Rita Weiman

“ Alone in her dressing-room, her opening eyes had met the look in his like a shaft of light struck [199] through blindness. His whispered “Gloria,” the straining of her close as if to hold her always; the swift loosening of that hold; the step backward; the breaking of their locked gaze.
If love could be classified—and of course it cannot—I wonder how we would label love that goes quietly on its way without hysteria, without big scenes, with no effort to grasp that to which it has no right; knowing that it must endure, even while it can never find fulfillment. ”

“ She would cut herself off from the theater entirely; for looking in at the window of a house of cheer whose door is barred—that would be unbearable. She would have to travel, to seek diversion elsewhere. Then suddenly like the lifting of a rosy veil on barren waste, she saw her career a thing of the past and herself wandering down the declining years of life—alone. The desert youth takes no count of—aloneness—stretched bleak and endless, a reach of sand with no oasis to slake the thirst, no shade to cool the soul. ”

“ And her quivering chin, her reproachful reminders of engagements he had overlooked, sent his mind and feet hurrying back to the woman whose red lips and drooping lids thrilled him like the dizzying lights of Broadway, like a draught of wine he had never before tasted.
“Why does a girl think, because you’ve been together all your lives,” he blurted out one night as he and Naomi drove through the jerk and jam of traffic hold-up, “that she has a right to know your comings and goings as if you belonged to her? Good heavens, a fellow can change his mind, can’t he?” ”

“ Marshy’s move had only succeeded in thrusting it more swiftly into her grasp. And yet she did not stop to think of that. All that registered were those three words: “I love you.” Their sweetness ran like some warm fluid through her veins.
“We’ll get away from here!” he plunged on. “I’ll take you west—home. No Kents there to tell ugly stories. We’ll forget them ourselves. Nobody need ever know. We’ll be happy—and I’ll have you all to myself. Those lips and eyes—they’ll be all mine. Naomi—dearest—let me kiss them now!” ”

“ Some one to whom she could be something more than heavy eyes and auburn-tinted hair, some one with whom she could share thoughts—and fears. But Marshy Kent had never given her friendship. No man had.
All through supper she was silent, with a hard, shell-like silence her companions could not break. Finally she pushed her plate to one side and her glance sifted the smoke-thickened air.
Beyond the table, in a space so small that they might have been squirrels chasing their tails, the crowd jostled and elbowed and glared at one another in an effort to keep time to a stamping, hilarious jazz. ”

“ Gloria Cromwell—in private life Mrs. Rudolph Cleeburg—was not tall and her intense slenderness made her look frail, yet standing next to her husband she measured a full inch above him. Any passerby taking in the round face, eyes and figure of the well-known manager, his bald pate and prominent features, would have smiled at the information that he was the most artistic producer in America. But then, no passerby would have noticed the hands, key to character, that tapered so incongruously. Even the man himself failed to take count of them. ”

“ Human frailty is their stock in trade, the theater their most satisfactory market. For a year they had stalked the steps of Gloria Cromwell and John Brooks. For a year they had appeared at unexpected moments, working in absolute harmony, waiting with tongue in cheek for the unguarded second when the set line of the man’s mouth would relax; when his lips would tell her what his arms had not yet made known; when the woman’s voice with its strange thrilling note would meet his and confess. ”

“ With his prophecy singing in her ears, Nancy made her bow to New York as a star. The audience was with her from the first, sharing her joy, her triumph, eyes shining with hers, tears flowing when hers did. She took it all modestly enough, even dragging on the leading man to take the curtains with her. When finally they brought her out alone, she stood a bit left-center and one could plainly see her whole body shake, her lips tremble like some unaccustomed schoolgirl’s.
It was at this moment that a man with towering shoulders and the stride of authority left his seat and made for the lobby. ”

“ Do you know what it means to want another man’s wife and feel her lips on yours every night?”
Cleeburg moistened his own. They opened and closed. His nails dug into the varnish of the chair. His eyes, so long unseeing, visualized in a flash the scene they had gazed upon so often—Gloria in the arms of the man facing him, himself urging them to more intense expression, more abandon of love. Like a raging animal the fighting male leaped up in him—then subsided, knowing it had to fight only itself. He met the straight look. ”

