Читать книгу Presenting Lily Mars - Booth Tarkington - Страница 6

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Driving homeward, he had an almost bodily sensation of having been pestered exhaustingly, and, at dinner that evening, he spoke of this feeling to his mother. He had not seen her after his call until they came to the table. “I went through it for you,” he said. “I must say your young friend knows how to put herself on a person’s hands! She’s got at least one temperamental qualification for the stage, too—an hour or so with her certainly takes it out of you!”

Mrs. Gilbert smiled at him approvingly across the lace cloth and “best silver” with which she honored this visit, even when she and her son dined alone together as they did to-night. “You were an angel to go there, Owen.”

“Not very,” he said with some dryness. “I went there instead of letting her come here because I thought I could get away when I wanted to—a mistake of mine because I wanted to get away all the time I was there.”

Mrs. Gilbert looked disturbed. “Oh, dear! Did you? Of course I understand what you mean by her taking it out of you. I’m afraid the poor child does, rather; but don’t you think it’s because all people of that abounding intense vitality do? Especially anybody with such great emotional volatility? They seem to feel everything so much more keenly than other people do, whether it’s joy or unhappiness or——”

“Or just egoism?” her son suggested. “How can you tell whether they feel things more or only express them more? She’s got that in common with quite a number of stage people of my acquaintance. They live by expressing feelings more eloquently than other people can, and when they’re not on the stage they naturally go on doing that. An inexpressive person might be feeling infinitely more.”

“Yes, but you did think she was expressive? You did see talent in her, didn’t you?”

“Talent!” he said, and groaned. “Heaven knows! Mother, if you knew the long hard road—the hundreds of tiny things and large things, the unending technical things an actor has to know before he can even begin to act! Why, just the mere knowing how to come into a scene, just to walk on the stage——”

“But dear me!” she interrupted. “You might as well say you’ve got to learn to swim without going near the water.”

“It’s true,” he returned despondently. “That’s just about it! I don’t mean there aren’t people who seem to have a natural instinct for the stage and appear to know all such things by intuition—at least, they seem to acquire ’em almost instantly——”

“But why couldn’t Lily Mars be one of those people, Owen? Are you sure she isn’t?”

“No, I’m not,” he admitted grudgingly. “I don’t know what she is. She ranted Lady Macbeth at me terribly; but I don’t know that she mightn’t have done better if somebody’d given her a few hints.”

“What sort of hints?”

“Not to do Lady Macbeth!” he said grimly. “Not constantly to use theatrical gestures. In a word, not to ‘act’ at all but to try to speak and move and look like a human being, even during the deadliest declamation!”

“But dear boy, why didn’t you tell her?”

“With her pathetic mother looking on who thinks she’s perfect—and the girl herself obviously convinced of being a genius and knowing more than anybody else in the world? Besides, what would have been the use? The trouble with your plan for her is that so far as her chance to get on the stage is concerned it doesn’t matter whether she’s the genius they all three think she is or just a stage-struck high school girl. Do you suppose George Hurley’d be willing to put her into the cast of a play when by lifting his little finger he can get any one of a hundred trained actresses, specialists for any kind of part he wants?”

“But good gracious, people do get on the stage!”

“Not through me! If I ask George Hurley——”

“Ah, but you will ask him!” the mother said quickly. “Owen, it’s just got to be accomplished somehow. You saw that poor dear broken woman on her sofa——”

“Yes, I saw her,” he returned, and shook his head pityingly. “I even saw the sister. She had to come home because she’d had some sort of fainting attack, standing on her noticeably small feet all day behind a counter, I suppose, and she seemed to have a pretty bad cough, too.”

“A pretty badly threatening one,” his mother said gravely. “Owen, I feel some sort of little protest or something in you against Lily, perhaps because she’s so buoyant and perhaps a little, too, because she’s not had any chance to cultivate much of what we think of as good taste. How could she? She was only a little girl when the family collapsed and she’s had to grow up in such meagre surroundings, naturally drifting among some pretty ordinary people, no doubt, on account of that—but it’s really touching to see such an attractive girl who loves life as she does giving up everything to take care of her mother. You see, one of them has to be near her all the time; Mrs. Mars told me Lily’d hardly been out of the house in months and months except a little in the evenings sometimes when Clara’s home. Aren’t actors rather well paid, even when they’re playing rather minor rôles?”

