He ran his fingers through his hair with a nervous gesture. "I told
Elise that it wasn't."
"But the girl"--Elise's gaze held hot resentment--"is wonderful. Surely
you can see that."
"She doesn't seem quite real."
"Then Jimmie shall make her real." Elise laid her hand lightly on her
husband's shoulder. Her gown and golden net were all flame and sparkle,
but her voice was cold. "He shall make her real."
"No"--it seemed to me that as he spoke Jimmie drew away from her
hand--"I am not going to rewrite it, Elise. I'm tired of it."
"Jimmie!"
"I'm tired of it--"
"Finish it, and then you'll be free--"
"Shall I ever be free?" He stood up and turned his head from side to
side, as if he sought some way of escape. "Shall I ever be free? I
sometimes think that you and I will stick to this old house until we
grow as dry as dust. I want to live, Elise! I want to live--!"
* * * * *
But Elise was not ready to let Jimmie live. To her, Jimmie the artist was
more than Jimmie the lover. I may have been unjust, but she seemed to me
a sort of mental vampire, who was sucking Jimmie's youth. Duncan Street
snorted when I told him what I thought. Elise was a pretty woman, and a
pretty woman in the eyes of men can do no wrong.
"You'll see," I said, "what she'll do to him."
The situation was to me astounding. Here was Life holding out its hands
to Elise, glory of youth demanding glorious response, and she,
incredibly, holding back. In spite of my gray hair and stiff figure, I
am of the galloping kind, and my soul followed Jimmie Harding's in its
quest for freedom.
But there was one thing that Elise could not do. She could not make
Jimmie rewrite his play. "I'll come to it some day," he said, "but not
yet. In the meantime I'll see what I can do with books."
He did a great deal with books, so that he wrote several best-sellers.
This eased the financial situation and they might have had more time for
things. But Elise still kept him at it. She wanted to be the wife of a
great man.
Yet as the years went on, Duncan and I began to wonder if her hopes
would be realized. Jimmie wrote and wrote. He was successful in a
commercial sense, but fame did not come to him. There was gray in his
burnt-gold hair; his shoulders acquired a scholarly droop, and he wore
glasses on a black ribbon. It was when he put on glasses that I began to
feel a thousand years old. Yet always when he was away from me I thought
of him as the Jimmie whose youth had shone with blinding radiance.
His constancy to Duncan and to me began to take on a rather pathetic
quality. The others in the office drifted gradually out of his life.
Some of them died, some of them resigned, some of them worked on, plump
or wizened parodies of their former selves. I was stouter than ever, and
stiffer, and the top of Duncan's head was a shining cone. And the one
interesting thing in our otherwise dreary days was Jimmie.
"You're such darling old dears," was his pleasant way of putting it.
But Duncan dug up the truth for me. "We knew him before he wrote. He
gets back to that when he is with us."
I had grown to hate Elise. It was not a pleasant emotion, and I am not
sure that she really deserved it. But Duncan hated her, too. "You're
right," he said one day when we had lunched with Jimmie; "she's sucked
him dry." Jimmie had been unusually silent. He had laughed little. He
had tapped the table with his finger, and had kept his eyes on his
finger. He had been absent-minded. "She has sucked him dry," said
Duncan, with great heat.
But she hadn't. That was the surprising thing. Just as we were all
giving up hope of Jimmie's proving himself something more than a hack,
he did the great thing and the wonderful thing that years ago Elise had
prophesied. His play, "The Gay Cockade," was accepted by a New York
manager, and after the first night the world went wild about it.
I had helped Jimmie with the name. I had spoken once of youth as a gay
cockade. "That's a corking title," Jimmie had said, and had written it
in his note-book.
When his play was put in rehearsal, Duncan and I were there to see. We
took our month's leave, traveled to New York, and stayed at an
old-fashioned boarding-house in Washington Square. Every day we went to
the theatre. Elise was always there, looking younger than ever in the
sables bought with Jimmie's advance royalty, and with various gowns and
hats which were the by-products of his best-sellers.
