Chapter XI: The Walling, 272 (2)

A man in a corner lifted his white face from a book and whispered, “Those are gifts the Greeks brought.” This caused stillness, then unpleasing chuckles. Gurdy climbed down from the bookcase and went to talk to Mr. Fitch. They talked of French lessons and the vagaries of governesses. The other callers complimented Mark on the boy’s good looks. The flattery was soothing after the strain of the last rehearsal. Mark knew it for flattery. Gurdy’s face was too long, his sober mouth too wide and his jaw prematurely square. But the compliments were the due of a successful actor turned manager. He sat for a little watching Mr. Fitch lazily chat with the boy as though he were a grown man. On the playwright’s warning he had lately published a careful interview announcing Gurdy and Margot as adopted children and his relationship to them. But people still probably reported Gurdy an illegitimate son and Margot his daughter by Cora Boyle. Mark sighed and took Gurdy down through the flowers to see the cream and gold play house where men were squirting perfume from syringes along the red aisles, killing the smell of paint. He let Gurdy have a syringe and went into the vestibule. The redhaired clerk listing the gifts of other managers handed him the card wet from its journey in a ball of pink roses.

“Mrs. Cosmo Rand.... Who the devil’s Mrs. Cosmo Rand, Billy?”

The clerk scratched his ear and grinned. “You’d ought to know, sir.”

“But I don’t. Cosmo Rand? Heard of him. Loeffler’s got him in something. Who’s she?”

“Miss Cora Boyle,” said the clerk and strolled off to insult a messenger bringing in more flowers.

Mark had a curious, disheartening shock. He didn’t bow to Cora Boyle on the street. What right had she to send him flowers? It must be a passing rudeness. She might remember that he disliked pink roses. Mark rested on the ledge of the box office, brooding. But she might mean to be pleasant. Her manager, Loeffler, was on bad terms with Carlson. This might be a dictated, indirect peace offering. Mark patted the florid carved stone of the ledge and thought. Cora’s new play wasn’t a success. The reviews had been tart. She might be tired of Loeffler. Mark was perplexed but the hunt for motives always wearied him. A scarlet petticoat went by outside the vestibule and led off his mind. He bade his treasurer telephone for the motor and stood joking with the man through the box office window until a flat stop in the noise behind him made Mark turn his head. The florists and clerks were motionless, regarding the street. A coupé had stopped. A footman was helping a woman and a tumult of varied flowers to the sidewalk. She came toward the doors gallantly, her face quite hidden in the enormous bouquet but the treasurer said, “By gee, I’d know her in hell, by her walk,” and chuckled. She tripped on the sill and screamed gaily to Mark, “Au s’ cours!”

Mark jumped to catch the sheaf of yellow roses. Miss Held waved her grey gloves wide and dipped her chin. “Je t’ apporte une gerbe vu que t’es toujours bon enfant, Marc Antoine! And ’ow does Beatriz get along to teach you French?”

“Pretty fair. Haven’t had much time lately. Thought you’d taken your show on the road, Anna?”

“Nex’ week.” Up the staircase some one began to whistle “La Petite Tonkinoise.” The little woman vibrated inside the grey case of her lacy gown and pursed her lips. “Oh, but I am sick of that tune! Make him stop.” The whistler heard and ceased. Miss Held swayed to and fro among the flowers, noting cards. She adopted a huge orchid for her waist and smiled down at it. A dozen grins woke in the collecting crowd. Mark was aware of upholsterers oozing from the theatre. Miss Held hummed from gift to gift, murmuring names--“Le Moyne.... ton institutrice.... Ce bon vieux David.... Nice lilies.” She moved in a succession of swift steps that seemed balanced leaps. One of the florist’s girls sighed a positive sob of envy. The curving body and the embellished eyes kept the crowd still. The soft gloves drooped on the hard lustre of the stirring arms. Mark wondered at her cool, sardonic mastery of attention. She was bored, unwell and her frock was nothing new. She was Anna Held and the people were edging in from the sidewalk to look at her.

“Like to see the house, Anna?”

“Oh, no. I very well know what that would be. All red, and gold fishes on the ceiling, eh? No. I must go away.” She strolled off toward her carriage, chattering sudden French which Mark did not understand. He heard an immense discussion surge up in the vestibule as he shut the coupé door, walked through it into the theatre where two upholsterers were quarrelling over the age of the paragon and where Mark bumped against a man in brown who seemed to inspect the gold dolphins of the vault.

“Clumsy,” said the man, briskly.

“Didn’t see you, sir.”

“I meant the decoration.” The man flicked a hand at the ceiling and the red boxes, “Like Augustin Daly’s first house but much worse. We should have passed that. Gilt. It’s the scortum ante mortum in architecture.” He jammed a cigarette between the straight lips of his flushed face and went on in a rattle of dry syllables. “Some one should write a monograph on gold paint and the theatrical temperament. Plush and passion. Stigmata.... Sous un balcon doré.... Can you give me a match?... Where’s Carlson’s office?” He bustled out of the foyer.

Mark wearily tore Cora Boyle’s card in his tanned fingers and nodded. The stranger was right. This new theatre was stale. The gold sparkled stupidly. The shades of velvet were afflicting. But Carlson liked it. Mark sighed and thought, rather sadly, that his patron’s whole concept of the trade was vulgar and outworn like this gaudy expense. Red velvet, heavy gold, bright lamps--the trappings of his apprenticeship. Old actors told Mark that this was a variant of the first Daly theatre. The stranger was right, then. Mark wondered and went upstairs to the office but the flushed man was gone.

“That feller Huneker was in tryin’ to get me to hire some orchestra leader,” Carlson said.

“But I thought Huneker was a young man,” Mark answered.

Mr. Fitch whispered from his corner, “He hasn’t any particular age. What was that riot downstairs, Mark?”

“Anna Held dropped in and left some flowers. She ain’t lookin’ well.”

