Helen's pride contended unceasingly with her love during the weeks of
her lover's alienation; for, with all her sweet dispraise of herself,
she was very proud of her place in the world, and it was not easy to bow
her head to neglect. Sometimes when he forgot to answer her or rushed
away to his room with a hasty good-bye, she raged with a perfectly
justifiable anger. "You are selfish and brutal," she cried out after him
on one occasion. "You think only of yourself. You are vain, egotistical.
All that I have done is forgotten the moment you are stung by
criticism," and she tried to put him aside. "What do his personal
traits matter to me?" she said, as if in answer to her own charge. "He
is my dramatist, not my husband."
But when he came back to her, an absent-minded smile upon his handsome
lips, holding in his hands some pages of exquisite dialogue, she humbled
herself before him. "After all, what am I beside him? He is a poet, a
creative mind, while I am only a mimic," and straightway she began to
make excuses for him. "Have I not always had the same selfish, desperate
concentration? Am I always a sweet and lovely companion? Certainly the
artistic temperament is not a strange thing to me."
Nevertheless, she suffered. It was hard to be the one optimist in the
midst of so many pessimists. The nightly performance to an empty house
wore on her most distressingly, and no wonder. She, who had never
hitherto given a moment's troubled thought to such matters, now sat in
her dressing-room listening to the infrequent, hollow clang of the
falling chair seats, attempting thus to estimate the audience straggling
sparsely, desolately in. To re-enter the stage after an exit was like an
icy shower-bath. Each night she hoped to find the receipts larger, and
indeed they did from time to time advance suddenly, only to drop back to
desolating driblets the following night. These gains were due to the
work of the loyal Hugh as advertising agent, or to some desperate
discount sale to a club on the part of Westervelt, who haunted the front
of the house, a pale and flabby wraith of himself, racking his brain,
swearing strange, German oaths, and perpetually conjuring up new
advertising devices. His suffering approached the tragic.
His theatre, which had once rustled with gay and cheerful people, was
now cold, echoing, empty, repellent. Nothing came from the balcony,
wherein Helen's sweet voice wandered, save a faint, half-hearted
hand-clapping. No one sat in the boxes, and only here and there a man
wore evening-dress. The women were always intense, but undemonstrative.
Under these sad conditions the music of the orchestra became factitious,
a brazen clatter raised to reinforce the courage of the ushers, who
flitted about like uneasy spirits. There were no carriages in waiting,
and the audience returned to the street in silence like funeral guests
from a church.
Hugh remained bravely at his post in front. Each night after a careful
toilet he took his stand in the lobby watching with calculating eye and
impassive face the stream of people rushing by his door. "If we could
only catch one in a hundred?" he said to Westervelt. "I never expected
to see Helen Merival left like this. I didn't think it possible. I
thought she could make any piece go. To play to fifty dollars was out of
my reckoning. It is slaughter."
Once his disgust topped all restraint, and he burst forth to Helen:
"Look at this man Douglass. He bamboozles us into producing his play,
then runs off and leaves us to sink or swim. He won't even change the
lines--says he's working on a new one that will make us all 'barrels of
money.' That's the way of these dramatists--always full of some new
pipe-dream. Meanwhile we're going into the hole every night. I can't
stand it. We were making all kinds of money with _The Baroness_. Come,
let's go back to it!" His voice filled with love, for she was his ideal.
"Sis, I hate to see you doing this. It cuts me to the heart. Why, some
of these newspaper shads actually pretend to pity you--you, the greatest
romantic actress in America! This man Douglass has got you hypnotized.
Honestly, there's something uncanny about the way he has queered you.
Brace up. Send him whirling. He isn't worth a minute of your time,
Nellie--now, that's the fact. He's a crazy freak. Say the word and I'll
fire him and his misbegotten plays to-night."
To this Helen made simple reply. "No, Hugh; I intend to stand to my
promise. We will keep _Lillian_ on till the new play is ready. It would
be unfair to Mr. Douglass--"
"But he has lost all interest in it himself. He never shows up in front,
never makes a suggestion."
"He is saving all his energy for the new play."
Hugh's lips twisted in scorn. "The new play! Yes, he's filled with a lot
of pale-blue moonshine now. He's got another 'idea.' That's the trouble
with these literary chaps, they're so swelled by their own notions they
can't write what the common audience wants. His new play will be a worse
'frost' than this. You'll ruin us all if you don't drop him. We stand to
lose forty thousand dollars on _Lillian_ already."
"Nevertheless, I shall give the new play a production," she replied, and
Hugh turned away in speechless dismay and disgust.
The papers were filled with stinging allusions to her failure. A shrewd
friend from Boston met her with commiseration in her face. "It's a good
play and a fine part," she said, "but they don't want you in such work.
They like you when you look wicked."
"I know that, but I'm tired of playing the wanton adventuress for such
people. I want to appeal to a more thoughtful public for the rest of my
stage career."
"Why not organize a church like Mrs. Allinger?" sneered another less
friendly critic. "The stage is no place for sermons."
"You are horribly unjust. _Lillian's Duty_ is a powerful acting drama,
and has its audience if I could reach it. Perhaps I'm not the one to do
Mr. Douglass's work, after all," she added, humbly.
Deep in her heart Helen MacDavitt the woman was hungry for some one to
tell her that he loved her. She longed to put her head down on a strong
man's breast to weep. "If Douglass would only open his arms to me I
would go to him. I would not care what the world says."
She wished to see him reinstate himself not merely with the public but
in her own estimate of him. As she believed that by means of his pen he
would conquer, she comprehended that his present condition was fevered,
unnatural, and she hoped--she believed--it to be temporary. "Success
will bring back the old, brave, sanguine, self-contained Douglass whose
forthright power and self-confidence won my admiration," she said, and
with this secret motive to sustain her she went to her nightly
delineation of _Lillian_.
She had lived long without love, and her heart now sought for it with an
intensity which made her art of the highest account only as served the
man she loved. Praise and publicity were alike of no value unless they
brought success and happiness to him whose eyes called her with growing
power.