Don-A-Dreams/Part 4/Chapter 5
V
Life in New York had seemed to Don a sort of multitudinous obscurity in which individuals were merely atoms of a homogeneous mass, living, thinking, and acting in groups of thousands; and it had seemed to him that death, there, would be worse than death at sea. He had found himself walking the streets in the midst of activities in which he had no part, like a ghost; and he had been as unregarded as if he had been indeed invisible. But now, on this memorable Monday, he was to begin acquiring a new point of view; he was to find that what had been a desert to one person could be an Eden for two; he was to learn that the indifference of the city could be as happy as the indifference of the fields.
He went with a swinging stride, from Mrs. McGahn's doorway up the cold November streets, through an iron rumble of cars and waggons, as much alone with his thoughts as if he were walking on the seashore beside the continual and meaningless rush and thunder of waves. He went with Margaret to hire a cart for the moving of her trunks, to interview Kidder about getting her Miss Morris's place in the background of "The Rajah's Ruby," and to see Mrs. Connors at the "Classic" about the costume for the part; and in the street-cars, as on the sidewalks, they seemed shut in together by the busy unconcern of the city—as they had been once by the storm on their umbrella, long ago—happy in the isolation of their common interests. Even when she forced him into a "gents' furnishing store" and helped him to choose a new hat, the clerk remained studiously indifferent to her coquettish participation in the purchase. And they ate luncheon, in a crowded "dairy restaurant," without so much as meeting a curious glance.
"Two checks," she directed the waitress. He attempted to protest that it was his "treat," and that her luncheon should be charged on his check. She said: "I'll never come with you again unless you let me pay my own way." He was wise enough to leave her that mark of her independence without any further argument; and she allowed him to escort her back to Mrs. McGahn's, where she wished to spend the afternoon writing letters and arranging her room.
He employed a vacant hour by strolling up the Avenue to call on Pittsey; and he found there a bitter letter from his aunt, upbraiding him for deserting Conroy after having, in the first place, induced the boy to run away to New York. He accepted her injustice with a calloused insensibility. A note from his uncle asked him to keep an eye on the prodigal, at least; and he tried to satisfy the obligation by asking Pittsey how Conroy was getting on.
"Don't know," Pittsey answered laconically. "Don't see much of him. I'm taking a staff position on the paper next week, and I'll see less of him then."
"How will you get the housework done?"
"Oh, he's found a woman to come in for three hours a day, to straighten up the rooms and cook us our dinner."
"Where did he find her?"
"Search me. I don't know. I haven't seen her yet."
"Well," Don said, "good-bye. I hope you have success on the paper."
"Thanks. I'll surely have my hands full. So long."
Don returned to his garret, glad that he was free of his old life. He sat smoking, with his feet on the fender of the stove, so occupied with his thoughts of the girl below him that he did not think to light a fire. He lay down on his bed, covered himself with his overcoat, and fell asleep to dream of Coulton. He was wakened in the darkness by her knocking on his door.
"Hurry! Hurry!" she cried. "We'll be late!"
They arrived in time—thanks to the laughing haste they made in the restaurant and on the street—but he found two new supers in the dressing-room; he had to show them how to "make up," and he was kept so busy helping them that he had not time to think of her. He was still powdering the hair on his temples, to give it the grey of approaching middle-age, when the call-boy shouted in the door: "All up!" And he had to run for the stage, pressing upon his upper lip his false moustache, of which the gum had not yet dried.
It followed that he did not see her until the curtain had risen on the act. He lifted his hat as he approached her in the promenade, but she gave him a frightened glance and tried to pass him without speaking; and when he said, "Don't you know me?" confronting her smilingly, she stepped back from him with a start of bewilderment, bumping into the two girls who were behind her. He saved the situation by stepping between her and the audience. "All right," he whispered. "Walk across the way you were going. Didn't you know me?"
When he had brought her safely to the wings, she stammered indignantly: "I—I thought it was another of those One of those men spoke to me."
"Who? Where?"
