Читать книгу Presenting Lily Mars - Booth Tarkington - Страница 8

Table of Contents

In that spacious bright apartment, an hour later, with the laughter of his mother’s guests merry in his ears, he reached the depth of his gloom, for he could no longer doubt that the moment was at hand. The four youngest men in the theatrical company, gathering at the piano, had burlesqued the sentimental quartet of vaudeville; then one of them, Harry Vokes, a fat young comedian with a face suggesting a dissipated baby’s, had sung “Silver Threads Among the Gold” and “After the Ball” in a sobbing tenor, with similar satirical intent. After that, besought by her colleagues, Miss Lebrun had given her humorous imitations of Mme. Bernhardt, Mme. Rejane, Coquelin and the elder Salvini, and during this performance Owen entertained a momentary wild hope that when Lily did Juliet and Lady Macbeth her exhibition might be mistaken for an intentional satire. But the glimmer of optimism extinguished itself; these experts would know better.

Several times he tried to get near enough to his mother for a private imploring plea; she was too gayly surrounded, yet all the while he saw calculation in her smiling eyes and understood that she was only waiting to seize upon what she’d believe the most favorable juncture for Lily’s exhibition. During Miss Lebrun’s mimicry, he thought he saw the calculation intensify; but he had another respite, for Miss Lebrun, concluding, to great applause, rushed upon the sallow Mr. Monk, dragged him from his chair and loudly announced that Mrs. Gilbert and Miss Mars must see his imitation of a visit to a Nickel Theatre. The stage director assented, and, going to the piano, played noisily with one hand, while with his other and the rest of him he mimicked recognizably the jerky and flickeringly seen gestures and expressions of the moving pictures. Thus, to ludicrous effect, he enacted a condensed idiotic melodrama, and, during its progress, Owen with a sinking heart saw his mother make the slight preparatory movements significant of her intention to rise from her big chair at the conclusion of Monk’s travesty.

Smoking a cigar unhappily in the wide doorway into the hall with his friend, Allan, the young playwright also saw Mrs. Gilbert glance covertly at Lily, who sat nearby with the quartet of young actors close about her, and he caught, too, the gleam of the girl’s excited return glance, as if she said, “Yes! Oh, yes! I’m ready!”

Allan meanwhile was talking to him in a voice lowered out of deference to the stage director’s performance. “Disagreeable old ass, Ord. You can’t tell me the older generation doesn’t hate us. All that tirade about the two kinds of actors—your ‘true actor’ playing heavies, low comedy and what not, and the other kind that just score by personality—levelled straight at me! They hate us because this modern quiet realism that we’ve brought in makes their old mugging and bellowing and gesticulating and clowning and all their nonsense of wigs and false noses and gluey whiskers look silly. Their day’s over; it went out with gas footlights, and they know it. Look at him, there by your mother, trying to look like a Doge or something talking to Queen Elizabeth! If you watch him closely, every now and then you’ll see him sneak his hand up behind his head and twist one of those locks of his round his finger to keep it curly. And that monocle of his! For ten years I’ve never seen him without it and never once saw him put it in his eye, because he’s afraid to. Thinks that would be just a little too much but believes it gets a fine effect dangling on a string and flopping about his monstrous waistcoat. If he cuts in on that third act speech of mine again with his roaring and snorting the way he did this afternoon I’m simply going to take him out in the alley and shoot him!” Allan laughed good-naturedly, drew reflectively upon his cigar and added with enthusiasm, “Alluring girl, your cousin Miss Mars. Wonderful!”

“What? She isn’t my cousin.”

“No? She spoke of your mother as ‘dear blessed Aunt Anne’. Oh, I see, just affectionately—lifelong family friendship. Do you know, Owen, I got an idea while I was talking to her at the table.”

“Did you?”

“Yes. In that second scene where I say to Isabelle, ‘I love you. I’ve loved you ever since’ so on, so on and so on, and she says, ‘Don’t tell me’ so on and so on, and I say, ‘I love you’ again, so on, so on, I think if I used a different tone right there—a little more tensity and yet more whispery; like this.” He whispered huskily, “I love you! What you think?”

“I suppose so,” Owen replied absently. “It might be better.”