The playwright closed his magazine and lifted himself from the chair, assuming his strange furry hat. “We have just so much vitality. She’s losing hers. But if she died tomorrow it would make almost as much noise as killing a president. And that’s quite right. Presidents never make any one feel sinful. Good night.”

Carlson asked, “You’re comin’ tonight, Clyde.”

“Not feeling right, thanks.”

Mark followed the bent back down the stairs. Fitch was stopped by a lounger at the doors, loaned the old fellow ten dollars and passed, unobtrusive, along Forty Fifth Street. He went shadowlike in his vivid dress. Liking the man, Mark frowned. The exhausted courtesy, the slow voice always left him puzzled; it was as though the playwright’s prosperity kept within it a dead core of something pained, as if the ghost of an old hunger somehow lived on under the coloured superfluity.

Mark’s motor arrived outside. He went to whistle Gurdy up from an investigation of the orchestra pit. All the bulbs burned about the house. For a second Mark liked the place then the gilt and the mulberry hangings bothered him. He chased Gurdy up an aisle to the vestibule. The treasurer slipped from the box office to say, “Young Rand just called up. I said you wasn’t here.”

“Who?”

“Cora Boyle’s new husband. That English kid.”

Mark shrugged and shoved Gurdy into the dull blue limousine at the curb. The motor took him away from the theatre and away from several beckoning hands on the sidewalk. His shift to managership had changed the fashion of salutes. People now beckoned him with a posture of confidential affection and earnestness. They had friends to recommend, deep suggestions. Carlson had warned him, “Mind, you’re a kid with a pocketful of candy, now. You’ve stopped bein’ just one of the gang. Better ride in cabs if you want to get anyplace.” Well, the motor, with its adorable slippery blue crust, kept people at a distance. Mark wound an arm about Gurdy and pulled himself into a corner of the seat. The car was hampered by a dilatory van that lurched ahead of its hood. The chauffeur cursed in Canadian French and a messenger boy on the van’s tail cursed back, joyously foul, emptily shooting accusations of all sins in a sweet, sexless howl that pierced the glass about Mark and made him grin, absently amused.

“He’s mad,” said Gurdy, dispassionately.

“No. He’s just talking, son.”

“Huh,” Gurdy grunted, trying to match the words with ordinary conversation. This messenger boy was plainly an accomplished fellow. The van rolled off over Broadway in a shock of light and dust. Gurdy saw “Red Winter” on a poster and asked, “Is this Red Winter a good play, Mark?”

“Pretty fair, honey.”

“Well, can I come to it?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Too dirty,” Mark said, then, “All about killin’ folks, son.”

Gurdy argued, “Well, Lohengrin’s all about killing people and Miss Converse took me to that and it was in Dutch.”

“German, sonny.”

“I like French better’n German,” Gurdy yawned, waving a leg in the air and went on, “I think Broadway’s ugly.”

“You’re right,” said Mark, enchanted by such taste.

Yet Carlson really liked to stroll on Broadway and Cora Boyle had often led Mark for dusty hours through this complexity of hesitant, garrulous people, along these sidewalks where there was nothing to be seen. He rubbed his jaw and thought of Paris, viewed last summer, of the long, swooping street at Winchester gilt in an afterglow. Oh, after dark Broadway was tolerable! Then the revolving people were shapes of no consequence and, with a little mist, these lights were aqueous, flotillas of shimmering points on a hovering, uncertain vastness. Now, the roadway was a dappled smear of bodies wheeled and bodies shod. The sidewalks writhed, unseemly. But Cora Boyle liked it. The pretty, black haired dancer just then lodged at Mark’s cost had rooms overlooking the new width above Forty Second Street. And she liked that.... And she liked the scenery of “Red Winter.” Poor stuff, he thought. He cursed scene painters. Charles Frohman had heard of a fellow who’d studied the art in Berlin and made astonishing sets. He must telephone Frohman and get the man’s name. He was tired. “Red Winter” had tired him. The leading woman had a way of saying “California” through her nose that had vexed him all week. A poor play. His head was full of jagged swift ideas, of memories; Eddie Bernamer milking a young cow against a sulphur wall and laughing when Mark tried to sketch him on the fly leaf of an algebra; Cora Boyle swaggering into Rector’s in a blue dress; Clyde Fitch telling little Margaret that her name was Margot; Stanford White shouting with laughter because Mark softened the ch of “architecture.” Why hadn’t they given White a billion dollars and let him build the whole city into charms of tranquil, columnar symmetry?... Gurdy knew that his uncle was oppressed. When Mark thought hard he stroked the scar on his jaw. Gurdy wanted to talk, now, and tossed a leg over Mark’s black, rocky knee.

“What’re you thinkin’ about, Mark?”

“Just bosh. What’s Margot been doing all day?”

“Havin’ a bellyache.”

That terrified Mark. He sweated suddenly and called through the tube bidding the driver hurry. Spinal meningitis, he read, began with nausea. But when he ran into the panelled library of his house Margot was playing with her largest doll and the angular governess assured him, in simple French, that a pill had set things right. Margot lifted her black eyes and said, rubbing her stomach, “I was ill, papa,” in her leisurely way.

“Ate breakfast too fast,” Gurdy said, in grim displeasure, watching Mark double his lean height and begin to cuddle Margot.

Margot stared at her cousin with an aggrieved, brief pout and then wound herself into Mark’s lap. The large doll was named Aunt Sadie for Mrs. Bernamer. Margot said, “Miss Converse fixed Aunt Sadie’s drawers, papa,” and her brown face rippled as she displayed three stitches. Then she righted the doll and gazed at Mark devotedly, solemnly, preening her starched skirt of pink linen. Pink went with her black hair and her tawny skin. Mark touched a roaming mesh of her hair and her face rippled once more. Her skin had this amber haze like the water of a pool in the pine forest behind the farm. In that pool he had bathed with her father through endless afternoons, idling on until other boys lagged off and the shadows were ink on the crumbled ocher clay of the margin where pink boneset grew. And now Joe was dead and his blackhaired wife was dead ... an unskilled cook before marriage, half Irish, half Italian, a good, sleepy woman who ate with her knife and wore a chaplet blessed for her Roman mother by some Pope. Margot would never know them. He kissed her hair. She was this warm bubble enclosed in his arms.

