"The stage creates and recreates," he rushed on. "It can raise the

dead. It makes men and women live again--Julius Caesar and Cleopatra,

Napoleon and Dolly Madison. It seizes whole segments out of the circles

of past history and sets them down in the midst of to-day, with the glow

of life and the sheen of reality over all, so that for an afternoon or a

night we live in another continent or another age. We see the life, the

customs, the petty quarrels, the sublimer passions, the very pulse-beats

of men of other circumstances and other generations than our own, so

that when we come out of the theater into the times of to-day, we have

actually to wake ourselves up and ask: Which is real, and which is art?"

Doctor Campbell leaned forward now. His mouth was round, his eyes were

widely open.

"It is that which gives the stage its dignity and power," concluded

John. "It is the highest expression of man's instinct to create a new

life in a more ideal Eden than that in which he finds himself. When you

condemn the stage you condemn the creative instinct, and," exhorted

John, with the sudden sternness of a hairy prophet on his desert rock,

"you had better pause to think if you do not condemn Him who planted

that instinct in the human breast."

Hampstead had now finished; but the minister was in no hurry to speak.

He felt the spell of the picture which had been painted, but he felt

still more the spell of the young man's ardent enthusiasm.

"You must have thought that out very carefully, John," he said.

"Brother Campbell!" answered John fervently, "I have done more than

think it out. I have felt it out. I propose to live it out!"

But Doctor Campbell had kept his head amid this swirl of words, and his

return was quietly forceful.

"The stage of to-day," he began, "as I know it from the newspapers and

the billboards, never seemed so vulgar and damnable as it does now after

your glorious idealization of it. I, as a preacher of righteousness,

must judge of such an institution externally, by its effects. I have

weighed the stage in the balance, John, and I have found it wanting."

This time there was something in the minister's calm tone, in the cool

detachment of his point of view, that held John silent.

"Isn't it possible," the minister continued, in a kind of sweet

reasonableness, "that there is something insidiously demoralizing or

infectious about it? Take your own experience, John. You are a

Christian man. You have been soaking yourself in the atmosphere of the

stage for a couple of weeks. Examine your soul now, and answer me if

you are as fine, as pure a man as you were before you went there. Are

you?"

"Why, of course I am," ejaculated Hampstead impulsively.

"Think," commanded the minister, in low, compelling tones; for having

controlled his emotions the better, he was just now the stronger of the

two. "Are you--John?"

Hampstead opened his mouth eagerly, but the minister's repressing

gesture would not let him speak. The young man was literally compelled

to think, to question his own soul for a moment, and as he searched, a

telltale flush came upon his cheek, and then his glance fell. There was

an embarrassing moment of silence, during which this flush of

mortification deepened perceptibly.

The minister was a wise man. He read the sign and asked no questions.

He upbraided nothing, cackled no exultant, "I told you so."

"Let us pray, Brother John," he proposed after the interval, and knelt

by his chair with a hand upon Hampstead's shoulder. The prayer was

short.

"Oh, Lord," the man of God petitioned, "help us to know where the right

stops and the wrong begins. Keep us back from the sin of presumption.

Give thy servants wisdom to serve thy cause well and work no ill to it

by over-zeal or over-confidence. Amen!"

Doctor Campbell might have been praying for himself. But John knew that

this was only a part of his tact.

As the two men rose, John felt a sudden impulse to defend the stage from

himself.

"It was my own fault," he urged; "the fault of my own weakness in

unaccustomed surroundings. It was not the fault of the surroundings

themselves, nor of any other person. Besides, it was nothing very

grave."

"Deterioration of character is always grave," said the Reverend Charles

Thompson Campbell as he walked to the door with his caller, and the

minister's tone intimated his conviction that this particular

deterioration had been very grave indeed.

*CHAPTER VI*

*ON TWO FRONTS*

There was high commotion in a big front office in the top floor of a

tall, gray building that stood in the days before the fire on the corner

of Kearney and Market streets in the city of San Francisco. This gray

structure housed the general offices of the San Francisco and El Paso

Railroad Company, and that big front office contained the desk of the

Freight Traffic Manager. Before this desk sat a man with a domed brow

and the beak of an eagle, hair gray, eyes piercing, complexion

colorless, and a mouth that closed so tightly it was discernible only as

a crescent-shaped pucker above his spike-like chin. His mouth at the

moment was not a pucker; it was a geyser. The name of this man was

William N. Scofield, and he was obviously in a rage. He had grown up

with the S.F. & E.P., his brain expanding as it expanded, his power

rising as it had risen. Long ago, when the one lone clerk in its little

rate department, he had made with his own hands the first of those

yellow commodity tariffs that John Hampstead had scorned with

objurgations. Now Scofield held in the hand which trembled with his

anger the first of that upstart's own contributions to the science of

tariff making--not yellow, but white, in token of the clarity it was

meant to introduce.

"How did they make it? this--this botch!" he exploded, repeating his

interrogation with other embellishing phrases not properly reproducible

and then slamming the offending white sheets down hard upon his

desk,--much harder than John had slammed the yellow ones,--this

impudent, white-livered thing that was an assault upon the customs he,

Scofield, had instituted and time itself had honored!

"Telegram!" he barked to his stenographer. "Robert Mitchell, Los

Angeles. Insist immediate withdrawal your entire line of commodity

tariffs, series J. Basis carried in our own tariffs is only one we will

recognize."

Mitchell answered:

"Decline to withdraw; our tariffs issued on actual basis on which

charges are assessed."

The fight was on.

Arming himself cap-a-pie with tariffs, amendments, letters, and

memoranda, Mitchell two days later followed his telegram to San

Francisco. Most of his resources, however, were packed behind the wide,

blond brow of John Hampstead, who accompanied his chief and was more

eager for the fray than Mitchell. The battle began on Monday morning

about ten of the clock, and was not finished with the day. The field of

action was a room of this same gray building, where Howison, General

Freight Agent of the S.F. & E.P., sat at the end of a long table,

flanked right and left by assistant general freight agents, rate clerks,

and even general and district freight agents called in from the field,

all to convince Robert Mitchell and his lone rate clerk sitting at the

other end of the table that their new tariff was a hodgepodge, without

practical basis or the show of reason to support it. Scofield himself

did not take a seat in the battle line, but looked in occasionally,

either to walk about nervously or sit just back of Howison's shoulder.

On the afternoon of the second day, the enemy Traffic Manager appeared

to watch Hampstead intently for half an hour. Again and again the keen

old fighter saw his allied forces attack, but invariably this

self-confident, smiling young man with a ready citation, the upflashing

of a yellow "special", the digging out of a letter or a telegram from

his file, or occasionally even of an old freight bill issued by the S.F.

& E.P. showing exactly what rate had been assessed, triumphantly

repelled the assaults, until reverses began to be the order of the day.

"It strikes me," Scofield remarked sarcastically, "that this young man

has got us all pretty well buffaloed. The trouble is, Howison," he

glowered, "that your Tariff Department needs cleaning out. You've got a

lot of old mush heads in there."

With this warning shot into his own ranks, Scofield arose, went

discontentedly out, and never once came back. Keener than any of his

staff, he had already discerned that defeat was advancing down the road.

But the battle of the tariffs raged on throughout the week, and it was

not until late on Saturday afternoon that John, standing in one room of

the suite in the Palace Hotel charged to the name of Robert Mitchell,

flung the pile of papers from his arms into the bottom of a suitcase

with a swish and solid thud of satisfaction. Victory from first to last

had perched upon his tawny head. He had met good men and beaten them;

and he had a right to the wave of exultation that surged for a moment

dizzily through his brain.

Mr. Mitchell, too, was feeling exultant and proud beyond words, as he

stood in the door of John's room. His hands were deep in his pockets;

his large black derby hat was pushed far back from his bulging brow. On

his great landscape of a countenance was an oddly significant

expression.

"Well, Jack," he began, after an interval of silence, "what about the

stage?"

John started like a man surprised in a guilty act, although he had known

for months that this was a question Mr. Mitchell might ask at any

moment; but the decision involved seemed now so big that from day to day

he had hoped the inevitable might be postponed.

"I shall be naming a new chief clerk in a couple of weeks, now that

Heitmuller is to become General Agent," Mr. Mitchell went on

half-musingly, and as if to forestall a hasty reply to the question he

had asked. "The new man will be in line to be appointed Assistant

General Freight Agent very soon, on account of the consolidations."

For a moment John saw himself as Chief Clerk, sitting in the big swivel

chair at the high, roll-top desk, with all the strings of the business

he knew so well how to pull lying on the table before him; with clerks,

stenographers, men from other departments and that important part of the

shipping public which carried its business to the general freight

office, all running to him.

And from there it was only a short, easy step to the position of

Assistant General Freight Agent.

Only the man who has toiled far down in the ranks of a railroad

organization doing routine work at the same old desk in the same old way

for half a score of years can know on what a dizzy height sits the Chief

Clerk, or how far beyond that swings the lofty title of Assistant

General Freight Agent.

"Your advancement would be very rapid," suggested Mr. Mitchell, flicking

his flies skilfully upon the whirling eddies of the young man's thought.

John had achieved enough and glimpsed enough to see that Mitchell was

right. Advancement would be rapid. Mitchell would soon go up the line

himself; he could follow him. General Freight Agent, Assistant Traffic

Manager, Traffic Manager, Vice-president in charge of

traffic--President! with twelve thousand miles of shining steel flowing

from his hand, which he might swing and whirl and crack like a whip!

The prospect was dazzling in the extreme, and yet it was only for a

moment that the picture kindled. In the next it was dead and sparkless

as burned-out fireworks.

"You have a strong vein of traffic in your blood," the General Freight

Agent began adroitly, but John broke in upon him.

"Mr. Mitchell," he said, and his utterance was grave, "I am sorry to

disappoint you, but it comes too late. A year ago such a hint would

have thrown me into ecstasies. To-day it leaves me cold. I have had

another vision."

The face of Mitchell shaded from seriousness almost to sadness, but he

was too wise to increase by argument an ardor about which, to the

railroad man, there was something not easy to be understood, something,

indeed, almost fanatical. Instead Mitchell asked with sober, interested

friendliness:

"What is your plan, John?"

"To resign July first," John answered, for the first time definitely

crossing the bridge, "to come to San Francisco and seek an engagement

with some of the stock companies playing permanently here, even though I

begin the search for an opening without money enough to last more than a

week or two."

"Without money!" exclaimed Mr. Mitchell, in surprise.

"Yes," confessed Hampstead, flushing a little. "My salary was not very

munificent, you know, and I have usually contrived to get rid of it,

frequently before I got the pay check in my hands."

