Delphi Complete Works of Booth Tarkington (Illustrated), page 577
“She asked me not to fall in love with you.”
“She didn’t!”
The seriousness of his exclamation amused Lily. “The dear angel, she was so cute about it! Made a great joke of it; but she meant it and so did I when I promised her. Of course what she really meant was that if I fell in love with you it might do something toward getting you that way about me; and what I really meant was that I owed her too much to let myself hope for any such calamity, and so I never would. I’ve got an idea you think I’m too feather-brained to be conscientious; but I am about some things, you’ll find out. Besides, it was an easy promise to make. I care too much about you to fall in love with you. The people I care about are my mother and Clara and your mother and you and — and Mr. Hurley — and old Joe and Jennie and Rita, and Pinkney Monk and the three boys and Harry Vokes and — Oh, there’s quite a list! Oh, and that audience to-night, the precious lambs!”
It seemed to Owen that she had made an omission that was strikingly significant, and, in a voice not entirely steady, he called it to her attention. “You don’t mention Mr. Allan.”
Lily’s gaze moved from his and fixed itself moodily upon the wall. “You men are queer — a great deal queerer than we women are. Do you think a woman of any spirit would let herself be treated absolutely as the property of every man that happened to be in love with her? But that’s just what you men do. If some woman falls in love with you she keeps you scared out of your wits for fear something you do won’t look as if you were as slavishly one of her possessions as her powder-puff is! What’s more, all your men-friends’ll be in a panic of exertion to keep her thinking you haven’t got any rights that she doesn’t allow you. Some friends of his that live here are giving him a party to-night and told him to bring along anybody in the company he chose, so of course he had to take Isabelle. Imagine if he hadn’t! Just suppose he’d asked me, what a state you and Mr. Hurley would have been in by this time over it!”
Owen glanced at his watch, and rose. “It’s time for you to be in bed, I have work to do and it isn’t safe for you to be here, anyhow, even if what you say is true about some theatrical people running in and out of each other’s rooms. You mustn’t do it again, especially not in this sort of hotel.”
She jumped up and put a hand on his arm. “I thought so. Now you’re really angry. I see! Keep off the grass! You two policemen are duty bound to see to it that her private property’s protected and that he doesn’t get one instant’s escape from being nagged and badgered and bored to death! That’s his reward for being magnificent in his part to-night — and oh, wasn’t he, though! And I couldn’t dare to tell him so in anything except the hastiest whisper!” Her voice trembled and so did the fingers upon Owen’s sleeve. “Yet I think that whisper may have meant something to the poor slave she and all the rest of you make of him. Ah, now you do hate me, don’t you?” She stepped back from him, and tears seemed imminent in her eyes; but suddenly she tossed her head, smiled and became radiant once more. “Silly! On such a night and just after I’d been saying we wouldn’t spoil it because it’s a night out of fairyland. Oh, help me to keep it so, Owen! I do so want to remember it as all perfect. Don’t you think it’s just about perfect, Owen, yourself?”
“Well, well; I hope so,” he said. “Just run along now, dear, and — —”
“I will.” She went toward the door, but stopped. “Owen, when we think of what this means at home — of my precious, precious mother and my precious, precious sister, and the light it brings into their lives!” She faltered, and then the tears did come. “I didn’t mean to cry; but they’re so — so dear to me.”
“I know, Lily. There’s something I think I’d better speak to you about. I think it was perfectly natural of you to want to give that little party to-night. Of course you would. Why not? And of course you’d want to be at this hotel; it’s a pretty special occasion. It seems to me, though, that you might run a little short of funds before the end of the week, and Mr. Paradene might make some fuss about additional advances; so if you’d let me — —”
“No, no!” She shook her head gayly, bright again. “Like you, I’ve had a bringing-up by a mother, and though most of her teaching doesn’t show, I’m afraid, there are one or two things I’d never be able to do. I just couldn’t borrow. I know it’s untheatrical of me, because Joe and Harry and Tom-Jim-Jack don’t really seem to know which is which about money — if one has some they all have, apparently. But I couldn’t do it. Don’t worry; I’ll get along all right.”
