FATHER AND DAUGHTER
One morning, shortly before she left for New York, Miss Fuschia Fleming
and her father sat in the sitting-room of their suite in the hotel at
Santa Barbara. The sunshine without lay broad and white and dazzling.
Within it seemed to be reflected, although through many tonal shadings
in subdued, but still golden points of emphasis. There were bowls of
yellow roses, there were baskets of oranges and lemons, there was
Fuschia herself in a morning gown as pale as the gold of her hair which
looked paler than ever in contrast to a great tawny, orange-colored
flower, which she had leaned from her window and plucked a short while
before and thrust carelessly above one ear.
Her chair was completely surrounded by newspapers, colored supplements,
Sunday magazine sections. They billowed about her like waves. Whoever
would reach her must cross a crackling sea. On the opposite side of the
room, her father reclined comfortably in a large easy chair, smoking an
excellent cigar and poring intently over a page of "past performances,"
with pencil in hand poised above it.
"Goodness!" said Fuschia suddenly, "she's a dream!"
"Who?" asked her father, looking up.
"Mrs. Hepworth." Fuschia was gazing at a page which presented many
pictures of the same lady. "Put down that dope sheet, papa; it's time
wasted studying it. All your money is needed to back just one favorite,
and copper just one bet, and that's me."
"In common with my brothers, men, the workers and the shirkers, I am
always ready with advice," obediently laying aside his paper.
"Save it for the weak brother then. I want to talk to you, to clear out
my own thoughts. Now Mrs. Hepworth--"
"Cress' wife?" her father interrupted with a show of interest. "What's
the matter there, Fuschia? Why isn't she here?"
"She's got a mission in life, just like you and me," Fuschia showed her
beautiful even teeth in one of her widest, curliest smiles. "Yours, with
the great motto inscribed upon your banner, 'Home-keeping youths have
ever homely wits,' is to rescue your brother from the deadly thraldom of
the home; mine is to reform the stage; Mrs. Hepworth's is to redeem
women's clothes. She has all kinds of theories about color and design
and she wanted to put them in practice. That nice Mrs. Wilstead says
that she's an odd, capricious, undisciplined creature, but a genius in
her line. Oh, I've learned a lot about her from what Mrs. Wilstead and
all these newspapers have told me, and what Mr. Hepworth hasn't told me.
Papa, dear, I never admired any one in my life as I do that man. I've
tried every way but using a drag-net to get him to tell me the whole
story, but he's stood every test. He'll talk freely on any other
subject."
"Didn't happen to give you any inside talk about those Arizona
properties, did he?"
"He did not. You see he married the poor but beautiful girl, and then
she got playing too gaily with Eugene Gresham, the great artist. You've
heard of him surely. It was the triangle, you see. Same old dramatic
motive. Then suddenly, just as every one was standing on their tiptoes
to enjoy the view, why the triangle flew to pieces. The Cresswell
Hepworth part landed out here, the Eugene Gresham part went to Europe,
the Mrs. Hepworth part went into business with a Miss Carmine, and
opened a big establishment in New York, and every one came down on their
heels with a thud, and are still staring at each other wondering what's
doing."
"If Cress really wants her," remarked Fleming, flicking the ashes from
his cigar, "he surely wouldn't be such a fool as to leave the field.
He'd stay and fight for her."
"That's man-talk," said Fuschia lightly contemptuous. "A crazy idea you
all have, that you can make women love you. Don't you know how the
leading man always walks about the stage clenching and unclenching his
hands, and muttering, 'By heaven, I'll make her love me; I'll win her
against all the wir-r-rld.' Poor souls, they think they can dazzle us
into loving them; and many feel that if they only talk enough about
themselves, and their great achievements, what they've done and what
they're going to do, that they can't fail to fascinate us; and it often
suits us to let them think so. Awfully funny, isn't it?"
"I never succeeded in fascinating 'em, no matter what line I took," said
her father with feeling.
