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FOOTLIGHTS
by
RITA WEIMAN
[Publisher’s device]
New York
Dodd, Mead and Company
1923
Copyright, 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922
by Rita Weiman
Printed in U. S. A.
_To_
MY MOTHER
_on whose love and influence
the curtain will never fall._
CONTENTS
PAGE
The Curtain Rises ix
Footlights 3
Madame Peacock 67
Grease-Paint 127
The Back Drop 169
Two Masters 219
Up Stage 249
Curtain! 289
The Curtain Falls 341
THE CURTAIN RISES
Arched like the dome of heaven, illumined with a glow not brilliant
but warm and intimate, carpeted with velvet that gives gently to the
tread of many feet, the air vaguely scented with a perfume that has no
name, row upon row of wide, soft-armed chairs facing a curtain that
falls in long, mysterious folds—silent, expectant, tantalizing,
inviting—a world all its own—THE THEATER.
Behind that curtain—the same world bounded by brick walls. Scenery
with act numbers scrawled in charcoal across its back being shoved
into place, hustling property men, frantic stage manager, nervous
director giving last minute husky orders, anxiously repeated lines
and cues, the final touches of make-up, restive feet striding
dressing-room floors. There is the murmur of hushed voices, its
excited undercurrent like a rising chant, the tremulo of uncertainty,
the eager activity of that suspended moment of waiting for the curtain
to lift.
Actors and audience—they must for a few brief hours change places if
this world made for forgetfulness, this house of dreams is to realize
its unwritten law:—“Abandon care, all ye who enter here:” The spirit
of the theater lays magic fingers over tired eyes. The audience steps
across the footlights and becomes the actor, throbs to his emotions,
sheds his tears, tingles with his laughter. The actor must step across
the footlights and become the audience, feel his pulse beat, sense his
pleasure or disapproval, know his reaction.
And in proportion to the measure with which each becomes the other,
the enthusiasm with which the audience acts, the keenness with which
the actor observes, the play lives. The house of dreams is alight!
But if either should fail—and if one fail, it is because the other
does—then the play is phantom. A stalking ghost walks the boards. The
house of dreams goes dark!
FOOTLIGHTS
_SATIRE_
The Romance of yesterday is the Satire of to-morrow. Juliet to-day
would be a lovesick flapper. We’d regard with tongue in cheek her
moonings to the moon. There is such a fine line between the smile of
sympathy and the smile of sophistication, that the author confesses
she is still in doubt which the heroine of “Footlights” will call
forth—if either.
FOOTLIGHTS
CHAPTER I
Have you ever been in a small town, small time vaudeville house? Well,
even if you have, and could live through it, you’ve probably never
seen that mysterious region known as “backstage.” You’ve never heard
warped boards creak under the lightest step. You’ve never stood in the
wings waiting for your turn, trying to escape the draught that is
everywhere, shivering but afraid to sneeze. You’ve never dodged
misdirected tobacco juice. You’ve never endured the composite odors
only a one time “opery-house,” sometime warehouse, another time
stable, can produce. You’ve never done your three a day, rain, shine
or blizzard, then rushed to catch a local with oil lamps swinging
weirdly overhead and a jerky halt at every peach tree. But most of
all, if you’re a woman, you’ve never known what it is to sit weeping
in a pea-green walled dressing-room because you chose to do the darn
thing yourself and won’t go back home and admit you’re beaten.
If any one of these experiences had been yours, you’d probably walk
straight into the pea-green dressing-room referred to, pat Elizabeth
Parsons on the shoulder and say, “I’m with you, old girl! It’s a
black, black world. No sunshine anywhere! Never was, never will be!”
As it happened, those in her world at the moment were not of her
world. They were a hardened lot, with hands ready to dig down and
share a copper with a pal, with glib greeting in their own peculiar
patois as they swung through the stage entrance, but inured to
creaking boards, to combined odors, to oaths and tobacco juice and icy
currents that gripped more sensitive shoulders like the hand of death.
Life had handed them a deal that wasn’t exactly square, perhaps.
Almost any of them would have been a knock-out on Broadway! But they
had reached the point where emotion, as well as indignation, expressed
itself in shrugs.
They could snore peacefully in a swaying day-coach, dreaming of the
hour when the flower of success would spring up by the wayside. So
Elizabeth Parsons wept alone. Her make-up boxes reeled in every
direction as her head went down in their midst. Her hands, pressed
against her lips, tried to still the sobs she knew were cowardly. Her
body shook with that least beautiful of human emotions, self-pity, and
she wished she were dead.
A gale of sleet and snow tore against her little alley window. It
rattled the single pane furiously. It forced its way through cracks
and dripped into pools of water on the stone floor. It blurred the
already dull electric globes round her dressing-table with a dank mist
and soaked a chill into her bones. But it had nothing whatever to do
with her tears. They were the result of an accumulation of misery and
loneliness, and finally the receipt of a wire from her booking agent
advising her that her route had been changed. For the next three days
she must play her own home town.
It was the crowning humiliation! She had endured the disappointment of
all the rest of it; but to go back to the barnlike old theater in Main
Street, wedged between movies and tinsel acrobats, was too much. To
hear the wagging tongues and see the wagging heads of those who had
warned her two years ago that New York was a pit of the devil; to let
them see that even his satanic majesty had let her sink into oblivion,
was more than she could bear.
From the stage at the foot of the iron stairs came a crashing chord
and the voice of Jack Halloran, “The Funniest Man in the World,”
singing a nasal travesty:—
“Oh, Rigoletto—give me a stiletto!”
Elizabeth raised her head, mopped away the tears, and rearranged her
make-up. Her turn was next but one.
“BETTY PARSONS—FAMOUS IMITATOR OF
FAMOUS STARS
STRAIGHT FROM BROADWAY.”
So proclaimed the announcements that accompanied her pictures outside
the theater. They always made Elizabeth smile. She had certainly come
from Broadway—straight.
She brushed back her soft brown hair, pinned a towel round it, laid on
a layer of grease-paint. A supply was needed to blot out traces of the
last bad half hour. She beaded the lashes, penciled black shadows
under them that made her gray eyes look green, and carmined her lips
so that the slightly austere New England lines of them softened into
luscious curves.
In the midst of transforming a primrose into an orchid, and with
thoughts still fastened on the dreaded to-morrow, she did not hear the
knock on her door. It was repeated. Turning, she saw a white square
of paper shoved through the crack. She picked it up wonderingly.
Communications from any one but her agent were almost unknown
quantities.
Dear Lizzie Parsons (she read),
I’m outside of the door waiting to come in and say hello.
Your old friend,
Lou Seabury.
In spite of her dread, in spite of her determination to die rather
than face home folks, she dropped her powder puff, made one bound for
the door, flung it wide.
“Oh, Rigoletti—give me a yard of spaghetti,” warbled Halloran from
below.
With a little checked cry, Elizabeth reached out both hands. A plump,
pink cheeked young man took them and somewhat diffidently stepped into
the little square of room. But Elizabeth clung to him shamelessly and
her voice caught when she tried to speak. He was the first link
between two years of loneliness and the yesterdays of happy childhood.
“Lou,” came at last, “Lou Seabury!”
“I got a nerve, haven’t I,—walkin’ in on you like this?”
His pink face flushed a deeper pink as she pulled the chair from the
dressing-table, thrust him into it, and stood looking down. “You’re
just an angel from heaven, that’s what you are! How ever in the world
did you find me?”
“I came over here yesterday to look at some threshin’ machines. Scott
Brothers are sellin’ out and Dad got word they’re lettin’ their stuff
go dirt cheap, so he sent me to take a squint. By Jiminy, I almost
dropped dead when I went past the theater this afternoon and saw your
picture. Maybe I didn’t go right up to the girl in the ticket box and
tell her I was an old friend of yours!”
Elizabeth’s tongue went into her cheek. “And what did she say?”
“Asked why I didn’t come in to see you perform to-night and I said I
would. But first I made up my mind I’d let you know I was here.
Say—what is it you do?”
“Imitations.”
“Who do you imitate?”
“Oh, Ethel Barrymore and Elsie Janis and Eddie Foy and George Cohan
and Nazimova—” She reeled off a list, most of them strange to him.
“I’ll bet you’re great. Gee—Lizzie—but you’re pretty.” His round face
went scarlet as the words popped out and he shifted uneasily under the
loose ill-fitting coat that hung from his broad shoulders.
She met his wide-eyed admiration with a smile. “It’s the paint, Lou.”
“No, sirree! You always were pretty. I used to watch you sittin’
beside me in the choir, and when you threw back your head and sort of
closed your eyes to sing, I didn’t wonder Sam Goodwin was crazy about
you.”
“Is he still organist at the First Presbyterian?”
“Yep.”
“And are you still in the choir?”
“Yep.” His boyish brown eyes dropped. His plump hands twisted the brim
of his wide slouch hat. “Guess that’s the most I’ll ever amount to.”
“But that beautiful voice of yours—it’s a sin!”
“My Dad don’t think so. Gimcracks, he calls it. I asked him once to
give me enough to get it trained,” the eyes lifted with a twinkle,
“and I never asked him again.”
She patted his arm sympathetically. “He wouldn’t understand—of
course.”
“Gee, I wish I had your sand, Lizzie! To break away—and make good.”
She turned swiftly to the mirror, picked up the discarded puff, dabbed
some powder on her nose, then carefully rouged her nostrils. And if a
tear smudged into the shadow under her eye, he didn’t notice it.
He watched her fascinated, every move, every practiced touch to her
make-up. She had unpinned the towel and her hair fluffed like a golden
brown halo round her small, mobile face. And catching his rapt
expression in the mirror, it flashed over her that to him she did
represent success. The mere fact that she had broken the chains of New
England tradition, that she had crossed the rubicon of the footlights,
put her on a plane apart.
Somehow the look in his nice eyes, of wonder, of envy, of homage—the
look she had so often worn when from a fifty cent seat in the gallery
she had studied the methods of the stars she impersonated—gave her new
courage. To-night she would not go through her ten minutes listlessly
with just one idea uppermost—to get her theater trunk packed in a rush
so that she might snatch a few hours’ sleep before making the train in
the dull gray dawn. To-night she would be sure at least of an audience
of one, of interest and enthusiasm and a thrill of excitement—and
these she would merit. She would do her turn for Lou Seabury in a way
he’d never forget.
She drew a stool from under the dressing-table, sat down and plied him
with hurried questions about the folks at home. He gave her the latest
news, little intimate bits that mean nothing but are so dear to one
who knows no fireside but the battered washstand and cracked basin of
a third-rate hotel room.
Grand’pa Terwilliger, seventy-nine, was keeping company with the widow
Bonser but was scared to marry her for fear folks would talk. Grace
Perkins had a new baby. Stanley Perkins had married a stenographer in
Boston and bought a flivver. He, Lou, had bought a victrola for
fifteen dollars second-hand and had some crackerjack opera records for
it. She ought to hear them!
When finally she sent him round to the front of the house and hurried
down the ugly iron steps, her low-heeled white slippers touched them
with an eager lightness they had not known for months.
The curtain was rung down on a one-act sketch. A placard announced
“Miss Betty Parsons—in her Famous Imitations.”
With a dazzling smile, Elizabeth sallied forth, cane in hand singing,
“I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy.”
Through her repertoire she went, changing like a chameleon from the
bland grin and strut of Eddie Foy to the crumpled pleading and
out-flung hands of Nazimova in “The Doll’s House.” She plunged into
Nora’s final scene with her husband:
... “When your terror was over—not for what threatened me, but for
yourself ... then it seemed to me—as though nothing had happened.
I was your lark again, your doll just as before—whom you would
take twice as much care of in future, because she was so weak and
fragile. Torwald—in that moment it burst upon me that I had been
living here these eight years with a strange man.... Oh, I can’t
bear to think of it! I could _tear_ myself to pieces!”
The greater part of the audience had never heard of the Russian
actress, knew less of the Scandinavian author. But the sob in the
voice of the frail little girl on the stage, the anguish in her face
got them by the throat.
There was a spontaneous burst of applause that held for a moment while
Betty bowed, glance straying into the misty auditorium, heart
fluttering with a gratification it had not known since the Grand
Central spilled her into the bewildering maze that is New York.
She swung quickly into ragtime after that, the drawling syncopation
and rolling step of a black-face comedian, and as a conclusion gave
them Elsie Janis in one of the songs from her latest Broadway success.
They brought her back several times. She threw them a final kiss,
disappeared into the wings and whisked up the stairs. Lou was going to
see the show to its finish, then call for her. He was sure they could
persuade the proprietor of the hotel where she was staying to fix up a
little supper of sandwiches and milk.
She slipped out of her white dress and into a dark one, folded the
former in layers of tissue paper and laid it in the top trunk tray,
stuffing stockings into the corners to keep it in place. She gathered
together her make-up, packed it into a tin box. To-morrow another
pea-green dressing-room, or perhaps, saffron-yellow. The week
following, one of chalk-blue. And so on, ad infinitum. Of such her
infinite variety!
A knock came at the door. She glanced at the gold watch which had been
her grandmother’s. Ten-fifteen. Lou had probably tired of the show.
Pulling on her black velvet tarn, she called gaily—“Come in!”
A mellow voice answered interrogatively, “Miss Parsons?”
It was then she wheeled about. Standing framed in the doorway was a
tall man with a cloud of black hair sweeping from a white forehead and
a pair of intense dark eyes. Elizabeth knew him instantly.
No mistaking that face and long, lean figure.
She drew a bewildered hand across a bewildered brow. In the doorway of
her dressing-room stood Oswald Kane, famous New York theatrical
producer!
She made no attempt at speech, just stared at him.
He smiled. “You expected some one else, I see. May I come in?” And as
she nodded, “You know me?”
She nodded again, indicated the chair and sank onto the low stool. She
couldn’t have stood another instant.
“You’re wondering, of course, why I am here,” the low musical voice
went on.
“Y-yes.”
“I’m very much interested in your work, Miss Parsons. I have come to
see it three times—last night and twice to-day. Until to-night,
however, I was not quite sure of you. There was a listless quality.
Had any one, perhaps, informed you that I was in front to-night?”
“If any one had, I’d probably have died of nervousness.”
He smiled again, ran a hand through his heavy hair, pushing it back
from his forehead, and leaned forward. “You seem to be a very talented
little girl. No technique, of course. You have the A B C’s of that to
learn. But you have a flexible voice and expressive face, and you
showed in that Nazimova bit emotional possibilities. Your reproduction
of her tone and accent were really excellent.”
“Th—thank you,” came with difficulty.
“Of course, I have no proof that you can act. Even if you can, it will
require infinite patience and training to make an actress of you. But
I could do it, I believe.”
Elizabeth gulped.
He shook back his shock of hair. His burrowing eyes narrowed. His
fingers hesitatingly played with the thin watch chain that spanned his
high waistcoat. “The majority of actresses on the American stage are
mere mummers. Those I have made are artistes. But in order to
accomplish this, they have given themselves into my hands—absolutely.
I have taken girls out of the chorus and made stars of them in the
drama—not because they were lovely to look at, or quick or clever, but
because I have worked hard with them, with infinite patience developed
their personalities, injected into them the inspiration that is Oswald
Kane.”
“Yes,” said Elizabeth.
“Of course there must be ability or I would not waste my time. I must
be sure the seed is there to be nursed into a beautiful flower. But
first and foremost, the actress I train must obliterate self. She must
become so much clay for me to model. She must accept my direction
without question. She must obey as a soldier obeys his commanding
officer.”
“Yes,” sighed Elizabeth.
“I see you now not as you are, but as what I can make of you. No two
of my stars are alike. Each has distinct and startling personality.
That is why the American public looks to me for sensations. Not one is
the actress she was when I discovered her. They are, one and all,
Oswald Kane creations.” He leaned back, still studying her.
Elizabeth felt a sea of eyes upon her in a gaze of hypnosis. She
stared back like one in a trance.
He sat for a long moment silent. Then the low, quiet voice went on,
richly vibrant as the tones of a cello.
“Yes, I think I might do something with you. That Nazimova bit showed
promise. But it will require training and patience—infinite patience.
You will have to work hard without complaint, hours over one line,
weeks over one short scene. And no recognition, perhaps, for some
years to come. You must not consider mundane things. Money must count
for nothing. I cannot think of money in connection with my art. You
must never grow tired or disgruntled. Above all, you must not
question. And in the end, a great artiste, my child,—a great artiste.”
Elizabeth nodded mechanically. She felt like screaming.
He got up slowly as if still uncertain, moved into a corner of the
little room, eyes still upon her. “Will you take off your hat and
smooth down your hair. I must see your features at close range.”
With fingers that trembled and stiffened, she pulled off her tam,
combed back her fluffy brown hair and breathlessly lifted her profile
to the light. It was, as he had said, a face not beautiful, but
malleable to mood as wax, with gray eyes set wide apart, a short nose,
full sensitive red lips, deep-cleft chin and swift change of
expression that was almost a change of feature. And there was in her
slim figure with its soft suggestion of curve, the magnetism of youth,
the flame of enduring energy.
He moved finally toward the door.
“You will take the 11:18 to-night to New York, cancel all bookings,
and I shall expect you at my theater to-morrow at noon.”
Elizabeth found her voice at last. “If you knew how many, many times
I’ve gone to your office, Mr. Kane, and begged on my knees for just
one little word with you!”
He smiled once more, that charming, somewhat deprecatory smile of his.
“That is not my way of engaging artistes. I must seek them, not they
me. I never see those who come to my office, unless I have sent for
them. No, my way is to haunt out-of-the-way places. Railroad stations,
unknown stock theaters, cheap theatrical hotels, vaudeville houses
like this. There, occasionally, I find my flower among the weeds. And
when I do, I pluck it to transplant in my own garden. If I discover
one a year, I ask no more.”
A sob broke in Elizabeth’s throat. “Oh, Mr. Kane—I—I’m so proud—and
so—so grateful.”
He took her trembling hand, patted it with his own rather soft,
artistic one. “You must prove a good pupil, that is all. Remember—no
mention of this when you go to cancel your booking—no mention of my
name to any one. For a time we must keep the agreement to ourselves.
Until you have my permission, the fact that you have come under my
management is to remain absolutely unknown to any but ourselves.”
She looked up at him wonderingly, “Anything you wish, of course.”
He dropped her hand, ran his fingers once more through the dark thatch
that persistently fell over his eyes. “I must have absolute faith in
you, little girl,—and you in Oswald Kane.”
“I—I have.”
“That is as it should be. To-morrow, then, at noon.”
He was gone.
In less than twenty minutes, after the manner of such happenings, a
miracle had been wrought.
Elizabeth stood dazed an instant. Then she stumbled to the window,
flung up the sash and leaned out to drink in the gale-slashed air with
deep convulsive breaths.
“Oh God,” she cried, tears streaming down her cheeks, “help me to make
good. Help me—help me!”
And so it happened that on a biting day in January, 1917, at the
stroke of twelve, Elizabeth Parsons, aged twenty-three, entered the
sanctum sanctorum of Oswald Kane, was handed a pen by his business
manager and forthwith signed away five years of her life with an
option on the next five, at the rate of fifty dollars per week for the
first two years, one hundred for the third, and one hundred and fifty
for each year following.
But just then Elizabeth would have signed away her whole life for
nothing.
CHAPTER II
On a brilliant night in January, 1920, under the sponsorship of Oswald
Kane, Mme. Lisa Parsinova made her bow to an expectant New York
public.
