IX
He woke defiant. He ignored the implied reprobation of Bert Pittsey's silence concerning Conroy's departure, although he knew that Pittsey must despise him for having betrayed Conroy to his father. He ignored Conroy's upbraidings, received in a letter which he destroyed without reply. He arranged that Walter Pittsey should take the vacant share in the apartment, and made no explanation to his friend, although he could see that Walter expected one. He told himself that he had done what was right; and he did not care what anyone thought of it. He was going to live his own life in his own way.
In that mood of bitter isolation, a letter from Margaret in Leipzig came to him like a message of affectionate trust, although there was nothing in it but her usual friendship. She was worried by the fact that the failure of Mrs. Richardson's investments had forced them to practise the meanest economies. "I shall have to earn my living now, without joking. Do you want any more music lessons? Do you remember your first one? Are you keeping up your practice? Do not be surprised if you see me in New York suddenly, because we are actually afraid of being left here without money, so far from home, and mother is tired of travelling on nothing. I do not know what may happen. How are you getting on? Write to me here."
He wrote her a long impassioned reply that was a sort of confession of faith in her and in all the ideals which he associated with her in his thoughts; and he went to his rehearsals, with Walter Pittsey, in the stilted manner of a martyr who has been fortified by a secret communion with a priest of his religion.
He found that Miss Morris had been engaged as a "walking lady"—an extra" like himself. He supposed—from the way in which she avoided him—that Walter Pittsey had told her how he had betrayed his cousin.
For the first week, of course, he was drilled in his street clothes, on a stripped stage, in the choking twilight of a closed theatre, suffering all the indignities of being driven, with the herd of "supers," by a raucous stage manager who continually exhorted them to put more "guts" into their work—an expression which revolted Don like an indecency. But with the dress rehearsal came the excitement of "making up" under Pittsey's direction—for Pittsey was acting as the head of the supers and when Don had put on the top hat, the frock-coat and the other morning wear of an English gentleman of fashion on the stage, he smiled at himself in the pier-glass of the dressing-room, stroking, like a dandy, with his gloved fingers, the gummed moustache that was tickling on his upper lip. For the first time, the element of "make-believe" in the work appealed to him.
Kidder, the agent—who not only furnished the supernumeraries but acted as a sort of overseer of them when they were not on the stage—came into the room on his round of the theatres, and complimented Don on his appearance. "That looks well on you," he said, with intent to flatter; for in his business of supplying "extras," he found it difficult to get youths of Don's intelligence and more difficult still to retain them. His praise was sweet to Don; and it added the final touch to his pleasure to find himself in a profession where such amenities were practised.
He raced upstairs after Pittsey, to take his place among those others who were to represent a crowd of promenaders on the Strand, in the first scene of the play; and now the game of make-believe was gorgeously coloured and dazzlingly alight. He smiled at the boys in their grease-paint that gave them the complexion of young Sioux, and at the girls in their rouge that added, in its exaggeration of unreality, a charm of something romantic to their young cheeks. When the stage manager called: "Take your places. Take your places!"—and the rehearsal began,—Don sauntered out into the sunny glare of the calcium light and saw Miss Morris coming across the boards toward him, a haughty English beauty in a summer gown, under a flowered parasol. He raised his hat to her, smiling gallantly.
She dropped her handkerchief, startled by the change which the grease-paint and the false moustache and the fine clothes had made in him. He picked it up for her, with a flourish. He shook hands with her, shoulder-high. "May I have the pleasure of a turn on the Strand with you?" he asked gaily. "Most certainly. I should be delighted!" she replied, in the game; and they returned together to the wings. Miss Morris gone nervous with the knowledge that the stage manager had been watching their by-play.
"All right," he said to them gruffly. "Leave that business in. It'll do. Go ahead." He called to the others: "Not so fast there. This 's no foot race."
Pittsey warned them, when they met in the opposite wings: "You're in luck that he didn't call you down. You'd better not put in anything else that you don't get from him."
