CHAPTER III.
“Father” was evidently “not home yet,” as Sprague was pleased to note by the approach of a blue kimono as he looked up from his sweeping.
“Whew! exclaimed its wearer. “Why don't you use tea leaves? Everything will be smothered—and hold the broom at a slant—so.” She took it from him, and completed the task with dexterous touch.
The last match and cigarette end had hardly been whisked from the veranda steps when her eye fell on the clothes-line, where fluttered a motley array of masculine attire.
“Trousers and shirts,” she announced, with a clothes peg in her mouth, “or anything like that, should be hung so that the wind blows through them—not at them—and by letting them overlap at the corners you use half as many pegs.”
Sprague watched her in grim silence.
“Is there anything else?” he queried presently. “Because if not I should be glad if you'd take a seat.” And he indicated his favorite chair, buried in cushions.
The girl sank on them with a happy laugh.
“I think that's all for the present,” she said. “Can you make tea?”
Sprague ignored the question, and proceeded to negotiate the boiling water, the while acutely conscious of an amused scrutiny following his movements from the veranda.
“Did you scald the pot?”
Still in dignified silence, he placed the tray—a bedizened advertisement of somebody's whisky—on the wicker table, and took a chair.
“When visiting a bachelor,” he announced sententiously, “you should say 'What a snug little place!' or 'How clever of you to manage for yourself!' or even 'Oh, you bachelors!' with a coy glance around the luxuriously appointed apartment.”
“But we're out on the veranda,” protested the girl; “and the apartment isn't luxuriously appointed.”
”Doesn't matter in the least,” he objected; “you should say it—if you want to be correct.”
The girl glanced out to sea, with the teaspoon suspended above her cup.
“I suppose I should,” she admitted thoughtfully. Her face was graver than Sprague had yet seen it, and, with something approaching alarm, he realized that she had taken him seriously.
“You surely don't think I meant it?” he laughed.
“Why not?” She turned toward him with a frown so entirely out of place on her sun-kissed face that he almost laughed. “I want to be correct.”
“For Heaven's sake, don't!” he pleaded earnestly. “Be yourself—you can't improve on it.”
“Now you're being silly.”
“No, indeed; I mean every word of it. We can't improve on nature; some of us think we can, but we can't, and there's going to be a very special kind of hell for those who pretend to be what they're not.”
The girl sipped her tea and set the cup on the edge of the table.
“What is one to do?” she sighed. “Your preaching is just the reverse of father's, yet you both sound right, taken separately. I should like you to meet father,” she ended thoughtfully.
“I should be delighted,” said Sprague.
The girl turned on him with laughter in her eyes.
“There!” she cried. “That's what I mean. You know you're not delighted a bit; you just said that because it was correct. I want to be correct,” she added defiantly.
Sprague gave his undivided attention to a thick slice of bread and butter, while Robert looked up at him with devouring eyes.
“Even he pretends,” she pursued unmercifully, leaning forward to pat his absurd head.
“I should like to know in what way?” bridled his master.
“To be a cocker spaniel.”
Sprague lit a cigarette, and flung the match over the veranda railing.
“That's where you make a great mistake,” he said gravely, emitting smoke with the words. “Robert pretends nothing; that is one of the many superiorities of dogs over man. I do the pretending for him.”
“I'm a beast!” said the girl suddenly and with conviction.
“No,” he answered, “you're not a beast. Let me give you another cup.”
But the girl shook her head.
“You were going to tell me,” she said presently, “all about it.”
“All about what? Ah, yes, of course.”
“Perhaps you'd rather not now?”
For answer Sprague leaned back in his chair and sent thin ribbons of smoke to hover on the still air above his head and disperse.
“Time was,” he began, “when I wanted to make money. I forget exactly how or why, but at the time I was, of course, looked upon as a disciple of high ideals, and all might have yet been well but for a tiny question presenting itself—tiny, yet ordained to undermine the foundations of my towering aspirations, and level them with the ground. It was simply: 'What's the use?' If I do these things I shall miss a great deal. It will be like scorching through beautiful country in a motor car, enveloped in goggles and dust. 'No,' said I, 'I have no time to make of myself a monument to modern prosperity; I will live instead.' And so I left family and friends, to dream the strange dreams of a diseased imagination, set them down on paper in saner moments, and watch for their appearance, fearsomely illustrated, in the magazines.”
Disappointment was clearly written in the girl's face.
