XI
HELEN'S warning was not as playful as it seemed to her lover, for something in the glow of his eyes and something vibrant in the tones of his voice had disturbed her profoundly. The fear of something which he seemed perilously near saying filled her with unrest, bringing up questions which had thus far been kept in the background of her scheme of life.
"Some time I shall marry, I suppose," she had said to one of her friends, "but not now; my art will not permit it. Wedlock to an actress," she added, "is almost as significant as death. It may mean an end of her playing – a death to her ambitions. When I decide to marry I shall also decide to give up the stage."
"Oh, I don't know," replied the other. "There are plenty who do not. In fact, Mary Anderson is the exception. When the conquering one comes along you'll marry him and make him your leading man, the way so many others do."
"When 'the conquering one' comes along I shall despise the stage," retorted Helen, with laughing eyes – "at least I'm told I will."
"Pish! You'd give a dozen husbands for the joy of facing a big first-night audience. I tell Horace that if it comes to a matter of choice for me he'll have to go. Gracious goodness! I could no more live without the applause of the stage – "
"How about the children?"
"The children! Oh, that's different. The dear tots! Well, luckily, they're not absolutely barred. It's hard to leave the darlings behind. When I go on the road I miss their sweet little caresses; but I have to earn their bread, you see, and what better career is open to me."
Helen grew grave also. "I don't like to think of myself as an old actress. I want to have a fixed abiding-place when I am forty-five. Gray hairs should shine in the light of a fireside."
"There's always peroxide," put in the other, and their little mood of seriousness vanished.
It was, indeed, a very unusual situation for a young and charming actress. The Hotel Embric stood just where three great streams of wealth and power and fashion met and mingled. Its halls rustled with the spread silks of pride and glittered with the jewels of spendthrift vanity, and yet few knew that high in the building one of the most admired women of the city lived in almost monastic seclusion. The few men who recognized her in the elevator or in the hall bowed with deferential admiration. She was never seen in the dining-rooms, and it was known that she denied herself to all callers except a very few intimate friends.
This seclusion – this close adherence to her work – added to her mystery, and her allurement in the eyes of her suitors increased as they sought vainly for an introduction. It was reported that this way of life was "all a matter of business, a cold, managerial proposition," a method of advertising; but so far as Helen herself was implicated, it was a method of protection.
She had an instinctive dislike, almost a fear, of those who sought her acquaintance, and when Westervelt, with blundering tactlessness or impudent design, brought round some friends, she froze them both with a single glance.
Furthermore, by denying herself to one she was able to escape the other, and thus save herself for her work; for though she had grown to hate the plays through which she reached the public, she believed in the power and the dignity of her art. It was a means of livelihood, it gratified her vanity; but it was more than this. In a dim way she felt herself in league with a mighty force, and the desire to mark an epoch in the American drama came to her. This, too, was a form of egotism, but a high form.
"I do not care to return to the old," she said. "There are plenty of women to do Beatrice and Viola and Lady Macbeth. I am modern. I believe in the modern and I believe in America. I don't care to start a fad for Ibsen or Shaw. I would like to develop our own drama."
"You will have to eliminate the tired business-man and his fat wife and their late dinners," said a cynical friend.
"All business-men are not tired and all wives are not fat. I believe there is a public ready to pay their money to see good American drama. I have found a man who can write – "
"Beware of that man," said the cynic, with a twofold meaning in his tone. "'He is a dreamer; let him pass.'"
"I do not fear him," she replied, with a gay smile.
XII
DOUGLASS now set to work on his second play with teeth clinched. "I will win out in spite of them," he said. "They think I am beaten, but I am just beginning to fight." As the days wore on his self-absorption became more and more marked. All his morning hours were spent at his writing, and when he came to Helen he was cold and listless, and talked of nothing but Enid and her troubles. Even as they rode in the park his mind seemed forever revolving lines and scenes. In the midst of her attempt to amuse him, to divert him, he returned to his theme. He invited her judgments and immediately forgot to listen, so morbidly self-centred was he.
He made no further changes in the book of Lillian's Duty, but put aside Westervelt's request with a wave of his hand. "I leave all that to Miss Merival," he said. "I can't give it any thought now."
From one point of view Helen could not but admire this power of concentration, but when she perceived that her playwright's work had filled his mind to the exclusion of herself she began to suffer. Her pride resented his indifference, and she was saved from anger and disgust only by the beauty of the writing he brought to her.
"The fury of the poet is on him. I must not complain," she thought, and yet a certain regret darkened her face. "All that was so sweet and fine has passed out of our intercourse," she sadly admitted to herself. "I am no longer even the great actress to him. Once he worshipped me – I felt it; now I am a commonplace friend. Is the fault in me? Am I one whom familiarity lessens in value?"
