Held to Answer: A Novel
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Title: Held to Answer: A Novel
Creator: Peter Clark MacFarlane
Illustrator: W. B. King
Release date: January 8, 2014 [eBook #44633]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44633
Credits: Produced by Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HELD TO ANSWER: A NOVEL ***
Produced by Al Haines.
[Illustration: "Follow your star, John," Bessie declared stoutly.
FRONTISPIECE. _See page_ 82.]
HELD
TO ANSWER
_A NOVEL_
BY
PETER CLARK MACFARLANE
AUTHOR OF
THOSE WHO HAVE COME BACK, ETC.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
W. B. KING
NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS
_Copyright, 1916,_
BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
_All rights reserved_
Published, February, 1916
Reprinted, February, 1916 (four times)
*CONTENTS*
CHAPTER
I The Face That Did not Fit
II One Man and Another
III When the Dark Went Away
IV Advent and Adventure
V The Rate Clerk
VI On Two Fronts
VII The High Bid
VIII John Makes Up
IX A Demonstration from the Gallery
X A Stage Kiss
XI Seed to the Wind
XII A Thing Incalculable
XIII The Scene Played Out
XIV The Method of a Dream
XV The Catastrophe
XVI The King Still Lives
XVII When Dreams Come True
XVIII The House Divided
XIX His Next Adventure
XX A Woman with a Want
XXI A Cry of Distress
XXII Pursuit Begins
XXIII Capricious Woman
XXIV The Day of All Days
XXV His Bright Idea
XXVI Unexpectedly Easy
XXVII The First Alarm
XXVIII The Arrest
XXIX The Angel Advises
XXX The Scene in the Vault
XXXI A Misadventure
XXXII The Coward and His Conscience
XXXIII The Battle of the Headlines
XXXIV A Way That Women Have
XXXV On Preliminary Examination
XXXVI A Promise of Strength
XXXVII The Terms of Surrender
XXXVIII Sunday in All People's
XXXIX The Cup Too Full
XL The Elder in the Chair
*HELD TO ANSWER*
*CHAPTER I*
*THE FACE THAT DID NOT FIT*
Two well-dressed men waited outside the rail on what was facetiously
denominated the mourners' bench. One was a packer of olives, the other
the owner of oil wells. A third, an orange shipper, leaned against the
rail, pulling at his red moustaches and yearning wistfully across at a
wattle-throated person behind the roll-top desk who was talking
impatiently on the telephone. Just as the receiver was hung up with an
audible click, a buzzer on the wall croaked harshly,--one long and two
short croaks.
Instantly there was a scuffling of feet upon the linoleum over in a
corner, where mail was being opened by a huge young fellow with the
profile of a mountain and a gale of tawny hair blown up from his brow.
Undoubling suddenly, this rangy figure of a man shot upward with
Jack-in-the-box abruptness and a violence which threatened the stability
of both the desk before him and the absurdly small typewriter stand upon
his left. Seizing a select portion of the correspondence, he lunged
past the roll-top desk of Heitmuller, the chief clerk, and aimed toward
the double doors of grained oak which loomed behind. But his progress
was grotesque, for he careened like a camel when he walked. In the
first stride or two these careenings only threatened to be dangerous,
but in the third or fourth they made good their promise. One lurching
hip joint banged the drawn-out leaf of the chief clerk's desk, sweeping
a shower of papers to the floor.
"John--dammit!" snapped Heitmuller irritably. The other hip caracoled
against the unopened half of the double doors as John yawed through.
The door complained loudly, rattling upon its hinges and in its brazen
sockets, so that for a moment there was clatter and disturbance from one
end of the office to the other.
The orange shipper started nervously, and the chief clerk, cocking his
head gander-wise, gazed in disgust at the confusion on the floor, while
far within Robert Mitchell, the General Freight Agent of the California
Consolidated Railway, lifted a massive face from his desk with a look of
mild reproof in his small blue eyes.
Yet when the huge stenographer came back, and with another scuffling of
clumsy feet stooped to retrieve the litter about Heitmuller's revolving
chair, he seemed so regretful and his features lighted with such a
helplessly apologetic smile that even his awkwardness appeared
commendable, since it was so obviously seasoned with the grace of
perfectly good intent.
Appreciation of this was advertised in the forgiving chuckle of the
chief clerk who, standing now at the rail, remarked _sotto voce_ to the
orange shipper: "John is as good as a vaudeville act!"
At this the red moustaches undulated appreciatively, while the two
"mourners" laughed so audibly that the awkward man, once more in his
chair, darted an embarrassed glance at them, and the red flush came
again to his face. He suspected they were laughing at him, and as if to
comfort himself, a finger and thumb went into his right vest pocket and
drew out a clipping from the advertising columns of the morning paper.
Holding it deep in his hand, he read furtively:
_ACTING TAUGHT_. Charles Kenton, character actor, temporarily
disengaged, will receive a few select pupils in dramatic expression at
his studio in The Albemarle. Terms reasonable.
Then John looked across aggressively at the men who had laughed. They
were not laughing now, but nodding in his direction, and whispering
busily.
What were they saying? That he was a joke, a failure? That he had been
in this chair seven years? That he was a big, snubbed, defeated,
over-worked handy-man about this big, loosely organized office? That in
seven years he had neither been able to get himself promoted nor
discharged? No doubt!
As if to get away from the thought, John turned from his typewriter to
the open window and looked out. There was the spire of the grand old
First Church down there below him. Yonder were the sky-notching
business blocks of the pushing city of Los Angeles, as it was in the
early nineteen hundreds. There, too, were the villa-crowned heights to
the north, shut in at last by the barren ridges of the Sierra Madre
Mountains, some of which, in this month of January, were snow-capped.
But here were these foolish men still nodding and whispering. Good
fellows, too, but blind. What did they know about him really?
They knew that he was a stenographer, but they did not know that he was
a stenographer to the glory of God!--one who cleaned his typewriter,
dusted his desk, opened the mail, wrote his letters, ate, walked, slept,
all to the honor of his creator--that the whole of life to him was a
sort of sacrament.
They thought he was beaten and discouraged, an industrial slave, drawn
helplessly into the cogs. They, poor, purblind materialists, were
without vision. They did not know that there were finer things than
pickles and crude oil. They did not know that he was to soar; that
already his wings were budding, nor that he lived in an inner state of
spiritual exaltation as delicious as it was unsuspected. They pitied
him; they laughed commiseratingly. He did not want their commiseration;
he spurned their laughter and their pity. He was full of youth and the
exuberance of hope. He was full of an expanding strength that made him
stronger as his dream grew brighter. Only his eyes were tired. The
cross lights were bad. For a moment he shaded his brow tenderly with
his hand, reflecting that he must hereafter use an eye-shade by day as
methodically he used one in his nightly study.
The morning moved along. The yearning orange shipper went away. One
mourner rose and passed inside. The other waited impatiently for his
turn to do the same. Luncheon time came for John, and he ate it in the
file room--ravenously; and while he ate he read--the Congressional
Record; and reading, made notations on the margin, for John was
preparing for what he was preparing, although he did not quite know
what. The train of destiny was rumbling along, and when it stopped at
his station, he proposed to swing on board.
His luncheon down swiftly, as much through hunger as through haste, he
swung out of the door, bound for Charles Kenton, "actor--temporarily
disengaged--Hotel Albemarle--terms reasonable," moving with such
headlong speed that he was soon within that self-important presence.
"Hampstead is my name," he blurted, with clumsy directness, "John
Hampstead," and the interview with Destiny was on.
"The first trouble with you," declared the white-haired actor
critically, "is that your face doesn't fit."
John wet a lip and hitched a nervous leg, but sat awkwardly silent, his
eyes boring hungrily, as if waiting for more. The actor, however, was
slow to add more. Faces were his enthusiasm, as well as the raw material
of his profession, but this face puzzled him, so that before committing
himself further he paused to survey it again: the strong nose with its
hump of energy, the well buttressed chin, and then the broad forehead
with its unusually thick, bony ridge encircling the base of the brows
like a bilge keel, proclaiming loudly that here was a man with racial
dynamite in his system, one who, whatever else he might become, was now
and always a first-class animal.
The eyebrows heightened this suggestion by being thick and yellow, and
sweeping off to the temples in a scroll-like flare. The forehead itself
was broad, but gathered a high look from that welter of tawny hair which
was roached straight up and back, giving the effect of one who plunges
headlong.
But the eyes completely modified the countenance. They did not plunge.
They halted and beamed softly. Gray and deep-seated, they made all that
face's force the force of tenderness, by burning with a light that was
obviously inner and spiritual. The mouth, again, while as cleanly
chiseled as if cut from marble,--sensitive, impressionistic, fine, was,
alas! weak; or if not weak, advertising weakness by an habitual
expression of lax amiability; although along with this the actor noted
that the two lips, buttoning so loosely at the corners, could none the
less collaborate in a most engaging smile.
Kenton concluded his second appraisal with a little gesture of
impatience. The man's features gave each other the lie direct, and that
was all there was to it. They said: This man is a beast, a great,
roaring lion of a man; and then they said: No, this lion is a lamb, a
mild, dreamy, sucking dove sort of person.
"That's it," he iterated. "Your face doesn't fit."
Hampstead did not wince.
"The question is," he proposed, in a voice husky with a mixture of
embarrassment and determination, "how am I to make it fit? Or, failing
that, how am I to get somewhere with a face that doesn't fit?"
The actor's reply was half sagacity, half "selling talk", mixed with
some judicious flattery and tinged with inevitable gallery play,
although there was no gallery.
"Elocution?" Kenton observed, with a little grimace of derision. "No!
Oratory? Not at all!" The weight of his withering scorn was
tremendous. "There are no such things. It is all acting! A man speaks
with the whole of himself--his eyes, his mouth, his body, his walk, his
pose--everything. That's what you need to learn. Self-expression! I
can make your face fit. That's simple enough," and Kenton waved his hand
as if the re-stamping of a man's features was the easiest thing he did.
"I can make your body graceful. I can take that voice of yours and make
it strong as the roar of a bull, and as soft as rich, brown velvet.
Yes," and the actor leaped to his feet in growing enthusiasm, "I can
make 'em all respond to every whim of what's passing inside. But," he
asked suddenly, with a penetrating glance, "will that make an orator of
you? Well, that depends on what's passing inside. It takes a great
soul to make an orator--great imagination, mind, feelings, sentiments.
Have you got 'em? I doubt it! I doubt it!"
The old man confirmed his dubiousness with the uncomplimentary emphasis
of hesitating silence. In the sincerity of his critical analysis, he
had forgotten that he was trying to secure a pupil. "And yet--and
yet--" his eye began to kindle as he looked, "I tell you I don't know,
boy--there's something--there might be something behind that face of
yours. It might come out, you know, _it might come out_!"
Kenton drawled the last words out slowly in a deeply speculative tone,
and then asked abruptly: "How old are you?"
"Twenty-four," admitted John, feeling suddenly as if he confessed the
years of Methuselah.
But the dark eyes of the old actor sparkled, and his long, mobile lips
parted in the ghost of a sigh which crept out through teeth stained
yellow by years and tobacco, after which he ejaculated admiringly: "My
God, but you are young!"
This came as an inspiring thought to John. He did feel young, all but
his eyes. What was the matter with them that the lids were so woodeny
of late? Yes; he was young, despite seven submerged years, and the
wings of his soul were preening.
Back in the General Freight Office, John fell upon his work with happy
vigor. Spat, spat, spat, and a letter was on its way from Dear Sir to
Yours truly. But in the midst of these spattings, he paused to muse.
"Kenton said he could make me graceful," the big fellow was communing
over his typewriter, when abruptly the outer door opened and, after a
single glance, John appeared to forget both his communings and his work.
Swinging about, he sat transfixed, his odd features turned eccentrically
handsome by a light of adoration which began to glow upon them, as if an
astral presence had entered.
Yet to the unprejudiced observer the newcomer was no heavenly being, but
a mere schoolgirl, whose dress had not been long at the shoe-top stage.
With a swish of skirts and an excited ripple of laughter, she had burst
in like a breeze of youth itself. But to this breeziness of youth the
young lady added the indefinable thing called charm, and the promise of
greater charm to come. She was already tall and would be taller, fair
to look upon and certain to be fairer. To a dress of some warm red
color, a touch of piquancy was added by a Tam-o'-Shanter cap of plaid
that was itself pushed jauntily to one side by a wealth of crinkly brown
hair; while a bit of soft brown fur encircled the neck and cuddled
affectionately as a kitten under the smooth, plump chin. The face was
oval with a tendency to fullness, and the nose, while by no means
_retrousse_, was as distinctively Irish as the sparkle in the blue of
her laughing eyes. Irish, too, were the smiling lips, but the delicious
dimples that flecked the white and red of her cheeks were entirely
without nationality. They were just woman, budding, ravishing woman;
and there is no doubt whatever that they helped to make the fascination
of that merry face complete, when its spell was cast over the soul of
Hampstead.
"Oh, John!" exclaimed the young lady with impulsive familiarity,
bounding through the gate and over to his side, "I want you to write
some invitations for me. This is my week to entertain the Phrosos. See!
Isn't the paper dear?"
There were caresses in the big man's eyes as the girl drew near, but he
replied with less freedom than her own form of address invited: "Good
afternoon, Miss Bessie."
The restraint in his speech however was much in contrast to the bold
poaching of his eyes. But Bessie appeared to notice neither restraint
nor the boldness as, standing by his desk, with the big man looking on
interestedly, she undid the package in her hand.
The picture of frank and simple comradeship so immediately established
proclaimed a certain mutual unawareness between this pretty,
half-developed girl and this big, unawakened man that was as delightful
to contemplate as it evidently was to enjoy.
"Isn't it darling?" the girl demanded again, having exposed to view the
contents of her box, invitation paper with envelopes to match, in color
as pink as her own cheeks.
"Yes, Miss Bessie, it is dear," John concurred placidly.
"But you are not looking at it," protested the girl.
"No," the awkward man confessed, but entirely unabashed, "I am looking
at you--devouringly."
"Well, you needn't," Bessie answered spicily.
"Yes, I need," John declared coolly. "You do not know how much I need.
You are the only unspoiled human being I ever see in this office."
"Old Heit does look rather shopworn," Bessie whispered roguishly. "But,
look here," and she thrust out her lips in a pout that was at once
defiant and tantalizing, while her eyes rested for a moment upon the
closed double doors: "My father is an unspoiled human being."
"What have you been doing to your hair?" Hampstead demanded critically,
refusing to be diverted.
"Doing it up, of course, as grown women should," she vouchsafed with
emphasis. "Don't you like it?"
With a flash of her two hands, one of which snatched out a pin while the
other swept off the plaid cap, she spun herself rapidly about so that
John might view the new coiffure from all angles.
"Oh, of course, I have to like it," he said, with mock mournfulness. "I
have to like anything you do, because I like you, and because you are my
boss's boss; but I am sorry to lose the thick braids down your back,
with that delicious little velvety tuft at the end that I used to catch
up and tickle your ear with in the long, long ago."
"But how long ago was that, Sir Critical?" challenged Bessie.
"Long, long ago," affirmed Hampstead, with another of his humorous
sighs, "when it was a part of my duty to take you to the circus and buy
you peanuts and lemonade of a color to match your cheeks."
"And that," dissented the young lady triumphantly, "was only last
September, and the one before that, and, in fact, almost every circus
day since I can remember."
"But now that you are doing your hair up high, you will not need me to
take you to the circus again."
This time the note of sadness in Hampstead's voice was genuine, whereat
all the loyalty in the soul of Bessie leaped up.
"You shall," she declared, with an impulsive sweetness of manner, while
she leaned close and added in a whisper that made the assurance
deliciously confidential--"as long as you wish."
"Then I shall do it forever," declared John recklessly.
"However," and Miss Elizabeth Mitchell, with a playful acquisition of
dignity, switched the subject abruptly by announcing briskly, "business
before circuses."
"Phrosos before rhinos, as it were," consented John.
"Yes--now take your pencil and let me dictate."
"But," bantered John, "I allow no woman to dictate to me. Besides, I
write a perfectly horrible hand."
"Oh," explained Bessie, "but I want them on the typewriter. It'll make
the other girls wild. None of them can command a typewriter."
"Yet," protested Hampstead, "overlooking for the moment the
offensiveness in that word 'command', I venture to suggest, Miss
Mitchell, that things are not done that way this year. A typewritten
invitation isn't considered good form in the best circles."
"I don't care; we'll have 'em," declared Bessie. "We'll set a new
fashion." Her little foot smote the floor sharply, and she stood bolt
upright, so upright that she leaned back, gazing at John through austere
lashes, her face lengthening till the dimples disappeared, while the
Cupid's bow of her lips became almost a memory.
"Oh, very well," weakened Hampstead, bowing his head, "I cannot brook
that gaze for long. It shall be as your Grace commands."
"Tired, aren't you?" commented Bessie, suddenly mollified, and scanning
the big face narrowly, while a look of soberness came into her eyes. "I
can see it; and your eyes look bad--very bad, John." Her voice was
girlishly sympathetic. "These people do not appreciate you, either.
But I do! I know!" and she nodded her round chin stoutly, while she
laid a hand upon the arm of this man who, seven years her senior, was in
some respects her junior. "You are a very great man in the day of his
obscurity. It will come out some time. You will be General Manager of
the railroad, or something very, very big. Won't you?" and she leaned
close again with that delightfully confidential whisper.
"I admit it," confessed John, with a happy chuckle.
But Bessie's restless eye had fallen upon the clock. "Pickles and
artichokes!" she exclaimed, with a sudden change of mood, "I must flit."
Snatching from her bag a crumpled note, she tossed it on the desk,
calling back: "Here. This is what I want to say to 'em."
Hampstead sat for a moment looking after her, his lips parted, his great
hands set upon his knees with fingers sprawled very widely, until Bessie
was out of view behind the double doors that admitted to her father's
presence.
*CHAPTER II*
*ONE MAN AND ANOTHER*
In the dusk of the early winter's night in that land where winter hints
its presence but slightly in any other way, two children dashed out of a
rambling shell of a cottage that sprawled rather hopelessly over an
unkempt lot, screaming: "Uncle John! Uncle John!"
Roused from castled, starry dreams, the big stenographer, who had been
enjoying the feel of the dark upon his eyes, and the occasional happy
fragrance of orange blossoms in his nostrils, greeted each with a bear
hug, and the three clattered together up the rickety steps into a tiny
hall. On the left was an oblong room, and beyond it, through curtains,
appeared a table set for dinner. Light streaming in from this second
room revealed the first as a sort of parlor-studio, where a piano, a
lounge, easels, malsticks, palettes, and stacks of unframed canvases
jostled each other indifferently. An inspection would have shown that
these pictures were mostly landscapes, with now and then a flower study
in brilliant colors; and to the practised eye a distressing atmosphere
of failure would have obtruded from every one.
From somewhere beyond the dining room came the odor of cooking food, and
the sound of energetic but heavy footsteps.
"Hello, Rose," called John cheerily.
At the moment a woman came into view, bearing a steaming platter. She
was large of frame, with gray eyes, with straight light hair, fair wide
brow, and features that showed a general resemblance to Hampstead's own.
Her face had a weary, disturbed look, but lighted for a moment at the
sight of her brother.
Depositing the platter upon the table, the woman sank heavily into a
chair at the end, where she began immediately to serve the plates. The
children, a girl and a boy, sat side by side, with John across from
them. This left a vacant chair opposite Rose, and before this a plate
was laid.
For a time the family fell upon its food in silence. The girl was eleven
years old perhaps, with eyes of lustrous hazel, reddish-brown hair
massed in curls upon her shoulders and hanging below, cheeks hopelessly
freckled, mouth large, and nose also without hope through being
waggishly pugged. The boy, whose sharp, pale features exhibited traces
of a battle with ill health begun at birth and not yet ended, had eyes
that were like his mother's, clear and gray, and there was a brave turn
to his upper lip that excited pity on a face so pale. He looked older
but was probably younger than his sister. Hero-worship, frank and
unbounded, was in the glance with which the two from time to time beamed
upon their uncle.
After a considerable interval, John, glancing first at the empty chair
and then at his sister, asked with significant constraint in his tone:
"Any word?"
His sister's head was shaken disconsolately, and the angular shoulders
seemed to sink a little more wearily as her face was again bowed toward
her plate.
After another interval, Hampstead remarked: "You seem worried to-night,
Rose."
"The rent is due to-morrow," she replied in a wooden voice.
"Is that all?" exclaimed John, throwing back his head with a relieved
laugh. At the same time a hand had stolen into his pocket, and he drew
out a twenty-dollar gold piece and tossed it across the table.
"The rent is $17.50," observed Rose, eyeing the coin doubtfully.
"Keep the change," chuckled John, "and pass the potatoes."
But the woman's gloom appeared to deepen.