“Love me any, sister?”

“’Course,” said Margot.

Gurdy snorted and stalked away. Mark talked to the stiff governess and patted Margot. Miss Converse sewed and chatted about Conrad’s novels, then getting fashionable. She assented, “Very interesting. Romantic, of course. I dare say the colour attracts you.”

“Of course,” said Mark, “and what if they are romantic?”

She had some vague objection. If she bored him, Mark was still grateful that she hadn’t tried to marry him. She was necessary to the training of the children but her buff, bulky face wasn’t alluring and her gowns hurt him by a prevalence of mole embroidery and rumpled lace. She was a gentlewoman, wonderfully learned and obliging about his pet airs on the piano. Mark talked and wished that he could escape, like Gurdy who went to practice handsprings in the white hall and slid downstairs at the note of the doorbell.

Gurdy slid along the handrail of black wood so admired by callers and jumped for the dining room which had doors of glass coated in blue silk. These doors opened into the drawing room which Gurdy despised for its furniture all black and silver and its hangings of cloudy tapestry, impossibly noiseless when one bounced balls against them. Yet people called it a lovely room. And now, peering through a rift of the blue silk Gurdy saw the butler turn a visitor into this space and the visitor looked about with brown eyes, seeming to admire. Gurdy speculated and decided that the slight man was an actor come to talk to Mark about a part. His hair curled, his overcoat clung to his middle neatly, his white gaiters were unspotted, his pale moustache didn’t overhang his little mouth. He was visibly an actor. Gurdy had examined many through this spyhole. And like many the fellow went to glance at a circular mirror above the cabinet with tiny doors which Miss Converse called “Siennese.” As Mark’s feet descended, the man straightened himself and began a smile. Gurdy listened to the jar of his high voice against Mark’s fuller drawl.

“Mr. Rand?”

“Yes. Don’t think we’ve ever met. Daresay you know who I am and all that?”

“Yes,” said Mark.

Gurdy noted the long pause. He held that actors were a talkative lot. Mr. Rand worked with his moustache an indefinite time before he spoke again.

“My wife sent me along--I’m a sort of ambassador, you know?... Matter of business, entirely.”

Mark said, “I see,” wondering how old the man was. The moustache had an appearance of soft youth. He smiled, wanting Cora’s third husband to be at ease, and nodded to a chair.

“Oh, thanks no. Mrs. Rand wants to know if you’d mind meeting her. At her hotel, for instance?”

“I don’t mind at all,” Mark lied, “Glad to. Any time.”

“Then she may let you know? Thanks ever so. Good luck to your play tonight,” said the young man and walked out gracefully.

Gurdy came through the glass doors and asked, “Who’s he?” Mark lifted the pliant, hard body in the air. He fancied that Gurdy must feel something odd, here.

“How old would you say he was, darling?”

“Dunno. Who’s Mrs. Rand?”

“An actress.”

“Put me down,” said Gurdy, “My pants are comin’ off.”

Mark breathed comfortably, helped the boy on his knee tighten the white trousers and passed into dotage. Eddie Bernamer and Joe Walling had begotten these bodies. The fact mattered nothing. Mark was a father. He had possession. When things went wrong he could come home to gloat over Margot and Gurdy. He promised, “I shan’t be busy now for a week. We’ll ride in the Park and feed the squirrels, sonny.”

“All right. Say, Mark, you’re all thin.--There’s the doorbell, again.--Oh, say, a lady telephoned s’noon. Her name was Miss Monroe and she wanted you to call her up.”

“I like her nerve!”

Gurdy jumped at this loud snort of his uncle.

“Who’s she?”

“She’s an actress,” Mark stammered, hoping the boy wouldn’t go on, and Carlson came in, his yellow face splotched as though he’d been walking fast.

“That Rand squirt been here?” he yelled at Mark.

“Yes. Why?”

“I passed him. What’s he want?”

“Me to meet her.”

“You goin’ to?”

“Guess I better, Mr. Carlson.”

Carlson jabbed Gurdy’s stomach with his cane and panted, “I can tell you what she wants and don’t you listen to it, neither. She’s had a fight with Billy Loeffler. He won’t put this whelp she married in her comp’ny. I bet she quits Loeffler. Her show’s no good, anyhow. Well, I won’t take her on. She’s a second rater. She’s an onion. I won’t have her for nothin’. Don’t you get sentymental about Cora Boyle any more, son!”

“You needn’t worry,” said Mark, patting Gurdy’s ear.

Gurdy sat up and inquired, “Is that the Cora Boyle grandpapa says was a loose footed heifer?” So Carlson broke into screaming mirth. Mark flushed and mumbled, sent the boy away and scowled respectfully at his partner. Sometimes Carlson’s crude amusement stung him.

“For God’s sake don’t talk of her in front of the kids, sir!”

“All right, son. Goin’ to let Gurdy come to the show tonight?”

“Not much!”

The old man lounged into a chair and jeered at his fosterling. Mark’s horror diverted him. He yapped, “Still think it’s a dirty show, do you?”

“Yes.... Oh, dunno! If there was anything to the slop but that second act, I wouldn’t care. Nothing but Sappho over again. Old as the hills.”

“What’s new in the show business, son?”

“The Merry Widow is,” Mark laughed, “and you wouldn’t buy it. Savage is bringing it in week after next. They were playing the music at Rector’s last night.--Look here, the set for the last act’s all wrong, still. Those green curtains--”

“You and your sets! God,” said Carlson, “you’d ought to’ve been a scene painter!”

