Читать книгу Presenting Lily Mars - Booth Tarkington - Страница 5

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If the unhappy young playwright in the rocking-chair could have spoken his mind he would have said, “For God’s sake, no!” and he had not infrequently heard managers and stage directors speak with that much frankness; but he had been brought up to be a gentleman, couldn’t get over it, and what he whispered was, “Interesting!”

“It’s an interpretive dance I’ve created, myself,” Lily explained. “Of course there isn’t room for it here; but I can give you an idea of the movements. It’s the joy of mankind in the springtime throughout all the ages. It begins with the savages and how they expressed themselves about the coming of the flowers and birds and bees, and then takes up how the nuns and monks hailed the going of winter in the middle ages, and then there’s the English peasants’ Maypole—folk-dancing, you know—then part of a minuet to show how people felt about it in Colonial times, and then just a touch of Cake Walk for modern expression, and it ends with my conception of the spring dancing of the future. I’ll have to hum the accompaniment.”

He produced a sound. “Interesting.”

She looked upward mystically, extended her arms wide, then slowly brought her small hands together with a little slap. She did this several times, chanting, “Tum! Tum! Tum! Bom! Bom! Bom!” She glanced down at him and explained confidentially, “Tom-toms, you know.” Then she hummed hoarsely, intending savage rhythms, and began to dance—principally with her shoulders.

She left in him no doubt of their graceful flexibility; but presently let them droop, and, to suggest a mediæval piety, made the sign of the cross upon her breast and forehead, hummed “Beulah Land” solemnly, and, with palms together prayerfully before her, walked a few slow steps forward and back several times. Then, with a startling generosity, she picked up her yellow satin skirt, held it high and began to skip round and round Gilbert’s rocking-chair, singing in a joyous sweet voice “Ye lads and lassies on the green”;—the incredulous young man could not but conclude that he represented a Maypole. After that, she trod minuetish measures recognizably, did Cake Walk steps flamboyantly, singing “Dinah, de moon am shinin’ ”; then, looking rapt, stood with her feet together and made fantastic gestures with her arms, the dancing of the future presumably. Finally, blushing resplendently but with downcast eyes, she sank to the floor in a deep curtsey close before the visitor.

“Bravo! Bravo, Lily!” Mrs. Mars cried tremulously from her sofa, and began to clap her fragile white hands.

Lily sprang up from the curtsey, rushed to her, caught the applauding hands and held them. “Muddie! Muddie, you mustn’t! You mustn’t jar! You mustn’t——”

“I just couldn’t help it! You were magnificent, Lily!” The mother appealed to Gilbert pleadingly. “Wasn’t she magnificent, Owen? You’ll let me call you Owen because I knew you when you were a little boy? Really and truly don’t you think she was magnificent?”

“Ah——” he began; but was spared a dishonest response. The front door was opened without prelude and a rather shabby boy of about eighteen walked brusquely into the room. A commonplace of lower-middle origin he was, in the instant classifying of the playwright, who recorded him as of the type “high school boy” and was somewhat astonished to see so bitter a sternness upon so youthful a brow. Lily was not pleased with the interruption.

“I can’t bother with you now, Charlie,” she said coldly. “Mr. Gilbert, this is Mr. Charlie Bright. We’re busy, Charlie!”

Young Mr. Bright remained where he was, in the centre of the room, looked fiercely from her to the surprised caller and then with increased anger back at her. “I see you are!” he said in a husky voice. “I know what kind of business it is, too! My mother told me it was going to happen, after she was here to see your mother yesterday. Mrs. Mars, are you going to let this thing go on? Are you going to lie there calmly and let your daughter’s life get wrecked the way it’s going to be if she——”

“You go straight out of that door!” Lily said in a low voice. “Go straight out of that door!”

“I won’t! I won’t go out of that door or any other door till I’ve done my duty. Do you s’pose I don’t know who this man is and what he’s here for?”

