After the inglorious failure of _Lear_, they tried _She Stoops to
Conquer_, with Cecilia Pyce, an English actress of advancing years and a
large and bony physique, whom MacNaughton much vaunted. Brainard
suspected that Cissie, as Mac called her, had been the Scotsman’s
sweetheart in her palmier days, and thus he was now paying his
sentimental debts by giving her a lucrative position at his patron’s
expense. However, nothing better offered at present, and Miss Pyce at
least knew how to act in the solid old English fashion. The people came
sparingly, and sat in the first four rows of the big auditorium, which
was a lonesome sort of place these days.
It was little better when the company essayed an “original American
play”—as it was advertised—that Farson had culled from the mass of
manuscripts he had examined. _May Magic_ lasted a week, and then fell to
pieces before an audience consisting of the author and about twenty of
his friends. The management could not even give their tickets away. At
_May Magic_ the critics took final leave of the People’s Theater with
such parting kicks as this:
What in the name of common sense is the amateurish aggregation at the
so-called People’s Theater trying to do? In what sense is it a
popular theater? The “people” are conspicuous by their absence. The
worthy gentleman who is spending his money giving the public
fifth-rate productions of English classics and such rejected modern
masterpieces as _May Magic_ had better go over to Broadway and learn
his trade.
Brainard was thankful that Louisiana was safe on the high seas on her way
to Munich, and would not see this article!
Somewhere Farson ran across a statuesque young woman of German extraction
who spoke English as if she had a cracker in her mouth, and became
persuaded that the mission of their organization was to introduce to the
American public the new plays of the advanced European theater.
“We must become the theater of ideas,” he said to Brainard.
So, with the assistance of Miss Beatrice Klinker in leading roles, the
People’s Theater became frankly “highbrow” and went after Brieux,
Hauptmann, Strindberg, and the tribe of the peculiar. Brainard poured
out money like water in buying rights at exorbitant prices, in preparing
new scenery, and in expensive additions to the company. He foresaw that
at this rate, instead of starting a chain of popular theaters across the
continent, he would have all he could do to maintain one organization in
New York, with possibly a couple of road companies. For the receipts
were always negligible. To such comparatively modest limits had his
great Idea already shrunken. If he had not thus far succeeded in
enlightening any large section of the American Public in dramatic art, he
himself had received a very thorough and costly lesson, not merely in the
drama, but in human nature and life. That, however, had not been his
purpose!
It was not until the People’s Theater produced an erotic piece by a new
Danish writer, whose name was unknown to the critics, that the house
began to fill.
“We’ve struck our pace!” Farson declared jubilantly. He exercised all
his journalistic ingenuity in whetting the appetite of the New York
public for the play with immediate results in the box office. Brainard,
although he had no high opinion of the play, felt relieved not to
encounter at each performance the same dreary waste of empty seats. He
comforted himself with the thought that if the Public could be induced to
come to a “sex play,” they might be captured for less hectic
entertainments. MacNaughton and Farson, with the easy sophistry of the
theater, maintained that what people cared to see must be good art and
stoutly defended the Danish piece.
But their good luck did not hold. At the Saturday matinée of the first
week the police visited the theater and the curtain was ordered down
after the bedroom scene in the second act. There was a mild
demonstration among the audience, whose curiosity was defeated, and the
price of their tickets was repaid to all who demanded it. The press made
considerable noise over the event.
“We’re made!” MacNaughton announced in great excitement. Farson was busy
with the reporters, trying to get the most out of this unexpected bit of
publicity. Brainard set forth in search of the virtuous police
commissioner to protest in the name of outraged Art. But the
commissioner was impervious to Art.
“That sort of show don’t go in New York,” he pronounced austerely, in
reply to Brainard’s argument that the play had been given even more
boldly in Vienna and Berlin and was held to be a “moral document” by the
best European critics. The police commissioner seemed to think that New
York had a different and better morality than that obtaining in Europe.
He was obdurate. When Brainard reported his failure to his associates,
Farson took it very lightly.
