Читать книгу The Lady is Dead - Patrick Laing - Страница 4

“Helena Stedman,” Prentiss said, and there was a wistful, far-away note in his voice, as if he were remembering a vanished love, “was the most remarkable actress I have ever seen—and the most beautiful woman. I’ll never forget the summer she gave a course of lectures here at the university dramatic school. All of the male students—and a large part of the faculty, I think—were more than half in love with her. But that was over twenty years ago.” His words trailed away into silence, as if those intervening years had blown like a cold wind across his heart.

“And you were one of them, perhaps?” Barto asked. He was our new professor of applied dramatics, and hadn’t been with us long enough to know that one didn’t put personal questions of that sort to our slightly pompous dean, even in the informal surroundings of the Faculty Club.

“I suppose I was.” Prentiss laughed depreciatingly and a little self-consciously. “I was a young English instructor then, in love with art and consequently in love with love.”

“What eventually became of the lady?” I inquired. Her name, when he had first mentioned it, had sounded vaguely familiar to me.

“She died,” he answered briefly.

“Wasn’t there a scandal of some kind about her?” Van Zittar, one of my colleagues in the psychology department, pursued. “I was too young at the time she flourished in the theater to remember much about it, but I seem to recall something. . . .”

“There was,” Prentiss admitted. “And it was all the more—er—spectacular because nothing even remotely suggestive of obliquity had ever been associated with the name of Helena Stedman before. She’d been married to a man not in the theatrical profession—a scientist of some kind, I believe, whose name I don’t remember. The year after she gave her lecture course here, she went to Hollywood to make a picture. During the filming of it, she fell in love with her leading man, a foreign importation who was expected to take the place of the late Rudolph Valentino, and who might have succeeded in doing it if he and Stedman had never met. There followed the usual scandal, in this instance a trifle lurid even for Hollywood.”

He paused, not for dramatic effect, but because, being, Prentiss, he always seemed to feel a vague embarrassment at discussing matters of this nature, as though he suspected that they robbed him of some of his scholastic dignity.

“She was granted her divorce from her husband exactly one month after her baby was born,” he finished stiffly.

Van Zittar, who upon occasion can be somewhat coarse in his reactions, gave a slightly vulgar whistle. “Wow!” he exclaimed. “If you mean what I think you mean—and I’ve no doubt that you do—I’ll bet that set tongues a-wagging, even back in the Roaring Twenties. And after such an episode, I suppose— Are you leaving us, Barto?”

Antonio Barto had risen. “I’m afraid I must,” he said apologetically. “I wish to prepare a written examination for my class in stage technique for tomorrow morning.” He turned to me. “If you’re leaving at this time too, Professor Laing,” he said, “I shall be happy to have your company across campus.”

I accepted his invitation, and we left the Faculty Club together.

But although he had requested my company, as we walked together through the cool stillness of the early spring night, he seemed lost in his own thoughts; and I received the impression that they concerned matters which were of more importance to him than the examination he had said he wanted to prepare for his class.

“I imagine,” I remarked in order to make conversation after we had progressed for several minutes in silence, “the affair Dr. Prentiss was telling us about ended Miss Stedman’s career as an actress.”

Barto made a sound in his throat that was half disgust, half contempt. “There is no doubt that you are right,” he answered in his precise English, which still retained a faint trace of a Spanish accent. “It was a great injustice to a great artist. You Americans!” He spat out the words as though they had been something bitter in his mouth. “You will never learn to appreciate art for itself alone, but you must go poking your clumsy fingers into that which does not concern you. Helena Stedman’s private life was her own affair; she had a right to do with it as she chose.”

Having some slight knowledge of the Latin attitude in such matters, I wasn’t surprised by his outburst. “Theoretically I agree with you,” I replied. “The art should not be judged by the private life of the artist. But unfortunately or otherwise, we Americans are so constituted that we demand a certain amount of conformity to the generally accepted standards of moral integrity in those we place upon our public pedestals. Otherwise, we cannot feel sure of their sincerity in anything.”

“Conformity!” he exclaimed passionately, and I heard a pebble skip across the path, as though he had kicked at it viciously as he walked. “Always there must be conformity to standards set up by others! Yet you prate of individual liberty, of the individual’s right to—”

He broke off with a self-conscious laugh. “Forgive me,” he said more quietly. “I didn’t mean to read you a lecture. It is only that we of the theater are inclined to speak with greater vehemence than we intend. It often, creates the impression that we feel more strongly upon a subject than is actually the Case.”

Although my blindness prevented me from seeing his expression, I wasn’t deceived by the apparent lightness with which he dismissed the subject. It was one which, I was positive, went deeper with him than he wanted me to suspect.

By this time we had reached the edge of the campus, where we said good night and went our separate ways. As I turned in at my own front walk a few minutes later, the faint, sweet scent of wood violets told me that my wife, Deirdre, was waiting for me on the porch.

