Delphi Complete Works of Booth Tarkington (Illustrated), page 558
He went to the telephone instrument that was screwed to the yellow-papered wall behind the wide black-walnut staircase, rang the bell, and, after a few moments of waiting, rang again, then gave to a languidly responsive voice the number five-hundred. Two or three minutes later, in reply to another languid voice, he mentioned his name, said that five-hundred had called him and was asked to wait. Then a brisker voice, a man’s, said, “This is the Gazette. We heard from New York you’d be here to-day and I figured out you’d most likely get in on the four-twelve. We picked up a story you were intending to open a new play here under Adler and Company’s management — going to use your own home town to ‘try it on the dog’ before opening in New York, what? I s’pose you know our old burg here takes quite some interest in your being a home town boy that’s making his way in the world and’s had successes on the New York stage. So if it’s a fact you’re going to put a play on here for its first première it’ll be quite an event and we’d like to make a feature of it. Anything in it?”
“No. That is—” Gilbert hesitated; then explained. “It’s true Adler and Company are going to put on a new play of mine; but it’s not to open here. Probably some rehearsing will be done here; that’s all.”
“Rehearse here? Well, that sounds interesting,” the voice returned ingratiatingly. “What’s the name of your new play, Mr. Gilbert, and what’s it about?”
“It’s called ‘Catalpa House’ and it’s about old times on the Mississippi River.”
“Romantic and all that?”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“Good enough,” the voice said. “How does it happen you’re going to rehearse it here instead of in New York, Mr. Gilbert?”
“There’ll be only a week of rehearsing here — week after next. Adler and Company’s ‘Skylark’ will be playing here that week. It has quite a small cast and they’re all engaged for my play, which requires a few more people; but they’ll be brought here with the ‘Skylark’ company for rehearsal, because the Adler firm means to put my piece on rather soon.”
“I see,” the voice said. “The ‘Skylark’ company’ll be rehearsing your play in its off hours. Very good. How about yourself, Mr. Gilbert? You’re combining pleasure with business, I take it, and getting in a little visit with your relations here before your work on rehearsals begins?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s see, now, Mr. Gilbert; you’ve had three very successful plays up to the present, haven’t you?”
“No. Only one. I’ve had only three plays produced altogether.”
“Is that so?” the voice from the telephone said sympathetically. “But your last was a big hit, wasn’t it?”
“No; not even a small one.”
“Is that so? Well, better luck with this next one. I guess that’s all, Mr. Gilbert; I’ll probably be calling you up again for something on your rehearsals when the ‘Skylark’ company gets here. Thank you for the information, and good day.”
Gilbert went out to the verandah and looked contemplatively at one of its wicker chairs, but did not sit down, for his ear caught a sound from a little distance down the street — conglomerate hoof-beats that seemed familiar. “Jeff and Joey,” he said, half aloud. “It couldn’t be any other horses in the world!”
Then, dappled with disks of sunshine beneath the Gothic shade trees, there came trotting down the middle of the street his mother’s two fat bay steeds, drawing the black and shiny “family carriage” and driven by a proud-looking thin old black man undoubtedly certain of the lofty effect of his white cotton gloves, his glistening high white collar and ministerial white lawn necktie. Behind him, a graceful shape in the graceful vehicle, sat a dark haired lady of fifty in wine-colored silk and white lace. The top of the carriage was down, and in one white-gloved hand she held the coral handle of the white silk parasol that kept sunlight from her plumed black hat; her other hand, in her lap, negligently clasped an ivory card-case carved in Chinese filigree. Already this was a picture beginning to be a little old-fashioned, the adopted New Yorker on the white stone verandah thought, and liked it all the more for that. The midland lady, returning in style from “paying calls” — formal calls accumulated for months against her precisely kept accounts of social credits — seemed the eloquent symbol of a whole historical period now perhaps about to vanish.