"You pay your board promptly," she protested. "This is the third month
in succession that you have also paid the rent. Besides, you are always
doing for the children."
"Who wouldn't, I'd like to know?" challenged John, surveying them both
proudly; whereat Dick, his mouth being otherwise engaged, darted a look
of gratitude from his great, wise eyes, while Tayna reached over and
patted her uncle's hand affectionately. "Tayna" was an Indian name the
girl's father had picked up somewhere.
"Besides," went on John, "Charles is having an uphill fight of it right
now. It's a pleasure to stand by a gallant fellow like him. He goes
charging after his ideal like old Sir Galahad."
But the face of his sister refused to kindle.
"Like Don Quixote, you mean," she answered cynically. "I haven't heard
from him in three weeks. He has not sent me any money in six. He sends
it less and less frequently. He becomes more and more irresponsible.
You are spoiling him to support his family for him, and," she added,
with a choke in her voice, while a tear appeared in her eye, "he is
spoiling us--killing our love for him."
The boy slipped down from his chair and stood beside his mother,
stroking her arm sympathetically.
"Poppie's all right," he whispered in his peculiar drawl. "He'll come
home soon and bring a lot of money with him. See if he don't!"
"Oh, I know," confessed Rose, while with one hand she dabbed the corner
of her eye with an apron, and with the other clasped the boy impulsively
to her. "I know I should not give way before the children. But--but it
grows worse and worse, John!"
"Nonsense!" rebuked her brother. "You're only tired and run down. You
need a rest, by Hokey! that's what you need. Charles is liable to sell
that Grand Canyon canvas of his any time, and when he does, you'll get a
month in Catalina, that's what you will!"
The wife was silently busy with her apron and her eyes.
"Do you know, Rose," John continued with forced enthusiasm, "my
admiration for Charles grows all the time. He follows his star, that
boy does!"
"And forgets his family--leaves it to starve!" reproached the sister
bitterly, while the sag of her cheeks became still more noticeable.
"Ah, but that's where you do Charles an injustice," insisted John. "He
knows I'm here. We have a sort of secret understanding; that is," and
he gulped a little at going too far--"that is, we understand each other.
He knows that while he is following his ideal, I won't see you starve.
He's a genius; I'm the dub. It's a fair partnership. His eye is always
on the goal. He will get there sure--and soon, now, too."
"He will never get there!" blurted out the dejected woman, as if with a
sudden disregardful loosing of her real convictions. "For thirteen
years I have hoped and toiled and believed and waited. A good while ago
I made up my mind. He has not the vital spark. For five years I have
pleaded with him to give it up--to surrender his ambition, to turn his
undoubted talent to account. He has had the rarest aptitude for
decorating. We might be having an income of ten thousand a year now.
Instead he pursues this will-o'-the-wisp ambition of his. He is crazy
about color, always chasing a foolish sunset or some wonderful desert
panorama of sky and cloud and mountain--seeing colors no one else can
see but unable to put his vision upon the canvas. That's the truth,
John! I have never spoken it before. Never hinted it before the
children! Charles Langham is a failure. He will never be anything else
but a failure!"
The words, concluded by the barely successful suppression of a sob, fell
on unprotesting silence. Who but this life-worn woman had so good an
opportunity to know if they were true, so good a right to speak them if
she believed them true? John looked at his plate, Tayna and Dick looked
at each other. It required a stout heart to break the oppressive quiet,
and for the moment no one in this group had that heart. The break came
from the outside, when some one ran swiftly up the steps and threw open
the front door. Instant sounds of collision and confusion issued from
the hall, followed immediately by a masculine voice, thin and injured in
tone, calling excitedly:
"Well, for the love of Michael Angelo! What do you keep stuffing the
hall so full of furniture for? Won't somebody please come and help me
with these things?"
The dinner table was abruptly deserted; but quick as John and the
children were, Rose was ahead of them, and when they reached the
hallway, a thin man of medium height, with an aquiline nose, dark eyes,
and long loose hair, was helplessly in the embrace of the laughing and
crying woman.
"Oh, Charles, you did come home; you did come home, didn't you?" she was
crying.
Charles broke in volubly. "Well, I should say I did. What did you
expect? Have I ever impressed you as a man who would neglect his
family?" After which, with the look of one who has put his accusers in
the wrong, he rescued himself from his wife's emphatic embraces, held
her off for a moment with a look of real fondness, and then brushed her
with his lips, first on one cheek and then upon the other.
"Dad-dee!" clamored the children in chorus. "Daddee!" Yet it was
noticeable that they did not presume to rush upon their father, but
flung their voices before them, experimentally, as it were.
"Well, well, _las ninas_" (las ninas being the Spanish for children),
the father exclaimed, his piercing dark eyes upon them with delight and
displeasure mingling. "Aren't you going to give me a hug? Your mother
nearly strangles me, and you stand off eyeing me as if I were a new
species."
At the open arms of invitation, both of the children plunged
unhesitatingly; but their reception was brief.
"Run away now, father is tired," the nervous-looking man proclaimed
presently, straightening his shoulders, while he sniffed the atmosphere.
"Dinner, eh? Gods and goats, but I am hungry!"
Rose led the little procession proudly back to the table, drawing out
her husband's chair for him, hovering over him, smoothing his hair,
unfolding his napkin, and stooping to place a fresh kiss upon his fine,
high, but narrow brow.
"That will do now; that will do now," he chided, with an air of having
indulged a foolishly doting woman long enough. "For goodness' sake,
Rose, give me something to eat."
His wife, still upon her feet, carried him the platter from which the
family had been served. Charles condemned it with a glance.
"Isn't there something fresh you could give me? Something that hasn't
been--pawed over?"
His tone was eloquent of sensibilities outraged, and his dark eyes,
having first flashed a reproach upon his wife, swept the circle with a
look of expected comprehension in them, as if he knew that all would
understand the delicacies of the artistic temperament.
"Why, yes," admitted Rose, without a sign of resentment. "I can get you
something fresh if you will wait a few minutes."
She slipped out to the kitchen from which presently the odor of broiling
meat proceeded, while the artist coolly rolled his cigarette, and,
surveying without touching the cup of coffee which John had poured for
him, raised his voice to call: "Some fresh coffee, too, Rose, please!"
After this Langham leveled his eye on his brother-in-law and asked
airily, "Well, John, how's everything with you?"
"Fine as silk, Charles," replied Hampstead. "How is it with you?"
"Never better," declared Langham. "Never saw such sunsets in your life
as they are having up the Monterey coast. I tell you there never were
such colors. There was one there in December,"--and he launched into a
detailed description of it, his eyes, his face, his hands, his whole
body laboring to convey the picture which his animated spirits
proclaimed was still upon the screen of his mind.
As the description was concluded, Rose placed a platter before him, upon
which, garnished with parsley, two small chops appeared, delicately
grilled.
Abruptly ceasing conversation, Charles sank a knife and fork into one of
them and transferred a generous morsel to his mouth.
"Thanks, old girl; just up to your topmost mark," he confessed
ungrudgingly, after a few moments, during which, with half-closed eyes,
he had been chewing vigorously and with a singleness of purpose rather
rare in him.
"Sold any pictures lately?" asked John casually.
"No," said Langham abruptly, lowering his voice, while a look of
annoyance shaded his brow. "I dropped in at the gallery first thing,
but"--and he shrugged his shoulders--"Nothing doing! However," and he
became immediately cheerful again, "Mrs. Lawson has been looking awfully
hard at that Grand Canyon canvas. If she buys that, my fortune's made."
"And if she doesn't," observed Rose pessimistically.
"And if she doesn't?" her husband exclaimed with sudden irritation.
"Well--it'll be made just the same. You see if it isn't! Oh, say!" and
a light broke upon his face so merry that it immediately dissipated
every sign of annoyance. "What do you think? I saw Owens to-day, the
fellow who auctions alleged oil paintings at a minimum of two dollars
each. You know the scheme--pictures painted while you wait--roses,
chrysanthemums, landscapes even. Well, he offered me fifteen dollars a
day to paint pictures for him. Think of it! To sit in the window before
a gaping crowd painting those miserable daubs, a dozen or two a day,
while he auctions them off. His impudence! If I had been as big as you
are, Jack, I would have punched him."
"Fifteen dollars a day," commented Rose thoughtfully.
"Yes," laughed Langham, his little black eyes a-twinkle, as he clipped
the last morsel from the first of his chops. "The idea!"
"Well, I hope you took it," his wife suggested.
"Rose!" exclaimed Langham, rising bolt upright at the table and looking
into her face as if she had unwarrantably and unexpectedly hurled the
blackest insult. "Rose! An artist like me!"
"It is the kind of a job for an artist like you," she rejoined
stingingly, with a sarcastic emphasis on just the right words.
"Oh, my God! My God!" exclaimed the man sharply, turning from the
table, while he threw his hands dramatically upward and clutched at the
back of his head, after which he took a turn up and down the room as if
beside himself with unutterable emotions.
John judged that this was the fitting moment for his withdrawal, but
Langham's distress of mind was not too great for him to observe the
movement and to follow. He overtook his brother-in-law in the
studio-parlor, and his manner was coolly importunate.
"Say, old man!" he whispered, "could you let me have five? I'm a little
short on carfare, and you'll be gone in the morning before I get up."
"Sure," exclaimed John, without a moment's hesitation, delving in the
depths of the pocket from which he had produced the money for the rent,
and handing out a five-dollar piece.
"Thanks, old chap," said Langham, seizing it eagerly and hastening away,
after an affectionate slap on the shoulder of his bigger and as he
thought baser metaled brother-in-law. He did not, however, say that he
would repay the loan, and Hampstead did not remark that it was the last
gold coin in his pocket and that he should have no more till pay day,
ten days hence.
John let his admiration for the assurance of Langham play for a moment,
and then turned to the rear of the studio, opened a door, struck a
match, and groped his way to a naked gas jet. The sudden flare of light
revealed a lean-to room, meant originally for nobody knew what, but
turned into a bedroom. The only article of furniture which piqued
curiosity in the least was a table against the wall, across which a long
plank had been balanced. Upon it and equilibrated as carefully as the
plank itself, was a row of books of many shapes and sizes and in various
stages of preservation. This plank was John's library.
Stuck about upon the walls were several large photogravures, portraying
various stirring scenes in history, mostly Roman. They were unframed
and fastened crudely to the wall with pins. Evidently this was the
living place of an untidy man.
The tiny table, with its balanced over-load of books, was directly
beneath the gas. John dropped heavily into the wooden chair before it
and drew to him a number of sheets of paper, upon which, with much labor
and many erasings, he began to fashion a sort of motto or legend.
Satisfied at length with his work, he printed the finished legend
swiftly in rude capital letters in the center of a fresh sheet, snatched
down the picture of a Christian martyr which occupied the central space
above his library, and with the same four pins affixed his motto in that
particular spot, where it would greet him instantly upon opening the
door, and where it would be the last thing upon which his eyes fell as
he went to sleep and the first when he awakened in the morning.
Once it was in position, he stood off and admired it, reading aloud:
"ETERNAL HAMMERING IS THE PRICE OF SUCCESS!"
"That's the stuff," he croaked enthusiastically.
"Eternal hammering!" And then he paused a moment, after which his
reverie was continued aloud. "That actor was telling me to-day about
technique. He said: 'There's a right way to do everything--to pitch a
horseshoe even.' He's right. The fellow with the best technique will
knock the highest persimmon. What makes me such a good stenographer?
Technique. What makes me such a bum office flunkey? The lack of
technique--no voice--no form--no self-confidence. I am a
young-man-afraid-of-himself--that's who I am. Technique first and
then--gravitation! That's the idea!"
By gravitation, however, Hampstead did not mean that law which keeps the
heavenly bodies from getting on the wrong side of the street, but that
process, which in his short life he had already observed, by means of
which the man in the crowd who takes advantage of his opportunities and,
by the dig of an elbow here, the insert of a shoulder there, and the
stiff thrust of a foot and leg yonder, sooner or later arrives opposite
the gateway of his particular desires.
Mere opportunism? That and a little more; a sort of conviction that
fortune herself is something of an opportunist, that what a man wants to
do, fortune, sooner or later, will help him to do, if he only wills
himself in the direction of the want early enough and long enough to
give the fickle jade her chance.
By way of proceeding immediately to hammer, Hampstead reached for a
heavy calf-bound volume, bearing the imprint of the Los Angeles Public
Library, and settled himself to read.
Most people in the railroad office were tired when they finished their
day's work. They were done with effort. John, however, was just ready
to begin. They thought of recreation; John thought only of hammering.
Since his scholastic education had been broken off in the middle by
economic necessities, he had formed the plan of reading at night the
entire written history of the world, from the first cuneiform
inscription down to the last edition of the last newspaper. In
pursuance of this plan, he had already traveled far down the centuries,
and it was with eagerness that he adjusted his eye-shade to-night,
because when he lifted the cover of his book he knew that he would swing
open the doors on one of the greatest centuries in human history, the
century in which the world discovered the individual. Hampstead was
himself an individual. This was in some sense the story of his own
discovery.
When John had been reading for perhaps half an hour, there came a
bird-like tap at his door, accompanied by a suppressed giggle.
"Who comes there?" called the student in sepulchral tones, stabbing the
page at a particular spot with his thumb, while his eyes were lifted.
The only audible sound was another giggle, but the door swung open
mysteriously, revealing two small, white-robed figures silhouetted
against the shadows in the studio.
"Enter, ghosts!" John commanded, in the same sepulchral voice, while his
eyes fell again upon his pages. The ghosts chortled and advanced, but
with great circumspection, to the little table with its dangerously
balanced bookshelf, its miscellaneous litter of papers, and its silent,
absorbed student.
Tayna, her long burnished curls cascading over the white of her
nightgown, and her eyes shining softly, ducked her head and arose under
one arm of her uncle, where presently she felt herself drawn close with
an affectionate, satisfying sort of squeeze. The boy, approaching from
the other side, laid an arm upon the shoulder of the man, and stood
watching with fascination the eyes of his uncle in their steady sweep
from side to side of the printed page.
"Uncle John," asked Tayna shyly, burying her face in his neck as she put
the question, "when will you be President?"
"When _shall_ you be President?" corrected the boy, looking across at
his sister with that same old-mannish expression which was a part of all
he said and did.
Hampstead cuddled the girl closer, and his eye abandoned the page to
look down the bridge of his nose into distance.
"Why?" he asked presently.
"Oh, because," said Tayna, with a little shiver of eagerness, "I can
hardly wait."
Hampstead's eyes wandered to his motto on the wall. The eyes of the boy
followed and spelled out the letters wonderingly, but in silence.
"We must be able to wait," said John, squeezing Tayna again. "It's a
long, long way; but if we just keep on keeping on, why, after a while we
are there, you know."
Tayna sighed and reached up a round, plump arm till it encircled
Hampstead's neck, as she asked, still more shyly:
"And when you are President, every one will know just how good and great
you are, and they won't call you awkward nor--nor homely any more, will
they?"
A flush and a chuckle marked John's reception of this query, after which
he observed hastily and a bit apprehensively:
"Say, you wet little goldfishes! Remember that you are never, never,
now or any time, howsoever odd I bear myself, to breathe a word to
anybody, not to a single soul, not to your mamma or your papa or your
Sunday-school teacher or anybody, of all these nice little play secrets
which we have between ourselves."
An instant seriousness came over the children's faces.
"Cross my heart," murmured Tayna, with a twitch of her slender finger
across her breast.
"And hope to die," added Dick, with a funeral solemnity, as he completed
Tayna's cross by a vertical movement of a stubby thumb in the direction
of his own wishbone of a breast.
Hampstead looked relieved.
"But," affirmed Tayna stoutly, "they are not play secrets. They are
real secrets. Aren't they?"
John looked up at his motto again.
"Yes," he said in a low, determined voice. "They are real secrets."
"And," half-declared, half-questioned Dick, "if you aren't President,
you are going to be some other kind of a very great man?
"Aren't you?" the boy persisted, when Hampstead was silent.
"Tell you to-morrow," laughed John. "Good night, ghosts!" and with a
swift assault of his lips upon the cheeks of either, he gently impelled
them toward the door.
"Good night, your Excellency!" giggled Tayna.
"Good night, my counselors," responded Hampstead, reaching for his book.
An hour later Hampstead was still reading. Another hour later he was
still reading. But something like a quarter of an hour beyond that,
when it might have been, say, near half-past eleven, he was not reading.
He was turning his head strangely from side to side and digging a
knuckle into his eyes. A surprising thing had happened. He could no
longer see the lines upon the page--nor the page itself--nor the
book--nor anything!
His first impression was that the gas had gone out; but this swiftly
gave way to the conviction that he had gone blind--stone blind!--and so
suddenly that it happened right between the beheading of one of the
queens of Henry the Eighth and the marrying of another. He was now
tardily conscious that for some time his eyes had been giving him pain,
that he had rubbed them periodically to clear away white opacities that
appeared upon the page; but now there was no pain; they were suffused
with moisture, and the room was dark.
After an interval he could make out the gaslight glowing feebly like the
tiny glare of a candle visible in some distant pit of darkness, but he
could discern no shapes about the room. Not one!
A horrible fear stole into his breast and chilled it. All of him had
suddenly come to naught, and just as he was getting started. He turned
futile, streaming orbs up to where his new-made motto should loom upon
the wall. It was there, of course, mocking at him now; but he could not
see it. He could not see the wall even. For fully five minutes he sat
in darkness, his hands clasped above his bowed head. Then he arose and
groped his way along the wall to the door and opened it, and stood
facing out into the grotesque dark of the studio. He thought of trying
to grope his way across it--of calling out--but decided to wait a few
minutes.
He felt stricken, broken, overwhelmed. His life, his career, himself
were ruined. He required time to get used to the sensation, time to
adjust his mind to the extent of the calamity and to gather some
elements of fortitude wherewith to face the world. Not even Rose must
see him broken and shattered as he felt right now.
Turning back, he closed the door, felt his way to the gas, and turned it
off. He had no need of gas now. Then he lay down, fully clothed, upon
the bed, with a cold cloth upon his eyes, thinking flightily and feeling
very sorry for himself.
*CHAPTER III*
*WHEN THE DARK WENT AWAY*
+--------------------------------+
| 513 |
| General Freight Department |
| CALIFORNIA CONSOLIDATED |
| RAILWAY COMPANY |
| ROBERT MITCHELL, |
| General Freight Agent. |
| Walk in! |
+--------------------------------+
This was the sign on the door that John Hampstead had opened every
morning for seven years. This morning he did not open it, and there was
something like consternation when as late as nine-thirty the chair of
the big, amiable, stenographic drudge was still vacant. Old Heitmuller,
the chief clerk, after swearing his way helplessly from one point of the
compass to another, was about to dispatch the office boy to Hampstead's
residence.
Inside, and unaware of all this pother, sat the General Freight Agent.
Big of body, with the topography of his father's heath upon his wide
face, soft in the heart and hard in the head, Robert Mitchell was a man
of no airs. His origin was probably shanty Irish, and he didn't care
who suspected it. By painful labor, a ready smile, a hearty laugh, a
square deal to his company and as square a deal to the public as he
could give--"consistently"--he had got to his present modest eminence.
He was going higher and was not particular who suspected that either;
but was not boastful, had the respect of all men who knew him well, and
the affection of those who knew him intimately.
He sat just now in a thoroughly characteristic pose, with the stubby
fingers of one fat hand thoughtfully teasing a wisp of reddish brown
hair, while his shrewd blue eyes were screwing at the exact significance
of the top letter on a pile before him.
Over in a corner was Mitchell's guest and vast superior, Malden H. Hale,
the president of the twelve thousand miles of shining steel which made
up the Great South-western Railway System, in which Mitchell's little
road nestled like a rabbit in the maw of a python. Mr. Hale was signing
some letters dictated yesterday to John, finding them paragraphed and
punctuated to his complete satisfaction, with here and there a word
better than his own looming up in the context. For a time there was no
sound save the scratching of his pen and the fillip of the sheets as he
turned them over. Then he chuckled softly, and presently spoke.
"Bob," he said, "that's an odd genius, that stenographer out there."
"Yes," replied Mr. Mitchell absently, without looking up from his work,
and then suddenly he stabbed the atmosphere with a significant rising
inflection: "Genius?"
"Well, yes," affirmed Mr. Hale. "Genius! He impresses you first as
absurdly incompetent, but his workmanship is really superior, and later
you get a suggestion of something back of him, something buried that
might come out, you know."
"I used to think so," the General Freight Agent replied, with a tone
which indicated loss of interest in the subject, but being tardily
overtaken in his reading by a sense that he had not quite done justice
to the big stenographer, he broke the silence to add: "He is a fine
character. He has very high thoughts,"--vacancy was in his eye for a
moment,--"so high they're cloudy."