"Women don't care much for you, do they? Well, cheer up, Daddy, dear.
They've never loved me. Once in a while, they're very nice to me, and we
purr and purr and rub noses, but all the time we are watching each other
out of our green eyes, and then one day there's the swift stroke of the
velvet paw and the deep mark of claws."
"Mighty little purr and velvet for me," Fleming's petticoat
reminiscences were invariably gloomy, "mostly claws."
Fuschia's unfeeling smile curved nearly up to her eyes. "How is that
Idaho property anyway?" she asked with apparent irrelevance.
"Fine, my dear, fine. I think Cress may really make something on it
himself, but in any event, he'll have no difficulty in unloading it."
"I'll need a pile of money for my campaign." She took an orange from
the basket and began tossing it from one hand to the other. "I've
brought a good deal of study to bear on the arrangement of this
checker-board. I always like to get on to the game just as much as
possible. Why have I been traveling about with those miserable little
stock companies putting up with all kinds of hardships? Just to get
experience. Now I'm ready for New York!" She mused a moment, and then
took up the subject with fresh enthusiasm. "It's helped me a lot, all
this newspaper notoriety about myself and Mr. Hepworth. Puts me before
the public as nothing else could. Just look at these pictures!" She
plunged her hand down into the rustling sea, and held out a Sunday
supplement to him. "There's a lovely picture of the auto tumbling over a
cliff and me landing in a tree. Simply great! Now just as soon as I get
to New York, Mrs. Hepworth's got to be a sister to me."
"How do you know she'll cotton to you?" asked Fleming.
"What's that got to do with it?" His daughter opened her eyes in
surprise. "I need her, for through her, I mean to have my portrait
painted by Gresham. And his prices! La, la! Sure, you can put your hands
on real money and plenty of it?"
"Fuschia, my child," her father laid aside his "dope sheet" and bent
impressively toward her, "this new proposition has more in it than even
you can spend, and you know what that means. It's one of those
spectacular properties that make a poet of a man. You can talk it
beautifully, splash on the color, you know, and it writes as well as it
talks. Shows up superbly in a prospectus, photographs like an artist's
dream. Just the thing to capture the eastern imagination. You see, it
matters very little whether the property is intrinsically all right or
not. That is always problematical, and to be left in the hands of
Providence. The great thing is to know what is going to capture the
eastern imagination. That's what you're really dealing with, not the
proposition itself, by Jingo, but the eastern imagination."
"That's just what I tried to tell that unborn babe of a press agent this
morning," cried Fuschia, nodding her head in emphatic agreement. "I got
him because he was a Mayflower Yankee, just out of Harvard, and yet
he's got no more idea of how to deal with his own people than a new-laid
kitten. He came bounding to me an hour or two ago with a lot of stuff
he'd been working over nights with wet towels around his head and a pot
of black coffee at his elbow.
"'I think I've struck it,' said he. 'It is both true and new!' Pop, it
was like this. 'Miss Fuschia Fleming can really do things, therefore she
does not waste time talking about them. One of the most competent of
stage managers, she never loses her temper. Admirable self-control a
striking characteristic. Thoroughly systematic and methodical.'
"Lord, Papa! I felt sorry for the kid. It like to killed me, you know.
Well, I waited a bit till the daze wore off and then I said, 'I'm sorry,
honey, but it won't do. If I'd made good in New York and had 'em all
rooting for me, it would be different, but they're effete Easterners,
boy, used to ruts and routine, and you can't change their breakfast food
on 'em like that. They won't stand for it. Give 'em the same good old
press notices that mother used to make back in 1860. Don't talk about
my "trim neatness." You won't believe it, Daddy, but the poor kid
actually did that! I said, 'Say that my favorite house costume is a
Mexican riding-suit hung with silver dollars, and that, in cold weather,
I always wear a Navajo blanket over my shoulders. Have a sketch of me
rolling a cigarette between the thumb and second finger of one hand and
throwing the lariat with the other. Describe me, when only fifteen,
playing Rosalind in the redwoods of the Yosemite before a wildly
enthusiastic audience of miners and cowboys. Then say that once before,
when appearing before the most brilliant audience ever assembled in a
San Francisco theater, I became so overwrought that I began to shoot
holes through the drop curtain.' Do you think that was all right, Papa?"
