Читать книгу Presenting Lily Mars - Booth Tarkington - Страница 4

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In the dusty little cross-street, far from Harrison Avenue, Gilbert stepped down from his mother’s carriage, said ruefully to the proud black driver, “I hope I’ll not keep you waiting long, Nelson”, crossed the uneven brick sidewalk and entered the gate of the grey picket fence. The “double frame” house, close before him, stood in a small yard of mangy patches of grass, and the twin half-glass front doors of the dwelling were within ten feet of the sidewalk. Between these doors there was nothing to choose; but he turned the brass handle set into the middle of the one to the right and evoked a metallic clatter from just within.

A woman’s voice a little tremulously called, “Please come in!”

There was neither vestibule nor hallway; he stepped straight into a brown room and saw first an invalid gentlewoman (so he defined her) lying upon a sofa beside the room’s one window. Her hair, carefully coiled high in an extinct fashion, was little less white than the pillow supporting her head; but her thin eyebrows were black over sunken bright eyes, and the pallid, fine face was one Du Maurier would have drawn, the caller fancied, for a dying great lady’s. To find such a face in the cheap ugliness of this room was to go beyond pathos and touch the grotesque, he thought. There was a repulsive little black fireplace, with paper flowers in two china vases on the mantel shelf, and Gilbert fastidiously suspected that the flowers, and the mantel shelf itself, were dusty.

“Mrs. Mars?” he began. “I’m——”

“You’re Owen Gilbert, of course,” the invalid said, with a perceptible eagerness. “I’m sure you couldn’t think I’ve forgotten you, and your mother’s been kind enough to say you remember me. Lily’ll be down right away. She saw you drive up through the window and ran upstairs to see if her nose was shiny, I’m afraid. The poor thing’s so terribly excited about your coming, and of course she’s temperamental and feels she’s got one of her off days and won’t be at her best. Naturally, with so much depending on it, she’s terribly afraid of the impression she’ll make on you. You’ll sit down, won’t you?”

Somewhat heartsick, he sat in a rocking-chair, facing Mrs. Mars. Her phrase “so much depending on it” dismayed him and conscientiously he felt he must enlighten her. “I’m afraid I can’t let you think that anything of importance could depend on me.”

“Ah, you mustn’t be modest!” she protested. “Of course we know all about the splendid career you’re having and——”

“My dear Mrs. Mars!” Gilbert said compassionately. “I’m not modest. I’m only explaining that though you can count on my help I haven’t the powers I’m afraid you imagine. A few playwrights much better established than I am select the casts for their plays and are sometimes able to put young people of talent on the stage; but I don’t possess that importance. I’ve had one fair success and two failures and——”

“Oh, but everybody knows the great Adler and Company are going to put on your new play; it’s been announced in our papers time and again.” Mrs. Mars evidently still thought him merely modest. “If there could just be a good part in it for Lily, or if that isn’t possible, because of course we realize she’s just a beginner, why, even a rather small one! Your dear mother said she was sure——”

“I’m afraid she did,” Gilbert said. “I’m afraid she’s always been given to overestimating an only son. For that matter, I’m afraid I’ve had to learn, myself, that a new playwright, next to a new actor, is generally treated as the most negligible person about a theatre. Compared to a stage-hand, he’s a nonentity. He’s pleased if the very doorman speaks to him with a little condescending familiarity.”

Mrs. Mars, unimpressed, laughed gently. “Your dear mother says you’ve always underrated yourself, and I can well believe her!” Abruptly serious, she looked at him with a fervid anxiety. “If there weren’t just the right part for Lily in this new play of yours, couldn’t a good one be written into it? I’ve read of such things being done, especially when some new genius is being discovered and——” She lifted a thin hand from the old white shawl that covered her; she touched her pallid lips admonishingly. “Sh! You mustn’t tell her I said this, because it was something she wanted to suggest to you, herself, and she thought she could do it better. She’s coming!”

Footsteps were heard upon an uncarpeted stairway, and Owen Gilbert’s low spirits sank lower as an inner door opened and Lily Mars came into the room.