And that was all. Mr. Hale made no further comment. Mr. Mitchell, a
just man, was satisfied that he had done justice. Thus in the minds of
two arbiters of the destinies of many men, John Hampstead, loyal,
laborious, who had served faithfully for seven years, was lifted for a
moment until the sun of prospect flashed upon him,--lifted and then
dropped. And they did not even know that nature, too, had dropped
him,--that he was blind.
But just then a privileged person knocked and entered without waiting
for an invitation. The newcomer was Doctor Gallagher, the "Company"
oculist, his fine, dark eyes aglow with sympathy and importance.
"That boy Hampstead," he began abruptly, "is in bad shape."
"Hampstead!" ejaculated Mr. Mitchell antagonistically, as if it were
impossible that lumbering mass of bone and muscle could ever be in bad
shape.
"Yes," affirmed the physician, with the air of one who announces a
sensation, "he's likely to go blind!"
"No!" ejaculated Mr. Mitchell, in still more emphatic tones of
disbelief, though his blue eyes opened wide and grew round with shock
and sympathetic apprehension.
"Yes," explained Doctor Gallagher volubly. "Continual transcription,
the sweep of the eye from the notebook page to the machine and back,
year in and year out, for so long, has broken down the muscular system
of the eye. He had a blind spell last night. He can see all right this
morning. But to let him go to work would be criminal. I have him in
the Company Hospital for two weeks of absolute rest, and then he will be
all right. But the typewriter, never again! You can put him on the
outside to solicit freight, or something like that."
A broad grin overspread the features of the General Freight Agent. "You
don't know John," he said. "That boy would die of nervousness the first
day out. He's afraid of people. Besides," went on Mitchell, "we
couldn't get along without him. He knows too much that nobody else
knows."
"Well, anyway, never again the typewriter!" commanded the doctor from
the door, getting out quickly and hurrying away with the consciousness
of duty extremely well performed. He knew that he had exaggerated the
extent of John's eye-trouble; but he believed that it was necessary to
exaggerate it, both to Hampstead and to Mr. Mitchell.
In his darkened room at the hospital, John was feeling somehow suddenly
honored of destiny. People were thinking, talking, caring about him.
There was exaltation just in that. But also he was fuming. He wasn't
ill. He was simply confined. He could not read. He could not write.
He could do nothing but sit in a darkened room according to
prescription, and wait. But on the third day Doctor Gallagher said:
"As soon as it is dusk, you may go out for a swift walk. That's to get
exercise. Keep off the main streets; keep away from bright lights, do
not try to read signs, to recognize people, or in fact to look at
anything closely."
John leaped eagerly at this permission, but there was design in his
devotion to the new prescription of which the doctor knew nothing. On
the fifth day of his confinement, Tayna and Dick, who had been coming
every afternoon to sit for an hour in the semi-darkness with their
uncle, surprised the interned one doing odd contortions in the depths of
his room: twisting his wrists; standing on one foot like a stork and
twirling his great heel and toe from the knee in some eccentric
imitation of a ballet dancer; then creeping to and fro across the room
in a silly series of bowings and scrapings and salutings that threw Dick
into irrepressible laughter. Caught shamefacedly in the very midst of
these absurdities, John confessed to the two of them what he would at
the moment have confessed to no other living being--last of all to
Bessie.
"I am taking lessons," he said, "from an actor. He is going to make me
easy and graceful, so people won't call me awkward any more--nor
homely," and he looked significantly at Tayna.
"Oh," the children both gasped respectfully, and repeated with a kind of
awe in their voices: "From an actor!"
"Yes. Every evening the doctor lets me go for a walk. On every other
one of these walks I go to the actor's hotel, and he teaches me."
"Awh! An actor-r-r!" breathed Dick again, his features depicting
profoundness both of impression and speculation.
"Say!" he proposed presently. "I would rather you would be an actor
than a president, anyway."
John laughed. "I am not going to be an actor," he said, "I am only
going to be polished till I shine like a human diamond." And then he
devoted himself to the entertainment of his callers.
"Remember! Never again the typewriter!" the physician adjured sternly,
when the fortnight of John's captivity was done. For although conveying
this verdict immediately to Mitchell, the doctor had postponed its
announcement to his patient till his discharge from the hospital. John
was stunned. The typewriter was his bread. At first he rebelled, but
with a rush like the swirl of waters over his head, the memory of that
night when he was blind for an hour came to him and humbled him.
With the trembling courage of a coward, he opened the door of room 513;
saw with sickening heart the strange face at his desk, shook the flabby
hand of Heitmuller, and inwardly braced himself to enter for the last
time between the double doors, where presently he confessed his plight
as if it had been a crime.
"You don't imagine we would let you go, do you?" Mr. Mitchell asked,
while an expression of amazement grew upon his face till it became a
laugh. "Why, Jack"--Mr. Mitchell had never called him Jack before--"we
should have to pay you a salary just to stick around and keep the rest
of us straight."
The stenographer gulped. It was not the first note of praise he had
ever received from this kindly railroad man, but it was the first time
Mr. Mitchell or any one else in that whole office had ever acknowledged
to John that he was valuable for what he knew as well as for what he
beat out of his finger-tips.
"You are going to be my private secretary," explained Mr. Mitchell,
still chuckling at the simplicity of John. "I have few letters to write,
and you know enough to do most of them without dictation. You keep me
reminded of things; handle my telephone calls and appointments.
Gallagher says your eyes will probably give you no trouble whatever
under these conditions. The salary will be fifteen dollars more a
month."
The big awkward man was too confusedly grateful and overwhelmed even to
attempt to murmur his thanks. Instead, he did a thing of unheard-of
boldness. He reached over and touched the General Freight Agent on the
arm,--just stabbed him in the upper, fleshy part of the arm with a
thrust of his stiff fingers, accompanying the act with a monosyllabic
croak. It was a clumsy touch, and it was presuming; but to a man of
understanding, it was eloquent.
After one month in this new position, John found himself seeing the
transportation business through new glasses. He had passed from details
to principles, and the change stimulated his mind enormously.
One of his new duties now was to sit at the General Freight Agent's
elbow in conferences, and later to make summaries of the arguments pro
and con. In transcribing Mr. Mitchell's part of these talks, it
interested John to elaborate a little. Soon he ventured to make the
General Freight Agent's points stronger when he felt it could be done,
and then waited, after laying the transcript on the big man's desk, for
some word of reproof. Reproof did not come, and yet John thought the
changes must be noticed.
But one day H. B. Anderson, Assistant General Freight Agent of the San
Francisco and El Paso, a rival line, was in the office.
"Mitchell," Anderson began, "I am compelled to admit your argument reads
a blamed sight stronger than it sounded to me the other day."
At this the General Freight Agent laughed complacently.
"The point about the demurrage especially," went on Anderson. "I didn't
remember that somehow."
"Um," said the General Freight Agent in a puzzled way and picked up the
transcript of the argument. As he scanned it, his face grew more
puzzled; then light broke. "Yes," he replied emphatically, "that's the
strongest point, in my judgment."
"Well," confessed Anderson, "it knocks me out. I am now agreeable to
your construction."
The private secretary listened from his little cubby-hole with mingled
exultation and apprehension. When the visitor had gone, the General
Freight Agent walked in and tossed the transcript upon the secretary's
table. John looked up timidly. The Mitchell brow was ridged and
thoughtful.
"Hampstead," he declared with an air of grave reluctance, "I guess I'll
have to lose you, after all."
"What, sir," gasped John, guilty terror shaking him somewhere inside.
At the change in John's face, Mitchell threw back his head and laughed;
one of those huge, hearty, bellowing laughs at his own humor, from which
he extracted so much enjoyment.
"Yes," he specified, "I am going to put you in the rate department. You
have the making of a great railroad man in you. What you need now is
the fundamentals. That's where you get 'em. Your brains are coming out,
John. I always thought you had 'em,--but it certainly took you a long
time to get any of them into the show window."
"It was seven years before you let me get to the window at all,"
suggested John, meaning to be a little bit vengeful.
"Nobody's fault but yours, my boy," said the G.F.A. brusquely, over his
shoulder. "By the way," he remarked, turning back again, "you aren't
afraid of people any more, either."
John flushed with pleasure. This was really the most desirable
compliment Mitchell could bestow.
"I think I am getting a little more confidence in myself," the big man
confessed, glowing modestly.
This was what three months of Kenton and "old Delsarte", as the actor
called the great French apostle of intelligible anatomy, had done for
John.
But Kenton and "old Delsarte" were doing something else to John that was
vastly more serious, but of which Robert Mitchell received no hint until
nearly a year later, when the knowledge came to him suddenly with a
shock that jarred and almost disconcerted him. It was somewhere about
noon of a day in February, and he had just touched the button for John
Hampstead, rate clerk. Instead of John, Heitmuller answered the summons,
laughing softly.
Now in the rate department John had made an amazing success. In six
months gray-headed clerks were seeking his opinions earnestly. At the
present moment he was in charge of all rates west of Ogden, Albuquerque,
and El Paso, and half the department took orders from him.
"John's away at rehearsal," explained Heitmuller, still chuckling.
"At rehearsal?"
"Yes,--he's going to play Ursus, the giant, in _Quo Vadis_, with
Mowrey's Stock Company at the Burbank next week."
"The hell!" ejaculated the General Freight Agent, while a look of blank
astonishment came upon his usually placid features. "When did that bug
bite him?"
"I can't tell yet whether it's a bite or only an itch," grinned
Heitmuller. "For a while he was reciting at smokers and parties and
things, and then I heard he was teaching elocution at home nights. Now
he's got a small dramatic company and goes out around giving one-act
plays and scenes from Shakespeare. Pretty good, too, they say!"
"Well, I be damned," Mitchell commented, when Heitmuller had finished.
"He's only away from eleven-thirty to one-thirty," explained Heitmuller.
"He was so anxious and does so much more work than any two men that I
couldn't refuse him."
"Of course not," assented Mitchell.
"Besides," added the chief clerk, "he might have gone, anyway. John's
getting a little headstrong, I've noticed, since he's coming out so
fast."
"Naturally," observed Mitchell drily, after which he dismissed
Heitmuller and appeared to dismiss the subject by turning again to his
desk.
*CHAPTER IV*
*ADVENT AND ADVENTURE*
But the General Freight Agent took care that Mrs. Mitchell, Bessie, and
himself were in a box at the Burbank on the following Monday night, when
the curtain went up on the Mowrey Stock Company's sumptuous production
of _Quo Vadis_, which for more than nine days was the talk of the town
in the city of angels, oranges, atmosphere, and oil. The Mitchells
strained their eyes for a sight of their late-grown protege, but it
appeared he was not "on." However, in the midst of a garden scene with
Roman lords, ladies, soldiers in armor and slaves decking the view,
there appeared a huge barbarian, long of hair and beard, his torso bound
round with an immense bearskin, his sandals tied with thongs, his sinewy
limbs apparently unclad, savage bands of silver upon his massy, muscled
arms, the alpine ruggedness of his countenance and the light of a
fanatical devotion that gleamed in his eye contributing in their every
detail to make the creature appear the thing the programme proclaimed
him, "Ursus, a Christian Slave."
But the programme claimed something more: that this Ursus was John
Hampstead.
Mitchell gaped and then rocked uneasily. The thing was unbelievable.
If the man would only speak, perhaps some tone of voice--but the man did
not speak, not even move. He stood half in the background, far up the
center of the stage, while the talk and action of the piece went on
beneath his lofty brow, like some mountain towering above a lakelet in
which ripples sparkle and fish are leaping. At length, however, stage
attention does center on Ursus, when the man enacting St. Peter, struck
by the nature-man's appearance of gigantic strength, observes:
"Thou art strong, my son?"
The rugged human statue moved. In a voice that was low at first but
broke quickly into reverberating tones which filled the theater to the
rafters, the answer came:
"Holy Father! I can break iron like wood!"
As the speech was delivered, the eye of Ursus gleamed, the folded arms
unbent, and one mighty muscle flexed the forearm through a short but
significant arc, after which the figure resumed its pose of respectful
but impressive immobility.
In that single speech and gesture Hampstead had achieved a personal
success and keyed the play as plausible, for by it he had come to birth
before a theater-full as a character equal to the prodigious feats of
strength upon which the action turned.
"Go to the stable, Ursus!" commanded an authoritative voice.
The huge head of the hairy man, with its crown of long, wild locks was
inclined humbly, and with an odd, rolling stride suggestive of enormous
animal-like strength, he swung deliberately across the scene and out of
it.
Robert Mitchell, staring fixedly, suddenly nodded his head with
satisfaction. At last, in that careening walk, he had seen something
that he recognized. That was the walk of Hampstead; but now Mitchell
recalled it was long since he had seen that gait, long since he had
heard the office door reverberate from a bang of one of those hip
joints, long since the big man had made any conspicuous exhibition of
the physical awkwardness that once had been so characteristic. And now?
Why now John was an actor. Not Nero yonder, harp in hand, looked more
nearly like his part. Hampstead had put on the pose, the voice, the
walk, as he had put on the bearskin and the beard.
"Isn't he w-o-n-d-e-r-f-u-l?" breathed Bessie, with a little squeeze of
her father's arm.
Mitchell laughed amiably and reached out for the curling lock upon his
brow which was his mainstay in time of mental shipwreck and began to
twist it, while he waited impatiently to see more of Ursus.
But the play appeared to have forgotten Ursus. A great party was on in
the palace of Caesar. The stage was alive with lights and music, and
with the movements of many people--senators in togas, generals in armor,
women with jewels in their hair and golden bands upon their white,
gracefully swelling arms. There was drinking and laughter and high
carousal. In right center, Caesar upon his throne was singing and
pretending to strike notes from a harp of pasteboard and gilt, notes
which in reality proceeded from the orchestra pit. At lower left upon a
couch sat Lygia, the Christian maiden, beautiful beyond imagining and
being greatly annoyed by the love-makings of the half-intoxicated Roman
soldier, Vinicius, who had laid aside his helmet and his sword, and was
pleading with the lovely but embarrassed girl, at first upon his knees,
then standing, with one knee upon the couch, while he trailed his
fingers luxuriously through the glossy blackness of her hair.
As the love-making proceeded, Lygia's apprehension grew. When Vinicius
pressed her tresses to his lips, she shrank from him. When, after
another cup of wine and just as the whole court was in raptures over the
conclusion of Caesar's song, Vinicius attempted to place his kisses yet
more daringly, Lygia started up with a cry of terror. Instantly there
sounded from the wings a bellowing roar of rage, and like a flying fury,
the wild, hairy figure of Ursus came bounding upon the scene.
Seizing Vinicius by the shoulders, Ursus shook him till all his harness
rattled, then hurled him up stage and crashing to the floor. Lygia was
swaying dizzily as if about to faint, but with another leap Ursus had
gained her side and swung her into his arms, after which he turned and
went hurdling across the stage, running in long, springing strides as
lightly as a deer, the fair, delicious form of the girl balanced
buoyantly on his arms, while her dark hair streamed out and downward
over his shoulder--all of this to the complete consternation of the
half-drunken Court of Caesar and the vast and tumultuously expressed
delight of the audience, which kept the curtain frisking up and down
repeatedly over this climactic conclusion of the second act, while the
principals posed and bowed and posed again and bowed again, to the
audience, to themselves, and to the scenery. Robert Mitchell even
supposed that Ursus was bowing to him, so being naturally polite and
somewhat beside himself, the General Freight Agent was on the point of
bowing back again when Bessie screamed:
"Oh! Oh! He bowed directly at me."
By this time, however, the curtain had recovered from its frenzy and
stayed soberly down while the lights came up so the people could read
the advertisements on the front. Immediately the tongues of the
audience were all a-buzz, and industriously passing up and down the
lines of the seats was the information that John Hampstead was a local
character. "Oh, yes, indeed,--instructor in public speaking at the
Young Men's Christian Association."
In due course, this piece of interesting information reached the
Mitchells in their box.
"I knew it all along," gurgled Bessie proudly.
"I begin to be jealous," announced Mrs. Mitchell, broad of face,
expansive of heart, aggressive of disposition. "I want all these people
to know that Ursus is our rate clerk."
"And I want them to know," said Mr. Mitchell, by way of venting his
disapproval, "that he is spoiling a mighty good rate clerk to make a
mighty poor actor."
"But," pouted the loyal Bessie, "he is not a poor actor. He's a
w-o-n-d-e-r-f-u-l actor! You are spoiling the plain truth to make a
poor epigram. You," and she looked up pertly at her father, "you are
just a bunch of sour grapes! You kept my poor Jack's nose on the
grindstone so long that he broke out in a new place, and now you are
afraid you'll lose him."
"Your poor Jack!" sneered Mrs. Mitchell merrily.
"Yes--mine!" answered Bessie stoutly. "I always told you Jack Hampstead
was a great man in disguise. I saw him first--before he saw himself,
almost. I'm going to be his friend for always and for always. Oh, look
there!"
The curtain had gone up on an odd, out-of-the-way corner of the imperial
city. There had been some colloquy over the gate of a small close,
participated in by the vibrant voice of an unseen Ursus and the calmer
one of a visible St. Peter, after which the gate opened and Ursus
entered, bearing the still fainting form of Lygia in his arms; giving,
of course, the desired impression that this fair figure of a woman had
been nestling on his great bosom ever since the curtain went down some
twelve minutes before, an inference that led some of the clerks in the
General Freight Office and other persons scattered through the audience,
to envy John. This presumption, however, was some distance from the
truth. As a matter of fact, Lygia had but recently resumed her position
in the arms of Ursus, while two stage hands, lying prone, had plucked
open the gate; and various happenings quite unsuspected of the audience
had intervened, at least one of which had been a severe shock to the
Puritan nature of John Hampstead.
However, there was the dramatic impression already referred to, and it
ate its way like acid into the consciousness of at least one person in
the playhouse.
Ursus, after looking about him for a moment in the little yard of the
Christian's house to make sure he was entirely surrounded by friends,
drew his fair burden closer and, as if by a protective instinct, bent
over it with a look of tenderness so long and concentrated that his
flaxen beard toyed with the white cheek, and his flaxen locks gleamed
for a moment amid the raven ones.
"Well," commented Bessie, in a tone that mingled sharp annoyance with
that judicially critical note which is the right of all high-school
girls in their last year, "I do not see any dramatic necessity for
prolonging this. Why doesn't he stick her face under the fountain there
for a moment and then lay her on the grass?"
Mercifully, Bessie was not compelled to contain her annoyance too long.
Ursus did eventually relinquish his hold upon the lady, and the piece
moved on from scene to scene to the final holocaust of Rome.
With the news instinct breaking out above the critical, the dramatic
columns of the morning papers gave the major stickful of type to the
performance of that histrionic athlete, John Hampstead, forgetting to
mention his connection with the Y.M.C.A., but making clear that in
daylight he was a highly respected member of the staff of Robert
Mitchell, the well-known railroad man.
But to John, the process of conversion from rate clerk to actor had been
even more exciting than the demonstration of the fact proved to his
friends.
To begin with, it was an experience quite unforgettable to the chairman
of the Prayer Meeting Committee of the Christian Endeavor Society of the
grand old First Church when for the first time he found himself upon the
stage of the Burbank at rehearsal time, with twenty-five or thirty real
actors and actresses about him. He looked them over curiously, with a
puritanic instinct for moral appraisal, as they stood, lounged, sat,
gossiped, smoked, laughed or did several of these things at once; yet
all keeping a wary eye and ear for the two men who sat at the little
table in the center of the bare, empty stage with their heads together
over a manuscript.
"Just about like other people," confessed Hampstead to himself, with
something of disappointment.
There were some tailor suited women, there were some smartly dressed
young men, there were some very nice girls, not more than a whit
different in look and manner from the typists in the general office.
There were two or three gray-haired men who, so far as appearance and
demeanor went, might have served as deacons of the First Church. There
were a couple of dignified, matronly-looking elderly ladies with
fancy-work or mending in their laps, as they swayed to and fro in the
wicker rockers that were a part of the furnishings for Act II of the
play then running. These two ladies, so far as John could see, might
have been respectively President of the Ladies' Aid and of the Woman's
Missionary Society, instead of what they were, "character old women," as
he later learned.
Totaling his impressions, Mowrey's Stock Company seemed like a large
exclusive family in which he was suffered but not seen. Nobody
introduced him to anybody. Mowrey merely threw him a glance, and that
was not of recognition but of observation that he was present.
"First act!" snapped the manager, with a voice as sharp as the clatter
of the ruler with which he rapped upon the table. Stepping forward,
prompt book in one hand, ruler in the other for a pointer, he began to
outline the scene upon the bare stage:
"This chair is a tree--that stage brace is a bench--this box is a rock,"
and so forth.
The rehearsal had begun. It moved swiftly, for Mowrey was a man with
snap to him. His words were quick, nervous, few--until angry. His
glance was imperative. It was all business, hot, relentless pressure of
human beings into moulds, like hammering damp sand in a foundry.