“I got it—well, it just seemed to come to me while I was talking to her. A marvellous girl—that peach-bloom exquisiteness and yet of course no end smart, to the manor born and all that.” He laughed with the effect of explaining that his modesty was still to the fore. “Do you know, old fellow my lad, if I hadn’t got a pretty steady head on my bally young shoulders I could almost believe myself girlhood’s sweet dream come true!”

“You could?” Owen said with some blankness. He liked Allan, a generous, warm-hearted human being and a fine, quiet actor so shrewd in his handling of the materials given him that he sometimes had a startling emotional effect upon an audience in spite of his quiet. He was a good comrade, and now and then said something intelligent enough to be thought over later; but, after all, wasn’t he rather fatuous—about women?

“I’m afraid I could be that much a gilly,” the actor returned, “if I’d let myself.” He laughed again, at the same time clapping his hands to show his approval of Mr. Monk, who was withdrawing from the piano. “Hello! Your mother’s up and going to say something. Splendid!” Then, not noticing the spasmodic expression of his friend’s face, he began to clap his hands again and to cry, “Hear! Hear! Hear!”

Mrs. Gilbert had risen; she went gayly to Lily, took the girl’s hand and brought her forth from the quartet. “Come, dear,” she said in a clear voice. “We must do our own poor best to show we’re grateful. I want that charade you did for your mother when I was there on her birthday.”

“Oh, no, no——” Lily protested, and seemed to struggle to regain her chair; but Owen thought her reluctance had little vigor. The other guests, meanwhile, were politely urgent, clapping their hands and with at least apparent earnestness entreating, “Please, Miss Mars! Please do!”

“She will!” Mrs. Gilbert announced, and, leaving the blushing girl alone in the centre of the room, returned to her own easy-chair in the semicircular group her guests had formed as spectators. Allan hurried conspicuously to make himself a member of the audience.

“Hear! Hear! Hear!” he exclaimed again, when he had seated himself; he clapped his hands. “Mars! Mars! Mars!”

“I wonder——” Lily said uncertainly. “It would be better if I had someone to act at.” She turned and spoke to the playwright, who had remained in the doorway and had the air of a lurking person about to disappear. “Will you help me?” she asked, smiling though there was a tremor in her voice.

“I?” he said incredulously. “What in the world do you want me to——”

“Won’t you? Just come and stand beside me here.”

Then, as in obviously dismal astonishment he did what she asked, both Allan and the vociferous Ord applauded, shouting loudly, “Author! Author! Author!”

Instantly the manager, sitting next to Ord, became red with rage. “Joe! What do you think human ears are made of? For God’s sake!” Moreover, he seemed to add, not orally yet all too plainly, by his expression and attitude, the intimation that it was bad enough to have to sit through the performance about to take place before him; he didn’t intend to bear any additional torture, especially not from his own people. Glancing at him pallidly, Owen felt that whatever the nature of Lily’s intended exhibition it couldn’t well begin under unhappier auspices. As for being forced to take part in it himself, he suffered but wasn’t a snob; he’d sink as calmly as he could with his mother and her stage-struck protégée.

Lily was explaining to the semicircle. “It’s the silliest little charade—‘a poor thing but mine own’—and made up one day when I was trying to amuse my mother, who’s an invalid; so don’t hate me too much for it! It’s two syllables and the whole word all in one scene, and really too dreadfully foolish!” She laughed deprecatingly and turned to Owen. “For the first part of it you must look mockingly imperious, if you don’t mind. Fold your arms as if you were terribly satisfied with yourself——”

“What? Oh—all right.” He folded his arms and so far as he was able complied with her instruction to look mockingly imperious.

“That’s it,” she said approvingly. “Now we’ll begin.” She turned her back to him, took two steps away, halted, gave him over her shoulder a sly estimating look, the glance of a dangerous shrew planning action, then abruptly turned upon him, frowning, pointed at him and spoke in a fierce voice. “ ‘Let him that moved you hither remove you hence! I am too light for such a swain as you to catch. If I be waspish, best beware my sting!’ ” She took a long stride that brought her close to him, and, with a sweeping arm, struck him upon the breast. “ ‘If you strike me, you are no gentleman!’ ” she cried sharply, as if in a little fear of his reprisal; then, breathless but reassured, she became mocking. “ ‘What is your crest? A coxcomb? This is my fashion, when I see a crab. Say you Sunday is our wedding-day? I’ll see thee hang’d on Sunday first!’ ” She walked away from him, let her shoulders droop, put her hands against her cheeks, looked upward deploringly and spoke in a voice that quavered with pathos yet seemed to rail against herself.