Her father gazed at her with an almost awed admiration. "Honest to God,
Fuschia," he said at last, "I don't know what to think of you. Here I've
spent my life handling those Easterners, singly and in bunches, and here
are you, without either experience or training, on to the game
intuitively. Fuschia, this is a proud day for me. I've never told you,
little girl, but sometimes I've had my doubts about your bringing up. I
tell you after your mother ran away with my best friend and then
divorced me for desertion and shortly died, leaving you, a two-year-old
girl baby to me as a last bequest, it was a black hour. Like one of
those Bible boys--Peter, wasn't it?--I went out and crew bitterly. 'If
she was only a boy!' I said. 'What can Jim Fleming do with a she thing
like this?' Then I took another look at you, in your white dress and
blue shoes, smiling at me with your mouth all over your face, and, true
as I stand here, Fuschia, you were the first thing in skirts that didn't
seem to be looking at me across a great gulf.
"And then I talked to myself a while. You see, if your mother had come
to me as man to man and said, 'Jim, I'm tired of you and I want to marry
Henry,' I'd have said, hard as it might have hit me, you know that,
Fuschia, 'Kate, I don't blame you, and I'll do what I can to help you.'
But she preferred the feminine route, a note on the pincushion and she
gone with all her jewels and ten thousand I'd given her to buy a
diamond necklace. But as I say, I looked at you in your white dress and
blue shoes and that friendly grin on your little mug, and I said, 'God
knows how it'll work, but this girl thing here ain't going to grow up
thinking that there's fences built all around her and that she's got to
coax and sneak and pretend to get her way. Poor Kate! With great price
she obtained her freedom, but my little Fuschia, here, she's born
free.'"
"Good old Poppy-doppy!" Fuschia's tone was fondly approving and
something like a tear glimmered in the depths of her turquoise eyes.
"I'm glad you never tried the snaffle bit of parental training and home
influences on me, because I'd sure have kicked myself free, and it
mightn't have been pleasant. But to come back to the present, Mr.
Hepworth is so splendid, that unless his wife is really in love with
this boy-Raphael or whatever he is, I'm going to get into the game and
make home happy for the Hepworths."
"Cautiously, cautiously, daughter," admonished Fleming, looking a trifle
alarmed. "That's all right on the stage; but in real life when an
outsider tries to join the parted hands of husband and wife, he's
likely to get a cuff on the ear."
"Oh, men are crude," sighed Fuschia. "You didn't suppose I was going to
do the child at Christmas act, did you? No, what I mean to do, that is,
if it's just her imagination and not really her heart that's captured,
is to take her boy-Raphael away from her."
Fleming gasped, and, lowering his head slightly, looked at his daughter
from under his eyebrows. "Fuschia," he said, "there are few things that
can feaze me. 'No limitations and no limits' has always been my motto,
but you do, child, you really do take my breath away sometimes. Why, if
report is true, Cress' wife is one of the most beautiful women in the
world."
"Um-huh," Fuschia yawned indifferently. "What has that got to do with
it? I've usually," she continued thoughtfully, "succeeded in getting
anything I wanted; that is, men. The wildest of them will trot right up
to me, and eat out of my hand."
"You're your father's own little girl, Fuschia," said Jim with emotion.
"Yes, and it's a good thing I inherited father's constitution as well as
his spell-binding abilities, considering that I have to be practically
my own press agent, stage manager and all the rest of it; the management
of Fuschia Fleming and Fuschia Fleming herself and then take up the task
of reuniting families besides. But Mr. Hepworth is a good, good man,
Papa, and we're going to make him happy, even if we have to do it on his
money."