“I wish I could be, for about one week!” Mark let a grievance loose, slapping his leg. “These people make me sick! You tell them you want something new and they trot out some sketch of a room that every one’s seen for twenty years. They never think of--”

“You ain’t ever satisfied! You act like scenery made a show--”

Mark sighed, “Well, we’re not giving the public its moneysworth with this piece. The scenery’s--mediocre.--Come up and see Margot.”

The old man poked Margot’s doll with a shaking thumb and called her Maggie to see her scowl, like Mark. The little girl’s solemn vanity delighted him. He was also delighted by Gurdy who became an embodied sneer when Mark fondled Margot. The boy watched Mark kiss this female nuisance then walked haughtily out of the library and set to work banging the piano in the upper playroom.

“All you need’s a wife and a mother-in-law and you’d have a happy home,” Carlson said when Mark let him out of the front door.

“Think I haven’t?”

“I suppose you have. Ain’t any truth in this that you’re goin’ to marry that Monroe gal?”

“No. I gave her a ring, last week. I suppose she’s been airing it.”

“Sure.--You big calf,” the old man said with gloom, “you always act so kind of surprised when one of ’em brags of you. You ain’t but twenty-nine and you’re a fine lookin’ jackass. Of course, she’ll show off her solytaire! A gal’s as vain as a man, any day. One of ’em’ll get you married, yet.--Yell at that cab, son. My legs are mighty tired.--See you at eight sharp. Now, mind, I won’t have nothin’ to say to Cora Boyle.”

Mark waited until the opening night of “The Merry Widow” for more news of Cora Boyle. She deserted her manager, Loeffler, while “Red Winter” was in the first week of its run at the 45th Street Theatre. Mark saw her lunching in the Knickerbocker grill with her young husband and a critic who always touted her as the successor of Ada Rehan. A busybody assured Mark that Cosmo Rand was twenty. Cora was thirty one. All three of her husbands, then, were younger. The oddity of theatrical marriage still alarmed Mark. In Fayettesville it was a fixed convention that girls should be younger than their husbands. But she was luscious to see at the “Merry Widow” opening. Mark thought how well she looked, hung above the crowd in the green lined box. She found novel fashions of massing her hair. That night it rose in a black peak sustained by silver combs. She kept a yellow cloak slung across one bare shoulder concealing her gown. Against the gentle green of her background appeared three men. Rand wore a single eye-glass that sparkled dully when the outer lights were low. Through the music and the applause Mark was conscious of the box and of Cora’s red feathered fan. Her second husband, a thin Jewish comedian, went up to shake hands in an entr’acte. Women behind Mark giggled wildly. He wandered into the bronze lobby where men were already whistling the slow melody of “Velia.” He was chaffed by an Irish actor manager born in Chicago whose accent was a triumph of maintained vowels.

“An’ why don’t you go shake hands with Cora, bhoy?”

“Shut up, Terry. Come have a drink?”

He steered his friend to a new bar. The Irishman was rather drunk but vastly genial. He maundered, “A fool Cora was to let go of you, bhoy. They’re tellin’ me you’ve made money in the stockmarket, too.”

“A little,” Mark admitted.

“I’ve had no luck that way. Well, a fool Cora was.--And how’s it feel bein’ a manager, lad?”

“Fine.”

The Irishman looked at Mark sidelong over his glass, then up at the gold stars of the ceiling.

“Ho!--Yes, it’s a fine feelin’.--Well, wait until you’ve put on a couple of frosts, bhoy! And have to go hat in your hand huntin’ a backer. You lend money, easy.--You’ll see all the barflies that’ve had their ten and their twenty off you time and again--You’ll see ’em run when they see you comin’. Well, here tonight and hell tomorrow.--So Cora’s quit Billy Loeffler, has she? The dhear man! May his children all be acrobats! ’Twas Gus Daly taught the scut every trick he knows. The Napoleon of Broadway! I mind Loeffler runnin’ err’nds for Daly in eighty five.--Well, you wanted to be a manager and here you are and here’s luck.--It’s a fine game--the finest there is--and, mind you, I’ve been a practicin’ bhurglar and a plumber. Drink up.”

They drank and returned to the green theatre, resonant with the prelude of the next act. Mark was struggling in the half lit thresh of men strolling toward their seats when Cosmo Rand halted him.

“You’d not mind coming to supper in our rooms at the Knickbocker?”

Mark accepted. The scene of the Maxim revel was lost to him while he wondered what Cora wanted. He wouldn’t engage her. Carlson’s prejudice was probably valid. The old man swore that she was worthless outside light comedy. Yet she had good notices in all her parts. She was famous for clothes. She signed recommendations for silks and unguents. She had made a dressmaker popular among actresses. She had played in a failure in London whence came legends of a passionate Duke. The Duke’s passion might be invented, like other legends. He mused. The flowing waltz music made him melancholy. What sort of woman was Cora, nowadays? Every one changed. He, himself, had changed. He was getting callous to ready amities, explosions of mean jealousy. He knew nothing of Cora, really. She might be a different person, better tempered, less frank. Women were incomprehensible, anyhow. He would never understand them, doubted that anyone did and sighed. He walked to Cora’s hotel with a feeling of great dignity. She had mauled him badly, abused him, lied to him and now she was seeking peace. Then, rising in the lift, he knew that this dignity had a hollow heart; he was afraid of Cora Boyle.

“This is awfully good of you,” she said, shaking hands. Then she rested one arm on the shelf filled with flowers and smiled slowly, theatrically, kicking her rosy train into the right swath about her feet. Mark felt the display as a boast of her body. She resumed, “There’s really no sense in our looking at each other over a fence, is there?”

His face, seen in a mirror among the flowers, cheered Mark to a grin. He looked impassive and bland. He drawled, “No sense at all,” and stepped back. But she confused him. He had to speak. He said, “That’s a stunning frock.”

“You always did notice clothes, didn’t you? Cosmo, do give Mr. Walling a drink.”