“He’ll woo a thousand, ’point the day of marriage,

Make friends, invite them, and proclaim the banns;

Yet never means to wed where he hath wooed.

Now must the world point at poor Katherine,

And say,—‘Lo, there is mad Petruchio’s wife,

If it would please him come and marry her.’”

This seemed to end a phase in both her acting and the charade. She returned to Owen, who was still holding his posture, and said to him with a timid air, appealingly and as if aside, “Now, if you can, will you begin to look as if you approved of me and even—if it’s possible—even as if you liked me a little?”

Suddenly and to his own surprise he found himself able to do both with a good grace. This dreaded philanthropic experiment of his mother’s was strangely enough turning out not badly. Lily wasn’t over-gesticulative; she was neither too much anything nor too little anything, and he was not ashamed of her, omitting to ask why he should have expected to be ashamed of her, since she was not his. He perceived that she must have taken readily to his mother’s coaching and that the coaching must have been excellent. More, Lily had caught the genuine attention of her audience; that was plain. Of course these professional actors would show polite indulgence to a pretty girl who played a charade for them; but there was something like eagerness in their silence as they watched her.

Her manner changed. She stood beside him humbly, looked up at him timidly and spoke with an imploring gentleness.

“And be it moon, or sun, or what you please:

And if you please to call it a rush candle,

Henceforth I vow it shall be so for me.”

She came closer to him, put her fingers fearfully yet tenderly upon his arm and spoke with a placativeness so eloquently clear that he guessed her little charade—“placate” of course, he saw it was; she was playing Kate from The Taming of the Shrew and now wistfully placated him, a dumb Petruchio.

“Then, God be blessed, it is the blessed sun:—

But sun it is not, when you say it is not,

And the moon changes even as your mind,

What you will have it named, even that it is;

And so, it shall be so for Katherine.”

She lifted her head, bringing her face nearer to his, and, smiling ineffably, let her brown lashes cover the hazel eyes for a moment; then they rose, almost dazing him with the revelation of an unfathomably sweet meekness.

“Such duty as the subject owes the prince,

Even such a woman oweth to her husband...

And place your hand below your husband’s foot;

In token of which duty, if he please,

My hand is ready, may it do him ease.”

For a perceptible instant longer she held him in a spell, her ardent face close to his and that worshipping look still upon it, while all through him there seemed to tingle a strange exhilaration, a feeling not to be identified with his mere great relief that after all she hadn’t made herself and his mother and him ridiculous.

Suddenly she laughed, swept downward in a curtsey so deep it made her half his height, jumped up and ran to a vacant chair near Mrs. Gilbert.

Already old Ord was thundering, “Bis! Bis! Bis!” and there was lively applause from the whole company. Allan jovially pulled Lily out of her chair to “take the call,” he said; she made her curtsey again to freshened applause, and Miss Hoyt, guessing the charade, shouted, “Placate! Placate! Why, it’s bully!” Ord discovered that young Mr. Lancey, least in years of the “Skylark” cast, was still somewhat puzzled, not by the charade but because he had never before heard of the comedy upon which it was founded; whereupon the sardonic laughter of the vociferous relic once more became unbearable in the manager’s ear.

Hurley jumped up from his chair and uttered a scream of rage and pain. “Joe! Will somebody block up that grotto! Nobody wants to see all your back teeth! My God!” He pointed to a glisteningly laden table against the wall. “Fill him! Drown him!” Then, less vehement but apparently not less embittered, he addressed the company at large. “I should think you’d all feel like a lot of cigar store Indians! On my soul, I should! Sit here and see an amateur with no pretensions to know anything about the calling you’re supposed to be following and she makes you all look like thirty cents! My God!”

In seeming fury he strode to the table he had recommended for the suppression of Ord and filled an assuaging glass for himself; while talk and laughter, beginning apprehensively after his outburst, took courage and again became general in the room. Mrs. Gilbert, excited in her triumph, drew Owen aside for a moment as soon as she could. “I didn’t tell you beforehand because you’d have been worried and——”

“And because I’d have been afraid and would have tried to stop you,” he admitted. “Of course I’m only a fool of a man. I ought to have remembered that women are always dashingly doing things that men won’t try because the things are impossible. I ought to have realized how much cleverer you are than I am and have seen what you could do with her—when all I did was just give up!”