Mr. Mitchell's small, prudent eyes looked disfavor at a spendthrift.

"However," he suggested, "you have only yourself to think of."

"That's another point against me," confessed Hampstead. "I have some

one else to look out for. My brother-in-law is an artist, you know, and

he has not been very successful yet, so that I hold myself ready to help

with my sister and the children if it should ever become necessary."

"That's a handicap," declared Mitchell flatly.

"I won't admit it," said John loyally. "You don't know those children.

Tayna's the girl, nearly twelve now, a beauty if her nose is pugged.

Such hair and eyes, and such a heart! Dick's the boy, past ten. He's

had asthma always, and is about a thousand years old, some ways. But

they--"

Hampstead gulped queerly.

"Those two children," he plunged on, "are dearer to me than anything in

the whole wide world. You know," and his tone became still more

confidential, while his eyes grew moist, "it would only be something

that happened to them that would keep me from going on with my stage

career."

Mitchell's respect for John was changing oddly to a fatherly feeling.

He felt that he was getting acquainted with his clerk for the first

time. He resolved that he would not tempt the boy, and that if it

became necessary, he would help him. However, before he could express

this resolve, if he had intended to express it, the telephone rang.

Hampstead answered it, stammered, faltered, replied: "I will see, sir,

and call you in five minutes," hung up the 'phone and turned to confront

Mitchell, with a look almost of fright upon his face.

"It's William N. Scofield," he exclaimed. "He wants me to take dinner

with him at his club to-night."

A disbelieving smile appeared for a moment on the wide lips of Mitchell;

then understanding broke, and his smile was swallowed up in a hearty

laugh.

"He wants to offer you a position," Mitchell said, when his exultant

cachinnations had ceased. "Look out that he doesn't win you. Scofield

is a very persuasive man. He nearly got me once. Besides, he has more

to offer you than I have."

Hampstead pressed his hand to his brow. Under his tawny thatch ideas

were in a whirl.

"What shall I do?" he asked rather helplessly.

"Stay over," commanded Mitchell unhesitatingly. "Ring up and tell him

you'll be there."

"But there's no use, anyway," replied John suddenly, getting back to the

main point. "My mind's made up."

"No man's mind is made up when he's going to take dinner on the

proposition with William N. Scofield," answered Mitchell oracularly.

"And you?" asked Hampstead, suddenly aware how good a man at heart was

Robert Mitchell, and quite unaware that he had seized that gentleman's

pudgy right hand and was wringing it in a manner most embarrassing to

Mitchell himself. "You--"

But the telephone was tingling impatiently.

"Mr. Scofield wants to know," began a voice.

"Yes, yes, I'll be happy to," interrupted John, not knowing just what

tone or form one should take in expressing the necessary amenities to

the secretary of a great man.

"Very well. His car will call for you at six-thirty," responded the

voice.

But before John could pick up the thread of his unfinished sentence to

Mr. Mitchell, a knock sounded at the door, at first soft and cushioned,

as if from a gloved hand, then louder and more determined, and repeated

with quick impatience.

"Come in," called Mitchell.

The knob turned, and the door swung wide, leaving the panel of white to

frame the picture of a woman. She was young, of medium height and

appealing roundness, clad from head to foot in a traveling dress of dark

green, with a small hat of a shade to match, the chief adornment of

which was a red hawk's feather slanting backward at a jaunty angle. A

veil enveloped both hat brim and face but was not thick enough to dim

the sparkle of bright eyes or the pink flush of dimpled cheeks, much

less to conceal two rows of gleaming teeth from between which, after a

moment's pause for sensation, burst a ringing cadence of laughter.

"Miss Bessie!" exclaimed John excitedly.

"The very first guess!" declared that young lady, advancing and yielding

the doorframe to another figure which filled it so much more completely

as to sufficiently explain a more deliberate arrival.

"Mollie!" ejaculated Mitchell, who by this time had turned toward the

door. "What in thunder?"

But the General Freight Agent's lines of communication were just then

temporarily disconnected by an assault upon his features conducted by

Miss Bessie in person. During this interval, Mrs. Mitchell stood

placidly surveying the room, and as she took in its air of preparation

for immediate departure, a tantalizing smile spread itself on her

expansive features.

"Is this an accident or a calamity?" demanded Mitchell, playfully

thrusting Bessie aside and advancing to greet his wife.

"Both!" declared that lady, submitting her lips with more of formality

than enthusiasm, after which, feeling that sufficient time had elapsed

to make an explanation of her sudden appearance not undignified, she

proceeded:

"Just one of my whims, Bob! Next week was the spring vacation; no

school, and the poor child was pale from overstudy and so anxious about

her examinations (Bessie shot a look at Hampstead), that I just made up

my mind I'd bring her up here and let her get a good bite of fog and a

breath from the Golden Gate."

"Fine idea!" declared Mitchell. "Fine! Now that you've had it," he

chuckled, "we'll start home. I'm leaving at eight."

"You are not!" proclaimed Mrs. Mitchell flatly. "You will stay right

here for at least three days and do nothing but devote yourself to your

child. And to her mother!" she subjoined, as if that were an

afterthought; all with a toss of her chin, which, by way of emphasis,

held its advanced position for a moment after the speech was done.

"And the business of the company?" Mitchell suggested, with a solicitous

air.

"It can wait on me," averred Mrs. Mitchell decisively, taking a turn up

and down the room and surveying once more the signs of confusion and of

hasty packing. "Many's the time I've waited on it. You can stay, too,

John," she said, turning to Hampstead. "I want you to take Bessie to a

lot of places Robert and I have been and won't care to visit this time."

"Robert!" and while her eyes turned toward the windows, two of which

opened on a view of Market Street, the new commander began a

redisposition of forces, "I rather like this suite. Bessie and I will

take the corner room. You can take this room and Mr. Hampstead can move

across the hall, or anywhere else they can put him."

As an act of possession, Mrs. Mitchell walked to the dresser, took off

her hat, stabbed the two pins into it emphatically, and tossed it upon

the bed, where it bloomed like a flower-garden in the midst of a desert

of papers while she, still standing before the mirror, bestowed a few

comfortable pats upon her hair.

"John," Mitchell said jovially, "I know orders from headquarters when I

get 'em. You were going to stay over, anyway; but use your own judgment

about obeying the instructions you have just received."

"Never had such agreeable instructions in my life," declared Hampstead,

turning to Mrs. Mitchell with an elaborately stagy bow, and the natural

quotation from Hamlet which leaped to his lips:

"'_I shall in all my best obey you, madam._'"

"See that you do," said that lady, not half liking the bow and shooting

a glance at Hampstead less cordial than austere. "And by the way," she

added, "see that you don't let that stage nonsense carry you much

further, young man," with which remark Mrs. Mitchell turned abruptly and

gave Hampstead a most complete view of a broad and uncompromising back.

In Mrs. Mitchell's mind a man had much better be a section hand on the

Great Southwestern than a fixed star on the drama's milky way.

"By the way, mother," remarked Mr. Mitchell, with the air of one who

makes an important revelation, "John is just going out to dine with

William N. Scofield."

Mrs. Mitchell turned quickly, and her dark eyes shot a meaningful glance

at her husband, while the line of her lower lip first grew full and then

protruded. A squeeze of that lip at the moment, Hampstead reflected,

would extract something at least as sour as very sour lemon juice.

"Scofield is after him," bragged Mitchell.

"Well, see that he doesn't get him," his wife commanded sternly, and

then shifting her somber glance until it rested on John with a look that

was near to menace, inquired acridly:

"Young man, you wouldn't be disloyal? You wouldn't sell yourself?" In

the second interrogatory her voice had passed from acridity to

bitterness, while the eyes bored implacably, till Hampstead at first

wriggled, then grew resentful and replied crisply, standing very

straight:

"No, Mrs. Mitchell, I would not sell myself!"

"That's right," exclaimed Bessie, stepping impulsively toward John's

side. "Do not let her browbeat you. I am sorry to say, Mr. Hampstead,

that mother is inclined to be somewhat dictatorial. You see what she

does to poor papa!"

"And you see what you do to poor me," exclaimed that worthy lady,

turning on her daughter with surprise and injury in her glance and

tone,--"dragging me almost out of bed last night to make this foolish

trip up here with you. Next week, of all weeks, too, when I wanted to

do so many other things."

"Ho! ho!" broke in Mitchell, "so that's the way of it. This trip up

here is a scheme of yours," and he turned accusingly upon his daughter,

but Bessie smiled and curtseyed, entirely unabashed. "Well, then, I

don't guess we'll stay," teased Mitchell. "And I don't suppose you knew

a thing about Hampstead's being here. That was all an accident."

"It was not," flashed Bessie. "I did. I haven't seen dear old John for

a year. I could go in and have delightful tete-a-tetes with him when he

was a stenographer, but out in the Rate Department there are forty

prying eyes and men with ears as long as jack-rabbits. He hasn't taken

me to a circus or anything for nobody knows how long. You shall give

him money for theater tickets, for dinners, for auto rides, for

everything nice for three whole days."

Bessie was standing directly in front of her father, her eyes looking up

into his, and her two hands patting his generous jowls, as her speech

was concluded.

John listened rapturously. This was the old Bessie talking. She had

entered the room looking a year older, a year prettier since that day

when he wrote the Phroso invitations for her, and had taken on so easily

the lacquer and dignity of dresses and of years that he was beginning to

feel in awe of her. This speech was a great relief.

Besides, in the whirl of the hour before she came, he had found himself

strangely wanting to take counsel with Bessie. The Mitchells had made

of him for all these years a convenient caretaker of their daughter.

Bessie had made of him a playfellow with whom she took the same

liberties as with any other of her father's possessions. This attitude

on her part had created the only atmosphere in which Hampstead could

have been at ease with her. It had permitted his soul to bask when she

was by, but it had done no more. But now, he somehow wanted to confide

in Bessie,--not to take her advice for he wasn't going to take anybody's

advice; all advice was against him,--but to tell her what he was going

to do, because he believed she would listen appreciatingly, if not

sympathetically. He felt he needed at least the added support of a

neutral mind. He had rejected Mr. Mitchell's proposal, but the glitter

of it flashed occasionally. And now he was going to face the

resourceful, the ingratiating, the dominating William N. Scofield, and

he felt like a man who goes alone to meet his temptation on the mountain

top.

*CHAPTER VII*

*THE HIGH BID*

For an hour and a half at dinner, and for another hour sunk in the

depths of a great leather chair in the lounging room of the Pacific

Union Club, William N. Scofield had searched the soul of Hampstead, who

had not only been led to talk rapturously of his stage ambition but to

reveal the metes and bounds of his interest in and knowledge upon many

subjects.