He rose, giving her a quick glance from eyes usually accurate in their estimations of people. Even to his own hearing, his greeting sounded plaintive, for his first impression of her was not favorable, and something startlingly personal and demanding in her reciprocal first glance at him shot into him a premonition that she was going to be a serious nuisance to him. “A girl in bad taste” was his too sweeping first thought; then he added, “Rather unusual type of good looks, though—and going to use them on me her darnedest!”

Within a moment, adding more to his observation, he somewhat modified his feeling of protest. Her brilliant eyes, like her mother’s, were warm hazel under black eyebrows; her hair was the deep tan of an oak leaf in late autumn. Altogether, at second glance, her features were “really not uninteresting” he thought, and he immediately admitted that her figure had a suave young symmetry out of the common. Moreover, he had never found himself in the presence of any person more exquisitely possessed of the very peach-bloom of youth, and this bloom and the lovely figure, too, were almost flagrantly revealed by the bad taste; for what she wore was a directoire ball gown of old yellow satin easily guessed to be a recently made-over relic of Mrs. Mars’s better days. Worst of all, it had probably been made over hurriedly for this very encounter and for the ampler display of the aspirant’s shapeliness, and, to the somewhat frayed, misplaced elegance of the costume, there had been added some jingling cheap bracelets and a necklace of false pearls execrably oversized.

She gave his hand a hasty but feverish clasp; then hurried at once to her mother and began to make a tender little fuss over her, smoothing the pillow, Mrs. Mars’s cheeks and the adjacent air. “Muddie, Muddie, Muddie!” she said, and the peculiar quality of her voice had its effect upon the caller in spite of his perception that it was intended to have an effect upon him. It was a slender voice yet a rich one and of a noticeable elasticity; even in the three utterances of the pet name it played up and down over a dozen tones, rang bell-like upon some of them, trembled either touchingly or playfully upon others, then sank to a husky gentle sweetness barely audible. “Muddie’s been moving her head too much, to talk. Muddie knows she mustn’t, mustn’t!” She turned toward Gilbert almost tragically and flung out her slender pretty arms in a jingling gesture of appeal. “Ah, you tell her she mustn’t! Whenever she moves her head it’s likely to jar her spine, and she mustn’t, she mustn’t! We can’t do anything with her; she’s so reckless. If you’d tell her she must be careful I think she would!” But without waiting for a response she sank gracefully upon a stool beside the sofa and said cozily, “Now, let’s all sit down and talk things over.” She leaned back against her mother, crossed her knees with an elaboration that gave one of them to view and allowed it to remain there, then inquired, “What day does the company get here?”

“The company?” Gilbert said blankly, not at once comprehending. “The com——”

“Your company,” she explained indulgently and too flatteringly. “This ‘Skylark’ company that’s to begin rehearsing your play. What day will rehearsals commence?”

“Oh, that,” he murmured, and replied with some coldness, “Possibly next Sunday.”

“Five days!” She jumped up, smiling. “We have five days! What I’d like to do, I’d take your manuscript and learn whichever one of the women’s parts you’d want me to by heart and then I’d play it for you; but we can take that up later. Just now I want to show you——” She turned toward her mother. “Muddie, which’ll I do first? The balcony scene, don’t you think?” She took a book from a battered little Eastlake table, gave it to her mother and smiled radiantly upon Gilbert. “Don’t you adore the balcony scene? You probably know it by heart, yourself—I mean from Romeo and Juliet. Ah, if I ever get a chance to play Juliet! I mean in New York! Of course you think I’m perfectly crazy! Muddie, have you found the cue for me?”

Then, while Mrs. Mars read a dozen words from the book, her daughter advanced a dramatic step toward Gilbert, who sat helplessly in the rocking-chair before her; she clasped her hands against her cheek, looked upward tensely, became rigid in this attitude and began to speak in a high-pitched, wailing voice.

“O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?

Deny thy father and refuse thy name...”

