Don-A-Dreams/Part 4/Chapter 11
XI
He was aware at once that the bar-room was only a sort of foyer to a larger music-hall in which he could see an audience seated at tables before a little stage on which a woman stood to sing; and he hurried into that hall in the hope of escaping notice in the larger gathering. He found a table in a corner and sat down trembling with audacity. A soiled waiter polished off the beer stains from the table-top and bent to take his order. He said throatily: "Bring me a cigar."
It came—in a glass with three matches—a long "rat-tail" Italian cigar. He lit it and drew one puff that had the taste of scorched rags. He held it fuming before him, and waited for Conroy to appear, watching the animated faces of Italians whose excited volubility had no meaning for him, and listening to the screaming high notes of the cantatrice who sang with a distortion of mouth that might have been studied in a dentist's chair. It was all as unreal to him as lunacy; and an old man with a basket of macaroons on his arm, who wandered from table to table mumbling, "Bene cotti, bene cotti," had a horrid face—as brown and wrinkled as a baked apple—that made the whole scene in some way confusedly hideous to Don. He stared at three Italians at a table who were blowing out the matches with which a fourth tried to light his cigar, making an unearthly laughter—at a little girl who drank from a glass of beer primly and dried her lips with a dirty handkerchief after each sip—at the foreign faces, the exaggerated gestures, the sudden movements of strange men, who had for him only the semi-human appearance of so many monkeys doing tricks.
He was leaning his elbow on the table, his head on his arm, relapsed into a blank depression of spirits—beaten upon by the loud music and suffocated by the foul smells—when Conroy appeared at the entrance of the hall, and Don ducked his head to hide his face. He looked up under his fingers. Conroy had seated himself at a table against the opposite wall. When the waiter turned away from him, Don could see him, as pale as despair, shabby, unshaven, staring listlessly. Don shut his eyes. The heat had dried them so that the touch of tears was painful.
When he looked again, the waiter had returned with a glass of liquor and the bundle of papers which Pittsey had left at the bar; and Conroy, after vainly trying to understand the man's explanation in Italian, nodded and tried to smile, and sent him away. He drank half the glass at a gulp, and settled back in his chair, drumming on the table with shaking fingers.
The woman on the stage was singing the "Marseillaise." She followed it with "The Watch on the Rhine,"the Russian national anthem, and the Austrian. She announced "God Save Or Caween," and Conroy frowned at her. Her voice rang in the little hall with the deep notes of the old song. It soared with the triumph of "Senda her veectorious, happa an' gloreeous," and Conroy drew down the brim of his hat and muttered. It faded into a whisper, sweet as old memories, with its prayerful "Goda save or ca-ween." And Conroy tried to drown it in the draught of poisonous whisky that was left in his glass.
For that song had come on him—as it had come on Don— with the perfume of old days from the life he had lost. It had seized and shaken him, as remembered music will. He called for more drink, fearfully aware of the approach of that self-horror against which he had been fighting when Pittsey came to aid it—afraid of the weakness of vain regret, struggling up from the terrible despondency that was clutching at him. And the tune haunted him with the loyal voices of youths singing together, with the clink of social glasses at a college dinner drinking the Queen's health, with the far note of a military band across the sunny campus. He fought against it, working the muscles of his face. He drank more liquor desperately, his brain beginning to reel in the vertigo of drunkenness, with vivid pictures of home, the laugh of voices dearly familiar to him, the flash of smiling faces—as confused as in a dream, and like a dream stirring a torturing regret. He tried to listen to the woman singing "The Star-Spangled Banner," and for an instant he got it clear in his ears, but the riot of memory burst in again, and he fought it back, struggling with trembling lips and fingers that twitched on his glass.
He turned frantically to the bundle of papers on the table and tore off the wrapper and spread the first one eagerly. He began with the advertisements, but he could read only the forms of the words; they had no meaning and they marched crazily to the tune in his head. He turned to the pictures. And these were the old fond pictures of snow and sunset, of country homes, of jolly plum-pudding dinners, of girls skating in furs or dancing under the holly. They were the embodiment to his eyes of all that his young Christmas had aspired to be. The million memories of boyhood and youth, of college days and home-coming, of Christmas holidays and Christmas sports stung and tormented him. He turned the pages in a trance of thought, page after page, fascinated. And when he looked up from them he found a nightmare life around him, dinning discordant music in his ears, choking him with the thick heat and the odour of unclean bodies. He ripped the paper up with an oath and threw it on the floor. Then he rose unsteadily and staggered out of the hall.