She did not permit herself to think that this was a lasting change, that he had forever passed beyond the lover, and that she would never again fill his world with mystery and light and longing.
And yet this monstrous recession was the truth. In the stress of his work the glamour had utterly died out of Douglass's conception of Helen, just as the lurid light of her old-time advertising had faded from the bill-boards and from the window displays of Broadway. As cold, black, and gray instantaneous photographs had taken the place of the gorgeous, jewel-bedecked, elaborate lithographs of the old plays, so now his thought of her was without warmth.
Helen became aware, too, of an outside change. Her friends used this as a further warning.
"You are becoming commonplace to the public," one said, with a touch of bitterness. "Your admirers no longer wonder. Go back to the glitter and the glory."
"No," she replied. "I will regain my place, and with my own unaided character – and my lines," she added, with a return to her faith in Douglass.
And yet her meetings with him were now a species of torture. Her self-respect suffered with every glance of his eyes. He resembled a man suffering from a fever. At times he talked with tiresome intensity about some new situation, quoting his own characters, beating and hammering at his scenes until Helen closed her eyes for very weariness. Only at wide intervals did he return to some dim realization of his indebtedness to her. One day he gratified her by saying, with a note of tenderness in his voice: "You are keeping the old play on; don't do it. Throw it away; it is a tract – a sermon." Then spoiled it all by bitterly adding, "Go back to your old successes."
"You used to dislike me in such rôles," she answered, with pain and reproach in face and voice.
"It will only be for a little while," he replied, with a swift return to his enthusiasm. "In two weeks I'll have the new part ready for you." But the sting of his advice remained long in the proud woman's heart.
He went no more to the theatre. "I can't bear to see you playing to empty seats," he declared, in explanation, but in reality he had a horror of the scene of his defeat.
He came to lunch less often, and when they went driving or visiting the galleries all the old-time, joyous companionship was gone. Not infrequently, as they stood before some picture or sat at a concert, he would whisper, "I have it; the act will end with Enid doing so-and-so," and not infrequently he hurried away from her to catch some fugitive illumination which he feared to lose. He came to her reception-room only once of a Saturday afternoon, just before the play closed.
"How is the house?" he asked, with indifference.
"Bad."
"Very bad?"
"Oh yes."
"I must work the harder," he replied, and sank into a sombre silence. He never came inside again.
Helen was deeply wounded by this visit, and was sorely tempted to take him at his word and end the production, but she did not. She could not, so deep had her interest in him become. Loyal to him she must remain, loyal to his work.
As his bank account grew perilously small, Douglass fell into deeps of black despair, wherein all imaginative power left him. At such times the lack of depth and significance in his work appalled him. "It is hopelessly poor and weak; it does not deserve to succeed. I've a mind to tear it in rags." But he resisted this spirit, partly restrained by some hidden power traceable to the influence of Helen and partly by his desire to retrieve himself in the estimation of the world, but mainly because of some hidden force in his own brain, and set to work each time filing and polishing with renewed care of word and phrase.
Slowly the second drama took on form and quality, developing a web of purpose not unlike that involved in a strain of solemn music, and at the last the author's attention was directed towards eliminating minute inharmonies or to the insertion of cacophony with design to make the andante passages the more enthrallingly sweet. As the play neared completion his absorption began to show results. He lost vigor, and Helen's eyes took anxious note of his weariness. "You are growing thin and white, Mr. Author," she said to him, with solicitude in her voice. "You don't look like the rugged Western Scotchman you were when I found you. Am I to be your vampire?"
"On the contrary, I am to destroy you, to judge from the money you are losing on my wretched play. I begin to fear I can never repay you, not even with a great success. I have days when I doubt my power to write a successful drama."
"You work too hard. You must not ruin your health by undue haste. A week or two will not make a killing difference with us. I don't mind playing Lillian another month, if you need the time. It is good discipline, and, besides, I enjoy the part."
"That is because you are good and loyal to a poor writer," he answered, with a break to humble appreciation of her bounty and her bravery. "Be patient with me," he pleaded. "Enid will recoup you for all you have suffered. It will win back all your funds. I have made it as near pure poetry as our harsh, definite life and our elliptical speech will permit." And straightway his mind was filled with dreams of conquering, even while he faced his love, so strangely are courtship and ambition mingled in the heart of man.