She went on with the scene, changing the wailing voice to a startled one, then sinking it to caressive murmurs; altering her posture, too, almost constantly, and becoming so flutteringly gesticulative that the playwright shivered internally, thinking of what a stage director would say (if he could speak) to a performer so much too eloquently in motion. Obviously, she was graceful, knew it and knew, too, how every shifting glimmer of the old satin added another hint of the gracefulness beneath it. Gilbert had no doubt that every one of the multitude of movements had been practised before a mirror; but, for a theatre become as nearly gestureless as the new school of stage directors could make it, such a volubility of pantomimic accompaniment was a disqualification. Too much expression was worse than too little, and overstatement had almost been banished from the stage; understatement was now the fashion. She played the scene through to the bitter end (he thought an audience would have been bitter) and he said to himself that she was worse than he had expected. Then she stopped and looked at him, and for some reason he decided that she was just the least bit better than he had expected.

She was flushed with exertion; the color glowing in her cheeks became her, and he observed with a slightly increased interest that her eyes could be rather dazzling. “There!” she said. “That’s my Juliet!”

“I see,” the embarrassed young man returned. “Ah—I’m glad you’ve learned not to use the half-gestures of the amateur. That’s a very good sign. Nearly all amateurs begin gestures and then get too self-conscious to finish them; they just flop their arms a little way out from their sides and then give it up. It’s quite an advantage that you’re already beyond that phase. But perhaps—ah——”

Mrs. Mars intervened. “Amateurs! There’s never been the slightest amateurishness about Lily’s dramatic work—not from the time she first began to recite, when she was only five years old. She’s always used the most natural, expressive gestures I’ve ever seen. Dr. Gordon, our family physician, is a great lover of the stage—he hardly ever misses any play that comes to town—and he’s seen Mary Anderson’s Juliet and Julia Marlowe’s, and he declares he likes Lily’s better.” She laughed deprecatingly. “Of course he’s an old friend of the family and prejudiced, but that’s what he says, and he really does know the stage.”

“From A to Z!” Lily added. “There’ve been times when if it hadn’t been for Dr. Gordon I’d have given the whole thing up. Oh, yes, I get awfully down sometimes. If it hadn’t been for Dr. Gordon’s faith in me——” She painted the catastrophe with a gesture of falling hands, then was blithe. “What do you think I’d better show him next, Mother? Wait, I know! Lady Macbeth—the sleep-walking scene.”

“Or else ‘Roger and I’,” Mrs. Mars suggested, and explained eagerly to Gilbert, “I think ‘Roger and I’ and Lady Macbeth are almost the finest things she does, and they show her range so wonderfully, I think—such different kinds of emotion. Suppose you do ‘Roger and I’ first and then Lady Macbeth, Lily.”

Lily did “Roger and I” first and then she did Lady Macbeth. Gilbert, conscious all the time of the mother’s anxious gaze upon him, sat in pain, engaged in a continual struggle to prevent his emotional opinion of the performance from manifesting itself dreadfully upon his countenance. He had selfish unfilial thoughts reproachful of his mother for putting him in this impossible position—when he’d come home for change and rest! Lily’s “Roger and I” was pseudo-pathos straight out of a School of Elocution; but Lady Macbeth, ranted at him at close quarters in that depressing small room, was sheer nightmare.

“Ah—very nice,” he said in a sickly voice when she finished. “That is, I mean——” He stopped himself and repeated the two words in almost a whisper. “Very nice.”

The invalid upon the sofa pathetically mistook his vocal inadequacy for the hush of appreciation. “That was magnificent, Lily! There’s only one word for it—magnificent! You never did it better in your life!”

“No,” Lily said judicially. “I did it better that night at the Auxiliary Supper. Anyhow, I did ‘Roger and I’ better that night, Mother. I’m not at my best to-day and I know it, myself. I can always feel it. There are times when I absolutely know I’ve got it, and there are other times when I can hear myself missing little shades of meaning. Other people mightn’t realize it; but I know!” She shook her head prettily in gloom, then clasped her hands impulsively. “Oh, Mother! Now shall I show him my dance?”