"Over on the other side." She pointed him out; and Don recognised him as an unwholesome-looking youth named Cousin, whom the other supers had nicknamed "Delicate Pete."
"What did he say?"
"Something about it being a fine day for a walk."
Don laughed. "Perhaps he thought he knew you."
"Well," she said, with a half-humorous exasperation, "I don't see how he could. I shouldn't know myself. I feel like a silly, plastered up this way. I can hardly see!" Her lashes were thick with cosmetique. "And you! You're the colour of a wooden Indian—the ones they have in front of cigar stores. I should think you'd feel perfectly absurd."
This was a point of view which he had not expected. He felt himself shrink from the figure of a Pall Mall dandy to something grotesque. "You have to put it on—the paint," he excused himself, his smile fading. "We'd look ghastly in this light, without it."
She frowned out at the sauntering chorus in the glare of the calcium light. "You look worse than ghastly with it!"
That remark struck him as rudely as a blow. When he spoke again it was to say, in a brave attempt to stand up to the situation: "I guess . . . it's our turn . . . to cross."
She hung back. "Do we have to go out there again? Do you think anyone in the audience might recognise me?"
"I'll walk on that side."
She crossed, stiff with embarrassment, her eyes fixed on the boards. "Oh dear," she said. "What do we have to do in the next scene?"
"Aren't you going to like it?" he asked, in such a disappointed tone that she replied: "I don't suppose it matters whether I like it or not. I'll do it, anyway."
They went to and fro, several times, in silence, Don crestfallen and gloomy, and she regarding her unfamiliar surroundings with critical distaste. "My gown doesn't even fit me," she complained. He did not confess that he thought she was as pretty as a bridesmaid in it. "They all look so shoddy," she said, a moment later. "It isn't a bit like what I thought it would be," And when he tried to turn the conversation by warning her to be careful with her parasol—that Miss Morris got into trouble with the stage manager for catching it in things"—she asked abruptly: "Was she like these other girls?"
"Why?"
"Because she wasn't very nice, if she was. In the dressing-room—well, they aren't very nice, the way they talk—some of them."
"I'm sorry you don't like it," he apologized humbly: "it's only for a short time, you know—till we find something better. Besides, some of them I've met are not like that. Those that are graduates of the dramatic schools—I'll introduce you to some of them. I think you'll find them better."
"Well."
He piloted her through the rush to the jeweller's window when the alarm was given inside the shop; and after the curtain had fallen, he saw her safely on her way down to her dressing-room again.
In the scenes that followed he watched her across the stage, and tried to smile encouragingly when he caught her eye. She seemed to be getting on better; she had evidently struck up an acquaintance with a "Miss Adara Doran," whom Don had found to be—in spite of her name—quite untheatrical and rather pleasant. He began to feel more hopeful. Perhaps, as she become more accustomed to her surroundings, she would be more contented.
While the stage-hands were setting out the last properties for the lawn-party scene, he picked his way through the crowd of waiting supers in search of her, eager to join her so that she might have no difficulty in finding the little table at which they were to sit together. As he crossed behind the back-drop, to gain that side of the stage to which she would enter from the women's dressing-rooms, he passed "Delicate Pete" coming in the opposite direction. Don nodded. There was a sort of defiant impudence in the smile Cousin gave him in response, but he thought nothing of it until he turned into the wings and came suddenly on Margaret standing to meet him in an attitude of being still at bay. The deadly paleness of her face flooded with blood at sight of him. She gasped: "He—he" She blinked dry eyes, staring, outraged. "He said something awful to me."
"The same one? Cousin? That same man?" He scarcely waited for her feeble "Yes." All the accumulated disappointments of the evening rose together in him in a rage. He hurried back after the super, his hands clenched. He saw Cousin standing among his fellows, his back turned. The others parted instinctively, staring at the wrath in Don's eyes. He caught Cousin by the collar, jerked him around, and struck him a blow in the face; the super threw up his arms blindly; and Don struck him three times, with his closed fist, on the mouth, placing the blows in a white heat of anger that made him as clear-sighted and apparently as deliberate as if the whole thing were done in cold blood. Then he threw Cousin off, and stepped back—into the grasp of the stage manager.
