Immediately after her second public appearance in "The Convict's
Return," Joan removed her make-up, changed to street dress and scurried
through the rain to a Child's restaurant, not far from the theatre. In
her excitement she had forgotten lunch and she was now thoroughly
hungry. But she lingered purposely over the meal and even for some time
after she had finished, preoccupied with self-dissection.
She was--at last!--an actress; but she was none the less singularly
discontented. In a very brief time she had travelled a great way from
the Joan Thursby of East Seventy-sixth Street; a world of emotion and
experience already dissociated them; but she seemed to have profited
little by the journey. She felt sure that she had started the wrong way
to prove her ability to act. And foreseeing nothing better than her
present circumstances, she questioned gravely an inscrutable future.
Instinctively she felt uneasy about this intimate, daily relationship
with Quard. She wasn't afraid of him, but she was a little afraid of
herself--because she liked him. Though still she dwelt in secret longing
upon the image, half real, half fanciful, of a lover gentle and strong
and fine--such an one as John Matthias might prove--for all that,
Charlie Quard had the power to stir her pulses with a casual look of
admiration, or with some careless note of tenderness in his accents.
The shower slashed viciously at the restaurant windows. At that hour
there were few other patrons in the establishment, no lights to relieve
the dismal greyness of the afternoon, and no sounds other than an
infrequent clash of crockery, the muffled shuffling of waitresses' feet,
and their subdued voices, the melancholy and incessant crepitation of
the downpour.
Joan was sensible to the approach of an exquisite despondency; and in
alarm, fearing to think too deeply, she arose, ran back to the theatre
and on impulse paid her way in through the front, to watch the
flickering phantasmagoria of the flying films and to sit in judgment on
the antics of her fellows on the variety bill. She was in no hurry to
return to the dressing-room, with its smells of grease-paint, scented
powder, ordinary perfumes, sweat, stale cigarette-smoke, gin, and broken
food. One of the clog-dancers claimed a tubercular tendency, for which
she asserted gin to be a sovereign specific; but as the day ran on was
even forgetting, at times, to cough by way of an overture to recourse to
the bottle. The other, viewing this proceeding with public disfavour,
had opened up an apparently inexhaustible and hopelessly monotonous
store of reminiscence of the privations she had endured in consequence
of "Fanny's weakness." Joan gathered that the two were forever being
dropped from one bill after another because of Fanny's weakness.
And of this she had five more days to anticipate and to endure....
She crawled back to Forty-fifth Street at half-past eleven, that night,
so dog-tired that she had neither the heart nor the strength to call on
the Deans with her good news; this though there were sounds of discreet
revelry audible through the door of the second-floor front....
Somehow the week wore out without misadventure. Joan walked through her
part with increasing confidence. Quard left her very much to herself
when they were off the stage; indeed, he spent no more time in the
theatre than was absolutely necessary. What he did out of it she did not
know, but from the frequency with which he played his part with an
alcoholic breath, she surmised that he was solacing himself in
conventional manner for his degradation to "the four-a-day."
On the third day the clog-dancers were dispensed with for the reason
forecast, their place being taken by two female acrobats of a family
troupe, who lolled about for eleven hours at a stretch in their grimy
pink tights and had little to say either to Joan or to the matronly lady
with the robust voice and the knitting. But the change was a wholesome
one for the dressing-room.
The following week _Charles D'Arcy & Company_ played at another house of
equal unpretentiousness, on the East Side, and the week after that was
divided between two other theatres. And on Wednesday of the fourth
week--they were then in Harlem--what Joan had vaguely foreseen and hoped
against, happened.
Quard turned up in the morning with red-rimmed eyes, a flushed face and
a thick tongue blatantly advertising a night of sleepless drunkenness.
By sheer force of an admirable physique and the instinct of a trained
actor, he contrived to play the first turn without mishap, snatched a
little sleep in his dressing-room, and seemed almost his everyday self
at the next repetition. But after that he left the theatre to drug his
jangling nerves with more whiskey; and appeared at the final repetition
so stupefied that he would not have been permitted to go on the stage
but for remissness on the part of the stage-manager. Before he had been
five minutes on view he was hooted off and the curtain was rung down
amid an uproar.