The part of the heroine of "The Gay Cockade" was taken by Ursula Simms.
She was, as those of you who have seen her know, a Rosalind come to
life. With an almost boyish frankness she combined feminine witchery.
She had glowing red hair, a voice that was gay and fresh, a temper that
was hot. She galloped through the play as Jimmie had meant that she
should gallop in that first poor draft which he had read to us in
Albemarle, and it was when I saw Ursula in rehearsal that I realized
what Jimmie had done--he had embodied in his heroine all the youth that
he had lost--she stood for everything that Elise had stolen from
him--for the wildness, the impetuosity, the passion which swept away
prudence and went neck to nothing to fulfilment.
Indeed, the whole play partook of the madness of youth. It bubbled over.
Everybody galloped to a rollicking measure. We laughed until we cried.
But there was more than laughter in it. There was the melancholy which
belongs to tender years set in exquisite contrast to the prevailing
mirth.
Jimmie had a great deal to do with the rehearsals. Several times he
challenged Ursula's reading of the part.
"You must not give your kisses with such ease," he told her upon one
occasion; "the girl in the play has never been kissed."
She shrugged her shoulders and ignored him. Again he remonstrated.
"She's frank and free," he said. "Make her that. Make her that. Men must
fight for her favors."
She came to it at last, helped by that Rosalind-like quality in herself.
She was young, as he had wanted Elise to be, clean-hearted,
joyous--girlhood at its best.
Gradually Jimmie ceased to suggest. He would sit beside us in the
dimness of the empty auditorium, and watch her as if he drank her in.
Now and then he would laugh a little, and say, under his breath: "How
did I ever write it? How did it ever happen?"
Elise, on the other side of him, said, at last, "I knew you could do it,
Jimmie."
"You thought I could do great things. You never knew I could do--this--"
It was toward the end of the month that Duncan said to me one night as
we rode home on the top of a 'bus, "You don't suppose that he--"
"Elise thinks it," I said. "It's waking her up."
Elise and Jimmie had been married fifteen years, and had never had a
honeymoon, not in the sense that Jimmie wanted it--an adventure in
romance, to some spot where they could forget the world of work, the
world of sordid things, the world that was making Jimmie old. Every
summer Jimmie had asked for it, and always Elise had said, "Wait."
But now it was Elise who began to plan. "When your play is produced,
we'll run away somewhere. Do you remember the place you always talked
about--up in the hills?"
He looked at her through his round glasses. "I can't get away from
this"--he waved his hand toward the stage.
"If it's a success you can, Jimmie."
"It will be a success. Ursula Simms is a wonder. Look at her, Elise.
Look at her!"
Duncan and I could look at nothing else. As many times as I had seen her
in the part, I came to it always eagerly. It was her great scene--where
the girl, breaking free from all that has bound her, takes the hand of
her vagabond lover and goes forth, leaving behind wealth and a marriage
of distinction, that she may wander across the moors and down on the
sands, with the wild wind in her face, the stars for a canopy!
It tugged at our hearts. It would tug, we knew, at the heart of any
audience. It was the human nature in us all which responded. Not one of
us but would have broken bonds. Oh, youth, youth! Is there anything like
it in the whole wide world?
I do not think that it tugged at the heart of Elise. Her heart was not
like that. It was a stay-at-home heart. A workaday-world heart. Elise
would never under any circumstance have gone forth with a vagabond on a
wild night.
But here was Ursula doing it every day. On the evening of the first
dress-rehearsal she wore clothes that showed her sense of fitness. As if
in casting off conventional restraints, she renounced conventional
attire; she came down to her lover wrapped in a cloak of the deep-purple
bloom of the heather of the moor, and there was a pheasant's feather in
her cap.
"_May you never regret it, my dear, my dear_," said the lover on the
stage.
"_I shall love you for a million years_," said Ursula, and we felt that
she would, and that love was eternal, and that any woman might have it
if she would put her hand in her lover's and run away with him on a
wild night!