"Gad, but you know a lot," ejaculated Scofield, with unfeigned

amazement. "Where'd you get it all?"

"I have read a good deal," confessed John, trying to appear much more

modest than in his heart he felt; for it was a part of Scofield's whim

or of his campaign to flatter him enormously, and he had succeeded.

But for a time now, the Traffic Manager was silent, puffing meditatively

at his cigar and staring at the ceiling through loafing rings of smoke

in which, as if they were floating letters, he seemed to read the

transcript of his thought,--the thought that if, beside employing this

enormously able young man, he could also enlist in behalf of the

railroad as an institution his capacity for fanatical devotion to an

ideal, the prize was one worth bidding high for, high enough to win!

"People like you, Hampstead," Scofield broke out presently, and in his

most ingratiating vein. "We all felt that down at the office. You did

a difficult thing without making an enemy of one of us. Therefore what

your personality can do interests me even more than what you know."

The railroad man interrupted his speech to shoot an exploratory glance

from under veiling lids and went on calculatingly:

"The railroad business is going to change. Now we tell the Railroad

Commission what to do. The time is coming when it will tell us what to

do, and we will do it. But the public attitude toward the railroad has

also got to change." Scofield's tone had taken on new emphasis.

"You would make the type of executive that could change it! The

successful transportation man of the future has got to be a sort of

ambassador of the railroad to the people, and the man who best serves

the people tributary to his road will best serve his stockholders."

"Do you know who gave me that point?" the Traffic Manager asked, turning

from the vision he was contemplating in the clouds of smoke over his

head and looking sharply at Hampstead.

"Naturally not," admitted the younger man.

"Bob Mitchell," said Scofield, and paused while his thin lips coaxed

persistently at the cigar which appeared to have gone out. "Bob

Mitchell! And I reviled him for his sagacity, told him he was an

altruistic fool. But after a while I saw he was right. Then I tried to

get him for us, but I didn't succeed. He wasn't as sensible as I hope

you will be. Besides, I am going to offer you more than I offered him."

More than he offered Mitchell! There was a sudden jolt somewhere in

John's breast, and he wet a dry, parched lip, but did not speak.

"Yes," breathed Scofield softly, almost as if he had been interrupted.

"I am going to offer you more. Hampstead!" and the voice was raised

quickly, "I want you to be our General Freight Agent!"

If Scofield had leaned over and kissed him, John would not have been

more surprised, nor have known less what to say.

"General Freight Agent!" he croaked hoarsely.

"Yes," affirmed the other coolly, almost icily, while he flicked the

ashes from his cigar and enjoyed the sensation his proposal had

produced.

"At my age?" stumbled John, still groping, but trying to see himself in

the position.

"Why, yes," reassured Scofield suavely. "You tell me you're past

twenty-five. Paul Morton was Assistant General Freight Agent of the

Burlington at twenty-one. Look where he is to-day--in the cabinet of the

President of the United States. The salary," Scofield added casually,

by way of finally clinching the argument, "will be twelve thousand a

year."

Hampstead's lips silently formed the words--twelve thousand! But he did

not utter them. They dazed him. They rushed him headlong. They made

rejection impossible. No man had a right to throw away such a fortune

as that. One thousand dollars a month! He felt himself yielding,

helplessly, irresistibly.

And then, suddenly as the photographer's bomb lights up every lineament

of every face in the darkened room, for one single moment Hampstead saw

things clearly and in their true proportions. This Schofield was not a

man. He was a grinning devil, with horns and a barb on his tail. He was

tempting, trapping, buying him. He would not be bought. "_No, Mrs.

Mitchell, I would not sell myself,_" he had said, not, however, meaning

at all what that lady meant.

Leaning back stubbornly, his fist smiting heavy blows upon the cushioned

arm of the chair, John muttered through clenched teeth:

"No! No! No--I'll never do it. No, Mr. Scofield, I cannot accept your

offer. I thank you for it; but I cannot accept it. The stage is to be

the place of my achievement. Why, why, Mr. Scofield, the wonderfully

flattering offer you have made to me to-night has come because of the

training incident to the cultivation of a stage ambition. If it can

bring me so much with so little devotion, is it not reasonable to

suppose that it will bring me more--very much more? I will not be so

disloyal to that which has been so generous with me."

Scofield's countenance had suddenly and impressively changed. It became

a mask of stone, a sphinx-like thing, the brow a knot, the nose a beak,

the mouth a stitched scar. The beady gleam of the eyes from beneath

drawn lids was sinister. This fanatical young fool was escaping him,

and Scofield did not like any one to escape him.

But the young man refused to be swerved by frowns.

"Not to manage railroads," he declared enthusiastically, "but to mould

human character is to be my life-work; to depict the virtues and the

vices, the weaknesses and the strengths of life, to make men laugh and

love and--forget."

Scofield's eyes twinkled, and his mouth became less a scar, but John

thought this was a very fine phrase really, and he rushed along:

"Life looks like a tangle, like a mess--drudgeries, disappointments,

injustices--the wrong man prospering--the wrong girl suffering! The

drama composes life. It grabs out a few people and follows them,

compressing into the action of two hours the eventualities of a lifetime

and shortening perspectives till men can see the consequences of their

acts, whether for good or for ill. The stage teaches the doctrine of the

conservation of moral energy--and of immoral energy--that sustained

effort, conserved effort is never cheated; it gets its goal at last."

"Say!" broke in Scofield; but John would not be denied what he felt was

a final smashing generalization.

"To figure the tariff on human conduct, to grade and classify the acts

of life, to quote the rates on happiness and misery in trainload lots.

That's what I'm going to do," he concluded, with a glow upon his face.

But by this time a smile of cynic pity had appeared upon the face of the

railroad man.

"Hampstead," he exclaimed sharply, with a mimic shudder and a shrug of

relief as if he had just escaped something, "you're not an actor.

You're a preacher!"

John gasped.

"You're a moralist," asserted Scofield accusingly, "a puritanical,

Sunday-school, twaddling moralist. I have misjudged you. I wouldn't

want you around at all."

With a look akin to disgust upon his face, the railroad man made a

motion with his fingers in the air as if ridding them of something

sticky, and arose, not abruptly but decisively, making clear that the

interview had proved disappointingly unprofitable and was therefore at

an end.

John also arose, bewildered by the sudden change in Scofield's

attitude--a change which he resented, and also the ground of it. He a

preacher? The idea was ridiculous.

Besides, it makes an astonishing difference when one has been stubbornly

refusing an offer to have the offer coolly and decisively withdrawn.

Something subtly psychological made him want the offer back. The door

of opportunity had been closed behind him with a snap so vicious that he

wanted to turn and kick it open.

But the thin, talon-like hand of Scofield was hooking the young man's

rather flaccid palm for a moment.

"Remember what I tell you," he barked out in parting. "You're not an

actor. You're not a railroad man. You're a preacher!"

The last word was flung bitingly, like an epithet.

John, feeling uncomfortable, walked out and along one side of Union

Square, casting a momentary wondering eye on the stabbing, twin towers

of the Hotel St. Francis, many windowed and many-lighted; then turned on

down Geary into Market and along that wide and cobbled thoroughfare to

the doors of the old Palace Hotel. By the time he was in bed, he

realized that Scofield had shaken him terribly. His decision was all to

make over again.

However, Bessie would be there for three days to help him, and with this

thought he felt comforted.

* * * * *

"It's been a great three days," sighed John, on the following Tuesday.

Bessie also sighed.

They had clambered down from the parapet below the Cliff House and sat

watching the seals at play upon the rocks a stone's throw out from

beneath their feet. Their position marked the southern portal of the

famous Golden Gate, through which a mile-wide stream of liquid blue was

running. Across the Gate rose the sheer gray cliffs of Marin County and

beyond those the rugged greens and blues of the mountains, spiked in the

center by the peak of Tamalpais.

Before their faces, the ocean, in swells and scoops of ever grayer gray,

ran out to catch the horizon as it fell, illumined in its lower reaches

by the sun, which was sinking into the haze above the waters like a

lustrous orange ball.

Southward, beyond the green head of Golden Gate Park, the yellow gray of

the sand dunes and the blue gray of the sea met in a lingering, playful

kiss that swept back and forth in a long shimmering line which ran on

sinuously, growing fainter and fainter, till lost in the shadow of the

distant cliffs.

The hour was five o'clock. At eight that night John was to leave for

Los Angeles. His vacation--the only vacation of his hard-driven

life--was to end, and an epoch in his existence was also nearing its

end. The past was clear as the land behind him; the future was an area

of tossing uncertainty. Nothing appeared,--no track, no wake, no sail,

no sun even. Only far over, beyond the curve of the horizon, was a kind

of strange, unearthly glow, and on this his eye was set.

For three days his soul had ebbed and flowed like that lip of foam upon

the beach, now stealing far up on the land,--for him the backward track;

now turning and running far out to sea,--for him the way of adventure

and advance.

But now the ultimate decision was to be made. Bessie saw it rising like

a tide upon that face which once had seemed not to fit, a rapt look

which snuggled in the hills and hollows and then began to harden like

setting concrete. No one would call that face homely now. Interesting,

most likely, would have been the word.

The gray eyes burned brighter, the lips grew tighter. The chin advanced,

moved out to sea a little, as it were.

"Follow your star, John," Bessie declared stoutly, though a look of pain

momentarily touched her whitening lips. "I shall despise you if you do

not."

"The decision is made," John replied solemnly, "and you, Bessie, have

helped to make it."

Bessie did not reply; she only looked.

Silence fell between them. Silence, too, was in the heavens; the sun,

the waves, the restless wind for the moment appeared to stand still.

All nature had paused respectfully. A man, young, inexperienced, but

potential, had cast the horoscope of life beyond the power of gods or

men to intervene,--and with it had cast some other horoscopes as well.

Hampstead felt the spell his act of will had wrapped about them, but he

felt also the substance of his resolution framing like granite in his

soul and making him strong with a new kind of strength.

But soon the sun was descending again, the clouds were drifting once

more, and a gust of wind nipped sharply, causing the skirts of John's

overcoat to flap lustily. Bessie twitched her fur collar closer about

the neck, and thrust both hands deep into the pockets of her gray

ulster. Hampstead passed his own hand through the curve of the girl's

elbow, gripped her forearm possessively, selfishly, absently, and drew

her toward him.

Indeed Bessie was closer to him than she had ever been before; and yet

she had never felt so far away.