For a long time, almost a year to be exact, Mr. Kane had been letting
fall gentle hints of his discovery of a rare Russian genius, driven by
the war to these shores. He was having her instructed in English, the
story went, and once equal to the exigencies of emotional acting in a
strange tongue, she would be presented by him to an American public
which could not fail to be entranced by her great art. All this had
been revealed in various interviews, bit by bit—a word here, a phrase
there, a subtle suggestion elsewhere. At first he had not given out
her name, had been gradually prevailed upon to do so, and by the time
he announced the date of her première, “Mme. Lisa Parsinova” was on
the lips of all that eager theater-going throng alert for a new
sensation.
Stories of a cloudy past had already gone the rounds, vaguely
suggested by Mr. Kane’s press representative, not through the medium
of the press. There were tales of her startling beauty, her lovers,
her temper. But so far no one had been permitted even a glimpse of
her.
So that when she made her appearance the opening night, the gasp of
thrilled admiration that met her was very genuine. The play was “The
Temptress”—Oriental in atmosphere, written for her by Kane and a young
collaborator whose name didn’t particularly matter. The plot was not
by any means unconventional, that of a slave of early Egypt wreaking
revenge through the ages upon the descendants of the master, who,
because she refused to yield to him, threw her to the crocodiles.
The first act, a prologue, took place on a flagged terrace of a palace
by the slow-flowing Nile. As the curtain rose, faint zephyrs of
incense wafted outward, a misty aroma. The terrace glistened under a
golden moon with still stars piercing a sky of emerald. The tinkle of
some far-off languorous instrument sounded soft against the night. And
waiting, his lustful gaze on the marble steps, sat the master.
Slowly, the slave descended. Sullen and silent, she slunk forward,
like some halting panther in the night.
Her body gleamed, golden as the moon, sinuous and satiny under the
transparent cestus. Her bare feet moved noiselessly, every step one
of infinite grace. She came forward, eyes brooding, and stood half
shrinking, half defiant before the long stone bench where sat her
master. Suddenly she raised her head, tossed back her short black hair
and faced him.
As by a signal, opera-glasses went up, a sigh of pleasure went through
the house. The audience waited. She opened her lips and her voice,
low and liquid, flowed out, thrilling through their veins. The thick
contralto of it, the fascinating foreign accent, completely captivated
them.
He reached out, drew her toward him. One felt the wave of terror
seizing her. His big hands grasped her shoulders. She gave a smothered
cry and he laughed.
She pleaded, then resisted, and finally, voice rising like a viol with
strings drawn taut, defied him, calling upon the gods to save her for
the man she loved.
And all the while he laughed, a chuckling laugh full of anticipation.
At last his arms closed round the golden body, his lips bent to hers.
The sudden gleam of a tiny dagger, its clatter as he caught her
upraised arm,—and he flung her from him, clapping his hands for the
eunuchs who waited.
With one swift word he condemned her.
She crumpled at his feet. The black men lifted her. She cried out in
horror, a curse upon him and his through all the ages.
A long moan as they bore her away, a pause, a splash against the
silence, and the curtain descended.
For a breath the house sat motionless. Then came a surge of applause.
But the curtain did not rise.
Buzz of conversation met the upgoing lights. Only a few, however,
moved from their seats. Those who did came together in the lobby and
discussed the new star with a wonder close to awe.
“They sure can turn them out over there,” avowed one seasoned first
nighter. “Temperament, that’s the answer, Slav temperament. No little
cut and dried two-by-four conventions to tie them down. They’ve got
something the American woman don’t know the first thing about.”
“Well, they know how to let go, for one thing!”
The curtain rose on Act II, a modern drawing-room in the London home
of an English peer, member of Parliament, on the occasion of his
thirty-ninth birthday. He entered, big, handsome, with his little,
clinging English wife.
There was revealed the fact that for generations the oldest male of
his line died before the age of forty, a violent death. They married,
there were children, and always reaching the prime of manhood, they
were cut down. A curse upon his family it seemed to be and the little
wife trembled.
Guests dropped in to tea. With them came the announcement that a
prominent barrister was bringing a French authoress who had asked to
meet their host. She had heard him in the House of Lords. They spoke
of her beauty, her extraordinary personality.
Then Mme. Parsinova appeared. In the brilliantly lighted set, the
audience had its first good look at her. Slim, with a slenderness that
made her seem tall, a mass of pitch-black hair piled high on her small
head, a pair of burning eyes, dark and shadowed, creamy skin, a short
nose, deep-cleft chin, and scarlet lips full and mobile, she seemed a
living flame. She moved forward with gliding step, her lizard-green
velvet gown clinging about her limbs, her sable cloak drooping from
her shoulders. And one felt at once, as her white hand, weighted with
a cabochon emerald, rested in his, the spell she would weave about the
insular and very British member of Parliament.
Not so insular at that, for it developed that in his veins ran a
strain, a very thin strain, of the blood of Egypt.
There followed the love story, obvious if you like, but with the
everlasting thrill and appeal of a great passion, magnificently
portrayed. For as the drama moved to its climax, the spirit of the
slave which through the ages had visited its will upon the family of
its master, found itself captive. The French woman fell madly in love
with her victim and in the end gave her life that the curse might be
lifted and his saved.
In the climactic love scene at the end of Act III when passion tore
from her lips, an onrushing tide, the beautiful voice ran a crescendo
of emotion that was almost song. Its strange accent stirred and
fascinated. Its abandon was that of a soul giving all, sweeping aside
like an avalanche law, thought, ultimate penalty.
And still at the curtain, when the house rang with demands for her,
Parsinova did not appear. Oswald Kane made his accustomed speech,
coming before the purple velvet curtain to tell his audience in his
usual reticent manner how deeply he appreciated their reception of the
genius he had discovered. He thanked them—he thanked them—he thanked
them. He raised a graceful hand, pushed back his weight of hair and
slipped into the wings while the house resounded once more with
clapping hands and stamping feet, and a full fifteen minutes elapsed
before the play could go on.
All through the final act sounded the low note of tragedy, the
realization that she who for centuries had ruthlessly taken toll must
now once more be sacrificed that the one who had become dearer than
life might endure.
When the audience finally rose after another futile attempt to bring
her out, the women’s eyes were red, the men’s faces white. New York
was undoubtedly taken by storm. It had been more than a typical Kane
first night. It had been a Kane ovation.
In the first row a man got to his feet as if shaking off a spell. He
was tall, very erect, almost rawboned, with hair turning gray about
the temples, a demanding jaw, sharp straight nose and eyes that
somehow seemed younger than the rest of his face, younger than the
bushy black brows that mounted over them. They had caught Parsinova’s
gaze, those eyes, as it swept once or twice over the audience. They
had held it longer than was fair to her.
“Great, isn’t she, Rand?” His companion tapped his arm as he stood
gazing at the fallen curtain.
“Paralyzing,” was the laconic reply. He wheeled about and made his way
up the aisle, followed by the other man.
Outside, close to the shadowy stage entrance, Oswald Kane’s car, a
royal blue limousine, and a curious throng of bystanders waited.
Inside, Oswald Kane himself begged the circle of those privileged
by wealth, position, influence, who clustered round the door of the
star’s dressing-room, to excuse her for to-night. Madame was
completely exhausted.
When both crowds, tired of waiting, had dispersed two figures hurried
down the little alley that led to the stage door and entered the
limousine.
The door slammed.
The car rolled out and east toward Fifth Avenue.
The man switched off the light that illumined the woman’s white face.
Her dark-shadowed eyes were burning with excitement. She leaned back,
closing them, and heaved a great sigh. He leaned forward, hair falling
over his eyes, echoed the sigh, and his hand shut tightly round her
ungloved one. With a tense, almost nervous movement she drew it away,
shrank imperceptibly into her corner.
“They are at your feet,” he whispered. “I have made you.”
She did not answer—merely opened her eyes and looked at him and
through the darkness, something like tears glistened on the lashes.
They drove on in silence. He recaptured her hand, held it to his lips.
She looked away.
The car drew up before a modest apartment building in a side street.
He helped her out, entered with her, and the elevator swung them
upward. He made a movement for the key she took from her bag but she
unlocked the door and led the way into the foyer.
Slowly he reached up, lifted the fur toque from her black hair and the
wrap from her shoulders, and his touch lingered caressingly as he
turned her toward him.
“You are my creation!” he told her. “Parsinova cannot exist without
me.”
Into the throat of the great Russian actress with the questionable
past came a flutter of fear. Her lips quivered. She gave a convulsive
choking sound. Her eyes raced the length of the hall as though she
wanted to run away, then went pleading up to his. He smiled down into
them, drew her firmly to him.
With a swift, hysterical laugh, a twist of her body, she was out of
his arms and across the foyer.
“Come,” she called.
She opened a door at the other side. The gold flames of a log fire
played upon the face of the little gray-haired woman in dusky silk who
rose to greet her.
“Mother,” said Parsinova, “kiss your child and thank Mr. Kane. I think
I’ve made a hit.”
Oswald Kane watched with a frown as she held out her arms adoringly to
the little old woman.
For over a year the little mother had had a way of appearing in the
background whenever he claimed the few sentimental hours which should
have been but small acknowledgment of his new pupil’s debt to him.
CHAPTER III
Parsinova instantly became the rage.
She gave delicious interviews in which she misapplied American slang
in a way that made the press chuckle. She spoke of the tragedy of
Russia. She told of her struggles there. She gave her impressions of
the American theater; American art; American fashions; the energy of
the American man; the vitality of the American woman.
“They do not give as we foreign women,” she said. “They take. And so
it is that they grow rich—in beauty—and are forever young.”
“But emotionally?” prompted the interviewer.
“I have said—they are forever young. Emotionally—they are children
always.”
This statement was followed by indignant protest from American
actresses and the sort of heated dramatic controversy that delighted
the soul of Oswald Kane.
She received all reporters in her dressing-room at the theater. If any
one save Kane knew where she lived, no one had ever crossed the sacred
threshold.
“I live two lives quite a-part,” she said. “One in my home which is
for me a-lone. And one in the theater which is for my dear public.”
Mr. Kane amplified this by stating that her hours at home were spent
in study. Others intimated that her hours at home were given to some
mysterious romance.
In spite of which she was not a hermit. Society, with a capital S,
sought the privilege of entertaining her. Occasionally she accepted a
dinner invitation—never on any day but Sunday, however—or permitted a
tea to be given in her honor. She went nowhere during the week.
Her dressing-room was always fragrant with flowers. Kane had had it
done over when she took possession. An alcove had been cut off for her
make-up table, and the orchid silken drapes, black rug, suspended
lights and carved chairs of the outer room gave it more the impression
of a salon. Here she held court. Here she read the hysterical notes of
matinée girls, the pleas of dilletanti youth that she dine or sup with
them, the tributes of actors, the encomium of the world in general.
Here, every week or so, she went into tantrums, threatening to kill
her maid in a voice that caused the stage hands to tremble, until Kane
himself had to be called to calm her. Here she smoked Russian
cigarettes and looked over the urgent invitations that piled mountain
high upon the bronze tray.
It was only at home in a cretonne hung bedroom, furnished with a rigid
fourposter and dotted swiss curtains through which sunlight flowed,
that she wept and sometimes felt lonely.
She played of course to packed houses. The S. R. O. sign was a common
occurrence. More than once in that same place in the front row, the
footlights illumined the face of the man whose intent gaze had
fastened on hers the opening night. He seemed never to tire of her
art.
Early in March Mrs. Collingwood Martin gave a reception for her.
Mrs. Julian van Ness Collingwood Martin flattered herself, with
justification, that in her wide old house facing Washington Square she
maintained the nearest approach to a salon that could be found this
side of Paris.
Her high drawing-room brought together leading spirits of the
professional, business and diplomatic worlds, and her gracefully
tinted head was never troubled with fear that the wrong ones might
meet. All those on her selected list were the right ones, each
interested in what the other represented. Many a little coup between
the artiste and the financier is consummated under the guise of
drinking a cup of tea or punch. And more than one professional has
amassed a neat little fortune by making wide-eyed queries of the Wall
Street man about his end of the game.
On the afternoon in question the rooms on the lower floor were crowded
with laughter, perfume, silks, jewels, furs and the hum of animated
voices.
Bowls of early spring bloom, azaleas, jonquils, mammoth daisies, stood
on tables and at either side of the arched doorway. A faint blue haze
of cigarette smoke hung overhead. Twilight had sifted through sunlight
before Parsinova appeared. She always came late.
As she stood, a silhouette within the white arch between the shining
bowls of jonquils, there was a general hush, then a forward movement.
She was gowned entirely in black—black lace trailing from her feet, a
black hat shadowing her face, and drooping from it to curl against her
shoulder, a black paradise. Black pearls dangled from her ears and a
strand of them about her neck emphasized its whiteness.
“Isn’t she wonderful? What personality—what atmosphere!”
“There’s no one like her.”
“She fairly oozes temperament.”
“Absolutely startling!”
“By Jove—these foreigners! Naughty but—er—so promising, don’t you
know!”
Mrs. Collingwood Martin bore her triumphantly to a thronelike chair
and presented the guests in turn.
Parsinova’s manner was charming, a bit weary but gracious, and her
efforts to carry on a conversation in colloquial English were
excruciating.
“That lit-tle French gentleman by the punch bowl,—I fear he has on a
biscuit,” she told the group of adorers.
They looked puzzled. Then one of them flung back his head with a
laugh. “You mean he has a bun on.”
“I shall never be right,” she sighed in the chorus of laughter that
followed.
From the music-room came a clear tenor singing the “Ave Maria.”
Silence met the lifted voice and at the final sobbing note, gentle
applause.
Mrs. Collingwood Martin swept toward her guest of honor.
“Darling,” she smiled with that touch of privileged intimacy she loved
to assume, “here is some one most anxious to meet you. Let me present
Signor Luigi Rogero of the Metropolitan.”
Parsinova looked up and out from under dropped lids. Then she wondered
whether any one saw the start she gave. Facing her with lips bent to
her outstretched hand stood Lou Seabury.
No mistaking him in spite of the close-fitting coat, carefully waxed
little mustache and black-ribboned monocle! Due to a New York tailor’s
art, his plump figure had grown slimmer. In place of the loose
disjointed shamble of old home days, he bore himself with consummate
_savoir faire_. But the pink cheeks and kind brown eyes were the same.
Parsinova waited breathlessly for some sign of recognition. None came.
In perfect English he merely voiced his satisfaction at the meeting
and joined the group about her chair. It was not until she rose to
leave and he craved the honor of escorting her to her car that she met
his gaze with curious question in her own. But his eyes were blank so
far as any subtle meaning was concerned.
He followed down the steps, helped her into the perfectly appointed
limousine. An impulse she made no attempt to curb prompted her to ask
if she could drive him uptown. They had gone several blocks before
either spoke. Then very low came the words:—
“Lizzie Parsons,—you’re a wonder!”
Instinctively she looked about to make sure his whisper had not been
overheard. Then she gave a long, smothered laugh and clutched his hand
just as she had that night in the three-a-day vaudeville theater.
“Lou,” she breathed, “I’m so glad, so glad!”
“Were you surprised to see me?”
“Surprised? I almost died.” She gave a little gasp. “Were you
surprised to see me?”
“Not a bit.”
“You knew me then—at once?”
“I’ve known who you were ever since your opening. I was there. Matter
of fact, I have you to thank for the brilliant idea that made me an
Italian.”
“Me?”
“Yep.” He lapsed into the old lingo and she closed her eyes with a
beatific smile. “You don’t think my brains would ever be equal to such
an inspiration.”
“Mine weren’t either. It was Oswald Kane’s.”
“Nobody would ever guess that you’re anything but Russian from the
word go.”
“You did.”
“That was only because I’d known you. And even then I mightn’t have
been on if I hadn’t heard your imitations. Do you remember that
night?”
“Do I remember it! That was the night that ‘made me what I am
to-day.’”
He laughed.
“I did my best to please you,” she went on, “and Oswald Kane was in
front and liked my act. He came back afterward and arranged to sign
me.”
“So that was why you left me cold. I dated you for supper and went
round after the show, to find my bird had flown. Believe me, I was the
most disappointed rube in town.”
“I wouldn’t have remembered my own name after Kane saw me.”
“Is that why you canned it?”
She laughed then, her low, rich contralto. “That was all his plan. I
was as amazed when he told me about it as if he’d asked me to change
my skin. He’s never told me why he did it—he doesn’t trouble to
tell you why. But I suppose he thought the public needed a thrill,
something new, something different. And my impersonations gave him the
idea. I think I might have made good if he had let me go on as just
plain Parsons. But of course, not half the hit that Parsinova has
made.”
“They sure are crazy about you. I wondered often how you were getting
on.”
“You didn’t guess that somebody was making a new woman of me, did
you?”
His gaze, as it traveled from her dark-rimmed eyes shadowed by the
drooping hat, to the long white hands and slim black-swathed body,
held the same look of awe it had worn the night he had seen her make
up.
“Lordy, girl!” he gasped. “How you must have worked to accomplish it!”
“Work!” came in a breath. “I worked like a galley slave—never
stopping, except for sleep. Even while I ate I studied—Russian and
French, and gesture and movement. I even learned to eat herring. And
all the time he was teaching me to act. In four years—almost—I’ve seen
no one, talked to no one but him. I’ve had to obliterate self
completely. He has in reality created Lisa Parsinova.”
“He had to have the material to do it. The stuff was there.”
“But he is a genius, Lou. He knows his public just as a magician knows
his bag of tricks.”
The traffic at Thirty-fourth Street halted them. They spoke in
whispers, and every now and then her eyes rested with a look of
caution on the inexpressive back of her chauffeur.
“Do you think he can hear?” she asked.
“’Course not.”
“I have to be so careful.”
She turned to him, eyes alight with interest as they started on up the
Avenue. “Tell me about yourself. You’re another man, too.”
“Dad died shortly after I saw you,” he explained. “Apoplexy. And I
thought of you, the break you had made, the gamble you took. So I
gathered together what he left me, sold out to my brother Jim, and
came to New York to stake everything on that voice you took such stock
in. I went to Fernald and he thought he could do something with it.
I’ve been in training so to speak ever since. And this season he got
me the job with the Metropolitan.”
“If only I could hear you!”
“Oh, I haven’t done much—not yet. A few matinées and one or two
Saturday nights. Next year, though, they’ve promised me a go at
leads.”
“I knew if ever you had the chance you’d prove yourself.”
“I owe a great part of that chance to Randolph,—you know, Hubert
Randolph. He’s one of the directors of the Metropolitan. I met him at
Fernald’s studio last winter and it was through him that Fernald
pushed me. He’s interested in you, by the way,—thinks you’re the
greatest actress of the century.”
“The century is very young,” she smiled.
“Well, Rand’s seen them all in the last fifteen or twenty years and
knows what he’s talking about. We were at your opening together and he
said then you were paralyzing.”
“Did I do that to you, too?”
“Paralyze me? Bet your life you did! When you walked out on that stage
and raised your head, a ramrod went up my back. ‘That’s Lizzie
Parsons,’ I said to myself, ‘or I’ll be shot.’ Then I thought I must
be loony, that when I’d see you in a better light without the short
wig, I’d laugh at my mistake. But in the second act I knew I was
right, in spite of the black hair—”
“It’s dyed, Lou.” She made the confession haltingly. “At first I
didn’t want to. My hair seemed sort of part of me—the color, I mean.
But that’s just why he made me do it; it was a question of
personality, he said. I begged him to let me wear a wig but he was
afraid it would be detected. And he was right, I dare say. He’s always
right.”
“Don’t you worry about the way it looks, either. You used to be just
pretty. Now you’re a beauty!”
“Am I—really?” There was a childish earnestness in the query.
“Should have heard Randolph rave! Say, I’m dining with him to-night.
Why not come along? He’s crazy to meet you and he won’t go to any of
those society fandangles to do it.”
“Meet a stranger—with you around? Oh—I couldn’t! I’d burst into
straight English as naturally as you burst into song. And that would
ruin me.”