“You go straight out of that——”

“I won’t!” The boy turned rudely upon Gilbert. “You see here! You can’t come here and take this girl away into all that life of false glitter and dissipation without having a counting with me first! She’s just the same as engaged to be married to me——”

“What!” Lily shouted out a contemptuous laughter. “Of all the crazy insinuations! Why, you ought to be taken straight to the insane asylum!” She stopped laughing and appealed vehemently to her mother. “Mother, tell Mr. Gilbert you know it’s absolutely and utterly false! Tell Mr. Gilbert I never——”

“You did!” Charlie Bright interrupted. “You just as good as did! I’ve considered myself the same as engaged to you ever since what you said when we were watching the fireworks Fourth o’ July night. If you think I’m going to stand idly by and see this man lure you into the life of the stage, where your whole personality would be pulled down to a mere puppet for everybody that could pay fifty cents for a ticket to laugh and sneer at——”

“March straight out!” Lily cried. “You little idiot, how dare you presume to interfere in my——”

“You call it interference from—from the man you’re engaged to?”

“I’m no more engaged to you than I am to the man in the moon or to——”

“Or to F. Munson Lang?” the boy asked, with the air of one who delivers the stroke that kills. “How about F. Munson Lang? Doesn’t he kind of think he’s engaged to you, too, Lily, if he could only get a divorce from his wife and three children?”

“You——” Lily’s breast heaved with a tumultuous breathing. She pointed imperiously at the door. “You slanderer, associating my name with a married man’s! You see that door?”

“Me?” the boy cried. “Didn’t you tell me yourself Mrs. F. Munson Lang was so jealous of you you were scared of her? Look at the way you behave! Didn’t you get about half the men in our class mashed on you, all at the same time? You know you did! Look what you did to me and Minnie Bush. You knew Min and I were practic’ly engaged; but you went ahead and got me mashed on you, the way you do and——”

“I didn’t! Minnie Bush is my best friend and I tried my best to keep you loyal to her. I——”

“You did?” young Charlie interrupted, with laughter as biting as he knew how to make it. “Min told my sister Fanny I’ve practic’ly ruined her life because how could she ever look at anybody else after me? She and everybody else knows it’s all on account of you! Then here now you just give us all the la-de-da because this man wants to put you on the stage, with all its tinsel and immorality, and you expect me to stand idly by with folded hands and——”

“You’re wrong!” Lily drew herself up grandly, threw back her head and spoke in a voice genuinely indignant yet of such a richness that the annoyed Gilbert suspected her of enjoying herself; indeed he was almost certain she was glad to make him a spectator of this scene that he felt might well have been seriously mortifying to her. “You’re wrong! I expect you to march out of that door!” Again she pointed to it regally. “Go!”

Charlie remained. “Everybody knows you always been stage-struck!” he said, and added passionately, “Just look at you now! I didn’t think I’d ever see you as low in the scale as this—exposing yourself dressed like that to an utter stranger, while he sits here and figures out just how many dollars and cents he’s going to make out of selling your looks on the stage to——”

The invalid on the sofa contrived to interrupt him. “That will do, Charlie,” she said quietly. “Your mother’s coming in this evening and I’ll tell her that when you’ve apologized to Lily and asked her to apologize for you to Mr. Gilbert I’ll think whether it’s best for me ever to allow you to come here again. You can’t stay now.”

“I can’t? Why, look here, Mrs. Mars——”

“No. That’s all, Charlie.”

The boy’s excitement departed out of him; his chest deflated and his shoulders drooped in gloom. “Oh—Gee,” he murmured in lamentable anticlimax, and turned toward the door. He had not reached it when it was opened and a thin and pallid blonde girl a little older than Lily came in.

Gilbert perceived that she was the older sister, the one who somehow meagrely supported the three of them by working at Vance’s. She was like Lily as a withering rosebud is like a fresh one. Lily was almost violently vivid; already Gilbert felt he had never in his life met anyone of such vividness, and this quality, which he knew not how otherwise to express, was lacking in the sister, as was Lily’s color, her delicate shapeliness and a look she had of being incomparably more alive than other people. Clara Mars, not yet twenty-one, seemed dried, lifeless and hard driven; her pallor, moreover, as she came into the room, was noticeable and she walked limpingly.

At sight of her, the invalid and Lily uttered little outcries of surprise and solicitude; Lily also, scrupulous upon etiquette, pronounced her sister’s name and Gilbert’s in a presentation that covered young Mr. Bright’s muttering, inglorious withdrawal from the house. “Nothing to worry about; I’m not dismissed,” Clara explained, as she went lamely to the inner door of the room. “They just let me off for the rest of the afternoon; that’s all. I’m all right.”

“You didn’t——” Mrs. Mars hesitated pathetically. “You didn’t—have another fainting spell from standing so many hours?”