At last he began to exult, to boast, to call attention to the beauty of the lines spoken by Enid. "See how her simplicity and virginal charm are enhanced by the rugged, remorseless strength, and by the conscienceless greed of the men surrounding her, and yet she sees in them something admirable. They are like soldiers to her. They are the heroes who tunnel mountains and bridge cataracts. When she looks from her slender, white hands to their gross and powerful bodies she shudders with a sort of fearsome admiration."
"Can all that appear in the lines?"
"Yes. In the lines and in the acting; it must appear in your acting," he added, with a note of admonition.
Her face clouded with pain. "He begins to doubt my ability to delineate his work," she thought, and turned away in order that he might not know how deeply he had wounded her.
XIII
HELEN'S pride contended unceasingly with her love during the weeks of her lover's alienation; for, with all her sweet dispraise of herself, she was very proud of her place in the world, and it was not easy to bow her head to neglect. Sometimes when he forgot to answer her or rushed away to his room with a hasty good-bye, she raged with a perfectly justifiable anger. "You are selfish and brutal," she cried out after him on one occasion. "You think only of yourself. You are vain, egotistical. All that I have done is forgotten the moment you are stung by criticism," and she tried to put him aside. "What do his personal traits matter to me?" she said, as if in answer to her own charge. "He is my dramatist, not my husband."
But when he came back to her, an absent-minded smile upon his handsome lips, holding in his hands some pages of exquisite dialogue, she humbled herself before him. "After all, what am I beside him? He is a poet, a creative mind, while I am only a mimic," and straightway she began to make excuses for him. "Have I not always had the same selfish, desperate concentration? Am I always a sweet and lovely companion? Certainly the artistic temperament is not a strange thing to me."
Nevertheless, she suffered. It was hard to be the one optimist in the midst of so many pessimists. The nightly performance to an empty house wore on her most distressingly, and no wonder. She, who had never hitherto given a moment's troubled thought to such matters, now sat in her dressing-room listening to the infrequent, hollow clang of the falling chair seats, attempting thus to estimate the audience straggling sparsely, desolately in. To re-enter the stage after an exit was like an icy shower-bath. Each night she hoped to find the receipts larger, and indeed they did from time to time advance suddenly, only to drop back to desolating driblets the following night. These gains were due to the work of the loyal Hugh as advertising agent, or to some desperate discount sale to a club on the part of Westervelt, who haunted the front of the house, a pale and flabby wraith of himself, racking his brain, swearing strange, German oaths, and perpetually conjuring up new advertising devices. His suffering approached the tragic.
His theatre, which had once rustled with gay and cheerful people, was now cold, echoing, empty, repellent. Nothing came from the balcony, wherein Helen's sweet voice wandered, save a faint, half-hearted hand-clapping. No one sat in the boxes, and only here and there a man wore evening-dress. The women were always intense, but undemonstrative. Under these sad conditions the music of the orchestra became factitious, a brazen clatter raised to reinforce the courage of the ushers, who flitted about like uneasy spirits. There were no carriages in waiting, and the audience returned to the street in silence like funeral guests from a church.
Hugh remained bravely at his post in front. Each night after a careful toilet he took his stand in the lobby watching with calculating eye and impassive face the stream of people rushing by his door. "If we could only catch one in a hundred?" he said to Westervelt. "I never expected to see Helen Merival left like this. I didn't think it possible. I thought she could make any piece go. To play to fifty dollars was out of my reckoning. It is slaughter."
Once his disgust topped all restraint, and he burst forth to Helen: "Look at this man Douglass. He bamboozles us into producing his play, then runs off and leaves us to sink or swim. He won't even change the lines – says he's working on a new one that will make us all 'barrels of money.' That's the way of these dramatists – always full of some new pipe-dream. Meanwhile we're going into the hole every night. I can't stand it. We were making all kinds of money with The Baroness. Come, let's go back to it!" His voice filled with love, for she was his ideal. "Sis, I hate to see you doing this. It cuts me to the heart. Why, some of these newspaper shads actually pretend to pity you – you, the greatest romantic actress in America! This man Douglass has got you hypnotized. Honestly, there's something uncanny about the way he has queered you. Brace up. Send him whirling. He isn't worth a minute of your time, Nellie – now, that's the fact. He's a crazy freak. Say the word and I'll fire him and his misbegotten plays to-night."
To this Helen made simple reply. "No, Hugh; I intend to stand to my promise. We will keep Lillian on till the new play is ready. It would be unfair to Mr. Douglass – "
"But he has lost all interest in it himself. He never shows up in front, never makes a suggestion."
"He is saving all his energy for the new play."
Hugh's lips twisted in scorn. "The new play! Yes, he's filled with a lot of pale-blue moonshine now. He's got another 'idea.' That's the trouble with these literary chaps, they're so swelled by their own notions they can't write what the common audience wants. His new play will be a worse 'frost' than this. You'll ruin us all if you don't drop him. We stand to lose forty thousand dollars on Lillian already."
