Persons Unknown Part 21

"Something like it. Set the tone for it, too, in a way. He was a highly respectable sentimental person, and used to carry about an old miniature of a lovely girl to whom, I believe, he had once been betrothed. The bans had been forbid by cruel parents but he used to brag to me, at fifty, that they could never force him to part from her idolized face!

Yet he knew so many shady stories I've often wondered if he hadn't left home in order to avoid a circle of too embarra.s.sing clients. At any rate he had known a woman whose husband had got into trouble with the police in Italy--for swindling, I think he said. She had to clear out and disappeared. Years afterward he found that she had run into the arms of a respectable, G.o.d-fearing family; the natural prey of cheats because years before their little daughter had been kidnapped or lost and never found. They cry out at this young woman's resemblance to the child; the young woman puts two and two together into a story which deceives those who wish to be deceived, and settles down to be taken care of for the rest of her life. It must have been any port in a storm, for I didn't gather her adopted family had money. Spent all they had in looking for her when she was a baby, as I understood. To Signor Gabrielli the cream of the jest was that this girl was being petted and cherished and labored for by industrious people who would have perished of horror if they had known who she was, and who had not one drop of their blood in her veins.--I may not have got the incidents at all straight, but that's the idea."

"But you've changed the relationship--?"

"Oh, yes. I've cut down the family to a daughter and, as you see, I've reversed the parts--in my story it is the daughter who is deceived; it is the supposed mother who settles down upon the devoted innocence and labor of a generous girl."

"Oh, of course!" exclaimed Mrs. Hope. "Put it all on the mother!

Nowadays, everything's sure to be her fault!"

Christina gave her mother her hand, much as she might have given her a cup of tea and said, "Well, but that is only where your novel begins?"

"Yes. I thought the interesting part was all to come. I thought I should be justified in supposing my reformed lady to go back to her old habits, perhaps through the mere claim of genuine ties,--old friendships, real relationships--to be caught in some serious crime, involve those friends and, finally, without in the least intending it, draw her daughter and her daughter's lover into her quicksand--of course, by means of their efforts to pull her out! And then to see what happened!"

"When the daughter finds out," Wheeler cogitated, "that should be a strong scene, a very strong scene.--What made you think of reversing the characters?--less trite?"

"Simply, I could handle it this way and not the other. When I had the cheat a young woman, she was very strenuous--I couldn't keep her from being the most lurid of common adventuresses. And I had a theory that people are never like that to themselves. Well, as soon as I subst.i.tuted a rather pa.s.see woman she became much quieter--just a feeble, worthless, selfish person a good deal battered by life, and wanting nothing but comfort--trying to get it in the easiest way. I wanted so much to give the commonplace quality of crime, of what a simple, sensible, ordinary piece of business it seems to the person engaged in it--at any rate until it's found out, and he begins to be reacted on by fear and other people's minds. Ah, if I can only give these people their own point of view, and make one thing after another seem quite ordinary and human, just the necessary thing to do! Until they begin to lose their heads when one gate and then another closes and, finding themselves cornered, they fight like rats in a trap! The good as well as the bad, in one panic degradation of despair! I heard a figure of crime the other day which I should like to carry out. I should like to start with the smallest blemish on the outside of the clean, rosy apple of respectable society, 'the little, pitted speck in garnered fruit, which, rotting inward' lets you, by following it, down and down, from one layer of human living to another, at last hold a whole sphere of crime, collapsed, crumbling and wide open, in your hand. Then I've got to save Evadne in the end, without the effect of dragging her through a trap-door!"

"Well, if you made it into a play," Wheeler persisted, "would the mother or the daughter be the star-part?"

"I could play both!" Christina cried.

Wheeler laughed aloud. "You are too good to be true!"

"Well, but why not? Why not a dual role? Even if the relationship were false, the resemblance would have to be real--it's the backbone of the story! Mother and I look a good deal alike, but I've seen chance resemblances incomparably stronger!"

She went on eagerly and Herrick was surprised to see that it was not she alone but Wheeler who took the idea of dramatization seriously. It was his first real gage of what was expected of Christina as an actress--that in a year or two she would be starring on her own account.

She was not only Wheeler's leading-woman, she was his find, his speculation; he meant to be her manager and Christina meant that he should, too. Again Ingham's death seemed to be dragging Herrick into the path of success.

Then his attention was caught by Wheeler's saying, "Well, we must all be as criminal as we can, while we can. Once P. L. B. C. Ten Euyck gets to be a police inspector there will be no more crime. The word will be blotted from the vocabulary of New York."

"That man!" Mrs. Hope cried.

"Well, all these recent scandals in the Department are making them remove Simmonds; they want somebody beyond the reach of graft; and Ten Euyck has resigned his coronership. What does that look like to you?