“All we’ll have to do,” he suggested, “is to make some slight changes—put
a screen in front of the bed scene—and see the inspector. I’ll take care
of him.”
But Brainard refused to pay the police to be allowed to produce his play,
and so on Monday night the People’s Theater remained dark.
“And just look at all that money!” MacNaughton wailed, as something of a
crowd began to form in front of the theater for the first time. “The
governor is a miserable puritan,” he said to Farson, wringing his hands.
“To think of turning his back on his luck just because of the morality of
the New York police! He ought to run a Sunday school.”
Brainard was not to be moved, although the theater would have to remain
closed for a week until the company could prepare another play. He was
deeply disgusted with the whole affair, with the notoriety as well as the
cheap pretense of morality by the police commissioner. For the first
time in four years his faith in the great Idea began to waver, and he
longed to escape from New York to the more vital air of Arizona. There
had been some difficulty recently with the pumps at the Melody mine, and
he might well take this opportunity of running down to Monument. Once
there it would be a temptation to abandon the great Idea altogether and
to remain in the mountains developing the copper mine. Or he could buy a
coffee plantation in Jalapa, as he had once fleetingly thought of doing,
and settle himself in Mexico like a medieval prince. Possibly the little
señorita Marie had not yet found another Prince and had waited all these
years for his expected return. The vision of that beautiful semitropical
valley dominated by the snowy crown of the old volcano returned to his
memory with alluring colors. Life in such a far-off Eden with a gentle
creature as mistress of a rose-covered haçienda was an inviting contrast
to the glare and vulgarity of New York. . . .
Brainard and the secretary left the theater in glum silence, each
possessed by an unhappy train of thought. On their way uptown they
passed a billboard on which some flaming posters displayed certain
tempting scenes from a soul-and-body-stirring play called _The Stolen
Bonds_, now being given for the first time in New York. Brainard paused
before the gaudy billboard.
“What the public really likes!” Farson commented with a grin.
Brainard remembered Louisiana’s angry taunt,—“Go and see a good
melodrama—see what folks are willing to pay real money for!”
“Let’s take it in!” he exclaimed, seizing his companion’s arm. “We
haven’t anything else to do this evening.”
“We’ll get all the goods before we reach the show,” the secretary
observed, pointing to another series of immense posters that represented
a gloomy bank vault in which a masked gentleman was holding a lantern
above the prostrate form of a woman. “They’re not afraid of giving away
their story!”
“Perhaps we shall find the great American play we have been hunting for
all this year,” Brainard replied, as they came into the garish foyer of
the theater. At one side was the entrance to a brilliant saloon, which
seemed part of the establishment. “Democratic and convivial this,” he
joked, thinking of the dainty “tea room” at the People’s.
There were only box seats left. When the two pushed aside the plush
curtains that concealed these luxurious retreats, the curtain was up and
the first act had started before a house packed with prosperous-looking
citizens and their women.
“Not a dead seat in the house, I’ll bet!” whispered the secretary.
The scene represented the inside of an office, with a large safe at one
side. The short, black-haired heroine was striving ineffectually to bar
the way of a brawny villain, who had her covered with a revolver in one
hand, and with the other whipped an ether cone from an inner pocket. She
was rapidly crowded into the vault, where she succumbed in due time,
after a muscular struggle and curdling shrieks, to the ether cone.
Thereupon the burglar set busily to work to fill an enormous sample case
with piles of yellow currency and bundles conveniently labeled BONDS, in
large letters, so that a child might read. The villain then departed,
carefully locking the door of the safe upon the etherized heroine.
But the villain had reckoned without the telephone. In the next scene
the stenographer-heroine slowly grabbed the ether cone from her face,
gaspingly crawled to the corner, where the telephone hung conspicuously,
and called Central. Presently the bolts began to grumble, and were shot
back by a young man who rushed in and dragged the tottering woman from
the safe, while she murmured in a dying whisper audible for two blocks:
“The ferry, Jasper! The ferry! The thief!” Then the noble girl fell
swooning and apparently lifeless.
“There’s something doing!” Farson remarked with an appreciative grin, and
added with a peculiar expression, “They’ve taken more than a hint from my
one play.”
