BOOK III
CHAPTER I
I have to take up my story again about eighteen months later at the point of my going out to Suburbia to ask Gerald McDermott for a part in his new play, which was being rehearsed with Sarah in the rôle of Bettina. But before that there had been some rather mortifying experiences to teach me that though I was done with Higgleston, it was, to a certainty, not done with me. In any case I suppose the shock of my husband's death must have affected my work unfavourably, but the knowledge of his secret defection, and the excuse he found for it in what was best in me, made still corroding poison at the bottom of my wound.
What it all amounted to in my career was that the season which should have swept me back to Chicago in triumphant establishment of my gift, trickled out in faint praise and cold esteem. It was not that you could place your finger and say just there was the difficulty, but what came of it was another year on the road with Cline and Erskine, in stock. The Hardings, notwithstanding their disappointment in what they expected to make of me, managed to be kind.
"You'll pull up," they assured me; "it's because you are really an artist that you show what you've been through!" And they didn't know the half of what that was.
To Henry Mills my engagement with Cline and Erskine, was a step forward into that blazoned and banal professionalism which passes in America for dramatic success; but Sarah knew, and I think I knew myself, that the dance they led us in the spotlight of copious advertisement, was a dance of death to much that the plastic art should be. In this instance it was demonstrated even to the hopeful eye of Henry Mills, for the play chosen proved so little suited to the semi-rural, Middle West cities where we played it, that before the season was half over we were recalled, and, after an empty interval, finished out the engagement in one of those sensation mongering shows with which such combinations as Cline and Erskine clutch at the fleeing skirts of a public they never understand.
It was about a month after the closing of this engagement that I took Sarah's suggestion about applying to Gerald McDermott, but not before I had tried several other things. The truth was, as I knew very well when I faced it, that I had at the time nothing in me. To those who haven't it, a gift is a sort of extra possession, like an eye or a hand that can be commanded to its accustomed trick on any occasion; but to the owners of it it is a libation poured to the Unknown God. I had emptied my cup of its froth of youth, and as yet nothing had touched the profounder experience from which it should be fed and filled again, and I had no technique to supply the insufficiencies of my inspiration. Somewhere within me I felt the stuff of power, stiff and unworkable, needing the flux of passion and the shaping hand of skill.
Looking back now from the vantage of a tolerable success, if you were to ask me what, more than any other thing, prevents the fulness of our native art, I should say the blank public misapprehension of its processes. Turning every way to catch the favourable wind, what met me then, was the general conviction on the part of my friends that if you had talent you succeeded anyway, and if you weren't succeeding it was because you hadn't any talent. I suffered many humiliations before I learned how absolutely, by that same society that so liberally resents the implication of any separateness in art, the artist is thrust back upon himself. To do what seemed necessary for the development of my gift, to have a year or two to travel and study, to connote its powers with its limitations, required money; and though there in Chicago there was money for every sort of adventure that stirred the imagination of man, there was none for the particular sort of investment I represented. At least not at the price I was prepared to pay.
The half of what had been put into setting my brother on his feet would have served me, but I learned from Effie, that as much of my mother's capital as had been put into Forester's business, was not only impossible to be withdrawn from keeping him upright, but threatened not to hold him so for as long as it was necessary for mother to see in him the figure of a provider. This had been made plain at Christmas, when Effie had written me that a particular wheeled chair which my mother had set her heart upon because of a hope it held out of church-going, would be impossible unless I came forward handsomely. I did come forward on a scale commensurate with the Taylorville estimate of my salary, which was by no means comparable to its purchasing power in Chicago; and now I was beginning to realize that unless some one came forward for me, I stood to lose the Shining Destiny to which I felt myself appointed. I was slow in understanding that it was not to be looked for by any of the paths by which interest and succour are traditionally due. Not, for instance, from Pauline and Henry Mills.
I was seeing a great deal of them since I had come to Chicago, not only because of our earlier friendship, but because I found myself constantly thrown back on all that they stood for, by my distaste for much that I saw myself implicated in as a theatrical star who had not quite made good. I hated, quite unjustly, I believe, the players with whom for the time I was professionally classed; I loathed the shallow shop talk, the makeshift rooms we lived in, the outward smartness and the pinch of anxiety it covered. I was irritated by my external and circumstantial resemblance to much that I felt instinctively, kept them where they were, and vexed at some cheapness in myself which seemed to be revealed by the irritation. I had been thrown up out of the freemasonry of the preliminary struggle into a kind of backwater of established second-rateness, where there were also second-rate manners and morals and social perceptions. It was a great relief to get away from it to Pauline's home in Evanston, and the air it had of being somehow established at the pivot of existence. Pauline had two children by now, and a manner of being abundantly equal to the world in which she moved, a manner which I was only just realizing was largely owing to the figure of her husband's income. What Pauline furnished me at her home, over and above the real affection there was still between us, was a sort of continuous performance of the domestic virtues.