Her voice had rounded and came crisply with an English hint. But it was not music. It jangled badly against Rand’s level, “What’ll you have, sir?” from the table where there were bottles and plates of sandwiches. Mark considered this boy as they talked of “The Merry Widow.” He saw man’s beauty inexpertly enough. Young Rand was handsome in the fragile, groomed manner of an English illustration. His chin was pointed. His eyes seemed brown. His curls lay in even bands. He had neither length nor strength. But he talked sensibly, rather shrewdly.

“There’ll be a deal of money lost bringing over Viennese pieces, of course. This thing’s one in a thousand. Quite charming.”

Mark asked, “You’ve not been over here long?”

“I?” Rand laughed, “Lord, yes. I’m a Canadian. Born in Iowa, as a matter of fact. I’ve been a good deal in England, of course.--Oh, I was at your new piece the other night. Red Winter, I mean. How very nicely you’ve mounted it. I really felt beastly cold in that second act. The snow’s so good.”

Mark bowed, selecting a sandwich. The critics had praised the snow scene. Rand might truly admire it. If the snow hadn’t satisfied Mark it had pleased every one else. He lost himself in thoughts of snow. Cora trailed her rose gown to the table and poured water into a glass of pale wine. A broad bracelet on her wrist clicked against the glass. She said, “You and Carlson own all the rights to Red Winter, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to send it to London?”

He laughed and put down his glass. “London? What for? It’d last just about one week!”

Cora smiled over a shoulder, retiring to the shelf of flowers.

“It would do better than that, Mark. I’ve played in London.”

“I’ve never played there but I’ve been there enough to know better. California Gold Rush! They don’t know there was such a thing!”

“Oh, I say,” said Rand.

Cora sipped some watered wine. The light shot through the glass and made a pear of glow on her throat. She was motionless, drinking. She became a shape set separate from the world in a momentary gleam. He knew that she was acting. Then she said sharply, “I’ll buy the English rights if you and Carlson’ll make me a decent figure.”

“Oh, look here! You’d lose. I was talking to Ian Gail about it, last night. It wouldn’t make a cent in England. They wouldn’t know what it’s all about. And--it’s such a rotten play! There’s nothing in it!”

She asked, looking at him, “Can I have it?” and her flat voice took fire in the question, achieved music. She must want the poor play badly. Rand’s pink nails were lined along his moustache, hiding its silk. The room fell silent.

“Oh, sure,” Mark said, “You can have it, Cora. I’ll see Mr. Carlson in the morning.... But damned if I can make out what there is in the play.”

“It’s not the sort of thing you like, I know. But I’m sick of comedy and that’s all I’m ever offered, here. And I’m sick of New York. Well, make me an offer of the English rights--Only--I’m no bank, Mark.” She swaggered to the piano and tamely played a few bars of the Merry Widow waltz. She hadn’t Olive Ilden’s grace, so seated, and the rose gown seemed sallow against the black of the piano. She had finished her scene. Mark saw the familiar stir of her throat as she hid a yawn. He promised to hurry the business of the English rights to the melodrama and took his leave.

What had he feared? He tried to think, in the corridor. Recapture, perhaps, by this woman who wasn’t, after all, half as wicked as others. Her new elegance hadn’t moved him. The stage did refine people! Cora had the full air of celebrity. She was now controlled, vainer. She might still be a shrew. He saddened, ringing for the lift, and thought of Cosmo Rand’s future if “Red Winter” failed in London. The elevator deposited a page with a silver bucket and this went clinking to Cora’s door. Rand and she would drink champagne. Mark sank pondering to the lounge and stopped to buy a cigar, there. It was almost one o’clock. Many of the lights had been turned out. The threaded marble lost sheen in the smoky gloom. Parties ebbed from the supper room and a wedge of dressed men waved to Mark. A candy merchant in the lead bawled to him and Mark went to be introduced to an English actress on the millionaire’s arm. She swayed, gracious and tipsy, involved in a cloak of jet velvet, her voice murmurous as brushed harp strings emerging from the pallor of her face above the browning gardenias on the cloak. She asked, “Like this wrap? Makes me feel like a very big black cigar--I should have a very broad red and gold band.” The men pressed about her fame sniggered, respecting this lovely myth. She was assigned in legend to the desire of princes. The candy merchant grinned, cuddling her hand on his waistcoat. She tapped the brass edge of the turning door with a gardenia stem and smiled at Mark’s silk hat, then at the millionaire. “Am I talking too loud, cherished one?”

“Shout your head off,” the candy merchant said, “It’s a free country.”

“Oh, only the bond are free,” she proclaimed. She told Mark, “Bond Street’s getting frightfully shabby. Max Beerbohm says--I do look rather like a very big black cigar, don’t I?--Do stop pulling my arm, you dear, fat thing!”

“The car’s here, honey.”

“How dear of the car! We’re going to sup somewhere, aren’t we? Oh, no, to bed.--Like a very big, black cigar--”

She was drawn through the brazen doors away from Mark. The men pushed after her avidly. She went tottering to the great motor, was engulfed. Mark blinked in the waning smell of gardenias, waited for the motor to be gone and walked into the street. He saw rain falling. There was no taxicab in sight along the street. From the west an orange palpitation flooded this darker way. Steam from a clamorous drill blew north about the white tower of the Times building. Wet cabs jerked north and south along the gleam of rails. The higher lights were gone. The rain dropped from an upper purple and rapped the crown of his hat as Mark strolled to the corner. Some one began to talk to him before he reached Broadway. Mark glanced at this beggar carelessly and paused to dig in a pocket for change. The shivering voice continued.