And it was the genius of Jimmie Harding that made us feel that the thing
could be done. He sat forward in his chair, his arms on the back of the
seat in front of him. "Jove!" he kept saying under his breath. "It's the
real thing. It's the real thing--"
When the scene was over, he went on the stage and stood by Ursula. Elise
from her seat watched them. Ursula had taken off the cap with the
pheasant's feather. Her glorious hair shone like copper, her hand was on
her hip, her little swagger matched the swagger that we remembered in
the old Jimmie. I wondered if Elise remembered.
* * * * *
I am not sure what made Ursula care for Jimmie Harding. He was no longer
a figure for romance. But she did care. It was, perhaps, that she saw in
him the fundamental things which belonged to both of them, and which did
not belong to Elise.
As the days went on I was sorry for Elise. I should never have believed
that I could be sorry, but I was. Jimmie was always punctiliously polite
to her. But he was only that.
"She's getting what she deserves," Duncan said, but I felt that she was,
perhaps, getting more than she deserved. For, after all, it was she who
had kept Jimmie at it, and it was her keeping him at it which had
brought success.
Neither Duncan nor I could tell how Jimmie felt about Ursula. But the
thought of her troubled my sleep. Stripped of her art, she was not in
the least the heroine of Jimmie's play. She was of coarser clay,
commoner. And Jimmie was fine. The fear I had was that he might clothe
her with the virtues which he had created, and the thought, as I have
said, troubled me.
At last Duncan and I had to go home, although we promised to return for
the opening night. Ursula gave a farewell supper for us. She lived alone
with a housekeeper and maid. Her apartment was furnished in good taste,
with, perhaps, a touch of over-emphasis. The table had unshaded purple
candles and heather in glass dishes. Ursula wore woodland green, with a
chaplet of heather about her glorious hair. Elise was in white with
pearls. She was thirty-five, but she did not look it. Ursula was older,
but she would always be in a sense ageless, as such women are--one would
thrill to Sara Bernhardt were she seventeen or seventy.
Jimmie seemed to have dropped the years from him. He was very confident
of the success of his play. "It can't fail," he said, "with Ursula to
make it sure--"
I wondered whether it was Ursula or Elise who had made it sure. Could he
ever have written it if Elise had not kept him at it? Yet she had stolen
his youth!
And now Ursula was giving his youth back to him! As I saw the cock of
his head, heard the ring of his gay laughter, I felt that it might be
so. And suddenly I knew that I didn't want Jimmie to be young again. Not
if he had to take his youth from the hands of Ursula Simms!
There were many toasts before the supper ended--and the last one Jimmie
drank "To Ursula"! As he stood up to propose it, his glasses dangled
from their ribbon, his shoulders were squared. In the soft and shaded
light we were spared the gray in his hair--it was the old Jimmie, gay
and gallant!
"To Ursula!" he said, and the words sparkled. "To Ursula!"
I looked at Elise. She might have been the ghost of the woman who had
flamed in the old house in Albemarle. In her white and pearls she was
shadowy, unsubstantial, almost spectral, but she raised her glass. "To
Ursula!" she said.
All the way home on the train Duncan and I talked about it. We were
scared to death. "Oh, he mustn't, he must not," I kept saying, and
Duncan snorted.
"He's a young fool. She's not the woman for him--"
"Neither of them is the woman," I said, "but Elise has made him--"
"No man was ever held by gratitude."
"He'd hate Ursula in a year."
"He thinks he'd live--"
"And lose his soul--"
* * * * *
Jimmie's play opened to a crowded house. There had been extensive
advertising, and Ursula had a great following.
Elise and Duncan and I had seats in an upper box. Elise sat where she
was hidden by the curtains. Jimmie came and went unseen by the audience.
Between acts he was behind the scenes. Elise had little to say. Once she
reached over and laid her hand on mine.
"I--I think I'm frightened," she said, with a catch of her breath.
"It can't fail, my dear--"
"No, of course. But it's very different from what I expected."