That faculty for knowing exactly what she wanted, which had led her to make the most of her housekeeping allowance in the days when making the most of it was her chief occupation, now that the centres of her activity had been shifted from the practical to the social and cultural, stood her in remarkable stead. I was so constantly amazed by the celerity and sureness with which she seized on just the attitude or opinion which suited best with the part she had cast herself for as the perfect wife and mother, that it was only when I discovered its complete want of relativity to the purpose of the play or to the rest of the company, that I was not taken in by it. I doubt now if Pauline ever had an idea or permitted herself a behaviour which was not conditioned by the pattern she had set for herself, which she intrigued both Henry and myself into believing was the only real and appreciable life.
At the time of which I write it was a great comfort to me to get away from my own dreary professionalism, to the nursery at Evanston, or to add my small flourish to the scene à faire of Henry's homecoming, made every day to seem the one event for which the household waited, from which, indeed, it took its excuse for being. For all of this was so well in line with what Henry, who with the amplification of his income had taken on a due rotundity of outline and a slight tendency to baldness, conceived as proper for a man's home to be, that he played up to it as much as was in him. He had still his air of knowingness about the theatre, and if there was at times in his manner a suggestion that he might have found it pleasanter to adjust his relation to me on the basis of what I was as an actress, if I had not been quite so much the friend, it was so far modified by his genuine admiration for his wife and his cession to her of every right of judgment in the home, that I was inclined to accept him at his own and Pauline's estimate as the model husband.
It was only a few days before my visit to Gerald McDermott, that I had undertaken to state to Pauline the nature of the help I required and my title to it. I had gone out to dinner and found her putting on a new gown, one of those garments admirably contrived between the smartness of evening dress and the intimacy of negligée, in which Evanston ladies of that period were wont to receive their lords.
"I'm needing something new myself," I said for a beginning, "and I'm divided between the certainty that if I don't get an engagement I can't afford it, and if I don't afford it I probably won't get an engagement." Pauline stopped in the process of hooking up, to take stock of me.
"You absurd child!" The note of amused admonition with which she ordinarily accepted my professional exigencies turned on the note of correction. "Don't you think you put too much stress on those things?"
"What things?" She had touched upon the spring of irritation.
"Clothes, you know, and appearances. Isn't it better just to do your work well and rest upon that?"
"Pauline, if you had ever looked for an engagement you would know that getting it is largely a matter of appearing equal to it, and clothes are the better part of appearing."
"But if you know that your work is good, what do you care what people think of you?" I dodged the moral situation about to be precipitated on me.
"It's about the only way you know it is good, knowing what people think of it."
"Now see here," Pauline protested, reinforced by the evident superiority of her viewpoint to mine, "you're getting all wrong; these things you are thinking of, they are not the real things; they don't count, not in the long run; it's only the spiritual things that really matter." She had put on all the plastic effect of nobility that was part of her stock in trade with Henry Mills. I thrust out against it sharply.
"Do you realize, Pauline, that if I don't get an engagement soon I shan't be able to pay my board?"
"Oh, you poor dear!" She came over and took my hand. I don't know why women like Pauline do that, but when they do it it is a sign they are not equal to the situation and are trying to fake it with you.
"I know it is hard" – she found the cooing note with facility – "but it will come right; it always does. I've always found that there is a way provided."
Something flashed into my mind that I had read in the newspapers recently about the corporations Henry worked for, and I wondered if Pauline had the least notion how the way, for her, was humanly provided, but the sound of Henry's latchkey put an end to the conversation, which I hadn't felt sufficiently encouraging to warrant my taking up again.
I went from Pauline's, at the very first opportunity, to Sarah Croyden, who was playing in Chicago, and doing her kindliest to blow the wind of hope into my sagging sails. I met Cecelia Brune there. It had been to me the witness of how far I had fallen from my mark, that I had been thrown with her again in my last engagement. Hers was the sort of talent that Cline and Erskine could play up to the limit of the inadmissible. There were not wanting intimations that Cecelia had moved her own limit a notch or two in that direction. She had taken a characteristic view of my reappearance in her neighbourhood.
"Got into the band-wagon, didn't you?" she remarked. "I saw Dean on the road last year and she said you was going in for high-brow stunts. Nothin' to it. You stay with Cline and Erskine; they get you on like anything." Her own notion of getting on was to figure as the sole female attraction in a song and dance skit in what she pronounced "Vawdville."
"It's the only place havin' a figgur does you any good!" That she did not recommend it for me must be taken for her estimate of mine. Nevertheless I was amused by her, and Sarah, I knew, was even a little fond. Sarah's affections were a sort of natural emanation from her, like the rays of a candle, and warmed all they lighted on. On this afternoon I found Cecelia drinking tea there and I wasn't able to conceal my professional depression from her sharp, shallow inquisitiveness. There were never two or three players got together, I believe, but the talk turned on the comparative ineffectiveness of Merit as against Pull in the struggle for success.