“And you call that doing something?”
Sprague continued, unmoved:
“If you remember, I told you it was only a seedling, and if you imagine there was no work attached to its cultivation you're quite mistaken. I ate lobster and went to bed directly afterward for tragedies. I went through tortures, mental and physical, in search of the necessary material for any drama that an editor could announce as 'of absorbing human interest.' In search of humorous anecdote, I once stayed with a sheep-herder, and lived on mutton and beans for two weeks, and got nothing but grunts from the herder and indigestion from his beans. I worked my passage on a cattle boat from Portland, Maine, to Liverpool, living on barley water and margarine; and it was a full three days before I could bribe another man to do my work and the cook to give me something to eat. I wrote a sketch, and acted in it, with a carmine nose and elongated boots, at a 'theater' in Spokane, Washington, where a ten-cent glass of beer entitled its purchaser to see the whole show. I” But here he paused, breathless; his audience was in no way impressed.
“But why dwell on horrors?” he continued. “Suffice it that a man can write short stories—and, what's more, get them published—till he's black in the face without gaining recognition, and so—and so”
“Yes?”
The girl was leaning forward now, chin on hands.
“I see I have succeeded in interesting you,” Sprague observed.
“Go on,” she commanded.
“I'm glad of it, because that is where the interest ends”
Please!”
“And the absurdity begins. I am now writing a play.”
Sprague tossed away his cigarette and drew forth a foul, but beloved, brier.
“I'm sorry I can't provide anything more exciting, but I have at least done what I promised. You see, the opinion of Queenscliff is more than justified.”
“But they say you threaten Rags—I mean Robert—with a boot, and shout 'I'll kill you!'”
“I do,” admitted Sprague placidly. “The boot is a heavy brass candlestick; Robert is the man who loves my wife; and I—I am the injured husband. I rehearse every line; it's the only way to see how they go. But come into the—er—padded room; that is, if you're not afraid.”
The girl perched herself on the bed and glanced curiously about her. The room presented an incongruous blending of art and toilet requisites, order and chaos. Directly above a dingy chest of drawers hung a beautiful, water-color landscape, half hidden by a festoon of neckties. A cottage piano occupied one corner, supporting a medley of photographs and shaving paraphernalia—brush, stick, and razor cases neatly laid out on a copy of Miss Allitsen's “Song of Thanksgiving.” Another corner harbored a bamboo whatnot, its shelves packed with boots, and capped by an excellent bust of Edward VII. as a Freemason. From every corner peeped something of interest—a rawhide lariat, the god of plenty in bronze, an Indian tom-tom, a Papuan comb.
“May I look?” she asked eagerly.
Sprague nodded, and she made a slow detour of the room, coming at last to a stop before a writing desk.
At a glance she had seen that this was the corner of the room. Everything else had been crowded out to make room for what it contained—a litter of paper, a typewriter, and a mysterious-looking receptacle fastened to the wall. It had bulging pockets, clearly labeled one, two, three, and four, and she contemplated it with a puzzled frown.
Sprague's laugh broke in on her reflections.
“No,” he said, “I don't 'save my hair.' That's the work.”
“The work?”
“The play. You see, each of those pockets is an act, and as I thought of what the people ought to say and do I scribbled it down and popped it into one of those pockets. It always happens that when you are at work on Act I. you think of something really splendid that ought to have been in Act IV., and vice versa; and if you don't get it down there and then, you forget it as sure as eggs are eggs. I'm compiling now.”
But the girl's attention had wandered to a picture tacked to the wall above the desk. It was a black-and-white reproduction of a familiar scene from one of the London illustrated weeklies—a theater portico in the rain, a stream of dazzling women and immaculately dressed men descending a flight of steps from the foyer to their waiting carriages. At one side an attendant was furiously blowing his whistle; on another a newsboy was shouting a tragedy; while outside in the rain, where the wet pavements reflected the murky yellow light of the street lamp, stood a haggard-faced man, intently studying the faces that surged by him, gay, indifferent, bored.
“Not bad, is it?” said Sprague. “It's called 'The Verdict.' The poor beggar's trying to see what they really think of his play.”
But the girl was silent. In a flash the picture had shown her, far plainer than words could have done, the high hopes and deeper aims of the rather frivolous man at her side. To create something vivid enough to hold and sway these people, vital enough to live after one's death—that was “doing something.” Her own childish words recurred to her, and from that moment respect—a sentiment hitherto unknown to her philosophy—found a place in her estimate of “the pyjama man.”
She was deeply interested; Sprague could see that, and he wondered vaguely why he wished to interest her. To be sure, she was pretty; but he had met many pretty children, and he failed to recall an occasion when he had tried to interest them. Perhaps it was because he had known that they could be so easily interested, and this particular one could not; or perhaps it was that he had lived too much alone of late; he was growing senile. He dispersed the problem with a mental shrug and lit his pipe.
“I've always wanted to write for the stage,” he found himself saying a moment later, and continued because he had begun: “There are more thrills to it. The child of your brain is there in the flesh, suitably dressed in suitable surroundings, doing the things you have made him do. Then there's the applause, and all the hundred and one little things that are impossible to get at through cold print. You've never seen a real first night,” he went on, with growing enthusiasm. “A play has to be an established success before it is produced in Australia; but at home, in London, people wait out in the rain in queues fifty yards long. They buy camp stools and chocolates and papers, and sit munching and reading and waiting hour after hour. They wait because they go into cheaper parts of the house; but they are the ones who decide a play's success or failure.
“Presently a bolt is drawn, and they surge through the narrow doorway, past the ticket office, and into the auditorium, and wait for another half hour before the play begins. A little later the stalls and the dress circle begin to fill with men and women just as you see them in that picture; and scattered among them here and there is a critic from one of the newspapers. Each one of these thinks he can sway the public mind and make the play a success or a failure with a few strokes of his pen; but he can't. It all rests with the people who have been waiting out in the rain; and the wretched author hangs on their verdict, tearing his hair at every hitch, or grinning inanely at his own jokes. Then comes the first curtain, and he imagines every one discussing the merits of his play, whereas the men are thinking of tobacco or drink, and the women of clothes.
“This goes on for about three hours, and at the end of it there is applause, perhaps a speech by the author, and every one goes away to spread his or her opinion of the play in his or her particular corner of the city, some advising others of London's seven millions to see it, others telling them not to waste their time. It's all a gamble, and the author who has placed his stake—perhaps a year's work on the play, and five in getting produced—on the wheel of public favor stands to lose all or win all at a single turn.”
Sprague stopped abruptly, and looked out through the veranda doors. The bathers had gone, and the brief Australian dusk was settling down on sea and beach and cliff.
“It must be glorious!” said the girl. She had curled herself up on the bed, and was listening with the absorbed attention of a child who hears an enthralling fairy tale.
“If you win,” said Sprague.
“Oh, whether you win or lose—but of course you'll win.”
He laughed, and turned again to the window.
“Yes,” he said, “I think I shall win this time.”
“Then you've written plays before?”
“Stacks of them.”
“And they were failures?”
“As plays, yes. I never even tried to get them produced, but they come in handy for shaving paper.”
The girl sat up on the bed.
“You shouldn't,” she said.
“It's all they were fit for; but this—this one is different. I know those others are bad, and that is why I know that this one is good.”
He was still looking out of the window, his lower jaw slightly protruding, as if he were answering some challenge from the semidarkness.
The girl fell to studying his half-averted face. It was strong, she decided, kindly, and, above all, humorous. It was the face of a man she would have liked as an uncle or an elder brother. Then, with a startling suddenness, it occurred to her that he was neither, only “the pyjama man”—a stranger whom she had met a few hours before; and something stirred within her—a vague unrest, born had she known it, that very afternoon in her desire to be “correct.” Yes, there was no doubt about it—she ought not to be there in his house, curled up on his bed, drinking his tea, listening to—almost sharing—his ambitions, his life; and sudden resentment took possession of her. It was his fault. He must have known better. What must he think of her?
Her feet slid silently to the floor, and Sprague turned to find her at his side, a slight, childish figure, with the kimono held tightly across her breast.
“Good-by,” she said, with outstretched hand.
He took it with mild surprise reflected in his face.
“Must you go—so soon?”
“So soon! I've—I don't know what father will say.”
“Isn't it a bit unfair?” Sprague suggested. “It's my turn, you know.”
“Your turn?”
“Yes; what's he like?”
The girl laughed in spite of herself.
“You ought to know,” she said; “you've seen him. Good-by.”
Sprague watched the blue kimono disappear among the wind-blown trees that hid the white house on the cliff's summit, then turned into the cottage with a puzzled frown.