He patted her hand and his kind brown eyes beamed. “Nonsense! You’re
too clever an actress for that.”
There was something pathetic in the way she clung to his handclasp.
“It’s so good finding you this way. I haven’t any friends—no one to
whom I can actually talk. With me it isn’t a case of acting behind the
footlights. I’m acting all the time, except when I’m alone.”
“But it’s not acting any more—this Russian business, is it?”
“No—it’s myself, the greater part of self, I dare say. But Lizzie
Parsons isn’t all dead yet and I don’t want her to die—” She blinked
up at him. “Don’t make me cry, please,—or the shadows will all come
off my eyes.”
His eyes took in the luxurious appointment of the car, mauve enameled
vanity apparatus on one side, smoking outfit on the other, gilt vase
with its spray of fresh orchids, soft tan cushions and robe of fur. He
gave her a warming look of satisfaction.
“I should say the exchange was all for the better. You must be making
a mint.”
“One hundred and fifty a week.”
“One hundred and fifty—?”
“That’s my contract.”
“But good Lord—”
“Oh, I made it with my eyes open. It extends over the first five
years—with an option on the next five.”
“But all this—” He waved his arm, bewildered, through the air.
“All this he gives me—my clothes, my car and its upkeep, my jewels,
though they’re mostly paste, everything except my home. I wouldn’t let
him give me that.”
He made an attempt to conceal the swift suspicion that would have
clouded any man’s eyes. Instantly she saw and answered it.
“Oh, don’t misunderstand! It’s purely a matter of business. I’ve got
to be equipped to play my part off the stage and I don’t earn enough
to do it on my own.”
“Then why doesn’t he give you enough?”
“I should probably grow too independent. This way he holds the reins.
That’s only supposition, of course. I’ve never discussed it. One can’t
discuss money with Oswald Kane.”
“It’s a damned outrage!”
“Oh, no it isn’t. He took a sporting chance. He staked time and effort
and money on a venture that might have proved a hopeless failure. I
had everything to gain. And now that I’ve made good under his
guidance, it’s only fair that he should reap the harvest.”
“Indefinitely?”
“For six years to come, at any rate,—until my contract expires.” She
leaned back, eyes closed, and an intensely weary look dropped the
corners of her red, mobile mouth.
They drew near the park. She urged him to ride with her a bit and they
drove into the blue velvet dusk, past the shimmer of lake curled among
the bushes. The car glided on swiftly through cool dark silence.
“You haven’t told me yet how I inspired you to become an Italian,” she
prompted.
“Oh, that—simple enough! Randolph remarked the night of your première
that there was an aura of romance about artistes from the other side,
particularly when they hailed from Southern Europe; sort of Oriental,
you understand. The next day I went to Fernald. ‘Can’t you change me
to something Italian?’ I said. ‘Seabury’s a rotten name for an opera
singer.’ Well, he did it. Of course, I make no attempt at accent—I
couldn’t handle that job in conversation. But the people I’ve met
don’t look for it; they understand the fact that I was brought up in
England. All I have to be careful of is my grammar.”
They laughed together. As her laugh bubbled girlishly into the quiet
night, she halted it with a swift movement of hand to lips and once
more sent that look of caution at her chauffeur’s back.
He reminded her of his dinner engagement with Randolph. “He’s made up
his mind to know you informally. And that’s all he has to do to get
what he wants. He’s a human dynamo, that man. Never knew anybody with
his finger in so many pies and able to put over whatever he tackles.
Sooner or later you’re bound to meet him in his own way. Might as well
be to-night.”
“What good would it do? He’ll never know me—the real me.”
“He’ll know a fascinating woman, any way you look at it.”
But she dropped him at the bachelor apartment on Park Avenue in spite
of his pleas.
“Come and see me, Lou, often,” she murmured, giving him her address as
he stepped out of the car. “You don’t know what a joy it is to play at
being myself.”
CHAPTER IV
It was inevitable that Parsinova should meet Hubert Randolph, as Lou
Seabury had prophesied. It was not inevitable that he should prove to
be the man whose intent gaze had held hers from the first row. But
when one considers that Randolph had determined from the moment he saw
her to know her in an unprofessional capacity, his accomplishment of
that end was in the natural order of things.
Hubert Randolph was not a self-made man. He had succeeded, made his
name stand firm in the humming world of finance, in spite of the
handicap of having been born to the purple. Early in his boyhood he
had started out to forget that he was a Hamilton Randolph and he had
been forgetting it satisfactorily ever since. At Harvard he had become
the pal of men who tutored in their leisure hours, thereby improving
his mind. Also, he had never taken the trouble to inform them to which
particular Randolph family he belonged. It was unimportant. He had
spent a winter in a shack in Arizona, partly for his health, but
largely to familiarize himself with the workings of a matrix mine in
which the Randolphs had an interest. He had chummed with the miners,
chewed tobacco and acquired a red-bronze that had never quite worn
off.
He had climbed Pike’s Peak, had shot big game in the Andes. And then
he had come back to civilization and taken a clerkship in the
brokerage offices of Parker, Gaines and McCaffery, to study banking
methods from the bottom up.
At thirty-eight, or it may have been thirty-nine, he was an authority
on banking, stood ace high in Washington, and was known as a patron of
the arts. The Randolph family never understood why he had gone to all
that bother. It was so old, so distinguished, that to have a member
attempt to distinguish it further was almost an insult. However, Rand,
as he was known among intimates, never troubled to consult the family
as to his movements. He saw as little of them as possible.
“Don’t concern yourself about me,” he was in the habit of telling his
sister when she tried to propel him in the direction of one of her
parties. “I’m a hopeless sort of devil who likes to choose his own
friends.”
Once she persuaded him to attend a tea and he appeared with a youth in
a shiny coat and cuffs that separated from his shirt.
“He’s a coming violinist,” he whispered. “I thought you’d like him to
play. But he’s hungry—give him something to eat first.”
She never attempted to persuade him after that.
Parsinova met Hubert Randolph in a funny little restaurant which years
back had been a stable. It was conducted by a group of painters for
the benefit of a Disabled Veteran’s Relief Fund all their own. He had
arranged the party for the Sunday following her meeting with Seabury
but it took her old friend another week to convince her that she could
carry it through.
The occasion was not propitious. She had had a bad half hour that
afternoon with Kane when he resented the omnipresence of her mother.
“She annoys me. She seems to be behind you like a shadow. You must
send her away! Some one is bound to discover her.”
“That is impossible. She goes nowhere, sees no one. I shall keep her
here.” Parsinova’s eyes glittered and for a moment it seemed likely
that a backstage tantrum would be duplicated in fact.
So that when she fastened the short black satin dress up the front
into a high collar under her ears and pulled the brim of her black
satin hat in a shading dip, it was in a mood that omened no
particularly cordial reception of Mr. Hubert Randolph.
Seabury called for her and Randolph met them in the cobbled courtyard
that led to their unique dining place. In the dark she did not
recognize him. But as they stood in the doorway where an old lantern
swung, she stopped and peered at him.
“I have seen you be-fore!”
“Have you?”
“Many times—in the firs’ row. And you look’ as if—you like me.”
“I do,” came promptly with a smile.
“No—no,” her eyes gave him a piquant uptilt, “my art, I mean to say.
Me—you do not know.”
“I’m going to.”
He led the way indoors. She glanced about and her mood dissolved into
a new interest. First the man, then the charm of this quaint place.
The stalls had been left standing and in each a table was set. Over
each from the beamed ceiling swung a lantern similar to the one
outside. There were no brilliant lights, no noises of clinking glass
and silver.
She slid along the upholstered seat that lined the stall to the place
he indicated at the table’s head. The men seated themselves at either
side.
“This is great, Rand,” remarked Seabury. “How is it you never brought
me here?”
“I saved it for Madame. What does she think of it?”
“Fas-scinating. I feel quite like a thorough-bred horse.” Then she
looked at him gratefully. “And one is not—on ex-hibition.”
“I don’t want to exhibit you,” rejoined her host. “You’ll find that
out.”
She did find it out in the weeks that followed. They dined frequently
at “The Mews,” sometimes with Seabury, more often alone.
At first she protested. She could not! But in the end Randolph won
out. They arrived always at six when the place was practically empty
and by seven-thirty she was at the theater.
As the weather turned warmer they drove occasionally to the country
and back in time for the performance. She never permitted him to call
for her but arranged to meet him at the theater. They never went to
conspicuous hotels or restaurants. He seemed to enjoy being with her
away from the stare of the world. One Sunday in April when they had
planned to lunch at an inn that dots the shore of the Hudson, he
appeared with two hampers and announced that they were going to
picnic. They left the car at the top of a slope, scrambled down and
unpacked the baskets with the anticipation of boy and girl off for a
holiday. She pulled off her hat with its floating veil and sat
cross-legged on the rug he had spread under a willow tree.
Sitting there watching him, this man so intensely real, so intensely
himself, a sense of infinite sadness swept over her. She wanted just
for to-day to drop all sham. Not that her pose was ever difficult.
Like all affectation used incessantly, she was no longer conscious of
it. It was herself. But in these rare days spent with Randolph in the
brimming sunlight, soft with young green things, she wanted with a
ridiculously hopeless yearning to let him glimpse Elizabeth Parsons,
the girl who would have let her hair fly in the wind for sheer joy of
springtime, the girl who lived only in hidden moments.
Sometimes she compromised by letting Parsinova express Elizabeth’s
thoughts, her ideals, separating the two women only by the breadth of
an accent. Often she caught him looking at her curiously, as if trying
to link some simply expressed idea of living with the reputation of
the woman sitting opposite him. But more frequently they were content
to enjoy the moment, tramping through the woods, discovering new
sun-flecked trails, drinking in the sweetness of April and
companionship.
He had suggested that he stop for her at her home but she put him off
with excuses, obvious and sometimes lame.
Once he reproached her.
“Why don’t you let me come to see you?”
“You can—at any time you wish.”
“Not at the theater. When I worship you, I like it to be from the
other side of the footlights.”
“Oh! Then what is it you wish to do on this side?”
“Adore you! And you haven’t even told me what street you live in.”
“Then it should be quite ea-sy. One adores that which one knows least
a-bout.”
“In other words a man loves what he doesn’t understand and likes what
he does?”
“That is ex-actly what I wish to say. Is it not strange?—when a man
wish’ to make a woman love him, he say:—‘_Mon adorée_, you are such a
my-stery to me.’ And when a woman wish’ to make a man love her, she
tell him:—‘_Mon amour_, I understan’ you per-fec’ly.’”
He gave a ringing laugh, then leaned across the table.
“Your foreign men have a dozen ways of telling a woman they want her
love. We Americans, when we care—the real thing—are awkward as boys
and a little afraid.”
“A-fraid?” Parsinova’s eyes were wondering, while Elizabeth Parsons’
soul cried out that she, too, could know such fear. “But why?”
“Less experience.”
Her eyes laughed into his then. “The Latin in love is an art-iste,—the
American an art-i-san. Is that what you wish to say?”
* * * * *
“Have you ever heard that Ade classic?—
‘I never run from the man behind the gun,
Tho’ other chaps are cowards,
As for me—not!
But my courage fades away,
And I don’t know what to say,
When I meet the little girl
Behind the tea-pot.’”
“Me-not. Tea-pot,” she repeated with a frown of concentration in which
lurked a smile. “How ver-y droll your classics are.”
His rather severe mouth lifted with a whimsical twist. “After all, it
resolves itself into this—a man fears, not what a woman is, but what
she seems to be.”
Parsinova met the steady gaze with a quick startled look and bit her
lip to keep it from quivering. But his next words answered the
unspoken question that for a second shook her perfect poise.
“I wonder—” he said slowly, “I wonder if you’re as simple as you seem
complex.”
She did not reply at once, did not lift her eyes. They wandered out
through the wide window to the sheen of river and hazy Palisades in
the distance. Randolph had driven her out to Longue Vue at the hour
when the sun slides lazily into soft spring shadows.
“Why do you think me—as you say—com-plex?” She lifted her eyes and the
sun slanted across them. Perhaps that was why he failed to give her a
direct answer.
“Odd,” he observed, “I didn’t guess you had gray eyes. They look so
dark from the stage. They’re wonderful eyes at close inspection, by
the way.”
“Are they, too,—com-plex?”
“Full of secrets.”
“Ah, but there you are wrong—quite wrong, my friend. Most of their
life they ’ave given to study. What secret’ could they possess?”
She hated herself while she said it, hated Kane and the stage and the
success she had made. But most of all she hated Elizabeth Parsons for
allowing Parsinova to dominate her. To this one man she wanted so
devoutly to reveal herself as she was. Ridiculous, of course, the
desire—for it was Parsinova who charmed him. That was all too evident.
The hours she loved best were those in which he told her of his
travels, his life in the West. In that she could evince an interest
that was sincere. She could picture him in rough flannel shirt and
corduroy trousers, hobnobbing with the miners, one of them. He was the
true democrat, eager to learn first-hand instead of living by proxy.
She would draw him out, welcoming the opportunity to be for the moment
Elizabeth Parsons, if only as a listener.
When he left her at the theater that evening, he startled her by
saying abruptly:
“I’m coming to dine with you next Sunday.”
It was just as he helped her out of the car and she stopped short,
hand still in his. “You—are coming—?”
“That’s it, in your home. Oh, I’ve found out where you live. But I had
a notion that I’d like you to tell me.”
“How—did you find out?”
“Had you followed, perhaps. At any rate, you can’t keep me away any
longer.”
“You—you must not come.”
He regarded her closely, his thick brows coming together. “Is there
any particular reason why you shut me out?”
She remembered suddenly that her hand was still in his. His tense grip
was hurting her.
“Please!” She made a futile effort to draw it away.
“Is there?”
“Many—reasons.” Her lips hesitated over the words.
“Any one reason, I should say.”
In spite of herself, she looked up at him. “No—one.”
“Right, then. Sunday next.”
He dropped her hand quickly, stepped back into the car.
The next three days she spent buying high-backed cathedral chairs
and carved tables and tabourets for her living-room. Down came the
cretonne hangings and up went heavy purple velvet ones that shut out
the blessed light of day. She selected a black rug that made the room
look hideously somber and for the divan, gold cushions weighted with
tassels. When she finished, she had consumed several months’ salary.
But the transformation was complete. Once more Elizabeth Parsons was
wiped off this mortal sphere. Soon no shadow would be left of her, not
even in the sacred nook she had saved to call “home.”
With an anxiety close to terror she waited for Hubert Randolph. She
was wearing white, soft, creamy, floating. There ought, at least, be
some spot of light in the mysteriously shadowed room.
He came at seven. She went to the door herself and let him into the
little foyer. His eyes were alight with eagerness. They had the look
of a small boy’s bound for a fishing trip on Sunday.
He caught her hand. “You know how glad I am to be here.”
“You know,” she rejoined to her own surprise, “how I am glad—for you
to be here.”
He followed into the living-room. “Odd,” he observed almost to
himself, “I’ve pictured it often—but not like this. I’d an idea of
light things—woman things about you.”
She could have laughed with sardonic glee at the thought of how she
had dragged down those light, woman things and spent a small fortune
to create another atmosphere.
“But on the whole,” he proceeded speculatively, “these are you, aren’t
they?”
“A woman is so man-y things—so man-y moods, I wish to say—that there
is no one room can express her.”
Her apartment was in one of those modern houses where dinner is cooked
by a chef downstairs and sent up via the dumbwaiter. To Parsinova this
had proved a convenience, saving as it did the necessity of curious
servants. To-night she had arranged for one of the waiters from the
restaurant below to serve them. But in spite of him, noiselessly in
the background, it was a cozy, intimate little party that somehow
brought them closer than all their former dinners. The small table
set in a corner of the living-room, its glistening silver and lacy
feminine damask, the dishes she had herself ordered, created a sense
of home dangerous to the peace of mind of an actress wedded to her
art.
To crown the illusion, when the _café noir_ had been served and the
waiter disappeared, Randolph pulled a pipe from his pocket and asked
if he might light it. “I’ve always wondered what it would be like to
smoke a pipe with you.”
“But I do not—smoke a pipe.”
“Don’t interpret me so literally. A pipe means fireside, something
intimate and real. I’ve always thought it would be nice, one of these
days, to see your face through pipe smoke. May I?”
She nodded, curled on a cushion by the fire. It was a rainy night. The
logs whirred merrily. “Now—tell me more about your won-der-ful West.”
She lighted a cigarette and listened, eyes partly closed, and a sweet
tranquillity bathed her soul.
He pulled his chair closer. Unconsciously, perhaps, her head dropped
against the arm. If a moment later she felt a hand lightly caress her
hair, she gave no sign. Parsinova fans would undoubtedly have been
amazed at the scene—the Russian actress curled like a kitten at the
foot of a man’s chair while he painted with broad strokes pictures of
prairie life.
It was what he did just as he was leaving that shattered her serenity
like an explosion. They were standing in the foyer and she had given
him her hand with her “Good-night,” when suddenly she was in his arms.
They closed round her, swept her to him and his lips were on hers. For
a long moment they stood so. Then, without a word, he put her at arm’s
length, held her eyes with a look whose intensity she found impossible
to read. An instant later she was alone.
But those few moments brought her up sharp. Hours afterward she felt
the vice of his arms gripping her, the thrill of his kiss, and knew
that she loved him. Subconsciously she had known it a long time. But
she had never faced the issue. Content with a comradeship dear to both
Elizabeth Parsons and Lisa Parsinova, she had drifted without any
forward look, without taking count of what payment the future might
exact. And now the hour had come. Elizabeth Parsons, who had never
loved before, loved Hubert Randolph. Hubert Randolph loved Parsinova
who, according to all report, had loved many times and with not too
much reserve. Long hours she lay staring into the blank darkness of
her room. Out of it she could draw nothing but misery.
Heretofore she had accepted Parsinova’s manufactured past without
question. Now it was a lurid flame, flaring through the smoke of all
reasoning, torturing her—more real because it was unreal. Had it been
fact, there would be no problem. As things were, it was the ghost at
the banquet, a ghost of that which had never been. And there was no
solution! There never would be!
Elizabeth Parsons was New England. It was part of her plan of life to
marry when she loved. That was as fundamental as the blood in her
veins. The very intensity of emotion of which she was capable was
reëxpressed in her intensity of adherence to the moral conduct
generations of upright-living ancestors had laid down for her. From
that there could be no swerving. It was part of her.
Throughout the dragging hours of that night she tried desperately
to read into the embrace of the man who had taken her love, some
interpretation other than the obvious. And suddenly it came to her
that even granted he might possibly be willing to give her his name,
it was impossible for her to accept it. He did not know Elizabeth
Parsons—would not, if he did, evince the slightest interest in her. It
was the Russian actress he adored, the woman she was not. If he wanted
her and she dared to marry him, she would have to live day and night a
lie she could not—and what was more, would not—carry through. In love
she would have to be herself. Brilliant as was her Slav rendering of
it on the stage, in life she was just an American girl who wanted to
live it with all her soul. When he took Parsinova in his arms, he
would be holding Lizzie Parsons. The sophisticated Russian lips
against his would be giving him New England kisses. Well—not quite
that! But one certainty she must face. To the man who had fallen in
love with the Russian actress, the American girl would mean less than
nothing. She hated her! In the confusion of her soul she did not know
which hated the other more.
Had there been any doubt in her mind as to the hopelessness of her
situation, Oswald Kane himself pounded the last nail in the coffin a
few days later. A chatty little sheet given to imparting information
about important people had got wind of Randolph’s devotion. It
announced subtly that the walls the Russian actress had built up
between herself and American men had evidently been shattered by one
who heretofore had evinced but slight interest in the beauties of his
own set. It hinted at their runs in his car out of New York and
wondered amiably whether he intended converting his bungalow up
Westchester way into a dovecote.
