"I suppose so," Sarah allowed; "it's a common saying that the way to the footlights in the Majestic is through the manager's private room." She came over and sat beside me on the bed, which, under a Bagdad curtain, did duty as a couch. "There are other theatres besides the Majestic,"

she said.

"None that want me," I averred.

"Oh," she cried, "you don't mean----?"

"No," I had to own, "I don't mean that I have a chance to get on even by misbehaving myself. I'm not the kind to whom that sort of chance comes." Sarah stroked my hand a while.

"I've been thinking, if you could get a small part or a season, you could take it under another name until you are quite yourself again.

It's often done." I could see she had gone much farther than that with it in her thought. It was just such cover as that I was seeking for the renaissance of my acting power.

And that was what led to my going out to Suburbia to see Gerald McDermott about the part of _Mrs. Brandis_ in "The Futurist."

It was out quite in the frayed edge of outer fringe of real estate ventures which hedged Chicago round, in a district which was spoiled for country and not quite made into town, and from the number of weedy plots not built upon between the scroll-saw cottages, had almost a rural air.

Leaning trolleys went zizzing along the banked highways, and at the ends of the unpaved avenues there were flat gleams of the lake. Depressed as I was by the consciousness of having fallen from the estate of actresses who command engagements to those who seek them, I was still able to be touched a little by curiosity by what Sarah had told me of McDermott and his wife, whom he had married for her pretty, feminine inconsequence, who, having no point of attachment to her husband's life but femininity, was able to imagine none for any other woman, and suffered incredibly in consequence.

"If one could only discover why clever men marry that sort of women!" I wondered.

"Oh, Jerry thought he was going to bend her to his will," Sarah explained. "But that kind don't bend, they just slump." I had hardly knocked at the door before I had an inkling of how painful to the author of "The Futurist" the process of slumping might be.

I could hear the fretting of a child, hushed suddenly by my knock, then the patter of little feet across the floor and voices startled and pitched low. I was just debating whether I shouldn't pretend I hadn't heard anything and go away again, when Mr. McDermott opened the door. I had met him once at Sarah's and should have known him again by the pallor of his countenance against the dead blackness of his hair, straight and shining like an Indian's. The effect of boyishness that one derived from his tall, thin figure was increased now by the marks of weeping about his eyes. In the glimpse of the room behind him I was aware of a disorder only excusable in the face of a family catastrophe; one of the children that ran to his knee was still in its little petticoat, without a slip, and had not been washed or combed that day. I wavered an instant between the obligation of politeness to ignore the situation and the certainty that I couldn't.

"Oh!" I cried. I s.n.a.t.c.hed at my repertory for the proper mixture of commiseration and consternation. "Is any one ill?"

His desperate need of help opened the door to me.

"My wife" ... he began, but the state of the room accounted for that, as he perceived, taking it in afresh through my eyes. Mrs. McDermott was lying on the sofa in the coma of exhaustion. She lifted her face to me for a moment, swollen with crying, and then let herself go again into that pit in which a woman sinks an impossible situation. She was really faint, poor thing, and, if I judged by the state of the house, had had no luncheon. I took all that in at a glance, but it was none of my business.

"Is it her heart?" I wanted to know of her husband as I bent over her.

He caught up the suggestion eagerly.

"Yes, her heart ... she is very weak." He did whatever I suggested on that explanation. I would have proposed putting her to bed if I had not feared that that would involve more revelations of the family disorder than I was willing to tax him with.

We got her out of her faintness presently and found her a safety valve in pitying her poor children with that sloppy sort of maternal affection which is not inconsistent with a good deal of neglect. I wasn't working for anything but to save Jerry--I came to call him that before many weeks--from the embarra.s.sment of what I was sure had been a family fracas which threatened at every moment to break out again. I suggested tea, for I was satisfied that both of them wanted food, and while I was making toast before the sitting-room fire, Mrs. McDermott managed to get herself and the children into some sort of order. I could see then how pretty she had been in a large-eyed, short-lipped way, and how charming in her youth had been the inconsequence which as the mistress of a family made her a sloven. Not to seem to notice too much the superficial air of being prepared for company which she managed to give the children by washing their faces surrept.i.tiously, I explained to Mr.