Could such a picture and its significance be expressed in the theatre, he wondered. No; even if he went to the trouble and expense (expense for the manager) of putting an actress in wine-colored silk into just such a carriage, with just such a coachman as old Nelson, and just such fat, brisk bay horses, and should place the whole equipage upon the resounding boards of the stage, the audience might be too thick-headed. “Doubt if they’d get it,” he murmured. However, he wasn’t sure, and reminded himself that almost impossible things could be made into theatrical effects. Hadn’t Augustus Thomas used actual perfumes in the theatre to transport audiences into the blossoming sweetness of Alabama springtime? “I’d put the driveway gates extreme left, with a shrubbery and foliage back-drop,” Gilbert thought, and then, catching himself at his tricks again, felt shame. “Nice of me, isn’t it? Haven’t seen my mother for six months and at sight of her begin trying to dramatize her!”
But the carriage was now on the driveway, his mother saw him, and, as the expression of her handsome face changed from absent placidity to startled brightest happiness, “No,” he thought. “Couldn’t get that out of any actress on Adler and Company’s lists!”
The mutual greeting, caressive and gently exclamatory, brought them all the way from the driveway stone mounting-block to the library, where each found further delight in the other’s “looking so well” and the son explained his premature arrival. “There really isn’t anything more for me to do about the new play until the ‘Skylark’ company gets here and I begin watching rehearsals. It just struck me yesterday rather suddenly that if I didn’t give myself a recess from ‘theatrical atmosphere’ I’d go crazy, and in all the world there isn’t anything more untheatrical than home and you, Mother; so I made a hansom cab dash for the train.”
Mrs. Gilbert laughed. “That’s funny talk from anybody who was as wild to be in the ‘theatrical atmosphere’ as you were a few years ago, Owen.”
“Oh, I know, I know! Of course the thing’s my life; but, Mother, I’ve got so soaked with it that I can’t even breathe except in what’s odiously called ‘terms of the theatre’. I’m getting to be so lost to life and drowned in theatre I’m like Barrie’s journalist who’d become so horribly nothing else that he knew, himself, he’d get material for a paragraph out of his own mother’s funeral!”
Mrs. Gilbert wasn’t alarmed; she laughed again and said, “You’d have a hard time to get a play out of mine, dear, and besides, it won’t be ready for a long, long time. For me I’m afraid the main thing is that you’re here, no matter what brought you.” But her glance, thus reminded, went gently to two silver-framed photographs upon the piano. “We could drive out to the cemetery to-morrow morning with some flowers, do you think? I’d like you to see how nice the lot looks — it’s so lovely out there — and — —”
“Yes; of course, dear Mother.”
“Then in the afternoon,” she went on musingly, “of course we’ll have to call on your Aunt Fanny and your poor old Uncle Harry and the Lord and Pennington cousins and all the rest of ’em. I suppose I’d better ask Cousin Jenny and the Whitlocks and some more in for dinner to-morrow evening. They’re all so genuinely interested in your career, Owen, and — —” She stopped speaking, looked thoughtful for a moment, and said, “Oh, that reminds me!”
“Of what, Mother?”
“There’s a special reason I’m glad you’ll have a little time here before your theatrical people arrive and begin their rehearsing. As a matter of fact, I’ve just come from their house. I was lucky and found a lot of people out this afternoon, so I had time and stopped in there on my way home.”
“You stopped in where?” her son asked, and laughed affectionately at the characteristic, unconscious cart-before-the-horse method of narrative just displayed to him. Yet, before she answered, he had that rather infrequent sensation commonly described as the memory of a previous incarnation; it seemed to him that long ago he and his mother had said to each other what they were saying now and that he ought to remember, as it were, what she was going to say next. Moreover, in addition to this disturbing sense of echoing the past, he had a feeling that what she was about to say was portentous, that it was to prove of great moment to himself and that these very seconds before she spoke were the final ones before the rising of the curtain to begin a dramatic period in his life. “Could I use this?” he thought. “Young man feeling it’s all happened before and having a premonition of something important and dangerous going to happen and — Oh, dear! There I go again! Shame on me!”
He broke off the thought despairingly, and, with a disappointed sense of anticlimax, looked plaintively at his mother as she said, “At that poor little place where they’re living now. Such a beautiful woman she used to be, poor Mrs. Mars! They’d heard you were coming home and wrote me a note to ask about it. Really, Owen, I never knew a young girl who showed a greater talent for the stage.”