"It will be nuts to watch," Wheeler went on. "The force, down in his district, will be shaken up till its teeth rattle. Ten Euyck won't rest contented till he has stopped mice from stealing sc.r.a.ps of cheese! But my leading-woman must be civil to him, now, or he's the sort of fellow to get my license revoked. n.o.body's ever run up against his self-righteousness and got away with it, yet. Poor chap, he'd be mighty able if he weren't crazy! I believe I could do a Valjean if I could engage him as Javert!"

"Don't let us speak forever of that bilious person! Why do you distract a poor girl from her work? Come," cried she to Wheeler, "are we going to do our scene?"

She drove her rather reluctant star to action.--"Young miss!" he said, "it is not every ageing favorite who would take a girl on the word of a mutual friend, give her a better part than his own, push her over his own head, and coach her in private into the bargain!" He put his big hand on Christina's shoulder. "But she's worth it!" he said. "A scene with her is a tonic to me--I did not know the old man had so much blood in him! Sally, the poor working-girl, what are you going to do to the critics, that still sleep unconscious? 'Ha--ha! Wait till Monday week!'

or whenever we open!

"'They'll be all gangin' East an' West, They'll be all gane a-glee!

They'll be all gangin' East an' West, Courtin' Molly Lee!'

"Mr. Herrick, as you come up Broadway, you don't see her name on the bills! But they might as well be printing the paper!--for the younger generation is knocking at the door. Ah, Christina, my dear, thou art thy Wheeler's gla.s.s, and he in thee calls back the lovely April of his prime!" His indulgent sardonic glance caught Christina's and the flaming sword of hers drove him to work. They left behind them such a vivid sense of Herrick's having written his play and their having taken it, that he might have thought it a scene of his they were working on.

From the room where they were immured strange sounds occasionally escaped; sometimes Wheeler laughed and sometimes he swore furiously.

"She'll get everything that he knows out of him!" said Mrs. Hope with great satisfaction.

Herrick discovered this, in no ign.o.ble sense, to be the keynote of Christina's life. It was borne in upon him with every hour that her work in the theater was the essence of her; that no matter where nor how utterly she should consciously give her heart the unconscious course of her nature would still flow through the field of dramatic endeavor. He might admire or condemn this, like it or leave it; but the jealous humility of his love must recognize it.

She seemed largely to have recovered from the terrors that had enveloped her upon Ingham's death. If for Nancy Cornish she had lain down to die, for her opening night she had got up again. And she was ready to bend the whole world to that night's service. Herrick saw that she had always been so.

It became a thrilling amus.e.m.e.nt to him to watch her at work; to see how vividly she perceived, how unscrupulously she absorbed! In the vocabulary of her profession, everything was so much "experience." All her life long she had sucked out of every creature that came near her some sort of artistic sustenance; learning from the jests of her own heart and its despair; out of the shop windows and the night sky. At an age when other girls were being chaperoned to dancing-parties she had worked,--she with her soft cheek and slight strength and shy eye,--"like a miner buried in a landslide"; she was mistress of her body's every curve, of her voice's every note; she had read widely and with pa.s.sionate intelligence; as soon as she had begun to make money, she had poured it into her accomplishments; she was a diligent student of pa.s.sing manners and historic modes, and of each human specimen through which she did not hesitate to run her pin.

For instance, what use had she not made of the Deutches? From Henrietta Deutch she had learned German and a not inconsiderable amount of music; they had a venerated library of standard works that contained a few modern continentals in the original; she developed her school-girl French by reading the Parisians under Mrs. Deutch's supervision and in Italian she surpa.s.sed her; while all the time she learned just enough knitting to know how people feel when they knit, and just what the sensation is of stirring sugar into the preserves. She liked to go to their apartment of an evening and, once, when Mrs. Hope sent Herrick after her, he found her sitting on the floor with her hair down and her head against Mrs. Deutch's black silk knee while that lady crooned German lullabies to the baby she had never borne, and "Herr Hermy"

played the pianola. As soon as she had twisted up her hair, she put on a long ap.r.o.n and got supper and waited on them all with the charming daughterly ways which lent her such a tender girlishness; and Herrick perceived that when a part required her to move about a kitchen she would be able to welcome the kitchen as an old friend. She could reproduce Deutch's accent, his whole personal equation, with inhuman exactness, even his tremors at the inquest, his inarticulate stammer--as of a mental dumbness, groping for words--that overtook him in moments of extreme excitement, she had caught in her net; she had learned from him some jokes and stories, some student songs, which would have astonished the many delicate tea-tables at which she shyly cast down her thieving eyes to observe exactly what service was in vogue; she did not hesitate to stir him up to dreadful stories of old racial hates and though Herrick saw her eyes darken and her nostrils expand he knew that she was drawing thoroughly into her system the dark pa.s.sion of retaliation with which she would some day scorch an astonished audience. "If ever I get a queen to do--oh, one of the virtuous queens, of course," she said, "I shall have to fall back on Tante Deutch." And Herrick saw how right she was; how all along she had modeled her grand moments--and Christina, though so fond of describing herself as a poor working girl, had occasional moments of extreme grandeur--upon that simple, domestic stateliness which was really the stateliness of a great lady.