“ There must be a car! Never must they be certain that Jimmie had gone for good! The savings account had long since gone the way of all flesh. And cars, like Pegasus, soar winged in the clouds. June had come gliding into the arms of May while Sallie suffered and waited, lived on bread and milk, and hopelessly priced the cheaper makes.
Other lips, mustached, clean-shaven, young, and not so young, answered Sallie’s plea of “Won’t you smile at me?” Sallie did not hear them. Other eyes sought hers from motors at the curb. Sallie did not know they were there. ”

“ New York was undoubtedly taken by storm. It had been more than a typical Kane first night. It had been a Kane ovation.
In the first row a man got to his feet as if shaking off a spell. He was tall, very erect, almost rawboned, with hair turning gray about the temples, a demanding jaw, sharp straight nose and eyes that somehow seemed younger than the rest of his face, younger than the bushy black brows that mounted over them. They had caught Parsinova’s gaze, those eyes, as it swept once or twice over the audience. ”

“ The bloods of New York patronize the Summer Garden with a loyalty that brings them back at least once a week. The one theater in town it is in which the chorus fraternizes with the audience, tripping down a runway into the aisles to trill their syncopated love ditties into the ears of selected members, or swinging overhead on ropes of roses, bare knees perilously near bald heads. ”

“ But first and foremost, the actress I train must obliterate self. She must become so much clay for me to model. She must accept my direction without question. She must obey as a soldier obeys his commanding officer.”
“Yes,” sighed Elizabeth.
“I see you now not as you are, but as what I can make of you. No two of my stars are alike. Each has distinct and startling personality. That is why the American public looks to me for sensations. Not one is the actress she was when I discovered her. They are, one and all, Oswald Kane creations.” ”

“ Have we played our parts as an audience and sensed its heartbeats? Have we smiled its smiles? Teased its vanity? Gained its approval? We of this little play—have we succeeded in our striving to make a critical throng throb to it? Back of the swaying curtain, before which one of asbestos has dropped heavily, all is wild hope, eager prayer, despairing question.
The house of dreams is empty, the soft-armed chairs shrouded as if each held a pale ghost. Is it to be alight or dark? Do we live or die? ”

“ Sallie stared, choked and bewildered, into the darkness. She didn’t know how to answer, how to act. This new Jimmie, this—this nasty one! He was a stranger. Small teeth settled into her lower lip. She felt like slipping to the floor of the car and crying her eyes out.
For three nights they followed the same program—Sallie bewitching in a new costume chosen tearfully to conciliate the mysterious male—he taciturn, unresponsive, answering her labored conversation with husky monosyllables or hard cynicism that hurt without enlightening. ”

“ Even the tame robins she had always regarded as more or less of a joke, she began to seek them as they in the past had sought her. The desire to be seen about pursued by youth; to lunch and tea at fashionable restaurants in their company; to hold the center of the public eye at any cost, became a mania. It was as grim an effort as that of a doomed man to cling to the last moments of life.
And when a year or so later came the inevitable day when Cleeburg said to her—trying to speak gently—
“Come, Jane, let’s talk horse sense. No use your trying to play a chicken! ”

“ But even as she met the question, it came less in the form he put it than in the thought of what Bill Dixon had come to mean to her. Not ease for herself, not insurance against bleak years ahead, not the road that led away from terror; but a boy’s hearty laugh and ardent eyes, the warm clasp of his hand, the strength of his arms, what it would mean to lose them. A light that lifted the weight of centuries shone through her lashes. A smile that trembled caught her lips. ”

“ She put her maid and bags into a cab, and sent them to the Ambassador Hotel. Stepping into another, she told the driver to take her to the Graystone Studio.
It was an afternoon of late June. The languorous breath of California summer had kissed the foliage into mammoth bloom. They drove through lazy, sunny streets, somnolent under warm skies, into that vortex of activity modern commerce has planted in the midst of beauty, the frame of artifice sprung up mushroom-like in the very heart of Nature.
Jane Goring descended at a row of small buildings that barricaded huge ones roofed with glass. ”