They were still standing; but, at this, Owen Gilbert sat down heavily. “Mother! It’s what I came home to get away from, and, of all things on earth, talented young girls who want to go on the stage! Besides, I can’t put anybody on the stage; I’m only a playwright. Who is it?”
Mrs. Gilbert looked surprised. “Why, I just told you! You remember the Mars family, Owen.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Why, yes, you do! All the time you were a little boy they lived in that big brown brick house with the Mansard roof where the Hubbards do now, with a fountain in the front yard, only Mr. Hubbard’s had the fountain taken out. They only had one child then and you used to play with him. Surely you remember little Willie Mars and his mother and father, too.”
“Oh, vaguely, vaguely,” the young man admitted. “What about Willie Mars? Seems to me I recall he died when he was a child.”
“He did. I’m talking about the survivors! Really, they’re in a pretty distressing situation, Owen. Mr. Mars failed in the Panic while you were in college. They dropped out of everything and he died, and Mrs. Mars and the two little girls that came after Willie’s death were left with scarcely anything.”
“I see, Mother, you want me to — —”
“No!” Mrs. Gilbert exclaimed. “Not money! About that, Mrs. Mars has always had the pride of Satan. I tried once to lend her a little money myself in a tactful way; but she said that if I wished I could use it to bury her — while she lived she wasn’t an object of charity! Finally she got something to do in the city library, and that kept them going; but she fell downstairs and hurt her spine and now she’s a helpless invalid. I just don’t know how they have lived, except that Clara, the older daughter, has been clerking in Vance’s Dry Goods Store and that brings in a little something, I suppose. The younger daughter had to leave high school last winter without graduating, because Mrs. Mars can’t do anything at all for herself and of course couldn’t be left alone. It’s been a constant sacrifice for both those poor girls, and if they hadn’t been upheld by their absolute conviction that the younger one’s a genius I don’t know what they’d have done.”
“A genius?” the young man asked, and added apprehensively, “Mother, if you don’t mind I believe I’d rather not hear much about the kind of genius she is.”
“Would you, poor lamb?” Mrs. Gilbert laughed, and again became solicitous. “Of course I could see they’d been looking forward desperately to your coming home, Owen — it’s just life or death to them, and oh, I do hope you’ll try your best to do something for them, dear! They feel if you could just get her started! Of course you can’t do it the first day or two; but after you’ve got a little rested and seen all the relatives — I told them that of course you’ll be glad to hear her recite and — —”
“Recite?” Gilbert said. “Recite! Oh, Mother! Oh, my goodness! What’s her name?”
“Owen! I’ve just been telling you! Lily Mars!”
CHAPTER TWO
IN THE DUSTY little cross-street, far from Harrison Avenue, Gilbert stepped down from his mother’s carriage, said ruefully to the proud black driver, “I hope I’ll not keep you waiting long, Nelson”, crossed the uneven brick sidewalk and entered the gate of the grey picket fence. The “double frame” house, close before him, stood in a small yard of mangy patches of grass, and the twin half-glass front doors of the dwelling were within ten feet of the sidewalk. Between these doors there was nothing to choose; but he turned the brass handle set into the middle of the one to the right and evoked a metallic clatter from just within.
A woman’s voice a little tremulously called, “Please come in!”
There was neither vestibule nor hallway; he stepped straight into a brown room and saw first an invalid gentlewoman (so he defined her) lying upon a sofa beside the room’s one window. Her hair, carefully coiled high in an extinct fashion, was little less white than the pillow supporting her head; but her thin eyebrows were black over sunken bright eyes, and the pallid, fine face was one Du Maurier would have drawn, the caller fancied, for a dying great lady’s. To find such a face in the cheap ugliness of this room was to go beyond pathos and touch the grotesque, he thought. There was a repulsive little black fireplace, with paper flowers in two china vases on the mantel shelf, and Gilbert fastidiously suspected that the flowers, and the mantel shelf itself, were dusty.