"Go there! Stand here! Laugh! Weep! Look pleased! Feign
intoxication!" Each short word was a blow of Mowrey's upon the wet
human sand.
John's name was never mentioned. Mowrey called him by the name of his
part, Ursus. Ursus was "on" in the first act, but with nothing to do,
and his eyes were wide with watching. One woman in particular attracted
him. She was tall and shapely, clad in a close-fitting tailored suit,
with hat and veil that seemed to match both her garments and herself.
She moved through her part with a kind of distinguished nonchalance, her
veil half raised, and a vagrant fold of it flicking daringly at a rosy
spot on her cheek when she turned suddenly; while in her gloved hands
she held a short pencil with which, from time to time, additional stage
directions were noted upon the pages of her part. This accomplished and
really beautiful young actress was Miss Marien Dounay, one of the two
leading women of the company.
Hampstead was inexperienced of women. He confessed it now to himself.
But this was to be the day of his opportunity, and he felt the blood of
adventure leaping in his veins. In his consciousness, too, floated
little arrows like indicators, and as if by common agreement, they
pointed their heads toward Miss Dounay.
If it were she now who played Lygia? Yes; it was she. They were
calling her Lygia. Hampstead smiled to himself. Presently he chuckled
softly, and the chuckle appeared to loose a small avalanche of new-born
emotions that leaped and jumbled somewhere inside.
But the first encounter was disappointing. Miss Dounay seized him by
the arm, without a glance,--her eyes being fixed on Mowrey,--and led the
big man out of the scene exactly as if he had been a wooden Indian on
rollers.
"Now," she said, "you have just carried me off." Her voice had
wonderful tones in it, tones that started more avalanches inside; but
she appeared as unconscious of the tones and their effect as of him.
She was making another note in her part.
"Better practice that 'carry off stage' before we try it at rehearsal,"
called the sharp voice of Mowrey. His eyes and his remark were
addressed to Miss Dounay. Miss Dounay nodded.
"Shall we?" she said, and looked straight at Hampstead, giving him his
first glance into self-confident eyes which were clear, brownish-black,
with liquescent, unsounded depths. In form it was a question she had
asked; in effect it was a command from a very cool and business-like
young person.
"I presume we had better," said John, affecting a foolish little laugh,
which did not, however, get very far because the earnest air of Miss
Dounay was inhospitable to levity.
"See here!" she instructed. "I throw up my arms in a faint. My left
arm falls across your right shoulder. At the same time I give a little
spring with my right leg, and I throw up my left leg like this. At the
same instant you throw your right arm under my shoulders, your left arm
gathers my legs; I will hold 'em stiff. There!"
Miss Dounay's arm was on John's shoulder, and she was preparing to suit
the rest; of her action to her words. "Without any effort to lift me,"
she continued, talking now into his ear, "I will be extended in your
arms. All you have to do is to be taking your running stride as I come
to you, and after that to hold me poised while you bound off the stage.
Can you do it?"
With this crisp, challenging question on her lips, Miss Dounay completed
the proposed manoeuvre of her lower limbs, and John found himself with
the long, exquisitely moulded body of a beautiful woman balancing in his
arms, while a foolish quiver passed over him and shook him till he
actually trembled.
[Illustration: A foolish quiver passed over him and shook him till he
actually trembled.]
"Am I so heavy?" asked a matter-of-fact voice from his shoulder.
"You are not heavy at all," replied Hampstead, hotly provoked at
himself.
"Run, then," she commanded.
The resultant effort was a few staggering, ungraceful steps.
"Dounay weighs a hundred and fifty if she weighs an ounce," said a
passing voice.
John, all chagrin as he deposited the lady upon her feet, saw her lip
curl, and her dark eyes flash scornfully at the leading juvenile man
who, with grimacing intent to tease, had made the remark to the ingenue
as both passed near.
"Insolence!" hissed Miss Dounay after the scoffer, and turned again to
Hampstead, speaking sharply. "Very bad! You must be in your running
stride when my weight falls on you. We must practice."
And practice they did, at every spare moment of the rehearsal during the
entire week. From these "practices", Hampstead learned an unusual
number of things about women which, in his limited experience, he had
either not known or which had not been brought home to him before. Some
of these he presumed applied generally to all women; others, he had no
doubt, were particular to Miss Dounay.
As, for instance, when he looked down at her face where it lay in the
curve of his arm, he saw that the oval outline of her cheeks was
startlingly perfect; that there were pools of liquid fire in her eyes;
that her lips were beautifully and naturally red; that they were long,
pliable, sensitive, with fleeting curves that raced like ripples upon
these shores of velvet and ruby, expressing as they ran an infinite
variety of passing moods. The chin, too, came in for a great deal of
this attention. It was round and smooth at the corners, with a
delicately chiseled vertical cleft in it, which at times ran up and met
a horizontal cleft that appeared beneath the lower lip, when any slight
breath of displeasure brought a pout to that ruby, pendant lobe. This
meeting-place of the two clefts formed a kind of transitory dimple, a
trysting-place of all sorts of fugitive attractions which exercised a
singular fascination for the big man.
He used to wonder what the sensation would be like to sink his lips in
that precious, delectable valley. It would have been physically simple.
A slight lifting of his right arm and shoulder, a slight declension of
his neck, and the mere instinctive planting of his lips, and the thing
was done. However, John had no thought of doing this. In the first
place he wouldn't--without permission; for he was a man of honor and of
self-control. In the second place, he wouldn't because a woman was a
thing very sacred to him, and a kiss, a deliberate and flesh-tingling
kiss, was a caress to be held as sacred as the woman herself and for the
expression of an emotion he had not yet felt for any woman; a statement
which to the half-cynical might prove again that John Hampstead was a
very inexperienced and very monk-minded youth indeed to be abroad in the
unromanticism of this twentieth century. Yet the fact remains that
Hampstead did not consciously conspire to violate the neutrality of this
tiny, alluring haunt of tantalizing beauty which lurked bewitchingly
between the red lower lip and the white firm chin of Miss Marien Dounay.
But there were other things that John was learning swiftly, some of
which amounted to positive disillusionment. One was that a woman's body
is not necessarily so sacred nor so inviolate, after all. That instead
of inviolate, it may be made inviolable by a sort of desexing at will.
Miss Dounay could do this and did do it, so that for instance when her
form stiffened in his arms, it was no more like what he supposed the
touch of a woman's body should be than a post. In the first place the
body itself, beneath that trim, tailored suit, appeared to be sheathed
in steel from the shoulder almost to the knee. John had supposed that
corsets were to confine the waist. This one, if that were what it was
and not some sort of armor put on for these rehearsals, encased the
whole body.
Another thing that contributed to this desexing of the female person was
Miss Dounay's bearing toward himself. He might have been a mere
mechanical device for any regard she showed him at rehearsals. She
pushed or pulled him about, commanded the bend and adjustment of his
arms as if he had been an artificial man, and never by any hint
indicated that she thought of him as a person, least of all as a male
person. Undoubtedly this robbed his new adventure of some of its spice.
But a change came. When for five days John was undecided whether he
should admire this manner of hers as supreme artistic abstraction or
resent it as supercilious disdain, Margaret O'Neil, one of the character
old ladies who had constituted herself a combination of critic and
chaperone of these "carry" practices, turned, after a word with Miss
Dounay, and said:
"We should like to know who it is that is carrying us about."
"Why, certainly," exclaimed John, all his doubt disappearing in a
toothful smile as he swept off his hat. "My name is Hampstead, John
Hampstead."
"Miss Dounay, allow me to present Mr. Hampstead," said Miss O'Neil,
without the moulting of an eyelash.
Miss Dounay extended her hand cordially for a lofty, English handshake,
accompanied by an agreeable smile and a chuckling laugh, understood by
John to be in recognition of the oddness of the situation.
After this, things were somewhat different. There was less sense of
strain on his part, and he began to realize that there had been some
strain upon hers which now was relaxed. Her body was less post-like;
and toward the end of rehearsal, when possibly she was a little tired,
it lay in his arms quite placidly, relaxing until its curves yielded and
conformed to the muscular lines of his own torso.
Yet Miss Dounay never betrayed the slightest self-consciousness at such
moments. Whatever the woman as woman might be, she was, as an actress,
so absolutely devoted to the creation of the character she was
rehearsing, so painstakingly careful to reproduce in every detail of
tone and action the true impression of a pure-minded, Christian maiden
that Hampstead, with his firm religious backgrounding, unhesitatingly
imputed to the woman herself all the virtues of the chaste and
incomparable Lygia.
When dress-rehearsal time came at midnight on Sunday, just after the
regular performance had been concluded, and John saw Miss Dounay for the
first time in the dress of the character, his soul was enraptured. The
simple folds of her Grecian robe were furled at the waist and then swept
downward in one billowy leap, unrelieved in their impressive whiteness
by any touch of color, save that afforded by the jet-bright eyes with
their assumed worshipful look and the wide, flowing stream of her dark,
luxuriant hair, which, loosely bound at the neck, waved downward to her
hips. The devout curve of her alabaster neck, the gleaming shoulders,
the full, tapering, ivory arms, her sandaled bare feet--yes, John looked
close to make sure, and they were actually bare--rounded out the
picture.
Marien Dounay stood forth more like an angel vision than a woman, at
once so beautiful and so adorable that big, sincere, open-eyed John
Hampstead worshipped her where she stood--worshipped her and loved
her--as a man should love an angel. Yet as he looked, he was almost
guiltily conscious that he knew a secret about this angelic
vision,--that this chiseled flesh with rounded, shapely contours that
would be the despair of any sculptor was not as marble-like as it
looked, was, indeed, soft to the touch and warm, radiant and magnetic.
And John, blissfully aglow with his spiritual ardor, had no faint
suspicion that his secret might kill his illusion dead, nor that his
devotion would survive that decease, although something very like this
happened on the night of the first performance.
The great second act was on. Things were not going as smoothly as they
appeared to from the front. Even the inexperienced Hampstead, as he
waited for his cue, could see that his angel was being enormously vexed
by the manner in which Vinicius made love. Henry Lester was a brilliant
actor, but flighty and erratic. During rehearsal Mowrey had much trouble
in getting him to memorize accurately the business of his part. He
would do one thing one way to-day and forget it or reverse it on the
next. To-night Lester was committing all these histrionic crimes. Miss
Dounay had continually to adapt herself to his impulsive erraticisms, to
shift speeches and alter business. The climax of exasperation came when
one of the wide metal circlets upon his arm became entangled in the
gossamer threads of Lygia's hair and pulled it painfully. Yet the
actress was sufficiently accomplished to play her own part
irreproachably and deliver John's cue at the right moment to secure the
startling entrance already described, and thus to be gracefully and
dramatically swept away from the rude advances of her importunate lover.
It was at the end of this particular scene and off stage, when the
curtain was descending to the accompaniment of applause from the
audience, that the death of John's illusion came. For a delicious
instant, he was still holding Lygia from the floor as if instinctively
sheltering her amidst the general confusion of crowding actors and
hurrying stage hands. Nothing loth, she lay at rest, with eyes closed
and features composed as if in the faint. To the raw, impressionable
young man, Marien had never looked so much an angel as at this moment;
and now she was coming to, as if still in character. Her eyelids
fluttered but did not open, and then her lips moved slightly, stiffly,
under their load of greasy carmine, as if she would speak. In
self-forgetful ecstasy, Hampstead bent eagerly to receive the
confidence. Perhaps she was going to thank him, to whisper a word of
congratulation. Whatever the communication might be, his soul was in
raptures of delightful anticipation as he felt her breath upon his
cheek.
The communication was made promptly and unhesitatingly, after which Miss
Dounay alertly swung her feet to the floor and walked out upon the stage
to receive her curtain call, leading Ursus by the hand, mentally dazed,
inwardly wabbling, outwardly bowing,--trying, in fact, to do just as the
others did. But in John's mind now there was this numbing sense of
shock, for he could not refuse to believe his ears, and what this
angelic vision had breathed into them in tones of cool, emphatic
conviction, was:
"What a damn fool that man Lester is!"
Off the stage again Hampstead stumbled about amid flying scenery, racing
stage hands, and a surging mass of supernumeraries, like a man
recovering consciousness. He wanted to get out of sight somewhere. He
had the feeling of having been stripped naked. Every vestige of his
religious adoration had been dynamited out of existence. This was no
Christian maiden but an actress playing a part. As for the woman
herself, she was very blase and very modern, who, at this moment, as he
could see by a glance into the open door of her dressing room, was
sitting with crossed knees, head back and enveloped in a halo of smoke,
while her pretty lips were distended in a yawn, and the spark of a
cigarette glowed in her finger tips.
"And I am another!" Hampstead muttered, with a sneer that was aimed
inward.
Seven minutes later, Lygia walked out of her dressing room minus the
cigarette and looking again that angel vision, but Hampstead knew better
now. He viewed her at first critically and then reflectively; but was
presently startled at the gist of his reflections, which was a sort of
self-congratulation because this creature that he was about to take in
his arms was not an angel, but that more alluring, less elusive thing, a
woman.
Two more minutes and the pair of stage hands were stretched stomach-wise
upon the floor ready to swing open the wings of the gate at the cue from
St. Peter, and Lygia was lying once more in John's arms. In the instant
of waiting before the curtain rose, he had time to notice how
contentedly and trustfully she appeared to nestle there. Her breathing
was like his at first, easy and natural; but gradually, as the moment of
suspense lengthened and the instant of action drew near, the rhythmic
pulse of both bosoms accelerated, as if, heart on heart, their souls
beat in unison. John was noticing, too, how soft Marien's body was
where the armor did not extend, how deliciously warm it was, indeed how
something like an ethereal heat radiated from it and filled all his
veins with a strange, electric, impulsive wistfulness. What was that
giddy perfume?
Involuntarily he drew her closer, with a gentle, steady pressure. At
this she raised her eyelids and gazed at him for a moment,
contemplatively first and then passively curious, after which she
lowered the lids again, while her lips half parted in a voiceless sigh.
So far as Hampstead was concerned, illusion had gone. He knew that he
was just a man. So far as Miss Dounay was concerned, he suspected that
she was just a woman. But devotion remained. John did not relax his
hold. Instead there was a momentary tightening of his arms.
"Let 'er go," called the low, tense voice of Mowrey; and with a rustling
sound the great curtain slipped slowly upward.
*CHAPTER V*
*THE RATE CLERK*
The week went by like a shot. On Sunday night the glory that was a very
stagy Rome burned down for the last time beneath the gridiron of the old
Burbank Theater. On Monday morning no odor of grease paint and no
noxious smell of stewing glue, which proclaims the scene painter at his
work, was in the nostrils of John. Instead, the clack of typewriters,
the tinkle of telephone bells, the droning voices of dictators, and the
shuffling feet of office boys filled his ears.
As if to completely re-merge the man in his environment, Robert Mitchell
came walking in, tossed a bundle of papers upon the desk, fixed the rate
clerk with a shaft of his blue eye, and commanded drily:
"Ursus! Make a set of tariffs embracing our new lines to correspond
with the commodity tariffs of the San Francisco and El Paso."
John colored slightly at the thrust of that name Ursus, but looked Mr.
Mitchell fairly and meekly in the eye and answered:
"Yes, sir."
"Have them effective July 1st," concluded the General Freight Agent, as
he turned away.
Burman, the lordly through rate clerk, lowered his sleek face behind his
books and snickered. John shot a scowl at Burman and then for a few
minutes hunched his shoulders over the documents in the case.
The California Consolidated was being consolidated some more. Two more
roads in the big system had just been pitchforked into the jurisdiction
of Robert Mitchell, adding twelve hundred additional miles to his
responsibility and pushing him several swift rounds up the ladder of
promotion.
These additions made the California Consolidated competitive with the
San Francisco and El Paso lines at hundreds of new stations. John's job
was to consolidate the freight tariffs of the three lines and make sure
that they equalized the rates of the competitor at competing stations.
It was an enormous task, and the General Freight Agent had breezily
commanded it to be done in ten weeks. That was why Burman snickered.
It was also why Hampstead scowled.
Now a freight tariff starts youthfully out to be the most scientific
thing in the world, but it ends by being the most utterly unscientific
document that ever was put together. The longer a tariff lives, the
more depraved it becomes. The S.F. & E.P. tariffs were very old, but
not, therefore, honorable.
John turned to the shelf that contained them and scowled again, a double
scowl, as black as his blond Viking brows could manage. These were to
be his models. They were yellow--a disagreeable color to begin
with,--each a half inch thick and larger than a letter page,--abortions,
every one of them! They were pea-vine growths like the monster system
which issued them, cumbered with the adjustments and easements of the
years.
The flour tariff! The hay tariff! The grain tariff! John took these in
his hands one by one and glowered at them. The mistakes, the
inconsistencies, the clumsiness of thirty sprawling years were in them.
And he was asked to duplicate these confusions on his own system.
Should he do it? No; be hanged if he would! He felt big and
self-important as he slammed the first of them face down upon his desk
and each thereafter in succession upon its fellow, until the pile
toppled over, after which, leaving the reckless heap behind him, while
Burman snickered again, John stamped out of the room.
"These S.F. & E.P. tariffs are so old they've got whiskers on 'em," he
began to say to Mr. Mitchell, "and hairs! And the hair has never been
cut nor even combed. They have been tagged and fattened and trimmed and
sliced and slewed round till the tariff is issued just to keep up the
basis and the tradition, and then you look in something else,--an
amendment, or a special, or a 'private special', or sometimes the carbon
copy of a letter,--to find out what the rate actually is. Sometimes
when I call their office up on the 'phone to get a rate, it takes 'em
twenty-four hours to answer, and maybe a week later they notify me the
answer was wrong. Our slate is clean; why not simmer the figures down
to what is the actual basis instead of the assumed one, and publish the
rates as we intend to charge 'em, and as we know they do charge 'em?"
Mitchell had listened with surprise at first to this rash proposal. It
sounded youthful and impetuous. But it also sounded sensible. Mitchell
hated red tape, and he knew that John's idea was the right one; but
tradition was god on the S.F. & E.P. They would fight the innovation
and fight it hard; they might win, too, and Mr. Mitchell had no stomach
for tilting at windmills. However, it might be a good thing for John,
this fight; might make him forget that foolish stage ambition of his;
and if he won, might crown him so lustrously that of itself it would
save him to a future already assuredly brilliant in the railroad
business.
"Do you think you could whip it out with 'em before their faces, John,
when the scrap comes?" Mr. Mitchell asked tentatively, but also by way
of further firing the soul of the fighter.
"I believe I could," replied John ardently.
"Then go to it," said Mr. Mitchell tersely.
And John went to it.
But there was another man who had been shocked by John's theatrical
venture, and that was the pastor of the First Church, who had his
virtues, much as other men. His face was round and like his figure, full
of fatness. He was a merry soul and loved a joke. He had a heart as
tender as his sense of humor was keen.
But beside his virtues, this man of God had also his convictions. His
pulpit was no wash-wallowing craft. He steered her straight. To Heaven
with Scylla! To Gehenna with Charybdis! Indeed, if there was one man
in all Los Angeles who knew where he was going and all the rest of the
world too, it was this same Charles Thompson Campbell, pastor of the
aforesaid grand old First Church. Doctor Campbell's hair and eyes were
black. His voice had the ultimate roar in it. When he stood up, locks
flying, perspiration streaming, and thumped his pulpit with that fat
doubled fist, the palm of which had been moulded in youth upon the
handle of a plow, every nook and cranny of the auditorium echoed with
the force of his utterance. But Doctor Campbell's convictions, like
most people's, were only in part based upon knowledge.
Some things in particular he wot not of yet scorned. One was the modern
novel. Another was the stage! Shakespeare, Doctor Campbell admitted
largely, had shed some sheen upon the stage and more upon literature;
but he never quoted Shakespeare. One could almost doubt if he had read
him, and when Shakespeare came to town, he never went to see him.
On the morning, therefore, when the good Doctor Campbell read in the
papers that the youngest of his deacons had the night before made his
debut as Ursus in _Quo Vadis_, he was not only pained but moved to
self-reproach. Grief enveloped him. It thrust the sharp cleft of a
frown into his smooth brow. It thrust his chin down upon his bosom and
caused him to heave a tumultuous sigh. He bowed his head beside his
study table and then and there put up an earnest petition for the soul
of John Hampstead. It was a sincere and natural prayer, because Doctor
Campbell was a sincere man and believed in the efficacy of prayer.
Besides, he loved John Hampstead. The young man's impending fate
stirred the minister deeply and caused him to reproach himself. In this
mood, he dug out all his sermons on the stage, nine years of annual
sermons on the influence of the drama, and read them sketchily and with
disappointment. Paugh! Piffle! How weak and ineffective they seemed.