"Nevertheless, I shall give the new play a production," she replied, and Hugh turned away in speechless dismay and disgust.
The papers were filled with stinging allusions to her failure. A shrewd friend from Boston met her with commiseration in her face. "It's a good play and a fine part," she said, "but they don't want you in such work. They like you when you look wicked."
"I know that, but I'm tired of playing the wanton adventuress for such people. I want to appeal to a more thoughtful public for the rest of my stage career."
"Why not organize a church like Mrs. Allinger?" sneered another less friendly critic. "The stage is no place for sermons."
"You are horribly unjust. Lillian's Duty is a powerful acting drama, and has its audience if I could reach it. Perhaps I'm not the one to do Mr. Douglass's work, after all," she added, humbly.
Deep in her heart Helen MacDavitt the woman was hungry for some one to tell her that he loved her. She longed to put her head down on a strong man's breast to weep. "If Douglass would only open his arms to me I would go to him. I would not care what the world says."
She wished to see him reinstate himself not merely with the public but in her own estimate of him. As she believed that by means of his pen he would conquer, she comprehended that his present condition was fevered, unnatural, and she hoped – she believed – it to be temporary. "Success will bring back the old, brave, sanguine, self-contained Douglass whose forthright power and self-confidence won my admiration," she said, and with this secret motive to sustain her she went to her nightly delineation of Lillian.
She had lived long without love, and her heart now sought for it with an intensity which made her art of the highest account only as served the man she loved. Praise and publicity were alike of no value unless they brought success and happiness to him whose eyes called her with growing power.
XIV
AT last the new play was finished and the author brought it and laid it in the hands of the actress as if it were a new-born child, and her heart leaped with joy. He was no longer the stern and self-absorbed writer. His voice was tender as he said, "I give this to you in the hope that it may regain for you what you have lost."
The tears sprang to Helen's eyes, and a word of love rose to her lips. "It is very beautiful, and we will triumph in it."
He seemed about to speak some revealing, sealing word, but the presence of the mother restrained him. Helen, recognizing the returning tide of his love, to which she related no self-seeking, was radiant.
"Come, we will put it in rehearsal at once," she said. "I know you are as eager to have it staged as I. I will not read it. I will wait till you read it for the company to-morrow morning."
"I do not go to that ordeal with the same joy as before," he admitted.
The company met him with far less of interest in this reading of the second play, and his own manner was distinctly less confident. Hugh and Westervelt maintained silence, but their opposition was as palpable as a cold wind. Royleston's cynical face expressed an open contempt. The lesser people were anxious to know the kind of characters they were to play, and a few were sympathetically eager to hear the play itself.
He read the manuscript with some assurance of manner, but made no suggestion as to the stage business, contenting himself with producing an effect on the minds of the principals; but as the girlish charm of Enid's character made itself felt, the women of the company began to glow.
"Why, it's very beautiful!" they exclaimed.
Hugh, on the scent for another "problem," began to relax, and even Westervelt grunted a few words of approval, qualified at once by the whispered words, "Not a cent in it – not a cent." Royleston, between his acts, regarded the air with dreamy gaze. "I don't see myself in that part yet, but it's very good – very good."
The reading closed rather well, producing the desired effect of "happy tears" on the faces of several of the feminine members of the cast, and Helen again spoke of her pleasure in such work and asked them to "lend themselves" to the lines. "This play is a kind of poem," she said, "and makes a direct appeal to women, and yet I believe it will also win its way to the hearts of the men."
As they rose Douglass returned the manuscript to Helen with a bow. "I renounce all rights. Hereafter I am but a spectator."
"I think you are right in not attempting rehearsals. You are worn and tired. Why don't you go away for a time? A sea voyage would do you good."
"No, I must stay and face the music, as my father used to say. I do not wish to seem to run away, and, besides, I may be able to offer a suggestion now and then."
"Oh, I didn't mean to have you miss the first night. You could come back for that. If you stay we will be glad of any suggestion at any time – won't we, Hugh?"
Hugh refused to be brought into any marked agreement. "Of course, the author's advice is valuable, but with a man like Olquest – "
"I don't want to see a single rehearsal," replied Douglass. "I want to have the joy this time of seeing my characters on the opening night fully embodied. If the success of the play depended upon my personal supervision, the case would be different, but it doesn't. I trust you and Olquest. I will keep away."