"There's no two ways about it," insisted Cecelia Brune; "you gotta get a hold of some rich guy and freeze to him." The extent to which Cecelia had blossomed out in ostrich tips and orchids that bright spring afternoon, might have suggested to an experienced eye, that the freezing process had already begun. I say might have, because Sarah and I found it difficult to disassociate her from the hard, grubby innocence in which our acquaintance had begun. Sarah, I know, believed in her and had her in often to informal occasions as a bulwark against what, with all her faith and pains, she didn't finally save her from.
"You can talk all you want to," Cecelia asseverated, "about man being the natural provider. I've noticed he don't work at the job much without he's gettin' something out of it. If you're sufferin' with that little old song and dance about men doin' for you because you're a woman and need it, you gotta get over it. There's nothin' laid down over that counter unless you deliver the goods." She was nibbling lumps of sugar moistened in her tea, and the wild rose of her cheeks and the distracting rings of her hair made her offensiveness a mere childish impertinence.
"Look at Helen Matlock," she ran on, "gettin' five hundred a week. And when old Sedgwick put it up to her she said she'd die rather; and then she went home and found her mother sick, and what did she do? Never batted an eye, but told her she'd got an engagement, and went back and made it good. An' now she's gettin' five hundred. That's what I call doin' well by yourself."
"She can't mean it," Sarah extenuated when Cecelia had gone; "she's too frank about it. When she stops talking I shall begin to suspect her."
"But is it true, about Miss Matlock, I mean?" Just at that juncture Helen Matlock was doing the work I felt most drawn to, most fit to undertake.
"I suppose so," Sarah allowed; "it's a common saying that the way to the footlights in the Majestic is through the manager's private room." She came over and sat beside me on the bed, which, under a Bagdad curtain, did duty as a couch. "There are other theatres besides the Majestic," she said.
"None that want me," I averred.
"Oh," she cried, "you don't mean – ?"
"No," I had to own, "I don't mean that I have a chance to get on even by misbehaving myself. I'm not the kind to whom that sort of chance comes." Sarah stroked my hand a while.
"I've been thinking, if you could get a small part or a season, you could take it under another name until you are quite yourself again. It's often done." I could see she had gone much farther than that with it in her thought. It was just such cover as that I was seeking for the renaissance of my acting power.
And that was what led to my going out to Suburbia to see Gerald McDermott about the part of Mrs. Brandis in "The Futurist."
It was out quite in the frayed edge of outer fringe of real estate ventures which hedged Chicago round, in a district which was spoiled for country and not quite made into town, and from the number of weedy plots not built upon between the scroll-saw cottages, had almost a rural air. Leaning trolleys went zizzing along the banked highways, and at the ends of the unpaved avenues there were flat gleams of the lake. Depressed as I was by the consciousness of having fallen from the estate of actresses who command engagements to those who seek them, I was still able to be touched a little by curiosity by what Sarah had told me of McDermott and his wife, whom he had married for her pretty, feminine inconsequence, who, having no point of attachment to her husband's life but femininity, was able to imagine none for any other woman, and suffered incredibly in consequence.
"If one could only discover why clever men marry that sort of women!" I wondered.
"Oh, Jerry thought he was going to bend her to his will," Sarah explained. "But that kind don't bend, they just slump." I had hardly knocked at the door before I had an inkling of how painful to the author of "The Futurist" the process of slumping might be.
I could hear the fretting of a child, hushed suddenly by my knock, then the patter of little feet across the floor and voices startled and pitched low. I was just debating whether I shouldn't pretend I hadn't heard anything and go away again, when Mr. McDermott opened the door. I had met him once at Sarah's and should have known him again by the pallor of his countenance against the dead blackness of his hair, straight and shining like an Indian's. The effect of boyishness that one derived from his tall, thin figure was increased now by the marks of weeping about his eyes. In the glimpse of the room behind him I was aware of a disorder only excusable in the face of a family catastrophe; one of the children that ran to his knee was still in its little petticoat, without a slip, and had not been washed or combed that day. I wavered an instant between the obligation of politeness to ignore the situation and the certainty that I couldn't.
"Oh!" I cried. I snatched at my repertory for the proper mixture of commiseration and consternation. "Is any one ill?"
His desperate need of help opened the door to me.
"My wife" … he began, but the state of the room accounted for that, as he perceived, taking it in afresh through my eyes. Mrs. McDermott was lying on the sofa in the coma of exhaustion. She lifted her face to me for a moment, swollen with crying, and then let herself go again into that pit in which a woman sinks an impossible situation. She was really faint, poor thing, and, if I judged by the state of the house, had had no luncheon. I took all that in at a glance, but it was none of my business.