“And several more from life,” Brainard muttered.
“I believe it _is_ life through the medium of my play—but altered
somehow,” Farson observed.
“Oh! much altered!”
The next scene was labeled, “AT THE FERRY SLIP—SAN FRANCISCO.” As the
curtain rose, the villain—no longer masked, but with a long ulster
concealing all but his sinister eyes—was deftly transferring himself and
his sample case, stuffed with money and bonds, on board the ferry-boat.
The bell rang—business in the wings. Then on rushed the hero-lover,
clutching vainly at the disappearing sample case. There was a desperate
tussle between the hero and the villain, while the dummy passengers on
the deck above obligingly turned their backs. The villain cut loose from
his pursuer with a wicked knife, threw the case upon the moving boat, and
leaped two yards after it, leaving the prostrate figure of the hero-lover
half dropping over the slip. The stenographer-heroine appeared—in a neat
traveling suit—and pulled her lover safely ashore. Curtain.
“Bravo!” Farson shouted enthusiastically. “If it isn’t exactly life,
it’s the way we’d all like to have it happen, anyway.”
“It may be nearer life than you think,” Brainard assented with a queer
smile. In this scene he had been able to get a good view of the heroine
of the piece. Beneath the coarse make-up he thought he recognized
familiar features, and felt sure that he had heard in real life that
pert, nasal voice which had just uttered the last speech—“Escaped! We’ll
track him into the darkest wilds of Africa!”
“Recognize a friend?” Farson inquired. Brainard nodded. They turned
over the leaves of their program to find the name of the heroine. It was
Lorilla Walters, in large black type.
“Lorilla,” Farson murmured. “Good stage name.”
“It sounds like her!” Brainard agreed.
Just then the curtain went up for the third act. Here was a rapid
succession of scenes representing the pursuit and escape of the villain
in the Arizona desert, with one very lurid background of flaming
mountains and sagebrush plain. Pistol shots and a chase through an adobe
haçienda outside a Mexican village concluded the act.
“Whew, these people have wire nerves!” Farson commented, wiping his brow.
“They have treated the story rather freely,” Brainard remarked grimly.
Farson talked nervously.
“Louisiana would like that!” he said. “There’s something doing all the
time. I bet that’s Lorilla. What do you say to trying her at the
People’s? She’s a trifle broad in her methods, but sound—and lets
herself go all the time. It’s just a bit loud in tone.”
“Not louder than life sometimes.”
“It carries home—look at the audience!”
In the fourth act the villain was at last cornered by the
stenographer-heroine and the hero-lover, aided by a United States
cruiser, which intercepted the villain and his sample case as they were
about to sail away from the port of Vera Cruz on a Spanish steamer. The
captain of the steamer on which the villain had taken refuge with his
sample case blasphemously defied the flag of the United States with loud
curses. But a booming shot from the wings knocked his smokestack out of
service, and brought him to his senses. The captain thereafter
gracefully received the smart American lieutenant who came aboard in
holiday uniform and collared the villain, denounced by the heroine, as he
cowered behind the fallen smokestack—still wearing the long ulster.
They applauded vigorously and were about to drift out with the crowd of
candy-eating females and their escorts, when the curtains of the box were
parted by a gentleman in evening clothes, who stood smiling, holding his
spotless silk hat in one hand and extending the other to Brainard.
“Hello!” the stranger said easily, as if he were greeting a casual
acquaintance whom he had not seen for several days. He came forward into
the box, and sat on the edge of a chair, dangling his glossy silk hat.
“Saw you from behind,” he added, smiling slightly upon Brainard, whose
surprise was evident.
“You, Hollinger!” the latter exclaimed, recovering himself. “What are
you doing here?”
“Oh, in the show business,—same as you,” he added with a little laugh.
“The last time I saw you—”
“Was in that Jalapa hotel where I had the pleasure of delivering a little
lecture on life for your benefit,” the fight-trust man supplied. “You
profited by it at once—that very night, if I remember rightly. Rarely
does a teacher of morals get such a rapid reaction!”
“Yes!” Brainard laughed. “Necessity pointed the moral to your talk with
a kick. I left on a mule car, and got away just in time.”
“So Calloway told me the next morning. We tried to keep your friends
interested in Jalapa until the boat sailed. I take it that we
succeeded.”
“Yes, I owe you a great deal for that good turn.”
“Don’t mention it,” Hollinger murmured, slipping into the chair, “always
ready to serve a friend.”
Brainard introduced Farson, who knew the “king of the prize ring trust”
by sight, for Hollinger had been a celebrated figure on the Coast in the
days before the graft trials. The three chatted for a time while the
auditorium emptied.
“How did you like our play?” he inquired casually.
“Your play! It’s suspiciously like mine.”
“Perhaps we drew from the same sources.”
“How did you get into the theatrical business?” Brainard inquired.
“I got into it in a rather roundabout way,” the fight-trust magnate
explained. “You remember the event at Jalapa? The American papers were
full of it at the time. I was interested in the moving picture
concession for the States. We expected to make big money out of it. But
they had another spasm of virtue in this country about that time, and we
were shut out of the best circuits. So from the movies I got into
vaudeville and then into the regular show business. Have a couple of
circuits on the Coast and interests in the East also. This is one of my
companies. They’ve done a tremendous business out West in this thing—did
it appeal to you?”
He smiled genially at Brainard, and added: “We couldn’t work in the
haçienda scene,—roses, moonlight, Orizaba, pretty Mexican girl, and the
rest,—it took too much scenery.”
“We thought it was a trifle overdrawn,” Brainard observed.
“Oh, the theater demands that, you know,—exaggeration. Art is never
quite like nature. Even Milton threw it on thick at times, if I
recollect. . . . But it stirs the blood—that’s what you want in these
dull times. People come to the theater to feel, their lives are so dull.
That’s the first thing I learned in the show business. Give the public
something to tease the nerves, keep ’em on the jump. And the second
thing I learned was that you must always hold up a high moral standard.
It never pays in the long run to cater to the small class that can afford
to think about morals as freely as they act.” He looked at Brainard
meaningly. “I saw your show last week,” he explained. “It’s not really
tough, but it don’t pay to do that sort of thing. Most people, of
course, are not half as good as they like to think they are. But even
the worst want their art and literature better than they know they are
and better than they think their neighbors are. That’s the way they
square themselves with life,” he concluded sententiously.
This was the second time, Brainard reflected, that he had received a
valuable lesson in ethics from the fight-trust magnate. He understood
now why Hollinger had been reading Milton when he first made his
acquaintance on the Overland Limited. He was a business philosopher.
“If you are going to deal with people,” he added gently, “you must know
how they act and feel about things.”
“I suppose that is why you let the heroine capture the thief in this
piece?” Brainard remarked.
“Precisely! The clever young dramatist who knocked the thing together
for me was all for another ending, a more convincing one, perhaps, where
the heroine was bought off for a good share of the bonds and currency.
But although admitting the truth of his reasoning, I could not permit him
to ruin the success of our play. We were compelled to violate nature
again, and in deference to the public’s unquenchable thirst for Virtue we
allowed the slow-moving heroine to accomplish the dire purpose of her
vengeful passions with the assistance of the government. In its present
form our play is terribly satisfying to our public. It gratifies
especially that common human desire to get somebody. Half our criminal
justice is built upon the same unpleasant trait of human nature. . . .
By the way,” he remarked, interrupting the flow of his philosophical
analysis, “I almost forgot! There’s a friend of yours in behind who
wants to see you. I promised to bring you back. You’ve no objections?”
“None at all!” Brainard laughed. “You see our encounter didn’t turn out
quite like the play, fortunately for me!”
“So I understand,” Hollinger replied demurely, holding the curtain aside
to let the others precede him.
X
They found the leading lady waiting for them on the darkened stage. She
was dressed quite handsomely in her street costume, with the inevitable
fur coat that seems the most characteristic mark of her profession.