He delved into his concordance for a text and found one. Then he drove
his pen deep into his inkwell and began to write.
The following Sunday night Doctor Campbell's red, excited features were
seen dimly through dun, sulphurous clouds of brimstone and fire; but to
the preacher's dismay, John Hampstead was not present for fumigation.
The reverend gentleman, in his unthinking goodness, had quite overlooked
the fact that the play in which John was performing concluded on Sunday
night instead of Saturday night; and so while his pastor was hurling his
fiery diatribes at that conspicuously assailable institution, the stage,
Deacon Hampstead was blissfully bearing Marien Dounay about in his arms.
But the next morning John read the sermon published in the newspaper.
He had already noted that the more doubtful the sermon, the more likely
it is to get into the headlines, because from the editor's standpoint it
thus becomes news, and late Sunday night, which is the scarcest hour of
the whole week for news, there is more joy in the "city room" over one
sermon that breathes the fiery spirit of sensation than over ninety and
nine which need no hell and damnation in which to express the tender
gospel of Jesus. John read it with a sense of wrath, of outrage, and of
humiliation. That night he launched himself at the study door of his
pastor.
"I was very sorry you did not hear my sermon last night," began Doctor
Campbell blandly, sensing the advantage of striking first.
"Brother Campbell, I have come to arraign you for that sermon," retorted
John, with an immediate outburst of feeling. "I say that you spoke what
you did not know. I say," and his voice almost broke with the weight of
its own earnestness, "I say that you bore false witness!"
The amazed minister's mouth opened, but John repressed his utterance
with a gesture.
"You will say you preached your convictions. I say you preached your
prejudice, your ignorance. I say you bore false witness against
struggling women, against aspiring men, against those of whose bitter
battlings you know nothing."
The Reverend Charles Thompson Campbell leaned back aghast. No man had
ever presumed to talk to him like this, no man of twice his years and
spiritual attainments; yet here was this stripling not only talking to
him like this, but with a fervor of unction in his utterance that made
his upbraiding sound half inspired.
"You are condemning the stage as an institution," went on John
scornfully. "You might as well condemn the printing press as an
institution. You discriminate with regard to newspapers and books. Do
the same with the stage. Taboo the corrupt play and teach your people
to avoid it. Support the good and teach the managers that you will.
Taboo the notorious actor or actress if you wish. Give the rest of them
the benefit of the doubt, as you do in your personal contact with all
humanity. Oh, Doctor Campbell, you are so charitable in your personal
relations with men and so uncharitable in much of your preaching!"
This one exclamatory sentence had in it enough of affectionate regard to
enable the minister to contain himself a little longer, under the
impassioned tide which now flowed again.
"The stage? The stage as an institution?" John appeared to pause and
wind himself up. "Why, listen! The stage function is a godlike
function. When God created man out of the dust of the ground and
breathed into him the breath of life he planted in man's breast also the
instinct to create. That instinct is the foundation of all art. Man
has always exhibited this passion to create something in his own image.
It might be a rude drawing on a rock, or only a manikin sculptured in
mud and set in the sun to dry; or it might be a marble of Phidias, with
the form, the strength, the spirit of life upon it. The painter can go
farther. He gets the color and the very visage of thought and even of
emotion. Yet each falls short. There is no God to breathe into their
creations the breath of life."
The minister leaned back a little as if to put his understanding more at
poise.
"But," continued Hampstead, "the playwright and the actor can go
farther. They breathe into their creations that very breath of God
himself, which he breathed into man. They make a character real because
he is a living man. They put him in the company of other men and women
who are as real for the same reason; they toss them all into the sea of
life together; the winds of life blow upon them. Hate and love, virtue
and vice, hope and despair, weakness and strength, birth and death, work
their will upon them."
"That is very beautiful, John," said Doctor Campbell, "very beautiful."
The tribute was sincere, but John was not to be checked even by a
compliment.
"The stage creates and recreates," he rushed on. "It can raise the
dead. It makes men and women live again--Julius Caesar and Cleopatra,
Napoleon and Dolly Madison. It seizes whole segments out of the circles
of past history and sets them down in the midst of to-day, with the glow
of life and the sheen of reality over all, so that for an afternoon or a
night we live in another continent or another age. We see the life, the
customs, the petty quarrels, the sublimer passions, the very pulse-beats
of men of other circumstances and other generations than our own, so
that when we come out of the theater into the times of to-day, we have
actually to wake ourselves up and ask: Which is real, and which is art?"
Doctor Campbell leaned forward now. His mouth was round, his eyes were
widely open.
"It is that which gives the stage its dignity and power," concluded
John. "It is the highest expression of man's instinct to create a new
life in a more ideal Eden than that in which he finds himself. When you
condemn the stage you condemn the creative instinct, and," exhorted
John, with the sudden sternness of a hairy prophet on his desert rock,
"you had better pause to think if you do not condemn Him who planted
that instinct in the human breast."
Hampstead had now finished; but the minister was in no hurry to speak.
He felt the spell of the picture which had been painted, but he felt
still more the spell of the young man's ardent enthusiasm.
"You must have thought that out very carefully, John," he said.
"Brother Campbell!" answered John fervently, "I have done more than
think it out. I have felt it out. I propose to live it out!"
But Doctor Campbell had kept his head amid this swirl of words, and his
return was quietly forceful.
"The stage of to-day," he began, "as I know it from the newspapers and
the billboards, never seemed so vulgar and damnable as it does now after
your glorious idealization of it. I, as a preacher of righteousness,
must judge of such an institution externally, by its effects. I have
weighed the stage in the balance, John, and I have found it wanting."
This time there was something in the minister's calm tone, in the cool
detachment of his point of view, that held John silent.
"Isn't it possible," the minister continued, in a kind of sweet
reasonableness, "that there is something insidiously demoralizing or
infectious about it? Take your own experience, John. You are a
Christian man. You have been soaking yourself in the atmosphere of the
stage for a couple of weeks. Examine your soul now, and answer me if
you are as fine, as pure a man as you were before you went there. Are
you?"
"Why, of course I am," ejaculated Hampstead impulsively.
"Think," commanded the minister, in low, compelling tones; for having
controlled his emotions the better, he was just now the stronger of the
two. "Are you--John?"
Hampstead opened his mouth eagerly, but the minister's repressing
gesture would not let him speak. The young man was literally compelled
to think, to question his own soul for a moment, and as he searched, a
telltale flush came upon his cheek, and then his glance fell. There was
an embarrassing moment of silence, during which this flush of
mortification deepened perceptibly.
The minister was a wise man. He read the sign and asked no questions.
He upbraided nothing, cackled no exultant, "I told you so."
"Let us pray, Brother John," he proposed after the interval, and knelt
by his chair with a hand upon Hampstead's shoulder. The prayer was
short.
"Oh, Lord," the man of God petitioned, "help us to know where the right
stops and the wrong begins. Keep us back from the sin of presumption.
Give thy servants wisdom to serve thy cause well and work no ill to it
by over-zeal or over-confidence. Amen!"
Doctor Campbell might have been praying for himself. But John knew that
this was only a part of his tact.
As the two men rose, John felt a sudden impulse to defend the stage from
himself.
"It was my own fault," he urged; "the fault of my own weakness in
unaccustomed surroundings. It was not the fault of the surroundings
themselves, nor of any other person. Besides, it was nothing very
grave."
"Deterioration of character is always grave," said the Reverend Charles
Thompson Campbell as he walked to the door with his caller, and the
minister's tone intimated his conviction that this particular
deterioration had been very grave indeed.
*CHAPTER VI*
*ON TWO FRONTS*
There was high commotion in a big front office in the top floor of a
tall, gray building that stood in the days before the fire on the corner
of Kearney and Market streets in the city of San Francisco. This gray
structure housed the general offices of the San Francisco and El Paso
Railroad Company, and that big front office contained the desk of the
Freight Traffic Manager. Before this desk sat a man with a domed brow
and the beak of an eagle, hair gray, eyes piercing, complexion
colorless, and a mouth that closed so tightly it was discernible only as
a crescent-shaped pucker above his spike-like chin. His mouth at the
moment was not a pucker; it was a geyser. The name of this man was
William N. Scofield, and he was obviously in a rage. He had grown up
with the S.F. & E.P., his brain expanding as it expanded, his power
rising as it had risen. Long ago, when the one lone clerk in its little
rate department, he had made with his own hands the first of those
yellow commodity tariffs that John Hampstead had scorned with
objurgations. Now Scofield held in the hand which trembled with his
anger the first of that upstart's own contributions to the science of
tariff making--not yellow, but white, in token of the clarity it was
meant to introduce.
"How did they make it? this--this botch!" he exploded, repeating his
interrogation with other embellishing phrases not properly reproducible
and then slamming the offending white sheets down hard upon his
desk,--much harder than John had slammed the yellow ones,--this
impudent, white-livered thing that was an assault upon the customs he,
Scofield, had instituted and time itself had honored!
"Telegram!" he barked to his stenographer. "Robert Mitchell, Los
Angeles. Insist immediate withdrawal your entire line of commodity
tariffs, series J. Basis carried in our own tariffs is only one we will
recognize."
Mitchell answered:
"Decline to withdraw; our tariffs issued on actual basis on which
charges are assessed."
The fight was on.
Arming himself cap-a-pie with tariffs, amendments, letters, and
memoranda, Mitchell two days later followed his telegram to San
Francisco. Most of his resources, however, were packed behind the wide,
blond brow of John Hampstead, who accompanied his chief and was more
eager for the fray than Mitchell. The battle began on Monday morning
about ten of the clock, and was not finished with the day. The field of
action was a room of this same gray building, where Howison, General
Freight Agent of the S.F. & E.P., sat at the end of a long table,
flanked right and left by assistant general freight agents, rate clerks,
and even general and district freight agents called in from the field,
all to convince Robert Mitchell and his lone rate clerk sitting at the
other end of the table that their new tariff was a hodgepodge, without
practical basis or the show of reason to support it. Scofield himself
did not take a seat in the battle line, but looked in occasionally,
either to walk about nervously or sit just back of Howison's shoulder.
On the afternoon of the second day, the enemy Traffic Manager appeared
to watch Hampstead intently for half an hour. Again and again the keen
old fighter saw his allied forces attack, but invariably this
self-confident, smiling young man with a ready citation, the upflashing
of a yellow "special", the digging out of a letter or a telegram from
his file, or occasionally even of an old freight bill issued by the S.F.
& E.P. showing exactly what rate had been assessed, triumphantly
repelled the assaults, until reverses began to be the order of the day.
"It strikes me," Scofield remarked sarcastically, "that this young man
has got us all pretty well buffaloed. The trouble is, Howison," he
glowered, "that your Tariff Department needs cleaning out. You've got a
lot of old mush heads in there."
With this warning shot into his own ranks, Scofield arose, went
discontentedly out, and never once came back. Keener than any of his
staff, he had already discerned that defeat was advancing down the road.
But the battle of the tariffs raged on throughout the week, and it was
not until late on Saturday afternoon that John, standing in one room of
the suite in the Palace Hotel charged to the name of Robert Mitchell,
flung the pile of papers from his arms into the bottom of a suitcase
with a swish and solid thud of satisfaction. Victory from first to last
had perched upon his tawny head. He had met good men and beaten them;
and he had a right to the wave of exultation that surged for a moment
dizzily through his brain.
Mr. Mitchell, too, was feeling exultant and proud beyond words, as he
stood in the door of John's room. His hands were deep in his pockets;
his large black derby hat was pushed far back from his bulging brow. On
his great landscape of a countenance was an oddly significant
expression.
"Well, Jack," he began, after an interval of silence, "what about the
stage?"
John started like a man surprised in a guilty act, although he had known
for months that this was a question Mr. Mitchell might ask at any
moment; but the decision involved seemed now so big that from day to day
he had hoped the inevitable might be postponed.
"I shall be naming a new chief clerk in a couple of weeks, now that
Heitmuller is to become General Agent," Mr. Mitchell went on
half-musingly, and as if to forestall a hasty reply to the question he
had asked. "The new man will be in line to be appointed Assistant
General Freight Agent very soon, on account of the consolidations."
For a moment John saw himself as Chief Clerk, sitting in the big swivel
chair at the high, roll-top desk, with all the strings of the business
he knew so well how to pull lying on the table before him; with clerks,
stenographers, men from other departments and that important part of the
shipping public which carried its business to the general freight
office, all running to him.
And from there it was only a short, easy step to the position of
Assistant General Freight Agent.
Only the man who has toiled far down in the ranks of a railroad
organization doing routine work at the same old desk in the same old way
for half a score of years can know on what a dizzy height sits the Chief
Clerk, or how far beyond that swings the lofty title of Assistant
General Freight Agent.
"Your advancement would be very rapid," suggested Mr. Mitchell, flicking
his flies skilfully upon the whirling eddies of the young man's thought.
John had achieved enough and glimpsed enough to see that Mitchell was
right. Advancement would be rapid. Mitchell would soon go up the line
himself; he could follow him. General Freight Agent, Assistant Traffic
Manager, Traffic Manager, Vice-president in charge of
traffic--President! with twelve thousand miles of shining steel flowing
from his hand, which he might swing and whirl and crack like a whip!
The prospect was dazzling in the extreme, and yet it was only for a
moment that the picture kindled. In the next it was dead and sparkless
as burned-out fireworks.
"You have a strong vein of traffic in your blood," the General Freight
Agent began adroitly, but John broke in upon him.
"Mr. Mitchell," he said, and his utterance was grave, "I am sorry to
disappoint you, but it comes too late. A year ago such a hint would
have thrown me into ecstasies. To-day it leaves me cold. I have had
another vision."
The face of Mitchell shaded from seriousness almost to sadness, but he
was too wise to increase by argument an ardor about which, to the
railroad man, there was something not easy to be understood, something,
indeed, almost fanatical. Instead Mitchell asked with sober, interested
friendliness:
"What is your plan, John?"
"To resign July first," John answered, for the first time definitely
crossing the bridge, "to come to San Francisco and seek an engagement
with some of the stock companies playing permanently here, even though I
begin the search for an opening without money enough to last more than a
week or two."
"Without money!" exclaimed Mr. Mitchell, in surprise.
"Yes," confessed Hampstead, flushing a little. "My salary was not very
munificent, you know, and I have usually contrived to get rid of it,
frequently before I got the pay check in my hands."
Mr. Mitchell's small, prudent eyes looked disfavor at a spendthrift.
"However," he suggested, "you have only yourself to think of."
"That's another point against me," confessed Hampstead. "I have some
one else to look out for. My brother-in-law is an artist, you know, and
he has not been very successful yet, so that I hold myself ready to help
with my sister and the children if it should ever become necessary."
"That's a handicap," declared Mitchell flatly.
"I won't admit it," said John loyally. "You don't know those children.
Tayna's the girl, nearly twelve now, a beauty if her nose is pugged.
Such hair and eyes, and such a heart! Dick's the boy, past ten. He's
had asthma always, and is about a thousand years old, some ways. But
they--"
Hampstead gulped queerly.
"Those two children," he plunged on, "are dearer to me than anything in
the whole wide world. You know," and his tone became still more
confidential, while his eyes grew moist, "it would only be something
that happened to them that would keep me from going on with my stage
career."
Mitchell's respect for John was changing oddly to a fatherly feeling.
He felt that he was getting acquainted with his clerk for the first
time. He resolved that he would not tempt the boy, and that if it
became necessary, he would help him. However, before he could express
this resolve, if he had intended to express it, the telephone rang.
Hampstead answered it, stammered, faltered, replied: "I will see, sir,
and call you in five minutes," hung up the 'phone and turned to confront
Mitchell, with a look almost of fright upon his face.
"It's William N. Scofield," he exclaimed. "He wants me to take dinner
with him at his club to-night."
A disbelieving smile appeared for a moment on the wide lips of Mitchell;
then understanding broke, and his smile was swallowed up in a hearty
laugh.
"He wants to offer you a position," Mitchell said, when his exultant
cachinnations had ceased. "Look out that he doesn't win you. Scofield
is a very persuasive man. He nearly got me once. Besides, he has more
to offer you than I have."
Hampstead pressed his hand to his brow. Under his tawny thatch ideas
were in a whirl.
"What shall I do?" he asked rather helplessly.
"Stay over," commanded Mitchell unhesitatingly. "Ring up and tell him
you'll be there."
"But there's no use, anyway," replied John suddenly, getting back to the
main point. "My mind's made up."
"No man's mind is made up when he's going to take dinner on the
proposition with William N. Scofield," answered Mitchell oracularly.
"And you?" asked Hampstead, suddenly aware how good a man at heart was
Robert Mitchell, and quite unaware that he had seized that gentleman's
pudgy right hand and was wringing it in a manner most embarrassing to
Mitchell himself. "You--"
But the telephone was tingling impatiently.
"Mr. Scofield wants to know," began a voice.
"Yes, yes, I'll be happy to," interrupted John, not knowing just what
tone or form one should take in expressing the necessary amenities to
the secretary of a great man.
"Very well. His car will call for you at six-thirty," responded the
voice.
But before John could pick up the thread of his unfinished sentence to
Mr. Mitchell, a knock sounded at the door, at first soft and cushioned,
as if from a gloved hand, then louder and more determined, and repeated
with quick impatience.
"Come in," called Mitchell.
The knob turned, and the door swung wide, leaving the panel of white to
frame the picture of a woman. She was young, of medium height and
appealing roundness, clad from head to foot in a traveling dress of dark
green, with a small hat of a shade to match, the chief adornment of
which was a red hawk's feather slanting backward at a jaunty angle. A
veil enveloped both hat brim and face but was not thick enough to dim
the sparkle of bright eyes or the pink flush of dimpled cheeks, much
less to conceal two rows of gleaming teeth from between which, after a
moment's pause for sensation, burst a ringing cadence of laughter.
"Miss Bessie!" exclaimed John excitedly.
"The very first guess!" declared that young lady, advancing and yielding
the doorframe to another figure which filled it so much more completely
as to sufficiently explain a more deliberate arrival.
"Mollie!" ejaculated Mitchell, who by this time had turned toward the
door. "What in thunder?"
But the General Freight Agent's lines of communication were just then
temporarily disconnected by an assault upon his features conducted by
Miss Bessie in person. During this interval, Mrs. Mitchell stood
placidly surveying the room, and as she took in its air of preparation
for immediate departure, a tantalizing smile spread itself on her
expansive features.
"Is this an accident or a calamity?" demanded Mitchell, playfully
thrusting Bessie aside and advancing to greet his wife.
"Both!" declared that lady, submitting her lips with more of formality
than enthusiasm, after which, feeling that sufficient time had elapsed
to make an explanation of her sudden appearance not undignified, she
proceeded:
"Just one of my whims, Bob! Next week was the spring vacation; no
school, and the poor child was pale from overstudy and so anxious about
her examinations (Bessie shot a look at Hampstead), that I just made up
my mind I'd bring her up here and let her get a good bite of fog and a
breath from the Golden Gate."
"Fine idea!" declared Mitchell. "Fine! Now that you've had it," he
chuckled, "we'll start home. I'm leaving at eight."
"You are not!" proclaimed Mrs. Mitchell flatly. "You will stay right
here for at least three days and do nothing but devote yourself to your
child. And to her mother!" she subjoined, as if that were an
afterthought; all with a toss of her chin, which, by way of emphasis,
held its advanced position for a moment after the speech was done.
"And the business of the company?" Mitchell suggested, with a solicitous
air.
"It can wait on me," averred Mrs. Mitchell decisively, taking a turn up
and down the room and surveying once more the signs of confusion and of
hasty packing. "Many's the time I've waited on it. You can stay, too,
John," she said, turning to Hampstead. "I want you to take Bessie to a
lot of places Robert and I have been and won't care to visit this time."
"Robert!" and while her eyes turned toward the windows, two of which
opened on a view of Market Street, the new commander began a
redisposition of forces, "I rather like this suite. Bessie and I will
take the corner room. You can take this room and Mr. Hampstead can move
across the hall, or anywhere else they can put him."
As an act of possession, Mrs. Mitchell walked to the dresser, took off
her hat, stabbed the two pins into it emphatically, and tossed it upon
the bed, where it bloomed like a flower-garden in the midst of a desert
of papers while she, still standing before the mirror, bestowed a few
comfortable pats upon her hair.
"John," Mitchell said jovially, "I know orders from headquarters when I
get 'em. You were going to stay over, anyway; but use your own judgment
about obeying the instructions you have just received."
"Never had such agreeable instructions in my life," declared Hampstead,
turning to Mrs. Mitchell with an elaborately stagy bow, and the natural
quotation from Hamlet which leaped to his lips:
"'_I shall in all my best obey you, madam._'"
"See that you do," said that lady, not half liking the bow and shooting
a glance at Hampstead less cordial than austere. "And by the way," she
added, "see that you don't let that stage nonsense carry you much
further, young man," with which remark Mrs. Mitchell turned abruptly and
gave Hampstead a most complete view of a broad and uncompromising back.