"Is it her heart?" I wanted to know of her husband as I bent over her. He caught up the suggestion eagerly.
"Yes, her heart … she is very weak." He did whatever I suggested on that explanation. I would have proposed putting her to bed if I had not feared that that would involve more revelations of the family disorder than I was willing to tax him with.
We got her out of her faintness presently and found her a safety valve in pitying her poor children with that sloppy sort of maternal affection which is not inconsistent with a good deal of neglect. I wasn't working for anything but to save Jerry – I came to call him that before many weeks – from the embarrassment of what I was sure had been a family fracas which threatened at every moment to break out again. I suggested tea, for I was satisfied that both of them wanted food, and while I was making toast before the sitting-room fire, Mrs. McDermott managed to get herself and the children into some sort of order. I could see then how pretty she had been in a large-eyed, short-lipped way, and how charming in her youth had been the inconsequence which as the mistress of a family made her a sloven. Not to seem to notice too much the superficial air of being prepared for company which she managed to give the children by washing their faces surreptitiously, I explained to Mr. McDermott that I had come about the part of Mrs. Brandis.
"Oh, you'll do," he assented heartily. "You'll do just as you are. Mrs. Brandis is a widow you know … that is, the Mrs. Brandis that I created – "
"Just as you conceived it of course," I insisted, "I should want to play it that way."
"The trouble is that Moresco isn't satisfied so easily; he wants me to make changes in the part."
"Well …" I was prepared to make concessions.
"I'm afraid he has somebody in mind …"
"Fancy Filette," his wife broke in, "a painting, flirting, immoral!.." Jerry scraped his chair back along the floor to cover the word, but I knew where I was in a twinkling.
"Fancy Filette! She'll play it in short skirts!"
"I'll be lucky if she doesn't insist on a song and dance."
"He doesn't need to have her unless he wants to." Mrs. McDermott was positive on that point. She was sitting with both children on her lap, chiefly in order to keep up the fiction that I didn't know she had just been having hysterics, I had cautioned her against letting them climb over her, and she promptly let them, because the idea that she was tending them at a risk to her health, rather helped out with her own notion of herself as a misused but devoted wife and mother.
Jerry looked at me over her head in a mute appeal to me to understand.
"Unless Moresco puts on my play there is no chance for it," he protested. "I've been to the others. I'll tell you, though, if you go to him just as you are, he may think better of it. He can't possibly get anybody so good."
We neither of us believed that Mr. Moresco would turn down Fancy Filette for anybody, but we kept up the game of thinking so from sheer desperation. I played too at the pretence that Jerry's wife was a delicate, idealized sort of creature who did not understand the great hard world. That was no doubt what had appealed to him in the beginning, but she wasn't made up for the part. She had begun to put on weight after she had children, and her hair wanted washing. I got away as soon as I could and went straight to Sarah.
"They'd been having some kind of a row," I told her.
"Oh, it must have been Fancy Filette who set her off," Sarah was certain. "She took to you as a relief, but you'll be in for it too if you get the part."
I had to admit to myself after I had been to Mr. Moresco, that there was not much likelihood that I would get it. He laid the tips of his pudgy fingers together and addressed me with the slight blur in his speech which convinced one of the racial affinity which he commonly denied.
"Mr. McDermott thinks it will suit me admirably," I told him.
"Ah, yes, the author," the manager mentioned him as though it were a fact indulgently admitted to the discussion, "but then, my dear Miss Lattimore, we have to think of the audience."
There was this peculiarity of Moresco's handling of an audience, that he treated it as an entity, a sort of human stratification of which the three front rows were lubricious, the body of the orchestra high-brow, the first balcony sentimental and virtuous, the gallery facetious. As far as possible he arranged his plays to meet the requirements.
"Now we have Miss Croyden for Bettina, she is your type." – He meant as a woman, not as an artist; Sarah and I were both serious and respectable. – "For Mrs. Brandis I think we should have something a little more snappy."
"It isn't written snappy in the play," I reminded him.
"Ah, no, that is the trouble; I have spoken to Mr. McDermott; he will perhaps change it."
"And if he doesn't you will keep me in mind for it." I kept my voice with difficulty from being urgent. "You see, I don't feel like playing a heavy part this year." I glanced down at my mourning; I hoped he would accept it as an explanation. Two or three days later I saw Sarah and she remarked that Jerry was rewriting some parts of his play at the request of the manager.
"The part of Mrs. Brandis?" Sarah nodded.
"Mr. Moresco wants it more – more – "
"Snappy," I supplied. "And who is to have it, have you heard?"
"Fancy Filette!"
"Oh, well, she's snappy enough, I suppose."
"I know; I don't even like to be billed with her; but, anyway, the part wasn't worthy of you." But I felt as I went home to my lodging that that was only Sarah's kind way of putting it.