Chapter IV: Part 4

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. Don't turn your head till I say!"

The lights were indeed beautiful, each with its halo of mist. The clanging bells of cars, and even the horrible squeak of the wheels as they turned a curve, with the low singing of the cables that drew them, did rise up like the orchestration of some strange new motif of the night that lulled him till he was only faintly conscious of the opening and closing of doors and a rustling at the other end of the room.

"Now!" called the voice of Marien cheerily, awakening him with a sudden thrill to the realization of her presence.

She stood at the far end of the room, surveying herself in a long mirror. Her figure was draped rather than dressed in a silken, shimmering texture of black, splashed with great red conventional flowers. The garment flowed loosely at neck, sleeves, and waist, and the fabric was corrugated by a succession of narrow, vertical, unstitched pleats, which gave an illusory effect of yielding to every movement of the sinuous body and yet clinging the closer while it yielded. As John gazed, Marien belted this flowing drapery at the waist with a knot of tiny crimson cord, and then released her coils of rich dark hair so that they fell to her hips in a fluttering cascade as silky as the texture of her robe.

When she advanced to him, the shimmering, billowy movements of the gown matched the rhythmic sway of her limbs as completely as the red splashes upon it matched the color of her cheeks. She came laughing softly, and bearing in her hand a pair of tiny red and gold slippers.

A low divan ran along one side of the room, piled high with gay cushions. Near the foot of it was a Roman chair.

"Sit here," said Marien, indicating the chair; and John, as if obeying stage directions, complied, while his hostess sank back luxuriously amid the cushions and by the same movement presented a slim, neatly booted foot upon the edge of the divan, so very near to the big man's hand as to embarrass him. At the same time she held up the slippers to his notice and observed with a nod toward the boot:

"As a mark of special favor."

For a moment John's face reddened, and he looked the awkwardness of his state of mind, his eyes shifting from the boot to Marien's face and back again.

Her face took on an amused smile, and the boot wiggled suggestively.

"Oh," exclaimed John, blushing with fresh confusion at his own dullness as he bent forward and began to struggle with the buttons of the boot.

"You see," he explained presently, still worrying with the combination of the first button, "you see--well, I guess I don't know women very well."

Marien laughed happily.

"Stage women!" John added, as if by an afterthought.

"Stage women," affirmed Marien loyally, "are no different from other women--only wiser." Then she tagged her speech sententiously with, "They have to be. Careful! You will tear the buttons off. And you--you are pinching me!"

"I beg your pardon," stammered John. "But there are so very many of these buttons."

After an interval during which Marien had appeared to watch his labors with amused interest, she asked, with mocking humor:

"Are you hurrying or delaying? I can't quite make out."

But John was by this time enjoying the to him novel situation, and merely chuckled happily in reply to this thrust. When the shoes were off, by a mystifying movement Marien snuggled first one stockinged foot and then the other into the gold embroidered slippers and with a sigh of contentment appeared to float among her pillows, while she contemplated with smiling attention the face of Hampstead. Presently she asked smiling:

"Are you a man or a boy, I wonder?"

Feeling himself drifting farther and farther under the personal spell of this magnetic woman, and entirely willing to be enthralled, John answered her only with his eyes.

"That's the Ursus look," she laughed softly, as if it pleased her.

A silver cigarette case was on a tabaret within reach of her hand.

"Have a cigarette!" she proposed.

John declined, a trifle embarrassed by the proffer. Miss Dounay lighted one and puffed a small halo above her head before she looked across at him again and asked quizzically:

"You do not smoke?"

"And I do not think women should," Hampstead replied, with level eyes.

"It is a horrid habit," she confessed, "but this business will drive women to do horrid things. Listen, Hampstead. It's hard for a man; you've found that out, and you're only beginning. It's harder for a woman; the despairs, the disappointments, the bitter lonelinesses,--the beasts of men one meets! But--" With a shrug of her shoulders she suddenly broke off her train of thought, and turning an inquiring glance on Hampstead asked:

"You never smoked?"

"Oh, yes," confessed John, "but I quit it. I decided it would not be good for me."

She regarded him narrowly, and asked:

"You would not do a thing which did not appear good for you?"

There was just a little accent on the "good."

"I have tried to calculate my resources," John confessed, resenting that accent.

Again Miss Dounay contemplated him in silence.

"You are a singularly calculating young man, I should say," she decreed finally. "And how long, may I ask, have you been living this calculating life?"

Marien was making a play upon his word "calculate."