The day it appeared on the news-stands Oswald Kane paid her an early
visit. For the first time she saw him with his smooth exterior
ruffled. It was a matinée day and she was having an eleven o’clock
breakfast when he arrived. A note from Randolph asking why she had
refused to see him the day before lay on the table beside her plate.
She looked tired and her eyes needed no artificial shadows.
Kane came into the room, then turned and stared at the new
furnishings.
“Do you like it?” she asked. “I’ve had it done over.”
“Why?”
“I thought it safe—in case any one should find me out and drop in.”
“Some one has found you out.” He handed her the society sheet, open at
the pointed paragraph that concerned her.
“I should like to know,” he began, his mellow voice going sharp, “who
the man is.”
She hastily slipped Randolph’s note into the pocket of her dress. “I
should like to be able to tell you.”
“You mean he does not exist.”
“I mean that if he did, it would be quite my own affair, wouldn’t it?”
“No. If you play a dangerous game and lose, Oswald Kane loses with
you. If any man discovers the truth about you, it means your
professional death as well as mine.”
“You need never worry—about that.”
Whether it was the hopeless note in her voice or the look in her eyes,
his voice softened. He went close to her.
“There is just one,” he whispered, “who knows you as you are. Lisa
Parsinova has the right to no man’s love but Oswald Kane’s. Forget
those New England prejudices!”
She dropped quickly into a chair. “Lisa Parsinova has the right to no
man’s love _at all_.”
Her eyes closed. Her voice went on monotonously.
“You see, I’ve thought it all out. I’ve swamped the girl I was and
it’s as final as if I’d killed her. One of these days, perhaps—when my
contract with you has been filled—Parsinova will sail back to Russia
or be drowned or something, and out of her ashes will rise a spinster
named Lizzie Parsons who doesn’t really matter, who’ll just pass
out—alone. But until then you are quite safe. Only—please—never speak
again of—of loving me.”
Kane bowed. “You are a great artiste, in spite of that. And at least
you cannot deny me the joy of the creator.”
“I shall never forget what you’ve done for me. I shall never betray
you in any way.”
She kept her word to the letter. Had she followed inclination she
would have gone through her performances mechanically. A numbness had
taken hold of her, of utter misery, utter futility. But her work did
not fall off in brilliance. Particularly in the love scenes and in the
final tragic sacrifice, did her beautiful voice shake with a suffering
so intense that it was real.
Randolph she saw several times a week in his accustomed place in the
first row. But his efforts to see her she ignored. A scene with him
would be unbearable, leading as it must nowhere. So she left his notes
unanswered, knowing he would eventually conclude that his passion the
night of their last meeting had been unwelcome, that she was choosing
the simplest means of telling him so. He wrote at first anxiously,
then demandingly, and when she failed to answer—stopped. When the
notes ceased to come she felt more miserably alone than ever in her
life, reaching back into the past for their hours together as groping
thoughts reach for memories of the dead.
She grew thin as a rail and her pallor was no longer creamy. It was
dead white, with unbecoming lines traced from nose to mouth. Seabury
remarked the change and suggested that she needed a change of air.
“You’ve been working too hard and you show it. When does your season
close?”
“Sometime in June.”
“Why don’t you get Kane to let you off the end of this month?”
“I don’t want to be let off. I’d like to play all summer.”
“Good Lord, it would kill you!”
“It will kill me if I don’t work.”
“Look here!” He went over to her chair, looked at her closely. “What’s
the matter?”
He had dropped in to tea at her apartment. She was seated behind the
copper samovar, white face emphasized against the dark hangings,
fingers moving restlessly among the tea things.
“Something’s wrong,” he persisted as she did not answer. “What is it?”
“Oh, a million things,—a million little things that don’t count.”
“Looks to me if it was one big thing that does.” He drew her out of
the chair—toward the window. “Come on—’fess up to papa!”
“Well, for one thing—” she bit her lip, woman-wise trying in her own
soul to veer away from the big issue by concentrating on a lesser. “My
mother’s blackmailing me.”
“Your—what?”
She looked up, met his stare of dismay. “The little old lady you see
around here sometimes.”
“I thought she was a maid. Look here—I don’t understand. You—why,
Lizzie Parsons, you’ve been an orphan for years!”
“I know I have. But I had to have some one—mother preferred—to protect
me.”
“I see—” A light dawned.
“So I engaged her. She looked the part and seemed a gentle, pathetic
soul—and now she’s blackmailing me.”
He grinned in spite of the seriousness of it. “Is she likely ever to
squeal?”
“Not as long as I give her all the money she wants. But it’s getting
on my nerves. She makes my life miserable by threatening to take my
story to the newspapers.”
“Next time she does it, send for me and I’ll bully her into keeping
quiet.” He made a move toward the door. “Is she here? I’ll do it now.”
“No—no!” She stopped him. “Let well enough alone.”
He took her hand. “Poor kid, you are in a mess!”
“I’ve committed suicide, Lou,” she said abruptly.
He looked at her silently, then shook his head. “What else is
bothering you?”
“What—what makes you ask that?”
“A blackmailing mama might make you look tired and worried but she
wouldn’t put all that sorrow into your eyes. Why, you look like
Isolde—by Jove, that’s it! Love stuff!”
“How absurd!” She looked away. “Whom could I be in love with?”
“Not with me, that’s a sure thing. Though, of course you know I’m in
love with you.”
“Lou—!”
“Oh, don’t worry. I know I haven’t a chance. But I care enough to be
darned upset by your condition. Now, come along, let papa fix things
for you.”
“They can’t be fixed, Lou, ever. When you’ve chosen to be two people
in one, you’ve got to stand up and take the consequences if God
ordains that two’s company and three’s a crowd.” She gave him a smile,
whimsical but without mirth. “Have you ever heard that saying: ‘_Je
suis ce que je suis, mais je ne suis pas ce que je suis?_’”
Seabury’s brow wrinkled. “I sing French. I don’t speak it.”
“It’s a play on verbs: ‘I am what I am, but I am not what I follow,’”
she translated. “Well, that’s me!”
He tried to persuade her to give him her confidence but she smiled and
told him there was nothing further to confide.
A few weeks later just before her season closed, he asked what plans
she had made for the summer. Kane was arranging to send her on tour
with “The Temptress” before opening in New York in a play being
written for her. She would have July and part of August to rest.
“I shall stay in town,” she told him, “and study.”
He protested vehemently.
“No use, Lou! I couldn’t bear being among people and this is the best
place to hide away. Besides, there’s my mother to consider. I can’t
risk having her run loose in New York without me.”
“But you must rest!”
“I must keep going, with as much work as I can manage.”
He bent over her, his kind brown eyes troubled.
“You’ll kill yourself.”
“On the contrary, I wish that I weren’t so intensely alive.” Then she
smiled and patted his shoulder. “Don’t worry about Lisa Parsinova.
She’s in fine shape.”
“But Lizzie Parsons?” he put in.
“She doesn’t count.”
“Seen Rand lately?” he asked casually as he got up to go.
“A number of times.” She had seen him only too frequently from the far
side of the footlights. “Have you?”
“No. He’s busy. Getting ready to go to Arizona. But of course you know
about that.”
“Y—yes. Has he told you when he leaves?”
“Tuesday of next week. May be gone a year. Don’t know why.”
She turned her back to the light so that her face was blurred and
misty and he could not read its expression. “Do you—do you think he
looks quite well?” she prompted, eager for some news, any news of him.
“Well, it struck me he looked a bit seedy last time I saw him—not just
up to the mark, that is. Probably spring fever. How does he impress
you?”
“I—I hadn’t noticed any change.”
When he had gone, she picked up the calendar on her desk and stared at
the day and date. Friday! By this time next week, a stretch of
continent would rush between her and Hubert Randolph. She shrugged her
shoulders with a short laugh. What mattered miles when worlds
stretched between them now!
She went into her bedroom, locked the door. Lizzie Parsons leaned
close to her mirror, stared into it. The white face and black-rimmed
eyes of Lisa Parsinova stared back. A frenzy seized her. She caught
hold of the first object her hand touched—a hair brush—and flung it
full force at the reflected face. The glass splintered. Then she
stepped back in trembling terror. Good heavens! Was she actually
becoming that Russian fiend?
On Monday night her gaze wandered instinctively toward Hubert’s
accustomed place in the orchestra. He was not there. Of course she
had expected that, but she would have liked just one more look at him.
Women have a strange way of wanting that which tortures them.
After the final curtain Kane appeared in her dressing-room and
suggested that they take a drive up Riverside and a bite of supper
somewhere along the road. He wanted to talk to her about the new play,
about her route for the coming season and a date for her New York
opening. His attitude had become thoroughly friendly and businesslike.
He was too much the artist to allow failure in a lesser game to
interfere with success in a greater.
It was nearing one when they drove back through the soft summer night.
The air touched her face like velvet but brought no drowsiness to her
eyes, no balm to the realization of blankness ahead—not of weeks or
months, but of years.
With the passing of those years it was inevitable that she become
Parsinova—with nothing left of poor, defunct Lizzie Parsons but the
recollection of a love that had touched her life like the moon on a
summer sea.
The Drive was still dotted with strolling couples oblivious of
passers-by. Cars sped past them, wheels expertly manipulated by one
hand. Mingled young laughter rang out like bells.
Kane’s rich voice flowed on, dwelling now on this, now on that scene
of the play. She listened absently, eyes straying in a way that was
absurd toward the magic of a June night, the enviable good fortune of
those who could become part of it.
“I shall give you even greater opportunities than you have had. I
shall produce a piece of work that will be epoch-making,” he told her.
She told him how pleased she was.
When they arrived at her apartment she asked him not to trouble
getting out of the car, and stood and watched it swing round the
corner. Then slowly she turned and went indoors.
CHAPTER V
Parsinova unlocked her door, stepped into the little foyer and after
an instant’s pause to take off hat and dustcoat, crossed the hall to
her living-room. Once more cretonne hung in the doorway and slips of
it covered the furniture. Summer had served as sufficient excuse to
convert the place to its former simplicity. The sight of cathedral
chairs and gold cushions had for the past few weeks depressed her to
the point of mania. More than once she wanted to tear them to bits.
The dim light from the foyer sifted weirdly into the dark, playing
here and there like ghost hands lifting the shadows. She felt her way
toward the fireplace, dropped to the floor, her head touching the
chair arm, and stared at the spot where in the flames she had
visualized the scenes he painted. It was blank now, just a vague
square full of darkness, but it gave her back his voice, the sense of
his strength, the caress of his arms. It sent once more sifting upward
the aroma of cloudy pipe smoke through which he had wanted to see her
face. Her eyes closed. Almost she sensed him there in the magic of one
of those long silences that needed no words. Almost she could feel his
touch upon her hair, her longing made it so real.
Tears came hot under her lids, the first she had shed since that
night. They streamed shamelessly down her cheeks and onto the sheer
clinging dress. All pose—and she had grown used to posing even to
herself—slid from her. Her poise slipped with it. The great Parsinova
became just a lonely, huddled heap of a girl.
She lay so, whispering his name shamelessly into the darkness when
suddenly it seemed that she was being lifted and drawn into the big
chair. It was like embarking into some dreamland of her own making.
She held her breath, choked with the fear that she might shatter it.
The caress upon her hair, arms closing round her, lips seeking hers!
It was not until she had the actual sense of a rough coat against her
cheek that, galvanized with terror, she started up and backed toward
the floor lamp that stood at one side of the fireplace.
The soft light went up. Hubert Randolph was sitting there! It was
impossible of course! Slowly she went toward him, reached out a hand,
touched his arm.
He laughed. “Oh, I’m real enough!”
She forgot her accent. At that moment she could not have assumed it
even though the future, though life itself, depended on it. “But
how—how—”
“I’ve been waiting for you since eleven-thirty,” he put in, apparently
not noticing the difference. “I concluded I was entitled at least to a
‘good-by’ from the woman I love.”
She gazed at him silently a moment and then because her heart and
throat were full, she voiced a triviality. “How did you get in?”
“Your little old woman! I bribed her. I’d had an idea I could go away
without seeing you. Well, I couldn’t, that’s all.”
Her nerves were quivering like live things. She moved toward the
couch, dropped on it. “I—” she said at last haltingly—“I am not the
woman you love.”
He looked across at her.
She went on without meeting his eyes. After the unconscious revelation
she had given him during those moments when she thought herself alone,
she could no more have stopped the confession that came now than she
could have stopped her breath.
“I am not any of the things you think me—not one of them. I am not
Russian—not foreign at all. I was born in Vermont of American parents.
Up to the time I met Kane, my struggle for existence was in cheap
vaudeville houses, not in Moscow. I’ve never had any lovers—”
“Well,” came with a low chuckle, “no man could object to that.”
She looked up. Her eyes met his, amazed. “You don’t understand. I am
not Lisa Parsinova—there is no such person. I am Lizzie Parsons and
I’ve imposed on you just as I’m imposing on the American public.”
“The American public asks chiefly to be charmed and interested. If
you’re doing that for them, they don’t care whether you’re Yankee or
Hindustani.”
She continued to stare at him, in bewildered fashion striving to
interpret his nonchalance. “You—you can’t possibly understand,” she
breathed at last. “Aren’t you surprised?”
“Not in the least. You see, I’ve been Kane’s backer for years. I was
with him in the vaudeville house the night he first saw you. As a
matter of fact, I was the one who suggested to him that you’d be a
winner on Broadway. Of course the foreign stuff was his. Any number of
times I’ve watched him work with you from an adjoining room. You don’t
know what pride I’ve felt in your success.”
“Then why, all these months, have you let me believe you were being
fooled?”
“Well, I hadn’t exactly taken count of the fact that I was going to
love you. And when the blow came I realized that if I’d been lucky
enough to make you care anything for me, you couldn’t go on acting to
me. You’d have to tell me—and I wanted you to, because you couldn’t
help it. That night when I had you in my arms, I thought some sort of
admission would come. When it didn’t and you ignored all my attempts
to see you, I could only conclude I’d lost out.”
“You didn’t guess—”
“Not until to-night.”
She still groped uncertainly, not able to fasten on any one fact. “It
was Kane, then, who told you where I lived.”
“No. Your little old woman here.”
“My little old woman?”
“She’s a canny soul. Must have found one of my notes that you brought
home from the theater or something like that, because she looked me up
one day and offered to sell me some interesting information about you.
I paid her _not_ to sell it and threatened her with jail if she went
to anybody else. Told her she was guilty of a criminal offense that
could send her up for twenty years. I think I made it strong enough
to shut her up for the rest of her days.”
“She’s been collecting from me just the same straight along.”
He flung back his head. “I said she was canny. Before I go West I’ll
have another talk with her.”
“You—you’re going to-morrow?”
“No, I’m waiting over. You close Saturday night. We’ll leave Sunday.”
With the last words, he leaned forward. She took a quick step toward
the wide chair, then stopped abruptly.
“But what am I to do with Parsinova?”
He pulled out his pipe, reflectively examined it.
“Think of the novelty—I’ll have two wives in one.”
Her lips tightened.
“No, you won’t! I’m going to take that woman out on a lake this summer
and capsize the boat—drown her! And the body will never be found. Then
I’m going to let my hair go back to its own color! Which one of us is
it,” she added suddenly, “that you love?”
He laid his pipe on the chair arm.
“The little girl who called to me in the dark. Now come back here,
Lizzie Parsons, where you belong!”
“I’ll always be jealous of that Russian devil!” she warned him.
MADAME PEACOCK
_CHARACTER DRAMA_
The battle royal of all time is between character and circumstance.
The way we meet the experience that waits for us round the corner is
the eternal Comédie Humaine. Success is the hole in the ground—the
banana peel—the stumbling block that may trip us up. It is as
uncertain as to-morrow.
MADAME PEACOCK
CHAPTER I
Of course that was not her name. No one knew just how she had been
christened—if at all. To a worshipful public she was known as Jane
Goring, which, as names go, answered all purposes and was quite as
simple as she was ornate. But “Peacock” was the title of the play in
which she had made the season’s hit and a wave of fads in honor of it
had typhooned over New York in consequence.
There were perfumes with bottles far more valuable than their contents
on which strutted the iridescent bird of beauty. There were soaps and
powders and sachets sold in green satin boxes similarly decorated and
similarly priced. Peacock feather fans swayed at dances and the opera
despite the age-old hoodoo. Beaded bags were worked in the popular
design. Dressmakers dictated the spreading train. Blues and greens in
every conceivably odd shade were introduced as the new color. The
peacock coiffure, originated by Goring, was imitated by dowager and
débutante, by movie star and chorus queen, by the girl behind the
counter even unto the cash girl—hair drawn flat over the top of the
head and puffed out stiffly at the ears, the whole being completed by
a comb that jutted at right angles. In Goring’s mahogany swirl,
framing as it did a face rather broad at the cheek-bones and tapering
heart-shaped to the chin, an impertinent nose and sleepy green-gray
eyes that lifted at the corners, the effect was startling. But the
variegated types it crowned north, south and east of Broadway would
scarcely have inspired an artist to his best work.
At the moment we make our bow to Jane Goring—for Goring bowed to no
one—she was on the top rung of the ladder of success. Her head had
reached the clouds and was held accordingly. So that when she looked
at you, she always looked _down_ at you. Which made those whom she
addressed feel infinitely small even when they were tall, always
excepting representatives of the press. They found her always
gracious, always smiling with corners of eyes and lips lifted and a
look of wonder at their great kindness to her. Each time she received
them it was in some new and amazing costume in one of the shades she
had made popular, with jangling jade or emeralds in her ears and green
lights darting from the comb in her hair. She spoke at length of the
arts and collected immense royalties from candy boxes, silk
advertisements and cold creams bearing her name and endorsement.
Somewhere in the dim and distant past her flaming head and Jap-like
eyes had graced the chorus. She had lived in a hall bedroom; had been
caught frying chops over an alcohol stove; had been lectured by the
landlady; had found the milk frozen to her window sill on winter
mornings; had known the exquisite thrill of being raised to a few
lines of persiflage with the musical comedy’s comedian. In those days
a young newspaper man, Bob McNaughton, had found her out, proclaimed
her a genius, and married her—not because of her genius, however, but
because he adored her. They had spent their honeymoon one Sunday on
the Palisades, and he had kissed her finger tips one by one and told
her how he was going to make her.
“There’s Jefferson who has our dramatic column—I’ll get him to give
you a boost every now and then. He stands in with a bunch of critics.
He’ll drop a word about you and they’re bound to take notice. You’ll
see, darling, what I’m going to do for you!”
And she had put her vivid head on his shoulder and gazed down at the
shining river and murmured that she didn’t care whether he did
anything for her or not. She loved him—she didn’t want anything in the
world but him.
The hall bedroom had given place to the third-story back, the frying
chops to a French table d’hôte that boasted a bottle of red ink with a
sixty-cent dinner, and Jane Goring was happy in the possession of a
broad shoulder to weep on when the latest step came hard or the
director asked casually if her legs were made of leather.
In the years that followed, the ardent young husband had made good his
promises. He had systematically press-agented Goring with a sincerity
and enthusiasm born of love. Untiringly he had worked to bring her
first to managerial, then to public notice. And his efforts, added to
natural talent and a bizarre personality, had hoisted her to the top
rung heretofore mentioned. “Peacock” marked the fourth season of her
success.
But long before that Bob McNaughton had awakened one morning to find
gray hairs threading his brown, and himself still a reporter—by no
means a star one. He had been so busy making her career that he had
forgotten to make his own.
It was about this time that his wife left him. Not actually left him,
of course, for at that particular moment Goring would not have stooped
to anything so disturbing as divorce. Waves of popular favor had begun
to roll smoothly up the beach of her ambition. But her temperament
demanded a home all her own. So they maintained separate
apartments—had done so for several years—his a room and bath in a
downtown bachelor hotel, hers a nine room and three-bath duplex in an
uptown studio building.
In the beginning they had seen each other occasionally. But each time
they met, Bob seemed to have grown grayer. Whether this fact was a
reminder that her own hair, left to itself, might show the same
tendency, or whether it was just the look in his eyes—the same look
they had worn that Sunday on the Palisades—seeing him began to tell on
her nerves.
More and more she denied herself to him until he became more of a
stranger in her beautiful rooms than the flock of tame robins who
pecked out of her hand at afternoon tea.
As a matter of fact, few of Goring’s vast throng of admirers even
guessed there was a husband in the offing. Women persistently married
her off to her handsome leading man, and more than one young
millionaire about town ecstatically visualized her presiding at his
dinner table.
So far as Jane Goring was concerned, Bob McNaughton belonged to
another life. Thus it was rather a shock to come home from the theater
one night when “Peacock” was at the height of its run and find her
husband waiting for her. It was fully five months since she had seen
him; over a year since she had been at home to him after the theater.
He was striding up and down her drawing-room, hands thrust deep into
his pockets, head bent. But when one considers that her drawing-room
consisted of three thrown into one, it was not surprising that at
first she was not conscious of another’s presence. She came in,
switched on the sidelights, dropped her furs and sank on the
davenport, hand hovering toward the table back of her, when from the
other end of the room, her name was spoken.
She sat up, startled, and saw Bob coming into the range of bluish
light from a Chinese temple lamp at the side of the piano. Jane Goring
looked her amazement. He drew nearer, stopped abruptly and faced her.
“My apologies,” he said with a slight, rather twisted smile, “for
calling so late.”
She dropped back, the look of amazement still lighting her long sleepy
eyes. “You did rather—startle me.”
For a moment neither spoke. Then he indicated the other corner of the
deep-cushioned couch, “May I sit down?”
“Certainly.” It was accompanied by a slight shrug.
His hand dove into his vest pocket and brought out a silver cigarette
case. He clicked it open, held it out to her. She may or may not have
noticed that his movements were tense and jerky, that the case was
held not quite steadily. She gave a faint gesture of dissent,
reaching once more to the table at her back, and opened a gold lacquer
box.
“I have a new special brand—imported for me from Egypt.”
He took one of his own, pocketing the case, and she waited for some
explanation of his visit.
“You’re looking well,” he began after a moment without looking at her.
“Feeling very fit,” she returned, and waited once more.
He did not speak, just sat staring down at his rather tightly clenched
hands.
She did notice then that he was looking old—years older than when she
had last seen him. Bob was forty-two,—to-night he looked fifty. Jane
was,—well, not even “Who’s Who” knew exactly how old Jane Goring
was—any woman who will tell her right age will tell anything!—but she
looked well under thirty.
The silence seemed to demand something of her.
“And you?” she queried politely.
He wheeled round in his corner. “That’s just what I’ve come to see you
about,” he brought out. “Matter of fact, I waited until the last
minute—didn’t want to bother you with it.”
“The last minute?”
“Yes. I’m pulling up stakes—beating it for Colorado to-morrow.”
At the back of Jane Goring’s brain, though even to herself she did not
acknowledge it, flared a sudden flash of relief. Like a jagged streak
of lightning across a summer sky it was there—and gone.
“Where—in Colorado?”
“Denver.”
“With what paper?”
“None, for a time. It’s like this.” He paused, seemed to be searching
for words, his hands clenched and unclenched nervously. “I’ve
been seeing Frothingham, the specialist, you know. Oh, it’s
nothing—contraction in the chest now and then and bit of a cough in
bad weather. Beastly uncomfortable, though. He tells me if I go now I
can get rid of it in six months or so.”
Goring gazed at the breadth of shoulder on which her head had snuggled
so peacefully in the old days. Not that that phase of it occurred to
her just then, but she stared at the big frame and could scarcely
credit what he told her.
“But how in the world did you get such a thing?”
“It got me, my dear,—before I knew it. Fellow living alone’s apt to
grow careless. Anyway, there it is, and it’s up to me to light out.”
Silence again for a moment, then—“I’m sorry, old boy,” she murmured.
“That’s good to know.” He slid nearer to her along the couch. Her face
through the pungent smoke from the Egyptian cigarette was an
indefinite white blur, vague as a dream, impossible to read. “I was
hoping, in a way, that you would be. Makes it easier for me to put up
the proposition I have in mind.”
“Yes?” she questioned as he paused again.
“But first I want to outline something of my plans once I knock this
bug on the head.”
“Yes?”
“The Graystone has made me an offer. I’ve been interested in the movie
game for the past few years; been studying it from the inside. And
recently Crosby Stone—he’s vice-president of the Graystone—asked me to
go to the Coast and take charge of the editorial department at their
Western studio. I told him that for the present I couldn’t consider
it—health needed jogging up. He said the job would be there for me
whenever I wanted it.”
“Seems to me an excellent idea,” she observed.
“Now what I wanted to ask you is this.” He fumbled for his case once
more. Against the light from the table lamp, his features formed a
sharp tense silhouette. He bent forward, struck a match. It flared
upward, emphasized the lines that were almost ridges in his face.
Suddenly he turned, and his next words came thick. “Janey, I want you
to do this much. Will you—when you close—take a run out to Colorado
and spend part of the summer with me?”
The tapering white hand that held the cigarette to her lips dropped as
if stricken. She straightened and her drowsy green eyes looked down on
him from the immense height of the top rung.
“My dear boy!” she ejaculated.
“Of course,” he put in quickly, “I wouldn’t expect you to stay in
Denver. Must be any number of mountain resorts we could go to—I’ll ask
Frothingham.”
“But, my dear boy, I couldn’t possibly. To begin with, I’m taking
‘Peacock’ on the road early in August, playing Philadelphia, Boston,
Chicago—all the big cities. Cleeburg wants to keep me out in it until
February when we begin work on a new production. That leaves me only a
few weeks’ vacation—”
“Spend them with me. Janey—” He leaned over with a swift, impulsive
movement, lifted her left hand, the little finger of which was
completely covered by a big beetle-green scarab, and kissed the tips
one by one. “Janey, there’s just you—no one else! These last years
have been hell. I’ve missed you—I’ve wanted you! A few weeks—is that
too much to ask?”
She drew her hand away—gently enough. But a little shudder of disgust
ran down her spine. “But I can’t, don’t you see?” she began
conversationally. “Those few weeks I must have to myself. I need the
rest.”
“Can’t we take it together? Can’t we go up into the mountains—away
from the muck of the world—and get to know each other all over again?
Remember our honeymoon, dear, the afternoon by the river? What a happy
pair of kids we were! Let’s have a taste of that, just a taste again.”
A slight flicker of amusement—oh, very slight—raised the corners of
her upslanted eyes. “Afraid we’ve passed the honeymoon age, dear boy.”
“It’s your love I want, Janey,” came from him desperately. “Just to
feel that you’ll come to me for a time when I need you.”
She got up, crushed the spark from her cigarette, tossed it with a
gesture of distaste into the tray and moved toward the piano. In her
trailing green gown with its fanlike train—Goring never wore short
skirts—and her dangling scarab earrings, she looked very exotic, very
tall and altogether unapproachable. She trailed the length of the room
and stopped under the Chinese temple lamp. Its blue light shed an aura
about her, giving her skin the moon-glow that Henner’s brush has made
immortal.
Her husband gazed after her. Mercifully she stopped with her back
toward him, and he failed to get the expression that pressed close her
lips. His eyes had followed her with dog-like pleading. Without
meeting them she knew—felt it. Neither could she escape the urge in
his voice. In the old days, that deep tender note had thrilled her,
made her yearn for him, given her the assurance that whatever
happened, Bob would be there to make things right. To-night it merely
annoyed her, rendered her position more difficult. Seeing Bob at all
had become trying and the very thought of the thing he now suggested
irritated her beyond measure. She had so completely done with
him—finished! Taking advantage of this sudden illness was taking
advantage of her. With all her being she resented it.
She stood for a moment turned from him, fingering the blue and gold
tassel that hung from a bit of Chinese embroidery flung across the
piano. Finally she turned back, face as void of light or shade as the
old idol enshrined in a corner.
“Suppose we have a snack of supper and talk things over,” she
suggested.
He was sitting bent almost double, elbows on knees, head in hands. A
wave of contempt for his attitude of dejection swept over her. She was
so palpitant with life, vibrating with the thrill—ever new, ever
sweet—that the laurel wreath brings.
Without waiting for a reply she rang. A tired-eyed maid appeared.
Goring gave her directions and when the girl had gone out, proceeded
to chat casually about affairs of the theater—a new firm of managers
recently bobbed up on the horizon with a new play by a new author; the
outlook for next season; the trend toward satirical comedy.
Bob sat without moving, knuckles pressing white against his forehead,
the veins on his hands standing out like blue welts.
Presently he looked up.
“I take it you are _not_ coming out to me.”
Goring in the depths of a chair some distance from him stirred
uneasily. “My dear boy, I’ve told you. It’s not only impractical—it’s
impossible.”
“Of course! I was an ass to think you might.”
“Can’t you see? I’m not my own mistress. I belong to my public. I’ve
got to conserve my strength for them—and my work.”
“Yes,—I see.”
“If I consulted my own desires—but I haven’t the moral right. I must
sacrifice what you want—what I want—to what my public expects of me.”
He might have reminded her of the years he had given to creating that
public for her. He might have dwelt at length on his Machiavellian
boosting of a red-haired show girl through the columns of his own
paper and gradually with insertions here and there in periodicals of
the theater, until managers began to ask who this Jane Goring was. He
might have made mention of the evenings he had spent round the Lambs
and the Friars adding to his list of acquaintances, as men can only at
men’s clubs, those who would eventually be of service to her.
He merely smiled with his lips, lighted another cigarette and tried to
cover the fact that the flame flickered.
“You must understand how I’m placed,” she persisted.
“I understand.”
His laconic reply, followed by flat silence, instead of alleviating,
somehow increased her discomfort.
After a moment he spoke. “Ever read ‘Frankenstein,’ Janey?”
“No.”
“Queer tale of a chap who tried to create a superman.”
“Well?” Her brows contracted, puzzled.
“Well—his superman rose up and destroyed him.”
“I fail to see—” The frown deepened.
“Oh, just a flight of fancy. Don’t mind me.” Again his hand struck a
flickering match.
“Ought you to smoke so much?” she asked, to fill in the gap. “I
shouldn’t think it would be good for—for—”
“My lungs? Oh, nothing wrong with them—actually. Dare say they’ll pull
up O.K. once I pull out of this town. Y’know what Paul Bourget said
about New York. Fellow asked him how he liked our climate, and he
answered, ‘But my dear man,—you do not have climate. You have samples
of weather!’”
She laughed and the weight of the air lifted somewhat. The maid
brought in a steaming chafing dish, set it on a nest of tables and
drew out the smaller two, placing them in front of the couch.
Goring moved over, once more took the corner opposite her husband. His
eyes traveled the length of her.
“You grow more beautiful every time I see you, Janey. Success is a
first rate old alchemist, isn’t it?”
She smiled down, her whole face softening.
The maid laid an embroidered doily of finest linen on each of the two
small tables and brought silver platters of creamed mushrooms with a
faint aroma of sherry. From a dusty bottle marked Amontillado she
poured into slim-necked glasses the same wine, glistening and amber.
When she had finished serving them, she asked tentatively if madame
wished her to wait up.
Goring wondered why the question brought from Bob a look of curiosity,
why he turned and watched her, waiting; why he smiled—with his eyes
this time—when she told the girl to go to bed.
She moved nearer—the tables were placed side by side—and sipped the
sherry. A few moments passed during which she noticed uncomfortably
that he had not touched the dainty, tempting dish before him.
“You’re not eating?”
“Not particularly hungry.” He lifted his glass, twirling it between
thumb and forefinger, his gaze never leaving her. “I want to fill my
eyes with you, Janey. May be a long time before I see you again.”
Her eyes warmed to the tense adulation in his. After all, he did look
beastly ill, and the least she could do would be to give him the
memory of a little kindness to carry away.
“And I want you to know, Bob, that I’ll be thinking of you, hoping and
praying that before long you’ll be quite fit again.” She leaned over,
touching his hand lightly with hers. Instantly his closed over
it—feverishly, as a man clings to hope when his ship of life has been
broken into wreckage.
“Will you, Janey?”
“Of course.”
“That will help—some.” He put down the glass and caught her other
hand, drawing her nearer. “I’d like to feel there’s still a corner for
me. No other fellow taking my place, I mean.”
“How absurd! You know I haven’t time even to think of men.”
“They have plenty of time to think of you.” Again that quizzical
smile. “I’ve got that much over them, haven’t I? You’re _my_ wife.”
She smiled back and tried to draw away but he held her with the grip
of hot iron.
“That’s what I’ve got over them, Janey—all of them. You may belong to
your public now but you’ve been mine. We’ve had our youth together,
haven’t we?”
“Yes.”
“We’ve had the best of life together.”
“Yes.”
“Nobody can take that from me.” He spoke breathlessly.
Suddenly his arm went round her, crushed her to him and his lips were
against hers. “My love!” he whispered.
Jane Goring’s body went rigid. She drew herself erect and the warmth
died out of her eyes as swiftly as a flame extinguished. Sharply her
slim white hands thrust out in defense. She pulled backward. Their
gaze met—locked. In his was hurt question. In hers a flash of fury. He
sat staring at her a moment and he did not look _up_. It was a look
direct, straight, boring to the heart of her.
And then he got to his feet. “I beg your pardon,” he began. “I—I
thought—” He paused, jaws coming together as though clamped. Without
another look at her he walked the length of the room.
At the door he turned. “Damn me for my humility!” he said.
CHAPTER II
Exceeding the most exalted expectations, “Peacock” ran two full
seasons. It might even have packed houses during the hot spell, save
that the star decided to give herself a rest, well-earned, and, of
course without her, the theater had to remain dark. At the end of four
weeks spent at a fashionable Adirondack hotel where she was fêted like
visiting royalty and her gowns created a sensation, she reopened and
the continued success of the play warranted Cleeburg’s decision to
give it another season on Broadway.
During all that time Goring had not a word from her husband. Even of
his Denver address she was unaware. But the fact that he did not write
failed to disturb her. It was a relief rather. The first few months of
his absence she dreaded another plea from him. In case his health had
grown no better, or—as was quite possible—had grown worse, further
excuses would be difficult. As the weeks rolled into months and the
months accumulated into a year and still not a line, the thought of
him lapsed into merely perfunctory curiosity. He must be alive or
she’d have been informed. Hence, if ever she needed to get in touch
with him it would be easy enough to do so through his former paper or
his clubs. Thus she blotted even the thought of him from her books.
Another season of acclaim on the road and she was back in New York
ready for rehearsals. Her new play, made to order for her by a
prominent dramatist, was read by him in her apartment the day of her
arrival.
Cleeburg met her at the Grand Central, full of enthusiasm, chewing the
butt of a cigar while his hands outlined the plot as an artist smudges
in with charcoal the foundations of his picture.
Goring’s manager had started life as a newsboy somewhere east of
Broadway and a few of the habits of childhood had become the habits of
a lifetime. His manners were not Chesterfieldian. Frequently he forgot
to take off his hat when a lady entered the room. His cigar was
removed from the right-hand corner of his mouth only to be shifted to
the left. But more than one actress out of a job could borrow a
hundred or two from him with no surer guarantee than her I.O.U. And
those of the chorus whose eyes had not grown hard from seeing too much
of the Rialto when lights are brightest, affectionately called him
“Papa.”
Rudolph Cleeburg or ’Dolph as he was familiarly named—was short and
stocky; heavily built, in fact, but with a lightness of foot that
enabled him to prance about the stage while directing, and an Oriental
imagination that carried him into any rôle he wanted to assume without
making him appear ridiculous. One of the ablest directors in the
country, in spite of English that sometimes tobogganed, he always took
his productions personally in hand once the first rough edges were
smoothed down. With Goring, of course, he assumed charge from the
beginning. She would have no one else.
The manager’s admiration for his star had at the start been of the
proverbial cat-and-queen variety. But as their association stretched
over the years, it was shorn of the awe in which he had first held her
and once he had even reached the point of proposing. It was when she
informed him that she and Bob had separated.
“Divorce?” he had asked quickly. And with her shake of the head,
“Well, if ever you do, there’s little ’Dolph waiting to step into his
shoes. Don’t forget that, Jane. It’s straight goods.”
The proposal had vastly amused her.
They drove up town through the fresh sweetness of a May morning.
Cleeburg’s panama dropped to the floor of the car as he excitedly
sketched the story in the air, one idea tumbling after the other as
fast as words would come. His bald head shone as did his eyes. All his
features were prominent—nose, eyes, teeth—but most prominent of all
was his smile which seemed to light like an arc his round commonplace
face. This he flashed delightedly as Goring listened with a calmness
unbroken.
“It’s sure fire, Jane! Sure fire! We got a bigger go than ‘Peacock’
and that’s going some.”
Jane Goring said little until the apartment was reached. Then she
shook hands with the author who was waiting for them, left the two men
together while she changed from her traveling clothes, and an hour
later glided in cool and revived in a peacock-blue house-gown whose
sleeves floated outward like wings. Cleeburg’s watch was in his hand,
but he pocketed it without a word as she entered, and settled back in
his chair.
The author opened his script and began to read. His voice filled the
silent room, chorused occasionally by the gay trill of birds from the
park across the way or city sounds from the street below.
The manager’s smile broadened with satisfaction as he progressed. The
cigar moved back and forth, propelled by emotion. But Goring listened
without comment, eyes half closed, gazing down at the playwright’s
head bowed over his manuscript.
Presently a new sound broke upon the stillness. It was from neither
bird nor branch, neither the clang of bells nor the rush of traffic.
It was light and regular, and it came from within—the steady tapping
of a slippered foot. Toward the end of Act II it became noticeable and
Cleeburg looked round interrogatively.
Tap—tap! Tap—tap! More swift, more impatient,—until the author’s voice
proclaimed “Curtain.”
Then Jane Goring spoke—and the tapping was explained. “But, my dear
Mr. Thorne, you don’t expect me to play the lead in _that_?”
Cleeburg wheeled about in his chair. “What’s the matter with it?”
“Why, there’s nothing for me—not a thing!”
“Nothing for you?”
“Nothing! Not a single opportunity in those first two acts.”
Cleeburg sprang up. His cigar rotaried excitedly. “No opportunities?
My God, Jane, what do you want? As the play stands, you’re the whole
show!”
“As the play stands, you might as well hand it to Harrison
Burke”—Burke was her leading man—“and let me retire,” came coolly.
The playwright’s eyes began to smoulder. “I don’t get you, Miss
Goring. This character has been absolutely built round you.”
She turned on him, still cool, still aloof.
“Then why is your man allowed to dominate every scene?”
“He isn’t,” the author protested. “The sympathy is yours, even when
I’ve been compelled to give him the long speeches.”
“I don’t see it—not at all. You don’t even give me an opportunity to
wear decent clothes.”
“That comes in your last act,” Cleeburg burst out.
“Well, I don’t want to wait until the last act.”
“I can’t very well put a factory girl in satins,” the playwright
observed.
“Why make her a factory girl?”
He threw up his hands and subsided.
Cleeburg took to pacing the floor. “Look here, Jane,” he said finally,
“let’s get a line on this. You’ve given ’em a fashion plate for three
solid years. Show ’em you can do something else. Otherwise they’ll get
sick and tired of you. This part’s great—just what you need. You act
through the first two acts and in the last you splurge. What more do
you want?”
“I want it understood that I’m the star of the production!”