“But about — about your mother and sister — —”
Lily clasped her hands upon her breast impulsively. “Oh, Owen, if they could have been here to-night! If they could have seen it! If some miracle could only have transported them to-night into that heavenly, heavenly audience, that darling audience! And to think there’ll be another to-morrow night — really to-night, because it’s already morning. Oh, I couldn’t sleep! I don’t want to sleep. I couldn’t! I can’t wait! I want to be into my costume and that glorious wig. I just want to act and act and act and act! And I shall! To-night and to-morrow night and the night after, and oh, every night! They’ll all be gloriously just like to-night! Won’t they, Owen?”
“Oh, I — I do hope so,” he said uncertainly.
Upon a thought she had, Lily uttered an urchin laugh. “You know something I’ve been more than half expecting? After the dress rehearsal everybody in the company believed she’d do it, too. They were all sure she’d try to get that wig away from me. Golly! The only reason in the world she didn’t must be because she hasn’t had sense enough to think of it!”
“Oh, no!” The playwright could not repress the impulse to lament. “Dear me! She’s thought of it, Lily!”
“What! You don’t mean — —”
“Yes, you poor child,” he said, and it seemed to him that it would be best to complete at once the unkind task to which he had been appointed. “She’s got her way. You’re not to wear the wig again and you’re to play your last act scene giving her the stage, with you in the chair down near the footlights where she was to-night.”
Lily was incredulous. “But it can’t be done! In the first place, Harry gives me the letter because — —”
“Because of ‘Myra’s’ auburn hair, certainly! But you see such trifles as the structure of a play don’t matter at all sometimes, my dear. At least you have a companion in misfortune; I’m hit too, you see. Somehow between now and to-morrow morning I have to scratch, twist and blister that manuscript on the table into giving Vokes another reason for handing you the letter, because you’re going to rehearse the new version at eleven in the morning.”
“But what possible other reason could there be?”
“You’re quite right,” he said. “But it has to be done. I’m afraid there are even more ups and downs in the life than you thought, Lily.”
“Well, but — —” She paused, and, to his astonishment, her expression was not one of consternation; she was suddenly profoundly thoughtful. “Play that scene down stage — in the chair?” she murmured, and added, looking at him absently, “My own hair mightn’t be so bad, you know. She’s a fighter, isn’t she? You poor man, caught in a ladies’ battle.” Her manner changed; her expression became that of a person who pathetically does not reproach another who has failed to defend her. “You want me to go, I know,” she said sadly, and pointed to the manuscript upon the table, “so you can begin the work of destroying me.”
“Lily! Lily!” he broke out, groaning. “I don’t want you to go and you know I’ll make this change in the script do you as little harm as I possibly can. It does pretty well knock ‘Myra’s’ eye out — Hurley knew that as well as we do and the sacrifice hurt him, too; but he made it to save the play and it’s got to be done. The theatre’s the devil and you’re just beginning to understand that. Isabelle herself can’t help doing what she’s doing; she’s worked hard all her life getting up to where she is, and of course she’ll fight — fight every way she knows how — to hold what she’s got. You might destroy it, you see. There! Go to bed! We’ll all just do what we can.”
“I — I know,” she said slowly, and sighed quaveringly on an indrawn breath, like a hurt child. “So this was my one night out of — out of fairyland. Just one.” Her head drooped; she went to the door and stood there for a last moment, a crushed, delicate figure infinitely touching in this loss of all the gay triumphancy so lately animating it. “I know — dear Owen. I’ll — I’ll be good. Good night.”
Not altering that attitude of desolation, she opened the door and went out slowly and so softly that the closing of the door made no sound. His heart was wrung for her and to brighten her he would have given whatever he had in the world, just then; nevertheless, somewhere in a remoteness of his mind there came into renewed vague life a small old suspicion of his. She had been all reality during the murmured expression of her thoughts about her own hair; but there seemed to be just a possibility that since then she had somewhat pressed her hurt meekness — in fact, that though unquestionably she had suffered a shock and was genuinely hurt, she had been acting a little, too, and, somewhere within her, had a little enjoyment of the scene she played.
The thought just peeped into view and withdrew entirely as he sat down to attempt a revision of his manuscript that would eliminate the wig. Tinkering dismally, he tried many devices, only to find them not plausible, and finally came to the conclusion that no device at all was better than a bad one. In the original manuscript of the play “Captain Feenix”, fat, wicked, inept henchman of the glittering “Hawkins”, is told to deliver secretly a letter to a lovely young auburn-haired lady at “Catalpa House” plantation; — at five in the morning the author decided that it would henceforth be best for “Captain Feenix” (Harry Vokes) to deliver the letter to the wrong lovely young lady at “Catalpa House” plantation without any mention of hair. Since neither “Hawkins” nor “Captain Feenix” knew that the auburn-haired “Hester’s” younger sister also had auburn hair, why could they not equally as well be ignorant that she had a sister at all? Fatigued, the playwright was conscious of an inner dissatisfaction with the subterfuge; but wrote the necessary rather slight alterations upon the pages before him, read them over, shook his head forebodingly and went to bed to dream a dream of being an actor playing a scene with Lily Mars before a gigantic audience that rose and drove them both screaming from the stage.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
HE SLEPT THREE hours and had breakfast in his room, accompanying it with a reading of the theatrical column of the Somerville morning newspaper. As O’Mahoney had foretold, young Mr. Leland was benign; he wrote at the outset that “ ’Catalpa House’, though more an entertaining stratagem in picaresque romance than a drama of deeps and human agonies portrayed by the mordant penetration of a genius” was nevertheless “distinctly worthwhile as a tour de force in lighter vein.” Continuing, after a synopsis of the plot, he remarked that Owen Gilbert was “neither Strindberg nor Shaw nor Pinero”; that a lack of “the more mature sort of thinking” was obvious in the play; that the theme would have been “the better expounded by the Gallic touch of Bernstein” and that those who sought for “Attic pellucid clarity of motivation sounding the robust profundities of nether human outcries in the formless passion of humanity’s agonized surge and struggle in the realities of life magnificent and terrible would be disappointed.” On the other hand, the play offered the spectator a “consummated suspensiveness and interludes of quaint comedy”; the audience had made manifest their “symptomatic delight” and when some of the more “glaring crudities” had been “lopped off” and the play “generally revised by an adroiter hand which it might possibly be advisable for the management to call in from outside” it would be not too much to hope that the “lavish and colorful production accorded to this undeniably meager and youthful but promising effort of the dramatist” would be granted the “guerdon of life by the Imperiali who rule Broadway.”
Concerning the actors and the “production”, however, the critic had written whole-heartedly and at times with an enthusiastically hurrying alliterative pen. “Seldom has Somerville seen scenery more satisfying and never has the able Adler more adroitly cast the characters of a drama.” As for Eugene, the reviewer felt that “words could not well be too warm for such wedding of manly beauty to masterly art”, a union “satisfactorily sustained and supported by the talented emotional acting of Isabelle Hedrington.” Owen read with anxiety what was said of Isabelle and came upon a word that worried him. “Mature” the thoughtless young Leland had written, possessing little mordant penetration of his own. “Mature in art and mind as well as in her tall, well-rounded pulchritude, this talented and conscientious actress is always excellent and dependable and will still be seen in leading rôles for many years to come.”
The review’s approval of Ord, Vokes and Rita Carlin was gracious; but when it came to Lily the playwright’s anxiety increased, though he was pleased, too, when he thought of what the printed scribblings would mean to Lily’s mother. “Here is a young actress we confess previously unknown to our orbit, and we would feel the more ashamed by the confession had we not heard a whisper that her advent upon the stage is a recent shift from the mere contentment with high social standing to the inevitable climax of a career as a brilliant society amateur with the adoption of professional footlights. Nothing could more lucidly illuminate the genius of Felix Adler as a producer than his discovery of this young artist, and we dare to asseverate that neither Frohman nor Belasco himself could have found two such red-haired examples of pulchritude and art in combination to present in one and the same play.