Once back in her dressing-room (where she was alone, since their act was
the last on the bill and the rest of the performers had already left the
theatre) Joan gave way to a semi-hysterical tempest of tears. It was her
first experience at close quarters with a man in hopeless intoxication,
and while Quard's surrender was too abject to terrify, she was faint
with disgust of him and incensed beyond measure with him for having
subjected her to those terrible five minutes before a howling audience.
With this, she was poignantly aware that henceforth their offering was
"cold": by morning Quard's name would be upon the black-list and
further booking impossible to secure. She might as well count herself
once more out of work, and now in even less hopeful circumstances than
when first she had struck out for herself; for then she had been buoyed
up by the fatuous confidence of complete inexperience, and then she had
been comparatively affluent in the possession of twenty-two dollars. Now
she knew how desperately hard was the way she must climb, and she had
less than five dollars. What little she had been able to set aside out
of her weekly wage had gone to purchase some sorely needed supplements
to her meagre wardrobe.
It was some time before she could collect herself enough to dabble her
swollen eyes with cold water, scrub off her make-up, and change for the
street.
She stole away presently across an empty and desolate stage and
through the blind, black alley leading from the stage-door to
One-hundred-and-twenty-fifth Street. She felt somewhat relieved and
comforted by the clean night air and the multitude of lights--the sense
of normal life fluent in its accustomed, orderly channels. It seemed, in
her excited fancy, like escaping from the foul, choking atmosphere of a
madhouse....
The theatre was near Third Avenue, toward which Joan hurried, meaning to
board a southbound car and transfer to Forty-second Street. But as she
neared the corner she checked sharply, and (simple curiosity proving
stronger than her impulse to fly across the street) went more
slowly--only a few yards behind a figure that she knew too well--a
swaying figure with weaving feet.
Vastly different from the carefully overdressed, dandified person he had
been at their first meeting, Quard stumbled on, his hands deep in
pockets, head low between his shoulders, a straw hat jammed down over
his eyes. Obviously he was without definite notion of either his
where-abouts or his destination. Passers-by gave him a wide berth.
He seemed so broken and helpless that pity replaced horror and
indignation in the heart of the girl. After all, he hadn't been unkind
to her; but for him she would long since have gone to the wall; and ever
since their clash on the day of the try-out, he had treated her with a
studied respect which had pleased her, apprehensive though she had
remained of a renewal of his advances.
Suddenly, and quite without premeditation, she darted forward and
plucked Quard by the sleeve just as he was on the point of staggering
through the swinging doors of a corner saloon. If her impulse had been
at all articulate, she would have said that this was, in such extremity,
the least she could do--to try to save him from himself.
"Charlie!" she cried. "No, Charlie--don't be a fool!"
The man halted and, turning, reeled against the door-post. "Wasmasr?" he
asked thickly. Then recognition stirred in his bemused brain. "Why, it's
lil Joan Thursh'y...."
"Come away," she insisted nervously. "Don't be a fool. Don't go in
there. Go home."
He moved his head waggishly. "Thash where 'm goin'--home--soon's I brace
up a bit."
"Come away!" Joan repeated sharply, dragging at his cuff. "Do you hear?
Come away. A walk'll straighten you out better'n anything else."
"Walk, eh?" Quard lifted his chin and lurched away from the door-post.
"Y' wanna take walk with me? All right"--indulgently--"_I_'ll walk with
you, lil one, 's far's y' like."
"Come, then!" she persisted. "Hurry--it's late."