“... ain’t like I’d come bothering you before. I ain’t that kind. But you’ve got comp’nies on the road and honest, Walling, I’m as good as ever I was. You’ve mebbe heard that I’m taking dope. Not so. Some of that bunch at Bill Loeffler’s office have been puttin’ that out. Honest--”

Three white capped young sailors blundered past, all laughing, and jarred the shadowy body away from Mark. The man came shuffling back and clung to Mark’s sleeve, his face lavender in the rainy light above a shapeless overcoat. He whispered on, “Honest, some of the things that bunch at Loeffler’s place say about you and Carlson! But I ain’t takin’ nothing, Walling. Had a run of bad luck. I’m on the rocks. But you’ve seen me run a show. You know I can handle a comp’ny--”

“The light’s so bad,” said Mark, “and your collar--I’m not just sure who--”

The man gave a whimpering laugh. “Oh, I thought you was actin’ kind of chilly to an old pal. I’m Jim Rothenstein. You know? I was stage manager for Carlson back when you was playin’ the kid in Nicoline. You know. I gave you your job. Cora Boyle she brought you in to me and asked if there wasn’t a little part--Honest, I ain’t takin’ dope. That bunch--”

Mark gulped, “Of course you’re not.” Some harsh drug escaped from the man’s rags. This was nightmare. Mark found a bill and held it out, backing from the shadow. “Come round to my office some day and I’ll see what--”

A hansom rolled to the curb and the driver raised his whip. Mark ran to shelter, crying his address. The grey horse moved toward Broadway. Mark shoved up the trap and shouted to the driver, “No! Go up Fifth Avenue!”

IV

Penalties

Cora Boyle played “Red Winter” in London for two years. She began her run in May of 1908 with a popular English male star as her hero. He presently retired from the company and Cosmo Rand replaced him. Olive Ilden wrote an opinion to Mark from her new house in Chelsea: “It seems to me that your one time wife is a competent second rate actress. She--or someone near her--must have intelligence. She has perfectly applied our musical comedy manner to melodrama. She is languid and rude to the audience and is enormously, successful, naturally. Ambrose Russell is painting her. If you knew London you would understand that to have Ambrose Russell paint one implies entire success. He alternates Gaiety girls and Duchesses and has acquired a trick of wonderful vulgarity. I met Miss Boyle at his studio on Sunday. We talked about you and she rather gushed. Her infantile husband stood by and said Rawther at intervals like an automatic figure on a clock. A pretty thing.... Of course I prefer London to Winchester. Ecclesiastical society is only amusing in Trollope. My husband got our house from a retired Admiral and it has a garden. I have fallen in love with him--my husband, not the Admiral. He has written a book of Naval tales on the sly and to my horror they are quite good. Having scorned him as a mere gentleman all these years it upsets me to have to consider him as an artist. I hear from Ian Gail that your plays all make quantities of money because they are utter rubbish in lovely settings and that your house is an upholsterer’s paradise. Very bad for the children who are probably spoiled beyond hope or help.”

Mark wrote four pages of denial and received: “Nonsense! Of course you do not have courtesans to lunch but leading ladies come and swoon on your drawing room floor and the children are pointed out in your Central Park as Mark Walling’s brats. Your parasites fawn on them. Their world is made up of expensive motors, sweets and an adoring idiot as God. The little boy reads theatrical reviews over his porridge and the little girl probably does not know that she is a mammal and liable to death, spanking or lessons. They live in a treacle well.... Your one time wife has taken a house near me and her pictures, eating breakfast in bed with a Pom on the pillow, adorn the Sketch. I danced with her husband last night.”

Cora Boyle’s photographs in the London Weeklies made old Carlson sneer. He lounged in Mark’s library and derided: “A fine figger and a pair of black eyes. Actress? Sure. She makes pictures of herself. And what the hell else do folks want, huh? Just that. They want pictures. You say they want fine scenery and new ideas about lights and all? Bosh, son! They want to see a good lookin’ gal in good clothes--and not much clothes--with all the lights in the house jammed on her. Act? Make ’em cry a little and they think it’s actin’. Margot’ll be the boss actress of the United States when she’s twenty--Come here, Maggie, and tell me how old you are.”

“Seven and a half,” said Margot, “and I don’t want to be an actress.”

“Huh. Why not?”

“Aunt Sadie says actresses aren’t nice,” Margot informed him.

Carlson wrinkled his yellow face and chuckled out, “Ask Mark what he thinks of ’em, sister.”

She turned her eyes up to Mark gravely and smiled. She was unlike her father, most like her mother. Mark bent and lifted her in the air, kissed her bare knees and put her hair aside from the little ears, faintly red, delightfully chilled for his mouth from a walk in the Park. She said, on his shoulder, “Oo, that’s a new stickpin, papa!”

“Diamonds get ’em all,” Carlson nodded.

“It’s a sapphire,” said Mark.

“Nice,” Margot approved and Mark felt glorified. Children were certainly a relief after the arid nonchalance of women who took money, jewels or good rôles and asked for more donations over the house telephone. Margot played with the sapphire square a moment and then scrambled down from Mark’s shoulder to his knee where she sat admiring him while he wrote checks. He smiled at her now and then, let her blot signatures and kissed her hands when she did so.

“You’d spoil a trick elephant,” Carlson muttered, “Ain’t Gurdy old enough to go to school?”

“He started in at Doctor Cary’s last week. They’ve got him learning Latin and French, right off.”

“What’s Doctor Cary’s?”

“It’s a school in Sixtieth Street.”

“Hump,” said Carlson, “Private School? Well, you’re right. Public schools teach hogwash. They got to. They teach hogs. But why didn’t you send him to one these schools out of town while you were at it? Get him out of New York.”

“My G--glory,” Mark cried, “He’s only nine!”