On the other hand when she was out with her mother she modeled herself--except for a stray vagary of speech--upon Mrs. Hope's excellent idea of a-young-lady-out-with-her-mother-a-la-mode; and she was by no means insensible to the glories of the smart world, nor to the luxuries of the moneyed world. "I want them all," she confessed to Herrick as they walked up Fifth Avenue from rehearsal. "I covet them; I long to own them, and I dare swear I should never be owned by them. I'm infinitely more fit than those that have them, and thank heaven I've stood out here when I was cold and wet and _oh!_ how hopeless, and felt in me the anarchist and his bomb. I was never made to smile on conquerors. One man, from these great houses, once taught me how to hate them! How I should like to do a Judith! How I should like to _tame_ all this!" She looked, with a bitterer gaze than he had ever seen in her, down the incomparable pomp of the great street. Then more lightly, with a curving lip, "My Deutches, I believe," she said, "are supposed to belong to the moneyed camp. But it is borne in upon me, every now and then, that our own race has occasionally put by a dollar or two."

She moved in such an atmosphere of luxury that it was difficult to imagine her what she plainly called "hard up." But it will be seen that they were now continually together and there was something about her which made it possible to offer her the simplest and the cheapest pleasures. In her rare hours of freedom he had the fabulous happiness of taking her where he had often taken Evadne in that old empty time; to Coney Island, to strange Bowery haunts, to the wharves where the boys dive, and even to his table d'hote in the back yard. She had a zest, a fresh-hearted pleasure in everything and her sense of characterization fed upon queer colors and odd flavors just as he had known it would. He was so sorry that the little Yankee woman was absent from his table d'hote, particularly as he had recently had a specimen of her which he longed to hear Christina reproduce. She had a little sewing-table behind her desk at which she sat playing solitaire with a grim precision which made Herrick think of the French Revolution and the knitting women; but as she had then been absent from the restaurant for some time he ventured a "Buon giorno" as he pa.s.sed.

She instantly replied, "You needn't talk that Dago talk to me. I just took my daughter's paul-parrot away from here, case 't 'ed get so it couldn't talk real talk."

"That's what I call a good firm prejudice!" Herrick laughed to himself, and he continued to hope for some such specimen, or at least for Mr.

Gumama, when he should bring Christina again.

But as the opening drew near, she began to limit her interests and to exclude from her vision everything which could interfere with the part in hand. It sometimes seemed to him, indeed, as if even her new calm about Nancy were only because Nancy--yes, and the threatening Arm of Justice,--were among these conscious, these voluntary exclusions. It was almost as though, over the very body of Ingham's death, she had thrown her part's rosy skirts and shut it out of sight. Beneath her innumerable moods one seemed permanent, strangely compounded of languor and excitement. By-and-by, she seemed to dwell within it, veiled, and Herrick knew that only her part was there behind the veil with her.

It was Mrs. Hope who could least endure this sleepwalking abstraction.

There came an evening when some people whom Mrs. Hope considered of importance were asked to dinner. Christina improved this occasion by having her own dinner served upstairs, so that she would not be too tired to rehea.r.s.e that night with Wheeler. And to Herrick Mrs. Hope reported this behavior, biting her lips. "She's the most self-willed person living! I declare to you, Mr. Herrick, she has the cruelest tricks in the world. The best friend that any girl ever had said once that, if acting were in question, she would grind his bones to make its bread!"

Later, Herrick said jealously to the girl, "Who _was_ the best friend you ever had?"

Her head happened to be turned from him and it seemed to him a long time before she spoke. Even then her indifference was so great she almost yawned as "Who has told you of him?" she asked.

"Both Deutch and your mother called some old actor that."

"They meant a dear fellow who put me in the moving-picture business, bless him, when I hadn't enough to eat!"

"And where's he now?"

"I dare say he's very well off. He taught me poise. He taught me independence, too. That's enough for one man. He had a singular way of turning his eyes, without turning his head. I learned that, too."