“No; not quite,” Clara said wanly. “I don’t know why it takes me so long to get used to it. There are girls down there that haven’t been at it nearly as long as I have and they can stand all day without even seeming tired. I don’t think it happens to me as often as it used to, Mother. Please sit down again, Mr. Gilbert. I guess—I guess if you’ll excuse me perhaps I’d better go and lie down.” She gave her sister an affectionate smile and forestalled Lily’s impulsive movement to accompany her. “No, I don’t need anything, Lily; I’ll be perfectly all right in an hour or two. I know Mr. Gilbert’s already seen what a wonderful actress you are; but I wish I could tell him what a darling sister you are!”

“Yes, and daughter,” Mrs. Mars murmured, as Clara shut the door. The mother lay with eyes closed—closed tragically, it seemed to Gilbert—while Clara could be heard slowly ascending the uncarpeted stairway, coughing hard as she went. “They’re both wonderful daughters to me, Owen. I’ve had to let them sacrifice their youth to me. I haven’t seemed to have any choice but just to lie here and see their beautiful young lives wasted on me.”

“Wasted!” Lily, with a lovely movement, flung herself upon one knee beside the sofa and clasped one of her mother’s hands in both of hers. “Ah, you precious Muddie, do you think anything’s wasted if it could be the least use in the world to you?”

Mrs. Mars’s eyes opened, releasing great crystal drops upon her cheeks. “You see, Owen?” she asked. “You see what Lily’s genius means to us? You see what our hopes in it must be?”

He saw indeed, and, in despair of what such wild hopes must lead to, again inwardly reproached his mother for letting him in for such an afternoon. Lily Mars was pretty; she was even what people call “striking” and he recognized the fact that she had exquisite and even beautiful moments—but, as a professional actress, “impossible.” That was the only word he found for her, though no word at all was needed, because even if she had been an untrained young Bernhardt or Terry or Marlowe he had no power to put her upon the stage. More, he knew what George Hurley would say to him—or, rather, roar at him—in response to any proposal for an exhibition of aspiring “local talent” or even in response to a suggestion that a young lady desirous of going on the stage be presented for brief inspection and words of counsel. Hurley was the junior partner in the firm of Adler and Company and would come with the “Skylark” people to rehearse “Catalpa House” the next week; he was the most uneven-tempered man in the world, the busiest, ruinously eloquent in his furies and always furious with anything that wasted a moment of his time. If he could by any means be brought to let Lily waste a moment of it he would inevitably destroy the hope that sustained these piteous women. “You learn to cook!” he would say, red-faced with indignation. “You learn to sew! You stay home and wash dishes! Get married!”

Gilbert, wrung with sympathy for Mrs. Mars and for the wan daughter, Clara, felt that there was nothing for it but to let them live on in their impossible hope. He had not the same feeling for Lily that he had for them; she roused in him not dislike at all, but a sense of protest—perhaps because he already felt her as a burden upon him and a little no doubt because of his continued suspicion that she was in some hidden way enjoying herself still, even when she gently and tenderly wiped her mother’s cheeks with a handkerchief and then hurriedly brushed the handkerchief over her own eyes.

“Dear Mrs. Mars,” he said, rising, “I’ll do everything on earth I can, though I warn you not to count too much on my being able to accomplish what I’m afraid you think I could if I wished to. I assure you I do wish to give your daughter her opportunity.”

But to his dismay Lily jumped up, radiant, and, what was worse, he saw that the mother was instantly radiant, too. “Oh, you heavenly angel!” Lily cried. “You lamb!” She seized his hands. “Oh, after all this long, long waiting and struggle—to get a hearing and to have it turn out like this!” She whirled from him to her mother. “Muddie! Muddie! Muddie! Can you believe it’s actually happened at last? Isn’t he an angel of a man, Muddie, to do this for me when he’s only heard me once?”

“I think he is,” Mrs. Mars said. “Owen, I know we owe it to the impression Lily’s talent has made on you; but if you could know what gratitude——”

“No, no!” he protested unhappily. “I’m afraid you don’t understand at all. You’re mistaking the deed for the will. I——”

“And we’ll just go on mistaking it!” Lily assured him, beaming upon him. She stepped close to him. “Oh, you shower golden happiness upon me! This is the most thrilling moment in my whole life—to think I’ve won your belief in my acting so instantly! I have the strangest, divinest feeling that this is the beginning of a great friendship—or something!” She laughed excitedly. “Oh, do you know, before you came this afternoon I was perfectly horribly frightened of you! I was! Since the world began, I don’t believe any person was so afraid of what some other person would think of them. I thought at the best maybe you’d say I had a little something that promised rather well but was terribly untrained and advise me to go to a dramatic school for years and years before you’d feel like giving me an actual start. Oh, I didn’t dream what you’d be like, and, oh, oh, oh, I never possibly could have dreamed you’d really commit yourself to me like this!”