“Fairly—while they’re acting. Financially it’s the most hazardous of professions, Mother. When a play fails, they’re out of work, some of them for the rest of the year probably, and there are never any certainties. I understand what you want to know, though; a new girl engaged for a minor rôle might get thirty-five or fifty or seventy-five dollars a week, according to the size of the part and the manager’s idea of her value to him. She’d have to pay all her own expenses, of course, except railroad fares.”

Mrs. Gilbert looked pleased. “But that would be splendid! Seventy-five dollars a week perhaps, and I suppose they’re living on something like ten! I don’t believe any of the Vance clerks get over fifteen. Why, this would be—you see it would solve the whole terrible problem for them, Owen. They could have a servant and a nurse for Mrs. Mars, and Clara could get the long rest she needs so dreadfully, and oh, how that plucky devoted Lily deserves it, Owen! I don’t doubt you discovered some of her youthful foolishnesses and, as you say, a funny girlish kind of egoism; but you’ve got to respect anybody who makes the sacrifice she does and if you could bring a little glory into her life—stage glory—you’d do more than that, you’d save the three of them, and you must have seen, yourself, how desperately they need saving.”

“Oh, murder, yes!” he said impatiently. “But you seem to be as sure as they were that I can do it, Mother. See here; I’d take the chance of her damaging my play in a small part if it were left to me. I need a success pretty badly just now, to keep the ear of the managers; but I’d do it. You can’t see people in such a hole as that and not try to pull ’em out. I wish you’d tell me how to do it! There are just four women’s parts in ‘Catalpa House’, and Hurley’s got just the four actresses he wants for those parts; three of ’em are in the ‘Skylark’ company and he has the other one, Lena Hoyt, along with them and they’re already rehearsing ‘Catalpa House’ in their spare time on the road.”

“I understand,” Mrs. Gilbert said musingly. “But sometimes, Owen, in case a great talent is discovered——”

“Mother! Stop!” He held up a protesting hand. “You’re going to suggest that I could write a part into the play for Lily. Lily put that into her mother’s head and her mother put it into yours.” He laughed feebly. “I’d like to see George Hurley’s face if I proposed adding another salary to the list for the benefit of unknown genius and a suffering family, throwing the play out of balance, lengthening it when it’s already too long and——”

“Oh, dear!” Mrs. Gilbert said blankly. “Is it as terribly discouraging as that? But, Owen, you will do something for her?”

“Yes, I will. It won’t do her the slightest actual good and it’ll make George Hurley think I’m a sentimental idiot and more of a stage greenhorn than he already does think I am; but I’ll do it. I could get the President of the United States to stop a Cabinet meeting for the pleasure of hearing young Miss Mars recite a great deal more easily than I could get Hurley to listen to her. He simply won’t do it, Mother, and by putting such a possibility out of our minds we’ll save ourselves useless worry. The best thing and the only thing I can do is to help those three women to go on living in their poor impossible hope. Hurley’s a good-hearted man inside, though he does his best not to let it interfere with his business, and I think he’ll do this much for me if I ask it as a personal favor. He’ll let me just barely introduce her to him, perhaps, and he’ll take just long enough to tell her to quit thinking about the stage; but if I ask him beforehand, as I will, I think he’ll ‘take her name’. That means he’ll pretend to write down her name and address in a notebook, as if maybe some day he’d have a part that looked her style and send for her. He’ll never do any such thing of course and he wouldn’t even be able to read what he pretends to scribble in his notebook; but she and her mother and sister’ll have the chance to think that perhaps some time the part will turn up and he’ll send for her—and they could add that hope to their other ones——”

“But none of them will ever be fulfilled?”

“No.”

“You’re sure there isn’t any chance of his being persuaded to give her a hearing—to let her recite——”

“Murder, no! But, Mother, those poor things will have their hope to go on with and it’s just possible that in two or three years I’ll be in a position to have something to say about the casting of my own plays and could let her try a small part. It might be——”

“In two or three years,” his mother said sorrowfully. “If their hope lasts that long, and if Mrs. Mars and Clara do!” Then she spoke in a brisker voice. “Your great Mr. Hurley and the company reach here next Sunday, do they?”

“Yes; in the morning, at ten. They’ll go at it at half-past ten and rehearse all day probably.”

“Wouldn’t you like me to ask them to dinner that evening?”

