1,99 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
In "Presenting Lily Mars," Booth Tarkington masterfully weaves a tale of ambition, passion, and the pursuit of success within the vibrant landscape of early 20th-century American theater. The narrative follows the spirited Lily Mars, a young and determined actress from a small town, as she navigates the challenging and often ruthless world of the performing arts in New York City. Tarkington employs a blend of sharp humor and heartfelt sentiment to explore themes of aspiration and disillusionment, while his vivid imagery and character-driven style create a captivating glimpse into the era's cultural zeitgeist. Booth Tarkington, an accomplished novelist and playwright, was deeply immersed in the artistic developments of his time, which heavily influenced his writing. Having won the Pulitzer Prize twice, Tarkington's keen observations on society and human behavior are evident in this work, reflecting both his experiences in the world of literature and his understanding of the theater's allure and pitfalls. His own background, coupled with a genuine love for performance, infuses "Presenting Lily Mars" with authenticity and emotional depth. For those intrigued by the complexities of ambition and the intricacies of the theatrical world, Tarkington's "Presenting Lily Mars" is an essential read. Rich in character exploration and societal commentary, it offers not only entertainment but also profound insights into the artistic journey, making it a timeless classic that resonates with aspiring artists and admirers of literary fiction alike.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Ähnliche
Presenting Lily Mars
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
People who have read “The Lost Theatre” by Owen Gilbert may recall his printed opinion that the heyday of the theatre and the best time to be young were in the days when the dépôt hack still struggled against the station taxicab and extinction. Intimate friends of Mr. Gilbert, reading this passage, have smiled, knowing that the celebrated gentleman was himself young in the favored period and guessing that he preferred a dépôt hack to a taxicab on the very day of his return to his native city for the visit that was to bring him his first acquaintance with Lily Mars.
The guess is accurate. Mr. Owen Gilbert, playwright, aged twenty-nine, comely, dark-eyed and of a reticent air, descended from the train that had borne him from New York to the heart of the midland plain; then, coming out of the station into September afternoon sunshine, he ignored the suggestions of several taxicab drivers and stepped into one of the two or three shabby old hacks that still competed with them.
The hackman, fat and red-faced, was pleased; a benevolent smile widened his dissipated old moustache. “Reckanize you, I guess,” he said. “Ain’t you the late Henry J. Gilbert of Gilbert and Company’s son, Owen? Thought so. Seen you many a time when you was growin’ up. I used to work for Foudray’s Livery and Undertaking, and I’ve drove you and your family I don’t know how often to funerals and parties when they wasn’t usin’ their own carriage. Guess you ’member my face, too, likely. Likely why you took my hack ’stead o’ one them automobile cabs.”
“Yes.”
The hackman sighed conversationally as he climbed to his seat. “Times all changin’. Goin’ to make a man scramble to git a livin’, it looks like. You rather have the top up?”
“No.”
“Thought not, account the nice warm fall weather.” He took up the reins and whip; the two flaccid old black horses walked a short distance, then conscientiously pushed themselves into a patient trot, and the hackman, turning his head a little for greater audibility, continued the conversation. “Ain’t seen you fer quite some time lately. Two or three years maybe. Ain’t been back here fer a good while, have you?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Seems like I heard somebody say you was livin’ in New York or Europe or somewheres nowadays. That right?”
“Yes.”
“Ain’t seen any your kinfolks all the time you been away?”
“Oh, yes. My mother comes to New York for a day or so sometimes.”
“I expect so.” The hackman, about to speak of his own beloved city, made wide gestures with his whip. “Well, sir, you’ll see big changes in this old burg, I guess. Bigger! Newhouse and Treadwell’s puttin’ up a ’leven-story building. Say the Chamber of Commerce is talkin’ about a skyscraper even higher’n that. Oh, we’re growin’! Say we’re goin’ to be ’way up over two-hundred thousand time o’ the next census. Guess you’ll find everything lookin’ natural up on Harrison Avenue, though, and all around through that neighborhood where your kin live. All them old fine big houses you’ll find them jest the same. Guess you ain’t found no place to live no better’n what we got here, have you?”
“No.”
“No, sir! Must feel mighty good to git back to God’s country when you’re able to!”