“Miss Mars has a piquante personality, lips of rose leaf, a dainty profile, eyes that kindle, eyes that beam and sparkle, eyes that grow tawnily soft, an aristocratic hand, a pretty foot, winsome symmetry of line and limb, and a head crowned with an auburn glory that would be the despair of a Parisian coiffeuse. Her voice has a singular quality. Like an evanescent perfume it is sweet and penetrant yet never for an instant saccharine and fails to cloy. Isabelle Hedrington with her mature methods and hair of almost exactly the same shade as this younger artist’s ardent ringlets is no fortuitous foil but a tributary illustration of the art of Felix Adler in selection. We recommend to our readers,” the review said in conclusion, “a remembrance of the name of Lily Mars henceforth. Beauty, attractiveness, scintillant wit and creative intellect are not often so combined. It is to be hoped and we venture the prophecy that Miss Mars will climb high. Lovers of the drama should attend this play in numbers and we advise that they will find ample reward for eye and ear in the perfect acting of Eugene Allan and in Miss Mars’s pluperfect portrayal of the character of ‘Myra.’ ”
Owen finished his reading of the last sentence with an actual gasp. “Oh dear!” he murmured just afterward, and was conscious that as an expression of his feeling the exclamation was ludicrously futile. “But the infernal thing’s printed,” he added more philosophically. “It can’t be helped now.” Then with a loudly blown “Whew!” he rose, put the manuscript of his play under his arm and set forth for the morning’s rehearsal; but in the corridor outside his door he encountered a youth in a jaunty uniform who brought him a telegram. It was from Mrs. Gilbert.
DELIGHTED WITH YOUR GOOD NEWS OF PLAY NO MATTER HOW GREAT ITS SUCCESS YOU DESERVE MORE I CANNOT WITHHOLD TOLD YOU SO ABOUT HER AND IT IS SPLENDID NEWS BUT PLEASE ASK HER TO WRITE HER MOTHER WHO IS VERY ANXIOUS AND I AM AFRAID WORRIES FOR MORE THAN ONE REASON WHICH I IMAGINE YOU WILL UNDERSTAND THEY HAVE HEARD FROM HER ONLY ONCE SINCE SHE LEFT HOME A SHORT EXCITED NOTE UPON REACHING NEW YORK THEY KNOW SHE IS VERY BUSY BUT NATURALLY ARE MUCH TROUBLED SO DO URGE HER PLEASE PLEASE WRITE THEM
Owen put the telegram in his pocket, and, recalling certain tears recently seen, smiled a lopsided smile as he went on his way to the theatre. There, as he came in from the lobby, he saw Hurley and Pinkney Monk waiting for him near the orchestra rail, while the members of the company stood chatting in pairs and groups upon the stage. Several of the actors held folded newspapers in their hands; young Lancey was one of these, and a tiny episode that resulted flickered for a moment across the playwright’s vision as he walked down the aisle. Lancey was talking to Eugene and Isabelle; he was cheerful and a lively gesture of his brought the newspaper near Isabelle’s face. There was no possibility that it would touch her; but her head jerked back and there was a glance from her eye that gave the playwright a curious brief impression. He thought she was like a fastidious woman tourist among tribesmen who carelessly handle snakes; that glance was like such a tourist’s for a savage who brings poison fangs close to her head.
This resemblance, not altogether fantastic, appeared and was gone in the same instant. Owen called to Lily, handed her the telegram across the footlights without a word, and, turning at once to Hurley and Monk, opened his manuscript before them and explained the alterations he had made. Hurley accepted these dubiously; but, as neither he nor the stage director proved able to think of anything better, he presently dismissed all of the company except Lily, Isabelle and Harry Vokes, the three whose “lines” were affected by the alterations. The rehearsal was short.
Lily went through her part in a defeated manner that brought no chiding from the sympathetic Monk; but, having concluded the listless business, he detained her until after Isabelle and Vokes had gone. “Brace it up as much as you can to-night, dear,” he said. “You can still get some nice little effects with this part, so don’t be discouraged. Anyhow, do the best you can with it.”
“I’ll try,” Lily said meekly, with quivering lips, as she turned away. She came through the passage behind the proscenium boxes at the right of the stage and called softly to Owen from the dark side aisle. “May I speak to you a moment?” Then, as he joined her, “You despise me again,” she said huskily. “You always think the worst of me, don’t you?” She laughed plaintively. “Ah, yes, whether it’s true or not! I wrote Mother a long letter just before we left New York. I don’t know why in the world she hasn’t got it yet. And of course I wired her last night about how the audience had treated me. I guess it’s a good thing I wired her then, before this happened to me.”
