actress
and what it would mean to her, or had he, after all, created this thing
for our own future--for me?
“You’re burning it!” called Jasper.
I hurried in with the toast.
“What are you crying for?”
“I’m not.”
“You’re up too early. Nerves. You ought to take more rest.”
I watched him miserably while he ate and looked through all the
newspapers.
“That’s fine,” he said. “That settles that! The old boys certainly were
nice to me!--Better than I deserve! Looks as if we were going to have
money in the bank!”
Then he picked up the letter.
“Read it,” I whispered. But I could not bear to see him, and I got up
and would have run away. He caught me in the doorway and, his arms
around me, kissed away my fears.
“I’m glad the old woman’s drowned!” he cried.
“Oh no, don’t say that!”
“Aren’t you?”
“But don’t put it that way!”
“What way? What’s the difference what way we put it, so long as she’s
out of it and we can get the house!”
“Shall we get it?”
“Do you want it?”
I broke down then and wept upon his shoulder.
“Don’t cry,” he kept saying, “don’t cry. All you need is sleep. We’ll
go up there and get rested. That’s the best news this morning. Why
didn’t you tell me right away?”
“I didn’t know whether you’d be interested.”
Jasper laughed, and, through my tears, I laughed, too.
“Don’t get any funny ideas in your head,” he said. “You know very well
that--”
It was too hard to say. I spared him.
“What I need is not sleep, Jasper,” I whispered; “it’s just--you.”
He looked at me quickly, with his chin thrown up, and did not smile.
Then he gathered me close to him, as if he had not seen me for a long,
long time.
“If that is all you want,” he said; “if that is all you want!”
And that was all I wanted.