The old liveryman, pleased with himself, stopped talking and gave his attention to the guidance of his horses through a thickening traffic. His passenger, meanwhile, glancing with thoughtful eye at the thronged sidewalks of the “business section”, meditated upon an impression that to anybody fresh from New York, all these bustling honest people, their buildings and the broad irregular prospects of their streets must have an appearance of some rusticity. They had that appearance to him, a returned native; and, as it was his habit to observe professionally his own thoughts and sensations, he inquired of himself whether or not there was anything vivid enough in his feeling about the rusticity to be put into a play. He decided that there wasn’t, and then, annoyed by the persistence of his habit, “Good heavens!” he thought. “Can’t I even come home to see my mother without worrying at every tiny thing on earth to find if I can’t use it for the stage?”
The hack crossed a wide thoroughfare, climax spectacle of the city’s trade and tumultuous with people and vehicles; then, after another block, hoof-beats had a softer sound. The old hack-horses trotted now not upon asphalt but upon a more genially resonant pavement of cedar, and abruptly were beyond the crowded ways and in a quiet neighborhood of churches and old-fashioned houses. Farther on, they passed an open green square with a busily plashing fountain in the centre and benches where old men sat in revery, their beards upon their G. A. R. buttons, while along graveled paths nurses pushed baby-carriages and small children rode velocipedes and trundled hoops.
Beyond this, the wide sunny street seemed to wear a mildly prouder air; for now, with bordering shady sidewalks, it entered the purlieus of the city’s obvious grandees. Here, with simple enough architecture, yet a touch of Mansard, there was a spaciousness not lacking dignity; and the large brick houses, none of them new, rose from clipped green lawns and softened their outlines graciously among the foliage of tall trees. The hackman, driving placidly in the middle of the street, turned his head slightly to inquire, “Want me to drive up your driveway?”
“No; just let me out at the front gate.”
“Well, so-so—whoa up!”
The horses immediately stopped trotting, and, upon the signal of one slightly twitched rein, walked obliquely to the left and halted near the curbstone on the left side of the street, their noses in line with a horse-headed cast iron hitching post under a big elm. The fat old hackman got down from his seat and glanced benevolently at the commodious stone-trimmed brick house of the Seventies, deep in its groomed lawn. “I guess you didn’t need to tell me where to bring you,” he said, smiling self-congratulation. “I’ll carry them valises in fer you if you’d like me to.”
The passenger rewarded the offer generously but carried the bags himself. He passed through the gateway of the tall iron fence, walked up the cement path, ascended white stone steps to the white stone verandah and pulled a bronze knob at the side of the carved walnut double front doors. A moment later a remote tinkling let him know that the bell at the end of the long wire was in operation; then there were faint sounds of movement within the house, and a middle-aged stout neat colored woman opened the door.
“Yes, suh, Mist’ Owen,” she said amiably. “I spectin’ you.”
“You were?” He was astonished. “Expecting me, Martha? Why, no; I’m a surprise. I wrote my mother I’d be here the last of next week.”
“No, suh; she ain’t spectin’ you. I said I was. She ain’t home an’ nobody wasn’t spectin’ you till couple minutes ago when telephome rung an’ says they want to speak to you. ‘No, suh,’ I says. ‘Mist’ Owen Gilbert in New York,’ I says. ‘No, ma’am, he ain’t either,’ telephome say. ‘He right in this city,’ telephome say. ‘Ef he ain’t home right now he goin’ be in ve’y few minutes. You please ask him call number five-hundud soon’s he git there,’ it tell me.”
“All right, Martha,” Gilbert said, coming into the ample hallway that bisected the forward part of the house. “Where’s my mother?”
“She out payin’ calls. Nelson he drivin’ her, so please res’ them valises right on the flo’ until they git back an’ Nelson carry ’em to your room fer you. Your mamma goin’ be mighty tickle’ see you here when she git home from payin’ them calls. Telephome on the wall behine stairway same’s it use’ to were, Mist’ Owen. Ev’ything stay jes’ the same in this house year in, year out, Mist’ Owen.”