“ Here Dick Cunningham brought his bride following their honeymoon trip through the Orient. Here they spent the greater part of each year. For with its kennels and stables, Nancy loved it next to the house of the fir trees which would always be her castle of romance. Besides, it was not too near Broadway, not near enough for whisperings of the Rialto to tug at the heart or fill the eyes. Or if the dull ache of longing too deep for tears did come, it was a place to hide them from a curious public. ”

“ His thumb went down on the press-button in his desk as if it were going through the top. “Bring me Mr. Brooks’ contract,” he told his secretary.
Brooks walked over to the window. His hands were shaking. His face was dead white. He stood staring out with jaws set and the look of a man going into battle.
But Cleeburg saw nothing of that. His own hands opened and shut spasmodically. He tramped steadily back and forth the space of his desk, muttering to himself like the rumble of storm. Under the puzzled question that brought brows together was a frown of fury. ”

“ With the passing of those years it was inevitable that she become Parsinova—with nothing left of poor, defunct Lizzie Parsons but the recollection of a love that had touched her life like the moon on a summer sea.
The Drive was still dotted with strolling couples oblivious of passers-by. Cars sped past them, wheels expertly manipulated by one hand. Mingled young laughter rang out like bells.
Kane’s rich voice flowed on, dwelling now on this, now on that scene of the play. ”

“ The mirror in a dressing-room just a few yards beyond Kane’s point of vantage reflected a face mask-like in its immobility. The man before it sat staring at the reflection as if it belonged to another. A shirt open at the neck showed muscles hard and tense. Even make-up could not widen the tight red line of the mouth. The eyes were dulled as if viewed through a curtain. Frank Moore went through his final preparations like a machine correctly set in motion. ”

“ Nancy turned indifferently from the object of discussion, but in that one short glance she could have told you exactly what he looked like. Ted Thorne in a way was right. Cunningham was one of those men whom women sense the instant they enter a room, not so much for height, big shoulders and powerful dark head, as for a certain dynamic force that stimulates fear and curiosity at once. In Cæsar’s day he might have been a Marc Antony, but I doubt whether Cleopatra could ever have persuaded him to abandon his armies for her dear sake. ”

“ He looked down at the head, reddened under the amber lights, at the graceful line of throat and shoulder, at the proud lips that were his. And his arms swept up and round her.
Drama moves swiftly. No pause for explanation once the wheels are set going, no rambling into far corners for side lights as in the novel, but a tornado-like gathering of incident that hurls itself without notice into crashing storm. Life crowded into a few short hours, just as a few short hours so often crowd life into one crashing crisis. ”

“ Gloria Cromwell was the girl’s name. It was quite as ornate as she was plain. Goring laughed the first time she heard it.
“Sounds as though she found it in a dime novel,” she told Cleeburg. “Why don’t you make her change it?”
“Says it’s her own. Anyhow, it don’t matter.”
“No—I dare say it doesn’t. She’s entitled to something to make her conspicuous.”
Often she noticed the girl at rehearsal sitting in the theater after her bit was done, leaning forward, chin in her cupped hands, mop of reddish hair falling over eyes that devoured every move the star made. ”

“ Behind that curtain—the same world bounded by brick walls. Scenery with act numbers scrawled in charcoal across its back being shoved into place, hustling property men, frantic stage manager, nervous director giving last minute husky orders, anxiously repeated lines and cues, the final touches of make-up, restive feet striding dressing-room floors. There is the murmur of hushed voices, its excited undercurrent like a rising chant, the tremulo of uncertainty, the eager activity of that suspended moment of waiting for the curtain to lift. ”

“ Cleeburg pulled up another chair as the chauffeur brought in their guest’s bag and helped him out of his overcoat.
The latter stood gazing round the place with a look of real affection.
“It’s good to be back,” he said with a deep breath.
“Well, the house has been here. Your fault that you haven’t!” Cleeburg cocked his ear to the comforting pop of a champagne cork.
“Gloria has enough of my company eight consecutive times a week,” smiled Brooks.
“We missed you anyhow. Didn’t we, kiddo?”
“Of course. Seeing you in the theater isn’t a bit like having you here under our own roof.” ”