“No, no!” she said. “What you can do comes now. You heard what he said. Wasn’t that really pretty tremendous—from a manager? Ah, look at her, dear! Isn’t it lovely—did you ever see a face so eager? Strike while the iron’s hot, Owen!”

“You mean ask him to take her name now?”

“ ‘Take her name’! No!” Mrs. Gilbert exclaimed, though she kept her voice low. “Good heavens, no! Tell him you want to write a part into your play for her!”

Owen looked uncertain. “You don’t know him; he’s incalculable. Of course I’ll try it, but——”

“I should think so!” she said. “Of course you will!”

He had misgivings, and also found it difficult to get a word apart with Hurley who had taken the stage director into a corner and begun a discussion of details for the production of “Catalpa House”. Owen made an effort to interrupt, but was waved away, and the discussion became more emphatic and exclusive, continued interminably. He did not find his opportunity until the radiant Lily had left the room (to be driven home by Nelson in her “dear blessed Aunt Anne’s” little brougham) and most of the grateful and exuberant theatrical party were surrounding Mrs. Gilbert before departure. Turning diplomatist, he scooped a handful of cigars from an open box on a table and pressed them upon the manager.

“What you trying to do, bribe me?” Hurley asked, staring angrily. “Want me to write Adler we ought to raise your royalty percentage?”

“You might find the cigar stand closed when you get back to the hotel, George. By the way—ah——”

Mr. Hurley accepted the gift. “By what way? What are you mumbling about?”

“I’ve been thinking about Miss Hoyt’s part in ‘Catalpa House’,” Owen said. “She’s going to play it well, I can see that, of course; but there’s something of a gap there somehow. I’ve thought it might be a good idea to write in a secondary ingénue part and——”

“Secondary!” Hurley interrupted fiercely. “What do you mean, secondary?”

“Ah—supplementary. I could brace up a lot of weakish points with it.”

“What? You mean you want two ingénues, like a Tom-show with two Topsys?”

“Not precisely! Please listen, George. The play’d be richer for such a part, and just to-night it struck me I knew exactly where we could find the right girl to play it.”

“What!”

“Miss Mars,” Owen said hurriedly, yet trying to speak with an air of bright discovery. “She’d be precisely what I see in such a part. You know what you thought about her, yourself, and besides, she’s terribly eager to go on the stage and wants to act and——”

“Oh, she does!” Hurley said, in a dangerous tone. “She wants to go on the stage, does she? She wants to be a real live actress, does she?”

“Don’t get excited, George, please. Yes, she does, and you know what you said of her acting, yourself. Even in that little charade, you saw what she could do and you stood up and said——”

“Listen!” Hurley interrupted, and then spoke slowly, with an air of profound enmity, his facial expression being that of a naturally suspicious person who discovers that a dish of sweets, just offered him, contains poison. “Listen! When she did her little charade I gave it the praise a Sunday School child ought to get for speaking his little lesson nicely, according to his little lights. If you don’t know better than to think I’d put a Sunday School child into a company of mine on account of his doing some such little thing nicely, or that I’d allow a part to be written into a play I’m producing when the damn thing’s already too long, just for the benefit of a society débutante’s vanity and her perfectly sickening desire to show herself off on the stage, why, God help you!”

“But, George, you——”

“I praised her for her little two-minute peanut charade, so now she wants to go on the stage, does she? If I say a baby looks healthy the hell’s-imp stands right up in its perambulator and swears I’ve as good as promised him seventy-five dollars a week as a juvenile!” His voice became falsetto. “Wants to go on the stage, does she? By cripes, I might have known it! But if you think I wreck my business to please every stage-struck heiress that gets a crush on me for an evening, God help you!”

“Good heavens! She isn’t——”

“That’s all I have to say! God help you!”

“George, please——”

“God help you!” Truculent, the manager strode into the little group about the hostess and ended the sonorous farewells of Ord by interposing a sturdy shoulder and a brusque “Goodnight, ma’am!” Then, stamping into the hall, he snatched his hat from a table and betook himself to the night air and the waiting automobiles.