He laughed, inquired if she was sure she wanted a whole theatrical company in her house at once; but remembered that this one wasn’t overwhelmingly numerous. “Let’s see. The seven ‘Skylark’ people and the ingénue who’s to play in ‘Catalpa House’, Lena Hoyt, and the two bit-part actors Hurley has with them to fill out the ‘Catalpa House’ cast of ten, and Hurley himself and Pinkney Monk, the stage director—that’s only twelve.” He assured her that they’d all be delighted with the opportunity to dine in a house as a change from hotels and road-town restaurants and suggested as a pleasant possibility that she might enjoy them, especially as several of them were well equipped to be the life of any party. “But don’t try to talk to George Hurley about young Miss Mars,” he added, in warning. “He’s had that sort of thing practised on him so often in the hope of getting somebody on the stage that he’s infuriated by the slightest sniff of it in his nostrils.”

“No, no,” Mrs. Gilbert protested. “I understand what you mean—that it would only antagonize him against her—and I haven’t the slightest idea of making a plea to him. It’s curious,” she added smilingly, as she rose, observing that he had finished his coffee, “to be the mother of a playwright and know as little about the theatre as I do; but I suppose that’s what I ought to try to talk to them about, isn’t it—the stage?”

“You needn’t worry!” he told her, and laughed, following her toward the library, where by old custom they always sat after dinner. “Don’t bother about your share of the talking or about knowing little of the stage, either. They’ll attend to both those matters for you.”

In the library she occupied herself with a floral embroidery, while her son, taking a volume of Walpole’s Letters from a shelf, sat with the book in his lap, beneath the light of a bronze standing-lamp near the piano. He read for some time but so absently that now and then he turned back to a previous page to discover what he was reading; for his mind’s eye prevailed over the physical one discomfitingly and what he continually saw were the shimmering and changing folds of old yellow satin, a flying grace of gesturing young arms, shades of autumn leaf tan in soft hair on a little head, fitful hazel glances entreating his admiration, and long looks, also hazel, warmly hinting—almost promising—that a unique adoration of himself was far from impossible.

Against his will and almost to his chagrin, the image of Lily Mars had remained insistently with him ever since he had left her at her gate in the afternoon. His feeling about the girl herself was that she was a bother, a high school declaimer who was going to be a nuisance to him on account of his sympathies and also because he had to go to the trouble of worrying the irascible and powerful George Hurley into “taking her name”. As for her devotion to her mother, he admitted it as admirable and even, as Mrs. Gilbert said, touching; but good heavens! daughters were supposed to sacrifice themselves for their mothers under such circumstances, weren’t they? He didn’t like the girl, neither did he dislike her; but he did indeed dislike what seemed to be her unremittent pursuit of him into his thoughts. With his annoyed eyes on his book, he read paragraphs of no meaning; old satin twinkled across the print, and Lily Mars seemed to sink to the floor in a curtsey before him, then to come close to him, tenderly, as if she half-offered a caress for which he had no desire. Her odd slender rich voice seemed to murmur, “I love you!”

In Taormina, a year past, he had completed a recovery from a severe love affair; he had no intention of being attacked by another, last of all by one concerned with such a person as Lily Mars. Then, “Rubbish!” he said contemptuously to himself for even mentioning Lily Mars in such a connection.

Across the room Mrs. Gilbert, apparently preoccupied with her embroidery, laughed softly aloud as if in preface to something she was going to say; but she did not say it and continued to ply her needle, though absentmindedly.

“Yes?” her son inquired. “You’ve thought of something funny but won’t share it?”

“Not funny precisely, I suppose,” she explained. “I was sitting here thinking I was embroidering, and in a way I suppose I have been—at least I haven’t made any mistakes—but what I’ve really been doing all the time was thinking about that poor dear child. I have a peculiar experience in connection with her; whenever I’ve been with her, or even when I’ve only been talking about her, I never can stop thinking about her for the longest time! Once I start thinking about her, I always keep on thinking about her for hours and hours! She has that odd effect, and to-night after we had that talk about her at the dinner-table—why, really it’s almost as if she were here in this very room with us. She’s so—so almost tragically vivid! Often it’s as if she absolutely makes me think about her whether I want to or not. Do you think she’d affect other people, too, that way, Owen—audiences perhaps? For instance, you’ve been reading and I suppose you’ve been busy with it; but hasn’t she come into your mind several times, for a moment or two, in spite of it?”

Her son’s response to this question was of a nature that might well have dismayed him had he perceived it to be what it actually was, a symptom that he wished to avoid admitting what was happening to him, and hence that something was indeed happening to him.

“Who?” he said coolly. “You’re speaking of——”

“Why, good heavens! Lily Mars!”

“Oh,” he said. “What about her?”