"Oh, but it's great to have a woman by you in a crisis," John chuckled

happily.

Bessie looked up startled. John had called her woman. But she recovered

from the start,--he had also called her _a_ woman.

"Come to understand each other pretty well, haven't we?" John observed,

still looking oceanward, but giving the arm of Bessie what was intended

for a meaningful squeeze.

"Not at all," sighed Bessie, also still looking oceanward.

Hampstead, his thoughts bowling rapidly forward, continued motionless

until a white-winged, curious-eyed gull sailed between his line of

vision and the water. Then, as if abruptly conscious that Bessie's

answer was not what it should have been, he turned, and at the same time

boldly swung her body round till they stood facing each other. Bessie

met this gaze unblinkingly for a moment, with her face set and sober;

then something in John's mystified glance touched her keen sense of

humor, and she laughed,--her old, roguish laugh,--and flirted the stupid

in the face with the end of her boa.

"You great big egoist!" she smiled. "There, that's the first chance

I've had to use that word. I only learned the difference between it and

another last week."

"Indeed!" retorted Hampstead. "And when did you learn the difference

between me and the other word?"

"Well, I'm not sure that there is a difference," she sparred. "Being

polite, I just concede it."

"Oh," he chuckled. "But," and he was serious again, "you say we don't

understand each other?"

"Nonsense; I was only joking. I do understand you; you great, big,

egoistical egotist! You are just now absolutely self-centered--and all,

all ambition! And I am secretly--secretly, you understand--proud of

you!"

"And you," said Hampstead, drawing her close again, "are just the

truest, most understanding friend a man ever, ever had. You know,

Bessie, a fellow can talk to you just like a sister,--a pretty little

sister!" he subjoined, when Bessie looked less pleased than he thought

she should.

"You've changed a lot, too, in a year," he conceded, studying her face

critically. "When you came into the hotel that night, you struck fear

into my heart, and then kind of made it flutter. I said to myself,

'She's gone--the old Bessie, that could be played with. But here's a

young woman, a handsome young woman, taking her place.'"

"Did you say that?" asked Bessie happily.

"An exceedingly beautiful woman," went on John, as if stimulated by the

interruption. "By George, a very corker of a woman--look at those eyes,

those lips, those dimples. Same old dimples, girl!" he laughed

emotionally. "And I said, 'Now, here's a woman, a ripe, wonderful woman,

to be made love to--'"

"John!"

There was in Bessie's sudden exclamation the surcharged sense of all the

proprieties which their relationship involved.

"Oh, don't be alarmed," exclaimed Hampstead, suddenly very earnest and

respectful. "I am not leading up to anything. I do not misunderstand

the nature of your goodness to me. I am not presuming anything. I am

only telling you what I said to myself."

"Oh," murmured Bessie noncommittally, though she shivered for a moment

as if a gust of wind had come again. Hampstead, feeling this, drew her

still closer and hunched his broad shoulder to shelter her more, as he

explained further:

"But it was I, you know, and there was nothing for me to do but to fly.

I was for jumping out the window. And then you suddenly made that

wonderful speech about going to the circus with dear old John, and your

mother let it out that you wanted me to run around with you here, and I

saw that toward me you were the same old Bessie; that for a few days we

could be once more just friendly, only two finer friends, because we're

both grown up now."

"Yes," Bessie sighed, almost contentedly. "I did want you, John. A

girl gets tired of society, of clubs and dances and things, even in

High. You know, I get weary of the sight of these slim, pompadoured

boys sometimes. I just wanted somehow to feel the arm of a real man, to

hear him talk, even if he does nothing but talk about himself, and until

this minute in three days has not confessed that I have dimples,

and--and a heart."

"Slow, about some things, am I not?" confessed John. "Awfully, awfully

slow!"

"I will agree with you," said Bessie, with a mournfulness that literally

compelled him to perceive that she was some way disappointed in him.

"But," he inquired reproachfully, "aside from my usefulness as a social

escort and a sort of masculine tonic, you do admire me a little, don't

you?"

"Oh, yes," she answered frankly. "I admire you a lot."

"But you're disappointed about something?"

"Apprehension is the better word," she confessed soberly.

"Apprehension? Of what?" John was looking at her almost accusingly.

Bessie avoided his glance. She could not tell him what she feared nor

why she feared it.

"You think I'll fail?" John demanded.

"No," disclaimed Bessie seriously. "I think you will succeed!"

"You think so?" and Hampstead's face lighted brilliantly. "Oh, God

bless you for that!" and again he shook her, this time tenderly and drew

her closer till her breast was touching his, and she leaned her head far

back to look up into his face.

"Yes," she breathed softly, "I think so!"

"And you do not think me silly for turning my back upon solid realities

to follow my ideal?"

"No! No!" and she shook her head emphatically, "I honor you for it,

John. You have inspired me, John, and thrilled me. I used to

think--how good you are! Now I think--how noble you are! You have made

my feeling for you one of worshipfulness almost."

The look in her face did express that, and Hampstead noticed it now.

"Ah," he murmured, pressing her arms against her sides, "you dear,

impressionable little girl!"

Quite thoughtless of how unnecessarily close he was drawing Bessie,

either to shelter her from the wind or for the purpose of conversation,

or especially in the fulfillment of his duty to his charge as guide and

protector, John was finding a pleasurable sensation in this position of

intimacy, and was indeed, just upon the threshold of one very great

discovery when he made another, perhaps equally surprising, but vastly

less important. Looking into the upturned eyes, which after the canons

of Delsarte, he was thinking expressed "devotion" perfectly, a shadow

was seen to project itself downward from the upper lids across the iris,

as if a storm were gathering on a placid lake. John watched the shadow

curiously as it deepened, until it became clear that a mist was

congealing in those swimming violet depths.

"Why, Bessie," he exclaimed, amazed, "you are going to cry!"

On the instant two tears trickled from the dark lashes and gleamed for a

moment like solitaire diamonds in the setting of two ruby spots that had

gathered unaccountably upon her upturned cheeks.

"You are crying," he charged straightly.

Bessie's expression never changed, but her smooth, round chin nodded a

trembling and unabashed assent. A sudden impulse seized John. The

position of his arms shifted.

"Bessie!" he murmured feelingly, "I am going to kiss you!"

Bessie did not appear half as surprised at this announcement as

Hampstead at himself for making it.

"May I?" he persisted.

The expression of devotion in Bessie's swimming orbs remained

unstartled, her pose unaltered. Only her lips moved while she breathed

a single word: "Yes."

Instantly their ruby and velvet softness yielded to the pressure of

John's, planted as tenderly and chastely as was his thought of her,--for

that other discovery that he was on the verge of making had been fended

off by the coming of the tear.

*CHAPTER VIII*

*JOHN MAKES UP*

That night, according to programme, John went back to Los Angeles; and a

few weeks later, also according to programme, he was again in San

Francisco, no longer a railroad man, but--in his thought--an actor.

Now calling oneself an actor and being one are quite different; but it

took an experience to prove this to John. Even the opportunity for this

experience was itself hard to get. It was days before he even saw a

theatrical manager, weeks before he met one personally, and a month

before he got his first engagement.

When he talked of the drama to actors the way he had talked of it to the

Reverend Charles Thompson Campbell, they did not comprehend him; when he

talked to them as he had to Scofield, they smiled cynically; when he

admitted to one manager that he was without professional experience, the

admission drew a sneer which froze the stream of hope in his breast.

John thereafter told no other manager this, but learned instead the

value of a "front", and inserted in the professional columns of the _San

Francisco Dramatic Review_ a card which read:

+------------------+

| |

| JOHN HAMPSTEAD |

| HEAVY |

| AT LIBERTY |

| |

+------------------+

"Heavy" in theatrical parlance means the villain. Modestly confessing

himself not quite equal to "leads", though in his heart John scorned to

believe his own confession, he had announced himself as a "heavy."

This card appeared for three succeeding weeks, but on the fourth week

there was a significant change. It read:

+-----------------------------------+

| |

| JOHN HAMPSTEAD |

| HEAVY |

| With the People's Stock Company |

| |

+-----------------------------------+

The People's Stock Company was new, a "ten-twenty-thirty" organization,

got together in a day for a season of doubtful length, in a huge barn of

a house that once had been the home of bucket-of-blood melodramas, but

for a long time had been given over to cobwebs and prize fights. The

promoters had little money. They spent most of it on new paint and

gorgeous, twelve-sheet posters. Everything was cheap and gaudy, but the

cheapest thing was the company--and the least gaudy.

The opening play was a blood-spiller with thrills guaranteed; the scene

was laid in Cuba at a period just preceding the Spanish-American War.

Hampstead's part was a Spanish colonel, Delaro by name. Delaro was no

ordinary double-dyed villain. He was triple-dyed at the least, and

would kick up all the deviltry in the piece from the beginning to the

end; he would steal the fair Yankee maiden who had strayed ashore from

her father's yacht; he would imprison her in an out-of-the-way fortress;

court her, taunt her, threaten her--and then when the audience was

wrought to the highest pitch of excitement and the last throb of pity

for her impending fate at the hands of this fiend in yellow uniform and

brass buttons, the galloping of horses would herald the appearance of

Lieutenant Bangster, U.S.N., lover of the maiden and hero of the play.

(The Navy on horseback!) A pitched battle would result, pistols,

rifles, cannon would be fired, the fortifications would be blown away,

and Old Glory go fluttering up the staff to the thundering applause of

the gods of the gallery.

Delaro was an enormous opportunity; but it was also an enormous

responsibility. John went into rehearsal haunted by fear that the

carefully guarded secret of his inexperience would be discovered,

knowing that instant humiliation and discharge would follow. He had

trudged, hoped, brazened, starved, prayed to get this part. He must not

lose it, and he must make good. The sweat of desperation oozed daily

from his pores.

Halson, the stage manager, was a tall, tubercular person, with a husk in

his throat and a cloudy eye. This eye seemed always to John to be

cloudier still when turned on him. On the fourth day of rehearsal,

these clouded looks broke out in lightning.

"Stop that preaching!" Halson commanded impatiently. "You are intoning

those speeches like a parrot in a pulpit. Colonel Delaro is not a

bishop. He is a villain--a damned, detestable, outrageous villain!

Play it faster; read those speeches more naturally. My God, you must

have been playing-- By the way, Hampstead, what were you playing last?"

The shot was a bull's-eye. John felt himself suddenly a monstrous fraud

and had a sickening sense of predestined failure. In his soul he

suddenly saw the truth. Acting was not bluffing. Acting was an art!

The poorest, dullest of these people, bad as they appeared to be, knew

how to read their lines more naturally than he. He was not an actor.

