The Dual Alliance Part 1

The Dual Alliance.

by Marjorie Benton Cooke.

PROLOGUE

Barbara Garratry was thirty and Irish. To the casual observer the world was a bright coloured ball for her tossing. When she was a tiny mite her father had dubbed her "Bob, Son of Battle," because of certain obvious, warlike traits of character, and "Bob" Garratry she had been ever since.

She had literally fought her way to the top, handicapped by poverty, very little education, the responsibility of an invalid and dependent father. She had been forced to make all her own opportunities, but at thirty she was riding the shoulders of the witch success.

Her mother, having endowed her only child with the gift of a happy heart, went on her singing way into Paradise when Bob was three. Her father, handsome ne'er-do-well that he was, made a poor and intermittent living for them until the girl was fifteen. Then poor health overtook him, and Bob took the helm.

At fifteen she worked on a newspaper, and discovered she had a picturesque talent for words. Literary ambition gripped her, a desire to make permanent use of the dramatic elements which she uncovered in her rounds of a.s.signments. She had a nose for news and made a fair success, until she took to sitting up at night to write "real stuff" as she called it. Her nervous, high-strung temperament would not stand the strain, so, true to her Irish blood, she gave up the newspaper job, with its Sat.u.r.day night pay envelope, and threw herself headlong into the uncharted sea of authorship.

She began with short stories for magazines. Editors admitted her, responded to her personality--returned her tales. "If you could write the way you talk," they all said. Now Daddy Garratry had to eat, no matter how light she could go on rations, so she abandoned literature shortly for a position in a decorator's shop. Here, too, she found charm an a.s.set. She worked eight hours a day, cooked for two of them, washed, sewed, took care of her invalid, lavished herself upon him, then wrote at night, undaunted by her first failure.

She used her brain on the problem of success. When the manager of the shop put her in charge of their booth at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition, because, as he said, "you can attract people," she recalled the consensus of editorial opinion, and made up her mind that personality was her real gift. The stage was the show window for that possession, so thither she turned her face at eighteen, and in due course of time joined the great army which follows the mirage of stage success.

But Bob proved to be one of the G.o.d's anointed, and from the first the charm of her, her queer, haunting face, which some found ugly and some proclaimed beautiful, marked her for advance. She was radiantly happy in the work, and happier still that she was able to provide more comforts and luxuries for daddy, who was her idol. The real crux of her ambition was the day when she could give him everything his luxury-loving heart desired.

She worked hard, she learned the trade of the theatre. She studied her audiences, noted their likes and dislikes, what they laughed at, and when they wept. Then once again she took up her abandoned pen and began to work on a play. She and daddy talked it, played it, mulled it over every waking hour for months. Then one historic day Bob read it to an audience of daddy and a manager--that was the beginning of the last lap of the race. The manager accepted it and left father and daughter in a state of ecstasy.

"Well, dad, it looks like the real thing this time."

"It does, Bobsie. Ye're not only the prettiest Garratry, but ye're the smartest of the clan!"

"Blarney!"

"I wish yer mither could see ye the day. Ye were such a queer mite, but smart--ye were always smart----"

"What'll I buy ye with our fortune, daddy? A farm in the ould counthry and little pigs----"

"No pigs for me! I'd like me a body servant in bra.s.s b.u.t.tons to wait on me noight an' day. Whin I come down our marble stairs, I want to see him sthandin' there, attintion, so I can say, 'Jimmy--there's yer valley.'"

"You funny old dad! What else? We'll get us a motor car----"

"Shure, an' a counthry place--but no pigs----"

"How about a yacht?"

"We'll sthay on land, mavourneen, 'tis safer."

"But we must go to Europe, cabin de luxe----"

"I don't care if it's de luxe, if it's D-comfortable," he laughed.

This was the beginning of a wonderful game of make-believe, which they played for months. Bob's comedy went into rehearsal at once, and every day when she came home, after hours spent in the theatre, she found daddy laughing over some new scheme he had devised for spending their fortune, when it came. They planned like magii with the magic carpet in their hands, ready to spread before them.

They worked out tours of Europe, they built and rebuilt their country house. They endowed charities for newspaper writers and interior decorators--they planned a retreat for indigent magazine writers and an asylum for editors. Life was a joyous thing, stretching out ahead of them, full of colour and success, and then, on the very eve of the production of Bob's play, daddy died. Bob went through it all, the first night and what came after, like a wraith. The adulation and the praise that came to her were ashes instead of fire.

Six years followed of success. Money, travel, friends, the love and admiration of great audiences came to her, but Bob found life stale.

Lovers came a-plenty; she made them friends and kept them, or sent them on their way. Bob had everything the world's wife wants, and in her own heart she knew she had nothing. Generosity was her vice. Anybody in her profession, or out of it, who was in trouble, had only to go to Bob Garratry for comfort or for cash. There was usually a tired, discouraged girl recuperating out at Bob's bungalow, and in the summertime all the stage children she could find came to pay her visits and live on real milk and eggs.

She interested herself in the girl student colonies in New York, and became their patron saint. She found that the girls in the Three Arts Club, and kindred student places--getting their musical and dramatic education with great sacrifice usually, either to their parents or themselves--had only such opportunities to hear the great artists of the day as the top galleries afforded. The dramatic students fared better than the others, she found, for they could get seats for twenty-five or fifty cents in the lofts of theatres, but the music students had to stand in line sometimes for two or three hours to buy a place in the gallery of the Metropolitan. As it was impossible to see anything from there, seated, they were accustomed to stand through the entire opera.

For this privilege they paid one dollar. Bob learned what that dollar meant to most of them, an actual sacrifice, even privation. While rich patrons yawned below, these young idealists, the musical and dramatic hope of our future, leaned over the railing, up under the roof, trying to grasp the fine shades of expression which mark the finished artist.

All this Bob Garratry learned, and raged at. She herself donated twenty-five student seats for every opera, and a lesser number for each good play. She interested some of her friends in the idea--with characteristic fervour she adopted all the students in New York, but even this large family did not fill the nooks and crannies of her empty heart. You felt it in her work--"the Celtic minor" as one critic said.

Possibly Paul Trent expressed it best when he said: "Behind her every laugh you feel her dreein' her weird!"

PART I

"Mr. Trent, Miss Garratry is on the wire," said the stenographer to Trent, who sat at his desk making inroads on the piles of correspondence, official doc.u.ments, and typewritten evidence which heaped his desk.

"I told you I couldn't be interrupted," he replied sharply.

"I explained that to her, when she called the first time. She says that if you don't speak to her she will come down here."

He smiled reluctantly as he took up the receiver. "Good morning," he said.

"What is the use of having a lawyer, if he acts like a Broadway manager?" she asked.

"I wish you could see the pile of papers completely surrounding me," he answered.

"I'm not interested in your troubles, I want mine attended to."

"Entirely feminine."

"Yes, it is selfish----"

"I said feminine."

"I heard you. I want you to lunch with me at two."

"I cannot possibly do it," he interrupted her.

"It isn't social, it is business, and it must be attended to to-day."

"I'm sorry, but----"

"Mr. Trent, I a.s.sure you it is a matter of serious importance. I feel justified in insisting upon your professional attention for one hour to-day. If you prefer, I will come to you."

Trent's face showed his annoyance.