“Mrs. Mars?” he began. “I’m — —”
“You’re Owen Gilbert, of course,” the invalid said, with a perceptible eagerness. “I’m sure you couldn’t think I’ve forgotten you, and your mother’s been kind enough to say you remember me. Lily’ll be down right away. She saw you drive up through the window and ran upstairs to see if her nose was shiny, I’m afraid. The poor thing’s so terribly excited about your coming, and of course she’s temperamental and feels she’s got one of her off days and won’t be at her best. Naturally, with so much depending on it, she’s terribly afraid of the impression she’ll make on you. You’ll sit down, won’t you?”
Somewhat heartsick, he sat in a rocking-chair, facing Mrs. Mars. Her phrase “so much depending on it” dismayed him and conscientiously he felt he must enlighten her. “I’m afraid I can’t let you think that anything of importance could depend on me.”
“Ah, you mustn’t be modest!” she protested. “Of course we know all about the splendid career you’re having and — —”
“My dear Mrs. Mars!” Gilbert said compassionately. “I’m not modest. I’m only explaining that though you can count on my help I haven’t the powers I’m afraid you imagine. A few playwrights much better established than I am select the casts for their plays and are sometimes able to put young people of talent on the stage; but I don’t possess that importance. I’ve had one fair success and two failures and — —”
“Oh, but everybody knows the great Adler and Company are going to put on your new play; it’s been announced in our papers time and again.” Mrs. Mars evidently still thought him merely modest. “If there could just be a good part in it for Lily, or if that isn’t possible, because of course we realize she’s just a beginner, why, even a rather small one! Your dear mother said she was sure — —”
“I’m afraid she did,” Gilbert said. “I’m afraid she’s always been given to overestimating an only son. For that matter, I’m afraid I’ve had to learn, myself, that a new playwright, next to a new actor, is generally treated as the most negligible person about a theatre. Compared to a stage-hand, he’s a nonentity. He’s pleased if the very doorman speaks to him with a little condescending familiarity.”
Mrs. Mars, unimpressed, laughed gently. “Your dear mother says you’ve always underrated yourself, and I can well believe her!” Abruptly serious, she looked at him with a fervid anxiety. “If there weren’t just the right part for Lily in this new play of yours, couldn’t a good one be written into it? I’ve read of such things being done, especially when some new genius is being discovered and — —” She lifted a thin hand from the old white shawl that covered her; she touched her pallid lips admonishingly. “Sh! You mustn’t tell her I said this, because it was something she wanted to suggest to you, herself, and she thought she could do it better. She’s coming!”
Footsteps were heard upon an uncarpeted stairway, and Owen Gilbert’s low spirits sank lower as an inner door opened and Lily Mars came into the room.
He rose, giving her a quick glance from eyes usually accurate in their estimations of people. Even to his own hearing, his greeting sounded plaintive, for his first impression of her was not favorable, and something startlingly personal and demanding in her reciprocal first glance at him shot into him a premonition that she was going to be a serious nuisance to him. “A girl in bad taste” was his too sweeping first thought; then he added, “Rather unusual type of good looks, though — and going to use them on me her darnedest!”
Within a moment, adding more to his observation, he somewhat modified his feeling of protest. Her brilliant eyes, like her mother’s, were warm hazel under black eyebrows; her hair was the deep tan of an oak leaf in late autumn. Altogether, at second glance, her features were “really not uninteresting” he thought, and he immediately admitted that her figure had a suave young symmetry out of the common. Moreover, he had never found himself in the presence of any person more exquisitely possessed of the very peach-bloom of youth, and this bloom and the lovely figure, too, were almost flagrantly revealed by the bad taste; for what she wore was a directoire ball gown of old yellow satin easily guessed to be a recently made-over relic of Mrs. Mars’s better days. Worst of all, it had probably been made over hurriedly for this very encounter and for the ampler display of the aspirant’s shapeliness, and, to the somewhat frayed, misplaced elegance of the costume, there had been added some jingling cheap bracelets and a necklace of false pearls execrably oversized.