He yielded peaceably, with a sodden chuckle; but as he turned the lights
of the saloon illumined his face vividly for an instant, and provided
Joan with a fresh and appalling problem. The man had forgotten to remove
his make-up; his mouth and jaws were plastered with a coat of
bluish-grey paint, to suggest a week's growth of beard when viewed
across footlights; there were wide blue rings round his eyes, and
splashes of some silvery mixture on his dark hair. His face was a
burlesque mask, so extravagant that it could not well escape observation
in any steady light. It was impossible for Joan to be seen publicly with
him--in a street-car, for instance. But now that she had taken charge of
him, she couldn't gain her own consent to abandon the man to the
potentially fatal whims of his condition. For a moment aghast and
hesitant, in another she recognized how unavoidable was the necessity of
adopting the suggestion his stupefied wits had twisted out of her
pleadings: she would have to walk with him a little way, at least until
he could recover to some slight extent.
Indeed, even had she desired to, she would probably have found it
difficult to get rid of him just then; for in an attempt to steady
himself, Quard grasped her arm just above the elbow; and this grip he
maintained firmly without Joan's daring to resent it openly. She was to
that extent afraid of his drunkenness, afraid of his uncertain temper.
Submissively, then, she piloted him to the south side of the street,
where with fewer lighted shop-windows there was consequently less
publicity, and to Lexington Avenue, turning south and then west through
the comparative obscurity of One-hundred-and-twenty-fourth Street.
Neither spoke until they had traversed a considerable distance and
turned south again on Lenox Avenue. The streets were quiet, peopled with
few wayfarers; and these few hurried past them with brief, incurious
glances if not with that blind indifference which is largely
characteristic of the people of New York. Quard suffered himself to be
led with a docility as grateful as it had been unexpected. It was
apparent to the girl that he was making, subconsciously at least, a
strong effort to control his erratic feet. He retained her arm, however,
until they were near One-hundred-and-sixteenth Street: when, noticing
the lights of a corner drug-store, the girl held back.
A swift glance roundabout discovered nobody near.
"Where's your handkerchief, Charlie?" she demanded.
"Where's whash? Whashmasser?"
"I say," she repeated impatiently, "where's your handkerchief? Get it
out and scrub some of that paint off your face. Do you hear? You look
like a fool."
"'M a fool," Quard admitted gravely, fumbling through his pockets.
"Well, I won't be seen with you looking like that. Hurry up!"
Her peremptory accents roused him a little. He found his handkerchief
and began laboriously and ineffectually to smear his face with it, with
the sole result of spreading the colour instead of removing it. In this
occupation, he released her arm. With a testy exclamation, Joan snatched
the handkerchief from him and began to scour his cheeks and jaws,
heedless whether he liked it or not. To this treatment he resigned
himself without protest--with, in fact, almost ludicrous complaisance,
lowering his head and thrusting it forward as if eager for the
scrubbing.
For all her willingness she could accomplish little without cold cream.
When at length she gave it up, his jowls were only a few shades lighter.
She shrugged with despair, and threw away the greasy handkerchief.
"It's no use," she said. "It just _won't_ come off! You'll have to go as
you are."
"Whash that? Go where?"
"Now listen, Charlie," she said imperatively: "see that drug-store on
the corner? You go in there and ask the man to give you something to
straighten you out."
Quard nodded solemnly, fixed the lighted show-window with a steadfast
glare, and repeated: "So'thin' to straighten m' out."
"That's it. Go on, now. I'll wait here."
He wagged a playful forefinger at her. "Min' y' do," he mumbled, and
wandered off.
"And--Charlie!--get him to let you wash your face," she called after the
man.
Waiting in the friendly shadow of a tree, she watched him anxiously
through the window; saw him turn to the soda-fountain and make his wants
known to the clerk, who with a nod of comprehension and a smile of
contempt began at once to juggle bottles and a glass.
Singularly enough, it never occurred to the girl to seize this chance to
escape. She was now accepting the situation without question or
resentment. Quard seemed to her little better than an overgrown,
irresponsible child, requiring no less care. Somebody had to serve him
instead of his aberrant wits. To leave him to himself would be sheer
inhumanity.... But she reasoned about his case far less than she felt,
and for the most part acted in obedience to simple instinct.