“Well, it is. Nobody else has a chance. Good Lord, Burke’s speeches
are just feeders! You’ve got—everything.”
“I don’t see it.”
The dramatist, who was sufficiently famous to be independent of
stars, rose. “Under the circumstances, there’s no need to read
further.”
“Hold on! Hold on!” Cleeburg clutched his arm. “Don’t take it like
that, old man. Let’s go into the thing and see what can be done to
please all parties.”
They did go into it for three long hours, at the end of which Jane
Goring insisted that she must have luncheon. She was as unruffled as
when she had entered—and as firm. Cleeburg was mopping his brow.
Through his glasses the playwright’s eyes were blazing. It was then
two forty-five. By that hour they had compromised to the extent of
cutting some of the hero’s long speeches and giving her a chance to
change her costume in the last act.
At luncheon Cleeburg consumed little more than whiskey and soda, and
wondered why he got no cooler. Likewise he swore at the twittering of
the birds and the distant clang of street cars.
When Jane Goring had finished the last morsel of her chicken salad and
leisurely emptied her cup of Chinese tea, they adjourned once more to
the drawing-room and the discussion was resumed.
A lantern of golden fire was hanging in the Western sky by the time
the play had been revamped to the star’s satisfaction. More than once
its author took hat in hand and made for the door. But Cleeburg’s
persuasive clutch and the whisper that an additional advance would be
paid for his trouble detained him. And finally an agreement was
reached.
Her objection to the drama as it stood, however, necessitated a
postponement of rehearsals and it was late July before the company
assembled on the stage of a playhouse just off Broadway. It annoyed
Goring to forego her usual few weeks of rest but since she wished to
have a New York opening in October, there was nothing else to be done.
The day the company was called was dank and humid, a breathless day
thick with summer dust, ominous with thunderclouds.
At ten Goring emerged from a cold bath, was dressed by her maid’s
moist fingers, and at eleven crossed the soggy pavement from her car
to the stage entrance. The drive downtown had been stifling. It
dizzied her. To enter the dark passageway and look out into the space
of auditorium, linen-covered, was a relief.
What is there about an empty theater that fascinates? The bare boards
of the stage, the heaps of scenery piled against bare brick walls, the
bare table and chairs ranged to form a semicircle within which the
actors move back and forth, the single electric light, bare of shade,
jutting up in the center like a giant eye in the cool darkness—surely
there is no illusion about them, no suggestion of the world of
make-believe into which they evolve. Yet the very odor of the place
redolent of grease-paint—those who love it sniff it as a thoroughbred
sniffs tanbark.
Manager, actors, author—they are about to conjure from those bare
boards all the elements of life. Conflict, laughter, tears, love,
hate, happiness—death! Theirs to build, theirs to take the written
page and make of it a tingling human thing. Theirs to people empty
chairs. Theirs to clothe with flesh and blood a skeleton. A wave of
the wand and into emptiness springs a home with soft rugs and
rich-colored hangings, deep divans, the ring of voices, the flooding
of moonlight or warm glow of the sun. And best of all, out in that
empty auditorium when the lights go up will throng a crowd whose
hearts will be theirs to thrill, to wring, to charm. Theirs the
blessed privilege, the joy of creation. That’s why they love it in
spite of the ache of disappointment, the discouragement of failure.
That’s why they cling to it.
Those assembled on the stage that throttling day of July had risen
tired from their beds, dragged wearily in from the street, noticed
that the management had electric fans going and laughed at the idea of
getting any relief from them. Yet the instant Goring appeared,
followed a few minutes later by Cleeburg, a light sprang into their
eyes, the spontaneous light of anticipation, and they promptly forgot
the weather. The play had been read to them the day before and their
parts assigned, so that they were ready to plunge into work.
Goring shook hands with her leading man and nodded to the rest, all of
whom were known to her—she had practically the same support from year
to year—except a slight girl whose face was so thin that her eyes
looked abnormally big and hungry. It made their expression almost
frightened.
The company ran quickly through the first act, parts in hand, while
Cleeburg sat under an electric fan and listened. Then, after a few
words with the author who was hunched in a seat somewhere in the
ghostlike auditorium, he ripped off pongee coat, his collar and
necktie, and real work began.
Goring did little but read at the first rehearsals. She liked to
conserve her energy for the long sessions Cleeburg put her through
during the last weeks.
When they left the theater at five everybody looked wilted but the
star. The hour for lunch had been consumed largely with liquid
refreshment and most of them again made for soda fountains.
Goring dined with her manager on the Astor Roof. The storm,
threatening all day, had not yet broken and a black hood of clouds
bore down on the city like the shadow of death. Cleeburg, full of
plans, ordered a near-champagne cup and substantial dinner and
appeared not to notice the depression above and around them. But
Goring it affected unpleasantly. She felt irritable, annoyed by the
fact that he could eat a heavy dinner on such a night, prone to find
fault with the service, rubbed the wrong way by the strum of the
summer orchestra.
“Did you notice how much older Burke looks?”
“Looks good to me,” Cleeburg lifted a cup of steaming bullion while
she played with a jellied one before her.
“He’s losing his figure, I think.”
“We ain’t any of us chickens, Jane.”
She pushed the cup away.
“Not that you ain’t a pippin,” he added hastily. “You’ve got the
lines—you’ll always have ’em.”
“Don’t talk as if I were a hundred.” Her voice was so sharp that it
cut.
“Good Lord, no! Not one on Broadway to-day can touch you.”
She softened a bit. “Who’s the new girl?”
“Who?”
“The one who plays my sister.”
“Oh, that one! Forget her name. Lewis has it.”
“Where did you get her?”
“She’s been hanging round the office, Lewis says, and couple of weeks
ago she held me up on my way out. Poor little thing looked as if she
needed a job so I gave her that sister bit. Hair’s something the color
of yours—that decided me.”
“She has a funny hysterical catch in her voice. Did you notice it?”
“Probably she’s hungry. Looks it—poor kid! Must have Lewis slip her an
advance on her salary.”
With gusto he cut into the _filet mignon_ and helped himself to some
new peas. The sight of the red blood oozing from the meat made Goring
feel ill. She turned her attention to the _halibut parisienne_ the
waiter placed before her. But even the slices of tomato and crisp
garnishing of lettuce could not tempt her appetite.
“I can’t see why you gave her the part—she’s so homely.”
“That needn’t hurt you any.”
“But she has a scene with me, even though it is only a bit.”
“Maybe when she gets a square meal in her she won’t look so much like
a ghost.”
He lit a cigar, rolling it between his lips with the joy of an
epicure.
Goring cooled her hot throat with an ice, frowning at his complacent
finality. It increased her own irritation, made her want to grip him
by the shoulders and shake him.
The girl _was_ homely. Why did he argue about it?
A zigzag of lightning cut through the sky. With a crash it tore open
and the deluge descended like the wrath of God sent to cleanse a
heathen city. Crash after crash, fire upon fire, barrages of rain
hurled against the buildings, shaking their very walls.
Goring shivered. In spite of the stewing heat a chill went through
her.
“Let’s get out of this,” she said.
“Better wait till it’s over.”
“I want to go home now.”
Cleeburg signed the check.
Like the lightning his car zigzagged through the storm. Water sprang
from the streets against the windshield. The noise about them was
deafening. Goring clung to the window strap at her side. For some
unknown reason her nerves were keyed to the nth degree. She felt
choked, as if shrieking alone would clear her throat. The first day of
work and this beastly weather, she told herself, were responsible.
Throughout the long night the storm raged. And tossing between soft
linen sheets she did not close her eyes.
CHAPTER III
They opened in Washington the end of August. Cleeburg tried to get
Atlantic City but the theater had been booked weeks before his bid for
it. Hence, in spite of the star’s popularity, they did not play to
capacity. The season in the Capital was at low ebb. Most of the homes
were closed and the usual Goring audiences were out of the city. Which
after all was an advantage, for the play was still very rough.
All things considered, both Goring and her manager were rather pleased
than otherwise. The four weeks of rehearsal had been torrid,
record-breaking heat rising from the pavements, the city consumed by
fever. The effect upon the company had been in ratio thereto. They
were limp by the date of opening, unequal to their best in spite of
the utmost effort.
And Goring’s rôle was difficult. She did not like it as well as
“Peacock.” There was more drama, more opportunity for emotional
acting, but less for the display of gowns and the bizarre beauty that
had made both men and women flock to the other play. However, as
Cleeburg had said, she couldn’t afford to stamp herself a one-part
actress. And there was no denying the interest of the story.
As never before, Cleeburg had put her through her paces. At the
theater after the company had dispersed, at her apartment in the
evenings, he had gone over her part again and again coaching her scene
by scene, speech by speech, until the rest, knowing nothing of those
extra sessions, judged her a miracle at quick study.
“Unbend, Jane!” he would say, prancing up and down her long
drawing-room. “Come off your perch! You love him, Jane! You love him!
D’you know what that means? You’d die for him. He ain’t your kind and
you’d go through hell to get to him. Ever felt that way? Well, think
about it—concentrate on it—and you’ll get it over.”
Vaguely, like a curtain lifted on another life, memory drifted before
her eyes the vision of an afternoon on the Palisades when a
vivid-haired girl clung to a brown-haired boy, whispering over and
over that she loved him—didn’t want anything ever in the whole wide
world but him.
For purposes of the drama she concentrated on it.
Quite like the actress she was, she flung herself into the passion of
those first months as if she had lived them yesterday. Fortunately for
her the Goring of to-day, the actress, was a shell into which emotion
could be poured as one pours burning fluid into an empty vessel.
Little ’Dolph, with cigar twirling, eyes popping, perspiration
dripping from his forehead, and a silk handkerchief tied round his
short neck, kept her keyed to the highest pitch—no let-down, no time
to think of self or the weather or rest; no time for anything but the
part in hand. Though he would not have known whence the quotation
sprang, with him “The play’s the thing” was a litany.
Critics in the Capital and in Baltimore were almost unanimous in the
opinion that it was a vital thing, sure of ultimate success when
placed on view for the thumbs-up, thumbs-down decision of that
capricious goddess—Broadway.
As a rule Goring and her leading man were the only two mentioned in
the reviews, but this time almost every member of the company came in
for a quota of praise. The old mother, the character man, the juvenile
comedian, even the homely little sister with her wide hungry eyes and
the queer catch in her voice, each had a word or two.
Gloria Cromwell was the girl’s name. It was quite as ornate as she was
plain. Goring laughed the first time she heard it.
“Sounds as though she found it in a dime novel,” she told Cleeburg.
“Why don’t you make her change it?”
“Says it’s her own. Anyhow, it don’t matter.”
“No—I dare say it doesn’t. She’s entitled to something to make her
conspicuous.”
Often she noticed the girl at rehearsal sitting in the theater after
her bit was done, leaning forward, chin in her cupped hands, mop of
reddish hair falling over eyes that devoured every move the star made.
Once they met at the stage entrance on their way out.
“Why don’t you go home earlier?” Goring asked. “I’m sure Mr. Cleeburg
will excuse you when you’re through.”
“I’d rather stay,” the girl answered in her peculiar breathless tone.
“I can learn so much from you, Miss Goring. Besides,” she paused,
hesitated, “I—live in a furnished room. It isn’t much to go home to.”
“Have you been in New York long?” Goring put the question as they
moved toward the street side by side.
“A year and a half—that is, this time. I used to come whenever I could
scrape together the fare while I was doing stock in the West. But
there never seemed to be an opening for me. Then I decided I’d best
just come and wait around or I’d never get a chance. And I waited, all
right.”
Another pause while the wide wistful eyes filled with the same look of
fright they had worn that first day at the theater—only this time it
was the fright of memory.
“Mr. Cleeburg has been wonderful to me. I’ll never be able to thank
him enough.”
They had reached the curb. Goring smiled. “I shall tell him that,” she
said, and with a nod stepped into her car and drove off.
In Washington she noticed that Miss Cromwell was looking better,
though the eyes were as hungry as ever and the figure as slight.
Undoubtedly Cleeburg was right. What she had needed was a few square
meals. Her strength seemed to increase as work increased and in their
scene together Goring remarked a give and take that made her own work
mount to greater intensity. It was a short scene in which the younger
sister who had hovered like a silent brooding shadow in the background
pleaded with the older not to break away from her own class, not to
try to go into a world she did not understand—and was met by the
defiance of one molded to make a place for herself in any world. The
scene went so well, in fact, that the author, at Cleeburg’s request,
lengthened it. At the end when Goring held out her arms and folded
the weeping girl in them, a gratifying sniffle and the flutter of
white went through the house. Which is the most either star or manager
can ask.
The company rehearsed the greater part of the night preceding the New
York première, though Goring left the theater early to allow herself
plenty of time for rest and the customary massage. She liked to relax
thoroughly before the strenuous demands on the nerves which an opening
always made. In her sea-blue silk draped bed she would lie for hours
while the magic hands of the Swedish woman who attended her each day
sent tingling through her veins an injection of new life. And finally
a delicious drowsiness would creep over her like a thin veil drawn
between her and the turmoil of the outside world. She would find
herself presently floating on the waters of Lethe, arms outstretched,
a smile upon her lips, a gentle undulation as of waves rising and
falling beneath her. Small wonder that when she drifted back to
reality some hours later she felt rejuvenated, with a calm and control
equal to any emergency.
She reached the theater a little after seven. On the way in she met
Miss Cromwell. The girl’s eyes were burning. Their hungry look had
gone completely and in its place had come a glow like a great light
from within.
“Oh, Miss Goring,” she breathed in passing, “I’m so thrilled. I’ve
lived and lived for this—New York! And now it’s come! It’s actually
come!”
Goring nodded, voiced a perfunctory “Good luck,” and wondered in her
soul what it would be like to feel once more that closing of the
throat, that turmoil of beating heart, that utter abandon of joy in
opportunity realized. It thrust her back to the day when she had
signed her first contract with Cleeburg. She and Bob had sat facing
each other a long space without a word, his two hands gripping hers
until they ached. And then—
“I’m so glad, little girl—so damn glad!” had come from him huskily.
Then his hands had loosed and swept round her and he had held her
close and she had cried into the lapel of his blue serge coat, tears
of sheer happiness.
Cleeburg came to her dressing-room shortly before the rise of the
curtain to tell her the house was packed. They were standing three
rows deep—he was sure of a knock-out. He brought her a pile of
telegrams from members of the profession and friends in the social
world. She read them leisurely. It was her first opening on which
there was not a long one from her husband. Not that she really missed
it, but the lack gave her a curious feeling of wonder as to what had
become of him.
Her maid gave her hair a final pat and she stepped back to survey. It
was an odd Jane Goring who gazed critically out of the mirror. No
jangling jade, no spreading tail, no sensuous color of plumage. Just a
blue serge dress of last year’s cut, a little shabby, open at the
throat. It had been selected by the author, not without some protest
from the star. She had wanted at least to go to a good tailor, but he
had dragged her into a department store and made her buy one from
stock at twenty-nine forty-nine. She had to admit that the effect,
while not beautiful, was absolutely in character. Her shoes she had
insisted upon getting at a Fifth Avenue boot shop. Feet are more
conspicuous on the stage than anywhere else in life and she must be
well shod to do herself justice. Her hair, too, was groomed. The
Goring coiffure was abandoned until the last act but the faint wave
necessary to it could not have passed unnoticed in the coils clustered
about the factory girl’s ears.
She went out, followed by her maid, and waited in the wings for her
cue. Then came the inevitable tightening of the heart cords, the tense
straining of muscles to achieve the best, the twinge of fear, all the
tearing thrill of embarkation on a new venture. It lasted only an
instant, however, an instant that ended in her entrance, followed by a
crashing burst of applause. She bowed again and again, and the
sweetness of it flowed like wine in her blood. The play halted, action
suspended in mid-air, while the actress took the tribute she had known
would greet her.
After which the audience settled back to be entertained. From the
beginning interest was evident, the heroine’s fight to make her own
life apart from the prejudice which is as rampant in the lower as in
the upper classes holding them. The struggle of evolution is the most
human, most vital problem in the world.
All through the first act the conflict endured, the girl’s discontent
striking like flint on steel until the final scene when the little
sister, matted hair falling over her eyes, dropped on her knees,
crying: “All I know is—you’re goin’. You’re leavin’ me! An’ you
can’t—you mustn’t! You’re gonna get hurt with them people you don’t
know. They’re gonna step on you an’ make fun of you an’ beat you down
until you ain’t got no fight left. You don’t belong there—you don’t
belong! Stay here with me! I’m your sister, your own blood—an’ I love
you, I love you! Nobody couldn’t love you no more’n I do!”
Gloria Cromwell’s slight figure shook with the words, her eyes burned
into Goring’s. That queer hysterical note lifted her voice into a
throb that was heartrending, and as the star drew her close she seemed
to crumple like a broken flower.
The applause that met the curtain’s descent was interspersed with the
same gratifying sniffle they had encountered all along the route. A
number of times it swung upward, members of the company taking it
according to a schedule posted backstage.
CURTAIN—ACT I
First Curtain Tableau.
Second 〃 Miss Goring and company
Third 〃 Miss Goring and principals
Fourth 〃 Miss Goring and principals
Fifth 〃 Miss Goring and Mr. Burke
Sixth 〃 Miss Goring
The manner and order of taking the curtains had been carefully
rehearsed the night before, but as it rose the fifth time with the
star and leading man alone on the stage, an incident unanticipated
occurred. Someone in the gallery shouted “Cromwell!” And the applause
seemed to swell in answer.
Goring at first paid no heed. The curtain fell—rose again and again.
The call was repeated insistently. Goring went graciously to the wings
and drew the girl onto the stage. She came, trembling so that she
could scarcely walk, eyes wide and terrified but shining somehow
behind it all. She made an awkward bow, clinging like a child to
Goring’s hand.
When several curtains had been taken alone and preparations were
finally under way for Act II, Jane Goring picked her way past property
men and scene shifters toward the dressing-room with a five-pointed
star painted on the door—to an actress the gate of heaven. Miss
Cromwell was waiting there.
“Oh, Miss Goring,” she breathed, “that was so—so sweet of you!”
Jane Goring looked down at her. “I take it you have friends in the
gallery?” she said.
“No, I have no friends in New York.”
Goring continued to gaze down and her look was not altogether
pleasant. But the girl did not see it. With an impulsive gesture, half
apologetic, half worshipful, she lifted the star’s hand to her lips.
“God bless you!” she murmured with that queer catch in her voice.
CHAPTER IV
At 5.00 a. m. ’Dolph Cleeburg was seated in the living-room-library
den of his apartment completely surrounded by early editions and the
butts of cigars. One of the latter circled joyously in his mouth as he
and the author read over the various expressions of approval.
“Here’s a fellow says Jane’s hair was too Fifth Avenue in the first
act. By godfrey, ain’t that just like ’em? Can’t find fault with
anything else, so have to pick on her hair.”
“I told her to let it go,” the playwright remarked.
“Well, that’s Jane. She’s got to look right or she can’t act. And, by
gad, I’ve seen lots of Third Avenue girls got up like Fifth. Ain’t any
law against it, is there?” He let the sheet rustle to the floor and
picked up another. His collar and tie were open, his coat was off, his
eyes held a blaze of excitement. A whiskey and soda stood on the
tabouret beside him, untouched.
“Listen to this, Ted!” He plunged into a eulogy that made his eyes
snap and the cigar roll with a velocity impossible to estimate. “By
godfrey,” came at the finish, “ain’t one of ’em don’t give some notice
to that Cromwell kid”—and went on reading—“‘Managers—keep your eye on
Miss Gloria Cromwell.’” Then he gave a long chuckle. “And to think I
engaged her because she looked starved!”
“She has something that gets you.” The author paused meditatively.
“Wonder if it’s her voice?”