In Mrs. Mitchell's mind a man had much better be a section hand on the
Great Southwestern than a fixed star on the drama's milky way.
"By the way, mother," remarked Mr. Mitchell, with the air of one who
makes an important revelation, "John is just going out to dine with
William N. Scofield."
Mrs. Mitchell turned quickly, and her dark eyes shot a meaningful glance
at her husband, while the line of her lower lip first grew full and then
protruded. A squeeze of that lip at the moment, Hampstead reflected,
would extract something at least as sour as very sour lemon juice.
"Scofield is after him," bragged Mitchell.
"Well, see that he doesn't get him," his wife commanded sternly, and
then shifting her somber glance until it rested on John with a look that
was near to menace, inquired acridly:
"Young man, you wouldn't be disloyal? You wouldn't sell yourself?" In
the second interrogatory her voice had passed from acridity to
bitterness, while the eyes bored implacably, till Hampstead at first
wriggled, then grew resentful and replied crisply, standing very
straight:
"No, Mrs. Mitchell, I would not sell myself!"
"That's right," exclaimed Bessie, stepping impulsively toward John's
side. "Do not let her browbeat you. I am sorry to say, Mr. Hampstead,
that mother is inclined to be somewhat dictatorial. You see what she
does to poor papa!"
"And you see what you do to poor me," exclaimed that worthy lady,
turning on her daughter with surprise and injury in her glance and
tone,--"dragging me almost out of bed last night to make this foolish
trip up here with you. Next week, of all weeks, too, when I wanted to
do so many other things."
"Ho! ho!" broke in Mitchell, "so that's the way of it. This trip up
here is a scheme of yours," and he turned accusingly upon his daughter,
but Bessie smiled and curtseyed, entirely unabashed. "Well, then, I
don't guess we'll stay," teased Mitchell. "And I don't suppose you knew
a thing about Hampstead's being here. That was all an accident."
"It was not," flashed Bessie. "I did. I haven't seen dear old John for
a year. I could go in and have delightful tete-a-tetes with him when he
was a stenographer, but out in the Rate Department there are forty
prying eyes and men with ears as long as jack-rabbits. He hasn't taken
me to a circus or anything for nobody knows how long. You shall give
him money for theater tickets, for dinners, for auto rides, for
everything nice for three whole days."
Bessie was standing directly in front of her father, her eyes looking up
into his, and her two hands patting his generous jowls, as her speech
was concluded.
John listened rapturously. This was the old Bessie talking. She had
entered the room looking a year older, a year prettier since that day
when he wrote the Phroso invitations for her, and had taken on so easily
the lacquer and dignity of dresses and of years that he was beginning to
feel in awe of her. This speech was a great relief.
Besides, in the whirl of the hour before she came, he had found himself
strangely wanting to take counsel with Bessie. The Mitchells had made
of him for all these years a convenient caretaker of their daughter.
Bessie had made of him a playfellow with whom she took the same
liberties as with any other of her father's possessions. This attitude
on her part had created the only atmosphere in which Hampstead could
have been at ease with her. It had permitted his soul to bask when she
was by, but it had done no more. But now, he somehow wanted to confide
in Bessie,--not to take her advice for he wasn't going to take anybody's
advice; all advice was against him,--but to tell her what he was going
to do, because he believed she would listen appreciatingly, if not
sympathetically. He felt he needed at least the added support of a
neutral mind. He had rejected Mr. Mitchell's proposal, but the glitter
of it flashed occasionally. And now he was going to face the
resourceful, the ingratiating, the dominating William N. Scofield, and
he felt like a man who goes alone to meet his temptation on the mountain
top.
*CHAPTER VII*
*THE HIGH BID*
For an hour and a half at dinner, and for another hour sunk in the
depths of a great leather chair in the lounging room of the Pacific
Union Club, William N. Scofield had searched the soul of Hampstead, who
had not only been led to talk rapturously of his stage ambition but to
reveal the metes and bounds of his interest in and knowledge upon many
subjects.
"Gad, but you know a lot," ejaculated Scofield, with unfeigned
amazement. "Where'd you get it all?"
"I have read a good deal," confessed John, trying to appear much more
modest than in his heart he felt; for it was a part of Scofield's whim
or of his campaign to flatter him enormously, and he had succeeded.
But for a time now, the Traffic Manager was silent, puffing meditatively
at his cigar and staring at the ceiling through loafing rings of smoke
in which, as if they were floating letters, he seemed to read the
transcript of his thought,--the thought that if, beside employing this
enormously able young man, he could also enlist in behalf of the
railroad as an institution his capacity for fanatical devotion to an
ideal, the prize was one worth bidding high for, high enough to win!
"People like you, Hampstead," Scofield broke out presently, and in his
most ingratiating vein. "We all felt that down at the office. You did
a difficult thing without making an enemy of one of us. Therefore what
your personality can do interests me even more than what you know."
The railroad man interrupted his speech to shoot an exploratory glance
from under veiling lids and went on calculatingly:
"The railroad business is going to change. Now we tell the Railroad
Commission what to do. The time is coming when it will tell us what to
do, and we will do it. But the public attitude toward the railroad has
also got to change." Scofield's tone had taken on new emphasis.
"You would make the type of executive that could change it! The
successful transportation man of the future has got to be a sort of
ambassador of the railroad to the people, and the man who best serves
the people tributary to his road will best serve his stockholders."
"Do you know who gave me that point?" the Traffic Manager asked, turning
from the vision he was contemplating in the clouds of smoke over his
head and looking sharply at Hampstead.
"Naturally not," admitted the younger man.
"Bob Mitchell," said Scofield, and paused while his thin lips coaxed
persistently at the cigar which appeared to have gone out. "Bob
Mitchell! And I reviled him for his sagacity, told him he was an
altruistic fool. But after a while I saw he was right. Then I tried to
get him for us, but I didn't succeed. He wasn't as sensible as I hope
you will be. Besides, I am going to offer you more than I offered him."
More than he offered Mitchell! There was a sudden jolt somewhere in
John's breast, and he wet a dry, parched lip, but did not speak.
"Yes," breathed Scofield softly, almost as if he had been interrupted.
"I am going to offer you more. Hampstead!" and the voice was raised
quickly, "I want you to be our General Freight Agent!"
If Scofield had leaned over and kissed him, John would not have been
more surprised, nor have known less what to say.
"General Freight Agent!" he croaked hoarsely.
"Yes," affirmed the other coolly, almost icily, while he flicked the
ashes from his cigar and enjoyed the sensation his proposal had
produced.
"At my age?" stumbled John, still groping, but trying to see himself in
the position.
"Why, yes," reassured Scofield suavely. "You tell me you're past
twenty-five. Paul Morton was Assistant General Freight Agent of the
Burlington at twenty-one. Look where he is to-day--in the cabinet of the
President of the United States. The salary," Scofield added casually,
by way of finally clinching the argument, "will be twelve thousand a
year."
Hampstead's lips silently formed the words--twelve thousand! But he did
not utter them. They dazed him. They rushed him headlong. They made
rejection impossible. No man had a right to throw away such a fortune
as that. One thousand dollars a month! He felt himself yielding,
helplessly, irresistibly.
And then, suddenly as the photographer's bomb lights up every lineament
of every face in the darkened room, for one single moment Hampstead saw
things clearly and in their true proportions. This Schofield was not a
man. He was a grinning devil, with horns and a barb on his tail. He was
tempting, trapping, buying him. He would not be bought. "_No, Mrs.
Mitchell, I would not sell myself,_" he had said, not, however, meaning
at all what that lady meant.
Leaning back stubbornly, his fist smiting heavy blows upon the cushioned
arm of the chair, John muttered through clenched teeth:
"No! No! No--I'll never do it. No, Mr. Scofield, I cannot accept your
offer. I thank you for it; but I cannot accept it. The stage is to be
the place of my achievement. Why, why, Mr. Scofield, the wonderfully
flattering offer you have made to me to-night has come because of the
training incident to the cultivation of a stage ambition. If it can
bring me so much with so little devotion, is it not reasonable to
suppose that it will bring me more--very much more? I will not be so
disloyal to that which has been so generous with me."
Scofield's countenance had suddenly and impressively changed. It became
a mask of stone, a sphinx-like thing, the brow a knot, the nose a beak,
the mouth a stitched scar. The beady gleam of the eyes from beneath
drawn lids was sinister. This fanatical young fool was escaping him,
and Scofield did not like any one to escape him.
But the young man refused to be swerved by frowns.
"Not to manage railroads," he declared enthusiastically, "but to mould
human character is to be my life-work; to depict the virtues and the
vices, the weaknesses and the strengths of life, to make men laugh and
love and--forget."
Scofield's eyes twinkled, and his mouth became less a scar, but John
thought this was a very fine phrase really, and he rushed along:
"Life looks like a tangle, like a mess--drudgeries, disappointments,
injustices--the wrong man prospering--the wrong girl suffering! The
drama composes life. It grabs out a few people and follows them,
compressing into the action of two hours the eventualities of a lifetime
and shortening perspectives till men can see the consequences of their
acts, whether for good or for ill. The stage teaches the doctrine of the
conservation of moral energy--and of immoral energy--that sustained
effort, conserved effort is never cheated; it gets its goal at last."
"Say!" broke in Scofield; but John would not be denied what he felt was
a final smashing generalization.
"To figure the tariff on human conduct, to grade and classify the acts
of life, to quote the rates on happiness and misery in trainload lots.
That's what I'm going to do," he concluded, with a glow upon his face.
But by this time a smile of cynic pity had appeared upon the face of the
railroad man.
"Hampstead," he exclaimed sharply, with a mimic shudder and a shrug of
relief as if he had just escaped something, "you're not an actor.
You're a preacher!"
John gasped.
"You're a moralist," asserted Scofield accusingly, "a puritanical,
Sunday-school, twaddling moralist. I have misjudged you. I wouldn't
want you around at all."
With a look akin to disgust upon his face, the railroad man made a
motion with his fingers in the air as if ridding them of something
sticky, and arose, not abruptly but decisively, making clear that the
interview had proved disappointingly unprofitable and was therefore at
an end.
John also arose, bewildered by the sudden change in Scofield's
attitude--a change which he resented, and also the ground of it. He a
preacher? The idea was ridiculous.
Besides, it makes an astonishing difference when one has been stubbornly
refusing an offer to have the offer coolly and decisively withdrawn.
Something subtly psychological made him want the offer back. The door
of opportunity had been closed behind him with a snap so vicious that he
wanted to turn and kick it open.
But the thin, talon-like hand of Scofield was hooking the young man's
rather flaccid palm for a moment.
"Remember what I tell you," he barked out in parting. "You're not an
actor. You're not a railroad man. You're a preacher!"
The last word was flung bitingly, like an epithet.
John, feeling uncomfortable, walked out and along one side of Union
Square, casting a momentary wondering eye on the stabbing, twin towers
of the Hotel St. Francis, many windowed and many-lighted; then turned on
down Geary into Market and along that wide and cobbled thoroughfare to
the doors of the old Palace Hotel. By the time he was in bed, he
realized that Scofield had shaken him terribly. His decision was all to
make over again.
However, Bessie would be there for three days to help him, and with this
thought he felt comforted.
* * * * *
"It's been a great three days," sighed John, on the following Tuesday.
Bessie also sighed.
They had clambered down from the parapet below the Cliff House and sat
watching the seals at play upon the rocks a stone's throw out from
beneath their feet. Their position marked the southern portal of the
famous Golden Gate, through which a mile-wide stream of liquid blue was
running. Across the Gate rose the sheer gray cliffs of Marin County and
beyond those the rugged greens and blues of the mountains, spiked in the
center by the peak of Tamalpais.
Before their faces, the ocean, in swells and scoops of ever grayer gray,
ran out to catch the horizon as it fell, illumined in its lower reaches
by the sun, which was sinking into the haze above the waters like a
lustrous orange ball.
Southward, beyond the green head of Golden Gate Park, the yellow gray of
the sand dunes and the blue gray of the sea met in a lingering, playful
kiss that swept back and forth in a long shimmering line which ran on
sinuously, growing fainter and fainter, till lost in the shadow of the
distant cliffs.
The hour was five o'clock. At eight that night John was to leave for
Los Angeles. His vacation--the only vacation of his hard-driven
life--was to end, and an epoch in his existence was also nearing its
end. The past was clear as the land behind him; the future was an area
of tossing uncertainty. Nothing appeared,--no track, no wake, no sail,
no sun even. Only far over, beyond the curve of the horizon, was a kind
of strange, unearthly glow, and on this his eye was set.
For three days his soul had ebbed and flowed like that lip of foam upon
the beach, now stealing far up on the land,--for him the backward track;
now turning and running far out to sea,--for him the way of adventure
and advance.
But now the ultimate decision was to be made. Bessie saw it rising like
a tide upon that face which once had seemed not to fit, a rapt look
which snuggled in the hills and hollows and then began to harden like
setting concrete. No one would call that face homely now. Interesting,
most likely, would have been the word.
The gray eyes burned brighter, the lips grew tighter. The chin advanced,
moved out to sea a little, as it were.
"Follow your star, John," Bessie declared stoutly, though a look of pain
momentarily touched her whitening lips. "I shall despise you if you do
not."
"The decision is made," John replied solemnly, "and you, Bessie, have
helped to make it."
Bessie did not reply; she only looked.
Silence fell between them. Silence, too, was in the heavens; the sun,
the waves, the restless wind for the moment appeared to stand still.
All nature had paused respectfully. A man, young, inexperienced, but
potential, had cast the horoscope of life beyond the power of gods or
men to intervene,--and with it had cast some other horoscopes as well.
Hampstead felt the spell his act of will had wrapped about them, but he
felt also the substance of his resolution framing like granite in his
soul and making him strong with a new kind of strength.
But soon the sun was descending again, the clouds were drifting once
more, and a gust of wind nipped sharply, causing the skirts of John's
overcoat to flap lustily. Bessie twitched her fur collar closer about
the neck, and thrust both hands deep into the pockets of her gray
ulster. Hampstead passed his own hand through the curve of the girl's
elbow, gripped her forearm possessively, selfishly, absently, and drew
her toward him.
Indeed Bessie was closer to him than she had ever been before; and yet
she had never felt so far away.
"Oh, but it's great to have a woman by you in a crisis," John chuckled
happily.
Bessie looked up startled. John had called her woman. But she recovered
from the start,--he had also called her _a_ woman.
"Come to understand each other pretty well, haven't we?" John observed,
still looking oceanward, but giving the arm of Bessie what was intended
for a meaningful squeeze.
"Not at all," sighed Bessie, also still looking oceanward.
Hampstead, his thoughts bowling rapidly forward, continued motionless
until a white-winged, curious-eyed gull sailed between his line of
vision and the water. Then, as if abruptly conscious that Bessie's
answer was not what it should have been, he turned, and at the same time
boldly swung her body round till they stood facing each other. Bessie
met this gaze unblinkingly for a moment, with her face set and sober;
then something in John's mystified glance touched her keen sense of
humor, and she laughed,--her old, roguish laugh,--and flirted the stupid
in the face with the end of her boa.
"You great big egoist!" she smiled. "There, that's the first chance
I've had to use that word. I only learned the difference between it and
another last week."
"Indeed!" retorted Hampstead. "And when did you learn the difference
between me and the other word?"
"Well, I'm not sure that there is a difference," she sparred. "Being
polite, I just concede it."
"Oh," he chuckled. "But," and he was serious again, "you say we don't
understand each other?"
"Nonsense; I was only joking. I do understand you; you great, big,
egoistical egotist! You are just now absolutely self-centered--and all,
all ambition! And I am secretly--secretly, you understand--proud of
you!"
"And you," said Hampstead, drawing her close again, "are just the
truest, most understanding friend a man ever, ever had. You know,
Bessie, a fellow can talk to you just like a sister,--a pretty little
sister!" he subjoined, when Bessie looked less pleased than he thought
she should.
"You've changed a lot, too, in a year," he conceded, studying her face
critically. "When you came into the hotel that night, you struck fear
into my heart, and then kind of made it flutter. I said to myself,
'She's gone--the old Bessie, that could be played with. But here's a
young woman, a handsome young woman, taking her place.'"
"Did you say that?" asked Bessie happily.
"An exceedingly beautiful woman," went on John, as if stimulated by the
interruption. "By George, a very corker of a woman--look at those eyes,
those lips, those dimples. Same old dimples, girl!" he laughed
emotionally. "And I said, 'Now, here's a woman, a ripe, wonderful woman,
to be made love to--'"
"John!"
There was in Bessie's sudden exclamation the surcharged sense of all the
proprieties which their relationship involved.
"Oh, don't be alarmed," exclaimed Hampstead, suddenly very earnest and
respectful. "I am not leading up to anything. I do not misunderstand
the nature of your goodness to me. I am not presuming anything. I am
only telling you what I said to myself."
"Oh," murmured Bessie noncommittally, though she shivered for a moment
as if a gust of wind had come again. Hampstead, feeling this, drew her
still closer and hunched his broad shoulder to shelter her more, as he
explained further:
"But it was I, you know, and there was nothing for me to do but to fly.
I was for jumping out the window. And then you suddenly made that
wonderful speech about going to the circus with dear old John, and your
mother let it out that you wanted me to run around with you here, and I
saw that toward me you were the same old Bessie; that for a few days we
could be once more just friendly, only two finer friends, because we're
both grown up now."
"Yes," Bessie sighed, almost contentedly. "I did want you, John. A
girl gets tired of society, of clubs and dances and things, even in
High. You know, I get weary of the sight of these slim, pompadoured
boys sometimes. I just wanted somehow to feel the arm of a real man, to
hear him talk, even if he does nothing but talk about himself, and until
this minute in three days has not confessed that I have dimples,
and--and a heart."
"Slow, about some things, am I not?" confessed John. "Awfully, awfully
slow!"
"I will agree with you," said Bessie, with a mournfulness that literally
compelled him to perceive that she was some way disappointed in him.
"But," he inquired reproachfully, "aside from my usefulness as a social
escort and a sort of masculine tonic, you do admire me a little, don't
you?"
"Oh, yes," she answered frankly. "I admire you a lot."
"But you're disappointed about something?"
"Apprehension is the better word," she confessed soberly.
"Apprehension? Of what?" John was looking at her almost accusingly.
Bessie avoided his glance. She could not tell him what she feared nor
why she feared it.
"You think I'll fail?" John demanded.
"No," disclaimed Bessie seriously. "I think you will succeed!"
"You think so?" and Hampstead's face lighted brilliantly. "Oh, God
bless you for that!" and again he shook her, this time tenderly and drew
her closer till her breast was touching his, and she leaned her head far
back to look up into his face.
"Yes," she breathed softly, "I think so!"
"And you do not think me silly for turning my back upon solid realities
to follow my ideal?"
"No! No!" and she shook her head emphatically, "I honor you for it,
John. You have inspired me, John, and thrilled me. I used to
think--how good you are! Now I think--how noble you are! You have made
my feeling for you one of worshipfulness almost."
The look in her face did express that, and Hampstead noticed it now.
"Ah," he murmured, pressing her arms against her sides, "you dear,
impressionable little girl!"
Quite thoughtless of how unnecessarily close he was drawing Bessie,
either to shelter her from the wind or for the purpose of conversation,
or especially in the fulfillment of his duty to his charge as guide and
protector, John was finding a pleasurable sensation in this position of
intimacy, and was indeed, just upon the threshold of one very great
discovery when he made another, perhaps equally surprising, but vastly
less important. Looking into the upturned eyes, which after the canons
of Delsarte, he was thinking expressed "devotion" perfectly, a shadow
was seen to project itself downward from the upper lids across the iris,
as if a storm were gathering on a placid lake. John watched the shadow
curiously as it deepened, until it became clear that a mist was
congealing in those swimming violet depths.
"Why, Bessie," he exclaimed, amazed, "you are going to cry!"
On the instant two tears trickled from the dark lashes and gleamed for a
moment like solitaire diamonds in the setting of two ruby spots that had
gathered unaccountably upon her upturned cheeks.
"You are crying," he charged straightly.
Bessie's expression never changed, but her smooth, round chin nodded a
trembling and unabashed assent. A sudden impulse seized John. The
position of his arms shifted.
"Bessie!" he murmured feelingly, "I am going to kiss you!"
Bessie did not appear half as surprised at this announcement as
Hampstead at himself for making it.
"May I?" he persisted.
The expression of devotion in Bessie's swimming orbs remained
unstartled, her pose unaltered. Only her lips moved while she breathed
a single word: "Yes."
Instantly their ruby and velvet softness yielded to the pressure of
John's, planted as tenderly and chastely as was his thought of her,--for
that other discovery that he was on the verge of making had been fended
off by the coming of the tear.