Was it true, then--what had been hinted to him often enough--that once she had plucked out the heart of your mystery, the heart of the human being she forgot all about? She might be of as various moods as she would, she was very single-minded, and was all she valued in her friends some personal mannerism?--any peculiar impression of which she might master the physical mechanism and reproduce it? A trait like this naturally made Herrick take anxious stock of his own position. What personal peculiarity of his was she studying? But it was nevertheless in such a trait that the staunchness of his love found its true food. He found his faith digested such things capitally; his pa.s.sion at once nourished and clarified itself by every human failing, by all the little nerves and little ways of his darling divinity, until it ceased to be merely the bleeding heart of a valentine and found within itself the solid, articulated bones of mortal life. If, in return, there was the least thing she could learn of him, let her, in heaven's name, learn it!

Only, how long before she would have finished with it?

In the blessed meantime she scarcely stirred without him. With a freedom unthinkable in girls of his own world, she let him take her to lunch every day; unlike a proper heroine of romance, Christina required at this time a great deal of food and he waited for her after rehearsal and took her to tea. It was a mercy that he was now doing a series of Famous Crimes in Manhattan, for the Record, as he certainly did not wish to put her on a diet of Italian table d'hotes! She accepted all this quite as a matter of course; and it had become a matter of course that he should go home with her for dinner. Sometimes they walked up through the Park, sometimes they took a taxi and drove to shops or dressmakers; she did not scruple, when she was tired or wanted air, to drive home with her hat off and her eyes shut. It seemed to the poor fellow that she had accepted him like the weather.

For she had become strangely quiet in his presence. Eventually she ceased to use upon him any conscious witchery whatever; something had spiked all her guns, and Herrick was too much in love to presume that this quiet meant anything except that he did not irritate her. Every now and again, it is true, he was breathlessly aware of something that brooded, touchingly humble and anxious and tender, in a tone, in a glance. He feared that this anxiety, this tenderness, was only that royal kindness with which, for instance, when Joe Patrick gave up his elevator, hating that haunted job, she at once got him taken on as usher at the theater. But Herrick dared not translate her expression, when, looking up suddenly, he would find her eyes swimming in a kind of happy light and fastened on his face. At such moments a flush would run through him; there would fall between them a painful, an exquisite consciousness. And, with the pa.s.sing of the wave, she would seem to him extraordinarily young.

He considered it a bad sign that seldom or never did she introduce him to any of her mates. Public as was their companionship, she kept him wholly to herself. This was particularly noticeable in the restaurants where she would go to strange shifts to keep actors from dallying at her table; she would forestall their advances by paying visits to theirs, leaving Herrick to make what he liked of it; and, do what he would, the poor fellow could find no flattering reason for this. Already he knew Christina too well to have any hope that it was the actors who were not good enough.

They were to her, in the most drastic and least sentimental sense, her family. She quarreled with them; often enough she abused and mimicked them; at the memory of bad acting scorn and disdain rode sparkling in her eye, and if her vast friendliness was lighted by pa.s.sionate enthusiasms, it was capable, too, of the very sickness of contempt. But this was in private and among themselves; there was not the least nor the worst of them whom she would not have championed against the world.

Quite apart from goodness or badness of art, Christina conceived of but two cla.s.ses of human beings, artists and not artists; as who should say "Brethren"; "Cattle." Herrick congratulated himself that he could be scooped in under at least the t.i.tle of "Writer." It was not so good as "Actor," but 't was enough, 't would serve. All her sense of kin, of race, of patriotism, and--once you came to good acting--of religion, was centered in her country of the stage. Herrick had never seen any one so cla.s.s conscious. With those whom she called "outsiders," she adopted the course most calculated, as a matter of fact, to make her the rage; she refused to know them. And when, for the sake of some day reproducing high life upon the boards, she brought herself to dine out, this little protegee of the Deutches had always said to herself, with Arnold Bennett's hero, "World, I condescend."

Such an affair took place on the Monday before Christina's opening. Some friends of the Inghams made a reception for her; and Herrick saw a dress arrive that was plainly meant for conquest. Now Herrick considered that this reception had played him a mean trick. He had a right to! He who had recently been a desperado with sixpence was soon to be an a.s.sociate editor of _Ingham's Weekly_!--While he was still dizzy with this knowledge a friend on the _Record_ had pointed out a suite in an old fashioned downtown mansion, which had been turned into bachelor lodgings: a friend of the friend wished to sub-let these rooms furnished, and Herrick had extravagantly taken them. A beautiful Colonial fireplace had decided him. He remembered a mahogany tea-table and some silver which Marion could be induced to part with, and it seemed to him that he could not too quickly bring about the hour when Christina, before that fireplace and at that tea-table, should pour tea for whatever Thespians she might think him worthy to entertain. But it had taken time for the things to arrive; to-morrow she was going on the road for the preliminary performances, and to-day was set for the reception! He had, of course, kept silence. But it was heartbreaking to see how perfect a day it was for tea and fires--one of those cool days of earliest September. He kindled the flame; alas, it didn't matter!

Then, toward six he went uptown to hear about the party.