Читать книгу Presenting Lily Mars - Booth Tarkington - Страница 7

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On Sunday evening, at the hour her son had advised her to set for dinner, the September twilight was still not so far advanced that Mrs. Gilbert, looking forth interestedly from the library bay-window, lacked a clear view of what was happening upon her driveway. Three closed automobiles had glided in and stood vibrating, a novel sight in that white lane. Owen had hired them from Foudray’s Livery, an old establishment now transitional, half equine, half mechanical, where doomed cab-horses in their stalls breathed burnt oil and gasoline, and Owen himself was in the leading car, guide to his mother’s guests after the long rigor of rehearsal he had shared with them. He sat forward with the driver, jumped lightly down, opened the door and at once received familiarly upon his shoulder the pressure of a slender hand in a grey suede glove. The owner of the hand, descending, was disclosed, a smiling, handsome, auburn-haired lady of thirty, of easy poise and carriage; and Mrs. Gilbert, at the window, instantly made the good guess, “Miss Hedrington, Isabelle Hedrington, the leading lady. And how lovely and what lovely Titian hair!” she thought. “I suppose probably they all put their hands on people’s shoulders like that without meaning anything by it.”

After Miss Hedrington there emerged a short and thick-waisted but active-looking man of about forty who was smoking a cigar, but, in spite of that and his clipped sandy hair, resembled Napoleon enough in profile for Mrs. Gilbert, recalling her son’s description, to be sure of him. “That’s the one,” she thought with gravity. “That’s the man we’re after! That’s the great Mr. George Hurley!” Then, following the manager from the dark interior, there emerged a tall fair young man of such comeliness, both of face and athletic figure, and so carefully exquisite in every point of haberdashery and tailoring that Mrs. Gilbert had no doubt whatever of him. “You handsome nice thing! You’re Owen’s great friend, Eugene Allan, and going to play the hero in ‘Catalpa House’. You’re perfect for it, too!”

Other members of the theatrical company were descending from the two other cars, and Mrs. Gilbert’s first impression of them was that outwardly at least they were not theatrical at all and that seen thus in their street clothes they were like any other group of well dressed, pleasant-looking people anywhere. There were two middle-aged women with good-natured, intelligent faces, a slim, short girl of twenty, pretty and “bright-looking”, as Mrs. Gilbert thought, and the rest were men of various ages who in her opinion might have belonged to almost any profession whatever. “Why, they don’t look like actors at all!” she thought, in surprise; but added, as the last of them emerged to her view, “Except that old fellow. Gracious me!”

The old fellow referred to was seventy probably, large all over, fat at the middle, yet plainly a person of high vigor; he had a great red old Roman face, and, fluffing out beneath the only silk hat in view, displayed a magnificent head of bushy white hair. Instantly upon setting foot on the lawn beside the driveway, he made himself audible over the voices of his colleagues who were all chatting and laughing cheerfully. “Green grass!” he bellowed, in a grand bass voice easily heard through the closed window. “Green grass to sport upon! Hark ye, hearties, demoiselles and lanzknechts, we’ll romp it!”

He rushed upon the two middle-aged women, laid hold of them, and, capering himself, sought to make them caper with him. “Trip it! How often do you see green grass, troupers? Sing hey, nonny hey, nonny no!” Repulsed by the two, he seized upon the “bright-looking” small girl who, nothing loth, gayly joined in his cavortings. With an arm about her waist, and side by side with her, displaying high dance steps of astonishing agility and grace, he swept her across the lawn. Mrs. Gilbert gave a thought to a scandalized Sabbath-observing neighborhood as he sang lustily:

“A great while ago the world begun,

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

But that’s all one, our play is done,

And we’ll strive to please you every day!”

The others paid no attention, and Mrs. Gilbert had to leave the window, for already her son and several of her guests were in the house. The rest followed immediately, the boisterous old man and his lively young partner bringing a fragment of song with them to add to the effusion of talk and laughter in the hall—Mrs. Gilbert had the impression that never under her roof had there been such a resonance of rich and musical voices. Owen came into the room with Miss Hedrington, who maintained a comrade’s affectionate clasp upon one of his arms, while the tall and elegant leading man, Mr. Eugene Allan, upon the other side, kept a white hand on the playwright’s shoulder. Mrs. Gilbert was pleased to see these tokens of liking for her son and fondly thought him almost as handsome as the actor. Even Owen couldn’t be quite that handsome, she realized, for she had never before seen any man so resplendently good-looking as Mr. Allan; but she made up to herself for this admission by thinking her son, in his dark, reticent way, much the more “distinguished”.

The Napoleonic though sandy haired Hurley, with his cigar fuming between two negligent fingers, sauntered in with this group, which seemed naturally to take precedence; but the others came forward with a little eagerness and a great deal of cordiality as Owen began to speak their names to his mother. Upon closer view, she found them somewhat more like actors than she had thought at first, or at any rate they seemed not quite like the people to whom she was accustomed; these guests of hers had perhaps a little more manner, spoke more distinctly, were better poised and also more emphatic. Naturally she mislaid most of the names; but was able to remember that the boisterous old Roman was Mr. Ord, that the sprightly young lady who had capered with him was Miss Hoyt, and that a sallow and emaciated young man who looked like Edwin Booth in ill health was Mr. Monk, the stage director. She was impressed again with the quality of the voices as the company disposed itself easily about the big room; especially she felt the beauty of the voice of Mr. Allan who remained beside her, talking of his admiration for her son. This deep and manly yet musical voice seemed to linger just detectably the slightest fraction of a second upon almost every word, as if to unite it the more suavely to the word that followed, and the effect of rhythmic cadence thus obtained hinted study—and almost that the speaker, with a little pardonable pleasure, joined his listener in listening.

Nelson and a temporary assistant of like age and color appeared with silver trays bearing small glasses of sherry, which were hospitably received by the company, emptied without exception, collected and borne away; then Nelson again made his appearance in the wide, open doorway into the hall and seemed content to stand there, doing nothing except to look important. Owen, near the doorway with Miss Lebrun, one of the two older ladies of the company, spoke to him aside. “If you want to tell my mother that dinner’s served, why don’t you?”

“No, suh,” Nelson said mysteriously. “She waitin’.”

“Waiting? What for?”

Nelson continued to be mysterious. “Doin’ jes’ like she tol’ me, Mist’ Owen. Supprise. You see in a minute.”

“Why, what——” The question was interrupted by an exclamation from Miss Lebrun. Standing in the doorway she had in view the broad staircase farther down the hall.

“What a lovely girl!” she cried.

“Girl? Where——” But then, following her glance, he saw Lily Mars in a black velvet evening dress that was beyond his fastidious criticism; she was coming slowly down the stairs, and he understood what his mother had done and how romantically—nay, how theatrically!—she had planned.

Nelson, in the doorway, thought fit to attract the general attention to himself with a gust of loud, pompous and artificial coughing; then, when talk naturally stopped and he held all eyes, he shouted solemnly, “Miss Lillian Mars!” and stepped aside.

Mrs. Gilbert had said she knew little of the theatre, yet she had devised and directed for her protégée an “entrance” that any stage star might have coveted, her son thought. Lily gave him one quick inscrutable look, as she approached in the hall; then, stepping to the centre of the bright doorway, she let herself be framed there for one instant, while an audible murmur came from every part of the room, and the over-bubbling old Ord was heard to exclaim, “Honorable Vera de Vere! Portrait by Gainsborough!” But Lily’s pause was so brief she could hardly have been caught at it; she went on quickly to Mrs. Gilbert, leaving behind her near the doorway a heart agitated by anxiety, admiration and another feeling not yet definite.

This worried heart was the playwright’s. The anxiety was for what the evening might bring—most probably a destructive outbreak on the part of the nearly absolute ruler over the destinies of most of the people in the house, the untamable Hurley—and the admiration was for what Mrs. Gilbert, untrained in such matters, had already accomplished as a “producer” and stage director. That black velvet evening gown must have been a hurry-order, yet it could have been Parisian; there was just one ornament, Owen’s grandmother’s diamond brooch, and in Lily’s left hand was the ivory handle of Mrs. Gilbert’s white ostrich feather fan—unquestionably, she was a picture of high fashion and Owen perceived that somehow through his own talk his mother must have divined that stage people, after centuries of half exclusion, half adulation by such fashion, are often unreasonably impressed by it. When Lily Mars came into the room, the superb Allan tested with his fingers the adjustment of his neck-scarf and coat collar, began as soon as possible to talk to her and Mrs. Gilbert of some “hunting people” he knew in Maryland, and Miss Lebrun murmured despairingly to Owen, “Ah, if we could ever get just that on the stage! How seldom you see an actress who knows how to simply walk on with anything like the gracious quiet aplomb these real society girls possess!”

“Dear me!” he said, staring, and Miss Lebrun, after a moment’s perplexity, decided that he hadn’t listened to her but had been thinking, most likely, about his play. She was mistaken; moreover, the playwright was unaware of the significance of the fact that for days his habit of subjecting almost everything to the search for drama had been broken. He sought no “situation” now in the plight of a young man afraid that his philanthropic mother and a coached girl in desperate circumstances were about to bring embarrassment and mortification upon themselves, and upon himself, too. He was beyond dramatizing, being far too feelingly that very young man himself and too sickeningly assured that before the evening was over his mother and Lily Mars between them, in touching innocence, would perpetrate a horror. Before these long-experienced and seasoned experts and the deadly Hurley, Lily would recite “Roger and I”; she would do Juliet and Lady Macbeth, and it was not beyond the bounds of a terror-struck imagination to suppose that she would do the dance of the coming of springtime throughout all the ages.

He had a respite; it became evident that the performance was not planned to take place before dinner, and presently, at the table, he recovered enough presence of mind to do his duty by Isabelle Hedrington and the vivacious Miss Hoyt between whom he sat, at the foot of the lace-covered, glittering board. Both of them expressed an almost rapturous admiration for his mother, something he had rather dryly expected; for he knew that actors more than most other people are not only volatile in enthusiasms but sympathetically love to say the pleasing thing.

“And it’s a privilege just to look at her!” Miss Hoyt exclaimed, concluding her tribute. “When I’m fifty I suppose George Hurley or that disgusting Adler’ll have me playing comedy old women instead of grande dame parts; but if I ever have a chance to do a grande dame I’ll remember your mother and try to play it like that. I’d remember her against the background of this grand serene old house of yours——”

“Now, now!” he protested. “I’m afraid that’s a little extreme—about the house.”

“Not at all!” Miss Hedrington assured him warmly. “Your mother would impart all that to it even if it weren’t there intrinsically, Owen. So serene and yet so smilingly, graciously simple and friendly! With such a beautiful person at the head of the table, it seems almost sacrilege to think about anything else; but tell me, I suppose Miss Mars is a cousin or something of yours?”

“No; her mother’s an old friend of my mother’s. She’s just——” He hesitated, then finished the sentence inadequately—“just a girl.”

“I doubt if that’s all she is,” Miss Hoyt rejoined, glancing toward the head of the table. Then she looked roguishly at Miss Hedrington who had an emotional failing humorously but unfortunately known to her theatrical associates. “It may be a good thing we’re to play here only a week, don’t you think, Isabelle?”

Miss Hedrington laughed quickly. “If Eugene, poor dear, were as susceptible to everybody he meets as you try to goad me into thinking he is, Lena, I’d better step aside at once and give you your chance at him, hadn’t I? Happily, I’m not of a jealous temperament.”

The mischievous Miss Hoyt looked at the ceiling. “No, you don’t know the meaning of the word,” she said musingly. “And isn’t that a good thing, too!”

In spite of herself, Miss Hedrington colored slightly and glanced again at Lily Mars to whom Mr. Eugene Allan was talking with a visible impressiveness. “Don’t be vicious, Lena.”

“Me? Why, you cat!”

“Gentlemen! Gentlemen!” the playwright said, with perfunctory humor, and was conscious himself of an inward objection to the warmly appreciative interest Allan appeared to be taking in Miss Mars. Actually to be sitting next to that romantic idol who looked, off the stage, all that on the stage he promised to be, and actually to have his musical voice doing its best to be fascinating to her—what could more demoralizingly fulfill the dream and turn the head of an obscure, stage-struck girl just out of high school? Moreover, it was ironically cruel that the philanthropy now providing her with the bright tinsel of these moments was in reality but the means to bring upon her a disappointment all the more crushing. At the head of the table his mother sat talking to George Hurley with the characteristic smiling unconcern of an impulsive good woman who, because of her ignorance of thunderbolts, believes she can play with them. Her son sent her a long, reproachful and significantly imploring glance.