Gilbert was already sure of that. At his left the doors stood open into the “reception room” whither formal callers had been shown, when they came, throughout his boyhood and youth. The stiff, gilded chairs and the brown velvet sofa were in their old accustomed places, and the oval portrait of his grandfather—side-burns, wavy black hair, velvet coat collar and all—hung coldly over the white marble mantelpiece where it had been in the grandson’s babyhood. Revealed by open double doors on the other side of the hall was the “library”, with the ponderous black grand piano near the bay-window. Fresh from New York he felt the size of this big room, like the width of the city’s streets, as something astonishing; yet here, under that high, high ceiling, he had spent hours enough to be counted into years. Here were the same old rows of books on the same old polished brown shelves, and, on the walls above, the same old steel engravings of Lincoln and his Cabinet, of Anthony and Cleopatra, and of Rebecca and Ivanhoe, the same old watercolors of Amalfi, the Grand Canal and Pisa’s tower. Upon the same old gayly floral Brussels carpet stood the same old Eastlake sofas and the same comfortable, unpleasantly carved old rosewood chairs in their old places precisely; and everything, including the almost imperceptible same old smell of cleanness, emanated to the young playwright the touching and reproachful eloquence of old familiar things half forgotten in long absence.
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.
She gave his hand a hasty but feverish clasp; then hurried at once to her mother and began to make a tender little fuss over her, smoothing the pillow, Mrs. Mars’s cheeks and the adjacent air. “Muddie, Muddie, Muddie!” she said, and the peculiar quality of her voice had its effect upon the caller in spite of his perception that it was intended to have an effect upon him. It was a slender voice yet a rich one and of a noticeable elasticity; even in the three utterances of the pet name it played up and down over a dozen tones, rang bell-like upon some of them, trembled either touchingly or playfully upon others, then sank to a husky gentle sweetness barely audible. “Muddie’s been moving her head too much, to talk. Muddie knows she mustn’t, mustn’t!” She turned toward Gilbert almost tragically and flung out her slender pretty arms in a jingling gesture of appeal. “Ah, you tell her she mustn’t! Whenever she moves her head it’s likely to jar her spine, and she mustn’t, she mustn’t! We can’t do anything with her; she’s so reckless. If you’d tell her she must be careful I think she would!” But without waiting for a response she sank gracefully upon a stool beside the sofa and said cozily, “Now, let’s all sit down and talk things over.” She leaned back against her mother, crossed her knees with an elaboration that gave one of them to view and allowed it to remain there, then inquired, “What day does the company get here?”
“The company?” Gilbert said blankly, not at once comprehending. “The com——”
“Your company,” she explained indulgently and too flatteringly. “This ‘Skylark’ company that’s to begin rehearsing your play. What day will rehearsals commence?”
“Oh, that,” he murmured, and replied with some coldness, “Possibly next Sunday.”
“Five days!” She jumped up, smiling. “We have five days! What I’d like to do, I’d take your manuscript and learn whichever one of the women’s parts you’d want me to by heart and then I’d play it for you; but we can take that up later. Just now I want to show you——” She turned toward her mother. “Muddie, which’ll I do first? The balcony scene, don’t you think?” She took a book from a battered little Eastlake table, gave it to her mother and smiled radiantly upon Gilbert. “Don’t you adore the balcony scene? You probably know it by heart, yourself—I mean from Romeo and Juliet. Ah, if I ever get a chance to play Juliet! I mean in New York! Of course you think I’m perfectly crazy! Muddie, have you found the cue for me?”
Then, while Mrs. Mars read a dozen words from the book, her daughter advanced a dramatic step toward Gilbert, who sat helplessly in the rocking-chair before her; she clasped her hands against her cheek, looked upward tensely, became rigid in this attitude and began to speak in a high-pitched, wailing voice.
“O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name...”
She went on with the scene, changing the wailing voice to a startled one, then sinking it to caressive murmurs; altering her posture, too, almost constantly, and becoming so flutteringly gesticulative that the playwright shivered internally, thinking of what a stage director would say (if he could speak) to a performer so much too eloquently in motion. Obviously, she was graceful, knew it and knew, too, how every shifting glimmer of the old satin added another hint of the gracefulness beneath it. Gilbert had no doubt that every one of the multitude of movements had been practised before a mirror; but, for a theatre become as nearly gestureless as the new school of stage directors could make it, such a volubility of pantomimic accompaniment was a disqualification. Too much expression was worse than too little, and overstatement had almost been banished from the stage; understatement was now the fashion. She played the scene through to the bitter end (he thought an audience would have been bitter) and he said to himself that she was worse than he had expected. Then she stopped and looked at him, and for some reason he decided that she was just the least bit better than he had expected.
She was flushed with exertion; the color glowing in her cheeks became her, and he observed with a slightly increased interest that her eyes could be rather dazzling. “There!” she said. “That’s my Juliet!”
“I see,” the embarrassed young man returned. “Ah—I’m glad you’ve learned not to use the half-gestures of the amateur. That’s a very good sign. Nearly all amateurs begin gestures and then get too self-conscious to finish them; they just flop their arms a little way out from their sides and then give it up. It’s quite an advantage that you’re already beyond that phase. But perhaps—ah——”
Mrs. Mars intervened. “Amateurs! There’s never been the slightest amateurishness about Lily’s dramatic work—not from the time she first began to recite, when she was only five years old. She’s always used the most natural, expressive gestures I’ve ever seen. Dr. Gordon, our family physician, is a great lover of the stage—he hardly ever misses any play that comes to town—and he’s seen Mary Anderson’s Juliet and Julia Marlowe’s, and he declares he likes Lily’s better.” She laughed deprecatingly. “Of course he’s an old friend of the family and prejudiced, but that’s what he says, and he really does know the stage.”
“From A to Z!” Lily added. “There’ve been times when if it hadn’t been for Dr. Gordon I’d have given the whole thing up. Oh, yes, I get awfully down sometimes. If it hadn’t been for Dr. Gordon’s faith in me——” She painted the catastrophe with a gesture of falling hands, then was blithe. “What do you think I’d better show him next, Mother? Wait, I know! Lady Macbeth—the sleep-walking scene.”
“Or else ‘Roger and I’,” Mrs. Mars suggested, and explained eagerly to Gilbert, “I think ‘Roger and I’ and Lady Macbeth are almost the finest things she does, and they show her range so wonderfully, I think—such different kinds of emotion. Suppose you do ‘Roger and I’ first and then Lady Macbeth, Lily.”
Lily did “Roger and I” first and then she did Lady Macbeth. Gilbert, conscious all the time of the mother’s anxious gaze upon him, sat in pain, engaged in a continual struggle to prevent his emotional opinion of the performance from manifesting itself dreadfully upon his countenance. He had selfish unfilial thoughts reproachful of his mother for putting him in this impossible position—when he’d come home for change and rest! Lily’s “Roger and I” was pseudo-pathos straight out of a School of Elocution; but Lady Macbeth, ranted at him at close quarters in that depressing small room, was sheer nightmare.
“Ah—very nice,” he said in a sickly voice when she finished. “That is, I mean——” He stopped himself and repeated the two words in almost a whisper. “Very nice.”
The invalid upon the sofa pathetically mistook his vocal inadequacy for the hush of appreciation. “That was magnificent, Lily! There’s only one word for it—magnificent! You never did it better in your life!”
“No,” Lily said judicially. “I did it better that night at the Auxiliary Supper. Anyhow, I did ‘Roger and I’ better that night, Mother. I’m not at my best to-day and I know it, myself. I can always feel it. There are times when I absolutely know I’ve got it, and there are other times when I can hear myself missing little shades of meaning. Other people mightn’t realize it; but I know!” She shook her head prettily in gloom, then clasped her hands impulsively. “Oh, Mother! Now shall I show him my dance?”
CHAPTER THREE
If the unhappy young playwright in the rocking-chair could have spoken his mind he would have said, “For God’s sake, no!” and he had not infrequently heard managers and stage directors speak with that much frankness; but he had been brought up to be a gentleman, couldn’t get over it, and what he whispered was, “Interesting!”
“It’s an interpretive dance I’ve created, myself,” Lily explained. “Of course there isn’t room for it here; but I can give you an idea of the movements. It’s the joy of mankind in the springtime throughout all the ages. It begins with the savages and how they expressed themselves about the coming of the flowers and birds and bees, and then takes up how the nuns and monks hailed the going of winter in the middle ages, and then there’s the English peasants’ Maypole—folk-dancing, you know—then part of a minuet to show how people felt about it in Colonial times, and then just a touch of Cake Walk for modern expression, and it ends with my conception of the spring dancing of the future. I’ll have to hum the accompaniment.”
He produced a sound. “Interesting.”
She looked upward mystically, extended her arms wide, then slowly brought her small hands together with a little slap. She did this several times, chanting, “Tum! Tum! Tum! Bom! Bom! Bom!” She glanced down at him and explained confidentially, “Tom-toms, you know.” Then she hummed hoarsely, intending savage rhythms, and began to dance—principally with her shoulders.
She left in him no doubt of their graceful flexibility; but presently let them droop, and, to suggest a mediæval piety, made the sign of the cross upon her breast and forehead, hummed “Beulah Land” solemnly, and, with palms together prayerfully before her, walked a few slow steps forward and back several times. Then, with a startling generosity, she picked up her yellow satin skirt, held it high and began to skip round and round Gilbert’s rocking-chair, singing in a joyous sweet voice “Ye lads and lassies on the green”;—the incredulous young man could not but conclude that he represented a Maypole. After that, she trod minuetish measures recognizably, did Cake Walk steps flamboyantly, singing “Dinah, de moon am shinin’ ”; then, looking rapt, stood with her feet together and made fantastic gestures with her arms, the dancing of the future presumably. Finally, blushing resplendently but with downcast eyes, she sank to the floor in a deep curtsey close before the visitor.
“Bravo! Bravo, Lily!” Mrs. Mars cried tremulously from her sofa, and began to clap her fragile white hands.
Lily sprang up from the curtsey, rushed to her, caught the applauding hands and held them. “Muddie! Muddie, you mustn’t! You mustn’t jar! You mustn’t——”
“I just couldn’t help it! You were magnificent, Lily!” The mother appealed to Gilbert pleadingly. “Wasn’t she magnificent, Owen? You’ll let me call you Owen because I knew you when you were a little boy? Really and truly don’t you think she was magnificent?”
“Ah——” he began; but was spared a dishonest response. The front door was opened without prelude and a rather shabby boy of about eighteen walked brusquely into the room. A commonplace of lower-middle origin he was, in the instant classifying of the playwright, who recorded him as of the type “high school boy” and was somewhat astonished to see so bitter a sternness upon so youthful a brow. Lily was not pleased with the interruption.
“I can’t bother with you now, Charlie,” she said coldly. “Mr. Gilbert, this is Mr. Charlie Bright. We’re busy, Charlie!”
Young Mr. Bright remained where he was, in the centre of the room, looked fiercely from her to the surprised caller and then with increased anger back at her. “I see you are!” he said in a husky voice. “I know what kind of business it is, too! My mother told me it was going to happen, after she was here to see your mother yesterday. Mrs. Mars, are you going to let this thing go on? Are you going to lie there calmly and let your daughter’s life get wrecked the way it’s going to be if she——”
“You go straight out of that door!” Lily said in a low voice. “Go straight out of that door!”
“I won’t! I won’t go out of that door or any other door till I’ve done my duty. Do you s’pose I don’t know who this man is and what he’s here for?”
“You go straight out of that——”
“I won’t!” The boy turned rudely upon Gilbert. “You see here! You can’t come here and take this girl away into all that life of false glitter and dissipation without having a counting with me first! She’s just the same as engaged to be married to me——”
“What!” Lily shouted out a contemptuous laughter. “Of all the crazy insinuations! Why, you ought to be taken straight to the insane asylum!” She stopped laughing and appealed vehemently to her mother. “Mother, tell Mr. Gilbert you know it’s absolutely and utterly false! Tell Mr. Gilbert I never——”
“You did!” Charlie Bright interrupted. “You just as good as did! I’ve considered myself the same as engaged to you ever since what you said when we were watching the fireworks Fourth o’ July night. If you think I’m going to stand idly by and see this man lure you into the life of the stage, where your whole personality would be pulled down to a mere puppet for everybody that could pay fifty cents for a ticket to laugh and sneer at——”
“March straight out!” Lily cried. “You little idiot, how dare you presume to interfere in my——”
“You call it interference from—from the man you’re engaged to?”
“I’m no more engaged to you than I am to the man in the moon or to——”
“Or to F. Munson Lang?” the boy asked, with the air of one who delivers the stroke that kills. “How about F. Munson Lang? Doesn’t he kind of think he’s engaged to you, too, Lily, if he could only get a divorce from his wife and three children?”
“You——” Lily’s breast heaved with a tumultuous breathing. She pointed imperiously at the door. “You slanderer, associating my name with a married man’s! You see that door?”
“Me?” the boy cried. “Didn’t you tell me yourself Mrs. F. Munson Lang was so jealous of you you were scared of her? Look at the way you behave! Didn’t you get about half the men in our class mashed on you, all at the same time? You know you did! Look what you did to me and Minnie Bush. You knew Min and I were practic’ly engaged; but you went ahead and got me mashed on you, the way you do and——”
“I didn’t! Minnie Bush is my best friend and I tried my best to keep you loyal to her. I——”
“You did?” young Charlie interrupted, with laughter as biting as he knew how to make it. “Min told my sister Fanny I’ve practic’ly ruined her life because how could she ever look at anybody else after me? She and everybody else knows it’s all on account of you! Then here now you just give us all the la-de-da because this man wants to put you on the stage, with all its tinsel and immorality, and you expect me to stand idly by with folded hands and——”
“You’re wrong!” Lily drew herself up grandly, threw back her head and spoke in a voice genuinely indignant yet of such a richness that the annoyed Gilbert suspected her of enjoying herself; indeed he was almost certain she was glad to make him a spectator of this scene that he felt might well have been seriously mortifying to her. “You’re wrong! I expect you to march out of that door!” Again she pointed to it regally. “Go!”
Charlie remained. “Everybody knows you always been stage-struck!” he said, and added passionately, “Just look at you now! I didn’t think I’d ever see you as low in the scale as this—exposing yourself dressed like that to an utter stranger, while he sits here and figures out just how many dollars and cents he’s going to make out of selling your looks on the stage to——”
The invalid on the sofa contrived to interrupt him. “That will do, Charlie,” she said quietly. “Your mother’s coming in this evening and I’ll tell her that when you’ve apologized to Lily and asked her to apologize for you to Mr. Gilbert I’ll think whether it’s best for me ever to allow you to come here again. You can’t stay now.”
“I can’t? Why, look here, Mrs. Mars——”
“No. That’s all, Charlie.”
The boy’s excitement departed out of him; his chest deflated and his shoulders drooped in gloom. “Oh—Gee,” he murmured in lamentable anticlimax, and turned toward the door. He had not reached it when it was opened and a thin and pallid blonde girl a little older than Lily came in.
Gilbert perceived that she was the older sister, the one who somehow meagrely supported the three of them by working at Vance’s. She was like Lily as a withering rosebud is like a fresh one. Lily was almost violently vivid; already Gilbert felt he had never in his life met anyone of such vividness, and this quality, which he knew not how otherwise to express, was lacking in the sister, as was Lily’s color, her delicate shapeliness and a look she had of being incomparably more alive than other people. Clara Mars, not yet twenty-one, seemed dried, lifeless and hard driven; her pallor, moreover, as she came into the room, was noticeable and she walked limpingly.
At sight of her, the invalid and Lily uttered little outcries of surprise and solicitude; Lily also, scrupulous upon etiquette, pronounced her sister’s name and Gilbert’s in a presentation that covered young Mr. Bright’s muttering, inglorious withdrawal from the house. “Nothing to worry about; I’m not dismissed,” Clara explained, as she went lamely to the inner door of the room. “They just let me off for the rest of the afternoon; that’s all. I’m all right.”
“You didn’t——” Mrs. Mars hesitated pathetically. “You didn’t—have another fainting spell from standing so many hours?”
“No; not quite,” Clara said wanly. “I don’t know why it takes me so long to get used to it. There are girls down there that haven’t been at it nearly as long as I have and they can stand all day without even seeming tired. I don’t think it happens to me as often as it used to, Mother. Please sit down again, Mr. Gilbert. I guess—I guess if you’ll excuse me perhaps I’d better go and lie down.” She gave her sister an affectionate smile and forestalled Lily’s impulsive movement to accompany her. “No, I don’t need anything, Lily; I’ll be perfectly all right in an hour or two. I know Mr. Gilbert’s already seen what a wonderful actress you are; but I wish I could tell him what a darling sister you are!”
“Yes, and daughter,” Mrs. Mars murmured, as Clara shut the door. The mother lay with eyes closed—closed tragically, it seemed to Gilbert—while Clara could be heard slowly ascending the uncarpeted stairway, coughing hard as she went. “They’re both wonderful daughters to me, Owen. I’ve had to let them sacrifice their youth to me. I haven’t seemed to have any choice but just to lie here and see their beautiful young lives wasted on me.”
“Wasted!” Lily, with a lovely movement, flung herself upon one knee beside the sofa and clasped one of her mother’s hands in both of hers. “Ah, you precious Muddie, do you think anything’s wasted if it could be the least use in the world to you?”
Mrs. Mars’s eyes opened, releasing great crystal drops upon her cheeks. “You see, Owen?” she asked. “You see what Lily’s genius means to us? You see what our hopes in it must be?”
