It became expedient that Will appeal to his father for financial assistance, a resort which he postponed as long as possible, since the old gentleman invariably accompanied his grudging remittances with advice, censure and no little contumely. Will could not understand why he was not "snapped up" at once, so he expressed it. He had made good in his last engagement, had kept himself well advertised (_vide_ the press-agent) and it would appear that, as a natural sequence, his services should be in demand. He commented on the statement made by several managers, viz.: they had nothing in his line. It was evident that in making a pronounced success in a certain _genre_ of plays he had become identified with the one type of hero and the managers could "see"
him in no other. Managers are, with rare exceptions, an unimaginative lot. In no other way can one explain the deluge of plays patterned on the same type: for example, let a manager by hit or miss produce successfully a play built around the Far West, immediately there spring up a dozen of the ilk. Or, again, let a play of farcical construction score a hit; the public is immediately surfeited with a run of farces.
So with the actor. Let him once become identified with heroes of romantic drama and the manager fears to entrust him with the dress-suit role, and vice versa.
More and more I was impressed with the ephemeral quality of the actor's success. At best the actor's is an aleatory profession and, as in all games of chance, the losses score highest.
It was well along in the autumn when Will signed and immediately began rehearsals. The star was a petulant little lady who, by grace of her marriage with a manager, had been hoisted to her present position, a position to which she was not equal either by training, personality or talent. For several seasons the husband-manager had invested--and lost--large sums of money in the attempt to build up a following for his wife. The present venture was a kind of last straw. That there was more or less "feeling" between the couple was evinced by their frequent _passages d'armes_ of a personal nature, at rehearsals. Accustomed as he was to the thoroughness of the stage-management under which he had worked during the past two seasons, Will found the hit and miss methods of his new affiliation disconcerting and irritating. In addition to this, the husband-manager-director had a picturesque if not a literate command of the language. He was in the habit of standing in the centre aisle or at the back of the theatre and shouting his directions to the members on the stage. When, as sometimes happened, a member resented the manager's method of criticism in no uncertain terms, that personage would back down and with tearful, if blasphemous, appeal explain himself. On opening nights, in response to the persistent calls from the claque, the manager reluctantly (!) appeared before the curtain to bow his acknowledgment--in shirt sleeves--his air of exhaustion contrasting sharply with his jaws which worked a piece of chewing-gum like a ticket-chopper in rush hours. It would seem that the vanity of actors is not an exclusive attribute.
The metropolitan reception of the play and star was not one of unmitigated joy. The husband-manager, not liking the opinions of the press, talked back both in print and from the stage. Two ghastly weeks in New York, playing to a papered house or empty seats, and the company took to the coal regions. Another fortnight was spent sparring for open time, reluctantly doled out to the weak, and the company gave up the ghost. Obviously Will had entered upon a cycle of bad luck. I took upon myself to look for an engagement. Not only on account of the material consideration, but because the emptiness and loneliness of my life had become no longer endurable. Self-imposed tasks palled. My mind refused to concentrate upon the line of study I had outlined. "And thus the native hue of resolution is sickled o'er with the pale cast of thought."
The career I once planned for myself had been consigned to the dump heap of lost illusions. I could not touch the clay which once had thrilled me with ambition.
Will went about with me on my visits to various managers. He encouraged me in my intention and I was glad to interest him, to take him out of himself, as it were. His run of hard luck had preyed on his nerves and frayed his temper. There was reason for me to suspect he was drinking more than was good for him. Finally there came an offer of a small part in a musical comedy which had settled down for a run in New York. The fact that I was possessed of no great amount of vocal equipment did not preclude me from the field. The manager intimated that what I lacked in voice I made up in pulchritude, though I recall he referred to it as "shape." The salary was to be thirty-five dollars a week. The gowns were furnished--those worn by my predecessor--though I was called upon to supply my own shoes, silk hose and gloves. In reality I was to be nothing more than a show-girl, with a few lines to speak.