He never had been an actor. He was only a recitationist.

"What were you playing last, I say?" bullied Halson, as if suddenly

suspicious.

But John had rallied. "If I don't get the experience, how will I ever

become an actor," was what he said to himself.

"My last season was in Shakespeare," was what he observed to Halson,

with deliberate dignity.

"Oh," exclaimed the stage manager, much relieved. "That explains it. I

was beginning to think somebody had sawed off a blooming amateur on me."

John had not deemed it prudential to add that this season in Shakespeare

lasted one whole evening and consisted of some slices from the Merchant

of Venice presented in the parlor of the Hotel Green in Pasadena; and

the scorn with which Halson had immediately pronounced the word

"amateur" sent a shiver to Hampstead's marrow, while he congratulated

himself on his discretion. Nevertheless, he suffered this day many

interruptions and much kindergarten coaching from Halson and felt

himself humiliated by certain overt glances from the cast.

"The boobs!" thought John. "The pin-heads! They don't know half as much

as I do. They never taught a Y.M.C.A. class in public speaking; they

never gave a lesson in elocution in all their lives, and here they are

staring at me, because I have a little trouble mastering the mere

mechanics of stage delivery. It's simple. I'll have it by to-morrow."

But at the end of the rehearsal, John felt weak. Instead of leaving the

theater, he slipped behind a curtain into one of the boxes and sank down

in the gloom to be alone and think. But he was not so much alone as he

thought. A voice came up out of the shadows in the orchestra circle.

It was the voice of Neumeyer, the 'angel' of the enterprise, who was

even more inexperienced in things dramatic than his "heavy" man.

"How do you think it'll go?" Neumeyer had asked anxiously.

"Oh, it'll go all right," barked the whiskey-throat of Halson. "It'll

go. All that's worrying me is this blamed fool Hampstead. How in time

I sawed him off on myself is more than I can tell. However, I've

engaged a new heavy for next week."

John groped dumbly out into the day. But in the sunshine his spirits

rallied. "They can't take this part away from me," he exulted and then

croaked resolutely: "I'll show 'em; I'll show 'em yet. They're bound to

like me when they see my finished work."

And that was what he kept saying to himself up to the very night of the

first performance. But that significant occasion brought him face to

face with another problem,--his make-up.

The matter of costume was simple. It had been rented for a week from

Goldstein's. It was fearsomely contrived. The trousers were red.

Varnished oilcloth leggings, made to slip on over his shoes, were relied

upon to give the effect of top boots. The coat was of yellow, with

spiked tails, with huge, leaf-like chevrons, with rows of large,

superfluous buttons, and coils on coils of cord of gold.

But make-up could not be hired from a costumer and put on like a mask.

It was a matter of experience, of individuality, and of skill upon the

part of the actor. All John knew of make-up he had read in the books

and learned from those experimental daubs in which his features had been

presented in his own barn-storming productions. The make-up of Ursus

had been almost entirely a matter of excess of hair, acquired by a beard

and a wig rented for the occasion. This, therefore, was really to be

his first professional make-up, and Hampstead was blissfully determined

that it should be a stunning achievement.

In order that he might have plenty of time for experiment, the heavy man

entered the dressing rooms at six o'clock, almost an hour and a half

before any other actor felt it necessary to appear, and went gravely

about his important task.

First treating the pores of his face to a filling of cold cream,--all

the books agreed in this,--John chose a dark flesh color from among his

grease paints and proceeded to give himself a swarthy Spanish

complexion. Judging that this swarthiness was too somber, he proceeded

next to mollify it by the over-laying of a lighter flesh tint; but

later, in an effort to redden the cheeks, he got on too much color and

was under the necessity of darkening it again. Thus alternately

lightening and darkening, experimenting and re-experimenting, seven

o'clock found him with a layer of grease paint, somewhere about an

eighth of an inch thick masking his features into almost complete

immobility.

Next he turned attention to the eyes, blackening the lashes and edging

the lids themselves with heavy mourning. At the outer corners of the

eyes he put on a smear of white to drive the eye in toward the nose;

between the corner of the eye and the nose, he was careful to deepen the

shadow. This was to make his eyes appear close together. Down the

bridge of the nose he drew a straight white stripe to make that organ

high and thin and narrow; while in the corner between the cheek and

nostril went another smear of white, to drive the nose up still higher

and sharper.

In the midst of this artistry, Jarvis Parks, the character man, who had

been assigned to dress with Hampstead, entered.

"Hello," said John, with an attempt at unconcern.

"Hard at it," commented Parks, and began with the ease of long practice

to arrange his make-up materials about him, after which deftly, and

almost without looking at what he was doing, he transformed himself into

a youthful, rosy-cheeked, navy chaplain.

"Half hour!" sang the voice of the call boy from below stairs.

John was busy now adjusting a pirate moustache to his upper lip by means

of liberal swabbings of spirit gum. As he worked, he hummed a little

tune just to show Parks how much at ease and with what satisfied

indifference he performed the feat of transposing his fair Saxon

features into the cruel scowls of a villainous Spanish colonel.

But catching the eye of Parks upon him for a moment, Hampstead was

puzzled by the expression, although he reflected that it was probably

admiration, since he certainly had got on ever so much better than he

expected. It surely was a fine make-up--a brilliant make-up.

"Fifteen minutes," sang the voice of the call boy.

Hampstead could really contain his self-complacency no longer.

"Well," he exclaimed, turning squarely on Parks, "what do you think of

it?"

Now if John had only known, he disclosed his whole amateurish soul to

wise old Parks in that single question, for a professional actor never

asks another professional what he thinks of his make-up.

"Great!" responded Parks drily, but again there was that look upon his

face which Hampstead could not quite interpret.

"Five minutes!" was bellowed up the stairway.

Hampstead drew on his coat of brilliant yellow, buckled on his sword,

and had opportunity to survey himself again in the glass and bestow a

few more touches to the face before the word "overture", the call boy's

final scream of exultation, echoed through the dressing rooms.

The corridor outside John's door was immediately filled with the sound

of trampling feet, of voices male and female, some talking excitedly,

some laughing nervously, every soul aquiver with that brooding sense of

the ominous which sheds itself over the spirits of a theatrical company

upon a first night.

Parks, with a final touch to his hair and a sidewise squint at himself,

turned and went out. The footsteps and voices in the corridor grew

fainter and then came trailing back from the stairway like a chatterbox

recessional.

It was quiet in the dressing rooms, except for a droning from across the

way, and John knew what that was; for the sweet little ingenue had told

him in a moment of confidence: "On first nights I always go down on my

knees before I leave my dressing room." There she was now, telling her

beads.

"Shall I pray, too?" he asked, and then answered resolutely, "No! Let's

wait and see what God'll do to me."

His throat was arid. His lips, from the drying spirit gum and the

excess of grease paint, were stiff and unresponsive.

"_Eternal Hammering is the Price of Success_" he muttered thickly,

trying to brace himself. "Now for a great big swing with the hammer."

But his spirits sagged unaccountably, and he turned out into the

corridor as if for a death march.

At this moment the area between the foot of the stairs and the wings of

the stage was a weaving mass of idling scene-shifters, hurrying,

nervous, property men, and a horde of supernumeraries made up as

American sailors, Spanish soldiers, and Cuban natives. All was movement

and confusion.

The principals had drifted to their entrances and taken position in the

order in which they would appear; but they too were restless; nobody

stood quite still; at every movement, at every loud word, everybody

turned or looked or started. The hoarse voice of Halson and his

assistant, Page, repeatedly resounded.

As Hampstead descended the stairs upon this strange, moving picture, it

appeared to him to organize into a ferocious, misshapen monster that

meant him harm; or a python coiling and uncoiling its gigantic, menacing

folds. The thing was argus-eyed, too, and every eye stabbed him like a

lance.

Emerging upon the floor, John paused uncertainly before this hostile

wall of prying scrutiny. Somebody snickered. A woman's voice groaned

"My Gawd!" and followed it with a hysterical giggle.

Could it be that they were laughing at him? John felt that this was

possible; but he stoutly assured himself that it was not probable.

However, just as his features passed under the rays of a bunch light

standing where it was to illumine with the rays of the afternoon sun the

watery perspective of a jungle scene, he came face to face with the

stage manager. Halson darted one quick glance, and then a look of horror

congealed upon his face.

"In the name of God!" he hissed huskily. "Hampstead, what have you been

doing to yourself?"

"Doing to myself?" exclaimed John, trying for one final minute to fend

off fate. "Why? What do you mean?"

Halson's voice floated up in a half humorous wail of despair, as he

rolled his eyes sickly toward the flies.

"What do I mean?" he whined. "The man comes down here with his face

daubed up like an Esquimaux totem pole, and he asks me what do I mean?"

But Halson was interrupted by a sudden silence from the front. The

orchestra had stopped. The curtain was about to rise.

"Page! Page!" groaned Halson in a frantic whisper, "Hold that curtain!

Signal a repeat to the orchestra! Here, you!" to the call boy. "Run for

my make-up box. Quick!"

John's knees were trembling, and he felt his cheeks scalding in a sweat

of humiliation beneath their blanket of lurid grease, as Halson turned

again upon him with:

"You poor, miserable, God-forsaken amateur!"

Amateur! There, the word was out at last, and it was terrible. No

language can express the volume of opprobrium which Halson was able to

convey in it. To Hampstead it could never henceforth be anything but

the most profane of epithets. As a matter of fact, he was never after

able to hate any man sufficiently to justify calling him an amateur.

While the orchestra dawdled, while the company of "supers" crowded

close, and the principals looked sneeringly on from all distances,

Halson made up the heavy's face for the part he was to play, thereby

submitting John Hampstead to the bitterest humiliation of his dramatic

career.

Yet once engaged upon this work of artistry, the stage manager's wrath

appeared to soften. Half cajoling and half pleading, he whined over and

over again, "If you had only told me, Mr. Hampstead! If you had only

told me, I would have helped you."

"If I only had told him," reflected John, beginning all at once to like

Halson, and never suspecting that the man in his heart was hating him

like a fiend, and that his fear that the amateur would go absolutely to

pieces under the strain of the night was the sole reason for soothing

and encouraging and commiserating him by turns.

But now the orchestra grew still again.

"Aw-right," husked Halson, and Hampstead heard that ominous, sliding,

rustling sound which to the actor is like no other in all the world.

*CHAPTER IX*

*A DEMONSTRATION FROM THE GALLERY*

Every chair in the orchestra of the People's Theater was taken; the

boxes were occupied, and as for the odd rectangular horseshoe of a

gallery, with its advancing arms reaching forward almost to the

proscenium arch, while its rearward tiers rose and faded into distance

like some vast enclosed bleachers, it seemed a solid mass of humanity.