"Get out!" He was swung around. "Get out!" He was thrust into the arms of a scene shifter who rushed him off to the stairs and shoved him down with a force that would have thrown him headlong if he had not saved himself by catching the handrail. The manager followed him with Cousin, who was bleeding at the nose and mouth. "You're both discharged. Don't either of you come back to that stage. Get your things off now, and get out."
Don hung up his hat and coat. "I'll have to wait," he said. "I look after the costumes for Mr. Kidder."
The stage manager, with an angry oath by way of dismissal, turned and went back to his work. It was the sight of "Delicate Pete" bleeding into the wash-bowl that brought Don to a sense of what had happened.
He had been as if poised above his own actions, watching himself, in a sort of double-consciousness that always came on him in such moments of excitement; and every aspect of the swift instants through which he had moved had imprinted itself on his visual memory as clearly as if he had seen it with the cool attention of an unmoved spectator. Now, all these sensations—Cousin's impudent smile, the sight of Margaret drawn up to meet another attack, the shameful suffering of her face—the eyes of the supers as they fell back in front of him, the crackle of Cousin's starched collar in the grasp of his hand, the blind movement of the super's arms guarding his eyes while he choked with open mouth, squirming to avoid the blows that struck brutally on his bleeding lips—the sudden roughness that had seized Don himself from behind and whirled him away dizzily and thrown him at the stairs down which he stumbled—all these sensations, all these pictures came back on him, together with the emotions which should have accompanied them, like the recollections of a drunken crime which now assailed his sober consciousness with a sickening poignancy, vivid and revolting. He sat down in a nervous collapse. He put his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands; the cold perspiration gathered on his face; he shuddered with the faintness of vertigo.
What would Margaret say? What would Kidder say? Where would he find work? His anger had passed from him like the fumes of liquor and left him sitting with these questions, in the midst of the wreck which he had pulled down on himself.
A sudden, violent blow on the back of his head brought him to his feet in time to see Cousin running from the room in fear of pursuit. He looked at the shoe with which he had been struck, lying where Cousin had dropped it. He put his hand up to the bruise, and rubbed it, dazed.
He was standing so, staring at nothing, when the supers came in at the end of the act and crowded around him with questions. He shook his head, like an idiot. "Tell Miss Richardson to wait for me," he said. "Ask her to wait for me at the door. Tell her it'll be all right. Tell her to wait. Tell her to wait for me."
His message, and the news that he had been dismissed from the company, came to her—through Miss Doran—in the dressing-room, where she had remained, too hysterical to return to the stage. And when Don had seen the last of the supers' costumes on the hooks, the room deserted, and the lights out—lingering over his duties as if he thought in that way to postpone the fact of his dismissal—he met her at the stage entrance with such a look of guilt and apology and broken appeal against her blame that it went to her heart like the sight of tears. "Oh, Don," she cried, "why, why did you bother with me? Why didn't you let me go home? I—I've only made trouble. I"
"Wait," he said, hurrying her out to the refuge of the darker street. "Don't. . . . It's nothing. We're all right."
She took his arm, clinging to him as they walked, neither of them paying any attention to the direction in which they were going. "You shouldn't have done it. You should have let me go."
"No, no. It isn't that. It's all right. I'll find something else with Kidder. I didn't know. I didn't understand how it would all seem to you. Miss Morris—I should have known better than try to—to associate you with those cads. Miss Morris warned me."
"Ah!" she sobbed, "what use am I? What is there that I can do if I can't do even this? I was ungrateful. I said things to hurt you. I didn't even try to help you by being cheerful, by accepting what you got for me."
"Don't," he pleaded. "You"
She shook his arm, almost angrily. "I did! I behaved shamefully. And any other girl, instead of appealing to you, would have slapped his face for him! The pig! What did you do to him?"