Will was in front the night I made my debut. After the performance we went to a restaurant, there to talk it over. Congratulating me on my "getting away with it" and telling me how "peachy" I looked, he laughingly predicted a line of Johnnies at the stage door, flowers, and the usual perquisites of the chorus girl.... "If you weren't wise to the game, I'd give you a few pointers," he said, ... "but" ... and here he reached across the table and patted me on the hands.... "I reckon you're equal to any situation, old pard.... Just sit tight until I again land on my feet and then you can cut it out, if you like."
I did not find myself subjected to any fierce onslaughts on the part of the Johnnies or _viveurs_ about town. Once or twice I received a note accompanied with flowers. The former I destroyed; the latter I promptly presented to the least pretty of my five dressing-room mates. She wore them on the stage and made eyes at the donor, who occupied an upper box, much to my amusement and to his confusion. I discouraged intimacies of all kinds, with one exception. But of this more hereafter. The stage director never attempted to chuck me under the chin or call me "baby,"
as he did other members of the cast. I had had my little run-in with him at rehearsal when he essayed to yell at me after the manner of his kind.
I stopped short, the orchestra petered out in discord and, walking to the apron of the stage, I modulated my voice, so that it reached him quietly but effectively, where he stood in the back of the theatre. "Mr.
M----," I had said, "if you have any further suggestion to offer, you will please do so in a less offensive manner. My hearing is good and I believe I have the average amount of intelligence." There was an ominous silence and the martinet started down the aisle. Behind me I heard a buzz of approbation from the girls who had suffered at his hands. Just why the bully changed his mind I never knew. At any rate the rehearsal was continued. Later the manager chaffed me about the incident. The manager was an undeveloped little person--as if some hereditary blight had nipped him in the bud--distinctly Semitic in all his traits. Will had known him from the time he had abandoned haberdashery for theatrical management; indeed, I believe he had been a member of the manager's first venture into the field.
One feature which stands out most prominently in retrospect was my adaptability to my surroundings. Conditions which once had shocked me no longer left an impression. Obviously the finer edge of my nature had worn blunt. Things appeared to me in a kind of impersonal light. My present path had been chosen from necessity; a part of the scheme of things, yet a thing apart. The commonplace round of concerns and duties went on, but life, real life, for the time being lay fallow.
Occasionally, when I caught myself dropping into the slang and jargon I had absorbed from my fellow workers, I mused a bit and pulled myself up with a sharp curb. But, as I have said, I was no longer disturbed or impressed with conditions which once had sent the blood to my cheeks.
The easy familiarity between the sexes which I had thought sufficiently deplorable in the "legitimate" branch of the theatrical profession was in the comic opera world flagrantly increased. I have heard a distinction made between immorality and unmorality, but I fail to observe any slight deviation from the general result. Vulgar stories, steeped in smut, went the rounds. Each new one was welcomed and passed down the line. If one betrayed her disapproval by ignoring the _raconteur_, she was laughed down and thereafter referred to as "very up-stage." In the dressing-rooms modesty of person was an unknown quantity. Not infrequently I found "extra" gentlemen performing lady's maid service for one of the girls. On one occasion when I slipped on the iron stairway leading to the stage, badly wrenching my ankle, a sturdy stage-hand picked me up, carried me to my dressing-room, and, before I realized what he was about, had pulled off my shoe and was in way of removing my stocking when I protested. "O, well, if you're that fussy--"
he said as he went out....
One of the most pernicious influences to be contended against by the girl who tries to go straight is the never-ceasing topic of "men" and "money." The man behind the bankroll is the basis, in one form or another, of all the chorus-girl conversations. To be picked out by a man of means to marry, or, failing this, to be set up in a "swell" apartment and "put it all over" the girls of her acquaintance, is the hope which springs eternal in the chorus-girl breast. Even in hard times, when the champagne appetite needs must be quenched with beer, she dreams of diamonds. Standing in the wings, waiting for the cue, one hears an exchange of banter such as this: "Heard you was at the Abbaye last night.... Where'd you pick him up?... Say, don't you believe anything he tells you! Henny knows all about him and he says that for a tight-wad he's got Russell Sage skinned to death!" Or ... "I was at Morrisheimer's to-day; they're havin' a sale of models. I gotta three-piece velvet suit for thirty-five dollars, marked down from seventy." ... "Say! He must be good to you. Why don't you introduce me to some of your gentlemen friends?"
I once asked a chorus girl of considerable notoriety how she had come to enter the profession. "O," she replied, "my folks was the poor but respectable kind. There was a big family of us, and I, bein' the oldest, had to help out. I didn't get much schoolin' and, after tryin' half a dozen things like bein' a chamber maid, waitin' in a restaurant and that kind of business, I tumbled to the fact that I wusn't bad lookin'.
That's all I had; my face and my shape, and the stage was the best place to show 'em."
My dressing-room mates were typical show-girls; maniere, self-conscious and always on parade. It was painfully evident they felt themselves above the chorus, though some of them were pleased to forget the fact that they were but recently graduated from that class.
One of these girls afterward married an English baronet. I have since wondered what disposition was made of the baronet's mother-in-law. I made her acquaintance in the dressing-room one evening, whither she had come to mend her daughter's wardrobe. She was a splendid specimen of the complaisant stage-mamma. Clad in rusty black, her portly figure bulging from ill-fitting stays, one might mistake her for the type of scrub-woman one sees about the large office buildings of early mornings, but never, never would one suspect her of being the mother of this near-Vere-de-Vere. Voluble to a point of madness, she would acquaint you with the family history, the cause and intimate details of her husband's untimely taking off and the great hopes she entertained for her daughter's "getting on." Sometimes she brought with her the youngest of her offspring, a little girl of six who had already made her debut as a child-actress. Like all children of the stage, she was precocious and most unchild-like. In the enactment of laws which are aimed to protect the child-labourer, an attempt is being made to bring about an exemption of their application to the stage-child. That the child-actor receives better pay, that he or she works less hours and under more sanitary surroundings than do children in other trades and professions, cannot be gainsaid. But is the economic welfare of the child the prime and only consideration? Is the physical protection the one and uppermost consummation to be desired? What of the spiritual, the moral side of the stage-child? If environment bear the strong influence on human life we are led to believe, then should the stage-child be removed from its infectious surroundings. The old saw to the effect of pitch and defilement is here most applicable.
I have referred elsewhere to the exception I made in my discouragement of intimacies. On that morning at rehearsal when I had resented the stage-director's mode of criticism, among others who had approved my act was a girl whose face had at once attracted me. She was pretty and of less common type than the chorus averages. There was something individual about her. Her appearance was neat and I had observed that her clothes were neither so new nor so extreme as were those of her colleagues. Also I was impressed with a quiet refinement of manner and her usage of good English. As we became better acquainted she sometimes waited for me after the performance and we walked together to the underground station, where our lines diverged. Later I had asked her to dine with me on a Sunday when Will was away on a week-end motor trip.
She appeared to enjoy the home atmosphere and visited with me in the kitchen while I was preparing dinner. Feeling that with our reduced income we could not afford it, I had dispensed with a servant. And as Will rarely, if ever, dined at home, my housekeeping duties were not onerous.
"This is what I have always longed for--a little home all my own," Leila had remarked, smiling wistfully.... It was after dinner and we had settled ourselves for a chat.
"Then, in the name of common sense, dear girl, why did you go on the stage? Home life and a stage career are as antipodal as the poles."
"And yet you manage to blend the two rather charmingly," she retorted.
"Absurd! I'm not trying for a career, and as for home life ... my dear child, it's the merest pretense. Half the time we are not at home and the flat has either to be let or remain closed. One never knows from day to day when the furniture will be packed off to storage."
"Yes ... I presume you are right.... How did I come to go on the stage?... Well, I suppose it was because I wanted a career of some kind.... I wanted to _do something_; you know how empty and shallow the average girl's life is, with the endless round of parties, visits, fancy work and that sort of thing. I was an only daughter, too. Father was well-to-do and wrapped up in the affairs of the small city in which we lived. After he died, mother thought she would like to travel. We went abroad. It was over there that the idea of a career took a stronger hold on me. About the only talent I could lay any claim to was music. I had always played and sung at our home concerts and church sociables.... But mother didn't encourage me in my ambitions. She argued that, since father had left us comfortably fixed, why should I want to worry my head about work? Besides, she said my first duty was to her as long as she lived. So there it rested.... We just drifted from place to place ...
vegetating...."
"Some parents are like that," I commented.