“What was Dr. Prentiss holding forth on this evening that kept you so late, Paddy?” she greeted me. “The unspeakable imbecility of the Government in Washington or the intellectual poverty of present-day American literature as exemplified by the modern novel?”

I laughed, and sat down beside her on the swing. “Neither, Derry,” I answered. “In some way—don’t ask me how, for I haven’t the faintest idea—the subject got around to an actress whom he’d admired in his youth; one who made a rather spectacular fall from grace, smashing both her own career and the Seventh Commandment in the process.”

“Was that why Dr. Prentiss admired her?” Deirdre asked innocently. “Or shouldn’t I ask?”

“You should know better than to ask,” I told her, slipping my arm about her slender shoulders. “However, I believe the old fraud actually enjoyed repeating that piece of scandal about her, once he got started. Barto, our new dramatics man, was there, and I’m afraid he got a little disgusted with what he evidently considers our provincial American attitude toward artists and morality. On the way across campus, he started to give me a spirited lecture on the subject, then suddenly checked himself.”

“He probably remembered just in time that he was talking to a psychologist,” Deirdre observed shrewdly. She settled herself more comfortably in the crook of my arm; then with an abrupt change of subject, “By the way, Paddy, I almost forgot: Mark Fordyce came over to see you this evening. He seemed disappointed when I told him you weren’t here.”

“Did he want to see me about anything in particular, or was it just a social call?” I inquired. Young Mark Fordyce, in addition to being one of my best students in behavioristic psychology at the university, was the son of our next-door neighbor, Dr. Eric Fordyce, who had moved to our city a little over a year before to work with one of the men in our chemistry department on some experimental work which I suspected had Government backing. He was not, however, an actual member of our faculty.

“He told me,” Deirdre replied in answer to my question, “that Professor Barto had offered him the leading role in the Senior play this year. I believe he wanted to talk it over with you.”

“The Senior play! Mark!” I exclaimed. “And his father violently opposed to dramatics in any shape or form. Oh, good Lord!”

“I think that was what he wanted particularly to discuss with you,” Deirdre said. “He knows that if he accepts the part, he’ll have to tell his father about it sooner or later, and he probably wants you to advise him as to the best approach. Paddy, why do you suppose Dr. Fordyce is so very antagonistic to Mark’s interest in the theater?”

“Heaven alone knows,” I answered. “Unless it’s that, being a serious-minded scientist himself, he can’t bear the thought of a son of his going into a field which must appear frivolous to him by comparison.”

“That could be the explanation, I guess,” she agreed thoughtfully. “Dr. Fordyce is a strange man. At times he seems passionately devoted to his son, while at others he’s so strict with him, it’s almost as if he actually hated him.”

She paused a moment, then added speculatively, “I wonder whether Professor Barto would have offered Mark the part in the play if he’d known about his father’s attitude.”

A little to my own surprise, I found myself speculating with something more than casual interest upon what Barto’s attitude in the matter would have been. Although the man and I had become only casual acquaintances since his arrival on campus the preceding fall, there was that about him which piqued my curiosity. With his fiery Latin temperament and his own particular code of ethics, he was in many ways a wholly unpredictable quantity.

Deirdre broke across my thoughts with an apparently irrelevant question. “Paddy,” she asked, “do you suppose Mark’s mother could have been Irish?”

“Why?” I teased. “Because of his flair for dramatics?”

“Of course not,” she answered. “Because of his coloring. Dr. Fordyce is blond, almost the Nordic type, but Mark has black hair and deep blue eyes, the same as you have.”

“The combination of black hair and blue eyes isn’t confined to Northern Ireland,” I reminded her. “Mark could have inherited the one from his mother and the other from his father. Incidentally, he never knew his mother. He told me once that she died when he was born.”

Deirdre’s small, cool hand came to rest upon mine. “I wonder,” she speculated, “whether that’s why Dr. Fordyce acts at times as though he hated his son. If he loved his wife very much, he might blame Mark. . . .”

“For having been the cause of his mother’s death?” I inquired. “I doubt it, Derry. Dr. Fordyce is too fair-minded a man for that sort of melodramatic injustice. However, it’s a pity he can’t be more in sympathy with the boy where this question of a theatrical career is concerned. In his way, Mark is as strong-willed as his father. I’m afraid there may be real trouble over this matter of the Senior play.”

We sat for a little while in silence then, both thinking about the boy and his problems. Suddenly the stillness around us was ripped to pieces by the sound of a sharp explosion that seemed to have had its origin not more than a hundred feet from where we sat. We both sprang up from the swing.

“Merciful heaven,” Deirdre exclaimed. “That came from Dr. Fordyce’s garage, where he’s set up his experimental laboratory! Come on, Paddy; we must go over there and find out whether he’s been hurt.”