Don, after one guilty moment of hesitation, shoved back his chair and followed. He came into the barroom as the street-door slammed at Conroy's heels. He ran out to the sidewalk and stood facing a curtain of fog behind which Conroy had been lost in an instant. He wandered about the streets, shuddering with the cold and with the horror of having helped to agonize despair. When he came on an elevated station, he accepted the futility of his hope, and turned homewards.
And Conroy, driven from the shelter of his familiar haunts, where he was known and—in the sodden way of bar-rooms—an honoured customer, went lurching from one saloon to another, attempting, by stupefying himself in a wild debauch, to escape the remorse that drove him along the streets. He had received a Christmas letter that morning from his mother, and the money that she had sent him made a trail behind him as he went. He came to a saloon full of negroes in Lower Sullivan Street; and in paying the bar-keeper he drew out a handful of bills and displayed them with a recklessness that had its inevitable issue, for when he left that bar-room two wolfish mulattoes followed him to the street; and the fog closed over the thugs and their victim.
In the morning he was found lying in a passage-way that led to a rear tenement, his pockets rifled, insensible from the blow of a black-jack on the back of his head.
There was no Christmas Eve dinner in Don's flat that next day. Conroy lay in the hospital, unconscious, between life and death. Bert Pittsey had accused Don of being the blundering cause of each step in his cousin's downfall and the wilful agent of his last undoing. Miss Morris's silence had left him no doubt of her disgust of him. All the failures of his life had crushed down on him together and buried him in the depths.
He sat at midnight, before his writing-table, unable to go to bed, staring as if he had seen a ghost; and the ghost that he had seen was the memory of his dead past, risen to rebuke him with the crimes of his incapacity. He saw his mother with that face of sorrow which had so often looked out on him from his dreams. He saw his father leaning across the cluttered dining-table, glaring at him in angry accusation. He saw Miss Morris watching him from the crowded stage of "The Rajah's Ruby," dumbly tragical. The glazed eyes of Conroy's hatred stared at him like the dull eyes of the dead. He shuddered at the thought that some day Margaret's face might join that company of malevolence and accuse him of the wreck of her life.
Above all, he saw himself moving like a blind fool through this unregarded misery, the execrated cause of it, ruthless and hateful. The elder Miss Morris's cold smile changed into Mrs. McGahn's large-mouthed and voluble exasperation. "Walter Pittsey's Don Quixote" echoed from some forgotten record of his memory with a contemptuous accent. Kidder lectured him. The stage manager of "The Ruby" cursed him. Every disgraceful incident of his life rose to point its finger at him; and he took his head in his hands and groaned.
His very imagination, that had been turned always on the future, cast its light back on his past, now, and illumined it with a baleful vividness. For the first time he saw himself as one might see a character in a book, among the men and women, friends and relatives who had moved and talked and loved and sorrowed around him. He watched them, as one would watch a play, sitting above them, above himself, above life, observing and understanding it all. And slowly, as he watched, the shame of his part in it detached itself from him. He began to study it with a curious aloofness. It had an appearance of unreality, of an illusion from which he had escaped. The illusion of life!
He looked up at the wall before him with the eyes of a trance—seeing the city lying asleep below him, the men and women in their beds, insensible, like discarded marionettes. Overhead the moon and the stars stood in their appointed places amid the mystery of space; and the haste and labour of the day were silly to remember, mocked at by the quiet sarcasm of old night. "Life!" he thought, "Life, the great illusion!" He smiled the derisive phantom of a smile; and that smile, he felt, was to be, forever after, the secret aspect and expression of his thought; his happiness was to be of that complexion; his failures, his sorrows, his tragedies were to wear at last something of that same face.
It reminded him of his Emerson, and he reached the volume from the row before him, unseeingly, his mind busy with his thoughts. He turned to a remembered passage in the essay on "Illusions." He read: "There is no chance and no anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere. The young mortal enters the hall of the firmament; there he is alone with them alone, they pouring on him benedictions and gifts and beckoning him up to their thrones. On the instant, and incessantly, fall snowstorms of illusions. He fancies himself in a vast crowd which sways this way and that and whose movements and doings he must obey; he fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant. The mad crowd drives hither and thither, now furiously commanding this thing to be done, now that. What is he that he should resist their will, and think or act for himself? Every moment new changes and new showers of deception to baffle and distract him. And when, by and by, for an instant, the air clears and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still sitting around him on their thrones—they alone with him alone."
The air had cleared! The cloud had lifted! The visionary had caught the first full sight of that vision which was to make the world less real to him thereafter than the matter of his thought. The idealist had fought his way, through the opposition of science and the realities, to the possession of the great ideal. The dreamer had made life itself the dream. Don, full-grown, was ready to achieve his destiny.
At the ringing of the electric bell of his apartment, he rose mechanically; and, still staring before him with blind eyes, he went to open his door.