Without her makeup and stage costume she looked much older than Brainard
remembered her to be and also stouter. But her dark face and flashing
eyes still preserved an air of confident assurance in her good looks that
had characterized Krutzmacht’s stenographer.
“Good evening, Mr. Wilkins!” she said promptly as the men approached her.
At that unfortunate _nom de guerre_ Farson laughed outright. Hollinger
came to the rescue.
“Mr. Edgar Brainard, of the new People’s Theater; Miss Lorilla Walters of
_The Stolen Bonds_ company,” the fight-trust man said with a little
cough.
“We seem both to have changed names,” Brainard observed, shaking hands
with the leading lady.
“Walters is my stage name,” the former stenographer snapped.
“Wilkins was mine—for a few hours!” Brainard laughed.
There followed an awkward pause. In spite of the amiable greeting,
Brainard could see fire in the woman’s dark eyes and realized that it was
not simply for the pleasure of meeting her former antagonist again that
she had got Hollinger to bring him behind the scenes. He realized also
from the determined bearing and solid form of the woman he had once
unceremoniously locked up in Krutzmacht’s safe for an hour, that she
possessed a kind of vindictive energy which might easily become
troublesome to any man she disliked. For a brief moment he wished that a
wayward fate had not led his steps on this evening into the Boulevard
Theater. But it was so patently absurd that the woman could in any way
touch him now after all these years that he easily put aside the thought.
He had led his new life so long, tested himself with men and affairs so
thoroughly that his early adventures in Krutzmacht’s service seemed to
him more like a youthful escapade than reality.
During this mute encounter Farson and Hollinger watched the two with
interest. Hollinger leaned against one of the properties of the last act
in _The Stolen Bonds_, a slightly satirical smile on his lips as if he
found much intellectual amusement in the situation.
“That’s a pretty lively show you have made out of our little affair,”
Brainard remarked at last to the leading lady. “You’ve touched up the
story all along and the _dénouement_ isn’t according to the facts as I
remember them.”
Miss Walters gave a little twitch to her short veil as she snapped
meaningly:
“Perhaps it isn’t finished yet!”
“As our friend Hollinger has been proving to me,” Brainard continued in
his scoffing tone, “Art and Nature don’t always jibe. The artist has
always found fault with dull fact, and he gets his revenge upon the real
world as you took yours to-night in the play.”
“One gets it somehow,” Miss Walters replied enigmatically.
“If you are going to discuss Art and Nature,” Hollinger put in genially,
“let’s go to some place where we can have supper.”
“A good idea,” Brainard agreed. “Come home with me. My man usually has
something ready for me at this time.”
He felt that something more vital than a discussion of Art and Nature was
impending and thought that his own house would be a better place for an
animated interview than a public café. So the four picked their way in
the gloom among the bulky properties of _The Stolen Bonds_ to the stage
exit and there found a cab, which carried them quickly to the little
house in Gramercy Park. Miss Walters did not open her mouth during the
ride; Hollinger and Farson maintained a factitious conversation on
politics, and the contrasts between San Francisco and New York. The
fight-trust man ridiculed “progressivism,” which was just then coming
into vogue, shrewdly pointing out that it merely cloaked the aspirations
of “the little fellows” to “get big Capital,” and praised California as
the only place for an American to live in. From time to time Brainard
eyed the actress from his corner of the cab, wondering what her relations
with his versatile acquaintance might be. She did not seem interested in
the conversation and stared steadily into the street.
There were bottles and cold meats on the table in the dining room as
Brainard had promised. Farson discovered in the pantry the ingredients
for a hot dish, and Hollinger showed himself to be an expert in this sort
of an impromptu feast. The three men were soon busy with chafing dish
and corkscrew in a comradely way, but Miss Walters, refusing to lay aside
her long fur coat and hat, sauntered about the cheerful room, examining
carefully the pictures and prints upon the walls, the furniture and
appointments, which though not especially luxurious were thoroughly
comfortable.
“Is this your house?” she asked her host point blank, and when he nodded
she remarked:
“A pretty cozy sort of place.”
“It is comfortable,” Brainard agreed, “and very convenient. I can’t
stand hotels,” he added by way of excuse.