Leila rested her chin in her palms and went on.... "After mother died I resolved to go after that career. I returned abroad to study...." She chuckled a little, probably, at the remembrance.... "Of course, the _teachers_ said I had a great future ahead of me ... with application and patience ... infinite patience. Meanwhile I must study--and pay exorbitant prices for my tuition. The income which had been ample for my needs heretofore did not go very far under the new regime. I found it necessary to cut into the capital, realizing the danger of such a move, but soothing my fears with the dream of my great future.... Well, honey, the splendid career as you see has ended in the chorus.... And, what's more, I'm living on my salary." She picked up Will's guitar and began strumming on it. "What I can't understand," she continued after a while, "what I feel most is the fact that I don't seem able to pull myself out of it. I see other girls lifting themselves to better positions; I know I can sing better than any one of them.... There was Miss Nelson whom you succeeded. As soon as I heard she was to retire I went to the manager and asked for her place. He sent me to the musical director, who heard me sing, commented favorably and said he would report to the manager. That was the last I heard of it until rehearsal was called and I learned that you had been engaged.... Tell me, honestly, what's the matter with me? Why don't I get on? Is it because I haven't any _pull_ or because--" She did not finish her sentence, but switched to another.... "Take our prima donna for example: three years ago she was playing a part not bigger than yours. Now look at her! My voice is as good as hers, if not better, but I can't get them to let me even understudy her." ...
A vision of the prima donna passed before my eye; an insipidly pretty woman whose sudden rise to fame had turned her empty little head. Vain, impetuous, over-keyed, already the marks of dissipation were leaving their indelible stamp. Whenever I saw her, resplendent in sables, dangling her jewelled gold-mesh purse, my mind reverted to a well-known club-man's comment on virtue: "I always measure the chastity of the unprotected female by the size of her gold-mesh bag; the larger the bag the less the virtue."
Leila, bent on relieving her mind and heart, went on: "When I went into the chorus it was a choice between that and Macy's. Of course I'd heard things about the life, but I told myself that a girl who wants to can go straight in any walk of life. I had all those copy-book maxims at the tip of my tongue: 'Virtue is its own reward,' and 'Then let us be up and doing, with a heart for any fate; still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labour and to wait,' or something like that.... Willie Stewart--you know the little black-eyed girl who plays next to me on the left--it was she who gave me my first eye-opener. Seeing that I was new at the business, she came to me shortly after we opened and asked me if I didn't want to meet some gentlemen; that she had been asked to bring some of the girls with her to a beefsteak party which was to be pulled off that night. I thanked her and told her I did not care to go. Willie squinted her eyes a little in sizing me up, then treated me to the following advice: 'Look here, angel child, you'd better go back to home and mother. This is no place for a minister's daughter. If you haven't got sense enough to take a chance when it's brought to you on a silver tray--well, all I've got to say is that you're in wrong. Managers want the girls that are popular and the way to be popular is to mingle. Just remember that you don't get anything for nothing in this business or in no other, as far as I've been able to observe. It's give up--_give up all along the line_ and it's only the foxy dame that gets what's comin'
to her, even then!'"
"Willie has a very large gold bag, I have noticed," I said.
"And a sealskin coat," Leila added. Then she jumped to her feet and struck at the sofa pillows viciously.... "It isn't the clothes and that sort of thing that appeal to me. It isn't the fact that I'm living in a dingy little room and trying to make ends meet; I'd live on a box of Uneeda Biscuits a day if I saw any hope, the faintest ray of hope that I could win out clean, on merit alone, in the end.... Sometimes I think I'm wrong and that they are right--"
"Leila! You don't think anything of the sort! You know you are right!
Hold on a little while longer; you're sure to win! Why, with a voice like yours, and your beauty, I should feel so sure of winning that nothing else would matter--and it doesn't, Leila, nothing else really counts if you live up to the best that's in you!" I had worked myself up to a state of enthusiasm where I almost believed my own words. I took her by the shoulders and held her at arm's length. We looked into each other's eyes, each trying to pierce the veil behind which are concealed our true thoughts.
It was nearing the holidays when Will signed for the engagement which was destined to play such an important role in our future lives. The star was of foreign origin, with a fascinating accent and a steadily increasing reputation for eroticism. Under the guise of "high-brow"
drama she revelled in the portrayal of abnormal femininity. Her adeptness in "suggestive" scenes, to which she lent a startling verisimilitude, soon gained for her a large, if not altogether intellectual, following. Will was not altogether satisfied with his role, but what actor ever is? I consoled him with the fact that the salary was good and that but little of the present season remained.
With Will on the road, left to myself in the empty apartment, the blue devils renewed their lease. And when the approach of the Christmas season began to manifest itself in shop-windows and in holiday rush, my heartache increased manifold. Leila and I were much together in those days. My little friend's increasing depression, instead of augmenting my own, acted as a spur to brighter moods. Together we made the round of the shops or tramped through the snow in Central Park. Sometimes we lingered to watch the young people skating on the ice; again we hitched ourselves to sleds to the merriment of small folk. Coming home alone from a matinee I would find myself following a party of children out on an ante-holiday survey. Standing close to them I listened to their prattle and eager expectancy of a visit from Santa Claus.... If the tears came I swallowed hard. No one was near to heed. In the seclusion of my home I fought it out alone.
It had been my intention to carry a box of flowers to the dear one's grave on Christmas morning. Passing one day through a wretched quarter of the East Side in search of a dilatory laundress, my steps halted in front of a cheap toy-shop. Beside me stood a small boy, clinging to the hand of an older girl, their eyes riveted upon the display within. With one grimy little hand, stiff and rough from the cold, the small man smeared the tears from his eyes and snivelled. His threadbare coat, sizes too large for his meagre frame, his toes showing through his shoes. The girl's face was peaked and old, as if the despair of life had already left its stamp. There was something infinitely tender in the way she held the boy close to her, mutely comforting his grief, her eyes meeting half defiantly the tinselled magnet of the shop-window, her lips compressed to stop their mutinous tremble. When at last I brought myself to break in upon their thoughts, they looked at me like startled fawns....
The overture was on when I rushed into the theatre that afternoon. With Leila's help I was in time for my cue. And it was with Leila's help that I dressed the toys and trimmed the tree and between us, late on Christmas Eve, we toted a big basket on and off the cars, up the dingy stairs where Maggie kept house for "me brudder" while their mother went out to work.... It was Boy's offering, not mine....
CHAPTER XVII
Coming out of the stage door after the performance one night shortly after the New Year, the back-door keeper met me with the information that a gentleman was waiting to see me. Before I could frame a reply a bulky figure emerged from the gloom. I recognized Mr. F. of Chicago.
There was something akin to embarrassment in the way he proffered his hand, though his grip was not lacking in geniality. Of the two I was the more self-possessed. To my polite inquiries about his family he murmured something about their being all right, he guessed, and abruptly changed the subject by asking me to "come jump in a taxi and let's go somewhere for a bite of supper." I did not understand why I so readily acquiesced.
On the way to Rector's--he himself having made the choice of restaurant--we exchanged amenities. I believe I deplored the fact that I was not dressed for the occasion, and he had replied with a flattering speech intended to salve my vanity. After he had ordered the most expensive items on the menu, he settled back in his chair, toyed with his fork, looked at me searchingly, then broke out laughing. The laughter was not pleasant to the ear; it left an unpleasant apprehension. He leaned across the table with a confidential air and smiled quizzically....
"Do you remember the last time we had supper together?"
I nodded and coaxed a smile.
"Perfectly," I responded.
A silence, while Mr. F. traced strange hieroglyphics on the napery.
After a while he tossed aside the fork with the air of one casting off unpleasant memories, and settled back in his chair.
"Tell me about yourself," he commanded. "How is the world using you?
What in the name of wonder ever took you on the comic opera stage? I couldn't believe my own eyes when I spotted you to-night, and, of course, the name on the programme meant nothing to me. I shook my friends as soon as the performance was over and interviewed the back-door keeper. He told me you were Mrs. Hartley in private life....
Well, what's the answer?"
"There's nothing mysterious about my present occupation. Mr. Hartley hasn't been especially lucky this season, and when a chance to help out a bit presented itself I took it ... that's all.... I presume you know that we lost our boy...."