The curtain rose on critical silence. The repetition of the overture

had given a hint that all was not running smoothly, and at the first

spoken word a jeer came from the gallery. The actor stammered and made

the foolish attempt to repeat his words, but the attempt was lost in a

clamor of voices. Feet were stamped, hats were waved, peanuts and

popcorn balls were thrown. The actors braced themselves and went on

doggedly, but so did the balconies, and it presently appeared that

something like a demonstration was in progress. Swiftly an explanation

of the great masses in the gallery and their behavior was passed from

mouth to mouth behind the scenes. It said they were six hundred

south-of-Market-Street hoodlums who had been hired by a rival theatrical

manager to come and break up the performance. Whether this was true, or

whether the outbreak in the gallery was merely the unsuppressible spirit

of turbulent youth, it stormed on like a simoon, gaining in volume as it

proceeded.

For a while the people down-stairs, having paid their thirty cents to

witness a theatrical performance, protested; but they appeared soon to

conclude that the show in the gallery was the more worth while. Ceasing

to protest, they began to applaud the trouble-makers and even to abet

them.

Behind the scenes panic reigned. The actors at their exits bounded off,

panting in terror, as if pelted by bullets. Those whose cues for

entrance came, snatched at them excitedly, and like gladiators rushing

into the arena, plunged desperately upon the stage. The face of the

leading lady was white beneath her make-up as she almost tottered upon

the scene. Some instinct of chivalry led the mob to desist for a minute

while she delivered her opening lines. But the demonstration broke out

afresh as the leading man entered, though he wore the uniform of a

lieutenant in the navy. His every speech was jeered. The excitement

grew wilder; not a word spoken upon the stage was heard, even by the

leader of the orchestra.

"My God, what they will do to you, Hampstead!" exclaimed Halson

fiercely, as a detachment in the gallery began to march up and down the

aisle, the rhythm of their heavy steps making the old house shiver like

a ship in a storm.

Yet of all the actors trembling behind the scenes, it is possible that

Hampstead was the very coolest. He had been the most perturbed, the

most distraught; but this counter-disturbance made his own distressing

situation forgotten. No eyes were riveted on him now. No thoughts were

on him and the terrible humiliation he had publicly endured or the

wretched failure he was going to make. The best, the most experienced,

were in the most complete distress--clear out of themselves. The

leading man had become angry, had lost his lines, and did not know what

he was saying.

"Stanley's lost; he's ad-libbing to beat the band," John heard Page

remark.

_Ad-libbing_! It was a new word. In the midst of all this confusion,

John took note of it and next day learned of Parks that it was a

stage-participle made from _ad libitum_. An actor ad-libbing was an

actor talking on and on to fill space in some kind of a stage wait or

because, as with Stanley, he had forgotten his lines.

Neumeyer, the "angel", came in from the front and added his white,

agitated face to the awed groups standing about the wings.

"They've lost half the first act," he groaned, through chattering teeth.

"Even when they wear 'emselves out, the piece is ruined because the

people down-stairs have missed the key to the plot."

"Your cue is coming," bawled Page to John.

"Don't worry, though," croaked Halson in Hampstead's ear, still fearful

that his man would collapse. "The piece is going so rotten you can't

make it any worse. Cut in!"

But to his surprise, Hampstead's eye glinted with the light of battle.

"Worry?" he exclaimed excitedly. "Watch me. I'm going to get 'em!"

Halson gazed in pure pity.

"Get 'em," he gutturaled. "You poor, God-forsaken amateur!"

But the cue had come. Colonel Delaro, his sword clattering, his buttons

flashing, his tall figure aglow with color, leaped through the entrance

and took the center of the stage--so clumsily that he trod on Stanley's

favorite corn and hooked a spur in the mantilla trailing from the arm of

Miss Constance Beverly, the mislaid daughter of a millionaire yachtsman;

but nevertheless, Hampstead was on. He had seized the center of the

stage and he filled it full, as with an ostentatious gesture, he swept

off his gold lace cap before Miss Beverly.

"What star's this?" shrieked a voice on one side the gallery.

"No star at all. It's a comet!" bawled a man from the other side,

cupping his hands to carry his second-hand wit around the auditorium.

The Spanish War was not then so far back in memory that the sight of the

uniform did not speedily kindle a little popular wrath upon its own

account, and the demonstration began again and rose higher, but

Hampstead became neither flustered nor angry. He maintained his

character and his dignity. He remembered his speeches, and delivered

them in stentorian tones that sounded vibrantly above the general

clamor. When the gallery discovered to its surprise that here was a

voice it could not entirely drown, it stopped out of sheer curiosity to

see what the voice was like and found it as attractive as it was

forceful. Moreover, there was a kind of special appeal in it. It was

the voice of a real man; if they had only known it,--of a man at bay.

He was not Colonel Delaro, plotting against the liberty and affections

of a lady. He was John Hampstead, fighting,--with his back to the

wall,--fighting for his opportunity, for an accredited position in this

poor, cheap misfit company,--a position which seemed to him just now the

most desired thing in all the world. Furthermore, he was fighting to

justify his own faith in himself and the faith of Dick and Tayna; yes,

and the faith of Bessie.

Hampstead was, moreover, used to rough houses. He had faced them more

than once on his own barn-storming one-night appearances.

The way to get an audience like this he knew was to play it like a fish,

to get the first nibble of interest and then hold it motionless with the

lure of some kind of dramatic story. The situation called for a

skilled, dramatic _raconteur_, and in truth that was what Hampstead

was,--not an actor but a recitationist. Also his talks in church

circles had given him skill in extemporaneous speaking. It happened

that his speeches in this first act completed the introduction of the

plot, but they were meaningless without a clear knowledge of what

already had been said. Now Hampstead began, at first instinctively and

then deliberately, as he played, to gather up these lost lines of half a

dozen actors and weave them into his own. The fever of composition

seized him. He used the people on the stage like puppets. He made them

help him re-lay the plot while he struggled to grasp the attention of

the mass child-mind out there in front and enthrall it with a story.

No better way could have been devised of making Hampstead overcome his

terrible faults of action and delivery. With marvelous intensity came

more repose. His eyes had been changed by the deft hand of Halson till

they no longer looked like holes in a blanket; and he shot out his

speeches, never once in that rhythmic, preaching tone, but rapidly,

jerkily, plausible or menacing by turns, but all the while convincingly.

Within a few minutes the audience was captured. It lost its enthusiasm

for riot and sat silent, following first the story as Hampstead had

retold it and then the action which thereafter began to unfold. It was

the sheer strength of the personality of the man which made this

possible. In his strength, too, the other players took courage; and

soon the action was tightly keyed and moving forward to a better

conclusion of the act than any rehearsal had ever promised.

At the fall of the curtain, an avalanche leaped upon Hampstead, an

avalanche which consisted solely of Halson. He seemed to have a

thousand hands. He was slapping John on the back with all of them, in

fierce, congratulatory blows.

"Man!" he exclaimed. "Man! You saved it! You saved it!"

Neumeyer was capering about deliriously, while tears of joy were

trickling from his eyes. Others crowded round: Stanley, who had the

lead, amiable old Parks, Lindsay, Bordwell, Miss Harlan, and the rest.

The audience, too, was excitedly expressing itself with hand-clappings

and foot-stampings.

"Scatter!" bawled Page.

The stage swiftly cleared of people as the curtain began to rise.

"Miss Harlan!" Page was shouting. "Mr. Stanley! Mr. Hampstead!"

In the order named, the three emerged and took their calls, but the

heartiest applause was for the big man in yellow and red, who, quite

ignoring the orchestra circle, showed all his teeth in a cordial and

understanding grin to the galleries, which thereupon broke out in that

hurricane of hisses which is the heavy's hoped-for tribute.

Throughout the remainder of the performance, the yellow and scarlet

figure of Delaro, with his great, sweeping gestures and his vast,

bellowing voice, moved, a unique and dominating figure; no doubt the

first and last time in which a villain who as a character was without

one redeeming quality was made the hero of the gallery gods.

With the final fall of the curtain, Hampstead climbed to his dressing

room, tired but gloriously happy. All the company knew his shame, the

shame of being an amateur; but all, too, knew his power, the power of a

man who could rise to emergency, who had commanding presence and

constructive force.

The dressing rooms were mere partitions open at the top, so that

everybody could hear what everybody else was saying, or could have

heard, if only they had stopped to listen. But apparently nobody

listened. The strain was over, and everybody talked as if the joy were

in the talking and not in being heard. Yet after the first few minutes

of excited blowing-off of steam, there came a lull, as if all had

stopped for breath at once.

Into this lull, Dick Bordwell, the juvenile man, as he wiped the grease

paint from his face, lifted his fine tenor voice in the first half of a

queer antiphonal chant, by inquiring loudly above his four wooden walls

toward the common ceiling over all:

"_Who is the greatest leading woman on the American stage?_"

"Louise Harlan!" chanted every voice on the floor, their tones mingling

merrily, as if they were playing a familiar game.

"Right-o," sang Dick, and chanted next: "_Who is the greatest leading

man on the American stage?_"

"Billie Stanley!" chorused the voices, with shrieks of laughter.

"And who," inquired Dick, with an insinuating change in his voice, "_who

is the greatest juvenile man in America?_"

"Rich-a-r-r-r-d Bordwell!" screamed the magpies.

"Right-o-right!" echoed Dick, with a grunt of immense satisfaction; and

then he went on piping his interrogatories, as to the rest of the

company, desiring to be informed who was the greatest character old man,

character old lady, soubrette, light comedian and stage manager,

concluding yet more loudly with:

"_And who is the greatest amateur heavy on the American stage?_"

As if they had been waiting for it, the voices burst out like a college

yell:

"_John Hampstead! John Hampstead, is the greatest amateur heavy on the

American stage!_"

The spirit of fun and hearty good will with which this initiation

ceremony had been performed was salve to the bruised, excited soul of

John. Besides an ever present sense of meanness and hypocrisy from the

concealment he had practiced, John had suffered a feeling of extreme

loneliness that had at no time been so great as now, when, the strain of

the play over, all these children of the stage were romping joyously

together. Now they had included him in the circle of their magic

fellowship. True, they had used the hateful word amateur, but that was

in play, and he was sure they would never use it again.

And he was right--from that hour some of them who liked him showed it;

some who disliked him showed that; some merely revealed themselves as

cool toward him or appeared ill at ease in his presence; but never one

of them, by word or act, failed from that moment to recognize his

standing as a man entitled to all the free masonry of their unique and

fascinating profession.