“Some of us have to stand ’em and be mighty thankful when they’re fit to
live in.”
Not having any appropriate reply to this remark, Brainard urged the
actress to lay aside her wraps and sit down before the fire, which he had
stirred into a blaze. She grudgingly unbuttoned her coat and sat on the
edge of the large chair he pushed to the hearth, stretching forth her
worn shoes to the warmth, and hitching up her skirt in a slightly vulgar
manner.
When Hollinger announced that his dish was ready, the four drew up at the
table and had supper, which, thanks to Farson and the fight-trust man,
was lively enough. They discussed theatrical matters, especially the
Danish play on which the People’s had come to grief. Hollinger
maintained that the trouble with the play was that it was neither moral
nor immoral enough. It was simply too much like life. “If you are going
in for vice, you must paint it red,” he pronounced. The leading lady
listened and taciturnly ate her supper. Afterwards she accepted a
cigarette and turned again to the fire. Brainard searched his brain for
a topic that might interest her and finally asked:
“How long have you been on the stage, Miss Walters?”
“It was a good many years ago, the first show I was in,” she replied, and
added with intention,—“before I met Krutzmacht.”
“Where was that?” he asked lightly.
“In Los Angeles in ninety-two.”
“You gave up the stage for a time?”
“Yes,” she said slowly. “He wanted me to.”
“Oh!”
Supper being finished, Brainard led the way to the large living room on
the floor above. Here there were books, pictures, and old theatrical
bills that seemed to interest Hollinger. He and Farson remained at one
end of the room and thus gave Brainard a further opportunity for
conversation with Miss Walters. Somewhat softened by the good supper and
the friendly reception, she began to talk more freely of herself, her
early experiences on the stage in a small stock company that played in
the little towns of central and southern California, until she met
Herbert Krutzmacht, who happened to be in Los Angeles one night when she
was playing. Brainard, who was curious to find out all he could about
Krutzmacht, observed carelessly:
“You were working in his office when I—when we last met?”
“Yes—I was working for him,” she said shortly.
“Then why,” he asked suddenly, “did you try to sell him out to his
enemies?”
“I had good reasons,” she replied, looking him defiantly in the face, “a
woman’s reasons. He hadn’t played fair with me!”
“That is, hadn’t married you as you hoped he would?” Brainard suggested.
“I didn’t say that!” she flashed quickly, realizing that she was in
danger of committing herself.
“Well, I hope the railroad people paid you well for your services.”
“They quit paying me, naturally, after you got over to Europe with the
stuff they wanted and sold it to the Germans.”
“They dealt with the Germans instead,” Brainard laughed. “It might have
paid better to stick by the old man to the end? . . . So, after we
parted at Vera Cruz, you went back to the stage—into the legitimate?”
“Mr. Hollinger suggested it when I met him at Jalapa. He got me a place
in one of the San Francisco theaters a friend of his was running, and
then later on when he went into the show business himself, he took me for
one of his companies.”
“Do you like the work?”
“It’s as good as anything else,” the leading lady replied, “so long as
you’ve got to work for your living.”
“Most of us have to do that.”
“Unless we are clever enough to get somebody else to do the work for us,”
she sneered.
“Then I think we lose most of the fun.”
Miss Walters stared at him skeptically.
“What’s the use of your taking that lofty tone with me?”
Brainard laughed good-naturedly. He found in this case, as he had in so
many others, that a little personal contact with an enemy modifies and
humanizes any antagonism. “Eat with an enemy and lose your hate,” is an
old proverb, the truth of which he was proving. In spite of the hardness
and vulgarity of Miss Lorilla Walters, actress and stenographer, there
was something pathetic in her commonplace struggle with life, which he
felt through her brief admissions. She had been fighting all her life
for herself with somewhat coarse weapons, the only ones she knew how to
use, and her appearance, now that she had lost the advantage of youth and
was declining towards middle age, her cheap clothes, her defiant
manner,—all told of the losing game. He was already beginning to wonder
what he could do for Krutzmacht’s old stenographer, wondering whether by
any chance she could be fitted into the People’s company, when his
amiable meditations were disagreeably interrupted by the actress.