Bert Pittsey was shaking the snow from his hat brim in the outer hall. "They've operated on Conroy," he said in a manner that was roughly apologetic. "He'll recover. I thought you'd like to know."
Don passed his hand across his eyes. "Yes. Thanks," he said thickly. "Won't you come in?"
Bert studied him. "Were you asleep?"
"No-o."
"Walt was afraid you might be. He wouldn't come up. He's downstairs."
Don shook his head meaninglessly.
"I think I'll get him. He has some news for you—from Polk."
He disappeared down the stairs. Don went back into his room and sat down to wait, in a sort of numb indifference. He reached an empty pipe and held it with the mouthpiece against his pursed lips. "Come in," he said.
Walter Pittsey smiled down at him. "I was afraid that you might be in bed. I saw Polk this evening. He says there's 'something' in your 'Winter'—something that he thinks he could work up into an extravaganza. He wants to see you about it. He'll probably offer to buy it from you. What do you say?"
He waited, expecting the boyish delight which did not appear. Don did not raise his eyes. "He can have it."
Walter coughed. "Well, you don't seem much excited!"
He laid aside his pipe. "Sit down, won't you? I'll get Margaret."
He went down the inner hall to their bedroom. Walter Pittsey looked around at Bert. They exchanged glances of amused perplexity. The younger brother laughed: "He's one too many for me."
But if Don was not enthusiastic, Margaret, in dressing-gown and "mules," more than made up his lack of spirit. "Oh, Don!" she cried. "Your first play! What did he say? Tell me! Tell me—every thing!"
Walter told her what little there was to tell; and Bert added his quota of good news about Conroy. "His father arrived at six o'clock. There was a pressure on the brain. They operated to relieve it, and they're going to take him home as soon as he can be moved. He wants to go." He turned to Don. "That bump on the head has done the business for him."
Don smiled, crookedly. "I—I hope" He did not say what he hoped. He leaned forward in his chair and put his face in his hands. "I'm—I've had a bad day, I guess," he faltered. "I feel . . . rather . . . knocked out myself."
Margaret went to him, and knelt on the floor beside him, and put her arms across his shoulders. "Don," she whispered. "What is it? Are you ill?"
He did not answer.
She tried to draw his hands from his face to see him. She found his fingers wet. "O—oh!" She looked up at the Pittseys, her lips trembling.
They caught up their hats and hurried each other silently out of the room.
And that was the beginning of a success in life that realized all Don's dreams. Polk had found "something" in his "Winter"; he had found, in fact, the promise which the years were to develop, and he took the process of development in hand. The story of Don's progress has already been followed by the dramatic critics—to various conclusions, for they are still uncertain whether he is "a possible successor to the Shakespeare of 'The Tempest' and 'The Midsummer Night's Dream,'" or only "an emasculated lyric-opera librettist with a disordered fancy and a naturalistic technique." He says himself, to Margaret: "I don't know—and I don't care—what I am. At one time I thought I was a fool—because everyone else thought so. Now they tell me I'm a genius—and, naturally, I 'ha' ma doots.'" In either case, he has found himself; he has found his work; he is happy.
He has kept his promise to Miss Morris. She came back from San Francisco to play the lead in "The Magic Ring," and she made her name in it. When she married Kuffman, she was already known as the most beautiful woman on the American stage"; Kuffman has worked all the oracles to make her famous, and though some of the critics still complain that she is stiff, the public is convinced that she is a great and classical tragedienne. To Don she has become a somewhat pathetic puzzle. Her husband worships her—worships her "like a graven image" as Bert Pittsey says. It was Pittsey who nicknamed the pair "Pygmalion and Galatea." He is the dramatic critic of an evening paper now and no matter what he writes he tries to write it flippantly. When he is asked why he does not attack the theatrical trust, he explains: "My brother is in it. It's bad taste to air a purely family quarrel in the newspapers, don't you think?" And when Walter hears of this he clears his throat—and smiles.
For the rest: Don spends a frequent "honeymoon" in Coulton where Conroy, now soberly settled down, is managing a department of his father's business, and F. Grayson Gregg is the junior partner in the law firm of "Gregg and Gregg," and Mr. Gregg no longer tries to hide from himself that he is not as proud of Frank as he is of his eldest son, "the dramatist." Don still finds his mother, in her invalid chair beside the window, waiting to welcome him with her remembered smile. The peephole still remains in the frosted glass of the nursery door through which he looked at Santa Claus. Margaret and he can still make a smiling pilgrimage to the little ravine where they used to read the "Faerie Queene" together; and there—as if the breath of the firs refreshed the unquenchable youth in him—she finds him still a lover, still a poet in spite of any disillusionment; still a gentle solitary, and still a Don-a-Dreams.
THE END.
BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD