“Rather a frost, wasn’t it, Ned?” Brainard observed, smiling humorously at the secretary.
Farson said nothing; he was too utterly depressed for words. The great social engagement on which he had counted so much had utterly missed fire, and he blamed himself for the fiasco. He should have written Brainard’s remarks for him and rehearsed him carefully beforehand, thus guarding against the “bad breaks” that his employer had been guilty of. And yet he had not expected to encounter such stiff prejudice, such conservatism as took offense at trivialities, and stuck fast on some nonessential detail. But his experience with the “patron” class of society had not been large.
They walked back to Brainard’s little house, and all the way the old Scotsman delivered himself of invective against the leisure class. Brainard remarked once:
“This is a democracy, so called! Art is to be handed to the public on a gilt plate by the upper classes!”
He laughed sardonically.
When they entered the library, the fire was burning cheerily on the hearth. Brainard, taking the roll of plans from his secretary, glanced at the elaborate blueprints and water-color sketches of the palatial theater, which might be built for three millions. Slowly he poked the roll into the flames, and watched it burn until the last bit was licked up. His companions looked on in consternation.
“You are not going to give up?” Farson asked.
“Not much!”
“I’m so sorry for this afternoon,” the young man said apologetically. “How could one tell—”
“You couldn’t! I don’t regret it. They taught me a lot—a whole lot,” Brainard mused. “It was worth while for that. We shall learn all along the way, all of us.” After another silence he roused himself suddenly, and said, with characteristic optimism and good humor: “There’s been too much talk—let’s get to work! You, Mac, go ahead and engage the best company you can get together for love of art or of money. I will attend to building the theater. Farson can read those.” He pointed whimsically at the pile of plays in the corner. “We’ll let publicity take care of itself for a time.”
V
It was very nearly a year from the day of the disastrous luncheon at Mrs. Pearmain’s before the new theater was ready for rehearsal of the first play. The year, as Brainard had foreseen, had been replete with education, if nothing else. To find a suitable site for a popular playhouse, to erect thereon a pleasing building, commodious and attractive in design, and to engage a competent body of actors, would not seem a tremendous task. It had been done before; in fact, Messrs. Einstein & Flukeheimer, and their fellows, were doing it all the time. But the amateur with ideas and ideals was at a disadvantage.
Brainard had chosen the site, which was removed from the theater district but quite accessible—in fact, not far from the side street where he had once lodged. As the result of a large search he had discovered an architect who would devote himself to making a useful and suitable building instead of exploiting his patron’s purse, and together they had worked over the plans until a satisfactory theater of modest proportions was evolved. It was decided to postpone the starting of the Actors’ College until the general scheme had established itself. Almost all the other features of Brainard’s model playhouse for the people were included in the plans.
The site bought and the plans finished, Brainard thought that his difficulties in regard to the building were over, but in fact they had not yet begun. There was one strike after another upon the building from the excavation up, with an annoying regularity and persistence. They were usually ended by a compromise, which consisted in Brainard’s paying a contractor a slight increase in contract price, to “square” some union or labor leader. MacNaughton, whose imagination was much given to plots and dire machinations of the enemy, held that these labor troubles emanated from the offices of Einstein & Flukeheimer in upper Broadway. Farson and Brainard tried to convince him of the folly of this delusion, telling him that the noted managers probably had enough troubles of their own to keep them busy, and indeed would doubtless be glad to give the People’s Theater one of their own empty playhouses for a reasonable consideration if Brainard would take it off their hands. But they could not convince the Scotsman, who would go to Brainard’s house at all hours with mysterious information about the plot, which had to be confided in deep whispers. He had thought it all out in his own mind and believed that their hated rivals were working through the powerful agency of the Catholic Church. He said that was their favorite weapon when they wished to put any rival out of business or ruin a promising star, who had refused to listen to their offers.
When Brainard on his return from a hurried trip to Monument to inspect the mine found all work suspended upon the theater building, he was almost inclined to take Mac’s view of the plot against the People’s. This time it proved to be a dispute between two rival unions over the job of electric lighting. The contractor had given the work to the regular union, and the union of theatrical electricians had declared war. Every workman was called out. Brainard’s patience was exhausted, and he would not listen to the usual proposal for compromise suggested by a suave “business agent.” Instead he telegraphed his manager in Arizona to send up at once old Steve and the “emergency gang,”—the name by which a choice collection of spirits under the command of the old miner Steve operated either as miners or strike breakers. On the third day they arrived,—twenty lean and lank specimens from the plains, in sombreros and riding boots, prepared for immediate action. They did not know much about gas fitting, electric wiring, tile laying, and allied trades, but they took possession of the unfinished building with an unconcern that created a sensation in labor circles, and before long work had begun again and this time was pushed uninterruptedly towards a belated conclusion—all under the careful supervision of the “emergency gang,” who rolled cigarettes and spat upon the premises, while they discussed the drama with MacNaughton.
This prompt action by Brainard raised him highly in the esteem not only of the contractors and workmen, but of his associates in the venture. They saw that beneath his good nature and smiling placidity, he was a man to be reckoned with who meant to carry out his purposes. After this final flurry he took more pleasure in watching the work on the building, and thus realizing as far as the outside went his old dream. It would be, he flattered himself, the most delightful and convenient recreation center in the city,—not merely a garish, ugly auditorium where the largest number of unfortunates possible would be packed into the smallest area. . . . At last the building was sufficiently near completion to permit the beginning of rehearsals. . . .
On his way to the first general rehearsal Brainard stumbled over the marble workers, who were laying the mosaic floors with what seemed incredible deliberation. At this rate, push the work as he might, the theater would be a rough barn on the night of its opening to the public, which had been announced for the first of December. It was easier to capture a fortune and develop a great mine than to build a playhouse in America! That gave him something to think of.
He dropped his coat and hat in the pleasant library on the second floor, where the carpenters were languidly putting up bookcases. He had watched these same carpenters at their work for a number of weeks and had marveled at their grudging slowness of movement. Certainly they were not touched with enthusiasm for the great Idea, although the philanthropic object of the building had been carefully explained to them. Some of these carpenters lived in the neighborhood, and the theater was designed to give pleasure to them and their wives and their children—it was to be their playhouse. And yet they seemingly took no more interest in it than they would in the Octopus Building farther down town, on which they would be employed next. Brainard himself had put much more than money into every detail of the place; he had given it loving thought and care, and he wished a beautiful product which should reflect that spirit in every line and tone,—something intimate and lovely and human. But nothing of all this could he evoke in workman or contractor. It was all just “business,” to be skimped and shirked wherever possible. With a sigh from these reflections, thinking dubiously of the state of mind it betrayed in that “public,” on which he was counting so hopefully, he turned toward the stage. It gave him a thrill of real pleasure to push aside the heavy hangings and enter the mysterious darkness of the empty auditorium. At least this was real!
In the bare spaces of the undecorated stage, with a background of white brick wall, the new company was rehearsing Lear. It had been Brainard’s idea to open with what he considered to be the greatest play of the greatest English dramatist,—to be followed, he hoped, by a new American comedy. Thus the new company would pay their respects both to the past and to the future. Farson had tried to dissuade him from attempting Lear, saying lightly,—“You don’t want to queer us with the profession at the start.” But Brainard, whose first conscious interest in the drama had been aroused by a performance of Lear by the elder Salvini, which he had witnessed with his father in the hazy years of his youth, clung to his idea. Perhaps the part of Cordelia also touched his feeling for that lonely girl, whose memory in some way this undertaking was to commemorate. And MacNaughton came to his support in the discussion with Farson, assuring him of the popular triumphs he had scored throughout the West in this masterpiece.
It was not until the parts were to be assigned that Brainard discovered the reason for the old actor’s unshaken faith in the ability of the people to rise to Lear. He wished to play the title rôle himself, and had broken into tears when forced to yield to a more suitable actor. It had been a very painful incident, and also an enlightening one, to the inexperienced patron of the theater. . . .
At the moment of Brainard’s arrival this morning, little Margaret Leroy, who, for the lack of a better actress, was their present leading lady, was languidly reciting Cordelia’s lines:
No blown ambition doth our arms incite,
But love, dear love, and our aged father’s rights,
In a few moments a voice with a beery tang boomed forth heavily into the dusky auditorium:
Aye, every inch a king;
When I do stare, see how the subject quakes!
At this point Brainard had his first misgivings. Perhaps, with their present company, Lear was overambitious. It gave him a pang to realize that the faded little Leroy, with her childish blond wig, was the best actress they could secure. She had had a quarrel with her manager at the opening of the season, because he wanted to send her to Omaha, in somebody else’s last season’s success, and had accepted the offer of the People’s Theater in a fit of pique, and with obvious reluctance.
“It queers one so with the profession,” she had told Farson confidentially.
She had insisted upon bringing along with her that ancient idol of the matinée, Dudley Warner. He was doing Lear in the style of Beau Brummel, in which he had made his last tour on the road.
As Brainard listened to the shrill pipings of Cordelia answered by Warner’s beery bass, his heart sank. He recalled all the rebuffs he had received from the better players whom he had approached—their insincere and voluble sympathy, their flimsy excuses, and the selfish fears that kept them from offending Einstein & Flukeheimer, in spite of the generous salaries and all the other temptations Brainard could think of to win them to the cause of art.
“Maybe your gold mine will give out, or you will get tired of the stage,” one well-known actress had said to him pertly. “Anyway, Einstein has promised to put me on in one of Dudu Smith’s plays, and that’s good enough for me!”
The People’s would have to do the best they could with second-rate and third-rate people until they had “made good,” or could train their own actors, Brainard reflected. Meanwhile Miss Leroy continued to pipe and Dudley Warner to bawl, interrupted now and then by MacNaughton’s resonant voice from the wings “No, no! That won’t do at all. Begin that once more, Miss Leroy,” etc.
“Ah, it’s rotten! Cut it out!” a voice murmured out of the darkness close to Brainard.
The fresh young voice so near to him startled Brainard, and he turned to see who had spoken. In the gloom he could make out a girl sitting hunched up, with crossed legs, a newspaper on her lap, from which she seemed to be eating her luncheon.
“It is pretty rotten,” Brainard admitted.
“The whole bunch is no account trash, anyway,” the young person continued impersonally, dangling a slice of sausage before her mouth. “Like last year’s grass or yesterday’s supper. But that Jenny! Why, she couldn’t decorate a cemetery properly!”
Thereupon, having disposed of the company, the young woman devoted herself unreservedly to her food, ignoring Brainard’s presence. The next time that the stage manager opened a discussion with Miss Leroy that promised to last for some moments, Brainard turned to the girl.
“Pardon my curiosity,” he said, taking the seat behind her, “but I should like to know how you happen to be here at the rehearsal.”
“Me? Why, I belong!” she replied, with a funny wrinkling of her small lips. “I’m part of it—this great uplift movement for the American drá-ma!”
Brainard winced at the gibe.
“Is that what they call us?”
“And a lot of other things,” the young woman admitted frankly. “Highbrows and amateurs and boneheads and—”
“I don’t know you, and I thought I had met every one in the company.”
“I’m not in the front row, you see. I am what they call a nee-o-phyte—a pupil in the Actors’ College, when there is any college.”
“Oh, I remember now!” Brainard said, recalling the first and only pupil enrolled. “Your name is—”
“Delacourt—Louisiana Delacourt,” the girl rolled out with gusto, as if she enjoyed her name, and hadn’t many opportunities of using it.
The slightly Southern accent of the girl set puzzling currents of memory at work in Brainard’s mind. He looked at her more closely, but in the dim light of the auditorium could not make out distinctly the face which was shrouded in one of the inverted “peach-basket” hats of the period. She seemed a slight little body.
“Say,” Miss Delacourt remarked confidentially, “I bet I could show that wiggle-tailed Flossie a stunt or two!”
“Do you know Lear?”
“Do I know Lear? I was nursed on Shakespeare. My mother knew the plays by heart, and used to recite ’em all over. Mr. Farson says he’ll get me a boy’s part in the last act. Five lines—but you’ll see how I’ll make ’em hum!”
Just then Farson came up to them out of the darkness of the auditorium, and nodded to the girl, who presently slipped off.
“So you know Miss Delacourt?” Brainard observed.
“Of course! Everybody about the place knows Louisiana. Queer little piece, isn’t she? Slangy and fresh, but she knows how to handle herself. . . . It’s pretty rotten!” he remarked cheerfully, glancing at the stage.
“Just what Louisiana said.”
“I guess she knows!”
Brainard and the secretary thereupon went out to lunch, and tried to forget their troubles.
VI
At last, amid turmoil and excitement, the opening day came. Brainard and Farson had been at the theater since early morning, doing what they could to bring order out of chaos. About lunch time MacNaughton rushed up to them, his face white with excitement.
“A telegram from Miss Leroy!” he gasped. “Doctor thinks she’s got appendicitis. She’s got Einsteinitis, all right,—that’s what is the matter with her! We can’t raise an actress in New York who knows Cordelia’s lines, let alone having rehearsed it. We’ll have to postpone the opening!”
“Not that!” Brainard said, with tightening lips. “Not if you read the lines, Mac!” The old actor stormed back and forth, snapping his fingers and cursing with equal warmth stars and managers, the stage and life.
“Isn’t there some one in the company who could take the part?” Brainard asked.
“Not one, man or woman!” the Scotsman growled. “We’re using the whole company.”
“Where’s Louisiana?” Farson inquired, a little smile wreathing his lips.
“You mean that Kansas kid? She’s knocking about the stage somewhere,” MacNaughton replied. He had had several passages with Miss Delacourt already, and had no great opinion of her ability except in repartee. “You aren’t thinking of that child?”
“Let’s find her,” Farson said. “She knows Shakespeare by heart—her mother used to put her to sleep on it—she’s always getting it off when she isn’t ragging the show with her Kansas slang.”
They found Louisiana sitting on a pile of properties, playing with a lanky pup. She smiled on Farson in a friendly fashion, and ignored the manager.
“Say, what’s broken down now?” she drawled. “Have Miss Leroy’s stays given warning, or did the big bass fiddle bust a string?”
“Look here, Miss Louisiana,” Farson replied. “Quit your guying, and get ready for Cordelia. We’ll rehearse you all the afternoon.”
“Gee whiz!” the young woman remarked, rising and yanking the puppy by the leash. “But you’re sudden, my dear!”
“Miss Leroy is sick—going to have an operation.”
“She needed it, if ever a woman did!” Miss Delacourt tossed back over her shoulder as she tied the puppy to the gilded throne.
“She’ll do!” Farson whispered encouragingly.
“She’ll do something,” MacNaughton growled gloomily.
It was not an auspicious outlook for the opening of the People’s Theater.
At eight o’clock that evening, the new playhouse was fairly well filled with what the local press calls a “highbrow audience.” Of these, not a few had come to scoff, for from the beginning the newspapers, led by the Beacon, had taken the People’s Theater as a pet toy with which to play during the silly season. It was variously described as the “Sulfur Extravaganza,” the “Cowboy Show,” or the “Arizona Théâtre Français.”
For ever since that fatal luncheon, the editor of the Beacon had directed the most skillful members of his celebrated stiletto gang in their sneers at Brainard. To the New York newspaper mind it was simply inconceivable that a man with a great fortune could put it to so purely childish a use as running a popular theater. A few friendly souls, however, were scattered up and down the house—those who follow the banner of “new ideas” wherever it may wave; and there were a few of the “people”—a very few—on free tickets.
As the curtains slowly parted, Brainard, sitting alone in the rear of the house, regretted more than ever that they had attempted to open with Lear. There were surely some in the audience whose memories, like his, would carry them back to the godlike fury of the elder Salvini. What could they make of the squat figure, the perspiring muscularity of Dudley Warner?
As the fated king waddled forth and began, Brainard shut his eyes. He opened them suddenly on hearing:
What shall Cordelia do? Love, and be silent.
It was Louisiana in walk and bearing,—the swagger from Iole, Kansas,—but the voice was rich and sweet, with an unpremeditated, girlish modulation that suggested depths of feeling unsuspected.
The audience, puzzled, was respectful through Cordelia’s humble replies, until the young actress essayed her first long speech:
You have begot me, bred me, loved me; I
Return those duties back as are right fit . . .
Haply when I shall wed,
That lord must take my—my—
Louisiana stumbled at the word, then brought out triumphantly:
My fist—
There was a ripple of amusement. Miss Delacourt heard it, flushed defiance in an un-Cordelia-like manner, and tore through the concluding lines. She got on well enough in the short responses, but the critics were waiting—as was Brainard, with trepidation—to see what the girl would make of her next long speech.
Alas! Miss Louisiana sailed in, as she would have said, to paint the lines. She drew herself up in all her girlish dignity.
I yet beseech your majesty,
If for I want that glib and oily part
To speak and purpose not; since what I well intend
I’ll do’t before I speak—that you make known—
A frightened look came over the girl’s face. “She is rattled,” Brainard said to himself, “and will break!”
Evidently the audience thought so, too, and there was a painful hush, in which MacNaughton’s efforts to whisper the words from the side could be heard.
“It is no—no—oh, hang it all, how does the talk go?” Louisiana muttered audibly, swinging on her heel toward the wings.
There was a roar of laughter from the house. With one contemptuous glance at the audience, Cordelia walked deliberately into the wings, and, returning in fierce haste, finished her speech. As she made her exit at the end of the scene, she jerked the train of her dress and gave it a kick in good vaudeville style. The galleries caught fire, and began to stamp and hoot. Louisiana turned and distinctly made a face, as a child might, at her tormentors. The applause was furious. It lasted so long that to resume the play with any degree of seriousness seemed utterly impossible.
At the end of the act, the manager pushed the unwilling Cordelia out upon the stage. She made a sulky little bow and another face. There were calls and whistles. She was a hit. But Lear!
Brainard, laughing in spite of himself, bit his lips with mortification. After this nothing could bring the audience to take the performance seriously. The galleries began to guy Warner, and to exchange repartee with the fool.
Fortunately, Cordelia did not appear during the next two acts. When she came on at the conclusion of the fourth act, for the affecting scene with the blind king, the gallery received her uproariously. She was white, with set lips, and she threw herself into her lines with a fine scorn of the mirthful house. When her memory failed her, she cut or improvised with fluent inspiration.
“She’s acting!” Farson whispered in amazement to Brainard.
“Yes, she’s acting, but they don’t know it!”
For the house, having amused itself once with Miss Delacourt, refused to take her seriously, and was ready to explode with derisive mirth at any unconventional gesture, any wrong accent. Poor Louisiana gave them enough openings; but she held herself steadily, and was winning her way with the sweetness of her voice and her real charm, when, alas, there came a long, hard line. She wavered, tried to bluff it out, but broke down, burst into tears, and fled to the wings.
“Poor child! It was too much for her,” Brainard murmured, while Farson tried to hiss down the laughter.
It would not down, however. Finally Brainard rose and walked down the aisle to the front. Holding up his hand to still the noise, he said:
“Miss Delacourt came to us merely as a pupil. We were compelled to ask her to take the difficult rôle of Cordelia at five hours’ notice, owing to the sudden illness of Miss Leroy. I think that Miss Delacourt deserves our thanks and our sympathy, instead of these jeers.”
There was silence, but Lear was doomed. The critics had left, and others followed. Those that stayed until the curtain swept together for the last time snickered contemptuously over the affair. Louisiana had saved the occasion from dismal dullness; she had turned Lear into a farce!
VII
The pleasant drawing-room and the library of the theater, which were on the second floor above the foyer, had been thrown open after the performance, and a few well-wishers of the enterprise lingered there to examine the new playhouse and to meet the shamefaced members of the company, to whom Brainard was giving a supper. Miss Delacourt did not appear with the others.
“She’s probably gone home, poor girl,” Farson said, as Brainard started to find her. He went directly to the dressing rooms and knocked at one of the closed doors. He had to knock twice before a sulky voice replied irritably:
“Well, come in!”
Louisiana had torn off the blond wig in which she had played Cordelia and tossed it into a corner. She had also removed the embroidered gold bodice of her costume and put on a rumpled dressing sack, and was sitting curled up on her long train, the big puppy in her lap. She was pulling his ears; her brown hair fell about his head. It was plain that she had been crying.
“What do you want?” she asked crossly, recognizing Brainard.
“I came to—to thank you for helping us in our emergency this evening,” Brainard stammered.
“Helping! That’s a smooth word, I must say!” the girl flashed. “You may like that sort of help; but it’s the last you’ll get from me, I reckon!”
“I hope not,” Brainard protested heartily. “You saved the performance from being just a soggy failure, anyway.”
He could not help smiling at the memory of her saucy antics, yet the picture of childish despair she presented, crumpled, with her hair falling about the puppy’s head, roused another unfamiliar feeling of sympathy and pity. She was such a forlorn little person, for all the bravado of her speech!
“Is that what you call saving it?” Louisiana turned the puppy from her lap and devoted all her passion to scorn. “Saving! To make yourself a guy, to be ‘it’ for the merry haw-haws of the smart Alecks in New York! I must say I don’t like your taste. I’d rather fail in some other way.” She pushed back her falling hair and tied it excitedly in a knot, then shrank into her dressing gown and glared at Brainard very much like a kitten that has been cornered and is ruffled, “Let me tell you right here, dear sir, if you are the big gun responsible for this whole show, you haven’t got much to be proud of!”
“I heard you say that once before,” Brainard admitted humbly. “You said it was rotten, and I guess it is. But we are going to try to make it better.”
“Yes, try! You’d better try. I haven’t seen much acting, but I’ve seen road shows in one-horse towns back in the State of Kansas that could play all over your swell outfit. You think you are uplifting the theater, do you? What do you know about the theater, anyway? You’d better go right out to Iole, or over in the Bowery, and look at a ten-twent’-thirt’ show and learn something about play-acting. This young ladies’ boarding-school sissy show—oh, why did I ever come to you? I’d have learned more in a Kansas City variety!”
She crossed the room to hunt up a cigarette, and puffed the smoke with a disdainful shrug of her thin shoulders, walking to and fro in the small dressing room, kicking her dress about like a football, and generally emitting sparks.
“So I saved your show from being too awfully dull—at the expense of my reputation!”
Brainard could not help laughing at this display of childish vanity. She was a child attempting to be dignified with something more than a child’s intelligence. He suppressed his laughter and let her emotion explode.
“What do you think those writer-guys in the front row are going to say about Louisiana Delacourt to-morrow morning? They’ll hand me the merry laugh, that’s all. I’ll be a deader in the profession after this. Anyway, I’ll have to make up another name.”
“Your name wasn’t on the program, you know,” Brainard suggested soothingly. Louisiana merely cast him a withering glance. “Of course, our company isn’t what it should be yet,” he admitted. “We’ll try to give you a better chance—”
“You’ll have to do some mighty smart trying,” the girl sneered fiercely. “You highbrows think all you’ve got to do is to open a theater and print ‘Ideals’ in big letters on the program, and the public will run to your show. Folks have been going to the theater some before you undertook to uplift it!”
“Do you think they do good work at the other theaters?”
“They ain’t all they might be, perhaps, but they’re so much more in the game than you are, Mr. Head-in-the-Clouds, that you can’t see ’em at all, at all! And to start off with Shakespeare, of course!”
“Lear was a mistake.”
“I should say it was!” she agreed with infinite sarcasm. “Why don’t you look around and see what the others are doing—what the horrid trust is putting on? They know their business, anyway.”
“Oh, come—you are a little hard on us!”
“I mean it. . . . Now, if you don’t mind stepping along, I’m going to shake off this meal sack and hike home to bed. Good-by to high art for me, thank you!”
Brainard started for the door on this broad hint, but paused with his hand on the knob.
“Miss Delacourt,” he said, facing the angry girl, “I came here to-night to say to you what I sincerely believe—that you have in you the making of a fine actress. I gather from what you have said about our undertaking that my opinion means nothing to you. But let me assure you that I didn’t see your mistakes to-night as much as the spirit and the talent—the very great talent, if I am not mistaken.”
“Very kind of you, I am sure,” the girl snapped.
“I don’t wish to persuade you to stay with us against your inclination. In our present shape, we can’t give you what you need.”
“I should think not!”
“One of my purposes, however, in this enterprise was to discover just such talent as I think you have, and develop it. Perhaps, if I can’t help you in one way to develop your talent, I can in another.”
Miss Delacourt deigned to pause in her toilette to stare at Brainard.
“I’m sure you have the real thing in you, even after this one unfortunate performance. I can’t tell whether the vein will hold deep, whether you have the character to develop it thoroughly, or will be content with the superficial success you might easily achieve in one of the commercial theaters. But I want to help you to do better than that—to give your talent a chance.”
“Well?”
“You must go where you can study—where you can see good acting also. You must go abroad—to England and France and Germany.”
The girl’s eyes opened wider and wider. She murmured:
“But that would take a sight of time and money, and I haven’t a cent in the world!”
“You have the time, at your age, and I can give you all the money you need,” he went on earnestly. “To-morrow Mr. Farson and I will talk the matter over with you and decide on what’s the best way to go about it.”
Louisiana threw back her head, as if to embrace the splendid vision opened before her. Still gazing at Brainard to see whether he really meant it all, or was perpetrating a cruel joke, she gave a long sigh. There was something pathetically wistful and desirous in her small face that stirred Brainard strongly. He seemed to be looking into a little starved soul that was trying to grasp the meaning of his promise.
“You don’t mean—”
She began and stopped. Her look wavered for one moment, as if an unpleasant idea had crossed her mind and made her doubt Brainard’s disinterestedness. Brainard understood the expression. Probably in her short experience of life she had met with little real generosity from men.
“I mean exactly what I said—and nothing more!” he added with meaning emphasis.
The girl’s face cleared with wonderful rapidity. Once more it had the eager, wistful expression of the child.
“My, but you are a good one!” she exclaimed at last, convinced of his earnestness and his singleness of purpose. “After all those fancy compliments I just passed you, too!”
“I guess we deserved a good part of what you said. Perhaps you’ll save the day for us again sometime—when you come back.”
“I sure hope I can! But not that way!” she blushed. “You mean it all—the study and travel? To go to Paris?”
“And London and Berlin and Vienna,” Brainard added with a smile. “And a lot of hard work, too, remember!”
“That never rattled me!” Louisiana exclaimed, gathering the sleepy pup into her arms and hugging him until he yelped. Presently she held out a hand to Brainard with an expression on her mobile face more mature than he had yet seen there. “Some day I’ll tell you my story, and then you’ll see what it means to me. You’ve given me—life!”
He left her hastily to spare her the embarrassment of a second fit of tears. In spite of all the humiliation that the evening had brought him, Brainard returned to his house in a happy and contented frame of mind.
VIII
When Brainard confided to Farson the plan he had formed for Louisiana Delacourt’s education, the younger man looked sharply at him for one moment as if he also suspected ulterior motives in this unexpected interest in the young woman, who had given the People’s Theater such dubious notoriety by her performance of Cordelia. In that rapid interchange of glances between the two men, Brainard felt for the first time a slight antagonism to his cheerful and companionable secretary. Why should Farson immediately infer that there was anything more than a disinterested desire on his part to help a poor and promising girl, whom fate had rather casually thrown in his path? Was it necessary that in the theater world this should inevitably be the implication,—that there could be no simple kindness between men and women!
“No!” he exclaimed, with a slight smile, answering Farson’s glance, “I don’t mean that!”
“Why do you think that it would be a good thing for Louisiana to go abroad now? She’s got a good deal to learn that she could learn here just as well,” the secretary observed evasively.
Brainard smiled more openly. It was plain enough that the young secretary did not like the idea of losing sight of their Kansas star, of whom he had seen a good deal in the course of business these last months.
“She’s nothing but a kid, you know,” he added in an indifferent tone.
“Exactly! And it’s just because she is so much of a child that I think the best thing for her is to have a lot of new experience of a totally different kind from any she’s likely to get over here. What she wants is to grow,—not learn grammar and elocution. She must develop in every way to become the actress that is in her, and that development she will get more easily somewhere out of her old environment—apart from all the inspiration that will come to her eager little mind by seeing real acting and real plays, of which there is much more just at present in Europe than in New York.”
“I see you have thought it all out,” the secretary replied dryly.
“Yes, I have thought a good deal about Louisiana since last night,” Brainard admitted.
It had occurred to him possibly in the course of this thought that the secretary’s growing intimacy with the girl was not altogether advantageous. His nature was too generous, however, to entertain this consideration seriously. The idea of rivalry between them for the girl’s interest was too ridiculous to be thought of, and yet he was forced to recognize in himself a trace of that subtle sex jealousy that seems inevitable wherever two men are concerned with one woman, no matter how trivial the occasion. He put it summarily out of his head.
“She won’t be away for always, Ned,” he observed good-naturedly. “And we must give the girl her chance—it’s the least we can do after encouraging her to come on here and join our organization, isn’t it?”
“I suppose so,” the secretary agreed more cordially.
When Brainard told MacNaughton of his purpose, the old actor expressed an unfeigned and unflattering surprise.
“What do you want to turn that silly’s little head for?” he roared, flourishing his cigar. “Send her abroad to study! You’d much better send her to a grammar school or a young lady’s fem sem where she could learn ordinary deportment. She’ll never make an actress.”
“I don’t agree with you,” Brainard replied quickly. “She’s the best we’ve got already.”
Farson watched the two with an amused smile. The old actor shrugged his shoulders in mute disgust.
“It isn’t saying much either,” the patron of the People’s Theater continued somewhat tartly. “Cordelia wasn’t the worst that happened last night by any means.”
“My God!” the Scotsman groaned fervently. “I hope nothing as bad will ever happen to me again in this life.”
Brainard’s doubts of MacNaughton’s fitness for his position of manager grew rapidly from this moment into a conviction that eventually produced difficulties in the hitherto harmonious management of the theatrical enterprise. Another disturbing current set in motion by the young person from Iole, Kansas!
Brainard and Farson discussed at some length the details of Louisiana’s trip. The secretary was firmly convinced that some sort of chaperone should be provided for the girl. She needed a duenna or guardian, he said, to keep her out of scrapes, if ever a woman did. When this idea was suggested to Miss Delacourt, it received an immediate and positive discouragement.
“I don’t know any female whom I could endure to have trailing around after me,” she said. “And what’s the use, anyhow? They won’t eat me up over there, I reckon. I’ve always managed to look out for myself so far, and I’m not likely to forget how now I’ve something worth doing to keep me busy. . . . No, I’ll go it alone, thank you, or not at all until I’m ready to select my own guardian.”
With this she cast Farson a belligerent look that delighted Brainard. When the secretary tried to explain in circumspect terms the manifold dangers to which a young woman traveling alone was necessarily exposed, she said:
“I’m going to take the pup along. A good dog is worth any two chaperones in case of trouble.”
Brainard observed finally:
“I think Miss Delacourt is right. She will get on very well anywhere by herself. She has the habit of independence.”
“You see!” the young woman remarked, nodding loftily to Farson. “You are too conventional for the theater. I have the habit of perfect independence, as your boss said. And I don’t propose to give it up in a hurry either.”
With this second jab at the secretary she squeezed her dog in an ecstasy of good spirits.
This important question being settled, there remained merely the plan of work and travel, which Brainard undertook to prepare and to which he gave much careful consideration. Then the passage was engaged, and the morning of the sailing the three had a pleasant breakfast together at a little down-town restaurant. Louisiana appeared in what she called “the proper make-up for her new part,”—a smart traveling costume, with fresh hat, gloves, boots, and parasol. Brainard was glad to see that she had made such an immediate and natural use of the liberal means he had placed at her disposal through his secretary, although the transformation worked by her new costume took away a certain quality of primitive girlishness that was pleasant to him. Louisiana was emerging rapidly from her chrysalis under the stimulus of the opportunity he had provided for her. As he sat back and watched her spar with Farson, he wondered whether the old Louisiana would ever return from Europe. What sort of woman would take the place of the girl who had made her début in the most unconventional Cordelia the English stage had ever seen?
At any rate everything was spontaneous in her now,—not a trace of self-consciousness in her attitude to him as her benefactor, and all the simplicity and directness of the child which had first touched him.
“He says he’s going to write a piece for the theater and put me in,” Louisiana remarked turning to Brainard. “He’d better let me see it first—I’ll give him a few points most men writers overlook. . . . You’ll keep the theater open until I get back?”
“Longer than that, we hope!” Brainard laughed.
“I want to make my début there—my real début,” she said importantly.
“I promise you we’ll keep it open for that!”
“You’d better fire the whole bunch and start over,” she observed thoughtfully. . . .
At the last moment, when Farson had already gone down the gangway, the girl drew Brainard to one side and uttered the first serious words they had had since their talk in her dressing room the night of Lear.
“It’s no use saying thanks, you know!”
“I don’t want you to thank me.”
“I know you don’t and I’m not—but I want you to know I understand.”
“What?”
“What you’re doing for me. . . . I’ll make good.”
“I believe you will!”
“Good-by!”
She gave him a lean little hand that gripped his nervously. The last he saw of Louisiana Delacourt as he went over the ship’s side, she was chasing her dog into some stranger’s deck cabin. As he made his way from the dock towards the People’s Theater that morning, his world seemed less gay and amusing with Louisiana out of it.
IX
After the inglorious failure of Lear, they tried She Stoops to Conquer, with Cecilia Pyce, an English actress of advancing years and a large and bony physique, whom MacNaughton much vaunted. Brainard suspected that Cissie, as Mac called her, had been the Scotsman’s sweetheart in her palmier days, and thus he was now paying his sentimental debts by giving her a lucrative position at his patron’s expense. However, nothing better offered at present, and Miss Pyce at least knew how to act in the solid old English fashion. The people came sparingly, and sat in the first four rows of the big auditorium, which was a lonesome sort of place these days.
It was little better when the company essayed an “original American play”—as it was advertised—that Farson had culled from the mass of manuscripts he had examined. May Magic lasted a week, and then fell to pieces before an audience consisting of the author and about twenty of his friends. The management could not even give their tickets away. At May Magic the critics took final leave of the People’s Theater with such parting kicks as this:
What in the name of common sense is the amateurish aggregation at the so-called People’s Theater trying to do? In what sense is it a popular theater? The “people” are conspicuous by their absence. The worthy gentleman who is spending his money giving the public fifth-rate productions of English classics and such rejected modern masterpieces as May Magic had better go over to Broadway and learn his trade.
Brainard was thankful that Louisiana was safe on the high seas on her way to Munich, and would not see this article!
Somewhere Farson ran across a statuesque young woman of German extraction who spoke English as if she had a cracker in her mouth, and became persuaded that the mission of their organization was to introduce to the American public the new plays of the advanced European theater.
“We must become the theater of ideas,” he said to Brainard.
So, with the assistance of Miss Beatrice Klinker in leading roles, the People’s Theater became frankly “highbrow” and went after Brieux, Hauptmann, Strindberg, and the tribe of the peculiar. Brainard poured out money like water in buying rights at exorbitant prices, in preparing new scenery, and in expensive additions to the company. He foresaw that at this rate, instead of starting a chain of popular theaters across the continent, he would have all he could do to maintain one organization in New York, with possibly a couple of road companies. For the receipts were always negligible. To such comparatively modest limits had his great Idea already shrunken. If he had not thus far succeeded in enlightening any large section of the American Public in dramatic art, he himself had received a very thorough and costly lesson, not merely in the drama, but in human nature and life. That, however, had not been his purpose!
It was not until the People’s Theater produced an erotic piece by a new Danish writer, whose name was unknown to the critics, that the house began to fill.
“We’ve struck our pace!” Farson declared jubilantly. He exercised all his journalistic ingenuity in whetting the appetite of the New York public for the play with immediate results in the box office. Brainard, although he had no high opinion of the play, felt relieved not to encounter at each performance the same dreary waste of empty seats. He comforted himself with the thought that if the Public could be induced to come to a “sex play,” they might be captured for less hectic entertainments. MacNaughton and Farson, with the easy sophistry of the theater, maintained that what people cared to see must be good art and stoutly defended the Danish piece.
But their good luck did not hold. At the Saturday matinée of the first week the police visited the theater and the curtain was ordered down after the bedroom scene in the second act. There was a mild demonstration among the audience, whose curiosity was defeated, and the price of their tickets was repaid to all who demanded it. The press made considerable noise over the event.
“We’re made!” MacNaughton announced in great excitement. Farson was busy with the reporters, trying to get the most out of this unexpected bit of publicity. Brainard set forth in search of the virtuous police commissioner to protest in the name of outraged Art. But the commissioner was impervious to Art.
“That sort of show don’t go in New York,” he pronounced austerely, in reply to Brainard’s argument that the play had been given even more boldly in Vienna and Berlin and was held to be a “moral document” by the best European critics. The police commissioner seemed to think that New York had a different and better morality than that obtaining in Europe. He was obdurate. When Brainard reported his failure to his associates, Farson took it very lightly.
“All we’ll have to do,” he suggested, “is to make some slight changes—put a screen in front of the bed scene—and see the inspector. I’ll take care of him.”
But Brainard refused to pay the police to be allowed to produce his play, and so on Monday night the People’s Theater remained dark.
“And just look at all that money!” MacNaughton wailed, as something of a crowd began to form in front of the theater for the first time. “The governor is a miserable puritan,” he said to Farson, wringing his hands. “To think of turning his back on his luck just because of the morality of the New York police! He ought to run a Sunday school.”
Brainard was not to be moved, although the theater would have to remain closed for a week until the company could prepare another play. He was deeply disgusted with the whole affair, with the notoriety as well as the cheap pretense of morality by the police commissioner. For the first time in four years his faith in the great Idea began to waver, and he longed to escape from New York to the more vital air of Arizona. There had been some difficulty recently with the pumps at the Melody mine, and he might well take this opportunity of running down to Monument. Once there it would be a temptation to abandon the great Idea altogether and to remain in the mountains developing the copper mine. Or he could buy a coffee plantation in Jalapa, as he had once fleetingly thought of doing, and settle himself in Mexico like a medieval prince. Possibly the little señorita Marie had not yet found another Prince and had waited all these years for his expected return. The vision of that beautiful semitropical valley dominated by the snowy crown of the old volcano returned to his memory with alluring colors. Life in such a far-off Eden with a gentle creature as mistress of a rose-covered haçienda was an inviting contrast to the glare and vulgarity of New York. . . .
Brainard and the secretary left the theater in glum silence, each possessed by an unhappy train of thought. On their way uptown they passed a billboard on which some flaming posters displayed certain tempting scenes from a soul-and-body-stirring play called The Stolen Bonds, now being given for the first time in New York. Brainard paused before the gaudy billboard.
“What the public really likes!” Farson commented with a grin.
Brainard remembered Louisiana’s angry taunt,—“Go and see a good melodrama—see what folks are willing to pay real money for!”
“Let’s take it in!” he exclaimed, seizing his companion’s arm. “We haven’t anything else to do this evening.”
“We’ll get all the goods before we reach the show,” the secretary observed, pointing to another series of immense posters that represented a gloomy bank vault in which a masked gentleman was holding a lantern above the prostrate form of a woman. “They’re not afraid of giving away their story!”
“Perhaps we shall find the great American play we have been hunting for all this year,” Brainard replied, as they came into the garish foyer of the theater. At one side was the entrance to a brilliant saloon, which seemed part of the establishment. “Democratic and convivial this,” he joked, thinking of the dainty “tea room” at the People’s.
There were only box seats left. When the two pushed aside the plush curtains that concealed these luxurious retreats, the curtain was up and the first act had started before a house packed with prosperous-looking citizens and their women.
“Not a dead seat in the house, I’ll bet!” whispered the secretary.
The scene represented the inside of an office, with a large safe at one side. The short, black-haired heroine was striving ineffectually to bar the way of a brawny villain, who had her covered with a revolver in one hand, and with the other whipped an ether cone from an inner pocket. She was rapidly crowded into the vault, where she succumbed in due time, after a muscular struggle and curdling shrieks, to the ether cone. Thereupon the burglar set busily to work to fill an enormous sample case with piles of yellow currency and bundles conveniently labeled Bonds, in large letters, so that a child might read. The villain then departed, carefully locking the door of the safe upon the etherized heroine.
But the villain had reckoned without the telephone. In the next scene the stenographer-heroine slowly grabbed the ether cone from her face, gaspingly crawled to the corner, where the telephone hung conspicuously, and called Central. Presently the bolts began to grumble, and were shot back by a young man who rushed in and dragged the tottering woman from the safe, while she murmured in a dying whisper audible for two blocks:
“The ferry, Jasper! The ferry! The thief!” Then the noble girl fell swooning and apparently lifeless.
“There’s something doing!” Farson remarked with an appreciative grin, and added with a peculiar expression, “They’ve taken more than a hint from my one play.”
“And several more from life,” Brainard muttered.
“I believe it is life through the medium of my play—but altered somehow,” Farson observed.
“Oh! much altered!”
The next scene was labeled, “At the Ferry Slip—San Francisco.” As the curtain rose, the villain—no longer masked, but with a long ulster concealing all but his sinister eyes—was deftly transferring himself and his sample case, stuffed with money and bonds, on board the ferry-boat. The bell rang—business in the wings. Then on rushed the hero-lover, clutching vainly at the disappearing sample case. There was a desperate tussle between the hero and the villain, while the dummy passengers on the deck above obligingly turned their backs. The villain cut loose from his pursuer with a wicked knife, threw the case upon the moving boat, and leaped two yards after it, leaving the prostrate figure of the hero-lover half dropping over the slip. The stenographer-heroine appeared—in a neat traveling suit—and pulled her lover safely ashore. Curtain.
“Bravo!” Farson shouted enthusiastically. “If it isn’t exactly life, it’s the way we’d all like to have it happen, anyway.”
“It may be nearer life than you think,” Brainard assented with a queer smile. In this scene he had been able to get a good view of the heroine of the piece. Beneath the coarse make-up he thought he recognized familiar features, and felt sure that he had heard in real life that pert, nasal voice which had just uttered the last speech—“Escaped! We’ll track him into the darkest wilds of Africa!”
“Recognize a friend?” Farson inquired. Brainard nodded. They turned over the leaves of their program to find the name of the heroine. It was Lorilla Walters, in large black type.
“Lorilla,” Farson murmured. “Good stage name.”
“It sounds like her!” Brainard agreed.
Just then the curtain went up for the third act. Here was a rapid succession of scenes representing the pursuit and escape of the villain in the Arizona desert, with one very lurid background of flaming mountains and sagebrush plain. Pistol shots and a chase through an adobe haçienda outside a Mexican village concluded the act.
“Whew, these people have wire nerves!” Farson commented, wiping his brow.
“They have treated the story rather freely,” Brainard remarked grimly. Farson talked nervously.
“Louisiana would like that!” he said. “There’s something doing all the time. I bet that’s Lorilla. What do you say to trying her at the People’s? She’s a trifle broad in her methods, but sound—and lets herself go all the time. It’s just a bit loud in tone.”
“Not louder than life sometimes.”
“It carries home—look at the audience!”
In the fourth act the villain was at last cornered by the stenographer-heroine and the hero-lover, aided by a United States cruiser, which intercepted the villain and his sample case as they were about to sail away from the port of Vera Cruz on a Spanish steamer. The captain of the steamer on which the villain had taken refuge with his sample case blasphemously defied the flag of the United States with loud curses. But a booming shot from the wings knocked his smokestack out of service, and brought him to his senses. The captain thereafter gracefully received the smart American lieutenant who came aboard in holiday uniform and collared the villain, denounced by the heroine, as he cowered behind the fallen smokestack—still wearing the long ulster.
They applauded vigorously and were about to drift out with the crowd of candy-eating females and their escorts, when the curtains of the box were parted by a gentleman in evening clothes, who stood smiling, holding his spotless silk hat in one hand and extending the other to Brainard.
“Hello!” the stranger said easily, as if he were greeting a casual acquaintance whom he had not seen for several days. He came forward into the box, and sat on the edge of a chair, dangling his glossy silk hat. “Saw you from behind,” he added, smiling slightly upon Brainard, whose surprise was evident.
“You, Hollinger!” the latter exclaimed, recovering himself. “What are you doing here?”
“Oh, in the show business,—same as you,” he added with a little laugh.
“The last time I saw you—”
“Was in that Jalapa hotel where I had the pleasure of delivering a little lecture on life for your benefit,” the fight-trust man supplied. “You profited by it at once—that very night, if I remember rightly. Rarely does a teacher of morals get such a rapid reaction!”
“Yes!” Brainard laughed. “Necessity pointed the moral to your talk with a kick. I left on a mule car, and got away just in time.”
“So Calloway told me the next morning. We tried to keep your friends interested in Jalapa until the boat sailed. I take it that we succeeded.”
“Yes, I owe you a great deal for that good turn.”
“Don’t mention it,” Hollinger murmured, slipping into the chair, “always ready to serve a friend.”
Brainard introduced Farson, who knew the “king of the prize ring trust” by sight, for Hollinger had been a celebrated figure on the Coast in the days before the graft trials. The three chatted for a time while the auditorium emptied.
“How did you like our play?” he inquired casually.
“Your play! It’s suspiciously like mine.”
“Perhaps we drew from the same sources.”
“How did you get into the theatrical business?” Brainard inquired.
“I got into it in a rather roundabout way,” the fight-trust magnate explained. “You remember the event at Jalapa? The American papers were full of it at the time. I was interested in the moving picture concession for the States. We expected to make big money out of it. But they had another spasm of virtue in this country about that time, and we were shut out of the best circuits. So from the movies I got into vaudeville and then into the regular show business. Have a couple of circuits on the Coast and interests in the East also. This is one of my companies. They’ve done a tremendous business out West in this thing—did it appeal to you?”
He smiled genially at Brainard, and added: “We couldn’t work in the haçienda scene,—roses, moonlight, Orizaba, pretty Mexican girl, and the rest,—it took too much scenery.”
“We thought it was a trifle overdrawn,” Brainard observed.
“Oh, the theater demands that, you know,—exaggeration. Art is never quite like nature. Even Milton threw it on thick at times, if I recollect. . . . But it stirs the blood—that’s what you want in these dull times. People come to the theater to feel, their lives are so dull. That’s the first thing I learned in the show business. Give the public something to tease the nerves, keep ’em on the jump. And the second thing I learned was that you must always hold up a high moral standard. It never pays in the long run to cater to the small class that can afford to think about morals as freely as they act.” He looked at Brainard meaningly. “I saw your show last week,” he explained. “It’s not really tough, but it don’t pay to do that sort of thing. Most people, of course, are not half as good as they like to think they are. But even the worst want their art and literature better than they know they are and better than they think their neighbors are. That’s the way they square themselves with life,” he concluded sententiously.
This was the second time, Brainard reflected, that he had received a valuable lesson in ethics from the fight-trust magnate. He understood now why Hollinger had been reading Milton when he first made his acquaintance on the Overland Limited. He was a business philosopher.
“If you are going to deal with people,” he added gently, “you must know how they act and feel about things.”
“I suppose that is why you let the heroine capture the thief in this piece?” Brainard remarked.
“Precisely! The clever young dramatist who knocked the thing together for me was all for another ending, a more convincing one, perhaps, where the heroine was bought off for a good share of the bonds and currency. But although admitting the truth of his reasoning, I could not permit him to ruin the success of our play. We were compelled to violate nature again, and in deference to the public’s unquenchable thirst for Virtue we allowed the slow-moving heroine to accomplish the dire purpose of her vengeful passions with the assistance of the government. In its present form our play is terribly satisfying to our public. It gratifies especially that common human desire to get somebody. Half our criminal justice is built upon the same unpleasant trait of human nature. . . . By the way,” he remarked, interrupting the flow of his philosophical analysis, “I almost forgot! There’s a friend of yours in behind who wants to see you. I promised to bring you back. You’ve no objections?”
“None at all!” Brainard laughed. “You see our encounter didn’t turn out quite like the play, fortunately for me!”
“So I understand,” Hollinger replied demurely, holding the curtain aside to let the others precede him.