Mrs. Gilbert did not see it. She had placed the manager upon her right, with Lily next to him and the leading man next beyond, and, although she had cautioned Lily not to talk a great deal, she wished her to talk more to Mr. Hurley than to Mr. Allan; but now, here was Lily speechless apparently, and with downcast eyes and heightened color, listening steadily to the richly toned murmuring of the actor. “I must let Miss Mars have a little chance at you,” the hostess said to Hurley. “Of course she’s interested in the stage, as everybody is, and to hear something of it from one of its fountain heads, so to speak——”

“Me?” he interrupted brusquely. “I’m a ‘fountain head’ of the stage all right, or maybe just a goat for having anything to do with it; but I’d certainly like to have a vacation from it sometimes. I can talk about other things when I try; I’m no actor.” Suddenly he became passionate. “Good God; but I get sick of it! I wouldn’t mind talking to this little girl if Allan’d ever shut off his tin horn voice and quit pushing his face at her to show how silly pretty it is; but I won’t talk about the stage to her. If you think that’d be a pleasure to me, you’re wrong! Isn’t it enough that when you and Owen ask me to your house you have to go and bring along all these people I’m compelled to live with in order to get my living, and that I have to sit here and can’t look anywhere around the room without seeing some actor’s face nor for one single damn second let my ears get a rest from the horrible din of old Joe Ord’s voice?” Abruptly, he gave a piercing tenor scream and leaned toward Ord who, upon Mrs. Gilbert’s left, was talking noisily to Miss Lebrun. “Joel For God’s sake!”

The outburst was so sudden and so vehement that Mrs. Gilbert gasped; Eugene Allan, reddening, laughed uneasily, and Lily turned open-eyed to Hurley. The elderly Ord, on the contrary, uttered a resounding laughter. “Bravo, George!” he said, in thunderous bass. “Gnat, thou sting’st me not!” He lifted a glass of claret from beside his plate. “Away slight man! Your health, ladies!” He drank, set down the empty glass and beamed upon Mrs. Gilbert and Lily. “Ladies, that man should have been an actor; I refer to the so-called guest of honor upon the hostess’s right. Dauntless, I say it; he should have been not a manager but an actor.” Then, regardless of the fact that Hurley said, “Oh, for God’s sake!” again loudly, stopped eating and pushed back his chair as if to leave the table, he continued, “I flatter him less than others do, yet I insist he should have been an actor. What is an actor?” He looked fixedly at Lily. “Fair child, do you wish me to answer?”

“Yes,” she said softly and eagerly. “Oh, yes.”

“You’ll be sorry!” Hurley warned her, in a voice unexpectedly quiet and resigned. “He talks about ‘the actor’ in hotel bars until everybody cries—after three A. M.! I see what’s happened. There’s a saloon across the alley from the stage door. Soon as I noticed it this morning I knew that before the week was out I’d be cutting his salary for delaying rehearsal.”

“Cut my salary!” The old player again projected a reverberating laughter. “Sir, you threaten the infinitesimal! There are things too small to be halved; they must be enlarged before they can be sliced. Now I will tell you what is an actor. But first——” He again lifted his glass, which Nelson had replenished. “Fair child, your health!”

“Have you got a barrel of that wine or any other liquor, no matter what, in the cellar?” Hurley asked Mrs. Gilbert harshly. “If you have for God’s sake bring it up and give it to him and maybe we’ll get a little peace for half an hour or so.”

Ord set down his empty glass. “Speech!” he announced sonorously. “By Joseph Ord, sterling old Joe Ord, never in the whole history of trouping permitted to play a heart of gold but usually in youth First Murderers, Attendants or Second Heavies, and later Tybalt at the most; the King in Hamlet throughout middle-age, varied by some two thousand, seven hundred and sixty-one performances of Simon Legree, between the years Eighteen hundred and seventy-seven and Eighteen hundred and ninety-four, both dates of the genus Anno Domini absolutely, I give you my word. Subject: the actor. What is he? Don’t ask me!”