Again they went to lunch together, but the old-time elation was sadly wanting. Hugh was silent and Douglass gloomy. Helen cut the luncheon for a ride in the park, which did them good, for the wind was keen and inspiriting and the landscape wintry white and blue and gold. She succeeded in provoking her playwright to a smile now and then by some audacious sally against the sombre silence of her cavaliers.
They halted for half an hour in the upper park while she called the squirrels to her and fed them from her own hands – those wonderful hands that had so often lured with jewels and threatened with steel. No one seeing this refined, sweet woman in tasteful furs would have related her with the Gismonda and Istar, but Douglass thrilled with sudden accession of confidence. "How beautiful she will be as Enid!" he thought, as, with a squirrel on her shoulder, she turned with shining face to softly call: "This is David. Isn't he a dear?"
She waited until the keen-eyed rascals had taken her last nut, then slowly returned to the carriage side. "I like to win animals like that. It thrills my heart to have them set their fearless little feet on my arm."
Hugh uttered a warning. "You want to be careful how you handle them; they bite like demons."
"Oh, now, don't spoil it!" she exclaimed. "I'm sure they know me and trust me."
Douglass was moved to their defence, and strove during the remainder of the ride to add to Helen's pleasure; and this effort on his part made her eyes shine with joy – a joy almost pathetic in its intensity.
As they parted at the door of his hotel he said: "If you do not succeed this time I will utterly despair of the public. I know how sweet you will be as Enid. They must bow down before you as I do."
"I will give my best powers to this – be sure nothing will be neglected at rehearsal."
"I know you will," he answered, feelingly.
She was better than her promise, laboring tirelessly in the effort to embody through her company the poetry, the charm, which lay even in the smaller rôles of the play. That one so big and brusque as Douglass should be able to define so many and such fugitive feminine emotions was a constant source of wonder and delight to her. The discovery gave her trust and confidence in him, and to her admiration of his power was added something which stole into her mind like music, causing foolish dreams and moments of reckless exaltation wherein she asked herself whether to be a great actress was not, after all, a thing of less profit than to be a wife and mother.
She saw much less of him than she wished, for Hugh remained coldly unresponsive in his presence, and threw over their meetings a restraint which prevented the joyous companionship of their first acquaintanceship.
More than this, Helen was conscious of being watched and commented upon, not merely by Hugh and Westervelt, but by guests of the hotel and representatives of the society press. Douglass, in order to shield her, and also because his position in the world was less secure than ever, returned to his self-absorbed, impersonal manner of speech. He took no part in the rehearsals, except to rush in at the close with some changes which he wished embodied at once, regardless of the vexation and confusion resulting. His brain was still perilously active, and not only cut and refined the dialogue, but made most radical modifications of the "business."
Helen began to show the effects of the strain upon her; for she was not merely carrying the burden of Lillian's Duty, and directing rehearsals of the new piece – she was deeply involved in the greatest problem than can come to a woman. She loved Douglass; but did she love him strongly enough to warrant her in saying so – when he should ask her?
His present poverty she put aside as of no serious account. A man so physically powerful, so mentally alert, was rich in possibilities. The work which he had already done entitled him to rank above millionaires, but that his very forcefulness, his strong will, his dominating idealism would make him her master – would inevitably change her relation to the world – had already changed it, in fact – she was not ready to acknowledge.
Up to this time her love for the stage had been single-minded. No man had touched her heart with sufficient fire to disturb her serenity, but now she was not merely following where he led, she was questioning the value and morality of her avocation.
"If I cannot play high rôles, if the public will not have me in work like this I am now rehearsing, then I will retire to private life. I will no longer be a plaything for the man-headed monster," she said one day.
"You should have retired before sinking your good money in these Douglass plays," Hugh bitterly rejoined. "It looks now as though we might end in the police station."
"I have no fear of that, Hugh; I am perfectly certain that Enid is to regain all our losses."
"I wish I had your beautiful faith," he made answer, and walked away.
Westervelt said little to her during these days; he only looked, and his doleful gestures, his lugubrious grimaces, were comic. He stood to lose nothing, except possible profits for Helen. She was paying him full rental, but he claimed that his house was being ruined. "It will get the reputation of doing nothing but failures," he said to her once, in a last despairing appeal, and to this she replied:
"Very well. If at the end of four weeks Enid does not pull up to paying business I will release you from your contract. I will free your house of Helen Merival."
"No, no! I don't want that. I want you, but I do not want this crazy man Douglass. You must not leave me!" His voice grew husky with appeal. "Return to the old plays, sign a five-year contract, and I will make you again rich."
"There will be time to consider that four weeks hence."
"Yes, but the season is passing."
"Courage, mein Herr!" she said, with a smile, and left him almost in tears.