"Seven years, I should say," replied John, thinking back.

"Seven years?" she mused. "Seven! And you feel that it has paid?"

"Immensely," replied John aggressively.

"By the way, how old are you, Ursus?"

This was what the old actor had asked. People were always asking John how old he was.

"Twenty-five," John answered a trifle apologetically. "I got started late. And you?"

The question was put without hesitation, as if it were the next thing to say.

"A man does not ask a woman her age in polite conversation," suggested Marien tentatively.

"He does not," replied John quickly, "if he thinks the answer is likely to be embarrassing."

Marien's face flushed with pleasure.

"Oh, hear him!" she laughed. "This heavy man is not so heavy, after all; but," she added, with another insinuating inflection, "he is always calculating." Then she went on, "You are right. The confession to you at least is not embarrassing. I am twenty-four years old, and I, too, have been living a calculating life for seven years."

"For seven years. How odd!" remarked John, rather excited at discovering even a slight parallel between himself and this brilliant creature.

"Yes," Marien replied. "I ran away from home at sixteen. I have been on the stage eight years. The first year was a careless one. The other seven have been--_calculating_ years."

John could think of no words in which to describe the sinister significance which Marien now managed to get into her drawling utterance of that word "calculating." She made it express somehow the plotting villainies of an Iago, of a Richard the Third and a Lady Macbeth, and then overlaid the sinister note with something else, an impression of lofty abandon, of immolation, as if, in calculating her life, she had laid upon the altar all there was of herself--everything--in order to attain some supreme end.

John, staring at her, got a sudden intuitive gleam of a woman who was not only ambitious as he was ambitious, but wildly, dangerously ambitious, with a danger that was not to herself alone, but to any who stood near enough to be trampled on as she climbed upward,--dangerous to one who might love her, for example!

He got the thought clearly in his mind, too; yet only for a moment, and to be crowded out immediately by another thought, or indeed, a succession of thoughts, all induced by the picture she made amid her cushions.

How beautiful she was! How very, very beautiful! And how magnetic! How she had made the blood run in his veins when she lay upon his breast as Lygia, their hearts beating, their souls stirring together!

And now she had resigned herself for an hour to his company, had given him her confidence, was awaiting, as it seemed, his pleasure,--while the color came and went in her cheeks, while subdued lights danced in the dark pools beneath lazily drooping lashes, and the filmy gown which sheathed her body stirred with every breath as if a part of her very self.

Lying there like this, her presence ceased soon to induce thoughts and began to stimulate impulses. Hampstead longed to reach out and lay a hand upon her. She was so alluring and so, so helpless.

For weeks now he had allowed himself to dream of her as possibly the woman of his destiny,--not admitting it, but still dreaming it. Here in his presence, she suddenly ceased to be even a woman. She was just Woman; and the primal attraction of the elemental man is not for the woman. Fundamentally, it is just for woman. And here was Woman, the whole race of woman, beautiful, bewitching, compulsive.

An odor began to float in from the kitchenette, an odor that was not of coffee and cakes, nor of grease upon the top of a range in a dirty little restaurant. It was savory and fragrant, and it filled his nostrils. It reminded him of all the appetizing meals he had ever eaten. It made him hungry with all the hungers he had ever known; his brain was reeling; he was going to faint,--and with mere appetite. Yet the appetite was not for food.

With a kind of shock he recognized the nature of his appetite. The shock passed; but the hunger remained. John felt that he himself was somehow changed. He was not the Chairman of the Prayer Meeting Committee of the Christian Endeavor Society, not a Deacon of the grand old First Church. He was instead the man that the Reverend Charles Thompson Campbell feared for and prayed for. He was the man whose heavy ridged brows had indicated to the shrewd old actor a nature packed full of racial dynamite.

And Woman was fulminating the dynamite. Deliberately--or recklessly--or innocently; but none the less surely. Her lips were pliant. Her form was plastic. The smouldering light in the eyes, the lashes drooping lazily, the witchery of a dark tress which coiled upon the white soft shoulder, all combined in the appeal of physical charm. To this, Woman added the subtle, maddening witchery of silence,--breathing, watchful, waiting quiet.

This silence continued until it became oppressive, explosive even.

Would she not speak? He could not. Would she not move? He dared not.

As if in response to this frenzy of thought, the ripe lips parted in a smile that added one more lovely detail to the picture by revealing rows of pearly, even teeth, and her hand began to move toward him.

"Don't touch me--don't," he found himself pleading suddenly.