*CHAPTER VIII*
*JOHN MAKES UP*
That night, according to programme, John went back to Los Angeles; and a
few weeks later, also according to programme, he was again in San
Francisco, no longer a railroad man, but--in his thought--an actor.
Now calling oneself an actor and being one are quite different; but it
took an experience to prove this to John. Even the opportunity for this
experience was itself hard to get. It was days before he even saw a
theatrical manager, weeks before he met one personally, and a month
before he got his first engagement.
When he talked of the drama to actors the way he had talked of it to the
Reverend Charles Thompson Campbell, they did not comprehend him; when he
talked to them as he had to Scofield, they smiled cynically; when he
admitted to one manager that he was without professional experience, the
admission drew a sneer which froze the stream of hope in his breast.
John thereafter told no other manager this, but learned instead the
value of a "front", and inserted in the professional columns of the _San
Francisco Dramatic Review_ a card which read:
+------------------+
| |
| JOHN HAMPSTEAD |
| HEAVY |
| AT LIBERTY |
| |
+------------------+
"Heavy" in theatrical parlance means the villain. Modestly confessing
himself not quite equal to "leads", though in his heart John scorned to
believe his own confession, he had announced himself as a "heavy."
This card appeared for three succeeding weeks, but on the fourth week
there was a significant change. It read:
+-----------------------------------+
| |
| JOHN HAMPSTEAD |
| HEAVY |
| With the People's Stock Company |
| |
+-----------------------------------+
The People's Stock Company was new, a "ten-twenty-thirty" organization,
got together in a day for a season of doubtful length, in a huge barn of
a house that once had been the home of bucket-of-blood melodramas, but
for a long time had been given over to cobwebs and prize fights. The
promoters had little money. They spent most of it on new paint and
gorgeous, twelve-sheet posters. Everything was cheap and gaudy, but the
cheapest thing was the company--and the least gaudy.
The opening play was a blood-spiller with thrills guaranteed; the scene
was laid in Cuba at a period just preceding the Spanish-American War.
Hampstead's part was a Spanish colonel, Delaro by name. Delaro was no
ordinary double-dyed villain. He was triple-dyed at the least, and
would kick up all the deviltry in the piece from the beginning to the
end; he would steal the fair Yankee maiden who had strayed ashore from
her father's yacht; he would imprison her in an out-of-the-way fortress;
court her, taunt her, threaten her--and then when the audience was
wrought to the highest pitch of excitement and the last throb of pity
for her impending fate at the hands of this fiend in yellow uniform and
brass buttons, the galloping of horses would herald the appearance of
Lieutenant Bangster, U.S.N., lover of the maiden and hero of the play.
(The Navy on horseback!) A pitched battle would result, pistols,
rifles, cannon would be fired, the fortifications would be blown away,
and Old Glory go fluttering up the staff to the thundering applause of
the gods of the gallery.
Delaro was an enormous opportunity; but it was also an enormous
responsibility. John went into rehearsal haunted by fear that the
carefully guarded secret of his inexperience would be discovered,
knowing that instant humiliation and discharge would follow. He had
trudged, hoped, brazened, starved, prayed to get this part. He must not
lose it, and he must make good. The sweat of desperation oozed daily
from his pores.
Halson, the stage manager, was a tall, tubercular person, with a husk in
his throat and a cloudy eye. This eye seemed always to John to be
cloudier still when turned on him. On the fourth day of rehearsal,
these clouded looks broke out in lightning.
"Stop that preaching!" Halson commanded impatiently. "You are intoning
those speeches like a parrot in a pulpit. Colonel Delaro is not a
bishop. He is a villain--a damned, detestable, outrageous villain!
Play it faster; read those speeches more naturally. My God, you must
have been playing-- By the way, Hampstead, what were you playing last?"
The shot was a bull's-eye. John felt himself suddenly a monstrous fraud
and had a sickening sense of predestined failure. In his soul he
suddenly saw the truth. Acting was not bluffing. Acting was an art!
The poorest, dullest of these people, bad as they appeared to be, knew
how to read their lines more naturally than he. He was not an actor.
He never had been an actor. He was only a recitationist.
"What were you playing last, I say?" bullied Halson, as if suddenly
suspicious.
But John had rallied. "If I don't get the experience, how will I ever
become an actor," was what he said to himself.
"My last season was in Shakespeare," was what he observed to Halson,
with deliberate dignity.
"Oh," exclaimed the stage manager, much relieved. "That explains it. I
was beginning to think somebody had sawed off a blooming amateur on me."
John had not deemed it prudential to add that this season in Shakespeare
lasted one whole evening and consisted of some slices from the Merchant
of Venice presented in the parlor of the Hotel Green in Pasadena; and
the scorn with which Halson had immediately pronounced the word
"amateur" sent a shiver to Hampstead's marrow, while he congratulated
himself on his discretion. Nevertheless, he suffered this day many
interruptions and much kindergarten coaching from Halson and felt
himself humiliated by certain overt glances from the cast.
"The boobs!" thought John. "The pin-heads! They don't know half as much
as I do. They never taught a Y.M.C.A. class in public speaking; they
never gave a lesson in elocution in all their lives, and here they are
staring at me, because I have a little trouble mastering the mere
mechanics of stage delivery. It's simple. I'll have it by to-morrow."
But at the end of the rehearsal, John felt weak. Instead of leaving the
theater, he slipped behind a curtain into one of the boxes and sank down
in the gloom to be alone and think. But he was not so much alone as he
thought. A voice came up out of the shadows in the orchestra circle.
It was the voice of Neumeyer, the 'angel' of the enterprise, who was
even more inexperienced in things dramatic than his "heavy" man.
"How do you think it'll go?" Neumeyer had asked anxiously.
"Oh, it'll go all right," barked the whiskey-throat of Halson. "It'll
go. All that's worrying me is this blamed fool Hampstead. How in time
I sawed him off on myself is more than I can tell. However, I've
engaged a new heavy for next week."
John groped dumbly out into the day. But in the sunshine his spirits
rallied. "They can't take this part away from me," he exulted and then
croaked resolutely: "I'll show 'em; I'll show 'em yet. They're bound to
like me when they see my finished work."
And that was what he kept saying to himself up to the very night of the
first performance. But that significant occasion brought him face to
face with another problem,--his make-up.
The matter of costume was simple. It had been rented for a week from
Goldstein's. It was fearsomely contrived. The trousers were red.
Varnished oilcloth leggings, made to slip on over his shoes, were relied
upon to give the effect of top boots. The coat was of yellow, with
spiked tails, with huge, leaf-like chevrons, with rows of large,
superfluous buttons, and coils on coils of cord of gold.
But make-up could not be hired from a costumer and put on like a mask.
It was a matter of experience, of individuality, and of skill upon the
part of the actor. All John knew of make-up he had read in the books
and learned from those experimental daubs in which his features had been
presented in his own barn-storming productions. The make-up of Ursus
had been almost entirely a matter of excess of hair, acquired by a beard
and a wig rented for the occasion. This, therefore, was really to be
his first professional make-up, and Hampstead was blissfully determined
that it should be a stunning achievement.
In order that he might have plenty of time for experiment, the heavy man
entered the dressing rooms at six o'clock, almost an hour and a half
before any other actor felt it necessary to appear, and went gravely
about his important task.
First treating the pores of his face to a filling of cold cream,--all
the books agreed in this,--John chose a dark flesh color from among his
grease paints and proceeded to give himself a swarthy Spanish
complexion. Judging that this swarthiness was too somber, he proceeded
next to mollify it by the over-laying of a lighter flesh tint; but
later, in an effort to redden the cheeks, he got on too much color and
was under the necessity of darkening it again. Thus alternately
lightening and darkening, experimenting and re-experimenting, seven
o'clock found him with a layer of grease paint, somewhere about an
eighth of an inch thick masking his features into almost complete
immobility.
Next he turned attention to the eyes, blackening the lashes and edging
the lids themselves with heavy mourning. At the outer corners of the
eyes he put on a smear of white to drive the eye in toward the nose;
between the corner of the eye and the nose, he was careful to deepen the
shadow. This was to make his eyes appear close together. Down the
bridge of the nose he drew a straight white stripe to make that organ
high and thin and narrow; while in the corner between the cheek and
nostril went another smear of white, to drive the nose up still higher
and sharper.
In the midst of this artistry, Jarvis Parks, the character man, who had
been assigned to dress with Hampstead, entered.
"Hello," said John, with an attempt at unconcern.
"Hard at it," commented Parks, and began with the ease of long practice
to arrange his make-up materials about him, after which deftly, and
almost without looking at what he was doing, he transformed himself into
a youthful, rosy-cheeked, navy chaplain.
"Half hour!" sang the voice of the call boy from below stairs.
John was busy now adjusting a pirate moustache to his upper lip by means
of liberal swabbings of spirit gum. As he worked, he hummed a little
tune just to show Parks how much at ease and with what satisfied
indifference he performed the feat of transposing his fair Saxon
features into the cruel scowls of a villainous Spanish colonel.
But catching the eye of Parks upon him for a moment, Hampstead was
puzzled by the expression, although he reflected that it was probably
admiration, since he certainly had got on ever so much better than he
expected. It surely was a fine make-up--a brilliant make-up.
"Fifteen minutes," sang the voice of the call boy.
Hampstead could really contain his self-complacency no longer.
"Well," he exclaimed, turning squarely on Parks, "what do you think of
it?"
Now if John had only known, he disclosed his whole amateurish soul to
wise old Parks in that single question, for a professional actor never
asks another professional what he thinks of his make-up.
"Great!" responded Parks drily, but again there was that look upon his
face which Hampstead could not quite interpret.
"Five minutes!" was bellowed up the stairway.
Hampstead drew on his coat of brilliant yellow, buckled on his sword,
and had opportunity to survey himself again in the glass and bestow a
few more touches to the face before the word "overture", the call boy's
final scream of exultation, echoed through the dressing rooms.
The corridor outside John's door was immediately filled with the sound
of trampling feet, of voices male and female, some talking excitedly,
some laughing nervously, every soul aquiver with that brooding sense of
the ominous which sheds itself over the spirits of a theatrical company
upon a first night.
Parks, with a final touch to his hair and a sidewise squint at himself,
turned and went out. The footsteps and voices in the corridor grew
fainter and then came trailing back from the stairway like a chatterbox
recessional.
It was quiet in the dressing rooms, except for a droning from across the
way, and John knew what that was; for the sweet little ingenue had told
him in a moment of confidence: "On first nights I always go down on my
knees before I leave my dressing room." There she was now, telling her
beads.
"Shall I pray, too?" he asked, and then answered resolutely, "No! Let's
wait and see what God'll do to me."
His throat was arid. His lips, from the drying spirit gum and the
excess of grease paint, were stiff and unresponsive.
"_Eternal Hammering is the Price of Success_" he muttered thickly,
trying to brace himself. "Now for a great big swing with the hammer."
But his spirits sagged unaccountably, and he turned out into the
corridor as if for a death march.
At this moment the area between the foot of the stairs and the wings of
the stage was a weaving mass of idling scene-shifters, hurrying,
nervous, property men, and a horde of supernumeraries made up as
American sailors, Spanish soldiers, and Cuban natives. All was movement
and confusion.
The principals had drifted to their entrances and taken position in the
order in which they would appear; but they too were restless; nobody
stood quite still; at every movement, at every loud word, everybody
turned or looked or started. The hoarse voice of Halson and his
assistant, Page, repeatedly resounded.
As Hampstead descended the stairs upon this strange, moving picture, it
appeared to him to organize into a ferocious, misshapen monster that
meant him harm; or a python coiling and uncoiling its gigantic, menacing
folds. The thing was argus-eyed, too, and every eye stabbed him like a
lance.
Emerging upon the floor, John paused uncertainly before this hostile
wall of prying scrutiny. Somebody snickered. A woman's voice groaned
"My Gawd!" and followed it with a hysterical giggle.
Could it be that they were laughing at him? John felt that this was
possible; but he stoutly assured himself that it was not probable.
However, just as his features passed under the rays of a bunch light
standing where it was to illumine with the rays of the afternoon sun the
watery perspective of a jungle scene, he came face to face with the
stage manager. Halson darted one quick glance, and then a look of horror
congealed upon his face.
"In the name of God!" he hissed huskily. "Hampstead, what have you been
doing to yourself?"
"Doing to myself?" exclaimed John, trying for one final minute to fend
off fate. "Why? What do you mean?"
Halson's voice floated up in a half humorous wail of despair, as he
rolled his eyes sickly toward the flies.
"What do I mean?" he whined. "The man comes down here with his face
daubed up like an Esquimaux totem pole, and he asks me what do I mean?"
But Halson was interrupted by a sudden silence from the front. The
orchestra had stopped. The curtain was about to rise.
"Page! Page!" groaned Halson in a frantic whisper, "Hold that curtain!
Signal a repeat to the orchestra! Here, you!" to the call boy. "Run for
my make-up box. Quick!"
John's knees were trembling, and he felt his cheeks scalding in a sweat
of humiliation beneath their blanket of lurid grease, as Halson turned
again upon him with:
"You poor, miserable, God-forsaken amateur!"
Amateur! There, the word was out at last, and it was terrible. No
language can express the volume of opprobrium which Halson was able to
convey in it. To Hampstead it could never henceforth be anything but
the most profane of epithets. As a matter of fact, he was never after
able to hate any man sufficiently to justify calling him an amateur.
While the orchestra dawdled, while the company of "supers" crowded
close, and the principals looked sneeringly on from all distances,
Halson made up the heavy's face for the part he was to play, thereby
submitting John Hampstead to the bitterest humiliation of his dramatic
career.
Yet once engaged upon this work of artistry, the stage manager's wrath
appeared to soften. Half cajoling and half pleading, he whined over and
over again, "If you had only told me, Mr. Hampstead! If you had only
told me, I would have helped you."
"If I only had told him," reflected John, beginning all at once to like
Halson, and never suspecting that the man in his heart was hating him
like a fiend, and that his fear that the amateur would go absolutely to
pieces under the strain of the night was the sole reason for soothing
and encouraging and commiserating him by turns.
But now the orchestra grew still again.
"Aw-right," husked Halson, and Hampstead heard that ominous, sliding,
rustling sound which to the actor is like no other in all the world.
*CHAPTER IX*
*A DEMONSTRATION FROM THE GALLERY*
Every chair in the orchestra of the People's Theater was taken; the
boxes were occupied, and as for the odd rectangular horseshoe of a
gallery, with its advancing arms reaching forward almost to the
proscenium arch, while its rearward tiers rose and faded into distance
like some vast enclosed bleachers, it seemed a solid mass of humanity.
The curtain rose on critical silence. The repetition of the overture
had given a hint that all was not running smoothly, and at the first
spoken word a jeer came from the gallery. The actor stammered and made
the foolish attempt to repeat his words, but the attempt was lost in a
clamor of voices. Feet were stamped, hats were waved, peanuts and
popcorn balls were thrown. The actors braced themselves and went on
doggedly, but so did the balconies, and it presently appeared that
something like a demonstration was in progress. Swiftly an explanation
of the great masses in the gallery and their behavior was passed from
mouth to mouth behind the scenes. It said they were six hundred
south-of-Market-Street hoodlums who had been hired by a rival theatrical
manager to come and break up the performance. Whether this was true, or
whether the outbreak in the gallery was merely the unsuppressible spirit
of turbulent youth, it stormed on like a simoon, gaining in volume as it
proceeded.
For a while the people down-stairs, having paid their thirty cents to
witness a theatrical performance, protested; but they appeared soon to
conclude that the show in the gallery was the more worth while. Ceasing
to protest, they began to applaud the trouble-makers and even to abet
them.
Behind the scenes panic reigned. The actors at their exits bounded off,
panting in terror, as if pelted by bullets. Those whose cues for
entrance came, snatched at them excitedly, and like gladiators rushing
into the arena, plunged desperately upon the stage. The face of the
leading lady was white beneath her make-up as she almost tottered upon
the scene. Some instinct of chivalry led the mob to desist for a minute
while she delivered her opening lines. But the demonstration broke out
afresh as the leading man entered, though he wore the uniform of a
lieutenant in the navy. His every speech was jeered. The excitement
grew wilder; not a word spoken upon the stage was heard, even by the
leader of the orchestra.
"My God, what they will do to you, Hampstead!" exclaimed Halson
fiercely, as a detachment in the gallery began to march up and down the
aisle, the rhythm of their heavy steps making the old house shiver like
a ship in a storm.
Yet of all the actors trembling behind the scenes, it is possible that
Hampstead was the very coolest. He had been the most perturbed, the
most distraught; but this counter-disturbance made his own distressing
situation forgotten. No eyes were riveted on him now. No thoughts were
on him and the terrible humiliation he had publicly endured or the
wretched failure he was going to make. The best, the most experienced,
were in the most complete distress--clear out of themselves. The
leading man had become angry, had lost his lines, and did not know what
he was saying.
"Stanley's lost; he's ad-libbing to beat the band," John heard Page
remark.
_Ad-libbing_! It was a new word. In the midst of all this confusion,
John took note of it and next day learned of Parks that it was a
stage-participle made from _ad libitum_. An actor ad-libbing was an
actor talking on and on to fill space in some kind of a stage wait or
because, as with Stanley, he had forgotten his lines.
Neumeyer, the "angel", came in from the front and added his white,
agitated face to the awed groups standing about the wings.
"They've lost half the first act," he groaned, through chattering teeth.
"Even when they wear 'emselves out, the piece is ruined because the
people down-stairs have missed the key to the plot."
"Your cue is coming," bawled Page to John.
"Don't worry, though," croaked Halson in Hampstead's ear, still fearful
that his man would collapse. "The piece is going so rotten you can't
make it any worse. Cut in!"
But to his surprise, Hampstead's eye glinted with the light of battle.
"Worry?" he exclaimed excitedly. "Watch me. I'm going to get 'em!"
Halson gazed in pure pity.
"Get 'em," he gutturaled. "You poor, God-forsaken amateur!"
But the cue had come. Colonel Delaro, his sword clattering, his buttons
flashing, his tall figure aglow with color, leaped through the entrance
and took the center of the stage--so clumsily that he trod on Stanley's
favorite corn and hooked a spur in the mantilla trailing from the arm of
Miss Constance Beverly, the mislaid daughter of a millionaire yachtsman;
but nevertheless, Hampstead was on. He had seized the center of the
stage and he filled it full, as with an ostentatious gesture, he swept
off his gold lace cap before Miss Beverly.
"What star's this?" shrieked a voice on one side the gallery.
"No star at all. It's a comet!" bawled a man from the other side,
cupping his hands to carry his second-hand wit around the auditorium.
The Spanish War was not then so far back in memory that the sight of the
uniform did not speedily kindle a little popular wrath upon its own
account, and the demonstration began again and rose higher, but
Hampstead became neither flustered nor angry. He maintained his
character and his dignity. He remembered his speeches, and delivered
them in stentorian tones that sounded vibrantly above the general
clamor. When the gallery discovered to its surprise that here was a
voice it could not entirely drown, it stopped out of sheer curiosity to
see what the voice was like and found it as attractive as it was
forceful. Moreover, there was a kind of special appeal in it. It was
the voice of a real man; if they had only known it,--of a man at bay.
He was not Colonel Delaro, plotting against the liberty and affections
of a lady. He was John Hampstead, fighting,--with his back to the
wall,--fighting for his opportunity, for an accredited position in this
poor, cheap misfit company,--a position which seemed to him just now the
most desired thing in all the world. Furthermore, he was fighting to
justify his own faith in himself and the faith of Dick and Tayna; yes,
and the faith of Bessie.
Hampstead was, moreover, used to rough houses. He had faced them more
than once on his own barn-storming one-night appearances.
The way to get an audience like this he knew was to play it like a fish,
to get the first nibble of interest and then hold it motionless with the
lure of some kind of dramatic story. The situation called for a
skilled, dramatic _raconteur_, and in truth that was what Hampstead
was,--not an actor but a recitationist. Also his talks in church
circles had given him skill in extemporaneous speaking. It happened
that his speeches in this first act completed the introduction of the
plot, but they were meaningless without a clear knowledge of what
already had been said. Now Hampstead began, at first instinctively and
then deliberately, as he played, to gather up these lost lines of half a
dozen actors and weave them into his own. The fever of composition
seized him. He used the people on the stage like puppets. He made them
help him re-lay the plot while he struggled to grasp the attention of
the mass child-mind out there in front and enthrall it with a story.
No better way could have been devised of making Hampstead overcome his
terrible faults of action and delivery. With marvelous intensity came
more repose. His eyes had been changed by the deft hand of Halson till
they no longer looked like holes in a blanket; and he shot out his
speeches, never once in that rhythmic, preaching tone, but rapidly,
jerkily, plausible or menacing by turns, but all the while convincingly.
Within a few minutes the audience was captured. It lost its enthusiasm
for riot and sat silent, following first the story as Hampstead had
retold it and then the action which thereafter began to unfold. It was
the sheer strength of the personality of the man which made this
possible. In his strength, too, the other players took courage; and
soon the action was tightly keyed and moving forward to a better
conclusion of the act than any rehearsal had ever promised.
At the fall of the curtain, an avalanche leaped upon Hampstead, an
avalanche which consisted solely of Halson. He seemed to have a
thousand hands. He was slapping John on the back with all of them, in
fierce, congratulatory blows.
"Man!" he exclaimed. "Man! You saved it! You saved it!"
Neumeyer was capering about deliriously, while tears of joy were
trickling from his eyes. Others crowded round: Stanley, who had the
lead, amiable old Parks, Lindsay, Bordwell, Miss Harlan, and the rest.
The audience, too, was excitedly expressing itself with hand-clappings
and foot-stampings.
"Scatter!" bawled Page.
The stage swiftly cleared of people as the curtain began to rise.
"Miss Harlan!" Page was shouting. "Mr. Stanley! Mr. Hampstead!"
In the order named, the three emerged and took their calls, but the
heartiest applause was for the big man in yellow and red, who, quite
ignoring the orchestra circle, showed all his teeth in a cordial and
understanding grin to the galleries, which thereupon broke out in that
hurricane of hisses which is the heavy's hoped-for tribute.
Throughout the remainder of the performance, the yellow and scarlet
figure of Delaro, with his great, sweeping gestures and his vast,
bellowing voice, moved, a unique and dominating figure; no doubt the
first and last time in which a villain who as a character was without
one redeeming quality was made the hero of the gallery gods.
With the final fall of the curtain, Hampstead climbed to his dressing
room, tired but gloriously happy. All the company knew his shame, the
shame of being an amateur; but all, too, knew his power, the power of a
man who could rise to emergency, who had commanding presence and
constructive force.
The dressing rooms were mere partitions open at the top, so that
everybody could hear what everybody else was saying, or could have
heard, if only they had stopped to listen. But apparently nobody
listened. The strain was over, and everybody talked as if the joy were
in the talking and not in being heard. Yet after the first few minutes
of excited blowing-off of steam, there came a lull, as if all had
stopped for breath at once.
Into this lull, Dick Bordwell, the juvenile man, as he wiped the grease
paint from his face, lifted his fine tenor voice in the first half of a
queer antiphonal chant, by inquiring loudly above his four wooden walls
toward the common ceiling over all:
"_Who is the greatest leading woman on the American stage?_"
"Louise Harlan!" chanted every voice on the floor, their tones mingling
merrily, as if they were playing a familiar game.
"Right-o," sang Dick, and chanted next: "_Who is the greatest leading
man on the American stage?_"
"Billie Stanley!" chorused the voices, with shrieks of laughter.
"And who," inquired Dick, with an insinuating change in his voice, "_who
is the greatest juvenile man in America?_"
"Rich-a-r-r-r-d Bordwell!" screamed the magpies.
"Right-o-right!" echoed Dick, with a grunt of immense satisfaction; and
then he went on piping his interrogatories, as to the rest of the
company, desiring to be informed who was the greatest character old man,
character old lady, soubrette, light comedian and stage manager,
concluding yet more loudly with:
"_And who is the greatest amateur heavy on the American stage?_"
As if they had been waiting for it, the voices burst out like a college
yell:
"_John Hampstead! John Hampstead, is the greatest amateur heavy on the
American stage!_"
The spirit of fun and hearty good will with which this initiation
ceremony had been performed was salve to the bruised, excited soul of
John. Besides an ever present sense of meanness and hypocrisy from the
concealment he had practiced, John had suffered a feeling of extreme
loneliness that had at no time been so great as now, when, the strain of
the play over, all these children of the stage were romping joyously
together. Now they had included him in the circle of their magic
fellowship. True, they had used the hateful word amateur, but that was
in play, and he was sure they would never use it again.
And he was right--from that hour some of them who liked him showed it;
some who disliked him showed that; some merely revealed themselves as
cool toward him or appeared ill at ease in his presence; but never one
of them, by word or act, failed from that moment to recognize his
standing as a man entitled to all the free masonry of their unique and
fascinating profession.
But the climax of this climactic night for John was reached when,
descending the stairway, Halson honored him with an astounding
confidence.
"Marien Dounay joins the People's to-morrow," he whispered excitedly.
"Fact!" he affirmed in response to John's look of sheer incredulity.
"She's a spitfire and a genius. She can do what she likes. She's
quarreled with Mowrey. She's coming here to spite him. Pie for us
while it lasts, huh? She opens as Isabel in _East Lynne_."
John knew that Mowrey had come up from Los Angeles and was just opening
a long season at the Grand Opera House; but Marien Dounay--almost a
star!--in that thread-bare play, _East Lynne_, in this out-at-elbows
company, and in this old barn of a house! Impossible!
This was what John was thinking, but he was too weak to give it
utterance. He wanted Halson's information to be true whether it was or
not. Yet in the midst of the elation which began to kindle swiftly, he
remembered what Halson had said to Neumeyer on Saturday in the dark of
the orchestra: that a new man had been engaged to play the heavies.
A wave of bitterness surged over him; and yet, he reflected, things must
be changed. They would scarcely let him go after to-night, so he
mustered courage to inquire:
"By the way, Halson, what do I play in _East Lynne_?"
"You play the lead," affirmed Halson, with dramatic emphasis.
"The lead?" John gulped, struggling as if a cobblestone had just been
tossed into his throat.
"Sure! You'll get away with it, too," declared the stage manager with
over-enthusiasm, slapping John heavily upon the back as the big man
turned away quickly, utterly unwilling that any save two or three not
there to look should see into his face.
It would scarcely have diminished his joy to know that he was getting
the lead simply because Archibald Carlyle was such an unredeemed
mollycoddle that the leading man usually chose to enact the villain,
Levison.
*CHAPTER X*
*A STAGE KISS*
For the strange freak of Miss Marien Dounay in joining The People's
Stock Company, the papers found ready explanation in artistic
temperament. The brilliant young actress, so the story ran, taking
umbrage because Miss Elsie McCloskey, twin star of the Mowrey cast, was
chosen to play a part for which Miss Dounay deemed herself specially
fitted, had resigned in a huff; and thereupon, to spite Mowrey, had
signed with this obscure stock company playing a dozen blocks away,
where it was believed her popularity would be sufficient to punish the
well-known manager in his one vulnerable spot, the box-office.
But there was one person interested who did not care a rap why Marien
Dounay was playing Isabel Carlyle, the wife of Archibald Carlyle at the
People's Stock this week, in the time-frazzled drama of _East Lynne_,
and that was the man to play Archibald. She was there, and that was
enough for him, swimming into his ken at the first rehearsal like a
vision of some glory too entrancing to belong to anything but a dream.
Had she changed much in the four months since he had held her in his
arms? Not at all, unless to grow more beautiful.
Yet if that crude actor fancied himself on terms of more than bare
acquaintance with this exquisite creature, his imagination presumed too
far. Miss Dounay's bearing made it instantly apparent that she gave
herself airs. One comprehensive glance was bestowed upon the semicircle
of the company. Hampstead's portion was more and less, a look and a
nod. The nod said: "I know you, puppet." The look warned: "But do not
presume. Stand."
John stood, wondering. As rehearsals progressed, his wonder grew into
bewilderment. Miss Dounay treated the whole company cavalierly, but she
treated him disdainfully. Her feeling for the others was simply
negative; for him it appeared to be positive.
As an actress, it developed that she was "up" in the part of Isabel,
having played it many times. She had, moreover, ideas of how every
other part should be played and was pleased to express them. Nobody
protested, Halson least of all. She was a "find" for the People's. As
a director, too, Miss Dounay was masterful. A languid glance, a single
word, a very slight intonation, had more force than one of Halson's
ranting commands. And she was instinctively competent.
Hampstead, despite his own sad experience, watched her open-mouthed.
This young woman, it appeared, was an intellectual force as well as a
magnetic one. She cut speeches or interpolated them, altered business,
and in one instance rearranged an entire scene, while in another she
boldly reconstructed the conclusion of an act. The storm center round
which much of this cutting, slicing, and fattening took place was
Hampstead. She heckled him unmercifully about the reading of his lines,
ridiculed his gestures, and badgered him to madness.
On the fourth day of this, John moped out of the theater, head down,
reflecting bitterly upon the illusory character of woman, of which he
knew so little,--moped so slowly that Parks overtook him on the first
corner.
"This woman is a friend of yours," Parks proposed tentatively.
"I thought she was," sighed Hampstead weakly, "but she keeps cutting my
speeches. By the end of the week, I won't have any part left at all."
Parks indulged a self-satisfied chuckle at the keenness of his own
discernment.
"Don't you see," he explained, "she's cutting the stuff you do badly.
She took away from you a situation in which you were awkward and unreal.
She changed that scene around and left you with a climax in which you
are positively graceful as well as forceful. You'll get a big hand in
it. She studies you. I've watched her."
"Old man," blurted Hampstead, with sudden fervor, "it would make me the
happiest man in the world if I thought that you were right. But you are
wrong, and her badgering has begun to get on my nerves. Say!" and he
interrupted himself to ask a question not yet answered to his
satisfaction. "Why is she here?--with the People's, I mean?"
"You've heard the stories," answered Parks, with a shrug. "However, I
doubt if it's any mere whim. She appears to me to have a cool, good
reason for anything she does."
Parks turns off at Ninth Street, and John moved on down Market. "A cold
good reason for what she does," he murmured. "What's the answer, I
wonder, to what she does to me?"
As the days went on, John's wonder grew.
Now it is according to the method of dramatists that when a husband is
to be abandoned by his wife in the second act there shall be certain
tender passages between the two in the first act, and this ancient drama
was no exception. There were contacts, handclasps, embraces, kisses.
Through all of these at rehearsal time the two went mechanically. Miss
Dounay apparently treated Hampstead with mere indifference, but actually
she found a thousand little ways to show utter repugnance. After the
first shock, John's combative instinct and his pride led him to face
this situation, so difficult for a gentleman, unflinchingly. Taking her
hands, pressing her to him, patting her cheek, playing with the wisps of
hair upon her temple, he conscientiously rehearsed the part of the
affectionate, doting husband. His very sincerity, it would seem, must
have been a rebuke to the woman. She must have seen that his heart was
stirred by an unexplained feeling toward her, and might have observed in
his determined bearing under the galling fire of her man-baiting
something noble.
Here, if she could only perceive it, was a man who had turned his back
on at least one of the kingdoms of this world to become an actor; a man
who would endure anything, suffer anything to add to his knowledge and
skill in that difficult and all demanding art; which, indeed, was why he
laid himself open to her polished ridicule by over-playing every scene,
overemphasizing every word, over-expressing every gesture and emotion.
But she never relented, not even on the night of the first performance.
Instead she became more aggressive in her antagonism, her method
changing from subtle scorn to open derision.
Now among experienced actors there are a great many things which may
take place upon the stage unsuspected of the audience. On this night,
all through the tender exchanges of that first act, Miss Dounay seized
upon intervals when her back was to the front to throw a grimace at
John,--to do, or _sotto voce_ to say, something irritating or ludicrous
that would throw him out of character, or, as the profession puts it,
"break him up." John steeled himself against all of this and went on
playing with that dignity of earnestness which seemed to characterize
all his life, until it would appear the climax of malice was reached
when, as Miss Dounay hung about his neck, she laughed in the midst of
one of his tenderest speeches, and whispered:
"There is a daub of smut on the end of your nose."
To John this communication was an arrow poisoned by the subtle power of
suggestion. Was there smut upon his nose? If there were and he touched
it with a finger, it would smear and ruin his make-up. If he did not
remove it, the audience would observe it the first time he came down
stage and laugh. On the other hand, he did not believe that there was
smut upon his nose. How could it get there? In no way unless some
joker had doctored the peephole in the curtain just before he peered out
at the audience.
Smutted or not smutted? To touch his nose or let it alone? That was
the maddening question. The puzzle and the doubt disconcerted him. His
memory faltered, his tongue stumbled, and a feeling of awful
helplessness came over him. He _was_ breaking up! He _was_ out of
character! This devilish woman had succeeded. She saw it, too. John
read the exultation in her eyes, and it filled him with indignation
until a wave of wrath surged over his great frame like a storm. Miss
Dounay saw his eyes grow suddenly stern with a light she had never
noticed in them. One arm was encircling her in a caress, the other hand
rested upon her shoulders. For one instant she felt this embrace
tighten into a python grip that was terrifying. The man's position had
not changed. To the audience it was still a mere pose, an expression of
endearment.
But to Marien Dounay it was an ominous hint that this great amiable
child had in him the primal elements of a brutal strength. A look of
alarm shot into her face, and she whispered:
"Don't, John! Don't."
The tone of her voice was pleading. She, the proud, had cringed. She
had called him John. She had surrendered.
"It was just a mean little fib," she whispered, and for a moment clung
to him helplessly.
John, greatly surprised, was not too much surprised to feel the exultant
surge of victory. For one moment he had lost control of himself, but in
that moment he appeared to have gained control of Marien.
The strangest thing was that Miss Dounay seemed rather happy about it
herself; and the wide range of the woman's capacity was revealed by her
swift transition to a mood of purring contentment and a spirit of
affectionate camaraderie that presently reached a surprising climax.
The act ended in the garden, with Isabel seated on a rustic bench, and
Archibald bending over her. As the curtain descended, he was to stoop
and print a kiss of tenderest respect upon her forehead. But now, as
the curtain trembled, Miss Dounay lifted not her forehead but her lips,
and held them, warm and clinging, to his for an instant that to
Hampstead seemed a delicious, thrilling eternity, from which he emerged
like a man newborn.
But the male instinct to gloat was the first clear thought.
"You do like me, don't you?" he breathed exultantly, while the curtain
was down for an instant. Marien answered with her eyes and a quick
affirmative nod, before the curtain bounded upward again for a last
picture of husband and wife gazing into each other's eyes with a look
expressing an infinitude of fondness. But John had ceased to be
Archibald. What his look expressed was an infinitude of mystery and
joy.
"And they say there is no satisfaction in a stage kiss!" he whispered to
himself as he leaped up the stairs to his dressing room.
*CHAPTER XI*
*SEED TO THE WIND*
The next night Miss Dounay gave John her forehead instead of her lips to
kiss, but she heckled him no more, and it was perfectly obvious to him,
as to Parks, that she helped him deliberately and had been helping him
all along by her stage direction.
"If you've got her interested in you, you're fixed for life," grumbled
Parks wistfully. "That girl's going up the line, and she's got stuff
enough to take somebody else with her."
There was a suggestion in this which John resented.
"I'm going up, too," he rejoined with the defiant exuberance of youth,
"but on my own steam."
Parks looked at John up and down, and laughed,--just that and nothing
more. The old man's frankness was comforting at times; at others
disagreeable. John moved away irritated, and his head went up into the
clouds of his dreams. But there was something in what Parks had
suggested that kept coming back to his mind. True, Miss Dounay never
exchanged more than the merest words of courtesy with John off the
stage. But on the stage and at rehearsal it really did seem as if there
was a very nice little understanding growing up between them.
Off stage John dreamed of going to call upon her. In his little room he
thought of her much and hungrily. That he should think hungrily was not
strange, since he was hungry. His salary was twenty dollars a week. To
send half to Rose, and save money to meet his wardrobe bills, he lived
on two meals a day. The morning meal, taken at half-past nine,
consisted of coffee and cakes, and cost ten cents. The evening meal was
taken at half-past five. It was a grand course dinner that went from
soup to pie, and its cost was fifteen cents. The tip to the waitress
was a smile.
When one goes supperless to bed, dreams come lightly and are fantastic.
John's dreams were of banqueting after the play with Marien Dounay.
Greenroom gossip had it that Marien lived royally but in modest thrift;
that her French maid, Julie, was also cook and housekeeper; that
Marian's disposition was domestic and yet convivial. That instead of a
supper down town in one of the brilliant cafes, she preferred the
seclusion of her small but cozy apartment, and the triumphs of Julie at
a tiny gas grill, supplemented and glorified by her own skill with the
chafing dish. That there were nights when she supped alone, but others
when a lady or two, or much more likely a gentleman, or mayhap two
gentlemen were honored with invitations to this feast of goddesses; for
tiny, efficient, ambidextrous Julie was in her way as much of an
aristocrat as her mistress, and as skillful in imparting the suggestion
that she was herself of some superior clay. Subject to the whims of her
mistress, she, too, had whims, and made men--and women--not only respect
but admire them. Rumor said that if an invitation to one of these
midnight revels with toothsome food under the personal direction of this
flashing beauty ever came, it was on no account to be despised,
especially if a man were hungry either for beauty or for food.
John Hampstead was hungry for food, and now he began to feel hungry also
for beauty. This last was really a new appetite. John, through all his
struggling years, had of course his thoughts of woman as all men have,
but vaguely, as something a long way off, indefinitely postponed. Yet
ever since he carried Lygia in his arms, these thoughts of woman had
been recurring as something nearer, more tangible, and more necessary
even. As for that kiss in the garden scene of _East Lynne_! Well,
there was something wonderfully awakening in that kiss. It was worlds
different from that brotherly, sympathetic little kiss he had given
Bessie yonder upon the rocks.
By the way,--why did Bessie cry? He used to wonder sometimes why she
did! And why did Marien Dounay taunt him till he was angry enough to
beat her,--and then kiss him?
Women were hard to understand. They seemed to do things that had no
meaning; to use words not to convey but to conceal thought; and they
spoke half their speeches in riddles. However, John reflected that when
he had been with women more, he would know them better. And in the
meantime he supplemented his professional contacts with Marien by
thinking of her constantly, even to the point where his absorbing
interest led him to follow her home at night after the play,--keeping
always at a safe distance behind,--and to stand across the street and
watch till the light went on in that third-story bay-window on Turk
Street near Mason; and then still to stand, trying to interpret the
meaning of shadows moving across the window for uncounted hours, till
the light went out, sometimes at two and sometimes later, or until a
policeman bade him move on. If any one had told John that he was
falling in love with Marien Dounay, he would have indignantly rejected
the idea. She held a fascinating interest for him,--that was all.
Something basic in him was attracted by something basic in her, and he
yielded to it wonderingly, experimentally almost, and that was all it
amounted to.
But on the night that Miss Dounay completed her engagement at the
People's, for her tiff with Mowrey was over in just four weeks, the
opportunity came to John to submit his feelings to more searching
experimentation.
It had been his custom to wait in the shadowy wings each night to see
the object of his solicitous interest depart, supposing himself always
to be unobserved. But on this last night Marien surprised him into
nervous thrills by walking over into the shadow with the cool assurance
of an autocrat, and saying:
"Come home to supper with me, John."
At the same time Miss Dounay took the big man's arm as comfortably as if
the matter had been arranged the week before last, and John walked out
as if on air, but hurriedly. That soft touch upon his arm made him
hungry with indescribable anticipations. Moreover, he was stirred by an
itching curiosity concerning the whole of the intimate personal life of
Marien Dounay. Who was she? What was she? _How_ was she?
Yet on the very threshold of the little apartment, his sense of what was
conventional in the world out of which he had come halted him.
"Should I?" he asked huskily, as the door stood open. "Would it
be--proper?"
"Most particularly proper, innocent!" laughed Marien. "At the theater
Julie is my maid; at home she is my housekeeper, my social secretary, my
companion, and chaperone."
While the light of reassurance kindled on John's face, Marien gently
drew him inside.
"Behold!" she exclaimed with a stage gesture, when the door was closed
behind him. "My temporary home; my balcony window overlooking the
street, my alcove wherein I sleep, the kitchenette in which we cook;
behind that the bath, and back of that Julie's own room. Isn't it dear?"
"Dear!" That was a woman's word. Bessie said that about her invitation
paper for the Phrosos.
"Dear?" he breathed, comparing it in one swift estimating glance to his
own barren cell. "It's a paradise!"
"So much more seclusion than in hotels," declared Marien, and then went
on to say in that sort of tone which belongs to an air of frank and
simple comradeship: "So much less expensive, too. Do you know what
saves a girl in this business? Money! Ready money. And do you know
what ruins her? Extravagance--debt. We are very economical, Julie and
I. We have what crooks call 'fall money', laid by for any emergency.
That's what you'll need to do. Save half your salary every week.
There'll be weeks you don't play, weeks when you have to go to expense.
You may be ill or have an accident, or your company will close
unexpectedly. Save. Save your money!"
Marien uttered these bits of practical wisdom, which were to John the
revelation of an unthought-of side of this exquisite young woman's
character while she was conducting him toward the window.
"Sit here," she commanded. "Look straight down Turk. See the lights
battling with the fog. Listen to the waning music of the night in this
noisy, cobbly, clangy city.
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