"What is different?"
"Success."
As the great scene came closer, I seemed to hold my breath. I was so
afraid that the audience might not see it as we had seen it at
rehearsal. But they did see it, and it was a stupendous thing to sit
there and watch the crowd, and know that Jimmie's genius was making its
heart beat fast and faster. When Ursula in her purple cloak and
pheasant's feather spoke her lines at the end of the third act, "_I
shall love you for a million years_," the house went wild. Men and women
who had never loved for a moment roared for this woman who had made them
think they could love until eternity. They wanted her back and they got
her. They wanted Jimmie and they got him. Ursula made a speech; Jimmie
made a speech. They came out for uncounted curtain-calls, hand-in-hand.
The play was a success!
The last act was, of course, an anti-climax. Before it was finished,
Elise said to me, in a, stifled voice, "I've got to get back to Jimmie."
It seemed significant that Jimmie had not come to her. Surely he had not
forgotten the part she had played. For fifteen years she had worked for
this.
We found ourselves presently behind the scenes. The curtain was down,
the audience was still shouting, everybody was excited, everybody was
shaking hands. The stage-people caught at Elise as she passed, and held
her to offer congratulations. I was not held and went on until I came to
where Jimmie and Ursula stood, a little separate from the rest. Although
I went near enough to touch them, they were so absorbed in each other
that they did not see me. Ursula was looking up at Jimmie and his head
was bent to her.
"Jimmie," she said, and her rich voice above the tumult was clear as a
bell, "do you know how great you are?"
"Yes," he said. "I--I feel a little drunk with it, Ursula."
"Oh," she said, and now her words stumbled, "I--I love you for it. Oh,
Jimmie, Jimmie, let's run away and love for a million years--"
All that he had wanted was in her words--the urge of youth, the beat of
the wind, the song of the sea. My heart stood still.
He drew back a little. He had wanted this. But he did not want it
now--with Ursula. I saw it and she saw it.
"What a joke it would be," he said, "but we have other things to do, my
dear."
"What things?"
The roar of the crowd came louder to their ears. "Harding, Harding!
Jimmie Harding!"
"Listen," he said, and the light in his eyes was not for her. "Listen,
Ursula, they're calling me."
She stood alone after he had left her. I am sure that even then she did
not quite believe it was the end. She did not know how, in all the
years, his wife had molded him.
When he had satisfied the crowd, Jimmie fought his way to where Elise
and Duncan and I stood together.
Elise was wrapped in a great cloak of silver brocade. There was a touch
of silver, too, in her hair. But she had never seemed to me so small, so
childish.
"Oh, Jimmie," she said, as he came up, "you've done it!"
"Yes"--he was flushed and laughing, his head held high--"you always said
I could do it. And I shall do it again. Did you hear them shout, Elise?"
"Yes."
"Jove! I feel like the old woman in the nursery rhyme, 'Alack-a-daisy,
do this be I?'" He was excited, eager, but it was not the old eagerness.
There was an avidity, a greediness.
She laid her hand on his arm. "You've earned a rest, dearest. Let's go
up in the hills."
"In the hills? Oh, we're too old, Elise."
"We'll grow young."
"To-night I've given youth to the world. That's enough for me"--the
light in his eyes was not for her--"that's enough for me. We'll hang
around New York for a week or two, and then we'll go back to Albemarle.
I want to get to work on another play. It's a great game, Elise. It's a
great game!"
She knew then what she had done. Here was a monster of her own making.
She had sacrificed her lover on the altar of success. Jimmie needed her
no longer.
I would not have you think this an unhappy ending. Elise has all that
she had asked, and Jimmie, with fame for a mistress, is no longer an
unwilling captive in the old house. The prisoner loves his prison,
welcomes his chains.
But Duncan and I talk at times of the young Jimmie who came years ago
into our office. The Jimmie Harding who works down in Albemarle, and who
struts a little in New York when he makes his speeches, is the ghost of
the boy we knew. But he loves us still.