Margot corrected, “Ten, papa. He was ten in May.” Then she told Carlson, “Papa’d just die if Gurdy went away to school. He told Miss Converse.” She slid from his knee and curtsied to Carlson with, “I must take my French lesson, now. So, good afternoon.” She was gone out of the room before Mark could kiss her again. She was always within reach of kisses and her warmth, curled on his lap was something consolatory when he did send Gurdy away to Saint Andrew’s School in September 1910. Villay, his broker, and his lawyer advised the step. Olive Ilden wrote to him: “I am glad you have done the right thing. God knows I am no cryer up of the Public School System. But a Public School (I forget what you call private kennels for rich cubs in the States) is the only thing for the boy, in your situation. Ian Gail tells me that Gurdy is rather clever. I can imagine nothing worse than to be the son by adoption of a theatrical manager and a day scholar at a small New York school. But I know how miserable you are. Every one has sentimental accretions. I dislike seeing old women run down by motors, myself. No, I know how badly you feel, just now. But these be the fair rewards of them that love, you know? My own son is, of course, as the archangels. I hear through his Housemaster at Harrow that he smokes cigarettes and bets on all the races.”

Mark tried to take Gurdy’s absence with a fine philosophy. His broker and his lawyer assured him that Saint Andrew’s was the best school in the country. But the red, Georgian buildings spread on the New England meadow and the impersonal stateliness of the lean Headmaster seemed a cold nest for Gurdy. He missed the boy with a dry and aching pain that wasn’t curable by work on five new plays, Margot’s plump warmth on his knee or contrived, brief intoxication. All his usual enchantments failed. He wore out the phonograph plates of the Danse Macabre and the Peer Gynt “Sunrise.” He worried wretchedly and the disasters of October and November hardly balanced his interior trouble. Two, the more expensive two of the five Carlson and Walling productions failed. Carlson cheerfully indicated the shrinkage of applicants for jobs, hopeful playwrights and performers in the office above the 45th Street Theatre. Mark regretted twenty thousand dollars spent for shares in the Terriss Pictograph Company. Yet young Terriss was a keen fellow and Carlson thought something might come of motion pictures after a while. His friends sighed about Mark that the “show business was a gamble” and on visits to the farm Mark tried to be gay. A Military Academy had been built in Fayettesville on a stony field owned by Eddie Bernamer, the only heritage from Bernamer’s Norwegian father. Gurdy’s brothers were transferred to this polished school and Mark was soothed, in thinking that he’d made his own people grandees. He wished that he could ape the composure of the Bernamers and said so on a visit near Christmas time.

“But, great Cæsar,” Bernamer blinked, kicking balled snow from a boot-heel, “this Saint Andrew’s is a good school ain’t it, even if it is up by Boston? The buildin’s are fire proof, ain’t they? Gurdy can’t git out at night and raise Ned? Then what’s got into you?”

“Oh, but--my God, Eddie!... I miss him.”

“You’re a fool,” said his brother-in-law, staring at Mark, “You’re doin’ the right thing by the boy. You always do the right thing--like you done it by us. Sadie and me’ve got seven kids and I love ’em all.... They got to grow up. Stop bein’ a fool.... You don’t look well. Thin’s a rail. Business bad?”

“We lost about forty-five thousand in two months.”

“That countin’ in the thousand you gave Sadie for her birthday?”

“No--Lord, no!”

Bernamer looked about the increased, wide farm and the tin roofed garage where Mark’s blue motor stood pompous beside the cheap family machine. He drawled, “Well, you’ve sunk about twenty-five thousand right here, bud. You let up on us. Save your money and set up that theatre of your own you want so. And I’m makin’ some money on the side.”

“How?”

The farmer grinned.

“That no good Healy boy--Margot’s mamma’s cousin, come soft soapin’ round for a loan last summer. He and another feller have a kind of music hall place in Trenton. A couple of girls that sing and one of those movin’ picsher machines. They wanted five hundred to put in more chairs. I fixed it I’d get a tenth the profit and they’ve been sendin’ me twenty-five and thirty dollars a week ever since--and prob’ly cheatin’ the eye teeth out of me. Dunno what folks go to the place for--but they do.”

“Funny,” said Mark.

A bugle blew in the grey bulk of the Military Academy. Boys came threading out across the flat snow between ice girt tree trunks. A triple rank formed below the quivering height of the flagpole where the wind afflicted the banner. The minute shimmer of brass on the blue uniforms thrilled Mark. The flag rippled down in folds of a momentary beauty. He sighed and turned back to the pink papered living room where Gurdy’s small, fat legged sisters were clotted around Margot’s rosy velvet on a leather lounge. Old Walling smoked a sickening cheroot and smiled at all this prettiness. Margot’s black hair was curled expansively by the damp air. She sat regally, telling her country cousins of Mastin’s shop where Mark bought her clothes. She kissed every one good-bye when Mark’s driver steered the car to the door and told Eddie Bernamer how well his furred moleskin jacket suited him. In the limousine she stretched her bright pumps on the footwarmer beside Mark’s feet and said, “Oh, you’ve some colour, now, papa!”

“Have I? Cold air. D’you know you say na-ow and ca-ow, daughter, just like you lived on the farm the year ’round?”

Margot gave her queer, chiming chuckle which was like muffled Chinese bells. “Do I?”

“Pure New Jersey, honey. I used to. Mrs. Le Moyne used to guy me about it when I was a kid.”

“Miss Converse says ‘guy’ is slang,” Margot murmured.

“So it is, sister. We ought to go to England some summer pretty soon and let Miss Converse visit her folks.”

“I’d love to.... I’ve never been abroad,” she said, gravely stating it as though Mark mightn’t know, “And every one goes abroad, don’t they?”

“And what would you do abroad?”

She considered one pump and fretted the silver buckle with the other heel. “I’d see people, papa.”

“What people, sis?”

“Oh,” she said, “every one!”

It set him thinking that she lived pent in his house with her stiff, alien governess. She was infinitely safe, so, but she might be bored; he recalled hot and stagnant evenings on the farm when his mind had floated free of the porch steps and his father’s drawl into a paradise of black haired nymphs and illustrious warriors dressed from the engravings of the Centennial Shakespeare. Perhaps she should go to school? He consulted the governess, was surprised by her agreement, began to ask questions about schools for small girls.