“Nope,” came crisply from Cleeburg. “It’s her heart. Probably suffered
like hell and that’s what puts her over.”
In Jane Goring’s boudoir some five hours later, the actress sat
propped up, also like an isle in a sea of newspapers. She had read
them in the small hours as had her manager. Only differently. One of
the society satellites who circle round a popular star even as the
moon circles round the earth and just as inconstantly, now silvering
her sky, now leaving it black, had at the play’s finish carried her
off to a supper party and dance. In the midst of gayeties a flunky had
been dispatched for the morning papers and, in a flurry of excitement
like the froth of champagne, the notices had been consumed, gushed
over, forgotten.
Not so by Goring, of course. Alone in the white light of a new day,
she reread them slowly, digesting each word. One watching her would
have found in her eyes no glow of satisfaction, no thrill that once
more she had scored. Rather was there the ghost of a frown on her
brow. A frown somewhat difficult to interpret.
At eleven Cleeburg had her on the phone. He had been ringing the
apartment at regular intervals since eight but her maid had refused to
disturb her. His voice ran the gamut of explosive enthusiasm.
“Great, Jane, great! We’ve got ’em again! We’ve got ’em! Didn’t I tell
you this one had it all over ‘Peacock’?”
He wanted to come up and lunch with her but she told him she was
tired, would see him later at the theater.
The greater part of the day she spent resting, going over her notices
and dictating letters to her secretary. Toward five she dressed and
sent for her car. It was a crisp, clear blue October day. A run in the
park or up Riverside—there were a number of things she had to think
about—would fill in time until dinner.
A restlessness unusual and unexplained made her pace the floor while
she waited. So unusual was it, in fact, that it caused a vague wonder.
By all previous portents she should have been exalted, lifted to the
zenith of content through the knowledge that the star of her success
still sailed high in the heavens. She was not. She felt nervous,
distressed, with a weight on her chest that even the buoyant breezes
from the river could not dissipate.
Rolling up Riverside Drive with the ease of floating in ether, she had
the sense of a great hand clutching her. The sensation was the same as
that which she had experienced the first day of rehearsal—only
intensified. It made breathing difficult, annoyed her to the point of
exasperation.
She ate no dinner, just swallowed a mouthful of tea and drove
downtown. Little ’Dolph came to her dressing-room a few minutes later.
He was jubilant. They were sold out weeks ahead. The play had hit the
jaded metropolis in the eye—to quote him, with variations. It was good
for another three seasons’ run. He rambled on at random, eyes popping,
infectious smile lighting his round face like the smile of the sun at
high noon. Presently he stopped, shifted his cigar and stared at her.
“What’s the matter with you, Jane?”
She looked down questioningly.
“Ain’t said a word,” he continued. “What’s got you?”
“Nothing. I’m tired, I dare say.”
“Sure! Morning-after stuff! Don’t let down, though. We don’t want ’em
saying second night’s off—the way it always is.”
“You don’t have to tell me that.” Indignation was in her voice.
“Oh, don’t get me wrong,” he apologized quickly. “And, Jane—”
“Yes?”
“Might let your hair go a bit in that first act—what?”
Her eyes were like two rapier thrusts. He made for the door. “They’ll
accept my hair just as it is,” was her verdict.
Their little chat did not tend to lift in any degree the mood that
held her. She gave up trying to shake it off.
Fortunately it had no perceptible effect on her work. She was too
clever for that. Many years on the stage had trained her to the
difficult task of obliterating personal worries the instant the glow
of the footlights would have revealed them to public gaze. In fact,
she had almost succeeded in stamping them from consciousness when
Gloria Cromwell made her entrance. At that moment there came a sudden
burst of applause. Miss Cromwell tried to go on with her lines. They
could not be heard. It was unprecedented, staggering. A girl, unknown,
unheralded, was holding up the play! Of course, action had been
suspended an instant when Goring came on, but this,—_this_ was
unheard of.
Faintness seized the star, blinded her,—then fury. She knew now the
nature of the weight that had stifled her all day. In a way, she had
known it from the beginning. It was this girl! The lengthening of the
part on tour, last night’s acclaim, her notices this morning, all had
formed a cumulative irritant that now expressed itself in a surge of
throttling hatred.
She jumped in on the girl’s lines, killing almost every speech. She
changed her own so that cues would be missed. No move, no turn that
would make the little sister’s performance fall flat was allowed to
pass. Even the final speech, ending with the beautiful tableau that
last night had brought down the house, was cut short. Like a red
tongue of flame her rage swept over its object consuming every
opportunity the part gave.
Still she did not kill the applause that greeted the curtain.
Storming to her dressing-room came Cleeburg.
“What’s the matter? You cut the act a minute and a half!”
“I was ill,” she told him. And barred the door, stripping off her
dress while the maid prepared a dose of aromatics and bathed her head
with eau de cologne.
Since Gloria Cromwell appeared only in the first act, dying for
exigencies of plot off-stage—the remainder of the performance went as
usual.
But that night, as once before, Goring tossed between sheets of finest
linen and did not close her eyes.
In the morning she sent for Cleeburg.
He came, solicitous for her health, relieved by the fact that her
aberration of the night before had not in any way affected the play’s
reception.
She met him, cool and smiling and looking very beautiful in a purple
mandarin suit, the skirt of which was weighted with wicked Chinese
embroidery. Her tapering white hands were ringless and low-heeled
Chinese slippers made her look less tall. Greeting him, her hand clung
to his.
She led the way into the drawing-room.
“’Dolph,” she began, and for the first time a rather plaintive note
crept into her voice. “’Dolph, I’m unhappy.”
In the act of lighting the omnipresent cigar, he looked up,
astonished. “Why—what’s wrong?”
“I’m unhappy—and for a reason you may not quite understand. But you
can help make things right. You can make them _all_ right, if you
will.”
“Sure, Jane, you know me! Anything I can do—”
“It has to do with the play.”
“Fire ahead!” He resumed the operation of lighting.
“’Dolph, that Cromwell girl, I simply can’t work with her.”
Again the process of lighting was arrested. “Can’t work with her? Good
God!”
She went to him, struck a match and, bending over, held it to the
weed. He laughed comfortably, settled back—patted her hand.
“Sort of took the wind out of my sails, that did. Guess I didn’t get
you straight, eh?”
She sat down in a chair close to his, her back to the light.
“Please _do_ get me right. I’ve nothing against her work, if _you_
like it. It’s her personality that irritates me. There’s
something—something snaky about her. She makes me nervous, makes me go
off in my lines. You know, I told you in the beginning I didn’t like
her.”
“You said she was too homely.”
“Well, she is.”
“Not any more. Why, she’s got a face like—like Fiske. One of those
faces you don’t get at first, but with so much behind it that you come
to like it better than the kind that’s just easy to look at.”
“I’ve never been able to like her, ’Dolph. I’ve tried to because you
seemed to, and you know how absolutely I depend on your judgment. But
I can’t, that’s all.” She looked away and the suggestion of a sob
sounded in the words.
Cleeburg’s cigar revolved silently for a few moments, then he leaned
forward. “What are we going to do about it?”
She turned to him, rested her white tapering hand pleadingly on his
arm. “Get rid of her, ’Dolph.”
“Get rid of her? Chuck her—just like that?” He snapped his fingers.
“You can find some way that won’t hurt her feelings.”
“Any way would be treating her rough.”
“She’ll have no difficulty getting another engagement.”
Cleeburg had been watching her over his cigar, round eyes studying her
as they were in the habit of doing at rehearsal. Now he snapped the
weed into the other corner of his mouth and smiled benignly. “That’s
exactly why I ain’t letting her go.”
Jane Goring’s eyes met his with a delicate film of tears veiling them.
“Don’t you want to please me?”
“I want to please the public,” said Cleeburg curtly, “and they like
her. Say—what’s got into you, Jane, anyhow?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know!” A few tears, well chosen, rolled over
onto her white cheeks. She brushed them away. “I’m just miserable,
that’s all. Last night made me so nervous that I gave a perfectly
rotten performance. Just playing opposite her gives me goose-flesh.
Something about her chokes me and she seems to feel it—to revel in it.
She’s a snake, ’Dolph, and I simply can’t stand her.”
“Seems to me a pretty nice kid.”
The hand resting on his arm traveled its length. “’Dolph,—isn’t it
important that I should be happy in my work?”
“Sure!”
“And if _she_ makes me unhappy?”
He gave her hand an understanding squeeze and a slow twinkle appeared
in his round eyes. “Ah, come on, Jane! Talk straight to yourself!
She’s made too big a hit to suit you. That’s what’s eating you.”
For an instant Jane Goring said nothing. A hard line tightened her
mouth, but quickly she dissipated it, replacing it with a deprecatory
smile.
“How absurd, ’Dolph!”
“’Course it’s absurd. Don’t try to hog it, Jane! Give the kid a
chance!” He dropped back, regarding his cigar contemplatively.
“But I tell you that’s not the reason. I simply can’t do anything if
she’s in the company. She makes me bristle!”
“Because she gets a big hand,” he put in. “Because she holds up the
show!” He leaned forward once more. “And you honestly think I’d let a
find like that get away from me?”
Jane Goring got to her feet. She had attempted a new rôle. She had
pleaded. Now she would play in character. She would demand.
“Either she goes—or I do,” came succinctly.
“Nonsense, Jane!” He, too, was on his feet.
“I mean it. You can take your choice.”
“Why, listen to me, old girl! You’ve got the public in the palm of
your hand! You can afford to give the kid a square deal.”
“I’ve told you—”
Cleeburg’s round eyes narrowed. “What’re you trying to do—bully me?”
“No. I want you to be fair.”
“I am fair—to all concerned—”
“Except to me who should be your first consideration.”
“Look here, Jane, you’ve had things pretty much your own way for a
good many years. To me there wasn’t anybody—not one of ’em—in your
class, either as actress or woman. Darned if I wasn’t even afraid of
you! You’ve laid down the law more than once and I let you get away
with it. But I can’t let you grab a find out of my hand, just like
that!” Again the fingers snapped. “And I won’t!”
The peacock’s shriek is the one unbeautiful thing about him. It is
blatant, raucous. It is crude as the rasp of iron on stone.
Jane Goring’s voice rose belligerently to the housetops. “And I tell
you, I won’t have her putting over that sob stuff on me! I won’t have
it! I won’t have it!!” Stripped of iridescence, shorn of plumage, she
stood facing him, nails grinding into palms, head thrust forward and
upward, body rocking with the same fury that had seized her the night
before.
Cleeburg came to her, his round eyes softened and troubled, and put a
hand on her shoulder. “Come, come, Jane! Don’t let’s do anything
hasty. You and I’ve pulled along pretty comfortably for a long time.
This thing is a tempest in a teapot. Let’s both think it over and have
a nice calm talk later in the week.”
When he had left, she settled down to weigh things and balance
accounts.
First and foremost, one discomforting thought was uppermost—she was
losing her drag with her manager. It had been a revelation, amazing,
most difficult to face, most delicate to handle. A few years ago
’Dolph Cleeburg would have been, as he had frankly stated, afraid to
cross her. Hers would have been the last word, the decisive one. Such
incidents as the cutting of scenes, the dismissing of actors to whom
she objected, were occurrences not uncommon. Gloria Cromwell would
simply have received her two weeks’ notice accompanied by a pleasing
smile from Cleeburg and, since he liked her, a contract and promise to
put her in his next production. To-day Jane Goring had met open
defiance, backed with a twinge of ridicule even harder to endure. Not
subtly but poignantly she felt it. That smile that had lurked in his
eye when he called the green-eyed monster by its right name—there was
no mistaking it.
Just one course remained. Her brain sprang instantly to that—to
tighten her hold on him in some other way so that her will would still
be the lever directing their business association. At any cost it must
be accomplished. Times innumerable he had begged her to procure a
divorce from the husband with whom she did not live, and marry him.
That answer was the obvious one to her present situation. It gave to
Jane Goring the one safe solution.
She did not hesitate, did not stop to weigh Bob’s wishes in the
matter. Circumstances had pushed her to take the step. Without delay
she must act and efficiently. Immediately and as quietly as possible
the whole affair must be put through, consummated. It must not be the
usual theatrical divorce, with blaring of trumpets and long columns in
the newspapers. If it could be managed, she wanted no publicity at
all. Just as her present marriage was unknown generally, so would she
conduct her second venture.
Having arrived at a solution she called up her lawyer, made an
appointment and drove downtown.
Two hours later she left his office, a shadow across her eyes, her
face drawn and a bit haggard. The thing was not so easy as she had
anticipated—impossible, in fact, in New York as matters now stood.
They had thrashed it out—viewed it from every conceivable angle—to
reach a conclusion that placed the final decision entirely in Bob
McNaughton’s hands. Unless Goring were willing to leave the state long
enough to establish a residence, Bob was the one who must sue. He must
be located, which would involve no great difficulty, and then, granted
his consent could be gained, it would take the red tape of the law an
indefinite time to unwind.
What worried her was the fear that Bob might take this occasion to be
nasty. The long silence since he had gone West made it difficult to
gauge his attitude toward her. More than likely he would refuse and
cause her no end of trouble.
When she received word from her attorney that, through his former
paper, Bob had been located with the Graystone Photoplay Company in
Los Angeles, she decided to write instead of trusting to the cold
terms of a legal request.
Very carefully she worded the letter, making it most friendly but with
the impersonal friendliness of those whose lives have never intimately
touched. Since she had not heard from him in over two years, she
wrote, she was quite sure he had by this time come to regard her as a
sort of mythical being. Their separation had become so complete that a
request she was about to make would, she knew, be nothing short of
welcome to him. She wanted him to have his freedom. Herself—she no
longer wanted to feel bound. She would always think of him as the best
friend she ever had, but so many years had elapsed since their
relationship had been that of husband and wife that it was rather a
farce to keep up the pose any longer. She was sure he would agree in
this. Knowing the New York laws he must realize that the move would
have to come from him. California, she understood, was more lenient,
and since he was now a resident, it would be practically easy. She
assumed that by this time his health had been entirely restored and
wished him every good wish in the world.
Before sending off the letter she gave it to her attorney. Stamped
with his approval but with no slight misgivings on her part, it was
registered and posted; then tossed carelessly into a bag with
thousands of others—tear-stained, anxious, pleading, desperate,
breathless, threatening, thumb-marked, hopeless—all jumbled as human
emotions are jumbled together in this puzzling world. With these it
was flung into a mass of other bags similarly laden and started on its
way across the country.
Meanwhile instead of resuming their discussion, ’Dolph Cleeburg had
diplomatically avoided seeing his star. For several days he stayed
away from the theater and Goring was forced at every performance to
endure the girl’s entrance—the applause that apparently had become a
habit.
The climax came when one of the Sunday papers featured the young
actress’s picture on the same page as the star’s. That was the
proverbial straw.
Jane Goring scorned any further attempt to bring Cleeburg round to her
way of thinking. If he was afraid to see her, was determined to keep
Cromwell in the cast—very well, she would read him a lesson. She would
prove to him who was the motive power that kept his play going. She
would show him in whose hands lay his success or failure. Incidentally
she would resort to the very feminine ruse of playing on his
sympathy.
At seven-thirty Monday evening she sent word to the theater that she
was ill and could not appear.
As she had anticipated, the stage manager phoned wildly, begging for a
word with her. The situation was terrible! Terrible! She must come!
They were sold out!
Goring smiled. It was just what she had looked for. No understudy for
her had been engaged so far. It was a matter with which they never
concerned themselves, for no one could have replaced Goring with the
public. The theater would have to remain dark—Cleeburg would have his
lesson. Madame was very ill, her maid replied, too ill even to answer
the telephone. The stage manager urged. He pleaded. In vain! A few
minutes later Cleeburg himself was on the wire. Couldn’t she drag
herself downtown? She must! To him she spoke, her voice so weak that
it could scarcely be heard. She had tried—impossible. Her heart— And
then the maid once more took the wire. Cleeburg was frantic. It meant
a refund—the loss of thousands. He almost wept into the phone. At the
psychological moment the maid told him madame had fainted.
Jane Goring slept that night with a smile on her lips.
She woke up in the morning to read that at half an hour’s notice
Gloria Cromwell had gone on in her place—and hit Broadway straight
between the eyes.
CHAPTER V
Some months later word came from the West that Bob McNaughton had
secured a divorce. There had been no personal reply to her letter.
Calmly and quietly he had complied with her request, his lawyer merely
notifying hers that Mrs. McNaughton’s wishes would be carried out to
the letter. No possible way had she of gauging how he had taken it, no
possible manner of knowing how, after all the years, such a request
had affected him.
Her relief was like a gale of wind sweeping over the city after a
stifling day. For months she had been trembling on the brink of
terrifying uncertainty. The day following Gloria Cromwell’s amazing
success had found her really ill, so ill that had she remained away
from the theater that night there would have been justification. She
was stunned, utterly bewildered, sickened to the soul by the trick she
told herself Fate had played her.
Over and over she read the papers, as one gazes fascinated over the
edge of a dizzying precipice. It was incredible! And worse still, it
might easily have been avoided. She might have accepted the girl, made
her a protégée, gracefully posed as having discovered a young genius
and pushed her to the fore. She saw all that now. And—further irony—it
would probably have redounded to her credit, a neat bit of
self-advertisement. As things stood she had made herself a
laughing-stock. She could not bear the thought of it.
On the verge of hysteria, she dragged herself out of bed and dressed
for the street. When her maid dared to protest, she turned on the girl
ready to strangle her.
Walking rapidly westward she veered north when she reached the Drive.
It was a dull day, no clarity of air to fill the lungs, no shimmer of
sunlight through the heavy clouds. Skeleton trees reached gaunt arms
to the sky. Thick mud covered the ground which a month before had
shown green and living. There was no cheer anywhere. Across the river
the Palisades rose misty and unreal, as if they had never been more
than mirages. Miles she made, on and on, seeking some way to still the
terror voice in her breast.
That night she drove down to the theater with a sense of dread. But
whatever the flurry of gossip backstage, it ceased with her arrival.
Members of the company inquired concerning her health—that was all.
While she was dressing a knock came. The maid opened and the Cromwell
girl stood in the doorway. She took a rather timid step forward.
“I’m so glad you’re back, Miss Goring.” She spoke with a note of
sincerity unmistakable, and in her wide eyes was a look of pleading as
of unspoken apology for what she had done. “I just had to come and
tell you.”
“Thank you,” Goring replied and for her life could not say more. Her
hatred was a living, searing thing.
The coup she had made in absenting herself accomplished its end.
Gloria Cromwell was withdrawn from the cast—to be featured by Cleeburg
in a new production!
Anxiously Goring waited for some reference to the turn events had
taken. None came, not even when the girl left the company. Little
’Dolph seemed to be full of the joy of living these days—cigar more
active than ever, smile more genial, himself more generous to the
down-and-outers and brimful of plans. In the weeks that followed he
never spoke of their misunderstanding. Evidently his admiration had
not in any way decreased. She had chosen, she concluded, the
psychological moment to gain her freedom.
When news came that it was consummated the weight of uncertainty
lifted. She felt buoyant, with a clear course to steer ahead. Not that
she was at all eager to marry her manager. But since it was the one
sure way to secure her future, it must be gone through.
She will always have reason to remember the bright spring day when she
dropped into his office to break the news. For some time he had known
Bob was suing.
“Glad to hear it,” he remarked when she told him everything was
settled. Then he swung round in his chair and gazed out of the window
at a pair of fleecy, fluttering clouds in the very blue heavens.
“Well, I took your advice, Jane,” he added casually.
“What advice?”
“Remember telling me once to make that Cromwell girl change her name?
I went ahead and did it.”
“You did?”
“Sure! Changed it for her. She’s Mrs. ’Dolph now.” And he grinned
happily.
She understood then why he had been grinning in just that way for a
number of weeks. Had she not been so absorbed in self, she would have
noticed that his smile was gayer—different from any he had ever worn.
It made his face quite boyish.
The decline of Goring after that was gradual. As a matter of fact, it
could have been dated actually from the night of her non-appearance.
Upon the heels of that night followed a change, scarcely noticeable at
first, in the sea of eyes and lips and hands to which she looked for
signs of approval. Slowly—oh very slowly—there crept into the
audience’s response to her a quality mechanical, automatic almost, as
if largely force of habit, a quality that presaged the beginning of
the end. Whether in herself or the public she could not tell. It was
nothing tangible, nothing definite. But something had happened. The
fine thread by which an actress chains herself to popular favor had
snapped. In vain she told herself it was just nervous imagination. It
made her choke with fear.
One thing Jane Goring had failed to take into consideration: Than the
highest rung of the ladder there is nothing higher; and unless one
dies having reached the top, there must be a descent. Youth pushes its
way upward relentlessly, and those who have been must make way for
those who will be. A ladder with top rung overcrowded would of
necessity break.
Had she possessed the art of Bernhardt or the intellect of Fiske—that
magnetic quality of soul that charms with the mellowing years—she
could have laughed at time. But her ability consisted chiefly in a
technique, the accumulated result of stage tricks that only up to a
certain point can present itself as youth.
With an eagerness that approached hysteria she reached out for the
adulation that for years she had accepted without question as her due.
The thirst for it was the thirst of fever. Even the tame robins she
had always regarded as more or less of a joke, she began to seek them
as they in the past had sought her. The desire to be seen about
pursued by youth; to lunch and tea at fashionable restaurants in their
company; to hold the center of the public eye at any cost, became a
mania. It was as grim an effort as that of a doomed man to cling to
the last moments of life.
And when a year or so later came the inevitable day when Cleeburg said
to her—trying to speak gently—
“Come, Jane, let’s talk horse sense. No use your trying to play a
chicken! God knows you ain’t one!”—
Jane Goring went home, flung open her bedroom windows letting in an
uncompromising flood of sunlight, sat down at her dressing-table and
looked herself squarely in the face. The whiteness—smooth,
glowing—which had made her skin like gardenia petals in the old days
had gone long since. She had grown accustomed to simulating it with
modern triumphs of the beauty parlor. But sitting there with God’s
spotlight turned full on her, it was not the realization of muscles
sagging as if pulled down by the hand of Time that made her shudder.
It was not the gooselike shriveling of her throat when she turned her
head that made her eyes shut with pain. It was the knowledge of ebbing
self-confidence, the face to face admission that her day was done.
From now on it would be—“Let’s go to see Jane Goring. She used to be—”
or “Don’t let’s go to see Jane Goring. She used to be—”
But always “She used to be—” Always that.
There was no quibbling, no splitting of hairs. She knew! And with the
acknowledgment she rose to her feet, a great overwhelming defiance
seizing her. She would not let age get her. She would not go downhill.
She would not become a has-been! Rather would she quit the stage now
and let them say she had retired in her prime. Money she had—an income
larger than she needed. She would cut herself off from the theater
entirely; for looking in at the window of a house of cheer whose door
is barred—that would be unbearable. She would have to travel, to seek
diversion elsewhere. Then suddenly like the lifting of a rosy veil on
barren waste, she saw her career a thing of the past and herself
wandering down the declining years of life—alone. The desert youth
takes no count of—aloneness—stretched bleak and endless, a reach of
sand with no oasis to slake the thirst, no shade to cool the soul.
And there swamped her with a sickening sense of need the longing for
that bulwark of days gone, the one thing that endures, the one thing
that counts not success nor failure, that survives when the ladder
itself lies crumbled in ruins. Giving it no conscious name, she knew
only that had Bob been there he would have shouldered the burden of
this cold hour of facing truth. He would somehow have contrived to
make it easier for her to hold her head high and continue to look
down, even though that look must be directed toward the sunset.
Bob, whose adoration had helped her always over the difficult places,
Bob would to-day and through all the days to come have stood by to
help her bridge this most difficult place of all.
Bob!! Well, why not?
Many hours she paced the floor, brows drawn together, hands clenched
as if grappling with a flesh and blood thing.
The peacock’s strut is slow and calculating. He lowers his head only
to gaze upon his own reflection in the pool. To shed the trait that
has made him world famous is to lay his gorgeous plumage in the dust.
* * * * *
The train steamed into the Santa Fé Station at Los Angeles. A woman
descended, the sort to whom one gives a second glance in spite of
tired lines round the eyes and little crinkles at their corners.
Gowned in the latest cut of blue serge, with a tan traveling cloak
swung across her arm, she cried New York the instant one laid eyes on
her.
She put her maid and bags into a cab, and sent them to the Ambassador
Hotel. Stepping into another, she told the driver to take her to the
Graystone Studio.
It was an afternoon of late June. The languorous breath of California
summer had kissed the foliage into mammoth bloom. They drove through
lazy, sunny streets, somnolent under warm skies, into that vortex of
activity modern commerce has planted in the midst of beauty, the frame
of artifice sprung up mushroom-like in the very heart of Nature.
Jane Goring descended at a row of small buildings that barricaded huge
ones roofed with glass. She made her way past men and women with faces
ghastly white and lips preternaturally red, mounted the steps and
asked for Mr. McNaughton. The attendant wanted her name but she
insisted upon being announced merely as a friend from the East. She
had given Bob no warning of her visit and her eyes followed the man
with a look half curious, half eager as he opened a door and
disappeared along a corridor lined with offices.
He came back presently and shut the door. Mr. McNaughton had gone
home. She asked his address quite as a matter of course—in a way that
brooked no refusal, and once more was driven out of bedlam to the
quiet of drowsy green streets, past the beautiful Hollywood homes of
picture stars who yesterday were unknown.
Toward the sunset she went, melting amethystine into violet night.
Shadows stretched across the road, cool and mellow, and a soft sense
of fragrant tranquillity.
She lay back, closing her eyes. When she opened them she had turned a
corner and was pulling up before the lawn of a rambling Queen Anne
cottage set snugly in a mass of shrubbery. She gave a little start,
pleasure surmounting surprise. It looked very much as though Bob
McNaughton had found time to make his own career.
A gate with a lantern over it opened on a bricked path that led to the
house. She paused there and looked in. Under a tree sat a man she
scarcely knew. His hair was quite gray—iron gray—but the face under it
was full and ruddy, the eyes keen, the mouth relaxed and smiling. The
hand that held a newspaper which he no longer read was firm and
capable. A hand accustomed to direct, the hand of a man sure of
himself! Bob, who was almost fifty, looked less than forty!
As she stood staring at him, the house door opened and a slim figure
was silhouetted against the light from within. The figure stepped to
the lawn, light shining through masses of soft brown hair like a halo,
eyes glowing, red lips parted in eager welcome, and with a cry full of
sweetness held out something to Bob McNaughton. He gave a laugh,
sprang to his feet, bent down to the eager lips, then caught the
something swiftly in his arms—with infinite tenderness hugged it close
against his heart. And it gave a gurgle of delight.
Jane Goring turned and went back to the waiting taxi.
GREASE-PAINT
_REALISM_
There is no such thing—either in life or the theater. For what is real
to one is unreal to another. The tenement of the stage is real to
those who live in drawing-rooms—the drawing-room, real to those who
know only the squalor of tenements. That which seizes our imaginations
with grim claws, shakes our emotions with sordid passions we have
never experienced—we call reality. That which is uncertain, sad,
elusive, delicate—we call unreality. Both are life!
GREASE-PAINT
CHAPTER I
She had weary eyes—eyes with the weight of centuries of knowledge upon
them—eyes that could no longer open wide with astonishment at anything
life might hold. The lashes were so long, so dark and straight that
they were like a veil of night shadowing the grayness beneath. Her
gaze came through, inviting you to penetrate, urging you by its very
weariness to try to read the story those eyes might tell.
A slow smile lifted the corners of her mouth, then let them droop
before the smile was really born. Her walk as she trailed from the
first line of show girls in her wide-spread bird of paradise costume
was as measured as the muse of tragedy.
And yet she was only twenty-six.
That was Naomi Stokes, who counted numberless acquaintances but few
friends; who knew many men better than they cared to be known but few
as well as she might have cared to know them.
Broadway was a playground to Naomi but she had long since learned that
in the game played there, none are winners. Time is the _croupier_
who rakes in the spoils and at Time Naomi had ceased to smile even
wearily. He stood with his long arm suspended, ready, it seemed to
her, to pounce upon each hour she might hold dear, jealous of all she
had crowded into one short life. Man she knew too well to fear but the
croupier with whom she had gambled so long, she dared not look in the
face. And as one sings in the dark to silence fear, so she had
developed a philosophy of life which she held close in those moments
when she might be tempted to take measure of things. She could not
afford to pause long nor to think much.
Of that glittering section which stretches like some bejeweled
recumbent queen of the night from Forty-second to Fiftieth Streets,
Naomi was such an integral part that if a night passed without her
appearance at one or another of the tightly wedged restaurants, their
habitués wondered. When she moved between rows of tables with her
long-lashed smile sweeping with lazy insolence the whole room, those
who did not know asked who she was. Her name—in the theater merely
that of another show girl—had for so long swung from lip to lip in the
after-theater life of the White Way that soon it would of necessity be
relegated to that past which hangs so cruelly over the present.
Naomi knew this. And more than once, alone in her tiny two-room
apartment and in spite of her philosophy, she wondered what would come
after. A shrug avails little in the midday glare of reality.
It was on a night following such a day—when the dregs of life had
tasted particularly bitter—that Naomi and four others went to supper
with Marshall Kent.
Kent having more money than he could spend enjoyed spending it on
Broadway. Having nothing better to do, he had never looked for
anything better. He and Naomi were good pals in their way. He liked to
stare through her lashes at the puzzle beneath. Most women were so
revealing.
But to-night she resented his set gaze, the ironic twitch of his thin
lip. After her nasty, self-disclosing day she wanted a friend. Some
one to whom she could be something more than heavy eyes and
auburn-tinted hair, some one with whom she could share thoughts—and
fears. But Marshy Kent had never given her friendship. No man had.
All through supper she was silent, with a hard, shell-like silence her
companions could not break. Finally she pushed her plate to one side
and her glance sifted the smoke-thickened air.
Beyond the table, in a space so small that they might have been
squirrels chasing their tails, the crowd jostled and elbowed and
glared at one another in an effort to keep time to a stamping,
hilarious jazz. In the doorway beyond, another crowd jostled and
elbowed and glared at one another and fought for the privilege of
slipping crisp greenbacks to supercilious head-waiters. Through the
befogged atmosphere the lights with their shades of brilliant yellow
and black glimmered faintly. At the tables and on the dance floor
jaded New Yorkers and curious out-of-towners pretended to enjoy
themselves.
Naomi swept it with a noxious sense of disgust. Suddenly it seemed
a ton weight, as if the ceiling like some infernal machine were
descending upon her. She lifted her shoulders and her head went back.
Oh, for a breath of real fresh air!
“What’s the matter, my dear?” put in Kent. “Off your feed?”
“No.” She brought her eyes toward him, then they drifted back to the
crowd at the door. “I was just thinking what a joke they are on
themselves, fighting like that to get into a stuffy old hole where
they’re going to be held up and fleeced.”
Kent laughed.
“Aren’t you worth the price of admission? You’re one of the exhibits,
you know.”
She shrugged.
He looked down at the easy movement of the white shoulders under the
narrow beaded straps that were the sole support of her black gown.
“Any one with the eyes and arms of Naomi will always count,” he
consoled.
She pulled from his gaze.
“Oh, what’s the use! You know I don’t matter to them any more than to
you. You play around with me here because you haven’t any better way
to pass your time. And they, poor idiots—”
“By Jove, you _are_ off your feed!”
She turned her back on his low, impudent chuckle.
His tolerant eye traveled over the shoulder turned from him to the
hot, wild mass clamoring at the doorway. Suddenly he became alert and
a second later was on his feet, without apology pushing his way round
the dance floor. Naomi saw him make for a man with a big frame and
graying mustache who lingered impotently at the rear of the crowd.
Kent reached out, grabbed his hand and with absolute disregard of
intervening humanity, wrung it as if he never wanted to let it go. She
wondered vaguely what it would be like to have some one as glad to see
her. He passed a word to the head-waiter. The red velvet rope dropped
as if by magic and, escorted by Kent, the party was led to a table a
few paces from where she sat.
The man glanced about with the curiosity, half amused, half critical
of the sight-seeing stranger. Back of him came a girl of twenty-one or
so with eager gray eyes a thousand years younger than Naomi’s, white
teeth showing through parted lips and hair the dense, dusky black of
an Indian’s. At her side walked a young man. As he passed Naomi, their
glances met. They locked with that odd, unintentional arresting which
means that two out of a vast throng have momentarily become
individuals. Naomi’s slow gaze followed as he went on and it seemed to
her that in the allotting of places, he deliberately chose the one
facing her.
Kent hovered over his friend with beaming enthusiasm. The ironic
twitch of his thin lips was gone. The somewhat sagging shoulders of
the man who keeps flesh down by massage rather than exercise had
straightened. He scribbled his address. He took theirs. He admonished
the waiter to treat them well, received that gentleman’s reassuring
nod, and apologized finally for having to return to his own table.
Naomi watched the younger man’s face as Marshall Kent sat down beside
her. No—she had not been mistaken. She who knew so well how to read
men’s eyes saw in his dark ones a look of intense, concentrated
interest. The girl next to him saw it, too—and following it, thought
she had never seen a face more fascinating than the one so smoothly
white with its heavy-fringed lids and wave of glinting hair across the
forehead. It was artificial, of course, but then you got used to that
in New York. Her clear gray eyes went swiftly back to the dark ones
that were fastened on Naomi’s.
Kent pulled in his chair and settled back.
“Well, little Marshy’s all het up!” one of the girls prompted. “Who’s
your friend?”
He was still beaming.
“Fellow I haven’t seen since college—Alec McConnell. I was chucked. He
went through to the finish. Mining engineer—big man in Idaho to-day.”
“And the other two?” queried Naomi casually.
“The one staring at you, my dear, is the son of Bill Dixon of
Dixonville, Oregon, big ranch owner, king of the apple country.”
“And the girl?”
“Little friend of his being chaperoned by McConnell and his wife.
First visit to the big town. Is that all?”
Once more Naomi’s lazy gaze met the one which had not moved from her
and a faint flush surged under her thick pallor. As the lids fell,
they covered something of the look of the gamester. It was a
calculating look that weighed possibilities, one she was quick to
hide.
Kent detected it rather by instinct than otherwise.
“Oh, have a heart, Naomi!” he teased. “He’s so young and tender.”
Naomi turned slowly in his direction. She said nothing for the moment
but waited until the others got up to dance.
“Well?” He was intrigued by her silence. “Well, Eve, do we tempt young
Adam to eat the apple or do we let him go home in peace and grow
them?”
“I think we marry him,” she said quietly.
Kent gave a start that brought him upright. Then he grinned, that
drawling grin tinged with cynicism. The idea of any one marrying Naomi
was amusing. She read his thought as plainly as if it had been put
into words and her head went up suddenly. Though the lashes did not
lift, a flash came through them. It was challenge.
“You think I couldn’t?”
“My dear Naomi—if you’ll pardon my brutality, I should say—not a
chance in the world!”
“Why?”
“In the first place I have a hunch that little girl, Nan Crawford, has
a pretty firm hold on young Bill. It’s plain to see they’re crazy
about each other. Darn sweet kid, too. I suspect she’s here
trousseauing. In the second, Bill is probably more sophisticated than
you or I imagine. This isn’t his first visit to New York.”
“I’m going to marry him just the same.”
“And go out and live on an Oregon ranch, old dear?”
“Yes.”
He laughed aloud this time.
“You’d look sweet in a sunbonnet and gingham dress.”
“Just what do you mean by that?” she asked, not quite sure what
emphasis to put on “sweet.”
“Just this! You belong here as surely as grease-paint belongs in the
theater.”
“No woman belongs here,” she flung at him. “There isn’t a woman made
who hasn’t the right to a home.”
“Then why does she start here?”
“Because she’s young and a fool—in nine cases out of ten. Because she
thinks this is living.”
Her face went hard as nails; with contempt, with futility, with
derisive defiance of herself. And then furtively she pulled a bit of
lace from her bag and dabbed at her eyes.
Kent’s mouth opened. It was the first time he had seen Naomi cry, had
witnessed a woman’s tears without suspicion. Usually they meant that
she wanted something.
“Don’t mind me!” She met his astonishment with a swift effort to pull
herself together. “I’ve had a rotten day.”
“How, my dear?”
“Oh, just the realization that to-night it’s this, and in two years
it’ll be ham and eggs and a lunch counter—if I’m lucky.”
“Nonsense!”
“Oh, yes! I’ll just drop out and you’ll forget me—like the rest.
What’s become of Emy Steward—and Cora Greene—and Ray Granville? You
don’t even know and you used to give parties for them like this one.”
He was silent, knowing she spoke the truth. Like comets across a
glittering sky those beautiful girls had gleamed and gone. Gone when
their beauty had gone, vanished into the night that engulfed them, too
proud or too forgotten to accept the humiliation of charity.
“We don’t last long, boy,” she added grimly. “And I’m one of those who
can’t keep on fooling herself. I’ve had a beast of a day.”
“Hence the ranch idea in Oregon.”
“Yes.” A queer twist lifted her lips—then dropped them. “Inspiration,
I call it. The Limited that will carry me away from the poorhouse!”
“You’ll never put it over.”
“Sporting enough to lay odds on it, Marshy old dear?”
In all justice to Marshall Kent, it must be admitted that under normal
conditions he would not have taken her up. But the restaurant happened
to be one of the many which prided itself that prohibition meant
nothing in its life and the silver flask reposing on Marshy’s hip had
been refilled on frequent visits to a side chamber just off the main
room. He looked out of the corner of an eye at Naomi stepping in where
angels might fear to tread and the flushed, grudging admiration of
gamester for gamester darted in the glance.
“You’re on!” he said.
“And you’ll keep off!” she urged, a bit breathless.
“Yes—I’ll give you ground. What stakes?”
“If I lose—”
“Yes?”
“We’ll make it a hundred perfectos, best brand.”
“Nice and impersonal!” observed Marshy, head to one side, now well
into the game. “And if you win?”
“The handsomest wedding present in town!”
“I call that odds in your favor.”
With a faint smile she leaned nearer, hand outstretched to clinch it.
“Hold on! What’s the time limit?”
“When he starts west I start with him.”
“It’s a go. Only don’t expect any help from me.”
“I won’t—except an introduction when he stops here on the way out.”
“What makes you think he’ll stop?”
“I know he will. He’ll find some excuse to.”
And he did, of course. Waveringly, as he drew nearer the magnet of her
eyes, he paused and tapped Marshy’s shoulder. The latter sprang up.
“Mr. Kent, we’re such a bunch of rubes—I thought you might recommend
the best show in town for to-morrow night.”
Naomi waited as Marshy considered.
“Why don’t you send your friend to ours?” she suggested in a low voice
apparently to him alone.
“What one is that?” asked the friend, flashing eagerly into the
breach.
Kent introduced him then to the upraised eyes round the table. But he
saw only Naomi’s veiled ones. She gave him the name of the musical
comedy and the theater—nothing more. And as he bowed and rejoined the
older man and the girl with the dusky hair standing in the doorway,
Marshall Kent dropped into his chair again.
“Quick work, Naomi,” he murmured, “and Machiavellian method! One more
move from you and the apple wouldn’t have looked nearly so inviting.”