Helplessly the young man made no effort to deny that he was committed to her. With envy he thought of old Nelson sitting in the free air and sunlight outside; for escape from this ugly little brown room and its confusions seemed the only desirable thing in the world. Moreover, a part of Gilbert’s own confusion of mind rose from a curious new impression of Lily Mars, as she stood close to him, chattering out her raptures. Her eyes were warmly, lustrously and gratefully uplifted to his; she almost touched him and seemed to wish to touch him. She looked, in fact, as though she were in love with him; she gave him the incredible impression that she was suddenly falling in love with him. Her very voice seemed almost to say, “I love you!” A personal, mutual consciousness of possibly illimitable consequences seemed to establish itself between them; she seemed somehow to make it almost witless of him not to exclaim to himself, “Why, this girl loves me!”

He murmured feeble reassurances and farewells to Mrs. Mars, touched her hand in departure and found that Lily was accompanying him outdoors. Incongruous and more in bad taste than ever in the unmitigating sunshine, she was nevertheless all the more vivid and only gained color from the strong light. She put a hand softly upon his arm to retard his crossing of the brief space of scrubby front yard and prattled to him confidentially in a sweet, lowered voice. “You don’t mind that crazy little Charlie Bright and what he said? I mean particularly what he said about that silly old Mr. F. Munson Lang. They’re both too ridiculous to speak of! You won’t think it possible for me to have ever done anything except try as decently as I could to stop them from being so silly? I really couldn’t stand it to have you believe I’d been as foolish as he tried to make you think I was—and about such terribly ordinary men! Ah, truly, truly, all I’ve cared about throughout all these years has been the stage—the stage! You see it’s my very life, don’t you? You could almost tell that just by looking at me, couldn’t you? Couldn’t you?”

“Well, I—I suppose I——”

“Of course you could! The idea of that goose’s saying I took him away from Minnie Bush! Minnie’s a lovely girl, my most intimate friend and cares almost as much for the stage as I do. We’ve spent whole days reciting to each other and talking about how if I ever got to be a star I’d put her in my company and all that. I’ll never speak to him again—as if I’d be flirting with mere high school boys and that silly old married F. Munson Lang! I know what I possess to give to any man who’d win me wholly; but I’ve put all that away until my dream comes true, my lifelong dream of being on the stage. You understand me! I know you do—I saw it in your eyes the instant I came into the room. I knew you were the man who brought me my great adventure. Do you see what it makes me feel about you?” She laughed emotionally. “To express it, would you let me lift you into your carriage?”

He laughed, too, but with no spontaneity. “I’m afraid you won’t feel that way after I’ve proved of no benefit to you.”

“You couldn’t make me doubt you—now,” she said, and, as he stepped through the gateway, seemed to have an afterthought. “Wait! Give me just one moment more. You wouldn’t mind if you knew how much I’ll treasure the memory of it. I’ve just thought——” She hesitated, frowning as in some perplexity. “I don’t suppose—I mean, isn’t something like this done sometimes with plays? If you thought—now after you’ve seen what I can do—if you thought one of the women’s parts could be changed a little to get some of that into it—or perhaps if a new part could be written in, with a good deal of that in it—I mean of course if it wouldn’t be any trouble. But isn’t something of that sort done sometimes with plays?”

He had the impulse to tell her, even somewhat vindictively, that it wasn’t done for girls just out of high school who recited; but she was looking at him with her remarkable eyes wistfully and in a bright confidence he could not shatter. Against his will, he said, “Sometimes”, smiled more benevolently than he meant to; then got into his mother’s carriage and drove away in a low state of mind. He was uncomfortably aware that she stood at her gate, gazing after him, and just before he reached the next corner he turned his head and looked back. She was there, and immediately raised her right arm high, a farewell symbol of their understanding. He lifted his hat and was sharply annoyed with himself for looking back, the more-so because he knew she had fully expected him to look back.