“Miss Thorne’s,” said his broker, Villay, “She’ll really be taught something there.... Miss Thorne was my wife’s governess. I’ll see if I can manage....”

“Manage what?”

The broker clicked his cigarette case open, shut it and laughed, “You know what I mean, Walling.”

“No, I don’t.”

“It was one thing getting Gurdy into Saint Andrew’s. The Headmaster’s a broad minded man.... My dear boy, you’re Walling--Walling, of Carlson and Walling and you used to be a matinée idol.... I don’t like hurting your feelings.”

“You mean you’ll have to go down on your knees to this Miss Thorne to get her to take Margot?”

The broker said, “Not exactly down on my knees, Walling. I’ll have it managed. The school’s a corporation and my wife owns some stock.” Mark groaned and was driven uptown thinking sourly of New York. Things like this made Socialists, he fancied, and looked with sympathy at an orator on a box in Union Square. But Gurdy was arriving by the five o’clock train at the Grand Central Station and the lush swirl of the crowd on Fifth Avenue cured Mark’s spleen. Snow fluttered in planes of brief opal from the depth of assorted cornices above the exciting lights. A scarlet car crossed his at Thirty Fourth Street and bore a rigid, revealed woman in emerald velvet, like a figure of pride in a luminous shell. Her machine moved with his up the slope. Mark examined her happily. She chewed gum with the least movement of her white and vermilion cheeks. He despised her and felt strong against the pyramidal society in which Walling, of Carlson and Walling, was disdained. A cocktail in the Manhattan bar helped. The yellow place was full of undergraduates bustling away from Harvard and Yale. The consciousness of dull trim boots and the black, perpetual decency of his dress raised Mark high out of this herd. At least he knew better than to smoke cigarettes with gold tips and the oblique, racy colours of neckties had no meaning for him beyond gaudiness. He strolled to the clapboards and icy labyrinthine bewilderment of the station, found the right gate and beheld uncountable ladies gathered together with children in leather gaiters, chauffeurs at attention smoking furtively. Here, he knew, was good breeding collected to take charge of its sons. The cocktail struggled for a moment with cold air. Mark retired to the rough wooden wall and watched this crowd. The mingling voices never reached plangency. The small girls and boys stirred like low flowers in a field of dark, human stalks. Colours, this winter, were sombre. The women walked with restraint, with tiny gestures that revealed nothing, with smiles to each other that meant nothing. He had a feeling of deft performance and a young fellow at the wall beside Mark chuckled, lighting a cigarette.

“A lot of rich dames waitin’ for their kids from some goddam school up in Boston, see?”

Mark nodded. The young fellow gave the grouped women another stare and crossed the tight knees of his sailor’s breeches. The nostrils of his shapely, short nose shook a trifle. He tilted his flat cap further over an ear and winked comradely at Mark, “Wonder who the kids’ fathers are, huh? A lot of rich dames....” He spat and added, “Well, you can’t blame ’em so much. Their husban’s are all keepin’ these chorus girls. But it’s too much money, that’s what. If they’d got to work some and cook an’ all they wouldn’t have time for this society stuff. It’s too much money. If they’d got to cook their meals they wouldn’t have time for carryin’ on with all these artists an’ actors an’ things--” He broke off to snap at a girl who came hurrying from a telephone booth, “Say, what in hell? Makin’ another date?”

“Honest, I was just phonin’ mamma,” the girl said.

“You took a time!--Phonin’ her what?” He scowled, dominating the girl, “Huh?”

The girl argued, “I’d got to tell her sump’n, ain’t I, Jimmy? I told her I was goin’ to a show with a gerl fren’--”

“Some friend,” said the sailor, laughed at himself and tramped off with his girl under an arm. The girl’s cheap suit of beryl cloth shook out a scent of cinnamon. Mark sighed; she was young and pretty and shouldn’t lie to her mother about men. But perhaps her mother was bad tempered, illiberal. Perhaps the flat was crowded with a preposterous family and exuded this slim thing often, hoping a fragment of pleasure. A man couldn’t be critical. Mark went to meet Gurdy and immediately forgot all discomforts in seeing that the boy had grown an inch, that the lashes about his dark blue eyes were blackening, in hearing him admit that he was glad to be at home again.

Gurdy’s schoolmates had sisters at Miss Thorne’s, it seemed, and Mark waited, fretting, through the Christmas holidays until his broker wrote that Miss Thorne would be pleased to have Margot as a pupil. Miss Converse, the governess, asked Mark bluntly how he had managed this matter.

“You Americans are extraordinary,” she said, “You’re so--so essentially undemocratic. It’s shocking. But we must get Margot some decent frocks directly.”

The bill for Margot’s massed Christmas clothes lay on his desk. Mark started, protesting, “But--”

“I’ve been meaning to talk of this for some time,” said the governess.

“Her clothes?”

“Her clothes.--My people were quite rich, you know, and I had things from Paris but really--O, really, Mr. Walling, you mustn’t let her have every pretty frock she sees! I must say you’ve more taste than most women--quite remarkable. But what will there be left for the child when she comes out?”

He wanted to answer that no frock devised of man could make Miss Converse other than a bulky, angular female but gave his meek consent to authority. He resented the dull serges and linens of Margot’s school dress and Sunday became precious because he saw her in all glory, flounced in rose and sapphire. She was a miracle; she deserved brilliancies of toned silk to set off the pale brown of her skin, the crisp thickness of her hair. But in June on the _Cedric_ he heard one woman say to another, “Positively indecent. Like a doll,” when he walked the decks with Margot and the other woman’s, “But she’s quite lovely,” didn’t assuage that tart summary of Margot’s costume. An elderly actress told him, “My dear boy, you mustn’t overdo the child’s clothes,” and a fat lady from Detroit came gurgling to ask where he bought things for Margot. He knew this creature to be the wife of a motor king and looked down at her thoughtfully.

“I suppose you have daughters, yourself?”