Don slapped his leg with his cane. "Had to do it," he laughed. "I couldn't leave the lady to pick up her own handkerchief."
But he did almost leave it to her to pick up, on the opening night of the play; for as soon as he stepped out on the stage, he was aware that the footlights stood at the mouth of a black cave from which the audience, like some huge animal with a thousand pairs of eyes, was watching, in a malevolent silence, every movement of the actors; and he went stiff with an attack of stage fright. Miss Morris steadied him with a cordial clasp of the hand. "It's all right," she said under her voice. "No one is looking at us, you know. We're only to fill in a background. You turn around with me." He recovered himself as soon as their turning brought her between him and the audience. He laughed at himself when they reached the wings.
The scene was a "box-set," representing a jewellery shop with stools and counters; and the promenade of supers passed across an opening in the rear wall of the "set," where gaps of white gauze represented the plate glass of two huge display windows and a double door. While the first act worked itself out, in the loud voices of the principal actors near the footlights, Miss Morris and he crossed and recrossed the windows in this stream of "extras," or stood chatting with Walter Pittsey in the wings until it should be their turn to cross again. Her cheeks were flaming with rouge; her eyebrows were pencilled; her eyelashes were as thick as black pins with "cosmetique"; and these artificialities gave her beauty a coquettish enticement for Don. He was grateful to her for having held him up when he had faltered over the handkerchief. She smiled and chatted rather archly, enjoying his good spirits and the way in which his eyes clung to her, admiringly.
It was near the end of the act that he asked her, apropos of nothing: "By the way, how did my father know I had met you—here?"
They were in the middle of their passage across the stage, and as they neared the wings her public smile of high society slowly froze. "Perhaps," she said, "because I wrote my sister so."
"Oh." They moved into the shadow behind the reflector of the calcium light. "Did you tell her that I was . . . going in for this sort of thing?"
There was a note of defiance in her flat "Yes."
He stood in front of her, studying the reflection of that tone in her face. He hesitated to believe what it implied. "She must have told him so," he suggested.
"I asked her to."
"You!"
"I wanted them to stop you," she said uncompromisingly. "I didn't think you should do it."
He did not reply. She opened her parasol, preparatory to taking her turn again in the promenade. When she looked up at him, she found him smiling doubtfully.
"You're as bad as I am," he said.
She did not understand him, being ignorant of his affair with Conroy. "I beg"
They were interrupted by a cry down the stage—the cry that was the signal for all the street crowd to rush to the windows of the shop and gaze in at an actor who was shouting, "Police! Thieves! Police!" Don lost her in the jostle. When the curtain fell on the act, he went downstairs to the supers' dressing-room, with an expression of face that puzzled Walter Pittsey.
It puzzled Miss Morris even more when he joined her in the background of the next scene; and his amused explanation that her treachery relieved him of the guilt of his own left her still in the dark. She did not get his point of view. While he was telling her of his quarrel with his father, she took his father's part against him, in her thoughts; and when he made a clean breast of his betrayal of Conroy, she sympathized with his victim and blamed him. She was accustomed to judge actions by the wisdom and justice of their results; the fact that he considered only the moral impulse that inspired the act escaped her. She was relieved by his smiling forgiveness of her interference in his affairs, but she did not see why this interference should draw him to her.
They were separated by the movement of the play and did not meet again until the third act, set to represent an English lawn party in which they sat at one of a number of rustic tables among stage trees. It was necessary that they should appear to be engaged in an animated conversation, oblivious to the actions of the principals who spoke their lines in the foreground of the scene; and she asked him how he liked his new profession of actor. He replied that he liked it very much—but he could not tell why. Certainly it would enable him to live without borrowing. He was to be paid 75 cents a performance; so that, with the two matinées, he would receive six dollars a week. He was looking around for something to do in the idle mornings. "At any rate, it's better than boosting on Bowery," he said; and he proceeded to tell her of that adventure.