“It’s no use your playing the great philanthropist with me,” she said
truculently. “I know what you are.”
“What?”
“A crook.”
“You think so?”
“I happen to know it.”
“The trouble always has been from the moment I entered Krutzmacht’s
office that afternoon that you have persisted in this wrong idea. You
took me for a common thief then, and you think me a successful swindler
now. Well, it happens that I am neither. So you can’t understand!”
She looked over the comfortable room, which for the moment they had to
themselves, as Farson had taken Hollinger into the library.
“You seem to have done very well by yourself,” she observed.
“I was Krutzmacht’s legitimate agent then, when I entered his office, and
I have been his executor so to speak every since,”—and as she shrugged
her shoulders skeptically, he added, “I haven’t a cent of my own—really
not a cent; I am poorer than you!”
“You want me to believe that song? . . . How about the theater and the
mine in Arizona? You see I have been following you up.”
“They belong to somebody else.”
“Indeed—to whom?”
“I shan’t tell you that!”
“Because you can’t. . . . They belong to _me_.”
“Prove your claim then!”
“And you will hand them over on a platter with a fine bow? . . . You
_are_ smooth!”
She looked into Brainard’s smiling face with an expression of perplexity.
“But until you can prove your claim, beyond doubt, I shall continue in
possession both of the mine and of the theater as guardian of the
property. And I shall fight you with all the resources I have until I am
convinced that your claim is sound.”
The actress slowly walked to the fire and threw away the cigarette she
had been smoking.
“Well, I guess we understand each other,” she said in a less truculent
voice.
“I think we do!”
“You are a curious sort of idiot,” she remarked musingly. “I don’t see
why we should fight. There’s enough money for two from what the papers
say about that mine.”
“There’s a great deal more than enough for two,” Brainard laughed, “in
one sense, but only enough for one in another—the right one,” he added
meaningly.
The actress watched him closely as he crossed the room to straighten a
picture that hung awry on the wall. She swayed gently to and fro in the
vulgar pose of the heroine of _The Stolen Bonds_, looking into the fire.
When she glanced up she saw that Brainard was observing her, a slight
smile on his lips. He was thinking that she had the temperament that
might have made a good actress, but had been hopelessly spoiled by her
bringing up and environment.
“Well?” he said. “Are you ready with the proof?”
“You are a queer sort of Willy,” she replied. “I don’t believe you and
me can ever rightly understand each other.”
“I think I understand _you_,” Brainard laughed; “you want Krutzmacht’s
money—that is quite intelligible! And you may not think so, but I am
sorry for you—I would really like to help you out—get a better position
for you!”
“But you won’t divide!”
“Never—all or nothing.”
“Do you know where I’m going to-night when I leave your swell little
house? Over on Second Avenue into a third-class hotel where my mother
and I get along with one bedroom between us. Hollinger don’t pay any big
salaries!”
“I am sorry.”
“Krutzmacht treated me like most men treat women they’ve got cheap. I
had no reason to be loyal to him, as I told you.”
“Unless,” Brainard suggested lightly, “you happened to be his wife!”
Miss Walters ignored the implication and continued explanatorily:
“When we lost you at Vera Cruz, and the railroad men I was working for
had no more use for me, I was down and out. There didn’t seem to be
anything for anybody from Krutzmacht’s money except what the Germans got
and you! So I went into the show that I told you of. But it seems there
was a good deal more property I didn’t know about—he was always close
mouthed. You were clever enough to find that mine and keep it for
yourself. . . . It wasn’t until you struck New York that anybody heard
about it. Then the papers and the magazines were full of it and of you
and of all the money you were throwing away on a theater.”
“Publicity is one of the penalties of success,” Brainard observed.
“It helped me to find you!”
Brainard bowed in acknowledgment.
“You don’t want any more trouble?” she suggested in a gentler tone than
she had previously used.
“Don’t mind trouble,” Brainard retorted quickly.
“If I was content with a half million—”
“Why not make it two?”