"I struck him . . . two or three times . . . in the face."
"And they discharged you?"
"He was bleeding. They don't allow fighting on the stage. They discharged us both."
"I don't care!" she cried defiantly. "I'm glad! It was no place for you, either. You're too good to be among such—such people. I'm glad it happened. It'll do them good." She added, in another spirit: "You'll be able to find something else to do, won't you?"
"Yes! Yes! Of course! Kidder will find me something. And Miss Morris, before she left, told me she would get something better for me in Polk's theatre—Peter Polk, the dramatist. She has some influence with him. She has known him a long time. I'll be all right. It's not that. It's you."
"Oh me! I can go home and teach deportment. I don't seem to have sense enough for anything better."
"We must start out to-morrow morning and find you something, some way—not on the stage, I mean."
"Why do you bother with me? Always—always—I've disappointed you. It was my fault that you left college. Now I've made trouble for you here."
He caught her hand up against his side, pressing it with the arm on which she had been leaning. "You're—you're all that made life worth living."
The voice silenced her, shamed her, oppressed her with her unworthiness and exalted her with the sincerity of his belief in her. It was the voice of a determined loyalty, at once so proud of her and so humble in its prides that it might have made a queen worthy of her throne. She looked out, with wet eyes, on the street of theatre crowds which had suddenly, at the turn of a corner, confronted them with its hansom cabs and its café lights and its midnight gaiety; and she felt herself uplifted above it, beside him, in the isolation of a companionship so intensely realized that for a bewildering moment he seemed not a separate person but a part of her. Then she drooped her head, like a woman returning from an altar-rail where she has received the eucharist; for she had indeed, in that moment, partaken of the sacrament of love, and she felt her emotion glowing through her like a holy spirit. In that moment the great miracle of the young heart had wrought its almost divine change in her. From that moment, she was no longer a soul free in the midst of its fellows; she had surrendered herself to the need of the man beside her, and, through him, to the great fraternity of human suffering and the office of bearing into the still unseeded future the wonder and agony of human life.
He felt the quivering of her hand on his arm. "Are you cold?"
"No," she said gently. "Don't worry—about me."
She accompanied him, thereafter, in a silence which gave him no hint of her thoughts; and supposing that she was silent because she was despondent, he tried to encourage her with his usual assurances that everything would "come out right," that they would begin their campaign "really" in the morning, that he had done wrong to temporize by accepting a position on the stage for her, that he should have "stood out" for something better. She had not the heart to reply to any of his extravagant misstatements of her case, for she could understand that he was talking to keep up his own courage; but she said, at last: "Yes, yes. It will be all right, of course. Don't worry about it any more to-night. We'll begin fresh in the morning."
"You're not thinking of going home?" he asked timidly.
"No," she said. "I'll stay—with you."
She said it with an accent—as of resignation—that spurred him on to new promises. "You'll never regret it. I never have. It's hard at first, but once you get your start made, you have opportunities—opportunities that you'd never find at home." There was Miss Morris, for example: she had made friends with "one of the most successful dramatists in America," and he had actually come to her and offered her "a leading part in one of his companies." There was Bert Pittsey, taking a staff position on "one of the best papers in New York." There was Walter Pittsey, at the head of a theatrical agency in Boston, with every prospect of rising to a high place among the managers of the "trust."
Their street—when they turned into it—was empty, the houses dark. The city seemed to be sleeping in an immense contempt of their misfortune, and his voice sounded small and impudent, in the optimism of a pigmy, the boast of an impotence so inconsiderable that silence received it without so much as an echo. She said, at their door: "You must get a good night's rest, now. Don't worry. Don't think of it any more to-night. Promise me, will you?"
He promised her. They tip-toed upstairs to their rooms, careful not to awaken the household. They exchanged a whispered good-night in the hall. He lit his lamp, locked his door, and sat down on the side of his bed, exhausted, all his bravado gone from him, confronting doggedly the renewal of a struggle in which he had been beaten down to defeat after defeat.