It led up to the problems which he had discussed with Walter Pittsey in Central Park, and thence to the question of religion which he had broached with her on the veranda of the café at Fort George. And looking out thoughtfully at the actors strutting and posturing against the glow of the footlights, he tried to tell her of another conclusion which had come to him in his solitary debates with himself.
"Almost the first thing I can remember," he said, "is the Christmas Eve when I found out that there was no Santa Claus. I don't think—I can't tell you what a shock it was." He smiled. "Nothing that has happened to me since—about religion—hit me harder. . . . But don't you see that there is a Santa Claus! He isn't a man in a fur coat—and a reindeer sleigh and all that—but he is the spirit of Christmas, isn't he? They've personified that, and made a saint of him, and invented legends about him—for the children—but when we're no longer children, and don't believe in him, we still have that Christmas spirit—and it's that that gives presents and makes us feel kindly towards one another, and makes Christmas what it is. . . Isn't it? . . . Well, that's the way it is about these other things. They're true—if they're not true in the way we used to think they were."
She nodded, somewhat nervously. She felt the absurdity of such a conversation in such surroundings, and she was afraid that someone might overhear it. She was relieved when the stage dialogue gave them the cue to retire into the wings, where they parted.
Nevertheless, she admired in him this almost ludicrous earnestness, as one admires in another a quality which shame conceals in oneself. She gave up her attempts to inspire him with her own aversion for the stage; and seeing the childish pleasure which he had in his work, she tried to help him by her criticisms and her counsel. She had been trained in a "dramatic school," and she endeavoured to give him the benefit of that training in her advice. She found, to her greater bewilderment, that he did not wish to be an actor; that the very thought of coming out before the opera-glasses and mimicking love or grief or any of his private emotions, was enough to make him blush. "I couldn't," he said. "Really—I know I couldn't." It was rather a joke to masquerade, unknown to the public, in the ranks of the silent; but imagine—he looked out at the leading man making stage love to the leading woman in a voice to reach the galleries—imagine him doing that!
"Well, for goodness' sake," she said, "what do you want to do? And why don't you find out, and go ahead and do it?"
"I am. I want to live. And I am living."
"That's all very well for the present—but what about your future? You don't intend to be a super all your life?"
"I don't intend anything, any more," he replied contentedly. "I'm tired of planning futures that never work out. Things will develop in their own way. I'm not troubling about them."
She turned away from him with a gesture of exasperation which he did not understand; and she went from him to Pittsey, who had been watching Don and her together with the mild curiosity that was natural to him.
He had been wondering why she remained so long an "extra" in this company, instead of finding a better engagement with some other, now that the season had well begun and all the stages were busy. When he asked her whether she had any prospect of a "part," she answered, languidly, "No,"—as if she had lost her interest and her ambition. He had learned—from Miss Arden—that she was eking out her small salary by posing during the day, in costume, for magazine illustrators. He had learned also that she and Don had made a morning excursion together to the Bronx. And when he tried to rouse her from the indifferent silence which she maintained with him, he found that she responded most readily to talk of Don.
"You used to know him, in Canada, didn't you?"
"Yes," she said, "I've known him since the first day he came to school—a little fellow in black-velvet knickerbockers—and a Scotch cap. When my sister introduced him to me, he said 'How do you do?' with a little old-fashioned bow that impressed me so much I've never forgotten it. I couldn't open my mouth to him after that."
When Pittsey spoke of the pleasure which Don seemed to find in his "suping," she replied: "He ought to make an actor. I remember at school once, in the winter, he pretended he was dead and the boys buried him in a snow-bank. They almost smothered him. And how I cried when I saw them doing it! . . . He was sent home for having snow down his neck and up his sleeves and in his ears."
She relapsed into a sort of staring meditation. He did not break in upon it, a little ashamed of having gone about to spy on her secret.