She saw him drain a long draught of some whitish, foaming mixture, pay
and reel out of the store. He had, of course, forgotten (if he had
heard) her plea to remove the remainder of his make-up. She was angry
with him on that account, as angry as she might have been with a
heedless youngster. But she did not let this appear. She moved quickly
to his side.
"Come on," she said quietly, turning southward; "you've got to walk a
lot more."
He checked, mumbled inarticulately, staring at her with glazed eyes, but
in the end yielded passively. In silence they continued to
One-hundred-and-tenth Street, Joan watching him furtively but narrowly.
The drug worked more slowly than she had hoped. Primarily, in fact, it
seemed only to thicken the cloud that befogged his wits. But by the time
they had gained the last-named street, she noticed that he was beginning
to walk with some little more confidence.
He now seemed quite ignorant of her company--strode on without a word
or glance aside. They crossed to Central Park and, entering, began to
thread a winding path up the wooded rises of its northwestern face.
Momentarily, now, there was an increasing assurance apparent in the
movements of the man. He trudged along steadily, but with evident
effort, like one embarrassed by a heavy weariness. His breathing was
quick and stertorous.
The park seemed very quiet. Joan wondered at this, until she remembered
that it must have been nearly midnight when they stopped at the
drug-store. She had noticed idly that the clerk had interrupted
preparations to close in order to wait on Quard.
They met nobody afoot, not even a policeman; but here and there, upon
benches protected by umbrageous foliage, figures were vaguely
discernible; men and women, a pair to a bench, sitting very near to one
another when not locked in bold embraces. Joan heard their voices,
gentle, murmurous, fond. These sights and sounds, the intimations they
distilled, would at a previous time have moved the girl either to
derision or to envy; now she felt only a profoundly sympathetic
compassion, new and strange to her, quite inexplicable.
Near the top of the hill they found a bench set in the stark glare of an
arc-light, and therefore unoccupied. Upon this Quard threw himself as if
exhausted. He said nothing, seemed wholly oblivious of his companion.
Immediately he was seated his chin dropped forward on his chest, his hat
fell off, his arms and legs dangled inertly. He appeared to sink at once
into impregnable slumber; yet Joan was somehow intuitively aware that he
wasn't asleep.
She herself was very weary, but she couldn't leave him now, at the mercy
of any prowling vagabond of the park. Picking up his hat, she sat down
beside him with it in her lap, glad of the chance to rest. She was at
once and incongruously not sleepy and thoughtless. Convinced that Quard
was coming to himself, she was no longer troubled by solicitude; her
wits wandered in a vast vacuity, sensitive only to dull impressions. She
felt the immense hush that brooded over the park, a hush that was
rendered emphatic by the muffled but audible and fast drumming of the
man's over-stimulated heart, straining its utmost to pump and cleanse
away the toxic stuff in his blood; the infrequent rumble and grinding of
a surface-car on Central Park West seemed a little noise in comparison.
Now and again a long thin line of glimmering car-windows would wind
snakily round the lofty curve of the Elevated structure at
One-hundred-and-tenth Street. Beyond, the great bulk of the unfinished
cathedral on Morningside Heights loomed black against a broken sky of
clouds.
At one time a policeman passed them, strolling lazily, helmet in hand
while he mopped his brow. His stare was curious for the two silent and
ill-assorted figures on the bench. Joan returned it with insolent and
aggressive interest, as if to demand what business it was of his. He
grinned indulgently, and passed on.
She had lost track of time entirely when Quard stirred, sighed, lifted
his head and sat up with a gesture of deep despondency. The movement
roused her from a dull, lethargic, waking dream.
"Feeling better, Charlie?" she asked with assumed lightness.
He nodded and groaned, without looking at her.
"Able to go home yet?"
"In a minute," he said drearily.
"Where do you live?" she persisted.
He waved a hand indifferently westward. "Over there--Ninety-sixth
Street."
"Think you'll be able to walk it?"
"Oh, I'm all right now." He groaned again, and leaned forward, elbow on
knee, forehead in his hand. "I feel like hell," he muttered.
"The best thing for you is to get to bed and get some sleep," said the
girl, stirring restlessly.