But the climax of this climactic night for John was reached when,

descending the stairway, Halson honored him with an astounding

confidence.

"Marien Dounay joins the People's to-morrow," he whispered excitedly.

"Fact!" he affirmed in response to John's look of sheer incredulity.

"She's a spitfire and a genius. She can do what she likes. She's

quarreled with Mowrey. She's coming here to spite him. Pie for us

while it lasts, huh? She opens as Isabel in _East Lynne_."

John knew that Mowrey had come up from Los Angeles and was just opening

a long season at the Grand Opera House; but Marien Dounay--almost a

star!--in that thread-bare play, _East Lynne_, in this out-at-elbows

company, and in this old barn of a house! Impossible!

This was what John was thinking, but he was too weak to give it

utterance. He wanted Halson's information to be true whether it was or

not. Yet in the midst of the elation which began to kindle swiftly, he

remembered what Halson had said to Neumeyer on Saturday in the dark of

the orchestra: that a new man had been engaged to play the heavies.

A wave of bitterness surged over him; and yet, he reflected, things must

be changed. They would scarcely let him go after to-night, so he

mustered courage to inquire:

"By the way, Halson, what do I play in _East Lynne_?"

"You play the lead," affirmed Halson, with dramatic emphasis.

"The lead?" John gulped, struggling as if a cobblestone had just been

tossed into his throat.

"Sure! You'll get away with it, too," declared the stage manager with

over-enthusiasm, slapping John heavily upon the back as the big man

turned away quickly, utterly unwilling that any save two or three not

there to look should see into his face.

It would scarcely have diminished his joy to know that he was getting

the lead simply because Archibald Carlyle was such an unredeemed

mollycoddle that the leading man usually chose to enact the villain,

Levison.

*CHAPTER X*

*A STAGE KISS*

For the strange freak of Miss Marien Dounay in joining The People's

Stock Company, the papers found ready explanation in artistic

temperament. The brilliant young actress, so the story ran, taking

umbrage because Miss Elsie McCloskey, twin star of the Mowrey cast, was

chosen to play a part for which Miss Dounay deemed herself specially

fitted, had resigned in a huff; and thereupon, to spite Mowrey, had

signed with this obscure stock company playing a dozen blocks away,

where it was believed her popularity would be sufficient to punish the

well-known manager in his one vulnerable spot, the box-office.

But there was one person interested who did not care a rap why Marien

Dounay was playing Isabel Carlyle, the wife of Archibald Carlyle at the

People's Stock this week, in the time-frazzled drama of _East Lynne_,

and that was the man to play Archibald. She was there, and that was

enough for him, swimming into his ken at the first rehearsal like a

vision of some glory too entrancing to belong to anything but a dream.

Had she changed much in the four months since he had held her in his

arms? Not at all, unless to grow more beautiful.

Yet if that crude actor fancied himself on terms of more than bare

acquaintance with this exquisite creature, his imagination presumed too

far. Miss Dounay's bearing made it instantly apparent that she gave

herself airs. One comprehensive glance was bestowed upon the semicircle

of the company. Hampstead's portion was more and less, a look and a

nod. The nod said: "I know you, puppet." The look warned: "But do not

presume. Stand."

John stood, wondering. As rehearsals progressed, his wonder grew into

bewilderment. Miss Dounay treated the whole company cavalierly, but she

treated him disdainfully. Her feeling for the others was simply

negative; for him it appeared to be positive.

As an actress, it developed that she was "up" in the part of Isabel,

having played it many times. She had, moreover, ideas of how every

other part should be played and was pleased to express them. Nobody

protested, Halson least of all. She was a "find" for the People's. As

a director, too, Miss Dounay was masterful. A languid glance, a single

word, a very slight intonation, had more force than one of Halson's

ranting commands. And she was instinctively competent.

Hampstead, despite his own sad experience, watched her open-mouthed.

This young woman, it appeared, was an intellectual force as well as a

magnetic one. She cut speeches or interpolated them, altered business,

and in one instance rearranged an entire scene, while in another she

boldly reconstructed the conclusion of an act. The storm center round

which much of this cutting, slicing, and fattening took place was

Hampstead. She heckled him unmercifully about the reading of his lines,

ridiculed his gestures, and badgered him to madness.

On the fourth day of this, John moped out of the theater, head down,

reflecting bitterly upon the illusory character of woman, of which he

knew so little,--moped so slowly that Parks overtook him on the first

corner.

"This woman is a friend of yours," Parks proposed tentatively.

"I thought she was," sighed Hampstead weakly, "but she keeps cutting my

speeches. By the end of the week, I won't have any part left at all."

Parks indulged a self-satisfied chuckle at the keenness of his own

discernment.

"Don't you see," he explained, "she's cutting the stuff you do badly.

She took away from you a situation in which you were awkward and unreal.

She changed that scene around and left you with a climax in which you

are positively graceful as well as forceful. You'll get a big hand in

it. She studies you. I've watched her."

"Old man," blurted Hampstead, with sudden fervor, "it would make me the

happiest man in the world if I thought that you were right. But you are

wrong, and her badgering has begun to get on my nerves. Say!" and he

interrupted himself to ask a question not yet answered to his

satisfaction. "Why is she here?--with the People's, I mean?"

"You've heard the stories," answered Parks, with a shrug. "However, I

doubt if it's any mere whim. She appears to me to have a cool, good

reason for anything she does."

Parks turns off at Ninth Street, and John moved on down Market. "A cold

good reason for what she does," he murmured. "What's the answer, I

wonder, to what she does to me?"

As the days went on, John's wonder grew.

Now it is according to the method of dramatists that when a husband is

to be abandoned by his wife in the second act there shall be certain

tender passages between the two in the first act, and this ancient drama

was no exception. There were contacts, handclasps, embraces, kisses.

Through all of these at rehearsal time the two went mechanically. Miss

Dounay apparently treated Hampstead with mere indifference, but actually

she found a thousand little ways to show utter repugnance. After the

first shock, John's combative instinct and his pride led him to face

this situation, so difficult for a gentleman, unflinchingly. Taking her

hands, pressing her to him, patting her cheek, playing with the wisps of

hair upon her temple, he conscientiously rehearsed the part of the

affectionate, doting husband. His very sincerity, it would seem, must

have been a rebuke to the woman. She must have seen that his heart was

stirred by an unexplained feeling toward her, and might have observed in

his determined bearing under the galling fire of her man-baiting

something noble.

Here, if she could only perceive it, was a man who had turned his back

on at least one of the kingdoms of this world to become an actor; a man

who would endure anything, suffer anything to add to his knowledge and

skill in that difficult and all demanding art; which, indeed, was why he

laid himself open to her polished ridicule by over-playing every scene,

overemphasizing every word, over-expressing every gesture and emotion.

But she never relented, not even on the night of the first performance.

Instead she became more aggressive in her antagonism, her method

changing from subtle scorn to open derision.

Now among experienced actors there are a great many things which may

take place upon the stage unsuspected of the audience. On this night,

all through the tender exchanges of that first act, Miss Dounay seized

upon intervals when her back was to the front to throw a grimace at

John,--to do, or _sotto voce_ to say, something irritating or ludicrous

that would throw him out of character, or, as the profession puts it,

"break him up." John steeled himself against all of this and went on

playing with that dignity of earnestness which seemed to characterize

all his life, until it would appear the climax of malice was reached

when, as Miss Dounay hung about his neck, she laughed in the midst of

one of his tenderest speeches, and whispered:

"There is a daub of smut on the end of your nose."

To John this communication was an arrow poisoned by the subtle power of

suggestion. Was there smut upon his nose? If there were and he touched

it with a finger, it would smear and ruin his make-up. If he did not

remove it, the audience would observe it the first time he came down

stage and laugh. On the other hand, he did not believe that there was

smut upon his nose. How could it get there? In no way unless some

joker had doctored the peephole in the curtain just before he peered out

at the audience.

Smutted or not smutted? To touch his nose or let it alone? That was

the maddening question. The puzzle and the doubt disconcerted him. His

memory faltered, his tongue stumbled, and a feeling of awful

helplessness came over him. He _was_ breaking up! He _was_ out of

character! This devilish woman had succeeded. She saw it, too. John

read the exultation in her eyes, and it filled him with indignation

until a wave of wrath surged over his great frame like a storm. Miss

Dounay saw his eyes grow suddenly stern with a light she had never

noticed in them. One arm was encircling her in a caress, the other hand

rested upon her shoulders. For one instant she felt this embrace

tighten into a python grip that was terrifying. The man's position had

not changed. To the audience it was still a mere pose, an expression of

endearment.

But to Marien Dounay it was an ominous hint that this great amiable

child had in him the primal elements of a brutal strength. A look of

alarm shot into her face, and she whispered:

"Don't, John! Don't."

The tone of her voice was pleading. She, the proud, had cringed. She

had called him John. She had surrendered.

"It was just a mean little fib," she whispered, and for a moment clung

to him helplessly.

John, greatly surprised, was not too much surprised to feel the exultant

surge of victory. For one moment he had lost control of himself, but in

that moment he appeared to have gained control of Marien.

The strangest thing was that Miss Dounay seemed rather happy about it

herself; and the wide range of the woman's capacity was revealed by her

swift transition to a mood of purring contentment and a spirit of

affectionate camaraderie that presently reached a surprising climax.

The act ended in the garden, with Isabel seated on a rustic bench, and

Archibald bending over her. As the curtain descended, he was to stoop

and print a kiss of tenderest respect upon her forehead. But now, as

the curtain trembled, Miss Dounay lifted not her forehead but her lips,

and held them, warm and clinging, to his for an instant that to

Hampstead seemed a delicious, thrilling eternity, from which he emerged

like a man newborn.

But the male instinct to gloat was the first clear thought.

"You do like me, don't you?" he breathed exultantly, while the curtain

was down for an instant. Marien answered with her eyes and a quick

affirmative nod, before the curtain bounded upward again for a last

picture of husband and wife gazing into each other's eyes with a look

expressing an infinitude of fondness. But John had ceased to be

Archibald. What his look expressed was an infinitude of mystery and

joy.

"And they say there is no satisfaction in a stage kiss!" he whispered to

himself as he leaped up the stairs to his dressing room.

*CHAPTER XI*

*SEED TO THE WIND*

The next night Miss Dounay gave John her forehead instead of her lips to

kiss, but she heckled him no more, and it was perfectly obvious to him,

as to Parks, that she helped him deliberately and had been helping him

all along by her stage direction.