Lily leaned toward him eagerly; her eyes were brilliant with excitement. “Ah, but I do ask you!”

“So be it,” he said promptly. “The actor is any member of the theoretically human race who thinks somebody else is looking at him, or who is looking at himself. The professional actor is a person with an instinct to be more so. Sometimes he is a Narcissus beset by such a passionate sweetness of feeling for his fellow-man that he makes any sacrifice in order to give everybody in the world a chance to see how beautiful he is and hear how dulcet the sounds produced from his œsophagus, charging a slight honorarium for the benefit. He is all love, so loving he will play no part that does not make him love his audience the more for their greater love of him; his dramatists must have ink-pots full of noble deeds, great thoughts and boyish modesty. Ah, but this is no true actor, for your true fellow gives little thought to being watched from the stage door and perhaps snatched and kissed by uncontrollable middle-aged wives of road-town stove-store proprietors and absent traveling-men. We are not all of us Narcissi! Your true fellow has for God knows what reason a passion for making his body into the portraits of other people, changing his voice into the voice of others and making his eyes look forth from their sockets as others’ eyes look forth from theirs. He will stick glue on his brows, wax in his nostrils, plaster on his teeth; he’ll wear rags and heave up a hump on his back and whine in a cracked voice—— What does he care, so he makes his picture? He would rather play a monster than a honey-hero and he adores his audience for hating him. Narcissus dies luxuriously in his suite at the Holland House; your true fellow gets hold of a little laudanum in jail.”

Mr. Allan, slightly flushed, spoke in an annoyed voice. “Oh, I say! You’re not going on any longer, are you?”

“Indubitably!” the old man returned, with elaborate distinctness. “You hear me pronounce the word? With that ejaculation, upon occasion, I have cleared away a false impression in the minds of the police. We return to our subject. Your true actor, then, is a person foolish enough to live in squalor and perish miserably for the sake of being allowed to make pictures of other people for brief intervals during six evenings and customarily two afternoons in the week. Why does he? What ecstasy rewards him? None. I can only tell you that you would be mad not to think him so. And under what horrid conditions does he make his pictures, in what shackles does he work! He may not utter a syllable not put in his mouth by an imperious playwright too often brainless. He may not take a step, may not wiggle a finger, cough, smile, stoop, lift ear or eyebrow unless so commanded by a stage director always hoarse and nine times out of ten insane. In Nuremberg they have the Iron Maiden. It is a steel box hollowed inside to the shape of a man; they would put a man inside it and close the ponderous horrible thing so that he was a man immovable in a ton of steel—and there’s your actor, in a ton of dramatist and stage director. What! Can he work thus, can he shine through the metal? Why, he does! Come to the theatre and let the curtain go up; there he is, poor Tom o’ Bedlam, all warm and glowing in the footlights, making elf-land pictures for you out of himself, draining out his life to make you see a life not his, breaking his heart in his passion to make you see a gnome or a miser, or maybe some such cheap thing as a cruel banker. And if you do see it and perhaps hiss him for the wickedness you hate in what he’s made you see, is he happy, is he at last content? Never! He’s saying to himself, ‘I misplaced my emphasis on that word in the first act to-night. Ah, if I only hadn’t, they’d be hissing me louder!’ ” The old trouper again lifted a refilled purple glass, and, with what seemed necromantic brevity, set it down glittering but colorless. “There, fair child! That’s your actor.”

“Yes! Yes! Yes!” Lily Mars cried, and she leaned toward him, her cheeks pale now in her excitement and her eyes alight with a hazel fire, while, at the other end of the table, Owen Gilbert held his breath. “It is! It is!” she cried. “I know! All my life I’ve understood! I feel it! I’m part of it!”

“You!” The barbaric Hurley turned upon her violently. “What do you understand? What are you part of?”

Lily caught a look from her coach and adviser at the head of the table; the color came into her cheeks again and she leaned back in her chair. “Of the audience,” she said softly. “When you have a successful play, Mr. Hurley, don’t you want the audience to feel it’s part of it?”

Owen’s breathing was resumed. He perceived that Lily was intended to protract the impression she was making as a “society girl”—at least she wasn’t going to recite at the table. But his soul groaned within him; the catastrophe was only postponed to the library after dinner.