McDermott that I had come about the part of _Mrs. Brandis_.

"Oh, you'll do," he a.s.sented heartily. "You'll do just as you are. _Mrs.

Brandis_ is a widow you know ... that is, the _Mrs. Brandis_ that I created----"

"Just as you conceived it of course," I insisted, "I should want to play it that way."

"The trouble is that Moresco isn't satisfied so easily; he wants me to make changes in the part."

"Well ..." I was prepared to make concessions.

"I'm afraid he has somebody in mind ..."

"Fancy Filette," his wife broke in, "a painting, flirting, immoral!..."

Jerry sc.r.a.ped his chair back along the floor to cover the word, but I knew where I was in a twinkling.

"Fancy Filette! She'll play it in short skirts!"

"I'll be lucky if she doesn't insist on a song and dance."

"He doesn't need to have her unless he wants to." Mrs. McDermott was positive on that point. She was sitting with both children on her lap, chiefly in order to keep up the fiction that I didn't know she had just been having hysterics, I had cautioned her against letting them climb over her, and she promptly let them, because the idea that she was tending them at a risk to her health, rather helped out with her own notion of herself as a misused but devoted wife and mother.

Jerry looked at me over her head in a mute appeal to me to understand.

"Unless Moresco puts on my play there is no chance for it," he protested. "I've been to the others. I'll tell you, though, if you go to him just as you are, he may think better of it. He can't possibly get anybody so good."

We neither of us believed that Mr. Moresco would turn down Fancy Filette for anybody, but we kept up the game of thinking so from sheer desperation. I played too at the pretence that Jerry's wife was a delicate, idealized sort of creature who did not understand the great hard world. That was no doubt what had appealed to him in the beginning, but she wasn't made up for the part. She had begun to put on weight after she had children, and her hair wanted washing. I got away as soon as I could and went straight to Sarah.

"They'd been having some kind of a row," I told her.

"Oh, it must have been Fancy Filette who set her off," Sarah was certain. "She took to you as a relief, but you'll be in for it too if you get the part."

I had to admit to myself after I had been to Mr. Moresco, that there was not much likelihood that I would get it. He laid the tips of his pudgy fingers together and addressed me with the slight blur in his speech which convinced one of the racial affinity which he commonly denied.

"Mr. McDermott thinks it will suit me admirably," I told him.

"Ah, yes, the author," the manager mentioned him as though it were a fact indulgently admitted to the discussion, "but then, my dear Miss Lattimore, we have to think of the audience."

There was this peculiarity of Moresco's handling of an audience, that he treated it as an ent.i.ty, a sort of human stratification of which the three front rows were lubricious, the body of the orchestra high-brow, the first balcony sentimental and virtuous, the gallery facetious. As far as possible he arranged his plays to meet the requirements.

"Now we have Miss Croyden for _Bettina_, she is your type."--He meant as a woman, not as an artist; Sarah and I were both serious and respectable.--"For _Mrs. Brandis_ I think we should have something a little more snappy."

"It isn't written snappy in the play," I reminded him.

"Ah, no, that is the trouble; I have spoken to Mr. McDermott; he will perhaps change it."

"And if he doesn't you will keep me in mind for it." I kept my voice with difficulty from being urgent. "You see, I don't feel like playing a heavy part this year." I glanced down at my mourning; I hoped he would accept it as an explanation. Two or three days later I saw Sarah and she remarked that Jerry was rewriting some parts of his play at the request of the manager.

"The part of _Mrs. Brandis_?" Sarah nodded.

"Mr. Moresco wants it more--more----"

"Snappy," I supplied. "And who is to have it, have you heard?"

"Fancy Filette!"

"Oh, well, she's snappy enough, I suppose."

"I know; I don't even like to be billed with her; but, anyway, the part wasn't worthy of you." But I felt as I went home to my lodging that that was only Sarah's kind way of putting it.

CHAPTER II