"If you've got her interested in you, you're fixed for life," grumbled

Parks wistfully. "That girl's going up the line, and she's got stuff

enough to take somebody else with her."

There was a suggestion in this which John resented.

"I'm going up, too," he rejoined with the defiant exuberance of youth,

"but on my own steam."

Parks looked at John up and down, and laughed,--just that and nothing

more. The old man's frankness was comforting at times; at others

disagreeable. John moved away irritated, and his head went up into the

clouds of his dreams. But there was something in what Parks had

suggested that kept coming back to his mind. True, Miss Dounay never

exchanged more than the merest words of courtesy with John off the

stage. But on the stage and at rehearsal it really did seem as if there

was a very nice little understanding growing up between them.

Off stage John dreamed of going to call upon her. In his little room he

thought of her much and hungrily. That he should think hungrily was not

strange, since he was hungry. His salary was twenty dollars a week. To

send half to Rose, and save money to meet his wardrobe bills, he lived

on two meals a day. The morning meal, taken at half-past nine,

consisted of coffee and cakes, and cost ten cents. The evening meal was

taken at half-past five. It was a grand course dinner that went from

soup to pie, and its cost was fifteen cents. The tip to the waitress

was a smile.

When one goes supperless to bed, dreams come lightly and are fantastic.

John's dreams were of banqueting after the play with Marien Dounay.

Greenroom gossip had it that Marien lived royally but in modest thrift;

that her French maid, Julie, was also cook and housekeeper; that

Marian's disposition was domestic and yet convivial. That instead of a

supper down town in one of the brilliant cafes, she preferred the

seclusion of her small but cozy apartment, and the triumphs of Julie at

a tiny gas grill, supplemented and glorified by her own skill with the

chafing dish. That there were nights when she supped alone, but others

when a lady or two, or much more likely a gentleman, or mayhap two

gentlemen were honored with invitations to this feast of goddesses; for

tiny, efficient, ambidextrous Julie was in her way as much of an

aristocrat as her mistress, and as skillful in imparting the suggestion

that she was herself of some superior clay. Subject to the whims of her

mistress, she, too, had whims, and made men--and women--not only respect

but admire them. Rumor said that if an invitation to one of these

midnight revels with toothsome food under the personal direction of this

flashing beauty ever came, it was on no account to be despised,

especially if a man were hungry either for beauty or for food.

John Hampstead was hungry for food, and now he began to feel hungry also

for beauty. This last was really a new appetite. John, through all his

struggling years, had of course his thoughts of woman as all men have,

but vaguely, as something a long way off, indefinitely postponed. Yet

ever since he carried Lygia in his arms, these thoughts of woman had

been recurring as something nearer, more tangible, and more necessary

even. As for that kiss in the garden scene of _East Lynne_! Well,

there was something wonderfully awakening in that kiss. It was worlds

different from that brotherly, sympathetic little kiss he had given

Bessie yonder upon the rocks.

By the way,--why did Bessie cry? He used to wonder sometimes why she

did! And why did Marien Dounay taunt him till he was angry enough to

beat her,--and then kiss him?

Women were hard to understand. They seemed to do things that had no

meaning; to use words not to convey but to conceal thought; and they

spoke half their speeches in riddles. However, John reflected that when

he had been with women more, he would know them better. And in the

meantime he supplemented his professional contacts with Marien by

thinking of her constantly, even to the point where his absorbing

interest led him to follow her home at night after the play,--keeping

always at a safe distance behind,--and to stand across the street and

watch till the light went on in that third-story bay-window on Turk

Street near Mason; and then still to stand, trying to interpret the

meaning of shadows moving across the window for uncounted hours, till

the light went out, sometimes at two and sometimes later, or until a

policeman bade him move on. If any one had told John that he was

falling in love with Marien Dounay, he would have indignantly rejected

the idea. She held a fascinating interest for him,--that was all.

Something basic in him was attracted by something basic in her, and he

yielded to it wonderingly, experimentally almost, and that was all it

amounted to.

But on the night that Miss Dounay completed her engagement at the

People's, for her tiff with Mowrey was over in just four weeks, the

opportunity came to John to submit his feelings to more searching

experimentation.

It had been his custom to wait in the shadowy wings each night to see

the object of his solicitous interest depart, supposing himself always

to be unobserved. But on this last night Marien surprised him into

nervous thrills by walking over into the shadow with the cool assurance

of an autocrat, and saying:

"Come home to supper with me, John."

At the same time Miss Dounay took the big man's arm as comfortably as if

the matter had been arranged the week before last, and John walked out

as if on air, but hurriedly. That soft touch upon his arm made him

hungry with indescribable anticipations. Moreover, he was stirred by an

itching curiosity concerning the whole of the intimate personal life of

Marien Dounay. Who was she? What was she? _How_ was she?

Yet on the very threshold of the little apartment, his sense of what was

conventional in the world out of which he had come halted him.

"Should I?" he asked huskily, as the door stood open. "Would it

be--proper?"

"Most particularly proper, innocent!" laughed Marien. "At the theater

Julie is my maid; at home she is my housekeeper, my social secretary, my

companion, and chaperone."

While the light of reassurance kindled on John's face, Marien gently

drew him inside.

"Behold!" she exclaimed with a stage gesture, when the door was closed

behind him. "My temporary home; my balcony window overlooking the

street, my alcove wherein I sleep, the kitchenette in which we cook;

behind that the bath, and back of that Julie's own room. Isn't it dear?"

"Dear!" That was a woman's word. Bessie said that about her invitation

paper for the Phrosos.

"Dear?" he breathed, comparing it in one swift estimating glance to his

own barren cell. "It's a paradise!"

"So much more seclusion than in hotels," declared Marien, and then went

on to say in that sort of tone which belongs to an air of frank and

simple comradeship: "So much less expensive, too. Do you know what

saves a girl in this business? Money! Ready money. And do you know

what ruins her? Extravagance--debt. We are very economical, Julie and

I. We have what crooks call 'fall money', laid by for any emergency.

That's what you'll need to do. Save half your salary every week.

There'll be weeks you don't play, weeks when you have to go to expense.

You may be ill or have an accident, or your company will close

unexpectedly. Save. Save your money!"

Marien uttered these bits of practical wisdom, which were to John the

revelation of an unthought-of side of this exquisite young woman's

character while she was conducting him toward the window.

"Sit here," she commanded. "Look straight down Turk. See the lights

battling with the fog. Listen to the waning music of the night in this

noisy, cobbly, clangy city. Don't turn your head till I say!"

The lights were indeed beautiful, each with its halo of mist. The

clanging bells of cars, and even the horrible squeak of the wheels as

they turned a curve, with the low singing of the cables that drew them,

did rise up like the orchestration of some strange new motif of the

night that lulled him till he was only faintly conscious of the opening

and closing of doors and a rustling at the other end of the room.

"Now!" called the voice of Marien cheerily, awakening him with a sudden

thrill to the realization of her presence.

She stood at the far end of the room, surveying herself in a long

mirror. Her figure was draped rather than dressed in a silken,

shimmering texture of black, splashed with great red conventional

flowers. The garment flowed loosely at neck, sleeves, and waist, and

the fabric was corrugated by a succession of narrow, vertical,

unstitched pleats, which gave an illusory effect of yielding to every

movement of the sinuous body and yet clinging the closer while it

yielded. As John gazed, Marien belted this flowing drapery at the waist

with a knot of tiny crimson cord, and then released her coils of rich

dark hair so that they fell to her hips in a fluttering cascade as silky

as the texture of her robe.

When she advanced to him, the shimmering, billowy movements of the gown

matched the rhythmic sway of her limbs as completely as the red splashes

upon it matched the color of her cheeks. She came laughing softly, and

bearing in her hand a pair of tiny red and gold slippers.

A low divan ran along one side of the room, piled high with gay

cushions. Near the foot of it was a Roman chair.

"Sit here," said Marien, indicating the chair; and John, as if obeying

stage directions, complied, while his hostess sank back luxuriously amid

the cushions and by the same movement presented a slim, neatly booted

foot upon the edge of the divan, so very near to the big man's hand as

to embarrass him. At the same time she held up the slippers to his

notice and observed with a nod toward the boot:

"As a mark of special favor."

For a moment John's face reddened, and he looked the awkwardness of his

state of mind, his eyes shifting from the boot to Marien's face and back

again.

Her face took on an amused smile, and the boot wiggled suggestively.

"Oh," exclaimed John, blushing with fresh confusion at his own dullness

as he bent forward and began to struggle with the buttons of the boot.

"You see," he explained presently, still worrying with the combination

of the first button, "you see--well, I guess I don't know women very

well."

Marien laughed happily.

"Stage women!" John added, as if by an afterthought.

"Stage women," affirmed Marien loyally, "are no different from other

women--only wiser." Then she tagged her speech sententiously with,

"They have to be. Careful! You will tear the buttons off. And you--you

are pinching me!"

"I beg your pardon," stammered John. "But there are so very many of

these buttons."

After an interval during which Marien had appeared to watch his labors

with amused interest, she asked, with mocking humor:

"Are you hurrying or delaying? I can't quite make out."

But John was by this time enjoying the to him novel situation, and

merely chuckled happily in reply to this thrust. When the shoes were

off, by a mystifying movement Marien snuggled first one stockinged foot

and then the other into the gold embroidered slippers and with a sigh of

contentment appeared to float among her pillows, while she contemplated

with smiling attention the face of Hampstead. Presently she asked

smiling:

"Are you a man or a boy, I wonder?"

Feeling himself drifting farther and farther under the personal spell of

this magnetic woman, and entirely willing to be enthralled, John

answered her only with his eyes.

"That's the Ursus look," she laughed softly, as if it pleased her.

A silver cigarette case was on a tabaret within reach of her hand.

"Have a cigarette!" she proposed.

John declined, a trifle embarrassed by the proffer. Miss Dounay lighted

one and puffed a small halo above her head before she looked across at

him again and asked quizzically:

"You do not smoke?"

"And I do not think women should," Hampstead replied, with level eyes.

"It is a horrid habit," she confessed, "but this business will drive

women to do horrid things. Listen, Hampstead. It's hard for a man;

you've found that out, and you're only beginning. It's harder for a

woman; the despairs, the disappointments, the bitter lonelinesses,--the

beasts of men one meets! But--" With a shrug of her shoulders she

suddenly broke off her train of thought, and turning an inquiring glance

on Hampstead asked:

"You never smoked?"

"Oh, yes," confessed John, "but I quit it. I decided it would not be

good for me."

She regarded him narrowly, and asked:

"You would not do a thing which did not appear good for you?"